Black Apache

by Clay Fisher

  BLACK APACHE

  CLAY FISHER

  Copyright © 1976 by Clay Fisher

  E-book published in 2018 by Blackstone Publishing

  All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

  Trade e-book ISBN 978-1-4708-6182-7

  Library e-book ISBN 978-1-4708-6181-0

  Fiction / Westerns

  CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress

  Blackstone Publishing

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  To Dr. Phil Welton

  True listener for

  the mission bells far off

  Translated from the Spanish, the original journals of Fr. Panfilo Alvar Nunez, OFM, an entry dated AD 1879, Barranca Rio de Naranjas, Durango y Sinaloa, Méjico.

  Apache language passages may differ from texts phoneticizing from American Chiricahuan sources.

  The Indian term “black robe” was initially employed to designate the Jesuits, in Sonora. Later, it came to include all orders of the priesthood, from brown-robed Franciscan to white-clad Carmelite.

  It was always consistent in Indian meaning; however, the “black robes” of any color went much unloved in that wild land and dangerous time.

  Flight from

  Casas Grandes

  A FOREWORD

  The story of the black Apache is a tale of two men: Sergeant Flicker and Father Nunez.

  Both were of a kind to remember—the kind Shakespeare meant when he vowed their antics would make the angels weep.

  Flicker was a renegade American soldier under charges of rape, murder, and desertion. Nunez was a crippled Mexican priest unfrocked by his church for gross rebellion. Both men were in unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. Arrest for the soldier meant death by the firing squad. For the curate a possible lifetime in the iron cages of excommunication. Each understood his own peril; neither would submit to capture alive.

  God arranged the crossing of their trails.

  Nunez wanted to build a chapel for the hostile Apache Indians. He saw it as a church no white man might attend, and he wanted to build it in the wild heart of Mexico’s Sierra Madre Mountains of the North. His Franciscan order absolutely forbade it. Nunez, being Nunez, absolutely ignored his order. Soon came the response from the Franciscans: Stay where you are, we are sending a bishops’ committee to arrest you.

  Nunez did not wait.

  He went over the wall of his mission at Casas Grandes, outward bound in his search for the one man he knew could save him and the dream of an Apache church.

  He was looking for a legend.

  The Indios reducidos, the tame Indians, called this man Soldado Negro, Black Soldier; and sometimes he was known as Mirlo, Blackbird. The Mexican’s called him Trasfuga, the Runaway. The mestizos, the lowly half-breed people of the monte, called him the Black Apache, and they feared—or revered—him more than any bronco of the pure blood.

  The Americans up in Arizona called him many things but mostly, “that damned nigger Cherry Cow (Chiricahua) son of a bitch.”

  The army at Fort Bliss, Texas, called him Robert E. Lee Flicker, first sergeant, cavalry, and listed him “deserter.”

  The sheriff of El Paso called him “wanted for aggravated rape and murder” and had his likeness nailed up on $500 reward posters from Fort Davis to Camp Grant in the Arizona Territory.

  The press of the time used all of the above, with but one paper printing a semblance of fair treatment: the El Paso Daily Outpost.

  Charged with the brutal rape-slaying of the daughter of post sutler Albert Thompson, Sergeant Flicker steadfastly denies his guilt and tells an entirely different story from his accusers.

  Outpost reporter John Brown Stokes found the black prisoner a tragic victim of the divisions following the late conflict. Sergeant Flicker, says Stokes, was the first Negro from a Southern state to be appointed, postwar, to the United States Military Academy at West Point. Reporter Stoke’s full story is exclusive with the Outpost, including the R. E. L. Flicker biographical summary beginning elsewhere in this issue.

  It was October, 23, 1868, that the Outpost spoke in lone voice against the public preclusion of guilt in the Flicker case. The black sergeant never saw the newspaper account but he foresaw the shadow of its dire prophecy: Untried, he was already convicted, and he knew then what he must do, and swiftly.

