The Diezmo

by Rick Bass

  Even now, however, I think that if anyone were to attempt to take or ruin this land, I would cross over that river yet again; that even knowing what I know, and having seen what I have seen, I might yet still be pulled across—an old man, now—as incapable of change in that regard as the turn of the seasons and the secrets of the soil itself.

  Seventy-three of us came home from the Castle of Perve.

  Some men came home to nothing; it was as if their lives had ceased from the moment that they had first crossed the border. Willis Coplan, for example, came home to a gravestone in his front yard that already bore his name, and with his wife remarried and living there with her new husband and family.

  For a while Charles McLaughlin worked as an illustrator for some of the newspapers that had agitated for our release, and then, following Texas’s annexation to the United States, he went to Paris, not as an act of political dissent but merely to pursue his education. For years I received hand-drawn Christmas cards from him as he traveled farther east—to China, and India, and Borneo—before I finally stopped hearing from him around the age of thirty.

  Other men, alas, were corrupted into the habit of war, beyond any hope of reclamation. Even in peace, they found more war. Colonel Fisher, Bigfoot Wallace, Samuel Walker, and others rode with the Texas Rangers, even after the annexation, fighting Comanches as well as Mexicans, and soon earned a name for their cruelty and tortures. Walker, who had buried a dime in the soil at Perote, vowing to come back and reclaim it some day with the interest of vengeance, did just that, leading a regiment back into Perote during the U.S.-Mexican War of 1846. He was shot dead while leading that charge but succeeded in routing the town and freeing all the prisoners—the scalawags, vermin, and unjustly imprisoned alike—and as he lay dying, his men fell prostrate across his chest, weeping for the loss of their captain.

  It was the same as it had always been. Those who did not die in battle were cursed to grow old and rheumy, forgotten and untended, such as Bigfoot Wallace himself, retired out on a hardscrabble ranch west of San Antonio, far too old for war, finally, but knowing nothing else. Having killed a thousand men perhaps, by bullet, knife, and saber, and knowing nothing else; and staring, now, into the long black tunnel of the last days of his life, with no other paths, no choices or options remaining but silence and the dark vanishing.

  The other night there was a warm balmy March breeze from the Gulf, and it seemed to carry every memory, every scent, from those days of hardship: memories and days and months and then years that I have labored to forget, as if working them to compost, cloaking them in the viny growth of pumpkins and squash, and in the military precision of countless rows of corn, and in the leafy green breath of peas and beans.

  The breeze blew open my doors and windows, banged open a cabinet, and knocked an empty tin cup from the counter, awakening me; and when I arose, it seemed then that all those memories had not been riven to soil and worm food but had been stored away somewhere, ever bright and unharmed—in my cabinets, perhaps—and ready to return. It seemed that they were returning, spilling and sliding from the empty shelves, or that they were the breeze itself: and I was frightened, as I should have been but was not, the first time, when Green and Fisher came riding into town so long ago, and I was overwhelmed too with sadness, and I found myself weeping.

  I walked outside, my face damp, frightened and lonely: as if all I had strived for in fifty years, all I had labored to bury and convert to good, had been for naught, had returned with but a single whim of the wind.

  The fields were ready for planting, had been plowed but not yet seeded. I had been drawing maps, making plans for what crop would go where, and in what quantity. How they would interact with one another in their various placements and positions, how one would rise while another would fall. Which ones would serve and give to the soil, and which ones would take from and deplete—for a little while—that same soil.

  The rows of furrows stretched comfortingly before me in the silver moonlight: a crescent moon was setting behind the bare pecan trees at the far edge of the field, down by the river. The rows were perfect, evenly spaced, and yet appeared to be converging across the field’s great distance to but a single point, down by those trees.

  My eyes adjusted to the moon’s light, and I saw then that all was not perfect, that something had marred the furrows. Something had passed transversely across them, crumbling their ridges and compacting the previously loosened and sifted soil.

