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

wear, fine coffee to drink twice a day, meat once, good flour bread with three kinds of cracked seeds in it. I am coopering and make about one bucket a week.”

Beneath that dark mountain, haunted by the sound of the fresh water rushing through the labyrinth of aqueducts just beneath us night and day, and under such steady oppression, our old dreams and fevers unraveled and ran wandering in a hundred and forty different directions, as if seeking to trickle back down into the stony soil beneath us.

Beneath our crosses and hobbles, and beneath the beatings and the lice, we continued to fall further, until we finally reached the bottom, at which point it was every man for himself: and sometimes not even that.

One by one, like the occasional sparrows that would find their way into our dungeon through the grate, flutter confused for a while, and then find their way back out, a few of our number were plucked from the group and turned free, by the deux ex machina we had all been dreaming of back before our spirits began to break. Two prisoners were released when the U.S. president, Andrew Jackson, sent Santa Anna a special letter asking for their release. Years earlier, following the surrender at San Jacinto, when Santa Anna had been so despondent he had attempted suicide, Jackson had invited Santa Anna to visit the United States, where he had been treated with dignity and respect, at a time when his own government, shamed by his defeat, wanted nothing to do with him.

Soon a third prisoner, George B. Crittenden, was also released—he was the son of the Kentucky senator John Crittenden, who, being a Whig, was an enemy of Jackson’s but a colleague nonetheless.

These strange mercies began stirring, once again, the still-warm ashes of hope in our souls.

Some, alas, responded without valor. A prisoner from San Antonio, Judge James W. Robinson, who had served briefly as lieutenant governor of Texas in the months preceding the Alamo, began crafting a complex plan of compromise in which the Republic of Texas could be induced to return to Mexico’s rule in exchange for some assurance of limited autonomy. Robinson proposed that he himself should be the mediator in such convoluted bargaining, which would of course necessitate his being released from the Castle of Perve.

His gambit worked. Santa Anna fell for it, and soon Robinson was back in Texas, having gained an audience with Sam Houston at Washington-on-the-Brazos.

Texas’s newspapers went berserk upon hearing the proposal—“The blood of the patriots who had secured our hard-fought independence barely yet dry,” they cried—but nonetheless, Robinson’s proposal, though ludicrous on its face, did connect with a larger underlying sentiment that craved stability in the aftermath of so much war.

The new nation hungered also for the prosperity that peace could bring, and from Robinson’s half-baked idea discussion of another kind of peace-making—an armistice—began to develop. Again, the annexation discussions were resurrected. Who would get Texas, and at what price, and under what terms?

Out of Robinson’s trickery a flickering peace seemed to be emerging. Perhaps it was just a good year for peace, as certain years are occasionally favorable for some rare crop; whatever the reason, Sam Houston—whose first son was born that spring—was ebullient, and began pursuing the armistice with Mexico with new vigor. To his friend Ashbel Smith he wrote, “The new nation could no longer afford the expense of war, and the idea of the Armistice has cheered our people, and the vicious, traitorous and factious are confounded.” And with hope rising, he wrote, “Our Mexican relations have assumed a more promising aspect. Let us never despair of the Republic; but like true citizens obey the laws, love order, be industrious, live economically, and all will soon be well. Noisy, non-productive and disappointed men, who hate labor and aspire to live upon the people’s substance, have already done us great injury abroad. At home they are too well known to be any longer feared.”

Charles McLaughlin kept sketching. Hundreds of pages now filled his portfolio. There were portraits decorating the dark stone walls of our cell and lining the walls of the prison outside the cell, stuck to the stone with dried gruel. Even the guards and soldiers were posting his works in their quarters and occasionally giving him a few pesos for them, which he used not for whiskey or tobacco or even extra food but to buy new art supplies.

Waddy Thompson was becoming increasingly enamored with Mexico—he had not been back to his home in South Carolina in years. He was too comfortable, some of the prisoners groused, calling him “Mexicanized,” alarmed by the way he seemed more and more to be speaking in the Spanish tongue rather than English, though he continued to assure us that he was working diligently for our release. Green complained, “I think now he is a good hand at ‘Wind Work’ only.”

Green would have been even further enraged if he had known what we were all to learn later, which was that to increase his chances for successful diplomacy, Thompson was secretly pocketing some of our less tactful letters back home, as well as our letters to Jackson, Houston, and Santa Anna—including several of Green’s invective-filled rhetorical howls.

Still, we could have wished for no finer ally. As U.S. ambassador, it was not even his job to represent us—we were still a separate nation—but he jokingly referred to himself as the Patron Saint of Lost Causes.

At night, while Charles McLaughlin sketched by candlelight, with a halo of sputtering moths circling his flame and casting wild shadows against the stone walls, and surrounded by the snoring and gurgling, hacking coughs of our fellow prisoners, I would think about the men I might have killed so long ago, back in Mier; and of the wrongful foundation of our expedition, the faulty first step, our pillage back in Laredo—back on our own free soil, no less. I would be seized with a kind of despair,