Diezmo

by Rick Bass

  She was the daughter of the architect who had been commissioned to design and rebuild the road, Colonel Raul Bustamente. He awakened us each morning at dawn, treated us with dignity and respect, and trusted us to work as perhaps he himself would have worked had he been in our position. We were paired in chains with ten feet separating us—I found myself partnered with Charles McLaughlin—and we walked each morning from the stone prison at Molino del Rey to the new road on the outskirts of the city.

  It was a pleasant walk in the cool of the morning. It was early spring, and the countryside all around us was leaping into green, the birds singing. We walked with the excess footage of our ankle chains hooked to our belts and wrapped around our waists to keep them from dragging. And compared to the previous days of our captivity, and all the ones that were to follow, I have to say that I remember those days as being the most pleasant.

  It was on this path that I first saw Clara, Bustamente’s daughter, crossing the road—or what passed for a road—with her friends on their way to school, though I wasn’t to learn she was his daughter for quite some time. The girls were dressed in bone white uniforms, and as we stopped to let them pass—half a dozen of them—the dust we had been raising with our , trudging rose higher and caught up with us, surrounding us as we stood there. The dust was the same color as their dresses, and as it rose around us I could taste it.

  We stood there like cattle, or a herd of horses, with Bustamente at the front, his hand held up in a signal for us to halt. The girls were a good distance in front of us—thirty or forty yards—and he intended to keep it that way.

  As they crossed, they glanced our way and waved to him, and Bustamente nodded back, but the girl kept looking at us, peering at our faces as if searching for someone she knew. She watched me for a moment—never had I felt so found—and then she was gone.

  The chalk dust from the road was still settling around us. It landed, fine as fog or mist, on the hair on our arms, our faces, our eyebrows: the finest powder imaginable, stone crushed to a substance one step away from invisible, by nothing more than the simple footsteps of tens or even hundreds of thousands of others just like us, marching back and forth through the centuries—to market, to school, to church, to death—and by the iron and hide and wooden wheels of carettas, from countless other such passages, and by the hooves of the beasts that had pulled them: donkey, ox, and horse.

  The girls, the young women, were long gone. Colonel Bustamente’s arm was still raised in the halt position, as if to counsel us not to even speak of what we had seen. Finally he lowered his hand slowly, took a newly starched linen handkerchief from his pocket, and wiped the street dust from his face, and then we proceeded on, north. As we passed the place where the young women had crossed in front of us, I looked in the direction they had gone, seeking to memorize the buildings and alleys, the landscape and terrain.

  I scanned the dust to the side of our passage, searching for their tracks, and did not realize I was lingering until I felt the tug of the chains lurching me back into the procession, and was nudged simultaneously by Charles McLaughlin.

  I stumbled, was pulled along. The men in front of me glanced back in confusion and some irritation, and I stepped back into their haunted flow—glory, they had said they wanted, each of them—with a secret burning in my heart. I carried it with me all the rest of the day.

  Charles McLaughlin laughed, watching my initial stumbling. “You would not like it if I were to draw a portrait of the young man in love,” he said. “You would be horrified by your appearance,” he said.

  We walked in silence a while, with me feeling both mortified and exhilarated, and a little farther down the road, McLaughlin spoke again: “Better by a hundred your chances of slipping free of these chains, being given an officer’s horse, and riding uncontested all the way back to Texas, than ever seeing that girl again, much less ever speaking to her, much less ever holding her in your arms, much less...”

  His voice trailed off into a laugh of utter delight, and I blushed and said nothing, but after we had walked quite a bit farther I said, “You’re wrong,” and he smiled after that, and did not argue.

