The Wild Girl

by Jim Fergus

  Because he had been claimed by Goso, little Charley went to live with the warrior’s family—his wife, Siki; their baby daughter; and a son of about four. The Apaches love children, dote on them and spoil them, and Siki accepted the boy as if he were one of her own, bestowing a freer and more natural affection upon him than he had ever known before. In his first days in the ranchería, she let him sleep under the robes with her, cuddling him when he awoke with nightmares of all that he had witnessed and only faintly understood. She whispered to him in her strange, guttural tongue, which he did not yet understand but which soothed him, until he burrowed his face into her warm, brown pungent breasts, and he slept again.

  Speculation about the fate of little Charley McComas was rampant in the American newspapers of the day, and angry outrage voiced against the government and the U.S. Army for their inability to protect the citizenry from the terrible depredations of the devil Apaches. Less than two months after his abduction, the American soldiers under George Crook, the nantan lupan, entered Mexico under the new agreement between the two countries that allowed either army to cross the border, in “hot pursuit” of their savage common enemy. General Crook had with him a large force of Apache scouts from the San Carlos reservation; they knew the location of the secret rancherías and led the army directly to them.

  Goso and many of the other warriors were off raiding in the state of Chihuahua on the morning that Crook’s forces surrounded the ranchería, and there were mostly women, children, and elderly people in residence. Charley remembered that he was playing a game of hoop and stick with some of the other children when the scouts and the army regulars burst into camp, firing their weapons. No one could understand why they were being attacked by some of their own people, and there was great chaos and screaming as the fleeing women and children were cut down by the soldiers’ bullets. Siki gathered Charley and her children and ran into the bushes as an old woman named Dahteste tried to help some of the younger people escape. The old woman had been very kind to Charley since he had been there, and when he saw her collapse, struck in the back by a bullet, he tried to run out to her. He was a brave boy, even then. But before he could reach her, a soldier grabbed hold of him. “I’ve got the boy!” the soldier hollered. “I’ve got the McComas boy!” But Charley did not feel like he was being rescued. On the contrary, he thought that the white soldiers were his enemies and that they wished to hurt him and his new family. Charley bit the soldier on the arm; the man cried out in pain and loosened his grip, and Charley slipped away, dashing back into the underbrush. “Hey, boy, come back here!” the soldier called after him. “Where are you going? What’s the matter with you? I’m trying to rescue you. Damn, I had him and he run off!”

  Goso and the other warriors returned from their raiding three days later to find the ranchería destroyed and their families gone. By then most of the Apaches had already surrendered to Crook, the women and children who had not been killed or captured during the attack straggling into the soldiers’ camp in small groups. Goso did not know what had become of his wife and children, did not know whether they had been killed in the attack or had turned themselves in. He and several other chiefs and warriors, Chato, Chihuahua, and old Nana among them, decided to surrender themselves and they rode into Crook’s camp carrying a white flag. Even Geronimo, who had brought so much trouble down upon the People, brought his band in, to plead with the nantan lupan to return them to the San Carlos reservation, where he promised to live in peace.

  Of each person who surrendered, Crook demanded information about little Charley McComas, but none could say for certain what had become of the boy. Some said that he had fled into the bushes, others that he had been killed by the soldiers’ bullets, though his body had not been found. But now that they were in the custody of the army, all of the Apaches feared reprisal and punishment for Charley’s kidnapping and the murder of his parents, and none wished to accept responsibility, least of all Goso himself. And so in perfect Apache fashion, they closed up around the secret as tightly as a covey of quail bedding down for the night, like spokes on a wheel, each facing vigilantly outward. They never spoke of Charley McComas again.

