The Diezmo

by Rick Bass

  “No es importante,” I said, reaching for her, but she shook her head and said, “Yes, it is important. Para mi, para ti, para el.” She shrugged helplessly and said, almost in a whisper, “Sí, es importante.”

  The sledging had stopped again and there was only river-sound and the silence of the day, and the heat. “Does he know?” I asked.

  “Does he know what?” She shook her head sadly. “No hay nada que saber. Una pequena casa, nada mas.”

  Over her shoulder, I saw now that the real reason Charles McLaughlin had started sledging was to warn me that two guards had come down to the river. I saw them advancing toward us, rifles in hand. I looked down at the broken chain still attached to my ankle: the half-length of it looking like a dead snake.

  “El sabe,” Clara said. Another lift of her shoulders. “Lo ha prohibido.”

  The soldiers were coming closer and were walking more quickly. She heard a stone clatter under their feet, and she turned, making a small sound, and stood abruptly. I rose too, and they looked roughly at her and then pushed me with the tips of their rifles, shoving me in the direction from which they had come. They said not a single word but took me back to my quarry, poking me with the ends of their rifles from time to time, with Clara trailing a short distance behind us, looking grief stricken, and the broken chain dragging and slithering over the rocks.

  Unwilling to abandon me, Charles McLaughlin was waiting by the rock pile, his face bruised. “I told them you went the other direction,” he said, “but they knew I was lying.”

  It was only when I saw Charles McLaughlin’s battered face that it occurred to me that they might kill us, or that Bustamente might execute us. They led us up the trail, not bothering to reattach our chains—and at the top of the bluff, the guard informed Clara that he had been told to escort her back to town, while the other guard was to take us back to the road.

  “You will not see her again, muchacho,” her guard said, as the other guard prodded McLaughlin and me with his rifle. I looked back at her but her guard stepped between her sight and mine, and our guard shoved me around and marched us down the new shining road.

  Bustamente did not execute us, but he put us back to work on the road, bound in new chains, and I was not allowed to quarry stones anymore; neither was Charles McLaughlin allowed to sketch. The red thread in the road had ended, as had the green thread, so similar in design to the little shoots and suckers that regenerated from the river-swept cottonwoods, and the fronds that had shaded the little stone house, never used.

  “Aye, soldados desgraciados” was the only greeting we received upon returning to the road, our new chains a source of curiosity to our fellow prisoners. No one ever knew: only Charles McLaughlin and I.

  In late August, Fisher and twelve other men began to make plans to escape on the twenty-first of September—the night before the grand ceremony that would celebrate the road’s completion. For three weeks, I held that secret as I worked beneath Bustamente’s gaze, laying down one heavy paving stone after another, condemning him to death with each day of my silence. I remembered Clara, there on the log, and thought about how it would be if she lost him.

  I kept hoping the plan would collapse so that I would not have to act, but when, ten days before the celebration, I saw that Fisher and the others had knotted their sheets, I wrote a note to Bustamente, telling him only that sheets were missing and some of the prisoners were acting strange. I wrote it in Spanish, and though I wanted to sign my name in an attempt to win his favor, and perhaps win Clara, I could not bring myself to do it. I left the note lying in the road and watched while a guard wandered over, picked it up, and read it, frowning, then took it over to Bustamente.

  When the colonel had finished reading it, he lifted his head and looked directly at me—I looked back down at the road, quickly—and I blushed, and wondered if he suspected me. It made perfect sense: I had betrayed him once. Why would I not betray also my fellow soldados?

  He posted extra guards within the garrison at night and curtailed all town privileges, so that Fisher, cursing, was forced to cancel the escape attempt.

  By late September, we were finished. Our own work—the final stretch of Tacubaya Road, six years in the building—had taken more than five months. A grand celebration was planned on the equinox to commemorate the opening. The leaves of the ash and sycamore trees were a beautiful gold color, and many had fallen from the trees and lined the sides of the road. We had swept the road free of all grit and rubble so that it was gleaming in the autumn light, and we were proud of our work, dazzled by its beauty.

