Diezmo

by Rick Bass

  I bent down quickly, picked it back up before anyone could see it, and pressed the bean upon him again, more urgently, saying, “You don’t understand, this can get you home.”

  He looked at me again, more fiercely than before, and threw the bean down again.

  Two guards came running up, thinking that we were about to fight, and separated us with the bayonets attached to their muskets, moving us back from each other and urging us into the line.

  Colonel Huerta was moving among others of us, jabbing us with his bayonet. Huerta insisted that Cameron draw first. Cameron nodded, stepped out from the crowd, looked at us and smiled, then approached the clay pot.

  His big crooked mason’s hand was nearly too large to fit in the jar’s mouth. He squeezed it through, stuck it all the way to the bottom, pulled it back out, examined his bean, and then grinned again. “Dig deep, boys,” he called out.

  Our officers drew next, one at a time: Fisher likewise drawing a white bean, as did Green. One of the men who had been an officer, a legitimate soldier in previous campaigns, a Captain Eastland, drew a black bean, and, stoically, he allowed himself to be separated from the rest of us. He sat on a bench, surrounded by soldiers, and watched the rest of us with clearly mixed emotions, wondering who his companions were to be.

  After the last officer had drawn—all the others drew white—the rest of us were called forward to stand in line for life or death.

  One of the sentries guarding the wall of the fort fainted and fell, like some plummeting angel, the gold tassels on his uniform fluttering as he flew to earth. His musket clattered to the ground, breaking when it landed, and there was a brief pause as the other soldiers revived him.

  Colonel Huerta placed each white bean that was drawn in a little pile on a bench, in a patch of spring sunlight, and placed Captain Eastland’s black bean and subsequent others in a vest pocket, as if they were some vital part of his essence that he had only loaned to the occasion, but from which he could not be long separated.

  Henry Whaling’s turn came. Even with the salvation of my white bean held tight in my sweating hand, my own heart was pounding, and I could not imagine what it must be like for those who did not have a white bean already in their hand. What if I dropped mine, or lost it in the pot when I plunged my hand in? What if I was unsuccessful in the sleight-of-hand transfer and was caught?

  Up ahead of me—his back turned to me—Henry Whaling was just standing there, staring down at his bean. Stoic as ever—though surely wishing for a second chance—he was led away to the bench.

  I walked up to the pot, trying to look properly terrified: and I was. Never had I had so many eyes upon me. Hundreds of eyes, from all directions.

  I stood at the pot for the longest time, and in the depth of that fear, I was tempted to not even try the trick: to play it straight, foolishly and recklessly, and to take my chances as had everyone else. As had Henry Whaling.

  The odds were still good—not quite nine in ten—seventy men remained behind me, and eight black beans. It could even be argued that it would be safer to play it straight, for if I was discovered I would surely be executed with the rest.

  One of the guards barked an order to draw, and I shook my head as if to clear it from a deep sleep and made the choice to choose life. With a black bean still in my right hand and my white bean in my left, I lowered my right hand into the pot, released my bean, rummaged blindly, selected two beans, and withdrew them, and then clasped both hands before my face with eyes shut, as if in prayer, in a manner I hoped would seem natural to the Catholic superstitions of the guards, and pretended to transfer the bean to my left hand. I lowered my right hand inconspicuously to my side, with its two unknown, just-drawn beans, and opened my left hand to show the guards—all eyes upon it—to reveal the old white bean I had been carrying for a month.

  Tears sprang to my eyes, partly from the joy of being allowed to keep living, but partly at the cost—someone else, some seventeenth, and perhaps even an eighteenth among the seventy still behind me, would pay for my duplicity—and it was not until I was back among the crowd of the saved, over on the other side of the courtyard, that I even thought to examine the two beans I had drawn, the true beans: and when I did, I was astounded to see that, indeed, one was as black as coal.

  Who would take my place? I could barely watch, and yet I could not turn my eyes away.

  When it was Bigfoot Wallace’s turn to pick, he walked up to the pot and pushed his big hand in and rummaged around for a maddeningly long time—examining each bean, it seemed.

  He had been studying the proceedings as intently as any hunter, and he told us later that it seemed to him that the black beans were larger than the white. He rolled each bean in his fingers, determined to find the smallest one. When he finally found the tiniest one left and withdrew it, it was neither black nor white, but an indeterminate grayish swirl, and we all held our breath, awaiting the decision.

  Huerta took the bean from him and examined it for a long time in that spring sunlight. He finally judged the bean to be white.

  There was only one prisoner who seemed overcome by the horror. This man, Patrick Altmus, was wringing his hands and moaning audibly, continually telling those near him that he would draw a black bean.

  Altmus could not be summoned to his feet, and so the guards had to drag him over to the jar and force his hand into it. They told him to pick one and only one bean, and that if he drew more than one bean he would be shot with the others, regardless of the color of the beans.

  He kept his hand in there a long time, before finally drawing a bean. His presentiment proved too true, for in it he held a fatal black bean. He turned deadly pale as his eyes rested upon it, and he turned and looked toward me, bewildered and terrified.

