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

melon-shaped stone that seemed perfect for the fit I was envisioning. It was a lot of work for one rock, and the labor consisted mainly of pulverizing the surrounding jigsaw grip of the other rocks all around it. Each time I struck a rock with the heavy pike, the canyon echoed with the sound of the blow, cold iron against hot stone, and little sparks tumbled from the rock like flashing windblown blossoms. The scent and taste of burnt rock dust was dense around me. I liked the smell, and I liked working steadily, rhythmically, encouraging the earth to give up that one stone, though there were enough pauses in my work—stopping to take my damp shirt off to hang it over a creosote bush to dry, mopping the stinging sweat from my eyes with the crook of my arm, looking up at the dizzying distant sight of a caracara circling high above on a heated updraft from the same rocks in which I labored, as if in an oven—for anyone who heard my sledgings to know that it was a human who toiled and not a machine.

She and her friends had chosen a place farther downstream, but hearing the noise she walked upstream nearly a mile to find me. I saw her from a long way off. She had been advancing whenever I was occupied with the sledge, then pausing whenever I stopped—but even as I was working I noticed from the corner of my vision the uneven movement, the advancement, of her white dress against the riverside cottonwoods. Thinking at first that the white was the uniform of one of Bustamente’s guards sent to spy on me, I kept working.

But I saw as she drew closer that she was a woman, then a young woman, and then I saw that it was her, and even though the rock was almost out—one or two more blows—I stopped, sweat-drenched and breathing hard, like a horse, and I leaned against the iron staff of the pry bar and waited for her to come that final distance.

“El constructor de caminos,” she said, smiling. She looked around. “Donde está tu camino?”

We talked for an hour, mostly about the routine details of her life—her schooling, her family, her chores and tasks—tut also about the larger abstractions, our loves and fears and beliefs.

She had learned nearly as much English from her father as I had Spanish from my captors, and she let me know quickly that she thought it was awful that we were having to work as slaves.

And yet, she said, for certain crimes and sins, there needed to be punishment.

“It’s not the colonel’s fault,” I told her. “He’s actually pretty good to us. He’s treated us better than anyone else so far.” I shrugged. “We chose to come into your country.”

Her eyes sought mine. “Why?” she asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. I wanted to make a joke of it and say something like To see you, but I was seized with an overwhelming sadness.

“How many men have you killed?” she asked. Not Have you killed any? but How many?

I shook my head and looked away. “I can’t remember who I was before I came across the river,” I said.

She started to say something, but we heard voices, the sound of her friends coming to search for her, having become worried when they could no longer hear the sound of the iron bar against the stones. They paused by my cairn of red rocks some distance away from where Clara and I were sitting by the riverbed, and waited, and watched. She rose, dusted the grit from her dress, and asked if I would be here the next day.

“I can try,” I said. “I will tell the colonel I need more red rocks.” I looked around at the garden of stone, an eternity of stone.

She laughed—her teeth seemed large, framed by that smile—and holding her skirt above her ankles she walked carefully through the boulders, back to where her friends were waiting. When she reached them she smiled again and waved.

I watched them until they were gone, and only then did the sound of my sledging return to the canyon, as I still tried to pry free from the earth that one perfect stone, and then the next.

I worked until dusk, until the first fireflies began to appear and the tree frogs in the reeds and groves of cottonwoods began to trill, and the bullfrogs began their nighttime drumming. I was supposed to be back up on the road by that time and was still an hour’s walk away, but it did not matter, this one evening: Colonel Bustamente trusted me.

Back at our garrison that first night, I told Charles McLaughlin what had happened. He said that all the other men, including Colonel Bustamente, believed that I had simply fallen asleep from having worked so hard; and it was not until I urged him to let the others continue to believe that story that he began to think I was telling the truth.

I visited with him about her for a long time—relayed not just the bits and pieces of our broken conversation—the general trading of news about siblings, friends and family, life histories, likes and dislikes. The words “truth” and “liberty” and “justice” were easily translatable across the two languages—verdad, libertad, justicia— but it had taken a bit more work to discuss our mutual admiration for other qualities such as courage, beauty, and the strength of one’s heart. There were at least two kinds of strength, we had agreed, looking at the pile of red stones I had assembled; at least two.

“Do you love her?” Charles McLaughlin wanted to know. “Are you falling in love with her?”

“Yes,” I said, answering the second question first, and then the first. “No. I don’t know. It’s that, but something more, something else. I don’t know what,” I said. “I don’t know what it is.”

“But it’s everything, isn’t it?” he asked. “It consumes you, like you’re