The Diezmo

by Rick Bass

  Sometimes when this happened a soldier would circle back around on his horse and dismount and offer a hand to the fallen captive to help him back to his feet, offering him a sip of water from his canteen; though other times, the circling-back captor would instead give the supplicant a lashing across his neck and back. Gradually we came to understand dimly that our captors’ wrath was most likely to be highest when the distances between one village and the next were greatest, and we tried to adjust our collapses accordingly. We helped each other along as we could, and tried to maintain a steady pace.

  So festive was the celebration of our arrival in Matamoros that we stayed for two nights rather than one, and Green and Fisher were allowed a new set of clothes and were boarded in a lieutenant’s home, and I began to understand that the more powerful our leaders could be made to appear, the greater the cause for celebration, and the greater the reflected glory cast upon the conquerors.

  The extra night’s rest, even though we were housed in a cow pen, was blissful. Three more of our number had died from consumption—we had stopped and buried them along the trail—and had we not gotten the extra night’s rest in Matamoros, I believe that we would have lost a dozen more. Among us, only Wallace and Cameron seemed impervious to fatigue and unable to acknowledge defeat.

  In the evenings I played cards with boys like Orlando Phelps and Billy Walker. We played not in the reckless style of young men but cautiously now, like old men; though our greatest bluff was the game itself, and the casual pretense that all those among us who played would still be with us at journey’s end. That our path would somehow lead us back home—or anywhere else, for that matter, other than the abyss.

  In Monterrey, our officers stayed once again in a private home. We were in the city for a week and never saw them once during that entire time. It was almost too much for men like Cameron and Wallace to bear, but our jealousy and resentment were tempered by the valuable recuperation time we were gathering.

  Captains Green and Fisher boarded in a colonel’s house on a bluff overlooking the city. They had been outfitted in more new clothes, grander than ever, which they now wore on the march ever south. And without meaning to gloat—indeed, expressing marvel and amazement at their fortune, rather than triumph—they allowed how they had been entertained on both the piano and the guitar by the colonel’s daughters, whom they had found, in Captain Green’s words, “attractive and compelling, altogether satisfactory.”

  They had danced and gone to lavish dinners every evening, being entertained by the city’s elite, who were curious and anxious to witness firsthand this sampling of the barbaric Texas rebels they had been hearing about. Captain Green described the Mexican women he encountered during this strange week as “winged creatures” and said that they danced “with a bewitching, ethereal, gossamer touch.”

  They discovered we were bound for the prison at Hacienda del Salado. Green and Fisher said that some of the women with whom they had danced had blanched on hearing that it was our destination and had informed them that it was one of the worst prisons in Mexico, one from which few ever exited alive. It was finally this knowledge more than anything else that emboldened us to make our first attempt at escape.

  In the evenings, as we talked about our escape a consensus began to develop, which was that it would be best to make our break from a town or village rather than out in the middle of the desert. A town or village, while possibly offering more resistance, might also yield more loot.

  But we still argued when would be the best time to make our rush. Many believed that it should be under cover of darkness, though Bigfoot Wallace, crafty as ever, postulated that morning might be best. He had noticed that the Mexican soldiers each slept with their firearms, but that at breakfast they stacked them in a neat pile while they stood in line to get their grub. He had noted also that the Mexican officers, who were allowed to dine first, had been in the habit recently of going off into the countryside shortly after breakfast for a morning ride with Green and Fisher.

  Wallace and Cameron told us to be ever vigilant, particularly in the mornings, that we would recognize the moment when it arrived, that we would know in an instant that it was our time to rise.

  We could each feel it building. Our guards seemed jumpy and were quieter than usual. And with this new tension, this new silence, there were now those among us who were beginning to falter at the thought.

  Wallace had an eye for these falterers and spent time with each of them, counseling that they would be better off participating in the escape, for if we failed, we all failed together, but if Wallace and Cameron and their followers succeeded, the wrath of the Mexican army would be visited upon those who remained.

