I WAS AS WILD for glory as any of us.
Before too much time had passed,
we had all changed our minds, had given
up on dreams of glory and were
fighting only to win. And not too much
longer after that, all that was on our
minds was a good cool drink of water;
and before it was over, all any of us
wanted was simply to get back home.
How much of it was hate, and how much
love? In our expedition,
there was plenty of both. Our
commanders, Thomas Jefferson Green (named
for his great-uncle in Virginia) and
Captain William S. Fisher, were adept from
the start at braiding the two together,
love and hate, in such a fashion as
ultimately to possess us. We became a
rope that they kept coiled, and then
used for their purposes – Thomas
Jefferson Green pursuing love, I think,
while Fisher was intent on chasing down
his hatred. It’s a miracle that any of
us got out alive, and though I was only
sixteen when they came riding
through, asking for volunteers, I do not
hold them accountable for my own
free-will choice. They were just passing
through: one counseling patriotism,
the other vengeance. Between them, they
caught the few of us who were left
unclaimed by that one emotion or the other.
The purpose of our militia, Fisher
informed us, would be to hunt
down a band of infidels, Mexican
nationals, who had come across the new
border of Texas and staged an attack on
San Antonio. There would be plenty
of fighting, he assured us, all we could
ever wish for. The glory existed just
beyond our reach, he told us, but only
barely. All we had to do was go out
and search for it, he promised, and it
would be delivered to us.
Too young to have fought at the Alamo,
my friend James
Shepherd and I thought we had missed our
opportunity for war. We thought
that with the victory at San Jacinto
less than a month after the fall of the
Alamo, a disgusting wave of peace and
softness had settled on the land and
that weakness had come flooding in. We
thought our manhood would never
be tested.
Thomas Jefferson Green, like his
namesake, was in love with his
new homeland and the potential of the
new republic – he had political
aspirations and was said to be one war
away from being eminently
electable – as popular one day, perhaps,
as General Houston himself – while
Fisher simply wanted to injure,
maim, and destroy.
My own town of LaGrange had a firsthand
acquaintance with such
sentiments. One of our native sons,
Captain Nicholas Dawson, had rushed to
the defense of San Antonio against one
of General Woll’s invasions. It was
infuriating to all Texans that Mexico
was coming back for more: six years
earlier Mexico had surrendered half her
nation – the whole of Texas – following
Santa Anna’s expensive victory
at the Alamo and humiliating defeat
at San Jacinto – and then the Mexican
army, having pinned Dawson into a
position of surrender, went ahead and
massacred thirty-five of his men,
despite the truce. Only five had escaped
the terms of the “surrender,”
including our own Dawson, who spoke
ceaselessly of revenge, and how he
would never trust the flag of Mexico again.
I had one day helped him repair a
fence, through which some of
his father’s cows had escaped – he was a
quiet, strong, pleasant young
man, only four years older than I was – though
when he came back from the
Dawson Expedition his arm was shattered
and held by a makeshift sling, a
saber scar ran across his thigh, and he
was no longer pleasant but always
angry and frightened.
So we knew, or should have known, what
we were getting into, but
we couldn’t help it.
A great victory had been achieved at
San Jacinto, and there was
no call, save pride and fury, to risk
ourselves now. We should have let the
bandits be. We should never have joined
when Captain Fisher and Captain
Green came calling. And having joined
their militia, we should have pulled up
shy at the Rio Grande, letting Mexico
understand that we would defend our
newly gained territory, but we should
never have gone on into their country.
Five hundred of us left LaGrange that
day – three hundred and
eight of us would go on to cross the
river into Mexico, and only a handful
returned. That was fifty years ago, and
whenever young people ask, I tell
them that there is no shortage of war in
the world, and that wars always
come looking for someone to fight them – particularly
if you’re from Texas,
with war born in blood. But young people
don’t often ask and instead plunge
into war.
I live on the outskirts of a small
town, and I watch mothers,
fathers, sisters, and brothers grieve.
And it’s not only the blood of the enemy
and of their own that they grieve, but
also the heart’s blood – the heart’s
drying out.
What fun, what glory, what joy must war
hold, to summon them
thus?
I remember how it seemed that the voice
of a beautiful woman
was calling and that a spacious country
filled with bounty lay just ahead.
