Tame the Wildest Heart

by Parris Afton Bonds

  “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” Bingham pronounced. “May the Lord God Almighty have mercy on these missing souls.” He stood and said, “Let’s skedaddle. Quick.”

  “Well?” Halpern asked, remounting. “Do we try and make Fort Bowie—or strike out into Mexico now?”

  She looked to Bingham.

  “At this point,” he said, “Fort Bowie will probably mean a large portion of a night march for us. I say it’d be safer to head straight for Mexico. Make camp in the safety of the mountains.”

  “Safety?” Halpern drawled. “Miners in Tombstone claim the mountains are crawling with Apaches.”

  “What Bingham means is that we’re fair game here on the plain for Indians doing sentry duty. In the mountain ravines, we have about as much a chance being seen by an Apache scout as we do seeing one.”

  Halpern shrugged. “The mountains it is then.”

  The sky turned purple in anticipation of evening before they reached the Chiricahua foothills. By the time the heavens were black with thousands of stars, the hills had grown so steep as to necessitate dismounting, and the threesome led their horses through the treachery of darkness.

  Mattie hadn’t bothered to tell Halpern how hazardous traveling in the mountains at night could be. His occasionally muttered, “Damn!” told her he was finding out. She smiled.

  In addition to thorns, cactus, yucca, and other spear-like plants to scratch the flesh, one had to avoid knifelike rocks that were practically invisible, holes and crevices in the ground, and cliffs of all kinds.

  Doing so came easily for Mattie. She had developed a sort of sixth sense over the years of traveling the Southwest with the Netdahe band.

  Like most Apaches, the Netdahe were warfaring nomads. As wide and vast as was the extent of the territory controlled by the Apaches and many as were the streams, mountains, and forests where they camped and hunted, regular supplies of water and food in that arid and crabbed Southwest were not easy to secure.

  Constantly, she strained to listen for noises that didn’t belong. The yip of a coyote made her pause to listen. But when no responsive yip followed, she began moving again, as quietly as possible considering the crunch of pebbles under foot and hoof.

  The moon was lost behind turreted peaks, when Bingham led them into a deep U-shaped ravine where they could set up dry camp. The tent would not be needed tonight.

  While Halpern unpacked the mule’s camp gear and Bingham unsaddled the horses and hobbled them for the night, Mattie gathered twigs and branches, the kind that made for a smokeless fire.

  This had been but one of her myriad, menial duties as Nantez’s captive. Gathering piñon nuts or mescal for roasting, building wickiups, weaving burden baskets, and making pottery jars were only a few others.

  Those and satisfying Nantez’s lust. When he was in one of his foul moods and she failed to do so, she could expect a boxing that left her ears ringing.

  Bingham elected to take the first watch from the rimrock above. It was a precaution only. At this point, unless a war party traveling by night stumbled over them, they were unlikely to draw attention. Raiding Apaches were interested in the more extensive booty they could get from robbing ranches and wagon trains.

  At dinner, she and Halpern passed the rations to each other in silence. She knew he was as uncomfortable with her as she was with him. Propped against his saddle, he sipped his coffee and eyed her across the small smokeless fire she had built.

  His expression of distaste for her mirrored her own for him, with his air of elegance. He represented all that she had been, and she was both contemptuous and envious of him.

  With his forearms braced on his knees, he leaned forward and asked, “I noticed your brogue—you’re Scottish?”

  She pushed her floppy hat off, so that it was suspended from her neck by its leather thong. “Aye, that 1 am.” She was wary of conversation with him for conversation’s sake alone.

  She remembered when a cavalry patrol officer had discovered her and Albert, half-starved and dehydrated, wandering the desert south of Tucson. He had brought them to Fort Lowell, and she had found it inordinately difficult to communicate in English. Even a few English words strung together in coherent fashion had required great concentration on her part. Further, she found English now full of empty and excessive phrases.'

  “Born in Scotland?”

  “Ayrshire.”

  “What were you doing in Mexico?”

