Apache Courage: Trumpets Around the Camp

by Cynthia Hearne Darling

Tom was sick of it all. He knew he should be ashamed of himself for want to have nothing with the wounded warriors in the hospital where he was working as a psychologist. He refused re-enlistment in the Army, accepted a job in, for God's sake in Arizona, on the White Mountain Apache reservation.
His transition to Whiteriver, seat of the White Mountain Apache Tribe, was made within a few weeks when the trailer in which he was to live became available. He suddenly realized he had not taken the time to find out about these people. The mental health department in the Indian Health Hospital was staffed by three women, one of whom seemed resentful of him. Slowly, the patients, some who had been overwhelmed by alcohol and the hardness of their lives, began to trust him.
The hospital set up a tour of the reservation for him with a former tribal chairman who took him first up to Fort Apache. It had a bizarre effect upon him. He could almost feel and hear what it was like when the Cavalry was posted there, chasing Geronimo up and down toward Mexico. He realized, ruefully, that he had not gotten rid of the Army; it was still a part of him. He had been a coward to leave those wounded men.
Strange things began to take place around him, things the Lutheran minister on the reservation called witchcraft. Some of his patients thought that they, too, were suffering from witchcraft. George, his first patient, had suddenly become afraid and was dying. Sheena, paralyzed, believed that someone had put a curse on her. There were puzzling funerals, cryptic remarks, and continual anger from one of his staff.
During all this, he reconnected with a woman stationed at Ft. Huachuca, someone he had known in D.C., but hadn't had the guts to get close to her at the time. She was the best thing that had happened to him in a long time; he hoped he was up to it now.
Then, unexpectedly, someone set a fire next to the door of his trailer. His hands got burned as he tried to put out the fire, the very weekend that Ada from Huachuca was to visit him. After she left, wearing a locket that had belonged to Tom's mother, he received a printed note that had been pushed under his door. The writer said to meet him at Knishbah, an ancient set of stone dwellings lived in hundreds of years ago by a vanished people. The note writer said they know who was casting spells. Tom knew he had to go; he would be a coward again if he did not learn the identity of the person and face him, the one who was causing so much hurt and even death.
Telling only one other person of his plans, he set out at night to the ruins. What confronted him went beyond his imagination. Could he conquor this evil? He was not prepared for what was ahead of him.

249 pages, Kindle Edition

First published May 1, 2014

About the author

Cynthia Hearne Darling has an English degree from the College of William and Mary and master's degrees in social work and public administration. She has worked for the federal government in mental institutions, Indian reservations and the Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. She says it was sometimes hard to tell one agency from another, but she preferred the Indian reservation. It was against this bureaucratic background that her love of writing was reinforced, because of the complete freedom it gave her. She has published Forty-Nine Poems, Shunned:Outcasts in the Land, and she has almost completed Georgetown Journeys, a novel taking place from the 1960's to the present.