by Rick Bass
Early into our work, General Ampudia himself had ridden among us, observing not just the progress of our labors but the features of the men we were burying, as if to memorize them for the inevitable day when their families and loved ones asked for an accounting. He carried a small ledger in his saddlebags, in which he occasionally entered a few phrases and what looked like brief sketches of the men.
General Ampudia had also taken note of the singular sight of Shepherd struggling to excavate his share of the graves—able to plunge the shovel into the loose soil with one hand, but having great difficulty then in lifting the sand out. The deeper Shepherd got, the more sand slid back off his shovel and down the hills of sand surrounding him, so that at times it seemed he was attempting to bury himself rather than any of the fallen enemy. By early afternoon of that first day, Ampudia had ordered one of his lieutenants to give Shepherd a hand up out of his hole, stating that he was a man of mercy and that since clearly we Texans had corrupted a young boy who was not yet old enough to make decisions on his own, he was going to take the boy under his wing.
Fisher protested, climbing out of his hole and laying a hand on Shepherd’s arm to detain him. But Shepherd only stared back at him—looking at him as if not recognizing him—and after a moment Shepherd pulled his arm away, and Ampudia laughed, and ordered one of his soldiers to dismount and give Shepherd his horse, while Ampudia walked. The soldier did as he was ordered, knelt and clasped his hands together to form a lower stirrup, and helped lift Shepherd onto his new horse. The next time we saw him, Shepherd was cleaned and scrubbed and wearing a Mexican uniform, and he neither looked our way nor avoided us but moved among and past us as if so completely in another world that the rest of us might never have existed for him: as complete an absence in his past now as was even his arm itself.
We had heard from other veterans that with such injuries there were ghost pains that persisted for decades. But if Shepherd ever felt such pain, he gave no sign of it. He appeared not even to acknowledge the arm’s absence, and this gave him a sad kind of grace; and as he moved among us, inspecting our work but never commenting, it seemed that he had buried us, also.
After the burials were completed we began cleaning the streets, scrubbing the blood from the cobblestones. We heated water and lye in iron kettles and cauldrons and scrubbed the stones with fistfuls of river sand until our hands were bleeding. We crawled across the cobbles on our knuckles and knees in the drenching rain that helped wash away the old blood as we scrubbed it free, as well as our own blood.
I have never been colder in my life. We scrubbed until our hands were so numb and torn and wrinkled that we could feel neither the heat nor the lye. As we hauled our iron buckets down the street, steam rose not just from the cauldrons themselves but from our bodies, our sagging, wet clothes draped over us to retain the dwindling heat of our animal bodies, and from the cleansed streets themselves.
Men were hacking and coughing, shivering and chattering. In this endeavor, the Mexican soldiers offered no aid but instead stood guard on the sidewalks, smoking and watching and visiting among themselves, and spelling one another frequently to go warm themselves by the fires within their temporary quarters.
The villagers watched us, too, as did the returning runaway horses, brush-whipped and hungry, saddles sagging sideways from where their cinches had loosened, mouths bloody from where they’d been stepping on their bridles, jerking their heads downward and rattling their teeth. The soldiers led these mounts, Mexican and Texan, into their corrals, and the more feeble among us, the hackers and wheezers, the tubercular rattlers, were assigned the less arduous job of cleaning and currying the remuda for our nearing departure.
We watched for Shepherd, hoping he might be able to inform us of what the Mexicans had in mind for us, and able to intervene somehow on our behalf—but we never saw him, or Ampudia either, and we wondered whether Shepherd had been sent back home.
The rain broke at the end of that fourth day, just as we were finishing cleaning the streets, with a brisk north wind pushing the drizzle southward and a blue sky clearing. The streets steamed in the new sunlight like freshly broken earth, though the cooler temperature of the north wind soon chilled the stones to a gleaming, polished stillness, with the last of the wisps of steam rising in tatters past the tile roofs of the adobe houses.
The city looked gilded, in that new gold late-day winter light, and the Mexican soldiers were still finding a few dead snipers here and there, fallen on those roofs, and in cracks and crevices, and behind chimneys. They were lowering them with ropes from the rooftops, the marksmen stiff as crabs now. And with the light so beautiful and the streets so clean, the town no longer looked so much like a ruin of war, but instead as if it had been a stage for a play; even the dead soldiers being lowered from the roofs, spinning slowly at the ends of their ropes, gave the appearance of actors between scenes.
We had thought that when we finished cleaning their streets we would be allowed to return to our prisoners’ quarters, where we could strip out of our stinking, sodden clothes and attempt to dry them on string and rope hung in crisscross lattice above the one small stove. But no sooner had we stood, groaning and stretching our crooked backs, than Canales came striding out and informed us that we were to begin repairing the damage to the adobe walls.
We were to work through the night, Canales told us, and on through the next day, and the next night—working, he said, until we had all the rubble cleared and every fracture patched, working until it was all as good as new, or better. We were to work ceaselessly, he said, and without food or water, save for whatever bits and pieces the townspeople of the wrecked town and the owners of the homes in which we were laboring chose to dispense to us.
