Diezmo (11 page)

But Green argued passionately that Colonel Barragan's orders were to transport him and Fisher to Mexico City for trial, and that the order to execute them could not take precedence over these other orders, which had been given by a general. Even Ampudia and Canales relented in the face of that argument, and so after some discussion they left ten of the cavalry up in the hills with Green and Fisher while the remainder rode back down into Hacienda del Salado to join the fray.

We were just leaving when Barragan and his little group rode up and tried to block our exit. Colonel Barragan dismounted and walked up to Ewen Cameron, and with all one hundred and fifty Texas muskets aimed at him, Barragan ordered Cameron to surrender.

Cameron laughed and declined—we all began to laugh—and with that, he pushed past Barragan, as did Bigfoot Wallace, walking stride for stride next to him, and the rest of us followed, with our ragged assemblage of booty, some of us on horseback and others walking or leading pack mules burdened with silver or ammunition.

We forgot to take water. We did not think about water. We did not know the countryside.

Colonel Barragan and his men followed us, good soldiers that they were. They remained always at a distance—too far for us to shoot—but always on our tracks.

We took turns walking and trotting and riding the mules and horses, and covered nearly ninety miles in those first twenty-four hours. Only three more days like that, and we would be home. I, for one, believed we were going to make it.

 

By the end of that first twenty-four hours, we were desperate, for water and not a little inconvenienced for food. We had been traveling down the center of the dusty road that led due north—our plan was to pass through La Encarnación and then veer west of Monterrey, through the rougher country of Venadito and Boca de los Tres Rios.

Just outside of La Encarnación, we decided to approach a home, all hundred and fifty of us, and request food and water. But the windows fairly bristled with guns at our approach. We noted that there were a few horses hitched outside belonging to Mexican soldiers and cavalry, and so we rode around that home. As we rode past, cries and calls went up, “
Soldados desgraciados!
” and though we tried to stay out of their range, they lobbed some distant shots at us anyway, one of which struck a young irregular, Herbert Garner, in the head, felling him instantly.

We did not have time to bury him, and instead trotted on, leaving him behind for Barragan's men, who were still trailing us, to bury. Now there was one more open space available on the back of a horse, though we knew our stock could not keep up the pace we had set for them that first twenty-four hours, that already we had almost ridden them into the ground.

As the pangs of hunger and thirst worked on us we began to squabble and unravel yet again, and rather than simply dividing in two groups, as had been our earlier tendency—one man choosing Green's leadership, and another Fisher's—we began to separate in what seemed like infinite directions, as if our differences were now no longer simply oppositional but as diffuse as gusts of wind.

That afternoon we met an Englishman heading in the opposite direction, riding a tall old gray mule and dressed in a long formal coat, carrying a parasol to protect his balding head from the cold but brilliant winter sun. He hailed us and visited with Cameron and Wallace for some time, informing them that he was traveling the wilderness for his own edification—and when we asked about the route ahead of us, he said that we would do well to stay on the main road all the way to the border—that although we would probably encounter a few soldiers and cavalry, there was none anywhere in such force as to outnumber us.

The Brit seemed delighted by our derring-do, by the valor of our grand escape, and wished us Godspeed, and before riding southward (toward Colonel Barragan's still-trailing little force) he paused and asked if there were any artists among us. To my surprise, one of the boys I had fished with on the Rio Grande, Charles McLaughlin, eased forward on the frothy, leg-trembling mule he was sitting, and raised his hand.

The Brit was delighted, and, still astride his own mule, nudged his animal forward and made a great show of presenting to Charles McLaughlin a blank journal and a little leather-bound satchel containing pens of varying gauges, and little vials of ink, as well as some chalk and pastels.

“You are on the grand adventure of your life,” he said. “You must record it, not for posterity, but for yourself.” A lone cloud was drifting across the sky, and as it passed now before the sun, the Englishman folded his parasol and, before placing it in an empty rifle scabbard attached to his saddle, reached out with it and touched Charles McLaughlin on the shoulder as if knighting him. He turned toward Wallace and Cameron then, studying them as if evaluating them for a painting—and then the cloud was past, exposing his bright pate to the sun's cold brilliance again, and he pulled the parasol from his scabbard and hoisted it once more and then rode on.

