by Clay Fisher
“My God!” I cried. “Wicked! Wicked!”
Tulip nodded. “She is a witch of my people, Jorobado. They fear her more than any man. That’s why you are in great danger here. All has changed for you.”
I refused to believe it, even feeling the chill of its mere possibility settle about me in the darkness. Sensing this, Tulip said, “Only wait a little while; I have sent Kaytennae out to hear what he can of how the people feel. But I must say to you that I know already how they feel—they feel as she tells them to feel.”
“You hate her,” I accused, surprised.
“As only an old ugly woman can hate a young and pretty one,” Tulip answered. “Don’t you think that Juh, too, sees those delicious fruits she carries beneath her blouse? Bah! Hate, you say? A poor, small word for how I feel, Jorobado.”
My vision of Huera the Blonde, of my wild Apache love, whose parts I had seen at Laguna de Luz and whose heart, I had dared to imagine, might in some secret pagan way return the worship of a poor lost misshapen young priest of the Spanish Faith, ah! That vision faded now into the black, stifling gloom of the interior of Juh’s wickiup.
She was no god-woman.
She was no priestess of these innocent barbarians.
She was an Apache Delilah.
She saw the power that was in Robert Flicker, as Robert Flicker saw the power that was in Huera the Blonde. They were both bitten of the same mad dog of desire to destroy the Pinda Lickoyi, the pale-eyed Anglos of the North—to hate the white man till death did them part of their evil, twisted devotions—and if this madness meant injustice, even death, for Juh, so be it. The plan was for the people.
Fortunately for the lives of tall Ben Allison and limping Blackrobe Jorobado, one old squaw and one young warrior did not believe the plan.
They knew who the people were.
They were Juh and Tulapai and Kaytennae.
True Nednhi Chiricahua.
Not all those fools rushing to obey an Apache woman who rode and fought and lived like a man, and a black extraño of a soldier deserter who had lied to the Nednhi about getting five hundred guns for one small white boy.
“Do you think there is any way, Tulip,” I said at last, softly, “that we may truly help the people?”
Juh’s wife peered out the door of the wickiup.
“I don’t know,” she said. “Perhaps Kaytennae has learned something.”
“He is there now?”
“Yes. He’s out in the brush behind the pole corral waiting for the chance to slip in, unseen. Ah—”
As she brightened, I heard an altogether too-familiar high voice piping unwantedly, “Hey, Kaytennae! I seen you move! Where at you been? Dogs, boy, you really missed the fun!”
I heard a grunt, as of from hard throwing, and a stone the size of a Casas Grandes lemon whistled in painful ricochet off the already bruised hind end of Little Buck. “Chito, tontito!” hissed Kaytennae, sliding into view along the wall of the wickiup. “I won’t be so nice to you next time.”
“Nephew,” called out Tulip, “before you come in, take the white boy for a walk on the chain. He needs to make water and perhaps dirt. Don’t be long about it.”
“Aunt,” said Kaytennae, plainly in distress, “we must talk. Let his bladder wait.”
“No, the people need to see that you are here, where Juh sent you. Show yourself. Walk the boy. But hurry. Did you learn something?”
“Everything,” Kaytennae murmured. He stepped away from the wickiup and called out loudly to Little Buck, “All right, come on, boca grande. It is time for your walk. I will let you off the chain if you are a good dog.”
“Bow wow!” answered Little Buck delightedly. “Try me out and see. I been wanting to take a pee so bad my back-jaw teeth been tasting like a buffler waller.”
I sank back against the woven-stick wall of my hiding place, too whelmed over even to pray.
What was the use? What did God know about escaping from an Apache rancheria, seven thousand feet up in the Sierra Madre of the North?
