Black Apache

by Clay Fisher

  But, at the side of the splashing tank of desert waters, Satan sprang from the rocks behind me. Entering into my poor body, he thrust out the wrath of God and installed the wit of Beelzebub.

  With a cry of plainest despair, I also ripped away the brown and dusty smother of my robes, kicked off mulehide guaraches, leaped, with the idiot’s laughter of a demented coyote, into the water of the tanque fair between the two full-teated, white-buttocked demons of my temptation. It was the finest swimming I ever had, although I cannot remember if it ever came to bathing.

  Our spirits were cleansed, however.

  That, I recall.

  7

  WE ACQUIRE YOUNG GRASS

  Refreshed, we went on. We at last knew that to reach Arizona we must travel westerly. But, making our way out of the Alamo Hueco Mountains, we were confronted by the even more forbidding Animas Range. We were lost among its peaks for five days. Finally, we were rescued and redirected by an ancient Mescalero woman left by her people to die. As she had been waiting for the Dark One nearly a week, feeling all the while stronger, she seized upon our predicament to alter her own fate.

  “Listen,” she said to me, interested that I spoke her Apache tongue, “I haven’t time to wait here any longer. I will go with you. A priest in Janos once nursed me to health and asked nothing. So I owe you something.”

  “No, no,” I interrupted. “We priests are vowed to such things, Little Mother, and never for hire.”

  “Pah!” she denied. “Most of you black robes are cheats and liars. But I like you; I am going to call you Broken Back.”

  I entreated her to withdraw the honor, but she insisted that if Broken Foot was good enough a name for the great Apache chief, Nana, then Broken Back was surely sufficient for a homely poor cripple of a Mexican padre.

  “Aye, but Nana does not permit that name to be used in his presence,” I objected. “I understand he is very sensitive about it.”

  “Well, of course, cura. Nana was crippled by an accident as a child, and he is a proud man.”

  “So am I also a proud man and a cripple.”

  “True. They ought to have shot you when you were hurt.”

  “Quita, woman; I was born this way.”

  “Hmm. Your mother should have drowned you, then. The Apache would never permit a mother to keep such a damaged thing.”

  I conceded the point. In return, the Mescalero squaw promised to guide us safely out of the Animas badlands. Resting until the sun went down, we set out once more to find Arizona. At first rest halt, two merciless hours later, the old lady limped over to me. Peering into my face, she squeezed my arm. “Don’t feel bad about that name I gave you,” she said. “Do you know how I am called? Old Croaker,” she answered herself. “Isn’t that a poor and shameful name? Once I was called Young Grass.”

  Touched, I looked back at her.

  The moon was rising. By its wan first light, I could see the bony, wrinkled features. She was crying silently.

  I looked away respectfully.

  “Young Grass,” I told her, “I did not hear that other name.”

  She rubbed sniffingly at the tears, anxious that I not note them. “Small man,” she replied, “be you also of good spirit; I will get you a better name soon.”

  Turning at once away from me, she addressed the two others of our party with some roughness of embarrassment.

  “Ugashe,” she ordered them. “Stir yourselves. It is time to go.”

  Charra Baca and her foster-mother arose with groanings of stiff muscles and blistered feet. I also abandoned my resting rock and once again the three of us followed the old lady westward. By dawn we had crossed over the Animas Range through San Luis Pass and were descending. We lay up through the fiercest heat of that day, went on at nightfall, now climbing once more. By midnight, we were near the summit of the Pedragosa Mountains, and were at last in Arizona.

  “Tomorrow,” Young Grass announced, “we will come to beautiful Whitewater River. From there, you will not need Old Croaker anymore.”

  I thought to hear her sniffle, to show some little hitching in the voice. But I was wrong. There was even ardor in the manner with which she wheeled on my two women, who had already found sitting rocks to groan upon.

  “Here, you two gourd-breasted weaklings!” the Mescalero anciana upbraided them. “Get up from your fat backsides. We are wasting coolness hours. Ugashe, ugashe!”

  She made effort to belabor them with her walking stick, but the motion only caused her to fall down. Unruffled, she gazed up at the early moon.

