by Clay Fisher
The explosion of the preaimed shot was precisely on its target, the center of the compound. Had not Kaytennae’s helio mirror given the warning, all of the command would have been shredded as they slept. For it was a canister shell, one of the dreaded “grapeshot” loads of the recent American Civil War. And its terrible charge of laterally dispersed metal would have withered all life within my now shattered garden. As it was, the Yanqui troops had survived largely unscathed, and, even as Flicker sent the second round crashing down on them, they were spreading themselves yet more behind available cover of adobe brick rubble.
For that moment, Kaytennae, the nephew of war chief Juh, had saved the white command at Casas Grandes. But who was to save Kaytennae from the command of the killer Otsai, up on the rocky slopes above?
The third and fourth and fifth rounds, even, of Flicker’s cannonading of the mission cried away in high wailing arc to explode below, while we crouched in helpless witness to the running down of Kaytennae. The Apaches had jumped the Nednhi youth, now, and were driving him as a rabbit by dogs. And Otsai, of a sudden taken by the hesh-ke, the craziness to kill, was firing his rifle at the boy.
“He means to kill the kid,” Allison said harshly.
I sensed that the Texan was going to Kaytennae’s aid, and I clutched his arm. “You can’t reach him,” I cried. “And we have the governor’s boy here. We might save him, Allison.” My voice broke in anguish. “Ah, God! If only poor Kaytennae could reach us!”
“Well, what if he could?” demanded Little Buck in belligerent interruption. “We’d still have to spy us out a hole to lay up in, just as old Ben says. And, why hell’s fire, it would have to hold all three of us, tool.”
“Yes!” Allison shouted joyfully. “And old Kaytenny makes four! You have hit the jackpot, kid!”
Allison wheeled upon me, the pale eyes blazing. “Christ Jesus, Padre, we got us a hole! Don’t you remember how you got us out past the walls down yonder?”
Every nerve in my body jerked wildly.
Nombre Dios! Yes, I did remember.
In leaving the mission originally, in order to avoid my parishioners who had come up to prowl the Mexican dead, I had guided the Texan underground through the ultimate mission tunnel that exited in the old dry well of the first Franciscans, in the bottom of the narrow Arroyo Árido, up-slope of the Church of the Virgin. I seized the hand of Little Buck, and was ready to lead the dash for the lower slope, when the low voice of Ben Allison ordered me to “hold up.”
I thought he had lost his control and was in the well-known shock of battle, for he was whipping off his Texas belt with an energy and haste totally alien to the dangers of our situation. But the sun had marched downward to where we were, now, and the burnished silver buckle of his horseman’s belt made a makeshift, if very small, helio of its own. Not too far up the slope from us, the buckle’s lancing signals of sunlight struck a dark, desperate eye. We all saw Kaytennae burst from the rocks to come bounding down toward us in a spray of rifle shots from Otsai and his howling packmates. Next instant, the Apache youth was among his friends and we were running for our lives to find the old well in Arroyo Árido, before the Apache rifles found us.
It was a narrow victory.
And dark with blood.
35
The ancient wellhead was a tumble of bleached timbers and adobes buried in thick chaparral. This cover, uncleared the past century, permitted us to reach the “hole” ahead of Otsai’s scrambling pack. I went down first, Allison handing down first Little Buck, then Kaytennae, squeezing his own lank form in last. But he was just too late. Otsai’s yelpers saw him going in. Allison ducked down, but he had seen something too: Otsai was wearing the big Walker Colt of Alcalde Bustamante. So when the Nednhi came eagerly brandishing his rifle to show his friends where the game had gone to earth, the Texan seized the leader’s ankle and yanked him down into the opening.
Strong as a snake, Otsai broke free and, regaining the surface, shouted his comrades back. But now he had left something with us. It was the big Walker Colt. Allison came up out of the ground with the great revolver bellowing in one continuous roar of discharges. The Apaches tried to get away and for a moment, in the heavy drift of the powder-smoke, I believed they had.
Allison knew better.
“Damn,” I heard him say. “One shy.”