26
Kaytennae brought Little Buck into the wickiup after walking him. It was the first opportunity I had had to speak with the Texas boy at any length. It proved a fruitless gift. Little Buck was having the time of his life. Chained, rocked, yelled at, he cared not. He was “the captive” in a genuine red Indian village, and a great scalp dance and barbecue were coming up that night, at which, he had been given to understand by Kaytennae, “all hell was due to bust loose.” “They was,” according to young Buckles, “going to name a new chief, and old Ben was agoing to thrash the liver-lights out of the old chief and, well, by cripes, it was going to be a barn-burner.”
In vain, I attempted to impart to the boy some measure of our mutual peril. If for no other reason, this was advisable to secure his cooperation in any escape that might open to us. His zestful habit of screeching out, “Hey, there, where the hell you going?” at least movement of any of us was, in itself, sufficient problem to warrant the lecturing.
It was still a waste.
He had not himself decided, he informed me, whether he would go home to Texas or stay with Kaytennae. He might also choose to stick with old Ben and become a pistolero. It depended. The one thing he was absolutely sure of, however, was that he had no interest whatever in becoming a priest. Or of siding-up with one. Chief on his mind was the worry that he should go to see his mother again right soon, and he wasn’t sure that his Apache friends would be welcome around Fort Bliss.
Do not mistake me, the boy was no fool.
He understood that good people had died under Apache guns in the attack on the El Paso stage, an attack that would never have taken place had it not been for Little Buck Buckles being on that stage. But the boy was only eight years old. Even seeing the rangers ambushed in my garden had not deranged his emotions. Children are like that. They are not cold. They are not cruel. But death is not the same thing to them that it is to an adult. Little Buck had seen the stage crew tumble off the box. He had seen the governess shot as she ran. He had watched the Apaches fire the wrecked coach and watched them again as they took Texan hair in my mission garden. But he would still say, and mean it for the moment, that he might stay with the Nednhi. He hadn’t made up his mind yet.
Well, he was an unusual boy.
Juh had noted that.
Perhaps Little Buck was a white Apache.
I only know that, in all the afternoon and until dusk drew on at sunset, where we waited in the dark of Tulip’s wickiup for whatever would happen, Little Buck never once mentioned his father; nor would he be persuaded to listen to my pleas for his attention.
“Don’t you fret it so, Reverend,” was all he would say. “Me and old Kaytennae, we’ll think of suthin.”
I would learn to have more faith in Henry Garnet Buckles III, but at the moment hope and patience waned apace. “You should be birched!” I snapped. “Were I your father, I would leave you here. Gladly!”
“Well, Reverend,” he said, completely without animus, “happen you’re right. But we ain’t ever going to find that out, because you couldn’t be my father.”
“What?” I said. “Why not?”
“Because priests don’t have no peckers,” he told me soberly.
At first flush, I would scathe him with fire.
Then, of course, I had to laugh.
My nerves gave way and I let everything go in the roll of the laughter. Tulip and Kaytennae began first to snicker, then to guffaw. Little Buck, dirty of mind like all healthy little boys, giggled hysterically at the success of his innocent Protestant canard. In a moment we were all weeping with our cackles of relief. We were still wiping eyes and collecting mutual breath when, against the last of the sun’s red light, six Nednhi men loomed suddenly in the open door span of the war chief’s wickiup.
In their van stood Otsai, the Bad One.
>
“Come on with us, Blackrobe,” he said. “All the good places will be taken.”
I stumbled to my feet. “Good places?” I said.
“Por supuesto,” answered Otsai. “To see the Tejano die. Up close, where the blood smells rank.”
27
Where Flicker had hidden the mescal jugs, none seemed to know. Probably, he had brought them in sequestered among the various properties with which he had furnished the big jacal. In any event, not long before sundown—and the scheduled battle between Allison and the deposed Juh—the containers made their convenient appearance. A fat mule was killed and butchered for spit-roasting. The fires were laid; the women had fed and put away for the night all of the smaller children. Only those girls who had menstruated and were ready for the goo-chitalth, the virgin dance ceremony, and the boys who had stolen one thlee, one horse, from the white man, or had been in at the burning of a Mexican casa, might attend the night’s celebration. And they would sit in the last row out and say nothing. Out there in the dark with the old people and the dogs. The Apache did not confuse such participation with permitting even the older youth a say in actual affairs of the band. Tribal power is never so given; it is always earned.
