Diezmo (20 page)

Some two thousand feet above the fort there was a rough volcanic ridge lined with scores of giant crosses, the spoor of recalcitrant prisoners from the past. After laboring all day without food or water—sometimes in an icy, rattling, sheet-driven wind, other times beneath a broiling sun—the prisoner had to erect the mammoth cross on that ridge and pile stones around the base to keep it from blowing over. (If the cross did blow over, the prisoner was required to go up there, drag it all the way back down the mountain, and then start over again the next day.)

Over the years, however, crosses had fallen, so that there were as many lying on the ground as there were standing, and there were crosses leaning halfway between sky and ground, so that spars and beams silhouetted the ridge in a myriad of angles, looking like a buck-and-rail fence. It was a tangle of dissymmetry, with some of the more ancient crosses beginning to crumble and rot on the stony ledge, while others still exuded the green odor of heavy new-sawn wood, and still others bore the stains from our bloodied and blistered backs, as we ourselves still bore splinters from that engagement. There was none among us who had not hauled at least one cross to the ridge, and such punishment did not dispose us favorably toward the Catholic race.

 

The U.S. ambassador, Waddy Thompson, was soon to become a staunch friend and ally, our one crux of support from the outside. Whenever he came to visit us, brimming with an encouraging mix of optimism and forcefulness, we felt hopeful, and whenever he left or was out of touch with us for too long—a month, two months, three months—we felt abandoned, rejected, even betrayed, and consumed by a fever of fear and loneliness and the damnable longing for freedom.

Each time Waddy Thompson reappeared—a gentleman, a man of power—our hearts leapt, and each time he left while we remained, we began again the long trek back down into misery and servitude, until in some ways it seemed that we were as much his prisoners as we were the Mexican government's, despite our knowing better.

We could never have wished for a better ally. He devoted more time to us than his job called for. It simply wasn't enough. Our needs were bottomless. No one man, and perhaps no nation, or nations, could extricate us; neither could we ourselves. We were captive to all who looked upon us, prisoners even to our own hearts, for we had not merely “lost” our freedom but willfully given it up, back when we had first crossed the border at Fisher's strident urging.

 

As ever, McLaughlin sketched in the evenings, choosing to spend his precious coins not on lead rivets or fruit or illicit mouthfuls of mescal passed from guard to prisoner, but on candles, so that he might work far into the night. When he ran out of pencils he used the smudge of charcoal, so that his hands and face were soon almost always smeared black. I would sit up with him often, reading or occasionally writing letters to those back home. And from the way he sketched, throwing himself into it with such unnerving focus, I wondered often if he even understood any longer that he was still a prisoner: there was something that made me think he did not, and I was envious.

Escape was no longer on our minds; we were broken, hobbled. In a general letter to his many friends back in Texas, R. A. Barclay wrote, “When we shall guet out of this snap God only knows. My only hope is an exchange of prisners... things growes daily more gloomey... they treat us worse evry day. The Mexicans point me out and say I am the worst one in the Castle—I have worn hobels two weeks, binn beat with there spades and muskets, calaboosed and evry means to cow me they can think of... There is no hope of release.”

 

Peter Maxwell, in a letter addressed to various newspapers, designed to sway the sympathies of Sam Houston, complained, “Our overseers... often beat we Texians with sticks with as little ceremony as we would beat Negroes.” And in an official complaint to Waddy Thompson—who on his last visit had said not to despair, that he was still working to somehow gain our release—Fenton Gibson, not a true Texan but a Kentuckian, and a grandson of Daniel Boone, wrote, “What then must be the deep agony of an American to be struck by one of these imps of darkness...? Sir, it is insupportable. The blood on an American cannot brook the degradation.”

In a letter to his wife, Norman Woods lied, trying to assuage her fears, and spoke proudly of the heroic regularity of his bowels. “We have plenty to eat, good clothes to wear, fine coffee to drink twice a day, meat once, good flour bread with three kinds of cracked seeds in it. I am coopering and make about one bucket a week.”

Beneath that dark mountain, haunted by the sound of the fresh water rushing through the labyrinth of aqueducts just beneath us night and day, and under such steady oppression, our old dreams and fevers unraveled and ran wandering in a hundred and forty different directions, as if seeking to trickle back down into the stony soil beneath us.

Beneath our crosses and hobbles, and beneath the beatings and the lice, we continued to fall further, until we finally reached the bottom, at which point it was every man for himself: and sometimes not even that.

 

One by one, like the occasional sparrows that would find their way into our dungeon through the grate, flutter confused for a while, and then find their way back out, a few of our number were plucked from the group and turned free, by the deux ex machina we had all been dreaming of back before our spirits began to break. Two prisoners were released when the U.S. president, Andrew Jackson, sent Santa Anna a special letter asking for their release. Years earlier, following the surrender at San Jacinto, when Santa Anna had been so despondent he had attempted suicide, Jackson had invited Santa Anna to visit the United States, where he had been treated with dignity and respect, at a time when his own government, shamed by his defeat, wanted nothing to do with him.

Soon a third prisoner, George B. Crittenden, was also released—he was the son of the Kentucky senator John Crittenden, who, being a Whig, was an enemy of Jackson's but a colleague nonetheless.

These strange mercies began stirring, once again, the still-warm ashes of hope in our souls.

Some, alas, responded without valor. A prisoner from San Antonio, Judge James W. Robinson, who had served briefly as lieutenant governor of Texas in the months preceding the Alamo, began crafting a complex plan of compromise in which the Republic of Texas could be induced to return to Mexico's rule in exchange for some assurance of limited autonomy. Robinson proposed that he himself should be the mediator in such convoluted bargaining, which would of course necessitate his being released from the Castle of Perve.

His gambit worked. Santa Anna fell for it, and soon Robinson was back in Texas, having gained an audience with Sam Houston at Washington-on-the-Brazos.

Texas's newspapers went berserk upon hearing the proposal—“The blood of the patriots who had secured our hard-fought independence barely yet dry,” they cried—but nonetheless, Robinson's proposal, though ludicrous on its face, did connect with a larger underlying sentiment that craved stability in the aftermath of so much war.

The new nation hungered also for the prosperity that peace could bring, and from Robinson's half-baked idea discussion of another kind of peace-making—an armistice—began to develop. Again, the annexation discussions were resurrected.
Who would get Texas, and at what price, and under what terms?

Out of Robinson's trickery a flickering peace seemed to be emerging. Perhaps it was just a good year for peace, as certain years are occasionally favorable for some rare crop; whatever the reason, Sam Houston—whose first son was born that spring—was ebullient, and began pursuing the armistice with Mexico with new vigor. To his friend Ashbel Smith he wrote, “The new nation could no longer afford the expense of war, and the idea of the Armistice has cheered our people, and the vicious, traitorous and factious are confounded.” And with hope rising, he wrote, “Our Mexican relations have assumed a more promising aspect. Let us never despair of the Republic; but like true citizens obey the laws, love order, be industrious, live economically, and all will soon be well. Noisy, non-productive and disappointed men, who hate labor and aspire to live upon the people's substance, have already done us great injury abroad. At home they are too well known to be any longer feared.”

 

Charles McLaughlin kept sketching. Hundreds of pages now filled his portfolio. There were portraits decorating the dark stone walls of our cell and lining the walls of the prison outside the cell, stuck to the stone with dried gruel. Even the guards and soldiers were posting his works in their quarters and occasionally giving him a few pesos for them, which he used not for whiskey or tobacco or even extra food but to buy new art supplies.

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.