Why was I one of the tiny handful who
survived the entire journey?
I can find no clue, no scrap of order or
design, even as I knew all along – or
almost all along – that I would survive.
Have I subsequently lived in such a
fashion as to justify being
spared? Have I done anything
magnificent, achieved more than those who
died would have? Fifty years later – a
farmer of stock, a raiser of goats,
sheep, and cattle, a grower of corn and
cotton – I can find no reason for my
survival, but then I can find no good
reason for having crossed the border in
the first place.
The night before Green and Fisher
arrived, I had been troubled by dreams. In
the first dream, my friend James
Shepherd and I were camped along the
James River, which was where we liked to
go in the summer to fish for
catfish. We could catch them closer to
home, in the lower meandering of the
muddy Brazos; but in the James River,
farther up into the hills, the water ran
clearer and faster and the fish tasted
better. It was Comanche country,
though, and we usually went there only
in the early summer, when the
People, as the Comanches called
themselves, had gone north to hunt buffalo.
There was nothing Shepherd and I loved
more in the world than to
eat catfish from the James. There was no
finer food, no finer times than on
those days and nights when we camped
beside the clear-running river and
feasted on catfish and dreamed about the
shape our lives might take. James
Shepherd was going to be governor of
Texas, or a senator at least, while I,
James Alexander, was less sure of my
role. I was the better student, and I
thought for a while that I might become
a physician. (Shepherd, on the other
hand, was troubled by the sight of
blood, so much so that I had to clean and
prepare the fish for him at our meals
each morning and evening.)
In this dream that came to me the night
before Captains Green
and Fisher arrived, Shepherd and I had
built a little hut woven from oak and
juniper branches – a mound that we
latticed and stitched tight with leaves
and smaller branches until it resembled
the larval encasement of a caddis fly.
Such structures kept us warm and dry
during even the most violent
thunderstorms, and we had spent
countless nights in these little huts, bathed
in the sweet scent of our oak cook fire,
as well as the odor of the crushed
juniper bushes and their gin-scented
berries.
But in this dream, our earth and branch
huts were blazing, and it
was neither campfire nor lightning bolt
that had ignited them but some dark
bird flying through the night, dropping
clumps of soil onto every hut. Seconds
later, each hut would burst into bright
flame, lighting the night.
Every hut of our childhood was there,
every sanctuary, and the
dark bird dropped load after load of
rich soil onto our thatched shelters, each
one blossoming into flame; and in the
dream, we were sometimes in those
huts, and other times we were running
from the giant bird and the burning
huts.
The bird, or whatever it was, seemed to
have no knowledge of us
personally but was mindlessly intent on
destruction, and this cold-blooded
indifference made its terror slightly
less frightening.
I woke drenched in sweat. The dream was
so real I went outside
to see if any fires were burning, but
the horses were quiet in the barn and
there were only a few fireflies circling
in the meadow and an owl murmuring
down by the creek.
I sat down and wrapped my arms around
my legs and watched
the stars for a long time, as if waiting
for something.
My heart was racing, but the world
seemed large and quiet,
unperturbed. I went back to bed, and
almost immediately upon falling asleep I
dreamed the second dream, which was more
real than the first.
I was up in the loft of an unfamiliar
house. Giant beams were
crashing down, breaking through the roof
and cracking open the walls, and
though the timbers seemed directed
toward me, I did not seem to be at risk.
This time when I woke, I could not go
back to sleep but went outside and sat
until dawn, watching and waiting.
I think I knew then that I would
survive many tests – that some
are chosen for no reason – and the
loneliness of that revelation was fierce
and complete, involving my greatest fear
of being left alone, or behind. It was
a fear that had a place in the world. It
seemed that I might be called on to
keep a certain terror burning in my
heart, until finally it burned no more.
Both Green and Fisher rode bay mares,
exquisite animals gotten from the
spoils of war. Green, a small, chesty
man, seeming as wide as he was tall,
rode the larger of the two horses, one
that was two hands too big for him, so
that although he rode it well, he never
quite seemed graceful but appeared to
expend considerable effort to control
the horse. Fisher was taller, more
military-looking, and rode a more
average-size horse. When the two men
were asaddle next to each other, the eye
was drawn to Green, as his tall,
stiff-legged horse turned and
backstepped, cantering and crabbing sideways
and rattling her bit. Fisher sat
motionless beside such prancings, his eyes
searching the crowd, until his gaze
narrowed on someone as if that person
had disappointed or betrayed him. Then
he gazed upon that person with an
almost tender forgiveness, but with a
fierce, angry curiosity as well, as if
asking, How could you? As if calling
into question all the choices a person
had made in a lifetime.