Had my own Indian countryman, Juárez, maintained a similar discipline among his “children,” I would not have been suffering that particular moment of Mexican history as a fireside guest of the wild Nednhi Apache. But, alas, Benito Pablo had let his young people run uncontrolled, losing not alone North Mexico but, if the rumors we heard in the Church were true, standing to lose his revolution in the south, as well.
I had the grim thought that, had El Indio been a Chiricahuan instead of an Oaxacan Indian, I might still be safe in my sacristy at Casas Grandes.
But then I thought of huge, simple Juh, together with such of his fellows as Sunado, Keet, Nazati, and Otsai, and wrote off the entire matter in my mind; I would, on balance, prefer to be in Oaxaca.
The thought of Juh was followed by his appearance at the battle site. He came alone out of the spring darkness, in no way guarded or followed. He was, I sadly noted, carrying a clay jug in one hand, and he walked with that exaggerated dignity of the drunken man of any skin color. Yet, spying where we sat, Kaytennae, Tulip, Little Buck, and myself—with our guards—he came over to us steadily enough. Greeting me with a nod and his nephew with a pat on the shoulder, he looked over our heads to Tulip and the Texas boy.
“Ish-ke-ne,” he said, in that unbelievably low voice, “has any harm come to you?” He spoke in Apache, and the boy frowned his puzzlement. Juh understood, repeated the query in Spanish. “No, no,” Little Buck answered happily. “Estoy bien de salud.” He peered up at the burly Nednhi. “But you don’t look very well, Jefe,” he said, frowning again. “Has anyone harmed you?”
“No, boy. I am Juh.”
“I am glad. But where are all your friends?”
“I don’t need them,” Juh said. “But you could do a favor for me. You remember our brave song?”
“Why, of course, de seguro.”
“I would like to sing it with you, ish-ke-ne.”
“Cripes! You would?” Forgotten was the cowpen Spanish, the labored frowning. “Leave us give her a lick, then. Here goes—!”
Juh comprehended nothing of this response save its elevated spirit. But the moment the white boy began to sing, sweet, clear, high-pitched, the towering Apache forgot all else. His great dark Mongol face lost its haunted look. A grin, as of another small boy, replaced the injured pride. The great deep bass joined in, softly and haltingly at first, then, picking up both words and rhythm, the war chief sang out the marching tempo of Little Buck’s “brave song.”
Oh, her eyes were bright as diamonds
They sparkled like the dew;
Her hair was black as midnight
Dah da dah da dah da dah
You can talk about your other girls
And sing of Aurelie,
But the Yellow Rose of Texas
la the only girl for me …
Well, it was surpassing strange to hear in that time and place. The Yellow Rose of Texas? Pardiez!
Juh’s mixture of Apache, Spanish, and supposed English—mimicking the white boy’s lyrics—would have reduced an Anglo audience to weeping with laughter. Yet the war chief had a grand singing voice, truly thrilling in its basso profundo tones of absolute pitch. Juh had a known speech impediment which impaired his native tongue in speech, but which disappeared in song. The difference may have encouraged him to become a singer, but the fact remained, from whatever inspiration, the deep-chested barbarian sang gloriously. Little Buck, too, was a singer. And the duetting of savage basso and settlement-boy soprano, at twilight-dark in the middle of an Apache camp preparing for a scalp dance and challenge fight, was unbelievably stirring.
The Yellow Rose of Texas?
I had never heard it, or heard of it.
But I would remember it forever from that night just before the deposed Nednhi war chief and the captive Texas cowboy were to fight to see who lived.
28
Across the camp now we could see torchlights coming from the big jacal. We had little doubt of who might prove the “guest of honor” in that parade of rush-and-tallow flambeau. But in the slight time required for the procession to wind down from Flicker’s dwelling to the “plaza” of the rancheria, I had a last moment to query Kaytennae.
