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

and that if he drew more than one bean he would be shot with the others, regardless of the color of the beans.

He kept his hand in there a long time, before finally drawing a bean. His presentiment proved too true, for in it he held a fatal black bean. He turned deadly pale as his eyes rested upon it, and he turned and looked toward me, bewildered and terrified.

He uttered not another word and appeared resigned to his fate—as if the anticipation and dread had been the hard part, but now the dying would come easy.

When it was James Shepherd’s turn to draw, he approached the urn with a swaggering indifference.

Although there were but five beans left and two of them had to be black, he barely bothered to look at his bean after he had drawn it—it was black, yet he seemed to give it no more mind than if it were a tick he had plucked from his pants cuff.

The four remaining irregulars approached the urn one by one. The first two selected white beans, as did the third, so that finally, it was George Washington Trahern who had to go through the motions of drawing with the foreknowledge that the bean within the pot was black. When he pulled it out, it was indeed black. He stared at it a long time, and then he was escorted over to join the other sixteen.

There was barely time for the condemned to pen last messages to their beloveds. On a scrap of parchment, and in shaking hand, Robert Dunham composed these final words:

Dear Mother,

I write to you under the most awful feelings that a son ever addressed a mother, for in half an hour my life will be finished on earth, as I am doomed to die by the hands of the Mexicans for our latest attempts to escape. It was ordered by Santa Anna that every tenth man should be shot. We drew lots. I was one of the unfortunate. I cannot say anything more. I will die I hope with firmness. May God bless you, bless you, and may He in this last hour forgive and pardon all my sins... farewell.

Your affectionate son,

R. H. Dunham.

Henry Whaling insisted on a last meal, and the cooks prepared mutton and beans. Few of the other doomed men had any appetite, but Whaling gorged himself—had several bowls of the very type of beans that had determined the end of his life—then called for a cigar, which he smoked slowly, with apparent satisfaction.

The doomed were marched to a courtyard on the opposite side of the wall. A priest who had been marching with us since Saltillo sprinkled holy water on the ground where they were about to die and offered to administer last rites. Only two of the seventeen accepted.

It was dusk: poor shooting light. A log had been placed along the wall of the corral and nine men seated on it to be executed; the other eight would wait their turn.

The rest of us were kept under heavy guard on the other side of the courtyard’s wall. We could see nothing but heard everything.

It took a lot of shooting—volley after volley, amid much shouting. One of our surviving white bean Texans, William Preston Stapp, wrote later:

The wall against which the condemned were placed was so near us we could hear every order given in arranging the work of death.

The murmured prayers of the kneeling men stole faintly over to. us—then came the silence that succeeded, more eloquent than sound—

—Then the signal taps of the drum—the rattle of muskets, as they were brought to aim—the sharp burst of the discharge, mingled with the shrill cries of anguish and heavy groans of the dying, as soul and body took their sudden and bloody leave.

Soldiers standing guard atop the fort’s ramparts had turned to watch the executions, and again, some of them began to swoon, falling to the ground.

We heard later that mutton-eating Henry Whaling died as well as any man or woman might ever hope. The Mexicans kept shooting but couldn’t kill him. And while they were shooting at him, Henry Whaling sat and cursed them.

The remaining eight waited and listened to him, as did the rest of us: as did I, with his bean, the extra bean, sitting unused in my pocket.

Whaling absorbed more than a dozen shots, and still he kept hollering and cursing, and the Mexicans kept shooting—they ran out of bullets and had to stop and reload, listening all the while to his bellowings—and then began firing again.

His entrails were spilling from him. The black beans he had eaten were spilling back out onto the soil, undigested. He kept shouting.

Finally Huerta walked across the courtyard in that dim light, put his pistol to Whaling’s temple, and fired.

The nine dead were then dragged away and stacked like cordwood in a corner of the corral, and the other eight were summoned—in the darkness, now—and the job was finished: again, crudely and inefficiently.

There was one among the seventeen who escaped. James Shepherd had somehow survived. One musket ball had blown through his cheek and another had fractured his arm, but he had never lost consciousness, and had lain there blood-covered in the stack of sixteen dead men, pretending to be dead himself while the village dogs chewed on the dead men’s arms and feet and legs and licked the sticky blood from their bodies.

That night, after the sentries had fallen asleep, Shepherd crawled away. It was not until the next day during burial duty that the soldiers discovered seventeen had become sixteen and realized he was missing. When we survivors heard of it, we cheered, until Huerta informed us that if he was not found, one of us would take his place.

The soldiers followed his blood trail out of the fort, but they lost it when it disappeared into the mountains, taking the same grueling path Cameron and his followers had attempted in our