Black Apache

by Clay Fisher

  At that point Rio Naranjas ran at the very base of the cliff of the legend and in a course as shallow and studded with impaling rocks as any pitfall of a just and avenging God.

  I turned from the sight of Kifer’s death-fall only in time to see Kaytennae bleeding and motionless on the ground where Flicker and Niño Bonito still fought. And worse, even. Flicker himself had been blinded by his own blood flowing from a tearing of his scalp above the eyes by the filed canine teeth of the brute Yaqui. The black Apache was still on his feet but staggering in a helpless circle, groping for his enemy. Niño Bonito, growling in his throat, was crouching in toward Flicker, slavering for the easy kill.

  Thus intent, Pretty Boy did not see our women gathering behind him. He bent and gathered a great skulling stone from the rim of the bench, raising it above the proud head of his sightless foe. In that second’s pause, I cried out a warning to blind Flicker and he turned toward the sound of my voice. The move caused Pretty Boy another moment’s pause to alter the blow with which he would crush the black man’s skull. It was in this second hesitation that our women killed the Yaqui.

  Zorra and Charra leaped in behind Pretty Boy and grasped his two arms. Their inspired strengths, with the heavy weight of the killing stone and the Yaqui’s weariness from the fight, brought Pretty Boy to lose balance momentarily. His upraised arms bent rearward with the killing stone before they might straighten for the final thrust. In that moment, Stella Allison fronted him with the waiting machete.

  Uttering a singular Indian war cry that I knew to be neither Apachean nor Yaquian, but must have been from her own quarter-blood Comanche origins, she drove the great blade downward.

  The blow went in a median line of her Yaqui husband’s face. It carried through the brainpan, divided the broad nose, separated the narrow eyes, cleaved the heavy bone of the prognathous jaw, and came to grating halt only when encountering the thick gristle of the breastbone.

  Niño Bonito died without a sound.

  For all I know, he lies there yet on the great rim of the Ghost Canyon of the River of the Oranges, a machete of his own broncos lobos buried in his split and bleaching skull. Sabe Dios. We did not linger then to dwell on such things of death.

  Preparations were ordered to leave the rim at once.

  While Packrat, reappeared from hiding to see to this work, and the women tended to the wounded Kaytennea who, thank God, was but lightly unconscious, I was drawn to the rim a last time by the whimpering and digging there of the old dog Loafer. I joined him and saw that he had found the Franciscan map where it had fallen from Santiago’s hand and lodged between two stones.

  I took the ancient carta from Loafer with but a careless glance. I would save it for a memory piece for telling lies when I was old. But something impelled me to look at it again. I did so and grew pale.

  There was nothing on it. All signs of drawing and directions had vanished, and this time I knew no juice of lime nor other earthly arts of Franciscan cryptology would restore it.

  I did not signal my find to my comrades. Instead, I crumpled the empty parchment, letting it drop from my hand over the rim. It was as I followed its downward flight that the second thing of God’s eerie will caught at my eye.

  There, far, far below, where El Naranjal had been, there now was no alabaster hacienda, no mission belltower, no orderly grove of glistening green trees, no webwork of straightly dug acequias. There was only a rubble of gray stones to call a house or a mission’s chapel, and these may have fallen from the canyon wall. The irrigation ditches were no longer truly-drawn but seemed now to be random coyote or deer trails among the lesser brush of the river’s loop. And the beautiful green of the orange grove was but a snarl of twisted ancient stumpings more liken to mesquite forest ruins than to orange trees of old Castile.

  I looked to Heaven and crossed myself.

  Nor did I ever, then or in all the years of my life, say to my comrades what I had seen that they had not.

  Rather, I busied myself with the others in preparation to leave the cliff. All went swiftly well, except for one odd absence. When we came to search for the paralyzed Monkey Woman, the Yaqui hag was vanished. Some of the company believed she might have regained use of her limbs and scuttled up the passage ahead of us, hence escaping us. I did not contend this benign explanation with my fellows, other than to give a hardened look toward Charra Baca, who merely laughed at my scowl and murmured, “Father, you have a dark and suspicious imagination; come, now, the old lady’s simply gone.”

