Diezmo

by Rick Bass

  He slept in the officers’ tent with Fisher and his aide, Henry Franklin. Fisher was teaching him military strategy, he said. He was eager for battle, though I saw the old fear in him, rivaling his desire.

  I wanted no special recognition from Green or Fisher but envied Shepherd’s ease and power.

  “How’s your arm?” I asked.

  “It hurts,” he admitted. He knew about the wagering on whether or not the arm would be amputated, yet seemed not to care, seemed almost exultant.

  “What do you think about this big river?” I asked. The Rio Grande was almost always in sight. “Do you think we could fish it one night?”

  “I want to cross that damn river,” he said. “Captain Fisher does, too.” He spit. “Green doesn’t.”

  His arm smelled like rot, and a few minutes later, when Fisher came riding up, looking angry, and Shepherd rose quickly and left, I was glad.

  Orlando Phelps, another man at the fire—only a year older than I and small and dark-skinned, with a Mexican mother—watched the two men ride away and laughed. “I see that your friend has become frail.” He said it without cruelty or taunt but in surprised observation. He started to ask me something but let it drop. And for myself, I couldn’t think how to approach the question of James Shepherd. What was the source of his anger? It was carrying him away.

  Up and down the river we patrolled, quarreling among ourselves, Ewen Cameron sometimes the instigator and other times the peacemaker, able single-handedly to subdue three or four men. I fell in with a group of boys—John Hill, Jesse Yocum, Orlando Phelps, Billy Reese, Gilbert Brush, and Harvey Sellers, most of whom were fourteen or fifteen. We watched the junior officers jockeying and plotting, with scrapes becoming increasingly frequent around each night’s campfire, though the next day always brought renewed solidarity.

  The weather grew colder and rainy, our bellies gaunt and our clothes shabby. Captain Green’s letter was tattered nearly to pieces now, and our fiddles had all been lost or left behind.

  Orlando Phelps and I and the other boys fished in the evenings. In the deepest pools of the Rio Grande there were catfish far bigger than anything ever hauled out of the James. For bait, we used the cut-up shanks of deer legs, ladled from our evening stew, or the offal of javelinas, or rabbits, or small birds. The catfish were always hungry, and there were endless numbers of them.

  Seated by a fire on the riverbank, we each baited a big hook, tossed our lines in, and waited. We talked about home, and what we’d do when we got back. John Hill was particularly homesick and spoke often of his younger brothers and sisters. “There’s this big tree we liked to all climb,” he said, and then corrected himself. “This tree we like to climb. You can see all the way to the Brazos. It’s a cool place in the summer. We would all five climb up in that tree and nap like coons, in the breeze, when we had our chores done.”

  A ferocious splashing commenced out in the river, a shout came from one of the boys, and then there was a sound like a cow trying to swim the river. And all the cheers and curses that went up would surely have alerted any soldiers on the Mexican side. The boys got the fish up on the bank, and clubbed it before it could break the line and slither back into the river.

  Gasping, flopping, writhing in the sand, the fish looked half as large as a calf. We caught several every evening, but it wasn’t the same as with James Shepherd before the war. It was satisfying but not pleasant.

  Some of the catfish were so big they broke the line and took our hooks, and when we lost all our hooks, we whittled new ones from green mesquite and huisache. Every evening we landed two or three dragonlike monsters and were proud to help provision the straggling army.

  Henry Whaling, a large youth of eighteen, busied himself catching smaller fish in the shallows, using crickets for bait. His fish were little larger than sardines, too small to bother dragging back to camp, so he made his own fire in the sand by the river and cooked them on a stick and ate them as fast as he caught them, a dozen or sometimes two in an evening.

  On such nights, war seemed far away and almost forgotten. The next day on the trail, many of us could barely stay awake. Lulled by the jingle of the horses’ bits and the ship-like creak of old leather, we kept falling asleep in our saddles. We would lurch back into wakefulness just in time to keep from falling from our horses. And it seemed that as we napped, We traveled to some deep, wonderful place, from which we emerged refreshed, even gilded; and shaking our heads to clear them from the dreamy residue of that brief voyage, we took the reins in both hands and nudged our horses into a trot, hurrying to catch up.

