Apache Lament

by Patrick Dearen

  But Quick Talker had no such responsibility to a child, and seeing their sister bleed out was apparently too much for someone so emotional. She pulled free of Nejeunee’s grasp, and when Nejeunee glanced back she saw Quick Talker standing over the dying woman and wailing as the bullets splattered the snow all around her.

  The arroyo’s sharp bank was slippery, and Nejeunee lost her footing as she started down. She plopped to a hip and a hand, the impact lifting the weight of the cradleboard off her shoulders. But her arms were still through the straps, and the willow frame dragged behind as she slid down and spilled off a limestone shelf less than eighteen inches high.

  Her shoulder met the rocky bed, a place that shielded her from direct gunfire but not from the screaming ricochets. She started to get up, only to see a black recess under the shelf. Six or seven feet long, it offered the kind of hope that the exposed mountainside ahead did not.

  Sitting up quickly, she removed the cradleboard to the rising shouts of the Indaa. She tried to soothe Little Squint Eyes with a soft word, but he continued to cry as she squeezed inside the musty overhang and pulled the cradleboard in after her. She was prone, her cheek against underlying rock, the only position possible in a space so confined. Still, there was just enough room to rock the cradleboard as she calmed Little Squint Eyes the way only a mother’s voice could.

  Quick Talker’s wailing persisted as the gunfire grew sporadic, and then both seemed to end at the same time. But now came strange words, neither Apache nor Spanish, and long, frightening shadows began to dance like evil spirits against what little of the snowy far bank that Nejeunee could see.

  For minutes that seemed hours, Nejeunee held her position, the cold rock on three sides numbing her. Any moment the Indaa would find her. Like the soulless beasts they were, they would drag Little Squint Eyes out first and take him by the heels in preparation for dashing him against the ledge. They would make her witness it from her place in the overhang, and the shadow wraiths on the bank across from her would mimic the heartless act. Before true death could spare her, she would experience in her heart the most terrible of all deaths, and there was nothing she could do but pray to Jesucristo and wait for it to happen.

  Then Little Squint Eyes began to gurgle and coo, abruptly silencing the nearest voice that spoke in a strange tongue. In utter terror, Nejeunee did her best to quiet Little Squint Eyes, but it was too late.

  Through the rock above came the resonant drum of boots coming down the bank.

  Blood against snow.

  As Sam had fired, and fired again, he had been back at Bass Canyon. His ears were still ringing, but now it was over—not just the surprise attack, but so many other things that he didn’t know how to digest. And yet he had to, for the carnage around him demanded it.

  They lay about camp, five lifeless forms in gaudy calico and filthy woolen blankets, and a gutshot sixth Mescalero who writhed in snow no longer white. Eight or nine other Apaches had crossed an arroyo and fled up the far slope, but they had escaped at a terrible cost, judging by the trails stained red. Whether the wounded bled out or not, Sam doubted that any of them would survive after Company A torched their stores and killed their animals. One thing seemed clear: this band of devils would never commit another outrage.

  So why was Sam so nauseated by everything he saw? Through dark nights and darker days, he had lived in anticipation of this moment. How could he be even more troubled than on the day before, when he had killed in the most personal of ways?

  He lifted his gaze above the defiled snow. Except for the rise ahead and the ridge behind, he had a boundless view. From what he had learned about this country, he could identify the dramatic, sunlit cliffs of the Guadalupes thirty miles to the north, the isolated cones of the Cornudas farther to the west, the dominating ridge of Eagle Mountain to the south, the sprawling Davis Mountains to the southeast. It was as if he looked down from the wings of an eagle, so why couldn’t he see inside himself?

  “Man’s inhumanity to man.”

  Sam turned, finding Arch at his right shoulder. “What?”

  Only after Sam asked the question did he realize that Arch wasn’t necessarily addressing him. After all, they hadn’t spoken since Sam had used the worst kind of leverage to keep Matto from deserting the previous morning. Even now, Sam was sickened by the thought of the sexual abuse to which the Mexican madam had subjected Matto in his boyhood. What was it Arch had said a couple of days ago? That Matto still hated every woman who wasn’t fair-skinned?

