Diezmo (7 page)

Fisher instructed his aide to take the two out into the brush and bind them to a tree, and he assigned Shepherd to fire the shots. A small group, including Fisher, took the priest and sheepherder, shackled and bound, hobbling into the brush. Shepherd walked beside Fisher with his chin up and his eyes forward, seeming to take no notice of the priest and sheepherder.

The priest looked around him and his eyes fell on me. “
Vayan con Dios,
” he said softly, “
soldados desgraciados
.” And then he and the others continued on into the brush. A short while later, we heard one gunshot and then the second.

Fisher and Shepherd came walking out of the brush—the others remained behind to do the burying and to construct crude crosses—and I could not help but notice that Fisher looked pleased: as if Shepherd had performed exactly as Fisher wished, with no weakness or hesitation.

We spent the afternoon huddled in the rain, planning our attack, sending out scouts and then conferring with them, checking and rechecking our weapons and imagining all the different ways to kill the enemy.

At the time, our plan seemed to me bold and elegant. Canales had stationed some of his men around the northern perimeter of the town, ostensibly to defend it but possibly to lure us to fight there. Fisher, having fought him before, suspected that if we fought Canales on the perimeter, he would retreat into the core of Mier, where Ampudia's larger force and the rest of Canales's men would be waiting. The Mexicans were lovers of pageantry, he said, and Green concurred; the Mexicans in the town would be lined up in cavalry formations, waiting to be stirred to action by the shrilling of trumpets. In light of this knowledge, it was decided that when Canales's men on the perimeter turned and fled, we would pursue them into Mier, pretending not to know it was a trap, but we would not pursue them to the center of the town. Instead, we'd commandeer some of the adobe homes. They were built shoulder to shoulder, and we could use them to stand our ground or could move slowly forward by knocking out the wall of one adobe and rushing into the next one—gnawing our way through the town, as Fisher described it—and, in the end, after we killed all of Canales's and Ampudia's troops, we would also have leveled the town, and it would serve as an example to other villages not to resist our advance.

I looked over at Green and his aide to see how they were taking Fisher's plan. Green was pale and listless, unlike his usual confrontational, swaggering self.

“We will crush them,” Fisher said. “We will destroy them. We will annihilate them, we will lay waste to everything they ever owned as punishment for having resisted us earlier, when we were moderate. They will wish forever that they had listened to us rather than having opposed us, and when we are done, we will find the treasures they sought to keep hidden.”

 

We waited in the freezing rain until dark and then crossed in the rapids so that the Mexicans would not hear the sound of our horses' hooves. We rode four and five abreast. We crossed quickly, and before I knew it we were suddenly among some of Canales's outposts, passing so close to them in the darkness that when their horses shivered in the rain we heard the animals' brass armor jangling and rattling, yet the enemy had no idea of our presence; we could as well have been ghosts.

It was Green, I think, not Fisher, who gave the order to attack—we might have been able to ride right on through them undetected and into Mier, to face Ampudia's men—but that was not the plan.

We heard Green roar—I was surprised to hear it come from behind me, and realized I must have ridden out slightly ahead of the expedition—and my first thought was that he had somehow been injured. He sounded like the mother black bear I had seen kept in a wooden cage above the James River, being fed and fattened through the summer and into the autumn by the man who had trapped her, preparing her like a pig for slaughter.

Rifles and cannons began to go off all around me, and then the woods filled with flashes of light and the odor of burnt powder, and of fresh-cut sap from the limbs and branches torn loose in the sudden fusillade.

Bullets flew all around us, and leaves fell and floated among us, and the horses were barely manageable. Ill shuttered glimpses we saw the enemy wheeling and galloping south, as Fisher predicted they would.

Shouting and whooping and reloading and firing again, we pursued Canales's men, and in the rout, I looked around for Shepherd but could not find him. Instead, I saw dozens of my own kind riding past, surging, raucous and confident and frightened and joyous—and for myself, I felt neither fear nor joy but was carried on the surge. We were a wave that crashed through the woods and into the town of Mier.

3

W
E FOUGHT
as if charmed.

