Apache Lament

by Patrick Dearen

  Setting a cross.

  Bitterness had kept him from doing so when her grave had been fresh, but he had come to regret his decision. Now that it was in place, the strange thought that she might rest more comfortably because of it was the only thing that buoyed him as Company A stopped for the day, just outside the adobe ruins of a Butterfield mail station at Van Horn’s Wells.

  Here among scattered creosote bushes under a mile-high desert crag, Sam and Elizabeth had spent their last night together, before falling in with the other wagoners at daybreak for a march that had taken his measure as a man and found him wanting. Now, Sam was alone, even though eight other rangers and an Apache woman set about making camp.

  While Red and Boye gathered firewood, and Matto and another ranger skinned jackrabbits to roast beside a mud-brick wall, Sam hung the straps of the empty canteens over his saddle horn and led his horse toward the well. Self-absorbed, he didn’t even give a thought to leaving the Apache woman in camp with Matto. For that matter, he was barely aware that Jonesy walked beside him, although the ranger talked a mile a minute in that New Jersey accent.

  Pushing through a row of slapping mesquites, they dropped into a gravelly arroyo and worked their way up it as the canteens bounced and banged. Not until Sam dodged a big yucca in the wash did Jonesy’s words pull him out of his private thoughts.

  “Oh, she’s a fine little girl, my Mary Jane. I expect by this time next year we’ll be married. Her father wants her to come of age first, you know.”

  Sam didn’t know, and he didn’t care.

  “I think I’ll bring her to Texas after the wedding,” Jonesy went on. “I can barely wait. We’ll settle down and I’ll raise some cows and when I come in every evening, she’ll be smiling that sweet smile. I’ll wager you’ve never seen anything like it.”

  But Sam had already seen the only smile he cared to see, even though it would always be a memory now.

  “Did I ever tell you about her dimples?” Jonesy persisted. “They’re something to see when she smiles. And when she and I dance—oh, my! The things she—”

  “I’ve heard enough,” said Sam.

  “Speaking of dancing, she took lessons, you know. There was an instructor from Europe, and he taught her how to—”

  “The well’s about a hundred and fifty yards up here,” Sam interrupted, hoping to spur a change in subjects.

  But Jonesy couldn’t be thrown off stride. “The way she sails across the dance floor, she’s just like an angel. I’m sure she—”

  Sam managed to ignore him again until they reached the arroyo’s brushy head under a sotol ridge that angled up to the heights. From out of a muddy seep covered in animal tracks, the cone of a well rose waist-high from a base constructed of the same native rock. Over the well stood a crude H frame of cured mesquite with a rope and pulley system in place.

  Sam had just secured the horse to one of the support posts when, little by little, Jonesy dredged up the worst moment of Sam’s life.

  “You can’t imagine what it means to have a girl like Mary Jane,” said the ranger, turning to retrieve a canteen from the saddle horn. “But I suppose you can’t miss what you never had.”

  The hell I can’t, thought Sam.

  “Let me tell you,” Jonesy went on, “there’s nothing like the talks and sharing all the little things that make you special to each other.”

  You don’t know the half of it, Sam said silently.

  “She’s the sweetest thing in this whole world,” Jonesy added. “I just don’t know what I’d do without—”

  Sam clutched Jonesy’s shoulder and spun him around.

  “No more!” Sam ordered, seizing his collar. “You hear me? Not another word more!”

  He shoved the ranger back into the horse with a bang of canteens. Turning away, Sam wanted it to end there, but Jonesy didn’t know when to leave well enough alone.

  “Why the hell you grabbing me?” Jonesy demanded. “All I was saying was what she means to me. Why, before I’d let anything happen to her, I’d crawl across this desert and take on the whole Apache nation.”

  Sam wheeled, his fist already cocked. With a cry of self-hatred that had festered for eight dark months, he drove a punch so hard into Jonesy’s crooked jaw that the man fell back against the rock cone.

  Jonesy lay there in an obvious daze, shaking his head, rubbing a hand across his jaw as blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. Then his glassy eyes seemed to clear and his hand moved toward his revolver.

  But Sam’s .45 had already cleared its holster, and he watched over the cocked hammer as Jonesy froze.

