Apache Lament

by Patrick Dearen

  “Arch.”

  This time, Sam’s voice was sharper, more warning than appeal, but Arch ignored him as he came abreast of Franks, two men and a horse standing over a saddle.

  “May I offer assistance?” Arch asked.

  Franks never looked up. “The day . . .” He coughed that rattling cough. “The day I cannot saddle my own horse . . .”

  Another coughing spell struck him, and as it lingered, Arch bent and took the saddle by the pommel and back housing. Like the moment when Sam had challenged Franks’s fitness on the snowy plain, the captain called upon a hidden reservoir of strength. He seized the saddle out of Arch’s hands, lifted the thirty-five pounds seemingly effortlessly, and placed it on the horse.

  “I know you mean well,” Franks said. “But I’ll saddle my own horse till the day I stop riding.”

  The captain clearly wasn’t going to be persuaded that he was unfit to command a chase, and Arch obviously realized it. Just before he walked away, he gave Sam a look that no one should give a friend, a look that said I cannot do this alone, and you’ve failed me.

  In response, Sam smiled ever so slightly in satisfaction. He wanted to tell Arch, Hell, if I can live all these months without Elizabeth, I can damn sure live with your disappointment.

  But as Sam watched Franks stumble around to the horse’s far side to lower the cinch strap and stirrup, a troubling question gnawed at him.

  Letting Arch down was one thing, but what about failing Franks and the whole company?

  CHAPTER 5

  Nejeunee awoke with Little Squint Eyes tugging at the phylactery between her breasts.

  She had lapsed into sleep nursing him, the two of them bundled under woolen blankets in a teepee with Quick Talker and her husband Klo-sen. Afraid that Little Squint Eyes would slip from her arms, Nejeunee had staved off sleep throughout the night march, even though the gait of the roan had been like the soothing sway of a cradleboard under a limb. Not until the breaking of neeldá, the dawn, had she and the other women made camp for the band, unquestioned miles ahead of the hated Indaa.

  Nejeunee peeled back the blankets so she could smile at Little Squint Eyes. Now four months into his young life, he had already learned to bat at objects and bring one hand to the other, but never before had he grasped. She thought how fitting that he did so first with the phylactery, the cord of which she always kept about her neck. Brimming with power that safeguarded her, the small buckskin pouch was marked by a meandering pair of yellow lines that passed through similarly crooked streaks of red. To Apaches, this cross symbolized the yellow and red snake, but for Nejeunee it had greater significance.

  She had never forgotten the faith that the kindly señora had taught her in the village of her upbringing. There had been an adobe mission, and a looming figure of Jesucristo on a cross not too dissimilar to the representation on the phylactery. Sometimes in Nejeunee’s dreams she again stood below that crucifix and sipped sweet wine and took bread on her tongue—Cristo’s blood and body, her mother had explained. Nejeunee hadn’t understood it all, and there was no one to instruct her now, but she had often yearned for the warmth and peace that she had always felt in that moment.

  Long immersed in the culture of the People, Nejeunee now believed as Mescaleros from birth believed. Power lived in all things, whether of this world or in Sháa, the sun, or Tl’é’na’áí, the moon. Furthermore, this power yearned for a role in the affairs of the Ndé, and it was an individual’s responsibility to draw upon it. Supreme over all things was Bik’egu’indáán, the Life Giver, who had drawn the People up from the earth’s depths and assigned them a homeland. Bik’egu’indáán reigned over not only the Ndé and the denizens of the deserts and mountains, but also over all the ghosts and supernatural beings.

  But Nejeunee knew something that most of the People did not. Bik’egu’indáán had a son, and he was the Jesucristo of her childhood. When Little Squint Eyes was older, she would teach him to kneel in prayer not only to Bik’egu’indáán, but to the One whose blood and flesh sustained Nejeunee even to this day.

  Inside the phylactery were three perforated shells, a bluish-green specimen of datl’ijee, or sacred turquoise, and an actual cross carved from a twig of a pine tree struck by lightning. For a Ndé, this cross carried the power of the black wind, but to Nejeunee it was also like a tiny crucifix.

