Diezmo (15 page)

Cameron refused to accept the blindfold that was offered him and instead bared his chest, glaring at the executioners, and called on them to fire.

He died instantly, Thurmond said, shredded by musket fire, and Thurmond wept. Of the giants, only Bigfoot Wallace now remained among us.

Months later we were to learn that Cameron had been executed because—according to Mexico's minister of war, José Maria Tornel—he had been “one of the most active Partisans in the warfare going on between the two countries,” and because, whenever imprisoned, he had ceaselessly encouraged fellow prisoners to escape. While they were at it, they had piled on a great list of other offenses—some purely fabricated, others, perhaps, closer to the truth.

We mourned him for days, on the trail to Mexico City—though he had never been an officer, he, more than anyone, had been our leader, particularly in times of deepest trouble. Now that he was gone, we were all diminished and weakened, and our spirit burned less brightly.

It felt to all of us, I think, as if the landscape were swallowing us now—as if we were descending, mile by mile, day by day, into a pit so vast and deep that we would never be able to get out again.

We came into the valley of Mexico City two days after Cameron's death and saw immense and shining lakes in all directions, the great bodies of water on which the Aztecs had once built floating gardens. We were humbled to be in the presence of so hallowed and powerful a civilization, and by the audacity of our own puny notions, eight hundred miles earlier, that our little band could mount a successful assault on such a glorious and ancient nation.

 

The volcanoes Popocatepetl and Ixtaccihuatl ringed the valley, and many of us saw snow for the first time, in the glaciers that capped their peaks. Our ultimate destination, the Castle of Perve, was in the southernmost tip of the country. We still had hundreds of miles to go to reach it, but because we were so threadbare (Bigfoot Wallace, in particular, was indecent to the point that he had to wear his broad floppy hat like a loincloth, and to protect his head from the sun he used a single red bandanna, wrapped like a turban), and because there was a road that needed rebuilding, and because our new escorts still desired, like all the others, to try to bask a bit in the glory of having captured us, we remained in Mexico City, at the prison of Molino del Rey, working in a quarry and rebuilding the ancient road to Tacubaya. In exchange for our labor, we would be given one new set of clothes each.

From the quarry each day, we cut and hauled slabs of white stone, square-cut rectangles of pleasing shape and density and texture. As we sledged them free with hammer and pry bar, the acid odor of rock dust that attended each stone's separation from the main body of the quarry was like the burned odor of a musket just fired; and, occasionally, after some certain slab's successful cleaving, I would be reminded of Shepherd and his lost arm.

The work was little different from the backbreaking labor we would have been doing at home—wielding shovels and swinging sledgehammers and grubbing hoes, hauling water and stone—but soon the men turned into the most awful laggards I have ever witnessed. Having been given our one new set of clothes—flannel one-piece prison uniforms striped red and white and green, and sandals (Bigfoot Wallace's had to be custom-made), most of the men began almost immediately to stall the project's progress in whatever way they could.

 

There was a major regret from that time, beyond the regret of having gone to war in the first place. I met a girl my own age, and think that I fell in love with her. I believe I would have traded my life for hers—would have traded this long life even, for more time with her—and I believed, and still believe, that she would have done the same.

She was the daughter of the architect who had been commissioned to design and rebuild the road, Colonel Raul Bustamente. He awakened us each morning at dawn, treated us with dignity and respect, and trusted us to work as perhaps he himself would have worked had he been in our position. We were paired in chains with ten feet separating us—I found myself partnered with Charles McLaughlin—and we walked each morning from the stone prison at Molino del Rey to the new road on the outskirts of the city.

It was a pleasant walk in the cool of the morning. It was early spring, and the countryside all around us was leaping into green, the birds singing. We walked with the excess footage of our ankle chains hooked to our belts and wrapped around our waists to keep them from dragging. And compared to the previous days of our captivity, and all the ones that were to follow, I have to say that I remember those days as being the most pleasant.

