Apache Lament

by Patrick Dearen

  Unexpectedly, Gian-nah-tah rode up behind the older woman. Nejeunee, facing her, saw him first—the same broken warrior who could no longer sit upright on his horse. But he was still as evil as ever, and Nejeunee didn’t like what she saw in his single eye.

  “Down his cheek,” repeated One Who Frowns in delight. “He couldn’t—”

  Gian-nah-tah pulled abreast on the far side of the woman’s horse. Just as she turned, he leaned toward her. As if wielding a war club, he backhanded her in the face—a blow as brutal as it was surprising.

  It would have knocked One Who Frowns from her mount if Nejeunee hadn’t reached for her. Even so, Nejeunee’s support only delayed the inevitable. As Gian-nah-tah rode on, One Who Frowns fell across the neck of her horse and began to slide, a moaning woman dazed and hurt. Smearing blood down the animal’s shoulder, she went down hard between the sets of hoofs ready to crush.

  “My sister!” exclaimed Quick Talker.

  “Take her horse!” cried Nejeunee, swinging off the roan.

  Nejeunee dropped to her knees beside the sprawled woman. Nejeunee had never liked One Who Frowns, but they had been sister wives of he-who-cannot-be-mentioned, and that in itself made her worthy of grudging respect. As Nejeunee slipped a hand under her head, blood rushed from One Who Frowns’s misshapen nose and painted the snow red.

  “Her nose is broken,” said Nejeunee.

  “My sister! My sister!” Quick Talker continued to cry from her sorrel.

  “Hush!” Nejeunee looked up at her dominating the sky. “Make too big a fuss and he’ll come back.”

  From her own garments, Nejeunee found a blue calico cloth as One Who Frowns came to her hands and knees, blood dripping from her lowered head. Weeping with pain, she was a pitiful sight as she sat up groggily. For the sake of their late husband, Nejeunee ached with her. It was all she could do, except watch blue calico turn red as she pressed it against One Who Frowns’s nose.

  “Why would Gian-nah-tah do such a thing?” Quick Talker was still emotionally wrought, but at least she had the common sense to ask quietly.

  Nejeunee looked up but had no answer. If a Ndé man failed at something, he was expected to endure the women’s criticism and not even comment, much less retaliate.

  “The Gáhé will be even angrier!” Quick Talker added with a furtive glance around. “They’ll stay in their caves and let all of us die!”

  One Who Frowns evidently regained her senses, for she slapped Nejeunee’s ministering hand out of her face. “Go away!”

  Nejeunee withdrew, still holding the soaked cloth. She wanted to be done with this hateful woman, but the compassion she had learned from the kindly señora wouldn’t let her. As One Who Frowns’s nose continued to bleed, Nejeunee extended the cloth.

  “Please,” she said. “It will stop the flow.”

  To Nejeunee’s surprise, One Who Frowns not only accepted the square of calico and applied it to her nose, but looked up with a muffled “Ixéhe,” a term of gratitude.

  Nejeunee acknowledged with a nod. “One Who Frowns, your nose is broken. You must let me set it.”

  “No.”

  “Please, my sister.”

  “No.”

  “It will hurt, but it will be much worse if you do nothing.”

  It took more persuading, but finally the injured woman agreed. Tightening her jaw, One Who Frowns steeled herself for the pain to come. It was the Apache way, but as Nejeunee took One Who Frowns’s nose in her hand and applied pressure, she admired her courage. Tears were in the woman’s eyes before Nejeunee succeeded in setting it, but One Who Frowns endured the moment in silence.

  As One Who Frowns turned away to suffer privately, Nejeunee considered the blood in the snow and remembered how caring their husband had been. He would have comforted One Who Frowns, and Nejeunee found herself stretching a hand toward her. Maybe One Who Frowns had always been in an impossible situation: a childless older woman forced to compete with someone of prime childbearing years. In no way did that excuse her vile treatment of Nejeunee, but maybe Nejeunee hadn’t been blameless in the matter. How many times had she purposely flaunted her youth before her sister wife?

  Edging closer, Nejeunee put her arm around One Who Frowns and began to stroke her long, black hair, and the woman responded by resting her head on Nejeunee’s shoulder.

  Nejeunee wondered if this would be the last campfire before which she would ever sit with Little Squint Eyes.