  There was yet another object in the phylactery, although she dared not reveal it in a culture so fearful of the dead. All belongings of the deceased were always burned, thereby eliminating anything that could be exploited by ghosts bent on harm. Before he-who-cannot-be-mentioned had died, Nejeunee had accepted this practice, even though it was foreign to her upbringing. But when he had fallen on that terrible day, her inconsolable grief had created sudden conflict between her two worlds.

  The Mexicano had won out, and in secret she had taken from his person a keepsake that was ever at her heart, comforting her just as it now seemed to soothe Little Squint Eyes. Someday, she would take it out and let him hold it while she told him about the father he would never know.

  Ever since Nejeunee had awakened, the teepee’s canvas walls had rippled and popped. Now the wind abruptly rushed in from behind her, so chilling that she quickly drew the blankets closer around Little Squint Eyes. Sitting up, she found One Who Frowns framed in the open flap, her dour face as disapproving as ever.

  “Must I tend the fires alone?” the older woman demanded. “Does Nejeunee think by hiding in blankets that she can keep the owls from her wailing child?”

  The old witch!

  Not wanting to disturb Quick Talker’s sleeping husband, Nejeunee said it only under her breath. But that didn’t keep her from turning away in disrespect.

  “The fire-place kunh-gan-hay can wait till Little Squint Eyes is in his cradleboard,” she said, reaching for the frame.

  “Don’t be angry with us, One Who Frowns,” Quick Talker said sleepily from across the teepee.

  Nejeunee began bundling Little Squint Eyes in his cradle-board blankets. “She’s only happy when she’s angry.”

  “Hmpf!”

  With the exclamation, the cold draft ceased, indicating that One Who Frowns had lowered the flap and left. Nejeunee didn’t care that the woman was even more upset now, but Quick Talker was always eager to appease and called after her.

  “We’ll hurry and awaken Brushing Against!”

  From outside, One Who Frowns gave another exclamation of displeasure.

  “Brushing Against is lazy!” One Who Frowns added. “Your sister pretends to be sick to stay in her blankets!”

  With Little Squint Eyes riding on her back by cradleboard, Nejeunee accompanied Quick Talker to a nearby teepee to check on Brushing Against. They found her stooped outside, vomiting clear fluid on the snow.

  “What’s wrong, Brushing Against?” asked a worried Quick Talker, placing a hand between her sibling’s bent shoulders. The older woman continued to vomit, charging the air with a sickening stench. “Tell me, my sister!”

  Even as Brushing Against’s heaves relented, she remained doubled over, moaning and clutching her abdomen. “For hours . . .” She paused to moan. “Sick . . . So sick.”

  Turning away, Quick Talker buried her face in her hands and began to sob uncontrollably. Surrendering to emotion always rendered her useless, leaving it up to Nejeunee to take Brushing Against by the shoulders.

  “Let’s get you inside,” said Nejeunee.

  Helping the groaning woman to the teepee flap, Nejeunee saw her features for the first time. Her face was drawn and her eyes sunken, and there was a bluish-gray cast to her skin. Her arms were still folded against the midsection of her spotted-calico overblouse, and Nejeunee was troubled to find her hands wrinkled like a very old woman’s.

  “When you’re warm in your blankets again,” said Nejeunee, “I’ll bring the gutaaln to drive away the evil.”

  She could only hope that he could do so, for Brushing Against showed signs of the Blue Death that had sw
ept through the reservation three years before. Four children and a woman had died, and the gutaaln there had blamed lurking owls for spreading a sickness beyond the cure of anyone except a special gutaaln who might draw power from niishjaa, the owl, itself.

  Stricken with concern for Little Squint Eyes, Nejeunee made Brushing Against as comfortable as possible and then summoned Nah-kay-yen, the band’s old gutaaln. As Quick Talker stood sobbing and the medicine man sprinkled cattail pollen and chanted to ídóí, the great cat through which he claimed power, Nejeunee hurried away to assist One Who Frowns with the cook fires and more. She had done all she could for the ill woman, and now she must tend the horses and mules. The animals had to have water, or the Indaa would track the People down and kill Little Squint Eyes as they had his father.