 

We found our first and last water at Agua Nieta. The spring was alkaline, surrounded by calceous stone walls of great antiquity, erected to keep animals out; but we knocked out the walls and gate and drove our remuda right into the warm shallow spring, where we slid down from our saddles and lay on our bellies like pigs, drinking among the mules and horses as they too wallowed and thrashed in the salty pond. Our thrashings were soon soiling the spring with horse piss and green mule shit, as well as the vomit of soldiers who had drunk too much too fast, and their own piss and shit and grime as they stripped out of their filthy rags and laundered them, standing ankle-deep in the turmoil and scrubbing themselves with gouty fistfuls of the chalky mud.

I and a few others crouched at the edge of the salty pond—the water was lowering before our very eyes—and quickly filled our flasks and canteens, splashed water on our bare faces and arms, and cleaned ourselves as best as we could. We looked backwards often, to see that the waver of Barragan's men was larger, becoming more and more distinct—and finally leaders rousted the wallowers from the now vile spring and told us we needed to be moving again.

Charles McLaughlin was seated on one of the stone walls, sketching the scene before him quickly, and by the time Wallace and Cameron had the men and their stock rounded up, he had finished his sketch. Those of us who cared to look at it agreed that it was almost realistic, but we were a bit surprised that it had come from his hand, and from his eye.

He had made the scene appear almost idyllic, with very little of the squalor.

In that regard, the picture was false, but in the sense that it presented ourselves the way we would have liked to be seen, it was true.

Briefly strengthened, the wallowers began to argue with Cameron about his decision to stay on the road. “Let's go up into the mountains,” they said. “The cavalry can never find or follow us there.” And I regret to say that although I had heretofore been in complete agreement with everything Cameron and particularly Wallace had counseled, in this instance I was among those clamoring to go up into the mountains and perhaps cross back over into Texas, farther west, through the Sierra Madres.

Only Cameron and Wallace wanted to stick to the main road. But now that the war was breaking up, their power was fading, and the hundred-other of us had our way.

 

What did we know of mountains? Only enough to be dangerous to ourselves. When we looked back, we rejoiced, at first, on seeing that Barragan's men had paused at the foot of the mountains, watching our ascent, and had not followed. Indeed, some of them turned back, and from our initial vantage, already some thousand feet above them, we had cheered. Others of Barragan's men watched us a while longer and then rode on farther north: and to a man, we felt that our choice had been the right one.

Barragan's men had not long been gone from sight before we began to encounter our first difficulties. What had seemingly offered us salvation, the mountains' ruggedness, was also what threatened to break us, for the pitch became steeper and our footing less certain in the scree at the base of the cliffs we sought to scale. Having never ridden horses in the mountains, we had not realized there might be terrain too steep for them or even the mules, and soon we were having to lead them up and over the larger boulders and through the scree, horses and men sliding and scrambling alike. We were having to pull and push them up through slots and chimneys, our work made all the more impossible by the heavy burdens of our looting.

Some of the clastic rocks were still sharp-edged, remnants from a long-ago exploded earth—and the razor edges of those shattered rocks slashed our tattered boots and shoes and sliced the fetlocks of our pack train, so that we left behind us a wandering ribbon of red, like a skein of bright thread laid down on a map.

There was no water, only brush and cactus and shattered stones. The vertical walls of granite were flecked with dark fragments of mineral so shiny that, when climbing with our faces pressed tight against those cliffs, we could sometimes see our own eyes reflected as if in blackened mirrors. It was an unsettling image—as if we had somehow been captured by the mountain and were now moving around inside it, or as if we were looking across time and space to another version of ourselves.

