The Diezmo

by Rick Bass

  That afternoon we rode toward the little town of Ciudad Mier, where, that evening, we again took a priest hostage, demanding ransom before retiring to our ragged camp back in the brush. Fisher told the townspeople that they had forty-eight hours to deliver the ransom—ten thousand dollars, this time, to make up for the inadequacy of Guerrero—and that he would meet them on the bank of the Rio Grande on Christmas Eve Day.

  I was part of the detail charged with guarding the priest, who seemed affable and forgiving. A lean man in his mid-fifties, he told us stories of saints and sinners he had known in his life. Men and women who had been little better than pagans, he said, as prone to pray to the animals of the fields and forests as to the highest of gods. Men and women who prayed to the weather, or the bare stone of the desert; or, worse yet, he said, who prayed not at all, but who instead assumed that all matters concerning their needs as well as their desires had been prearranged. He spoke to us partly in English and partly in Spanish, with Alfred Thurmond helping translate.

  “There was one such man,” he said, “one who believed his destiny was laid before him like a gleaming road, and who believed he could pass through danger unharmed, like a man—a circus master passing through a crowd of lions or tigers. Jaguars,” the priest said, “and panteras.

  “He could be said to be a good man, in that he concerned himself with the welfare of others less fortunate than him self, and the welfare of the village—but he did not believe that his life was built of choices. Did not believe that he was the mason, constructing it with each hour of his life, and each day.

  “We argued often about this. Of course to such a man, prayer was unknown: there was no need for it. He simply followed his life. This man was a farmer,” the priest said, “and it was a source of frustration to the rest of us, and to the other farmers who worked so hard, that this man’s crops were always more bountiful than the other farmers’ in hard seasons, though this man, Pico, never troubled himself overmuch with his labors. Un medio,” the priest said, and one of our men clarified the interpretation, calling out “A half-ass,” and the priest shrugged, then nodded.

  “I asked him to become a man of God,” the priest said. “I asked him to consider that many things in the world were undecided, things in which a strong and fiery heart could make a difference. Desperate things in need of salvation,” the priest said. “But Pico always shook his head and said that I was wrong.

  “He ate and drank as he wished, philandered as he wished—his wife abandoned him—and yet, as I said, nothing mattered much to him. His heart was not afire; it could be neither changed nor harmed. If someone asked him for a favor—anything—he would do it—but he passed through his years like a sleepwalker. He smiled, joked, sang, worked. But he was asleep. I was the only one who knew it. Again and again, I tried to awaken him, but I could not.” The priest shook his head and looked down at his hands sorrowfully. As if the man had been his own brother.

  “What happened to him?” I asked. “Is he still alive?”

  The priest looked up and smiled at my interest. “I do not know,” he said. “I think that maybe he just went away. He vanished. We stopped seeing him, and no one knew what had become of him. It was as if he never was.”

  But Pico was not the worst, the priest said. Most distressing of all to him, he said, were those who waited until the end to pray. He glanced around at us as if in secret commiseration rather than indictment. As if we already were, and always had been, men of God, to whom he could speak frankly about such things.

  Certainly, the priest said, as a man of God himself, he welcomed the opportunity to receive the souls of those whose hearts changed in the last days, and the last hour, but it saddened him deeply, he said, to consider all the wasted time behind such last-minute conversions—the backwash, he called it, the rubble of compassion whose seeds never germinated, the toxic residue of a lifetime of ill deeds.

  The priest had seen much waste in his lifetime, he told us, and much loneliness, and to him, the loneliness was the worst thing of all.

  On Christmas Eve Day, Fisher took a detail to the riverbank to collect the ransom. Shepherd rode with him, so hard-faced, and looking so much older, that I barely recognized him, and when he turned to look back at camp before riding off, he looked right through me, not with anger or hostility or envy or sadness, but simply through me, as if one of us had already left this world.

  “A friend of yours?” the priest asked, observing the strange moment.