  He uttered not another word and appeared resigned to his fate—as if the anticipation and dread had been the hard part, but now the dying would come easy.

  When it was James Shepherd’s turn to draw, he approached the urn with a swaggering indifference.

  Although there were but five beans left and two of them had to be black, he barely bothered to look at his bean after he had drawn it—it was black, yet he seemed to give it no more mind than if it were a tick he had plucked from his pants cuff.

  The four remaining irregulars approached the urn one by one. The first two selected white beans, as did the third, so that finally, it was George Washington Trahern who had to go through the motions of drawing with the foreknowledge that the bean within the pot was black. When he pulled it out, it was indeed black. He stared at it a long time, and then he was escorted over to join the other sixteen.

  There was barely time for the condemned to pen last messages to their beloveds. On a scrap of parchment, and in shaking hand, Robert Dunham composed these final words:

  Dear Mother,

  I write to you under the most awful feelings that a son ever addressed a mother, for in half an hour my life will be finished on earth, as I am doomed to die by the hands of the Mexicans for our latest attempts to escape. It was ordered by Santa Anna that every tenth man should be shot. We drew lots. I was one of the unfortunate. I cannot say anything more. I will die I hope with firmness. May God bless you, bless you, and may He in this last hour forgive and pardon all my sins... farewell.

  Your affectionate son,

  R. H. Dunham.

  Henry Whaling insisted on a last meal, and the cooks prepared mutton and beans. Few of the other doomed men had any appetite, but Whaling gorged himself—had several bowls of the very type of beans that had determined the end of his life—then called for a cigar, which he smoked slowly, with apparent satisfaction.

  The doomed were marched to a courtyard on the opposite side of the wall. A priest who had been marching with us since Saltillo sprinkled holy water on the ground where they were about to die and offered to administer last rites. Only two of the seventeen accepted.

  It was dusk: poor shooting light. A log had been placed along the wall of the corral and ni
ne men seated on it to be executed; the other eight would wait their turn.

  The rest of us were kept under heavy guard on the other side of the courtyard’s wall. We could see nothing but heard everything.

  It took a lot of shooting—volley after volley, amid much shouting. One of our surviving white bean Texans, William Preston Stapp, wrote later:

  The wall against which the condemned were placed was so near us we could hear every order given in arranging the work of death.

  The murmured prayers of the kneeling men stole faintly over to. us—then came the silence that succeeded, more eloquent than sound—

  —Then the signal taps of the drum—the rattle of muskets, as they were brought to aim—the sharp burst of the discharge, mingled with the shrill cries of anguish and heavy groans of the dying, as soul and body took their sudden and bloody leave.

  Soldiers standing guard atop the fort’s ramparts had turned to watch the executions, and again, some of them began to swoon, falling to the ground.

  We heard later that mutton-eating Henry Whaling died as well as any man or woman might ever hope. The Mexicans kept shooting but couldn’t kill him. And while they were shooting at him, Henry Whaling sat and cursed them.

  The remaining eight waited and listened to him, as did the rest of us: as did I, with his bean, the extra bean, sitting unused in my pocket.

  Whaling absorbed more than a dozen shots, and still he kept hollering and cursing, and the Mexicans kept shooting—they ran out of bullets and had to stop and reload, listening all the while to his bellowings—and then began firing again.

  His entrails were spilling from him. The black beans he had eaten were spilling back out onto the soil, undigested. He kept shouting.

  Finally Huerta walked across the courtyard in that dim light, put his pistol to Whaling’s temple, and fired.

  The nine dead were then dragged away and stacked like cordwood in a corner of the corral, and the other eight were summoned—in the darkness, now—and the job was finished: again, crudely and inefficiently.

  There was one among the seventeen who escaped. James Shepherd had somehow survived. One musket ball had blown through his cheek and another had fractured his arm, but he had never lost consciousness, and had lain there blood-covered in the stack of sixteen dead men, pretending to be dead himself while the village dogs chewed on the dead men’s arms and feet and legs and licked the sticky blood from their bodies.

  That night, after the sentries had fallen asleep, Shepherd crawled away. It was not until the next day during burial duty that the soldiers discovered seventeen had become sixteen and realized he was missing. When we survivors heard of it, we cheered, until Huerta informed us that if he was not found, one of us would take his place.

  The soldiers followed his blood trail out of the fort, but they lost it when it disappeared into the mountains, taking the same grueling path Cameron and his followers had attempted in our first escape.

  He wandered, we learned later, for four days, before someone recognized him and turned him in. He was taken to the outskirts of town and shot again, this time for good. By then we were already a hundred miles away, manacled and bound in chains, marching south once more.

  5

  The Tacubaya Road

  WE AWAKENED AT dawn, haunted by the horrors of the day before.

  Following breakfast, we were chained, and we filed past the outer wall of the courtyard where the victims still lay piled, as William Preston Stapp was to write later from his cell at Perve, with their “stiffened and unsepulchered bodies, weltering in blood... their rigid countenances, pallid and distorted with agony.”

