Jessie squeezed with all her might, and it seemed to help her ride the crest of pain. When it eased, her breath came in sharp pants. “Thank you.”
Thank you? God, how could she thank him? She wouldn’t be sitting there, sopping wet, freezing cold, nearly split in two with pain if it weren’t for him.
“Stop it,” she told him firmly.
Blake blinked. “Stop what?”
“Stop blaming yourself. It took two of us to get me here, you know.”
He couldn’t help the smile that came over him. “What, are you a mind reader now? Did some of that Apache magic floating around the rest of your family rub off on you?”
She smiled back. “No. I’m just a very wise woman who happens to know the way your mind works.”
Blake arched a brow. “I’ll get you some towels and a night gown, oh, wise Grandmother.”
Once he dried her and helped her out of her soaked clothes and into a dry gown, her shivers subsided. And the pains came with relentless swiftness.
No sooner did he have her in bed, than things happened so fast he didn’t have time to remember how scared he’d been or how his mother had died or how much too early this was all happening or that Daniella was supposed to be here helping Jessie because Blake knew nothing about human babies. He was too busy catching this one to worry, too caught up in the miracle unfolding at his very fingertips.
“By the way,” he said to keep her mind off the pain. “What are we going to name him?”
“Would you mind—” She gasped. “—if we…talked about that…later? I’m rather…busy just now.”
“Let’s see,” he said. “We made him in a hotel, but Hotel’s a stupid name. How about Menger?”
“I…think not.”
“Okay.” He shrugged. “How about…Fort Sam?”
Huffing and puffing, Jessie glared at him.
“Don’t like that, huh? What about…San Antonio?”
“Anthony.”
“Anthony?” Blake smiled. “I kinda like that. Anthony Colton Renard.”
Another pain rushed her.
Blake’s heart raced. “I can see the head. Come on, Jess, once more. This time, push hard.”
She scowled down at him, sweat running in rivulets over every inch of her pain-racked body. “I am pushing hard, damn you.”
“Well push harder. My baby wants out of there.”
“Your baby? Well pardon the hell out of me. What am I, some innocent bystandeeeerrrr—” The word ended in a growl as the pain took her again and she pushed—damn him, I’ll show him push—with all her might.
Blake kept one eye on the child miraculously emerging from her body, and the other on Jessie. He didn’t know what else to do but tease her and pick on her. She was so damn tiny, so delicate, he didn’t see how the hell she stood what was happening to her. He had to take her mind off the pain somehow, had to give her strength any way he could. If teasing her or making her mad would do it, he’d piss her off as much as he could.
One tiny shoulder came free into the world, then things seemed to stop. Jessie was still straining, still gripped in a pain so fierce he knew if it was him, it would kill him. But the other shoulder wasn’t coming. “Come on, Jess, harder. Push harder.”
She might have cursed him as she reared off the mattress, he couldn’t tell. All he heard was a fierce, blood-curdling scream that tore through him like a dozen sharp knives. God, Jessie… The baby slid free, perfect and red and wrinkled. Jessie collapsed onto the bed, her breath rasping.
“We did it, Jessie girl, we did it!”
“Jesus God, if I had the energy, I’d kick you, Blake Renard. We didn’t do anything. I did all the work here, if you’ll notice. I’m the one lying here feeling like a herd of longhorns has just thundered across me. I’m the one drowning in my own sweat. You’re the one…” She looked down to where he knelt between her raised knees and saw him holding their squirming child in his big callused hands. “You’re the one,” she said softly with a catch in her voice, “who’s…crying.”
He was, and he didn’t give a damn. He held their son—he hadn’t even told her yet that it was a boy—and met her joy-filled gaze. “Have I ever told you—” He had to stop and swallow past the huge lump of emotion in his throat. “That you are the most magnificent woman on the face of the earth?”
“No.” She sniffed and tried to smile, but it kept wobbling away. “But it’s about time you did.”
Blake saw the muscles across her abdomen bunch. “Here. Hold our son while I take care of business.” He placed the baby on her belly and knelt again between her knees. “And if you can manage it, another hard push wouldn’t be frowned upon by your favorite midwife.”
But she wasn’t listening to his teasing. The push came without thought; the pain of the contraction to expel the afterbirth never reached her mind. She was too busy staring in awe at the tiny person created by her love for Blake and his for her. “Look at him,” she breathed. “Oh, Blake, he’s perfect.”
Blake couldn’t speak. The lump in his throat had grown too large.
After he cleaned up Jessie and the baby and the bed, he sat next to her hip and watched her sleep. New lines were etched around her eyes and mouth, lines of suffering, lines of courage. Lines of motherhood.
Her eyes fluttered open.
He stroked a finger down her cheek. “I didn’t mean to wake you.”
Jessie took his hand and brought it to her lips. “We’re a family now.”
“Yes. A family. I’ll do my best by you both, Jessie, I swear I will. And I’ll never leave you. Never.”
Her smile took his breath away with its radiance. “I know.”
“You knew yesterday, didn’t you? That I couldn’t leave you, even if I tried?”
