How Few Remain (72 page)

Señor
Salazar gobbled in fury, and looked about ready to explode. “No insults,” Stuart said sternly. If he felt like guffawing, his face never found out about it. “Go on.”

Geronimo spoke again. Again, Chappo translated: “My father says three
putas
came to our tents. I do not know how to say
putas
in English: women who give you their bodies if you give them something.”

“Whores,” Major Sellers said succinctly.

“Whores—thank you,” Chappo said. He collected English words the way his cousin Batsinas collected artisans’ tricks. Batsinas had made himself a pretty fair blacksmith in a few months’ time, and was always trying to trade for new tools. Stuart took that as a good sign, a sign that the Apaches could, with
patience, be civilized.
Perhaps with the patience of Job
, he thought.

Before Chappo could apply his new vocabulary, Salazar erupted again, shouting, “Lies! Lies! All lies!”

“He let you speak,” Stuart told him. “You will let him speak, or I will decide this case for him on the spot. Do you understand?” Ever so reluctantly, the
alcalde
composed himself. Stuart nodded to Chappo and Geronimo again.

Through his son, Geronimo said, “Like I say, these three whores”—Chappo pronounced the word with care it did not usually get—”came to our tents. They had
mescal
with them. Some of my warriors enjoyed them, yes, and gave them silver, it could be even gold, for their bodies and for the
mescal.”
After a bit, the old medicine man added, “Our women do not make free of themselves like this, and, if they do, we cut off the tip of their nose.”

“Ought to do that in New York City,” Major Sellers said with a coarse laugh. “Sure would be a lot of ugly women there, in that case.” The biggest city in the USA had in the Confederate States the name of being the world’s chiefest center of depravity.

However much Stuart agreed with his aide-de-camp, he waved him to silence. Then he asked Geronimo, “How did the woman of Cananea come to die during all this?”

“She is not dead,” the Apache leader answered. “She fell in love with one of my men, and they ran off together.”

“Bring them back,” Stuart said. “Send men after them. If you can prove this, you had better do it.”

Chappo translated for Geronimo but then, sounding worried, spoke for himself: “The woman will say the man took her away by force, whether it is true or not. She will try to take the blame off herself.”

“It could be,” Stuart said in neutral tones. In fact, he thought it likely. No one—Confederate, Yankee, Mexican, Indian—was fond of accepting blame. He turned to
Señor
Salazar. “Who are the two women who did come back to Cananea, and where do they live?”

“One is Guadalupe Lopez; her family’s house is by the plaza,” the
alcalde
answered. “The other poor victim of the
Indios
’ desires is Carmelita Fuentes. She lives on the edge of the town, by the road toward Janos.”

“Thank you, sir.” Stuart tugged at his beard as he thought. After a few seconds, he said to Major Sellers, “Send men to both
these houses. See if there are any unusual amounts of U.S. gold and silver coins in them. The Apaches have been doing a lot of looting up in New Mexico Territory. If they have silver and gold to spend on women, that’s the money they’ll be spending.”

“Yes, sir.” His aide-de-camp beamed. “That’s very clever, sir.”

Now Salazar was the one who spoke in tones of alarm: “I must remind you, General, Cananea has since a long time traded with
los Estados Unidos
. Much money of that country is in this town. You must not be surprised to find it in many homes.”

“It could be,” Stuart said, as neutrally as he had toward Chappo. “We’ll find out any which way, the same as we’ll find out whether the Apaches bring in this other girl of yours and what she says when they do.”

The
alcalde
bowed. “I will go with your soldiers to the houses of these two poor women and aid them in any way I have the power to do.”

“You will do nothing of the sort. You will stay here with me.” Stuart put the snap of command in his voice. The last thing he wanted was Salazar telling the women and their families what to do and what to say. He let the
alcalde
save face by adding, “I have men who speak Spanish. Doing this will be good practice for them.”

Under the circumstances, Salazar could only acquiesce. He looked very unhappy doing it. Geronimo and Chappo looked unhappy, too. Seeing that, Stuart realized nobody knew exactly what had passed between the women of Cananea and the Apaches, and Indians and Mexicans both feared finding out exactly what had passed would show them in a bad light.

Horatio Sellers had been thinking along the same lines. When he came back from sending soldiers into Cananea, he spoke to Stuart in a low voice: “What do you want to bet we find out the greasers
were
whores and the redskins
did
ravage ’em?”

“Wouldn’t surprise me one bit,” Stuart answered, also almost whispering. “They aren’t sure who did what, but they were sure they were ready to kill each other on account of it. We’re going to need more Regulars in the Army than we used to, just because of these two provinces. We’ll need to patrol the border with the Yankees, we’ll need to patrol the new border with the Empire of Mexico, and we’ll need to patrol every foot of ground in between unless we want fights like this one almost was to break out three times a week.”

“God help the secretary of war when he tries to explain that to Congress,” Sellers said.

“God help Congress if they don’t listen,” Stuart returned. Whether the congressmen in distant Richmond would listen was anyone’s guess. If they didn’t, the noise would get louder soon. Stuart was sure of that.

After a couple of hours, the soldiers who had searched the Lopez and Fuentes houses reported to Stuart. “We found five U.S. silver dollars at one place, sir, and two U.S. quarter-eagles at the other, sir,” said the lieutenant who’d led them. “Five dollars at each place—”

“More than those Mexican sluts are worth,” Major Sellers muttered.

