EARLY BIRDS
Rafe sometimes wondered why Arizona Territory seemed hotter and dustier than New Mexico Territory, even though they sat side by side. This was late April 1871. The sun had not yet cleared the mountain peaks, but already the heat would melt hell’s hinges. Patch lay panting in the shade of Joseph Felmer’s wagon. Red munched hay in Felmer’s corral. The chestnut gelding that Rafe intended to ride when he left Red here stood saddled and grazing.
Felmer pumped the pedal on his grindstone to get the heavy wheel spinning. He angled Rafe’s long blade against it and sparks flew, prickling Rafe’s bare forearm like insect nips.
“The heat makes early birds of us all, don’t it?” Felmer spoke mining-camp English with a hint of a German accent. He tested the edge with his thumb and made quick touches with it against the wheel to even it out.
Felmer knew horses, and he was good with them. He had river-bottom land waist-high with succulent grass, and he was willing to let an old retired warhorse eat as much of it as he wanted. Rafe figured if anyone could prevent the Apaches from stealing Red, Joseph Felmer could.
He had married a woman of the small band of Aravaipa Apaches, and he spoke the language fluently. Felmer called his wife Mary. She spoke only kitchen-English, but she could cook a savory pot roast with potatoes and carrots stewing in its juices. And she had taken to the rest of white ways as Rafe had never seen an Apache woman do. He was always startled by the sight of her in corseted bodice and an excess
of skirts and petticoats, her glossy black hair heaped up and secured with tortoiseshell combs.
When she rode away early yesterday morning, she left some cold roast behind for last night’s supper. She had gone to visit her uncle, old Chief Eskiminzin, and her other relatives at their camp three miles on the other side of the army post.
Whenever Rafe’s work brought him to Arizona and to the tumbledown, wretched collection of huts called Camp Grant, he stayed with Joe and Mary Felmer. He liked to sit at the kitchen table, with the aromas of a woman’s cooking soaking into his clothes. He liked to listen to her and Joe conversing in the low, throaty, musical language of her tribe. To him, people speaking Apache or Navajo always sounded as though they were sharing secrets.
Mary Felmer reminded Rafe of his Navajo woman and the life they had shared. She made him wonder if he could ever find someone like his woman or like Mary. He thought fleetingly of Lozen, but dismissed the notion. The Warm Springs people were Chiricahuas, and the Chiricahuas were not like the peaceful Aravaipas. Even if they had been, Lozen was not one to put on a rufled apron and bustle about in the kitchen. Come to think of it, he wouldn’t want her to.
Still, if everyone had Felmer’s generous attitude, the situation here would improve vastly. Maybe then Lozen would ride with him. She knew all about horses, that was certain, and probably mules, too. He had no doubt that what she didn’t know she could learn faster than an owl could blink. He indulged in a brief reverie of her sharing the trail with him. A partner. A lover. A friend. He shook his head to clear it of such foolishness.
Rafe helped Joe heave the portable forge onto the wagon. He climbed aboard and took the anvil and smithing tools that Felmer handed up to him. Joe was headed for Camp Grant and his weekly stint of shoeing. Lt. Howard Cushing and the men of the Third Cavalry gave Felmer a lot of work. If Cushing wasn’t returning from a scout against the Apaches, he was preparing for one.
Mary called Joe Felmer by the name Apaches gave blacksmiths, pesh-chidin, ghost or spirit or devil of the iron, but that was just the latest of his identities. He did have a devilish look. He was tall and gaunt, with black hair, a single black eyebrow hovering like a storm cloud above his keel of a nose, and a luxuriant mustache. His dark eyes had a fire at their centers as intense as any he stoked in his forge.
He told a different story whenever the subject of his past came up. Rafe knew he was German, but he claimed at various times to being a Russian, a Pole, a Turk, a Polynesian, and a Theosophist. Where the latter was concerned, he said he was a personal friend of Helena Petrovna Blavatsky. Madame Blavatsky had received her Theophisitic notions from a cluster of Oriental mystagogues who had staked claim to a more elevated tract of real estate than the rest of mortality. Felmer had tried to explain it all to Rafe, who found it fascinating but irrelevant.
Joe levered his long legs onto the high wagon seat. Rafe checked the cinch on the chestnut and swung into the saddle. Red had been restless, but now he started galloping from one end of the corral to the other. As Joe and Rafe started down the rutted track toward the main trail, Red let out a series of shrill whinnies. Patch whined and ran back and forth between the corral and the wagon. Even the chestnut neighed in sympathy.
“Sounds like a rally of widders and orphans,” said Felmer.
“I’ve left him behind before.”
“Yep, but you never meant it to be permanent before.”
Rafe knew he was right. He didn’t know how they did it, but Red—and Patch, too—always seemed to sense his intentions. Red trotted to the far side of the corral, and Rafe could see that he was about to make a run at the fence. He was far too old for that nonsense.
