The Diezmo Read online

  These words were from a man who had been kicked out of Tennessee for alleged marital scandals, stripped from the U.S. Senate for alcoholism, and had gone to live with the Indians in east Texas before it was a nation; who had recovered, in that wilderness, and who had gone on to become a chief of the Cherokees, and then the president of a new nation. It was just one sentence, and perhaps a small one—twenty-four words—but in the end, it was all the difference between what was intended and what was done.

  We rode south, led by Green and Fisher, the two sometimes glancing at each other but usually staring straight ahead, as if afraid some of us might look back toward home and change our minds. But in the beginning, as we rode south, searching for mysterious bandits, infidels against the republic, we were certain we would win. It was a feeling like the Holy Spirit descending. Your hands and feet tingle. You feel that all is predestined and you have prepared for glory. You cannot imagine loss or the anonymity brought by time.

  We secured beef from the ranches and farms we passed. Everything we saw was ours—ours to defend, and then ours to possess. Shepherd and I shared a tent with two boys from Elgin and Navasota. Each night we cleaned our weapons and sharpened our swords. The sound of the steel seemed like the sound of judgment itself, and we were overcome with wonder and relief at having been chosen. We would lead remarkable lives. We had been rescued.

  2

  Glory

  WE SEETHED WITH the gold light within us, rode across burnished plains gilded in November light, with the dead dry grasses rustling in the north wind. With the Comanches up north hunting buffalo and the Mexicans on the run back behind their border, the country was ours. It was wonderful to see new country, and more wonderful to be in possession of it: to gain ownership of it merely by the act of looking.

  Green and Fisher were our captains, but among us were other natural leaders. Bigfoot Wallace, six feet four inches tall and gaunt as a whippet, named for his size-sixteen boots, had been a Texas Ranger—never an officer, because of his uncivilized ways, but a learned soldier nonetheless, in every way the equal of either of our captains and in many ways their superior. He drew a goodly number of men about him at the campfire each night to hear tales of his exploits from past campaigns. He seemed to be a peaceable giant, though it was also said that he had never gone more than a week in his life without engaging in some sort of battle, and it seemed to me, in those first days, that I could see that change beginning to come over him—an abiding and overarching good humor and generosity becoming slightly more dulled with each passing evening. An anxiety rose in him as day after day passed by without war.

  Also prominent within our regiment was the Scotsman Ewen Cameron, who was as dumb as a box of rocks. His strength was so prodigious as to seem supernatural, and like Wallace, he was anxious when in the absence of war. He was less cunning than Wallace, and his anxiety was fed by his fervor. He was a soldier of the Lord, eager to judge and punish, and, in his simplicity, desperate.

  And like Bigfoot Wallace, Cameron too had scores of soldiers who gathered around him each evening. And among us was a third group, Lieutenant Somervell’s, composed of those who seemed destined to become the politicians and leaders of the republic.

  Lieutenant Somervell was another former Texas Ranger—though unlike Wallace, who had been a mere scout, he was a military man through and through. Why Green and Fisher had been assigned leadership, while Somervell, with his precise and military bearing, his caution and dignity, seemed only a participant on the expedition was unclear. I supposed Somervell and others like him could not be kept from war, whether or not their qualities were fully recognized.

  We settled into three distinct camps: Fisher’s marauders, Green’s yeoman nondescripts, and Somervell’s dandies. Each man had a chance to tell the others his story if he was fortunate to have one worth telling, though there were many of us who were silent.

  For my part, what to tell these rough and angry men: that I was a farmer and a fisherman?

  By six short years, the youngest among us had missed the Alamo, and San Jacinto, and the birth of a nation. There was none among us who did not still feel the righteous pride of the victory at San Jacinto, or the pride of the courage and resolve we heard had been displayed at the Alamo during those thirteen days of siege.

