Diezmo

by Rick Bass

  We walked out into the courtyard and stood in line for our food, and were astonished to see one of the guards aim his musket at his commanding officer. We were to learn later that they had been quarreling for months.

  The officer ducked just as the musket discharged, and the bullet struck one of our young irregulars, Shields Booker, in the neck. The prison medics did all they could for him, but he died twenty-four hours later and was buried in the moat (only Catholics were allowed to be buried in the prison cemetery), in a service made all the more poignant in that it was attended by the silent swans, who gathered around the ripples left by Booker’s stone-weighted coffin after it had slipped straight to the bottom.

  At the moatside funeral service, I looked over at Charles McLaughlin, who was, as ever, sketching vigorously, and I tried to look at the scene around me, and the world, the way he might be seeing it: not what it had been moments before Booker had been shot, and not what it might be after the funeral, but what it was now, as if that were all it ever would be; and then on to the next sketch, and the next.

  It was tempting to look at the world that way—without fear—but it still seemed important to me, more than ever, not to delude myself, but to remember that the world was a dangerous place.

  Charles McLaughlin lifted his head briefly from his agitated scratchings and looked over at me for a moment—I thought he was contemplating drawing me, and, knowing that if he did the fright on my face would be revealed, I turned away.

  Breakfast each day consisted of a tiny bowl of cornmeal gruel sweetened with brown sugar, and a single cup of coffee: hardly enough for the tasks demanded of us, which included carpentry, latrine duties, more road-building, cleaning the stables, and, once again, quarrying stones for other construction projects.

  Lunch was no better. Jittery-legged with fatigue, we would crowd around a cauldron of simmering water into which had been tossed an onion or two, a handful of salt and rice, some red peppers, and occasionally the offal of a cow or horse or pig—bones, hoofs, hide, entrails, brains, and whatever else the guards would not eat.

  Back to work we would be sent, then, dysenteric and choleric, with dinner that evening consisting once more of gruel. Only occasionally were we given the opportunity to use our meager earnings to purchase a piece of fruit—a banana, or sometimes a single red strawberry.

  Fisher and Green appeared to be reversing roles.

  Green, previously the fierce patriot and lover of the land, seemed to be losing his interest in the revolution, despairing at the threat to our new nation’s independence, as well as the loss of his own. Once in the Castle of Perve, the two officers no longer received the special courtesies that had been extended to them before and were instead forced to work alongside the rest of us, rotating through the same insufferable and demeaning tasks and duties of captivity.

  And while such menial and humbling labor seemed to be having a positive effect on Fisher, making him more human, and more accessible to us, Green now seemed estranged and haunted, collapsing into himself, sinking like a dense stone dropped into a dark, slowing river.

  Green was spending increasing amounts of time alone in the evenings, penning angry letters back to Sam Houston in Texas, and to the United States government, and to Santa Anna, alternately threatening, cajoling, pleading, bargaining, and haranguing, working at the far end of the dungeon by that gridwork opening through which a few dim stars could be seen, and sometimes, briefly, the clockwork gear passage of the moon in its revolution around us—while the rest of us, Fisher included, entertained ourselves at night in the center of our cell with dances and skits and songs and games.

  Not Green, however. He burned bitterly, stewing in the toxins of injustice. Petty things were consuming him now, final tiny straws upon the long-suffering camel’s back. At the Battle of San Jacinto, years earlier, following Santa Anna’s surrender to Houston, Green had given General Houston his fine, new, unbloodied officer’s coat to help keep an exhausted Santa Anna warm against the April chill. In gratitude, Santa Anna had given General Houston a jeweled snuffbox, which Green, eyeing it covetously, had valued at being worth about a thousand dollars.

  Being a junior officer then, Green had received nothing from the transaction, and now, seven years later, in his letters to both Houston and Santa Anna, he badgered them about this, trying somehow to parlay this inequity into his own personal freedom at least, if not that of his men. He informed Santa Anna that he had once defended Santa Anna’s honor by reprimanding a soldier who said something unflattering about the Mexican leader; surely this favor deserved some reciprocal notice.

  In the jail cell, in addition to having ample opportunity to blacken the pages of various ledgers and journals with the accounts of our imprisonment and to pen letters home (in which we tried not to let anyone know how squalid and dire conditions truly were), we had access occasionally to old newspapers, some of them many months out of date, from the Republic of Texas, as well as the United States—Memphis and New Orleans, mostly. We all knew that both Houston and Santa Anna were in political trouble over matters far more immediate and pressing than our imprisonment—that Mexico was hugely in debt and could not much longer afford to field an army without the financial assistance of Great Britain, and that the United States, desiring to annex Texas, was afraid that Great Britain might be trying to take control.

  In essence, Sam Houston’s new nation—our new nation—was simultaneously under siege from at least six other nations—three at once, in a loose coalition of Apaches, Comanches, and Kiowas; Mexico; Great Britain, which wanted to either control Texas or at least keep Texas out of the United States’ hands; and the United States itself, which desired to peacefully absorb our new nation (even as, twenty years later, they would wage war against us—deservedly so—over the issue of human slavery).

  We should never have crossed that river. What madness could possibly have possessed us?

