Geronimo's Laptop, Chapter 2, I Have Three Wives!
Historical fantasy/humor. Available now in paperback and soon on Kindle. ISBN #978-0-9855400-9-8 Available soon in paperback and later, on Kindle.
Chapter 2. I Have Three Wives!
Dear Big Nose, I’m using Lt. Scott’s laptop while he’s away. Today, I’m going to explain the translation app to my visitors. It’s lots of fun for everyone, young or old. It has given me an idea: maybe I should send out some messages to you in French, German, Italian, and Canadian. Maybe I can’t find you because you’ve moved out of the country!
^ Geronimo
^^^
When they hear a wagonload of people coming down the road to visit with Geronimo, Naiche hurries through the house made from scrap wood and out the backdoor to go check on their herd while Ziyeh goes to the kitchen sink to begin cutting slices of watermelon to serve to their guests. By the time the horses and carriages round the corner, Geronimo is there to greet them.
“Anzhoo! I am happy to see you. Please come and sit with me under my shady ramada.” While everyone is getting comfortable, Geronimo casually asks, “How many of you speak Apache?” Of course, Geronimo knows it is unlikely any of them speak an Indian language.
In the front of the group, he notices a freckled little boy about seven who looks as if he’s heard every one of Killer Geronimo’s exploits. The expression on his face makes Geronimo think he might be having a fight-or-flight moment. Fear is something he has often witnessed in his lifetime, so he’s not unfamiliar with it. “How about you?” Geronimo asks gently, to keep from frightening the child. The youngster tentatively shakes his head no.
“Don’t worry,” Geronimo says with a grin, “I travel a lot and I’ve picked up enough English to get us by. Also, I have a nephew, Daklugie, who went to Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania, and he reads and speaks English. He helps me when I need to know how to say something not in Apache, and I remember real good. So, we’ll be fine.” He pats the boy’s head before he runs back to his mother.
“I know it’s hot,” Geronimo says to the men and women. “One of my wives, Ziyeh, is in the kitchen cutting us some watermelon.” Geronimo sees questions in the women’s eyes and continues. “Right now, at Fort Sill, I have three wives.” Geronimo loves to see the shock in white women’s eyes when they hear him talk about multiple wives. It’s also a good way to start their visit. He knows from experience his having many wives is on their minds because it's in all the books and articles printed about him. Best to get the question out of the way in the beginning. As always, men elbow each other in the ribs and whisper in each other’s ears.
“As a leader, I’m entitled,” he explains. “Besides, if I didn’t take them in, where would they go? How would they eat? They’d have no home! A lot of our men got killed when we fought the soldiers and settlers, leaving our women and children with no protection.”
“Where are your other wives now?” asks a woman who is obviously stressed about Geronimo’s multiple wives.
“They are here on the reservation somewhere. They don’t like me very much, so they don’t hang around.” Quickly, not wanting to dwell on that particular aspect of his life, he adds, “I was even married to Francisco for a short while. Some people call her Francesca. Mangus, another Apache, was married to her back when people called her Huera. I don’t know why she has so many names. Maybe because she’s so famous. Almost as famous as Geronimo. I’m not kidding!” The surprised look on his visitors’ faces tickles him.
“Almost everyone here on the reservation knows the story of Huera. She’s an Apache who, along with some of her friends, was being held as a slave in Mexico. They didn’t like it there; Apaches are too strong-willed to make good slaves. They wanted to come home so Francisco planned an escape. She was a smart woman; she knew a lot about plants.
“She planned to escape when the cactus was in fruit, so they’d have something to eat on the way home. The women had a hard time during their trip home. They had no shoes, so their feet were bloody. All they had to protect themselves was a few butcher knives they had stolen from farmers who had driven them to work so hard in the fields. When they stopped to rest at night, they’d gather a big clump of prairie grass and tie it at the top to make a little hut—the grass is over five feet tall out there on the prairie, you know—then they’d crawl inside it, make a small fire, and rest.
