Diezmo (8 page)

And though it seemed like ten minutes that we fought in this manner, buying time for our own second wave to reload, it was probably no more than thirty seconds before a hundred of our rifles were answering again, and then a hundred more; and once again, the Mexicans sounded a retreat. Our position was unassailable.

In the silence following their retreat, there was at first only the sound of the injured and the dying, groaning and calling out for help, in the streets of Mier as well as within our own ranks, and the whinnying of injured horses.

We heard a new sound, then, coming from the buildings across the street—a sound like a rushing creek coming from the waterspouts that lined the buildings of commerce. As the rain had stopped, we did not think it was the sound of runoff and feared instead that it might be coal oil—that they were planning to try to smoke or burn us out.

It was almost first light. In the recovery period for the opposing armies, the regrouping and strategizing, we listened to that newer rushing water sound, and as the gray light of day revealed to us the carnage, we saw, beyond the hundreds of dead Mexicans and the scores of dead horses, that the waterspouts were running red with the blood of all the snipers we had killed atop those buildings. The red rivers of their passing were pouring out onto the cobblestones of the street, and the village dogs, gaunt as skeletons, were tottering among the dead and dying, lapping at the pools and puddles of blood between the cobblestones and drinking straight from the fountain of the drain spouts, their muzzles and whiskers red-splashed.

Now a lone upright, uninjured soldier appeared in the plaza, walking toward us and waving a white flag of surrender, and several among Fisher's command, still drunk on the orgy of blood lust, were keen to cut him down as he approached.

Even as Fisher was ordering them to wait, half a hundred rifles were being cocked, heated barrels bristling from almost every opening, and it was only as the soldier drew nearer that we recognized him as old Ezekiel Smith, who had been captured and made to dress in one of the Mexican uniforms—and the message old Smith carried was not a surrender by the Mexican army nor the town of Mier, but rather a request by Ampudia that
we
surrender.

Green, Fisher, and Cameron, and a few others conferred, and Ezekiel Smith advised, “Do what you want, boys, but they've still got seven hundred or more at the ready, and have sent messengers out to Santa Anna and Huerta and Woll. I believe in another day or two they may have another two or three thousand here.”

He stood waiting for our decision, and now Green's and Fisher's voices rose in argument, and in reversal—Fisher counseling surrender in order to be able to fight another day, while Green, Cameron, Wallace, and others wanted to stay and fight at least one more day.

I looked over at Shepherd, who was still standing by that same slotted window. He had tossed the near-useless pistol aside and held a Texan rifle upright, with the hammer already cocked. He was listening to Fisher, but his silent attitude, the righteous indignation and aggression, indicated that he wanted to stay with Green, and to try to kill, with our remaining hundred and fifty or so, the last seven hundred of the enemy before the reinforcements arrived.

And then what?
I wanted to shout.

He looked like a monster, without that arm and shoulder, wrapped in that big oilcloth coat. He looked like a gigantic vulture. I had plenty left to live for and was all for surrendering with Fisher, beginning the first steps of gaining my life back, if it could still be had—but our sentiments were divided, and we all grumbled and groused and argued while old Smith waited patiently. If we chose to fight, he would stay; if we surrendered, he would take that message back across the street.

Capitalizing immediately on our indecision, two Mexican officers came hurrying across the street with their own white flags, ostensibly to begin discussing the terms of surrender, but also to assess the morale and injuries among us. As they prattled on with their offers, guaranteeing that we would be treated as prisoners of war, they kept peering into our ranks, taking note.

There was a new flurry of hope and ambiguity among us at the news that if we surrendered we would be treated as prisoners of war rather than as the plunderers and marauders we were. All through the chain of fractured adobe homes, the translation was passed along:
They say they will let us live.
We had slain more than thirteen hundred of their men in an evening, and they said they would let us live.

Fisher and Green continued to argue, more vehemently now, and in the new light I could see that Fisher's thumb was completely torn off.

