Diezmo (3 page)

Williams dismounted and gutted the animal as he would a deer shot on the prairie. He took care not to get his hands or clothing bloody, and when he was done, he gestured to one of his friends to help him lift the carcass onto his horse—as if he intended to eat the whole thing by himself—and then we rode on, silent and tense and changed, with a few more hours of food procured; fuel for the coming war, if only we could find the war.

 

Some of us were homesick. I myself was troubled by the slightly uneasy feeling that, even though this was a grand and glorious adventure, as well as a just cause, I was leaving behind a land almost as dear to me as life. As we descended into a country of brush and thorns, we missed the soft green hills of home, and as we traveled away from our new country toward one that had been a millennium in the making, we started to see more and more Mexican faces in the villages near the border, and we felt further misgivings.

“When we get home,” I told Shepherd one night after dinner, “no matter what time of year it is, I want to go back up to the James and go fishing. I'll let you fish the hole first.” I was thinking of the deep water near where we liked to camp and where there were always fish.

James Shepherd looked frightened, but his face shone with a strange intensity—almost a fever.

“Fishing,” he snorted. He looked over at the other recruits. “We're going
hunting.
Hunting men,” he said.

But none of them paid him any mind, knowing it was only bravado—he was so young—and I knew him better than to take his rebuke seriously. He was only trying to find his place.

Often we spent our time around the campfire writing letters to those we had left behind, exaggerating both our hardships and the heroes' welcomes we received. And not having met the enemy, we speculated about victory. Travis Parvin, a twenty-year-old from Goliad, with his ambition set on the Texas Senate, wrote to his parents that his “unswerving faith in our own fighting abilities, and in the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race, has stilled all doubts of our success in this upcoming war.” Others spoke of the “miscegenation of the Indian and Hispanic peoples,” which had created “a lower breed rendered all the more inferior by a hot, tropical climate which leaves them listless and phlegmatic.” Some of the men carried leatherbound journals with elegant fountain pens, and wrote increasingly as the campaign advanced and their boredom grew. Whenever we paused, I'd see one or more of them scribbling away, dipping quill tip cautiously in the inkwell, shielding it and the journal from the blowing grit. The illiterates in our brigade crouched beside the writers, studying the flow of sentences, attempting to discern order and meaning, mystified by the process.

 

The farther south we got, the more James Shepherd and I talked about death.

In the daytime, Shepherd projected nonchalance, indifference. “If I don't make it back, Jim,” he told me, “I want you to have my gun, give my horse to my youngest brother, and tell my family that I died bravely.”

In the evenings, he was less confident.

Up on the James River, he had always been exceedingly cautious about the possibility of encountering Comanches. That was understandable, but he had also worried about lesser things—deep-water river crossings, sleeping out at night, and the possibility of getting ill from eating fish that wasn't cooked enough or from dishes that weren't clean. At home, his father had been increasingly critical of his work, so Shepherd was enjoying his first taste of freedom, but an anger was blossoming in him: all his native cautions and fears were finding root in a new, more toxic substrate. We rode on Green's side of the regiment, though Fisher, on the right, searched us out with his yellow eyes.

A half-dozen cliques formed, with cross-pollination occurring daily—subtle betrayals and disappointments, social defections and misunderstandings, intentional disrespect or challenges, and ceaseless miscommunication. Some of us were perceived to be more valuable, more vital to the cause, than others. And we boys from the country were the most expendable, the most unnoticeable of all. Occasionally, even our patriotism was questioned.

“What are your goals?” the interpreter Alfred Thurmond—one of the important ones—asked me and Shepherd one evening, having sensed our weakness, or softness, with our having said hardly a word—an interpreter of silence.

“To do good for my country,” I said, with the full earnestness of youth. “To send a message to the enemy, and to make a stand.”

Shepherd's answer was more terse, as if he had been pondering and hungering for the question. “Respect,” he said. And Alfred Thurmond nodded, as if only that one goal could have a chance of coming true.