Rafe held up his hands and shouted “Whoa! Hold on, old man.” He went back and opened the gate so Red could join them. Red touched noses with Patch; then he trotted alongside the chestnut as though it had all been a stupid mistake and he forgave Rafe for it.
Rafe nodded at the dejected mule who stood at the corral fence with drooping head and an adoring swarm of flies mining the sores on his back.
“Is that the critter you bought from condemned army stock?”
“He is. I call him Lazarus.”
The men at the fort had told Rafe about it. They thought Felmer’s senses must have taken leave of him. Rafe was not in the habit of asking questions, but he had to ask this one. “Why?”
“Fer bait. The ’Pache is hungry nowadays and on the scout fer anyting edible. I figure they’ll come into my alfalfy field atter ’im, and then the joke’s on them.”
“I thought the Apaches around here were tame,” Rafe said.
“Mary’s people are, but you know Apaches. They tend to stray into other folks’ pastures. The trail to the reservation passes near here.”
“How’s that going, Lieutenant Whitman’s unofficial reserve for the Aravaipas?”
“Better than anyone expected. Old Eskiminzin and a few hundred of my woman’s people came in askin‘for peace and plenty. They’s plantin’ corn and squashes along the river bottom where they always did afore the troubles. Whitman is payin’ them to cut hay for the army stock. He even convinced the ranchers hereabouts to hire the men to help mit the barley crop.”
“Did he ever get authorization to feed them?”
“Naw. Hell, he sends dispatches to department headquarters in Los Angeles every week. He don’t get no reply.” Felmer spit a stream of tobacco. “He’s a good ‘un, Whitman is. Honest. Treats the ’Paches fair.”
“They don’t have anything good to say about him in Tucson or Prescott.”
Rafe was aces at understatement. The Prescott newspaper, Arizona Citizen, wrote that Lt. Royal Whitman was a scoundrel and a drunkard and a slave to vice. They said he only wanted to gather the Apaches at Camp Grant because he had an unnatural sexual attraction to “dusky maidens.”
Halfway to the fort, Rafe and Joe passed the spindly poles and crossbar marking the entrance to the ranch of Hugh Kennedy and Newton Israel. Prickly pear, mesquite, and clumps of coarse grass were taking over the wagon ruts that passed through it and off into an astonishing glory of spring flowers.
“Did anyone find out which Apaches killed Kennedy and Israel?”
“I tink it was old Whoa and his bucks and maybe Geronimo. They was headin’ for Mexico, at any rate.”
Rafe knew the story of the raid on the wagon train. He’d heard Felmer’s description of the goods strewn everywhere and of Newton Israel’s naked corpse punctured with lance and arrow wounds, his skull smashed in. The Apaches had cut out Israel’s heart and a small piece of his scalp and thrown them onto the body.
Felmer expanded on the subject, maybe because he had had time to think about it. “When we found them, the buzzards hadn’t gotten to old Newt’s eyes yet, and he had a tranquil look, doncha know. Never saw the like.”
“And Kennedy?”
“We found him alive. Thought he would make it, but he said, ‘No, boys, it’s all up mit me. I’m a goner.’ He was right.”
Rafe was tempted to ask a question that had occurred to him more than once: Was it worthwhile to pay so dearly for so little that was good? But he knew that was a stupid question. It must be, because he and Joe Felmer were both here and not somewhere else.
“I hear the Apaches stole a case of patent medicine.”
“Dr. Worme’s Gesundheit Bitters.” Felmer pronounced that with a double-barrelled, waterproof, wrought-iron German accent. “They got powerful drunk on it, too. When Lieutenant Cushing lit out after them, I went along to track fer ’im. We could see that the bucks had staggered all over the landscape, homing in on cactus like they was chickens going to roost. Falling full-out into ‘em, too. Must’ve been quite a sight.”
About seven o’clock Rafe and Felmer reached the fort,
named Grant after the current president of the country. The flag hung limp from the stubby pole. Dogs quarreled over the scraps of shade. They found Lt. Royal Emerson Whitman at breakfast in the officers’ mess. As he ate his eggs, ham, and biscuits, he complained about the lack of response from his superiors in Los Angeles. Rafe had a good idea why the brass was being evasive. The idea of assembling and feeding another batch of Apaches was very unpopular with the civilians here in Arizona. If the effort worked, headquarters could take the credit. If it failed, Whitman would suffer the salvo of criticism.
A runner knocked and hustled in, panting for breath.
“Sir, a mob from Tucson has drawn Sharps and Spencer rifles from Governor Safford’s stores. They set out in this direction.”
“How many?” Whitman stood up so fast his chair crashed to the floor behind him.
“About a hundred Papagos, forty-eight Mexicans, and six whites.”
“Oh, Lord,” breathed Whitman. “Oh, Lord.”
