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

had hoped, but his personal secretary was traveling to Molino del Rey to participate, and we continued to hope that he would be so awed by our work that our sentences—eternal prisoners of War—would be remanded and we could return to our country.

Santa Anna’s secretary spent a good bit of time with Captains Green and Fisher that evening, and before departing the next day he ordered that our chains be removed—but in the end, that was the only dispensation we received for all our work. Three days later we received the news that, with our work on the Tacubaya Road completed, we were to resume our march toward the Castle of Perve.

6

The Castle of Perve

DESPITE OUR DESPAIR over failing to be released, the forced march to Perote felt like freedom compared to the fortress at Molino del Rey. We left the valley floor and went up into the mountains, which during the rainy season were usually swathed in clouds. We smelled the fresh sweet scent of fir and pine and saw tropical ferns and the late-season bloomings of tens of thousands of orchids. There were bromeliads—Charles McLaughlin had read about them, and told us about them excitedly—plants with upturned spiny leaves that formed cups and goblets holding so much rainwater that sometimes they supported little populations of minnows, which in turn fed on the mosquito larvae living in those same cupped flower goblets. Each blossom was its own tiny world, with the world’s struggles within, and as McLaughlin pointed them out, nearly all two hundred of us, Mexicans and Texans alike, crowded around him to listen and to take turns peering into the flower.

Transfixed, we each crouched beside it, staring into its shallow waters as if into a wishing well, watching the translucent little fish hanging suspended in their horizontal positions, finning steadily, and the wriggling little commas of wiggletails on the surface. Columns of sunlight came down through the treetops and illuminated the depths of the tiny world into which we were staring like giants.

Still fascinated, we began to wander off in groups of a dozen or more, looking for more bromeliads, the guards strangely indulging us, as if they too had fallen under the forest’s spell. Finding more, we would stare again in rapture, until it was only with great difficulty and some reluctance themselves that our captors were able to urge us on: and we departed wistfully, passing down off the mountain, with the sparkling drops of the last night’s rain still dripping from the canopy, and we kept looking all around for more bromeliads, our sandals squishing at every step.

Our clothes were drenched, and when the sun was filtering down through the canopy our backs and shoulders steamed in that gold light, as did the necks and backs of the horses and mules.

Where once we had sweltered and burned in the desert, we now rotted. At first our feet merely itched, but then the flesh grew tattered and bloody, until it seemed our feet could no longer support us. We cut tree limbs to use as crutches, and in the steady rain we moved through a bright green paradise of creatures we had never seen before, long-billed toucans and parakeets. Sorrow-faced monkeys followed us, clicking their teeth and conferring among one another, as if empathizing with the misfortune that had brought us so far from home. Such was our misery that guard and captive were prisoners alike, merging as if back to a single army. One day Shields Booker asked to borrow a gun from a guard and then turned and fired at one of the monkeys that was following us in the falling rain. The bullet struck the monkey in the chest, and he fell backward, clutching the wound; and rather than fleeing, the rest of the band hurried to him and gathered around their fallen comrade, tending to him as he died.

We followed ancient stone-lined trails through the mountains, covering in our ceaseless, limping procession more than twenty miles a day. After only a week we had given up any efforts to stay dry, and when darkness fell each day we merely curled up in the mud and mulch beneath the dripping fronds of giant ferns and slept amid the hissing rain.

I dreamt often of being in a river, riding it downcurrent. Many of the men developed rattling coughs and chills, and we buried several along the trail. We no longer even said words at their burying but simply carved out a trough in the stony soil as best as we could and laid them into it, the trough filling with water even as we did so, and then covered them back up and resumed our march. I thought of Clara and felt utterly that my life had become a failure in every way.

After another two hundred miles—nearly nine hundred miles from home, now—we reached the pass into the valley and village of Perote, seven thousand feet above sea level. Other mountains, mist-shrouded volcanic spires and crags, towered nearly twice as high above us—the Cofre de Perote, and others, many of them capped with snow and ice—and it was a humbling experience to pass beneath them.

We passed down out of the rainy mountains—the stripe faced monkeys continued to follow us for a while, as if they too were our captors, and parakeets flew back and forth, blazes of emerald and gold and crimson, while brightly colored butterflies rose from the tangle of ferns and flowers with swarming, fluttering beauty—and then the castle appeared before us, perched at the edge of the mountains, with the barren, shimmering sprawl of ash-gray volcanic plains stretching far below, all the way to the coast at Vera Cruz.

A slashing purple rain was hurling itself against the prison, and black clouds were stacked up to the horizon, awaiting their turn tb drift across the castle before continuing on out into the desert, where they would dissipate without dropping any water on the boneyard plains below—evaporating in midair