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

iron sledge beginning again. Charles McLaughlin, the artist, was trying to buy us time with the sound of his rock-smashing. Anyone would be able to tell that there was something totally different about the cadence and force, or lack of it, with which he was striking the rocks—if anything, it seemed to me it would arouse more suspicion than assurance—but it was a kind gesture, and I smiled.

“Mi padre es Bustamente,” Clara said flatly, watching me to see that I understood. And for a moment, I did not. I heard what she was saying but did not want to believe that she was speaking literally—preferring that she meant that he was like a father, or that he knew her father, or that he might even be related to her father.

“No es importante,” I said, reaching for her, but she shook her head and said, “Yes, it is important. Para mi, para ti, para el.” She shrugged helplessly and said, almost in a whisper, “Sí, es importante.”

The sledging had stopped again and there was only river-sound and the silence of the day, and the heat. “Does he know?” I asked.

“Does he know what?” She shook her head sadly. “No hay nada que saber. Una pequena casa, nada mas.”

Over her shoulder, I saw now that the real reason Charles McLaughlin had started sledging was to warn me that two guards had come down to the river. I saw them advancing toward us, rifles in hand. I looked down at the broken chain still attached to my ankle: the half-length of it looking like a dead snake.

“El sabe,” Clara said. Another lift of her shoulders. “Lo ha prohibido.”

The soldiers were coming closer and were walking more quickly. She heard a stone clatter under their feet, and she turned, making a small sound, and stood abruptly. I rose too, and they looked roughly at her and then pushed me with the tips of their rifles, shoving me in the direction from which they had come. They said not a single word but took me back to my quarry, poking me with the ends of their rifles from time to time, with Clara trailing a short distance behind us, looking grief stricken, and the broken chain dragging and slithering over the rocks.

Unwilling to abandon me, Charles McLaughlin was waiting by the rock pile, his face bruised. “I told them you went the other direction,” he said, “but they knew I was lying.”

It was only when I saw Charles McLaughlin’s battered face that it occurred to me that they might kill us, or that Bustamente might execute us. They led us up the trail, not bothering to reattach our chains—and at the top of the bluff, the guard informed Clara that he had been told to escort her back to town, while the other guard was to take us back to the road.

“You will not see her again, muchacho,” her guard said, as the other guard prodded McLaughlin and me with his rifle. I looked back at her but her guard stepped between her sight and mine, and our guard shoved me around and marched us down the new shining road.

Bustamente did not execute us, but he put us back to work on the road, bound in new chains, and I was not allowed to quarry stones anymore; neither was Charles McLaughlin allowed to sketch. The red thread in the road had ended, as had the green thread, so similar in design to the little shoots and suckers that regenerated from the river-swept cottonwoods, and the fronds that had shaded the little stone house, never used.

“Aye, soldados desgraciados” was the only greeting we received upon returning to the road, our new chains a source of curiosity to our fellow prisoners. No one ever knew: only Charles McLaughlin and I.

In late August, Fisher and twelve other men began to make plans to escape on the twenty-first of September—the night before the grand ceremony that would celebrate the road’s completion. For three weeks, I held that secret as I worked beneath Bustamente’s gaze, laying down one heavy paving stone after another, condemning him to death with each day of my silence. I remembered Clara, there on the log, and thought about how it would be if she lost him.

I kept hoping the plan would collapse so that I would not have to act, but when, ten days before the celebration, I saw that Fisher and the others had knotted their sheets, I wrote a note to Bustamente, telling him only that sheets were missing and some of the prisoners were acting strange. I wrote it in Spanish, and though I wanted to sign my name in an attempt to win his favor, and perhaps win Clara, I could not bring myself to do it. I left the note lying in the road and watched while a guard wandered over, picked it up, and read it, frowning, then took it over to Bustamente.

When the colonel had finished reading it, he lifted his head and looked directly at me—I looked back down at the road, quickly—and I blushed, and wondered if he suspected me. It made perfect sense: I had betrayed him once. Why would I not betray also my fellow soldados?

He posted extra guards within the garrison at night and curtailed all town privileges, so that Fisher, cursing, was forced to cancel the escape attempt.

By late September, we were finished. Our own work—the final stretch of Tacubaya Road, six years in the building—had taken more than five months. A grand celebration was planned on the equinox to commemorate the opening. The leaves of the ash and sycamore trees were a beautiful gold color, and many had fallen from the trees and lined the sides of the road. We had swept the road free of all grit and rubble so that it was gleaming in the autumn light, and we were proud of our work, dazzled by its beauty.

Santa Anna himself would not be attending as we