Diezmo

by Rick Bass

  We found our first and last water at Agua Nieta. The spring was alkaline, surrounded by calceous stone walls of great antiquity, erected to keep animals out; but we knocked out the walls and gate and drove our remuda right into the warm shallow spring, where we slid down from our saddles and lay on our bellies like pigs, drinking among the mules and horses as they too wallowed and thrashed in the salty pond. Our thrashings were soon soiling the spring with horse piss and green mule shit, as well as the vomit of soldiers who had drunk too much too fast, and their own piss and shit and grime as they stripped out of their filthy rags and laundered them, standing ankle-deep in the turmoil and scrubbing themselves with gouty fistfuls of the chalky mud.

  I and a few others crouched at the edge of the salty pond—the water was lowering before our very eyes—and quickly filled our flasks and canteens, splashed water on our bare faces and arms, and cleaned ourselves as best as we could. We looked backwards often, to see that the waver of Barragan’s men was larger, becoming more and more distinct—and finally leaders rousted the wallowers from the now vile spring and told us we needed to be moving again.

  Charles McLaughlin was seated on one of the stone walls, sketching the scene before him quickly, and by the time Wallace and Cameron had the men and their stock rounded up, he had finished his sketch. Those of us who cared to look at it agreed that it was almost realistic, but we were a bit surprised that it had come from his hand, and from his eye.

  He had made the scene appear almost idyllic, with very little of the squalor.

  In that regard, the picture was false, but in the sense that it presented ourselves the way we would have liked to be seen, it was true.

  Briefly strengthened, the wallowers began to argue with Cameron about his decision to stay on the road. “Let’s go up into the mountains,” they said. “The cavalry can never find or follow us there.” And I regret to say that although I had heretofore been in complete agreement with everything Cameron and particularly Wallace had counseled, in this instance I was among those clamoring to go up into the mountains and perhaps cross back over into Texas, farther west, through the Sierra Madres.

  Only Cameron and Wallace wanted to stick to the main road. But now that the war was breaking up, their power was fading, and the hundred-other of us had our way.

  What did we know of mountains? Only enough to be dangerous to ourselves. When we looked back, we rejoiced, at first, on seeing that Barragan’s men had paused at the foot of the mountains, watching our ascent, and had not followed. Indeed, some of them turned back, and from our initial vantage, already some thousand feet above them, we had cheered. Others of Barragan’s men watched us a while longer and then rode on farther north: and to a man, we felt that our choice had been the right one.

  Barragan’s men had not long been gone from sight before we began to encounter our first difficulties. What had seemingly offered us salvation, the mountains’ ruggedness, was also what threatened to break us, for the pitch became steeper and our footing less certain in the scree at the base of the cliffs we sought to scale. Having never ridden horses in the mountains, we had not realized there might be terrain too steep for them or even the mules, and soon we were having to lead them up and over the larger boulders and through the scree, horses and men sliding and scrambling alike. We were having to pull and push them up through slots and chimneys, our work made all the more impossible by the heavy burdens of our looting.

  Some of the clastic rocks were still sharp-edged, remnants from a long-ago exploded earth—and the razor edges of those shattered rocks slashed our tattered boots and shoes and sliced the fetlocks of our pack train, so that we left behind us a wandering ribbon of red, like a skein of bright thread laid down on a map.

  There was no water, only brush and cactus and shattered stones. The vertical walls of granite were flecked with dark fragments of mineral so shiny that, when climbing with our faces pressed tight against those cliffs, we could sometimes see our own eyes reflected as if in blackened mirrors. It was an unsettling image—as if we had somehow been captured by the mountain and were now moving around inside it, or as if we were looking across time and space to another version of ourselves.

  We kept ascending, a diminished army of thieves and gentlemen, but by nightfall had made only a few more hundred feet. We made camp on a narrow ledge, roping ourselves to crags and pinnacles, and slept fitfully in the freezing wind. All night, whenever I drifted off for even a few minutes of slumber, I dreamt of falling, as apparently did many of the rest of the men, and all night the mountain rang with our sleepy shouts of fear, while our unhobbled horses and mules wandered off to search in vain for a blade of grass, of which there were none, only stone and creosote bushes.