It was on this path that I first saw Clara, Bustamente's daughter, crossing the road—or what passed for a road—with her friends on their way to school, though I wasn't to learn she was his daughter for quite some time. The girls were dressed in bone white uniforms, and as we stopped to let them pass—half a dozen of them—the dust we had been raising with our , trudging rose higher and caught up with us, surrounding us as we stood there. The dust was the same color as their dresses, and as it rose around us I could taste it.

We stood there like cattle, or a herd of horses, with Bustamente at the front, his hand held up in a signal for us to halt. The girls were a good distance in front of us—thirty or forty yards—and he intended to keep it that way.

As they crossed, they glanced our way and waved to him, and Bustamente nodded back, but the girl kept looking at us, peering at our faces as if searching for someone she knew. She watched me for a moment—never had I felt so
found
—and then she was gone.

The chalk dust from the road was still settling around us. It landed, fine as fog or mist, on the hair on our arms, our faces, our eyebrows: the finest powder imaginable, stone crushed to a substance one step away from invisible, by nothing more than the simple footsteps of tens or even hundreds of thousands of others just like us, marching back and forth through the centuries—to market, to school, to church, to death—and by the iron and hide and wooden wheels of
carettas,
from countless other such passages, and by the hooves of the beasts that had pulled them: donkey, ox, and horse.

The girls, the young women, were long gone. Colonel Bustamente's arm was still raised in the halt position, as if to counsel us not to even speak of what we had seen. Finally he lowered his hand slowly, took a newly starched linen handkerchief from his pocket, and wiped the street dust from his face, and then we proceeded on, north. As we passed the place where the young women had crossed in front of us, I looked in the direction they had gone, seeking to memorize the buildings and alleys, the landscape and terrain.

I scanned the dust to the side of our passage, searching for their tracks, and did not realize I was lingering until I felt the tug of the chains lurching me back into the procession, and was nudged simultaneously by Charles McLaughlin.

I stumbled, was pulled along. The men in front of me glanced back in confusion and some irritation, and I stepped back into their haunted flow—
glory,
they had said they wanted, each of them—with a secret burning in my heart. I carried it with me all the rest of the day.

Charles McLaughlin laughed, watching my initial stumbling. “You would not like it if I were to draw a portrait of the young man in love,” he said. “You would be horrified by your appearance,” he said.

We walked in silence a while, with me feeling both mortified and exhilarated, and a little farther down the road, McLaughlin spoke again: “Better by a hundred your chances of slipping free of these chains, being given an officer's horse, and riding uncontested all the way back to Texas, than ever seeing that girl again, much less ever speaking to her, much less ever holding her in your arms, much less...”

His voice trailed off into a laugh of utter delight, and I blushed and said nothing, but after we had walked quite a bit farther I said, “You're wrong,” and he smiled after that, and did not argue.

 

Each day, Bustamente directed us to a wide and shallow stream far outside of town, from which we were to gather decorative rocks for the road. The chalky square-cut quarry was the source for our paving stones, but it was this stream that yielded the finer, prettier rocks for the project. He called it Rio Seco, the dry river, though it was not dry that spring. Judging by the boulders it had moved, sun-bleached and round, and by the scatter of driftwood, the water-polished assemblage of giant cottonwoods piled into fantastic clumps of debris, it was evident that huge torrents of water had cascaded down the floodplain not long ago, transporting the rattling, clattering boulders and great hollowed-out cottonwood spars. Scatters of giant stone, boulders as big as houses, were nestled in amid cobbles the size of a man's fist. Our task was to select the most attractive, ornamental river stones and carry them, along with the bags of the valuable white river sand, all the way back to the road.

