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

Anna warm against the April chill. In gratitude, Santa Anna had given General Houston a jeweled snuffbox, which Green, eyeing it covetously, had valued at being worth about a thousand dollars.

Being a junior officer then, Green had received nothing from the transaction, and now, seven years later, in his letters to both Houston and Santa Anna, he badgered them about this, trying somehow to parlay this inequity into his own personal freedom at least, if not that of his men. He informed Santa Anna that he had once defended Santa Anna’s honor by reprimanding a soldier who said something unflattering about the Mexican leader; surely this favor deserved some reciprocal notice.

In the jail cell, in addition to having ample opportunity to blacken the pages of various ledgers and journals with the accounts of our imprisonment and to pen letters home (in which we tried not to let anyone know how squalid and dire conditions truly were), we had access occasionally to old newspapers, some of them many months out of date, from the Republic of Texas, as well as the United States—Memphis and New Orleans, mostly. We all knew that both Houston and Santa Anna were in political trouble over matters far more immediate and pressing than our imprisonment—that Mexico was hugely in debt and could not much longer afford to field an army without the financial assistance of Great Britain, and that the United States, desiring to annex Texas, was afraid that Great Britain might be trying to take control.

In essence, Sam Houston’s new nation—our new nation—was simultaneously under siege from at least six other nations—three at once, in a loose coalition of Apaches, Comanches, and Kiowas; Mexico; Great Britain, which wanted to either control Texas or at least keep Texas out of the United States’ hands; and the United States itself, which desired to peacefully absorb our new nation (even as, twenty years later, they would wage war against us—deservedly so—over the issue of human slavery).

We should never have crossed that river. What madness could possibly have possessed us?

Centuries’ worth of vermin inhabited every crack and crevice of the dank fort. They did not even wait until true dark to emerge but began scuttling out well before dusk and did not return to their burrows until long after dawn’s first light. Rats, mice, scorpions, dung beetles, and roaches whirred and raced and scrabbled everywhere, bumping into us if we should get in their way, outnumbering us by the thousands. They stank and shat and pissed and gnawed incessantly on the wooden legs of furniture, and on one another’s bones. They fought and squealed and snarled and chattered, some of the rats as large as cats, though fiercer; but worst of all were the lice, which could hide anywhere, and which, though silent, seemed to be born of the night, with the ranks of each night’s army swelling tenfold.

They awakened us every evening, pouring out from between the weave of our blankets and from our hair, and from the fur of all the living mammals in the fort. They began swarming us almost the minute we fell asleep, so many of them moving across the stone floor that in the near darkness of soft moonlight it appeared that the floor itself was moving, with waves and ripples of the milky white crablike creatures rolling across the floor like the phosphorescent foam of waves at sea. We would turn and rattle our blankets every few moments, trying to shake them off, but always they returned, drawn relentlessly by the heat of our bodies and by the bright blood within us. To defend against them we shaved our heads and grew our fingernails long so that we could pluck them from each other’s bodies.

In the evenings we would hold louse races, using charcoal to draw a circle in the center of the dungeon, placing lice in the center, and then wagering on which one would reach the perimeter the soonest. We had little money so gambled instead with fragments of soap, called tlacos, or used and reused remnants of tobacco, gotten from the stubs of pipes and cigarettes, chewed and then dried to use again and again.

With livestock in poor condition and short supply at the fort, we ourselves were often forced into service, fitted with rawhide harnesses, twenty-five men to a team, and made to pull oxcarts filled with stones down out of the mountains. The road was steep, and sometimes we lost control by accident, though other times it was on purpose. We would slip out of our harnesses and watch as the runaway wagon, with its heavy load, went thundering down the hill before crashing into a wall or into the moat, upsetting the swans.

We devised new ways to get rid of our chains. The most common trick was to smash one link with a stone, then go to the blacksmith who, for the bribe of a few cents, would replace the old iron rivet with a softer and more malleable lead one. We could then remove the chains at will while the guards were gone and then fasten them back together when the guards returned.

We called the chains our “jewelry,” and often, late at night after the final lockup and roll call, we would all one hundred and fifty be shed of our chains and would sleep, even if fitfully, among the lice and rats in relative freedom: though the morning’s first dull shaft of light and the sound of the guards stirring outside would send us all scrambling to put the chains back on.

In the Castle of Perve, there were no positive incentives to do good work or behave. When we were discovered free of our chains, or when we broke an oxcart or failed to move a satisfactory amount of stone in a day, we were punished; our only reward was no punishment.

Beatings were infrequent—as if they might be too burdensome for our captors to inflict upon our thick skulls and hides—but far more