Chapter 25

WOMEN’S WORK

Geronimo rode in front with Victorio and Loco. Lozen came behind them with Broken Foot and Red Sleeves. Talks A Lot, He Steals Love, and the other young warriors and apprentices followed. They had climbed all morning toward the towers of fawn-colored rock that flanked the narrow defile leading to Cheis’s stronghold. They leaned into the cold wind whining through the cliffs, outcrops, and heaps of avalanche rubble.

Geronimo was discussing the group of The People who had acquired the Spanish name Tontos, Foolish Ones, or Bini-e-dinéh, People Without Minds. Geronimo now spent most of his time with his sister’s husband, Long Neck, leader of the Enemy People. He seemed unconcerned about the low esteem the Chiricahua had for his adopted band. The Enemy People clawed out a living in Mexico’s Sierra Madre, a territory even less charitable than that of the Chiricahuas. Everyone looked down on the People Without Minds, but the Chiricahuas generally considered the Enemy People to be inferior, too.

Geronimo talked loudly, so the apprentices could hear. “Those Bini-e-dinéh, those People Without Minds, they’re so ignorant, they eat coyotes, snakes, even fish. If one of them ever invites you boys to eat with him, sniff the pot first. You never know what he might feed you. You could grow all smelly and spotted like a fish.”

Geronimo was jollier than Lozen had ever seen him. He was the only jolly one. Everyone else rode grim-faced, in spite of his stories and jokes, in spite of the prospect of mules for the taking.

Geronimo had brought the news that the American soldiers had betrayed the sacred trust of hospitality. They had invited Cheis to a meal, and they had captured not only his nephews and his brother Ox, but his wife and children, too. The Bluecoat chief would have held Cheis prisoner if he had been slower with his knife and his feet. Word had spread like a grass fire through the Chiricahuas country. Already people referred to the incident as Cut the Tent.

“Why won’t the Bluecoat let the captives go?” Victorio asked.

Geronimo grimaced, although with him a grimace was hard to distinguish from his usual expression. “I went with Cheis when he held council with the Bluecoat chief,” he said. “The Bluecoat is frightened. He’s afraid of seeming a fool in front of his men, and so he’s acting like a bigger fool. I think the Pale Eyes are People Without Minds, too.”

“And all for that red-haired, crazy-eyed, no-good coyote of a boy,” said Loco. “It was a good day for the White Mountain people when his mother escaped from them years ago and took him with her. Now they’ve stolen him back.”

“How many mules do the Bluecoats have?” Talks A Lot led the conversation back to the most important point.

“Fifty-six, if the Bluecoats haven’t eaten them or they haven’t died of thirst,” Geronimo said. “The only water they have is stored in one of those big, wooden pots.” He made a circle of his arms to indicate a barrel. “Even if the Pale Eyes sip like lizards, that pot has been dry for at least a day.”

Red Sleeves slumped in his saddle, his face trenched from care and weariness. Cheis’s wife was Red Sleeves’ daughter. Her children were the Old Man’s grandchildren. The news of their capture seemed to have hardened Red Sleeves’ spirit like an insect gall on a scrub oak leaf.

“The Pale Eyes are very troublesome people,” he said sadly.

They stopped on a ridge and looked down. The four wagons in the rutted road below were the reason for Geronimo’s good humor. Buzzards wandered among the ruins and sat on the blackened wheels. The men of Cheis’s band had tied the nine Mexicans’ wrists to the wheels before setting the wagons on fire. The heat had cooked their flesh until it fell away from the bones, and then it had charred the bones.

“We took the three white men to trade for Cheis’s family,” Geronimo said. “The Bluecoats don’t care about Mexicans, so we amused ourselves with them.” Geronimo grinned. Nothing made him happier than dead Mexicans, and the more horribly they died, the happier he was.

Victorio forbade torturing enemies. He and Lozen left the others joking about Geronimo’s cooking talents and how best to prepare Mexicans. They walked to the nearby pile of rocks deposited by Ndee grateful to have come to the top of that long climb. Lozen added a piece of shale to the altar. She scattered pollen to the four directions and then onto the pile of stones.

She was praying for success with the raid on the Bluecoats’ mules when she heard the familiar sighing in her head. She felt the sucking sensation in her chest, as though the wind that gusted around her had formed a vortex that drew away her breath.

She turned until she faced the southwest. She trembled as the dread washed through her like a flood through a narrow canyon. When it passed, she stood drained and shaking. Each time the spirit spoke to her the feeling became more intense. She opened her eyes and found the men staring silently at her. The group had grown. Cheis and several of his warriors had come to meet them.

“Have the Pale Eyes sent your family back to you?” she asked him.