  Santa Anna himself would not be attending as we had hoped, but his personal secretary was traveling to Molino del Rey to participate, and we continued to hope that he would be so awed by our work that our sentences—eternal prisoners of War—would be remanded and we could return to our country.

  Santa Anna’s secretary spent a good bit of time with Captains Green and Fisher that evening, and before departing the next day he ordered that our chains be removed—but in the end, that was the only dispensation we received for all our work. Three days later we received the news that, with our work on the Tacubaya Road completed, we were to resume our march toward the Castle of Perve.

  6

  The Castle of Perve

  DESPITE OUR DESPAIR over failing to be released, the forced march to Perote felt like freedom compared to the fortress at Molino del Rey. We left the valley floor and went up into the mountains, which during the rainy season were usually swathed in clouds. We smelled the fresh sweet scent of fir and pine and saw tropical ferns and the late-season bloomings of tens of thousands of orchids. There were bromeliads—Charles McLaughlin had read about them, and told us about them excitedly—plants with upturned spiny leaves that formed cups and goblets holding so much rainwater that sometimes they supported little populations of minnows, which in turn fed on the mosquito larvae living in those same cupped flower goblets. Each blossom was its own tiny world, with the world’s struggles within, and as McLaughlin pointed them out, nearly all two hundred of us, Mexicans and Texans alike, crowded around him to listen and to take turns peering into the flower.

  Transfixed, we each crouched beside it, staring into its shallow waters as if into a wishing well, watching the translucent little fish hanging suspended in their horizontal positions, finning steadily, and the wriggling little commas of wiggletails on the surface. Columns of sunlight came down through the treetops and illuminated the depths of the tiny world into which we were staring like giants.

  Still fascinated, we began to wander off in groups of a dozen or more, looking for more bromeliads, the guards strangely indulging us, as if they too had fallen under the forest’s spell. Finding more, we would stare again in rapture, until it was only with great difficulty and some reluctance themselves that our captors were able to urge us on: and we departed wistfully, passing down off the mountain, with the sparkling drops of the last night’s rain still dripping from the canopy, and we kept looking all around for more bromeliads, our sandals squishing at every step.

  Our clothes were drenched, and when the sun was filtering down through the canopy our backs and shoulders steamed in that gold light, as did the necks and backs of the horses and mules.

  Where once we had sweltered and burned in the desert, we now rotted. At first our feet merely itched, but then the flesh grew tattered and bloody, until it seemed our feet could no longer support us. We cut tree limbs to use as crutches, and in the steady rain we moved through a bright green paradise of creatures we had never seen before, long-billed toucans and parakeets. Sorrow-faced monkeys followed us, clicking their teeth and conferring among one another, as if empathizing with the misfortune that had brought us so far from home. Such was our misery that guard and captive were prisoners alike, merging as if back to a single army. One day Shields Booker asked to borrow a gun from a guard and then turned and fired at one of the monkeys that was following us in the falling rain. The bullet struck the monkey in the chest,
and he fell backward, clutching the wound; and rather than fleeing, the rest of the band hurried to him and gathered around their fallen comrade, tending to him as he died.

  We followed ancient stone-lined trails through the mountains, covering in our ceaseless, limping procession more than twenty miles a day. After only a week we had given up any efforts to stay dry, and when darkness fell each day we merely curled up in the mud and mulch beneath the dripping fronds of giant ferns and slept amid the hissing rain.

  I dreamt often of being in a river, riding it downcurrent. Many of the men developed rattling coughs and chills, and we buried several along the trail. We no longer even said words at their burying but simply carved out a trough in the stony soil as best as we could and laid them into it, the trough filling with water even as we did so, and then covered them back up and resumed our march. I thought of Clara and felt utterly that my life had become a failure in every way.

