by Clay Fisher
As to their fearsome Mexican reputation, Flicker concluded, this was also fearsomely exaggerated. The Yaqui, historically, could not begin to match murderings, Mexican and American, with the Apache. The good Yaqui were no more represented by such killers as our prisoner and his men than were the good Apache by wild ones of the breed of Chato, old Nana, Chihuahua, Geronimo, or Delgado. Tribally, the Yaqui of Sonora were an intelligent people, notably more industrious than the Apache, say, of Chihuahua state. Like most dwellers in the desert and the main of arid-mountain peoples, the Yaqui were possessed of keen senses both of humor and harsh reality.
A dangerous people—in that time and that empty, brooding monte that was their querencia, their place—yes.
But depraved and vicious as an entire people, ridículo!
Flicker, the lecture completed, returned his frowns and scowls to the subject of determining what the outlaw Yaqui rurales had been about, so far from Rio Yaqui and so near to old Nacozari. As to this, he had one immediate concern.
We must remember, he said, that Santiago Kifer had passed us and gone ahead of us into the land of his mother, Monkey Woman. It was not impossible, from this, that the prisoner and his men had been looking for us when they happened upon the Mexican muleros and their rich train. It was not, at the same time, highly likely that such was the case. He had not wished to alarm me, Flicker stressed. Only to caution me against disturbing the prisoner, either to comfort or to converse with him.
“Leave him to me,” the big Negro had said. “He’s mine.”
But the captive fascinated me, the while.
It was like exhuming some live man of the caves from his limicolous pit of mud, a million years later.
His head was enormous. It was far too large for the gross, square body. The great skull appeared to grow directly, like some loathsome tumor, from the shoulders. There could have been no more than two fingers of neck. The hair, harsh and straight as wire, grew in a black shock down over the eyes. The effect of the simian orbs, thus buried and set close as those of a ferret to the flattened, big-nostriled nose, was startlingly prehistoric. Unlike most Indians, this creature had the hard-carven muscles of an Anglo or African. The thick torso was borne on short hairy legs so grotesquely bowed that the knees bent several inches outward of the ankles. The horn-soled feet turned inward so they well-nigh trod upon one another. Erect, the knuckles of the dangling orangutan arms came nearly abrush of the desert sand. The man was, withal, a creature from another time.
What there was, or might be, of a mind behind the wild and hating eyes, we were yet to determine.
No least hint had thus far been shown of a rational intelligence.
Turning to be back with Flicker and the woman, I made toward the creature, and by habit, the sign of the cross and of the benediction. For the first time the man ceased struggling to peer at me. It was the look of a lobo or a mountain puma pinioned in the steel of the jawed trap. Release me, it cried. As God is your conscience and Saint Francis the patron of my kind, let me go free. “I cannot,” I said aloud to the creature. “I cannot do it.” And went on away from there, shaken that the thought had reached me and that I had considered obeying its plea.
Crossing the camp, I saw that my people were busy.
Zorra and Charra Baca had a fire lit, and the smell of bacon, asizzle in one of our grand new skillets, was in the air. There was also, where Packrat squatted to ably help them, the odor más magnífico de todo of Apache bread baking in a greased pan, being “fried,” in their description. Kaytennae stood nearby, watching them.
Yonder, past the fire, Young Grass tended our new and old stock, getting them all under “Comanche picket,” a method of loose-roping trailstock together borrowed by the Apache from their Staked Plains cousins.
The scene warmed me. It gave me confidence in our small company. It made Nunez’s dream grow more real, more possible, more urgently beckoning than ever.
“Praise His name,” I said, and made a cruz.
Flicker heard me and glanced up as I approached. His quick eye saw my motion of the cross.
“Save it for the white sister,” he said to me. “She’s slipped away again. They must have used her more than seemed likely. Have a look.”
