Apache Lament

by Patrick Dearen

  “What’s this about?” Sam asked.

  “I will treat this child with the same care I would a white baby,” said the surgeon. “But I will not tolerate a threat.”

  “You can’t send his mother off. He’s still nursin’.”

  “She will tent nearby until she’s removed to the Mescalero reservation. But you, sir, are no longer welcome.”

  All Sam could do was stare as a soldier closed the door.

  “Sam-el? Sam-el?”

  He turned to the señora, but a soldier was already tugging on his arm.

  “Give me a minute, will you?” Sam requested.

  “He say git you off of the post.”

  “I’ll go. Just let me tell her.” Finding the woman’s frightened face in the light from the window, Sam addressed her in Spanish. “They’ll take good care of him. I have to go, but you’ll have a tent outside so you’re close by when he’s hungry.”

  Even as he spoke, it struck Sam that he wouldn’t ever see this Apache woman again. More startling, he realized that in turning her over to the Army, he was giving up more than a mere captive. He wasn’t prepared for the suddenness of it all, or the permanence, and he stood there on the porch and searched her eyes.

  “We got to git,” the soldier ordered, taking Sam’s arm.

  Sam eased out of the man’s hold. “Damn it, let me walk on my own.”

  As Sam turned to start for the horses, he heard the señora sob. Facing her for the last time, he found her cheek glistening in the lamplight and couldn’t understand what was inside him. All he knew was that he felt a powerful sense of loss, as if he was once again sprawled in Bass Canyon and letting an outside force take something away from him.

  “Hate goin’ off this way,” Sam told her quietly. “Been through a lot, you and me.”

  He forced a bittersweet smile and the soldier ushered him away. They were already ten steps down the veranda when Sam heard his name, spoken with an emotional lilt that carried across this strangely dark moment. Looking over his shoulder, he listened as the young woman—a proud member of the very people who had sentenced him to hell—told him at last what he had wanted to know.

  “I am called Nejeunee.”

  CHAPTER 20

  The Indaa with crooked eyes looked at Nejeunee in a manner in which no one but a woman’s husband had a right.

  It was morning, and she sat discreetly nursing her baby in the hospital anteroom to which she had been denied entry the night before. Across from her at an angle, the scruffy civilian freighter with the dirty gray beard and foul odor lingered in an interior doorway, his attention divided between Nejeunee and the surgeon who was out of view inside. She could hear the surgeon’s voice as he stocked the apothecary’s new deliveries.

  The moment the wagon had rumbled up as the corpsman had escorted Nejeunee from her tent, she had thought of the tobacco-chewing freighter with the filthy beard as Crooked Eyes. He seemed to look in two directions at once, his eyes unable to work together, and it made her all the more distrustful of him.

  Nejeunee didn’t need anything else to trouble her. Little Squint Eyes’s face was hot against her breast, and he cried as much as he suckled. Throughout the night and morning, no one had communicated with her except by gesture, leaving her to fear the worst for her baby and herself.

  But something else also wore on Nejeunee. There was a new hollow in her heart, alongside the breach that an Indaa bullet had placed there when it had taken he-who-cannot-bementioned from her. Sam-el had earned her trust in a way that she had never expected of an Indaa. Repeatedly, he had come to her defense, and that of Little Squint Eyes, and not once had he leered at her as Crooked Eyes did.

  But for all the times Sam-el had befriended her, he was gone now, whisked away as suddenly as the mother and husband and Ndé sisters of whom she must never speak again.

  Crooked Eyes, however, was very much present, and he displayed another characteristic that set him apart from Sam-el. He spoke the Indaa language with an accent, and as he moved away from the apothecary doorway and addressed Nejeunee, he did so mostly in Spanish that carried the same unusual pitch.

  “Sacré bleu! Where hell they get you?”

  He directed a question back toward the apothecary, and the concealed surgeon answered in a language that Nejeunee couldn’t understand. Whatever the exchange, it failed to discourage Crooked Eyes from approaching her.

  “So,” he said, “squaw show up and Army got no place for.” He looked her up and down, and Nejeunee shrank. “The price you would bring!”

