Authors: Terry C. Johnston
Then he thought to remind her, “You won’t earn this kind of money in a week. In a month. Will you?”
Reluctantly, the whore shook her head, clutching her daughter ever tighter. “I … I am not sure I should—”
Dragging out another single eagle, Jonah told her with a low, even voice, “All right, I’ll give you the two of them. For that dress your daughter wears. With this you can buy her, and yourself, many dresses now.”
She swallowed, as if something dry and unforgiving were lodged in her throat, then reached out for the two shiny coins.
Jonah pulled them back, just out of reach—tantalizing. “But first, you tell me if there are any comancheros in this village.”
Her brow knitted in concern.
“Sí.”
She nodded. “There are a few. Why do you—”
“Good.” He glanced at Two Sleep, seeing the interest there lighting the Shoshone’s face. “Now we are making ground. I think you got this dress from one of the comancheros, yes?”
She nodded again. “Yes.”
“Take it off your daughter and give it to me.”
“I have … don’t have nothing else to put her in. Not another dress.”
“Put her coat on her now and give me the dress … that shirt.”
As her eyes fell away, the woman sought to apologize. “Yes,
Señor
—it is a shirt. The only thing I could afford when the comancheros bring clothing to sell.”
As she set the girl on the hearth beside the fire and took up the threadbare coat, preparing to pull the thin, faded garment from the child’s skinny frame, the woman gazed up at Hook, her eyes pleading. “You are really … really going to give us those coins?”
“Yes,” he answered, holding them out to her. “I am an honest man. I will never steal from a mother. Never would I steal from a child.”
As she pulled the garment over her daughter’s head and quickly put the thin coat on the child, Jonah felt Two Sleep step up beside him in the firelight. Hook asked the woman, “How do the comancheros have clothing to sell?”
Her eyes went to the floor again as she rose and handed him the limp, much-washed shirting. “It was so dirty when I bought it. But I knew it was big enough, it would fit her for some time to come.”
He pressed the two coins into her hand. “How did the comancheros have this?”
With abject apology in her eyes, the woman looked up from the coins in her palm and replied, “They take the clothing from the American children they buy from the Comancherias.”
His mouth went dry, his tongue almost pasty, slow and clumsy to move of a sudden. “Where did the comancheros go with the child who wore this?” He held its faded shadows out before him, as if beckoning for her to answer.
Instead, she shook her head, her lips trembling. “Please,
Señor.
Take that and go. Give me your money, or no. But just go.”
Jonah took a step closer to her, towering over the small woman now. “I will go, but only when I have your answer. Where did the comancheros take the child who wore this shirt?”
Again she shook her head, gazing up at his face, her eyes swimming with tears, imploring him, her words coming hard. “There was no … no child. Only this.” She touched the garment, then knotted her hands in the front of her chemise, beginning to sob. “I think I know now why you came here. To our village.”
He was slow putting it into order in his mind. “You are telling me you don’t know of the child the comancheros took this from? The child who wore this shirt?”
“All I know,” she answered, dragging a hand beneath her nose, “I heard them tell a story that they had bought that with some other clothes from a band of Comancheria.” She pointed. “To the north in the forbidden land where the comancheros go to trade with the Indians.”
“Wait,” he said angrily, confused. “You are telling me there was no child sold to the comancheros? Only the shirt?”
She nodded, her eyes fluttering to the old Indian before she answered. “That is right. The story the Comancheria told the traders was that their warriors had
killed another band of bad comancheros—distrusted ones—then the Indians took the white children from the traders they killed. When the children outgrew the clothing, the Comancheria decided to trade it to other comancheros, as they did with other things the traders wanted.”
“Did the traders say … did anyone say anything about the children? How old they were? Boys?”
She wagged her head in resignation. “Nothing like that,
Señor.”
“All right,” Jonah finally said, his tone softened now. Looking quickly at Two Sleep, he said in English, “We got a fresh trail to follow now, my friend.”
When the Shoshone had nodded, Hook turned back to the woman. He reached for her hand and laid another gleaming coin in the charcoal-stained palm. Then spoke in Spanish, “I have been waiting a long time to give this money to someone who can help me find someone I love.”
