Ghost Warrior

by Lucia St. Clair Robson

  His assistant was Carlos, an Apache boy of about fourteen. Sam had found him living as a slave among the Pimas a couple years ago, had bought him from them, and become his guardian. Carlos’s hair was neatly clipped. He wore trousers, shirt, and jacket, lace-up shoes, and a wool porkpie hat. Everyone watched him set up the big projector on its three spindly legs as though they expected a procession of tiny people to emerge from it at any moment.

  As usual, He Makes Them Laugh set to work embarrassing Rafe while they all waited for the show to begin. How many wives did Rafe have? When he shit, what color was it? He had heard that white men’s shit was red with white stripes. With owl-like solemnity, he told Rafe that the women wanted to know how big his penis was.

  Mattie stood with the women, although she kept a nervous eye on her son, Abraham Lincoln Raphael Jones. All afternoon the two-year-old had bobbed, laughing, from one woman to another while each observed that he was the handsomest, strongest boy they had ever seen. People gave him presents and fed him fingerfuls of the sweet paste made from dried juniper berries pounded and mixed with fat.

  He ended up with Lozen. As darkness fell, she balanced him on her hip while she chatted with Stands Alone, and Rafe shot glances at her. She had looked so carefree in the cornfield that afternoon, smiling with arms held wide embracing the world. He had never cared about photography, but he wished he could have a picture of her like that.

  She was dressed like the other women, and she had the air of someone who had carried a child on her hip countless times before. She did not look like a powerful medicine woman. She did not look like the rogue who rode with the men, stole horses and telescopes, and neglected to get married and have children of her own.

  Then she did what Rafe had a feeling no other Apache woman would. She walked over to stand next to him, so close he could smell the fragrance of her hair, like newmown grass. She bounced Linc on her hip and smiled up at Rafe as though he were an old friend, which, in a manner of speaking, he supposed he was.

  “Tomorrow,” she said in Spanish, “I will give Uncle’s son a name, and we will cut his hair.”

  “Uncle will be pleased.” Rafe said.

  He Makes Them Laugh bent down so he was eye-to-eye with Linc.

  “Grandmother will cut your hair short all over, Boy.” He rested the back of his wrist above his forehead so his fingers jutted out like a quail’s crest. “She’ll leave strands in front so you’ll look like a quail.” He mesmerized Linc by imitating the quail’s song, from the moaning uweea to the high, sharp cries of spik, spik, to soft chuckles and a selection of noises in between.

  This is all very heartwarming, Rafe thought, but he had seen Geronimo in the crowd. Geronimo’s depredations had made his name well known on both sides of the border. Rafe had also noticed the hundreds of horses and mules grazing. A lot of them had the look of army stock. Rafe almost believed Victorio when he said his men were not stealing army horses, but Geronimo was a different matter.

  RAPE HAD MET MEN WHO SEEMED UNFAMILIAR WITH THE notion of fear, but Tom Jeffords was that and something else. He had a quiet certainty about him, the belief that if he did the right thing, the decent thing, no harm would come to him. With their eye for the obvious, the Apaches had named him Red Beard. He stood an inch shorter than Rafe and carried more meat on him, but he was about the same age, somewhere on the far side of forty. He had powerful hands and an old stager’s squint.

  Rafe had known him when the two of them drove the stages. Now he was the superintendent of mails between Tucson and Fort Bowie at what was called Apache Pass. Even after the governor appointed him superintendent, Jeffords often carried the mail himself on account of attrition among his men due to what he called Cochise fever.

  As interpreter on this trip, Jeffords had brought along a wisp of an Apache from Cibicu Creek to the north. He was a pale man. He often stared off into space, and Rafe wondered what he was thinking. Of late, he had taken to calling himself Noch-ay-del-klinne, Dreamer.

  As the three of them rode up into the melee of boulders that made Cochise’s aerie about as accessible to outsiders as the moon, Rafe asked Jeffords how he had come to befriend the old chief. He’d heard stories, and he figured none of them was exactly true.

  “The chief’s bucks kept sniping at the boys when they were carrying the mail,” Jeffords said. “Killed a few too many of ’em. I knew I’d never find the old man in this malpais, but I wandered up this way until his scouts intercepted me. They took me to him.”

