Diezmo (16 page)

 

One day, unknown to us, Charles McLaughlin's hidden charcoal sketches were discovered, with their damning portrayals of our indolence: the glee of the truants sharing stalks of grapevine, the contented smiles of the slumberers. The evidence, too, of my own ambitious labors, making my way through the boneyard of a river with both arms wrapped around a boulder as large as my chest, with the veins in my arms, neck, and forehead leaping out like deltas and rivers themselves.

The next day, after allowing us an hour's head start, Colonel Bustamente sent a pair of guards down the trail to check on us.

Our sentry that day was Daniel Drake Henrie, who had already fallen asleep at his post, and, having been somewhat an acolyte of Ewen Cameron, upon being discovered—upon being interrupted from a most pleasant dream, he was to tell us later—he responded not with shame and guilt but insolence, hurling insults at the two guards.

Down on the river, the sleeping men awoke from their naps and looked up to see the guards beating Daniel Henrie with their musket butts, clubbing him to the ground and then continuing to strike at him—no dream this, now. As it appeared they were likely to kill him, we charged up the trail with our shovels and pickaxes, twenty of us in chains versus two of them with but single-shot muskets and small derringers suited for little more than killing squirrels or rats. The guards backed away from the bruised and bleeding Henrie and hurried off for reinforcements.

Some of the men were all for breaking our chains and trying another escape, fearing we would be executed, while others of us thought we would merely be punished, and argued moderation, counseling that we would not be executed yet, for Bustamente still needed us to complete the road.

“If they try to whip me, I will kill them,” Henrie said. “I will not let a Mexican whip me.”

In the end we remained where we were—we did not go back down to the river to work, but waited at the top of the trail for the new muster of guards to come hurrying back—and when they arrived, twenty strong, shouting and firing their muskets, we stood our ground, fearing the worst.

They surrounded us, jabbing at Henrie with their bayonets, but did not strike him again, and instead escorted us roughly up the trail, back to Bustamente's road.

The work groups were changed after that—only Charles McLaughlin and I were allowed to remain on river duty—and not only were we allowed to keep traveling to the river with the new workers, but we had our chains removed as well, so that I was free to range as far as I wished in search of the most beautiful stones and boulders, while Charles McLaughlin was free to continue his sketches and document the various stages in the fruition of Bustamente's grand dream. Bustamente alternated McLaughlin between the river and the road, and the canyon and the quarry.

Just as McLaughlin had a haunting eye for detail in his illustrations, I was developing an eye for stone, not merely seeking the most interesting individual boulders—a stone the precise size and shape of a skull, complete with two water-worn sockets where the eyes would have been, only slightly off-kilter; a long slab shaped like a park bench, requiring the heft of four men; a boulder curiously shaped like the nation of Mexico, and another, lying not all that far away, even more curiously shaped like Texas—but also developing an aptitude for the placement of one rock against another. I traveled farther and farther upstream, searching for finer and more curious rocks, ranging for hours at a time—spending half a day sometimes, to return with only one good stone, and downstream, too, passing beneath the leafy green canopy of sunlit bower and birdsong.

The road was beginning to achieve a brilliance that not even Bustamente had imagined, with the thread of fantastic stones running like a seam through the predetermined elegance and simplicity of his design, and Bustamente—a man of integrity and generosity—gave me credit for my small share of the work. He saw me as the kind of man he wanted to believe we were all capable of becoming—transformed, under the benevolent shaping hands of the superior landscape and culture of Mexico, into men more civil, dignified, genteel. For a while, I even believed it myself.

 

She found me on the river two weeks later. She and her friends came to the river to wash their laundry. I had been working in a downstream stretch of the river that week—had discovered a seam of red boulders that crossed the river like the transverse slice of a knife across a piece of fruit—and I had petitioned Colonel Bustamente for the use of, and had received, a heavy iron pike with which to extricate some of the fractured stones from within this band. I was stacking and sorting them on the bank to dry in the sun.

