by Clay Fisher
Wagh being the universal expression of “well done” among horseback Indians, particularly where a show of fortitude has been made, we understood that Little Buck had just been importantly honored.
“Wagh, Jefe!” I enthused, waving him adieu. “Mil gracias. Buenas noches. Buenos sueños.”
“Hasta luego,” Allison added.
Juh did not answer. The Texan and I stood and watched him weave his unsteady way back to the mescal and half-burned deer meat. When we sat down again by our dying guard fire, Allison suggested we “tote up” our blessings. It proved very short work.
For the moment, our health prospered with that of our patient. As a sometime benefactor of these wild people, I myself might survive a failure in Huera’s recovery. Allison would not. In the Apache mind he was now responsible for the warrior woman’s life. If that life faltered, so did his. And if it failed altogether, he at once reverted to being merely the seventh of the hated Texas Devils, the only one who had escaped their Apache vengeance in the garden of the humpbacked priest, at Casas Grandes. Moreover, even if the woman recovered, she could, with the whim of any next moment, decide that the big Tejano was still an evil shade and must so be exorcised.
In all of this, there remained one grim certainty.
Tomorrow would take us to the mesa’s top and to our meeting with the alien stranger who had gained control of these fiercest of Chiricahuan peoples. The prospect, insofar as we had deliberately aborted the very life of his plan—delivery of the ransom note—brought a minimum of sleep to Allison and I through that very long, dark night at Waiting Camp, in Cañon Avariento, below Juh’s Stronghold.
20
The great cliff of the Zig Zag Trail was like that of the Nednhi drop-off in the canyon of the Rio Casas Grandes, only thrice its height. In the four-hour climb I did not see Ben Allison or Little Buck, as the interminable hair-pinnings of the track prevented the tail of our line from seeing its head. But I knew they were in the van with Juh and so as safe as any mortals might be in scaling such a fearsome place. As for my charge, Huera, all went well. The Apaches had fashioned a tandem sling in place of the abreast model, so that the warrior woman was carried behind one of the hinnies and before the other. This permitted Tin Can to set the pace and Mean Trick to shoulder the greater weight. It was precarious around some of the switchback turns but, on the worst of them, the Nednhi men came back and unhitched the rear mule, guiding the sling past the bad place by man power. In this manner, well before noon, we came out at the top into a U-notch defile which Kaytennae, traveling with me the entire way, said would lead us directly into Juh’s rancheria. Even so prepared, I was not ready for what followed.
We did not go one hundred pasos through that square cut in the living rock before we broke into the open.
I literally gasped at the view.
There it was, the fabled stronghold of the Nednhi Apache. All spread before me and so beautiful as to be unreal. It was more a dream than a thing of actual earth and stone and grass and timbered woodland. Lying as it did, immediately back from the great cliff, but hidden by the bastion of the cliff’s crest, it was planned by the Creator both as a haven and a heaven for his Apache children. A perfect saucer, half a mile in diameter, its gently sloping outer flange met the pine forests on three sides away from the west wall and these virgin stands of conifer ran until the eye lost them with distance. Yet the vicinity of the camp itself was a meadow of thickest mountain grasses, and Kaytennae told me similar grazing breaks in the timber dotted the entire mesa. He did not know the extent of the mesa’s table in its whole, but he said it required a pleasant two-day ride to circle it and that, in all that way, no other trail of ingress or egress passable to horse and rider broke the great rock’s scarp.
A clear mountain stream flowed loopingly through the principal meadow of the encampment, watering the permanent beehive jacals and more temporary brush wickiups and ramadas that distinguish every Apache settlement, and furnishing even some limited irrigation to the several small cornfields and bean and melon patches which so surprised me at this altitude.
The stream, at the moment of our exit from the defile, was full of laughing and yelling Apache children and rimmed by women bent to the family laundering stones; standing idly in the water were dozens of the graceful Indian ponies of the Nednhi herd that was on loose graze to forest’s edge. In the “town square” of the rancheria, which as in all Indian encampments was circular, old men tossed smooth creek stones at lines drawn in the warm dust, and everywhere in the quiet sunlight of the morning hung the smoke haze and wondrous smells of pitch-pine breakfast fires.
At my side, young Kaytennae nodded and said, “Estamos en casa, we are at home.”
“Qué bonito, qué belleza,” I said. “It does not seem that any evil could dwell here.”
“Cuidado,” the slender warrior warned. “Here is Juh again, coming to take Huera from us.” The party was spreading out to take different pathways into the rancheria, causing the war chief some delay as he bid now this and now the other member of the successful El Paso raid a sober gracias for their part. Kaytennae lowered his voice, scarcely moved his lips. “Be very careful with all that you say and do up here, Blackrobe,” he muttered. “Remember that He Who Has the Plan is not of your faith. Particularly, you must not depend on us to help you. The people have listened to this extraño. He has them all in his hand like you have the Mexicans down in Casas Grandes. In no case must you believe your robes or your cruz will prevail as they have before. That is all I can say.”