The families in the adobe houses fled into the streets, and we used the butts of our rifles to knock out the walls of first one home and then the next. Canales's men, retreating into Mier, caught the brunt of the fire from Ampudia's men, who were stationed in the center of town, and many of them were cut down more quickly by their own than by us.

There were candles and lanterns still burning in the houses we entered, and we could see in the dim light crude Christ-and-crucifix carvings on the walls, tattered Bibles on the mantels, paintings of Christ, and novenas everywhere.

Canales's and Ampudia's men were trying to follow us into the homes, but they were easy to defend. We had only to station a few men by each door to shoot point-blank each soldier, one by one or two by two, as they attempted to storm those small low doorways.

Soon the entrances were stacked high with dead Mexican soldiers, and as each one fell his gun was wrested from him and tossed down to those of us who sat or lay beneath windows, where we peered up and fired out at Ampudia's men across the street. Occasionally there was a simultaneity between my one shot, among dozens, and the tumbling of a rider. As if his horse, or the rider himself, had suddenly encountered some rope strung chin-high through the darkness. We moved from one adobe to the next, snuffing out the candles and lanterns left burning by the occupants who had fled.

From their snipers' posts in town, Ampudia's men could look down and take note of our methodical advance by the winking-out last glimmers of candlelight: each new adobe growing dark as we advanced into it, eating our way into the town like some beast gnawing into a carcass, or like a bear ripping through honeycomb.

The Mexicans aimed their cannons at the adobe huts, knocking out head-sized holes with each blast, but in truth these only aided us, for they gave us better windows from which to shoot.

There were too many of us to fit in the windows all at once, so we took turns fighting and sleeping. There was much revelry and good-natured bantering going on among us, and a young man from Rosharon, Joseph McCutcheon, would later write, “There is no sight more grand or sublime than the flash of opposing firearms at the hour of midnight. No sound can produce such an idea of grandeur, and engender such intense excitement, as the ringing report of rifles, the hoarse roar of musketry, the awful thunder of artillery, and the encouraging shouts of fellow man, against unlike men, all mingled in din and confusion.

“This night was by far the most exciting Christmas scene that ever I had witnessed!”

It was not until about midway through the night that a kind of heaviness began to descend on me, a melancholia made all the more profound by its absence in those around me—my fellow Texans were jostling one another for space at the windows, arguing about whose turn it was to get to do more shooting—and I was overwhelmed with homesickness, and with the sure and deep knowledge of having made a terribly wrong choice.

The loneliness felt as heavy as a trunk of lead, and I was suddenly nauseated and wanted no more turns at the window, and no more war, though it was far too late for that.

I moved to the back of the adobe house and took refuge beneath an overturned table. I pretended to be busy cleaning and reloading my gun, examining some malfunction. Several times my friends from LaGrange and Bexar offered me their guns or the weaponry of dead Mexicans, but I declined, told them to go ahead without me.

I made my decision to leave that night, or perhaps in the morning, when I might stand a better chance of finding a horse. I could be back across the river in less than a day, and home three or four days after that. The thought that I could be home in four days, farming, helped get me through that dark night, even as the shouts and whoops of my comrades indicated that they were having the best time of their lives.

I felt a new lightness, and I had the curious thought that this could be somewhat like the feeling James Shepherd might have had in finding his own new path, riding now with Fisher as he was. As if all his life he had labored down the wrong path—had in fact been placed upon the wrong one at birth—and had only now found his own true road, just as my own was to return home, and to leave the warring to soldiers.

I don't think I was very frightened. I was simply hungry for home.

I got up from beneath my table and went searching for Shepherd, to tell him of my plan. I did not want him worrying about me, thinking that I might have been lost in the river crossing, or in battle, beneath some rubble of adobe, hundreds of miles from home.

I found him four houses ahead, in the farthest dwelling of our advance. He was easy to recognize in cannon-fire silhouette, with his missing shoulder. He was leaning against a portal, a long-barreled pistol in his hand. He was not firing it but was instead only staring out the portal. The pistol hung limp from his hand, as if fastened by a thong or bracelet, and he seemed relaxed, though his gaze into the darkness was intent, and he seemed to be doing some sort of mental calculation.

