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

one laid down for me even before my birth—as might all men, of all nations, have various paths laid down before them, to choose, or not to choose—lay in the direction of Mexico City, and a return to Clara. As a released man, finally, if not yet free, I might have been able to impress myself upon Bustamente and claim and make a life with Clara, in either her country or mine, no matter.

I hesitated after crossing the bridge. I was still a young man, barely seventeen. I had time to burn, a whole life to burn. Below me, the swans were paddling in elegant patterns that seemed somehow linked and connected to everything else in the world.

My fellow soldiers were wasting no time. They were marching on, shouting and crying in disbelief at their good fortune.

I hurried on to catch them.

Epilogue

I HAVE SPENT the fifty years since in the rolling hills near Navasota, growing pecans and corn and cotton and peaches. I survived the ensuing U.S. war with Mexico, following Texas’s annexation by the United States, and the Indian wars, which are only now ending, and the Civil War, or War for Southern Independence Against the Northern Aggression, as many in this state called it, though I was not one of them. I have seen a tenuous, uncertain nation bloom into a confident state: too confident at times, it seems to me, in the attitude that because its freedom was born of blood rather than diplomacy, that is the only true and right way.

Even now, however, I think that if anyone were to attempt to take or ruin this land, I would cross over that river yet again; that even knowing what I know, and having seen what I have seen, I might yet still be pulled across—an old man, now—as incapable of change in that regard as the turn of the seasons and the secrets of the soil itself.

Seventy-three of us came home from the Castle of Perve.

Some men came home to nothing; it was as if their lives had ceased from the moment that they had first crossed the border. Willis Coplan, for example, came home to a gravestone in his front yard that already bore his name, and with his wife remarried and living there with her new husband and family.

For a while Charles McLaughlin worked as an illustrator for some of the newspapers that had agitated for our release, and then, following Texas’s annexation to the United States, he went to Paris, not as an act of political dissent but merely to pursue his education. For years I received hand-drawn Christmas cards from him as he traveled farther east—to China, and India, and Borneo—before I finally stopped hearing from him around the age of thirty.

Other men, alas, were corrupted into the habit of war, beyond any hope of reclamation. Even in peace, they found more war. Colonel Fisher, Bigfoot Wallace, Samuel Walker, and others rode with the Texas Rangers, even after the annexation, fighting Comanches as well as Mexicans, and soon earned a name for their cruelty and tortures. Walker, who had buried a dime in the soil at Perote, vowing to come back and reclaim it some day with the interest of vengeance, did just that, leading a regiment back into Perote during the U.S.-Mexican War of 1846. He was shot dead while leading that charge but succeeded in routing the town and freeing all the prisoners—the scalawags, vermin, and unjustly imprisoned alike—and as he lay dying, his men fell prostrate across his chest, weeping for the loss of their captain.

It was the same as it had always been. Those who did not die in battle were cursed to grow old and rheumy, forgotten and untended, such as Bigfoot Wallace himself, retired out on a hardscrabble ranch west of San Antonio, far too old for war, finally, but knowing nothing else. Having killed a thousand men perhaps, by bullet, knife, and saber, and knowing nothing else; and staring, now, into the long black tunnel of the last days of his life, with no other paths, no choices or options remaining but silence and the dark vanishing.

The other night there was a warm balmy March breeze from the Gulf, and it seemed to carry every memory, every scent, from those days of hardship: memories and days and months and then years that I have labored to forget, as if working them to compost, cloaking them in the viny growth of pumpkins and squash, and in the military precision of countless rows of corn, and in the leafy green breath of peas and beans.

The breeze blew open my doors and windows, banged open a cabinet, and knocked an empty tin cup from the counter, awakening me; and when I arose, it seemed then that all those memories had not been riven to soil and worm food but had been stored away somewhere, ever bright and unharmed—in my cabinets, perhaps—and ready to return. It seemed that they were returning, spilling and sliding from the empty shelves, or that they were the breeze itself: and I was frightened, as I should have been but was not, the first time, when Green and Fisher came riding into town so long ago, and I was overwhelmed too with sadness, and I found myself weeping.

I walked outside, my face damp, frightened and lonely: as if all I had strived for in fifty years, all I had labored to bury and convert to good, had been for naught, had returned with but a single whim of the wind.

The fields were ready for planting, had been plowed but not yet seeded. I had been drawing maps, making plans for what crop would go where, and in what quantity. How they would interact with one another in their various placements and positions, how one would rise while another would fall. Which ones would serve and give to the soil, and which ones would take from and deplete—for a little while—that same soil.

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