Diezmo (6 page)

 

We crossed the river in the darkness before first light, riding into Guerrero in a heavy downpour. The smoke from the pueblos hung dense and blue. We were agitated, nervous that the slightest sound would give us away, unleashing enemy fire. The creak of saddle leather from so many horses and the splashing surge of our river crossing swept me up in a collective courage and daring. I was not afraid of dying, only losing.

We rode into the darkened village with our rifles ready, our pistols loaded. Those of us who carried swords had practiced drawing them, for use in close combat. We entered the village and rode through it, nearly a thousand horse hooves clopping, a sound from a dream perhaps. A few dogs roused and barked. I was certain we would find our battle, and waited in delighted anticipation for the first rifle shot.

We rode all the way through the village undisturbed, then turned around and came back to its center. Fisher and Green dismounted and announced loudly to the sleeping town that we would now be occupying it, holding it hostage. The rest of us sat on our horses, strung out up and down the streets, while Fisher and Green dispatched a number of men to commandeer enemy funds.

We took possession of the village without a single shot being fired; indeed, we never saw a weapon in Guerrero other than our own. The inhabitants were gaunt mules and starving paisanos.
Hostage to what?
one of them asked.

Fisher found the town priest and threatened to harm him if a $5,000 ransom was not paid. He gestured toward Shepherd and indicated that with his good arm Shepherd would execute the priest with a sword.

The town leaders hurried from door to door in the driving rain—curious faces appearing in the open doorways and windows while we sat around on our horses getting drenched. The town presented us with $381 at noon, and after counting it Green spat and said, “If that's all they can do, tell them to keep it.”

We stayed the night, splitting up and taking refuge in the huts of the starving villagers, with none of the revelry of Laredo; as if, to a man, we were ashamed of that past behavior, and as if the spirit of Christmas commanded us, in spite of Fisher's threats to the priest. The rain shifted to sleet. We shared soup with the various families whose huts we occupied.

In the morning, we discovered that many of the lame and starving of our horses had died from the freezing cold. After we butchered and ate as much as we could hold, there was horse meat left for the villagers, and they asked for the hides of the horses as well.

Two more of our lieutenants—Byrd and Kenedy—decided to turn back, taking their men with them. Several men not belonging to the two lieutenants' companies chose to go with them. One man—Joseph Berry—was suffering from a cactus needle lodged in his leg, his kneecap stinking and swelling, Sinnickson eyeing it daily—but Berry chose to stay.

Fisher, however, was determined to push south—
Look how easily Guerrero fell,
he argued.
Why not continue southward, and achieve even greater victory?

He and Green both scowled after these newest defectors, but being an unofficial army—more marauders than militia—neither had any true military authority, and with each passing defection they were reminded of this.

 

That afternoon we rode toward the little town of Ciudad Mier, where, that evening, we again took a priest hostage, demanding ransom before retiring to our ragged camp back in the brush. Fisher told the townspeople that they had forty-eight hours to deliver the ransom—ten thousand dollars, this time, to make up for the inadequacy of Guerrero—and that he would meet them on the bank of the Rio Grande on Christmas Eve Day.

I was part of the detail charged with guarding the priest, who seemed affable and forgiving. A lean man in his mid-fifties, he told us stories of saints and sinners he had known in his life. Men and women who had been little better than pagans, he said, as prone to pray to the animals of the fields and forests as to the highest of gods. Men and women who prayed to the weather, or the bare stone of the desert; or, worse yet, he said, who prayed not at all, but who instead assumed that all matters concerning their needs as well as their desires had been prearranged. He spoke to us partly in English and partly in Spanish, with Alfred Thurmond helping translate.

“There was one such man,” he said, “one who believed his destiny was laid before him like a gleaming road, and who believed he could pass through danger unharmed, like a man—a circus master passing through a crowd of lions or tigers. Jaguars,” the priest said, “and
panteras.

“He could be said to be a good man, in that he concerned himself with the welfare of others less fortunate than him self, and the welfare of the village—but he did not believe that his life was built of choices. Did not believe that he was the mason, constructing it with each hour of his life, and each day.

