Winter Rain (43 page)

He had wished he remembered more of the words he should have said over the shallow grave he dug there beside the twisted tracks. Words of love and forgiveness and everlasting peace. But in the past seven years since his cousin’s death, Jonah had come to realize all the more that he knew very, very little of love and forgiveness. And had long ago come to the conclusion he would likely never know a damned thing of everlasting peace.

Pushing on into autumn Jonah and Two Sleep had reached Fort Sill. They spent time among the bands gathered at the Kiowa and Comanche agency. Talking with Indian agent James Haworth, they picked the man’s brain for all that Jonah hoped to learn. In the end they saw a handful of white children waiting to be claimed, were shown crinkled daguerreotypes of others—pictures that had been taken by a photographer out of Topeka, photographs to be circulated among the forts and towns of Kansas in hopes that relatives might come to claim these orphans of the Indian war.

As much as Jonah wanted any of those boys to be his, as much as he strained and squinted, trying to make those dim, sepia-toned tintypes into something he might recognize, he finally had to admit he had come up with a busted flush again. What hurt even more was his growing fear that in the end he would never recognize his grown-up boys, even if by that unadulterated God-ordained miracle he ever came across Jeremiah and Ezekiel.

In taking his leave from the Kiowa-Comanche agency, Jonah stopped for a moment with Haworth outside the door of the small clapboard shack topped by a hip roof that served as the agent’s office. A few yards away on a patch of bare ground, a young man was using a long branch
to pick up dirty, greasy clothing. Those worn and torn garments were fed to a smoky fire, one at a time. Jonah watched as britches and shirts, pantaloons and dresses, coats and even Indian clothing, were fed onto the smoldering, smoky flames.

“What’s he doing?” Hook asked Haworth.

“The children’s clothes.”

“You burn what they got to wear?”

“We give the recaptured children a bath, cut their hair, and purge them of the body lice before we give them new clothes donated by Friends back east.”

Hook’s eyes narrowed as he turned away from the fire. “Your work should give you satisfaction, Mr. Haworth. What you do makes these poor children white again.”

The agent wagged his head. “Not so simple as that, Mr. Hook. Some of these young wretches will live with their horrors the balance of their natural lives.”

“And the rest?”

He tried a smile. “They’ll do fine. Just a matter of getting them back to their own people.”

Jonah turned his back on the fire and asked, “How about a child, took when he was five or six?”

Haworth tried to put a cheerful face on it, but it turned out to be nothing more than a wan smile. “Who is to say?” And he shrugged.

“No,” Jonah forced the question. “I want to know. What are the chances?”

The agent’s face went as gray as old oatmeal. “Perhaps that child will heal in time. Any younger, a child—well, it depends on how long the child is held by his captors. Still …”

“Still … what, Mr. Haworth?”

“Any younger than that, Mr. Hook—truth is, I’m afraid there is little hope of fully recovering the child to a life among a God-fearing white culture.”

He turned back to watch the fire, watch the smudge of
smoke rise among the trees losing their autumn-tinged leaves that chilly afternoon. Finally he asked, “So where does a man go from here?”

“You might move north. To Anadarko on the Washita. If you find no help there, you can check with John Miles, agent at the Darlington Agency up on the Canadian.”

“What tribe?”

“Cheyenne, Mr. Hook.”

“I know something of the Cheyenne,” he replied too quietly, two fingers brushing the long scar at his hairline where a warrior’s bullet had grazed him seven long years gone. Then he stared directly at the agent, saying, “These Indians will never make farmers, Mr. Haworth. Scratching at the ground is something for the white man who wants to dig like a burrow mouse.”

“I must still try, Mr. Hook. Like you, I must keep on trying.” Haworth held out his hand, hope in his eyes. “I wish you God’s speed in your search.”

Perhaps it would have been better if they had never tried Anadarko and Darlington. About that time another Christmas passed and with it his unenthusiastic greeting of another new year. Just a waste of time. Slowly they made their way through each camp dotting the two agencies, looking, talking in sign with those who would talk. For the most part, the old men stood around their lodges as Jonah and Two Sleep came through, old men who talked in furtive whispers with their heads bent together. Jonah thought of those on the free prairies to the north when he looked at these beaten people. These old warriors so much like gaunt prairie wolves caught and trapped in this cage—grown suspicious, cautious, anxious, and frightened of the white man who holds their spirits prisoner. Yet saddest of all were the starving, sunken-cheeked children peering up at the two horsemen, each one in his ill-fitted, cast-off clothing from a benevolent white society back east.

