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

hands were calloused from gripping the sledge, and my shoulders bruised and swollen from the relentless jarring.

It had occurred to me that even if she did find me it might be awkward with Charles McLaughlin in attendance, and I had already resolved, should such a reunion occur, to break our chains, for that one day only, with the sledge bar, and then plead to Bustamente that it had been a mistake, that Charles McLaughlin had shifted just as I had been bringing the sledge down and that the chain had gotten in the way.

Bustamente liked me, Bustamente needed me. I felt certain I could get away with it once.

I did not like how the road looked now, with its abrupt transition from red to green, but Bustamente did. His guards were harsher to us and Bustamente was no longer friendly. His eyes glittered with what I presumed at the time was fear—the way we, the prisoners, ironically held sway over his own freedom, even his life—though I understand now it might have been more anger than fear.

In the early summer heat the manacles would grow unbearable, and we would plead with the guards to pour water over the iron, briefly cooling it. The shackles burned some men’s legs like brands. Several men’s wounds became infected, and a few men died and were buried in the little military cemetery by the shady grove within the fort’s walls, near the spot where Samuel Walker and the others had climbed the wall. As we worked on through the summer and into the fall, it seemed to me sometimes that we were paving the road with our own bones, that the stones themselves were only a façade.

She found me in early August. Charles McLaughlin saw her first, and rather than alerting me he let me keep on working, hammering the sledge into the dry riverbed. He set about sketching her as she approached, and it was not until he had finished drawing her and closed his sketchbook and tugged on my chain that I looked up and saw her.

She had cut her hair short for the summer, and was wearing a long white cotton dress and leather sandals, and she was smiling to see me. She greeted Charles McLaughlin and then stepped up and touched my arm lightly before saying anything. She stepped back and looked at McLaughlin again.

McLaughlin cleared his throat and turned away, walked off to the full reach of the chain like a dog at the end of its tether, and when the chain reached full stretch, she saw me wince, with my own ankles chafed, old calluses worn back to raw skin in the drier heat of August.

I asked McLaughlin to help me position a link of the chain on a flat rock, and then lifted the sledge up and brought the point of it down hard, snapping the link and cleaving the chain into rattling halves.

The feeling of freedom was so profound that both Charles McLaughlin and I laughed—the chains felt as light as a kite string—and I took her hand and broke into a run, still laughing.

We ran upriver, picking our way around loose stones, and around the bend, out of sight, where, sweating and breathless, we found a driftwood log on which to sit.

She said she had heard that a small stone house had been built near where we had met before.

“That was a surprise,” I said, “for you. Lo has visto?”

“No la he visto,” she said. “He escuchado que fue muy linda.”

Even with my pidgin Spanish I thought I noticed the use of the past tense, but I decided it was simply some aspect of the language I had not yet learned.

“I would like for us to go there,” I said. We were directly in the sun, with no shade at all—the driftwood log warm beneath us and the August sunlight giving parts of her hair that almost purple sheen—and now with a mixture of sadness and pleasure she said quietly, “Me gusta.”

“What do you think of the road?” I asked. “El camino, la calle?”

“Es muy bonita,” she said. “He tocado las piedras frequentamente.”

I pictured her doing that, walking on the road alone or with her friends, after we prisoners had been taken back to the garrison. Studying the slender red and green veins that ran through the otherwise all-white road like threads. Crouching and touching certain of them, knowing that! had touched them weeks and days earlier or, at the end of the road, perhaps only hours earlier. Noting the piles of rocks remaining stacked on the side of the road and the distance yet to travel: the time remaining before either I and the others would be sent to the Castle of Perve, in Perote, or—as we continued to hope—we might all be set finally free, because of the grudging success of our work on the road.

“Mi padre—” she began. “Mi padre,” she said again.

“Yo sé ahora porque Bustamente no me deja ir a las piedras rojas,” I said. “He found out I had been working on the casita there. But we could meet here at the green rocks.” I looked around at the materials on hand: an endless supply of stones. “I can build a new casita, here,” I said, gesturing to a shady bower. “Or I can slip out of the fort for a while. I can go over the wall,” I said, “but Colonel Bustamente said that if there’s one more escape, he’ll be court-martialed, or maybe worse.”

The color left her face, and she sat back and looked at me. “Repitalo de nuevo,” she said.

I tried to say it in Spanish. “No hay que ser mas escapadas. No more mistakes. Colonel Bustamente has told us he is on—” I searched for the word—“probación.” If there is any more trouble, he will lose his job, and”—I shrugged—“maybe his life.”

She lowered her head, and I took her hands again and said, “Que pasa? Que pasa?”

Upstream, we heard the sound of the