There might have been a revolt right then, even though we had no weapons, but we were too exhausted from the full day of kneeling on the cobbles like penitents; and I think also that the incredible gold light that was pouring into the village was lulling our warrior spirits somehow, almost as if transforming us from rebels and revolutionaries back into the simple yeomen we had once been.
We looked instinctively to our leaders, or to the men who had once been our leaders—the hateful Fisher, with his thumb blown off, and the cocksure, swaggering Green, as well as big Cameron and big Wallace—and when we saw their shoulders slump and saw Green and Fisher turn and begin surveying the damage, we knew that it was possible some of us would end up working ourselves to death, which was certainly not the way we had envisioned achieving our glory when we had first set out: death by washerwoman scrubbing, death by adobe digging.
We began by clearing out the old rubble, forming an assembly line and passing out fragment after fragment, like a bucket brigade—Texans, Mexican soldiers, and townpeople alike. Night had fallen and a low full moon was rising, dropping the temperature precipitously, freezing the wet cobblestones with a glistening skin of ice. We made bonfires of the ruined rafters and chairs and tables, fires so large that they cast heat upon us even from a great distance, the glimmering of the flames reflecting in each icy cobblestone and in the dark eyes of the villagers and the soldiers; and as we worked in that unbroken chain, there was again a strange solidarity that began to be knit among us, captors and captives and townspeople alike.
By morning, we had each of the residences cleaned out completely, and, wobbling with fatigue, dug new pits in which we formed the adobe mixture. Our grimy rags of clothes were crusted with our own blood and the grit of the adobe mixture, and some of the townspeople had found coats for us to wear, and crude gloves.
We worked as we could, sometimes pausing to lie down in the street or next to the adobe pit to pass into a brief unconsciousness of sleep for two or three glorious minutes, before rousing to rejoin our fellow laborers.
The boy who had gotten gangrene in his knee from the cactus needle, Joseph Berry, was working with us, though fading fast. During the battle he had been shot in his good knee as well, so that he was unable to stand without crutches, and we
could each smell on him the same telltale odor of rot and loss that had been on Shepherd. But Joseph Berry was even more insistent that he be allowed to keep both legs, regardless of the consequences, and Dr. Sinnickson, beaten down by our travails, did not have the energy to argue with him much. Neither was Captain Green or Fisher inclined to order the legs’ removal, figuring that we were all short for this world anyway.
The odor, however, was horrific, and I had the thought that had he been more comely, like Shepherd, rather than as scraggly and scruffy as he was, the doctor and the officers might have worked harder to save him. As it was, he died on the fifth day—in his last hours, he changed his mind and asked Sinnickson to remove the legs, though by that time he was too far gone and we had begun digging his grave even before he passed. We had him buried by that evening, still more bloody and fevered seed for that contested soil.
It took us all that night and the next day and night to finish—Texans and Mexicans alike, working shoulder to shoulder, past the point of exhaustion; but when we were finished, the rebuilt city sparkled, the still damp stucco gleamed like gold, and the hands of destroyers and avengers had been turned instead into those of creators.
We accomplished more in those last two days than we had all autumn, and a greater solidarity had grown between us, captives and captors, for when men have worked together in hard physical labor toward a shared and common goal, their differences and even ancient enmities can be bridged in a way like no other.
We left Ciudad Mier on the seventh day following our surrender, marching in a long, filthy line southward, and attended on every side by the horsebound filade of the victors, the successful defenders of their homeland. And in this manner, I suppose, we were getting what we had desired all along—marching ever southward, as if still on some larger mission: one that we had thought we had understood but of which we were now beginning, in our fatigue and humbling defeat, to realize we had no inkling. That there was a larger mission, a destiny fuller and more powerful than even the one of our own imaginings.
4
Escape
THEY KEPT US in a crude cedar-split corral each night, with a cannon guarding the gate, so that should we try a mass escape, they could level us all. We were kept separate from the horses but afforded the same treatment; we had a communal trough from which to water, were made to void along the perimeter of the corral, and were given but one shovel with which to fling the offending spoor as far from the crude corral as possible.
The nights were bitterly cold, the stars harder and fiercer out in the desert than they had been in the soft hills of home. For warmth we had to build a fire in the center of the corral and then scrape away the coals and sleep bunched up together in the warm ashes. Each morning when we awoke, we looked like ghosts.
We arose at daylight, were given a breakfast of boiled beans, and resumed our march, not even bothering to extinguish our cooking fires, for there was little left in that desolate country to burn. All we possessed were the tattered clothes on our backs, and it was difficult to walk in our riding boots. The cobblers’ nails began to protrude into our heels, so we cushioned the boots with cactus pads and short grass; when the country permitted it, we marched barefoot, carrying our ragged boots in our arms.
Shepherd rode with General Ampudia, always looking forward at his new countryside, never back.
Canales’s infantry and Ampudia’s cavalry kept us surrounded constantly, and from somewhere a military band had joined us, sometimes marching silently beside us, carrying their bright, brassy instruments large and small, and other times playing them loudly. We marched on blindly, unmindful of where we were going or of what fate awaited us, pale prisoners in an alien land, advancing across the desert like a gaudy and inept circus.
