by Rick Bass
“I can try,” I said. “I will tell the colonel I need more red rocks.” I looked around at the garden of stone, an eternity of stone.
She laughed—her teeth seemed large, framed by that smile—and holding her skirt above her ankles she walked carefully through the boulders, back to where her friends were waiting. When she reached them she smiled again and waved.
I watched them until they were gone, and only then did the sound of my sledging return to the canyon, as I still tried to pry free from the earth that one perfect stone, and then the next.
I worked until dusk, until the first fireflies began to appear and the tree frogs in the reeds and groves of cottonwoods began to trill, and the bullfrogs began their nighttime drumming. I was supposed to be back up on the road by that time and was still an hour’s walk away, but it did not matter, this one evening: Colonel Bustamente trusted me.
Back at our garrison that first night, I told Charles McLaughlin what had happened. He said that all the other men, including Colonel Bustamente, believed that I had simply fallen asleep from having worked so hard; and it was not until I urged him to let the others continue to believe that story that he began to think I was telling the truth.
I visited with him about her for a long time—relayed not just the bits and pieces of our broken conversation—the general trading of news about siblings, friends and family, life histories, likes and dislikes. The words “truth” and “liberty” and “justice” were easily translatable across the two languages—verdad, libertad, justicia— but it had taken a bit more work to discuss our mutual admiration for other qualities such as courage, beauty, and the strength of one’s heart. There were at least two kinds of strength, we had agreed, looking at the pile of red stones I had assembled; at least two.
“Do you love her?” Charles McLaughlin wanted to know. “Are you falling in love with her?”
“Yes,” I said, answering the second question first, and then the first. “No. I don’t know. It’s that, but something more, something else. I don’t know what,” I said. “I don’t know what it is.”
“But it’s everything, isn’t it?” he asked. “It consumes you, like you’re on fire, always burning?”
“Yes,” I said, “that’s what it’s like. Have you known that feeling?”
He looked down at the sketch he was working on. “I have, and still do,” he said. He brushed an eraser crumb from his sketch, then furrowed his brow, frowned, and touched his pencil to the page. It was a sketch of the fort, our jail. “That’s not love,” he said, still studying his sketch, so that at first he appeared to be speaking of his illustration. “That’s obsession. Still, it’ll certainly get you out of bed in the morning.”
Though I hurled myself at the work, most of the men continued to resist. They cut slits into their bags so that as they ferried sand and gravel and cobble from the river to the road they left behind a sifting, wandering trickle, sometimes arriving at their destination with less than half a bag. Some of the men feigned injury or illness, though the Mexicans dealt with that by treating them universally with a diet of cornmeal gruel and castor oil, taking their clothes away, and confining them to a hospital bed, while outside the spring winds continued to rattle and the leaves shimmered in the sunlight.
Colonel Bustamente, exasperated, resisted the calls from his superiors to impose even harsher discipline, and instead tried to implement incentives to reward good workers, such as being fitted with lighter chains, or even having their chains removed completely. And it surprised me, if not him, that the men’s work did improve, as did the quality of the road, which was drawing still more praise from Bustamente’s superiors, all to his credit.
She did not show up the next day, or the next. Never had I felt so captive. A week passed like a century, and then another. I felt sure that she would find me again—would come walking back up the riverbank, picking her way through the bleached field of rocks and into the skein of red rocks.
And as I waited, I set about building her a gift of sorts: a little house, scarcely larger than a hut. I built it with the best stones I could find. There were various minerals in the riverbed—tiny flakes and nuggets of fool’s gold, copper and silver, as well as reddish crystals that might have been rubies and garnets—and I made a rough mortar of clay and sand and inlaid the windows and doorjambs with these discoveries. The walls were dry stone. I fitted the stones together tightly, in a way that was pleasing and calming to the eye, and made a snugly latticed roof using the polished spars of driftwood. Numerous of the limbs and branches of the cottonwoods, in particular, seemed nearly indestructible, with green sprouts and buds and branches continuing to grow from the main corpse of the limb, even after so rough a downriver journey, and by watering the latticework of the roof I was able to encourage these sucker-sprouts to continue growing, so that they wrapped around one another like vines, binding the roof even more tightly. Soon the thatched covering was shaded with the newly emergent leaves of those horizontal cottonwood spars, as well as the dappled shadow-and-light cast from those trees still standing beside the small house.
I made a bed inside the hut, using driftwood slats cushioned with moss and leaves. My stonework blended so well with the natural, jumbled stone chaos of the floodplain, and the thatched roof merged so well with the riverside forest, that the tiny house was barely noticeable from a distance, even to my own eye. Sometimes I would find myself looking right at it without realizing I was seeing it. Small birds fluttered amid the leaves of the roof, flew out over the thin ribbon of the river’s shallow center and hovered, angel-like, daring and snapping at rising hatches of aquatic insects.
I worked hard to finish up the tiny house, and harder still after I had it finished, never resting for more than a few minutes, so that she might know always where I was by the ringing-steel sound of my labor. I waited. All my life, I have waited.