  Again, I accepted the company view outwardly.

  But I always thereafter believed that I knew “how” the old Yaqui devil had “gone.” And so, too, did Charra Baca.

  Still, it was time that we must depart the cliff. And so, with Charra supporting the recovering Kaytennae, and Stella Allison guiding the still-blinded Flicker, we made our way quickly up the dark cleft to where feeble-witted Crench, Young Grass and our faithful pack-mules waited to bear us back to the outer world.

  47

  BLACK ROBES’ GOLD

  We came forth upon the mountainside from the cleft. There, some final surprises awaited.

  Young Grass lay bound and gagged beside our only two remaining pack mules. We freed the old lady and got her story. Kifer had left Deputy Belcher and Deputy Crench once again as rear guards, Crench having made his peace with his old friend Belcher. The moment Kifer and the Yaqui had gone down the cleft, the two deputies had taken the other mules and fled for East Barranca, and the return to civilization. Any belief they had in Naranjal, or any hunger for its gold, were both long forgotten in the urge, as Young Grass had heard hairy Belcher put it, “To get shut of Kifer and them crazy Injun kin of his, ’fore one of us, or both, gets kilt.”

  We made little of this flight of minor thieves.

  “Forget them,” Flicker advised. “We’d better take a leaf from the same book, padre. We can walk out. We’ve got two good pack mules left, and the old bell mule can carry Young Grass.”

  He glanced around, “Where’s the white mule, anciana?” he asked Young Grass. But the old Apache squaw peered hard at him and answered that the white mule had been with us, not with her. And, no, it certainly had not come back ahead of us, through the cleft.

  “Do you think, Mirlo, I would not know that old devil of a she-ghost? She has tried to bite me or urinate on me for seven hundred miles. De ahí! She’s gone.”

  “Yes,” Kaytennae added uneasily. “And let us be also gone. I feel a heaviness of spirits in this place.”

  “Anh, ugashe,” agreed Packrat.

  They all started to go, but I had heard something.

  “Wait!” I called out, holding up a hand. “Listen—”

  There was a silence then and we all heard it—the eerie thin tinkling, coming up the cleft, of the mule bell hung about the neck of old Cosa Dulce, the white and bony leader of our pack mule string.

  “Christ,” said Robert Flicker. “It can’t be.”

  The black soldier’s vision had cleared now; he turned with the others of our company to stare at the dark opening of the cleft. A moment later, the old white mule emerged into the sunlight of the topping-out place.

  For the first heartbeat, none of us noted the peculiar thing about her. Then Flicker said, “Wait a minute, that mule didn’t have any packs on her.” And, as one, our eyes dilated and our breaths whistled sharply inward.

  Slung on the lather-caked sides of the panting animal, heaving from a climb the length of which no mortal man might know, were two ancient ore-carrying panniers of leather. They were of a design not known nor made for two hundred years. And both were bulged to spilling over with an ore embedded by nuggets as large as Majorcan hens’ eggs and of a blazing deep orange color and clustering of odd, ball-like globules of the mother gold known only from one mine in Mexico’s history.

  “Jesucristo!” I said aloud, staring at the ore of E
l Naranjal. “What is this that God has sent us?”

  And Robert Flicker, taking the hand of tall Stella Allison and answering for the others, said quietly to me, “It’s your black robes’ gold, padre; we all found some of it here, one way and another.”

  It was true. Glancing about me, I could see that it was. Zorra and the pudgy Packrat had found one another. So had slim, shy Kaytennae and bold, ripe-busted Charra Baca. Even I had found a friend where I had none before, the wheezing old and smelly camp dog, Loafer. And Young Grass had the old white bell mule to curse at and be beshat upon by, and so she was no longer alone, either.