Her damp eyes filled to brimming as her lips sought words, but found none.
Folding her fingers over the three coins, Jonah continued, “Buy your children clothes to wear. Fill their bellies and keep them warm, woman. It matters not what you do to feed them—for there is no shame in doing what you must in caring for your children.”
Her face filled with hope. “You … will you ever come back,
Señor?”
He shrugged. “It is not likely that I will ever ride this way again.” Looking quickly at the infant asleep on the bed, at the young daughter clutching her mother’s leg, Jonah spoke. “I never asked you: is your youngest another girl?”
She shook her head. “No. He is a boy.”
With a single nod Hook turned, went to the doorway. In opening it, Two Sleep slipped out into the drizzling rain of that gray spring morning. The breeze freshened, tossing
a shaft of rain onto the pounded clay floor at the portal. Jonah turned to the woman, sensing suddenly the warmth on one side of his body beckoning from the little hut with its fireplace and family within. On the other side he sensed the cold already clutching for him, ready to embrace him fully—the rain ready to swallow him on the shelterless plains, leading him on a joyless trail as he shivered in the saddle, on to fireless camps and curling up in soggy wool blankets, fighting off the nightmares that he knew were now to return.
Now that he had a fresh trail to follow. Now that he knew his own flesh and blood had not been sold into slavery by the comancheros.
Now that Jonah Hook knew part of his family might still be alive … among the Comanche.
“Take care of them both,” he told her softly as he stood there framed in the tiny doorway, half-warm, the other half of him grown suddenly cold in the leave-taking. “Your girl … and the boy. They are both, both so very special. Watch over them, as God would watch over them in your absence.”
A gust of wind followed his prayer into that tiny mud hut as Jonah Hook closed the door, turning into the lancing sheets of rain.
Hurrying into the cold once more.
“T
HE DRESS. WHAT
of that dress?”
When the Shoshone first asked Jonah that question, Hook hadn’t looked back at the Indian. Instead, he sat there in the shadows of their cheerless camp that first night riding north toward the land of the Comanche, surrounded by the immense prairie and soggy darkness, hulking buttes rising like ominous shadows against the sodden, seeping sky. Theirs had been a hard ride pointing their noses into that forbidden country, a long day of hardly ten words spoken between them after saddling and dragging their pack animals out of the tiny, nameless village in southwest Texas.
All day they had watched low black clouds swirling out of the west like smoke off a greasewood fire, and now the rain fell from gray sky gone mushy with twilight. Just before they had been forced to make camp, the wind came up, spitting a thin, driving rain between its snapping teeth.
With night coming down, that wind became an ugly thing on these southern plains, whistling and whining like death’s own hollow bones.
Hook sighed quietly. “It weren’t a dress, Injun.”
“Did not look like no dress,” Two Sleep replied, wagging his head as he tried to sound out his best English. “A shirt, yes.”
Finally, Jonah nodded. “A boy’s shirt.”
“Sure it your boy’s?”
Staring into the icy darkness of that sodden, moonless night, watching the grayish, ghostly curl of his own breathsmoke rise before his face, Jonah explained, “That shirt may be faded and old, for certain. But I knowed right off from the way the front placket was sewed that Gritta made it. Never in my days did I see another like it. The woman’s mother taught her to sew like that. Only folks in all the Shenandoah. But not just that—it were the cloth of it too. Gritta made our children clothes from her old worn-out dresses. That woman never let anything go to waste. Not Gritta.”
“You sure, I trust you,” Two Sleep replied.
“It ain’t just a matter of you trusting me.” Then Jonah wagged his head, saying, “Besides, until I looked back of the collar, I couldn’t be absolute certain it come from one of my boys.”
Two Sleep reached up to tap the back of his own shirt. “Collar?”
“Gritta sewed the boys’ names in their shirts. I imagine it were handed down from the older boy to his brother.”
“What name you see in the collar?”
“Ezekiel. That’s my youngest. Ezekiel Hook.”