We kept ascending, a diminished army of thieves and gentlemen, but by nightfall had made only a few more hundred feet. We made camp on a narrow ledge, roping ourselves to crags and pinnacles, and slept fitfully in the freezing wind. All night, whenever I drifted off for even a few minutes of slumber, I dreamt of falling, as apparently did many of the rest of the men, and all night the mountain rang with our sleepy shouts of fear, while our unhobbled horses and mules wandered off to search in vain for a blade of grass, of which there were none, only stone and creosote bushes.

In the harsh cold red light of morning we awakened and understood, each of us, that the horses and mules would have to be slaughtered.

We set about this task methodically, using our knives and jeweled swords. It was sloppy, inefficient work, and as the floundering mules and horses staggered about bleeding to death, we raced after them, laboring to hold our empty gourds beneath leaping gouts of blood; and when the gourds were filled, we drank directly from the animals' necks, gorging once more, while the rocks beneath us, like our faces and bodies, became painted bright crimson in the morning sun. The giants, Cameron and Wallace, were of invaluable assistance in this gruesome task, and worked with grim wordlessness, as if we had entered another land where language no longer mattered.

Charles McLaughlin followed us, sketching it all.

After we had drunk the blood of the horses and mules, we began carving on them; and because there was no wood for making real cooking fires, we set fire to the creosote bushes, a hundred or more such little fires burning all around us, and we cooked the meat as best as we could in that manner, searing it to warm gray on sticks held over the oily black smoke of the smoldering creosote.

Many of our shoes and boots had fallen apart completely on the rocks below, so we cut up the horses' saddles, and the bloody hides themselves, in crude attempts to make sandals. And yet, we were not despairing. High up on the mountain, it seemed to us that we were free, even in our misery. We divided our $1,400 of silver, giving each man his share.

We pushed on higher up the mountain. At the next crest we paused to look down. Below us, like the spoor of our freedom, lay hundreds of charred and smoking bushes. The bright shattered rocks seemed almost alive in their brilliance now, and the skinned and shredded carcasses of nearly a hundred mules and horses lay broken open on the rocks.

Curtis Haieber, Jimmy Pinn, and Robert Gosk decided to stop for a while and nurse their feet. The rest of us kept moving, but by morning two more dropped out. Charles McLaughlin paused to sketch the deserters.

We ascended a ridge and were up out of the creosote and chaparral. The walking should have been easier, but it wasn't, and by noon three more men dropped their packs and sat down and waved to the rest of us and told us to go on, go on,
mas alla,
farther on.

 

That night we couldn't sleep. Our tongues were swollen and beginning to turn black. There was no more discussion of reaching the Rio Grande, or even of leaving this godforsaken country. We desired only water, and the next day we split apart further, with Cameron and Wallace still commanding a core of about fifty men and the rest unbraided into little tribes of five and six, with the agreement that any of us who found water would send up smoke signals.

McLaughlin stayed with us. He had been sketching Wallace and Cameron, drawing them even as they walked, and now he had begun to sketch me, too, which made me feel worthy and officerlike.

I still had the last beans in my pocket: a smaller fistful, but still a fistful. I had lost all hunger, craved only water, and was allowing myself one bean per day, which I sucked on from morning to evening. As we trudged, I counted and examined each bean—I had gone into the mountains with forty—and I wondered how many, if any, would be left when I was finally out of the mountains.

Later in the day, we abandoned our rifles and packs. Even Bigfoot Wallace lay down his musket, building a little cairn around it so that he might one day return to it. He was moving slowly; it took him an hour to perform this small task, and his usually sharp mind was torpid—he appeared befuddled at times by the choice of all the rocks that were available to him—and then we proceeded on, feeling, for a while, almost winged in our lightness.

There was little vegetation of any kind—we gnawed at the black lichen we sometimes found growing on the rocks, so that to anyone watching us from above, it would have seemed that we were gnawing at the rocks themselves—and when we encountered an occasional clump of prickly pear cactus, we dug these up with bleeding hands and chewed greedily at the spiny pads and succulent roots, trying to avoid piercing our swollen black tongues on the cactus spines.