  Goso never learned what became of his wife, Siki, and his children, or the boy Charley. He was returned to the San Carlos reservation, and eventually, like so many of the other Apache men, he became a scout for the army and joined the reservation “police force.” It was something to do to combat the endless hours of boredom and inactivity, a last chance to use the only skills they owned, to do the one thing they knew how to do, to be warriors, to be men. He took another wife at San Carlos, a young widow named Huera, and she gave birth to their first child there. Although employment for monetary remuneration was not a concept understood by the Apaches, Goso worked for the United States government now, and in return for his services as a scout, he earned meager rations for his family, barely enough to live, but better than nothing. He knew that the old days were gone forever, and that only by cooperating with the White Eyes and learning to live in their world could the People hope to survive.

  Two years later, May of the White Eyes year 1885, a number of the discontented Apache chiefs and warriors, Geronimo, Chihuahua, Mangus, Naiche, Loco, and Nana among them, got drunk on tiswin one night and broke out of San Carlos again, splintering off into their respective bands and fleeing for old Mexico, raiding and killing as they went.

  By now Goso was chief of his own scouting force of a hundred men, and he and his warriors set out in advance of the regular army troops, in hot pursuit of the renegades. Early one morning two weeks later, he trailed Chihuahua’s band into a ranch yard near Silver City, New Mexico. It was a fine spring day, clear and cool. But for the incongruous singing of the birds, the ranch yard possessed that specific deathly quiet that immediately follows a raid, the emptiness that fills the void left by chaos and death. The raiders had departed only minutes before, their dust barely settled, and as Goso rode in, he had the sense of being a ghost reliving his own past. Later he would come to think of this as the dividing moment between his old life and his new.

  The gates of the corrals were open, the horses and stock gone, the discarded possessions of the house scattered in the yard. The rancher lay dead by the front door, scalped and stripped of his boots and clothes. His wife, too, dead, naked, violated inside the house, a small boy decapitated beside her, his head on the kitchen table.

  Goso found the little girl hanging from a meat hook on the barn wall behind the house. She was still alive, the hook buried in the base of her skull. She must have thought when she saw him ride up to her that the Apaches had come back to finish her off, to torture her further. She looked him straight in the eye, and Goso imagined that he was the man who had hung her here, saw himself lifting her slight body by one powerful arm, slamming her against the barn wall, impaling her on the hook.

  Goso would never for the rest of his life forget the way the little girl looked at him on that morning, hanging from the meat hook on the barn wall, the birds singing so joyfully in the cool spring still of the day; this child who had seen coalesced into the final brutal moments of her short life all the horror of these centuries-long wars between the races, between their unspeakably depraved gods, who permit men to slaughter the children of their enemies. Her gaze was calm and steady, and she looked into Goso’s eyes with … pity. With forgiveness. And she smiled, as if apologetically, and reached out her arms for him to take her down. Goso lifted the little girl up off the hook and brought her toward him on his horse, and as he did so she wrapped her frail arms tenderly around his neck, and she died.

  Goso and his scouts pursued the renegades south across the border into Mexico, leading the army troops into the old country of his birth and youth, across the high plains and grasslands, into the foothills of the Blue Mountains, the Sierra Madre, the hard massive rock formations that erupted so violently from the earth, lacerated by canyons and arroyos, and dark shadowed valleys, this vast quiescent country that ran on forever,
like the crests of waves on a storm-driven sea.

  While he was in Mexico, Goso heard faint rumors from the renegades as they trickled into the soldiers’ camp to surrender one by one that some of the People had fled into the mountains farther to the south, that some of those who had not surrendered three years before were still living there, having made their new rancherías in places unknown to Goso and the other scouts, in the country of the peaceful Taramuhare Indians, a strange lush land, where enormous green birds spoke the language of men. He heard vague murmurings to the effect that his old wife, Siki, and his two children had been seen there, and that she had taken a new husband. He even heard that little Charley McComas was still alive. But for all his inquiries, Goso could never confirm these rumors, and because the renegades so hated the scouts, he thought this was probably nothing more than the malicious talk of vengeful men who wished him to imagine his family living free and wild without him.

