The Diezmo

by Rick Bass

  “This night was by far the most exciting Christmas scene that ever I had witnessed!”

  It was not until about midway through the night that a kind of heaviness began to descend on me, a melancholia made all the more profound by its absence in those around me—my fellow Texans were jostling one another for space at the windows, arguing about whose turn it was to get to do more shooting—and I was overwhelmed with homesickness, and with the sure and deep knowledge of having made a terribly wrong choice.

  The loneliness felt as heavy as a trunk of lead, and I was suddenly nauseated and wanted no more turns at the window, and no more war, though it was far too late for that.

  I moved to the back of the adobe house and took refuge beneath an overturned table. I pretended to be busy cleaning and reloading my gun, examining some malfunction. Several times my friends from LaGrange and Bexar offered me their guns or the weaponry of dead Mexicans, but I declined, told them to go ahead without me.

  I made my decision to leave that night, or perhaps in the morning, when I might stand a better chance of finding a horse. I could be back across the river in less than a day, and home three or four days after that. The thought that I could be home in four days, farming, helped get me through that dark night, even as the shouts and whoops of my comrades indicated that they were having the best time of their lives.

  I felt a new lightness, and I had the curious thought that this could be somewhat like the feeling James Shepherd might have had in finding his own new path, riding now with Fisher as he was. As if all his life he had labored down the wrong path—had in fact been placed upon the wrong one at birth—and had only now found his own true road, just as my own was to return home, and to leave the warring to soldiers.

  I don’t think I was very frightened. I was simply hungry for home.

  I got up from beneath my table and went searching for Shepherd, to tell him of my plan. I did not want him worrying about me, thinking that I might have been lost in the river crossing, or in battle, beneath some rubble of adobe, hundreds of miles from home.

  I found him four houses ahead, in the farthest dwelling of our advance. He was easy to recognize in cannon-fire silhouette, with his missing shoulder. He was leaning against a portal, a long-barreled pistol in his hand. He was not firing it but was instead only staring out the portal. The pistol hung limp from his hand, as if fastened by a thong or bracelet, and he seemed relaxed, though his gaze into the darkness was intent, and he seemed to be doing some sort of mental calculation.

  “Does it hurt?” I asked. He seemed to be favoring his wound, trying to lean against the adobe in a way to avoid putting pressure on the other side of his body.

  “It always hurts,” he said. He glanced at me, then resumed his watching through the cannon-shot portal. “Step behind me—they don’t know this hole is here yet. If I shoot, they’ll start shooting here, too. I’m just watching, right now. I want to wait until I can get a whole bunch of them.”

  “Where’s Captain Fisher?” I asked. “Where’s Green?” He answered with a quick gesture of his head toward a back room. In the pulses of muzzle blast I could see through the open doorway the figures of two men seated at a table, deep in argumentative discussion, sipping soup from small clay bowls. I could smell the soup; it must have been simmering on the stove when they came through this wall. It smelled of chicken stock, with hot peppers and onions, and I realized how famished I was.

  I saw now that there was an empty bowl beside Shepherd, and I started to ask if I could have some soup but then did not. Shepherd kept looking at his window keenly, counting and watching.

  “Captain says our rifles are better,” he said. He glanced down at his pistol. “Their old flintlocks aren’t worth shit in this rain. They keep misfiring. They’ve charged us three times, and we’ve put them down every time. I’ll bet there’s a thousand dead Mexicans out there.”

  Another cannon burst sounded from across the village, and almost instantaneously there was an explosion above our heads, followed by a crumbling slide of adobe shell. A sifting, whispering powder poured down on us, the adobe returning to the sand and clay from which it had come.

  Shepherd cursed and drew the big overcoat more tightly around him. I expected him to answer the cannon’s fire with fire of his own, but instead his eyes only narrowed and he marked that cannon’s position, too, keeping his own unannounced and lethal.