  In the harsh cold red light of morning we awakened and understood, each of us, that the horses and mules would have to be slaughtered.

  We set about this task methodically, using our knives and jeweled swords. It was sloppy, inefficient work, and as the floundering mules and horses staggered about bleeding to death, we raced after them, laboring to hold our empty gourds beneath leaping gouts of blood; and when the gourds were filled, we drank directly from the animals’ necks, gorging once more, while the rocks beneath us, like our faces and bodies, became painted bright crimson in the morning sun. The giants, Cameron and Wallace, were of invaluable assistance in this gruesome task, and worked with grim wordlessness, as if we had entered another land where language no longer mattered.

  Charles McLaughlin followed us, sketching it all.

  After we had drunk the blood of the horses and mules, we began carving on them; and because there was no wood for making real cooking fires, we set fire to the creosote bushes, a hundred or more such little fires burning all around us, and we cooked the meat as best as we could in that manner, searing it to warm gray on sticks held over the oily black smoke of the smoldering creosote.

  Many of our shoes and boots had fallen apart completely on the rocks below, so we cut up the horses’ saddles, and the bloody hides themselves, in crude attempts to make sandals. And yet, we were not despairing. High up on the mountain, it seemed to us that we were free, even in our misery. We divided our $1,400 of silver, giving each man his share.

  We pushed on higher up the mountain. At the next crest we paused to look down. Below us, like the spoor of our freedom, lay hundreds of charred and smoking bushes. The bright shattered rocks seemed almost alive in their brilliance now, and the skinned and shredded carcasses of nearly a hundred mules and horses lay broken open on the rocks.

  Curtis Haieber, Jimmy Pinn, and Robert Gosk decided to stop for a while and nurse their feet. The rest of us kept moving, but by morning two more dropped out. Charles McLaughlin paused to sketch the deserters.

  We ascended a ridge and were up out of the creosote and chaparral. The walking should have been easier, but it wasn’t, and by noon three more men dropped their packs and sat down and waved to the rest of us and told us to go on, go on, mas alla, farther on.

  That night we couldn’t sleep. Our tongues were swollen and beginning to turn black. There was no more discussion of reaching the Rio Grande, or even of leaving this godforsaken country. We desired only water, and the next day we split apart further, with Cameron and Wallace still commanding a core of about fifty men and the rest unbraided into little tribes of five and six, with the agreement that any of us who found water would send up smoke signals.

  McLaughlin stayed with us. He had been sketching Wallace and Cameron, drawing them even as they walked, and now he had begun to sketch me, too, which made me feel worthy and officerlike.

  I still had the last beans in my pocket: a smaller fistful, but still a fistful. I had lost all hunger, craved only water, and was allowing myself one bean per day, which I sucked on from morning to evening. As we trudged, I counted and examined each bean—I had gone into the mountains with forty—and I wondered how many, if any, would be left when I was finally out of the mountains.

  Later in the day, we abandoned ou
r rifles and packs. Even Bigfoot Wallace lay down his musket, building a little cairn around it so that he might one day return to it. He was moving slowly; it took him an hour to perform this small task, and his usually sharp mind was torpid—he appeared befuddled at times by the choice of all the rocks that were available to him—and then we proceeded on, feeling, for a while, almost winged in our lightness.

  There was little vegetation of any kind—we gnawed at the black lichen we sometimes found growing on the rocks, so that to anyone watching us from above, it would have seemed that we were gnawing at the rocks themselves—and when we encountered an occasional clump of prickly pear cactus, we dug these up with bleeding hands and chewed greedily at the spiny pads and succulent roots, trying to avoid piercing our swollen black tongues on the cactus spines.