  Arch, to his credit, didn’t leave Sam’s question unanswered. Instead, he nodded to the dead and dying. “The beauty of the scenery, marred only by man’s inhumanity to man.”

  As Sam looked things over again, there was no denying it, even though Sam himself had been instrumental in causing it. As his eyes settled on the gutshot Apache, squirming in silent anguish beside another bloody figure whose suffering was over, he was struck by a terrible realization.

  “Squaws, Arch,” he said in disbelief. “We shot squaws and all.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Damn us to hell. Squaws.”

  “What is it you expected, Samuel? Franks’s orders were to fire indiscriminately into the teepees.”

  “Those two was shot in the open.”

  “There was no way to distinguish them. One and all were draped in blankets.”

  Sam tried to tell himself that. He tried to convince himself that killing women along with the men had been justified in the fog of battle. But no matter how much he wanted to believe it, he couldn’t dismiss the fact that these women had been just as defenseless as Elizabeth.

  “We shouldn’t’ve done it thataway,” he said, unable to take his eyes off the writhing woman. “We’s no better than they are, killin’ women like that.”

  “This is what you wanted, isn’t it? Preemptive action?” Arch’s tone was strangely challenging. “Isn’t that how you prevailed on my decency? Or was that a mere ruse?”

  Nothing else could have pried Sam’s focus off the wounded woman, and he turned in surprise.

  “If it was vengeance you sought,” Arch went on, “you now have it in the extreme, and you’re more responsible than anyone. So you can cease and desist with your hypocrisy and false piety.”

  For a moment, Sam just stared at him. “Arch, get the hell away from me.”

  Sam started away, but Arch’s words followed.

  “ ‘Regret, remorse, and shame—many and sharp the num’rous ills inwoven with our frame.’ ”

  Sam figured it was just as well that he had no idea what any of that meant. In a near daze, he wandered toward the surviving woman, his head down, the crimson stains in the snow a blur. Gun smoke lingered, collecting in his throat, and so did the pungent odor of singed flesh back at a fire; no one had dragged the dead Apache off the coals.

  Sam stopped before the wounded woman, his boots almost touching the dark discharge that had soaked her calico blouse and discolored the snow. He could only imagine the pain she endured, and he wondered if he had been the one who had shot her. Even if he hadn’t, a few feet away was a younger woman, stretched out dead, and he couldn’t forget all the blanketed figures he had seen down the barrel of his Winchester.

  What was the matter with him? Every one of these butchers had contributed to what had happened in Bass Canyon, so how the hell could he feel even a twinge of guilt?

  But that wasn’t the worst of it, and across time and distance and the black divide that no one could span, Sam silently cried out for Elizabeth, and more.

  I’m here, right where I promised I’d be! I buried you and told you what I’d do, and now I’m here!

  He was here, all right, but there was truth in what Arch had implied the day before. He was just a pathetic little figure driven so long by vengeance that, now that it was over, he had no reason to take another step.

  “Well, looky what we got here—a damned squaw and her papoose.”

  The sharp arroyo wasn’t far away, and from where
Sam stood, he couldn’t see over the rocky rim dusted with white. But Matto’s voice from the arroyo bed was unmistakable, and so was a woman’s cry in a language Sam couldn’t understand.

  “Come outa there!” he heard Matto say.

  A baby began to wail, and the voice of the woman grew louder, frantic, increasingly desperate.

  “Let me have that brat!” ordered Matto. “I’ll put a stop to that squallin’!”

  Sam didn’t know the situation below, but he wasn’t about to compound the company’s misdeeds.

  “If you got a baby there, don’t hurt it!” he shouted, starting for the bank. “You hear me, Matto?”

  But the commotion continued, and as Sam’s field of vision widened with his approach, he found Matto clutching a baby upside down by the foot and fending off a young Apache woman at close quarters. Her straight black hair flew as she flailed away at him, a mother fighting for her child. But Matto was so much larger and stronger, and he seemed to delight in keeping the baby just out of her reach. There was cruelty to his teasing, and no one had to tell Sam that Matto would end this in the most heartless of ways.