  He turned to look at me almost as if surprised that I was still there. I was just about to let him know of my plans, and to ask if there were any messages he wanted me to convey to his family, when something in his demeanor stopped me.

  I think he could see that I was done, that I had no heart or desire to kill any more of the enemy, and there was pity and scorn in his look, and even anger.

  Why, you sonofabitch, I thought, with a flash of fire I had not even felt yet for the enemy. In friendship and loyalty, I have avoided judging you, and now you’re daring to judge me.

  “Is there something you wanted to tell the captains?” he asked. He glanced in the direction from which I had come. “Are the other posts secure?”

  I looked down at the empty bowl beside his portal.

  I was just about ready to say to hell with it: the war, and all my old loyalties to this neighbor, this childhood friend. Sure, Sinnickson had saved his life, but the life of the child I had known was as gone as if the enemy had already claimed him back in Laredo.

  I stared at him a moment longer, preparing to leave and to start my own new life, when Ampudia’s and Canales’s men sounded their fourth charge, sending two whole battalions. Fisher’s cunning in keeping the precise extent of our southern advance secret had had an unintended consequence, for now the Mexicans were storming over the top of our farthest adobe, believing it to be unoccupied.

  We were obligated to cut them down.

  At Shepherd’s command, a great number of men whom I had not earlier seen in our adobe came rushing forward, gripping a rifle and a pistol in each hand, and they filled every available crack and crevice in our structure. Someone jammed a rifle into my hands but then shoved me aside, and once more I found myself crouched at an open window, firing into the glimmering, sporadic lightning-light of the war, with the staccato images of the surprised Mexican soldiers throwing their arms skyward as they were shredded by our fusillade, suddenly lifting their arms as if to fly.

  We cut them all down, the entire first wave and much of the second; but as we were reloading, the third and then the fourth wave was still coming, slowed only by their stumbling in the darkness over the mountains of their own dead. We could smell the odor of our gunpowder and the dust of crushed and shattered adobe all around us—but there was also another odor, the scent of gallons of blood—and then the Mexicans were at our walls, trying to press themselves through the doors and windows, so that we were having to beat them back with swords and the butts of our pistols and rifles. Ewen Cameron had gone out into an enclosed courtyard and was tearing loose the cobbles from a stone wall, passing them into the house for us to use as weapons in the hand-to-hand fighting.

  And though it seemed like ten minutes that we fought in this manner, buying time for our own second wave to reload, it was probably no more than thirty seconds before a hundred of our rifles were answering again, and then a hundred more; and once again, the Mexicans sounded a retreat. Our position was unassailable.

  In the silence following their retreat, there was at first only the sound of the injured and the dying, groaning and calling out for help, in the streets of Mier as well as within our own ranks, and the whinnying of injured horses.

  We heard a new sound, then, coming from the buildings across the street—a sound like a rushing creek coming from the waterspouts that lined the buildings of commerce. As the rain had stopped, we did not think it was the sound of runoff and feared instead that it might be coal oil—that they were planning to try to smoke or burn us out.

  It was almost first light. In the recovery period for the opposin
g armies, the regrouping and strategizing, we listened to that newer rushing water sound, and as the gray light of day revealed to us the carnage, we saw, beyond the hundreds of dead Mexicans and the scores of dead horses, that the waterspouts were running red with the blood of all the snipers we had killed atop those buildings. The red rivers of their passing were pouring out onto the cobblestones of the street, and the village dogs, gaunt as skeletons, were tottering among the dead and dying, lapping at the pools and puddles of blood between the cobblestones and drinking straight from the fountain of the drain spouts, their muzzles and whiskers red-splashed.

  Now a lone upright, uninjured soldier appeared in the plaza, walking toward us and waving a white flag of surrender, and several among Fisher’s command, still drunk on the orgy of blood lust, were keen to cut him down as he approached.