  That night we lay collapsed in the high desert. No one spoke, no fires were built, no sentries were posted. It was our fourth day without water. It seemed that all the water in the world was gone.

  Overnight, John Alexander, who was sleeping but a short distance away from me, dreamt of water. In the morning, he told us that in his dream he was back at his home in Brazoria County, where there was a great feast in his honor, with friends and family, but he kept pushing all the wonderful food aside.

  “I craved water, only water,” he said, “and when this was forthcoming I emptied each jar as it was brought to me and then called for more.” He shook his head slowly, exhibiting the same torpor that had afflicted Bigfoot Wallace. “Each draught seemed only to inflame my thirst, and yet no one of the vast company present seemed astonished at the amount of water I drank. My thirst was unquenchable.”

  We all felt a great envy that he had received such offering, even if only in a dream, and I felt a great loneliness, that I had been sleeping near him but had received no such dream, that it had passed over me and chosen him.

  And when he, too, split off from our larger group, choosing instead to try to crawl back down off the mountain, no one tried to discourage him, and an older man, an ex-officer from Zachary Taylor’s campaign in New Mexico, Major George Oldham, joined him, as did a few others. We watched as they crawled away across the high desert like animals, disappearing over the rim of the mountain, looking like a line of slow-moving bears: disappearing, bound for the salt-desert below.

  They found water. Gnawing again at the roots and eating even the thin, salty soil itself, they had continued descending until they stumbled finally onto a waterfall gushing straight out of the mountain.

  There was no prefatory seep or spring above it, but simply a great cannonade of water jetting from a port, a rift in the mountains, and splattering onto the rocks below, in which, over the centuries or millennia, the water had carved a wide and deep pool before trailing away back down the mountainside, running as a small creek for a while and then disappearing back into the soil.

  It had been running just a thousand feet below us all along.

  John Alexander and his group spent the rest of the day lying in that pool, bathing and drinking and eating the last of the now rotten horse meat one of them had stashed in his pack. It was not the feast of his dream of the night before, he told them: it was better.

  In the meantime—never dreaming of Alexander’s success (neither did we see the smoke from their cooking fires), we staggered north, still clinging to the mountain’s spine, unwilling to give up any of our hard-earned vantage. Two more of our number—Buster Toops and O. M. Martin— drifted off and never returned. They, unlike so many dozens of others, did survive, and upon their return to Texas their accounts were well publicized, recorded into the strange vault of written and remembered history, while the exploits, the failures and successes, of so many others vanished unknown or were never told.

  Toops and Martin licked rainwater from little depressions in the scooped shallows of rocks over on the shadier north side of the mountain, when they could find them. They would hike until they collapsed into sleep, then awaken and hike, again for days at a time, before collapsing again, until one day they came upon a feral ox.

  Martin, unlike almost all the other men, had retained his musket; he killed the animal, and once again they drank its blood, sucking it straight from the wound. When they had gotten out all that they could in that manner, they used the tiny flint from the musket to gut the ox and were finally able to open it enough to be able to extract and roast the liver and a few other organs.

  They came eventually into a little valley, where they encountered a few small, remote ranches. Here they were treated with kindness and hospitality, and with their stolen silver they purchased food and supplies and then veered north and east, back toward Laredo, the site of our original plundering.

  They reached the river and floated across on a fallen log, shouting and whooping. Their joyous splashing alerted a few townspeople, who, believing themselves to be under attack again, responded with a volley of gunfire that successfully steered Toops and Martin away from town and back into the brush. But it was native brush, and native soil, and they staggered on with great joy to San Antonio, where their selective tale was received with awe.

  John Alexander and Major Oldham’s waterfall groip had continued on, falling apart in the meantime, dwindling and scattering, lost and dying in the desert until finally only Alexander and Oldham remained. Oldham found a beehive and was mauled by the bees when he tried to scoop the honey out with his bayonet—they followed him on a dead run for two miles before he collapsed, unable to go any farther, and was very nearly stung to death. He was ill for several days—Alexander stayed with him and cared for him—and no sooner had they started moving again than Alexander fell ill, wracked by fever, and Oldham stayed and cared for him.

