The Diezmo

by Rick Bass

  Waddy Thompson was becoming increasingly enamored with Mexico—he had not been back to his home in South Carolina in years. He was too comfortable, some of the prisoners groused, calling him “Mexicanized,” alarmed by the way he seemed more and more to be speaking in the Spanish tongue rather than English, though he continued to assure us that he was working diligently for our release. Green complained, “I think now he is a good hand at ‘Wind Work’ only.”

  Green would have been even further enraged if he had known what we were all to learn later, which was that to increase his chances for successful diplomacy, Thompson was secretly pocketing some of our less tactful letters back home, as well as our letters to Jackson, Houston, and Santa Anna—including several of Green’s invective-filled rhetorical howls.

  Still, we could have wished for no finer ally. As U.S. ambassador, it was not even his job to represent us—we were still a separate nation—but he jokingly referred to himself as the Patron Saint of Lost Causes.

  At night, while Charles McLaughlin sketched by candlelight, with a halo of sputtering moths circling his flame and casting wild shadows against the stone walls, and surrounded by the snoring and gurgling, hacking coughs of our fellow prisoners, I would think about the men I might have killed so long ago, back in Mier; and of the wrongful foundation of our expedition, the faulty first step, our pillage back in Laredo—back on our own free soil, no less. I would be seized with a kind of despair, a dejected acceptance of our fate, knowing that we deserved the misery that had befallen us and that even our captivity was a kind of blessing or mercy in that we were fortunate to at least have had our lives spared.

  I would stand beneath the lone grate, looking up at three or four dim stars. I could hear as ever the rush of unseen river below, flowing through and beneath the mountain, louder and so much clearer at night, and if I strained I could hear sounds from much farther away, the breeze that seemed to bathe those stars, polishing them and making them glimmer. From just beyond the fort came the muted gabblings of the swans, and the sound of the wind lapping little waves against the moat’s walls.

  I knew that at night nearly all the animals in the desert came from miles away to drink from the moat—on our stone-load oxcart trips the next day, or our cross-hauling punishments, I had seen the stipplings of their tracks in the dust, prints of deer, antelope, bobcat, bear, javelina, jaguar, raccoon, skunk, fox, and panther—and it seemed to me as I stood there at the grate that I could hear them splashing and bathing in the moat’s waters.

  It seemed too that I could hear the night-mutter of red-winged blackbirds, rustling with reeds as they were disturbed briefly by the larger-bodied slither of deer and antelope into those waters, the splashing of the lions and jaguars and the wolves and coyotes, the night-trilling of frogs.

  Green was cracking. He had taken to blaming us for his captivity—arguing, yet again, that we should have fought harder at Mier, should never have surrendered. His father, still on the Tennessee Supreme Court, had sent word that he had failed now in his entreaties for his son’s clemency to not one but two presidents—first Jackson, then Tyler. Green’s own letters, alternately ranting and cajoling, had gotten him nowhere, even as other prisoners, one by one, had been slipping through those iron grates.

  Green began to circulate among us once more, interrupting our card games, trying to encourage others to make another escape attempt. He had several takers—most surprising of all ex-captain Reese, who had been so reluctant back at Salado, refusing to escape even when the gate had been opened.

  All this time, Reese had been writing his own appeals, arguing that he should be rewarded for his moderation, but finally, seeing that he was receiving treatment no better than the rest of us, he too began to crack. “We are going to die here,” he said. “We are going to rot here. We must do what we can—no one will save us.” He agreed with Green that we had to make another attempt soon, and told us that many nights he dreamt that we were already dead and rotted, and that the dream was real, while all else—“this,” he said, pinching his wizened arm—was the dream.

  “Are you going?” Charles McLaughlin asked me one night.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Do you want to get out?” he asked.

  “Of course,” I said. “But...”

  “But what?” he said. “Reese is right. We have to leave now.”

  We began digging, working at night. The prison walls were eight feet thick, but because much of the stone was volcanic pumice, it was fairly easy to chisel. Many of the men worked in the carpentry shop, building the frames and wagons for cannons and other heavy artillery weapons, so’they had easy access to chisels and hammers.

  Charles McLaughlin moved his bunk over to the wall where they were digging in order to be in a better position to illustrate the operation.

  To dispose of the rubble, each of us carried a load to the latrines three times a day, whether we were in on the escape or not. The horizontal tunnel, about two feet wide, was hidden by a small boulder. If Bigfoot Wallace wanted to escape, he would have to dig his own, for it was calculated that a three-foot-wide tunnel would have taken twice as long.

  Sixteen men were planning to escape. Each man would carry enough food for at least two weeks. We each began to purchase and hoard small amounts of bacon fat, chocolate, hardtack, sugar, and dried fruit, as well as anything that was packaged with rope or twine, which we then wove into one larger, stronger rope, for the prisoners to use in scaling the wall once they had passed through the tunnel.

  Once the tunnel was finished, the plan called for us—for them—to wait for a rainy night, since the guards usually skipped the evening roll call, which took place in the courtyard, when it rained.