  “The hell with Mary Jane!” Sam yelled. “I pull this trigger and it’ll be the hell with the both of you!”

  Jonesy turned his head away and held up his palms in a defensive gesture. “God Almighty, don’t do this, DeJarnett!”

  Jonesy was trembling, but so was Sam’s gun hand. “I will, so help me. Tell me why I shouldn’t!”

  “God Almighty! There’s not any Mary Jane. Don’t do this!”

  “What?”

  “I-I made her up, all of it. Everything about her. For God’s sake, listen to me!”

  Stunned into silence, Sam only stared as the man spoke quietly through a sob.

  “All the wanting . . . the never having . . . Jesus, who’d have somebody like me, a face caved in by a horse? I-I was just getting by, day to day, dreaming what I won’t ever have.”

  Only now did Sam realize how much his knuckles hurt from the punch, but the guilt inside was a hundred times worse. Holstering his .45, he stretched out his hand as the ranger looked up at him.

  “We fought Indians together, Jonesy. You deserve better from me.”

  But the ranger’s eyes held a lot of concern as Sam helped him up.

  “You . . . You telling everybody about this?” Jonesy asked.

  “Not if you don’t tell them what an SOB I am for hittin’ you.”

  A blowfly maggot, that’s all Sam was.

  On into nightfall, long after Jonesy started back with full canteens draped across the horse, Sam sat on the well’s rock platform. He regretted and grieved and wept, and when he looked up at the sky, Elizabeth was still as far away and the stars just as indifferent. He didn’t want to go back to camp. He didn’t want to look Jonesy in the face. The incident had been just one more example of how Sam had used and abused every man in the company to atone for something for which none of them had been responsible.

  To the howl of a lobo wolf, he finally dragged himself up and trudged down the arroyo. He was exhausted and so were the horses, but he wondered if it would be best if he rode on alone tonight. Fort Davis was sixty-five miles away down a beaten trail, and Musquiz Canyon was only a few miles farther. Who the hell would care if he proceeded toward company headquarters on his own?

  But then for the first time since he had set the cross in Bass Canyon, Sam considered the Apache woman. He was dismayed to realize that, upon going for water, he had left her subject to mistreatment, or worse. Couldn’t he ever think of somebody besides himself?

  Sam saw the still-distant campfire flickering in the night, and he picked up his pace.

  As he climbed out of the arroyo, he could smell the roasted jackrabbit and see exaggerated shadows move against the adobe wall as rangers helped themselves at the cookfire. He could hear the baby crying, and a raised voice as well, but not until he broke through the low creosote bushes did he distinguish the voice as Matto’s. The Apache woman sat apart from everyone as she cradled her child in her arms, and Matto approached her and continued to rail.

  “That squallin’ brat. I’d’ve dashed its brains out when I found it if DeJarnett hadn’t stuck his nose in. Maybe I’ll—”

  Sam entered camp, and for a moment Matto’s silhouette froze against the fire. Then his shadow melted away into the night, and Sam went directly to the woman. There was concern in her face as she tended the infant, and when she looked up at Sam, he could see her troubled eyes glisten in the fir
elight.

  “Qué sucede, señora?” he asked. “What’s wrong?”

  She glanced at the baby. “Mi niño,” she said through a half-sob.

  Sam’s anger flared, and he quickly scanned camp. “Somebody hurt him?”

  She shook her head. “Él ésta enfermo. A fever.”

  Sam stooped and felt the baby’s forehead. Hot, he confirmed. Like a coal from the fire.

  He went to his nearby saddle and dug a rag out of his war bag. From beside the fire ring, he retrieved a canteen, obviously the only one left unclaimed after Jonesy’s return from the well. Soaking the cloth on his way back to the woman, Sam found that she had removed the infant’s blankets in anticipation and placed him in the cradleboard.

  Sam squeezed the excess water from the rag and extended it. She accepted with a quiet “Gracias” and began sponging the ill child, but his cry persisted.

  Sam turned and stared at the fire. He didn’t like this. His infant brother had taken a fever on a Sunday night and begun to cry, and by the following Tuesday he had been silenced forever. Sam had been only five at the time, but he could still remember the baby in a little coffin.

