Diezmo (19 page)

 

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 sense 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.

It was tempting to look at the world that way—without fear—but it still seemed important to me, more than ever, not to delude myself, but to remember that the world was a dangerous place.

Charles McLaughlin lifted his head briefly from his agitated scratchings and looked over at me for a moment—I thought he was contemplating drawing me, and, knowing that if he did the fright on my face would be revealed, I turned away.

 

Breakfast each day consisted of a tiny bowl of cornmeal gruel sweetened with brown sugar, and a single cup of coffee: hardly enough for the tasks demanded of us, which included carpentry, latrine duties, more road-building, cleaning the stables, and, once again, quarrying stones for other construction projects.

Lunch was no better. Jittery-legged with fatigue, we would crowd around a cauldron of simmering water into which had been tossed an onion or two, a handful of salt and rice, some red peppers, and occasionally the offal of a cow or horse or pig—bones, hoofs, hide, entrails, brains, and whatever else the guards would not eat.

Back to work we would be sent, then, dysenteric and choleric, with dinner that evening consisting once more of gruel. Only occasionally were we given the opportunity to use our meager earnings to purchase a piece of fruit—a banana, or sometimes a single red strawberry.

 

Fisher and Green appeared to be reversing roles.

Green, previously the fierce patriot and lover of the land, seemed to be losing his interest in the revolution, despairing at the threat to our new nation's independence, as well as the loss of his own. Once in the Castle of Perve, the two officers no longer received the special courtesies that had been extended to them before and were instead forced to work alongside the rest of us, rotating through the same insufferable and demeaning tasks and duties of captivity.

And while such menial and humbling labor seemed to be having a positive effect on Fisher, making him more human, and more accessible to us, Green now seemed estranged and haunted, collapsing into himself, sinking like a dense stone dropped into a dark, slowing river.

Green was spending increasing amounts of time alone in the evenings, penning angry letters back to Sam Houston in Texas, and to the United States government, and to Santa Anna, alternately threatening, cajoling, pleading, bargaining, and haranguing, working at the far end of the dungeon by that gridwork opening through which a few dim stars could be seen, and sometimes, briefly, the clockwork gear passage of the moon in its revolution around us—while the rest of us, Fisher included, entertained ourselves at night in the center of our cell with dances and skits and songs and games.

Not Green, however. He burned bitterly, stewing in the toxins of injustice. Petty things were consuming him now, final tiny straws upon the long-suffering camel's back. At the Battle of San Jacinto, years earlier, following Santa Anna's surrender to Houston, Green had given General Houston his fine, new, unbloodied officer's coat to help keep an exhausted Santa Anna warm against the April chill. In gratitude, Santa Anna had given General Houston a jeweled snuffbox, which Green, eyeing it covetously, had valued at being worth about a thousand dollars.

Being a junior officer then, Green had received nothing from the transaction, and now, seven years later, in his letters to both Houston and Santa Anna, he badgered them about this, trying somehow to parlay this inequity into his own personal freedom at least, if not that of his men. He informed Santa Anna that he had once defended Santa Anna's honor by reprimanding a soldier who said something unflattering about the Mexican leader; surely this favor deserved some reciprocal notice.

In the jail cell, in addition to having ample opportunity to blacken the pages of various ledgers and journals with the accounts of our imprisonment and to pen letters home (in which we tried not to let anyone know how squalid and dire conditions truly were), we had access occasionally to old newspapers, some of them many months out of date, from the Republic of Texas, as well as the United States—Memphis and New Orleans, mostly. We all knew that both Houston and Santa Anna were in political trouble over matters far more immediate and pressing than our imprisonment—that Mexico was hugely in debt and could not much longer afford to field an army without the financial assistance of Great Britain, and that the United States, desiring to annex Texas, was afraid that Great Britain might be trying to take control.

In essence, Sam Houston's new nation—our new nation—was simultaneously under siege from at least six other nations—three at once, in a loose coalition of Apaches, Comanches, and Kiowas; Mexico; Great Britain, which wanted to either control Texas or at least keep Texas out of the United States' hands; and the United States itself, which desired to peacefully absorb our new nation (even as, twenty years later, they would wage war against us—deservedly so—over the issue of human slavery).