  That was a much tamer version than any Rafe had heard. For almost fifteen years, ever since Lieutenant Bascom hung Cochise’s kin, no white man had seen him up close and lived to brag about it. The way Rafe heard it, Cochise’s men had a discussion of just how to dispose of Jeffords, but he had been so cool in the teeth of it, they had decided to take him to the chief instead. The two had become fast friends.

  “I’ll tell you, Rafe, until General Crook showed up, Cochise was the most impressive human being I’d ever met.”

  “Too bad they transferred Crook out.”

  Jeffords shrugged. “Grant wanted to give his peace commission a chance.” He chuckled. “The head of that commission tried to talk Cochise into going to Washington to see President Grant. The old man said ‘No, thank you very kindly.’ He said a few officers sometimes kept their word, but the Great Father never did.”

  Grant’s peace commission had cut short General Crook’s campaigns against the Apaches. The Americans in Arizona did not approve. The editor of the Arizona Miner called the head of the commission “a cold-blooded scoundrel,” “a redhanded assassin,” and for good measure, “a treacherous, black-hearted dog.” Maybe the editor didn’t know that the man riding with Rafe was the one responsible for the dastardly act of making peace between the red man and the white one.

  Jeffords had gotten Cochise to promise to stop raiding on the condition that the government put Jeffords in charge of a reservation that included Cochise’s vast territory. Cochise also demanded that Jeffords have authority over the military in southeast Arizona, and that his word was law. Jeffords treated the Apaches so fairly that for four years, since 1871, trouble had been sporadic. What thefts and killings occurred were the work of rengades of various nationalities roving back and forth across the border, Geronimo being the most notable.

  Rafe and Jeffords rode all morning until they reached a high plateau carpeted with lush grass. Cedars, oaks, and pines covered the slopes. A stream ran almost deep enough to float a canoe.

  They found Cochise smoking among the exposed roots of an oak. The spot comanded a view a hundred miles in every direction. He could see the Chiricahua Mountains all around, the Dragoon Mountains to the west, and wild, magnificent country in between. The grandeur of it caused Rafe to catch his breath.

  As best Rafe could tell, Cochise’s worldly estate consisted of a few buckskins, blankets, and a water jar hung from a limb so evaporation would cool the contents. A shallow basket held dried mescal and jerked beef. Coffee brewed in a small tin pail. His bow and arrows, knives, Winchester rifle, saddle, and bridle were near at hand.

  “Oh, lord,” breathed Jeffords. “He don’t look good.”

  Deep hollows exaggerated the bony ridges of Cochise’s face. Rafe figured he must be seventy at least. He was obviously ill, but he sat straight as a gun barrel. A spot of vermilion paint graced each cheek. Pain haunted his dark eyes, but they still gleamed with intelligence. Even the editor of the Arizona Miner had written of him that he “looks to be a man who means what he says.”

  He was thinner than Rafe remembered him, but muscular. When he adjusted his blanket, Rafe saw the scars on his bare chest. He recognized the puckers of bullet holes, the graveled expanse where buckshot still lodged under the skin, the raised welts left by knife blades, and even a ragged scar of the sort an arrow would make.

  Cochise’s two sons, Taza and Naiche, his two daughters, and three wives watched from their cluster of lodges and cookfires. Taza was the oldest, and he lo
oked as though he were trying to act like someone who could walk in his father’s moccasins. Rafe thought that unlikely. Napoleon would have a tough time following Cochise’s act.

  Cochise fed sticks into his small fire and adjusted the pail on its three flat stones. He was as gracious a host as any officer in his quarters. The men rolled cigarettes while the coffee brewed. They smoked and stared out at the view.

  “You know, old friend,” said Jeffords. “The army surgeon can remove that thing growing in you.”

  “Life Giver sent this evil to me.” Cochise put a hand on the bulge below his stomach. “You once told me that the evil which one knows is better than the evil one does not.” He gave a wry smile. “The Pale Eyes medicine men sometimes cut more than is necessary.”

  Rafe and Tom knew what he meant. An army surgeon had treated a young Chiricahua with an infected foot. He had amputated the boy’s leg at the torso and boasted afterward that he had made sure one less Apache would trouble anyone.

