Diezmo (12 page)

That night we lay collapsed in the high desert. No one spoke, no fires were built, no sentries were posted. It was our fourth day without water. It seemed that all the water in the world was gone.

 

Overnight, John Alexander, who was sleeping but a short distance away from me, dreamt of water. In the morning, he told us that in his dream he was back at his home in Brazoria County, where there was a great feast in his honor, with friends and family, but he kept pushing all the wonderful food aside.

“I craved water, only water,” he said, “and when this was forthcoming I emptied each jar as it was brought to me and then called for more.” He shook his head slowly, exhibiting the same torpor that had afflicted Bigfoot Wallace. “Each draught seemed only to inflame my thirst, and yet no one of the vast company present seemed astonished at the amount of water I drank. My thirst was unquenchable.”

We all felt a great envy that he had received such offering, even if only in a dream, and I felt a great loneliness, that I had been sleeping near him but had received no such dream, that it had passed over me and chosen him.

And when he, too, split off from our larger group, choosing instead to try to crawl back down off the mountain, no one tried to discourage him, and an older man, an ex-officer from Zachary Taylor's campaign in New Mexico, Major George Oldham, joined him, as did a few others. We watched as they crawled away across the high desert like animals, disappearing over the rim of the mountain, looking like a line of slow-moving bears: disappearing, bound for the salt-desert below.

They found water. Gnawing again at the roots and eating even the thin, salty soil itself, they had continued descending until they stumbled finally onto a waterfall gushing straight out of the mountain.

There was no prefatory seep or spring above it, but simply a great cannonade of water jetting from a port, a rift in the mountains, and splattering onto the rocks below, in which, over the centuries or millennia, the water had carved a wide and deep pool before trailing away back down the mountainside, running as a small creek for a while and then disappearing back into the soil.

It had been running just a thousand feet below us all along.

John Alexander and his group spent the rest of the day lying in that pool, bathing and drinking and eating the last of the now rotten horse meat one of them had stashed in his pack. It was not the feast of his dream of the night before, he told them: it was better.

In the meantime—never dreaming of Alexander's success (neither did we see the smoke from their cooking fires), we staggered north, still clinging to the mountain's spine, unwilling to give up any of our hard-earned vantage. Two more of our number—Buster Toops and O. M. Martin—
drifted off and never returned. They, unlike so many dozens of others, did survive, and upon their return to Texas their accounts were well publicized, recorded into the strange vault of written and remembered history, while the exploits, the failures and successes, of so many others vanished unknown or were never told.

Toops and Martin licked rainwater from little depressions in the scooped shallows of rocks over on the shadier north side of the mountain, when they could find them. They would hike until they collapsed into sleep, then awaken and hike, again for days at a time, before collapsing again, until one day they came upon a feral ox.

Martin, unlike almost all the other men, had retained his musket; he killed the animal, and once again they drank its blood, sucking it straight from the wound. When they had gotten out all that they could in that manner, they used the tiny flint from the musket to gut the ox and were finally able to open it enough to be able to extract and roast the liver and a few other organs.

They came eventually into a little valley, where they encountered a few small, remote ranches. Here they were treated with kindness and hospitality, and with their stolen silver they purchased food and supplies and then veered north and east, back toward Laredo, the site of our original plundering.

They reached the river and floated across on a fallen log, shouting and whooping. Their joyous splashing alerted a few townspeople, who, believing themselves to be under attack again, responded with a volley of gunfire that successfully steered Toops and Martin away from town and back into the brush. But it was native brush, and native soil, and they staggered on with great joy to San Antonio, where their selective tale was received with awe.

John Alexander and Major Oldham's waterfall gro\ip had continued on, falling apart in the meantime, dwindling and scattering, lost and dying in the desert until finally only Alexander and Oldham remained. Oldham found a beehive and was mauled by the bees when he tried to scoop the honey out with his bayonet—they followed him on a dead run for two miles before he collapsed, unable to go any farther, and was very nearly stung to death. He was ill for several days—Alexander stayed with him and cared for him—and no sooner had they started moving again than Alexander fell ill, wracked by fever, and Oldham stayed and cared for him.

