The Diezmo by Rick Bass (funny books to read .txt) 📕

If you cross the Rio Grande, you must suffer no surprise, but be always on the alert.

“In battle, let the enemy feel the fierceness of just resentment and retribution. You alone will be held responsible to the government, and sustained by its resources.

“I have the honor to be, Your Obedient Servant, Sam Houston.”

Again and again on the campaign, Green would read this letter to us, and he always paused near the end. It was not until much later in the campaign that I found out he had been skipping a sentence.

“You will be controlled by only the most civilized warfare,” the sentence read, “and you will find great advantage of exercising great humanity toward the common people.”

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