  Each day, Bustamente directed us to a wide and shallow stream far outside of town, from which we were to gather decorative rocks for the road. The chalky square-cut quarry was the source for our paving stones, but it was this stream that yielded the finer, prettier rocks for the project. He called it Rio Seco, the dry river, though it was not dry that spring. Judging by the boulders it had moved, sun-bleached and round, and by the scatter of driftwood, the water-polished assemblage of giant cottonwoods piled into fantastic clumps of debris, it was evident that huge torrents of water had cascaded down the floodplain not long ago, transporting the rattling, clattering boulders and great hollowed-out cottonwood spars. Scatters of giant stone, boulders as big as houses, were nestled in amid cobbles the size of a man’s fist. Our task was to select the most attractive, ornamental river stones and carry them, along with the bags of the valuable white river sand, all the way back to the road.

  Working at the river, we had slightly more freedom. It was nearly an hour’s walk down a steep trail to the river bottom, and our small gang—McLaughlin, myself, and a dozen other recruits, all young men, stronger and healthier than the rest—soon reached a tacit understanding with the guards that we would not run away and they would not have to descend and then ascend with us each time we went down the steep path to the river. I poured my energies into the hauling, so I often did the work of three or four men—accumulating a greater stack of boulders on the days when we went down to the Rio Seco, or cutting and laying more stone on quarry days. The guards and Bustamente noticed my work, although Bustamente almost always stayed up on the road, two miles distant, after having taken us down to the river only that first day, wandering out among the tangled cataclysm of stone to show us what kinds of rocks he preferred.

  The river was brilliant and heated, dazzling. But on the riverbanks beneath the ash, cottonwood, and sycamore trees, it was green and cool and shady, with the leaves fluttering in the spring wind, and it was easy to lie in the white sand and listen to the wind in the tops of the trees and to imagine that in another life the stonemason Ewen Cameron might have enjoyed working with the Rio Seco’s stones, even as another part of me knew there was at least as much chance that had he remained living, he would be using these very stones to try to bash in the heads of our captors.

  Not all of the boneyard of the river was parched. In some places a ribbon of water still trickled through the riverbed’s center, running and then pooling before disappearing for a while, only to reemerge elsewhere. Cool breezes bathed these wetted portions of the canyon and rose from the sparkling, riffling water scented with the growth of new life. Tiger-striped butterflies and those the colors of emeralds and amethysts gathered in great numbers by the salty riverside puddles to sip before rising into a flashing kaleidoscope of escape, each one a tornado of broken church glass, frightened by our own sweating, salty, labored approach.

  Out among the boulders, our footing was uncertain and we slipped often. We jettisoned the boulders when we could—sometimes they cracked in half when they landed—though other times we could not turn loose of them quickly enough and smashed our arms and thumbs and fingers, so that the river canyon echoed with the sound of curses, and the stones and boulders were smeared and painted with the bright red palm prints of such mishaps, as were some of the stones that would ultimately go into the road above.

  Still, all in all it was a place of peace, not just for me but for each of us. Bright songbirds of every color were drawn to the water and the leafy foliage that grew alongside the river. Wild roses bloomed on gravel-bar islands and between the boulders, existing seemingly on nothing more than the rocks themselves, and air. Hummingbirds whirred about the blossoms, probing.

  The cottonwood spars lined both banks, marking where the river had been, and served as impromptu benches for whenever we took a break, which, for the othe
r workers, was increasingly often. I noticed that each of them was lulled into a state of great sleepiness and contentment by the sound of the river. The morning and afternoon light that passed through the riverside foliage cast a shimmering green on their faces, and sometimes they would lie down on various of the cottonwood spars, after searching for and finding the one polished spar that most perfectly fit the length and shape of their bodies: the curves and hollows and tapers of each spar determining to some extent the position of repose into which the prisoners settled.

  The soldiers lay as if stupefied, nestled into the slick fit of their various logs, the men and logs both looking like the carcasses of giant fish that had washed ashore. They smoked precious cigarettes they had been able to purchase or to reassemble from the scraps of butts gathered roadside, and when those were gone they cut crooked lengths of grapevine and smoked those, inhaling the thick sour smoke until they were nearly intoxicated and the riverside was filled with the blue haze of their exhalations. It was not unlike the scene of a battlefield, with the fallen soldiers, arms outflung and faces vacant to the sun, and the earth beneath them torched, and the smoke of cannonade still lingering; and if they did not know bliss, in those moments, they seemed at least to know peace.