  Yet there remained something missing, some one thing incompleted, undone, forgotten even.

  Then I struck fist into palm.

  “The church!” I cried. “My church for the Apache. It can be built now!”

  Flicker nodded, but he looked at me questioningly.

  “Where will you build it, padre?” he asked. “In the Sierra Madre, still?”

  “But of course,” I started confidently, then frowned. “Why, I don’t really know, Flicker,” I admitted. “Where else would you build it?”

  “I would build it where it’s always been built,” he answered. “In your heart, padre.”

  The words filled the void that had disturbed me. I knew at once that he was right. A man cannot build a church with golden bricks, no matter where. Love is the only mortar that will cement the soul to salvation.

  “You have answered me, Flicker,” I confessed. “The gold shall go to other good causes, as the company in communion may agree. Let us leave it thus, as it was sent us, in God’s will. Can you say amen to that?”

  Robert E. Lee Flicker looked long at me.

  Then the black head inclined soberly.

  “Soldado Negro says ‘amen’ to it,” he murmured. “It is the will of God, padre. I know that now.”

  And so we all went back over the mountain, followed by the tinkling glad bell of the old white mule and her ancient-panniered load of clustered gold. But I cared not for that treasure in the final thing of it.

  I had found my black robes’ gold where Robert Flicker had at last found his.

  In our hearts, where God had come to dwell again for Flicker as for Father Nunez.

  Return to

  Casas Grandes

  A CONCLUSION

  They tell it in old Chihuahua in this manner.

  When Nunez announced to the compañeros that he would return to Casas Grandes to serve his punishment for his church and for the God he had rediscovered at Naranjal, a touching thing happened. The comrades voted to go with their little crippled priest. They wanted to stand by him and to speak for him before the Franciscans.

  They did this, but their loyalty found that yet more “gold” of Naranjal awaited Nunez.

  The bishops’ committee from which the hunchbacked cura of Casas had fled had not come to arrest or charge him. They were sent to confer the blessings of the order on him for his long and dangerous work among los bárbaros del Norte, the wild Apache of his parish. A change had come in the regimes of the church; evil Bishop Galbines and his protector Cardinal Mendoza were deposed. The new “scarlet prince” of the church was Jimenez Bustamante, a cousin of that Bustamante who was the alcalde of Casas Grandes. And even more, the new cardinal was a seminary mate, in the long-ago monkhood of their youth, of Alvar Nunez himself.

  Not only was “Father Jorobado” pardoned and restored fully of his robes and his parish, in the kind letter he received from Jimenez Bustamante informing him of this reaffirmation, a postscriptum was attached inquiring how rang in the ear of his old monastery cellmate the name of Bishop Alvar Nunez?

  Typical of Nunez, he declined his bishopric. Rather, he would rebuild his mission at Casas Grandes and labor therein to bring all skin colors of men together in God.

  Stirring news awaited other members of the famous little band of heroes.

  A courier from the governor of Texas arrived in Casas the same day they did. He bore a full pardon for Robert E. Lee Flicker from the state of Texas and also from the Department of the Army covering all charges against him. The white officer guilty of the crimes charged to Flicker had confessed. Robert Flicker could go home again.

  Moreover, the courier was a man known to several of the little band. He was very tall with notably pale eyes and a mane of flaxen hair. His name was Ben K. Allison, fabled Texas gunfighter, favorite pistolero of Father Alvar Nunez, brother of long-lost “white Indian,” Stella Allison.

  The grandsons of the monte who still tell such olden tales say that when tall Ben learned of Flicker’s role in saving Stella from the Yaqui, he offered the Negro wanderer full partnership in the San Saba ranch and asked that he and sister Stella come and live there with him.

  The couple tried it, but both had been too long with the wild red brothers. It is remembered that, in the blaze of one certain night of a full Comanche moon, Robert Flicker and Stella Allison rode out and away, forever, from the land of the white man.