  I took a long time answering. “Yes,” I said finally.

  He resumed his narrative about the streets and palaces in the kingdom of heaven—how such an architecture in the hearts of men and women and children gave way to the creation and construction of a similar architecture in the physical world, which those dreamers and initiates could then inhabit. He believed that a paucity of such compassion led to the construction of a life, and a landscape, of the destitute.

  He looked around at us, and I felt he was reading our faces and fates as clearly as if he had unscrolled the map of a much-traveled country, as if he could see as well the country through which we had already traveled.

  He did not seem troubled by his situation with us. He seemed prepared to live or die—accepting either with dignity—and it was this quality that kept us clustered around him.

  We waited all morning and into the afternoon for Fisher and his men to return. The priest appeared unfazed, though later in the day he asked if he could have a little privacy in a tent, so we fastened a leash to his wrists and ankles and allowed him to go into the tent by himself, where he stayed for a good two hours. We assumed he was praying, though when I went in to take him some fish soup at dinner, I found that he was sound asleep, lying on the ground on his back with his hands clasped and folded neatly over his chest.

  He opened his eyes, sat up, and after a moment inquired about Joseph Berry’s knee—asking how long it had been infected and how he had injured it—and said that he had offered up a prayer on Joseph Berry’s behalf.

  Fisher and his regiment didn’t get back until shortly after dark, having waited on the riverbank all day to no avail: they left two men there overnight, in case the ransom was merely running late. They had discussed going back into town but feared a trap.

  That night, they ordered that the priest not be given any food—as if by punishing him in secret the ransom seekers might somehow, through divine intuition, be inspired to search harder for the ransom, or as if the priest, with his allotted hours expired, were living on borrowed time.

  The priest was quieter, that last night. Those of us who were guarding him sought to assure him that we were certain the ransom would be delivered the next day, but he remained courteous though distant and, finally, with our permission, bid us good night. Shackled, he crawled into his tent, and after a little while we heard him snoring.

  We went to bed not long after that, save for the lookouts. It was the quietest and strangest Christmas Eve I have ever known. I think that each of us was considering the priest’s plight.

  The next day, Christmas, we had a short prayer, officiated by Sinnickson, who had also been a preacher for a while. I sat next to Shepherd and watched how he labored to cut his dried mutton with his knife before he finally gave up, picking it up with his free hand and gnawing on it, as many of the nonofficers did.

  Otherwise, Shepherd held himself like an officer, with an erect, guarded posture, and dressed like an officer, in one of Fisher’s coats with the sleeve pinned, and sat his horse like an officer, and carried an officer’s sword. But he gnawed on that mutton like the most savage of us—like Bigfoot Wallace himself, or even the brute Cameron. When he saw me watching him, he scowled and stared at me with such steel that I felt we had become enemies.

  We finished our thin rations, and Fisher and his men were about to ride back down to the river to wait again for the ransom when a lone Mexican sheepherder came walking into camp, unarmed.

  We were antsy, and some of the irregulars who first
spied the sheepherder nearly cut him down with their muskets and pistols; but the sheepherder raised his hands carefully, and they allowed him to come all the way into camp.

  He said that no one had sent him, but that he had come on his own, out of concern for the priest and as a gesture of goodwill as well to the Texans, to let us know that two of Mexico’s fiercest commanders, General Pedro de Ampudia and General Antonio Canales, had arrived in Ciudad Mier less than a day after the priest was taken hostage. Ampudia and Canales were commanding nearly a thousand men, the sheepherder said, and they had instructed the town not to pay the ransom.

  Fisher cursed and leapt up, spilling his coffee and burning himself, and, in a rage, ordered the sheepherder to be taken hostage too. Green and Fisher’s aides complied, binding the sheepherder’s wrists and ankles with rope before leading him to the priest’s tent, where the priest welcomed him like a lost brother.