Working at the river, we had slightly more freedom. It was nearly an hour's walk down a steep trail to the river bottom, and our small gang—McLaughlin, myself, and a dozen other recruits, all young men, stronger and healthier than the rest—soon reached a tacit understanding with the guards that we would not run away and they would not have to descend and then ascend with us each time we went down the steep path to the river. I poured my energies into the hauling, so I often did the work of three or four men—accumulating a greater stack of boulders on the days when we went down to the Rio Seco, or cutting and laying more stone on quarry days. The guards and Bustamente noticed my work, although Bustamente almost always stayed up on the road, two miles distant, after having taken us down to the river only that first day, wandering out among the tangled cataclysm of stone to show us what kinds of rocks he preferred.

The river was brilliant and heated, dazzling. But on the riverbanks beneath the ash, cottonwood, and sycamore trees, it was green and cool and shady, with the leaves fluttering in the spring wind, and it was easy to lie in the white sand and listen to the wind in the tops of the trees and to imagine that in another life the stonemason Ewen Cameron might have enjoyed working with the Rio Seco's stones, even as another part of me knew there was at least as much chance that had he remained living, he would be using these very stones to try to bash in the heads of our captors.

Not all of the boneyard of the river was parched. In some places a ribbon of water still trickled through the riverbed's center, running and then pooling before disappearing for a while, only to reemerge elsewhere. Cool breezes bathed these wetted portions of the canyon and rose from the sparkling, riffling water scented with the growth of new life. Tiger-striped butterflies and those the colors of emeralds and amethysts gathered in great numbers by the salty riverside puddles to sip before rising into a flashing kaleidoscope of escape, each one a tornado of broken church glass, frightened by our own sweating, salty, labored approach.

Out among the boulders, our footing was uncertain and we slipped often. We jettisoned the boulders when we could—sometimes they cracked in half when they landed—though other times we could not turn loose of them quickly enough and smashed our arms and thumbs and fingers, so that the river canyon echoed with the sound of curses, and the stones and boulders were smeared and painted with the bright red palm prints of such mishaps, as were some of the stones that would ultimately go into the road above.

Still, all in all it was a place of peace, not just for me but for each of us. Bright songbirds of every color were drawn to the water and the leafy foliage that grew alongside the river. Wild roses bloomed on gravel-bar islands and between the boulders, existing seemingly on nothing more than the rocks themselves, and air. Hummingbirds whirred about the blossoms, probing.

The cottonwood spars lined both banks, marking where the river had been, and served as impromptu benches for whenever we took a break, which, for the other workers, was increasingly often. I noticed that each of them was lulled into a state of great sleepiness and contentment by the sound of the river. The morning and afternoon light that passed through the riverside foliage cast a shimmering green on their faces, and sometimes they would lie down on various of the cottonwood spars, after searching for and finding the one polished spar that most perfectly fit the length and shape of their bodies: the curves and hollows and tapers of each spar determining to some extent the position of repose into which the prisoners settled.

The soldiers lay as if stupefied, nestled into the slick fit of their various logs, the men and logs both looking like the carcasses of giant fish that had washed ashore. They smoked precious cigarettes they had been able to purchase or to reassemble from the scraps of butts gathered roadside, and when those were gone they cut crooked lengths of grapevine and smoked those, inhaling the thick sour smoke until they were nearly intoxicated and the riverside was filled with the blue haze of their exhalations. It was not unlike the scene of a battlefield, with the fallen soldiers, arms outflung and faces vacant to the sun, and the earth beneath them torched, and the smoke of cannonade still lingering; and if they did not know bliss, in those moments, they seemed at least to know peace.

The laggards napped briefly, or stared unblinking at the sky, while I continued to work and while Charles McLaughlin sketched. (Afterward, he kept his drawings, the evidence of our turpitude, rolled up inside his shirt; and even back at the garrison, where we were being housed, he did not display them, to keep from informing the other prisoners of the sweet details that attended our assignment.)

My coworkers would lounge there as long as they dared—an hour or sometimes even two—just long enough to make the guards watching the main crew back at the road become exasperated and consider sending someone after us, but not quite so long that they'd actually do it. We kept a lookout posted in the trees, watching the path down to the river, so that he could run and alert us to resume working if he saw anyone approaching.