  John Alexander—no relation to me—had been traveling with Green for weeks, always, it seemed, mere hours behind the enemy. It was Green’s fire at which Shepherd and I usually sat, and although John Alexander was too reticent to speak up at the evening storytelling sessions, we learned from him that some days they had been so close to the enemy that coals from their cooking fires had still been glowing and the horse turds in their makeshift corrals still so warm as to be drawing gnats and flies.

  He had learned much in the short time he’d spent with Green, he said, but he was growing frustrated, afraid we would never find or catch up to the enemy.

  “Those fires,” Shepherd asked him, “how did you know they were from the Mexicans?”

  John Alexander looked confused as he considered it, and searched for an answer. “Because Captain Green said they were,” he said finally.

  There were so many others like John Alexander who feared we would never find the enemy, would never engage in combat—that the bandits had already crossed back over the border, and that peace, like a curse, was settling in. But Fisher, Green, and Somervell told us not to worry, there would be more war.

  Sitting around Green’s fire, we could hear the singing around Somervell’s fire, could see the flame-backed silhouettes of men dancing and cheering. His military men were cut from a different cloth than were we recruits and Fisher’s hard cases, but during our journey our differences began to fade, even as our varied desires and motivations began to divide us.

  We drifted south, finding occasional traces of the bandits—a whisper in one village, the tale of a pilfered cow in another, the rumor of a stolen ferry, the sound of gunfire, the remains of a large campfire, three days old. I was filled with unease, the sense of having made a poor choice, and I think Shepherd felt it as well. From time to time he looked questioningly over at me.

  The sky above us was huge. The tall drying grass of late autumn and early winter rustled before us in waves. The sight of the wind moving across land balanced my unease. I stared forward across the plains and avoided Fisher’s and Green’s eyes—especially Fisher’s. Did they ever look back at their five hundred and consider which ones, or how many, might not return?

  We basked in the attentions of the farmers and ranchers. We were given bushels of bread and nuts, chickens and calves, fruits and vegetables. The farther we traveled, the more accustomed we became to such treatment, so that when we did not receive it, there was resentment. Fisher’s men, in particular, were quick to take offense, grumbling that they were risking their lives for ungrateful sodbusters and hayseeds, and even some of Somervell’s men, despite the lieutenant’s obvious displeasure, grew more and more like marauders. It was an astonishment to me how much we required to eat, and the swath we cut, with well over three hundred horses—twelve hundred hooves—cutting our way through the brush, raising sand and dust and eating everything in sight.

  Otto Williams was the first man I saw take something without the formality of asking. One day he was near the lead of our ranks as we rode into a small settlement north of Laredo, supposedly looking for the bandits but actually looking for food. It took so much to keep us going that we were less like a military expedition than a very large and extended hunting trip. From the very beginning, I noticed that there were some who were not so much interested in the search for bandits as they were simply in the hunting and the war.

  Otto Williams was one of these. As we rode into the little settlement, the townspeople spread to either side of the road and held their possessions close to them: a basket of poor-looking chickens, a sack of flour over each shoulder, a goat on a rope—it was midmorning on a market day—and although they were simply going about their busine
ss, the impression it gave, or could have given, I suppose, to a man like Otto Williams, was that these people were coming out to the street to give us these things, that a feast was being prepared in our honor.

  And for the first time, without bartering or even asking, Otto Williams simply rode over to a villager who had a young bull tethered to a heavy rope—the bull nearly as large as the old man, whose hair was completely silver—and after drawing his sword from his saddle, Otto Williams brought it down quickly and forcefully. Just as he did so, another rider shifted in front of me, and I thought Otto Williams was only severing the rope that bound the animal, but then I saw that he had struck the animal itself, his razor-sharp sword passing halfway through the animal’s neck. The red blade lifted again, bright in the sun, without a sound, and the old man fell back in terror while Williams struck a second and third time before the head—still attached to its halter—fell to the dusty ground, and the animal knelt and fell over.

