After Two Apache Brides Were Rejected for Being Unable to Have Children, a Lonely Cowboy Took Them I

PART 2: 

She had blood drying above her eyebrow from where someone had already hit her. She looked at me with these dark eyes that were very calm. Not the calm of someone who’d accepted dying, the calm of someone who was still thinking, still working through options. Even now, that woman, I didn’t know it then, but she would become the most important person in my life.

 “They’re Apache wives,” said another man, heavy-set, flour on his boots, baker probably. “Brought over from the Mescalero territory, arranged legal and proper. Both declared barren. No children after 3 years each. Husbands want their bride price back. These two got nowhere to go.” I looked at him for a long moment. “So, you’re hanging them?” I said.

 “A husband’s got the right.” “Show me the law that says so.” Nobody said anything. “Show me,” I said again. “Write it on a piece of paper. Draw me a picture. Explain it slow if you need to.” Red Mustache put his hand near his gun. “I told you to stay out of it.” “My name is Callan Draice,” I said. “I have ridden through 11 territories, and I have never in my life seen a law that lets a man hang a woman for not giving him a son. You don’t have a law.

 You’ve got a mob, and I’ve got a Colt’s patent and 8 years of practice.” I looked at each man in turn. “So, let’s all be real thoughtful about the next 60 seconds.” The silence that followed was the kind that has weight to it. The baker took a step back. Red Mustache didn’t move, but his hand came away from his gun.

 I walked to the wagon. I took out my knife. I always keep one in my left boot. Old habit from years I don’t much talk about. And I climbed up beside the women and I cut the rope above their wrists. Not the neck rope yet. I needed the wagon to stop rocking first. When it steadied, I reached up and worked the neck loops loose.

 Took about 30 seconds each. Felt like an hour. The younger woman was shaking so hard I had to hold her arm to keep her steady stepping down. The [clears throat] older one stepped down by herself. But when her feet hit the ground, her legs buckled. Just for a moment. And I caught her elbow. She looked at that hand on her arm the way you’d look at something unexpected.

Not afraid. Just surprised. “You’re all right.” I said. Which was a foolish thing to say because she clearly wasn’t. But it was all I had. She said something in Apache I didn’t catch. “She says you smell like horse and dust.” the younger one said. Her English was clear and careful. Like someone who’d learned it from a book.

“She means it as a compliment. It means you are real.” We got out of Corvo Feo Creek before sundown. I didn’t have a plan beyond that. Chester was a good horse, but he couldn’t carry three people. So the older woman, her name was Nadi, rode. And the younger one, Isa, walked beside me. I led Chester by the reins.

 We went south because south felt more open than anywhere else. And sometimes that’s all a decision is. About 2 miles out, when the town was fully behind us, and there was nothing but smae and scrub, and the particular silence of the desert at evening, Isa said, “Where are we going?” “Working on it.” I said. “Do you have a home?” I thought about that.

 “I have a piece of land.” I said. “In the Guadalupe foothills. Been sitting empty about 2 years. Roof might have some holes in it.” “Why is it empty?” I didn’t answer right away. The truth was that the land was my father’s and my father had died and I’d been moving since then because it hurt less to be moving.

 43 acres of scrub pine and limestone, a two-room adobe house, a well that still worked when I’d last checked. I’d been planning to sell it. I’d been planning to sell it for 2 years and somehow never gotten around to it. “It just is,” I said. Nadie said something from atop Chester. Isa listened, then looked at me sideways. “She wants to know if you do this often, riding into towns to cut down people.

” “First time,” I said. Nadie spoke again. “She says that explains why you were so nervous.” “I wasn’t nervous.” Isa looked at me. “I was cautious,” I said. Nadie made a sound that I would learn over the next weeks was her version of laughing. A single short breath through her nose, eyes going flat for just a second.

 You could miss it if you weren’t watching. I was watching. We camped that night at the base of a dry arroyo. I had cornmeal and dried beef and a battered coffee pot that made the worst coffee in the American Southwest. I laid out my second bedroll for the women and put myself on the hard ground near the horses.

 Around the fire with the darkness pressing in and the stars coming out enormous the way they only do in the desert, Isa told me some of what had happened to them. She and Nadie weren’t related. They’d come from different bands, both given as wives to Anglo settlers in a government-encouraged arrangement that the man at the bureau called cultural integration and that the women called something I don’t have the English word for.

Isa translated it roughly as being given away to strangers. Nadie’s husband had been 54 years old and largely absent. When after 3 years she hadn’t given him a child, he’d blamed her. Though Isa said Nadie suspected, based on some things she’d observed and some things she’d understood, that the problem was not with Nadi at all.

