Apache Lament

by Patrick Dearen

  Still Nejeunee’s quake persisted—only now it was because Sam-el’s arm remained about her shoulders.

  She went silent, and so did he, but they had much to say in other ways. She looked at Sam-el and found him looking back, and she snuggled against this Indaa while the stream trickled from behind and roosting birds flitted in the limbs above.

  Nejeunee didn’t want the moment to end, but Little Squint Eyes soon appeased his appetite and began to flail his small fists.

  Sam-el bent his face toward him. “Always gettin’ left out, aren’t you, nubbin,” he said with a little laugh.

  Nejeunee didn’t understand the last word, since it wasn’t in Spanish, but there was no mistaking his tenderness.

  “You’ll make a good father someday,” she said.

  “If I get a chance, maybe. But it’s sure good Little Squint Eyes has got somebody like you takin’ care of him.”

  Straightening, Nejeunee held the infant up before her and danced him on her knee.

  “Shilth nzhu, Little Squint Eyes,” she told him happily. “Shilth nzhu, shilth nzhu, shilth nzhu!”

  “The way you say it, ever’thing’s pretty,” said Sam-el. “Shilth nzhu—I say that right?”

  He had, and Nejeunee was so caught up in hearing him voice it that she ceased her play and turned to him. Sam-el was an innocent child in the ways of the People, but he was also a man, and no man but he-who-cannot-be-mentioned had ever said such words in her presence.

  “So what’s it mean?” Sam-el asked.

  Embarrassed, Nejeunee dropped her gaze, and when she looked up she had a teasing smile instead of a reply.

  Sam-el gave a little laugh. “Well?”

  Nejeunee felt mischievous. “ ‘Shilth nzhu, Nejeunee.’ ”

  She knew he would repeat it, and he did so, although haltingly.

  “Stringin’ words together’s a little harder,” he said. “I know nejeunee means friendly, so what is it I said?”

  Nejeunee flashed another coquettish smile. “You just told me I’m dear to your heart.”

  Night may have been falling, but it couldn’t disguise the deep flush that swept across Sam-el’s face. Nevertheless, he managed a nervous laugh.

  “Well, at least I wasn’t goin’ on about how brave I am with deer.”

  For a moment, Sam-el’s humor defused the situation. But as their mutual gazes lingered, he seemed to explore Nejeunee’s eyes, as she did his. Once, his lips parted as if he was about to speak, but his voice stayed quiet. Still, when he pulled her closer and Nejeunee laid her head against his chest, the things unsaid were more powerful than words.

  “It’s all right, Sam.”

  Sam awoke with a start, and the soft voice seemed to follow him out of a dream that had lasted the night.

  “Sam,” Elizabeth repeated. “It’s all right.”

  The words seemed so real that Sam sat up, searching the dark for someone who couldn’t be there.

  “Sam . . . Sam . . .”

  The voice faded and went silent. Lying back and closing his eyes, Sam yearned to hear more, so that he might understand and accept.

  The images came again.

  He stood with Elizabeth in Bass Canyon, and before them, strangely, was the windswept mound that was her grave. At its head knelt Nejeunee, her raven hair falling across her face as she fashioned a cross out of sotol stalks.

  “Go to her, Sam,” Elizabeth said. “Sam, it’s all right.”

  He turned to Elizabeth and placed a tender hand on the bulge in her abdomen. “But—”

  Elizabeth was pointing. Sam looked, and now he saw tiny hands flailing in the cradleboard at Nejeunee’s side.

  “Go to them, Sam. Sam, it’s all right . . . all right . . . all right . . .”

  When Sam opened his eyes again, dawn had broken, and there was a whole new world to greet him. The air was fresh and exhilarating and the trickle of the stream joyous. Through the ponderosa limbs above, the sky glowed with a golden hue that he had never seen before, and he had to hold back a cry of exaltation that would have rolled from slope to slope and shaken the piñons and gray oaks, the junipers and maples.

  Turning, he saw Nejeunee facing him in peaceful sleep from beyond the cradleboard and Little Squint Eyes. Had Sam dreamed what he had because he wished it to be true? His feelings seemed so clear now, his conscience so clean, and suddenly all he wanted to do was smile, and smile some more. He was alive, truly alive, in a way he hadn’t been for three seasons, and there was hope where there had been despair.

