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

“Yes,” I said, “that’s what it’s like. Have you known that feeling?”

He looked down at the sketch he was working on. “I have, and still do,” he said. He brushed an eraser crumb from his sketch, then furrowed his brow, frowned, and touched his pencil to the page. It was a sketch of the fort, our jail. “That’s not love,” he said, still studying his sketch, so that at first he appeared to be speaking of his illustration. “That’s obsession. Still, it’ll certainly get you out of bed in the morning.”

Though I hurled myself at the work, most of the men continued to resist. They cut slits into their bags so that as they ferried sand and gravel and cobble from the river to the road they left behind a sifting, wandering trickle, sometimes arriving at their destination with less than half a bag. Some of the men feigned injury or illness, though the Mexicans dealt with that by treating them universally with a diet of cornmeal gruel and castor oil, taking their clothes away, and confining them to a hospital bed, while outside the spring winds continued to rattle and the leaves shimmered in the sunlight.

Colonel Bustamente, exasperated, resisted the calls from his superiors to impose even harsher discipline, and instead tried to implement incentives to reward good workers, such as being fitted with lighter chains, or even having their chains removed completely. And it surprised me, if not him, that the men’s work did improve, as did the quality of the road, which was drawing still more praise from Bustamente’s superiors, all to his credit.

She did not show up the next day, or the next. Never had I felt so captive. A week passed like a century, and then another. I felt sure that she would find me again—would come walking back up the riverbank, picking her way through the bleached field of rocks and into the skein of red rocks.

And as I waited, I set about building her a gift of sorts: a little house, scarcely larger than a hut. I built it with the best stones I could find. There were various minerals in the riverbed—tiny flakes and nuggets of fool’s gold, copper and silver, as well as reddish crystals that might have been rubies and garnets—and I made a rough mortar of clay and sand and inlaid the windows and doorjambs with these discoveries. The walls were dry stone. I fitted the stones together tightly, in a way that was pleasing and calming to the eye, and made a snugly latticed roof using the polished spars of driftwood. Numerous of the limbs and branches of the cottonwoods, in particular, seemed nearly indestructible, with green sprouts and buds and branches continuing to grow from the main corpse of the limb, even after so rough a downriver journey, and by watering the latticework of the roof I was able to encourage these sucker-sprouts to continue growing, so that they wrapped around one another like vines, binding the roof even more tightly. Soon the thatched covering was shaded with the newly emergent leaves of those horizontal cottonwood spars, as well as the dappled shadow-and-light cast from those trees still standing beside the small house.

I made a bed inside the hut, using driftwood slats cushioned with moss and leaves. My stonework blended so well with the natural, jumbled stone chaos of the floodplain, and the thatched roof merged so well with the riverside forest, that the tiny house was barely noticeable from a distance, even to my own eye. Sometimes I would find myself looking right at it without realizing I was seeing it. Small birds fluttered amid the leaves of the roof, flew out over the thin ribbon of the river’s shallow center and hovered, angel-like, daring and snapping at rising hatches of aquatic insects.

I worked hard to finish up the tiny house, and harder still after I had it finished, never resting for more than a few minutes, so that she might know always where I was by the ringing-steel sound of my labor. I waited. All my life, I have waited.

Charles McLaughlin and I agreed how ironic it seemed that in having crossed the border “to stir up the whirlwind of war,” we had ended up doing far more building up than tearing down; and of how, rather than leaving lamentations and ruin in our wake, we had a legacy of fine craftsmanship, such as the new thoroughfare we were working on, the rebuilt Ciudad Mier, and Charles McLaughlin’s art.

In the evenings, McLaughlin sketched while I read, teaching myself Spanish in the process, asking our guards the names for certain words and phrases. Forever. Desire. Meet me. Little house, casita. Under the new system of rewards, nearly all of the Texans were allowed to travel into town in the evenings in small groups for dinner and entertainment, with only a single guard, but Charles McLaughlin and I usually stayed home, weary from our labors and content to sketch and read. While in town, one of our men, Matthew Pilkington, was caught in the embrace of an officer’s wife, and was beaten severely; another was stabbed in the buttocks with an ice pick.

Many nights the guards had to carry drunk prisoners home on their shoulders, but Samuel Walker and a few of his more fiery compatriots, still intent on escape, always refrained from drinking. Walker inspired one prisoner, Willis Coplan, to simply walk away on the evening of July 30. The guards did not even notice he was missing—they called roll only once a day, in the evenings before the trips to town—and Samuel Walker now knew that he had less than twenty-four hours to attempt his own escape, knowing that once Coplan was discovered missing we would all be chained back together again and our privileges would be rescinded.

Walker resolved to leave the next evening, just before roll call, and spent the night tearing and knotting bed sheets with two