The Baron Range

by Jory Sherman

  “Don’t forget that,” Anson said, without realizing that he had spoken aloud.

  “Shut up,” Cullers said.

  “I—I didn’t say anything.”

  “You keep your damned mouth shut or I’ll shut it permanent.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I’ll sorry you, you young whelp. One more sound out of you and I’ll put your goddamned lights out.”

  That was the trigger. Suddenly Juanito’s words made perfect sense to Anson. He knew what he must do. He knew he would not come out alive if he didn’t do what Juanito was trying to tell him. He was in the cave, the deepest, darkest cave he had ever been in, and Cullers was the evil one who held Anson’s life in his bloody killing hands. Cullers was the monster he, Anson, had to destroy.

  Anson’s hand slid to the handle of his knife. He looked at Cullers with a slit-eyed hatred that fueled his loathing for the man who had so brutally murdered Jerry Winfield.

  “You sonofabitch,” Anson muttered as he drew his knife from its sheath. His head was clear, he could see Cullers, could see his mouth drop open in surprise, could see him swinging the rifle around, could hear the click and scrape of the lock as Cullers pulled the hammer back.

  And then they both heard another sound that froze them for a moment when all time seemed to stand still and nothing so much as a heartbeat could be heard for that split second of eternity when the two men faced each other and looked across a vast chasm at Death, an empty, desolate place, dark as a cave, darker than a night shrouded in the blackest of clouds.

  40

  MICKEY BONE LISTENED to the old man, who spoke slowly in the Lipan dialect so that Bone would understand his words. The two sat in the shade of a large boulder high above the camp where they could talk privately. The Old One had his pipe and his tambour with him and was wearing his medicine pouch beaded in the sacred pattern of the Thunderbird and the Four Directions and the First Woman.

  “I am called Dream Speaker,” the old man said. “I knew your family. I saw you grow to be a young boy who had been taught the Way of the Eagle. Do you remember that?”

  “Yes,” Bone said. “I remember. It was a long time ago.”

  “It was the time before the Mexicans came and spilled our blood upon the ground.”

  “It is said that you can tell me what my dreams mean.”

  “I listen to the spirits. They tell me what the dreams mean.”

  “I dream of a maiden in this place. She is Yaqui. Of the tribe of Yaqui.”

  “And of what tribe are you?”

  “You know, Dream Speaker, of what tribe I am. Lipan.”

  “Who says that this is so?”

  “It was always so.”

  “Are you, then, Apache?” Dream Speaker spat the last word out as if it was filth in his mouth.

  “That is what the white eyes call us.”

  “Ah, then you are what the white eyes call you. You are not a human being as I am.”

  “I do not understand, old man.”

  “Apache is a bad word given to many of us by the frog eaters, the French, and it is not what we call ourselves. We are human beings created by the Great Spirit that blows through all life, even to the stars and beyond.”

  “I know this,” Bone said. “Is not Lipan my tribe?”

  “They call you a Querecho too, do they not?”

  “I have heard that some of us are called by that name. It is a Spanish word.”

  “Then you are not Querecho?”

  “I do not know,” Bone said.

  “You are not Lipan, either, my son.”

  “And what am I, then?”

  “You are a human being. As long as there are tribes with separate names, they will fight one another. It is only when people know who they are, of one spirit, that they will fight no more. They will know that they breathe the same air, bleed the same blood and are of the same tribe. Then they will fight no more.”

  “But this can never be,” Bone said. “My father said we are fighters, that we always have been fighters and always will be.”

  Dream Speaker sighed and shook his head. A look of sadness came into his eyes. “That is so. But we no longer raid the pueblos and bring back slaves and take scalps and fight our enemies. Instead, we run and hide and are hunted ourselves, like rabbits. And now we must talk of the girl, the human being you want for your woman.”

  “I dream of her with my heart and with my eyes open and I dream of her when my eyes are closed and my heart sings a song of sadness,” Bone said.

  “Yes. It is said that you look at her with longing in your heart. It is said that you undress her with your eyes.”

  “That is true,” Bone said.

  “Then you dream of being with her, of lying on top of her while the blanket grows hot with the warmth of your coupling.”

  “I want her as my woman.”

  Dream Speaker opened a leather pouch that was attached to his sash by a pair of draw-thongs. He took out some bones and feathers and painted stones, some dried bugs, beetles and dragonflies and horseflies and some pieces of metal hammered into strange shapes. He held these objects in his hands and lifted his arms. Then he let fall the sacred things and they struck the ground and made a pattern that only he could decipher. The old man bent over and looked at the jumble of objects very carefully, his eyes scanning them for meaning.

  “You must give this woman a new name before you can have her.”

  “A new name?” Bone asked.

  “A human name that you know from your boyhood. You must tell this woman her new name and then she will be yours to take. You must build a lodge for her and it must be purified as you have been purified since returning to the people.”

  “Who will purify such a lodge?” Bone asked.

  “I will do this. And you will bring me a horse and kill a deer for me, and these I will take as my due for performing the ceremony.”

  “What if the girl does not want to be my woman?”