 Isa’s husband had been 28 and cruel in small incremental ways. The kind of man who never does one big terrible thing but does a hundred small ones until the person he’s doing them to barely remembers what they used to feel like. When both husbands decided to send the women back and back meant to a reservation 300 miles away with no horses and no provisions, someone in town had suggested hanging as a more permanent solution to the problem of what to do with two inconvenient Apache women.

 I sat and listened to all of this and I didn’t say much because there wasn’t much to say. After a while I said, “What do you want to do after, I mean? Is there somewhere you want to go?” People? Isa was quiet for a moment. Nadi was looking at the fire. “Nadi’s mother died two winters ago.” Isa said. “Her father gave her to the first arrangement.

 There is a cousin maybe near the Rincon Mountains. Maybe.” She paused. “My family, I don’t know if they would take me back. It is complicated. When a woman is sent away, sometimes it is easier for everyone if she stays away.” She said this with no particular bitterness. Like she was just reporting weather. Which somehow made it worse.

 “You could come to the land.” I said. “For a while, figure out what you want.” Nadi looked up from the fire. In the firelight she was, I’m going to just say it plain, she was striking. Not pretty in the way magazines use that word. Something stronger than that. She had a face that had clearly decided long ago not to perform anything it didn’t mean.

She said something to Isa. “She wants to know what you get from this.” Isa said. I turned the coffee pot in my hands. There was a crack running up the side that I kept meaning to fix. “Company maybe.” I said. “The land is quiet, too quiet.” Nadi held my gaze for a long moment like she was reading a page of very small print.

 Then she nodded, just once, decisively. It took us four more days to reach the Guadalupe land. Four days of walking and riding and trading off on Chester. Four days of me relearning how to exist around other people after two years of mostly being alone. I had forgotten, for instance, that you couldn’t just stop walking when you were tired if other people were walking with you.

 I had forgotten that when you share a fire, someone else might want the spot nearest the heat. I had forgotten how to make conversation at meals, rather than just eating in silence. Isa was patient with me. She’d ask me questions, careful, specific questions about where I’d been, what I’d seen, what kind of bird that was flying over the ridge, and I’d answer, and then she’d tell me something in return.

 And slow slowly, awkwardly, like two people trying to start a cold engine, we learned each other. Nadi communicated mostly through Isa those first days, not because she was shy, more because she was watching. That was her nature, I came to understand. She watched everything with this complete, unhurried attention, and she made her judgments slowly and then kept them.

 On the third morning, I woke up before dawn and found her already up, sitting on a rock above the camp, looking east. The sky was that particular deep blue that it goes right before the sun breaks the horizon. She had her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around them and she was very still. I didn’t say anything, just sat down on a rock nearby.

 We watched the sunrise together without speaking. It took about 20 minutes. When it was fully light, she stood up and went back to camp and started rebuilding the fire, like that was just a thing we’d agreed to. A new regular thing. The adobe house was in worse shape than I’d let myself remember. Part of the roof had caved in at the back corner.

Field mice had gotten into what was left of the bedding. The well rope had rotted through and the bucket had fallen. And something, coyotes probably, had gotten through the shutters and made a mess of what had been my father’s chair. I stood in the doorway and looked at it and felt that specific exhaustion that comes not from the size of a problem but from the long time it’s been sitting there being a problem.

 Nady walked past me and started moving debris. Just like that. Walked in, picked up a piece of fallen roofing, carried it outside. You don’t have to. I started. She gave me a look. I picked up some debris and started carrying it outside, too. Issa, who had a practical intelligence that manifested as the ability to look at any broken thing and immediately identify what was wrong with it, crouched next to the well, examined the mechanism, and said, “I need rope, strong rope, and a new bucket or something that can serve as one.

” “Town’s 14 miles,” I said. “Then I’ll need your horse tomorrow.” She said this matter-of-factly, like it was already settled, and I realized with some surprise that it was. That first month is hard to describe. It was uncomfortable and exhausting and occasionally maddening. Three people who didn’t fully know each other’s habits in a small house with a lot of work to do and not a lot of resources to do it with. I am not a naturally patient man.

I tend towards silence when I’m frustrated rather than saying the thing directly, which my father always told me was a character flaw that would cause me suffering, and he was right. I burned the cornmeal twice in the first week because I was thinking about other things. I forgot to bring in the tools one night and they rusted in unexpected rain.

