Apache Lament

by Patrick Dearen

  “Damned if you didn’t find you a squaw.”

  Sam turned to the flap of the teepee on his right and saw the ruddy-faced ranger named Red step out.

  “Pretty one too,” Red added, depositing a buckskin on the nearest fire.

  Jonesy looked up from the stack of firearms and stroked his crooked jaw. “With a papoose, no less. Oh, my sweet Mary Jane—do I have some things to tell you.”

  Red grinned, revealing buck teeth. “Captain didn’t say nothing about no squaws. What we going to do with her?”

  “Haven’t got that far yet,” said Sam.

  “My, my, the ideas she gives me.”

  As Red pressed near the woman, she seemed set on avoiding eye contact. But she had no choice when the ranger clutched her shoulders and turned her by force.

  “Show me that pretty face again,” he said, grinning even wider. “Think I’ll take you home for myself.”

  Maybe the woman couldn’t speak English, but Red’s demeanor needed no translation. Her eyes flashing, she pulled away with an exclamation in Apache.

  “That’s enough,” Sam told the ranger. “We got things to do.”

  “Yeah, and I’ll start right here.”

  Red tried to seize her again, but Sam met him with a hand to the chest and shoved him away. “Stop it. No place for that.”

  The lanky redhead flushed as he stumbled back. “Where you come off pushing me? I’m as white as you are.”

  “Captain give us orders, and manhandlin’ a squaw wasn’t one of them.”

  By now, Arch had walked up, dragging a soiled wagon sheet across the snow. He must have witnessed the incident, considering what he had to say.

  “You, Samuel, are a study in contradictions.”

  Sam had heard enough of his snide remarks. “A what?” he asked angrily.

  “Suffice it for now to say that you’ve burdened us with a dilemma.”

  Sam waited, not caring to discuss anything with him and yet knowing the ranger might have something important to say.

  “We cannot humanely leave her and the baby to die,” Arch elaborated, “as they most certainly would without stores, shelter, or saddle stock.”

  “Matto’s for killin’ them right now.”

  “From what I overheard, you were not in favor of the prospect. For the record, neither am I.”

  Studying mother and child again, Sam relived his first kill on the snowy rimrock and the emptiness that nothing seemed to satisfy.

  “I guess they’s comin’ with us.”

  Maybe it was the only thing a man who had once had a soul could say, but that didn’t mean Sam didn’t hate himself for it.

  Arch seemed to look past Sam’s shoulder. “If only a decision about the casualty down by Matto might be solved as easily.”

  With his back to the scene, Sam had momentarily forgotten the gravely wounded woman. She might die in the next minute, or she might linger until wolves were drawn by the scent of blood. If the latter were the case, so what? Wouldn’t there be a measure of justice in leaving one animal to be finished off by another? Who would there be to care?

  Then Sam looked at the young mother and knew who would care, for her face was like a window into a guarded part of himself.

  “Maybe,” he said, “we could—”

  He flinched at a sudden gunshot from behind. He turned, his carbine ready at his hip as the report echoed across the hollow.

  In the blighted snow down and away, Matto stood over the woman in question, smoke trailing from the muzzle of his revolver.

  CHAPTER 14

  Even as the Mescalero camp receded behind him to the slog of his boots up the snowy slope, Sam could hear in his mind the repeated gunfire that had felled women and warriors and horses. Pungent smoke from the roaring bonfires drifted up the mountainside with him, and together the real and the remembered seemed to hold Sam in a man-made hell.

  There had been death and destruction, but only one scene had burned itself into his memory as vividly as Bass Canyon—Matto’s .45 extended downward after an execution.

  The image was as much a part of the march back to Franks as the eight rangers around Sam, or the two mules loaded with spoils, or the lone dun horse spared for the purpose of escorting the young mother and child to Fort Davis. Instead of ridding himself of Bass Canyon, Sam had succeeded only in adding to his host of troubling memories.

  Upon Matto’s return to the fires, an enraged Sam had stepped in front of the ranger. Never had Sam been so determined to tear a person limb from limb, and at first even he couldn’t understand. But before he acted, the reason came to him as surely as a descending war club. Two helpless women—one white, one red—had died, and they had died senseless deaths that could never be undone. Never!