  Old Archibald Fitzgerald, a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, who had signed up as much out of boredom as patriotism, was ambivalent, hoping that his status as a British citizen might gain him some kinder treatment, or even release. Another prisoner, Richard Brenham, was far more upset—inconsolable, truthfully. He confided to anyone who would listen that he had been haunted lately by an inescapable premonition that his career was “shortly to be closed,” and had even been hinting at suicide, he said, for “release from this painful thralldom.”

  The first day out of Monterrey, en route to the next village, Saltillo, Cameron approached us one by one and told us to be ready. We languished for weeks in Saltillo, however, without an opportunity—and growing weaker—and then were marched farther south, to Hacienda del Salado, where Cameron told us that this time we had to escape, or die, and that we would make our attempt the next morning.

  Only Charles Reese was solidly against the escape plan. He pointed out that we were now more than three hundred miles from home, an observation that infuriated Cameron. Reese shook his head and argued further. “Even if you man age to escape into the countryside, the local militias will cut you down.”

  It was his use of the word you rather than us that made me think afterward that he was the one who tipped off the officer directly in charge of guarding us—Colonel Barragan. The next morning, with all of us waiting anxiously for some sign from Cameron, we were surprised to see that Barragan checked in on us an hour earlier than usual. He seemed extraordinarily suspicious, and some accused Reese outright of having alerted him. The more charitable among us—of whom I was not one—believed that Reese had escape plans of his own and was concerned that our attempt might jeopardize them.

  Regardless, the plan was foiled that day, and later that night Cameron urged Reese once more to change his mind, warning him that the break would need to be made very soon, maybe even the next day, and even if he had to make it “all alone and single-handed.”

  Reese remained unconvinced. “You have sinned away your days of grace,” he told us that night, staring into the fire and speaking calmly. “What was courage and wisdom on one side of the border would be madness and weakness on this side. There is only this one earthly life,” Reese said. “Regardless of your beliefs in a hereafter, or a merciful God, we are flesh but once, and our choices must be made wisely.”

  Bigfoot Wallace was listening, pensive for once, but Cameron cursed and rose from the fire and stalked away.

  Our sleep was fitful, and my fishing acquaintances and I visited late into the night, speaking not so much of war or freedom but about the homes we had left behind.

  Jimmy Pinn spoke of the berry cobbler that his mother made each Sunday in the spring, and Curtis Haieber told of going turkey hunting with his father.

  “I even miss the work,” I told them, “digging stumps, hauling stones out of the field, plowing, cutting stovewood. It wasn’t any more tiring than this, and you felt better at the end of the day.”

  In that younger life, there had been a security, even sanctity, in the regular cycles and rhythms, even if harsh. And were not these things—bygone, now—every bit as much the essence of freedom as our current campaign for contested, distant territories?

  We were still just children. We talked into the night about all th
e things that were most precious to us, and, I think, without ever speaking directly about it, we formed the necessary courage that would be required in the morning—to take on our armed captors barehanded, and to be prepared to fight, again, to the death.

  Since Monterrey we had been receiving rice for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, which was a wonderful improvement over beans. I still carried a dusty fistful of dried beans in my coat pocket as an emergency ration, but now that we had new stores of rice, our spirits were better, and we were no longer beset by the diarrhea that had begun to plague us. Occasionally, as they had with the beans, our captors threw in a few scraps of meat: hoofs, gristle, ears, tongues, internal organs. Any offal they did not want was ours. A dead snake encountered in the middle of the trail. The shell of an armadillo. A vulture that one of their marksmen shot from the sky, the great black bird plummeting from such a height that it exploded upon impact, leaving only a smeared mess, and feathers.