Charles McLaughlin and I agreed how ironic it seemed that in having crossed the border “to stir up the whirlwind of war,” we had ended up doing far more building up than tearing down; and of how, rather than leaving lamentations and ruin in our wake, we had a legacy of fine craftsmanship, such as the new thoroughfare we were working on, the rebuilt Ciudad Mier, and Charles McLaughlin’s art.
In the evenings, McLaughlin sketched while I read, teaching myself Spanish in the process, asking our guards the names for certain words and phrases. Forever. Desire. Meet me. Little house, casita. Under the new system of rewards, nearly all of the Texans were allowed to travel into town in the evenings in small groups for dinner and entertainment, with only a single guard, but Charles McLaughlin and I usually stayed home, weary from our labors and content to sketch and read. While in town, one of our men, Matthew Pilkington, was caught in the embrace of an officer’s wife, and was beaten severely; another was stabbed in the buttocks with an ice pick.
Many nights the guards had to carry drunk prisoners home on their shoulders, but Samuel Walker and a few of his more fiery compatriots, still intent on escape, always refrained from drinking. Walker inspired one prisoner, Willis Coplan, to simply walk away on the evening of July 30. The guards did not even notice he was missing—they called roll only once a day, in the evenings before the trips to town—and Samuel Walker now knew that he had less than twenty-four hours to attempt his own escape, knowing that once Coplan was discovered missing we would all be chained back together again and our privileges would be rescinded.
Walker resolved to leave the next evening, just before roll call, and spent the night tearing and knotting bed sheets with two of his best friends, James Wilson and D. H. Gattis.
Just before dusk, Walker and Wilson and Gattis walked past some Mexican soldiers, conversing earnestly, as if merely out for a stroll. They had hidden the knotted sheets by one of the fort’s back walls in a tiny grove of shade trees, and as the summer dusk fell they scaled the walls with the bed sheets and let themselves over the other side.
They broke into a run, not even bothering to reel in their li
ne of knotted sheets, and six other men, emboldened by the sight of their escape, climbed the wall and ran after them.
Willis Coplan, pursued almost incessantly by cavalry, traveled eight hundred miles, all the way back to the Rio Grande, only to be caught in that last hundred yards as he attempted to cross; he spent the next twenty years in captivity in Matamoros, within sight of the Texas border.
Samuel Walker, James Wilson, and D. H. Gattis also were captured, only a mile outside of Mexico City, but Walker paid their captors a dollar each and they were released. The next night they were captured again but were held in a one-room jail with a dirt floor. Using a wooden plank, they dug an opening beneath the door and slithered out.
Unlike Coplan, they headed for the coast, traveling alternately south and east, staying in the mountains, moving toward the scent of the ocean, where they hoped to be able to find an American vessel and sign on as deck hands.
Near a small mining village, they were apprehended again, but they pretended to be British mine workers. When asked for some sort of identification, James Wilson pulled out a wrinkled piece of paper on which a prisoner back at Molino del Rey had scribbled for him the words to an ancient ballad, “When Shall We Three Meet Again”—a song Wilson had been much taken by—and pretending to read from it, he cribbed a ludicrous declaration of passport that nonetheless convinced the cavalry, none of whom could read English.
Wilson fell ill after that and had to be left behind—no one ever saw him again—and Walker was recaptured yet again, but Gattis continued on, reaching Tampico a week later, where the United States consul was able to get him on a ship headed north.
Although there was a part of us that was happy for those who escaped, there was also a part of us resentful at the price we were made to pay for our compatriots’ freedom. All of our privileges were revoked immediately, and we were put back in shackles and chains. Colonel Bustamente was nearly court-martialed over the incident, and he told us he had been given only one more chance by his superiors; that if another Texan escaped, Bustamente would be not only court-martialed, but also possibly executed. There were those in government, he said, who resented and disagreed completely with not only the tender treatment he had shown us but the fact that we were alive at all; that with the diezmo, nine in ten of us had evaded the call of justice.
“My life is in your hands,” he said, speaking to us before dinner one evening. “I will be frank with you: Next to my family, this road is my life. Next to my family, this road is how I will be judged in the world, and is how I will judge myself. Another escape and I am gone, and the road will fall into lesser hands. I cannot afford that,” he said, gesturing to our chains. “When the road is finished, on the other hand...” He made a gesture of both ambiguity and hope. “Perhaps then I will have more influence. Perhaps then I can be your patron and argue for your release.”
What he said next caused some of us to wonder at first if he had been drinking; but I saw that he was cold sober.
“I will remain kind to you soldados,” he said. “It is what is in my soul, this belief that all men should be equals—right up until the time you betray me, at which point I shall kill any of you without remorse.
“It is for my own safety that I imprison you all in the chains again,” he said. “For that, I am sorry. But it is a small thing, for my own safety, and for what the road requires.”
So once more Charles McLaughlin and I were chained together, which hampered his drawing, and my own reading; it made the road work more difficult, as well.