  One evening, after we set up camp, we heard a single shot, not from across the border but from behind us. Thinking we were being fired upon, we scrambled onto our horses, leaving our cooking fires and extra stock untended, and charged off into the brush under the semicommand of scattered officers.

  But what we found was fifteen-year-old John Hill, huddled crying over the body of his fourteen-year-old friend Jesse Yocum.

  They’d been out rabbit hunting, crawling through the brush, and a branch snagged the trigger of Hill’s gun, discharging a bullet into Yocum’s back. Hill hurried to Yocum, turned him over, and saw a gaping exit wound in his ribs. Yocum barely had time to forgive Hill before he died.

  We carried the body back to camp and wrapped it in blankets to prepare it for burial the next day. All that night, the camp was kept awake by Hill’s sobbing.

  In the morning, under a cold rain with a northwest wind, we buried Yocum in an unmarked grave on a bluff of the Rio Grande, Yocum’s head slightly elevated and his boots pointing north into the republic younger than himself.

  Shepherd’s arm was the next thing lost. Some days we smelled it from a distance, and other days there was little scent at all. At times, the flesh of his arm was putrescent, bruised and streaked with rivulets of blood and pus, grit and debris. Nightly, Shepherd yelled as Dr. Sinnickson attempted to irrigate the wound, though each day the wind brought new dust and dirt. Sometimes it seemed to have sealed over with a vitreous, almost metallic sheen, and on those days the odor was subdued, and we could hope that beneath the fiery purple scab, the flesh was knitting.

  Some days even his breath was gangrenous, and I thought we might lose him yet. Instead, three days after we buried Yocum, Shepherd lost the arm. Sinnickson had been preparing him for the eventuality, but Shepherd had been resisting it. The issue resolved itself when Shepherd passed out while riding. He landed on his bad arm, rupturing it. Pulpy fragments remained on the rocks where he fell. The arm was bleeding profusely, and Sinnickson tied it off.

  A tent was set up. Sinnickson directed Shepherd to drink three glasses of whiskey, while we built a low fire in the rain, in order to boil the carving knives and fine-toothed saw he carried in his satchel. They tied Shepherd down, with Cameron’s help.

  While Shepherd screamed and cursed—before he passed out—Sinnickson sawed the arm off through the top of the shoulder, as if quartering a deer, taking a piece of the shoulder, clamping the artery with horsehair thread and then cauterizing the flesh before sewing the flap of bruised skin back over the wound. He told us the gangrene was close to Shepherd’s heart and gave him a one in ten chance of surviving, but he did not say this to Shepherd.

  Captain Fisher wrapped the arm in a sheet and grabbed me by my arm, and we stumbled off into the rain, toward the officer’s latrine, where he got a shovel and thrust it at me. Then we reeled off into the brush, down toward the river.

  I dug, while Fisher knelt clutching the arm. The soil was sandy and soft in the rain, and soon I had a pit deep enough to bury a body in. He handed me the arm and watched as I laid it in the sand, climbed out, and shoveled sand over it. We stood by the mound until finally Fisher fetched a large rounded stone from the bluff and placed it on the mound as a marker.

  We went back to the tent, where Shepherd lay unconscious. Fisher, Sinnickson, and I sat waiting for Shepherd to come to, and I wondered if I might be asked to ride up front, and whet
her I wanted to. Sometime after midnight, Shepherd awoke wailing and thrashing in pain. We struggled to hold him down, Shepherd cursing us, Mexicans, war, God, his family, and all the world. Fisher’s aide, Franklin, ran to get the big Scot, Ewen Cameron, to help hold Shepherd down again, while others tied rope and strips of bed sheet around him.

  For nearly two hours, Shepherd carried on so loudly that wolves and coyotes answered with their own wails. Finally he fell unconscious. I wanted to stay there in the tent with him, but Fisher told me to go get some rest.