“Does it hurt?” I asked. He seemed to be favoring his wound, trying to lean against the adobe in a way to avoid putting pressure on the other side of his body.

“It always hurts,” he said. He glanced at me, then resumed his watching through the cannon-shot portal. “Step behind me—they don't know this hole is here yet. If I shoot, they'll start shooting here, too. I'm just watching, right now. I want to wait until I can get a whole bunch of them.”

“Where's Captain Fisher?” I asked. “Where's Green?” He answered with a quick gesture of his head toward a back room. In the pulses of muzzle blast I could see through the open doorway the figures of two men seated at a table, deep in argumentative discussion, sipping soup from small clay bowls. I could smell the soup; it must have been simmering on the stove when they came through this wall. It smelled of chicken stock, with hot peppers and onions, and I realized how famished I was.

I saw now that there was an empty bowl beside Shepherd, and I started to ask if I could have some soup but then did not. Shepherd kept looking at his window keenly, counting and watching.

“Captain says our rifles are better,” he said. He glanced down at his pistol. “Their old flintlocks aren't worth shit in this rain. They keep misfiring. They've charged us three times, and we've put them down every time. I'll bet there's a thousand dead Mexicans out there.”

Another cannon burst sounded from across the village, and almost instantaneously there was an explosion above our heads, followed by a crumbling slide of adobe shell. A sifting, whispering powder poured down on us, the adobe returning to the sand and clay from which it had come.

Shepherd cursed and drew the big overcoat more tightly around him. I expected him to answer the cannon's fire with fire of his own, but instead his eyes only narrowed and he marked that cannon's position, too, keeping his own unannounced and lethal.

He turned to look at me almost as if surprised that I was still there. I was just about to let him know of my plans, and to ask if there were any messages he wanted me to convey to his family, when something in his demeanor stopped me.

I think he could see that I was done, that I had no heart or desire to kill any more of the enemy, and there was pity and scorn in his look, and even anger.

Why, you sonofabitch,
I thought, with a flash of fire I had not even felt yet for the enemy.
In friendship and loyalty, I have avoided judging you, and now you're daring to judge me.

“Is there something you wanted to tell the captains?” he asked. He glanced in the direction from which I had come. “Are the other posts secure?”

I looked down at the empty bowl beside his portal.

I was just about ready to say to hell with it: the war, and all my old loyalties to this neighbor, this childhood friend. Sure, Sinnickson had saved his life, but the life of the child I had known was as gone as if the enemy had already claimed him back in Laredo.

I stared at him a moment longer, preparing to leave and to start my own new life, when Ampudia's and Canales's men sounded their fourth charge, sending two whole battalions. Fisher's cunning in keeping the precise extent of our southern advance secret had had an unintended consequence, for now the Mexicans were storming over the top of our farthest adobe, believing it to be unoccupied.

We were obligated to cut them down.

At Shepherd's command, a great number of men whom I had not earlier seen in our adobe came rushing forward, gripping a rifle and a pistol in each hand, and they filled every available crack and crevice in our structure. Someone jammed a rifle into my hands but then shoved me aside, and once more I found myself crouched at an open window, firing into the glimmering, sporadic lightning-light of the war, with the staccato images of the surprised Mexican soldiers throwing their arms skyward as they were shredded by our fusillade, suddenly lifting their arms as if to fly.

We cut them all down, the entire first wave and much of the second; but as we were reloading, the third and then the fourth wave was still coming, slowed only by their stumbling in the darkness over the mountains of their own dead. We could smell the odor of our gunpowder and the dust of crushed and shattered adobe all around us—but there was also another odor, the scent of gallons of blood—and then the Mexicans were at our walls, trying to press themselves through the doors and windows, so that we were having to beat them back with swords and the butts of our pistols and rifles. Ewen Cameron had gone out into an enclosed courtyard and was tearing loose the cobbles from a stone wall, passing them into the house for us to use as weapons in the hand-to-hand fighting.