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

McLaughlin finished reading, and we filed into the room he had just described. We were relieved immediately by the relative spaciousness after the claustrophobia of the dark and narrow hall. The body heat from the mass of us attended our movements like a thunderstorm, a rank humidity that occupied any space we entered, and here, too, it followed us, emanated from us, and I remembered briefly the hope, the joy I had known down at the river, working on Bustamente’s road, and then that memory passed, all but useless, from my mind.

In our long room there were high arches overhead. We could sense that we were in the maw of the earth, below ground, to the depth of that one flight of stairs, but high above our heads at the far end of the room there was a single grate through which one lean trapezoid of light entered from the world above.

We began staking out our individual cots, with Green and Fisher and Wallace and their aides securing the prime beds, closest to that little wedge of light that would never quite reach the floor of our dungeon.

I had thought Charles McLaughlin would seek out some private place where he could practice his craft in the evenings, undisturbed by the nightly card games and songs and dances—but he dragged a bed into the center of the dungeon and positioned it just so beneath that slightly angled, nearly flat trajectory of dying light—and I found myself following him, grabbing my own cot and sledding it into the center of the barracks also, rather than heading over to one of the corners, as had been my initial inclination.

We walked out into the courtyard and stood in line for our food, and were astonished to see one of the guards aim his musket at his commanding officer. We were to learn later that they had been quarreling for months.

The officer ducked just as the musket discharged, and the bullet struck one of our young irregulars, Shields Booker, in the neck. The prison medics did all they could for him, but he died twenty-four hours later and was buried in the moat (only Catholics were allowed to be buried in the prison cemetery), in a service made all the more poignant in that it was attended by the silent swans, who gathered around the ripples left by Booker’s stone-weighted coffin after it had slipped straight to the bottom.

At the moatside funeral service, I looked over at Charles McLaughlin, who was, as ever, sketching vigorously, and I tried to look at the scene around me, and the world, the way he might be seeing it: not what it had been moments before Booker had been shot, and not what it might be after the funeral, but what it was now, as if that were all it ever would be; and then on to the next sketch, and the next.

It was tempting to look at the world that way—without fear—but it still seemed important to me, more than ever, not to delude myself, but to remember that the world was a dangerous place.

Charles McLaughlin lifted his head briefly from his agitated scratchings and looked over at me for a moment—I thought he was contemplating drawing me, and, knowing that if he did the fright on my face would be revealed, I turned away.

Breakfast each day consisted of a tiny bowl of cornmeal gruel sweetened with brown sugar, and a single cup of coffee: hardly enough for the tasks demanded of us, which included carpentry, latrine duties, more road-building, cleaning the stables, and, once again, quarrying stones for other construction projects.

Lunch was no better. Jittery-legged with fatigue, we would crowd around a cauldron of simmering water into which had been tossed an onion or two, a handful of salt and rice, some red peppers, and occasionally the offal of a cow or horse or pig—bones, hoofs, hide, entrails, brains, and whatever else the guards would not eat.

Back to work we would be sent, then, dysenteric and choleric, with dinner that evening consisting once more of gruel. Only occasionally were we given the opportunity to use our meager earnings to purchase a piece of fruit—a banana, or sometimes a single red strawberry.

Fisher and Green appeared to be reversing roles.

Green, previously the fierce patriot and lover of the land, seemed to be losing his interest in the revolution, despairing at the threat to our new nation’s independence, as well as the loss of his own. Once in the Castle of Perve, the two officers no longer received the special courtesies that had been extended to them before and were instead forced to work alongside the rest of us, rotating through the same insufferable and demeaning tasks and duties of captivity.

And while such menial and humbling labor seemed to be having a positive effect on Fisher, making him more human, and more accessible to us, Green now seemed estranged and haunted, collapsing into himself, sinking like a dense stone dropped into a dark, slowing river.

Green was spending increasing amounts of time alone in the evenings, penning angry letters back to Sam Houston in Texas, and to the United States government, and to Santa Anna, alternately threatening, cajoling, pleading, bargaining, and haranguing, working at the far end of the dungeon by that gridwork opening through which a few dim stars could be seen, and sometimes, briefly, the clockwork gear passage of the moon in its revolution around us—while the rest of us, Fisher included, entertained ourselves at night in the center of our cell with dances and skits and songs and games.

Not Green, however. He burned bitterly, stewing in the toxins of injustice. Petty things were consuming him now, final tiny straws upon the long-suffering camel’s back. At the Battle of San Jacinto, years earlier, following Santa Anna’s surrender to Houston, Green had given General Houston his fine, new, unbloodied officer’s coat to help keep an exhausted Santa