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

Two guards came running up, thinking that we were about to fight, and separated us with the bayonets attached to their muskets, moving us back from each other and urging us into the line.

Colonel Huerta was moving among others of us, jabbing us with his bayonet. Huerta insisted that Cameron draw first. Cameron nodded, stepped out from the crowd, looked at us and smiled, then approached the clay pot.

His big crooked mason’s hand was nearly too large to fit in the jar’s mouth. He squeezed it through, stuck it all the way to the bottom, pulled it back out, examined his bean, and then grinned again. “Dig deep, boys,” he called out.

Our officers drew next, one at a time: Fisher likewise drawing a white bean, as did Green. One of the men who had been an officer, a legitimate soldier in previous campaigns, a Captain Eastland, drew a black bean, and, stoically, he allowed himself to be separated from the rest of us. He sat on a bench, surrounded by soldiers, and watched the rest of us with clearly mixed emotions, wondering who his companions were to be.

After the last officer had drawn—all the others drew white—the rest of us were called forward to stand in line for life or death.

One of the sentries guarding the wall of the fort fainted and fell, like some plummeting angel, the gold tassels on his uniform fluttering as he flew to earth. His musket clattered to the ground, breaking when it landed, and there was a brief pause as the other soldiers revived him.

Colonel Huerta placed each white bean that was drawn in a little pile on a bench, in a patch of spring sunlight, and placed Captain Eastland’s black bean and subsequent others in a vest pocket, as if they were some vital part of his essence that he had only loaned to the occasion, but from which he could not be long separated.

Henry Whaling’s turn came. Even with the salvation of my white bean held tight in my sweating hand, my own heart was pounding, and I could not imagine what it must be like for those who did not have a white bean already in their hand. What if I dropped mine, or lost it in the pot when I plunged my hand in? What if I was unsuccessful in the sleight-of-hand transfer and was caught?

Up ahead of me—his back turned to me—Henry Whaling was just standing there, staring down at his bean. Stoic as ever—though surely wishing for a second chance—he was led away to the bench.

I walked up to the pot, trying to look properly terrified: and I was. Never had I had so many eyes upon me. Hundreds of eyes, from all directions.

I stood at the pot for the longest time, and in the depth of that fear, I was tempted to not even try the trick: to play it straight, foolishly and recklessly, and to take my chances as had everyone else. As had Henry Whaling.

The odds were still good—not quite nine in ten—seventy men remained behind me, and eight black beans. It could even be argued that it would be safer to play it straight, for if I was discovered I would surely be executed with the rest.

One of the guards barked an order to draw, and I shook my head as if to clear it from a deep sleep and made the choice to choose life. With a black bean still in my right hand and my white bean in my left, I lowered my right hand into the pot, released my bean, rummaged blindly, selected two beans, and withdrew them, and then clasped both hands before my face with eyes shut, as if in prayer, in a manner I hoped would seem natural to the Catholic superstitions of the guards, and pretended to transfer the bean to my left hand. I lowered my right hand inconspicuously to my side, with its two unknown, just-drawn beans, and opened my left hand to show the guards—all eyes upon it—to reveal the old white bean I had been carrying for a month.

Tears sprang to my eyes, partly from the joy of being allowed to keep living, but partly at the cost—someone else, some seventeenth, and perhaps even an eighteenth among the seventy still behind me, would pay for my duplicity—and it was not until I was back among the crowd of the saved, over on the other side of the courtyard, that I even thought to examine the two beans I had drawn, the true beans: and when I did, I was astounded to see that, indeed, one was as black as coal.

Who would take my place? I could barely watch, and yet I could not turn my eyes away.

When it was Bigfoot Wallace’s turn to pick, he walked up to the pot and pushed his big hand in and rummaged around for a maddeningly long time—examining each bean, it seemed.

He had been studying the proceedings as intently as any hunter, and he told us later that it seemed to him that the black beans were larger than the white. He rolled each bean in his fingers, determined to find the smallest one. When he finally found the tiniest one left and withdrew it, it was neither black nor white, but an indeterminate grayish swirl, and we all held our breath, awaiting the decision.

Huerta took the bean from him and examined it for a long time in that spring sunlight. He finally judged the bean to be white.

There was only one prisoner who seemed overcome by the horror. This man, Patrick Altmus, was wringing his hands and moaning audibly, continually telling those near him that he would draw a black bean.

Altmus could not be summoned to his feet, and so the guards had to drag him over to the jar and force his hand into it. They told him to pick one and only one bean,