He talked as best he could with the old men who did
not turn away when he made sign, asking them about two boys—one who soon would be fifteen, and the other seventeen. And as he talked with the old warriors gathered around smudgy fires on those cold early-winter days, a piece of Jonah’s mind snagged on a thought the way a man’s coat might catch on a nail worked loose from barn wood by the torment of the wind: these were no longer boys he was looking for. They were young men now. Going on a dozen years since he walked away down that narrow, rutted lane, stopping to turn one last time and wave back at those three children and their mother, before he marched off to fight the war. A war he had yet to come home from.

He hated these Cheyenne and Kiowa, hated them even more for what they kept hidden behind their unmoving, gaunt faces and the hollow looks in their black, sunken eyes. Hated them for ever riding with the Comanche. He hated them most for giving up and coming in to feed their families on the infested flour and moldy salt pork now that the buffalo were disappearing from the southern plains. In those cloudy, angry eyes and sullen faces Jonah caught a glimpse of himself—like dark light sliding off a broken shard of mirror.

In their eyes he saw the hopelessness that grew daily inside his own breast. Their hopelessness now become a way of life. His, a hopelessness for two boys and their mother. In reality no less a way of life for Jonah Hook.

In late January he raked off his chips and turned their trail south once more, back across the Red River to Fort Richardson. From there he planned to strike out to the northwest, pointing into the deepest reaches of the Llano Estacado. A land where the trickles of rainfall grew and gathered into creeks and streams and then the meandering forks of the great rivers like the spreading of a great many-fingered hand. Among those canyons and austere, sere-colored bluffs Jonah Hook decided he would stake himself one last turn of the cards.

And came up with a hand that would not force him to fold.

“You a resident of the state of Texas?”

Hook looked at the tall, skeletal old man who had asked him the question. The skin fell in folds over the gaunt cheeks, dark rings of sleeplessness gouging liver-colored pockets below the eyes lit with some distant, yet bright inquisitional fire. His white mustache and much of his chin whiskers were yellow, stained with dribbles of tobacco juice. His clothes seemed of the wrong size, too big for the bony frame—yet there was a sinewy strength and assurance about the elder one, something that gave an intangible bulk to his otherwise wispy stance: that aura of rock-solid resolution there in the jut of his jaw, that and the butt of the big Walker Colt’s pistol that rode in front of the man’s left hip as if it hung there from birth.

“Missouri.”

“If I get this right—you’re telling us you’d join up just to hunt Comanche?” asked the second man at the table, a civilian as well.

He was younger than the first, clean-shaven except for the bushy black mustache that fell from the severe crimp of his face to hide his lower lip. The tip of his tongue repeatedly combed the long brush aside as the man gave voice to the deep concerns seen in his blue eyes. They were as blue as a good trout hole, all tracked up with crinkles that made him seem real sociable.

“I would. You’re hunting Comanche I was told.”

The younger of the two flicked his trout-hole eyes at his partner. “This company is commissioned to keep the peace, Mr. Hook. We don’t set out a’purpose to hunt down Comanche. If they are raiders—we’ll follow their trail wherever it leads.”

“Out there,” Jonah asked, pointing. “To the Staked Plain.”

The old man nodded his gray head, his face so old and
creased, it looked like a frost-bitten apple. “We go to that savage land on the trail of the heathens, and snag the feet of murderers if God so wills it.”

“Then I want to join.”

The younger one quickly eyed Two Sleep. “I’m not so sure we can use you.”

“But you said you needed men—any man who could use a gun.”

The civilian nodded, his blue eyes squinted as if they perpetually squinted against the high plains sun and wind. “True, that’s what I said and I stand by it. I must recruit where I can, Mr. Hook. If that means to take our fighters from the watering holes and the knocking shops here across the way from Fort Richardson, so be it.”