  “Me father was a mining engineer. He worked for American Smelting and Refining. Twelve years ago they sent us to a mining town, Santo Tomas. Outside of Chihuahua.”

  She could tell he was trying to figure out her age. She made it easy for him. “I was eighteen at the time.” His unwavering gaze didn’t betray that he might think she looked older than her thirty years. “How did you come to be . . . captured by Nantez?”

  She noted he did not use the demeaning term of ‘Nantez’s squaw.’ “Nantez and his warriors struck Santo Tomas, looking mainly for horses, cattle, arms, and ammunition. They took four hostages. Me parents, me, and the reverend there.” She nodded up toward the rim, where spiraling pines were silhouetted against the rising moon.

  “Me parents were tortured to death.”

  “And the reverend?”

  “Our preacher survived because he was rambling and ranting about what God would do to Nantez and his warriors. They thought he was crazy. Touched by the gods. He was released after only a few months of captivity.”

  “But not you?”

  She focused on stirring her sea of peaches and tomatoes. “Not me.

  “Do you mind?”

  Was he daft? She looked up. He was rustling in his supply pack. “Mind what?”

  He fished out a pad and a small leather sack. From the sack he extracted a wand of pastel chalk. “I’m a portrait artist.”

  “Really?”

  “Do you mind if I sketch you?” he asked, propping the pad against one raised knee. “In this altitude, without the distraction of city lights, the night has its own magic lights and shades.”

  She shrank back. She hadn’t glanced in a mirror since before retiring for bed on that muggy night in August of 1871. “No!” The refusal was more a hiss of her breath than an actual word.

  He arched one black brow. “Why not?”

  She scraped off her tin plate. “Why not?” She recalled the occasional photographers and artists who painted Tucson’s blanket Indians and poncho-wrapped Mexicans as caricatures. She knew what she had become. She certainly did not want to add to descriptions like pathetic and disgusting the term of laughable. “I’m simply not interested in posing.”

  “You’re afraid!”

  She packed away the plate and took out her leather bag. “I most definitely am not.” She unlaced one high-top moccasin, then the other. The tin ornaments on the fringe seaming their sides clinked as she tugged off each. “Maybe I believe in what Geronimo always said. Something that makes your likeness steals your soul.” She took a jar from the pouch. “Then ye get ghost sickness.”

  He was watching what she was doing with curiosity written in his expression, but he only said, “Tell me about this ghost sickness.”

  She uncorked the small terra-cotta jar and scooped out a fingertip glob of the precious cream. “The Apache fear the ghosts of the dead.”

  She concentrated on massaging the salve into the cracked skin of her left heel. “If a relative has kept anything that belongs to the departed, he would fear that the ghost of the dead person would come back to claim it. They believe that ye might arouse or anger the ghost of the dead if you speak his name.”

  “How does the person get sick?”

  “They become nervous. Agitated. Sick to their stomach. Ghost sickness is brought on by the hooting of a nearby night owl. You see, the Apache have an obsessive dread of the owl. If one hoots near the camp, it is an omen of the worst sort. The Apache believe that the spirit of the dead enters into the owl and comes back to warn or threaten them.” He
r lips curved in a smile. “Like a Scotsman, they are afraid of the supernatural. That’s why after awhile, the Apache women stopped tormenting me.”

  “Why is that?”

  She lifted her other bare foot and inspected it by firelight. Hard skin. Dead skin. Scar tissue. She applied another dab of the unguent to the ball of her foot. “Oh, I began watching the medicine man. His cures seemed to work for the most part. Ye must understand that those who traffic with the supernatural for evil purposes are witches. Evil beings who work their spells through things like the snake and the coyote, clouds and lightning. The Apache have a superstitious dread of a witch.”

  “And they thought you were a witch?”

  “I never let on either way. The shaman taught me the art of healing after I helped him when he was in a bad way. But I also took care to fast and keep lonely night vigils and act as though I could interpret omens. A precaution, mind ye.”

  “What did you do for the shaman?”