  No one in camp believed that Shepherd would survive the night. Money changed hands, wagers made on his demise in terms not of if but when. My campmates’ voices fell when I approached. “Is he living?” Billy Reese asked, just a boy himself. “Is he alive?” I said that he was, and that he was going to survive and live a full, useful life, doing many great things. The men and boys paused, then resumed their wagering.

  We stayed in camp for five days while Shepherd’s shoulder healed, Sinnickson administering laudanum in scrimping doses, and only when Fisher ordered him to. Shepherd slept and was semiconscious most of the time. His waking moments were highlighted by screams and curses, making not just the men but even the horses in their hobbles nervous, and frightening the nearby game, so that our hunters had to travel farther to find success.

  The boys and I fished each evening and napped during the day, wrapped in our blankets under scraggly mesquite trees, with the stark December sun on our faces. Several times each day I checked on Shepherd. On occasion, he was awake and not howling but silent and grim-faced. He looked ten years older and fierce. He wanted to know what we had done with the arm and if I was certain that it hadn’t been salvageable. As if he were considering returning to it, or returning to something. The boy he had been, perhaps.

  Meanwhile, the tension grew between Green and Fisher. Green wanted to move on, whether Shepherd was ready or not. Sinnickson said Shepherd would benefit from another week of rest, but Shepherd was antsy to travel again.

  I wondered where Somervell was by now. It was a few days before Christmas, and what I wanted was a fine Christmas feast at home with my family. But most of the men were anxious to forge south, which was more perplexing when I learned that Green and many of his men, including Cameron and Wallace, had been captured by the Mexicans before, while they were under the command of Zachary Taylor.

  Green and several hundred of his men had been scheduled for execution until they vowed, under penalty of death, never to take up arms against Mexico again and never even to venture back into Mexico. (Under much these same terms, Santa Anna was allowed to return to Mexico after his defeat at San Jacinto. Some said he retired and was living on the coast in Vera Cruz, raising fighting cocks and tending a garden of orchids, while others said he was plotting a return and had been a secret partner in General Woll’s raids on San Antonio.) Whatever pact Green and his men had made, they were ready, less than a year later, to betray it.

  Aggression mounted, the turmoil in our spirits agitated by the delay, the cold wet weather, and the increasing squalor of camp. There were more fights, until finally the situation grew so untenable that Fisher agreed we had to move, whether Shepherd was ready or not. Fisher planned to leave me and his aide, Franklin, with Shepherd, with instructions to catch up as soon as Shepherd could travel; but on the morning of the sixth day, as the men broke camp, rolling up wet tents and unhobbling the stock, Shepherd asked Franklin to saddle his horse, and then climbed up onto it and declared himself ready.

  He didn’t look graceful, hauling himself up onto that horse. Shepherd’s legs, never powerful, were weak from his ordeal, and he nearly fell backwards. Franklin hovered to catch him, but once he was up, he sat with a certain nobility. The men gave a great cheer, Fisher looked overcome with pride, and we moved out, Shepherd in the lead between Fisher and Green, the ranks behind them serpentine, disjointed, rusty, but rested. Ready to kill and be killed.

  The weather grew worse—fog and cold mist that turned to sleet. Icicles hung from our horses’ nostrils and the brims of our hats. Our rations and clothes were worse than ever, but our spirits received a boost when, in a steady downpour, Henry Whaling, Billy Reese, and I glimpsed the horrific and exhilarating sight of the Mexican army moving through the fog at dusk on the other side of the river, heading upstream toward Laredo. It was but blind luck that we weren’t already on the riverbank, fishing, but in the bushes, where we remained, watching and taking a rough assay of their numbers. We counted two thousand before darkness obscured the columns. If they were searching for us, we were flattered and terrified that we were considered dangerous enough to inspire such a large expedition. At camp, we announced our discovery, and after a quick parley, Green and Fisher decided to push hard upstream and cross the river a day or two ahead of the Mexicans’ march. There we would capture and hold hostage the first undefended village we found.

