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

He had learned much in the short time he’d spent with Green, he said, but he was growing frustrated, afraid we would never find or catch up to the enemy.

“Those fires,” Shepherd asked him, “how did you know they were from the Mexicans?”

John Alexander looked confused as he considered it, and searched for an answer. “Because Captain Green said they were,” he said finally.

There were so many others like John Alexander who feared we would never find the enemy, would never engage in combat—that the bandits had already crossed back over the border, and that peace, like a curse, was settling in. But Fisher, Green, and Somervell told us not to worry, there would be more war.

Sitting around Green’s fire, we could hear the singing around Somervell’s fire, could see the flame-backed silhouettes of men dancing and cheering. His military men were cut from a different cloth than were we recruits and Fisher’s hard cases, but during our journey our differences began to fade, even as our varied desires and motivations began to divide us.

We drifted south, finding occasional traces of the bandits—a whisper in one village, the tale of a pilfered cow in another, the rumor of a stolen ferry, the sound of gunfire, the remains of a large campfire, three days old. I was filled with unease, the sense of having made a poor choice, and I think Shepherd felt it as well. From time to time he looked questioningly over at me.

The sky above us was huge. The tall drying grass of late autumn and early winter rustled before us in waves. The sight of the wind moving across land balanced my unease. I stared forward across the plains and avoided Fisher’s and Green’s eyes—especially Fisher’s. Did they ever look back at their five hundred and consider which ones, or how many, might not return?

We basked in the attentions of the farmers and ranchers. We were given bushels of bread and nuts, chickens and calves, fruits and vegetables. The farther we traveled, the more accustomed we became to such treatment, so that when we did not receive it, there was resentment. Fisher’s men, in particular, were quick to take offense, grumbling that they were risking their lives for ungrateful sodbusters and hayseeds, and even some of Somervell’s men, despite the lieutenant’s obvious displeasure, grew more and more like marauders. It was an astonishment to me how much we required to eat, and the swath we cut, with well over three hundred horses—twelve hundred hooves—cutting our way through the brush, raising sand and dust and eating everything in sight.

Otto Williams was the first man I saw take something without the formality of asking. One day he was near the lead of our ranks as we rode into a small settlement north of Laredo, supposedly looking for the bandits but actually looking for food. It took so much to keep us going that we were less like a military expedition than a very large and extended hunting trip. From the very beginning, I noticed that there were some who were not so much interested in the search for bandits as they were simply in the hunting and the war.

Otto Williams was one of these. As we rode into the little settlement, the townspeople spread to either side of the road and held their possessions close to them: a basket of poor-looking chickens, a sack of flour over each shoulder, a goat on a rope—it was midmorning on a market day—and although they were simply going about their business, the impression it gave, or could have given, I suppose, to a man like Otto Williams, was that these people were coming out to the street to give us these things, that a feast was being prepared in our honor.

And for the first time, without bartering or even asking, Otto Williams simply rode over to a villager who had a young bull tethered to a heavy rope—the bull nearly as large as the old man, whose hair was completely silver—and after drawing his sword from his saddle, Otto Williams brought it down quickly and forcefully. Just as he did so, another rider shifted in front of me, and I thought Otto Williams was only severing the rope that bound the animal, but then I saw that he had struck the animal itself, his razor-sharp sword passing halfway through the animal’s neck. The red blade lifted again, bright in the sun, without a sound, and the old man fell back in terror while Williams struck a second and third time before the head—still attached to its halter—fell to the dusty ground, and the animal knelt and fell over.

Williams dismounted and gutted the animal as he would a deer shot on the prairie. He took care not to get his hands or clothing bloody, and when he was done, he gestured to one of his friends to help him lift the carcass onto his horse—as if he intended to eat the whole thing by himself—and then we rode on, silent and tense and changed, with a few more hours of food procured; fuel for the coming war, if only we could find the war.

Some of us were homesick. I myself was troubled by the slightly uneasy feeling that, even though this was a grand and glorious adventure, as well as a just cause, I was leaving behind a land almost as dear to me as life. As we descended into a country of brush and thorns, we missed the soft green hills of home, and as we traveled away from our new country toward one that had been a millennium in the making, we started to see more and more Mexican faces in the villages near the border, and we felt further misgivings.

“When we get home,” I told Shepherd one night after dinner, “no matter what time of year it is, I want to go back up to the James and go fishing. I’ll let