“I knew.”
“How? I didn’t.”
“Because you love me. Because I love you. Because I trust you. Because I have too much to live for, and I couldn’t live if you left me.”
“Ah, Jess.” He closed his eyes and leaned down until his forehead rested on hers. “I do love you.”
When he kissed her lips and sat up, she was asleep. Blake watched over her and the baby that night, feeling his heart so full he thought it might burst.
He vowed this child of theirs would not be given a legacy of hatred and deceit, lies and betrayal, as Blake had been. No, this child, and the ones who would follow, would receive a different gift. With Jessie by his side, Blake vowed to build a living legacy for his family. A legacy of strength.
A legacy of warmth and security.
A legacy of pride and hope.
A legacy of love.
THE END
Author’s Note
As hinted at in the pages of this story, the U.S. Government never made any attempt to honor the promises made to Geronimo when he surrendered to Lieutenant Gatewood and General Nelson Miles. President Cleveland wanted the renegades—particularly Geronimo—turned over to civil authorities in Arizona for trial. And hanging. He did send Miles a telegram, and Miles really did have it intercepted, so he could claim it arrived too late.
President Cleveland then had the train stopped in San Antonio to determine if there was a legal way for him to return the prisoners to Arizona. He sent message after message to General Miles, asking, demanding to know what the general had promised the Apaches. General Miles blithely ignored the president’s requests/orders for weeks while he led parades and let the citizens of Arizona tout him as a hero.
Finally Cleveland had the prisoners themselves questioned, separately. Each told of the same promises made by Miles. During this time there was great fear among the prisoners and some of their guards that a massacre was being planned. George Wratten did indeed secure a stash of weapons in his tent. He told Geronimo that if trouble broke out, the guns were for the Apaches to use in self defense.
The next day the president, feeling he had no legal recourse, reluctantly had the Apaches sent on to Florida. What was supposed to be a two-year exi
le ending with their return to Arizona turned into a twenty-six year prison sentence for the Chiricahua. Not only were Geronimo, Naiche, and the renegades who rode with them held as prisoners of war until 1913, but so was every Chiricahua man, woman, and child, plus the scouts, some of whom were Warm Springs and White Mountain Apaches.
The conditions for the prisoners in Florida were even more atrocious than I have depicted. Yes, their children were taken away to Pennsylvania to school. And in many cases, the men were kept at Fort Pickens just outside Pensacola, while the women and those children too young for school were held at Fort Marion in St. Augustine, hundreds of miles away.
Used to the dry deserts and cool dry mountains of Arizona, the prisoners did not fare well in humid Florida. Many, many Apaches fell ill and died. Even many of the children sent to the Carlisle School in Pennsylvania died. Finally, through the efforts of a few compassionate whites who formed the Indian Rights Association, the U.S. Government was convinced to send the prisoners to the far more healthful climate of the abandoned barracks at Mount Vernon, Alabama.
More healthful to whom, no one knows, for the prisoners kept dying at an alarming rate. They continued to succumb to a variety of diseases until 1894, when they were finally sent to Fort Sill, Oklahoma Territory. By then, nearly than half the tribe had perished.
The Chiricahua were not missed in the least by the citizens of Arizona. But neither were they forgotten. When the Chiricahua were sent to Alabama, the Coltons were there.
Spencer Colton, Travis and Daniella’s youngest son, is an established doctor by now. Near the time of the prisoners’ transfer to Oklahoma in 1894, Spence is sent to Carlisle to get LaRisa Chee, the daughter of a warrior prisoner—Matt’s friend, Chee—who lies dying at Mount Vernon.
LaRisa’s heart is breaking. How can she trust this man who will not let her mourn? How can she live in the strange and barren world of the white man? How can her heart sing when her love…ah, but that’s another story. When next we share a campfire, you and I, I’ll pass you a cup of coffee and tell you of Spencer Colton, and of LaRisa Chee. Of her fight for dignity, her fight for love. Her prayer that one day her soul will once again sing an APACHE HEARTSONG.
Sincerely,
Janis Reams Hudson
Oklahoma City, Oklahoma
Copyright
Diversion Books
A Division of Diversion Publishing Corp.
443 Park Avenue South, Suite 1008
New York, NY 10016
www.DiversionBooks.com
Copyright © 1995 by Janis Reams Hudson
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.
For more information, email [email protected]
First Diversion Books edition October 2014
ISBN: 978-1-62681-460-8
Land of the Heartsong
Clean wind whispering through the pines,
The call of the coyote,
The song of the quail,
The smell of sage on the breeze.
Thunder rumbling.
Lightning flashing.
The soothing balm of a quiet evening.
This land is in my blood.
Love is here.
It makes my heart sing.
Prologue
The Promise
They were promised two years in exile in Florida with their families, after which they would be returned to their native country in the Arizona Territory. Once returned, they would have their own land, land no white man could take from them. They would have houses and blankets and clothes and farmland and livestock. They and their children would not be cold in winter. They would not go hungry in this land where the white man had run off most of the game. No one would attack them. They would no longer need to fight for their rights, their land, their freedom. These things were guaranteed them. So said the United States Government to the Chiricahua Apaches, upon Geronimo’s final surrender in September of 1886.