  That next morning, Colonel Barragan checked in on us early again before heading into the hills for his morning ride with Green, Fisher, Canales, and Ampudia, as well as Shepherd, who continued to ride with Ampudia. We kept spooning rice from our gourds, watching the officers’ cavalry grow more distant, and when they were tiny specks, Ewen Cameron tossed his hat high into the air where all could see it, and with a wild whoop he charged the two guards at the gate, knocking them both to the ground, and with our own wild roars the storm of us poured through the gate and fell upon our startled captors as they were still eating their own breakfast.

  One irregular, John Robson, had made a weapon by wrapping a stone in his coat and swinging it around and around, leveling any soldier who came near him. He spun through the Mexicans like a tornado, with others trailing in his wake, and we were able to get to the cache of rifles just steps ahead of the soldiers.

  On the trail, they might have been our benefactors at times, and even, occasionally, our commiserates, but now we fell upon them and mowed them down—swinging stone-coats, firing rifles, and even turning their own cannon upon them. Bigfoot Wallace had seized a bayonet and was fighting hand to hand. There was pain in our captors’ faces, but what I remember more were the expressions of surprise and sorrow.

  A soldier and a Texan wrestled for a musket, and the musket discharged at such close range that the powder burns ignited the Texan’s ragged coat. He ran howling among us and leapt into one of the horses’ watering troughs.

  More a way station for supplies and a crude military fortress than a true village, Hacienda del Salado was a lonely place, built of stone in the middle of a small barren valley, between the foothills—beyond which stretched the cold blue mountains of the Sierra de la Paila—and as we gained the upper hand, the two hundred or more villagers began abandoning it, fleeing into the surrounding countryside.

  We were fighting amid a hail of bullets, and the air was filled with flashing swords and knives and bayonets. Runaway horses were knocking us to the ground, and men were astraddle one another, pounding their brains out with stones and boulders.

  In little more than ten minutes we took the fort, and then immediately became divided amongst ourselves. There were those of us who wanted to strike out for home, but there was another faction who wanted to loot and plunder first. The homelanders, as I had come to think of those of us who preferred Green’s command, sought to gather the frightened mules and horses, while the renegades roamed the stone fortress, routing those terrified villagers who crouched in hiding, commandeering all they could find of worth in that barren desert city. By the time they were done, they had gathered 160 muskets and carbines, a dozen jeweled swords and as many pistols, and $1,400 worth of silver, as well as three mule-loads of ammo: and once again, we were an army.

  There were five dead among our number, and twenty dead Mexicans. Included among our dead were Richard Brenham, who had been tormented days earlier by the pre monitions of his death, and the veteran of the Napoleonic Wars, Archibald Fitzgerald: a particular tragedy, we were to find out later, as there had already been a letter en route to Mexico City that stated his release had been secured, as he had been hoping, by the British consul.

  Up in the hills, we were to find out later, the cavalry that was escorting Green and Fisher on their morning ride heard all the gun- and cannon-fire and looked down arid saw the women and children fleeing Hacienda del Salado, and then the soldiers themselves fleeing—and in their fury, they wanted to return the betrayal by killing Green and Fisher right then and there, and to ride to the defense of the fort.

  But Green argued passionately that Colonel Barragan’s orders were to transport him and Fisher to Mexico City for trial, and that the order to execute them could not take precedence over these other orders, which had been given by a general. Even Ampudia and Canales relented in the face of that argument, and so after some discussion they left ten of the cavalry up in the hills with Green and Fisher while the remainder rode back down into Hacienda del Salado to join the fray.

  We were just leaving when Barragan and his little group rode up and tried to block our exit. Colonel Barragan dismounted and walked up to Ewen Cameron, and with all one hundred and fifty Texas muskets aimed at him, Barragan ordered Cameron to surrender.

  Cameron laughed and declined—we all began to laugh—and with that, he pushed past Barragan, as did Bigfoot Wallace, walking stride for stride next to him, and the rest of us followed, with our ragged assemblage of booty, some of us on horseback and others walking or leading pack mules burdened with silver or ammunition.

  We forgot to take water. We did not think about water. We did not know the countryside.