“No.” Cheis had always maintained a dignified calm, but now he looked about to explode with hatred and rage.

“Where are the enemies coming from?” Victorio asked.

She pointed her chin toward the southwest.

“Did the spirits tell you how many?”

“Many, I think, but they’re far away.”

“My wife’s cousin was hunting,” said Cheis. “He saw seventy Bluecoats with three Ndee prisoners. He thinks the Ndee are Coyoteros. The Bluecoats are on foot, but they should arrive by midday tomorrow.” He looked down at the wreckage below. “The Bluecoat chief took our men from their families. I didn’t stop those men’s women from killing the Pale Eyes we captured from those wagons. They killed the white man from the stone house, too, and left the bodies where the Bluecoats will find them on their way here.”

“The Bluecoats will make war on us,” said Victorio.

“Let them.”

 

 

BY THE WAN LIGHT OF THE SETTING MOON LOZEN LAY ON her stomach near the spring. She could feel the ground’s chill through her doeskin shirt and breechclout and on her bare thighs, but the scrub oaks that hid her from sight also provided some shelter from the cold wind. Victorio had held her chin steady while he painted a broad, reddish-brown stripe of deer blood mixed with mescal paste across her cheeks and the ridge of her nose. The horizontal stripe matched his own and those of the men who rode with him. It also confused the familiar contours of her face so that it would blend with the light and shadows of the desert.

Lozen had wondered if Victorio could hear her heart pounding while he did it. The expedition for army mules had turned into something much more significant and dangerous. She had expected to be sent home, but the men had voted to allow her to come with them.

Lozen rubbed dust into her hair. She broke leafy twigs from the scrub oak and stuck them into her headband. She draped her faded blanket over her back and legs, rested her chin on her crossed hands, and vanished into the landscape. In less time than it took a nearby spider to wrap up the fly thrashing in her web, the rest of Victorio’s men turned into stones and earth and bushes as magically as she had.

Cheis wasn’t interested in mules. He wanted to lure the Bluecoats out so he could kill them and rescue his family. If he could not do it this morning, all would be lost. He did not have enough men to take on these soldiers combined with the ones who would be arriving soon.

Through the branches of the scrub oaks, Lozen could see the spring’s rock-lined basin. She could hear the desperation in the mules’ distant braying. The Pale Eyes would have to water them soon, or their corpses would start piling up behind that wall. But the Pale Eyes operated on assumptions and beliefs that were incomprehensible to reasonable people, so she and the spider waited.

The sun had risen when the whistle of a hawk signaled that the Pale Eyes were opening the gate. Lozen stayed relaxed. Before she and the others took the mules, they would let them drink enough to slake their thirst, but not enough make them bloated and slow. They had to be in shape for the long trip to Mexico.

She could feel the vibrations of hooves through the ground pressed against her stomach. The braying grew louder and more frantic. The hawk whistled twice more. Only two men were driving the mules, and the spring was out of rifle range for the soldiers at the stone house. This would be easy.

At the sentry’s last, long, mournful hawk call, she stood up and tucked her blanket into the back of her belt. Already she could hear the shouts of Victorio’s men and the pop-pop-pop of their muskets firing over the mules’ heads to spook them. Giving her high, eerie cry, Lozen ran to join the warriors converging on the spring.

The mules didn’t stampede as they were supposed to. Most didn’t even raise their heads from the water. Lozen flapped her blanket, but as Broken Foot often said, a mule was more stubborn than Her Eyes Open, his wife, on her worst day.

With shouts and snapping blankets, cudgels and gunfire, the men drove individual animals away, only to have them wheel and dodge back to the water. Lozen was running toward the milling throng of swaying rumps and sharp hooves when she saw the big roan approach at a gallop. Hairy Foot was heading back to the stone wall with his dog racing beside him.

Lozen stood between him and safety. She picked up four stones, and as she trotted along, she knotted each one in a corner of the blanket. Then she ran at an angle intersecting the roan’s course.

He saw her coming, but her war paint had changed her so completely that she detected no light of recognition in his eyes. She saw no fear either, just a determination to get where he was going. As he approached she sprinted to cut him off. With the dog snapping at her heels she ran parallel to the roan’s forequarters and tossed the blanket. The weighted corners sent it soaring above his head. It settled like a large bird on a branch. The horse stopped short, throwing his rider over his neck.

Hardly breaking stride, Lozen vaulted into the saddle. She tucked her blanket into her belt, grabbed the reins, and kicked the horse’s sides. Hairy Foot picked himself up and ran for the wall. She felt a twinge of regret at setting him afoot among men who would do their best to kill him, but it passed. Life was hard and death was easy, but if anyone could outrun death, Hairy Foot could.

