How Few Remain (40 page)

“I’ll bet she is,” Custer sneered. “And how many other community pillars carry the name of Sessions?”

“I know of no others,” Haight said. Custer had heard that in Salt Lake City, too. The Mormons habitually dissembled about their plural marriages.

He gathered up his troopers by eye. “We are going to search that house for John Taylor. We are also going to search it for any evidence the abhorrent vice of polygamy is being practiced within. If by some chances we find such evidence, despite the statements of Mr. Haight here, we shall take whatever action I deem at the time to be appropriate. Come along.”

Grinning, the soldiers followed him. As they tramped toward the large, rambling house, they told lewd jokes. Custer pretended not to hear them, except when a good one made him laugh out loud.

He walked up to the front door and rapped smartly upon it. When it opened, standing before him was one of the formidable middle-aged women of the sort Brigham Young had apparently married in battalions: broad through the shoulders, broader through the hips, graying hair pulled straight back from a face that had not approved of anything since the War of Secession. Custer thought how good her head would look stuffed and mounted on the Wall back at Fort Dodge next to a pronghorn or a coyote. “You are Mrs. Irma Sessions?” he asked.

“I am. And you are a United States soldier.” By her tone, that put Custer somewhere between a Comanche and a polecat.

“My men and I are going to search these premises for the possible presence of the fugitive John Taylor,” Custer announced. “All persons inhabiting this residence must first come forth.”

“And if we do not?” Irma Sessions inquired.

Custer folded his arms across his broad chest. “Then we shall remove you with whatever force proves needful and bind you over for trial for defying the authority of the United States Army.” He pulled out his pocket watch. “You have five minutes.”

He watched Mrs. Sessions contemplate calling his bluff. He watched her decide, with obvious reluctance, that he wasn’t bluffing. He watched her start to slam the door in his face and then, with even more obvious reluctance, think better of it.

Within the appointed deadline, half a dozen women emerged, the other five as like Irma Sessions as peas in a pod. Along with them came something like two dozen children, ranging from babes in arms up to youths old enough to carry a gun and girls well on their way to becoming stolid copies of their mothers. “Where is Mr. Sessions?” Custer asked when the patriarch of the family proved not to be in evidence.

“In Salt Lake City, on business,” Irma Sessions replied. Maybe it was true, maybe it wasn’t.

“And all six of you are his wives?” Custer persisted.

“Oh, no,” one of the other women said. “I am his widowed cousin.” Another claimed to be his sister, still another said she was Irma’s sister, and the last two didn’t explain how or why they were living there, save to assert that they were not affiliated with Zedekiah Sessions in any illegal or immoral manner. They were
so shrill, so insistent, Custer would not have believed them even had he previously been inclined to do so, which he was not.

In the midst of the women’s denials, a leering trooper brought Custer a photograph in a fancy gilt frame. It was a family group: a stout, bearded man, presumably Mr. Sessions, surrounded by the six women and their multifarious offspring. He displayed it to them. They went quiet. Rudely, he wondered if Sessions could get the same effect with it. For the sake of the man’s peace of mind, he hoped so.

“I say that this photograph shows me you have been imperfectly truthful here,” he told them, having been too well brought up to call a woman a liar to her face. “As you must know, General Pope has commanded that polygamy shall be suppressed in this Territory by all available means.” He turned to the cavalryman. “Any sign of Taylor, Corporal?”

“No, sir,” the soldier answered. “Nobody in there now.”

“Very well. Put this place to the torch, that sin may have no dwelling place to call its own. If we needs must cleanse Utah with fire and sword, that is what we shall do.”

The six wives of Zedekiah Sessions screamed and wailed, as did their female children. The boys, the older ones, cursed Custer and his men as vilely as they knew how. He’d heard worse. Despite screams and wails and curses, the house burned. Going through the town, he and his men found three more homes obviously belonging to polygamists. Those went up in flames, too. He wondered if the Mormons would shoot at his men for that. He almost hoped they would. They didn’t.

“It’s not so Bountiful any more,” he said to his brother as they led the two cavalry troops north to the next little town. Both Custers laughed.

IX

Tubac drowsed under the relentless sun of the western part of New Mexico Territory. It had been a Mexican village, adobe houses clustered around a Catholic church that was also adobe but whitewashed. Then it had been a Mormon settlement, one of the many sprouts from the main tree in Utah. Since the War of Secession, unending raids by Apaches and by Mexican and white bandits had left it a sad shadow of its former self.

That left Jeb Stuart, whose army was camped nearby, something short of brokenhearted. “Mormons,” he said to his aide-de-camp. “You ask me, the damnyankees are welcome to them.”

Major Horatio Sellers nodded and said, “Yes, sir.” His principal bugbear, though, was not the Mormons, of whom only a handful were left hereabouts, but the Apaches—not those who’d raided Tubac halfway back to savagery, but those now accompanying the Confederate forces (assuming a distinction could be drawn between those two groups, which was by no means obvious). After coughing once or twice, he said, “The more time we spend with these Indians, sir, the more I think one of the reasons the Empire of Mexico sold us Sonora and Chihuahua was to give us the joy of putting them down.”

“It could be so, Major,” Stuart allowed. “If there were more of them, they would be even worse trouble than they are.”