  The surgeon’s voice sounded again, and Crooked Eyes glanced over his shoulder before continuing.

  “What hell he want us do? Stop the talk? Au contraire, we got more to say. Soldiers need señoritas, and posts need hog ranches to give soldiers señoritas. Simple, eh? Oui, the price hog ranch here would pay me! Or at Camp Peña Colorado or Stockton!”

  Nejeunee had never heard of a hog ranch, but his meaning was clear. He pressed closer and hovered over her, his holstered revolver probing her arm as he stared down at her half-veiled charms. She looked left and right, but there was no place to go. All she could do was cry for the only Indaa who had been kind to her—a silent, futile cry that Sam-el would never hear.

  But the surgeon, to his credit, apparently sensed a problem, for he appeared in the apothecary doorway and raised his voice at the freighter. Turning, Crooked Eyes threw his hands out at his sides as if in protest. After more words passed between the two, the surgeon went back inside and Crooked Eyes faced Nejeunee again.

  “He say your baby sick. Maybe by time I get back from Peña Colorado, he be better, huh? Maybe I set you up at hog ranch so he have good place to live and mucho to eat.”

  Ogling her even more, he tried to stroke her hair and cheek.

  Nejeunee recoiled. “Idzúút’i!” she yelled, reverting to the language of the Ndé.

  Her outburst did nothing to deter Crooked Eyes, but it brought the surgeon rushing into the room. Crooked Eyes pivoted to him, and there ensued a heated exchange that ended with the freighter leaving. But just as he went out the door, he looked back at Nejeunee and gave her a smile as crooked as his eyes.

  Nejeunee.

  Alone at the Ranger camp in Musquiz Canyon, Sam woke up wondering what the name meant. He said it out loud, noting its rare and mysterious sound. The musical way the word played on his tongue, it seemed the ideal complement to the trickle of the creek outside the beaded inner wall of his tent. He didn’t think he had ever heard a name so appealing, and he closed his eyes and listened again as she stood in the lamplight and said it.

  For eight months, it had been Elizabeth’s voice that had lived in his thoughts, and he couldn’t understand why it should be different now. He felt strangely guilty, as if somehow he were being unfaithful. But there was no denying that he ached inside in a new way, and there was just as little to soothe this pain as the anguish of a blood sun descending on Bass Canyon.

  On this winter day at the camp of Company A, the sun rose bright, finding its way through the folds of Musquiz Canyon and the bare cottonwoods. It melted away the white frost on the canvas tents and the glaze of ice in the creek’s shallows. The warmth of the rays was a balm for so much, and Sam should have been thankful for a comfortable place to recuperate. But it was all he could do to drag himself out of his tent and build a fire for coffee.

  He was lost.

  For eight months, he had lived to track down Elizabeth’s killers. For brief days afterward, he had pursued a new purpose as ironic as it was unexpected: aiding a mother and child from that very band. But now his missions were over. Damn it, his life was over, just as surely as if he had slipped the muzzle of his .45 under his hat brim and squeezed the trigger.

  Sam didn’t think any day could be as black as that morning in May, but this one came close. He had never felt so lonely. In every breath of wind was despair. In every murmur of the creek was hopelessness. Together they reminded him not only of the yesterdays he
could never reclaim, but all the tomorrows he would see alone. He wished he could talk it over with Elizabeth, but he didn’t even have the silver locket that might have helped focus his thoughts. Maybe if that Mescalero rider hadn’t snatched it from her neck—even after the warrior had slumped to Sam’s surely mortal rifle shot—Sam might have read in the pendant’s shining surface what her heart had to say about so many things, or perhaps only one.

  Nejeunee.

  There was no denying that Sam wanted to see this young woman. He worried about her, and even more so about her baby. Was Nejeunee being treated with the respect due her? How could she be, when the Army considered her nothing but an enemy squaw? And Little Squint Eyes—was he even alive anymore, and how would Sam ever know?

  Under the midday sun at the adjacent ford in the Davis-Peña Colorado road, Sam sat flipping pebbles into the water and asked himself these questions and more. But answers were as fleeting as the quick splashes in the currents, even as Nejeunee’s name kept bouncing around in his head.