He was gone out of my sight then and we heard a single booming report—the sixth, last load in the relic Walker—and Allison was back carrying one of the new Winchester rifles. “Otsai’s,” he said, tossing the gun to Kaytennae, who had come up to my side in the opening. “He’ll not be needing it. Let’s dig.”
The vision of the Indian bodies lying all about in the silent sprawl of their falling places went with me into the hole, and I said to the Texan, “God’s name, Allison. All of them?” His answer was a grunt and a curse as he struck his head on a timber. “It had to be,” he told me. “Did they leave one soldier boy at the wagon jump to bear the bad news home?”
I understood then. We crawled on, crowding Little Buck who led the way. But when we emerged in my confessional inside the church, Allison was still wrong in his Apache arithmetic. One Indian had gotten away.
“Tarnation,” announced Little Buck, peering back into the tunnel. “Where at is old Kite?”
Kaytennae was gone. At the last moment the call of his wild blood had proven too strong. He had returned to the Nednhi. “May God protect him,” I prayed.
“He don’t need God, he’s got Juh,” the Texan said.
And who could argue with that?
Certainly not Little Buck Buckles. Said the Texas boy, wistfully, “Wasn’t it for my maw, I’d purely steal a gun and go with him. Old Kite and me, we was prime favorites of old Juh. The jefe, he tooken me same as he done Kite. We was both sons to him. Now he ain’t nobody to teach him the rest of Yeller Rose.”
“I reckon,” said Ben Allison, “that you will grow outen it. And Juh will somehow recover from the loss.” He turned on me, the drawl taking its arid edge. “Padre,” he rasped, “stay here inside the church with the kid. Lock him up, if you have to. Just don’t turn your back on the little son of a bitch. I don’t mean to lose him now. Nor you, neither. Stay low—!”
With that, he was gone out of the church, and Little Buck and I, as one, raced to the narrow windows on the courtyard side to watch his progress.
The shelling outside now had reached its crashing zenith. Some twenty rounds had fallen in and around my mission. What proved to be the final one made a direct hit on the church, seconds after the Texas boy and I left its nave. The roof arch held in its last downcaving from the great bursting jolt, and we only felt the gashes and breath-choking of flying masonry, tile shards, and adobes pulverized into strangling dust.
When we could see, we realized one more round into the building would bring it down about us. Even without that round, the broken-in mass of the roof was creaking and settling as though it might come down at any instant, of its own lodged weight.
I dragged Little Buck through the rubble to the outer room of my quarters. Here I followed Allison’s admonition, forcing the boy roughly into the linen alcove and locking him in there, shouting his red-haired head off that he hoped “the Injuns win” and “Juh wipes up the whole of Chihuahua!”
Before leaving the room, I glanced fearfully out the rear window which gave sight on the Rio Casas Grandes roughlands and Flicker’s cannon.
The big gun stood deserted in its emplacement, blue smoke yet drifting from its fouled and silent muzzle. Off to its right, I saw Robert Flicker running to mount the pony held for him by a knot of Indian horsemen. His tall form was easily recognizable by its much-patched and laundered cavalry sergeant’s uniform, his sole garb in the times that I saw him with the Nednhi. He wore it, I will always think, as the badge of his soldier’s pride. He could not, in the end, be an Apache. He would die in his old faded blues,
honoring the uniform that had dishonored him.
But his cause was still the Apache cause, and he rode now to join the long streams of warriors down the roughland slopes to finish what his “soldier cannon” had shocked and pounded into confusion. In that span of five minutes required for the Indians to race down and infiltrate the gullies flanking the mission, north and south, the doom of the El Paso scout troop of Lt. Jefferson Flowers seemed sealed.
That I might not miss the fate of the Yanquis, I returned back through the still dust-clouded church to the eastern window apertures that gave on the courtyard.