Without bothering to put her feet in stirrups that were set too long for her anyway, she galloped away. She tugged Hairy Foot’s carbine from its saddle boot and waved it over her head with a shout of joy. She glanced over her shoulder to see if Victorio had witnessed her triumph. The roan swerved. Lozen turned in time to see the tree limb rush toward her, but not in time to dodge it. The branch hit her across the chest and knocked her heels over head in a somersault along the horse’s rump.

She landed on her stomach, bounced, and skidded, still clutching the rifle. Gulping to suck air into her lungs, she watched the roan, stirrups flapping, prance up to Hairy Foot. Hairy Foot climbed back aboard, and he and his dog reached the gate safely. She heard the iron bolt slam shut.

Aching and bleeding from abrasions on her arms, knees, and cheek, she limped to where the men were rounding up the mules. She hoped no one had seen her fall. If someone had, everyone would hear about it.

She had a rifle, though. As for the horse, he was still hers. Possession had only been delayed. She felt sure she would see him and Hairy Foot again.

 

 

“COLLINS, COME OVER HERE.” DR. IRWIN BECKONED TO Rafe.

Lieutenant Bascom walked away from Irwin, and his hasty breakfast came up faster than it went down. Rafe could hear the remains of cold beans and biscuit splattering onto the hardpan of the desert floor.

Rafe winced as he eased out of the saddle. The fall from his horse at the spring had reopened the bullet wound in his back. He didn’t relish seeing what Irwin wanted him to look at, so he used the wound as an excuse to take his time.

He limped slowly toward Bascom and Dr. Bernard Irwin, the post surgeon from Fort Buchanan. Irwin had arrived with seventy soldiers and three captive Coyotero Apache cattle thieves six days before, just in time to be too late to save the mules. Knowing Cochise, Rafe had a feeling that wasn’t a coincidence.

Rafe had been more than glad to see the soldiers. Thirst had swelled his tongue until he felt as though he were sucking on a saddle horn. Added to that inconvenience was the blight of life with Bascom. Rafe and Sergeant Mott had tried to convince the lieutenant that Apaches couldn’t send for reinforcements the way the U.S. Army could. Hence they would not attack stone walls, and they would not take on overwhelming odds, but the lieutenant had swung from bravado to gibbering terror and back again several times between every sunup and sundown.

As the days dragged on, stretched out by boredom and fear, the soldiers had commenced quarreling. Those from the North argued with the fervently secessionist Southerners. Their political discussions ended in brawls as often as not. By the time the infantry from Fort Buchanan arrived, Rafe had been ready to whistle to his dog, saddle Red, and load his pistols and Jim Wallace’s fine new slant-breech Sharps rifle. He had been ready to ride through the gate to take his chances with Cochise and his minions.

He discovered that Dr. Irwin was cut from the same cloth as Bascom, but at least Irwin had allowed Lieutenant Moore to take his men on a three-day scout. They had returned yesterday to announce that they had found only old tracks and hastily abandoned camps. They said the Apaches had left for parts unknown, but Rafe didn’t believe that. People believed that the Apaches had no feeling for friends or kin, but Rafe felt sure Cochise wouldn’t abandon his family.

Now the soldiers were headed for Fort Buchanan, seventy miles away. They had stopped when they came to the abandoned campsite. Rafe walked to the clearing sheltered by the canopy of four huge oaks, their limbs as parallel to the ground as ridgepoles. Three bodies lay strewn like so much litter in a shallow gully. Irwin and Bascom were standing over the fourth near the cold remains of a campfire.

“Can you say who this is?” Bascom’s face had turned as gray as last night’s ashes.

Rafe looked down at the wreckage of flesh and bones and entrails that once had been some mother’s son. His stomach wanted to add his breakfast to Bascom’s, but he only hawked and spit out the bile that rose in his throat.

The Apaches had staked the man spread-eagle on his back. They had stripped the body and cut off various appendages. His abdomen had been ripped open and charred areas covered his chest. Gaping holes left by lances had obliterated his features. Rafe took a deep breath and crouched for a closer look. The sun glinted on a gold tooth in the bloody hole that had been a mouth.

“It’s Jim Wallace.”

“What kind of men could do this?” Irwin asked.

“This is woman’s work,” Rafe said. “Probably they were kin of the people we’re holding.”

“Well, let’s see justice done and then get moving.” Irwin polished the dusty toes of his boots on his trouser legs. He swiveled on his heels and strode toward the six men, the boy, and the woman holding a baby in a sling on her hip. They were all tied in a line and guarded by a dozen men with rifles.