  When they finally reached the Rio Grande, they dismantled an old stock pen, built a pole raft, and floated across in moonlight, back to the freedom of the Republic of Texas, although not yet back to safety.

  The village of Laredo had, via Toops and Martin’s accounts in San Antonio, received word of the expedition’s escape and had posted lookouts. Alexander and Oldham had to skirt the town and hide in the brush to avoid capture by the local militia. It took them another month to reach San Antonio, where they too were received as heroes.

  Still others split off from Cameron and Wallace’s group. They struck out on their own, descending back into the desert, although they failed to encounter the waterfall that Alexander and Oldham had found.

  It was still cool up in the mountains, but out on the desert, the weather had turned warmer. We could see the shimmering heat waves rising from the desert below, and could see where many of the men had tossed their threadbare blankets on top of scrub brush to make crude tents, and then crawled beneath them to die. Others scratched at the thin soil with their fingernails, digging as if searching for buried treasure; but we saw then, as they wallowed in that freshly dug depression, that they were simply trying to use that brief coolness of the newly exposed soil to take some of the radiant heat from their fevered, baking bodies.

  They appeared to be eating the cool dirt they had just dug, applying it to their cracked and blistered mouths. They drank their own urine.

  There were others strung out all over the mountainside and crawling around in the valleys. The mountain was bleeding men. I don’t know why we stayed on top. Cameron and Wallace appeared confused, directionless, almost lifeless. I tried to formulate a plan, tried to dream an idea, a strategy, anything that might give us hope, no matter how improbable, but could think of nothing, could instead only desire, like the others, water. Even a single jar would have been enough, even a single swallow.

  Looking back at the trail of our misery, we could see rafts of vultures, looking like columns of black smoke, circling the ruin of horses and mules several miles distant. Anyone could look up at the mountain and see where we had been and where we were going.

  Indeed, it turned out, entire villages had been observing the stupor of our progress and our descent. Barragan’s men, now well rested, well wa
tered, well armed, had ridden around to the north, knowing that that was where the mountain would spit us out. They were waiting patiently there, at the mouth of the Cañon de San Marcos, where they began snaring Texans one by one and two by two, like fish in a weir.

  We who were left remained far atop the mountain, watching the soldiers below, still waiting for us. Our upper group had dwindled from seventy to twenty. We had no water, no food, no weapons, and it was not going to rain; neither did it seem that any divine intervention was going to reach us. Charles McLaughlin had stopped sketching and instead sat numbly, staring, as we all were, at the smoke from the soldiers’ fires far below.

  There was nothing to do but surrender, no other alternative in the world if we were to have another chance at life, yet Wallace and Cameron seemed unable to discuss this fact, and I saw that it was up to me to broach the subject, that it was my responsibility to try to save myself, as well as the tatter of men scattered around me.

  I fingered the beans in my pocket. The men were dying, boiling on the rocks, desiccating like withered salamanders; I was not sure they had the strength to descend, even if they could be persuaded.

  “If we are to have any hope of fighting again,” I said, “we must survive.” My voice was a croak, and I could see now that many of the men did not even understand what I was talking about; that although they had seen the activity below and witnessed the smoke rising from the soldiers’ cooking fires, their minds were no longer making even the simplest of connections. Issues such as freedom or captivity no longer existed for them. There was just one thing in the world: the next rattling breath, followed by another, followed by another.

  Cameron bowed his chin to his chest, then shook his head slowly. Wallace reached over and put a hand on his shoulder, then rose and went around to each of the fallen men, touching them lightly, and one by one, we rose, all except Cameron, and proceeded down the mountain, limping and wobbling, toward the smoke. When I paused to look back, I saw that Cameron had finally risen and was following, and although he was bullheaded and often violent beyond reason, I felt a wave of guilt at being responsible, even partially, for the surrender of so uncompromising a man.