There remained a moment yet before Juh was up to us, and I spent it saying good-bye to Huera. She still lay in the sling, with Lata fore and Jugada aft. As I touched her forehead with my fingers, she opened her eyes, not yet knowing where she had come. “You are come home again,” I told her. “We have brought you up the Zig Zag Trail. The big Tejano treated you for your hurts. Do you remember?”
She frowned, as though in useless effort to recall, then shook her head. “No, Blackrobe. Where was that?”
I did not wish to remind her of the terror at Old Campground, and so I said, “Do not concern yourself, Huera. Do you remember me?”
“Anh, yes; we were going to take the letter to el gobernador, you and I. But something happened—”
“Yes,” I said. Again, I did not care to recall to her memory the missing body from the pile of Texas Ranger dead at the mission. Allison’s position was going to be difficult enough without restoring the “vanished spirit” fantasy as Apache subject matter. “What happened was that you fell captive to some very evil men. Do you know them in your mind now?”
She shook her head, some weariness in the frown now. “Dah, no,” she denied. “I know we came to Old Campground, and nothing more. Just darkness then.”
I knew what it was: she did not want to remember.
But there was no time to probe further with her. Juh was there, and the trip up the cliff had not helped his head from the mescal of Waiting Camp; if glaring would mortify human tissue, Father Alvar Nunez would have been decomposed on the spot.
I murmured, “Buenos días, Jefe. Qué día,” but Juh was in no mood to be told what a great day it might be, or even bid a nominal good morning.
“Callate,” he snapped. “Come on with me.”
By now, of course, we were surrounded by the people. Many of them knew me, a few were pleased to admit it, more chose to hold back. It was notable that the old ones were more friendly, the young almost hostile. I made a leap in my mind from this that the stranger had spread his ideas more successfully among the youth. That is to say the young adult warriors, not the children. I had plied too many of the very young with sweetmeats and trinkets at the mission. They welcomed me like an old friend, followed me into the rancheria as so many goslings attached to a bachelor gander.
But within the camp, drawing near a patently new jacal, quite the largest one I had seen constructed by Apac
hes, Juh ordered the youngsters to stay back. We went on to the big jacal, unattended.
Try as I might on this brief walk, I had not been able to discern the whereabouts of either Ben Allison or Little Buck. Both had been led away by guards on first arrival through the defile and, in the general confusion of the greeting, I had lost them. I thought to ask Juh about them but decided better. With Apaches, the less that was said, the more that might be learned.
Juh had now halted at the deer-hide door-hanging of the jacal. As it was a warm morning, the hide was hung aside. A plainly foreign voice called to us from the interior to enter. We did so, and I was immediately struck by two most startling revelations. The jacal possessed a window—unheard of in Apacheria—and, seated by the light of that window, writing at a desk, which must have been freighted up the Zig Zag Trail dismantled, was one of the handsomest men my eyes had ever beheld: most striking because so young and yet, the one.
He arose, with a slight bow to me, waved a slender hand to the room’s second chair—actual settlement furniture again—and said, surprising me with a classically Castilian accent, “Ah, Padre Nunez. Usted es muy amable. Siéntese usted, por favor.”
“Un millón de gracias,” I mumbled, unable to remove my gaze from him, feeling awkwardly for the chair.
To be recognized and greeted by name, to be told I was too kind, to be requested then to please be seated, well, it was an experience of rarity. Particularly in the context of the nature of the man who extended the gratuities. He was, after all, the most unusual furnishing of this most fantastic of Apache jacals.
Mutely, I accepted the chair.
“Cómo le va, Padre?” he said. “Have they treated you well?”
“Si, muy bien, gracias.”
He returned behind the desk and sat down again. In the brief movements he had made since my arrival, I had detected something familiar. Now, in the ramrod way that he held himself in the desk chair, I knew what it was. This man had been a soldier, and not just a gente of the ranks. An officer, surely.
“Capitán,” I said, employing a small waist-bow of my own, “it is you who are too kind, and I who must inquire of you yet another kindness: you are, de seguro, who you must be. Of a certainty we both can admit that. But true names are another thing. You possess the advantage of me.”
“As was my design, Padre.” A subtle chill crept over the young face. “But be easy one moment more.”
He spoke to Juh, standing soundlessly behind me, and, not looking at the man as he spoke to the chief, one could not have detected that it was not one Nednhi discoursing with another. His command of the Apache tongue was uncannily perfect. Having heard his Spanish, and now his Indian tongue, I knew of course that he was not only a soldier but a linguist of high art. Yet it was not alone Juh’s language he commanded. Juh wheeled and went about his orders like some young horse-tender out on his first war mission. And by that I knew that Kaytennae had been correct: there was a great and serious trouble among the Nednhi, and it was this slender extraño of the big jacal—the man, unquestionably, who had penned and sent the ransom demand to Governor Buckles and the military of Texas—who would now and swiftly, my every instinct told me, reveal himself and his damnable plan.
But he would toy with me first.
“May we speak English, Father Nunez?” he asked unexpectedly. “I have sent Juh for the Texan and the boy. It will be easier for us all. Does it present any problem for you, sir? My people tell me you are proficient in three tongues.”
“Four,” I corrected him.