When they finally reached the Rio Grande, they dismantled an old stock pen, built a pole raft, and floated across in moonlight, back to the freedom of the Republic of Texas, although not yet back to safety.

The village of Laredo had, via Toops and Martin's accounts in San Antonio, received word of the expedition's escape and had posted lookouts. Alexander and Oldham had to skirt the town and hide in the brush to avoid capture by the local militia. It took them another month to reach San Antonio, where they too were received as heroes.

 

Still others split off from Cameron and Wallace's group. They struck out on their own, descending back into the desert, although they failed to encounter the waterfall that Alexander and Oldham had found.

It was still cool up in the mountains, but out on the desert, the weather had turned warmer. We could see the shimmering heat waves rising from the desert below, and could see where many of the men had tossed their threadbare blankets on top of scrub brush to make crude tents, and then crawled beneath them to die. Others scratched at the thin soil with their fingernails, digging as if searching for buried treasure; but we saw then, as they wallowed in that freshly dug depression, that they were simply trying to use that brief coolness of the newly exposed soil to take some of the radiant heat from their fevered, baking bodies.

They appeared to be eating the cool dirt they had just dug, applying it to their cracked and blistered mouths. They drank their own urine.

There were others strung out all over the mountainside and crawling around in the valleys. The mountain was bleeding men. I don't know why we stayed on top. Cameron and Wallace appeared confused, directionless, almost lifeless. I tried to formulate a plan, tried to dream an idea, a strategy, anything that might give us hope, no matter how improbable, but could think of nothing, could instead only desire, like the others, water. Even a single jar would have been enough, even a single swallow.

Looking back at the trail of our misery, we could see rafts of vultures, looking like columns of black smoke, circling the ruin of horses and mules several miles distant. Anyone could look up at the mountain and see where we had been and where we were going.

Indeed, it turned out, entire villages had been observing the stupor of our progress and our descent. Barragan's men, now well rested, well watered, well armed, had ridden around to the north, knowing that that was where the mountain would spit us out. They were waiting patiently there, at the mouth of the Cañon de San Marcos, where they began snaring Texans one by one and two by two, like fish in a weir.

We who were left remained far atop the mountain, watching the soldiers below, still waiting for us. Our upper group had dwindled from seventy to twenty. We had no water, no food, no weapons, and it was not going to rain; neither did it seem that any divine intervention was going to reach us. Charles McLaughlin had stopped sketching and instead sat numbly, staring, as we all were, at the smoke from the soldiers' fires far below.

There was nothing to do but surrender, no other alternative in the world if we were to have another chance at life, yet Wallace and Cameron seemed unable to discuss this fact, and I saw that it was up to me to broach the subject, that it was my responsibility to try to save myself, as well as the tatter of men scattered around me.

I fingered the beans in my pocket. The men were dying, boiling on the rocks, desiccating like withered salamanders; I was not sure they had the strength to descend, even if they could be persuaded.

“If we are to have any hope of fighting again,” I said, “we must survive.” My voice was a croak, and I could see now that many of the men did not even understand what I was talking about; that although they had seen the activity below and witnessed the smoke rising from the soldiers' cooking fires, their minds were no longer making even the simplest of connections. Issues such as freedom or captivity no longer existed for them. There was just one thing in the world: the next rattling breath, followed by another, followed by another.

Cameron bowed his chin to his chest, then shook his head slowly. Wallace reached over and put a hand on his shoulder, then rose and went around to each of the fallen men, touching them lightly, and one by one, we rose, all except Cameron, and proceeded down the mountain, limping and wobbling, toward the smoke. When I paused to look back, I saw that Cameron had finally risen and was following, and although he was bullheaded and often violent beyond reason, I felt a wave of guilt at being responsible, even partially, for the surrender of so uncompromising a man.