  The laggards napped briefly, or stared unblinking at the sky, while I continued to work and while Charles McLaughlin sketched. (Afterward, he kept his drawings, the evidence of our turpitude, rolled up inside his shirt; and even back at the garrison, where we were being housed, he did not display them, to keep from informing the other prisoners of the sweet details that attended our assignment.)

  My coworkers would lounge there as long as they dared—an hour or sometimes even two—just long enough to make the guards watching the main crew back at the road become exasperated and consider sending someone after us, but not quite so long that they’d actually do it. We kept a lookout posted in the trees, watching the path down to the river, so that he could run and alert us to resume working if he saw anyone approaching.

  One day, unknown to us, Charles McLaughlin’s hidden charcoal sketches were discovered, with their damning portrayals of our indolence: the glee of the truants sharing stalks of grapevine, the contented smiles of the slumberers. The evidence, too, of my own ambitious labors, making my way through the boneyard of a river with both arms wrapped around a boulder as large as my chest, with the veins in my arms, neck, and forehead leaping out like deltas and rivers themselves.

  The next day, after allowing us an hour’s head start, Colonel Bustamente sent a pair of guards down the trail to check on us.

  Our sentry that day was Daniel Drake Henrie, who had already fallen asleep at his post, and, having been somewhat an acolyte of Ewen Cameron, upon being discovered—upon being interrupted from a most pleasant dream, he was to tell us later—he responded not with shame and guilt but insolence, hurling insults at the two guards.

  Down on the river, the sleeping men awoke from their naps and looked up to see the guards beating Daniel Henrie with their musket butts, clubbing him to the ground and then continuing to strike at him—no dream this, now. As it appeared they were likely to kill him, we charged up the trail with our shovels and pickaxes, twenty of us in chains versus two of them with but single-shot muskets and small derringers suited for little more than killing squirrels or rats. The guards backed away from the bruised and bleeding Henrie and hurried off for reinforcements.

  Some of the men were all for breaking our chains and trying another escape, fearing we would be executed, while others of us thought we would merely be punished, and argued moderation, counseling that we would not be executed yet, for Bustamente still needed us to complete the road.

  “If they try to whip me, I will kill them,” Henrie said. “I will not let a Mexican whip me.”

  In the end we remained where we were—we did not go back down to the river to work, but waited at the top of the trail for the new muster of guards to come hurrying back—and when they arrived, twenty strong, shouting and firing their muskets, we stood our ground, fearing the worst.

  They surrounded us, jabbing at Henrie with their bayonets, but did not strike him again, and instead escorted us roughly up the trail, back to Bustamente’s road.

  The work groups were changed after that—only Charles McLaughlin and I were allowed to remain on river duty—and not only were we allowed to keep traveling to the river with the new workers, but we had our chains removed as well, so that I was free to range as far as I wished in search of the most beautiful stones and boulders, while Charles McLaughlin was free to continue his sketches and document the various stages in the fruition of Bustamente’s grand dream. Bustamente alternated McLaughlin between the river and the road, and the canyon and the quarry.

  Just as McLaughlin had a haunting eye for detail in his illustrations, I was developing an eye for stone, not merely seeking the most interesting individual boulders—a stone the precise size and shape of a skull, complete with two water-worn sockets where the eyes would have been, only slightly off-kilter; a long slab shaped like a park bench, requiring the heft of four men; a boulder curiously shaped like the nation of Mexico, and another, lying not all that far away, even more curiously shaped like Texas—but also developing an aptitude for the placement of one rock against another. I traveled farther and farther upstream, searching for finer and more curious rocks, ranging for hours at a time—spending half a day sometimes, to return with only one good stone, and downstream, too, passing beneath the leafy green canopy of sunlit bower and birdsong.