  Even as Fisher was ordering them to wait, half a hundred rifles were being cocked, heated barrels bristling from almost every opening, and it was only as the soldier drew nearer that we recognized him as old Ezekiel Smith, who had been captured and made to dress in one of the Mexican uniforms—and the message old Smith carried was not a surrender by the Mexican army nor the town of Mier, but rather a request by Ampudia that we surrender.

  Green, Fisher, and Cameron, and a few others conferred, and Ezekiel Smith advised, “Do what you want, boys, but they’ve still got seven hundred or more at the ready, and have sent messengers out to Santa Anna and Huerta and Woll. I believe in another day or two they may have another two or three thousand here.”

  He stood waiting for our decision, and now Green’s and Fisher’s voices rose in argument, and in reversal—Fisher counseling surrender in order to be able to fight another day, while Green, Cameron, Wallace, and others wanted to stay and fight at least one more day.

  I looked over at Shepherd, who was still standing by that same slotted window. He had tossed the near-useless pistol aside and held a Texan rifle upright, with the hammer already cocked. He was listening to Fisher, but his silent attitude, the righteous indignation and aggression, indicated that he wanted to stay with Green, and to try to kill, with our remaining hundred and fifty or so, the last seven hundred of the enemy before the reinforcements arrived.

  And then what? I wanted to shout.

  He looked like a monster, without that arm and shoulder, wrapped in that big oilcloth coat. He looked like a gigantic vulture. I had plenty left to live for and was all for surrendering with Fisher, beginning the first steps of gaining my life back, if it could still be had—but our sentiments were divided, and we all grumbled and groused and argued while old Smith waited patiently. If we chose to fight, he would stay; if we surrendered, he would take that message back across the street.

  Capitalizing immediately on our indecision, two Mexican officers came hurrying across the street with their own white flags, ostensibly to begin discussing the terms of surrender, but also to assess the morale and injuries among us. As they prattled on with their offers, guaranteeing that we would be treated as prisoners of war, they kept peering into our ranks, taking note.

  There was a new flurry of hope and ambiguity among us at the news that if we surrendered we would be treated as prisoners of war rather than as the plunderers and marauders we were. All through the chain of fractured adobe homes, the translation was passed along: They say they will let us live. We had slain more than thirteen hundred of their men in an evening, and they said they would let us live.

  Fisher and Green continued to argue, more vehemently now, and in the new light I could see that Fisher’s thumb was completely torn off.

  As they argued, it appeared that Green was beginning to sway Fisher into staying and fighting for at least another day.

  But several men had pushed past Fisher, surrendering even before any terms had been agreed on; and as that first flow broke ranks, others followed them. Shepherd, Franklin, and Simmons tried to stop them, as did Cameron and Wallace, but they dodged and twisted past them like fish through a rend in a net. Realizing that with this depletion, further resistance would be futile, thumbless Fisher changed his mind and decided once more to surrender, though he had to hurry after the others to do so, catching up with them only after they had already been escorted into General Ampudia’s command.

  And suddenly, despite my best intentions to depart and wash my hands of the entire expedition, I found myself victim once again of my own inaction, my tendency to sit and wait and observe rather than to act impulsively. I was now one of two dozen soldiers remaining—Green, Cameron, and Wallace among us—holed up in the adobe, our numbers whittled suddenly down to less than a tenth of what they had been when we’d departed LaGrange back in the autumn, so full of verve.

  We watched Fisher and a few of his stragglers being bound and carted off—the officers with their flags of surrender, as well as old Ezekiel Smith, had disappeared—how much of my own choice was loyalty and how much simple indecision?—and we set about gathering and loading all of the weapons we could find, knowing that we were going to die but preparing, as soldiers and warriors have, across the millennia, to sell our lives dearly.

  Such accounting had worked at the Alamo—had yielded the victory a month later at San Jacinto and the birth of a new nation—and even if it had not made sense, it was the only value left to us, it seemed, so we began settling ourselves into the repetition of that story, that cycle. And among those of us who were left, it seemed to me that I was the only one who was now frightened of dying, that the others were accepting it matter-of-factly—the end of this glorious life—as might animals in a stockyard, being prepared for market.