  Centuries’ worth of vermin inhabited every crack and crevice of the dank fort. They did not even wait until true dark to emerge but began scuttling out well before dusk and did not return to their burrows until long after dawn’s first light. Rats, mice, scorpions, dung beetles, and roaches whirred and raced and scrabbled everywhere, bumping into us if we should get in their way, outnumbering us by the thousands. They stank and shat and pissed and gnawed incessantly on the wooden legs of furniture, and on one another’s bones. They fought and squealed and snarled and chattered, some of the rats as large as cats, though fiercer; but worst of all were the lice, which could hide anywhere, and which, though silent, seemed to be born of the night, with the ranks of each night’s army swelling tenfold.

  They awakened us every evening, pouring out from between the weave of our blankets and from our hair, and from the fur of all the living mammals in the fort. They began swarming us almost the minute we fell asleep, so many of them moving across the stone floor that in the near darkness of soft moonlight it appeared that the floor itself was moving, with waves and ripples of the milky white crablike creatures rolling across the floor like the phosphorescent foam of waves at sea. We would turn and rattle our blankets every few moments, trying to shake them off, but always they returned, drawn relentlessly by the heat of our bodies and by the bright blood within us. To defend against them we shaved our heads and grew our fingernails long so that we could pluck them from each other’s bodies.

  In the evenings we would hold louse races, using charcoal to draw a circle in the center of the dungeon, placing lice in the center, and then wagering on which one would reach the perimeter the soonest. We had little money so gambled instead with fragments of soap, called tlacos, or used and reused remnants of tobacco, gotten from the stubs of pipes and cigarettes, chewed and then dried to use again and again.

  With livestock in poor condition and short supply at the fort, we ourselves were often forced into service, fitted with rawhide harnesses, twenty-five men to a team, and made to pull oxcarts filled with stones down out of the mountains. The road w
as steep, and sometimes we lost control by accident, though other times it was on purpose. We would slip out of our harnesses and watch as the runaway wagon, with its heavy load, went thundering down the hill before crashing into a wall or into the moat, upsetting the swans.

  We devised new ways to get rid of our chains. The most common trick was to smash one link with a stone, then go to the blacksmith who, for the bribe of a few cents, would replace the old iron rivet with a softer and more malleable lead one. We could then remove the chains at will while the guards were gone and then fasten them back together when the guards returned.

  We called the chains our “jewelry,” and often, late at night after the final lockup and roll call, we would all one hundred and fifty be shed of our chains and would sleep, even if fitfully, among the lice and rats in relative freedom: though the morning’s first dull shaft of light and the sound of the guards stirring outside would send us all scrambling to put the chains back on.

  In the Castle of Perve, there were no positive incentives to do good work or behave. When we were discovered free of our chains, or when we broke an oxcart or failed to move a satisfactory amount of stone in a day, we were punished; our only reward was no punishment.

  Beatings were infrequent—as if they might be too burdensome for our captors to inflict upon our thick skulls and hides—but far more common were trips to the calabozo, a tiny closet of solitary confinement, for days on end, after which the old captivity seemed by comparison the sweetest of freedoms.

  Less stern measures included attaching heavy iron or wooden crossbars between our ankle chains, which caused us to trip and stumble all day, or, on Sundays, fastening a gigantic cross to a prisoner’s back and making him haul it far up the mountain, with the guards and townspeople of Perote being able to glance up at that giant cross moving up the mountain, at any time of day, and gauge the slow ascent as if it were but one more louse race.

  Our captors were particularly fond of forcing Bigfoot Wallace to carry a cross—fashioning an improbably oversized one for him to haul—and it never ceased to amaze me how, despite the punishment, they were unable to break his spirit. Some of the larger crosses took him three days and nights to get to the top, but he never complained, and told us afterward that compared to our time in the calabozo, such trips were almost like freedom itself, or what we remembered of freedom.

  Some two thousand feet above the fort there was a rough volcanic ridge lined with scores of giant crosses, the spoor of recalcitrant prisoners from the past. After laboring all day without food or water—sometimes in an icy, rattling, sheet-driven wind, other times beneath a broiling sun—the prisoner had to erect the mammoth cross on that ridge and pile stones around the base to keep it from blowing over. (If the cross did blow over, the prisoner was required to go up there, drag it all the way back down the mountain, and then start over again the next day.)

  Over the years, however, crosses had fallen, so that there were as many lying on the ground as there were standing, and there were crosses leaning halfway between sky and ground, so that spars and beams silhouetted the ridge in a myriad of angles, looking like a buck-and-rail fence. It was a tangle of dissymmetry, with some of the more ancient crosses beginning to crumble and rot on the stony ledge, while others still exuded the green odor of heavy new-sawn wood, and still others bore the stains from our bloodied and blistered backs, as we ourselves still bore splinters from that engagement. There was none among us who had not hauled at least one cross to the ridge, and such punishment did not dispose us favorably toward the Catholic race.