As they argued, it appeared that Green was beginning to sway Fisher into staying and fighting for at least another day.

But several men had pushed past Fisher, surrendering even before any terms had been agreed on; and as that first flow broke ranks, others followed them. Shepherd, Franklin, and Simmons tried to stop them, as did Cameron and Wallace, but they dodged and twisted past them like fish through a rend in a net. Realizing that with this depletion, further resistance would be futile, thumbless Fisher changed his mind and decided once more to surrender, though he had to hurry after the others to do so, catching up with them only after they had already been escorted into General Ampudia's command.

And suddenly, despite my best intentions to depart and wash my hands of the entire expedition, I found myself victim once again of my own inaction, my tendency to sit and wait and observe rather than to act impulsively. I was now one of two dozen soldiers remaining—Green, Cameron, and Wallace among us—holed up in the adobe, our numbers whittled suddenly down to less than a tenth of what they had been when we'd departed LaGrange back in the autumn, so full of verve.

We watched Fisher and a few of his stragglers being bound and carted off—the officers with their flags of surrender, as well as old Ezekiel Smith, had disappeared—how much of my own choice was loyalty and how much simple indecision?—and we set about gathering and loading all of the weapons we could find, knowing that we were going to die but preparing, as soldiers and warriors have, across the millennia, to sell our lives dearly.

Such accounting had worked at the Alamo—had yielded the victory a month later at San Jacinto and the birth of a new nation—and even if it had not made sense, it was the only value left to us, it seemed, so we began settling ourselves into the repetition of that story, that cycle. And among those of us who were left, it seemed to me that I was the only one who was now frightened of dying, that the others were accepting it matter-of-factly—the end of this glorious life—as might animals in a stockyard, being prepared for market.

If these men were pondering the things I was pondering as we waited for the day to unfold, they gave no indication of remorse. Instead, there was only grim resolve, filtered with a kind of firm peace or satisfaction, if not quite contentment, and I marveled at this manifestation of pure courage, and at how far I had to travel yet to reach it myself.

For about half an hour we conversed among ourselves, roundly denouncing Fisher and what was perceived to be his cowardice. At any time, Ampudia and Canales could have stormed us, could have peeled loose a couple hundred men and overwhelmed us, but the Mexicans chose instead to wait, chose not to spend any more of their lives or resources in that ten-to-one barter that we had inflicted so far. Green cursed violently and then spat and announced, “Boys, I think we are going to have to cross over.”

He looked over at me for a second, then shook his head—
it was Fisher's fault; if only Fisher had remained, we might have been able to make a stand
—and with a sadness I have rarely seen in a man, Green nodded to Simmons to prepare and then hoist a white flag; and as it was lifted, the throng of the Mexican army gave a great cheer of victory and came hurrying across the street to “capture” us.

Before they reached us, Green, rather than allowing our, captors to take his rifle from him, began smashing it to pieces with one of the same bloodstained cobbles he had used earlier in the night to crush the head of a Mexican soldier.

Bigfoot Wallace said nothing, though his eyes filled with water. Later in his journal, he would write of the incident: “Never shall I forget the humiliation of my feelings when we were stripped of all our arms and equipment, and led off ignominiously by a guard of swarthy, bandy-legged, contemptible greasers. Delivered over to the tender mercies of these pumpkin-colored Philistines, I could have cried, if I hadn't been so mad.”

 

Even then, not everyone crossed over with us. Whitfield Chalk and Caleb St. Clair, both ministers, had been among those most fiercely committed to standing their ground and fighting—due perhaps to previous arrangements they believed they had made with their Maker—and as the Mexicans hurried across the street to take charge of our surrender, tripping and stumbling over the bodies of their own fallen, Chalk and St. Clair climbed into one of the giant baking ovens in the home in which we were hiding. They would make it out alive, I was to find out much later, waiting until nightfall before slipping out of town and crossing the river, making it all the way back to Texas, where they told President Sam Houston of the heroic events at Ciudad Mier, and of the brave manner in which they had fought their way free of the besiegement.

