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

common were trips to the calabozo, a tiny closet of solitary confinement, for days on end, after which the old captivity seemed by comparison the sweetest of freedoms.

Less stern measures included attaching heavy iron or wooden crossbars between our ankle chains, which caused us to trip and stumble all day, or, on Sundays, fastening a gigantic cross to a prisoner’s back and making him haul it far up the mountain, with the guards and townspeople of Perote being able to glance up at that giant cross moving up the mountain, at any time of day, and gauge the slow ascent as if it were but one more louse race.

Our captors were particularly fond of forcing Bigfoot Wallace to carry a cross—fashioning an improbably oversized one for him to haul—and it never ceased to amaze me how, despite the punishment, they were unable to break his spirit. Some of the larger crosses took him three days and nights to get to the top, but he never complained, and told us afterward that compared to our time in the calabozo, such trips were almost like freedom itself, or what we remembered of freedom.

Some two thousand feet above the fort there was a rough volcanic ridge lined with scores of giant crosses, the spoor of recalcitrant prisoners from the past. After laboring all day without food or water—sometimes in an icy, rattling, sheet-driven wind, other times beneath a broiling sun—the prisoner had to erect the mammoth cross on that ridge and pile stones around the base to keep it from blowing over. (If the cross did blow over, the prisoner was required to go up there, drag it all the way back down the mountain, and then start over again the next day.)

Over the years, however, crosses had fallen, so that there were as many lying on the ground as there were standing, and there were crosses leaning halfway between sky and ground, so that spars and beams silhouetted the ridge in a myriad of angles, looking like a buck-and-rail fence. It was a tangle of dissymmetry, with some of the more ancient crosses beginning to crumble and rot on the stony ledge, while others still exuded the green odor of heavy new-sawn wood, and still others bore the stains from our bloodied and blistered backs, as we ourselves still bore splinters from that engagement. There was none among us who had not hauled at least one cross to the ridge, and such punishment did not dispose us favorably toward the Catholic race.

The U.S. ambassador, Waddy Thompson, was soon to become a staunch friend and ally, our one crux of support from the outside. Whenever he came to visit us, brimming with an encouraging mix of optimism and forcefulness, we felt hopeful, and whenever he left or was out of touch with us for too long—a month, two months, three months—we felt abandoned, rejected, even betrayed, and consumed by a fever of fear and loneliness and the damnable longing for freedom.

Each time Waddy Thompson reappeared—a gentleman, a man of power—our hearts leapt, and each time he left while we remained, we began again the long trek back down into misery and servitude, until in some ways it seemed that we were as much his prisoners as we were the Mexican government’s, despite our knowing better.

We could never have wished for a better ally. He devoted more time to us than his job called for. It simply wasn’t enough. Our needs were bottomless. No one man, and perhaps no nation, or nations, could extricate us; neither could we ourselves. We were captive to all who looked upon us, prisoners even to our own hearts, for we had not merely “lost” our freedom but willfully given it up, back when we had first crossed the border at Fisher’s strident urging.

As ever, McLaughlin sketched in the evenings, choosing to spend his precious coins not on lead rivets or fruit or illicit mouthfuls of mescal passed from guard to prisoner, but on candles, so that he might work far into the night. When he ran out of pencils he used the smudge of charcoal, so that his hands and face were soon almost always smeared black. I would sit up with him often, reading or occasionally writing letters to those back home. And from the way he sketched, throwing himself into it with such unnerving focus, I wondered often if he even understood any longer that he was still a prisoner: there was something that made me think he did not, and I was envious.

Escape was no longer on our minds; we were broken, hobbled. In a general letter to his many friends back in Texas, R. A. Barclay wrote, “When we shall guet out of this snap God only knows. My only hope is an exchange of prisners... things growes daily more gloomey... they treat us worse evry day. The Mexicans point me out and say I am the worst one in the Castle—I have worn hobels two weeks, binn beat with there spades and muskets, calaboosed and evry means to cow me they can think of... There is no hope of release.”

Peter Maxwell, in a letter addressed to various newspapers, designed to sway the sympathies of Sam Houston, complained, “Our overseers... often beat we Texians with sticks with as little ceremony as we would beat Negroes.” And in an official complaint to Waddy Thompson—who on his last visit had said not to despair, that he was still working to somehow gain our release—Fenton Gibson, not a true Texan but a Kentuckian, and a grandson of Daniel Boone, wrote, “What then must be the deep agony of an American to be struck by one of these imps of darkness...? Sir, it is insupportable. The blood on an American cannot brook the degradation.”

In a letter to his wife, Norman Woods lied, trying to assuage her fears, and spoke proudly of the heroic regularity of his bowels. “We have plenty to eat, good clothes to