Tame the Wildest Heart

by Parris Afton Bonds

  She was a vision that had flitted through his dreams for years, all sparkle and light and loveliness. Warm brown eyes that tilted at the ends, matching that same tilt to the ends of her pale pink lips. Rich, cocoa-brown hair spilled in curls from a circlet of silver-wrought flowers atop her head. And she was small, standing no higher than his shoulder.

  Her smile was given freely, but not so her affections. Those, William Bingham learned, were reserved for Reginald McAlister, the young civil engineer newly graduated from the University of Edinburgh, who was a guest of the Chisholms until he could find his own place.

  Obviously, he already had, Bingham soon realized. In Mattie’s heart.

  That night, and for the thousand-and-one nights thereafter, William Bingham retired to his bed to pray and chafe and rail and pray again, humbled by his own rebellious spirit. He lusted after Mattie, who belonged to another. This unplucked flower, who was much purer in heart than he could ever hope to be.

  “‘Let us lie down in our shame, and let our humiliation cover us; for we have sinned against the Lord our God,’” he would pray each night, even as his flesh burned for her and his imagination ran riot: to hold her beneath him, to rain kisses on her skin, as white as the lily, to enter her and give her his life seed.

  That sacrifice of sacrifices.

  Soon, he found his prayers were little more than fantasies. Mattie had become his Vision, his Way, his Light, and his Life. He waited for her to visit his little adobe house with her basket of cast-off clothing or unused food that her mother sent weekly for the campesinos and blanket Indians to whom he ministered.

  Could Mattie not see his suffering? That he suffered because of her? The fetes and soirees he occasionally attended at the Chisholm home were opportunities to glimpse his adored.

  The night the pueblo’s priest married Mattie and Reginald, William had watched with a heart that shriveled. Behind the priest and the bridal couple, the ivory statue of Saint Tomas, patron saint of the pueblo, glowed warmly from the brass niche in the west crucero. The heavyset priest gently nudged the couple, a prompt to indicate they were to go down on their knees. In adherence to tradition, a rosario was looped over the shoulders of the pair.

  Crazy thoughts beat at William’s brain. He could still rip away the rosario, carry her off into the night with him; make her his forever. She should have been his mate. Together, they could take God’s Word to the world’s four corner s.

  Like a man possessed by a demon, a wild animal turned loose, he whirled from the back of the chapel and charged out into the rain-misted night. He had no idea where he was going. For him, there was no Gethsemane.

  A voice from an arched doorway called softly. “Señor Billy, I give you fun time.”

  Fun time? Had he ever known a fun time? At six years of age, he had pulled the plow—he, the mule the family couldn’t afford. His nights had been spent learning to read from the family Bible. His toil-worn mother had been the strictest of teachers.

  The plow harness of his youth had become the faith harness of his manhood. But on this night his manhood rebelled against this unfair yoke. He strode through that portal to hell and bedded the young Mexican puta. Over and over. Until his pockets were empty. His body was empty. His mind was empty.

  Then, after only half dressing, he went outside. Turned his face up to the rain. And cried. For the first time. And the last.

  He left Santo Tomas. Rode circuit through the numerous mining towns and pueblos scattered throughout northwestern Mexico. He didn’t see Mattie McAlister again. Not for almost a year. Not until some ten days after he and she were captured on the same sweeping raid Nantez’s braves made in a twenty-mile range of the subchief’s Sierra camp. When he did see her, he almost didn’t recognize her.

  She was bedraggled. Still wearing the cotton nightgown she had been wearing the night she was captured. It was tattered and blood-stained, and it clung to her distended belly. She was with child!

  Her hair was matted. Her eyes looked haunted. At that moment, he probably felt for her the only pure love he would ever feel for anyone. It was uncontaminated by desire in any of its demonic faces.

  He did not see her again for some days. At that time, he was feigning insanity. The deception permitted him to roam free within the camp. Left on his own, he had hopes of escape soon. Then bad luck intervened.