I had followed the seam of red rock out into the sun-warmed boulder field where the river had once been, and was striking at a melon-shaped stone that seemed perfect for the fit I was envisioning. It was a lot of work for one rock, and the labor consisted mainly of pulverizing the surrounding jigsaw grip of the other rocks all around it. Each time I struck a rock with the heavy pike, the canyon echoed with the sound of the blow, cold iron against hot stone, and little sparks tumbled from the rock like flashing windblown blossoms. The scent and taste of burnt rock dust was dense around me. I liked the smell, and I liked working steadily, rhythmically, encouraging the earth to give up that one stone, though there were enough pauses in my work—stopping to take my damp shirt off to hang it over a creosote bush to dry, mopping the stinging sweat from my eyes with the crook of my arm, looking up at the dizzying distant sight of a caracara circling high above on a heated updraft from the same rocks in which I labored, as if in an oven—for anyone who heard my sledgings to know that it was a human who toiled and not a machine.

She and her friends had chosen a place farther downstream, but hearing the noise she walked upstream nearly a mile to find me. I saw her from a long way off. She had been advancing whenever I was occupied with the sledge, then pausing whenever I stopped—but even as I was working I noticed from the corner of my vision the uneven movement, the advancement, of her white dress against the riverside cottonwoods. Thinking at first that the white was the uniform of one of Bustamente's guards sent to spy on me, I kept working.

But I saw as she drew closer that she was a woman, then a young woman, and then I saw that it was her, and even though the rock was almost out—one or two more blows—I stopped, sweat-drenched and breathing hard, like a horse, and I leaned against the iron staff of the pry bar and waited for her to come that final distance.

“
El constructor de caminos,
” she said, smiling. She looked around. “
Donde está tu camino?
”

 

We talked for an hour, mostly about the routine details of her life—her schooling, her family, her chores and tasks—tut also about the larger abstractions, our loves and fears and beliefs.

She had learned nearly as much English from her father as I had Spanish from my captors, and she let me know quickly that she thought it was awful that we were having to work as slaves.

And yet, she said, for certain crimes and sins, there needed to be punishment.

“It's not the colonel's fault,” I told her. “He's actually pretty good to us. He's treated us better than anyone else so far.” I shrugged. “We chose to come into your country.”

Her eyes sought mine. “Why?” she asked.

“I don't know,” I said. I wanted to make a joke of it and say something like
To see you,
but I was seized with an overwhelming sadness.

“How many men have you killed?” she asked. Not
Have you killed any?
but
How many?

I shook my head and looked away. “I can't remember who I was before I came across the river,” I said.

She started to say something, but we heard voices, the sound of her friends coming to search for her, having become worried when they could no longer hear the sound of the iron bar against the stones. They paused by my cairn of red rocks some distance away from where Clara and I were sitting by the riverbed, and waited, and watched. She rose, dusted the grit from her dress, and asked if I would be here the next day.

“I can try,” I said. “I will tell the colonel I need more red rocks.” I looked around at the garden of stone, an eternity of stone.

She laughed—her teeth seemed large, framed by that smile—and holding her skirt above her ankles she walked carefully through the boulders, back to where her friends were waiting. When she reached them she smiled again and waved.

I watched them until they were gone, and only then did the sound of my sledging return to the canyon, as I still tried to pry free from the earth that one perfect stone, and then the next.

I worked until dusk, until the first fireflies began to appear and the tree frogs in the reeds and groves of cottonwoods began to trill, and the bullfrogs began their nighttime drumming. I was supposed to be back up on the road by that time and was still an hour's walk away, but it did not matter, this one evening: Colonel Bustamente trusted me.

 

Back at our garrison that first night, I told Charles McLaughlin what had happened. He said that all the other men, including Colonel Bustamente, believed that I had simply fallen asleep from having worked so hard; and it was not until I urged him to let the others continue to believe that story that he began to think I was telling the truth.