  If these men were pondering the things I was pondering as we waited for the day to unfold, they gave no indication of remorse. Instead, there was only grim resolve, filtered with a kind of firm peace or satisfaction, if not quite contentment, and I marveled at this manifestation of pure courage, and at how far I had to travel yet to reach it myself.

  For about half an hour we conversed among ourselves, roundly denouncing Fisher and what was perceived to be his cowardice. At any time, Ampudia and Canales could have stormed us, could have peeled loose a couple hundred men and overwhelmed us, but the Mexicans chose instead to wait, chose not to spend any more of their lives or resources in that ten-to-one barter that we had inflicted so far. Green cursed violently and then spat and announced, “Boys, I think we are going to have to cross over.”

  He looked over at me for a second, then shook his head—it was Fisher’s fault; if only Fisher had remained, we might have been able to make a stand—and with a sadness I have rarely seen in a man, Green nodded to Simmons to prepare and then hoist a white flag; and as it was lifted, the throng of the Mexican army gave a great cheer of victory and came hurrying across the street to “capture” us.

  Before they reached us, Green, rather than allowing our, captors to take his rifle from him, began smashing it to pieces with one of the same bloodstained cobbles he had used earlier in the night to crush the head of a Mexican soldier.

  Bigfoot Wallace said nothing, though his eyes filled with water. Later in his journal, he would write of the incident: “Never shall I forget the humiliation of my feelings when we were stripped of all our arms and equipment, and led off ignominiously by a guard of swarthy, bandy-legged, contemptible greasers. Delivered over to the tender mercies of these pumpkin-colored Philistines, I could have cried, if I hadn’t been so mad.”

  Even then, not everyone crossed over with us. Whitfield Chalk and Caleb St. Clair, both ministers, had been among those most fiercely committed to standing their ground and fighting—due perhaps to previous arrangements they believed they had made with their Maker—and as the Mexicans hurried across the street to take charge of our surrender, tripping and stumbling over the bodies of their own fallen, Chalk and St. Clair climbed into one of the giant baking ovens in the home in which we were hiding. They would make it out alive, I was to find out much later, waiting until nightfall before slipping out of town and crossing the river, mak
ing it all the way back to Texas, where they told President Sam Houston of the heroic events at Ciudad Mier, and of the brave manner in which they had fought their way free of the besiegement.

  This was nearly fifty years ago. Once I was able to finally make it back home, for the next five decades I planted crops, season after season, and harvested them, year after year, with very little if anything changing in my fields, even as the world around me changed, or seemed to change.

  All wars, like all crops, are the same in that the secret story housed within each seed is undeniable, and that they will always play themselves out in the same manner, again and again, season after season. That belief—that knowledge—is both a terror and an assurance. Terrible, because the content of that seed lies within the hearts of all men, and yet assuring, too, in that we can do little if anything to change it.

  They kept us under house arrest for a week while we buried the dead, ours and theirs. Woll and Santa Anna never appeared—perhaps having been informed it was no longer necessary, or perhaps they had never been coming in the first place—and some of Ampudia’s and Canales’s men guarded us as we worked, while others helped us with the burials.

  We carried the dead Texans in carts and on our shoulders to a field outside of town, where we carved their names on hastily lashed crosses, prefacing their last names with only one initial to save time; and we buried the Mexipan soldiers in a field at the top of a bluff at the other end of town, laying them down in precise and geometric military fashion.

  The digging was easy in the soft sand, and the cold weather was in our favor, as was the dampness of the earth. We were each responsible for burying sixteen soldiers a day—a soldier every hour—and by the middle of the third day we had the task completed, nearly fifteen hundred men buried.

  As we worked side by side with our captors and our enemies, a rapport soon developed; and while I would certainly never call it friendship or even affection, there was a kind of respect and peacefulness that accrued as the residue of those labors; and we all took pride, at the end of each day, in the comfort of a difficult job done well.