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

for candidacy—and was elected to the Texas House of Representatives: and though we were not to learn of these things until many months later, when we did we received each piece of news with joy at the exploits of our captain, our mad captain, and William Fisher, whenever he heard the latest, smiled quietly.

Waddy Thompson came to see us after the escape. Usually positive and upbeat, he seemed dejected on this visit, and we soon learned why.

“Santa Anna was just about to release you,” he told us. “My entreaties had been working, as had Britain’s and the United States”. He was this close,” he told us, holding his thumb and finger up: a bean-sized distance, a pea-sized distance. He dropped his hands in exasperation. “You should have told me,” he said to Fisher. “I could have at least counseled postponement.”

Fisher looked away, saying nothing.

Thompson sighed. “Santa Anna’s precise words now are that your souls will rot in hell before you ever leave the Castle of Perve.” He shook his head dejectedly. “I won’t give up,” he said. There were those in Britain who wanted us free, and many in the United States, and even some in Texas, and if only we could endure, he would keep trying to arrange the political puzzle pieces that might allow us to one day walk out as free men.

He said that in the past Santa Anna’s impulsiveness might have worked to our advantage—that as he had once been quick with a grudge, so too had he been quick to forgive—but that the once brilliant, mercurial military hero was disintegrating, isolated at his Vera Cruz estate, drinking too much and immersing himself in the violent sport of cockfighting. Thompson had assisted him on numerous occasions and had found the sport—if it could be called that, he said—repellent.

As to whether we should attempt another escape, he said that earlier he would have advised against it wholeheartedly, but he was no longer sure what he himself would do, were he in our situation—though he reminded us that if any of us attempted escape and were captured, we would surely be executed. No longer would we be afforded the relative grace of the diezmo.

And though our old tunnel had been discovered and sealed back up with stones and mortar, and though our rations had been cut in half and we had each been made to haul crosses up onto the mountain, and though we were strip-searched daily, we nonetheless began digging another system of tunnels, hiding this one in the stony earth beneath the tile flooring so that it would pass not through the walls but beneath them, tunneling straight down toward the hypnotic sound of the underground river. We planned this time to dig down into the aqueduct, paint ourselves with charcoal until we were as black as night, and ride in crude hand-carved rafts made from the reassembly of our cots, also painted with charcoal, down that rushing stone-lined underground river, past whatever few guards might be lounging around the place where it exited from the mountain—passing beneath the spouting mouths of those stone-carved lions at night, and riding, as if over a small waterfall, the rushing waters that crashed out into the moat, at which point we, too, would scatter out into the desert, following the night stars east to Vera Cruz.

The typhus hit us that fall. The first symptoms were like those of yellow fever—crushing headaches, alternating with chills and nausea and disorientation—and in our relentless portages of the heavy crosses up the steep mountainside beneath the blue October sty, we clung to the mountain, and our crosses, as if to keep from being pitched off a suddenly dizzying earth. We had to stop often, lying down and curling up in the thin sun like dried fetuses expelled from some dying creature.

We were accused of malingering, were whipped and forced to work harder, but our stumbling gait grew worse, and after the first man died a physician was allowed to visit us.

The diagnosis was “jail fever,” caused by a lack of fresh air and sunlight, poor diet, and melancholia. We were allowed to move our cots and bunks out into the courtyard, to sleep beneath the stars, though still chained together. Even in our infirm state, we nearly swooned with pleasure at what had once been our birthright.

A few of us rallied briefly, but soon another wave of the illness hit, fiercer the second time around, and now the contagion leapt not just from prisoner to prisoner but to our guards, and from our guards to the surrounding town of Perote.

At the time it was not understood that the lice were carriers of the typhus—that it was in their feces, which entered our bloodstream through our scratching at our endless bedsores, and then was passed to the guards and on to the rest of the town through the tiny drops of saliva in our coughs.

The disease raged through the winter, killing half of our number and thousands of Mexicans, in results that were ironically far superior to any we might have achieved through battle.

Every day, all through that autumn and winter, several of us were hauled across the drawbridge over the moat in oxcarts—some dead, some dying—to be dropped off at the hospital or buried in the desert beyond. During that time, we had to stop work on our new tunnel, for none of us was strong enough. We could hear the river below but could not travel to it.

Bigfoot Wallace was given last rites, but he survived somehow, and proclaimed of his Mexican physician afterward that he was “one of the best-hearted men” he ever knew. But we also saw some of the guards, and indeed some of the physicians and nurses, taking the last coins from the pockets of men whose bodies were still warm.

Men who had once been comrades now argued even unto their deaths. One relatively healthy prisoner refused to give a dying partner the twelve cents