We should never have crossed that river. What madness could possibly have possessed us?

 

Centuries' worth of vermin inhabited every crack and crevice of the dank fort. They did not even wait until true dark to emerge but began scuttling out well before dusk and did not return to their burrows until long after dawn's first light. Rats, mice, scorpions, dung beetles, and roaches whirred and raced and scrabbled everywhere, bumping into us if
we should get in their way, outnumbering us by the thousands. They stank and shat and pissed and gnawed incessantly on the wooden legs of furniture, and on one another's bones. They fought and squealed and snarled and chattered, some of the rats as large as cats, though fiercer; but worst of all were the lice, which could hide anywhere, and which, though silent, seemed to be born of the night, with the ranks of each night's army swelling tenfold.

They awakened us every evening, pouring out from between the weave of our blankets and from our hair, and from the fur of all the living mammals in the fort. They began swarming us almost the minute we fell asleep, so many of them moving across the stone floor that in the near darkness of soft moonlight it appeared that the floor itself was moving, with waves and ripples of the milky white crablike creatures rolling across the floor like the phosphorescent foam of waves at sea. We would turn and rattle our blankets every few moments, trying to shake them off, but always they returned, drawn relentlessly by the heat of our bodies and by the bright blood within us. To defend against them we shaved our heads and grew our fingernails long so that we could pluck them from each other's bodies.

In the evenings we would hold louse races, using charcoal to draw a circle in the center of the dungeon, placing lice in the center, and then wagering on which one would reach the perimeter the soonest. We had little money so gambled instead with fragments of soap, called
tlacos,
or used and reused remnants of tobacco, gotten from the stubs of pipes and cigarettes, chewed and then dried to use again and again.

With livestock in poor condition and short supply at the fort, we ourselves were often forced into service, fitted with rawhide harnesses, twenty-five men to a team, and made to pull oxcarts filled with stones down out of the mountains. The road was steep, and sometimes we lost control by accident, though other times it was on purpose. We would slip out of our harnesses and watch as the runaway wagon, with its heavy load, went thundering down the hill before crashing into a wall or into the moat, upsetting the swans.

We devised new ways to get rid of our chains. The most common trick was to smash one link with a stone, then go to the blacksmith who, for the bribe of a few cents, would replace the old iron rivet with a softer and more malleable lead one. We could then remove the chains at will while the guards were gone and then fasten them back together when the guards returned.

We called the chains our “jewelry,” and often, late at night after the final lockup and roll call, we would all one hundred and fifty be shed of our chains and would sleep, even if fitfully, among the lice and rats in relative freedom: though the morning's first dull shaft of light and the sound of the guards stirring outside would send us all scrambling to put the chains back on.

In the Castle of Perve, there were no positive incentives to do good work or behave. When we were discovered free of our chains, or when we broke an oxcart or failed to move a satisfactory amount of stone in a day, we were punished; our only reward was no punishment.

Beatings were infrequent—as if they might be too burdensome for our captors to inflict upon our thick skulls and hides—but far more common were trips to the
calabozo,
a tiny closet of solitary confinement, for days on end, after which the old captivity seemed by comparison the sweetest of freedoms.

Less stern measures included attaching heavy iron or wooden crossbars between our ankle chains, which caused us to trip and stumble all day, or, on Sundays, fastening a gigantic cross to a prisoner's back and making him haul it far up the mountain, with the guards and townspeople of Perote being able to glance up at that giant cross moving up the mountain, at any time of day, and gauge the slow ascent as if it were but one more louse race.

Our captors were particularly fond of forcing Bigfoot Wallace to carry a cross—fashioning an improbably oversized one for him to haul—and it never ceased to amaze me how, despite the punishment, they were unable to break his spirit. Some of the larger crosses took him three days and nights to get to the top, but he never complained, and told us afterward that compared to our time in the
calabozo,
such trips were almost like freedom itself, or what we remembered of freedom.