  We waited for a week, trembling with anticipation—so much so that I worried the guards would hear the clamor of our hearts. I still didn’t know if I would be going or not. If I got free, I had decided to head for Texas. It would be tempting to go find Clara again, but sheer folly, too, and I had had enough of folly.

  Fisher refused to be part of the escape. He had been brooding over some of Green’s accusations, and when the rain finally came, Fisher surprised us all by saying he would be remaining behind, vowing not to leave the Castle of Perve until every prisoner had been freed.

  He and Green stood in front of the tunnel opening, briefly facing each other—they said nothing but shook hands stiffly, formally—and I had the impression that Fisher would have embraced Green but that Green would have none of it. Slipping out of their jewelry, the men wriggled into the tunnel one by one, as if being swallowed by the mountain itself: and I was astounded when Charles McLaughlin, who up until that point had still been sketching the goings-on, scene by scene, laid down his charcoal and tablet and stood up and followed the other prisoners into the hole, pausing at the entrance only long enough to motion for me to join him.

  I hesitated, and he turned and crawled into the tunnel, and Fisher placed the stone back in place. I felt the strangest mix of emotions: a savage joy mingled with the most awful kind of loneliness.

  We stood there, our numbers lessened by seventeen—and then Fisher looked down at a note that Green had left with him, and began to laugh.

  We had assumed the note was some formal transfer of command, or perhaps the letter Sam Houston had penned so long ago, authorizing us to cross the border in the first place and to engage the enemy wherever we might find him.

  Instead, it was a letter from Green to Santa Anna. “Dear Sir,” Fisher read. “Since I have recently discovered that the climate of Perote is not suiting to my health, I think that I should, for the present, retire to one in Texas that is more congenial to my feelings.”

  There was half a moment’s silence and then our cell swelled with the uproar of our laughter. The guards came running to investigate, and we quickly pretended to be engaged in a raucous cup-banging dance: and if our ranks appeared significantly diminished, it was not apparent to our captors, who peered in and saw only the whirling-
dervish jigs and reels of scraggly captives who had been, kept too long imprisoned. They peered in, then turned away; roll call could wait until morning.

  I could hear the rain running off the clay tiles in steady sheets, could feel the dampness emanating from those stones. I could see nothing around me but the dimmest shadowcast of candles, and the dark walls, and I yearned for nothing more than the feel of sunlight on my bare skin, and the privilege of laboring in the dry warmth of day, with clean air filling my lungs.

  With my head leaning against the stones, it took a while before I realized I was hearing something other than the steady rain outside. The escapees had passed all the way through the tunnel, but upon reaching the outermost exit—the final wall, which lay beyond our wall—they found that the exit hole was still too small, that they had underestimated, and they were having to chisel it wider, working deep into the night, racing against the morning.

  I listened for two hours. I had just about decided to try to join them when there finally came a silence, and then I thought I heard a few faint voices—guards, or prisoners, murmuring as if from within the rocks—and then more silence.

  Surely they had been captured; surely it would be folly for me to go with them now.

  I waited a while longer, listening to the silence of the stones, and then, from a different direction, with the rain still coming down in torrents, I heard the faintest, briefest sound of what sounded like the swans’ warning calls. It was short-lived, questionable—almost like a sound imagined, rather than real—and though I froze, listening for it again, and then went over to the grate where I might hear better, it did not come again.

  Some of the prisoners did not get very far. In the coming days, the guards and recaptured prisoners would tell us how it went, the guards praising us for not having participated in the escape.

  After squeezing through the fortress tunnel and using their rope to climb over the point-sharpened, rain-slick logs at the far end of the fort, and swimming the moat (disturbing not just the swans but all the other wild animals that were gathered there), the escapees had split into small groups and run off into the desert, with each lightning flash revealing them to be scattered farther and farther from the castle, and from one another.

  One prisoner broke both arms when he fell over the other side of the wall and nearly drowned; Green rescued him, dragged him to shore, and then left him there to fend for himself. He spent the rest of the rainy night shivering, surrounded by a menagerie of animals, and in the morning he was recaptured and executed; we heard the firing squad.

  Other prisoners were hunted down by the cavalry, one by one, and executed. Each day I feared that Charles McLaughlin would be among them—but after a week had passed with no new prisoners being brought in, alive or dead, I relaxed, and we learned some weeks later that Green and a few others had made it to freedom. They had made it safely all the way to Mexico City, where some American friends had hidden them for several days in Jalapa, in the home of a rich and elderly Mexican national who was hostile to Santa Anna’s violent regime.

  This distinguished gentleman entrusted Green and his associates to a gang of ladrones, bandits, who ferried the Texans through secret jungle trails down to Vera Cruz, where a Frenchman gave them safe harbor for a week while they waited for an American steamer to pass through.