  There followed a brief and heated counsel, unique in that the soldiers were included. The reason for this, as well as for Fisher’s agitation, was that many of our men had once ridden with Canales. Canales, who had renounced his Mexican citizenship, had been a soldier in the Texas army—a mercenary, and a fierce one at that. He and many of the men among us had fought against General Ampudia, who never renounced his homeland.

  Ampudia, the men said, was fiercer than Canales. In one battle, back in Texas, when the two men opposed each other, Ampudia captured one of Canales’s fellow insurrectionists and decapitated him, boiled his head in a vat of grease, and stuck it on a pike in front of the man’s home. That Ampudia and Canales had joined forces set off new currents of alternating fear and bravado in the camp—the fear hidden, the bravado manifest.

  Green convinced Fisher that we should take a vote on whether to engage Ampudia and Canales, capture the town of Mier, and then continue south, looting and raising more funds—or whether we should turn back. Fisher hesitated, ill at ease with any notion of democracy within the military ranks, but his rage had subsided enough for him to see the reason behind Green’s proposal. A militia that determined its own fate would be more committed going into battle, and we would need every bit of ferocity and valor we could muster.

  The men voted almost unanimously to attack—about twenty men abstained, and another small group counseled that we wait for a more propitious time, though after the vote the naysayers and the abstainers allowed themselves to be carried with the group. The vote had whipped the men into a frenzy. They believed that even if Ampudia and Canales commanded six thousand, our expedition could handle them. Fisher expressed the deepest regret about the need to execute the priest and the sheepherder. Fisher explained it to the men, and then, in heartfelt words, explained it also to the priest and sheepherder, admonishing the villains Ampudia and Canales for abandoning the priest.

  Fisher instructed his aide to take the two out into the brush and bind them to a tree, and he assigned Shepherd to fire the shots. A small group, including Fisher, took the priest and sheepherder, shackled and bound, hobbling into the brush. Shepherd walked beside Fisher with his chin up and his eyes forward, seeming to take no notice of the priest and sheepherder.

  The priest looked around him and his eyes fell on me. “Vayan con Dios,” he said softly, “soldados desgraciados.” And then he and the others continued on into the brush. A short while later, we heard one gunshot and then the second.

  Fisher and Shepherd came walking out of the brush—the others remained behind to do the burying and to construct crude crosses—and I could not help but notice that Fisher looked pleased: as if Shepherd had performed exactly as Fisher wished, with no weakness or hesitation.

  We spent the afternoon huddled in the rain, planning our attack, sending out scouts and then conferring with them, checking and rechecking our weapons and imagining all the different ways to kill the enemy.

  At the time, our plan seemed to me bold and elegant. Canales had stationed some of his men around the northern perimeter of the town, ostensibly to defend it but possibly to lure us to fight there. Fisher, having fought him before, suspected that if we fought Canales on the perimeter, he would retreat into the core of Mier, where Ampudia’s larger force and the rest of Canales’s men would be waiting. The Mexicans were lovers of pageantry, he said, and Green concurred; the Mexicans in the town would be lined up in cavalry formations, waiting to be stirred to action by the shrilling of trumpets. In light of this knowledge, it was decided that when Canales’s men on the perimeter turned and fled, we would pursue them into Mier, pretending not to know it was a trap, but we would not pursue them to the center of the town. Instead, we’d commandeer some of the adobe homes. They were built shoulder to shoulder, and we could use them to stand our ground or could move slowly forward by knocking out the wall of one adobe and rushing into the next one—gnawing our way through the town, as Fisher described it—and, in the end, after we killed all of Canales’s and Ampudia’s troops, we would also have leveled the town, and it would serve as an example to other villages not to resist our advance.

  I looked over at Green and his aide to see how they were taking Fisher’s plan. Green was pale and listless, unlike his usual confrontational, swaggering self.

  “We will crush them,” Fisher said. “We will destroy them. We will annihilate them, we will lay waste to everything they ever owned as punishment for having resisted us earlier, when we were moderate. They will wish forever that they had listened to us rather than having opposed us, and when we are done, we will find the treasures they sought to keep hidden.”