 I stepped on Issa’s seedlings, the ones she’d planted along the south wall, and I didn’t even notice until she pointed at my boot and said, “Those were tomatoes.” With a quiet devastation that made me feel about 2 in tall, but things also happened that I didn’t expect. Nady turned out to be extraordinary with animals, not just comfortable with them, genuinely able to communicate with them in some way I couldn’t quite explain.

Chester had been a difficult horse for 3 years, who’d bitten two people I knew of, and who threw strangers regularly, let her walk right up to him on the second day and put her face against his cheek. After that, he followed her around the yard like a dog. She got us two chickens from a passing settler family by trading labor.

She spent one day helping them with some fencing and came home with a rooster and a hen tucked under each arm, looking deeply unsentimental about the whole transaction. He’s a fixed the well. Then she fixed the south wall where the adobe had crumbled. Then she started building a small structure along the east fence.

Without asking, just building it. And when I finally said, “What’s that going to be?” she said, “A proper kitchen.” in a tone that made clear this was obvious and I should have seen it coming. I mostly stayed out of the way and fixed the roof and the shutters and tried not to step on anything important.

 But in the evenings, when the work was done, we’d sit outside in the last of the light because the house was still small and still a little smoky when the wind was wrong. And those evenings were different from anything I’d had in a long time. Nady started talking to me directly around week three, not through Issa, to me.

 Her English was rough and she knew it and she didn’t seem to mind. She’d say a word and wait, and if I didn’t understand, she’d try another angle. She never seemed frustrated by the gaps. She was, this is the best I can describe it, undefended. She said what she meant without the layer of social maneuvering most people put around their meaning.

It was startling at first. Then it was the most refreshing thing I’d ever experienced. She asked me once, very directly, whether I was lonely before they came. I said yes. She asked if I had always been lonely or just recently. I said honestly that I wasn’t sure there was a difference anymore. She sat with that for a minute.

 Then she said, “Lonely is not a bad thing. It means you have a place for someone inside you that has not been filled. That is not emptiness. That is space.” I thought about that for a long time after she went inside. I should tell you about the men from Cuervo Creek because they did come. I knew they would. It was about 6 weeks in, three of them, Red Mustache and two others I hadn’t seen clearly before.

 They rode up in the mid-morning when I was at the far fence checking the line and I didn’t hear them until I was already walking back toward the house. They were in the yard. Red Mustache, his name turned out to be Prine, Deputy Prine, was telling Nady and Isa to get on the horses he brought. Nady was standing in the kitchen doorway with a knife in her hand.

Not threatening him with it. Just holding it. Because she’d been in the middle of cutting something when they arrived. But Prine didn’t know that and he looked nervous. Isa was very still the way she got when she was calculating. I came around the corner of the house with my rifle. “Prine,” I said. He turned.

 His two men shifted their horses. “Drace, these women are still wanted on a charge.” “What charge?” “Flight from lawful custody.” “You had them in a noose,” I said. “That’s not custody, that’s execution. You can’t flee from execution. I checked.” “That’s a matter of legal interpretation.” “Then let’s get a judge. I’ll ride to Santa Fe myself.

Love to hear a federal judge’s interpretation of hanging two women for being unable to have children.” I looked at him steadily. “Which newspapers you think would cover that story, Prine? The Albuquerque one? The Texas papers?” His jaw moved. “You want to walk that path,” I said. “I’ll walk it with you all the way to Washington if I need to. I’ve got time.

 I’ve got a horse. I have never in my life lost an argument I was willing to stay in.” I paused. “Or you ride back to Cuervo Creek and we never see each other again. Your call. But make it in the next 30 seconds because I’ve got fence to check.” Prime looked at the women, then at me, then at the women again. He left.

 He didn’t say anything. He just pulled his horse around and rode back the way he’d come. And his two men followed. When I turned around, Nady was looking at me with that reading small print expression. She said something in Apache. “She says you were nervous again,” Isa said. “I was not.” “Your left hand,” Isa said, “was shaking.

” I looked at my left hand. It was shaking. “Cautious,” I said. “That’s called being cautious.” Nady did the single breath laugh. Went back inside to finish cutting whatever she’d been cutting. I don’t want to make this story sound tidier than it was. There were hard weeks that winter. We ran low on flour. Chester threw a shoe at the worst possible time, and I had to walk 14 miles to town and 14 back.

 Isa got sick in December with something deep in her chest, and we were all scared for about 10 days in a way that nobody talked about directly, but that sat over the house like weather. She came through, obviously, but those 10 days watching her, making sure she ate, boiling the same roots Nady showed me three times until I stopped burning them, those 10 days changed something in me.

