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

and crawled into the tunnel, and Fisher placed the stone back in place. I felt the strangest mix of emotions: a savage joy mingled with the most awful kind of loneliness.

We stood there, our numbers lessened by seventeen—and then Fisher looked down at a note that Green had left with him, and began to laugh.

We had assumed the note was some formal transfer of command, or perhaps the letter Sam Houston had penned so long ago, authorizing us to cross the border in the first place and to engage the enemy wherever we might find him.

Instead, it was a letter from Green to Santa Anna. “Dear Sir,” Fisher read. “Since I have recently discovered that theclimate of Perote is not suiting to my health, I think that I should, for the present, retire to one in Texas that is more congenial to my feelings.”

There was half a moment’s silence and then our cell swelled with the uproar of our laughter. The guards came running to investigate, and we quickly pretended to be engaged in a raucous cup-banging dance: and if our ranks appeared significantly diminished, it was not apparent to our captors, who peered in and saw only the whirling-dervish jigs and reels of scraggly captives who had been, kept too long imprisoned. They peered in, then turned away; roll call could wait until morning.

I could hear the rain running off the clay tiles in steady sheets, could feel the dampness emanating from those stones. I could see nothing around me but the dimmest shadowcast of candles, and the dark walls, and I yearned for nothing more than the feel of sunlight on my bare skin, and the privilege of laboring in the dry warmth of day, with clean air filling my lungs.

With my head leaning against the stones, it took a while before I realized I was hearing something other than the steady rain outside. The escapees had passed all the way through the tunnel, but upon reaching the outermost exit—the final wall, which lay beyond our wall—they found that the exit hole was still too small, that they had underestimated, and they were having to chisel it wider, working deep into the night, racing against the morning.

I listened for two hours. I had just about decided to try to join them when there finally came a silence, and then I thought I heard a few faint voices—guards, or prisoners, murmuring as if from within the rocks—and then more silence.

Surely they had been captured; surely it would be folly for me to go with them now.

I waited a while longer, listening to the silence of the stones, and then, from a different direction, with the rain still coming down in torrents, I heard the faintest, briefest sound of what sounded like the swans’ warning calls. It was short-lived, questionable—almost like a sound imagined, rather than real—and though I froze, listening for it again, and then went over to the grate where I might hear better, it did not come again.

Some of the prisoners did not get very far. In the coming days, the guards and recaptured prisoners would tell us how it went, the guards praising us for not having participated in the escape.

After squeezing through the fortress tunnel and using their rope to climb over the point-sharpened, rain-slick logs at the far end of the fort, and swimming the moat (disturbing not just the swans but all the other wild animals that were gathered there), the escapees had split into small groups and run off into the desert, with each lightning flash revealing them to be scattered farther and farther from the castle, and from one another.

One prisoner broke both arms when he fell over the other side of the wall and nearly drowned; Green rescued him, dragged him to shore, and then left him there to fend for himself. He spent the rest of the rainy night shivering, surrounded by a menagerie of animals, and in the morning he was recaptured and executed; we heard the firing squad.

Other prisoners were hunted down by the cavalry, one by one, and executed. Each day I feared that Charles McLaughlin would be among them—but after a week had passed with no new prisoners being brought in, alive or dead, I relaxed, and we learned some weeks later that Green and a few others had made it to freedom. They had made it safely all the way to Mexico City, where some American friends had hidden them for several days in Jalapa, in the home of a rich and elderly Mexican national who was hostile to Santa Anna’s violent regime.

This distinguished gentleman entrusted Green and his associates to a gang of ladrones, bandits, who ferried the Texans through secret jungle trails down to Vera Cruz, where a Frenchman gave them safe harbor for a week while they waited for an American steamer to pass through.

When one did, they slipped down to the beach at night, climbed aboard—the ship was bound for New Orleans—and were three days at sea when a plague of yellow fever struck them. The illness quickly ran its way through the sailors and escapees alike, killing half outright and incapacitating almost all of the others. But they were able to navigate the big ship back to America, half crashing it in the mouth of the Mississippi, where Indians were waiting for them. Some of the men, Green included, escaped into the brush even as the Indians were setting fire to the steamer—in its hold were no small amount of munitions, which began to explode with what seemed an unending fusillade of smoke and flame and artillery fire—and it was not until September that Green, fevered and gaunt, made it back to Texas, where he was hailed as a patriot and intrepid hero of the Revolution, in addition to the latest and now most persistent thorn in Sam Houston’s side.

Green ran for office the very next month—arriving home twenty-four hours in advance of the deadline to file