This was nearly fifty years ago. Once I was able to finally make it back home, for the next five decades I planted crops, season after season, and harvested them, year after year, with very little if anything changing in my fields, even as the world around me changed, or seemed to change.

All wars, like all crops, are the same in that the secret story housed within each seed is undeniable, and that they will always play themselves out in the same manner, again and again, season after season. That belief—that knowledge—is both a terror and an assurance. Terrible, because the content of that seed lies within the hearts of all men, and yet assuring, too, in that we can do little if anything to change it.

 

They kept us under house arrest for a week while we buried the dead, ours and theirs. Woll and Santa Anna never appeared—perhaps having been informed it was no longer necessary, or perhaps they had never been coming in the first place—and some of Ampudia's and Canales's men guarded us as we worked, while others helped us with the burials.

We carried the dead Texans in carts and on our shoulders to a field outside of town, where we carved their names on hastily lashed crosses, prefacing their last names with only one initial to save time; and we buried the Mexipan soldiers in a field at the top of a bluff at the other end of town, laying them down in precise and geometric military fashion.

The digging was easy in the soft sand, and the cold weather was in our favor, as was the dampness of the earth. We were each responsible for burying sixteen soldiers a day—a soldier every hour—and by the middle of the third day we had the task completed, nearly fifteen hundred men buried.

As we worked side by side with our captors and our enemies, a rapport soon developed; and while I would certainly never call it friendship or even affection, there was a kind of respect and peacefulness that accrued as the residue of those labors; and we all took pride, at the end of each day, in the comfort of a difficult job done well.

Early into our work, General Ampudia himself had ridden among us, observing not just the progress of our labors but the features of the men we were burying, as if to memorize them for the inevitable day when their families and loved ones asked for an accounting. He carried a small ledger in his saddlebags, in which he occasionally entered a few phrases and what looked like brief sketches of the men.

General Ampudia had also taken note of the singular sight of Shepherd struggling to excavate his share of the graves—able to plunge the shovel into the loose soil with one hand, but having great difficulty then in lifting the sand out. The deeper Shepherd got, the more sand slid back off his shovel and down the hills of sand surrounding him, so that at times it seemed he was attempting to bury himself rather than any of the fallen enemy. By early afternoon of that first day, Ampudia had ordered one of his lieutenants to give Shepherd a hand up out of his hole, stating that he was a man of mercy and that since clearly we Texans had corrupted a young boy who was not yet old enough to make decisions on his own, he was going to take the boy under his wing.

Fisher protested, climbing out of his hole and laying a hand on Shepherd's arm to detain him. But Shepherd only stared back at him—looking at him as if not recognizing him—and after a moment Shepherd pulled his arm away, and Ampudia laughed, and ordered one of his soldiers to dismount and give Shepherd his horse, while Ampudia walked. The soldier did as he was ordered, knelt and clasped his hands together to form a lower stirrup, and helped lift Shepherd onto his new horse. The next time we saw him, Shepherd was cleaned and scrubbed and wearing a Mexican uniform, and he neither looked our way nor avoided us but moved among and past us as if so completely in another world that the rest of us might never have existed for him: as complete an absence in his past now as was even his arm itself.

We had heard from other veterans that with such injuries there were ghost pains that persisted for decades. But if Shepherd ever felt such pain, he gave no sign of it. He appeared not even to acknowledge the arm's absence, and this gave him a sad kind of grace; and as he moved among us, inspecting our work but never commenting, it seemed that he had buried us, also.

 

After the burials were completed we began cleaning the streets, scrubbing the blood from the cobblestones. We heated water and lye in iron kettles and cauldrons and scrubbed the stones with fistfuls of river sand until our hands were bleeding. We crawled across the cobbles on our knuckles and knees in the drenching rain that helped wash away the old blood as we scrubbed it free, as well as our own blood.