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

Just before dusk, Walker and Wilson and Gattis walked past some Mexican soldiers, conversing earnestly, as if merely out for a stroll. They had hidden the knotted sheets by one of the fort’s back walls in a tiny grove of shade trees, and as the summer dusk fell they scaled the walls with the bed sheets and let themselves over the other side.

They broke into a run, not even bothering to reel in their line of knotted sheets, and six other men, emboldened by the sight of their escape, climbed the wall and ran after them.

Willis Coplan, pursued almost incessantly by cavalry, traveled eight hundred miles, all the way back to the Rio Grande, only to be caught in that last hundred yards as he attempted to cross; he spent the next twenty years in captivity in Matamoros, within sight of the Texas border.

Samuel Walker, James Wilson, and D. H. Gattis also were captured, only a mile outside of Mexico City, but Walker paid their captors a dollar each and they were released. The next night they were captured again but were held in a one-room jail with a dirt floor. Using a wooden plank, they dug an opening beneath the door and slithered out.

Unlike Coplan, they headed for the coast, traveling alternately south and east, staying in the mountains, moving toward the scent of the ocean, where they hoped to be able to find an American vessel and sign on as deck hands.

Near a small mining village, they were apprehended again, but they pretended to be British mine workers. When asked for some sort of identification, James Wilson pulled out a wrinkled piece of paper on which a prisoner back at Molino del Rey had scribbled for him the words to an ancient ballad, “When Shall We Three Meet Again”—a song Wilson had been much taken by—and pretending to read from it, he cribbed a ludicrous declaration of passport that nonetheless convinced the cavalry, none of whom could read English.

Wilson fell ill after that and had to be left behind—no one ever saw him again—and Walker was recaptured yet again, but Gattis continued on, reaching Tampico a week later, where the United States consul was able to get him on a ship headed north.

Although there was a part of us that was happy for those who escaped, there was also a part of us resentful at the price we were made to pay for our compatriots’ freedom. All of our privileges were revoked immediately, and we were put back in shackles and chains. Colonel Bustamente was nearly court-martialed over the incident, and he told us he had been given only one more chance by his superiors; that if another Texan escaped, Bustamente would be not only court-martialed, but also possibly executed. There were those in government, he said, who resented and disagreed completely with not only the tender treatment he had shown us but the fact that we were alive at all; that with the diezmo, nine in ten of us had evaded the call of justice.

“My life is in your hands,” he said, speaking to us before dinner one evening. “I will be frank with you: Next to my family, this road is my life. Next to my family, this road is how I will be judged in the world, and is how I will judge myself. Another escape and I am gone, and the road will fall into lesser hands. I cannot afford that,” he said, gesturing to our chains. “When the road is finished, on the other hand...” He made a gesture of both ambiguity and hope. “Perhaps then I will have more influence. Perhaps then I can be your patron and argue for your release.”

What he said next caused some of us to wonder at first if he had been drinking; but I saw that he was cold sober.

“I will remain kind to you soldados,” he said. “It is what is in my soul, this belief that all men should be equals—right up until the time you betray me, at which point I shall kill any of you without remorse.

“It is for my own safety that I imprison you all in the chains again,” he said. “For that, I am sorry. But it is a small thing, for my own safety, and for what the road requires.”

So once more Charles McLaughlin and I were chained together, which hampered his drawing, and my own reading; it made the road work more difficult, as well.

I was nearly frantic to return to the stretch of river where I had been quarrying the red stones and where I had built the casita. But after only a few days, during which we hauled out all the neatly stacked piles I’d gathered and laid the thin red ribbon of them in the road, in subtle patterns that were almost floral in nature, Bustamente suggested that he would like me to find another color of rock, and another style. “Este verde,” he said, holding up a fist-sized stone and pointing in the opposite direction from where I had been working. He said there was a seam of it that bisected the river upstream, just as the formation of red rock crossed downstream.

I told him I wanted to keep working the red rocks, and that I thought the road would be improved by having more of them, but he just laughed and said that no, that was the end of the red rocks.

Charles McLaughlin and I had only twenty feet of chain. He had to shield his face as I worked the sledge, to keep the rock chips from spraying him. There was not much to sketch. Often he would want to wander off into the shade to draw a certain tree, a certain scene, but I would want to remain out in the riverbed, pounding the green rocks, so that she might hear me working and might find me. My