  Sam sat up, quietly calling Nejeunee’s name, and she awoke with a smile for him.

  “Nil daaguut’é,” she greeted him, stretching with obvious pleasure. “Mexicanos say ‘Buenos días.’ ”

  “It is a good mornin’, Nejeunee.” He reached for her, and she sat up and took his hand across Little Squint Eyes. “It’s a good mornin’ ’cause you’re here with me and ’cause I want it to stay that way. You and me’s so different, and ever’thing’s happened so quick, but that don’t matter. I don’t care if I say it in Apache or English or Mex, shilth nzhu or te amo or ten other ways, I love you. You and Little Squint Eyes both, Nejeunee. I want to take care of you and the three of us to be together.”

  Nejeunee’s eyes began to glisten, and Sam feared that he had crossed a boundary that he should have respected. An uncomfortable silence followed, but her fingers stayed inside his hand as her chin quivered and emotion flooded her cheeks. When she finally withdrew from his clasp, Sam sank inside, and then she flashed him a reassuring smile and rose.

  Confused, Sam stood with her.

  “Por favor, watch Little Squint Eyes,” Nejeunee said. “I must saddle your horse and prepare your meal.”

  She must have caught the quizzical look on Sam’s face. “It’s the Apache way,” she added.

  “Way?”

  “If you accept the horse and eat, you declare us joined.”

  With a chuckle of relief, Sam put his hands on her shoulders. “All right, but first things first.”

  He managed only a quick kiss before she slipped out of his arms with a laugh of her own and went to the horses.

  CHAPTER 26

  From the sunrise came a horse’s nicker, sudden and unmistakable.

  By instinct Sam pivoted down-canyon, but he didn’t waste time debating what to do.

  “They’re on us!”

  Scooping up Little Squint Eyes in his cradleboard, he ran for the horses staked to ponderosas across the small meadow. Nejeunee had already saddled his gray and had the burlap bag spread open at the log, but she met him and took the cradleboard.

  “I’m sorry, Nejeunee, but we got to wait to make it official,” he said. “You grab ever’thing while I throw a saddle on the roan.”

  She obviously was experienced in breaking camp quickly, for when Sam tightened the cinch and turned, the bedrolls and supplies were affixed to the horses and she was extending the gray’s reins.

  Nejeunee’s face may not have shown disappointment, but Sam felt plenty of regret.

  “I’ll make this up to you,” he said, taking the reins. “For the rest of our lives. I promise.”

  Moments later the three of them were bearing up-canyon as quickly as the brush and terrain and Sam’s sore-footed animal would allow.

  All that morning, they pushed on without pause, twisting and turning with the canyon’s course. They scared up cottontails and a bobcat, mule deer and a gray fox, and once when the horses shied in a piñon brake, Sam glimpsed a large, brown form with white-tipped fur at its back and a hump at its shoulders. The stream grew intermittent and then went dry, and soon the horses weaved through wagon-sized boulders that stood among dense mahoganies, gray oaks, and mountain laurels, along with madrones with their sleek, red limbs.

  With the bordering slopes hidden by the timber, Sam didn’t realize until it was too late that he and Nejeunee were being funneled into a box canyon.

  They broke into bright sunlight to face fifty yards of open gorge en
ding at a dramatic pour-off between impossibly steep bluffs left and right. From the high notch, stark against the sky, fell a thin stream that struck the cliff halfway to bottom. Splitting in two, the water clung to the rock in a diamond pattern as it rushed down almost vertically to a small pool. There at canyon’s head the water apparently sank into the ground, for there was nothing but gravel all the way back to Sam.

  It was a beautiful place, but so too had been the Diablo snows before blood had profaned it.

  Sam wheeled his horse to Nejeunee. “Can’t go back! I don’t know what to do!”

  He expected to find her paling, but he had forgotten that her people had lived by escape during all the months that the Tenth Cavalry had hunted them.

  “Anee! Over there!” she exclaimed, pointing over his shoulder.

