Winter Rain (41 page)

Outside he heard the rise of some laughter, a snippet of a song, and knew the men enjoyed themselves here, as they regained their spiritual strength for spring’s coming sojourn into the land of the heathen. From time to time each winter, he regaled his soldiers with flip made with imported rum and John Doyle Lee’s own home-brewed potato beer, the heady concoction flavored with cinnamon and blended with a hot poker.

He turned from smoothing the garments and looked at her reclining there in the soapy water, curls of steam rising from the tub’s still surface, soppy ringlets of her blond hair turned dark, pasted against the side of her face as her eyes watched him approach, then looked away to stare at the ceiling.

Yes, he thought, the Mormon faithful. They would once more respond to a charismatic leader. They could not
fail to respond to his power once he made his play against Young.

As big a man of towering bulk as he was, Usher slipped into the tub with barely a ripple, settling back against the side, where he took up one of her feet and kneaded the sole of it with his thumbs. Her eyelids always fell when he did that—perhaps in some hedonistic response to the sheer pleasure of it, perhaps because she realized what always came next.

After kneading the sole of her other foot, Jubilee brought the woman’s feet together at his groin, stroking his soft underbelly with her wrinkled toes, working the feet downward, ever downward until he had them both pressed around his hardening flesh. Up and down, slowly, deliciously slow he moved her feet along his shaft in that warming womb of soapy water, studying her half-lidded eyes as he brought himself to a full erection.

Most Mormon women were flannel-mouthed and all too often kept their legs locked together so that a man could never have any randy fun for fun’s own sake. But not this one.

He could never think of giving her up.

A year after Jubilee’s army first came to winter in Cedar City, Brigham Young himself had given Usher’s father the directive to forward a message for the elder’s son, in whatever manner he could contact Jubilee:

Little did the Prophet know what needs this woman truly satisfied in Jubilee Usher.

Oh, Young made much of the fact that in February of 1870 Utah had followed Wyoming’s 1869 lead in granting
women full suffrage rights. But in this realm of the Church Empire women served their greatest function not as political tools in the electoral process—but as repositories of future Saints. It was through the woman’s power to conceive, carry, and give birth to babies that the Mormon faithful grew. Evermore were the disembodied spiritual star-seeds required to find earthly, temporal homes among the Latter-day Saints. A woman’s greatest role on this earth, her spiritual gift, lay in giving birth to a baby where would rest another wandering, disembodied soul come home at last to Zion.

What, after all, was more important now? Jubilee wondered. After all these years of building and grooming his army? Should he obey Brigham Young and abandon the woman?

Damn that heretic who had allowed his feet to wander away from the path that led to the throne of Almighty God!

Usher took one of the woman’s hands and wrapped the soft, wrinkled fingers around his oak-hard shaft, holding that hand in both of his as he worked hers up and down, sensing the approach of climax.

Or, Usher thought as he brought himself to full arousal, in the end was he called upon by the Almighty Himself to challenge the false Prophet?

This woman was here of a purpose. And here she would stay.

There would come a day when he had it all: the throne of power in Zion and this woman there beside him.

Closing his eyes as he began to erupt in the warm, soapy water, furiously dragging her hand up and down the length of his hardened flesh, Usher trembled slightly.

She was the only weakness he allowed himself.

His flesh throbbed at the boiling surface of the bath water.

He would kill all who attempted to take her from him.

His heart hammered at his temples.

Jubilee Usher would strip away all obstacles that stood in his road to achieving leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

And he would joyfully kill any man—Prophet or no—who dared separate him from the woman he loved.

Not just kill him … but revel in that man’s destruction.

I
T SEEMED THE
wind had howled for days, the frozen icy snow driven against the crusty side of the buffalo-hide lodge, rattling like hailstones against a hollowed log.

It was February. The heart of winter on the central plains.

She was alone again.