I bent down and saw that the woman had indeed lost ground. It was not that actual suffering from the attempted rape yet pained her, except in the contusions of the beating, but her inner spirit had withdrawn. Now not only would she not talk to us, she would not look at us.
“What do you figure, padre?” Flicker said.
“You know what it is,” I answered, and he nodded.
Both the Negro American deserter and myself had seen other white women long held captive by bronco tribes, whether Apache, Comanche, or mixed-blood bands of wild nomads. This woman was suffering from and showed harsh evidence of just such prolonged captivity. Perhaps—no, almost surely—she had been many times traded. Sold in some cases as a woman, some as a pack animal, some as a slave to the Apache or Comanche squaws, cruelest fate of all. This poor thing had not seen the inside of a white or a mestizo house, or even a lowly jacal of the monte, for more winters than she would remember or want to remember. Her hands and feet were thickened with calluses and scar tissues. Her skin was burned by wind and sun to a cordovan brown. In places, as beneath the eyes and around the mouth, the burn was nearly black. Yet the long hair bleached nearly colorless and the remarkable paleness of the eyes named her race as Anglo. There could be no question here; this had been a white woman.
And more.
There was that about her that stirred the memory. Something in the rawboned defiance of wasted figure. In the unbroken bearing of great pain. The angular boning of the narrow face. And, above all, in the slanted set of the brilliantly light gray eyes.
Somewhere I had known this woman.
Or known someone enough like her to make of our gaunt, lost sister an eerie reminder of my own past.
Who was she?
And why could she not, or would she not, tell us?
We continued to wash her wounds with cool water brought from the sand-well dug by our women. We did not give up. Especially did black Flicker labor to restore this blistered, bleeding, pathetically desexualized woman. His dark eyes never left the bruised and swollen face. He laved it constantly with both the water and the touch of his hands. All the while, he gentle-talked her and kept the others of the company back from her, protecting her.
I did not understand it then. Since, it has become clear to me, and it ought to have been obvious at the time. I thought it was the common bondage of their backgrounds—both had been enslaved, both robbed of an identity of self in an alien society of other skin colors—that kept the black man at the side of the exhausted white woman, and kept her mind from breaking that day at Sycamore Water. Or so Nunez pompously assumed.
And, ah, how ever far from the truth I was.
But that will wait its time of blossoming. It will bear its proper fruit before this tale is done.
For then, for that hour of that day, Flicker won his battle to bring the woman back. Miraculously, her color and strength returned. The gray eyes opened again, and this time clear of all cloud, of all staring blankness. Flicker and I knew the victory when, in sudden unexpected response to a lingering touch of his, she reached forth in return to take the black man’s hand.
Flicker put his other hand atop the woman’s hand and held it thus, and he asked her softly who she was.
She spoke with difficulty but with no disarray of mind.
“My name is Stella,” she said. “Stella Allison. I have been with the Indians nineteen years.”
The name leaped my memory ten years back in a great heart-bumping tug. Wonder of God, was this the sister of the famed Texas pistolero? Would my words now bear the miracle to her that she had been found?
“You are the sister of Ben Allison,” I said, and she
answered with tears and a low moaning cry of weeping affirmation that outspoke a dozen clearly worded answers.
Flicker put his great black arm about her whip-marked shoulders, his deep voice soft as east wind.
“You’re home, white sister,” he said.
And then she slept.
33
STELLA’S STORY
The noon meal was done. All had fed well. After some debate with Kaytennae, Flicker had decided to rest here at Sycamore Water the remainder of the day. The Apache had thought such delay dangerous. He did not like the presence of the Yaqui band outside their usual range. But he had scouted a circle entirely around the sycamore oasis and found no track of other Yaqui than those he and Flicker had killed. As none of these had escaped to bear warning to the main tribe or to the unknown camp of Monkey Woman, the Apache grudgingly agreed. As Indians forever will, he had a defense for his surrender. The flow of the well our women had dug was so little that it would require all the afternoon to let the stock drink. This they must do, also, having had no water the previous night at Burro Meat camp.