The smoke of gunpowder and exploded adobes lay over all. Great sections of the wall were down. Shell-burst craters pocked the court, the garden, the small burial ground. The American soldiers were yet pinned down to the breastworks formed by blown-in walls and cratered earth of the mission garden. As I came again to the church windows, the soldiers were being driven back into these piles of rubble by the rifle fire of the Apaches now successfully deployed in both flanking arroyos. There appeared no escape could be made. Flicker’s plan of executing the troops like beef cattle in a corral was no longer a nightmare dreamed in Juh’s distant stronghold. It was being carried forward at that very hour of the spring morning in my tortured courtyard.
I saw, for a moment where the smoke drift cleared, Ben Allison running up to the sole officer on the far side of the garden. The man was plainly the lieutenant, but he did not seem in command, as the men were being fought by the two sergeants and the corporals. Indeed, he seemed dazed, distraught. I could make that out by Allison’s obvious frustration in shouting at him.
But the smoke closed in again. Under cover of this drift-over, a wild-crying rush was made for the walls by the Indians from the gullies. They were repulsed by a brave but thin volley from the perhaps fifteen troopers yet active on each ruined parapet. One did not need a soldier’s education to know that the next advance would see the Apaches over the walls.
That charge never came.
I saw, in the final moment of it, Juh’s huge form striding the length of the south arroyo. To the north the Warm Springs chief Loco held command, his crippled hunching gait as distinctive to single him out as my own. Both Apache leaders were plainly arousing their fighters for that second, fatal rush. Actually, the Indian charge left both gullies and came on about half distance, when it happened.
There was a blinding stab of light from the roughland high country to the west. A helio mirror was blinding the eyes of the war chief of the Nednhis, and he knew whose slim dark hand held that mirror. The great booming basso of Juh’s voice arose over rifle fire and soldier shout and war cry of his and Loco’s wild-eyed riders. “Alto! Alto! Reculamos—!” And the Indian horsemen, hearing the order to halt, go back, wheeled their mounts and drove them for the gullies. Indian warriors will seldom obey in the field as these did that day outside my ruined mission walls. But these Indian warriors knew those mirror flashes as well as Juh did, and there were those of them in both arroyos who could read the urgent sun messages of the looking glass.
That was Kaytennae up there in the hills; and his warning light-stabs told Nednhi and Warm Springs, alike, the same startling war news: Many enemies coming. Very close. From the east.
De seguro, Father Alvar Nunez read those words as well as any Apache. Who had taught the Nednhi boy to use the mirror in the first place? Ay de mí!
I ran headlong again to my study. I had an ancient pair of Spanish field glasses there. Yet even as I ran the better thought caught up with me—in the bell tower of my caving church reposed a German telescope, used for long-range spying-out of Indian approaches to our mission, originally emplaced there by the Franciscan builders. The tower, by God’s grace, was intact. Up its winding well I sped and seized up telescope.
The distant haze of mirage above Big Dry Wash muddied the glass for the first moments, then the image steadied. Coming from the wash, and for the rising knoll of Misión de la Virgen de Guadalupe, was a vast company of riders. There was no mistaking the manner of their horsemanship and the nature of their heavy armament—each man with twin revolvers strapped about waist, rifle in hand, and riding like white Comanches. These were Texas riders. And more than that. They were los Tejanos Diablos.
Those were the Texas Rangers coming!
Below me, I saw Ben Allison with a rifle hot from firing. “Rangers!” I cried down to him. “It is the Texas Rangers riding out there to the east!”
Hearing me, he ran to the top of the nearest pile of the wall’s rubble, squinting off toward the big wash. “By God, Padre!” I heard him yell back. “You win! And so do we!”
Others were now coming from the walls.
“Rangers! It’s the rangers. Thank Christ!”
The men inside and outside the broken walls knew that the fight was over. The Nednhi could see like eagles and the Warm Springs like antelope. They understood, as well, the English cries of “rangers!” and when the great block of horsemen rolled up out of the wash, the Indians in both arroyos were already leaving.
It was in this stark moment that I saw Robert Flicker seize up a loose pony and vault to its back, spurring out of the south gully. But the black sergeant was not going with his departing Apache allies. He was driving the little Nednhi pony through a gaping breach in the mission wall. Then it was that I saw what brought him to this suicidal lone thrust.