  In the chill fog of earliest dawn, Sergeant Flicker broke barracks and fled across the Rio Grande. He had but one passion, one rage of purpose remaining. Vengeance against those he believed had betrayed him because he was black. For the next ten years, living among the hostile bronco Apaches of the Sierra Madre del Norte, he waged war on both governments, Mexican and American, and the blood price was on his head north and south of the border.

  It was this outlawed American army deserter whom Father Nunez set forth to find in 1879, the eleventh year of Flicker’s Mexican exile.

  How the two men found each other, and so found themselves, is the story of Black Apache.

  1

  THE BANISHMENT

  My name is Father Nunez. Once I was a priest of the people, fully cloaked in the authority of my order, that of the monks of Saint Francis of Assisi. Now, God save me, the Franciscans have cast me out. The cruel Bishop Galbines will not hear me, and Eminence Cardinal Mendoza, down in Ciudad Chihuahua, has sought a papal dire warrant for my arrest. Should he succeed, it will mean imprisonment and secret trial, with God alone knowing the penalties but any monk able to guess at them. And tremble.

  In the happy years before my banishment, I had found and restored the original mission that had been built at Casas Grandes half a century gone and left in ruins by the Apaches shortly thereafter.

  I had toiled like a human dog, as well, to win over for God these same Apache Indians. For the first time in my church’s history, I was succeeding. There were no conversions, no Catholic Apaches, true. But Nunez was being a friend to the untamed ones and making friends of them. Then, entirely through no fault of either priest or Apache, events conspired to once more bring the wild riders to destroy the mission. Full blame for this second loss was inevitably put by my superiors upon my forbidden efforts to solicit the trust of an implacable foe. What a sad waste and wrongness for us all.

  Yet one may not criticize his church here.

  The Apache were in fact known as los bárbaros, the barbarians. My own people feared them hysterically. In consequence of that dread, my flock also turned against me. The personal crusade of their pastor to entice and tame—it was whispered even to train!—the red wolves of the Sierra Madre was not alone malo but loco.

  And so they prayed, the time of Crazy Nunez upon their blighted parish would soon be done.

  Yet, strangely, my advertised failures and my church’s published bans notwithstanding, no new padre appeared in Casas Grandes to take my place. Neither did any bishops’ soldiers arrive from the south to denounce Panfilo Alvar Nunez, the outlaw priest.

  It became a singular time of waiting.

  The days fled into years. Years through which I labored alone to once again raise the mission, my parishioners refusing to help their mad cura another useless time. Mercifully, I lost count of the winters of solitary devotion. In the end I had rebuilt but the rudest of quarters for myself, a village housekeeper, and an Apache child I had been rearing at the mission before its demolishment. But then, on that last day of which I tell, one of my flock, loyal yet, brought me dread word.

  The ye
ars had been long but my order had not forgotten me. One of the justly feared bishops’ committees of the Franciscans was finally en route to Casas Grandes to arrest me for my crimes. Its grim members were in fact but a day’s mule ride away. And pressing their wearied mounts.

  I grew pale at the news.

  Were I now to wait, I would be carried off by the bishops’ committee to those unlit dungeons from whence no rebel priest returns—an unthinkable thing. One course of desperation remained to me. I must seek a miracle from the hand of God to guard me against the nearing peril.

  And it came to pass, even so. The hand of God did intercede. The visitation came as I rested in the darkling sunset of that final day. A day I had squandered as ten hundred others in exhorting my parishioners to labor with their beleaguered priest. To join him in the burro-headed effort of rearing up yet one more church of the Virgin for the Apache to tear down.

  The nature of the miracle requires a turning back to another, older sunset of the years before. The sunset that had seen my beautiful mission pounded into its present ruin by the artillery fire of perhaps the most sinister figure in Mexican-American frontier history.

  I speak of the renegade Negro West Point officer turned Apache messiah, Lt. Robert E. Lee Flicker.

  It is with Flicker that it all began. That was when the miracle was poised, put in place.