Flicker was gracious in the victory.
“Anh, yes,” he grunted to Kaytennae. “Thanks, warrior; I had not thought of that.”
The truth was that Flicker knew more of stock and of slow wells and water than Kaytennae did. But he had been ten years with the Apache. And was himself a Negro. He knew you trap more ants with molasses than with mustard seed.
To me he said, aside, “Be easy, Nunez. It’s time we powwowed. For openers, I want you to help me get her story out of the Allison woman. The hunch is gnawing me that she’s holding cards we’ve got to read. Come on.”
I delayed, mentioning my sharing of Kaytennae’s fear that somehow the Yaqui would learn of the massacre of their comrades and seek us out in whelming numbers there at Sycamore Water.
“Look, father,” Flicker said impatiently, “there was one survivor of our fight with the sons of bitches, and we have got him diamond-hitched to a stump that all our mules and three sticks of giant powder could not uproot. Now, come on. The woman’s awake and feeling better. I think she wants to talk. And I know I want her to.”
He was right, as nearly ever he was.
Stella Allison, after some little awkwardnesses to use the English tongue she had not spoken in nineteen years, of a sudden broke wide the dam of memory and of nightmare. The story spilled in a rush from her bruised lips. We sat spellbound to its dark flow.
In 1859, when she was twenty years of age, she had been at a boarding school in Brownsville, Texas, learning, her San Saban ranch parents had hoped, “to become a lady.” That was the year of the Cheno Cortinas raid from Mexico, when the dashing Cheno actually held Brownsville for twenty-four hours. In the retreat (when the rangers came) the red-haired Cortinas had seen Stella Allison on the street. With Latin abandon, the young general had seized the girl and carried her off with his troops to Mexico.
The “romance” had been spectacularly terminated.
When she had been but three days the captive of Cheno Cortinas, Apaches in force, raiding far out of their country, struck the isolated camp of Cheno and his staff officers, taking the white girl away in their own retreat back toward the “great silent grass” from whence they had come.
Wearying, on the retreat, of his white captive’s wildcat determination not to be forced to the blanket, the Apache jefe sold her for a number of fresh horses to the patrón of a raffish band of comancheros. That is to say, to the head of a nomad band of mixed-breed Mexican Comanches who spent their lives following the buffalo herds to hunt for the market.
In his surprised turn, the patrón discovered he had wasted a lot of very good ponies on a virago and vixen who would not bed him and who, indeed, caused him several painful private wounds for his efforts.
But the patrón was a shrewd trader, and he convinced the very next party of war-riding Indians—these were Mescalero Apache from the valley of the Rio Grande, near Socorro—to take the Texan treasure off his hands and to guarantee to transport her out of his territory. He received some old Spanish gold coins and three good repeating rifles for his property, a gypsy’s profit to say the very least.
Now followed the years of wandering and reselling, jefe to jefe, tribe to tribe, territory to territory.
She had eventually and inevitably been “married” in the bronco manner. Not one time but too many times to remember, or to recount if remembered. With these unions, mercifully, there had been no issue beyond the first. These were twins, girls, and in the Apache custom were killed, twins being a severe taboo. This shadow also stayed with the mother. Less and less the dark-skinned riders sought her as mate. More and more she was given over to the squaws as servant, pack animal, kicking post, and beating woman.
It was the Apache women who had given Stella Allison her myriad of wounds that would never smooth. The men were indifferent but the squaws exquisitely attentive. Stella hated the squaws and always would. This, despite her own full quarter of Comanche blood through her full-blood grandmother, and her being second cousin to the notorious Kwahadi Comanche raider, Quanah Parker. Somehow, the Apache were different.
In probable truth, the Comanche were as cruel as any Indian people alive. But Stella had not seen this in them, owing to the shelter of her grandmother’s custody when among the Comanche on secret visits—against all parental warning—with her brother Ben.