  A contingent of Mexican soldiers approached Nantez’s base camp with a white flag of negotiation. A misunderstanding occurred. He never knew what it was, but one of the soldiers fired on the mother of an Apache named Tsao. Tsao was so enraged that he turned on Bingham and scalped him on the spot.

  He was left to die. Unattended, he would have. But Mattie ministered to his wounds, even at the risk of being cuffed, being battered was more like it.

  He fell in love with her this time. Desire, love, lust all consumed him like a gigantic conflagration. During his circuit riding, he had witnessed a holocaust wrought by a wildfire. For those who were in its path, there was no escaping it.

  He had been in Mattie’s path. There was no escaping her. He was afire for her. All over again. And all over again, she chose another. Nantez.

  Bingham’s prayers included new biblical intonations. ‘“Behold, you have spoken and have done evil things, and you have had your way. Then the Lord said to me in the days of Josiah the king, Have you seen what the faithless Israel did? She went up on every high hill and under every green tree, and she was a harlot there. And I thought, after she has done all these things, she will return to me; but she did not return. . . .’”

  When he could stand no longer her groveling beneath the heathen, he plotted his escape and looked not once behind him. Put the harlot from him forever.

  Until that day she arrived at Fort Lowell with her bastard child. Not even all his condemnation would make her bend her head with shame.

  He had put her behind him again when he left her and Halpern at that first night’s camp. And after getting lost in a sandstorm, he had run upon her again.

  Now he knew that Satan was a god he hadn’t discovered yet.

  § CHAPTER EIGHT §

  The rain started and did not stop. Surely it was a curse of God, Bingham would say. Forty days and nights of rain.

  The foothills had leveled out. Mattie and the others were traveling across a wide, endless plateau dotted with juniper and piñon. The trees by themselves did not offer sufficient shelter.

  So she made her own shelter, just as she had for Nantez every time he moved base camp. She instructed the men, including Albert, who did not remember how, to cut saplings and brush. Next the long, slender poles where thrust into the ground about two feet apart, bent inward until they met and bound together at the top. A little hole was left to let the smoke out. She then proceeded to show them how to weave brush and branches into the framework. All this took a little less than two hours. By the time they were finished, the four were drenched.

  Mattie huddled with the others around a fire that was more smoke than flame. She thought of other tasks she had performed for Nantez. Of tanning buffalo hides and using animal brains and tallow. Of more intimate tasks like fashioning the muslin strip around his smelly body, passing it between his squat legs and around his pelvis and adjusting the ends so that they fell to the knobby knees, both in front and behind.

  He had seemed to take delight in watching her do this. Had it been because he had known she loathed him?

  She had to be unbalanced after all those years of captivity. Proof was right here, right now: she was persisting in the search. She had Albert back. She hadn’t taken any of Gordon’s money up front. She had no responsibility to him.

  And yet, she was going to help him find his wife. Help him find the very thing that would take him out of her own life. If he didn’t find Diana . . . maybe, just maybe, he might come to find in herself the qualities that were worth loving. Except, after all these years, she didn’t know what they were. If any, they certainly weren’t those that would attract romantic lo
ve.

  Why would she want to reject those very qualities that had sustained her during those nightmarish years? Her ability to withdraw from that outer brutal world even as she performed degrading tasks and received physical blows. Her desire to find beauty amid the ugliness.

  Disgust at her weakness, coming now when she had put the worst behind her, overcame her. She was more than her body! Abruptly, she leaned forward, clawed both hands through the mushy earth and raked them down her cheeks, painting muddy war stripes.

  Her outrageous action elicited a variety of responses from her traveling companions. Albert glanced up and then away. His little face, as usual, betrayed little of what was going on in his mind.

  Next to her, Bingham didn’t even bother to look up from the stringy dried beef he gnawed.

  Across the fire pit, Gordon stared at her through the eye-stinging smoke. His brows were raised in surprise.

  She laughed. “Mother Earth.” Explanation enough.