  The weakest of us were allowed to ride in oxcarts, and though many of us were still at death’s door, not fully re-covered from our time in the mountains, the younger and stronger began to improve as we moved slowly across the central plateau and into the more fertile and heavily populated regions north of Mexico City. The villages were so frequent now that we almost always were able to spend the night under a roof, in an abandoned silo or barn, and now and again we were allowed a day of rest, as well as more frequent baths. When we reached the city of San Luis Potosí, nearly five hundred miles from the border now, we were allowed to take our chains off, nearly a month after we had departed Salado.

  In San Luis Potosí, we left five of our number behind in a hospital—they all soon died—and three more died of pleurisy soon after we resumed the march toward Mexico City.

  In the smaller towns, such as Queretaro and San Miguel, the townspeople, chagrined at our raggedness, would often take up small collections on our behalf—though horribly impoverished themselves—in order to allow each of us to buy an extra bowl of beans or extra cup of pulque, the latter which relaxed us considerably and made us feel, for a while, that we were not in such a bad place after all, and that where we were bound for might yet be better than where we had been.

  We rested again in the village of Tula, where Colonel Ortiz was finally relieved of us and a new escort took over. Most of us were beginning, finally, to feel stronger, and were beginning, once more, to talk at night in low murmurs of trying to escape again.

  The next day we reached the even tinier village of Hue-huetoca, and upon our arrival another sandstorm came from out of nowhere, every bit as inexplicable and fierce as the one that had marked our entrance to the fort of Salado.

  That night, a lone express rider arrived from the south, having ridden hard from Mexico City, with the news that Ewen Cameron was to be taken from us and shot the next morning. Alfred Thurmond, who had been serving as our translator when needed, was allowed to sit with Cameron in his stone cell the last few hours until daylight, at which time the rest of us were pushed southward. Thurmond rejoined us by noon of that same day.

  We had not been gone ten minutes, Thurmond said, when Cameron was taken outside and ordered to stand against a stone wall. The cavalry surrounding him dismounted and took aim at extremely close range. The tips of their muskets were wavering, Thurmond said.

  Cameron refused to accept the blindfold that was offered him and instead bared his chest, glaring at the executioners, and called on them to fire.

  He died instantly, Thurmond said, shredded by musket fire, and Thurmond wept. Of the giants, only Bigfoot Wallace now remained among us.

  Months later we were to learn that Cameron had been executed because—according to Mexico’s minister of war, José Maria Tornel—he had been “one of the most active Partisans in the warfare going on between the two countries,” and because, whenever imprisoned, he had ceaselessly encouraged fellow prisoners to escape. While they were at it, they had piled on a great list of other offenses—some purely fabricated, others, perhaps, closer to the truth.

  We mourned him for days, on the trail to Mexico City—though he had never been an officer, he, more than anyone, had been our leader, particularly in times of deepest trouble. Now that he was gone, we were all diminished and weakened, and our spirit burned less brightly.

  It felt to all of us, I think, as if the landscape were swallowing us now—as if we were descending, mile by mile, day by day, into a pit so vast and deep that we would never be able to get out again.

  We came into the valley of Mexico City two days after Cameron’s death and saw immense and shining lakes in all directions, the great bodies of water on which the Aztecs had once built floating gardens. We were humbled to be in the presence of so hallowed and powerful a civilization, and by the audacity of our own puny notions, eight hundred miles earlier, that our little band could mount a successful assault on such a glorious and ancient nation.

  The volcanoes Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl ringed the valley, and many of us saw snow for the first time, in the glaciers that capped their peaks. Our ultimate destination, the Castle of Perve, was in the southernmost tip of the country. We still had hundreds of miles to go to reach it, but because we were so threadbare (Bigfoot Wallace, in particular, was indecent to the point that he had to wear his broad floppy hat like a loin
cloth, and to protect his head from the sun he used a single red bandanna, wrapped like a turban), and because there was a road that needed rebuilding, and because our new escorts still desired, like all the others, to try to bask a bit in the glory of having captured us, we remained in Mexico City, at the prison of Molino del Rey, working in a quarry and rebuilding the ancient road to Tacubaya. In exchange for our labor, we would be given one new set of clothes each.

  From the quarry each day, we cut and hauled slabs of white stone, square-cut rectangles of pleasing shape and density and texture. As we sledged them free with hammer and pry bar, the acid odor of rock dust that attended each stone’s separation from the main body of the quarry was like the burned odor of a musket just fired; and, occasionally, after some certain slab’s successful cleaving, I would be reminded of Shepherd and his lost arm.

  The work was little different from the backbreaking labor we would have been doing at home—wielding shovels and swinging sledgehammers and grubbing hoes, hauling water and stone—but soon the men turned into the most awful laggards I have ever witnessed. Having been given our one new set of clothes—flannel one-piece prison uniforms striped red and white and green, and sandals (Bigfoot Wallace’s had to be custom-made), most of the men began almost immediately to stall the project’s progress in whatever way they could.

  There was a major regret from that time, beyond the regret of having gone to war in the first place. I met a girl my own age, and think that I fell in love with her. I believe I would have traded my life for hers—would have traded this long life even, for more time with her—and I believed, and still believe, that she would have done the same.