  And the rest of the story you already know, Neddy. Shortly thereafter, the summer of 1886, the scout Goso traveled to Washington, D.C., with the contingent of Chiricahua and Warm Springs Apaches to meet with the Great White Father, ostensibly to negotiate a reservation for the People in their homeland. But instead he and the others were sent to Fort Marion in St. Augustine, Florida, where they were held as prisoners of war with Geronimo and his people, and a number of other Chiricahuas—men, women, and children—who had been shipped there from the San Carlos reservation in Arizona. Less than a year later, in the spring of 1887, the government shipped the Apaches to Mount Vernon Barracks, Alabama, an abandoned army fort in the swamps of Mobile Bay. But these were a people of the mountains and deserts and they could not tolerate the hot, damp climate of Florida and Alabama. Babies died from mosquito bites, and by 1894, nearly half of the Chiricahuas had succumbed to malaria, dysentery, or tuberculosis. Others had simply died of homesickness and broken hearts. That year the government finally transferred Goso and the rest of the survivors to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, a military reservation which housed the Wichita, Kiowa, and Comanche Indians, and where the Chiricahuas were given their own allotment of land upon which to live. But not until 1913, twenty-seven years after his initial incarceration, was Joseph Valor, as he had been renamed by his captors, allowed to return to his home country, or at least close to it—the Mescalero Apache reservation in New Mexico.

  The girl came back to the fire in front of the white Apache’s wickiup leading a young boy. I did not have to be told that it was Geraldo Huerta. He was a slender, willowy child with fair hair, light skin, and fine features. Charley spoke to him in Apache and the boy answered. Of course the irony of an American man speaking to a Mexican boy in their common tongue, Apache, was not lost on the cultural anthropologist in me.

  And to me in Spanish, Charley said: “He does not wish to return to the Mexicans. Es uno de nosotros. Es Apache ahora. He is one of us now. Ask him yourself if you like.”

  “Hello, Geraldo,” I said. “He encontrado a tu padre. He misses you very much. I’m going to take you home to him.”

  The boy looked uncertainly at Charley. “He does not remember his Mexican father,” the white Apache said. “This”—he gestured with his arm to take in the ranchería—“this is all he knows.”

  “Let him go,” I said to Charley. “Give him the chance you never had. To live the life he was born to live. The life that you stole from him. The life that Goso stole from you.”

  “I did not capture the boy,” Charley said. “He is not mine to give back.”

  “If you give him up, you may be allowed to continue to live here as you have been living all these years,” I said. “If you don’t, you and the rest of your people will be destroyed. That’s your choice.”

  Charley looked at me for a long time. His pale blue eyes were weathered and deep-set, shadowed by a prominent brow, and long, delicate blond eyelashes that lent his face a certain sensitivity. There was intelligence in those eyes, that much was sure; I could see him evaluating me with a certain shrewdness. And I also saw the antipathy in his gaze, the disgust, even hatred. A white Apache brought up to hate white people.

  “Once we are discovered here, we will not be allowed to live free,” he said. “Even if we give up the boy. This much we know.”

  “How do you know?”

  “We have lived peacefully here for a long time,” he said. “But now the Mexican government has reinstated a bounty on Apache scalps. The bounty hunters are so greedy to collect their reward that they kill and scalp our neighbors to the south, the Taramuhare, who are a peaceful people without weapons. The Mexicans can’t tell the difference between Apache hair and Taramuhare hair. Some of them even kill and scalp their own people, as long as the hair of the victim is long and dark.” Charley smiled slyly. “In the villages you will see that the Mexican men all wear their hair very short now, in order not to tempt their neighbors.” He took his own long red locks in his hand. “But I do not have to worry about losing my scalp, as who would pay a bounty for hair of this color?”

  I smiled myself. It appeared that Charley McComas had a sense of humor. “You should never have taken the boy,” I said. “You must know that the Huertas are a powerful ranching family. You brought this upon yourselves.”