  “I will cast a spell that will sing inside her head and she will look at you with a heart full of love.”

  “That is all?”

  “That is how men and women find each other, my son. Their spirits sing the same song. They are in harmony like the doves that coo and the quail that hum through their noses and make the flute sounds. That is why you can take a bone from the wing of a bird and play music with it. Are you stupid?”

  “No,” Bone said. “I do not think so.”

  “Then listen, for I am going to give you a song that you must learn. It is an old song that must be passed down from the fathers to the sons or there will be no more life. You must make this song your own and you must teach it to your son before you die. Will you do this?”

  “I will do this,” Bone said, feeling the power of the Old One, the medicine that he was making for him.

  “We will smoke and offer tobacco to the four directions and to the Great Spirit, and then I will sing the song for you. Remember it. Remember it always.”

  “I will do this,” Bone said.

  Dream Speaker picked up his pipe and brought out a small leather bag of tobacco from his medicine pouch. He offered the tobacco to the four directions and to the sky and the Great Spirit, then filled his pipe. He lit it with a small piece of glass that he held to the sun so that the sun’s rays came through to the tobacco and ignited the dry leaves. He puffed on the pipe and then handed it to Bone.

  Bone smoked while the old man chanted an ancient prayer, only part of which Bone could understand. He had been with the people of the mountains for nearly a month. He had gone through the purification ceremony and had heard the tongue spoken, but he had felt like a stranger until Dream Speaker had befriended him and helped him learn the words he had forgotten.

  “I pray to the Great Spirit that blows like the wind through all things,” Dream Speaker chanted, “and I give thanks for my life and for all life that I see around me. I pray that my friend, Counts His Bones, finds his own spirit and becomes a human being again.
”

  It was a solemn moment for Bone. The old man’s face was radiant as he looked up, eyes closed, directly at the sun beyond the rock shadow.

  Dream Speaker put out his pipe and saved what had not been burned, putting the leaves back into the little leather bag and returning that to his medicine pouch. He picked up his tambour, which was beaded along the worn rim of leather and tied with the rattles of snakes that hung six centimeters apart. He began to shake the tambour with his left hand and then thrummed it with the bony fingers of his right hand in a staccato tattoo in counterpoint to the snake rattles.

  “This song is the song of Counts His Bones,” Dream Speaker sang, “and tells how as he sings, he flies through the air like an eagle to a holy place where Yusun gives him the power and the magic to do wonderful things. I, Counts His Bones, am surrounded by clouds decorated of spun and hammered gold. I am high away from the places of human beings and I fly like the great eagle with the snows of winter on his head. As I fly fast through the air I change and change until I am no longer a human being but am become spirit only, and then I am one with all things for all times to come.”

  When he was finished with the song, Dream Speaker sat with his eyes closed and Bone closed his own eyes and thought of the words he had heard and sang them over and over in his mind until it seemed to him that he was dreaming with the mind of an eagle and he was flying high above the earth, high above the mountains until he was in the clouds. Then he was very light, like the air, and he was no longer an eagle but a spirit being and he had no body but was only spirit, only air that one could not see but only feel against his face and in his hair. He knew the song was holy and would make him very powerful and let him do great things whenever he sang it.

  The two men sat there through the long afternoon, their eyes closed. The sun went down and they were still sitting there hours later when Dream Speaker opened his eyes and tapped Bone on the shoulder. “Come. Let us go back to camp and sleep. This is a very good day. This is a holy day.”

  “Yes, Dream Speaker. I thank you for my song. I thank you for helping me find my way to my own spirit.”

  “It is Yusun you must thank, my son.”

  And together they made their way down the mountain to their village and Bone felt the lightness of being as he crawled into his shelter and onto his flea-ridden blankets. He had no hunger or thirst. He had only the peace he had sought for so long and the dreams of making the Yaqui girl his woman and bringing a son into the world, a son whom he would teach the old ways of the human beings and the sacred song that would become his own to pass down to his son someday as the song had been passed down to him on that holy day when he had flown like an eagle beyond the sun.

  41

  JUANITO SAT IN the shadows of his casita watching the main house. He had enjoyed the supper with Caroline, a fine meal after a long ride. But her ambivalent feelings toward Martin disturbed him. He also sensed a feeling of hysteria emanating from her whenever she spoke of the child she carried in her womb. She did not speak directly of either her husband or the baby, but obliquely, and he wondered if she had not been too long alone without her son and husband nearby.

  He had offered to help with the dishes, since he had seen Martin do such a thing, but Caroline had shooed him away, extracting from him the promise that he would “take care of Tonto tomorrow.” He had not lied to her. He said he would see that her wishes would be carried out, but as he was saying this, he was certain that she did not really know what her wishes were. Not truly, not in the deepest sense. She was a woman on the brink of either coming to understand her feelings and her situation, or destroying everything in her path. Not a mad woman, but a woman teetering on the edge of hysteria.

  Juanito knew that the word came from the Greek word for womb, and he once again marveled at the brilliance of the ancient scholars, the physicians, the mystics.