“Ah, yes! I had forgotten. But you are no usual monkish priest. One could not look at you and imagine a tongue of Caesar’s to issue forth.”
“Nor would one study your face by jacal light and expect to hear such sounds as are growled in guttural by Juh, Geronimo, Mangas, and Cochise.”
“Ah, yes,” he said. “My face.”
The charm was gone. The graceful ease evaporated. De buenas a primeras, all of a sudden, he was not the same. And I knew that my remark, all unintended, had reminded him not of who, but of what, he was.
He spoke no further word until Allison and the Texas boy were brought before him. Then he waited deliberately to watch the captive Tejano’s startlement to see a man of his kind in the jacal of He Who Has the Plan.
Allison reacted even more poorly than had I. He stared at the man and stared at him.
So, too, did Little Buck Buckles.
Finally Allison stammered, “You’re him?”
The other’s answer was a single, blank-eyed nod, and the quiet extended itself unbearably.
It remained for the innocently cruel candor of an eight-year-old child to make honest men of us all.
“Why, blame it all, Reverend,” Little Buck complained indignantly to me, “this here feller’s a nigger.”
21
Flicker told us his story then. And even the boy said no other word until he had finished.
His full name was Robert E. Lee Flicker, and that was in itself where the tale of his life began. His father, James Flicker, known as Black Jim, had been one of Lee’s slaves freed when Marse Robert went off to fight for the Confederacy. As was common with the blacks of the Arlington plantation, Black Jim loved the gentle man and would not accept emancipation. He followed Lee into the war, continuing to serve on his staff unofficially, indeed, anonymously. During the long and cruel years of the conflict, Black Jim managed to slip home to Arlington and visit his wife and child, the boy then, or rather at war’s outset, a bright lad of fifteen. With the surrender at Appomattox, Lee insisted that Black Jim take his freedom. Jim agreed but, in the parting, told the famed Confederate commander that his one wish was that his son, now nineteen years of age, could be a soldier as General Lee was. When Lee asked the faithful Negro what, precisely, he meant in this request, James Flicker told him that it was that a black man might go to West Point—that is, that the son of a black man might do so—and graduate an officer and gentleman, “the same as any white man’s son.”
Lee, to the consternation of his several advisers, told Flicker that he would do what might be done.
No one at Arlington, or in Washington for that matter, expected the appointment to see reality, but it had.
Robert E. Lee Flicker, born a slave and the son of a born slave, became a black cadet at West Point.
The times at the military academy were not easy ones for any youth, least of all for a freed slave. The body of appointees was still made up of Southerners, and these youngsters were in no sense prepared to accept equality with a black boy. Young Flicker had prevailed. The memory of his father’s dream carried him on. The elder Flicker had lived long enough to see his son enter the academy and stay the ensuing bitter but deeply rewarding years to the very eve of graduation. Now Robert Flicker was about to become Lieutenant R. E. L. Flicker and, with Black Jim but a fortnight in the grave, no power on earth, save his own death, could have deterred young Robert, or indeed, turned him from the path.
Then it happened.
In the dark of the final night of prom week, a young white girl, guest of an Alabama cadet of patrician but war-ruined family, had been assaulted sexually. Incoherent at the time, and failing in emotional recovery subsequently, the young woman was never permitted to testify. Her affidavit stated only that her attacker had been hooded and gloved, thus unidentifiable except by his cadet uniform. A suspect, however, was not long in being provided. Each young gentleman of the class was accounted for, either by senior officer or by agreement of fellow cadets. Except one. Robert E. L. Flicker could find no cadet to testify as to his whereabouts during the time involved. Indeed, the only testimony was from his cadet roommate, cadet captain and honor student, Jefferson Flowers, the fiancé of the victim. Said young Flowers: “I couldn’t imagine where he was, and still stoutly maintain he would not and could not be guilty of such a heinous crime against a white woman. Yet circumstan
ces force me to confess, gentlemen, that he was not in our quarters during that time when I pray to God Almighty that he had been.”
The precise opposite, according to Flicker, had been the case: he, Flicker, had been in the room; Flowers had not.
But this was not, either by the trial officers or by Flicker himself, considered evidence that might in any way suggest deeper investigation of the white cadet. Such a possibility was unimaginable. Southern honor alone would forbid it. But in this matter there was much more than that to deny the unthinkable—it was Flowers’ betrothed, his own bride-to-be, who had suffered the rape. The officers of the board of investigation proceeded not a single question beyond this ironclad exclusion-by-sanity of Cadet Captain Jefferson Flowers from pressing inquiry.
As for almost-lieutenant of the army, Robert E. Lee Flicker, he could thank a just and generous God that he had been appointed to the academy by General Lee and that, in accordance with this fact, together with the lack of prima facie evidence to convict him beyond peradventure of justice miscarried, he would be granted the military charity of a sergeant’s rank in the enlisted corps and no formal dismissal from either the army or the United States Military Academy at West Point. The saving appearance of the matter would be that the course had proved beyond his capacities and that, graciously, the service had offered him its shelter and succor “as a fellow soldier in time of greatest need and trouble.”
The damnable thing was that young Flicker had to accept the lie and to live with it.