  Now she grinned. “Most Apache medicine men believe special virtue resides in their hair. They take care that no one should touch it. When a warrior in a raiding band of renegades, Commancheros, tried to scalp Ramos, he thought he had lost his power. I told him about the Biblical Samson and convinced him that with new hair growth his power would return.”

  “There.”

  At the single word, she looked up at Halpern. He held the pad up for her to see. The fire’s smoldering embers glowed beneath the portrait of a woman she did not recognize. His hazel-green eyes watched her steadily. “Well?”

  The woman in the pastel portrait was neither youthful nor particularly pretty. Dirt smudged her cheeks like a whore’s rouge. Her hair was lackluster and looked as if it could use a good washing. All this against the background of the squalid trappings of her attire.

  The long, dark eyes, framed by eyebrows shaped like hummingbird wings, glinted with unmistakable anger. How he had managed to capture her inner rage with mere colors and lines was remarkable.

  The woman in the portrait, though, wasn’t remarkable.

  Yet in the tilt of the square chin there was a certain strength. The broad forehead suggested an intelligence the wild image rebuked, and in the direct gaze and the set of the wide mouth could be found a certain integrity. The overall tone was one of innate dignity.

  She had seen a jaguar once, prowling the perimeters of the family hacienda. She had been picking blackberries. Both she and the jaguar had frozen and stared at one another, waiting. Then the jaguar had gone on its way.

  The portrait Mattie stared at now could be a human rendition of that jaguar. “That’s me?”

  Gordon Halpern’s gold earring glinted in the firelight. “That’s what I see.”

  She corked her jar. “Ye do have a measure of talent, Mr. Halpern.”

  He might have chuckled. She wasn’t sure. After putting away pad and pastels, he rose and swirled his jacket about his shoulders with the grace of a matador. “I’ll relieve the reverend of his watch.”

  She watched the man use his cane to scale the boulders with the agility of a goat herder with his staff. She thought of Halpern’s deadly fists. That they could deftly wield a fragile paint brush was unimaginable.

  When he was out of sight, she stepped around the fire to his supply pack and drew out his sketch pad. She held it up to catch the firelight. What she saw in the portrait was not the young girl she remembered and still thought she was in her mind’s eye.

  She had been a fool to hope she could escape unchanged. Tears trickled paths through the dust coating her cheeks. And for the first time in eleven years, Mattie cried.

  § CHAPTER FOUR §

  Mattie, minus her riding jacket, was already stretched out in her bedroll when Bingham slithered down the boulders and approached the campfire. “You asleep, gal?” he asked.

  “I’d like to be.”

  “What do you think about the gent up there?”

  She raised on one elbow and stared at the bearded man. “Do ye even sleep in your hat?”

  “He made more noise up there than a mescal-drunk Indian. Greenhorns like that could land us in more trouble than the three thousand dollars is worth.”

  “Give him time, Buckskin. He’s smart.” She knew that sobriquet irritated Bingham.

  “Are you lusting after him, gal? Is your harlot’s heart plotting how you can destroy his soul?”

  At another time, she would have ignored him, rolled onto her stomach and gone to sleep. But the image of the woman in Halpern’s sketch lent her insight. “Ye remember me as 1 was, don’t ye, Bingham?”

  He eyed her suspiciously. “What makes you ask that?”

  “Ye remember me as a young, attractive woman. Ye sat at me parents’ dinner table and drank our wine. Ye admired the Goyas and Miros hung on our walls. Ye knew me mother, Lady Morgan, and knew that I was the granddaughter of a Highland earl.”

  “I don’t remember anything from those days at Santo Tomas—and right after. Best you don’t either. Memories can kill.”

  He was right. Memories killed self-esteem. Emotion. The ability to love. They could also heal, though. At least, that’s what she wanted to believe.

  She lay down again, her back to him, and propped her head on her saddle blanket. Her jacket she spread over her chest against the early morning cold that settled over the mountains even on summer nights.

  “If that’s true,” she said as she stared off into the darkness, “then why return to Nantez’s camp? Like ye said, three thousand dollars wouldn’t be worth risking another scalping, would it?”

