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

Knowing Shepherd’s sensitive nature, his queasiness regarding blood and pain and entrails, I wasn’t sure I should tell him what I’d seen. I came hurrying down the trail through the thicket and found him awake and watching for me. He had been crying, and little rivers and deltas of salt tracked the dust and grime on his face. He asked what took me so long, and I told him that, yes, there had been looting.

He greedily drank the water. His arm was so swollen that he could barely move it, and I was about to examine it when Fisher came galloping down the narrow trail, brush thwacking his small agile horse at every turn, so that Fisher seemed barely in control.

He reined to a slashing stop, spraying a shower of sand across us. At first I didn’t understand that he had come after me. I thought the rage in his eyes was about his horse’s behavior, or that he was chasing someone else—some bandit, some infidel to the republic.

He leapt down from his horse, one hand on the reins and the other on his sword. He glanced at Shepherd and then at me.

“What is your intent?” Fisher demanded, glancing possessively at Shepherd, believing perhaps that I had kidnapped him and would form a splintered ragtag militia of two. Fisher gripped the butt of his sword. “Just where did you think you were going?” he asked. “We can’t be having desertions. The mission hasn’t even begun.” He gestured toward town.

“My friend is hurt,” I answered. “I’m taking care of him.”

Then Fisher went to Shepherd and held his arm almost tenderly and examined the blood-soaked bandage with a critical and scornful but concerned air.

“May I look at it?” he asked.

The wound hurt and Shepherd could barely tolerate the lightest touch, but he didn’t protest while Fisher touched the wound with his long fingers, then traced the blood-streaked tracks of impending infection.

Sweat beaded around Shepherd’s scalp and trickled down his nose and fell in splattering drops. Fisher studied upon the wound almost admiringly.

“Another inch to the left or the right, and you’d be as dead as the ones we left behind,” Fisher said. “Still, you’re not out of it. We’ll have to get this dressed.” He looked up at me inquiringly and then remembered who I was—he did not need my permission—and he gestured for one of the whiskey bottles of water.

Taking a rumpled, dirty handkerchief from his coat pocket, he dabbed the water onto it. At the first firm touch, Shepherd’s eyes sought mine, wildly, as if pleading, and Fisher tensed. Shepherd bit his lip and didn’t cry out, but simply shuddered, and Fisher relaxed and went on cleaning the wound.

Soon I untied the horses and held Shepherd’s as Fisher helped him into the saddle. I felt I was betraying him, sending him off to his doom.

We rode the brushy trail back into the clearing where the fighting had begun. We saw dead horses, dead villagers, dead Texans. Our horses shied, and Shepherd glanced at me, starting to understand, I think, that we were traveling in the wrong direction.

I followed them at a distance. James Shepherd, never a good rider, listed in his saddle, unable to lift his damaged arm. Fisher rode on his bad side to catch him should he fall.

In Laredo, Somervell and his men were cleaning the streets. In the daylight hours, I had seldom seen him dismounted. He walked bandy-legged along with several of his men, gathering torn, ragged garments from mud puddles, carrying armloads of them like washerwomen, and dragging corpses off the streets and leaning them against the sides of buildings, their heads down-tipped and shoulders slumped, as if they were only napping.

When we came to the hotel in which the officers had gathered that morning, a fire burned in the middle of the street, with half a hundred men gathered around. I smelled meat cooking and saw that the men were roasting several pigs.

Fisher dismounted and helped Shepherd dismount. He handed me their reins to hitch their horses and gestured Shepherd to precede him up the stairs. When I followed, Fisher turned and I thought he was going to tell me to remain downstairs, but he said nothing.

Upstairs, he sat down with Green and the others, and then Somervell came up the steps, angry, and informed Green and Fisher that he was taking his men north and disbanding them, that this regiment was a disgrace to the republic.

Fisher’s face darkened and he rose with his hand on his sword, half-drawn, but Green intervened by firing his pistol into the floor.

Green’s volley was answered by the whoops and shouts of the soldiers down by the pig roast—they started firing their own weapons—and after a moment of cold staring between Somervell and Fisher, Somervell turned and went back toward the stairs to gather his men and leave. I knew I should go with him.

Somervell was two paces away, and then he was three and four. Even at five and then six paces there was time. And how would my life have been different, if I had left? The difference was not along a fine line or in a shade of gray. It was a stark and enormous abyss.

We had a feast, and after the last of the pigs were eaten, along with a great iron kettle of hominy, seasoned with chili peppers and dotted with flecks of ash from the fire, we bid farewell to the terrorized town, Green and Fisher vowing loudly to whoever might be within hearing that we would return and erase Laredo from the face of the earth if we were fired upon again and that the same would hold true for any other village along the border.

Shepherd rode at the front, next to Fisher, and wore an expression of foolish pride. I remembered what Green’s face looked like when the shooting started: how eager he had looked, and how instantaneous the change had been. As if he