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

He wandered, we learned later, for four days, before someone recognized him and turned him in. He was taken to the outskirts of town and shot again, this time for good. By then we were already a hundred miles away, manacled and bound in chains, marching south once more.

5

The Tacubaya Road

WE AWAKENED AT dawn, haunted by the horrors of the day before.

Following breakfast, we were chained, and we filed past the outer wall of the courtyard where the victims still lay piled, as William Preston Stapp was to write later from his cell at Perve, with their “stiffened and unsepulchered bodies, weltering in blood... their rigid countenances, pallid and distorted with agony.”

The weakest of us were allowed to ride in oxcarts, and though many of us were still at death’s door, not fully re-covered from our time in the mountains, the younger and stronger began to improve as we moved slowly across the central plateau and into the more fertile and heavily populated regions north of Mexico City. The villages were so frequent now that we almost always were able to spend the night under a roof, in an abandoned silo or barn, and now and again we were allowed a day of rest, as well as more frequent baths. When we reached the city of San Luis Potosí, nearly five hundred miles from the border now, we were allowed to take our chains off, nearly a month after we had departed Salado.

In San Luis Potosí, we left five of our number behind in a hospital—they all soon died—and three more died of pleurisy soon after we resumed the march toward Mexico City.

In the smaller towns, such as Queretaro and San Miguel, the townspeople, chagrined at our raggedness, would often take up small collections on our behalf—though horribly impoverished themselves—in order to allow each of us to buy an extra bowl of beans or extra cup of pulque, the latter which relaxed us considerably and made us feel, for a while, that we were not in such a bad place after all, and that where we were bound for might yet be better than where we had been.

We rested again in the village of Tula, where Colonel Ortiz was finally relieved of us and a new escort took over. Most of us were beginning, finally, to feel stronger, and were beginning, once more, to talk at night in low murmurs of trying to escape again.

The next day we reached the even tinier village of Hue-huetoca, and upon our arrival another sandstorm came from out of nowhere, every bit as inexplicable and fierce as the one that had marked our entrance to the fort of Salado.

That night, a lone express rider arrived from the south, having ridden hard from Mexico City, with the news that Ewen Cameron was to be taken from us and shot the next morning. Alfred Thurmond, who had been serving as our translator when needed, was allowed to sit with Cameron in his stone cell the last few hours until daylight, at which time the rest of us were pushed southward. Thurmond rejoined us by noon of that same day.

We had not been gone ten minutes, Thurmond said, when Cameron was taken outside and ordered to stand against a stone wall. The cavalry surrounding him dismounted and took aim at extremely close range. The tips of their muskets were wavering, Thurmond said.

Cameron refused to accept the blindfold that was offered him and instead bared his chest, glaring at the executioners, and called on them to fire.

He died instantly, Thurmond said, shredded by musket fire, and Thurmond wept. Of the giants, only Bigfoot Wallace now remained among us.

Months later we were to learn that Cameron had been executed because—according to Mexico’s minister of war, José Maria Tornel—he had been “one of the most active Partisans in the warfare going on between the two countries,” and because, whenever imprisoned, he had ceaselessly encouraged fellow prisoners to escape. While they were at it, they had piled on a great list of other offenses—some purely fabricated, others, perhaps, closer to the truth.

We mourned him for days, on the trail to Mexico City—though he had never been an officer, he, more than anyone, had been our leader, particularly in times of deepest trouble. Now that he was gone, we were all diminished and weakened, and our spirit burned less brightly.

It felt to all of us, I think, as if the landscape were swallowing us now—as if we were descending, mile by mile, day by day, into a pit so vast and deep that we would never be able to get out again.

We came into the valley of Mexico City two days after Cameron’s death and saw immense and shining lakes in all directions, the great bodies of water on which the Aztecs had once built floating gardens. We were humbled to be in the presence of so hallowed and powerful a civilization, and by the audacity of our own puny notions, eight hundred miles earlier, that our little band could mount a successful assault on such a glorious and ancient nation.

The volcanoes Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl ringed the valley, and many of us saw snow for the first time, in the glaciers that capped their peaks. Our ultimate destination, the Castle of Perve, was in the southernmost tip of the country. We still had hundreds of miles to go to reach it, but because we were so threadbare (Bigfoot Wallace, in particular, was indecent to the point that he had to wear his broad floppy hat like a loincloth, and to protect his head from the sun he used a single red bandanna, wrapped like a turban), and because there was a road that needed rebuilding, and because our new escorts still desired, like all the others, to try to bask a bit in the glory of having captured us, we remained in Mexico City, at the prison of Molino del Rey, working in a quarry and rebuilding