  Cochise spoke to Rafe, and Dreamer translated. “He says many years ago he saw you loading goods onto the stage. He said you chanted a prayer that tamed the wild Pale Eyes there. He wants to know what that prayer was.”

  Rafe searched his memory. He didn’t think of himself as the praying kind. Then he remembered that first run of the Butterfield Southern Overland stage when he had recited Hamlet’s speech as he loaded the trunks and bags. Cochise had stood in the crowd, and apparently he had wondered about it ever since. How could Rafe explain Hamlet’s soliloquy in Apache?

  He waded in. “The words were written by a great storyteller. He lived many years ago, about the same time the Spaniards came to your country. Pale Eyes still remember his words.”

  Cochise leaned forward, a rapt expression in his pain-filled eyes. “Was he a black robe, a holy man, a di-yin?”

  “No, he was just a storyteller.”

  Rafe started to recite, using as many Apache words as he could, and Spanish, and asking Dreamer and Jeffords for help.

  To be, or not to be: that is the question.

  Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

  The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

  Cochise held up a hand. “The storyteller was a Pale Eyes?”

  “Yes.”

  “And did his people use slings and arrows, as we do?”

  “Yes.”

  “That is very interesting.” Cochise permitted himself to lean against the oak. He motioned for Rafe to continue.

  Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

  And by opposing end them? To die; to sleep;

  No more; and by a sleep to say we end

  The heartache and the thousand natural shocks

  That flesh is heir to. ’Tis a consummation

  Devoutly to be wish’d. To die; to sleep;

  To sleep? Perchance to dream! Ay, there’s the rub;

  For in that sleep of death what dreams may come …

  “Your storyteller speaks of dreams and death. He speaks of a heart that aches and a thousand hardships.” He smiled. “He was wise for a white man.” He waved for Rafe to go on.

  As Rafe continued, he had to agree with Cochise.

  For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,

  The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,

  The pangs of dispriz’d love, the law’s delay … .

  Shakespeare could have written this speech for Cochise, for a people, a place, and a tragic unfolding of events of which he could not have dreamed, asleep or awake. Cochise was right. Shakespeare was savvy.

  Rafe realized that he was a praying man after all, given the right circumstances. He didn’t like to bother the Lord for trivial needs, but now, Rafe asked God not to let Cochise die while he and Tom Jeffords were there. Jeffords said that Cochise’s people believed someone had either poisoned the old chief or put a spell on him. In either case, all members of the pale-eyed race were the prime suspects. Rafe knew the Apache cure for sorcery. They hung the witch upside down from a tree, lit a fire under him, and watched him roast from the brains up.

  He thought about the relative peace that Jeffords and Cochise had been able to maintain in this trackless wilderness set aside for the Chiricahuas. The agreement was one of gentlemen with nothing on paper, not that paper counted for anything with the government. What would happen when Cochise died?

  Chapter 49

  HEAD COUNT

  After Cochise’s death in June of 1874, the United States government’s Indian concentration policy went awry. Instead of collecting most of the Apaches at the San Carlos reserve, it attracted all their flies. At least that’s the way the situation seemed to John Clum when he stepped out of the hovel where he had spent his first night. He looked out from under the wide brim of his soft felt hat at the grisly souvenirs in the middle of the agency’s assembly area.

  The month was August. At seven o’clock in the morning, the thermometer refused to recant its declaration of 110 degrees, even though Clum had rapped briskly on the glass. The flies didn’t mind the heat. What appealed to them more than the infirmary’s dysentery patients, the quartermaster’s casks of rancid pork, and the overflowing privies, were the seven severed heads that greeted Clum when he stepped outside. The flies were concentrating around them with the sort of enthusiasm the government envisioned for the Apaches.

  Clum assumed the rotting remains belonged to the Apache outlaws who had attacked and killed the passengers on a stage passing through the Chiricahuas’ reserve a couple hundred miles to the south. Clum knew that the army had tracked and shot the murderers two weeks ago, which would explain the heads’ unsavory state.

