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

ourselves. We heard the whoops and revelry of our own men, and their galloping horses. All through the night, people fled through the thicket, running past our spot without noticing us. Around midnight, the shouts from our men began to sound more drunken; and not much after that, musical instruments began to play—horns and fifes and guitars—a mock-joyful symphony issuing from the burning town.

A fiddle was found, though no true fiddler, for the sounds that emanated from those tortured strings were dirgelike and anguished; and from elsewhere in the village there came random and occasional drumming—stones against overturned empty barrels, wooden clubs against the sides of buildings, musket butts against doorways—and more laughter and revelry, more cries of fright.

If we slept again at all, we might have done so for a few moments just before the cold dawn. Then, only because we had no more water, and because James Shepherd felt that he would die of thirst without some, he allowed me to leave the grasp of his hand and venture into the village to get water and to take stock of what had happened.

“If they capture you,” he said, “don’t leave me here. Make them come get me.”

His arm was hurting terribly, all soft-tissue tear, without a bone broken—and I told him not to be ridiculous, that I couldn’t be captured because they were on my side and I was on theirs. But he just looked at me, understanding what I didn’t. I have no idea how two boys growing up in the same small town could know such disparate things and, in the end, turn out so differently.

Corrals and barns stood empty, their gates and doors de molished. Low fires smoldered and crackled almost everywhere I looked. A mist was beginning to fall, mingling smoke with the morning’s fog, and I smelled not only the charred odor of wood but other things not meant to burn—a scent of trash, like spoiled fruit, and burning metal, and wet cloth.

There were dead animals everywhere—dogs and chickens strewn in the street, with a layer of dust absorbing the morning’s mist and slowly transforming to mud. There were dead horses and cattle, mules and pigs, too, some shot and others killed by swords.

Murdered men and women lay in the street, too, their congealed blood loosened in the light rain. Scraps and rags of clothing lay the streets, a man hung from a second-story balcony, a crude noose around his neck, his head and arms drooping.

In the gray light, I saw that some of the outstretched bodies were stirring. A man tried to sit up, put his hands to his head, then tipped over on his side. A woman with a battered face reached down to pull her shawl up farther over her and then lay looking up into the rain.

I didn’t know whom to help or where to turn; there was too much carnage. I found a bloodless severed hand in the street—a woman’s? A young man’s?—and walked past it, puking bile. I would find water for James Shepherd and then go back to him. And after that, we would return home and start over. Our quiet lives would be enough.

I understood that I was looking into some horrific new territory that could never be forgotten, and more than anything I wanted to flee, even abandoning Shepherd, but I stepped over and around carcasses and went up the stairs of the only building left unharmed. The downstairs was some sort of lobby. I ascended to the second floor and saw why the building was unscathed. Green and Fisher had commandeered it for their headquarters—Wallace was there, too, and half a dozen others whose looks were terrifying.

They sat in a circle of mismatched chairs. Green and Somervell’s chairs were turned backwards so that they straddled them like horses. They leaned forward in the chairs, resting the weight of their torsos against the backs, as if even here they intended to somehow charge into battle. Of them all, only Fisher seemed relaxed, with one leg stretched out before him. All of the men’s boots and pants were wet, and a dull fire in the stove was only now beginning to warm enough to send up steam.

Empty whiskey bottles lay on the floor, and several men held partly finished tumblers, though while I was there, none of them drank, as if, finally, they’d had enough.

Ashy-faced, nearly all were smoking, a raft of blue smoke hanging halfway to the ceiling. They looked at me with a mix of curiosity and hostility. I wondered if any of them had hung the man across the street, and for what offense.

There was a little sound from outside on the porch, a kind of a hiss or gasp, like the air going out of something—the sound of an injured man or woman dying—and the men gave no indication of noticing. After a moment, I eased out of the room and went back downstairs.

Outside, a raven filtered down from the fog and smoke and settled onto the shoulder of one of the fallen, as if that man were his master and the raven had been seeking him out, returning after a long night’s absence. The raven perched for a moment, clutching the man’s stiff shoulder as if waiting for him to awaken, and, when he did not, the raven edged a couple of hops closer to the man’s clenched face, and with a delicate motion of his heavy bill, pulled the lids open and daintily pecked his eyes.

I hurried out into the street and shooed the raven away. I walked closer to the man and saw a crumpled trumpet lying in the mud next to him. I looked up and saw across the street, in the downstairs doorway of the building from which the hanged man was suspended, a young child watching, barely a toddler. I went back to the sidewalk and picked up several of the empty whiskey bottles, filled them from a watering trough, and hurried off, three