  When one did, they slipped down to the beach at night, climbed aboard—the ship was bound for New Orleans—and were three days at sea when a plague of yellow fever struck them. The illness quickly ran its way through the sailors and escapees alike, killing half outright and incapacitating almost all of the others. But they were able to navigate the big ship back to America, half crashing it in the mouth of the Mississippi, where Indians were waiting for them. Some of the men, Green included, escaped into the brush even as the Indians were setting fire to the steamer—in its hold were no small amount of munitions, which began to explode with what seemed an unending fusillade of smoke and flame and artillery fire—and it was not until September that Green, fevered and gaunt, made it back to Texas, where he was hailed as a patriot and intrepid hero of the Revolution, in addition to the latest and now most persistent thorn in Sam Houston’s side.

  Green ran for office the very next month—arriving home twenty-four hours in advance of the deadline to file for candidacy—and was elected to the Texas House of Representatives: and though we were not to learn of these things until many months later, when we did we received each piece of news with joy at the exploits of our captain, our mad captain, and William Fisher, whenever he heard the latest, smiled quietly.

  Waddy Thompson came to see us after the escape. Usually positive and upbeat, he seemed dejected on this visit, and we soon learned why.

  “Santa Anna was just about to release you,” he told us. “My entreaties had been working, as had Britain’s and the United States”. He was this close,” he told us, holding his thumb and finger up: a bean-sized distance, a pea-sized distance. He dropped his hands in exasperation. “You should have told me,” he said to Fisher. “I could have at least counseled postponement.”

  Fisher looked away, saying nothing.

  Thompson sighed. “Santa Anna’s precise words now are that your souls will rot in hell before you ever leave the Castle of Perve.” He shook his head dejectedly. “I won’t give up,” he said. There were those in Britain who wanted us free, and many in the United States, and even some in Texas, and if only we could endure, he would keep trying to arrange the political puzzle pieces that might allow us to one day walk out as free men.

  He said that in the past Santa Anna’s impulsiveness might have worked to our advantage—that as he had once been quick with a grudge, so too had he been quick to forgive—but that the once brilliant, mercurial military hero was disintegrating, isolated at his Vera Cruz estate, drinking too much and immersing himself in the violent sport of cockfighting. Thompson had assisted him on numerous occasions and had found the sport—if it could be called that, he said—repellent.

  As to whether we should attempt another escape, he said that earlier he would have advised against it wholeheartedly, but he was no longer sure what he himself would do, were he in our situation—though he reminded us that if any of us attempted escape and were captured, we would surely be executed. No longer would we be afforded the relative grace of the diezmo.

  And though our old tunnel had been discovered and sealed back up with stones and mortar, and though our rations had been cut in half and we had each been made to haul crosses up onto the mountain, and though we were strip-searched daily, we nonetheless began digging another system of tunnels, hiding this one in the stony earth beneath the tile flooring so that it would pass not through the walls but beneath them, tunneling straight down toward the hypnotic sound of the underground river. We planned this time to dig down into the aqueduct, paint ourselves with charcoal until we were as black as night, and ride in crude hand-carved rafts made from the reassembly of our cots, also painted with charcoal, down that rushing stone-lined underground river, past whatever few guards might be lounging around the place where it exited from the mountain— passing beneath the spouting mouths of those stone-carved lions at night, and riding, as if over a small waterfall, the rushing waters that crashed out into the moat, at which point we, too, would scatter out into the desert, following the night stars east to Vera Cruz.

  The typhus hit us that fall. The first symptoms were like those of yellow fever—crushing headaches, alternating with chills and nausea and disorientation—and in our relentless portages of the heavy crosses up the steep mountainside beneath the blue October sty, we clung to the mountain, and our crosses, as if to keep from being pitched off a suddenly dizzying earth. We had to stop often, lying down and curling up in the thin sun like dried fetuses expelled from some dying creature.

  We were accused of malingering, were whipped and forced to work harder, but our stumbling gait grew worse, and after the first man died a physician was allowed to visit us.

  The di
agnosis was “jail fever,” caused by a lack of fresh air and sunlight, poor diet, and melancholia. We were allowed to move our cots and bunks out into the courtyard, to sleep beneath the stars, though still chained together. Even in our infirm state, we nearly swooned with pleasure at what had once been our birthright.

  A few of us rallied briefly, but soon another wave of the illness hit, fiercer the second time around, and now the contagion leapt not just from prisoner to prisoner but to our guards, and from our guards to the surrounding town of Perote.

  At the time it was not understood that the lice were carriers of the typhus—that it was in their feces, which entered our bloodstream through our scratching at our endless bedsores, and then was passed to the guards and on to the rest of the town through the tiny drops of saliva in our coughs.

  The disease raged through the winter, killing half of our number and thousands of Mexicans, in results that were ironically far superior to any we might have achieved through battle.

  Every day, all through that autumn and winter, several of us were hauled across the drawbridge over the moat in oxcarts—some dead, some dying—to be dropped off at the hospital or buried in the desert beyond. During that time, we had to stop work on our new tunnel, for none of us was strong enough. We could hear the river below but could not travel to it.

  Bigfoot Wallace was given last rites, but he survived somehow, and proclaimed of his Mexican physician afterward that he was “one of the best-hearted men” he ever knew. But we also saw some of the guards, and indeed some of the physicians and nurses, taking the last coins from the pockets of men whose bodies were still warm.