  “Quit it!” Sam yelled, pausing at the drop-off.

  But Matto seemed completely unaware, his attention fixed solely on the Apache woman. Or could it be that it wasn’t she he saw at all, but a dark-skinned madam in a long-ago whorehouse?

  “Mi niño! Por favor, mi niño!”

  Even as the Apache woman pleaded for her child with Spanish words that Sam understood, Matto kept up his ruthless taunt. But maybe the ranger underestimated her, for her hand went inside her clothing and reappeared with a glinting knife.

  Sam’s warning was still in his throat when the blade flashed against Matto’s overcoat. It must have pierced the thick wool, for Matto flinched and drew his left arm close to his ribs.

  “What the hell!”

  “Look out!” cried Sam.

  Just in time, Matto dodged a second thrust and stumbled back. His heel caught on a rock and he began to go down, leaving himself vulnerable as she lunged at him again. But this time her concern was for the dangling baby, and just as it seemed certain that Matto would drag the infant down to the crushing rocks, the woman snatched the child away.

  Matto went down with a loud grunt, his boots flying up as he rocked back on his spine. The spill must have taken the wind out of him, and for a moment he wallowed in the icy rocks as if searching for air.

  The woman withdrew, displaying a mother’s tenderness as she clutched the baby to her breast, and an Apache’s ferocity as she brandished the knife. As Sam slid down the bank, her frightened eyes darted from Matto to Sam and back to Matto. Her alarm about Matto was justified, for just as Sam broke between the two, the sprawled ranger reached under his coat for the .45 that Sam knew was in its holster.

  “Leave it there!” cried Sam, swinging the barrel of his Winchester around to the woman.

  As the morning rays winked in the twisting knife, Sam stared at her, and she stared back. She was no more than twenty, and with her shapely facial features, he would have considered her pretty if she hadn’t been a Mescalero. But she looked more Mexican than Indian, for she didn’t have the rounded face and drooping nose of the Pueblo scouts back at Fort Davis. Her cheekbones were softer as well, and her skin lacked the rich, coppery complexion common to the scouts.

  Still, everything else about her cried “Apache!”—the crimson bow of calico in her hair, the dark-blue tattoo of a new moon on her forehead, the beaded necklace with tiny, dangling mirrors flashing sunlight. Maybe from a hiding place in Bass Canyon, she had celebrated the attack that had robbed Sam of hope. Maybe she had watched and planned for the day when her child would perpetrate his own cowardly act against someone innocent. Maybe breeding-stock such as she was more to blame than anything for all the tears wreaked by her merciless band.

  The hell with this dirty squaw and her whelp! Shoot them both and be done with it! They stood for every renegade Mescalero’s hopes for a tomorrow, so finish them once and for all!

  But the crying of the baby, his bare skin exposed to the frigid morning, touched a place inside Sam that he didn’t know existed anymore. His own child would have been about as old now. Elizabeth should have been cradling him, sheltering him from the winter chill in their New Mexico home. Even now, Sam could almost see Elizabeth in the actions of this Apache woman, a mother giving her all in sacrifice for the most innocent and helpless.

  “Out of my way! I’m killin’ the whore!”

  Checking over his shoulder, Sam looked down into the wavering muzzle of Matto’s revolver. The ranger lay back on a hip and an elbow, an awkward position from which to cock a .45. But maybe the support of a rock under his elbow was vital to someone who trembled in fury the way Matto did.

  “She drawed blood!” Matto exclaimed. “Blood, damn her!”

  Sam didn’t doubt it, considering how Matto kept his left arm against his rib cage. How easy it would be to step aside and let someone else do the dirty deed. One squaw was already dead and another gravely wounded, so what difference would a third make?

  Elizabeth! Elizabeth!What would you have me do?

  There was no Elizabeth to tell him, but as he faced the knife again, the baby’s crying and the pleading eyes of his mother were answer enough.

  Without turning, Sam shouted at Matto. “Put that gun away! We killed enough squaws!”