  The road was beginning to achieve a brilliance that not even Bustamente had imagined, with the thread of fantastic stones running like a seam through the predetermined elegance and simplicity of his design, and Bustamente—a man of integrity and generosity—gave me credit for my small share of the work. He saw me as the kind of man he wanted to believe we were all capable of becoming—transformed, under the benevolent shaping hands of the superior landscape and culture of Mexico, into men more civil, dignified, genteel. For a while, I even believed it myself.

  She found me on the river two weeks later. She and her friends came to the river to wash their laundry. I had been working in a downstream stretch of the river that week—had discovered a seam of red boulders that crossed the river like the transverse slice of a knife across a piece of fruit—and I had petitioned Colonel Bustamente for the use of, and had received, a heavy iron pike with which to extricate some of the fractured stones from within this band. I was stacking and sorting them on the bank to dry in the sun.

  I had followed the seam of red rock out into the sun-warmed boulder field where the river had once been, and was striking at a melon-shaped stone that seemed perfect for the fit I was envisioning. It was a lot of work for one rock, and the labor consisted mainly of pulverizing the surrounding jigsaw grip of the other rocks all around it. Each time I struck a rock with the heavy pike, the canyon echoed with the sound of the blow, cold iron against hot stone, and little sparks tumbled from the rock like flashing windblown blossoms. The scent and taste of burnt rock dust was dense around me. I liked the smell, and I liked working steadily, rhythmically, encouraging the earth to give up that one stone, though there were enough pauses in my work—stopping to take my damp shirt off to hang it over a creosote bush to dry, mopping the stinging sweat from my eyes with the crook of my arm, looking up at the dizzying distant sight of a caracara circling high above on a heated updraft from the same rocks in which I labored, as if in an oven—for anyone who heard my sledgings to know that it was a human who toiled and not a machine.

  She and her friends had chosen a place farther downstream, but hearing the noise she walked upstream nearly a mile to find me. I saw her from a long way off. She had been advancing whenever I was occupied with the sledge, then pausing whenever I stopped—but even as I was working I noticed from the corner of my vision the uneven movement, the advancement, of her white dress against the riverside cottonwoods. Thinking at first that the white was the uniform of o
ne of Bustamente’s guards sent to spy on me, I kept working.

  But I saw as she drew closer that she was a woman, then a young woman, and then I saw that it was her, and even though the rock was almost out—one or two more blows—I stopped, sweat-drenched and breathing hard, like a horse, and I leaned against the iron staff of the pry bar and waited for her to come that final distance.

  “El constructor de caminos,” she said, smiling. She looked around. “Donde está tu camino?”

  We talked for an hour, mostly about the routine details of her life—her schooling, her family, her chores and tasks—tut also about the larger abstractions, our loves and fears and beliefs.

  She had learned nearly as much English from her father as I had Spanish from my captors, and she let me know quickly that she thought it was awful that we were having to work as slaves.

  And yet, she said, for certain crimes and sins, there needed to be punishment.

  “It’s not the colonel’s fault,” I told her. “He’s actually pretty good to us. He’s treated us better than anyone else so far.” I shrugged. “We chose to come into your country.”

  Her eyes sought mine. “Why?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. I wanted to make a joke of it and say something like To see you, but I was seized with an overwhelming sadness.

  “How many men have you killed?” she asked. Not Have you killed any? but How many?

  I shook my head and looked away. “I can’t remember who I was before I came across the river,” I said.

  She started to say something, but we heard voices, the sound of her friends coming to search for her, having become worried when they could no longer hear the sound of the iron bar against the stones. They paused by my cairn of red rocks some distance away from where Clara and I were sitting by the riverbed, and waited, and watched. She rose, dusted the grit from her dress, and asked if I would be here the next day.