  Kaytennae found waiting for him in Casas Grandes a delegation of American Chiricahua from Warm Springs. These people said that the government of the United States wanted Kaytennae to head an Apache farming program to save his Apache kinsmen from being sent to Florida or other bad places. Kaytennae accepted the position and rose to documented fame among his long mistreated people.

  A footnote: In the delegation from Warm Springs was a handsome squaw named Born Again who had recovered from a seeming death-wound. It was learned that the woman had lost an infant child in this very town of Casas, having left the child for succor on a church doorstep. Nunez questioned the squaw and, yes, she did prove to be the mother of Charra Baca. Charra’s Mexican officer father was dead, and the flame-haired child-wife of the shoemaker went at last to live with her own, her mother’s people.

  A further footnote: When Charra confessed to Father Nunez that Kaytennae’s baby was already growing in her belly, the good cura blessed the couple by back-dating their wedding banns and the final papers of their marriage, as well. “A small enough sin,” he said, “given the temptation.”

  Packrat and Zorra opened a cantina in Fronteras, hometown of the onetime fallen sparrow. It had, as they said in Fronteras, “a second floor and a back door,” and it proved a better gold mine than Naranjal.

  Old Young Grass was given charge of the barnyard at Father Nunez’s new mission, a responsibility including the two pack mules, the old white bell mule, and Nunez’s prize flock of purebred Majorcan chickens.

  As for the dog, old Loafer, and Bayo Alto, the tall bay horse of Tombstone, the two were adopted as town mascots of Casas Grandes and were inseparably seen in the dusty streets and grassy plots of the ancient settlement for muchisimos años.

  Loafer died in 1888, at an estimated and unusual age of twenty-three years. Villagers say that the tall bay horse was dead within the same hour that the old dog wagged his tail and whined his last.

  As for the gold of El Naranjal and the old white bell mule that bore it away from Ghost Canyon this near century gone, well, quień sabe?

  The old mule disappeared one dark night and was never seen in the flesh again. There are those who see her every anniversary of the return to Casas of the Naranjal comrades, but such ones see ghosts at the bottom of every bottle. The only problem with denying this story of the ghost bell mule of Mission Casas Grandes is that, every time it is told, fresh mule tracks are found leading into and then away from the now-abandoned mission.

  The gold itself?

  Ask God.

  All that is known is that, for a simple priest of the people, Nunez lived better than any cardinal in Mexico and most happily ever after.

  R. E. L. Flicker

  Biographical Summary

  The following appeared in the El Paso Daily Outpost, October 23, 1868, under the byline John Brown Stokes, later a noted New York
feature writer. Copyright © 1874:

  My true name is Robert E. Lee Flicker. I believe that is where the troubles of my life began, bearing that famous name.

  My father, James Alvin Flicker, known as old Black Jim, was a slave—one of the slaves—freed by General Lee when he went away to fight for the Confederacy. Black Jim would not accept the emancipation and served Lee as personal body servant from Sumpter to the end.

  With the eventual surrender at Appomattox, Lee once more insisted my father take his freedom. Black Jim agreed but in his parting told Lee of his one wish, that his son Robert, now nineteen, could attend the United States Military Academy at West Point and graduate an officer and gentleman, “the same as any white man’s son.”

  Lee, to the consternation of his advisers, obtained the appointment. Robert E. L. Flicker, born a slave and son of a born slave, became a black cadet at West Point.

  The times at the academy were despairful. The body of appointees was still made up of Southerners in no sense prepared to accept the reality of equality with a black boy. The memory of my father’s wish sustained me, but I was not to win the victory in the end.

  The final night of graduation week, a white girl was sexually assaulted at the Point. Incoherent at the time and failing of subsequent emotional recovery, the young woman was never permitted to testify. Her affidavit stated only that her attacker had been hooded and wearing gloves, thus identifiable by cadet uniform alone. A suspect, however, was not long in being provided.

  Each cadet was accounted for, save one.

  Robert E. L. Flicker could find no cadet to testify to his whereabouts at the time of the attack.