The Wild Girl (24 page)

19 MAY, 1932

From our camp in the foothills of the Sierra Madre

For all the dire premonitions of my last entry, the past days have been nothing if not an idyll, the easiest, laziest, most carefree time we have yet spent. A small river courses down the valley just below our campsite. The water is perfectly clear, running over a freestone base, with deep pools and riffles and full of fat trout. Tolley has given me the loan of one of his bamboo fly rods and I go out early every morning, or in the evening just before sunset, to fish for an hour or two. It’s nothing in that time to catch a couple dozen trout. I save a few for breakfast, rolled in flour and fried in bacon grease, or for dinner variously prepared by whoever is cooking that night. Strangely, the Apaches will not eat fish as they consider it to be unclean. Although they remain very closemouthed about revealing anything to us “White Eyes” concerning their religious or cultural practices, with some delicate prodding from our resident anthropologist, the old man finally admitted that they consider fish to be the spirits of wicked women.

During our first night here, we heard a pitiful wailing issuing from the girl’s wickiup, a sound of such pure, primeval grief that it raised gooseflesh on me as I lay in my bunk. In the morning she emerged from the wickiup with her hair hacked off at the shoulders. When we asked Joseph about it, he would only say that she had borrowed his knife for the job, and that it was the Apache custom for women and children to cut their hair upon the death of a close family member.

“Who died?” Margaret asked.

“We do not ask such questions,” Joseph said. “It is not a good thing to speak of the dead.”

“Now that she’s back among the living,” Tolley asked, “do we have to worry about her running off?”

“She won’t run off,” Joseph said. “She has no place to go yet. And she has heard Billy Flowers’s dogs barking.”

In the few days that we have been here, the girl is making an astonishing recovery. At the beginning, she spent most of her time in the wickiup or squatting by the fire, silently watching us. Now, day by day, she seems to be coming back to life, as if she takes her sustenance from the country itself, from the mountains and fresh air and sunlight as much as she does from food and water. She is a pretty girl, even with her crude haircut. Slender, lithe and fine-boned, with small, perfectly formed hands and feet, she has an an extraordinary way of moving that is difficult to explain in physical terms, a kind of grace that seems almost otherworldly. Margaret obtained some clothes in Bavispe for the girl to wear—a skirt and blouse of brightly colored Mexican fabric—and Joseph has made her a pair of traditional Apache moccasins, and a breechclout to wear for riding. Already it’s hard to remember the filthy, naked, hissing creature crouched in the corner of the dank jail cell.

She is still shy with us . . . by
us
I mean especially the white people . . . unable even to look us in the eye, though I have the oddest sense that she recognizes me, for she seems even shyer in my presence, and I catch her watching me furtively from time to time. I think she remembers that I washed her in the jail cell and is ashamed of such an intimate act being performed by a stranger, a man and a White Eyes at that.

She seems fascinated, too, by Margaret and yesterday before dinner actually approached her, reaching out to touch her blond hair with a kind of timid wonder. Margaret stayed perfectly still, the way you might do to avoid frightening a wild animal, and then very slowly she reached out herself and touched the girl’s cheek. “There,” she said. “Now that wasn’t so bad, was it?” And she smiled at her and the girl smiled back.

“What is this young lady’s name, Joseph?” Margaret asked.

“She does not have a name,” he answered.

“What do you mean by that?”

“It is the old way to change the name of women and children upon the death of a close family member,” he said. “To protect them from the deceased’s ghost. Thus the girl has given up her name and will not speak it.”

“What do you call her, then?” Margaret asked.

“It is not necessary to call her anything,” Joseph said. “In the old way, Apaches do not greet each other by name, for it is impolite to call a person’s name to his face.”

“And so is it impolite of me to call you by name?” Margaret asked the old man.

“I am a civilized man,” he said with a smile, “baptized in your church.”

“She has to have a name,” Margaret said.

“Right now she is
la
niña bronca,
” Joseph said. “That is sufficient. Later on something may occur that will cause people to call her another way, and then she will be given a new name that will fit her.”

“You let us know when that happens.”

We have been making short exploratory rides every day in the vicinity of our camp. Joseph serves as our guide. He knows all this country and has already shown us some extraordinary sights: the pueblos of the ones he refers to as
ilk’idande,
the “ancient people,” with the remains of small stone dwellings thousands of years old; there are pottery fragments scattered all over the ground and dozens of
metates,
the large stones, cupped in the center, that were used to grind corn. Many of the hillsides are elaborately terraced with rock walls, so that they resemble giant natural amphitheaters. Margaret herself has studied these earlier civilizations in her university classes and tells us that the walls are called
trincheras
and were constructed by the ancient people for agricultural purposes.

La niña bronca
rides one of the pack burros on these outings and by the third day had already regained sufficient strength to put on a performance worthy of a professional trick rider. Suddenly she swung off the burro, trotted alongside it, swung back on, twirled around on the animal’s back, dismounted on the other side, moved to the burro’s rear and catapulted herself onto its rump, stood up and walked to its shoulder, spun around and walked back, moving with her strange and indescribable grace. All the while she laughed with pure joy and abandon, the first time we’ve heard laughter from her, a lovely trilling sound.