  “There are those among us who I do not control,” he said. And, of course, I knew that he was speaking of Indio Juan.

  “Your only chance is to give the boy up.”

  “No one who comes here is ever allowed to go back,” Charley said. “Our warriors are already in pursuit of your men who escaped. We will catch them. The only reason we did not kill them before is because you saved my granddaughter’s life. But now that favor has been repaid.”

  “That’s how you repay a favor?” I asked. “You send a madman to attack us on the trail? You hold knives to our throats? You bash a dear, gentle man’s skull in with a rock? You hang the others over a fire to explode their heads?”

  Charley spoke angrily to Joseph in Apache.

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  “He says that the white slave woman has very bad manners.”

  “Very bad manners?” I said.

  “Be careful, Margaret,” Joseph said. “He says that you need a beating in order to learn your place here.”

  And then I made a serious cultural misjudgment, and one about which I should have known better. Not wishing to appear weak, or afraid of Charley, I challenged him. “Well, go ahead, then, big boy,” I said, speaking to him in Spanish. “Go ahead and beat up a girl if that will make you feel like a man.”

  Charley looked at me coldly and then he stood calmly and came over to me. He reached down, took hold of my hair, and wrapped it around his enormous fist, and he dragged me, kicking and hollering, behind the wickiup. There, out of their sight but not out of their hearing, he beat me, methodically and passionlessly, the way a man whips a dog simply to teach him a lesson, slapping me about the head with his open hands, until my ears rang, and I could feel my face swelling, the warm blood running. I fell to the ground and curled up and tried to cover my head with my arms.

  I do not remember how I got back there, but I woke up in the other wickiup with the girl dabbing my face with a wet cloth. My eyes were swollen so that I could barely see her and every inch of my body ached, particularly my face, which felt like it had been overinflated with air and was about to explode. “Oh God, I hurt,” I muttered. And in Spanish I said to the girl, “Why did your grandfather do that to me? What is the matter with you people that everything must be addressed with violence? With murder, torture, and beating?”

  “He did it to teach you respect,” she said, “and because he had to do it. You insulted him in front of others and the chief cannot lose face in that way. To do so is to weaken his position.”

  Of course, I should have known this, indeed, I did know; it is a common law of native tribal societies that the chief must not be challenged, particularly in front of others. But I had stupidly let my own professional hubris get in the way of my i
nstincts for self-preservation.

  “And he did it to protect you from Indio Juan,” the girl added. “By beating you, he claimed you once and for all as his slave. If another ever touches you again, he can kill him.”

  So this, once again, little brother, is what women are reduced to in both the civilized and savage worlds—seeking protection from men, a position that I have been trying to escape my entire life. And in order to satisfy your curiosity, I will tell you a little something about that life now. My mother died of malaria in Brazil when I was ten years old. My father was a difficult, demanding man, for whom his profession was everything, and after her death, I largely took over the household duties that had been my mother’s responsibility. We were living in the jungle in very primitive conditions, and there was always a great deal of work to be done. I became somewhat of an indentured servant myself, working for room and board, and the education my father gave me himself, as, of course, there were no schools in the Amazon. I was daughter, student, housekeeper, cook, laundress, gardener, and when I reached puberty, my father had me assume the rest of my mother’s duties—as his wife. A man has needs, my father explained, and he did not care for the native women; he said they were dirty, that they stank of the mud they rubbed upon themselves. He preferred blond women, like my mother, like myself.

  There was never any question of saying no to my father, about that or anything else. Indeed, our life there was so isolated that it wasn’t until some years later, after we had returned to the United States, that I even realized how deeply wrong this had been, how deeply, and irrevocably, my father’s despotism had scarred me.

  Does that explain some things to you, little brother? The law of the jungle which I learned at a young age, and have been trying to escape ever since, is that we do what we must to survive.