  We waited in the freezing rain until dark and then crossed in the rapids so that the Mexicans would not hear the sound of our horses’ hooves. We rode four and five abreast. We crossed quickly, and before I knew it we were suddenly among some of Canales’s outposts, passing so close to them in the darkness that when their horses shivered in the rain we heard the animals’ brass armor jangling and rattling, yet the enemy had no idea of our presence; we could as well have been ghosts.

  It was Green, I think, not Fisher, who gave the order to attack—we might have been able to ride right on through them undetected and into Mier, to face Ampudia’s men—but that was not the plan.

  We heard Green roar—I was surprised to hear it come from behind me, and realized I must have ridden out slightly ahead of the expedition—and my first thought was that he had somehow been injured. He sounded like the mother black bear I had seen kept in a wooden cage above the James River, being fed and fattened through the summer and into the autumn by the man who had trapped her, preparing her like a pig for slaughter.

  Rifles and cannons began to go off all around me, and then the woods filled with flashes of light and the odor of burnt powder, and of fresh-cut sap from the limbs and branches torn loose in the sudden fusillade.

  Bullets flew all around us, and leaves fell and floated among us, and the horses were barely manageable. Ill shuttered glimpses we saw the enemy wheeling and galloping south, as Fisher predicted they would.

  Shouting and whooping and reloading and firing again, we pursued Canales’s men, and in the rout, I looked around for Shepherd but could not find him. Instead, I saw dozens of my own kind riding past, surging, raucous and confident and frightened and joyous—and for myself, I felt neither fear nor joy but was carried on the surge. We were a wave that crashed through the woods and into the town of Mier.

  3

  Victory

  WE FOUGHT as if charmed.

  The families in the adobe houses fled into the streets, and we used the butts of our rifles to knock out the walls of first one home and then the next. Canales’s men, retreating into Mier, caught the brunt of the fire from Ampudia’s men, who were stationed in the center of town, and many of them were cut down more quickly by their own than by us.

  There were candles and lanterns still burning in the houses we entered, and we could see in the dim light crude Christ-and-crucifix carvings on the walls, tattered Bibles on the mantels, paintings of Christ, and novenas everywh
ere.

  Canales’s and Ampudia’s men were trying to follow us into the homes, but they were easy to defend. We had only to station a few men by each door to shoot point-blank each soldier, one by one or two by two, as they attempted to storm those small low doorways.

  Soon the entrances were stacked high with dead Mexican soldiers, and as each one fell his gun was wrested from him and tossed down to those of us who sat or lay beneath windows, where we peered up and fired out at Ampudia’s men across the street. Occasionally there was a simultaneity between my one shot, among dozens, and the tumbling of a rider. As if his horse, or the rider himself, had suddenly encountered some rope strung chin-high through the darkness. We moved from one adobe to the next, snuffing out the candles and lanterns left burning by the occupants who had fled.

  From their snipers’ posts in town, Ampudia’s men could look down and take note of our methodical advance by the winking-out last glimmers of candlelight: each new adobe growing dark as we advanced into it, eating our way into the town like some beast gnawing into a carcass, or like a bear ripping through honeycomb.

  The Mexicans aimed their cannons at the adobe huts, knocking out head-sized holes with each blast, but in truth these only aided us, for they gave us better windows from which to shoot.

  There were too many of us to fit in the windows all at once, so we took turns fighting and sleeping. There was much revelry and good-natured bantering going on among us, and a young man from Rosharon, Joseph McCutcheon, would later write, “There is no sight more grand or sublime than the flash of opposing firearms at the hour of midnight. No sound can produce such an idea of grandeur, and engender such intense excitement, as the ringing report of rifles, the hoarse roar of musketry, the awful thunder of artillery, and the encouraging shouts of fellow man, against unlike men, all mingled in din and confusion.