 I’d spent 2 years convincing myself that not being attached to anything was a kind of freedom. Watching Isa breathe too carefully under two blankets, I understood that was just that something I’d told myself to make loneliness feel like a choice. By spring the house had changed enough that my father might not have recognized it.

 Isa’s kitchen was finished and it was objectively better than what had been there before. Nadi had built a pen for the chickens and acquired two more through methods she never fully explained. The garden along the south wall had gone from three dead tomato plants to something that was going to genuinely produce food. The roof was solid and I had changed, too, though it took me longer to see it.

I started waking up looking forward to the day. That’s the clearest I can say it. For 2 years, I’d woken up with no particular orientation toward anything. Get through it. That was my mornings. And then gradually, without me noticing the exact moment it shifted, I started waking up thinking, “I want to see what Nadi’s doing with that corner of the yard.

 I want to hear what Isa makes of the letter I got from the land office. I want coffee and conversation and the specific way this morning feels when there are three of us in it instead of one. I am not a man who talks about his feelings easily. I want to be honest about that because it’s relevant to what happened next and how badly I almost handled it.

It was an evening in late April, warm enough to sit outside. Isa had gone to bed early. She’d been working on something with the roof all day and was worn out. Nadi and I were sitting in the chairs I’d built over the winter, not talking much, watching the sky go dark. There was something between us that had been building for months that I’d been carefully not looking at because I didn’t know what to do with it and I was afraid of getting it wrong.

She got up to go inside and I said without planning to, “Nadi.” She stopped. I had absolutely no idea what was going to come out of my mouth next. Some part of me had started the sentence without consulting the rest. “I want you to stay,” I said. “But not as I mean, not because” I stopped, started again.

 “I want this to be your home, for real, not just until you have somewhere else to go. I want it to be the place.” I looked at my hands. “I want you to stay because I because of who you are. What you’ve the way you” I stopped again. She turned around. “I’m not good at this.” I said. “Yes.” she said. “Yes what?” “Yes, I know you are not good at this and yes I will stay.

” She went inside. I sat there for a while longer just letting my heart do what it was doing. I asked Isa the next morning quietly while Nadi was with the horses whether she would stay too, whether she wanted to. I told her she never had to feel obligated that she could go anywhere she wanted that I’d help her get there if she wanted, money or horse or letter of reference or whatever she needed.

 She looked at me for a long time. “Callum.” she said. “When those men had the rope around our necks, do you know what I was thinking?” “No.” I said. “I was thinking I have never once in my life woken up somewhere and felt that the place itself was glad I was in it.” She looked out at the yard, at the garden at the pen Nadi had built.

 “I wake up here and I feel that.” She looked back at me. “So yes, I will stay.” I nodded. Didn’t trust my voice much right then. “Good.” I finally said. “Also.” she said, “I am not finished with the kitchen. There is a second shelf I want to add.” “Add whatever shelves you want.” I said. “I intend to.” she said and went back to her work.

Summer came. The tomatoes came in red and heavy and Nadi made something with them and dried chiles that I ate three servings of without stopping. Isa finished the second shelf and started on a third. I fixed the fence along the north pasture and started for the first time thinking seriously about cattle.

 Not many, just enough to make the land earn something, enough to build towards something rather than just maintain. On a Sunday in July in the evening, the three of us sat outside and Nadi leaned against my side the way she’d started doing, matter-of-factly, like it was where she naturally fit. Isa had her knees up, looking at the stars coming out, while telling us about a constellation her grandmother had named something different from the Anglo name.

A different story mapped onto the same sky. I had my arm around Nady’s shoulders. Chester was in the pen, nosing at his water. The chickens were doing whatever chickens do in the last light. The land was quiet in the way it only gets when it’s full rather than empty. I thought about that rope swinging in Cuervo Creek, about two women on a wagon above a ditch, about the moment they looked at me, past everything else, through everything else, like I was the one undecided variable.

I thought about all the roads I’d taken to not be anywhere in particular, 11 territories, 4 years of moving south to north and back, a piece of land I’d been planning to sell for 2 years and never got around to. I thought about how sometimes you don’t find the thing you’re supposed to do. Sometimes it’s already going to happen when you ride in, and you’re just the last piece of it arriving.

 Isa finished the constellation story. The silence after it was comfortable. The kind of silence that three people only have when they’ve decided, without saying so, that they belong to the same place. “Tell us another one,” I said, and she did, and the stars came fully out over the Guadalupe foothills, and the land was warm and still. And the three of us stayed there under all that enormous sky until the night was deep around us.

And for the first time in longer than I could clearly remember, nobody was going anywhere.