“Too damned many of ’em as is,” Sellers said, stubbornly sticking out his chin. “If there were more—” He shuddered. “Sir, we have good men, tough men. But these Apaches, there isn’t a one of ’em can’t go through this country on foot faster than a trooper can on horseback, come up behind you in the middle of a crowded church, cut your throat, and be out the window before anybody notices you’re dead.”

He was exaggerating only slightly, and not at all about the
Apaches’ ability to outperform cavalry. “But they don’t want to cut
our
throats,” Stuart said. “They want to cut the Yankees’ throats, and especially the Mexicans’.”

“Now
they do,” Sellers said. “When is it our turn?” He looked around and lowered his voice almost to a whisper: “I still say we ought to fill ’em full of whiskey and get rid of them when they’re too polluted to fight back.”

“That will be enough, Major,” Stuart said sharply. “That will be more than enough. One of the reasons the Apaches hate the Mexicans so much is that the Mexicans would pull that on them again and again. It would work—they like popskull, no two ways about it—but it made enemies forever out of the braves the Mexicans didn’t get. I want to use these Indians against the United States; I don’t want to give the damnyankees any chance to use them against us.”

“Yes, sir,” Sellers said.

Stuart hid a smile. He recognized that tone: it was the one a soldier used when he thought a superior was out of his mind. He said, “In the end, my guess is that we civilize them, Major. Geronimo’s son, Chappo, now—he’s a sharp young fellow. And his cousin, that Batsinas: I’ve had two different blacksmiths tell me he’s been after them to teach him their trade. He’s got only a few words of English, and a few more of Spanish, but one of the men who was showing him things said he picked them up as fast as you’d want with a white man.”

Major Sellers said nothing at all. He tried to make his face say nothing at all, too. He wasn’t as good at it as the Apaches. Clear as if he were shouting, Stuart read his thoughts:
learning things from white men doesn’t civilize Indians, it only makes them more dangerous
.

“Cherokees,” Stuart said quietly. “Choctaws. They might as well be white themselves—well, some of them.”

“That’s different,” his aide-de-camp answered, but, when Stuart pressed him, he couldn’t say how.

“It doesn’t matter, anyway,” Stuart said after looking at his watch. “We’ve got to meet with Geronimo anyhow, get everything in a straight line for his run up to Tucson and where we’ll bushwhack the Yankees when they come after him.”

Actually, the meeting hadn’t been set for a specific time; the Indians, though they used telescopes most often taken from dead soldiers, didn’t care about watches. But nine-thirty was a close
enough equivalent to midway through the morning, which was how Geronimo had put it.

The Apaches approved of the Confederate-issue tents Stuart had given them: they were roomier and faster to put up than the hide-covered brush wickiups the Indians made for themselves. Geronimo was sitting cross-legged in front of a little cookfire, drinking coffee from a tin cup stamped
CSA
. Next to him sat Chappo, whose bronze, broad-cheekboned face showed what his father had looked like as a young man.

As Stuart came up to Geronimo, so did the Apaches’ war leaders: Cochise’s handsome son Naiche (whom half the Confederates called Natchez, that having a more familiar sound to their ears); a clever old man named Nana; and Hoo, a tough veteran. Only gradually had Stuart realized that Geronimo’s influence, despite lurid tales to the contrary, came more from religion than generalship.

Polite greetings used up some time; both the Apaches and the Confederates were ceremonious folk. Then, through Chappo, Geronimo said, “Our scouts have found the perfect canyon for us. We can lead the bluecoats into it, and you can be waiting for them with your rifles and your wagons.”

“Wagons?” That puzzled Stuart. He and Chappo went back and forth for a couple of minutes before he figured out the Indian was talking about artillery. The cannon traveled on wheels; as far as the Apaches were concerned, that made them wagons. When the misunderstanding was cleared up, Stuart nodded. “It is good. Where is this place?”

“Let me see the paper with places on it, and I will show you,” Geronimo said. Stuart drew from his pocket a map of New Mexico Territory and unfolded it. He’d watched Geronimo take in the concept of maps at one big bound. The Apache had gone from complete incomprehension to rapt admiration when he realized what the line of the Southern Pacific (printed complete with little cross ties) represented. From that beginning, he’d made sense of the rest of the symbols in a hurry. Naiche, who could sketch very well himself, also understood maps now. The Apaches weren’t stupid. The more Stuart dealt with them, the clearer that became.

He wished they were, almost as much as Major Sellers did. It would have made his life easier.

Geronimo drew a knife from his belt, to use the tip as a pointer.
“We are here.” He touched it to Tubac with complete confidence. He could not read, but he knew how to make the map in his head, the one a lifetime in these parts had given him, match the map on the paper. “The canyon is here, a little more than halfway to Tucson.” He moved the knifepoint.

“If we are to ambush the bluecoats, we will have to wait there till you have lured them,” Stuart said. “Is there water?” In so much of the Southwest, that was the overriding concern.

“Yes.” Geronimo smiled for a moment: he’d asked the right question. “Two springs close by. Good water, even in summer: not much water, but enough.” He waved around at the Indian encampment. “Some of us will be with you. If it is not as I say, they are men you may kill.”

“Hostages,” Stuart said. Chappo’s lips moved as he repeated the word to himself so he could learn it. Stuart plucked at his beard, considering. The Apaches were short on manpower. They thought a raid where they lost a couple of warriors a misfortune, because the fighters could not easily be replaced. Stuart didn’t think Geronimo would offer hostages unless he was sincere. “We’ll try it,” he said. “My men can ride this afternoon.”