  Sam knew he needed to dwell more on the role of his misplaced anger, so without comment he had moved aside and let Matto pass. But even as he proceeded now in the man’s tracks, a cauldron of invectives churned inside Sam. He had no idea that he was talking out loud until Arch, trudging at Sam’s right shoulder, spoke quietly.

  “Glad, indeed, am I that Matto marches so far ahead of us. Otherwise, your expressed vehemence might incite even more conflict.”

  Sam looked at Arch and found only his profile.

  “Praise him or damn him,” Arch went on, “Matto performed a service.”

  “Service?” Sam repeated in disbelief. “He out and out executed her.”

  “For all intents and purposes, she might as well have been dead already. Matto’s actions spared prolonged suffering and freed the company from yet another burden.”

  Sam breathed sharply. “Matto was all heart, all right. Like hell.”

  “As I said, damn him if you wish. But he ended it quickly and painlessly.”

  Sam’s rage was building, occupying the place where emptiness had been.

  “Pin a medal on him then,” he snapped. “While you’re at it, go back and pin one on a dead Apache for bein’ so damned thoughtful how he killed Elizabeth.”

  Arch wouldn’t grant him even a respectful glance. “I—”

  Surprising even himself, Sam seized Arch by the shoulder and spun him so that they were face-to-face. “Look at me if that’s what you’re sayin’! Tell me how that Indian was just tryin’ to do right by Elizabeth, like Matto with that squaw. You unfeelin’ bastard, that how you see things?”

  No sooner had he said it than he regretted looking into Arch’s eyes, for they seemed to probe the depths of Sam’s unrelenting torment. But Arch’s reply touched an even deeper nerve.

  “It was not sufficient, was it?” Arch fidgeted with the bandana about his neck. “The yearning and scheming, the way you manipulated Franks and Matto and me in order to pursue revenge—you’ve accomplished it now, and vengeance was never going to be sufficient, was it?”

  Sam went silent. Turning away, he fell off the pace, his head hanging, his boots growing blurry as they moved one after the other through the snow. Maybe he could have defended himself, but what purpose would it have served when everything Arch had said was true?

  When the rangers gained the shelf from which they had opened fire at sunrise, Jonesy pointed out something that only the light of day might reveal: an Indian trail. The snow lay more softly in it than elsewhere, and it stretched like a fleecy blanket down into canyon country at Sam’s left. The trace disappeared in places, hidden by frosted outcrops and hogbacks, but across a rugged gulch it reemerged as a gentle, snaking thread. At a canyon mouth three thousand feet below and a few miles away, it spilled out into the broad salt flats that separated the Diablos from the Guadalupe cliffs.

  “Ain’t that a way down from here?” asked Matto.

  “The sweetest sight I’ve seen since my Mary Jane,” said Jonesy.

  “After our communion with the wintry mountains of His Satanic Majesty,” observed Arch, “I think our captain will welcome a quick course to the lowlands.”

  It meant nothing to Sam. Whether he followed one course or another, or none
at all, meant nothing, for at the end Elizabeth would be just as dead and he just as alone. Suddenly he wished that a Mescalero bullet had left him facedown in the snow.

  Nevertheless, the discovery of the descending trail seemed to invigorate the other rangers. Veering in the opposite direction from the canyon lands for now, they fell into their predawn tracks that would lead them back to Franks and the horses they would need for the drop into the salt flats.

  “Walter . . . Walter . . .”

  The raspy voice was weak and broken by a rattling cough, but Sam could hear the passion in it as he slid down the final icy yards in the wake of the other rangers and the captive who had marched in silence with her child. The traverse of the massive rise over now, Sam was back on the Diablos’ backbone, Company A’s staging grounds of the night before. The rangers who led the seized stock veered for the staked horses, and other men sought out the saddles and stores, but Sam went straight to a scrub piñon under which Franks lay in a latticework of shadows.