Long before last winter young Pipe Woman had bundled up her few possessions and rode off with Porcupine and his band of Dog Soldiers, heading north into the land of Two Moon and the rest of the wild tribes. It was said Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa and Crazy Horse’s Hunkpatilla Oglalla roamed that land up there. Shell Woman remembered that country from her childhood. With the fondness of those memories, she had allowed her daughter to go with the young Hotamitanyo warriors hurrying north to the last great hunting ground of the roaming bands.

After all, she had reasoned with herself, what else
could she do? No one believed the thin one called Hook would be coming back. Gone more than four winters, with no word of where he was, when he would return. Pipe Woman was growing old waiting for a ghost to return. Reluctantly, with a real pain in the parting, Shell Woman let her daughter go, to roam the north country with the bands wandering in the footprints of the nomadic old ones.

She had not let her daughter see the tears. But that was more than a winter ago and long enough to get over it.

So now she was alone again.

Six sleeps ago Shell Woman had watched her husband ride off to find work, called to the place called Kan-sas by the army, to guide the Bear Coat General.

Outside her lodge the rattling, bare-bones wind was finally dying, like a living creature itself, slowing its raging howl into a keening whine. For a night it had lowed like a snuffling rodent outside the frozen lodge walls. And now the wind whimpered in its last gasps of the blizzard.

Miles: the American name her husband used when he spoke of the soldier chief. Her man had gone off to find work in a faraway place he said was called Kan-sas, where he said the army was preparing to crush the southern tribes. Kiowa. Comanche. And her own people too—the Shahiyena. All those who would not come back in to register themselves on the reservations staked out for them in Indian Territory. It was common knowledge that many bands had never ventured in to the reservations, had vowed they never would.

The army knew they were out there raiding, stealing, killing—kidnapping again. And the Bear Coat General was gathering his warriors to take up the war road against the southern tribes one last time. He needed scouts: eyes and ears and noses—wolves to track the scent of his enemy, the warrior bands.

Her man, the one her people had named Rising Fire, had held her body close against his through that last long
winter night before riding off of a cold gray dawn that grew no brighter for Shell Woman.

For the most part he hadn’t left her side ever since that autumn day four winters ago when he returned to her camp in the shady copse of trees where she had raised her lodge. Already the cottonwood had begun changing, going to gold when the man named Sweete had come riding slowly into her camp where she waited, there near the soldier fort called Laramie. He had an extra pony with him: a gift for High-Backed Bull’s mother that he said came from Porcupine.

“Why does Porcupine send me a gift of this pony?” she had asked the big white man who stood over her, reaching to take her in his arms.

In his eyes Shell Woman had seen the answer.

Through the days of her grief that followed, time and again her husband repeated the story. Telling and retelling the details to give them permanence in the heart of Shell Woman. It was there in the heart of a mother that High-Backed Bull would live on.

It was the scars she touched now, running her callused fingertips slowly, gently over the long, stiffened worms of discolored flesh that laddered up the length of her arms the way the ancient rivers made a lattice across the great plains on their relentless march to the big water she had only heard stories of, but had never seen. In time her hair had grown after she hacked off the long braids in mourning the loss of one born of her womb. Now it hung nearly gray, streaked with the iron of more and more snow come every winter. So old now, she thought—and never would she see the children her son might have fathered.

Had he not hated his own blood. His own father.

Shell Woman lay back down; resting her head on an arm, and closed her eyes. Time enough to venture into the cold for more firewood. Enough left there by the door if she was frugal—for she ate so little anymore. And if she stayed
wrapped in her buffalo robe, she would not need to keep a big fire burning day and night like those in other lodges. Only what was needed to drive most of the frost from the inside of the dewcloth.

Time enough to look outside at the world. She had seen many, many snows in her lifetime—remembering how it was to be a child and push aside the hide door flap after a blizzard, to gaze outside happily at the dazzlingly white world that’ stretched pristine and unbroken clear to the horizon in all directions. Overhead would dome the inside of that virginal blue bowl, so close and pure that she was sure this was how the world must have looked the day after the Everywhere Spirit had created all things.

