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

The laggards napped briefly, or stared unblinking at the sky, while I continued to work and while Charles McLaughlin sketched. (Afterward, he kept his drawings, the evidence of our turpitude, rolled up inside his shirt; and even back at the garrison, where we were being housed, he did not display them, to keep from informing the other prisoners of the sweet details that attended our assignment.)

My coworkers would lounge there as long as they dared—an hour or sometimes even two—just long enough to make the guards watching the main crew back at the road become exasperated and consider sending someone after us, but not quite so long that they’d actually do it. We kept a lookout posted in the trees, watching the path down to the river, so that he could run and alert us to resume working if he saw anyone approaching.

One day, unknown to us, Charles McLaughlin’s hidden charcoal sketches were discovered, with their damning portrayals of our indolence: the glee of the truants sharing stalks of grapevine, the contented smiles of the slumberers. The evidence, too, of my own ambitious labors, making my way through the boneyard of a river with both arms wrapped around a boulder as large as my chest, with the veins in my arms, neck, and forehead leaping out like deltas and rivers themselves.

The next day, after allowing us an hour’s head start, Colonel Bustamente sent a pair of guards down the trail to check on us.

Our sentry that day was Daniel Drake Henrie, who had already fallen asleep at his post, and, having been somewhat an acolyte of Ewen Cameron, upon being discovered—upon being interrupted from a most pleasant dream, he was to tell us later—he responded not with shame and guilt but insolence, hurling insults at the two guards.

Down on the river, the sleeping men awoke from their naps and looked up to see the guards beating Daniel Henrie with their musket butts, clubbing him to the ground and then continuing to strike at him—no dream this, now. As it appeared they were likely to kill him, we charged up the trail with our shovels and pickaxes, twenty of us in chains versus two of them with but single-shot muskets and small derringers suited for little more than killing squirrels or rats. The guards backed away from the bruised and bleeding Henrie and hurried off for reinforcements.

Some of the men were all for breaking our chains and trying another escape, fearing we would be executed, while others of us thought we would merely be punished, and argued moderation, counseling that we would not be executed yet, for Bustamente still needed us to complete the road.

“If they try to whip me, I will kill them,” Henrie said. “I will not let a Mexican whip me.”

In the end we remained where we were—we did not go back down to the river to work, but waited at the top of the trail for the new muster of guards to come hurrying back—and when they arrived, twenty strong, shouting and firing their muskets, we stood our ground, fearing the worst.

They surrounded us, jabbing at Henrie with their bayonets, but did not strike him again, and instead escorted us roughly up the trail, back to Bustamente’s road.

The work groups were changed after that—only Charles McLaughlin and I were allowed to remain on river duty—and not only were we allowed to keep traveling to the river with the new workers, but we had our chains removed as well, so that I was free to range as far as I wished in search of the most beautiful stones and boulders, while Charles McLaughlin was free to continue his sketches and document the various stages in the fruition of Bustamente’s grand dream. Bustamente alternated McLaughlin between the river and the road, and the canyon and the quarry.

Just as McLaughlin had a haunting eye for detail in his illustrations, I was developing an eye for stone, not merely seeking the most interesting individual boulders—a stone the precise size and shape of a skull, complete with two water-worn sockets where the eyes would have been, only slightly off-kilter; a long slab shaped like a park bench, requiring the heft of four men; a boulder curiously shaped like the nation of Mexico, and another, lying not all that far away, even more curiously shaped like Texas—but also developing an aptitude for the placement of one rock against another. I traveled farther and farther upstream, searching for finer and more curious rocks, ranging for hours at a time—spending half a day sometimes, to return with only one good stone, and downstream, too, passing beneath the leafy green canopy of sunlit bower and birdsong.

The road was beginning to achieve a brilliance that not even Bustamente had imagined, with the thread of fantastic stones running like a seam through the predetermined elegance and simplicity of his design, and Bustamente—a man of integrity and generosity—gave me credit for my small share of the work. He saw me as the kind of man he wanted to believe we were all capable of becoming—transformed, under the benevolent shaping hands of the superior landscape and culture of Mexico, into men more civil, dignified, genteel. For a while, I even believed it myself.

She found me on the river two weeks later. She and her friends came to the river to wash their laundry. I had been working in a downstream stretch of the river that week—had discovered a seam of red boulders that crossed the river like the transverse slice of a knife across a piece of fruit—and I had petitioned Colonel Bustamente for the use of, and had received, a heavy iron pike with which to extricate some of the fractured stones from within this band. I was stacking and sorting them on the bank to dry in the sun.

I had followed the seam of red rock out into the sun-warmed boulder field where the river had once been, and was striking at a