It was Lt. Jefferson Flowers.
The young officer was standing almost beneath the bell tower. I could hear him talking to no one. He was completely broken. “The church, Lieutenant!” I shouted down. “For God’s sake, run into the church!”
Whether he heard me or ran on fuddled instinct, the officer stumbled up the steps and into sanctuary. Flicker only swerved his mount to follow. Ben Allison shot the small Indian horse out from under the black avenger, full on the incline of the steps. The rider rolled unharmed to his feet, reached the doors, and was inside. I fled the tower, crying to God that He not let the Negro kill his nemesis.
I reached the pews in time to wave back the Texan, running through the door with his rifle, but Flicker already had Jefferson Flowers cornered at the altar.
“Sanctuary!” I cried in low voice to Allison.
And, saying nothing, he stopped with me.
What followed was more destructive to me than the expected slaying. Flowers was crying like a child. He knew he was going to die and he wept and screamed and burbled in his coward’s utter agony, to turn a true man’s innards. Flicker did not see us behind him. But he was the man that his father Black Jim had made him and had prayed to his God that his son would be.
Flicker turned his back on the sobbing hysteria of the officer and gentleman that he himself could never be, and all the black man said to him, so low and quiet that the Texan and I barely made it clear, was, “God help you.”
With that, Flicker turned from the altar and came up the aisle levering his brass-framed Winchester Rifle, prepared to die himself against whatever rush of soldiers would now come pounding on the doors which I had barred behind Ben Allison and myself.
Flicker saw us in the same moment that the soldiers arrived outside the doors, thundering upon them for admittance with their rifle butts. The Negro deserter and the San Saba pistolero stood, dark to pale eye, crouched both and each awaiting the movement of the other to kill.
“Robert Flicker,” I said, “I give you the right to confession. Will you take it, now, while there is yet time? Our God is the same God. He offers you life eternal. As you have forgiven your enemy, thus our God now forgives you. Follow me quickly, my son—!”
The black man hesitated, eyes wild, body trembling.
Allison said quietly, “Do it, Flicker. You don’t need to die for nothing. Your war’s over.”
I took Flicker’s arm, and he came with me then. Allison did not once turn our way, but put his back to us and, when I last saw him, he was u
nbarring the doors of my church and letting the Yanqui soldiers rush in with their rifles at the ready, to execute the black deserter.
But my church stood empty behind the tall Tejano.
No priest, no deserter, not a human thing to shoot down; there was only Lt. Jefferson Flowers to find at the altar and to lead away up the littered debris of the aisle, still sobbing, still mumbling, still pleading for his life.
36
True endings seldom catch all ravels.
When I returned from confessing Robert Flicker, it was in time to see Governor Henry Garnet Buckles of Texas come hero-striding into the ruins of my beloved Mission of the Virgin. He it was who had gathered up the great troop, of mixed “resigned” rangers and general Texas Indian fighters, that had rushed in to “save” the beleaguered army troops “in the very nick of Texas time.”
To me it seemed an inequity that this credit went to Governor Buckles, but Allison only laughed and told me not to “fret it.” He would settle, he said, for a writ of amnesty from his Honor, clearing him, Ben, of stealing that horse in El Paso. This paper was actually produced by the governor and signed in my presence. I could not believe any reward might be so mean and yet be greeted with such a grin by its receiver. But Allison intrigued me to the end.
He took the paper and waved a proper farewell to Governor Buckles when the governor, who was in Mexico in flagrante delicto of the law between his country and mine, gathered up his young son from out the prison of my linen closet, got back to horse with all his men and moved out of Casas Grandes that same afternoon. The army troops went with him. The entire column took the old river road north to Janos, and, by the peace and quietude of the four o’clock evening of the desert monte, the last traces of their unwanted dust had thinned into history.
The remove left Allison and myself alone with the poignant awkwardness of two men saying good-bye.
We delayed it to conclude important business in Casas Grandes.