  The marring was far too large to be the stippled tiny hoofs of deer, and yet too even for the stumbling destruction of cattle or horse. There was instead a wild elegance to the script, and an ominousness.

  I walked out into the field toward those tracks, being careful not to disrupt any of the ridges I had so carefully plowed. When I came to the tracks—so fresh that I knew they had been made only moments earlier—I crouched and examined them, and I recognized them to be those of a great cat, a jaguar, its prints wider than the spread of my hand: tracks such as I had seen in my travels of half a century ago, and even occasionally in the country around my home as a child, before settlers and civilization killed all the jaguars off.

  Something moved at the far end of the field, back in the trees’ darkness; something dark stirred within the darkness, then was gone.

  I was barefooted, but the night was warm and I felt no chill. I set out across the field in the moonlight, following the script of those fresh tracks down toward the trees.

  Acknowledgments

  In the fall of 1842, with the new Republic of Texas barely six years old, and tensions between Mexico and Texas still raw and rife—as they would continue to be, even after Texas was ultimately admitted to the United States—a small army of Texas volunteers invaded Mexico in defiance of the Texas president Sam Houston’s explicit orders, though perhaps with his contradictory, tacit assent, off the record. This much seems true: one leader, William S. Fisher, defied the expedition’s leader, Alexander Somervell, and crossed over the Texas-Mexico border, seeking war.

  The militia volunteers committed atrocities on both sides of the border (as many of them had already committed against the Comanches, in the years preceding their adventure in Old Mexico). Decapitations, inhumane treatment of prisoners, questionable documents, economic inabilities to wage sustained war, political ambitions: all that exists now existed then. For readers interested in the facts of this period, works by the great Texas historian T. R. Fehrenbach, such as Lone Star, would be a fine beginning point, as would the invaluable Soldiers of Misfortune: The Somervell and Mier Eocpeditions by Sam W. Haynes, and Mier Expedition Diary: A Texas Prisoner’s Account, by Joseph D. McCutchan, edited by Joseph Milton Nance. The Adventures of Bigfoot Wallace by John Duval, circa 1870, is an interesting read, as is Fanny Gooch Inglehart’s 1910 chronicle The Boy Captive of the Texas Mier Expedition: A Thrilling Episode of the Texas Republic.

  It’s standard practice for novelists trafficking in history to establish the traditional caveat along the lines of “Any inaccuracies are solely the responsibility of the author, not the subjects,” etc.; but in this instance, the novelist has traveled some distance beyond what might be termed “historical fiction.”

  Certain things are factual, others imagined: all, one hopes, are true to the spirit of this novel, if nothing else. General Somervell, a significant part of the historical raid, is largely absent in this accounting, which focuses, through a fictional narrator, on the leadership of two other Texans, Thomas Jefferson Green and William Fisher. This book is not intended to be read as a replacement for or even a supplement to Texas history, but instead has arisen from that history and heritage. The novel was written in the first days of the invasion of Baghdad; for that emotional truth I can claim no evasion or caveat. Certain historical timelines and key incidents are factual. For others I found no reference beyond the truth of my own engagement with this story, its landscape, and the nature of men and nations at war.

  I’m grateful, as ever, to my editors—Har
ry Foster and Alison Kerr Miller—and for help by Beth Kluckhohn and Will Vincent, and my typist, Angi Young, and to Robert Overholtzer and Rodrigo Corral. I’m grateful also for the editing of Tom Jenks and Carol Edgarian of Narrative magazine, which serialized this novel—and to my agent, Bob Dattila, and to Terry Jones for help with Spanish translations, and the biologist Jerry Scoville for help with thè natural history of Mexico.

  Visit www.hmhbooks.com to find more books by Rick Bass.

  About the Author

  RICK BASS’s fiction has received O. Henry Awards, numerous Pushcart Prizes, awards from the Texas Institute of Letters, fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, among others. Most recently, his memoir Why I Came West was a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award.

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