  Until Clum saw them, he had been preoccupied with the heat, and with the centipedes, spiders, snakes, and scorpions that inhabited the mud-chinked log shed that the post’s commander, Major Babcock, had assigned as his quarters. He had awakened with a fist-size tarantula ankling up his chest to hold a stare-down with him. He suspected that the vermininfested hut and the welcoming committee of decayed heads were Major Babcock’s way of letting him know who was in charge here.

  Clum had news for the major.

  John Philip Clum was not quite twenty-three years old, not quite five feet six inches tall, and not quite 125 pounds. He had the confidence of a man twice his age and the strength of one twice his weight. He was arrogant, aggressive, cocksure, and cantankerous. He was honest, able, smart, and fearless. And when in high dudgeon he could write letters that would singe the bristles off a badlands boar.

  Major Babcock was in for a tussle.

  RAFE WASN’T USED TO HEARING THIS MUCH GAITY BETWEEN paydays at a fort, and he could see no sign of ardent spirits. It wasn’t natural. The lamplight shining through the pale canvas of the soldiers’ tents was normal enough, but the laughter was louder, more carefree. From beyond the lines of tents came drumming, singing, and hands clapping in a bewitching cadence.

  As Rafe led his chestnut throught the bivouack, he could see through the open tent flaps the soldiers with their jackets unbuttoned, and their sleeves rolled up. They were playing cards, rolling cigarettes, cleaning their guns, polishing their boots. They were doing everything that soldiers did except drink whiskey and start fights. The other disorienting aspect of the men of the Ninth Cavalry was that they were shades of brown, from beige to ebony, with ebony predominating.

  Rafe followed the sound of celebration and found Caesar standing at the rear of the crowd spilling out of an arbor walled with brush on three sides. The Ninth had arrived in New Mexico only a few weeks ago, and this was the first time Rafe had seen Caesar in his uniform. His sky-blue trousers were tucked precisely into knee-high boots polished till they shone like obsidian. The brass spurs glowed.

  The trousers and the dark blue jacket were spotless, starched, and ironed with precise creases. The yellow stripe on each leg and the yellow piping around the collar identified Caesar as cavalry. The big gold chevrons on his sleeve proclaimed him a First Sergeant. The forage cap
with the crumpled, low crown, and the stiff leather bill sat forward at precisely the correct angle. Rafe imagined that with the dress uniform’s white plume in the cap, Caesar would resemble his namesake.

  Rafe leaned close so Caesar could hear him over the noise. “I thought you despised army life, Sergeant Jones.”

  Caesar turned and grinned at him. “This is the cavalry, Rafe. This ain’t just soldierin’, it’s horse-soldierin’. And they treats my family well here.”

  Rafe had a hard time keeping his boots from falling under the spell of the drums. He shifted from one foot to the other in time with the beat. “Is this a special meeting?” he asked.

  “No, they does it just about every night. They calls it a shout.”

  The drummers stood to one side, beating out the complex rhythms on kegs and crates, on tin pots, canteens, and a mule’s jawbone. A dozen or more men moved in a circle in the center of the ramada. Some danced, some whirled, others rocked side to side or trembled, while spectators shouted encouragement.

  Another man joined Rafe and Caesar, and the three of them started toward the long adobe building where the sergeants lived with their families.

  “Rafe, I wants you to meet Sergeant George Carson. Sergeant Carson, this here is my friend, Mistuh Rafe Collins. Mistuh Collins and I go back a long ways.”

  “Pleased to make your acquaintance, suh.”

  George Carson was as tall as Caesar and much thicker through the middle. At first glance a stranger would notice his exaggerated features, his wide, flat nose and swollen lips, and his field hand’s grammar, but Rafe knew to look into his eyes. He could see the quiet competence. He saw curiosity and a thirst for knowledge, too. A good sergeant was more valuable to a company of soldiers than a good captain, and the army usually did better at selecting them.

  They met Colonel and Mrs. Hatch coming from the officers’ mess with their daughter Bessie trailing behind. Mrs. Hatch was tall and rawboned, cinched into a palisade of iron corset stays. Cascades of lace foamed up around her sturdy jaw. Her hair was pinned up so tightly under her hat that it pulled the skin taut over her cheekbones. She had to stop in mid-harangue so the colonel could salute the sergeants, and she was not happy about it. The dusty hem of her long skirt quivered with the motion of the foot tapping under it.