  Even worse, Sam couldn’t forget how the loss had affected their mother. Inconsolable with grief, she had lapsed into a bedridden world of denial from which she had never recovered. A year to the day after her child had died, a second coffin had rescued her from the pain, and Sam never wanted to see that kind of anguish from a mother again.

  Even if she was Apache.

  If Sam was looking for an excuse to ride on, this was it. Fort Davis had a post surgeon, the only doctor for a week’s journey in any direction. If Sam could coax a night of steady riding out of the horses, he might have the woman and her baby within striking distance of the fort by sometime the next night.

  Sam turned to her. “You and me’s leavin’. I’ll get your baby some help at the Army post.”

  As they prepared to ride, Sam didn’t say a word to anyone, not even in response to an inquiry from the ranger who guarded the horses outside of camp. But once the woman and her child were on the dun, and Sam began cinching up his gray, he heard Arch’s voice from behind.

  “Matto and Red have entered into a wager. The former holds that you’re deserting, while the latter attributes your actions to carnal desires to be acted on in private.”

  Sam had nothing to say. Satisfied with the cinch, he untied the reins from a scrub mesquite and swung up into the saddle.

  “Samuel?” pressed Arch.

  Sam reined the horse about so that he faced Arch’s shadowy form against the fire flaring in the background.

  “I’ll see you in Davis,” said Sam.

  With the dun carrying his wards keeping pace, Sam rode away into the hard dark, a troubled captive himself in one respect. Because there was nothing he could do for Elizabeth and her baby, he felt strangely compelled to help this mother and child—even if they were from the very band that had killed them.

  CHAPTER 18

  The call in the night followed Nejeunee away from the Indaa camp.

  She heard the hooting only once, but she turned to it immediately. Open country dominated by cacti and chaparral wasn’t favored by owls, which preferred adequate timber. Not only that, but this owl hooted with an unmistakable Apache accent.

  Nejeunee knew what it meant.

  Be ready.

  By foot, one of the People had pursued all the way from the devastated camp high in the mountains, for a warrior could trot for days with little rest. Pushing on through each night as the Indaa had slept, he had overtaken them and let her know. Now that she and Sam-el were horseback again, the pursuer would fall behind, but that would change once they stopped.

  Nejeunee was the captive of a hated enemy, but she was strangely conflicted. The People no longer had a gutaaln to cast tádidíné and drive away her baby’s evil sickness, for she had seen Nah-kay-yen fall at her feet to gunfire. Sam-el, meanwhile, had begun to earn her trust, and he had assured her that there would be help ahead for Little Squint Eyes.

  Nothing mattered more than her baby’s welfare, but there was something else with which Nejeunee also struggled. When the Indaa had attacked the camp, warriors had fled up the snowy slope, but she remembered only one who had not dripped a bloody trail. Only he would have been in any condition—and had a reason—to pursue for so great a distance, and Nejeunee didn’t dare say his name even to herself.

  She dwelled on these things as she and Sam-el took the horses in a slow trot down the beaten road. Sponging Little Squint Eyes had been effective, or maybe it was just the soothing sway of the horse’s gait, but his crying soon diminished.

  As the stars crept across the sky, however, the baby’s crying returned in force, prompting Nejeunee and Sam-el to stop and sponge him again. They did so twice more to the howl of wolves, and on each occasion Nejeunee looked back into the brooding dark and wondered who might be there, biding his time. She was aware that an Apache seldom attacked at night, believing that to die under such circumstances would set him adrift in blackness forever. But the dawn would come, and with it Nejeunee would face yet another moment that could alter the course of her life.

  The lilt of the hoofs persisted far into the dark of the morning before she and Sam-el halted to rest the horses and nap. He stretched out on his back, and even as she reclined near him, her protective hand on the cradleboard between them, Nejeunee couldn’t sleep. But it wasn’t so with Sam-el, whose breathing fell into the peaceful rhythm of a man who had no idea that danger was about.