  Sam turned. The bare bluffs on either side were too rubbly for handholds, and the sun-splashed cliff with its shining diamond seemed mostly worn smooth. But a few yards to the right of the pool the rock face was less burnished, and he could see a dark, jagged line springing up from the bottom.

  He gigged his horse for it and Nejeunee followed, and the hoofbeats still echoed when they swung off their animals before a crack perhaps eighteen inches wide. But the cliff was undercut by four feet, a daunting first step, and when Sam looked up, the wall of rock seemed to rise into the sky itself. They couldn’t do this, neither of them, not with Little Squint Eyes and the certainty of death if they slipped.

  But death was exactly what Nejeunee faced if they stayed here and waited for those Army rifles to flash fire.

  Already, Nejeunee was reaching for a handhold, and Sam boosted her up and brought his horse alongside the rock and stepped up from the saddle. He gained the crack and dug a boot into it, and then there were just the three of them, fighting their way up a place never meant to be climbed. His doubts only grew as he clawed at her heels and the canyon floor receded, and he could only imagine what it would be like if the soldiers caught them with their faces to the rock and opened up with their rifles.

  Sam never should have glanced back, but he did, and in the woods down and away he saw light gleaming, the kind of effect expected when sunlight catches a firearm.

  “We’s in a bad way,” he said, looking up at Nejeunee’s legs and the cradleboard blazed in the sky. “If you got any of that special power to call on, now’s the time.”

  “I’ll pray to Jesucristo.”

  In this most desperate of situations, Sam was struck as never before by the Christian faith of this young Mescalero woman who, twice uprooted from her people, had every reason to call upon only Apache gods, if any at all. She was nothing less than inspiring, and he thought back to his boyhood when his father would take his hand and tell him that the Almighty had a purpose for him, if Sam would only walk in His ways. For almost nine months, Sam hadn’t understood why he had been spared at Bass Canyon, but he wondered now if an agent of vengeance had ever been his intended role. Maybe his real mission had been to watch over Nejeunee and Little Squint Eyes, for where would the two of them be if Sam hadn’t intervened in the Diablo snows and ever since?

  Service.

  Maybe Boye had been right.

  As Sam listened to Nejeunee quietly call upon Jesucristo, he found himself doing something that had been unthinkable from the moment the Apache fiend had seized Elizabeth’s locket and killed her: He prayed as his father had taught him.

  They had climbed far past the diamond, and now the zigzagging crack bore left until Sam could feel a spray from the free-falling water. Abruptly Sam’s hands were wet, every handhold and foothold slick, and when Nejeunee’s moccasin slipped and momentarily struck his shoulder, the three of them came perilously close to plummeting. It had become an impossible climb, and all he could do was cry out for Nejeunee to hold on.

  His lungs heaving and his strength waning, Sam clung there, knowing it was the end but refusing to accept it. Then Nejeunee shouted “There!” or “Where!” or an Apache word he didn’t know, and she inched higher and inward across the cliff face. Sam couldn’t understand why she would seek out the falling stream and even slicker rock, but where he no longer had confidence or strength, he found both courage and will and followed. The water’s full force was in his face before it was over, but after another harrowing minute, Sam crawled after Nejeunee onto a recessed ledge directly behind the falls.

  The sunlit hollow was just high enough to allow a person to sit, and deep enough to escape the spray. But the cold water had already soaked Little Squint Eyes, and his wails were alarmingly loud as Sam came abreast of Nejeunee and helped her shed the cradleboard.

  “Got to keep him quiet!” Sam warned as he turned and looked out. “If they can’t see us, they’ll hear us!”

  He had only his .45, and the distance and height would render a revolver shot useless, but he nevertheless drew it. Through the falling water, sparkling in the sunlight, he saw blurry images: the white gravel of the canyon floor, the gray and green of the woods, the swells of bordering mountains stretching into the horizon.

  Sam knew when Nejeunee took Little Squint Eyes in her arms and tried to soothe him with soft words and gentle rocking, but the chilled and frightened infant continued to cry.

  “There’s nothin’ you can do?” Sam pleaded.

