KINFOLK
Caught in the night behind his blindfold and lulled by the surefooted gait of Red under him, Rafe dozed off. He woke with a start to the high, wailing women’s call that pumped fear through his veins. He almost yanked off the blindfold and pulled his pistols from the saddle holsters.
“You may look now,” said the Mexican woman.
Lozen handed him the reins, and when Rafe’s eyes adjusted to the light of the full moon, he thought he was dreaming. As the procession rode through the rows of boys and women and into the village, he saw cookfires illuminating the hillsides all around. The size of the encampment made him reconsider just who was Goliath and who was David.
Rafe estimated that several thousand people had turned out to greet them. Dr. Steck’s presents wouldn’t go far with this mob, but they seemed overjoyed to see the mules and their loads, anyway. The women danced, sidestepping in time to a chant that sounded to Rafe like a thousand cats with their tails caught in vises. The children swarmed around the procession. Boys led the Apaches’ horses away, but Rafe and Caesar declined all offers to take theirs. Rafe didn’t feel like testing the dictum that Apaches wouldn’t steal from guests.
Caesar rode up beside Rafe. “They sure ain’t layin’ low, is they? Don’t they savvy that Ole Cross-Eyes Carleton means to root ’em out, wheat and weed?”
“They savvy.” But Rafe himself was at a loss to understand the carefree mood and the huge number of people.
The singing, dancing crowd of women led them to an open space where they had laid out blankets and hides. Victorio gestured for them to sit on his right side. Rafe took that as
a high honor because he could tell the other leaders had been seated by rank on Victorio’s left. Cochise sat next to him, then Red Sleeves’ son, Mangas, and Whoa, with Broken Foot beside him, and the scar-faced one Rafe knew as Loco. Lozen sat behind her brother. From much farther along in the ranking of warriors glowered a square-jawed, beetlebrowed, droop-mouthed, thin-lipped visage that Rafe had caught glimpses of at Santa Rita.
Caesar saw him, too. “Is that Geronimo?” he murmured.
“I think so. He must be taking a holiday from murdering Mexicans.”
Whoa and Geronimo present in the same location. Rafe imagined Kit Carson looking at him from across a tableful of beer bottles and saying, “Those two will present you with a complete invoice of rascality.”
“Con permiso.” The young Mexican woman knelt behind Rafe and Caesar. “I will translate,” she said in Spanish.
“What is your name?”
“María. María Mendez.”
Rafe realized that he and Caesar were about to be included in a council. It began with more oratory than a congressional filibuster. Even Whoa gave a speech, or rather he muttered it to Geronimo, who delivered it.
Victorio finally arrived at the point. “Tell Father Tse‘k that his children, the Ndee, long to see his face again and welcome him at our fires. Tell him that our women can no longer gather food to eat. Our children are hungry. Mothers weep for their dead sons. Wives weep for their husbands. Tell Father Tse’k that we want peace.”
“But you will not take your people to Bosque Redondo.”
“No, we will not live with the Navajos at that place.”
Nanay, the one called Broken Foot, stood up. He waved an arm to include the surrounding countryside. “This land speaks to us,” he said. “It teaches us how to behave correctly. It keeps wickedness away.”
Cochise rose next. “If we leave our land, the young ones will forget the names of the places here. Those who forget the names, forget what the names mean; they forget what
happened there. When we cease to know the meaning of the land, we no longer know who we are.”
Rafe wondered how he would explain all that and realized he needn’t even try. Dr. Steck would understand it, but he could do nothing. No one else would have the slightest interest.
“I’ll tell him, but I do not think Carleton will change his mind.”
“Life Giver decides who will eat well and who will not. Life Giver decides who will live and who will die. Life Giver decides who will go and who will stay.”
After the council, the women served a feast; then Victorio distributed the gifts of blankets and knives, the pots and beads. Rafe noticed that most of the first recipients were women, widows he assumed. He was impressed by how self assured Victorio was, and by the fact that no one grumbled about their share.
When all that was finished, the dancing started. The crowd milled in and out of the light thrown across the ground by the huge fire. They greeted friends. They chatted and laughed, at ease with each other and at home in a situation that felt totally alien to Rafe. Rafe and Caesar stood with the men, aware that they were being scrutinized by the women in particular. Rafe watched for glimpses of Lozen in the crowd, and he knew Caesar was looking for Pandora. Then Skunk Head appeared and held a conference with Maria.
She turned to Rafe and Caesar. “The one they call He Makes Them Laugh wants to give these to the black Pale Eyes.”
He Makes Them Laugh carried a pair of tall moccasins, covered with beadwork. He started talking, and María had to speak fast to keep up.
“I told my woman when she cut these out four years ago that they were so big she could use them to carry the baby in. She said they would fit the black Pale Eyes and that some day she would give them to him.” He Makes Them Laugh handed them to Caesar.