  After another two hundred miles—nearly nine hundred miles from home, now—we reached the pass into the valley and village of Perote, seven thousand feet above sea level. Other mountains, mist-shrouded volcanic spires and crags, towered nearly twice as high above us—the Cofre de Perote, and others, many of them capped with snow and ice—and it was a humbling experience to pass beneath them.

  We passed down out of the rainy mountains—the stripe faced monkeys continued to follow us for a while, as if they too were our captors, and parakeets flew back and forth, blazes of emerald and gold and crimson, while brightly colored butterflies rose from the tangle of ferns and flowers with swarming, fluttering beauty—and then the castle appeared before us, perched at the edge of the mountains, with the barren, shimmering sprawl of ash-gray volcanic plains stretching far below, all the way to the coast at Vera Cruz.

  A slashing purple rain was hurling itself against the prison, and black clouds were stacked up to the horizon, awaiting their turn tb drift across the castle before continuing on out into the desert, where they would dissipate without dropping any water on the boneyard plains below—evaporating in midair above that dazzling playa—and though a sodden chill ran through each of us as we saw where we were to be housed perhaps for the rest of our mortal days, we could not help but also feel awe at the utter defensibility of the fort.

  It had literally been carved into the mountain. The jutting neck of an old volcano had been cut out, countless buckets of rubble and slag hammered and hauled away by Indian slaves, across the centuries—and scattered across the blackened mountain, where basalt had been forged and cast by the earth’s original fire and then cooled beneath the breath of the world, were other parapets and turrets, the remnants of smaller volcano necks in which soldiers could take refuge and fire upon any approaching armies.

  So perfectly did the fort blend into the rainy black mountain that at first glance I didn’t even see it. Once I had detected its subtle pattern against the mountains, a kind of horror grew as I realized the size and extent of it—that the entire mountain face was a fortress and prison.

  As we approached, we saw that cannons protruded from every embrasure. Our captors raised the flag of Mexico and called out, and in a driving rain we crossed a moat twenty feet deep and fifty feet wide, and entered the gates, which were made of giant cedar logs and were defended by countless high parapets with guns and cannons protruding in all directions. The stone walls themselves were sixty feet high, and, looking up, it seemed to us that there was an entire nation of soldiers atop those walls, all of them peering down at us as we had earlier gazed down at the tiny creatures living in the water-filled cups of the orchids.

  The water in the moat was sparkling clear. Lily pads, their blossoms alternately butter yellow and snow white, floated in the crystal waters, and white swans paddled back and forth, elegant and yet strangely military-looking. We studied them hungrily and imagined how good they would taste. Bigfoot Wallace tossed a rock at the swans and one of the larger drakes responded with a high squeal. Wallace warned us that the swans were sentinels and would sound an alarm if we tried to escape.

  The first thing we saw upon entering the prison—other than the legions of guards assigned to defend it, and to stand watch over all the other prisoners already assembled there, generations of military and political prisoners—was a torrent of clear sparkling water gushing from the roaring wide mouth of a stone-carved lion. Channels had been carved and dug so water could run beneath the fort in underground aqueducts, and, looking back out at the windy pumice desert, just before the gates closed for good, we saw now that there were numerous such lions and bears and gargoyles carved into the cliff’s walls, their fierce mouths and once sharp fangs polished from where water had coursed in the past. We understood that, besides serving as a barrier, the water could also be used as a weapon: certain underground flows could be adjusted and transferred to cause great torrents of water to begin spouting from the mouths of the animals, making it more difficult for an attacking enemy to scale the walls.

  The immense, uninhabited mountains towering above us—the snowfields and glaciers—yielded a steady and perhaps limitless supply of clean water to the fort, water that passed through those engineered channels and reservoirs before draining back underground and beneath us, audible through the porous rock in those secret aqueducts. Hearing it splash and splatter out into the moat beyond, I was reminded of the strange dream that young John Alexander had had up in the Sierra de la Paila mountains following our flights from Salado, back when we had been dying of thirst.