Such was the look that fell upon me
that morning they rode into
town.
Fisher seemed to study me for hours,
but it could only have been
seconds. When he finally released me, I
turned to search for James
Shepherd and saw that he was watching
the curious exhibition of Thomas
Jefferson Green atop the massive bay,
which was turning in tight circles like
a copper-colored dervish.
Shepherd saw me and then raised his
hand to enlist. He took a
step toward the soldiers, who looked so
clean and sharp and precise – so
alive – and I found myself raising my
own hand.
We didn’t know then that the soldiers,
or irregulars, had stopped
the day before and bathed in the river
and scrubbed their hair and washed
their uniforms; they had hung them out
to dry in the late-autumn sun, and
had brushed and curried their mounts and
filed their hoofs in preparation for
the next morning’s recruiting. We didn’t
know that they needed only forty
more volunteers to attain their desired
goal of five hundred, which was what
they had ascertained was the ideal
strike force, able to travel fast and far and
light, yet also sufficient, when under
focused discipline, to present
formidable, lethal force against the enemy.
Neither did we know that the night
before at their encampment the
two captains had debated – not quite
arguing – about whether to go
searching for those final forty in
LaGrange, or to veer northwest to Bastrop.
“We only need forty,” Fisher had said.
“Surely we can find forty in LaGrange.”
“But Bastrop is larger,” Green said.
“And if we don’t get forty, then we have to
go on up to Bastrop anyway, losing two
extra days.”
They debated some more, out of earshot
of their men, and finally
decided by Fisher’s choosing one of two
twigs from Green’s fist. The short
twig meant they would take the near path
to LaGrange, while the longer twig
meant traveling directly to Bastrop,
bypassing LaGrange. The men, women,
and children – the farmers and teachers,
mothers and fathers, brothers and
sisters – slept peacefully in Bastrop,
never knowing, never being asked to
die, spared, as I would be – but without
the choice and the challenge.
In LaGrange, Fisher and Green secured
forty-two volunteers. They came from
a mix of society: the unschooled and the
well educated, the poor and the
elite, the sons of ne’er-do- wells, of
politicians, of farmers, clerks, and
grocers. What burned brightest in us all
was a love of the land, with its wild
pecan groves and deer and turkey, and
the fertile river bottom and endless
timber and grasslands.
Surely we would not have had so many
wars, had our land not
been so beloved – fighting the Indians
to the west, and Mexico to the south,
as the flow of Appalachian emigrants
continued to filter down from out of the
highlands.
What our town was like then was the
calm in the eye of a storm.
We lived in bucolic idyll, and knew it;
each morning, dawn’s rising found us
already out in the fields, working. And
paradoxically, it was the pastoral
existence, this peace within the
whirlwind, that compelled many of us to
leave the calm and venture out into the
storm. Looking back, I can see
clearly the irony and wrong-headedness
of it, but back then it seemed to
make perfect sense: almost as if such
decisions and such notions had been
foreordained.
My own family were farmers, Gores and
Lowrys from Tennessee,
whose ancestors had come down from
Wales, pausing for a generation in
County Cork before traveling across the
Atlantic. Like the other forty-one new
recruits, I told my parents goodbye and
said that our commanders promised
we would be back in two weeks, or three
at the most.
We gathered our weapons – a rifle or a
pistol, or both – and
ammunition, with which we were never
wasteful, and packed a lunch, and
rode out that afternoon.
Not all of us were young. The eldest
was Claudius Toops, a
blacksmith of sixty, who enlisted with
his son Buster, who was forty, and
Buster’s own son Andrew, who was twenty.
But regardless of rank or age or
station in life, that first evening,
with the mass of us camped on the banks
of the Brazos, we were all in high
spirits, conjoined in a new brotherhood.
Continues…
Excerpted from The Diezmo
by Rick Bass Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Houghton Mifflin Company
ISBN: 0-395-92617-3