“The Mexicans could never find them but one night, a cougar did. I’m thinking he smelled their bloody feet. He was huge! The big cat jumped onto the top of their shelter, fell through, and landed right on top of them. Then he attacked Francisco and began to carry her off. He tried to bite her on the neck, but she kept her hands around her throat to protect it. She was so busy saving her neck that she couldn’t get to her butcher knife. When she finally reached it, she stabbed the cougar over and over, but it wouldn’t stop attacking her. It ripped off her face and chewed her up real good. At last, her friends got over their shock and were able to help her. It took all of them to kill that big cat. Francisco lived but she is scarred all over, especially on her face.
“Poor thing. No one wanted to be married to her except Mangus, who was the son of Mangus-Coloradas, head chief of the Chiricahua Apaches at the time. But Mangus only wanted her because he liked the way she made tiswin, a kind of beer we make from corn. It’s not as strong as army beer, and I think it explains one of the reasons we have so much trouble with drunkenness when we drink soldiers’ beer.
“Huera, or Francisco, had nothing but trouble with Mangus. She did all the work to make the tiswin Mangus wanted. She loosened the soil, planted the seed, hauled water to the plants in the hot sun, and took care of the corn until it was time to harvest it. She even picked the corn with no help from Mangus. Then, all by herself, she fermented the corn into tiswin. When it was finished, Mangus sold it and kept all of the money. Well, that was the final straw for Francisco. She’d already had more than her share of trouble from that cougar; she was in no mood to be taken advantage of by Mangus.
After she left him, I thought she was brave and deserved a husband, so I married her. It didn’t last long though,” he laughs, “She didn’t like my drinking. Sometimes, I didn’t know whether I was married to Francisco or the cougar she killed. But we’re still friends and my other wives like her, too.”
“How many wives have you had, Geronimo?” one of the men asks.
“They say I’ve had about nine wives. I can’t even remember most of their names.”
“About n-n-nine wives?” a stunned woman stammers.
“You have to understand,” Geronimo answers, “Apache marriages are not like yours. We were on the run from the American and Mexican armies, so we had no time for romance. When a woman’s man was killed, another warrior simply stood beside her and said they were married. These were marriages for survival. No records were kept because what would be the point? Either or both of them could be killed during the next raid.
“Divorce is the same way. Simple. No need for lawyers. If a man comes home and finds a bundle of his belongings outside the tepee, he knows he’s divorced. The only thing for him to do is to grab his stuff and go find another wife.” The idea of a surprised Indian walking away from his tepee carrying his possessions in a bundle under his arm makes the men laugh.
He adds, “All the tribes have lost many men because of war, and their warriors have married their widows so they’d have someone to protect them. Quanah has had seven wives so far. If you see him during your visit, say hello. He’s easy to recognize because he’s tall and always wears a three-piece suit like he’s on his way to a funeral. His mother was a white woman so maybe his white blood let him adapt easily to the white man’s way of doing things. He even serves on the Lawton Board of Education, so he loves to talk like all those politicians do.”
Geronimo hears a murmur in the crowd. “You want to know how a Comanche chief had a white mother? Well, Cynthia Ann Parker, Quanah’s mother, also known as Naduah, which means Someone Found or Keeps Warm With Us, was captured by a band of Comanches around 1825 when she was about ten years old. She lived with the Comanches for twenty-four years. When she was grown, she married Quanah’s father, Chief Peta Nacona, and had three children with him. They were very happy, but one day, Texas Rangers out on patrol came across the Comanche’s camp. When one of them saw Naduah, they insisted she had to let them take her home to her parents.
“She’d been away so long, she had forgotten all she had ever known about her mother and father and her first life. She begged the Texas Rangers to let her stay with her husband, Nacona, but maybe the rangers wanted to collect the reward for finding her because they wouldn’t leave her alone.
“Finally, the only way they could get Naduah to come with them was to let her bring her daughter, Blossom. Once the rangers dragged her back home, she discovered her white family had forgotten her and wasn’t at all glad to have her back because they thought her having been married to an Indian brought shame to the family. The white women wouldn’t talk to her; they just talked about her behind her back.