Skeletons already, we stumbled down the mountain, falling often and helping each other up, making our way toward the distant threads of smoke. When we arrived in the camp and saw the too familiar sight of our comrades housed once again in makeshift corrals, we were rewarded for our surrender with a few sips of water. Colonel Barragan escorted Wallace and Cameron away from the rest of the skeletons and placed them in their own separate corral.

From time to time we would look across at them, peering through our rails to where the two big men sat hunch-shouldered and conversing, and as we recovered and felt the flow of life returning to us, many of the men allowed that they felt awful and lamented that they had not stayed on the main road all the way home, as the Englishman had advised.

 

For the next few days, Barragan's cavalry scoured the countryside, bringing in stragglers. The Mexicans had gathered several wild longhorns, and they slaughtered some of these and fed us. After we had eaten the meat, the soldiers then prepared us for another march by binding our wrists and ankles with strips of damp hide cut from the same cattle. The intestines of the slaughtered animals were turned inside out and given to us to use for water vessels. We filled them and hung them around our necks, and as we resumed our marching, southward again toward that coppery sun, the sloshing of the water in those intestines made the same sound it must have made in the cattle, back when they had still been living.

And still our numbers kept diminishing. Two of our men, Priest Gibbons and Crandall Nash, crawled out from beneath the corral one night, sneaked into the water reserves, and drank all they could hold, and then died in agony a few hours later, their systems shocked into exploding.

 

The soldiers marched us toward the nearest jail, which was at Saltillo; we could not have made it all the way to the fort, the prison, at Hacienda del Salado. And even at that, it was a difficult march. Our captors were alternatively frustrated or made compassionate by our slow progress. One day a soldier might offer any of us a hand up, assisting us from a sitting position, when it was time to march again, and the next day the same soldier might give the same prisoner but a jaunty sneer, signifying the smug knowledge that no good end lay ahead for the captive. One day the soldiers would knock us sprawling to the ground with the butts of their muskets, and the next day they would be inquiring about our health, soliciting water and extra rations of food for us from the caravan's new leader, General Francisco Mejia. (In time-honored military tradition, Colonel Barragan had been busted down in rank for allowing us to escape.)

Some of the soldiers even got off their horses and walked so that the more emaciated of us could ride.

Our physician, Dr. Sinnickson, expired, falling off his horse as he did so, and it was a lonely feeling indeed, gathering around him and not knowing how to help him who had been helping us.

 

The pairings of history, the inescapable relationship between predator and prey; the way two oxen pull a plow so much more powerfully than one. I came slowly to understand that two of anything are required for the movement of history, and—no matter whether allies or combatants, friends or foes—there must be pairings. Otherwise, all is stillness, and latent powers lie unsummoned, like a planted field that receives no water.

After his defeat at San Jacinto, the Mexican president, Santa Anna, had been living in semiretirement at his Vera Cruz estate. Weary of battle, he was spending the bulk of his time raising enormous preening peafowl. He raised fighting gamecocks as well, which he would pit against one another in battles td the death.

Santa Anna had kept up a regular and, at times, warm correspondence with the general who had defeated him at San Jacinto, the Texas president, Sam Houston. It was Houston who had given Santa Anna back his freedom following his humiliating loss. (Shackled and hectored by the Texans after that battle, Santa Anna had tried to commit suicide with an overdose of laudanum. A Texas physician, James Phelps—whose son, Orlando, ironically, was still with us on this expedition—had pumped the poison from his stomach and cared for him afterward, until he could be released.)

Santa Anna would have been unlikely to order our execution without first consulting with Sam Houston, but Santa Anna was no longer always sentient, or available, disappearing for days at a time; in his absence he left the country to a fierce and impulsive associate, General Nicolás Bravo.