  Later, much later, she left the wickiup and went to stand alone in the downpour, her face uplifted to the cleansing rain. When she allowed herself the luxury of feeling emotion, she had to be where none could spy upon her.

  No, she would never be afraid again. At least, of change. Of loss. Of death.

  Unless she was afraid of emotion. Love was something she didn’t know if she was courageous enough to risk. The wise knew that love meant all three at once: change of the self, loss of the self, death to the self. That supreme sacrifice.

  Dias muire, what she wouldn’t give for a cigarette!

  She stared down at the gumbo mud, into which her moccasins were sinking. Neglected feet, she thought morosely, wishing even more for her lost foot balm than for a cigarette.

  Reluctantly, she turned those feet back toward the wickiup with its fragrant bed of pine needles and the man who had the power to make her panic.

  Love was ecstasy and torment, freedom and captivity.

  * * *

  Captivity. That was what life on a U.S. government reservation meant to Nantez of the Netdahe band of Apaches. Instead, he would take his own captives.

  The Netdahe were regarded by other Apaches as being true wild men, whose mode of life was devoted entirely to warfare and raiding the settlements.

  The band was composed of outlaws recruited from other Apache bands. It included in its membership a few Navajos as well as Mexicans and whites who had been captured as children and had grown up as savages.

  He stared across the fire pit at the two figures huddled in the corner. The woman he had taken captive more than a month ago in Piños Altos had no spirit and bored him. But her coloring—gold skin, gold hair, turquoise eyes—was a living trophy. A symbol of his prowess.

  The little girl, four or five years of age he judged, he had captured four days earlier in a raid on a stage outside Fort Bowie.

  He had heard that Baishan, his son by the woman his people called Cimarron, was somewhere in southeastern Arizona. He would yet find the boy. And the boy’s mother. Nantez’s rage at the insolence of the white woman continued after all these years to seek an outlet.

  He raised a finger and crooked it. “Come here,” he told the child.

  The yellow-haired woman scrambled farther back into the wickiup’s corner. The more compliant she was, the more contempt he had for her. Cimarron had been hard-nosed, a scrapper with the pluck of a man. And much more amusing to torment.

  Behind him, he heard his wife Ponchie rise. “Where are you going?” he demanded as he turned.

  She dropped her gaze before his fierce stare. “The deer meat . . . . ”

  He nodded his head and watched her depart in silent and rapid steps. Sometimes his vengeance could not be contained and directed at only the selected quarry.

  He took pride in the reports that said he wasn’t human. That he was invincible. People looked into his eyes and were spooked. Because they said they saw nothing there. Nothing. No light. Only darkness. No soul.

  Good. Fear made them weak. Ramos was weak. The medicine man didn’t show his fear, but the way he slunk around the camp was proof enough. Hobbled was a better word. Ramos had intervened once too often.

  Nantez hated to admit it, but he needed Ramos. Like all great leaders, he needed a whipping boy.

  His grin was contemptuous. His enemies underestimated him, all but the white woman Cimarron.

  He crooked his finger again. The little girl rose. He looked her over. Her swollen lips trembled. Tears made her eyes ugly red berries. She was obviously having trouble breathing. He thrilled at the fear exuding from her.

  As a boy, his parents had claimed he displayed a mischievous nature. He used to go out into the woods with a few other young men to tease the girls who were gathering acorns. One of his tricks was to wait until the girls had done a lot of hard work, then take the acorns away from them.

  This had come to the attention of the wife of Chief Mah-ko, who told her grandson Goyakla and some of his friends to waylay Nantez and give him and his gang a good whipping.

  As the chief’s grandson, Goyakla was always the favored boy. The weak and fearful boys sought the protection of his status. It was the only time Goyakla probably lost a battle. Now, under the Mexican name of Geronimo, Goyakla had become a noted leader and spent most of his time preying on the weakness of the Americans.