  Semiconscious at best, the captain had the look of a man already dead. His color was bad, and his bristly cheeks were as sunken as his eyes were hollow. Suspecting dehydration, Sam confirmed it by pinching the back of Franks’s hand; the skin had lost its elasticity.

  Between coughs and the intermittent summons for Walter, Sam took a canteen and dribbled water between the cracked lips. The ill man half-choked, but instinct led him to swallow, and thereafter Sam was able to support Franks’s head and tilt the canteen to his mouth. After a few minutes, the captain seemed to revive a little, but his mind was still somewhere else.

  “Walter? That you, Walter?” Franks asked of Sam.

  “It’s me, Captain—DeJarnett.”

  “Yes, DeJarnett. The Yankees, what about . . .?”

  Sam hoped that Jonesy wasn’t in earshot. “We took care of them for you, just the way you told us.”

  “The way . . .?”

  “Surprised them at sunup. What we didn’t kill, we shot all up when they was runnin’.”

  “They’re crafty, those Yankees.” Franks struggled for breath. “Falling back . . . to regroup.”

  “No, sir, they was bleedin’ ever’ step. They disappeared over a mountain and we set about burnin’ the camp and killin’ the horses. Their raidin’ days is over.”

  For a moment, Franks seemed to meditate over what Sam had said. “Are you certain? Are—”

  “I expect ever’ one of them’s breakfastin’ in hell.”

  Franks began to blink a lot and the corners of his mouth bent upward in a faint, satisfied smile in which Sam wished he could share. But the captain’s was a pained smile that also suggested the crippling grief that Sam knew he carried.

  Franks’s lips trembled. “Avenged,” he whispered. “My boy, he’s . . .”

  Franks abruptly went silent and stared at Sam with wide, wild eyes, and then his hand stole up and seized Sam’s arm. “You’ve come back. Walter, you’ve come back.”

  Sam didn’t think a dehydrated man could make tears, but Franks’s eyes began to glisten. His ashen face blotched, and for a full minute his chin quivered. He seemed overwhelmed at finding the son he had lost so long ago, and there was no way that Sam was going to correct him this time. Then the captain lapsed into unconsciousness with a look of peace, and Sam gently pried a loving father’s fingers from his arm and laid it across the man’s heart.

  Sam wandered away, his chin on his chest as he considered Franks’s plight. When he came upon boots in trampled snow, he looked up and found several men resting on their respective saddles and eating. On a rock alongside, the Apache mother sat nursing her baby.

  “No way the captain can ride,” Sam said quietly.

  “Has he deteriorated to that degree?” asked Arch.

  Sam still didn’t care to have anything to do with Arch, but everyone needed to hear the answer. “Looks of things, he could go any minute.”

  “Won’t catch me mourning any,” interjected Jonesy.

  Sam glanced around at the horses and thought out loud. “I could try takin’ him double, hold him in front of me. Maybe fix up a travois and let a mule do the work.”

  “Given our mounts’ condition, the former is infeasible,” said Arch. “As for the latter—”

  “I say we leave him and ride out of here,” said Jonesy.

  Sam gave him a hard look. “Nobody’s leavin’ nobody.”

  Matto snorted. “We’s done our job. Damned if I’m stayin’ up here and freezin’ my butt off another minute.” Rising, he started past Sam for Franks, and at the same time his hand casually went across his body for the revolver under his coat. “If he’s that near gone, just look the other way.”

  “Stay away from him!” Sam seized Matto’s gun arm, pinning his hand against his side.

  “What the—”

  “Just stay the hell away!”

  Startled at first, Matto’s dark eyes quickly went cold as the two men faced one another. For the second time that morning, Sam wondered if he had pushed the man too far, for there was something deadly in Matto’s features, as if he were a predator sizing up prey. The tension persisted for long seconds, but when Sam let him withdraw his fingers from his coat, his hand was empty.

  And tinged with blood, thanks to the prick of the young woman’s knife.

  Sam looked at the other men, none of whom had risen.

  “What the hell’s the matter with everybody? He kills that squaw and nobody says a thing, and all of you sittin’ on your hands when he’s fixin’ to do worse!”

