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

the ancient road to Tacubaya. In exchange for our labor, we would be given one new set of clothes each.

From the quarry each day, we cut and hauled slabs of white stone, square-cut rectangles of pleasing shape and density and texture. As we sledged them free with hammer and pry bar, the acid odor of rock dust that attended each stone’s separation from the main body of the quarry was like the burned odor of a musket just fired; and, occasionally, after some certain slab’s successful cleaving, I would be reminded of Shepherd and his lost arm.

The work was little different from the backbreaking labor we would have been doing at home—wielding shovels and swinging sledgehammers and grubbing hoes, hauling water and stone—but soon the men turned into the most awful laggards I have ever witnessed. Having been given our one new set of clothes—flannel one-piece prison uniforms striped red and white and green, and sandals (Bigfoot Wallace’s had to be custom-made), most of the men began almost immediately to stall the project’s progress in whatever way they could.

There was a major regret from that time, beyond the regret of having gone to war in the first place. I met a girl my own age, and think that I fell in love with her. I believe I would have traded my life for hers—would have traded this long life even, for more time with her—and I believed, and still believe, that she would have done the same.

She was the daughter of the architect who had been commissioned to design and rebuild the road, Colonel Raul Bustamente. He awakened us each morning at dawn, treated us with dignity and respect, and trusted us to work as perhaps he himself would have worked had he been in our position. We were paired in chains with ten feet separating us—I found myself partnered with Charles McLaughlin—and we walked each morning from the stone prison at Molino del Rey to the new road on the outskirts of the city.

It was a pleasant walk in the cool of the morning. It was early spring, and the countryside all around us was leaping into green, the birds singing. We walked with the excess footage of our ankle chains hooked to our belts and wrapped around our waists to keep them from dragging. And compared to the previous days of our captivity, and all the ones that were to follow, I have to say that I remember those days as being the most pleasant.

It was on this path that I first saw Clara, Bustamente’s daughter, crossing the road—or what passed for a road—with her friends on their way to school, though I wasn’t to learn she was his daughter for quite some time. The girls were dressed in bone white uniforms, and as we stopped to let them pass—half a dozen of them—the dust we had been raising with our , trudging rose higher and caught up with us, surrounding us as we stood there. The dust was the same color as their dresses, and as it rose around us I could taste it.

We stood there like cattle, or a herd of horses, with Bustamente at the front, his hand held up in a signal for us to halt. The girls were a good distance in front of us—thirty or forty yards—and he intended to keep it that way.

As they crossed, they glanced our way and waved to him, and Bustamente nodded back, but the girl kept looking at us, peering at our faces as if searching for someone she knew. She watched me for a moment—never had I felt so found—and then she was gone.

The chalk dust from the road was still settling around us. It landed, fine as fog or mist, on the hair on our arms, our faces, our eyebrows: the finest powder imaginable, stone crushed to a substance one step away from invisible, by nothing more than the simple footsteps of tens or even hundreds of thousands of others just like us, marching back and forth through the centuries—to market, to school, to church, to death—and by the iron and hide and wooden wheels of carettas, from countless other such passages, and by the hooves of the beasts that had pulled them: donkey, ox, and horse.

The girls, the young women, were long gone. Colonel Bustamente’s arm was still raised in the halt position, as if to counsel us not to even speak of what we had seen. Finally he lowered his hand slowly, took a newly starched linen handkerchief from his pocket, and wiped the street dust from his face, and then we proceeded on, north. As we passed the place where the young women had crossed in front of us, I looked in the direction they had gone, seeking to memorize the buildings and alleys, the landscape and terrain.

I scanned the dust to the side of our passage, searching for their tracks, and did not realize I was lingering until I felt the tug of the chains lurching me back into the procession, and was nudged simultaneously by Charles McLaughlin.

I stumbled, was pulled along. The men in front of me glanced back in confusion and some irritation, and I stepped back into their haunted flow—glory, they had said they wanted, each of them—with a secret burning in my heart. I carried it with me all the rest of the day.

Charles McLaughlin laughed, watching my initial stumbling. “You would not like it if I were to draw a portrait of the young man in love,” he said. “You would be horrified by your appearance,” he said.

We walked in silence a while, with me feeling both mortified and exhilarated, and a little farther down the road, McLaughlin spoke again: “Better by a hundred your chances of slipping free of these chains, being given an officer’s horse, and riding uncontested all the way back to Texas, than ever seeing that girl again, much less ever speaking to her, much less ever holding her in