  Our first act in the prison at Perote, in the Castle of Perve, was to kneel around the plunge pool beneath the mouth of the lion and drink like cattle from those clear waters, with the sound of the heavy gate being closed and latched tight behind us.

  We had imagined we might be housed in separate cells, so we were surprised and relieved to discover that we would all be herded into one long common room. Our captors led us down an ever-darkening hallway, past the heavy oaken doors of other such rooms in which the prisoners from other nations and even from Mexico herself were housed; and as we passed by each door, the inhabitants within, as if by some divine intuition, were able to discern our passage, and though they knew nothing of who we were or how we had come to be here, they each set up a howling and banging clamor, a blind and unknowing welcome.

  We descended a flight of stone steps, as cold and dark and dank as would be our room itself, and stopped at a doorway, where there was a lectern with a cracked leather-bound journal atop it, a registry of all the prisoners who had occupied, for whatever periods of time, this one particular room in Perote across the centuries. As Charles McLaughlin thumbed through it, he stopped at one entry from only a few years earlier, September 1839, and read, “The walls of our dungeon are smoke-stained black and brown. The limestone plaster is still visible in only a few places. White saltpeter, which forms everywhere, is the only adornment of our damp abode. Spreading along the cracks in the walls and ceiling, it solidifies into formations of various shapes. With a little imagination one can see animals, human profiles, Saturn’s rings, the Milky Way, the isthmus of Panama, and other things. The floor, half brick and half limestone mortar, is full of holes and not too easy to walk on. In one corner... there is a barrel; one can easily guess its purpose without my describing it. In the opposite corner there is another barrel that contains water, our daily beverage. On wooden pegs, protruding rocks, or on cords we hang our clothes, tools, and other things.”

  McLaughlin finished reading, and we filed into the room he had just described. We were relieved immediately by the relative spaciousness after the claustrophobia of the dark and narrow hall. The body heat from the mass of us attended our movements like a thunderstorm, a rank humidity that occupied any space we entered, and here, too, it followed us, emanated from us, and I remembered briefly the hope, the joy I had known down at the river, working on Bustamente’s road, and then that memory passed, all but useless, from my mind.

  In our long room there were high arches overhead. We could sen
se that we were in the maw of the earth, below ground, to the depth of that one flight of stairs, but high above our heads at the far end of the room there was a single grate through which one lean trapezoid of light entered from the world above.

  We began staking out our individual cots, with Green and Fisher and Wallace and their aides securing the prime beds, closest to that little wedge of light that would never quite reach the floor of our dungeon.

  I had thought Charles McLaughlin would seek out some private place where he could practice his craft in the evenings, undisturbed by the nightly card games and songs and dances—but he dragged a bed into the center of the dungeon and positioned it just so beneath that slightly angled, nearly flat trajectory of dying light—and I found myself following him, grabbing my own cot and sledding it into the center of the barracks also, rather than heading over to one of the corners, as had been my initial inclination.

  We walked out into the courtyard and stood in line for our food, and were astonished to see one of the guards aim his musket at his commanding officer. We were to learn later that they had been quarreling for months.

  The officer ducked just as the musket discharged, and the bullet struck one of our young irregulars, Shields Booker, in the neck. The prison medics did all they could for him, but he died twenty-four hours later and was buried in the moat (only Catholics were allowed to be buried in the prison cemetery), in a service made all the more poignant in that it was attended by the silent swans, who gathered around the ripples left by Booker’s stone-weighted coffin after it had slipped straight to the bottom.

  At the moatside funeral service, I looked over at Charles McLaughlin, who was, as ever, sketching vigorously, and I tried to look at the scene around me, and the world, the way he might be seeing it: not what it had been moments before Booker had been shot, and not what it might be after the funeral, but what it was now, as if that were all it ever would be; and then on to the next sketch, and the next.