  The U.S. ambassador, Waddy Thompson, was soon to become a staunch friend and ally, our one crux of support from the outside. Whenever he came to visit us, brimming with an encouraging mix of optimism and forcefulness, we felt hopeful, and whenever he left or was out of touch with us for too long—a month, two months, three months—we felt abandoned, rejected, even betrayed, and consumed by a fever of fear and loneliness and the damnable longing for freedom.

  Each time Waddy Thompson reappeared—a gentleman, a man of power—our hearts leapt, and each time he left while we remained, we began again the long trek back down into misery and servitude, until in some ways it seemed that we were as much his prisoners as we were the Mexican government’s, despite our knowing better.

  We could never have wished for a better ally. He devoted more time to us than his job called for. It simply wasn’t enough. Our needs were bottomless. No one man, and perhaps no nation, or nations, could extricate us; neither could we ourselves. We were captive to all who looked upon us, prisoners even to our own hearts, for we had not merely “lost” our freedom but willfully given it up, back when we had first crossed the border at Fisher’s strident urging.

  As ever, McLaughlin sketched in the evenings, choosing to spend his precious coins not on lead rivets or fruit or illicit mouthfuls of mescal passed from guard to prisoner, but on candles, so that he might work far into the night. When he ran out of pencils he used the smudge of charcoal, so that his hands and face were soon almost always smeared black. I would sit up with him often, reading or occasionally writing letters to those back home. And from the way he sketched, throwing himself into it with such unnerving focus, I wondered often if he even understood any longer that he was still a prisoner: there was something that made me think he did not, and I was envious.

  Escape was no longer on our minds; we were broken, hobbled. In a general letter to his many friends back in Texas, R. A. Barclay wrote, “When we shall guet out of this snap God only knows. My only hope is an exchange of prisners... things growes daily more gloomey... they treat us worse evry day. The Mexicans point me out and say I am the worst one in the Castle—I have worn hobels two weeks, binn beat with there spades and muskets, calaboosed and evry means to cow me they can think of... There is no hope of release.”

  Peter Maxwell, in a letter addressed to various newspapers, designed to sway the sympathies of Sam Houston, complained, “Our overseers... often beat we Texians with sticks with as little ceremony as we would beat Negroes.” And in an official complaint to Waddy Thompson—who on his last visit had said not to despair, that he was still working to somehow gain our release—Fenton Gibson, not a true Texan but a Kentuckian, and a grandson of Daniel Boone, wrote, “What then must be the deep agony of an American to be struck by one of these imps of darkness...? Sir, it is insupportable. The blood on an American cannot brook the degradation.”

  In a letter to his wife, Norman Woods lied, trying to assuage her fears, and spoke proudly of the heroic regularity of his bowels. “We have plenty to eat, good clothes to wear, fine coffee to drink twice a day, meat once, good flour bread with three kinds of cracked seeds in it. I am coopering and make about one bucket a week.”

  Beneath that dark mountain, haunted by the sound of the fresh water rushing through the labyrinth of aqueducts just beneath us night and day, and under such steady oppression, our old dreams and fevers unraveled and ran wandering in a hundred and forty different directions, as if seeking to trickle back down into the stony soil beneath us.

  Beneath our crosses and hobbles, and beneath the beatings and the lice, we continued to fall further, until we finally reached the bottom, at which point it was every man for himself: and sometimes not even that.

  One by one, like the occasional sparrows that would find their way into our dungeon through the grate, flutter confused for a while, and then find their way back out, a few of our number were plucked from the group and turned free, by the deux ex machina we had all been dreaming of back before our spirits began to break. Two prisoners were released when the U.S. president, Andrew Jackson, sent Santa Anna a special letter asking for their release. Years earlier, following the surrender at San Jacinto, when Santa Anna had been so despondent he had attempted suicide, Jackson had invited Santa Anna to visit the United States, where he had been treated with dignity and respect, at a time when his own government, shamed by his defeat, wanted nothing to do with him.

  Soon a th
ird prisoner, George B. Crittenden, was also released—he was the son of the Kentucky senator John Crittenden, who, being a Whig, was an enemy of Jackson’s but a colleague nonetheless.

  These strange mercies began stirring, once again, the still-warm ashes of hope in our souls.

  Some, alas, responded without valor. A prisoner from San Antonio, Judge James W. Robinson, who had served briefly as lieutenant governor of Texas in the months preceding the Alamo, began crafting a complex plan of compromise in which the Republic of Texas could be induced to return to Mexico’s rule in exchange for some assurance of limited autonomy. Robinson proposed that he himself should be the mediator in such convoluted bargaining, which would of course necessitate his being released from the Castle of Perve.

  His gambit worked. Santa Anna fell for it, and soon Robinson was back in Texas, having gained an audience with Sam Houston at Washington-on-the-Brazos.

  Texas’s newspapers went berserk upon hearing the proposal—“The blood of the patriots who had secured our hard-fought independence barely yet dry,” they cried—but nonetheless, Robinson’s proposal, though ludicrous on its face, did connect with a larger underlying sentiment that craved stability in the aftermath of so much war.

  The new nation hungered also for the prosperity that peace could bring, and from Robinson’s half-baked idea discussion of another kind of peace-making—an armistice—began to develop. Again, the annexation discussions were resurrected. Who would get Texas, and at what price, and under what terms?