Whenever we came to a village, our procession halted at the nearest creek and the Mexicans bathed, polished their boots and brass until they shone, and groomed their horses. They slicked back their dark hair and, reassembling in precise military order, proceeded into the village, with the band marching alongside us, blaring. We were paraded around the town square while the villagers cheered.
In each new village there would be bright decorations, as if for a feast, with colorful ribbons and articles of clothing hanging from Maypoles and strung on clotheslines stretched across the streets and between buildings: scarves, rebozos, serapes, dresses, men’s sequined pants. Paper banners with the slogans of ETERNAL HONOR AND IMMORTAL AMPUDIA and GLORIA Y GRATITUDE AL BRAVO CANALES were everywhere. Church bells pealed and clanged as we were marched around and around the town square, no longer warriors but objects of derision and entertainment. Children danced among us, shaking gourds and rattles made from bones of indeterminate origin. In Nueva Reynosa, an old Indian ran up to us, flashing a mirror in our faces.
In other villages—perhaps towns that had produced some of the soldiers who had been killed in the battle for Mier—there was no celebrating, but instead we were pelted with stones and rotten eggs and called hard names. We were deprived of food and water in these towns, or given the murkiest, brownest, saltiest water imaginable, so that sometimes my own dreams were no longer of escape but instead of pure, clean water, even a single cup of it. All that I now desired I had once possessed.
We soon realized that despite the rigors of the journey, the forced marches through the countryside were infinitely preferable to staying overnight in the villages. In the desert, the camaraderie between us and our captors usually returned, and we preferred the open air of the wilderness to the humiliations of town.
“While marching,” Bigfoot Wallace said, “we can at any rate breathe the pure, fresh air of heaven without being hooted at and reviled by the mob and rabble that always collects around us wherever we halt.”
At the feasts that celebrated our captivity we were given only beans, and never quite enough. We had been given old coats to replace the thin tatters in which we’d previously been shrouded—our “uniforms”—and I would try to save a few dry beans each day from the bag that was offered to us for cooking—slipping a fistful of them, dry and rattling, into my coat pocket before the bulk of the bag was poured into the group caldron. On the next day’s march I would finger them in my coat pocket, examining each one like a talisman before choosing one to place in my mouth.
I would suck on the hard bean, making it last as long as I could, the bean providing some moisture as I salivated, and, later, when it was finally softened enough to chew, a trace of nourishment, giving enough energy for another ten paces, or another hundred.
We pushed on, southward.
We thought about escape all the time. Bigfoot Wallace and Ewen Cameron thought about it most insistently.
Although the officers realized that Wallace was an excellent soldier, they did not know of his fame among the Texas Rangers. They were familiar with Cameron, however. Back when Canales had been a mercenary in the Texas Revolution, fighting on our side for a while, Canales and Cameron had fought nearly to the death in an argument over which one of them would get to ride a certain horse. It looked for now as if Canales the Decapitator had won that argument, and as he rode alongside Cameron—the Scot, walking, nearly as tall as the horse was at the shoulders—it was evident that Canales found great mirth in the present situation, and just as evident that Cameron was simmering.
Each night in our prison camp inside the corral, Wallace—who more and more was becoming our de facto leader—had to counsel restraint. Escape was the unspoken catechism in everyone’s mind—it had become our identity, our reason for being—but each night Wallace reminded us to bide our time and to wait for the single best chance, that we would have only one opportunity, and that we would need to be ready, eternally ready, to make the most of it.
Our old captains had all but deserted us. They had ceased their day-and-night squabbling—having nothing left, finally, to argue about—and for the most part kept to themselves down at one end of the corral. Because they were officers, they were afforded more respect by our captors—s
ometimes, in the evenings, they would even be given a cigar to smoke. Green still occasionally made an effort to stay connected to his former command, and while Fisher was interested only in his own survival, the fires of escape and revolution still burned bright in Green’s eyes, or so it seemed at night, when he would come over to our low fire to visit. He would sit next to Wallace and appeared to mind neither the unspoken weakening of his own rank nor the unofficial rise of Wallace’s. He seemed like one of us, just a man who had made a poor choice.
In the daytime, however, Green drifted back into conversation with Fisher, and then the two men and their different desires were combined once more, incompatible but as inseparable as they had been at the beginning of the journey. Sometimes, believing it unfit for officers of any kind to be made to march so far, Canales and Ampudia would allow Fisher and Green to ride with them—though always Ampudia kept Fisher separated from Shepherd, whose black hair was getting longer, and whose already olive skin was growing even darker.
And in the daytime, trudging through my comrades’ dust, dreaming of water, I would grip the fistful of beans in my coat pocket, would examine each one in my hand, rolling them between my fingers like pebbles. I would think of the incredible power latent in each seed—of the way a single bean, unfolding from beneath the soil, could shove aside a stone; and of the way a handful of such seeds could transform a barren land into a crop of bounty—and such dreams, such images, gave me strength, without my yet having to put a single bean into my mouth, even as other men around me were stumbling, falling to their knees.