 

James Shepherd watched Captain Fisher with an intensity that bordered on the hypnotic. When Fisher lifted his canteen to drink, Shepherd did the same. When Fisher lifted a hoof of his horse to clean it, Shepherd examined his mount's hooves.

Respect,
Shepherd had said. Where might that reside?

 

I was unobtrusive, almost invisible, in my unremarkableness, my silence and attentiveness. I had a kind of critical awareness of the way that things not said can occupy more space and possess deeper meaning than the things that are spoken. When the cook was distributing the evening beans or that night's stew, I was the one overlooked or not seen, by-passed, not given enough or any at all. I was neither threat nor menace to anyone, possessed neither confidence nor brute strength. Even Green, who had recruited me, could never remember my name. “James Shepherd's friend” was what he and Fisher both called me.

I learned to trust my instincts and imagination, and I detected an unbraiding of currents between Green and Fisher, as well as confusion and drift among Somervell's dandies. Even so, I was unprepared for what happened in Laredo.

We were on our side of the line, among Texans if not yet Americans: we were still our own separate nation. We had not yet decided whether to cross the Rio Grande, which would have been an act of war, but were ostensibly searching for the bandits.

For days, the powder had been smoldering in all the men. It was Shepherd's seventeenth birthday, and he and I rode near the back. We hoped we might lay up overnight in Laredo so we could fish the Rio Grande. We had been told it held catfish large enough to swallow dogs.

We heard a shot—a surprising, unfamiliar sound, different from the tone of any of the weaponry I'd heard from our target practice—and then there was a pause, and I imagined that a gun had gone off by accident or that someone had shot at a snake or perhaps a deer. After that, there was some shouting—just a lone voice at first, but then another, and another—and then several shots together. These were answered by more shots, more shouting, and then the horses and riders around us were wheeling in different directions, some flaring away from us and others riding back past us; and my first thought was that a bear or even a jaguar was charging through our midst, within the thrashing jungle of the horses' tangled legs. Our horses were rearing and spinning, and bullets whined past. I shortened my reins, leaned into my horse, and found myself looking not for Green or Fisher but for Somervell.

I turned to shout at Shepherd and saw him get hit in the shoulder, in the meaty part just below the joint. The bullet slapped his flesh and his mouth dropped open. He was nearly tossed from his horse but only glanced at the wound, then leaned against his horse and pushed hard to rejoin me. Somervell's men had taken cover in a line of trees on the northwestern edge of town. They climbed off their horses, reined them to branches and trunks, and then hunkered down behind logs and trees, trying to hold their fire. But a few men left their horses and ran into the fray, whooping. They disappeared into the musket smoke, waving their sabers, and were shot dead. One man, spun by the rose blossom on his chest, fell so close to me that I couldn't shake the feeling that he intercepted a bullet meant for me.

I turned and saw that Shepherd was still with me. We reached the trees and I leapt off, tied my horse to a limb, grabbed Shepherd's reins, and helped him down. The gunfire lessened, though seemed more frightening now than when the shooting had started.

“Hold your fire!” Somervell shouted. Some of his dandies still ran to join the melee and were shot—another crimson boutonniere erupting on a chest, a sudden wide birthmark on a forehead. Others were more fortunate, surviving hits by low-caliber bullets or homemade shrapnel fired from the barrel of ancient pot metal blunderbusses.

The rest of us stayed crouched and hidden. Shepherd vomited, standing upright, clutching his shoulder, blood streaming through his fingers. He walked in circles, shouting and bending over to regurgitate the morning's breakfast. He looked frightened and angry, both, and I hurried over and took him farther into the thicket, where I cleaned his shoulder with water from my canteen while he stared at me and his teeth chattered. His arms and legs began to shudder, and he looked at me in amazement and said, “I'm going to die, aren't I?”

And though I thought he might, I told him that no, he wasn't; and this calmed him so that, slowly, he stopped trembling.

The wound had a clear exit hole on the inside of his arm, just below the armpit, so there was probably no shrapnel left inside. He was bleeding heavily, and I hoped the bullet hadn't nicked an artery. I took off my shirt and bound a tight bandage, almost a tourniquet, and then sat him down under an oak tree and told him to remain still.