  “But she—”

  “Damn it! Do like I say!”

  “The hell I will!”

  Another look over his shoulder found Matto scrambling to his feet, but Sam was determined. “Two ways you can shut me up about Juarez. And the other one’s to kill me!”

  Matto lost all color, but his revolver remained a deadly force. For a moment, Sam wondered if he had pressed the matter too far, if he would hear Matto’s gunshot and see the snow fly up in the last instant of life. Then Matto relaxed his grip on the Colt and hung his head—another man crippled by memories too damning to overcome.

  Still, as Sam focused on the young woman again, she seemed as terrified as ever—and who could blame her, considering the bloodshed of the last couple of minutes?

  “It’s all right, nobody’s goin’ to hurt you.”

  Sam’s softer tone did nothing to diffuse the threat of the blade, and he tried addressing her in Spanish. “The knife. You need to put it down.”

  He was certain she understood, but she maintained her hold on the weapon as her eyes dropped. Sam traced her gaze to his hip and realized that his Winchester was still leveled on her.

  “Mira aquí,” he said. Stooping, he found a soft place in the snow for the rifle and then showed her his empty palms, fingers up. “Nobody’s takin’ your baby. Look, he’s turnin’ blue, he’s so cold.”

  Still, she hesitated, and Sam turned to the disheveled cradle-board before a black overhang in the bank. Leaving his rifle where it lay, he continued to watch her while he retrieved the small blankets unfurled in the snow. Approaching within striking distance of the knife, he extended them.

  “Por favor,” he said, studying her dark eyes and hoping that trust would work both ways.

  For a moment she hesitated, and then she dropped the weapon and accepted. Her attention now fixed solely on the baby, she snugged the woolen fabric about him and calmed his crying with gentle words.

  Sam, leaving the knife but taking up the carbine, made eye contact with her again and indicated by a sweep of his arm that she was to ascend the bank. She asked a question he didn’t understand, but when she pointed to the cradleboard, he let her retrieve it and secure the baby inside. As soon as she slipped the straps over her shoulders, he motioned again to the icy slope and she scrambled up.

  When she broke out on top, she abruptly stopped, and as Sam came abreast, he found her staring with stunned eyes.

  Before her lay the two women—one dead and the other bleeding out on the snow.

  In raid after terrible raid, these Mescaleros had proven themselves less than human
. Animals, Sam had thought of them. But as he considered the young mother’s reaction, he realized that grief wasn’t limited to his own kind. For all the grimness and savagery of her people, she displayed the same shock and vulnerability that he would have expected of a white woman.

  Slowly she advanced, her jaw quaking and her balance unsteady. At the dead woman, she halted and stretched down a tentative hand. A word—perhaps a name—trembled in her throat, and Sam allowed her a moment before escorting her a few steps more.

  At the wounded victim she stopped again, and this time the young mother wouldn’t be denied. Kneeling in snow smeared red, she checked the gutshot woman, who remained unresponsive even as the young mother stroked her hair and addressed her in Apache.

  Sam, concerned that she might find a knife and secret it away, took her arm and urged her to stand. She resisted, but as soon as she adjusted a blanket about the dying woman’s shoulders, Sam pulled her up with a quiet “Por favor” and they continued to camp.

  He found a flurry of activity. Several men dragged stores out of the teepees and fueled the fires, as Franks had instructed. The material included camp equipage, wagon sheets, buckskins, American-made clothes, and bolts of red and blue calico. Collecting in a pile between the fires were spoils worth keeping: two Winchester carbines and one Remington, a pair of Colt revolvers, and lead, powder, and empty cartridges for reloading. At the far end of camp, other rangers assessed the horses and mules, most of which the company would have to kill to prevent recapture. Boye, meanwhile, prayed over a fallen Apache as his voice carried across the flat.

  At the sight of more of her people dead, the señora went weak-kneed and might have fallen if Sam hadn’t steadied her. He could feel her prolonged shudder, and he let his hand linger compassionately until he realized anew that she had been a party to the killing of Elizabeth. Elizabeth, for God’s sake!