“Are you quite sure of what you have told me?” I whispered. “It would be a terrible thing if you were wrong.”
Kaytennae checked to see if Otsai, or any of the guards, were listening. They were not. They were watching the others of our party. Juh now sat with his old wife Tulapai and the white boy, whom the war chief sheltered next to him in an arm embrace. The two were nodding to the cadence of a low, rumbling chant in Apache that Juh now intoned. Betimes, and between long notes, the war chief and his old wife were finishing off the jug of mescal. Little Buck seemed enchanted with the Nednhi couple and would not even look in our direction. Kaytennae seemed satisfied.
“I made no mistake,” he told me. “You can see there are many boulders up there behind the black one’s jacal. I was able to creep from the pines into those rocks and so come up beneath his prized window, which was open for the unusual heat of this day lingering. Every word came to me exactly; he speaks better in our tongue than do we. No, what I told you he said, he said.”
I peered up toward Flicker’s place but the darkness was down too heavily now. The boulders described by Kaytennae were only shadows upon other shadows. But the torches were much nearer now, and I could see Ben Allison walking, in his distinctive bowlegged stride that only Americano cowboys and old sea dogs practice, between two lines of Nednhi men. These, I saw, were the remaining warriors of the original raiding party that Juh had led into Texas. To my surprise, the Negro deserter was not among their number.
“Say it one more time,” I instructed Kaytennae.
The young Apache nodded quickly. “Otsai, Keet, Nazati, and Sunado were present. The black soldier said this final word to them: ‘Juh will be drunk; he has the jug and will drink it and cannot then beat the Tejano in any fight. So he will lose and can be charged with the Law of the Ancients and either killed or driven from the band. Huera has told me of this law and it does not matter that you others have not known of it before this time. She has the power and we do not. We must obey Huera. Go now, and, when Juh is drunk enough, I will send him down to you. When the Tejano wins, Huera will appear and charge that he is an evil shade and that Blackrobe Jorobado is his master and that the one may not die except that both die. The proof will be that the Tejano defeated Juh, a thing possible only through evil. Huera will say the blackrobe has no power remaining. He has lost his cruz. These are all true things, my brothers.’ The black one told Otsai, Keet, Nazati, and Sunado, ‘I say to you only what the holy woman said to me. Enjuh. Ugashe!’”
<
br /> Kaytennae palmed dark hands in helpless period to his hushed recital. “It is exactly as I told it to you before,” he said. “Al-li-sun will die and Juh will be shamed like a whipped dog and you, Jorobado, will—” He broke off the thought in deference to my settlement softness of heart and courage. “One more thing only,” he added, whether in truth or only trying to shore up my fortitude, “I may be able to help you get away. Al-li-sun is doomed. But if you come with me when I say so, when the fight is high with excitement, you may live—I know a way by foot and handholds through a secret hole in the high rock to get down from here and come to South Way not far from Old Campground.”
I would have queried him further but time had gone.
Keet and Nazati had Allison up to the battle site. Sunado came over to where Otsai and the others stood or squatted behind Juh. “It is time,” Sunado said, and Otsai grunted and prodded Juh with his short fighting lance and then, when the big man arose, handed him the lance and ordered simply, “Go and fight.”
Juh started off, lance in one hand, jug forgotten in the other. Tulip waddled after him and took back the jug and some of the people nearby snickered and tittered. Kaytennae uttered an Apache oath. He stepped out before these people and said to them, “Make way for the war chief, you yapping dogs,” and the gigglers silenced themselves.
Allison had now been given his fighting lance and was examining it, as an old Mexican expression went, in patient haste—as a man who has just been given the banderillas for a very bad bull, and this man has never placed a stick before in his life and only been in the arena one time previous, when, victim to the cerveza and the afternoon sun, he had fallen into it over the barricada.
But the Texan was a fighting man, one of those rare ones who had the instinct for personal combat, be it with clubs, pistols, blades, bullwhips, or six-foot Nednhi short lances.