  Williams dismounted and gutted the animal as he would a deer shot on the prairie. He took care not to get his hands or clothing bloody, and when he was done, he gestured to one of his friends to help him lift the carcass onto his horse—as if he intended to eat the whole thing by himself—and then we rode on, silent and tense and changed, with a few more hours of food procured; fuel for the coming war, if only we could find the war.

  Some of us were homesick. I myself was troubled by the slightly uneasy feeling that, even though this was a grand and glorious adventure, as well as a just cause, I was leaving behind a land almost as dear to me as life. As we descended into a country of brush and thorns, we missed the soft green hills of home, and as we traveled away from our new country toward one that had been a millennium in the making, we started to see more and more Mexican faces in the villages near the border, and we felt further misgivings.

  “When we get home,” I told Shepherd one night after dinner, “no matter what time of year it is, I want to go back up to the James and go fishing. I’ll let you fish the hole first.” I was thinking of the deep water near where we liked to camp and where there were always fish.

  James Shepherd looked frightened, but his face shone with a strange intensity—almost a fever.

  “Fishing,” he snorted. He looked over at the other recruits. “We’re going hunting. Hunting men,” he said.

  But none of them paid him any mind, knowing it was only bravado—he was so young—and I knew him better than to take his rebuke seriously. He was only trying to find his place.

  Often we spent our time around the campfire writing letters to those we had left behind, exaggerating both our hardships and the heroes’ welcomes we received. And not having met the enemy, we speculated about victory. Travis Parvin, a twenty-year-old from Goliad, with his ambition set on the Texas Senate, wrote to his parents that his “unswerving faith in our own fighting abilities, and in the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxon race, has stilled all doubts of our success in this upcoming war.” Others spoke of the “miscegenation of the Indian and Hispanic peoples,” which had created “a lower breed rendered all the more inferior by a hot, tropical climate which leaves them listless and phlegmatic.” Some of the men carried leatherbound journals with elegant fountain pens, and wrote increasingly as the campaign advanced and their boredom grew. Whenever we paused, I’d see one or more of them scribbling away, dipping quill tip cautiously in the inkwell, shielding it and the journal from the blowing grit. The illiterates in our brigade crouched beside the writers, studying the flow of sentences, attempting to discern order and meaning, mystified by the process.

  The farther south we got, the more James Shepherd and I talked about death.

  In the daytime, Shepherd projected nonchalance, indifference. “If I don’t make it back, Jim,” he told me, “I want you to have my gun, give my horse to my youngest brother, and tell my family that I died bravely.”

  In the evenings, he was less confident.

  Up on the James River, he had always been exceedingly cautious about the possibility of encountering Comanches. That was understandable, but he had also worried about lesser things—deep-water river crossings, sleeping out at night, and the possibility of getting ill from eating fish that wasn’t cooked enough or from dishes that weren’t clean. At home, his father had been increasingly critical of his work, so Shepherd was enjoying his first taste of freedom, but an anger was blossoming in him: all his native cautions and fears were finding root in a new, more toxic substrate. We rode on Green’s side of the regiment, though Fisher, on the right, searched us out with his yellow eyes.

  A half-dozen cliques formed, with cross-pollination occurring daily—subtle betrayals and disappointments, social defections and misunderstandings, intentional disrespect or challenges, and ceaseless miscommunication. Some of us were perceived to be more valuable, more vital to the cause, than others. And we boys from the country were the most expendable, the most unnoticeable of all. Occasionally, even our patriotism was questioned.

  “What are your goals?” the interpreter Alfred Thurmond—one of the important ones—asked me and Shepherd one evening, having sensed our weakness, or softness, with our having said hardly a word—an interpreter of silence.

  “To do good for my country,” I said, with the full earnestness of youth. “To send a message to the enemy, and to make a stand.”

  Shepherd’s answer was more terse, as if he had been pondering and hungering for the question. “Respect,” he said. And Alfred Thurmond nodded, as if only that one goal could have a chance of coming true.