  It was dusk as he nursed at her breast, and the gloom seemed to rise up out of her soul and settle over this west-lying hollow below the summit ridge. The slope beyond the flames was gentle at first, but grew increasingly steep as it neared the crest, a hundred yards away and seventy-five feet closer to the budding stars. For troubling hours, the Ndé had held to the ridge and attained the mountains’ highest reaches. Then the long hogback had bent northwest, dramatically yielding its northerly course to sculpted canyons and far-below desert.

  Nejeunee and the other women had erected the teepees immediately upon reaching this agave-strewn flat, which backed up to a sharp arroyo that separated it from a moderate rise with cholla and scrub juniper between rock outcrops. In one sense, this was a sheltered place, but Nejeunee felt only misgivings, her doubt and apprehension heightened by the somber mood that hung over camp.

  Across the fire, Quick Talker stood weeping for her missing husband. At Nejeunee’s left, One Who Frowns sat wincing, her face showing the pain that she wouldn’t vocalize. Down the line of crackling fires beyond, men squatted sullenly in bunches—all except for Gian-nah-tah, who sat alone with bowed head at the farthest blaze.

  “Klo-sen . . . Klo-sen . . .”

  Quick Talker sobbed her husband’s name, a lament so mournful that it touched the wellsprings of Nejeunee’s heart. He should have caught up with them by now, and the fact that he hadn’t done so meant that he probably never would. Nejeunee didn’t know what to say to Quick Talker, except that her separation from him might not be long at all.

  But Quick Talker already realized it as she lifted her gaze skyward.

  “Klo-sen!” she wailed. “You’ll never come back to me, but before Sháa, the sun, shows its face, I’ll go to you!”

  Nejeunee looked into the fire, and the flames blurred as though a reflection in stirring water. I’ll go to you. Quick Talker had given voice to Nejeunee’s own abiding hope: that when the time came, Nejeunee would at last pass into the waiting arms of he-who-cannot-be-mentioned.

  Little Squint Eyes, his appetite satisfied, began to gurgle and coo as he toyed with the phylactery at her neck. She wondered if Bik’egu’indáán would let the two of them remain long enough for her to do as she had planned: remove the forbidden keepsake of he-who-cannot-be-mentioned and let him hold it as she whispered of a father’s love.

  But maybe Quick Talker’s prophecy was also theirs, and before the rising of the sun, she would watch Little Squint Eyes’s father tell the child in person.

  “Inádlu, he laughs,” said One Who Frowns.

  Indeed, as Little Squint Eyes grasped the small buckskin pouch, he was laughing for the first time ever. But Nejeunee was more surprised by the way One Who Frowns leaned into Nejeunee’s shoulder and peered at him with genuine interest. As the moment persisted, something akin to a sense of loss deepened the scoring in the older woman’s face, and her welling eyes began to shine in the firelight.

  “I have failed two husbands,” One Who Frowns whispered with emotion. “A wife should bear elchínde, children, and raise them as Ndé, and I have failed.”

  One Who Frowns stretched out a hand and caressed the back of Little Squint Eyes’s head. Now her cheek glistened, and Nejeunee felt such compassion that she did what would have been unthinkable a short time ago.

  She passed Little Squint Eyes into her arms.

  Showing a tenderness that belied everything Nejeunee had thought about her, One Who Frowns cradled him with a bittersweet smile.

  “If only . . . ,” she sobbed.
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br />   With sudden regret, even guilt, Nejeunee wished that she and One Who Frowns had lived together as intimates rather than as bitter competitors.

  “You didn’t fail, my sister,” said Nejeunee. “It was the Indaa who denied you. If yah-ik-tee, he who is not present, had lived, Little Squint Eyes would have been yours as much as mine.”

  They faced one another, two women who had loved—and been loved by—the same man. Then One Who Frowns turned again to their husband’s son, and like the sister wives they should have been, she and Nejeunee joined in a quiet lullaby that soothed Nejeunee as much as it did Little Squint Eyes.

  CHAPTER 12

  The trail in the snow couldn’t have been fresher.

