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

he needed to buy a piece of fruit in his final hours. Others prowled among the dying, crafting last wills and testaments in which they would inherit the paltry possessions of the dead. Through it all, the lice continued to scuttle from the porous stones, and the winter rains beat down upon the baked-clay tile roofs, flooding the courtyard and turning the old castle into a choking, coughing, stinking quagmire. Those of us who continued to survive grew as gaunt as skeletons, and so hollow of dreams that we could barely remember our past lives.

We burned Charles McLaughlin’s many hundreds of sketches for warmth, and often we wondered if those who died were not in a better place than those who survived. At the hospital we were lashed to cots so that we could not scratch at the sores and blisters that riddled our bodies, and we were gagged in order to keep from driving the nurses berserk with our screams of agony, and sometimes we were even blindfolded so that the nurses did not have to bear the torture of being watched by our agonized and pleading eyes. I spent two weeks there in a delirium, unable to do anything but feel the blisters spreading across my body.

And in my delirium, I was visited in dreams by James Shepherd, who was no longer missing an arm—the Shepherd of my youth, before he turned angry—and by Charles McLaughlin as well, who was angry, disappointed that I had not talked him out of his escape attempt. He was lost in the mountains, he said, and needed water again, he was dying and needed water, and then he was gone, and there was only my own fever.

We were always thirsty. In the hospital we were allowed a little coffee in the morning, and a little brandy in the evening—still blindfolded and still lashed to the hospital beds. Of the few senses still available to us, our sense of sound was the sharpest: we would hear the creak of gurney wheels each day carrying out the dead, not knowing who had survived and who had succumbed. Like divers, then, we would each descend back into the day’s fevers, never knowing if each would be our own final descent as well.

Healed and back in our indoor cell, with the out-of-date New Orleans Times-Picayunes brought to us occasionally by Waddy Thompson, we tried to keep up with the volatile international reversals and convolutions.

Sam Houston was increasingly considering the benefits of Texas’s joining the United States, but only under his republic’s own terms, which would allow it to secede any time it wished. He knew that Texas would be a more attractive annexation package if he could effect an armistice with Texas’s most troublesome neighbor, Mexico. Santa Anna, renegade warrior and tyrant, was also interested in an armistice, though for different reasons: his army had run out of food and supplies and needed to take a breather if they were to keep alive at all the dream of recapturing Texas.

Sam Houston, the most manipulative politician the young republic had produced to date, let Britain work toward the brokering of that armistice while he continued to pretend to be interested in the cowardly Robinson plan, hatched from one of our own prisoners in the Castle of Perve, in which Texas would actually rejoin Mexico, though with some autonomy retained. Nothing could have pleased Great Britain more, neither Santa Anna; and nothing could have made the United States more anxious, and in turn more eager to annex Texas. And in the weeks and months following our slow recovery from the typhus, we wondered if the proposed armistice might lead to our ultimate release.

Sam Houston continued to manipulate the British, Santa Anna, and the United States masterfully, and it occurred to us daily that if he was successful in the armistice, then Mexico might release us as a symbol of the newfound goodwill and cease-fire between the two countries.

Back in Texas, the newly elected House member Thomas Jefferson Green, not understanding that Houston’s discussions with Robinson and Santa Anna were but a feint, was haranguing Houston like a bulldog, as were some of our other successful escapees, who would not forget those whom they had been forced to leave behind. We read with gusto of how they kept up the drumbeat for our release, forcing it to become an issue for Sam Houston, so that gradually that demand became part and parcel of the armistice talks.

A newspaperman named Francis Moore was particularly incensed by the Robinson plan and railed that the blood of the patriots at the Alamo and San Jacinto, in addition to the “heroism” of the Mier Expedition, would be in vain were Texas to be annexed by either Mexico or the United States; and many of the letters now making their way out of the Castle of Perve contained the same complaints.

“We hear that annexation of Texas to the United States will take place,” wrote nineteen-year-old Joseph McCutchan from our dark, damp dungeon. “If I could for myself exercise influence it would be to say to Texas and the Texians hold dear those rights so dearly bought and promptly payed for in the blood and misery of your countrymen. Part not so freely with that which has cost you your best citizens at the Alamo, Goliad, and San Jacinto. Remain a nation yourselves, or Nobly Perish!”

And in a letter to the Telegraph and Texas Register, McCutchan wrote, “We are not much elated with the idea of Texas sallying under another nation for protection... as for myself (and it is, I believe, the opinion of the majority)—let me die—let me perish, neglected, and obscure in prison—let my frame sink under cruelties such as man never endured—let me go among the unnumbered (and innumerable) dead—and, in short, let my body decay in obscurity and my name sink into oblivion! But annex not Texas to any government.”

A tentative, informal armistice was finally agreed on between Houston