As if by accident, Stuart trod on his toe. “Doesn’t prove anything, not really,” the commander of the Trans-Mississippi said. “We
are
close to the U.S. border. The women still insist they were violated?” At the lieutenant’s nod, Stuart sighed. “All right. Let’s see if the other one turns up. If she doesn’t, then I reckon we have to believe the
alcalde.”

But she—Maria Guerrero was her name—did indeed turn up, four days later. Once back in Cananea, she loudly proclaimed the outrages the Apache in whose company she was found had inflicted on her. The warrior in question, a stalwart brave named Yahnozha, as loudly insisted on her willingness. She wasn’t bruised and battered and beaten, but she declared she’d been too terrified to resist. Yahnozha said she hadn’t wanted to resist.

Impasse. Stuart hated impasses. He hated ambiguity of any kind. The older he got, the more ambiguity he saw in the world. He hated that, too. “In a battle, by God, you know who’s won and who’s lost,” he complained to his aide-de-camp. “That’s what war is good for.”

“Yes, sir,” Sellers agreed. “But what do we do now, since nobody here knows anything and nobody much wants to find out?”

“Convince the Apaches and the Mexicans to forget this time, since nobody
is
sure about it,” Stuart said. “That’s all I can think of now. Next time they quarrel, maybe who did what to whom will be a little clearer. I hope to heaven it is, I tell you that.”

He did his best to keep the peace between allies and subjects. Time helped, too. When they hadn’t flown at each other’s throats
for a while, he decided they probably wouldn’t, not over this. He wished he could believe either side would really forget it. Try as he would, he had no luck with that.

XVI

Frederick Douglass’ train pulled into Chicago at the South Side Depot, on the corner of State and Twelfth Streets. Looking out the window at the hurly-burly on the platform, Douglass was forcibly reminded that, while the Army of the Ohio butted heads with the Confederates at Louisville, most of the United States kept right on with the business on which they had been engaged before the war began.

After seeing nothing but blue uniforms for so long (save only during that brief, appalling interlude when he saw gray and butternut uniforms instead), Douglass blinked at the spectacle of checked and houndstooth and herringbone sack suits and brightly striped shirts on men, and at the fantastic, unfunctional cut and bright colors of women’s clothes. Truly this was a different world from the one he’d just left.

Carrying his suitcases, he made his way to the waiting line of Parmelee’s omnibuses. The driver, who was taking a feed bag off a horse’s head, looked at him with something less than delight. “What would you be wanting?” he asked, brogue and carroty head of hair alike proclaiming him an Irishman.

“To go to the Palmer House,” Douglass replied evenly.

As they often did, his deep, rolling voice and educated accent went some way toward making up for the color of his skin. So did his destination, one of the two best hotels in Chicago. Instead of snarling at him to take himself elsewhere, the omnibus driver, after a visible pause for thought, said nothing more than, “Fare is fifty cents.”

Have you got fifty cents?
lurked behind the words, as it would not have were the driver addressing a white man. With practiced carelessness, Douglass tossed him a half-dollar. “I’ve been there before,” he said.

The driver plucked the coin out of the air, as if it would vanish if he let it touch the ground. Douglass boarded the half-full omnibus. The driver stared at him, as if wondering how much he could get away with. Douglass looked back with imperturbability as practiced as the carelessness. The Irishman’s shoulders slumped. He picked up Douglass’ bags and heaved them, a little harder than he might have, into the boot at the rear of the omnibus.

Before long, all the seats on the conveyance were taken—except the one next to Frederick Douglass. He wondered how many times he’d seen that over the years. More than he could count, certainly. The driver evidently reckoned that last seat would not be filled, for he climbed up into his own place, flicked the reins, and got the omnibus rolling. Above the streets, telegraph wires were as thick as vines in the jungle.

“Palmer House!” the driver shouted when he got to the hotel, which occupied the block on Monroe between State and Wabash, the entrance lying on the latter street. Douglass, a couple of other men, and a woman got off the omnibus. Douglass tipped the driver a dime for getting his bags out of the boot, then went inside. The lobby was a huge hall with a floor of multicolored marble tiles. Spittoons rang to well-aimed expectorations; poorer shots gave the marble new, less pleasant, hues. Western Union boys and letter carriers hurried through the hall in all directions.

To Douglass’ relief, he had no trouble with his reservation. “Room 211,” the desk clerk said, and handed him a key with that number stamped on it. The fellow looked back at the great grid of pigeonholes behind the front desk. “Yes, I thought so—there’s a letter waiting for you.”

“Thank you.” Douglass took the envelope, which bore his name in a script long familiar. The note inside was to the point.
If you are not too tired
, it read,
meet me for supper at seven tonight in the hotel restaurant. We were in at the birth; let us pray we are not to be in at the death
. As usual, the signature ran the cross stroke of the initial of the Christian name into the beginning of the first letter of the surname:
A. Lincoln
.

“Help you with anything?” the desk clerk asked.

“Only in reminding me whether I remember correctly that the entrance to your restaurant is on the State Street side of the building,” Douglass replied.

“Yes, that’s right.” The clerk nodded. He wasn’t calling Douglass
sir
, but in ail other respects seemed polite enough. The Negro discounted slights far worse than that.

He went upstairs, unpacked, and took a bath in the tin tub down at the end of the hall. Refreshed, he went back to his room, relighted the gas lamp above the desk, and wrote letters and worked on a newspaper story till it was time to join the former president for supper.