“Even Blossom was never accepted by the other children. If she tried to play with them, they’d call her names and push her around. Day after day, Naduah and Blossom constantly cried for their real home with the Comanches. Things got worse and the two couldn’t stand being constantly scorned anymore. At least once, they tried to run away but were caught and brought back. Why didn’t they just let them go?” Geronimo angrily asked with clenched fists.
“They finally stopped eating and quietly talked and sang only to themselves in their Comanche language. It’s tempting to say their crying made their situation worse, but there was never anything they could have done to make them acceptable to the white community. Even if they’d stopped crying and put on white women’s clothing, their hearts were Comanche. The whites would never forgive Naduah for living with an Indian and having his children.
“So, white men couldn’t accept her as she was, and Naduah resented them for taking her away from her Indian family. It was years too late for her rescue. She had become a Comanche, through and through. She finally died of influenza in 1870 after Blossom got sick and passed away, crushing the last piece of Naduah’s broken heart.
With tears in his eyes, Geronimo looked at his visitors, “You know, after a few years, no one in the town could even remember where they were buried! The family vaguely remembered burying the two somewhere outside the main cemetery over a barbed wire fence where there were lots of weeds. They were buried in the weeds! The pitiful paper markers they’d placed on the graves fell apart during the first winter.”
There isn’t a dry eye in the group. What kind of people could never forgive one of their own even in death? they wondered.
“So, in the end, Naduah lost everything and everyone she loved. I don’t know when the Comanches discovered Naduah and Blossom had died, but I’m sure they grieved over their passing. Chief Peta Nacona never remarried although it was traditional for chieftains to do so. There were three broken hearts when the Texas Rangers took Nadua and Blossom away. Why didn’t the white men just bring Naduah and her daughter back to the Comanches if they didn’t want them? What did they prove by keeping the two against their will when they could see how miserable they were?” Even Geronimo is weeping by the end of the story.
“But not all mixed-color marriages end so badly. For instance, Ziyeh is part white and was raised by her white family. For some reason, she won’t talk about her unhappy childhood, even to me. Don’t mention it to her,” Geronimo cautions the women when he hears murmurs among the women. “No Texas Rangers have ever come looking for her to make her go home to her original family.” Almost with a chuckle, he adds, “Maybe, even if those Texas Rangers knew we were here, so close to Texas, they’d be too smart to mess with Geronimo and Naiche! I think even Quanah would help us if we needed him!” He looks toward the house with affection. “She doesn’t seem to miss her first family. She and I have raised her son, Fenton, and we have had two children together. I don’t know what I’d do without her.”
Geronimo decides he has to lighten the group’s mood, so he leans over his laptop and the visitors gather around him as he draws their attention to the strange gadget he is fooling with. “Right now, I’m building a page on the Indian social network called WeSquawk. So far, I’m the only one doing it around here. Not even Quanah knows about it. If you ask him, he’ll say a laptop is some place for kids to sit. Shh! Don’t tell him. He thinks he’s such a big shot he’ll probably want one too. The problem is, he won’t do anything with it except make out a powwow schedule. Who needs a laptop to announce a powwow? There’s a powwow almost every night around here. Just follow the drums! We all love to dance!
When we’re happy, we dance!
When we’re sad, we dance!
When we’re going to war, we dance!
When we come back, we dance!”
Geronimo has such a friendly demeanor a little girl about six wearing her Sunday best and a head full of pink ribbons, crawls up on Geronimo’s lap, looks at the screen real close, and politely says, “But, Mr. Geronimo, I know my letters and what you’re writing doesn’t look like anything I’ve ever seen before.”
“That’s because I have an app on this computer so I can write in Apache,” he says as he smiles at the curious child.
“What’s an app?”
Geronimo looks at the silver apple on the outside of the lid and says, “I dunno. I think it’s something made from apples.”
Geronimo finishes his message. “Then, when I’m ready to post, I just click a button and the laptop people have a translation service that people all over the world can use and it will instantly translate it for them in any language the reader wants. I even have a few readers in France!” He playfully tugs one of the little girl’s pigtails and asks, “Parlez vous Francais?” The little girl giggles.