“We argued often about this. Of course to such a man, prayer was unknown: there was no need for it. He simply followed his life. This man was a farmer,” the priest said, “and it was a source of frustration to the rest of us, and to the other farmers who worked so hard, that this man's crops were always more bountiful than the other farmers' in hard seasons, though this man, Pico, never troubled himself overmuch with his labors.
Un medio,
” the priest said, and one of our men clarified the interpretation, calling out “A half-ass,” and the priest shrugged, then nodded.

“I asked him to become a man of God,” the priest said. “I asked him to consider that many things in the world were undecided, things in which a strong and fiery heart could make a difference. Desperate things in need of salvation,” the priest said. “But Pico always shook his head and said that I was wrong.

“He ate and drank as he wished, philandered as he wished—his wife abandoned him—and yet, as I said, nothing mattered much to him. His heart was not afire; it could be neither changed nor harmed. If someone asked him for a favor—anything—he would do it—but he passed through his years like a sleepwalker. He smiled, joked, sang, worked. But he was asleep. I was the only one who knew it. Again and again, I tried to awaken him, but I could not.” The priest shook his head and looked down at his hands sorrowfully. As if the man had been his own brother.

“What happened to him?” I asked. “Is he still alive?”

The priest looked up and smiled at my interest. “I do not know,” he said. “I think that maybe he just went away. He vanished. We stopped seeing him, and no one knew what had become of him. It was as if he never was.”

But Pico was not the worst, the priest said. Most distressing of all to him, he said, were those who waited until the end to pray. He glanced around at us as if in secret commiseration rather than indictment. As if we already were, and always had been, men of God, to whom he could speak frankly about such things.

Certainly, the priest said, as a man of God himself, he welcomed the opportunity to receive the souls of those whose hearts changed in the last days, and the last hour, but it saddened him deeply, he said, to consider all the wasted time behind such last-minute conversions—the backwash, he called it, the rubble of compassion whose seeds never germinated, the toxic residue of a lifetime of ill deeds.

The priest had seen much waste in his lifetime, he told us, and much loneliness, and to him, the loneliness was the worst thing of all.

 

On Christmas Eve Day, Fisher took a detail to the riverbank to collect the ransom. Shepherd rode with him, so hard-faced, and looking so much older, that I barely recognized him, and when he turned to look back at camp before riding off, he looked right through me, not with anger or hostility or envy or sadness, but simply through me, as if one of us had already left this world.

“A friend of yours?” the priest asked, observing the strange moment.

I took a long time answering. “Yes,” I said finally.

He resumed his narrative about the streets and palaces in the kingdom of heaven—how such an architecture in the hearts of men and women and children gave way to the creation and construction of a similar architecture in the physical world, which those dreamers and initiates could then inhabit. He believed that a paucity of such compassion led to the construction of a life, and a landscape, of the destitute.

He looked around at us, and I felt he was reading our faces and fates as clearly as if he had unscrolled the map of a much-traveled country, as if he could see as well the country through which we had already traveled.

He did not seem troubled by his situation with us. He seemed prepared to live or die—accepting either with dignity—and it was this quality that kept us clustered around him.

 

We waited all morning and into the afternoon for Fisher and his men to return. The priest appeared unfazed, though later in the day he asked if he could have a little privacy in a tent, so we fastened a leash to his wrists and ankles and allowed him to go into the tent by himself, where he stayed for a good two hours. We assumed he was praying, though when I went in to take him some fish soup at dinner, I found that he was sound asleep, lying on the ground on his back with his hands clasped and folded neatly over his chest.

He opened his eyes, sat up, and after a moment inquired about Joseph Berry's knee—asking how long it had been infected and how he had injured it—and said that he had offered up a prayer on Joseph Berry's behalf.

Fisher and his regiment didn't get back until shortly after dark, having waited on the riverbank all day to no avail: they left two men there overnight, in case the ransom was merely running late. They had discussed going back into town but feared a trap.