The Betrayal
Florida was a living hell. Their drinking water was salty. They were crowded into areas meant to hold one-fourth their number. They had few clothes and little food. Many husbands and wives were kept in separate prisons hundreds of miles apart. Their children were taken away and sent to school in Pennsylvania. When the children became ill with tuberculosis, they were sent back to their parents to die. The parents, too, were dying. The promised two years came and went.
From 1886 through 1889, more than one-fourth of the Chiricahua Apache tribe died in prison in Florida. Men, women, and children. They died from diseases, from malnourishment, from utter hopelessness. To improve their condition, the government, under tremendous pressure from a handful of influential people and a new Indian Rights organization, sent the Chiricahua survivors to an abandoned Army barracks in Mount Vernon, Alabama. There the once-fierce, freedom-loving Chiricahua continued to die at an alarming rate.
By 1894, eight years after they surrendered in good faith, the Chiricahua Apaches were still being held as prisoners of war. Their children were still being taken away from them, only to be sent back to die. They were still being lied to. Many in the U.S. Government were still trying to devise ways to totally annihilate the tribe. The loyal Army scouts, without whom the Army would never have gotten near enough to Geronimo to talk of surrender back in 1886, were also still prisoners.
The People could not see the sky, nor any mountains, nor deer. They had not heard the call of the coyote or the song of the quail in eight long years. They were dying from more than disease. They were dying from loss of faith, from broken promises, broken spirits, broken hearts.
Finally there was talk of moving them to Fort Sill, Indian Territory, where the Kiowa and Comanche tribes had offered to share their reservations. It still wouldn’t be home, and they would still be prisoners, but the Chiricahua were told that in Indian Territory, they could see the sky.
So they waited. They waited for word to come. And they waited for that word to be broken. From the white man, it always was.
The Reality
The air in the shack—what air there was—hung motionless and thick with humidity, despair, and the ever-present bloodthirsty mosquitoes. Cockroaches the size of small mice, never having read the white man’s encyclopedia that stated they were nocturnal, didn’t deign to wait for darkness to forage for food and wave their antennae defiantly at any human who looked their way.
It was a dismal place, hot and sticky. Measuring eight by eight, the tiny hut housed four unmarried men, but during the day, only one remained inside. He lay in the corner on a moldy, moth-eaten blanket that covered a thin layer of dried grass serving as a bed. The latest coughing fit had nearly strangled him.
He was dying. Fever raged through his once-strong warrior’s body and pushed him toward the darkness. A bright circle yawned in his vision, the opening to the Land Where the Cottonwoods Stand in Line. His Maria, lost to him more than fifteen summers now, waited for him with a soft smile in her eyes.
It would be so easy to slip through and take his wife’s outstretched hand. To touch her again…
But he could not go. Not yet. He must find a way to protect their daughter.
Chee lay in the sweat and stink of his fever, feeling the frustration of helplessness gnaw at his insides. For a once-proud Apache warrior, this feeling of helplessness ate at his soul. He could not permit LaRisa to live, and die, this way.
While LaRisa had been spared the indignities of life in a prison camp since she’d been sent away to school—ripped from his side!—when she was eleven, he was not convinced her life at the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania was any better. She was nineteen now, a woman. He had not seen her face nor heard her voice in eight long years.
&
nbsp; Still, she and he were lucky. LaRisa had not fallen ill and been sent to him to die. Dozens of other families had been forced to endure such agony.
He wanted so much to see her face again before he died. Yet he must find a way to protect her. She could not stay at the school forever. As a Chiricahua Apache, her gender and age meant nothing; she was still considered a prisoner of war. Chee could not bear the thought of her coming back to the tribe and being forced to live forever with the hopelessness of The People.
Yet what could he do? There was so little time left.
A shadow darkened the doorway of his room.
Chee blinked sweat from his eyes and tried to focus. “Matt?”
“Yeah, it’s me.” Matt Colton entered and squatted on the dirt floor beside the pallet where his oldest, closest friend lay.
The two men were the same age—forty-three. They’d known each other, befriended each other, taught each other, been like brothers, since they were ten years old. One was a wealthy Arizona rancher. The other used to be a fierce Apache warrior. Now he was a prisoner. And he was dying.
The knowledge made the backs of Matt’s eyes burn.
“I’ve never asked you for anything,” Chee said.
Matt clenched his jaw. “That’s a damn stupid thing to say. You’ve never had to ask, and neither have I.”
“I’m going to ask now.”
“There’s nothing you can’t ask. You know that, juundé—friend.”
“It’s a big one.”
“Christ.” Matt squeezed his eyes shut. “Ask, dammit. Let me do something. Anything.”
“Risa. I have to find a way to protect her. I…”
“I’ll send for her.”
“No! If she comes here, they’ll make her stay. That’s what I need to protect her from. This…place. This life. I don’t want her to live like this, Matt.”
Apache-Colton Series Page 148