“Don’t say, thank you,” Rafe muttered.
“Why not?”
“Not polite. Say you’ll wear them a long time, or something like that.”
Caesar took off his hat. He held it to his chest with one hand while he accepted the moccasins with the other.
“Tell your woman these are very beautiful.”
“She says to tell you she named our son Ch‘inayihi’dili,” said He Makes Them Laugh. “It means Sets Him Free.”
“I’d surely like to meet him.”
He Makes Them Laugh and María held another conference; then he sent a boy off with a message. Stands Alone arrived soon after with her five-year-old son walking behind her.
“Don’t talk to her directly,” warned Rafe. “No matter what white people might think, Apache women are as chaste as Desdemona.”
Caesar crouched down and held out a penknife with a deer horn handle. The child stared fixedly at it while Caesar demonstrated how to open it. He held the blade so the haft pointed toward Sets Him Free.
“Please tell him it’s a present for him,” said Caesar.
Maria obliged.
The child ran forward, snatched the knife, and retreated to his mother’s skirt. Caesar laughed so heartily everyone turned to look.
“Tell him I’m gonna call him Charlie.”
Stands Alone bent down and whispered something to her son. He walked out to stand in front of her.
“Shida’a,” he said.
“Shida’a means uncle,” said María.
“Uncle,” Caesar beamed at Rafe, “I gots me some kinfolks.”
A second boy joined Charlie Sets Him Free. María said he was Victorio’s son by his second wife and his name was Washington. Before long the two of them were riding on Caesar’s shoulders. Before the dancing ended, they had fallen asleep in his lap.
By the time Victorio announced the last dance, Rafe was
dozing, too. Then he felt a tap on his shoulder. Lozen walked away from him and onto the dance ground where couples were gathering. Rafe wanted to decline the invitation, but he had seen what happened to men and boys who did. Broken Foot and Loco seemed to be in charge of the dance, and they dragged the reluctant ones out to face their partners.
Rafe joined Lozen so that they stood a pace away from each other. At least he wouldn’t have to touch her. The step was simple enough, and he’d been watching them do it all night. Together they swung back and forth, she taking five steps forward and he backwards, and then reversing so that he advanced on her.
The singing, the drumming, the crackle of the leaping fire, Lozen facing him; her strong, lovely face now in shadow, now lit, all seemed like a dream, except that he would never have dreamed of doing this. The throb of the drums and the sway of bodies around him mesmerized him. He drifted away from his reality to a world more fantastical than he could have imagined.
When the drums and the singing stopped, he and Lozen walked toward the crowd standing around the dance ground. She spoke to him in Spanish, though she looked straight ahead and she hardly moved her mouth. Maybe she didn’t want people to see her talking to a Pale Eyes.
“¿Donde está su perra? Where is your dog?”
“Tiene niños. She has little ones.”
“Dogs are useful,” Lozen said. “They have far-sight. They can warn of enemies.”
“I will bring you a puppy.”
“Enjuh, good,” she said. She looked slantwise up at him, a mischievous smile playing across her full lips. She knew he was ignorant of the customs. “The man is supposed to pay the woman for dancing with her.”
All Rafe had in his pockets was lint, except for a shiny copper penny. He held it on the palm of his hand so the engraved likeness of the Indian faced up.
Lozen’s smile was radiant, though Rafe knew she had no use for a coin as currency. She took it and slipped it into the
small pouch hanging at her waist. She reached out a hand and touched the leather pouch that he had found in his old wagon years ago, and in which he kept whichever of Shakespeare’s works he was reading. Her smile turned a little sly, and he knew for sure, finally, who had made it.
Without saying anything more, she put her arm through that of an old woman with a ringtail’s elfin face and flared ears. The two of them walked off into the assembling dawn.
Her grandmother, Rafe thought. The old one is probably Lozen’s grandmother.
Lozen had a family. She had a life far different from anything in Rafe’s experience, and yet similar, too. Rafe had had a grandmother, until the Comanches, frugal with their arrows, clubbed her to death.
Victorio took Rafe and Caesar to a brush-covered shelter at his wife’s camp. Someone had put down two heaps of fragrant cedar branches inside. Rafe and Caesar picketed their horses at the entrance. The camp grew quiet except for occasional coughs and snores and the brief fussing of a baby. Rafe slept more soundly than he would have thought possible, being in the den of the lion and all. He left his boots on, though.
When the sound of women’s laughter woke them, the sun had already risen. Charlie Sets Him Free and Wah-sin-ton stood in the doorway.
As soon as Caesar stirred, the boys shouted, “Shida’a.” They ran in, jumped on him, and started bouncing on his chest.