  Qué cosa maravilloso, what a thing of wonderment!

  Even the hand of God is sometimes black.

  2

  THE LIONS OF YESTERDAY

  When I came home to Casas Grandes from my small part in the rescue from Flicker’s Apache of the young son of the governor of Texas, I was a popular hero.

  Ben Allison, the famed Texan pistolero, and myself had achieved a wide and generous notoriety. Our dangerous ransoming and safe retrieval of the boy were trumpeted in the press of both lands. We were lions then.

  But that was yesterday.

  Now, this decade later, the lesser lion was grown older and his keepers jaded with him. When the unforgiving monks of the bishops’ committee came next day, they would make short work of my guilt. I would be found wanting and marched away in peremptory arrest. I would be a priest as ruined as my broken mission.

  At this prospect depression whelmed me over.

  I must flee, but where, how, toward what future and what friend?

  Allison, alas, was years since disappeared.

  He had vanished the same day of our defeat of Flicker, riding off into the haze of cannon smoke that was still drifting from the Negro deserter’s shelling of Misión Casas Grandes. Deserted, I had no power to replace that of Allison’s great cap-and-ball revolver. But still I knew there must be a better way than bullets to prosecute my salvation of the barbarian Apache. What I required of course was a miracle, and none had come forth.

  Angrily, I cursed aloud and hurled the heavy tile in my hand against the mission bell, long since fallen from its tower to lodge amid the sharded adobes of my garden patio.

  The tile caromed off the ancient bronze with a deep gonging vibration. The bell, thus tolled, commenced to shudder with an unnatural intensity. Suddenly, it broke through the crust of rubble to plunge into a tunneled room beneath the ruins. A cloud of debris swirled upward. Borne aloft on the dust, a parchment fluttered and fell at my feet. Its legend caught my eye: Mapa de Mina Perdida del Rio Naranjas.

  Merciful Father, what was this?

  Had the bell’s cave-in released the true map to the fabled lost mine of El Naranjal? The ghost mine whose odd name meant “the orange grove” and which—legend hinted—the Franciscans owned in specious title to one Blasco Salazar, civilian citrus rancher? The spectral bonanza camouflaged thus by an orange grove planted to hide it from taxation by the central government?

  No, how might such treasure fall to me, a ruined priest? It was beyond thinking. But as I continued to peer at the map, it became not beyond thinking. Indeed, I was looking upon the very carta of the folklore. Two centuries of antiquity lay in the hand of a spoiled half-breed priest who must soon be fugitive or lose his freedom to the subterranean cages of Bishop Galbines.

  It was then the realization invaded me; here was my miracle.

  With the gold of El Naranjal, I could escape Galbines. Escape him and so remove myself to build entirely another kind of church than yet imagined by Rome. A church built for the wild Apache alone. It would not be in Casas Grandes but the inner ranges of the Sierra Madre. No white man might attend it, not even any Mexican, and Nunez would have done a thing no other priest of the cloth had dared to dream before him.

  Pardiez! I would raise up an Apache chapel.

  All I need do now was follow the ancient map to the phantom canyon of the orange grove. There awaited me a treasure second only to the fabled lost Tayopa mine of the thieving Society of Jesus. Madre! It fevered the brain.

  Who found the wealth of El Naranjal controlled not alone his redemption as a priest, he would rule all of Chihuahua, even of Sonora. There was no bishop in Mexico who could say him nay. The committee be damned. Fornicate Bishop Galbines. Even Saint Francis take heed. Nunez had the power now. He held it in his single hand that clutched the parchment carta of the mine.

  The thought twisted my senses awry.

  I leaped atop a mound of rubbish in the ruins of my bombarded church.

  “I shall find it! I shall find the gold!” I shouted. And when the earless adobes and broken shards of mission tile answered not, I tucked brown Franciscan robes and galloped down the hill toward the village of Casas Grandes, screeching, “It is mine, damn your eyes! The gold is mine, do you hear? All of it! All of it! All of it!”

