Ghost Warrior (46 page)

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Authors: Lucia St. Clair Robson

BOOK: Ghost Warrior
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“If you will not help me,” she shouted into the storm, “then do not talk to me anymore. Don't come around here if you're only going to do what you want.”
She crouched with her head down and her arms around her knees. She thought about promises made. Her brother had promised to take care of his people. If he left here he
would have to abandon many of them because they were too sick or weak to travel. He could not bring himself to do that. He hoped the Pale Eyes would keep their promises.
Lozen knew they wouldn't. The Great Father in Washington had promised that Warm Springs would belong to her people for as long as the mountains stood and the rivers flowed; then they had taken it. They had promised Lozen's people they would give them the things they needed, but they had not.
The Pale Eyes belonged to a rich and powerful nation. They ate beef and soft bread. They rode big horses and wore warm coats when the cold wind blew. As rich as they were, they could not spare food and blankets for those they had made homeless and destitute.
Promises. Lozen thought of the promise she had made to her capricious and crotchety spirits. She had said she would keep the peace with the Pale Eyes for the good of all her people, but the bad behavior of the Pale Eyes and her own spirits made that promise hard to keep.
SLINGS AND ARROWS
A
s the light snow drifted around her, Lozen stood near the pool where the other women were bathing. Steam rose from the surface of it. She pulled off her moccasins. She put her bead necklaces and her small bag of pollen inside them. Holding her blanket in front of her with one hand, she struggled out of her dusty tunic and skirt.
She slid into the pool, leaving the blanket on the ledge. Stands Alone, She Moves Like Water, Corn Stalk, Maria, Her Eyes Open, and Daughter sat with their heads leaning against the wall of dark gray basalt. Lozen joined them and let her legs float in front of her. She watched her breath mingle with the steam rising off the water. She felt as light as the snowflakes falling on her hair.
Whenever she bathed in the hot waters of the spring she knew the past year here wasn't a dream. She was truly home. After that terrible time at Tulerosa, the Pale Eyes had finally kept their promise. They had given the Warm Springs country back to them. They also distributed blankets, beef, and corn at the agency half a day's ride away. Lozen's people were beginning to think they might recover from the terrible losses of the past ten years of warfare.
Lozen closed her eyes and felt the snowflakes tangling in her eyelashes. The snow had come early, but it wasn't a heavy one. The women had worked all morning harvesting corn. The thick ears filled the baskets and overflowed in heaps in the arbors.
Broken Foot's second wife, Wide, arrived and stripped. Unlike most Ndee women, she wasn't shy about her body,
and she didn't ease into anything. She gathered herself to leap.
“Avalanche,” announced Lozen.
“Avalanche and flood,” added She Moves Like Water.
“Avalanche, flood, and earthquake,” said Corn Stalk.
Wide jumped, tucking in her elbows and pulling her legs up to form a tight, round projectile. She landed with a force that sent water sloshing over the lower rim and into the stream below. She came up sputtering and flinging her long black hair back and forth.
While they talked about the old days, they washed each other's hair with suds made from the pounded roots of the yucca. As the shadows lengthened, they climbed out and dressed. They sat with their feet dangling in the water and draped their hair over their arms to dry. They were almost ready to start for home when Wide's eleven-year-old daughter, Denzhonne, Very Pretty, galloped up on her mother's pony.
Wide frowned. She had told her daughter not to ride the horse until the sore on his back healed, but Very Pretty had a habit of doing what she wanted. Lozen tried to sympathize with Wide, but she remembered being the same way.
Very Pretty called to Lozen. “Grandmother, Hairy Foot is here, and Uncle and Uncle's woman and son. They brought a man who has a box that captures people and makes them small.”
The women hurried to the field to collect the baskets of corn. The boys were supposed to be chasing off the crows with their bows and their slings, but the lure of Pale Eyes visitors was too strong to resist. Lozen lingered. Seeing the crops flourish, knowing her people would have corn and beans for the winter, reassured her. The Red Paints had always grown some corn, but for many years their lives had been too unsettled to plant or harvest.
She turned to see Hairy Foot sitting on his big chestnut under the walnut tree. She held out her arms at her sides and grinned at him, inviting him to admire the corn plants. Then she ran to catch up with the other women.
 
 
THE SMALL WAGON HAD “SIERRA SAM'S STEREOPTICON EXTRAVAGANZA” painted on its wooden side. The finer print proclaimed that the wagon's owner could produce PAPER PRINTS, AMBROTYPES, STEREO VIEWS, AND CABINET CARDS OF BREATHTAKING CLARITY AND SCOPE. Sam used the wagon's white canvas cover as a backdrop for his lantern slide show. He intended to coax Victorio and his people to pose for photographs. He told Rafe and Caesar that the suckers in the east would cough up cash for them.
The black burnsides and beard bordering Sam's solid jaw looked like an extension of the top hat he wore at a rakish angle. The hem of his wool coat came halfway to the knees of his dust-colored canvas trousers. If photography hadn't been invented, Sam would have been a snake-oil salesman, and a good one, too.
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 looked 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.”

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