  “That is true, gal. But a cache of gold nuggets is. Found it when I was fleeing Nantez’s camp. A placer mine on the Yaqui River. Big enough to last several lifetimes.”

  So, she thought sleepily, Bingham was putting his own period on the end of a sentence. “Remember, me good man, that the mines men find are never so rich as the ones they lost.”

  Her lids grew heavy. Kaleidoscopic memories of her childhood in Scotland, revived by her conversation with Bingham, were woven into her deep sleep:

  Of Hogmanay, when her parents permitted her to toast in the new year with hot spiced claret, the cinnamon smell of plum pudding, the evergreen decorations.

  Of high tea at six o’clock and crumpets dripping with great dollops of butter.

  Of her father teaching her to use the mayfly for trout bait. “’Tis nae wee thing how ye cast, Mattie. Drag your line crosswise. So that ’tis like the way a mayfly flutters upstream just before their wings are dry and are unable to lift off the surface.”

  Of Wappinschaw, when games were held, of tossing the caber and curling and shinny.

  The Apache women played a game like shinny, but that was the only way her life with the Apaches ever paralleled her old life in the Highlands of Scotland. Unless she counted the Apache male’s white breechcloths that looked for all the world like kilts.

  She realized that what she missed was not so much her family, but family memories. They gave color and warmth to her harsh, austere life.

  She was finding out that memories were inaccurate, that they changed with vicissitudes and prejudices. A sorrowful thing when not even memories could be trusted.

  When she would have drifted deeper into sleep, the image of Nantez loomed before her, as often happened, turning her dreams into nightmares: his broad head on his short, muscular neck; his thick coarse black hair with its few streaks of silver, smelling of smoke, sweat, and grease; his powerful torso and spindly legs.

  The hands shaking her shoulders ripped a scream from her throat.

  “Sssh!” a male voice warned.

  Her eyes snapped open to see Halpern kneeling over her. “What is it?” she asked, sitting up. “Bingham. He’s gone, damn’t!”

  She brushed her tangled hair from her eyes and tried to blink the sleepiness from them as well. “He’s probably just scouting—”

  “Scouting—hell! That’s not all. He took the pack mule and supplies.”

  “What?”
She scrambled to her feet and almost tripped on her rolled saddle blanket.

  By the light of the moon, she could see that his grim gaze was accusatory. After all, it had been she who had suggested hiring the Mormon preacher.

  She felt like demanding why, since it was Halpern’s watch, he had not noticed Bingham stealing out of camp. True, Halpern may have been unaccustomed to distinguishing the moving shadow of a branch from an animal, but surely he had heard something. She supposed she shouldn’t have let herself sleep so deeply that she was oblivious.

  She brushed past him to where only Pepper and Halpern’s gelding were now tethered. She dropped to one knee and studied the ground. Apache could learn a lot from the manner in which a twig or branch of a tree had been broken, the way horse manure dropped in camp or along the trail, even the way in which three sticks had been placed.

  She could tell little from the rocky ground. A few overturned stones told her that the preacher had been careless in covering his tracks. But then, he had little to fear from her.

  From the looks of Halpern’s thunderous expression, Bingham might have to fear either flying lead or a leading left if the Easterner caught up with him. “Now what?” he asked her.

  “Now what? Why, ’tis up to ye. Ye can head back and keep your money. As for meself, I’m going on into Mexico.”

  Something in his eyes changed. The accusing gaze gave way to reluctant . . . well, maybe not admiration, but perhaps reluctant acknowledgment of her grit.

  “The question is,” she said, “are ye still bent on going?”

  He turned back to the campfire, now nothing but a few glowing embers. “If I have to crawl on my knees like a penitent on pilgrimage, I’m going after my wife.”

  “Well, then, we’ll need supplies. We’ve got enough with us to last maybe through tomorrow.”

  “We can replace them at the first Mexican village we come to.”

  Now was not the moment to tell him that the Mexicans liked Americans only a little more than they did Apaches, which was about as much as the Mexicans liked rattlesnakes. “Ye’d better get some rest. I’ll stand guard.”