  Colonel Barragan and his men followed us, good soldiers that they were. They remained always at a distance—too far for us to shoot—but always on our tracks.

  We took turns walking and trotting and riding the mules and horses, and covered nearly ninety miles in those first twenty-four hours. Only three more days like that, and we would be home. I, for one, believed we were going to make it.

  By the end of that first twenty-four hours, we were desperate, for water and not a little inconvenienced for food. We had been traveling down the center of the dusty road that led due north—our plan was to pass through La Encarnación and then veer west of Monterrey, through the rougher country of Venadito and Boca de los Tres Rios.

  Just outside of La Encarnación, we decided to approach a home, all hundred and fifty of us, and request food and water. But the windows fairly bristled with guns at our approach. We noted that there were a few horses hitched outside belonging to Mexican soldiers and cavalry, and so we rode around that home. As we rode past, cries and calls went up, “Soldados desgraciados!” and though we tried to stay out of their range, they lobbed some distant shots at us anyway, one of which struck a young irregular, Herbert Garner, in the head, felling him instantly.

  We did not have time to bury him, and instead trotted on, leaving him behind for Barragan’s men, who were still trailing us, to bury. Now there was one more open space available on the back of a horse, though we knew our stock could not keep up the pace we had set for them that first twenty-four hours, that already we had almost ridden them into the ground.

  As the pangs of hunger and thirst worked on us we began to squabble and unravel yet again, and rather than simply dividing in two groups, as had been our earlier tendency—one man choosing Green’s leadership, and another Fisher’s—we began to separate in what seemed like infinite directions, as if our differences were now no longer simply oppositional but as diffuse as gusts of wind.

  That afternoon we met an Englishman heading in the opposite direction, riding a tall old gray mule and dressed in a long formal coat, carrying a parasol to protect his balding head from the cold but brilliant winter sun. He hailed us and visited with Cameron and Wallace for some time, informing them that he was traveling the wilderness for his own edification—and when we asked about the route ahead of us, he said that we would do well to stay on the main road all the way to the border—
that although we would probably encounter a few soldiers and cavalry, there was none anywhere in such force as to outnumber us.

  The Brit seemed delighted by our derring-do, by the valor of our grand escape, and wished us Godspeed, and before riding southward (toward Colonel Barragan’s still-trailing little force) he paused and asked if there were any artists among us. To my surprise, one of the boys I had fished with on the Rio Grande, Charles McLaughlin, eased forward on the frothy, leg-trembling mule he was sitting, and raised his hand.

  The Brit was delighted, and, still astride his own mule, nudged his animal forward and made a great show of presenting to Charles McLaughlin a blank journal and a little leather-bound satchel containing pens of varying gauges, and little vials of ink, as well as some chalk and pastels.

  “You are on the grand adventure of your life,” he said. “You must record it, not for posterity, but for yourself.” A lone cloud was drifting across the sky, and as it passed now before the sun, the Englishman folded his parasol and, before placing it in an empty rifle scabbard attached to his saddle, reached out with it and touched Charles McLaughlin on the shoulder as if knighting him. He turned toward Wallace and Cameron then, studying them as if evaluating them for a painting—and then the cloud was past, exposing his bright pate to the sun’s cold brilliance again, and he pulled the parasol from his scabbard and hoisted it once more and then rode on.

  We found our first and last water at Agua Nieta. The spring was alkaline, surrounded by calceous stone walls of great antiquity, erected to keep animals out; but we knocked out the walls and gate and drove our remuda right into the warm shallow spring, where we slid down from our saddles and lay on our bellies like pigs, drinking among the mules and horses as they too wallowed and thrashed in the salty pond. Our thrashings were soon soiling the spring with horse piss and green mule shit, as well as the vomit of soldiers who had drunk too much too fast, and their own piss and shit and grime as they stripped out of their filthy rags and laundered them, standing ankle-deep in the turmoil and scrubbing themselves with gouty fistfuls of the chalky mud.