I was nearly frantic to return to the stretch of river where I had been quarrying the red stones and where I had built the casita. But after only a few days, during which we hauled out all the neatly stacked piles I’d gathered and laid the thin red ribbon of them in the road, in subtle patterns that were almost floral in nature, Bustamente suggested that he would like me to find another color of rock, and another style. “Este verde,” he said, holding up a fist-sized stone and pointing in the opposite direction from where I had been working. He said there was a seam of it that bisected the river upstream, just as the formation of red rock crossed downstream.
I told him I wanted to keep working the red rocks, and that I thought the road would be improved by having more of them, but he just laughed and said that no, that was the end of the red rocks.
Charles McLaughlin and I had only twenty feet of chain. He had to shield his face as I worked the sledge, to keep the rock chips from spraying him. There was not much to sketch. Often he would want to wander off into the shade to draw a certain tree, a certain scene, but I would want to remain out in the riverbed, pounding the green rocks, so that she might hear me working and might find me. My hands were calloused from gripping the sledge, and my shoulders bruised and swollen from the relentless jarring.
It had occurred to me that even if she did find me it might be awkward with Charles McLaughlin in attendance, and I had already resolved, should such a reunion occur, to break our chains, for that one day only, with the sledge bar, and then plead to Bustamente that it had been a mistake, that Charles McLaughlin had shifted just as I had been bringing the sledge down and that the chain had gotten in the way.
Bustamente liked me, Bustamente needed me. I felt certain I could get away with it once.
I did not like how the road looked now, with its abrupt transition from red to green, but Bustamente did. His guards were harsher to us and Bustamente was no longer friendly. His eyes glittered with what I presumed at the time was fear—the way we, the prisoners, ironically held sway over his own freedom, even his life—though I understand now it might have been more anger than fear.
In the early summer heat the manacles would grow unbearable, and we would plead with the guards to pour water over the iron, briefly cooling it. The shackles burned some men’s legs like brands. Several men’s wounds became infected, and a few men died and were buried in the little military cemetery by the shady grove within the fort’s walls, near the spot where Samuel Walker and the others had climbed the wall. As we worked on through the summer and into the fall, it seemed to me sometimes that we were paving the road with our own bones, that the stones themselves were only a façade.
She found me in early August. Charles McLaughlin saw her first, and rather than alerting me he let me keep on working, hammering the sledge into the dry riverbed. He set about sketching her as she approached, and it was not until he had finished drawing her and closed his sketchbook and tugged on my chain that I looked up and saw her.
She had cut her hair short for the summer, and was wearing a long white cotton dress and leather sandals, and she was smiling to see me. She greeted Charles McLaughlin and then stepped up and touched my arm lightly before saying anything. She stepped back and looked at McLaughlin again.
McLaughlin cleared his throat and turned away, walked off to the full reach of the chain like a dog at the end of its tether, and when the chain reached full stretch, she saw me wince, with my own ankles chafed, old calluses worn back to raw skin in the drier heat of August.
I asked McLaughlin to help me position a link of the chain on a flat rock, and then lifted the sledge up and brought the point of it down hard, snapping the link and cleaving the chain into rattling halves.
The feeling of freedom was so profound that both Charles McLaughlin and I laughed—the chains felt as light as a kite string—and I took her hand and broke into a run, still laughing.
We ran upriver, picking our way around loose stones, and around the bend, out of sight, where, sweating and breathless, we found a driftwood log on which to sit.
She said she had heard that a small stone house had been built near where we had met before.
“That was a surprise,” I said, “for you. Lo has visto?”
“No la he visto,” she said. “He escuchado que fue muy linda.”
Even with my pidgin Spanish I thought I noticed the use of the past tense, but I decided it was simply some aspect of the language I had not yet learned.
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“I would like for us to go there,” I said. We were directly in the sun, with no shade at all—the driftwood log warm beneath us and the August sunlight giving parts of her hair that almost purple sheen—and now with a mixture of sadness and pleasure she said quietly, “Me gusta.”
“What do you think of the road?” I asked. “El camino, la calle?”
“Es muy bonita,” she said. “He tocado las piedras frequentamente.”
I pictured her doing that, walking on the road alone or with her friends, after we prisoners had been taken back to the garrison. Studying the slender red and green veins that ran through the otherwise all-white road like threads. Crouching and touching certain of them, knowing that! had touched them weeks and days earlier or, at the end of the road, perhaps only hours earlier. Noting the piles of rocks remaining stacked on the side of the road and the distance yet to travel: the time remaining before either I and the others would be sent to the Castle of Perve, in Perote, or—as we continued to hope—we might all be set finally free, because of the grudging success of our work on the road.
“Mi padre—” she began. “Mi padre,” she said again.
“Yo sé ahora porque Bustamente no me deja ir a las piedras rojas,” I said. “He found out I had been working on the casita there. But we could meet here at the green rocks.” I looked around at the materials on hand: an endless supply of stones. “I can build a new casita, here,” I said, gesturing to a shady bower. “Or I can slip out of the fort for a while. I can go over the wall,” I said, “but Colonel Bustamente said that if there’s one more escape, he’ll be court-martialed, or maybe worse.”