  3

  THE WIFE OF THE SHOEMAKER

  Long before I reached the town and Bustamante’s flyblown mercería, I regained my good sense. Rather than waving the treasure map, I hid it quickly in my robes. In place of running and shouting, I sat down on a roadside boulder and prayed. After six Hail Marys, I felt improved. Now for some straight thinking.

  Patently, I could not dash into Bustamante’s marketplace yelling that I had found the map to El Naranjal. Every wastrel and day dreamer in Chihuahua would hear of it within three days. Yes, and every evil person, too. I understood my position. Hereinafter, I would need to travel in the full shelter of my priest’s habit. It would not be easy, but I did have armament.

  No sensible servant of the Church goes about a frontier land without weapons—concealed naturally—against the uncertainties of the road. I now, therefore, sought my Jeruselem blade, my Writ of Holy Scripture, that is to say my Bible. The Book never failed when called upon with proper devotion.

  Scanning the way to make certain no parishioner observed me, I removed the flask of grape brandy from the hollowed-out Bible and took a smacking pull. I then put mind to problem of moment: What did a veritable pilgrim require to outfit himself for finding a lost gold mine?

  Before all things of course must come a chief of soldiers to protect the expedition. All things else—including an Apache ambassador to get us through his fierce people in safety, a mining expert who would know the gold country when we reached it, and perhaps a cook and keeper of the pack mules—must wait upon the finding of our capitán, our jefe de soldados. Without such a one to guard against the barbarians and outlaws of that wild land (who would kill travelers for no more than a pound of bacon, a mold of bread, or pellizco of salt), not one step could be taken.

  Praise God, I knew such a leader; I would seek out the black lieutenant, later sergeant, Flicker. But to find Flicker I needed a certain Apache named Kaytennae. So then, let first things be first. Where was Kaytennae?

  Arising from my rock at roadside, I went into town and sought out the handsome, ripe-bodied wife of my storekeeper friend, Mayor Bustamante. She, Dolores, was a creature surrendered in totality to the cross. Even an unfrocked priest could command her. When I told her that I wished a discreet c
onference with the Indian wife of Refugio Baca, the town shoemaker, fat Dolores put down her metate, left cornmeal in grinding bowl, and departed at full waddle.

  Presently, I was with the summoned girl in the darkest backreach of the Bustamante barn.

  Ay de mi! Here permit a word about Charra, Baca, the young wife of Refugio, known to the Apaches as Josana.

  This was a child of tenderest years but a completed woman, no matter. She appeared to be of mixed Apache and Anglo blood. She had been left on the steps of my church by passing Indian raiders whose number had included the child’s mother. The fleeing war party was almost certainly of the Chiricahua of Cochise, from Arizona, and were being hotly pursued by veteran Mexican cavalry troops. There was blood all over the stones of the entryway to God’s house, and I always assumed the mother to have been mortally hurt—Apaches unfailingly know if they will die—and thus to have left her child with Father Nunez rather than to see it end upon a Mexican bayonet.

  In any event, the Mexican Nednhi Apache of Chief Juh would not accept the infant, it being a female, and mestizo.

  I, Nunez, had been forced to employ a whore of the village, just then wet from a stillbirth of her own, to nurse the foundling. Both the woman and the orphaned waif lived with me at the mission until the child was off the breast.

  At this time the villagers were commencing to whisper of my inordinately kind treatment of a street woman, admittedly a creature of superb animal graces, and I had to discharge her. It was my understanding that she removed to Fronteras, where the Anglos were more numerous and business therefore more prosperous.

  Left with the Apache girl, I naturally attempted to rear her as my own daughter. Yet all too soon were the summers fled. Little Charra was no longer little Charra. Her nubbins became overnight as noble as any in North Chihuahua. When, all swiftly, the remainder of her grew to match the remarkable breasts, my parishioners once more demanded some less earthy housekeeper for their humpbacked priest.