  “My, but isn’t this a pretty evening?” she asked.

  And, with the opinion, she got unsteadily back afoot and tottered on in the lead singing a cracked and very much off-tune Apache happy song.

  8

  FLICKER IS NEAR!

  All through the remaining “coolness hours” of the march onward into Arizona, the ancient Mescalero crone continued in her anticipations of the blessed valley of Whitewater River. She was a poetess, a gifting not uncommon among her desert kind. Those bred of that hot, harsh land had to see in it a loveliness beyond its too evident cruelty in order that the spirit might survive.

  Even so, even knowing of this Apachean trait of gilding the cacti lilies, so convincing was Young Grass in these lyric praises of the Whitewater that I kept repeating, “Praise God. Celebrate his name. Press on.”

  But that was only because I had never seen the lovely meadows of the beautiful Whitewater River, in Arizona.

  With the pearling gray of dawn we came to this stream, and Young Grass announced it as the place of her birth, hence of her naming. We looked about in the growing light. The Whitewater River flowed only with sand and the naked upshoulderings of its bedrock channel. There was no visible drop of water in it and already, even before the sun, one could see the shimmer of the heat lines wriggling above its bone-parched course. Of ground cover there was only the thinnest hairing of a brown and coarse salt grass growing in some of the river flats where accidents of previous flooding had deposited a trace of soil to bind the footless sand. “My God,” I said to our Mescalero guide, “this is the grass of your naming? This the place of such a lovely baptismal? What did the shaman annoint you with? This pea gravel that cuts our sandals?”

  “Ahhh,” the old lady said softly, “your eyes are not long enough. Come on, we’re almost there.”

  She went ahead, turning up the seared channel, moving now like some ancient mustang mare that has smelled the water of a hidden tanque and will reach it ere falling. Following her as best we could, we came presently around a sweeping bend buttressed by high red cliffs. The walls opened out before us. “Miran!” the old woman cried. “Do you see it? There, where I point with my stick.”

  We peered hard, seeing nothing.

  “Loco,” Zorra muttered beside me. “Mas loco.”

  The old lady heard her. “No,” she said, “not crazy. Smart. Come along, mujer, I forgive you. After all, you carry no Apache blood.” She scuttled forward once more, bearing to her left, toward a nearby dark opening in the red rock walls. Charra was suddenly quickening her pace to come up with the Mescalero woman. “Aha!” Young Grass said. “So finally you show your mother’s strain, eh? You see it?”

  “I smell it!” Charra cried. “Water!”

  “Yes, and more. Grass, wood, everything. Follow me, chiquita. I will teach you how to be a whole Apache.”

  We all hurried after her and soon had crawled up into the dark opening in the wall. Going under a low natural rainbow rock, we came out upon the most astonishing of secret Apache oases. It was of about two hectares of level rich earth, thickly overgrown with meadow grass and harboring a grove of silverleaf poplar trees. Through the foliage of the poplars we could see the glint and sparkle of a body of water. We ran forward through the thick grass, laughing like children. Within minutes we were laving our weary bodie
s in the basin of the tanque escondido, the hidden Apache water hole.

  This ancient camp of the desert was called Hueco Perdido, Lost Hole, Young Grass said. The centuries had collected there the seeds of grass and cottonwood and other desert flora. Even many Apaches did not know of its existence. As for the whites, untold numbers of them had died of thirst down at the crossing of Whitewater River, not quite a mile from this Arizona Eden.

  We rested there for twenty-four hours.

  It was during the rest that we discovered the real treasure we had found in our Mescalero grandmother, Young Grass.

  Firstly, the home of the Warm Spring Apaches at Ojo Caliente was not far from the old lady’s Mescalero Reservation at Sierra Blanca. Young Grass knew well many of the Warm Springs kinfolk. When questioned about Kaytennae, she had exclaimed over the youth at length. A remarkable young man indeed. He would go far in the affairs of his people. No doubt of it whatever.