  James Shepherd watched Captain Fisher with an intensity that bordered on the hypnotic. When Fisher lifted his canteen to drink, Shepherd did the same. When Fisher lifted a hoof of his horse to clean it, Shepherd examined his mount’s hooves.

  Respect, Shepherd had said. Where might that reside?

  I was unobtrusive, almost invisible, in my unremarkableness, my silence and attentiveness. I had a kind of critical awareness of the way that things not said can occupy more space and possess deeper meaning than the things that are spoken. When the cook was distributing the evening beans or that night’s stew, I was the one overlooked or not seen, by-passed, not given enough or any at all. I was neither threat nor menace to anyone, possessed neither confidence nor brute strength. Even Green, who had recruited me, could never remember my name. “James Shepherd’s friend” was what he and Fisher both called me.

  I learned to trust my instincts and imagination, and I detected an unbraiding of currents between Green and Fisher, as well as confusion and drift among Somervell’s dandies. Even so, I was unprepared for what happened in Laredo.

  We were on our side of the line, among Texans if not yet Americans: we were still our own separate nation. We had not yet decided whether to cross the Rio Grande, which would have been an act of war, but were ostensibly searching for the bandits.

  For days, the powder had been smoldering in all the men. It was Shepherd’s seventeenth birthday, and he and I rode near the back. We hoped we might lay up overnight in Laredo so we could fish the Rio Grande. We had been told it held catfish large enough to swallow dogs.

  We heard a shot—a surprising, unfamiliar sound, different from the tone of any of the weaponry I’d heard from our target practice—and then there was a pause, and I imagined that a gun had gone off by accident or that someone had shot at a snake or perhaps a deer. After that, there was some shouting—just a lone voice at first, but then another, and another—and then several shots together. These were answered by more shots, more shouting, and then the horses and riders around us were wheeling in different directions, some flaring away from us and others riding back past us; and my first thought was that a bear or even a jaguar was charging through our midst, within the thrashing jungle of the horses’ tangled legs. Our horses were rearing and spinning, and bullets whined past. I shortened my reins, leaned into my horse, and found myself looking not for Green or Fisher but for Somervell.

  I turned to shout at Shepherd and saw him get
hit in the shoulder, in the meaty part just below the joint. The bullet slapped his flesh and his mouth dropped open. He was nearly tossed from his horse but only glanced at the wound, then leaned against his horse and pushed hard to rejoin me. Somervell’s men had taken cover in a line of trees on the northwestern edge of town. They climbed off their horses, reined them to branches and trunks, and then hunkered down behind logs and trees, trying to hold their fire. But a few men left their horses and ran into the fray, whooping. They disappeared into the musket smoke, waving their sabers, and were shot dead. One man, spun by the rose blossom on his chest, fell so close to me that I couldn’t shake the feeling that he intercepted a bullet meant for me.

  I turned and saw that Shepherd was still with me. We reached the trees and I leapt off, tied my horse to a limb, grabbed Shepherd’s reins, and helped him down. The gunfire lessened, though seemed more frightening now than when the shooting had started.

  “Hold your fire!” Somervell shouted. Some of his dandies still ran to join the melee and were shot—another crimson boutonniere erupting on a chest, a sudden wide birthmark on a forehead. Others were more fortunate, surviving hits by low-caliber bullets or homemade shrapnel fired from the barrel of ancient pot metal blunderbusses.

  The rest of us stayed crouched and hidden. Shepherd vomited, standing upright, clutching his shoulder, blood streaming through his fingers. He walked in circles, shouting and bending over to regurgitate the morning’s breakfast. He looked frightened and angry, both, and I hurried over and took him farther into the thicket, where I cleaned his shoulder with water from my canteen while he stared at me and his teeth chattered. His arms and legs began to shudder, and he looked at me in amazement and said, “I’m going to die, aren’t I?”

  And though I thought he might, I told him that no, he wasn’t; and this calmed him so that, slowly, he stopped trembling.