  In all the months since he had laid Elizabeth to rest, Sam had learned what it was to want, and never have. Why dwell on Nejeunee and Little Squint Eyes, when he might never be allowed on the post again?

  Approaching hoofbeats and the screech of a wheel drew Sam back into the here and now, and he looked across at the Fort Davis road dropping into the creek. Standing, he watched the ears of two lead mules appear over the gentle far bank, followed by four more sets of ears and a wagon stacked high with freight. On the left wheeler—a harnessed mule nearest the wagon box—rode the teamster, evidently a civilian contract freighter for the Army, judging by the three-man cavalry escort alongside.

  The freighter was so disheveled that Sam wondered if the long scout to the Diablos had rendered his own appearance similarly offensive. Sam’s clothes were probably just as soiled, but at least he didn’t have tobacco stains in a gray rat’s nest of a beard, as did the stranger. But the man’s most striking features were his eyes, for the left looked at Sam while the right seemed to chase imaginary butterflies.

  Working the long jerk line, or single rein, the freighter stopped his team in mid-creek to water and spat off the side of his mule. Despite his best effort, just as much tobacco juice ended up on his revolver holster as reached the current. Brandishing his coiled blacksnake at the team, he cursed the animals in Spanish with a vocabulary that could have made Matto blush. He swore with a French accent that became more noticeable as he turned and addressed Sam in English.

  “Ranger camp, eh? Quartermaster tell me, ‘Dubois, don’t let no rangers take flour. Sacks all requisitioned for Peña Colorado.’ ” He glanced toward the tents. “Where hell every body?”

  “On scout. Been chasin’ Indians.”

  “Sacre bleu! What a pretty squaw I seen at post. They make best whores, do squaws. This one—mon Dieu! If I had her tonight, I’d sure hell—”

  In terms not meant for polite company, Dubois described intimate details that Sam didn’t care to hear. But what did interest him was whether it was Nejeunee of whom Dubois spoke.

  “Where’d you see her?” interrupted Sam. “The hospital? She got a baby?”

  “Hanging on teat, damn sure. Sapristi! I wanted to—”

  “That this mornin’? Baby seem all right?”

  “Squalling, sucking same time, and squaw she spitting at old Dubois like mama cat. Spitfire she was!”

  When the freighter resumed his vivid description of what he would do to Nejeunee, Sam set his jaw in anger. He waded into the stream, his rage growing with the Frenchman’s every word. The crooked-eyed bastard! He’d drag him off that mule and teach him what respect was!

  But then Dubois popped his long blacksnake against the team, and the mules lunged forward in their harnesses and carried the Frenchman on across with the wagon in tow.

  Watching from the shallows as the outfit rumbled away with its escort, Sam tried to understand why he had become so enraged.

  Respect.

  For an Apache.

  A few short days ago, Sam wouldn’t have believed he could ever have associated respect with the people who had killed Elizabeth. But that had been before a young Apache woman and her child had touched something inside and given him purpose again—even if for a moment that had passed as quickly as it had come.

  CHAPTER 21

  Sam-el lived in Nejeunee’s thoughts the way Sháa ruled the sky.

  During her first day at the post, he was especially on her mind whenever a black soldier escorted her from the tent to the nearby hospital so that Little Squint Eyes could nurse. Upon mounting the steps, she would look down the long veranda and expect to see Sam-el return just as he had left: with his boots clicking against the planks.

  But when two days had passed, and then three, Nejeunee’s expectation and hope gave way to loneliness and fear. By day four, self-preservation forced her to adopt a Ndé’s stoic acceptance of what had to be.

  Sam-el was never coming back.

  Just as he-who-cannot-be-mentioned, and her Ndé sisters of yesterday and the kindly señora of her childhood, Sam-el was now in the lake-of-the-gone-forever, relegated to dreams that would only sadden her upon awakening.

  And yet he had taught Nejeunee so much about the Indaa, a people she had considered inferior. Maybe the Indaa were not so much different from the Ndé, or the Mexicanos of her upbringing. Maybe every people had their good men, like Sam-el and he-who-cannot-be-mentioned, and their bad as well, like Mat-to and Gian-nah-tah. Maybe Bik’egu’indáán and his Son Jesucristo blessed and punished without regard to a person’s race.