  What? Could Young Grass take us to see Kaytennae at Ojo Caliente? Well, she could take us to Ojo Caliente, yes. But we would not see Kaytennae there, no. He had gone with some wild Apaches to raid an ammunition camp over by Fort Huachuca. The times were uncertain. Victorio had fled again to Mexico, killing many Arizona settlers on the way. Indeed, Young Grass believed Kaytennae might be trying to get that ammunition for those same Victorio people who had been badly hurt by the pursuing cavalry.

  “The White Eye settlers are angry again, too,” the ancient crone finished. “They never could see the same humor in an Apache burning their barns and houses as in white men putting the torch to Apache jacals and rancherias. Kaytennae will be in great danger. He will need strong help from Yosen.”

  Yosen, also Ussen and Ysun, was the Apache main god. The use of his name made me fearful for Kaytennae. I asked Young Grass anxiously who the raiders were that had recruited him. Her reply brought me hard around.

  “A black chief, up out of Mexico,” she said. “I forget his name. Of middle years, handsome, fine pride, fierce.”

  “My God!” I cried. “Flicker!”

  “Why, yes,” nodded Young Grass, pleased. “That was the name. Do you know him?”

  “Too well!” I said. “But never mind that. How was it that Kaytennae went with him?”

  “Flicker needed a guide, someone who knew where the Huachuca dump was. Kaytennae agreed to go.”

  I then told the old woman of my kinship with the Apache Kaytennae—how, when he was a boy, I had nursed him against certain death and won him through to happy life. When she learned this, her gap-toothed smile embraced me as a brother.

  “Padre Jorobado!” she proclaimed, “Father Hunchback! Of course. Now it comes to me. Damn the ruinations of the mind which ride apace and always on a faster horse with each winter’s approach and passing. I apologize, Nunez. We hear you are half Indian yourself. The mestizo padre they call you, anh?”

  “Anh, yes,” I agreed, answering in Apache. “My mother was full-blood, an Opata, captive of the Nednhi.”

  “Juh’s people,” Young Grass said, as to herself. Then, to me, “Yes, I will help you find Kaytennae. At least I will take you to where Fort Huachuca is.”

  “We shall search where you direct us,” I assured her earnestly. “We must find Kaytennae, as he alone can lead us to Flicker.”

  The withered crone nodded. “Ah, that black one,” she said. “Like a wild horse, a king of wild horses. He stirs the blood with danger. He is a man of men. Hijo!”

  “Flicker is all you say,” I replied, “but now I had better tell you our story, mother. The truth of why we are here looking for him and for Kaytennae.”

  “Go ahead, Padre Jorobado. And be careful. I have the power of smelling liars.”

  “How do they smell?” I inquired, in humor.

  She did not smile for return.

  “They smell like priests,” she said. “Tell your story as if you were someone else.”

  “Eh? What do you mean, mujer?”

  “You know what I mean, small man. Speak with open words, not as a damned black robe.”

  “Ah,” I sighed resignedly, “Indios!”

  “Excrementos mulos,” the old lady said calmly, “mule droppings.”

  And so we left it.

  9

  I CONFESS THE GOLD

  OFEL NARANJAL

  Quickly, I told Young Grass of my dream to build an Apache church with the gold of El Naranjal. I described for her, as well, my knowledge of the lost mine’s location, “five days down the great North Barranca of Durango, three days travel toward Sinaloa and the sea.” One had but to find Barranca del Norte to be on the road to Naranjal, I explained. And, once on the road, he had only to listen for the sound of the mission bells far off, and follow them, to find where the yellow metal waited. I then conveyed to the ancient squaw my immediate purpose of reaching Headstone, Arizona, with my companions. “Do you know Headstone?” I concluded. “Charra says it is near Fort Huachuca.”

  “Tombstone,” Charra Baca corrected patiently.

  “Call it whichever you will,” Young Grass shrugged. She was masticating poplar bark for its sugar and she spat expertly of the juice to drown a passing small bug. “I know where the new mining camp of the gray metal is over there, Jorobado,” she returned to me. “I can find it for you.”

  “And find the Chiricahua people for me?” Charra cried.