  Company A had pushed hard ever since Sam had descended far enough down the mountain to summon the rangers waiting in the basin. Once on the crest, he and the others had taken the dead Apache’s horse and ridden on, leaving the body stretched out on the bloody rim. Throughout the day, they had persisted in the chase: eight privates following orders, one grieving officer re-fighting a foredoomed war, and one lost and lonely man now burdened by self-doubt.

  Franks, who had rallied some in the lower elevations, didn’t take well to the thin air. With shoulders bent, he rode wheezing and coughing with almost every pace of a horse that was more scarecrow than the muscled black animal it had been just a few days ago. Yet Franks seemed as determined as ever, even if he was far from clearheaded as Sam took his gray up along the officer’s left flank in late afternoon.

  “Makin’ it all right, Captain?” Sam asked.

  “Walter,” Franks greeted him.

  Sam winced, because this time Franks wasn’t asleep.

  “It’s DeJarnett, Captain. Sam.”

  “Oh, yes, of course. DeJarnett, those Yankees cannot be far ahead.”

  “You mean Mescaleros. It’s Mescaleros we’s after.”

  “Yes, Mescaleros. Didn’t I say . . .?”

  “No, sir, you said—”

  “I’ve got a score to settle,” interrupted Franks. “What they took from me . . .”

  Sam studied the addled man against a sweeping sky that must have stretched a hundred miles to the eastern horizon. From the sagging posture to the drawn cheeks and weary eyes creased at the corners, Franks was the portrait of privation and illness—a man spent in everything but obsession.

  As Sam turned to the trace ahead, watching the beaten snow rise and fall with his horse’s gait, he could barely distinguish his own subdued voice from his troubled thoughts.

  “Say we do all this,” he offered, “take our pound of flesh. It make any difference? You know, in what you and me’s been through, what we lost?”

  “Maybe my boy’s never coming back, but going after his killers this way, I’ve never been so close to him.”

  It was the first time Sam had ever heard Franks refer to his son’s death. Sam wasn’t surprised that the captain continued to confuse Apaches with Yankees, but he hadn’t expected a response that spoke so powerfully to his own situation. Franks was right; through every mile of this chase, Elizabeth had lived inside Sam in a way she hadn’t since Bass Canyon.

  “So what happens when this is done?” Sam pressed. “Is it like losin’ who we had all over again?” He stared at a rocky rise that hid the way ahead. “Better we don’t ever catch up, if that’s how it’ll be.”

  Franks turned to him, and for a moment his distressed eyes must have mirrored Sam’s. Then the captain straightened in the saddle, as if from some submerged stock of resolve, and he gigged his horse faster down the vengeance trail.

  Left to ride single file, Sam looked into the uncaring sky and dwelled on so many matters he couldn’t understand. Everything he had done since failing Elizabeth in that canyon—eight months spent reeling from one memory to another in search of peace—had been futile. Utterly futile. It had taken an enemy’s blood on his hands to realize it, and yet here he was, closing in to take revenge on the rest of the Mescaleros, and for what?

  Just an emptiness so great that not even the sky could fill it.

  You’s here for a reason.

  They came for the first time in days, his father’s long-ago words as the two had sat before a dog-eared book aglow in lamplight. The statement had been so easy to believe in boyhood, and so impossible to accept now. If only there had never been a Bass Canyon . . .

  Behind Sam, Boye was preaching aloud to himself, something he had been doing increasingly often. In spite of his youth and unrelenting death wish, Boye seemed to know things that many people didn’t, and Sam found himself dropping back abreast of the ranger’s jaded roan. Sam’s presence didn’t seem to affect Boye’s concentration, for he kept up his quiet sermon.

  “You make me think of my father,” interrupted Sam.

  Boye turned, his peach fuzz shining in the rays of the low-hanging sun.

  “A preacher man, he is?”

  “Died when I was thirteen but used to talk about things a lot. You know, the whys of life and all that.”

  “ ‘Fear God, and keep His commandments,’ ” quoted Boye. “ ‘For this is the whole duty of man.’ ”

  Something about the smugness with which Boye said it touched a nerve in Sam, and he could feel his pulse begin to pound.

  “My father wasn’t no preacher, but he’d say somethin’ like that too, like he had it all figured out.” Sam gave a bitter half-laugh. “Thought the world of him, but if he’d ever been in my place, he’d’ve knowed better.”