  When he saw the lights in the house go out one by one, he waited several more moments before rising from his chair. He put out his pipe, knocking the bowl on his boot heel to shake out the hot dottle. Then he walked slowly past the barn and down to the cluster of adobes that lay scattered out of sight of the main house, where the wranglers and their families lived. It was a pleasant summer evening and he did not hurry.

  Well beyond the little village of adobes was one that stood alone, surrounded on three sides by mesquite and live-oak trees, a place he might have picked out for himself, since its wildness reminded him of the cordilleras of his home in Argentina.

  “Chato,” he called softly and heard a chair scrape inside the adobe. Not a chair, he knew, but a crate brought from Baronsville, suitable enough for a man who had grown up in Mexico without furniture of any kind.

  “Buenas,” Chato said as he opened the door.

  “Do you want to do a little work?” Juanito asked. “It will not take long.”

  “Serguro, jefe. What is it that you want me to do?”

  “Come with me. I will show you.”

  “Do I need the rifle?” Chato was both a vaquero and a hunter, not only of game, but of wolves and other predators on the Box B. He had come from the deepest reaches of Mexico, from a poor family who had lived desperately off the land. Chato was one of those men who could smell quail in the brush and see into the hearts of animals. All but Juanito thought him strange. It was Chato’s ability to think like an animal, be it horse or cow or wolf or eagle, that made him a good hunter and a man of much patience.

  “No, it will not be necessary. You have your boots on.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then walk with me and I will tell you a story.”

  Chato did not close his door, which was only two blankets folded together and nailed to the wood frame above the doorway. The blankets hung open on a sixteen-penny nail just inside the door. He had no lantern, only candles, and he seldom lit them. Chato could see in the dark better than an owl.

  As they walked back toward the barn and corrals, Juanito told Chato of a woman in his country who raised sheep and rabbits.

  “This woman was not married. Her father had beaten her and her mother. The father had beaten his wife to death and the daughter grew up hating him. Then her father was killed by a jaguar, a female jaguar, which was later tracked down and shot by hunters.

  “The woman had fifty ewes and one ram among her flock. She had one buck and twenty does in her rabbit hutches. Over the years, she managed to make a good living selling her wool and her mutton, her rabbits. She was patronized by the mine owners and the miners in the little village where she lived, Plata.

  “But many of the miners lusted after this woman, whose name was Maria. She would have nothing to do with them, so they began calling her La Virgen Maria and this was very cruel and hurt Maria deeply. The rich son of one of the mine owners lusted after María as well, and she rebuffed him and he grew angry. He boasted to everyone that he would be the one to deflower the virgin, and bets were made and money passed hands.

  “One night this rich son of the mine owner came by Maria’s little house to buy mutton. She was afraid of him, so she locked her door and did not come out. This made the mine owner’s son very angry, so he broke into her house and raped her. Then he called in all the miners, waking them up, and brought them to her house and showed them the blood on her legs and on her loins and bragged that he had deflowered her.

  “Then because he hated Maria, he let the others take her one by one until all of the miners had tasted María’s blood and left their seed in her womb. After that, Maria became deranged and the miners stayed away from her. Some sent their wives to buy rabbits and wool and mutton from her, but she never saw any of the men except at a distance.

  “Finally one day she took one of her kitchen knives and sharpened it, honing it on a leather strap until it would cut a hair in two, and she castrated the ram who serviced her flock of ewes, and she castrated the buck who serviced her does and she screamed into the night and became quite insane.

  “But she sold her mutton and her
wool and her rabbits until she had no more. She had no ram to impregnate her ewes and she had no buck to make babies with her does, and so she had nothing to sell but herself and none would buy her body for they all knew that she was crazy and they had all tasted her. So she starved to death and the mine owner tore down her house because all the women and the men of Plata were superstitious and the house reminded them of their shame. María was not buried, but left to rot in her house, and the rats and the worms and the jackals ate her up and carried away her bones.

  “And to this day no one in Plata will eat rabbit meat, nor dine on mutton, and they do not want clothing made out of wool. It is a very strange village, and there were many riots against the cruel mine owners over the years. Finally the silver ran out and the mines closed and the town became a ghost and few go there, only hunters passing through. Even they do not linger, for they say at night they can hear María’s screams when she was deflowered and when she castrated the ram and the buck and sealed her own doom.”

  “Is that the end of the story?” Chato asked.

  “Yes, I think so,” Juanito said.

  “Why do you tell me this, Juanito? It is a very sad story.”

  “Yes, it is a sad story.”

  “Then why do you tell this story to me?”

  “Ah, does it have the point, you mean?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know the bull Tonto?”

  “The big longhorn ? Yes, I know this bull. He is a grand bull of sound Spanish stock and is very agile and graceful for his immense size.”

  “Yes, Tonto is a very good bull and he has sired many fine calves.”

  “What does Tonto have to do with the sad story you told me, Juanito?”

  “Caroline has ordered me to castrate this grand bull. She wishes this to be done tomorrow, but we are going to the corral where Tonto is kept tonight.”

  Chato gasped loudly. “What? You are going to castrate Tonto? I can’t believe you would do such a thing. Senor Baron would not like this.”