  Only Arch responded. “Samuel—”

  “That’s Franks he’s talkin’ about, not some Apache!”

  “He’s a Yankee hater, is what he is,” said Jonesy. “Should’ve taken care of him myself yesterday.”

  “You’d’ve hung for it!” said Sam. He took a sweeping look at the others. “I’ll see any man among you hung!”

  Arch again tried to speak. “Samuel—”

  “Stay away from him!”

  “Samuel, I would’ve prevented Matto had you not. You were just positioned to intervene sooner.”

  “Didn’t bother you none, him killin’ that squaw!”

  Now Arch stood. “Your hypocrisy knows no bounds. It’s you who’s spoken repeatedly of exterminating the entire Mescalero race.”

  “That’s different. We’s in a war with them!”

  But some part of him must have realized that Arch had a point, for Sam began to calm. As everyone fell silent, he looked down and stirred the snow with his boot. Maybe he had overreacted. Maybe he had made a fool out of himself. All he knew was that there were rangers in the outfit who would rather help a good person die than be burdened.

  Sam lifted his gaze. His outburst had drawn every able man in the company, and they were bunched before him, eight weary figures who had been through hell and looked it. How could he blame them for wanting to get out of these mountains?

  “All right,” he said quietly, “nobody’s got to stay but me. I’ll watch after him till he’s able to ride—either that or he’s . . .” Sam couldn’t bring himself to say it; there had been too much death already.

  “Sinners we be, all of us,” said Boye, who stood closest to Matto. “There be a righteous man among us to pray over him? Book says the ‘prayer of a righteous man availeth much.’ ”

  A couple of rangers glanced at each other, but only Matto responded.

  “Not a mother’s son here I’d waste a breath over.” He hacked up phlegm and expectorated within inches of Boye’s boot.

  Prayer wasn’t something in which Sam would squander a breath either—not since Bass Canyon—but he didn’t like Matto’s disrespect. At least Boye was well-meaning, and what was Matto?

  “Boye,” said Sam with a glance at the other ranger, “some people’s not worth a bucket of warm spit, but Captain’s not one of them. Better take it on yourself to do the prayin’.”

  Boye looked toward the twisted piñon under which a good man lay in need. “Chief among
sinners, I am,” he confessed. But he already had a fervent prayer on his lips as Sam watched him stride away toward the piñon.

  “Let’s get our horses saddled,” urged Jonesy, drawing Sam’s attention. “My Mary Jane’s waiting on a letter from me.”

  “I’m all for it,” agreed Red, taking his saddle by the back housing and pommel. “Can’t wait for a warm night’s sleep.”

  Judging by the enthusiasm with which Matto and another ranger followed suit, it seemed a foregone conclusion to Sam that a march was imminent. But then an objection came from someone he didn’t expect.

  “Gentlemen,” said Arch, “we must consider what our noble captain stressed more than once: Company A does not abandon a ranger. To do so now, even if one of our own were to stay, would be irresponsible.”

  “Toes on my left foot’s been numb for two days,” said Red.

  “Hell, mine too,” interjected Matto.

  Red continued. “ ‘Irresponsible’ is somebody tellin’ me to hang around till all my toes is froze off.”

  Sam didn’t disagree. These men had lives to live, people to return to, hope for tomorrow. He had nothing, and a man with nothing had nothing to lose.

  “You men mount up and go,” he said impatiently. “Just go.”

  But Arch continued to object, and the discussion persisted until tempers flared. This time, Sam stayed out of it, but he couldn’t help but admire Arch’s unflagging stance.

  Then Boye’s pronouncement from where he hovered over Franks settled the matter.

  “The Almighty be praised! His angels have carried away our brother’s spirit.”

  CHAPTER 15

  Nejeunee may have rocked to the gait of a horse descending a steep trail alongside a gaping canyon, but she was still back at the red snow.

  Through no fault of her own, she had left Quick Talker and One Who Frowns lying in disrespect, the final gunshot ringing in her ears. And now that the owls had spirited Nejeunee’s sisters away to the Land of Ever Summer, she must never speak of them again.