Clint, her other “big brother,” had no familial regard for the red cousins, being a Texan first, last, and, as he put it, “foremost.” Her younger sister, Star Allison, was like Ben. Star looked and lived like an Indian. Unlike Ben, she was dark of hair, skin, and eyes. But in the heart they were both “Comanch.” The remaining, small-fry brother, Arjay, was only six when Stella was taken, too young to have been visiting the fierce old Comanche lady.
It had been this “Indian hope”—of Ben Allison and the wild riders of Cousin Quanah Parker coming to rescue her—that had kept Stella Allison sane those first years of her epic captivity—sane and never surrendering her spirit.
By the time she knew that Ben was never going to come, nor Cousin Quanah venture so far into enemy Apache country, Stella Allison had grown more Indian than white woman and was able to survive and to keep from surrendering her mind, simply by her own strength.
By the year past she now finished her tale of wandering—she had lived with at least a dozen Indian tribes, mainly Apache and mainly of Mexico.
Then, at the close of that past year, last springtime it would be, she had been given as a gift to the wild people of Yaqui River. This by the Bedonkohe Apache of the ominous Geronimo; indeed, she came from the jacal of the chief himself. The gift was to seal an agreement of nonaggression with the Yaqui. This had become needful for the Bedonkohe in their ever-increasing flights to avoid American pursuit and entrapment by Mexican cavalry. The treaty permitted the Bedonkohe to come over the Sierra Madre and hide on the Yaqui side. In return, Geronimo vowed to stop killing Yaquis who might, for whatever need, enter his domain. Unless, of course, those Yaquis wanted to get killed and proved it by stealing Apache horses or women. The treaty had been honored, Stella Allison said, but not for her. The Yaqui had proved utterly pagan with her.
In fact, the sole reason she lived was that she struck the western slope savages as being so proud and such a mujer dura, such a woman of rock, that they made a game of seeing in whose camp she would finally die.
In this obscene succession of moves, the last one, but one night ago, had been to the camp of the dreaded Monkey Woman.
At this point, Flicker caught my eye. He nodded and tapped head with finger, as though to say, you see, hombre, what did I tell you; I knew there was reason we must hear her fdbula.
I returned his nod, and Stella Allison continued.
When the ultimate ugliness of her fate—at being delivered into the camp of Monkey Woman—came to her, the end was plain
to see. Here was the place where the mujer dura would break. When, the same night of her arrival in the Yaqui camp, Monkey Woman gave her as a “using woman” to a tribesman more wild animal than human being, Stella Allison determined to end the nineteen years of her living death among the Indians.
She would go that night. If they caught her, she had a knife and would kill herself with it. Should God, on the opposite hand, work a miracle and let her win away alive, then the world yet held some years of better days for Stella Allison.
Here, our storyteller paused, regathering composure lost to such vicious memories. Soon, she went on.
“I left the campo early last night; there was the chance to go while the band was drinking Yaqui beer furnished by my husband to celebrate his new Yori woman.
“I ran all night long, coming north, trying to reach the Mexican settlement at Nacozari. Before daylight, I climbed into some high rocks and dug a hole in a bank of soft earth, up there, and hid myself in it. When the sun came, I looked far to the south and saw seven Yaquis following my track of the night before. I knew I was lost. I drew the knife.
“But, as I did, I heard the tinkle of mule bells. Below my high place in the rocks, I saw the packstring with its three Mexican drivers following the trail I had hoped myself to find with first light, that to the village of Nacozari. Now, also in the sun, I could see the town lying just over the next range of rocks from where I had hidden. By so near had I come to finding Nacozari before the Yaqui found me.
“But now there was still some chance. If I could reach the Mexican mule train and warn its drivers, we might, all of us, yet win to the settlement in time.
“I looked again for the Yaquis coming on my track, and now they had disappeared from it.