  I made a gesture, interrupting. “First things should be hewn to, girl,” I reminded her. “The beginning goal is to locate Kaytennae. Let us pray that Young Grass really knows where Fort Huachuca is.”

  The fierce-eyed old Mescalero squaw drew herself up. “Damned black robe,” she said. “I know everything about the soldiers in Arizona, all their camps. I can show you where every horse apple of the American cavalry has dropped since Red Beard Crook was out here the first time.”

  “How near are we to Fort Huachuca, then?”

  “Thirty miles, a pony ride.”

  “And Headstone?”

  “Tombstone,” Charra repeated faithfully.

  “Twenty miles,” Young Grass said. “Only a good walk.”

  I took in a deep lungful of the sunshine-heated redolent air of the oasis. The excitement of the nearness of these places was building in me like altar wine. God had sent this ancient female Moses of the Mescalero to lead us out of the Arizona wilderness. Victory was to hand.

  “Father, thy name be exalted!” I shouted aloud, startling my companions. “We shall press onward with dark.”

  “Let’s go now,” Charra Baca suggested, catching some of my fever. “The day’s heat is not too great.”

  “No, no,” Young Grass said, alarmed. “The black robe is right. We travel only by dark into that country.”

  “Why so?” Zorra demanded rudely. “Damn such delay. I am losing money every minute that we sit here waiting for night. Hell, that is when I make my money.”

  Young Grass took interest. “What money is that, great teats?” she asked. “Do you dig for silver, then? A woman?”

  “My mother is a whore,” Charra Baca laughed, answering for her scowling dam. “She fornicates with men for money. You don’t need a pickax to strike gold, anciana.”

  “Annnhh, I see.” Young Grass made a lisping, disapproving Apache sound. “But nevertheless we shall wait for fullest night. Flicker’s party of broncos will have stirred soldier and settler alike. Much too dangerous to go by day, fornicator. The white people would shoot us all.”

  “Cállate, shut up, mother,” Charra broke in to tell Zorra when Zorra would argue further. “Did you ever hear of a dead whore getting rich?”

  Zorra lost her scowl, barked out her fox-like laugh.

  Young Grass, however, retained her frown, and I, seeing that our Apache guide was not pleased with this low cháchara, made hasty reproof. “Enough of loose converse, ladies,” I warned. “We should all be at
thankful prayer. God has led us this far well and safely. Hail Mary.”

  “Pah!” Young Grass snorted. “Why don’t you ask this god of yours to guide you on from this spot? Wasn’t it this same black robe god that was leading you when I rescued the three of you from walking in stupid circles back among the Animas peaks? Ih! A poor god and a poor guide, both things, I say.”

  It might have proved a bad turn in our pathway but that Divine illumination lit it for Nunez.

  “Ah, yes, Young Grass,” I agreed gracefully, “but didn’t my God lead us to you, who then saved us?”

  “Don’t bother to reply to him,” Zorra advised the Mescalero crone. “You cannot trap a priest except that you kill him first.”

  “Yes,” Charra Baca said. “But we don’t want to do that. Who would be my only father, then?”

  “Pony offal!” Zorra rasped. “You’re not interested in a father. It’s the Franciscan gold. Don’t you think I was watching you when Nunez mentioned the old mine to this Apache hag? El Naranjal, he said, and your ears nearly flew away from your scheming head. All that buried treasure of Saint Francis in the Ghost Canyon, eh? Down there a mile deep where the Rio Naranjas flows and the old hacienda waits two hundred years silent in the sunshine? That is why you don’t want your dear ‘only father’ to be harmed, you red-haired bitchling, you. It’s the gold!”

  “A lie!” Charra defended angrily. “I barely noted Father Nunez to speak of the gold.”

  “Estúpida!” Zorra exploded. “Don’t you know that every thieving priest in north Mexico has a map to some old Sierra gold or silver mine of mother church? Hell, girl, they sell those maps for two céntimos in the streets of Ciudad Chihuahua to raise money for their damned orphanages.”

  “A second vile falsehood!” Charra cried. “I want only to find my mother’s people and to be with them.”