But as he spoke his son’s name, Jonah sensed again that unrequited pang of doubt. The gnaw of something so tangible it felt real. Yet there was nothing to fight, nothing to grapple with, nothing he could get his hands on so as to settle the doubt then and there.
Little Zeke hadn’t been much older than the Mexican whore’s daughter when Jonah last saw him, when Jonah marched off with Sterling Price’s volunteers to drive the Yankee army back north. Three years old was all he had been. Only six when he was taken from his home by Usher and his gunmen.
Like old Seth would chaw on a big bone, Jonah worked over it in his mind, scratching hard for an image of the boy, trying to see how he just might age that mental picture of Zeke he had been carrying so that when the time came, he would recognize his own son: older, taller, filling out as boys always did.
What was it John Bell Hood’s old soldier had told him? Was it really eighteen and seventy-three already? If Zeke was born in the spring of fifty-nine, that would mean Jonah’s youngest was already fourteen. A time to set aside childhood things, time to take up the mantle of a man.
And Jeremiah. A dim, wispy portrait of his eldest son swam before him in that frosty darkness by their smoky fire. He was two years older than Zeke. Sixteen now and almost a full-growed man. Would either of his boys know him as their daddy?
What pierced him with all the more pain was his own self-doubt. Would he recognize his own sons, the flesh and blood of his own body, when at last the time came to find them? So many, many years gone. So much doubt lay waiting there in the cold darkness, enough to make him wonder if the time ever would come to find them both.
Huddled beneath his cold, wet blanket steaming beside the fire, Jonah counted off the years on his fingers. Eight of them gone. That meant Jeremiah had spent half of his life with the Comanche. Even more than half of little Zeke’s life was with the savages.
It had been even longer since last he had laid eyes on his boys. An eternity since they had last known their father.
His eyes grew hot despite the cold drizzle of earlyspring
rain come to bring its resurrection to this winter-starved southern prairie, here on the precipice of what many had called the most dangerous country in the whole of the continent.
His lips moving silently within the dark curl of his beard, Jonah cursed this land for granting these poor people so little of life that they fell easy prey for the
ricos.
And he cursed the rich ones who funded the expeditions into the land of the Comanche that traded in human misery.
The wealthy hired the poor wastrels—turning them into drivers, wagon packers, cooks, guards, and even gun handlers for the dangerous plunge into enemy territory, the last two brought along as some minimal insurance against the terror of what lay ahead in Comancheria. In this land blessed with little hope, between the poverty of Mexico and the far edge of nowhere, a
rico
could buy what and who he wanted to put together his wagon train bound for Indian country, and not only buy the services of a man who might want nothing more than to earn enough to feed his family for one more season—the
rico
bought as well that poor man himself, body and soul.
Many times, Jonah had learned, the poor and expendable hadn’t returned from Comancheria. No matter to the
ricos
, though. There were always a dozen or more out there, each one eager to step into those empty tracks and embark on the next trip out come trading season.
When he thought on it, Jonah had to admit he really knew little more than he had four or five years ago. Only now Jonah was certain that the boys were not among those Mexicans—they were held by a band of Comanche. Every bit as bewildering, perhaps, as looking for a particular outfit of comanchero traders was looking across this trackless waste for the comings and goings of a particular band of horse Indians. True, he had learned to track and read sign, to tell if he was following a village on the move
fleeing soldiers or a war party riding out to avenge themselves on far-flung settlements.
Later that spring Jonah finally admitted to himself that he did not know how to find any one single band of the Comanche.
Spring slipped into the first warming days of early summer as they left Fort Concho and crossed the Rio Colorado, moving north for the headwaters of the Brazos. The two were traveling lighter now, trading a Danite saddle if they could, a belt gun if they had to, to buy beans and bacon, flour and coffee, along with those twists and plugs of tobacco gone black as sorghum molasses in the tin cases sutlers opened for smoke-hungry travelers come in from the sun and the dust of the western prairie.
The Fort Concho trader had eyed Jonah’s rifle with envy as he stacked the horseman’s provisions on the counter to begin his total. He was a pie-faced man of simple features, most certainly a face nothing usually happened to. “That a sixty-six Winchester, ain’t it?”