“Apaches are the finest horsemen in the world,” said Joseph, who watched her performance as proudly as a grandparent. “In the old way of living, children learn to ride before they can walk. But now the young people on the reservation are losing these skills.”

The girl has started talking more frequently to Joseph, and to a lesser extent to Albert. It’s frustrating for the rest of us not to be able to understand their conversations and Joseph and Albert are taciturn about revealing much of what is said. And so we’re all trying to learn Apache, although the language seems nearly impenetrable to our ears and tongues. Only Margaret, because she has already studied the southern Athapascan languages, seems to be making some progress. The girl also clearly understands Spanish because whenever Jesus speaks in his own language, she appears to be listening to him, although she has not yet spoken it herself. Joseph, too, speaks Spanish and says that all the Sierra Madre Apaches have learned the language due to the fact they have had contact with the Mexicans, and before them the Spanish for at least a couple of centuries. “In the old days, many of us took Mexican women as captives,” he said. “I myself once had a Mexican captive. Her name was La Luna. She became just like an Apache.”

We tease Jesus mercilessly because he is still terrified of the girl; he watches her warily and always keeps a certain distance from her. He is so afraid she will slit his throat in the night that he has set out booby traps around his sleeping place to alert him to her approach, a kind of necklace of tin cans which he has strung together in a circle around his bedroll and tied to his neck so that the noise they make if she violates his inner sanctum will wake him. As it is, we hear the cans rattling every time the boy shifts position, and so it is mostly our sleep being disturbed.

Other than that, thanks largely to the provisions Tolley brought with him, we’ve been eating and drinking rather well, although Tolley informs us that his wine supply is already running low and he’s thinking of sending the boy back to Bavispe to collect his last case.

We take turns cooking, although some are more skilled in that department than others. After a day of exploring and a dip in the springs, “cocktail hour” and dinner are festive times. We had all begun to notice of late that Albert, so generally outspoken, has become tongue-tied and shy when he’s ever around Margaret, and she herself seems uncharacteristically quiet and self-conscious in his presence. A couple of nights ago Tolley embarrassed them both by suddenly announcing: “Okay, I saw that, you two are making
goo-goo
eyes at each other, aren’t you?”

“Shut up, Tolley,” Margaret said.

“I thought you said that you didn’t believe in having love affairs in the field, darling,” Tolley asked.

“We’re not having a love affair,” Margaret said.

“It won’t do you any good to deny it,” Tolley said. “We’ve all noticed. And I’ve heard you sneaking around in the night. You’re among friends, darling, why not just get it out in the open and move into the big
injun
’s tepee?”

“I said, shut up, Tolley,” Margaret said. “You’re just jealous because you can’t have him.”

“That’s true,” Tolley admitted. “I’ve always wanted to have a fling with a
real
savage
.
And I mean that in the nicest possible way, Albert.”

“I must tell you, Tolley,” Margaret said, “one thing I’ve learned in my studies is that the Apache culture, unlike that of many other Native American tribes, is not in the least bit tolerant of sexual deviations.”

“That is true,” Albert said, nodding. “In the old days homosexuals were considered to be witches and were usually put to death.”

“Well, then you see, our cultures aren’t so terribly different, after all,” said Tolley. “So if your people are so intolerant of sexual deviations, does that mean you confine yourselves to the missionary position?”

“No, Tolley,” said Albert, smiling. “As a matter of fact, in our worldview the missionary position is a deviation.”

21 MAY, 1932

From our camp in the foothills

Billy Flowers came calling today, strode into our camp like the day of reckoning itself. At the sight of him, the girl cried out, terrified, and looked as if she was going to run away, but Joseph took hold of her and led her into the wickiup.

We offered Flowers a cup of coffee. He sat down, fixing us with his bright blue eyes that seem to bore holes into whomever he is looking at. He told us that he had been watching us, and that now that the girl had recovered, our time here was nearly up. The expedition was scheduled to leave Bavispe in three days, and we must prepare to move deeper into the mountains.

“We shall need to resupply before we depart, Mr. Flowers,” Tolley said. “The cupboard is nearly bare.”

“Run out of French wine already, have you, Mr. Phillips?”

“You should have made yourself known,” Tolley said, “rather than spying on us. We’d have invited you to share a glass.”

“The elixir of the devil, sir,” said Flowers. “‘Look not upon the wine when it is red,’” he quoted, “‘when it giveth his colour in the cup . . . At the last it biteth like a serpent and stingeth like an adder.’”

“Oh, nonsense, Mr. Flowers,” Tolley said with one of his little dismissive flutters of his fingers. “Those biblical people you’re always quoting were swilling wine at every opportunity. When they ran out during the wedding feast of Galilee in Cana, didn’t Jesus Himself help out by turning water into wine? ‘Wine is as good as life to a man, if it be drunk moderately,’” he quoted, amazing us all. “‘What life is then to a man that is without wine? For it was made to make men glad.’ Ecclesiasticus.”

Flowers, too, seemed suitably impressed at Tolley’s knowledge of Scripture.

“One of my father’s most notably unsuccessful schemes to save me,” Tolley explained. “As a boy he insisted I become an honor acolyte in our church. I went to confession every week.

“‘Forgive me, Father, for I have sinned,’ I would confess to kindly old Father McClellan, a dear family friend.

“‘And what sins have you committed, my son?’