The Diezmo, Rick Bass [spiritual books to read .TXT] 📗

the thrashing jungle of the horses’ tangled legs. Our horses were rearing and spinning, and bullets whined past. I shortened my reins, leaned into my horse, and found myself looking not for Green or Fisher but for Somervell.

I turned to shout at Shepherd and saw him get hit in the shoulder, in the meaty part just below the joint. The bullet slapped his flesh and his mouth dropped open. He was nearly tossed from his horse but only glanced at the wound, then leaned against his horse and pushed hard to rejoin me. Somervell’s men had taken cover in a line of trees on the northwestern edge of town. They climbed off their horses, reined them to branches and trunks, and then hunkered down behind logs and trees, trying to hold their fire. But a few men left their horses and ran into the fray, whooping. They disappeared into the musket smoke, waving their sabers, and were shot dead. One man, spun by the rose blossom on his chest, fell so close to me that I couldn’t shake the feeling that he intercepted a bullet meant for me.

I turned and saw that Shepherd was still with me. We reached the trees and I leapt off, tied my horse to a limb, grabbed Shepherd’s reins, and helped him down. The gunfire lessened, though seemed more frightening now than when the shooting had started.

“Hold your fire!” Somervell shouted. Some of his dandies still ran to join the melee and were shot—another crimson boutonniere erupting on a chest, a sudden wide birthmark on a forehead. Others were more fortunate, surviving hits by low-caliber bullets or homemade shrapnel fired from the barrel of ancient pot metal blunderbusses.

The rest of us stayed crouched and hidden. Shepherd vomited, standing upright, clutching his shoulder, blood streaming through his fingers. He walked in circles, shouting and bending over to regurgitate the morning’s breakfast. He looked frightened and angry, both, and I hurried over and took him farther into the thicket, where I cleaned his shoulder with water from my canteen while he stared at me and his teeth chattered. His arms and legs began to shudder, and he looked at me in amazement and said, “I’m going to die, aren’t I?”

And though I thought he might, I told him that no, he wasn’t; and this calmed him so that, slowly, he stopped trembling.

The wound had a clear exit hole on the inside of his arm, just below the armpit, so there was probably no shrapnel left inside. He was bleeding heavily, and I hoped the bullet hadn’t nicked an artery. I took off my shirt and bound a tight bandage, almost a tourniquet, and then sat him down under an oak tree and told him to remain still.

He was as pale as his blood was bright—there was so much of it—and we sat quietly and listened to the exchanges of gunfire and shouting. A couple of times he said, “I’m scared,” but I told him to be still and hold on, that he was going to be all right; and he quieted down and clung to that advice as if I held the key to his survival. He started to shake again, and I laid my jacket across him like a blanket, and it was enough to stop his shaking.

After a while the shooting stopped—only the shouting persisted—and then there was relative silence. Not long after that, I heard our men regrouping—the burr and bray of Ewen Cameron, the occasional shouts of Green and Fisher, and the calmer declarations of Somervell—and I wanted to go and join them, but Shepherd became so pale and agitated—the crimson stains on his bandage dampening as he raised his good arm to restrain me—that I feared he would not survive my leaving, and so I stayed.

I was worried that the others might think that Shepherd and I had run away from the battle, but there was nothing I could do about that. We sat side by side beneath that oak in the failing light and listened to the sounds of our army’s reassembly. It was cold—the last day of November—and as the night grew quieter, Shepherd reached for my hand and gripped it, clenching it so tightly that I thought for certain he was dying.

But he wasn’t; instead, he just sat there gripping it, even as he slept. I had no matches for a fire, and no blanket with which to keep myself warm, but I did not move and tried instead to remember how warm and pleasant the day had been only hours earlier. I had almost fallen asleep in my saddle, lulled by the mild heat and the steady rocking of my horse.

We awoke later in the evening to renewed shouts, and the cries and screams of men, women, children, and horses, and dogs barking, and guns firing again. I saw by the moon that we had not slept more than an hour, but it felt that a great deal of time had passed, time not measured in minutes and hours but weighed in tons, or scaled in rods and cubits.

“Looting,” Shepherd said quietly, almost wisely—as if he were the veteran of many such campaigns. His hand still gripped mine as if in lockjaw death, then released slightly.

After a while we saw reflections of firelight through the trees—how I longed to edge closer and stand beside those warming fires!—as one building after another was torched. I felt certain that these buildings, and the people that lived in them, were not the enemy: that they Were merely fodder for the path of Fisher and Green, the path of history, the path of glory. And it was not I who had lit any of the torches: not a single one. What would it have hurt for me to go and warm myself beside, and benefit from, even one of them? But I could not, and so we remained back in the shadows, beyond the throw of firelight, quiet and invisible: history dust,