That night, they ordered that the priest not be given any food—as if by punishing him in secret the ransom seekers might somehow, through divine intuition, be inspired to search harder for the ransom, or as if the priest, with his allotted hours expired, were living on borrowed time.

The priest was quieter, that last night. Those of us who were guarding him sought to assure him that we were certain the ransom would be delivered the next day, but he remained courteous though distant and, finally, with our permission, bid us good night. Shackled, he crawled into his tent, and after a little while we heard him snoring.

We went to bed not long after that, save for the lookouts. It was the quietest and strangest Christmas Eve I have ever known. I think that each of us was considering the priest's plight.

The next day, Christmas, we had a short prayer, officiated by Sinnickson, who had also been a preacher for a while. I sat next to Shepherd and watched how he labored to cut his dried mutton with his knife before he finally gave up, picking it up with his free hand and gnawing on it, as many of the nonofficers did.

Otherwise, Shepherd held himself like an officer, with an erect, guarded posture, and dressed like an officer, in one of Fisher's coats with the sleeve pinned, and sat his horse like an officer, and carried an officer's sword. But he gnawed on that mutton like the most savage of us—like Bigfoot Wallace himself, or even the brute Cameron. When he saw me watching him, he scowled and stared at me with such steel that I felt we had become enemies.

We finished our thin rations, and Fisher and his men were about to ride back down to the river to wait again for the ransom when a lone Mexican sheepherder came walking into camp, unarmed.

We were antsy, and some of the irregulars who first spied the sheepherder nearly cut him down with their muskets and pistols; but the sheepherder raised his hands carefully, and they allowed him to come all the way into camp.

He said that no one had sent him, but that he had come on his own, out of concern for the priest and as a gesture of goodwill as well to the Texans, to let us know that two of Mexico's fiercest commanders, General Pedro de Ampudia and General Antonio Canales, had arrived in Ciudad Mier less than a day after the priest was taken hostage. Ampudia and Canales were commanding nearly a thousand men, the sheepherder said, and they had instructed the town not to pay the ransom.

Fisher cursed and leapt up, spilling his coffee and burning himself, and, in a rage, ordered the sheepherder to be taken hostage too. Green and Fisher's aides complied, binding the sheepherder's wrists and ankles with rope before leading him to the priest's tent, where the priest welcomed him like a lost brother.

There followed a brief and heated counsel, unique in that the soldiers were included. The reason for this, as well as for Fisher's agitation, was that many of our men had once ridden with Canales. Canales, who had renounced his Mexican citizenship, had been a soldier in the Texas army—a mercenary, and a fierce one at that. He and many of the men among us had fought against General Ampudia, who never renounced his homeland.

Ampudia, the men said, was fiercer than Canales. In one battle, back in Texas, when the two men opposed each other, Ampudia captured one of Canales's fellow insurrectionists and decapitated him, boiled his head in a vat of grease, and stuck it on a pike in front of the man's home. That Ampudia and Canales had joined forces set off new currents of alternating fear and bravado in the camp—the fear hidden, the bravado manifest.

Green convinced Fisher that we should take a vote on whether to engage Ampudia and Canales, capture the town of Mier, and then continue south, looting and raising more funds—or whether we should turn back. Fisher hesitated, ill at ease with any notion of democracy within the military ranks, but his rage had subsided enough for him to see the reason behind Green's proposal. A militia that determined its own fate would be more committed going into battle, and we would need every bit of ferocity and valor we could muster.

The men voted almost unanimously to attack—about twenty men abstained, and another small group counseled that we wait for a more propitious time, though after the vote the naysayers and the abstainers allowed themselves to be carried with the group. The vote had whipped the men into a frenzy. They believed that even if Ampudia and Canales commanded six thousand, our expedition could handle them. Fisher expressed the deepest regret about the need to execute the priest and the sheepherder. Fisher explained it to the men, and then, in heartfelt words, explained it also to the priest and sheepherder, admonishing the villains Ampudia and Canales for abandoning the priest.