“Lieutenant, assign a detail to bury these poor bastards. We’ll need a second one to hang the prisoners, two men to a tree. We’ll hoist them so high the wolves can’t get them. We’ll leave them here as a lesson to any thieving, bloodthirsty savage who passes.”

Rafe knew that was a bad idea. It would only make matters worse, although he didn’t see how they could get any worse. Even so, the sight of Wallace made his gut writhe with fury, revulsion, and disillusionment. He had thought Cochise honorable, and he had been wrong. Cochise had allowed this to happen to the man he had called friend.

The torture had a significance lost on Irwin and Bascom. The Apaches believed that their victims would have to pass to the other world as they had died. They had damned Wallace to spend eternity deformed.

And damn the Apaches for it, Rafe thought.

Soldiers began untying the ropes that held the canvasshrouded crates and sacks in the wagon.

“You speak some Spanish, Collins,” Irwin said. “Explain to these bucks that they’re to be executed for the death of those men.”

Rafe pointed out the obvious. “But they didn’t kill them.”

“Just tell them.”

“What about the woman and the two kids?”

Irwin looked about to snarl at Rafe for pestering him with questions; then he remembered that Rafe wasn’t an enlisted man. “My inclination is to squash the nits with the lice, but Lieutenant Bascom advises turning them loose. He seems eager to be rid of them. He didn’t want to hang Cheis’s three bucks, either, but I convinced him it was the right thing to do.”

Rafe wanted to observe that if Bascom had come to his senses ten days earlier about the woman, the children, and the three bucks, none of this would have happened. He walked over to the six Apache men who watched the proceedings as if they had far less importance than a card game or a new horse. Then, joking and laughing, the soldiers tied knots in the ends of the ropes to weight them. One stood on the wagon seat and threw the first rope over a high limb. The prisoners became more intent.

Another soldier led the wagon’s team forward so the man on the seat could heave the second rope five feet farther along the limb. Then he led the team to the next tree. Behind him two men began tying nooses in the dangling ends.

“They’re going to kill you,” Rafe said.

Coyundado stepped forward from the group. He was shorter than Cochise, and he had coarser features, but he was as muscular. To Rafe, he radiated a nonchalant menace that was remarkable even among people for whom menace was second nature.

“¿De garrote?” Coyundado put a hand to his neck, above the necklace of silver conchos. Will they strangle us?

“Sí.”

“Tiranos,” he said.

Rafe turned to Irwin and Bascom. “They want you to shoot them.”

“What do they care?”

“Vanity. If they die hung in a noose, they’ll have to spend eternity with their necks stretched.”

“Their necks are the least of their worries in eternity. I will not grant depraved thieves and murderers the honor of a firing squad.”

Rafe translated the decision, although the men undoubtedly had guessed what it was.

“Entonces, danos pulque.”

“They want whiskey,” Rafe said.

“This isn’t a goddamned tavern.” Irwin motioned to the soldiers to finish the arrangements.

“No importa.” Coyundado hands were tied behind his back, but he shook his head, as though dismissing death like a bothersome fly. “I killed two Mexicans recently,” he said in Spanish. “I am satisfied.”

The soldiers unhitched seven horses from the wagon teams. The six Apaches’ hands were tied, so the soldiers helped them mount. They positioned each horse under a noose. The seventh soldier mounted and arranged the nooses over their necks and tied the other end to their saddle horns. As he did it, he looked not at all sure they wouldn’t find a way to kill him even while trussed up.

The young soldier jumped visibly when he reached Coyundado, who began to chant in a loud, steady voice. Rafe would have sworn Coyundado did it as much to scare the lad as to celebrate his own death. Apaches did like their little jokes.

The older of the two boys looked to be about ten or twelve years old. He stood as silent and expressionless as his mother and the child riding in a sling at her hip. They stayed that way when the soldiers lashed the horses with their quirts. The animals bolted, cutting Coyundado’s song short and hauling the prisoners up until the tops of their heads hit the limb bringing the horses to an abrupt halt. The men swung and kicked so hard they bumped into each other. When the last one had stopped twitching, the soldiers tied the other ends of the ropes around the oaks’ trunks.

The sergeant untied the woman and gave her a shove between the shoulder blades. Rafe watched her and her son walk away without turning back. He wondered if she would be capable of torturing a man the way Wallace had been tortured. He was pretty sure she would. He wondered how she would find her husband, if indeed Cochise and his men had gone to Mexico.

Well, that wasn’t his problem. His problem was to make it back to Fort Buchanan alive with this bunch of greenhorns. That should keep all of them occupied for the duration of the trip. Then he would try to stay alive each day after that, just as he always had.