  I knew it was wrong. The logic was obviously faulty, but I had been stirred by the sight of the Mexican cavalry, the precision of their riverside march. It was an honor to be their enemy. Green encouraged us, “You may take pride in the battle when the cause is just.” When I asked myself much later why he and Fisher had not turned back north to recruit more men to fill Somervell’s departure, it occurred to me that they were afraid they would be disciplined for the atrocities in Laredo. That already, they—we—were prisoners.

  In a long and tattered line, our horses slick and darkened by the cold rain, we rode without lanterns through the night. All I saw in front of me were milky clouds of breath from my horse and plumes from the horse ahead.

  We prepared to cross over near the Mexican village of Guerrero, which would be our first target. We didn’t go fishing that night but stayed around our campfires, cleaning and re-cleaning our weapons and talking quietly. Bigfoot Wallace argued with old Ezekiel Smith about the relative unimportance of numbers in opposing armies. In a cause such as ours, Wallace argued, we could succeed with one tenth the force of our enemy. A discussion ensued concerning which was the greater war—Thermopylae, under the defense of Leonidas I, or our own recent Alamo, in which one hundred and eighty-six men stood against six thousand of Santa Anna’s finest, buying time and inflicting enough casualties to allow Sam Houston his victory at San Jacinto a month later. Ezekiel Smith held that Thermopylae was the greater victory, since it allowed Greece to become Greece, whereas the birth of Texas meant nothing to the world. Wallace disagreed strongly, promising that the republic was a cradle of democracy, the birthplace of a civilization that would advance arts and letters, science, engineering, the production of goods from a bounty of natural resources, and, above all, the chivalry, honesty, fortitude, and fairness that marked man’s highest purpose. He became so exercised in his assertions that I think he would have thrashed the old man had Smith dared to disagree.

  We crossed the river in the darkness before first light, riding into Guerrero in a heavy downpour. The smoke from the pueblos hung dense and blue. We were agitated, nervous that the slightest sound would give us away, unleashing enemy fire. The creak of saddle leather from so many horses and the splashing surge of our river crossing swept me up in a collective courage and daring. I was not afraid of dying, only losing.

  We rode into the darkened village with our rifles ready, our pistols loaded. Those of us who carried swords had practiced drawing them, for use in close combat. We entered the village and rode through it, nearly a thousand horse hooves clopping, a sound from a dream perhaps. A few dogs roused and barked. I was certain we would find our battle, and waited in delighted anticipation for the first rifle shot.

  We rode all the way through the village undisturbed, then turned around and came back to its center. Fisher and Green dismounted and announced loudly to the sleeping town that we would now be occupying it, holding it hostage. The rest of us sat on our horses, strung out up and down the streets, while Fisher and Green dispatched a number of men to commandeer enemy funds.

  We took possession of the
village without a single shot being fired; indeed, we never saw a weapon in Guerrero other than our own. The inhabitants were gaunt mules and starving paisanos. Hostage to what? one of them asked.

  Fisher found the town priest and threatened to harm him if a $5,000 ransom was not paid. He gestured toward Shepherd and indicated that with his good arm Shepherd would execute the priest with a sword.

  The town leaders hurried from door to door in the driving rain—curious faces appearing in the open doorways and windows while we sat around on our horses getting drenched. The town presented us with $381 at noon, and after counting it Green spat and said, “If that’s all they can do, tell them to keep it.”

  We stayed the night, splitting up and taking refuge in the huts of the starving villagers, with none of the revelry of Laredo; as if, to a man, we were ashamed of that past behavior, and as if the spirit of Christmas commanded us, in spite of Fisher’s threats to the priest. The rain shifted to sleet. We shared soup with the various families whose huts we occupied.

  In the morning, we discovered that many of the lame and starving of our horses had died from the freezing cold. After we butchered and ate as much as we could hold, there was horse meat left for the villagers, and they asked for the hides of the horses as well.

  Two more of our lieutenants—Byrd and Kenedy—decided to turn back, taking their men with them. Several men not belonging to the two lieutenants’ companies chose to go with them. One man—Joseph Berry—was suffering from a cactus needle lodged in his leg, his kneecap stinking and swelling, Sinnickson eyeing it daily—but Berry chose to stay.