I visited with him about her for a long time—relayed not just the bits and pieces of our broken conversation—the general trading of news about siblings, friends and family, life histories, likes and dislikes. The words “truth” and “liberty” and “justice” were easily translatable across the two languages—
verdad, libertad, justicia—
but it had taken a bit more work to discuss our mutual admiration for other qualities such as courage, beauty, and the strength of one's heart. There were at least two kinds of strength, we had agreed, looking at the pile of red stones I had assembled; at least two.

“Do you love her?” Charles McLaughlin wanted to know. “Are you falling in love with her?”

“Yes,” I said, answering the second question first, and then the first. “No. I don't know. It's that, but something more, something else. I don't know what,” I said. “I don't know what it is.”

“But it's everything, isn't it?” he asked. “It consumes you, like you're on fire, always burning?”

“Yes,” I said, “that's what it's like. Have you known that feeling?”

He looked down at the sketch he was working on. “I have, and still do,” he said. He brushed an eraser crumb from his sketch, then furrowed his brow, frowned, and touched his pencil to the page. It was a sketch of the fort, our jail. “That's not love,” he said, still studying his sketch, so that at first he appeared to be speaking of his illustration. “That's obsession. Still, it'll certainly get you out of bed in the morning.”

 

Though I hurled myself at the work, most of the men continued to resist. They cut slits into their bags so that as they ferried sand and gravel and cobble from the river to the road they left behind a sifting, wandering trickle, sometimes arriving at their destination with less than half a bag. Some of the men feigned injury or illness, though the Mexicans dealt with that by treating them universally with a diet of cornmeal gruel and castor oil, taking their clothes away, and confining them to a hospital bed, while outside the spring winds continued to rattle and the leaves shimmered in the sunlight.

Colonel Bustamente, exasperated, resisted the calls from his superiors to impose even harsher discipline, and instead tried to implement incentives to reward good workers, such as being fitted with lighter chains, or even having their chains removed completely. And it surprised me, if not him, that the men's work did improve, as did the quality of the road, which was drawing still more praise from Bustamente's superiors, all to his credit.

 

She did not show up the next day, or the next. Never had I felt so captive. A week passed like a century, and then another. I felt sure that she would find me again—would come walking back up the riverbank, picking her way through the bleached field of rocks and into the skein of red rocks.

And as I waited, I set about building her a gift of sorts: a little house, scarcely larger than a hut. I built it with the best stones I could find. There were various minerals in the riverbed—tiny flakes and nuggets of fool's gold, copper and silver, as well as reddish crystals that might have been rubies and garnets—and I made a rough mortar of clay and sand and inlaid the windows and doorjambs with these discoveries. The walls were dry stone. I fitted the stones together tightly, in a way that was pleasing and calming to the eye, and made a snugly latticed roof using the polished spars of driftwood. Numerous of the limbs and branches of the cottonwoods, in particular, seemed nearly indestructible, with green sprouts and buds and branches continuing to grow from the main corpse of the limb, even after so rough a downriver journey, and by watering the latticework of the roof I was able to encourage these sucker-sprouts to continue growing, so that they wrapped around one another like vines, binding the roof even more tightly. Soon the thatched covering was shaded with the newly emergent leaves of those horizontal cottonwood spars, as well as the dappled shadow-and-light cast from those trees still standing beside the small house.

I made a bed inside the hut, using driftwood slats cushioned with moss and leaves. My stonework blended so well with the natural, jumbled stone chaos of the floodplain, and the thatched roof merged so well with the riverside forest, that the tiny house was barely noticeable from a distance, even to my own eye. Sometimes I would find myself looking right at it without realizing I was seeing it. Small birds fluttered amid the leaves of the roof, flew out over the thin ribbon of the river's shallow center and hovered, angel-like, daring and snapping at rising hatches of aquatic insects.