He was as pale as his blood was bright—there was so much of it—and we sat quietly and listened to the exchanges of gunfire and shouting. A couple of times he said, “I'm scared,” but I told him to be still and hold on, that he was going to be all right; and he quieted down and clung to that advice as if I held the key to his survival. He started to shake again, and I laid my jacket across him like a blanket, and it was enough to stop his shaking.

After a while the shooting stopped—only the shouting persisted—and then there was relative silence. Not long after that, I heard our men regrouping—the burr and bray of Ewen Cameron, the occasional shouts of Green and Fisher, and the calmer declarations of Somervell—and I wanted to go and join them, but Shepherd became so pale and agitated—the crimson stains on his bandage dampening as he raised his good arm to restrain me—that I feared he would not survive my leaving, and so I stayed.

I was worried that the others might think that Shepherd and I had run away from the battle, but there was nothing I could do about that. We sat side by side beneath that oak in the failing light and listened to the sounds of our army's reassembly. It was cold—the last day of November—and as the night grew quieter, Shepherd reached for my hand and gripped it, clenching it so tightly that I thought for certain he was dying.

But he wasn't; instead, he just sat there gripping it, even as he slept. I had no matches for a fire, and no blanket with which to keep myself warm, but I did not move and tried instead to remember how warm and pleasant the day had been only hours earlier. I had almost fallen asleep in my saddle, lulled by the mild heat and the steady rocking of my horse.

We awoke later in the evening to renewed shouts, and the cries and screams of men, women, children, and horses, and dogs barking, and guns firing again. I saw by the moon that we had not slept more than an hour, but it felt that a great deal of time had passed, time not measured in minutes and hours but weighed in tons, or scaled in rods and cubits.

“Looting,” Shepherd said quietly, almost wisely—as if he were the veteran of many such campaigns. His hand still gripped mine as if in lockjaw death, then released slightly.

After a while we saw reflections of firelight through the trees—how I longed to edge closer and stand beside those warming fires!—as one building after another was torched. I felt certain that these buildings, and the people that lived in them, were not the enemy: that they Were merely fodder for the path of Fisher and Green, the path of history, the path of glory. And it was not I who had lit any of the torches: not a single one. What would it have hurt for me to go and warm myself beside, and benefit from, even one of them? But I could not, and so we remained back in the shadows, beyond the throw of firelight, quiet and invisible: history dust, ourselves. We heard the whoops and revelry of our own men, and their galloping horses. All through the night, people fled through the thicket, running past our spot without noticing us. Around midnight, the shouts from our men began to sound more drunken; and not much after that, musical instruments began to play—horns and fifes and guitars—a mock-joyful symphony issuing from the burning town.

A fiddle was found, though no true fiddler, for the sounds that emanated from those tortured strings were dirgelike and anguished; and from elsewhere in the village there came random and occasional drumming—stones against overturned empty barrels, wooden clubs against the sides of buildings, musket butts against doorways—and more laughter and revelry, more cries of fright.

 

If we slept again at all, we might have done so for a few moments just before the cold dawn. Then, only because we had no more water, and because James Shepherd felt that he would die of thirst without some, he allowed me to leave the grasp of his hand and venture into the village to get water and to take stock of what had happened.

“If they capture you,” he said, “don't leave me here. Make them come get me.”

His arm was hurting terribly, all soft-tissue tear, without a bone broken—and I told him not to be ridiculous, that I couldn't be captured because they were on my side and I was on theirs. But he just looked at me, understanding what I didn't. I have no idea how two boys growing up in the same small town could know such disparate things and, in the end, turn out so differently.

Corrals and barns stood empty, their gates and doors de molished. Low fires smoldered and crackled almost everywhere I looked. A mist was beginning to fall, mingling smoke with the morning's fog, and I smelled not only the charred odor of wood but other things not meant to burn—a scent of trash, like spoiled fruit, and burning metal, and wet cloth.