  Nejeunee experienced it all with heightened senses—the hard desert floor under her shoulders, the shifting hoofs of the horses staked at Sam-el’s head, the chilled air seeping through her blankets. She peered into the night, searching for what she couldn’t see, and repeatedly checked the east sky past Sam-el for signs of daybreak. And throughout, she remembered and deliberated and grappled, her Ndé self at war with the part of her that had been Mexicano, and even more so with her maternal instinct to protect her baby.

  Never was a hint of red against dark horizon so unsettling, but suddenly it was there, showing through the notch between Sam-el’s chin and chest. As the glow grew brighter, some sixth sense led her to roll away from Sam-el and watch the desert emerge from the shadows. Two horse-lengths distant, a willowy ocotillo rose out of lechuguilla and pitaya. The ocotillo stalk bent in a slight wind that was cold but not frigid, its currents rich with the scent of creosote that was still too deep in gloom to see.

  Peaceful yet menacing, it was a morning that begged for the favor of Sháa, the sun. For such a request, Nejeunee needed to blow tádidíné to the antlers of the dawn, the orange streaks shooting from the daybreak horizon. But now, as discreet as a field mouse, something was rattling a dead sotol stalk.

  Nejeunee froze in anticipation, and from the brush suddenly crept a terrible figure she had hoped never to see again.

  Gian-nah-tah!

  Cautioning her to silence with an open palm, he approached with his knife out and ready to kill. Here was the Ndé to whom she was pledged, the Ndé who had butchered her mother and threatened Little Squint Eyes. And now he was at the Indaa’s feet, ready to drive the blade into the heart of one who had befriended her and had risked his life to save her baby.

  “Sam-el!”

  Nejeunee’s cry came at the last moment, but it was enough to alert Sam-el. He threw out an arm and Gian-nah-tah fell on him with a shriek. She lost sight of the blade as their bodies closed, and then she was busy dragging Little Squint Eyes out of harm’s way.

  Spinning back around on her hip, she saw the blade flash as the two men rolled in the dirt, their legs flailing. Sam-el’s hand appeared to be on Gian-nah-tah’s wrist, trying to prevent the blade from plunging, but there was no way to follow it in the struggle. Regardless, this battle of grunts and endurance could end only one way, for she knew Gian-nah-tah for the fierce warrior he was. Any moment he would cast Sam-el aside and leave his lifeless body in a dark
pool like the one that had claimed her mother’s rebosa.

  Then a gun roared, startling Nejeunee and Little Squint Eyes and scaring the horses, and Gian-nah-tah rolled away with a moan. Scrambling up, the warrior fled doubled-over, clutching his side as a second shot cut an ocotillo stalk in half at his shoulder.

  Smoke trailed from Sam-el’s revolver as he jumped to his feet. With an Indaa battle yell, he pursued to the edge of the brush but held his fire. When he glanced over his shoulder, Nejeunee was rising with her crying baby at her breast.

  The dawn grew brighter as Sam-el held his position, his revolver cocked as he turned toward all four winds. Finally, he lowered the weapon and came up before Nejeunee.

  “You saved my life,” he said. “Didn’t even realize you knowed my name.”

  For a moment his gray eyes were like a parted flap that let her see him for who he was.

  “Maybe,” he added with a smile, “you could tell me yours sometime.”

  Even after a sponging, the baby was too feverish to suckle for more than a couple of minutes. All Sam could do was get mother and child mounted and strike out into the sunrise for still-distant Fort Davis.

  He rode with vigilance and a Winchester across his thighs, for the cry of a captive had been all that had spared him. He watched her hair bounce as her horse trotted beside his, and he wondered if he would ever sleep well again.

  “How come you to do what you did? Warn me and all.”

  “You help Little Squint Eyes.” She said the name first in Apache, and then in Spanish.

  “That what you call him?” Sam dropped his gray off the pace enough to see the baby in the cradleboard at her back. “He does kind of look like he’s squintin’. Wish the poor little thing felt better.”

  Sam brought his pony abreast of her again. “So who was it jumped me?”

  The young woman didn’t answer.

  “He didn’t just happen on us out here,” Sam observed. “He one of your band?”

  Still she rode in silence, her focus straight ahead.

  “Diablos to here is a long way to chase,” he continued. “Since he nearly finished me off, I expect I got a right to know. He somebody to you?”