The Diezmo by Rick Bass (top fiction books of all time TXT) 📗

While negotiations for our freedom were taking place, one of our men, Billy Reese (brother of the reluctant-to-escape Charles Reese), was allowed to go down to Mexico City, because of his general intelligence and eloquence, to meet with Waddy Thompson and Pakenham.

Reese—who had heard Fisher read aloud to us countless times Sam Houston’s tattered secret letter exhorting rebellion—found out from Thompson that in his letter to the British minister asking for our release, Houston had stated that we had marched into Mexico without orders.

Our little pissant expedition, begun with such high hopes for glory—indeed, sustained by the near-religious fervor that what we were doing mattered more than anything in the world—had crumbled. For a while we had felt powerful, significant, filled with life and meaning. Now we lay moaning with illness, wracked by pneumonia, on cold stone floors in a foreign country, while the world, we were to find out later, continued to argue over us as if we were stray poker chips.

Still, we fought, if only for our own lives. Still, some of us held on to hope.

We were not recovering. We were languishing. Occasionally another one or two men would be strained from out of the mountains and thrown back into the mix, gaunt and fevered. We were still receiving only one meal per day, though when we pointed out we were dying we were given an extra piece of bread and a ration of coffee to improve our spirits.

I held on to my beans more as talismans now than nutrition. For some illogical reason, I had it in my mind that when they were all gone I would be free, that however many beans I had left, that was how many days I had: but that I was allowed, by some unknown law of the world, to eat only one per day.

We had no blankets. The sound of coughing kept us awake all night. Sometimes we dozed in the daytime, when it was slightly warmer. One boy became deathly ill with pneumonia. When visited by a local padre who wished to administer last rites, he refused. He died three days later. This made some among us believe that if they accepted the Catholic faith, they might be rewarded with better treatment. They converted, but, alas, no special dispensation was forthcoming, save for the loathing and censure cast their way now by the rest of us.

In Mexico City, Santa Anna made his decision, though we were not to learn of it immediately. Certain of us would live, and certain of us would die.

After three weeks, Mejia’s replacement, Colonel Ortiz, told us that we would be leaving the prison at Saltillo and would be marched south toward Mexico City, where we would be freed. We had heard by now of General Mejia’s defiance of the initial order to execute us weeks earlier, and so we believed this wonderful news and were swayed by Colonel Ortiz’s cheerful manner as he told us to walk fast, for we would soon be free men. Among us all, he said, only Fisher and Green would be punished—they were to be banished to the horrible Castle of Perve in the faraway town of Perote. Hearing this, we were sorry for the fate of our captains, though there were some among us also who, after our long months of captivity, during which time the captains had occasionally been squired and wined and dined, felt that things were evening out some, now. Still, we vowed to ourselves to lobby for their release upon our return to Texas.

On the first day of the march, when Ortiz saw that we were bothered by the dust kicked in our faces by the cavalrymen who rode alongside us, he ordered the riders to fall to the rear, leaving us out in front and alone, and for a short, glorious while, it felt as if we were free already.

It was but two long days’ march to Hacienda del Salado, the site of our initial escape, and later on that second day, as we drew nearer to it, Ortiz’s co-commander, Colonel Huerta, ordered us to stop, and placed our manacles back upon us.

The day was warm and sunny, but as we paused on the hill to look down at the old prison, a dark swirling cloud blew across the sun, a sudden sandstorm that completely obscured our view. We could not see our hands in front of our faces, and we cowered, then fell to the ground, seeking cover wherever we could: behind a log, in the scalloped lee of a dune, or even against one another.

Cursing, Ortiz and Huerta and the rest of their cavalry dismounted and hid behind their horses, trying to block the stinging sand. Jerking the manacled pack-train of us to our feet, they pushed us on.

We reached the walls of the prison, feeling them with our hands more than seeing them, and moved laterally in the blinding storm until we reached the gate and then entered, where the one hundred seventy-six of us encountered thirty well-armed infantrymen. As soon as we had entered the fort and were unmanacled, the storm stopped. And as we took our coats off, emptying the sand from our sleeves and shaking it from our bodies as if we had been deeply buried and had just emerged, we all noticed the terrible stillness and silence within the fort.

Through an interpreter, we were told only now of Santa Anna’s decision to implement the diezmo to determine our fates. The terrible Colonel Huerta took pleasure in explaining that one out of every ten of us was going to be killed. “You came seeking glory but sacrificed your own freedom,” the interpreter told us.

In a daze, I heard the words. Libertad. Muerto. The interpreter said something about blood and soil, but I was too weak to hear it all clearly.

“You will draw from ajar of black beans and white beans,” the interpreter told us. “Some