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

you fish the hole first.” I was thinking of the deep water near where we liked to camp and where there were always fish.

James Shepherd looked frightened, but his face shone with a strange intensity—almost a fever.

“Fishing,” he snorted. He looked over at the other recruits. “We’re going hunting. Hunting men,” he said.

But none of them paid him any mind, knowing it was only bravado—he was so young—and I knew him better than to take his rebuke seriously. He was only trying to find his place.

Often we spent our time around the campfire writing letters to those we had left behind, exaggerating both our hardships and the heroes’ welcomes we received. And not having met the enemy, we speculated about victory. Travis Parvin, a twenty-year-old from Goliad, with his ambition set on the Texas Senate, wrote to his parents that his “unswerving faith in our own fighting abilities, and in the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race, has stilled all doubts of our success in this upcoming war.” Others spoke of the “miscegenation of the Indian and Hispanic peoples,” which had created “a lower breed rendered all the more inferior by a hot, tropical climate which leaves them listless and phlegmatic.” Some of the men carried leatherbound journals with elegant fountain pens, and wrote increasingly as the campaign advanced and their boredom grew. Whenever we paused, I’d see one or more of them scribbling away, dipping quill tip cautiously in the inkwell, shielding it and the journal from the blowing grit. The illiterates in our brigade crouched beside the writers, studying the flow of sentences, attempting to discern order and meaning, mystified by the process.

The farther south we got, the more James Shepherd and I talked about death.

In the daytime, Shepherd projected nonchalance, indifference. “If I don’t make it back, Jim,” he told me, “I want you to have my gun, give my horse to my youngest brother, and tell my family that I died bravely.”

In the evenings, he was less confident.

Up on the James River, he had always been exceedingly cautious about the possibility of encountering Comanches. That was understandable, but he had also worried about lesser things—deep-water river crossings, sleeping out at night, and the possibility of getting ill from eating fish that wasn’t cooked enough or from dishes that weren’t clean. At home, his father had been increasingly critical of his work, so Shepherd was enjoying his first taste of freedom, but an anger was blossoming in him: all his native cautions and fears were finding root in a new, more toxic substrate. We rode on Green’s side of the regiment, though Fisher, on the right, searched us out with his yellow eyes.

A half-dozen cliques formed, with cross-pollination occurring daily—subtle betrayals and disappointments, social defections and misunderstandings, intentional disrespect or challenges, and ceaseless miscommunication. Some of us were perceived to be more valuable, more vital to the cause, than others. And we boys from the country were the most expendable, the most unnoticeable of all. Occasionally, even our patriotism was questioned.

“What are your goals?” the interpreter Alfred Thurmond—one of the important ones—asked me and Shepherd one evening, having sensed our weakness, or softness, with our having said hardly a word—an interpreter of silence.

“To do good for my country,” I said, with the full earnestness of youth. “To send a message to the enemy, and to make a stand.”

Shepherd’s answer was more terse, as if he had been pondering and hungering for the question. “Respect,” he said. And Alfred Thurmond nodded, as if only that one goal could have a chance of coming true.

James Shepherd watched Captain Fisher with an intensity that bordered on the hypnotic. When Fisher lifted his canteen to drink, Shepherd did the same. When Fisher lifted a hoof of his horse to clean it, Shepherd examined his mount’s hooves.

Respect, Shepherd had said. Where might that reside?

I was unobtrusive, almost invisible, in my unremarkableness, my silence and attentiveness. I had a kind of critical awareness of the way that things not said can occupy more space and possess deeper meaning than the things that are spoken. When the cook was distributing the evening beans or that night’s stew, I was the one overlooked or not seen, by-passed, not given enough or any at all. I was neither threat nor menace to anyone, possessed neither confidence nor brute strength. Even Green, who had recruited me, could never remember my name. “James Shepherd’s friend” was what he and Fisher both called me.

I learned to trust my instincts and imagination, and I detected an unbraiding of currents between Green and Fisher, as well as confusion and drift among Somervell’s dandies. Even so, I was unprepared for what happened in Laredo.

We were on our side of the line, among Texans if not yet Americans: we were still our own separate nation. We had not yet decided whether to cross the Rio Grande, which would have been an act of war, but were ostensibly searching for the bandits.

For days, the powder had been smoldering in all the men. It was Shepherd’s seventeenth birthday, and he and I rode near the back. We hoped we might lay up overnight in Laredo so we could fish the Rio Grande. We had been told it held catfish large enough to swallow dogs.

We heard a shot—a surprising, unfamiliar sound, different from the tone of any of the weaponry I’d heard from our target practice—and then there was a pause, and I imagined that a gun had gone off by accident or that someone had shot at a snake or perhaps a deer. After that, there was some shouting—just a lone voice at first, but then another, and another—and then several shots together. These were answered by more shots, more shouting, and then the horses and riders around us were wheeling in different directions, some flaring away from us and others riding back past us; and my first thought was that a bear or even a jaguar was charging through our midst, within