  Jesucristo.

  Ever since Nejeunee had awakened that last morning to roast sotol hearts before the teepees of the Ndé, she had endured so much. There had been sudden violence and crushing change, followed by threats to Little Squint Eyes that still persisted. Throughout it all, the Beloved Son had seemed to do more than merely walk with Nejeunee. It was as if He had carried her. Even in her captivity, Jesucristo seemed to shelter Nejeunee under His wings as if she again held a chalice and sipped sweet wine, and more.

  Maybe she felt His presence so powerfully here because of what stood against the sky at the summit of the adjacent mountain.

  On the final night of their hard ride, Nejeunee and Sam-el had passed through the shadow of that mighty ridge and reached the post boundary at the hogback’s sloping point. Now, sitting in the open flap of her tent and staring up, she closed her eyes against the afternoon glare and experienced a moment as real as if her steps had just now carried her to that very location in the road.

  Before her in vision, the mountain’s point loomed up in two stages: a sharp initial rise of perhaps a hundred feet, capped by two hundred feet of rock stacked upon rock. Nejeunee’s dream-self struck out for the heights, dodging lechuguilla and prickly pear as she weaved up through scattered boulders. At the base of the towering palisade, the maraca-like warning of a black-tailed rattler stopped her in her tracks.

  Just outside a dark recess, she saw it coiled, its deadly fangs poised to attack.

  From the Ndé, Nejeunee had learned to revere góbitseegháleglíní, the rattlesnake, for its power over life and death. Indeed, no Apache would kill one, but that didn’t mean that the creature wasn’t evil—and this one was as sinister as a serpent striking at the heel of Bik’egu’indáán’s Son.

  “Back in your den, góbitseegháleglíní, you evil thing!” she cried, a typical Ndé curse on a snake. “Take the world’s evil with you!”

  Considering Nejeunee’s mission, she wasn’t surprised that a creature out of infierno would try to turn her away. But she wouldn’t be denied. Skirting the rattler, she worked her way up a chimney between massive stone columns splotched ocher with lichen. She clawed at the rock, her fingernails searching out holds, her toes digging into crevices. Apaches prided themselves on their climbing ability, and Nejeunee did the Ndé justice as she scaled the palisade with intelligence and skill, along with strength that belied her slender f
rame.

  The uppermost section consisted of loose rubble, and as she squirmed over the summit rim and looked up, the sky held a large cross, shining brilliantly under Sháa.

  Buffeted by wind, Nejeunee crawled onward, the underlying rock digging into her knees. She reached the foot of the cross and stopped, a young woman wrenched out of one world into a second, and now into a third. Adrift, she stretched out a trembling hand, seeking the wood and more, and found the only constant in a life that had spanned the gulf between Mexicano and Ndé, and between Ndé and Indaa.

  “Señora.”

  A voice outside her tent shook Nejeunee back into reality. Peering around the dangling flap, she saw two figures approaching from the hospital. One was the uniformed guard, who never ventured far, and the second was a Pueblo scout in Indaa shirt, trousers, and boots. The scout, his long black hair secured by a flat-brimmed hat, again addressed her in Spanish.

  “Ven afuera, come out.”

  As soon as Nejeunee emerged and faced the men, she also found the post surgeon weaving toward her, his face and eyes inflamed by Indaa liquor. In his arms was Little Squint Eyes, his little fists flailing.

  “Mi niño,” she said, extending her hands.

  Speaking in the Indaa language, the surgeon passed Little Squint Eyes into her care. Her baby smelled like the white man’s breath—strong with liquor—but his color was better than in days, and his temperature seemed normal as she pulled him close.

  “The fever is gone,” the scout told her. “You are to keep him now.”

  Through all the stunning events, Nejeunee had held her emotions largely in check, even as they had strained for release. But now, leaning her cheek into Little Squint Eyes and kissing his head, she could suppress her feelings no longer. She looked up at the surgeon through a mist and said two words again and again.

  “Gracias, señor . . . gracias, señor . . .”

  The surgeon acknowledged with a nod before responding in the Indaa language, which the scout translated for her.