  Concentrating on reconnoitering, he was only vaguely aware as Nejeunee withdrew her phylactery from her blouse and spread the drawstring. But almost immediately Little Squint Eyes grew quiet, not a moment too soon considering the abrupt flashes of sunlight in the last line of brush.

  “They’re right there!” he said quietly, pointing as he turned to Nejeunee. “See the trees where—”

  Suddenly the trees and flashes didn’t matter anymore, for in Little Squint Eyes’s hand glinted a silver locket.

  In an instant Sam was back in Bass Canyon—back in deepest hell. He snatched the locket away from the infant and sprang the catch, and the engraving seemed to seize him by the throat and choke the life from him.

  May I

  Have your

  Hand in marriage?

  He clutched Nejeunee by the shoulder, his fingernails sinking into her flesh. “Where did you get this?” he demanded. “Where the hell did you get this!”

  He had never addressed her so harshly or treated her so roughly, and her dark eyes were startled and confused. She didn’t answer, and his nails dug deeper.

  “Tell me!”

  “He held it. On his journey to the afterworld, he held it.”

  “Who held it?”

  “Yah-ik-tee. He who is not present.”

  “His father? Little Squint Eyes’s father?”

  Ashen and trembling, her eyes now insecure, Nejeunee could only nod.

  “You sayin’ he died with it?” pressed Sam. “He had it in his hand and died with it?”

  Her fingers stole out as if to caress his face. “Sam-el, what’s wrong? What’s—”

  Sam shook the locket in front of her. “Elizabeth’s! It was my Elizabeth’s! I shot him before he got to her, but he grabbed it and killed her! The son of a bitch killed her!”

  “You, Sam-el? You killed my . . . ? No! No! No!”

  Now there was something new in Nejeunee’s face—realization, shock, panic, revulsion—and she shrank from Sam.

  “Idzúút’i!” she cried. “Get away, filthy white man! Idzúút’i! Idzúút’i!”

  For a moment that seemed forever to Sam, they stared at one another, two people who had lost so much and found so much.

  And lost so much again.

  CHAPTER 27

  “Samuel! Samuel!”

  The voice echoed loudly, but it had to probe the depths of Sam’s perdition to find him. Through the falling water, he peered down at the canyon bottom and saw two figures standing beside horses and looking up at him.

  “May I inquire why you’re perched there, Samuel?” the voice added.

  Even if Sam hadn’t recognized the face at a distance, he would have known who it was by
the diction.

  “What are you doin’ here, Arch?” he shouted back.

  “Seeking Ranger DeJarnett. It seems I have located him.”

  “How many soldiers with you?”

  “I know the reason you ask, and that’s why my good man Boye and I have developed admirable saddle sores to overtake you. The major at Davis accepted your account without question, but I feared that you would flee an imagined patrol and never cease to run. From the looks of your perch, it seems my concerns were warranted. Come down and let us have coffee.”

  Several minutes later, after a descent as treacherous as the climb up, Sam followed Nejeunee down the final few feet and joined the two men on the canyon floor. As Nejeunee wandered away with her head hanging, Sam let his clasp on Arch’s hand linger as they shook. There was something different about the ranger, but Sam couldn’t identify it.

  “How come you to do this, Arch? That’s a hell of a ride up this canyon.”

  “I decided I owed it to you, Samuel. For all the obtrusive remarks and resistance and general obstinacy I showed you on our scout, I owed it to you.”

  Not until Sam released Arch’s hand did he realize what had changed in his appearance.

  “You’re not wearin’ your bandana no more.”

  “And I’m all the better for discarding the malodorous burden,” said Arch. “I’m a work in progress, but no longer am I in hiding from the troubles of my youth. Our talk in Musquiz Canyon convinced me it was time to confront the past and move on.”

  Beyond his friend’s shoulder, Nejeunee was removing Little Squint Eyes from the cradleboard. Sam’s eyes began to sting as he watched this young woman, who would have been his wife, take into her arms the child who would have been his son.

  “Arch, my gray’s got a sore foot. Can I trade with you for a spell? It’s a long ride till I can leave them at the reservation.”

  “Indeed.”

  Sam started away, only to hesitate.