“Poxy sluts,” the old man grumbled miserably, “sluts what don’t know nothing but how to prop a man up for minutes at a time.”

The younger one stared at Two Sleep, as if studying the Indian. “Deacon—we’ll recruit where we can.”

“Told you—I want to join,” Jonah repeated.

“And the Indian?” asked the younger, eyeing Two Sleep again.

“He’ll ride with me.”

Leaning back with a sigh, the bushy mustache said, “We are a paramilitary organization, sir. Men who have volunteered to undertake great privations to protect their families and homelands against outlaws of all color. And frankly—a lot of that job right now requires us to kill Indians. Your friend here, he’s a …”

“Shoshone.”

He cleared his throat diplomatically. “I’m concerned that he might be mistaken for the enemy in the heat of battle.” Jonah wagged his head, spreading both his hands on the small cafe table where he sat with the two white men. The winter sun was sinking fast on the small town of Jacksboro, a frontier settlement erected not far from Fort
Richardson, state of Texas. It was to this smoky café that Hook had been told he might come to meet men who best knew the Staked Plain. Men who knew the Comanche, knew where the warrior bands might be hiding.

Finally Hook nodded toward Two Sleep, who stood with his back against a far wall, away from the ring of conversation, but with his eyes never leaving the three at the table.

“Look at him. Then you tell me that Injun’s gonna get mistook for a Comanch’.”

Reluctantly the two eyed the Shoshone, dressed the most part in the clothing of a white man. Most everything had come from traders over the years, all of it the dress of a white man, but those long braids spilling over his shoulder, along with the medicine pouch hung at midchest. The younger of the two civilians took his eyes from the warrior to glance at the rawhide-wrapped amulet hung around Jonah Hook’s neck.

“You spent time among the Injuns, you said?”

“Not the Comanch’. But I’ll bet my ass I been scrubbing leather a damn sight longer than most of the boys you two are toting along, boys swaybacked under all their iron and tin badges.”

“The Comanch’re the devil’s own handiwork, my friend,” spouted the older man, his ire suddenly pricked. “Pure murdering fornicators, them are.”

“See that Spencer the Indian’s packing?” Jonah asked the two, turning to throw a thumb at Two Sleep.

“What of it?” asked the young one.

“That Snake there is handier with that Spencer of his than a Comanche with a new scalping knife.”

They looked at each other, then the bushy mustache wagged his head. “Just don’t know about enlisting a—”

“Listen,” Hook said, quieter now as he leaned forward on the table. “He’s been riding with me for more’n five year now. Been through one scrape and another. Just
say he can ride with me and you won’t have to pay him. And what you get is two good guns for the price of one.”

Hook watched the two men look quickly at one another, and if there was some exchange there between them, Jonah could not say what it was. Perhaps only something in the cast of the eyes. When next the younger man spoke, the die had been cast.

“You’ll provision him on your own, Mr. Hook. From your own rations. And I will expect him to keep himself to himself. For the sake of my command. Is that understood?”

“Perfectly.”

“You both have horses, I take it?”

“And two pack animals.”

“Sell one of ’em,” the old man ordered.

“Where?” he asked.

“To the fort. Army always needs horses—the way them brunette troops and Mackenzie’s cavalry going through good riding stock the way they are.”

“You won’t need but one pack animal for the two of you, Mr. Hook,” the younger man explained, the muscles along his clean-shaven jaw making little ripples just beneath the surface of the tanned skin. “We travel light and fast.”

“You got to,” Hook agreed. “If you’re going to track a war party what’s moving light and fast. More times’n not, the army moves too damned slow.”

“Amen to that!” the old man exclaimed, animation brought to that face sharp-stitched with lines of hard living.

Hook asked eagerly, “When we go?”

“Two days. At dawn. Front of the sheriff’s office down the street,” answered the younger, his blue eyes become narrow points of light. “But drop by there tomorrow sometime, and the deacon will get you signed on proper.”

“Papers?”

The younger man eyed Hook with another hard-eyed cast of appraisal. “You ain’t got a reputation to hide, do you?”

“Nothing what would keep me from signing my name to your paper, no,” Jonah answered. “Nothing what would keep me from hunting Comanche neither.”