  Against a nearby rock bluff, a deep snowdrift had formed in a basin so large that it could have held a teepee. Along the edge, Nejeunee helped build fires as Little Squint Eyes’s cradleboard hugged her back. The crackling flames would provide warmth and permit cooking, but more importantly the heat would melt the snow and allow the animals to drink.

  Nejeunee wanted nothing more than to linger by the life-giving blaze and let Little Squint Eyes stay as comfortable as possible. But as soon as the warriors gathered to eat, she yielded to duty. The mules were hardy and could survive on little to drink, but the horses would need the equivalent of two wagon barrels of water. With snow always melting down to a small portion of its original promise, she set out for more to add to the basin.

  The rock bluff was part of an icy outcrop springing up thirty feet, and to its right Nejeunee scrambled up a game trail too steep to hold more than a sprinkling of white. Advancing and sliding, she broke out on top in ankle-deep snow that blanketed a small flat set against the higher ridge beyond. The rising smoke danced between a couple of twisted yuccas and a stand of pitaya cactus, but what surprised Nejeunee was that Gian-nah-tah was here, packing snow around a snowball already larger than a man’s head.

  He didn’t look up, and Nejeunee had no interest in engaging him in conversation. Making her way to a drift against a thick yucca stalk, she piled and compressed snow into a sphere too heavy to carry. It picked up grass and additional snow when she rolled it away, a trail forming in its wake. Intent on keeping the snowball in motion, she paid no attention to Gian-nah-tah until she came alongside his lowered shoulder at cliff’s edge.

  Stooped over an even larger mass of snow, he shouted a warning below and rolled it down into the billowing smoke. Turning to assist Nejeunee, he reached between her arms, his hand pinning one of hers against the icy ball. Revolted by his touch, she flinched and pulled her fingers free. It was instinctive, but as he pushed the snowball over the cliff, she wished that she could have endured the moment. Gian-nah-tah was not someone to anger.

  Nejeunee started away, smoothing the mourning cape at her thighs as she focused on the deeper snow around the yuccas. During the brutal night ride, she had used her woolen blanket as an outer wrap; still, upon trying to dismount, she had found herself all but frozen to her horse. Hoping to stay warmer this morning, she now wore the blanket inside the cape. She was only vaguely aware of how arresting the blue calico was against the snow, but apparently it did not go unnoticed by Gian-nahtah.

  “How long will you wear the clothes of mourning?” he asked.

  Such a personal question caught Nejeunee off guard, and all she could do was stop and look back at him standing in the smoky haze.

  “Three seasons have passed,” Gian-nah-tah added. “Soon your hair will reach your shoulders again.”

  She lowered her gaze to her tracks in the snow. “I’ll mourn longer. The pain inside stays strong.”

  “Nine men have no woman to warm their blankets. Nine men await the end of your mourning. I am one. I alone of all the Ndé have the power to find enemies.”

  Nejeunee looked up at Gian-nah-tah, keying on the jagged scar that ran down his forehead, split his eyeless socket, and twisted his upper lip into a snarl. Abruptly, like lightning flashing behind a veil of clouds, more visions came. She saw a señora’s rebosa streaming as the woman fled with her across a shining salt bed. She saw a fierce warrior on a muscled black horse riding them down, his stone-head war club framed against the cloudless sky. She saw the gleaming ground fly up and strike her face, and the quick wheeling of the Guadalupe cliffs as she rolled to her shoulder and looked up.

  But most powerfully, she saw Gian-nah-tah lower a war club fresh with blood and matted hair, and the wind tug at a rebosa in a massing pool.

  As Nejeunee stood now in the snowy foothills of the Sierra Diablo, vision and reality merged. If she had harbored doubt about who had killed her mother, it had vanished, replaced by conviction. Suddenly, Gian-nah-tah’s face seemed worthy of the whispers that he was a witch.

  “Why are you backing away?” he asked. “Why do your eyes grow wide? For what reason do you shake?”

  Nejeunee hadn’t realized that she had retreated a step, or that her demeanor had betrayed her.

  “Tell me!” he demanded.

  Startled, she could only stare, her heart pounding.

  “Am I like a sickness to you?” Gian-nah-tah asked. “Is that not what you said in the night?”

  “I-I did not,” she managed.

  “Do you also lie now?”

  “It was One Who Frowns who spoke. She hates me and calls down evil on me.”