  Nantez hated people for their weakness. He liked to believe it was his strength that made him succeed. But he sometimes acknowledged to himself that it wasn’t that way at all. It wasn’t his strength. It was the weakness of others that helped him. That, and his own ruthlessness in the face of truth and honesty.

  Now, he lifted his fist and cuffed his captive. The little girl was an object for the hatred he felt for the weak, a target for the overwhelming hatred he felt for all those who were not on his level. The girl fell with a thud, and her head hit one of the fire pit’s rocks. Blood slowly stained it red.

  He shrugged, then shifted his gaze to the only one remaining in the tent. He crooked his finger at the figure crouching in the shadows. “Come here.”

  * * *

  The rain poured so hard that it was pointless even to attempt riding that day, especially considering the condition of their mounts.

  That scrap of humanity known as Mattie McAlister curled up and dozed as easily as an old, mangy mongrel. The preacher read silently from his Bible. His hat’s soggy feather still drooped from the morning’s outing to relieve himself. The half-breed kid doled out his cards in four strips of solitaire.

  As for Gordon, he decided a shave was in order. Without a mirror and only rainwater to serve as a lather, the shaving was turning into a bloodletting worthy of a medieval apothecary. The inconveniences imposed by the Wild West were beginning to irritate him.

  “Nine of hearts goes on the ten of spades over there,” he told the kid.

  Albert fixed him with a baleful look but moved the card as instructed.

  Gordon temporarily abandoned his effort at shaving to watch the kid. For a nine-year-old, he was good. Very good. “Ever play stud poker?” he asked.

  Albert shook his head, and his long, black hair flicked against his copper cheeks. Though he was small, like his mother, there was little other similarity between them. He looked completely Indian.

  “Any kind of poker?”

  Again, the shake of the head.

  “Then it’s time you learned.”

  Bingham shifted his attention to them. His gray eyes were stormy with condemnation. “‘The way of the wicked is an abomination to the Lord, but He loves him who pursues righteousness.’ Proverbs fifteen.”

  “‘But the mouths of fools spouts folly.’ Proverbs fifteen also,” Gordon said. He picked up the kid’s deck and began to shuffle. “First, you ante up. Seeing as how we’re short of coins, pebbles will serve.” He went on to explain the royal and straight flush, four-of-a-kind, and the rest of the ranks. “We’ll go through a practice hand, all right?”

  He dealt the hand. When the kid p
icked up his cards, he fanned them out. After a moment, confusion puckered his arrow-straight brows.

  “What is it?”

  The kid flipped the joker in the center. “What is that?”

  “No one ever told you?”

  Albert shook his head.

  “It’s a joker. A wild card.”

  Those acute dark eyes stared back at him. “A wild card? Then it is not good. Something wild.”

  “No, not at all. It’s the highest ranking card.” Then, he understood what the kid was really saying. “Look, Albert, a joker is good because it is wild. Besides cards, a joker is something that is held in reserve to gain an end or escape from a predicament. Understand?”

  The kid displayed a jack-o’-lantern smile. “I hold five aces, then. I think you will not escape from this predicament.”

  Albert seemed so cocksure. Yet Gordon knew the kid was like him. Bewildered about where he was, and who he was. Like a leaf poised on its edge. Swirling, turning, blowing in various and opposing wind currents. Uncomfortable in his uncertainty. Needing to find where he was, but moving before he knew. Accepting without question the unpleasant, but somehow not believing the pleasant with equal certainty.

  “That was nice of ye to take the time to teach Albert to play poker,” Mattie said later that afternoon. She had awakened just as Gordon was explaining the purpose of the wild card, the joker.

  “I was bored.” He sat on a stump. The big lightning-hit desert willow bridged a ravine where it had fallen, some fifty yards from their campsite. Once the drizzle had stopped, he had deserted the crowded, stuffy wickiup. The bitter tang of wet sage scented the rain-washed air.

  “Here, let me help.” She knelt beside him. Taking his razor from him, she tilted his head at an angle to catch the sunlight, which was finally peeking through tattered curtains of clouds.