Caesar spoke in gusts as his new relations jolted the wind out of him. “What’s the word for nephew, Rafe?”
“I think it’s shik’a’a.”
Rafe left them wrestling in the tangle of the blankets and stepped outside. The first thing he noticed was that both Red and the gray were munching on piles of grass that someone had left for them. The second thing he noticed was that the valley was on fire, or at least it appeared to be. Smoke hovered over everything. It came from the cookfires scattered
along the river and across the surrounding hills as far as the eye could see.
The rancheria covered much more area than he had thought, and all of it was in a ferment. In spite of the fact that they had spent most of the night dancing, women and girls swarmed in and out of Victorio’s wives’ arbors and the cookfires scattered around them. Rafe saw Lozen and her grandmother and Pandora sorting, chopping, peeling, skinning, and gutting with the rest. A second arbor contained baskets and trays of food and trinkets. Leather pouches bulged with goods. So much for Victorio’s claim that his people were poor.
Other women hurried to and fro with loaded burden baskets and water jugs. Some bent at the waist under heaps of firewood. The young children collected kindling and carried small water jugs, or they chased each other around, more excited and frenetic than the day before. An army of small boys rubbed down the hundreds of ponies and led them to better grass. A group of girls sang and danced where the boys would be sure to see them.
Victorio, Loco, and fifteen or twenty men were clearing rocks and pebbles from the dance ground, then sweeping it with bundles of brush. Some of them laid a foothill of wood for a fire and dragged in four thirty-foot-long saplings that seemed to have some special purpose. Steam rose from a hut by the river, and Rafe heard the muted chant of male voices from inside it.
Caesar came out, hoisted the boys onto his shoulders, and stood next to Rafe. He was wearing his new moccasins with his wool trousers tucked into the high tops. Rafe felt a twinge of envy.
“Looks like they’s fixin’ to throw a hoedown,” Caesar said.
“I don’t know what to make of it, pardner.”
María arrived with a cradleboard on her back.
“Look at this.” Caesar walked around Maria to admire the baby.
María half turned so Rafe could see the wide-eyed child
staring at him from under a shock of black hair.
“Boy or girl?” Rafe asked.
““She is a girl.”
María had brought them a gourd of stew, a sotol stalk for a spoon, and an explanation. Victorio’s daughter was to participate in the ceremony of becoming a woman, she said. People had come from all over the Apacheria for it. The celebration would go on for days. It was the most sacred of their rituals. The Pale Eyes would have to leave.
As they were saddling the horses, Victorio and his number-one wife approached them. At least Rafe assumed she was his number-one-wife. She had taken charge of distributing the gifts to the women the night before. She held out a rawhide saddle pouch with painted designs on the carrying straps and long fringes. The tin cones on the ends of the fringes jingled when Rafe took it.
“This will be very useful.” Rafe tried to think of something he could give in return, but last night he had divided out all his tobacco. He had not packed clothes, and what he had was old and shabby.
“Give her my darnin’ kit,” Caesar murmured.
When Rafe opened Caesar’s saddlebag to look for it, he noted that nothing had disappeared in the night. He retrieved the leather packet that contained a small quilted sack with two steel needles, heavy black cotton thread wound around a peeled stick, a few wooden buttons, and a packet of straight pins. The name ELLIE was embroidered on the sack.
“I can’t take this, Caesar,” he said. “It belonged to your mother, didn’t it?”
“She’d be proud.”
Rafe hesitated.
“Go on. Shake a leg. They wants us out o’ here so’s they can get on with the fandango.”
Rafe handed the sewing kit to Victorio. “For your daughter, in honor of her special day.”
Victorio passed it to his wife, who gave the slightest of smiles, then turned and went back to work. Victorio shook
their hands the way he had seen Pale Eyes do. María continued translating.
“Nantan says, ‘May we live to see each other again, my brothers.’”
“God keep you,” said Caesar.
As they mounted, Victorio handed Rafe a war club. The round stone head was encased in a cow’s tail which had been wet, slid over a stout oak handle, allowed to shrink in place, and tightly wrapped with sinew. A flexible section of hide was left between handle and the stone so the head moved freely. The design allowed it to deliver a skull-crushing blow without breaking off. A loop through the butt of the handle fit over Rafe’s wrist. Rafe took the Green River knife and sheath from his belt and gave it to Victorio, who smiled his gratitude.
Rafe and Caesar put on the blindfolds again. This time a few young boys escorted them away. Caesar started singing to himself as soon as they were out of sight of the rancheria, and Rafe smiled.
Rafe realized that Caesar had had kinfolk even before Sets Him Free called him “Uncle” yesterday. Rafe himself had come to think of Caesar as a brother. He knew he would fight to the death for him, and that was no idle proposition. He knew that Caesar would do the same for him.