  He rode on in silence, staring ahead into nothingness, the rhythm of the hoofs tolling away a life as meaningless as it was empty. As disquieting thoughts crushed what little promise he might have had left, he whirled on Boye with questions.

  “What the hell’s today about? Or yesterday? Or tomorrow, if there is one? Soon as I think I have a reason for bein’—chasin’ down those Mescaleros, wipin’ them out—I start thinkin’, what difference it make? Somebody lives or dies, so what?”

  Boye went wide-eyed, but Sam wasn’t finished.

  “What makes livin’ any better than dyin’? Best we can do is just get by, one moment to the next, till we don’t have to put up with it no more.”

  Boye started to respond, but his face grew troubled and he looked down. “Sinned like David, I have,” he whispered as if in prayer, “and hypocrite I be to think I could shepherd even this flock of one.”

  Then he lifted his gaze to the sky and closed his eyes, and when he opened them to Sam again, his features seemed different somehow—firmer at the jaw, stronger around the mouth. For the moment, at least, it was as if he shrugged off the guilt and showed a confidence Sam had never seen in him before.

  “Serve,” Boye said. “That’s what we be here for, to serve. If your days be dark, do something for somebody that needs it. Help them out, and it’ll be you that it helps too.”

  Consumed by terrible blackness, Sam didn’t think a ray of light would ever find its way again into the hollow where his soul had been. But as he pondered the preacher boy’s words, it occurred to him that the only glimmers of hope he had known during this scout had come when he had assisted Captain Franks. Maybe the concept of service wasn’t nearly enough to rescue Sam, but it was more than he’d had a moment ago.

  “You got a different way of lookin’ at things, Boye,” said Sam, calming a little. “Guess it was what I was needin’ to hear.”

  Boye looked pleased, for he flashed a smile and straightened in the saddle. Maybe Sam’s words were what he needed to hear.

  “Yes, sir,” Boye said with greater vigor, “help somebody else, and ol’ sun, it’ll shine way down in your heart.”

  “If that’s the case,” said Sam, “maybe you oughta not be so hasty offerin’ yourself up to get killed. Might be able to dish out some help yourself.”

  Boye knitted his brow and gave Sam a long stare. “But . . .”

  The preacher boy’s protest died in the wind, and he looked down toward his saddle horn and went silent. Maybe what Sam had tol
d him was true, and maybe it wasn’t, but Sam felt better for having said it.

  As the sun sank behind faraway clouds as blue as Elizabeth’s eyes, Sam knelt with reins in hand and wondered what life would be like the next time he saw a sun.

  In the beaten snow at his knee were horse feces, still faintly warm to his touch.

  Sam lifted his gaze down-trail, picturing the passage of those Mescaleros, and then looked around at Franks, who hovered over him from the stirrups of his exhausted horse. Like the men behind him, the captain had stayed in the saddle.

  “A hour ago,” Sam said quietly. “That’s all, just a hour.”

  Indeed, something was about to happen, and Sam expected it by the time night was done. But would sunrise bring him hope, or just a continuation of the gloom that crept this very moment across the canyons below?

  Or maybe he had already seen his last sun.

  Franks ordered a dismount, which he accomplished himself only with Sam’s discreet help. The captain was even weaker than before, and Sam kept a hand on the stumbling man’s arm as he made his way to a large rock and brushed away the snow. Franks sat there coughing and wheezing as the rangers gathered before him.

  “Boys,” he finally rasped, “they’re almost in our sights. I’m guessing they already made camp. That’s right where we want them. We’ll rest the horses here, and when it’s dark I want two of you to reconnoiter.”

  More breathless than ever, Franks craned to see around Sam, who obliged by stepping aside. Tracing the captain’s gaze, Sam studied the bunched men and their animals. There was only one name that Franks mustn’t call for reconnaissance duty, only one ranger whose crooked jaw was set tightly in anticipation. Surely Franks wouldn’t—

  “Jones. Private Jones.”

  The captain’s summons was barely above a whisper, but it seemed to roll across the ridge’s every peak and swale.

  What the hell’s he doing?

  Sam only asked it silently, and Jonesy only muttered it, but every word was unmistakable on Jonesy’s lips.

  “Matto, you as well,” Franks added after finding a breath. “Boys, step up here so we can talk.”