  “She has taken another husband already. She knows that our warriors’ blankets are cold. She is true Ndé, and she cares that she is Ndé.”

  “I’m Ndé. I care as much as One Who Frowns.”

  “Then show it. Remove your mourning clothes and make known your interest in a man. In me.”

  In a society in which a woman had sole right to initiate a relationship, Gian-nah-tah had crossed a boundary. But Nejeunee was afraid to tell him so, and the only thing she knew to do was turn and continue on for the snowdrift.

  “You walk away from me?” he challenged.

  A rough hand on her shoulder spun her around so forcefully that her legs twisted. Off-balance, she went down hard, the impact of her hip and forearm against snow and ice jolting the cradleboard. Little Squint Eyes began to cry, and Nejeunee quickly sat up and removed the straps from her shoulders. Placing the cradleboard across her lap, she peered into his unhappy face and tried to calm him. But even her soft words and gentle rocking couldn’t soothe.

  “One Who Frowns is right.”

  At Gian-nah-tah’s gruff voice, Nejeunee looked up. He towered over her like a mountain spire, a powerful figure in a position of dominance.

  “A child that always wails is not fit to be Ndé,” he continued. “The owls should come for him.”

  “No!” She pressed the cradleboard to her breast and cast frightened eyes about for a swooping shadow with claws and hooked beak. “He’s Ndé! The owls won’t come!”

  Nejeunee didn’t know where she had found the strength to defy Gian-nah-tah, and now she trembled.

  “You would bear me a true Ndé son,” he growled. “You will bear me a son.”

  “You . . . You’re not permitted.” Out of Nejeunee’s throat the quivering words rose up unfamiliar and distant, as if someone else spoke them. “It’s not the way of the People.”

  “You dare tell me what is Ndé? With my very hand I seized you by the hair from the Mexicanos and lifted you to my horse. Now you dare tell me the ways of the People?”

  Nejeunee was terrified, but she had the wherewithal not to blurt what was on her tongue: Gian-nah-tah, killer of helpless women!

  “I . . . I don’t remember that day,” she said instead.

  “I remember it. I remember you wailing as I held you in front of me and rode away. I remember you striking me with your little fists when I told you, ‘Ink-tah, sit down!’ I would have opened your throat with my knife, but you fought with the bravery of a Ndé, so I let you live. Do not make me sorry that I did.”

  Gian-nah-tah’s outburst did nothi
ng to pacify Little Squint Eyes, and Nejeunee took her wrapped son from the cradleboard and held him close. Looking past Gian-nah-tah, she scanned the gray skies and foggy bluffs for the owls she hoped would never come.

  “For now, I will be content to escape the Indaa,” Gian-nahtah added. “When we are safe, you will show interest and join me in my kuughà, teepee.”

  “I . . . I will not,” Nejeunee heard herself say.

  Gian-nah-tah’s single eye narrowed, and he lunged at her as though he were a mountain spirit descending from a sacred summit. Seizing her by the hair, he pulled her to her feet.

  “Like this I picked you up and carried you off!” he bellowed. “You were Mexicano then, but when the time is right you will come to my blankets like a Ndé!”

  “I will not!” she cried out through the pain. “First I’ll die like—”

  My mother! she wanted to say.

  Gian-nah-tah tightened his fist in her hair, his grip burning every root.

  “You will come, or your wailing child will die.”

  With a vicious shove to her head, Gian-nah-tah stalked away through the snow. And Nejeunee was left to comfort Little Squint Eyes and shed tears for the husband whom the heartless Indaa had taken from her.

  She may have ridden with Little Squint Eyes in a party of twelve fierce warriors and three other women—one of them violently ill—but Nejeunee rode alone with her thoughts.

  She was adrift in an uncaring world, and she didn’t know where to turn. She dwelled on Gian-nah-tah’s ultimatum, and the answers seemed as far away as Sháa, the sun that lay hidden behind somber, gray clouds.

  In this remnant of Victorio’s band—these final few Ndé who refused the indignity of the reservation—Gian-nah-tah’s authority was supreme. No one would dare challenge him, even if Nejeunee had someone in whom to confide his transgression of the ways of the Ndé.