RAFE SEARCHED FOR THE INFANT’S LEGS AMID THE SCATTERED debris of baskets, blankets, clothing, and lifeless bodies. He felt he could not bury the child until he found his legs. He spotted them next to a burning lodge, picked them up, and laid them carefully so they joined the places where they had been severed.
All the lodges were on fire, but the smoke did not obscure the devastation; it only made it more hellish. The Tucson mob must have arrived as the earliest birds were tuning up, and before the Aravaipas woke. Bodies lay sprawled everywhere, almost all of them women and children. The men must have gone off hunting or had taken cover to defend their families.
The Papagos had clubbed and knifed their victims, taking care to smash their faces so they would have to spend eternity that way. They had mutilated them in other ways also,
whatever struck their sense of whimsy. They had clubbed the dogs, too, a lot of dogs.
Felmer’s wife lay on her back with her skirts up over her face, her legs spread. Ashen-faced and silent, Joe Felmer gently pulled the skirt and petticoats down and arranged them. Her face had been smashed and Felmer laid his jacket over it. He wrapped her in his blanket and lifted her as he would a sleeping child. He carried her to his horse and laid her across it. Oblivious of everyone, he led the horse away.
Lieutenant Whitman, his eyes red from weeping, handed Rafe a shovel. He took a bandana from inside his jacket and blew his nose as he walked away to supervise the troops with burial detail. He ordered the soldiers to carry the bodies to the dance ground in the center of the village and line them up, a routine they had learned, no doubt, from the slaughters at Gettysburg, Antietam, and Atlanta. Rafe stopped them.
He pointed out that the men could dig the graves now, but if the bodies were allowed to lie where they had fallen, relatives could identify them more easily. If Eskiminzin and his people didn’t return by the next day, they could bury the corpses before the stench became overpowering. Of the 125 corpses, only eight were men.
Lt. Howard Bass Cushing arrived with a company of soldiers. Sgt. John Mott rode with him, and Rafe was glad to see him. He’d known Mott for over ten years, since that imbroglio with Lieutnant Bascom and Cochise.
Howard Cushing had been in the territories for only a year, but he had covered a lot of ground and killed a lot of Apaches in that time. He and his three brothers had earned an impressive record during the late war of rebellion, but the other three hadn’t lived to crow about it. Cushing had packed his kit and come west to continue doing what he did best: killing the enemy, whomever he might be. His superiors had given him vague orders to attack Apaches wherever he found them and Cushing was eager to oblige.
Cushing put Rafe in mind of the relay races soldiers held when off duty. Men would space themselves out along the course so they could snatch the baton from the flagging runner
who started before them. The army was like that, begining with Bascom. Or maybe the line went back a couple hundred years to that first high-toned Spaniard rattling through the desert in his suit of armor like a loosely packed case of tinned sardines on horseback. The Spaniards, after all, had been the first to enslave the Apaches and start the whole chain of events in motion. The lineage of military demagogues passed through Bascom, Carleton, and now Cushing. They were the men for the job, if killing Apaches was the answer.
Cushing was four or five inches shorter than Rafe’s five feet, eleven inches. He was lean and sinewy, and with his sleeves rolled up, Rafe could see the veins standing out on his arms and hands. He was slightly stoop-shouldered and restless as a ferret. He had sandy hair and eyes like smoky quartz.
Rafe heard Lieutenant Whitman ask him if he and his men had come to help bury the dead.
“I kill them,” Cushing said. “I don’t bury them.” He gestured to the wagon loaded with water, food, ammunition, blankets, and medical supplies. “We’re heading east to hunt Mescaleros.”
Whitman shrugged and went back to digging.
“I heard the blacksmith’s here,” Cushing said. “I want him to look at the mounts’ shoes.”
“They killed his wife. He took her home to bury her.”
Cushing shook his head. “A white man’s got no business setting up house with a squaw.”
Royal Whitman didn’t turn to look as Cushing strode back to his big black horse and ordered his men to mount.
Rafe could see that digging graves would occupy most of the day. He helped throughout the morning, and then he took his leave. He had heard that Victorio and the Warm Springs band had returned from Mexico and had set up camp near Fort Craig in New Mexico.
Rafe could see from the devastation around him that the army was not providing protection for the Apaches who came in peacefully. Rafe decided to leave his wagon at Joe
Felmer’s ranch and ride east. He would pick up Caesar at Central City, and the two of them could warn Victorio to be careful.
He decided to keep Red with him. Red had emphatically stated his feelings about retirement. Besides, Rafe could switch off between Red and the chestnut and cover ground faster. He had made that trip so many times, he knew the shortest routes, the narrow, steep, God-help-us trails that Cushing’s supply wagon couldn’t maneuver. If he started well before sunup, he could cross Doubtful Pass before Cushing arrived there. The traveling would be more bearable before sunup, too.
Honest labor, desperate rescues, and brutal slaughter. In Arizona they were all best conducted early, before the kiln of a sun sapped breath, nerve, muscle, and thought.