A world not yet marred by the tracks of man nor disturbed by the passing of animals—it was so new it made her heart ache looking at it. Beneath that white blanket of winter’s might lay the renewal of life that throbbed in the endless flow of the seasons.

And now she chose to lie here instead of going out to look upon the new world. Shell Woman had seen it before. Instead, she would sleep and think about the renewal of the world another time.

Outside, the commotion of the loafer camp told her the others were moving about. Poking her head from beneath the robe, Shell Woman saw her breath in the murky darkness of her lodge. With the door flap closed and the smoke flaps laid one over the other, little light penetrated the thick, smoke-cured buffalo hides. From the texture of the sky above and quality of what light snaked in at the top fan of lodgepoles, she knew it must be late afternoon. That meant she had slept again for more than a day without waking.

A night and another day come and gone.

She heard voices of women and children, the yips of camp dogs, and occasionally the sound of young men. Burnt Thigh of Spotted Tail’s clan: these people who
hugged close to the soldier fort at Laramie. They were Lakota words, and most she understood.

“Shell Woman.”

The scratch came at the antelope hide over the lodge entrance. After a moment they called out her name again. It was a voice she had not heard before. And it spoke to her in her own tongue: Shahiyena.

Though she did not allow herself to hope, she had to ask, anyway. “Rising Fire?”

“No, Shell Woman,” the man answered. “It is Porcupine.”

“Is Pipe Woman with you?”

“No. Your daughter did not come south with us.”

Her heart cracked, as did her voice when she replied, “Come … come in.”

The setting sun’s light seeped in through the east-facing lodge door as the warrior pulled back the stiffened antelope hide and stepped into the dark interior. She sat up, clutching the buffalo robe to her with a cold shudder.

“Porcupine,” she said, a smile adding its light to her face. “It is good to see you. The rest? They come with you?”

He wagged his head and came to sit at her left hand. “No. Not all. A few rode with me. To see family. Visit old friends.”

“The storm.”

“Yes,” he replied, and smiled. “The skies were very angry for many days, weren’t they? We waited them out at the forks of a stream a day’s ride west of here. Had to kill one of our ponies for food. But we kept warm, and out of the wind. And our bellies were full enough that we sang and told stories and made fun of one another.”

“Young men,” she said with a sigh.

“You are all right?” he asked, his eyes falling to the cold ash mound in the fire pit.

“I am well. Warm and fed.”

His eyes bounded over the dewcloth rope strung the circumference of the lodge, in search of what might hang from it. “Is the white man here?”

Her eyes dropped from his as she answered. “Six … no, seven suns now. He went to …” Then Shell Woman decided not to say any more about her husband to the warrior. That they fought, she knew. That these two had clashed at the springs where Tall Bull’s village had been destroyed—that much was certain. But she had vowed not to let either of them put her between her people and her husband.

“Yes. I see,” Porcupine replied. “The army is thinking of marching again. It is no secret.”

“You have been fighting?”

“Not since last summer—far to the north on the Elk River.
^*
The pony-soldier chief called Yellow Hair by the Shahiyena, he led his warriors along the river for a long time while the days grew hot.”

“Yellow Hair. The same who rode into Black Kettle’s camp on the Washita?”

“The same,” he answered. “My small numbers joined Crazy Horse, Gall, and others as we followed the pony soldiers and the ones they escorted. The Lakota grow very angry, for it appears the white man will bring the tracks for his smoking horse across those northern lands.”

“Will the Lakota stop the white man?”

“With the help of the Shahiyena, they will stop the white man for ail time.”

“You scared the soldiers off?”

“Yes—I think we drove them off, back to the east they fled.”

“For now, Porcupine,” she sighed. “The day is coming when—”