Winter Rain (46 page)

None of the rest mattered anymore, for the children were all gone and with God now. Only her regrets that she would not live for eternity with them in the glory of the Lord’s love. And J—…Jonah himself must surely be dead. Not come home from the war for so long. Not come after her. He was surely dead. Killed by the Yankee soldiers Sterling Price wanted to drive out of Missouri. How much longer would they be fighting?

She knew these men who rode with Usher fought and then marched back north to spend the winter. It must be a long, long war for the fighting to go on and on and on this way.

When the war ended, would she no longer be Usher’s slave? How that made her battered soul rejoice, sending tiny shards of light against all the darkness of her gloom. Not that she saw anything to change in the way things had worked out for her: getting took off that farm of theirs in Missouri was probably the best thing after all—what with Jonah killed by the Yankees and her unable to do a lot of the work it took a man to do. Better that she was took by Usher now that Jonah was dead.

Only regret she had was those children of hers dying so young.

As sure as she was about anything, she would be going to hell eventually—if this wasn’t it already.

This heat. This singing, buzzing, hot air. This endlessness. This despair and lack of any hope. Where she was, it must surely be hell.

“I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

The first day
of the Moon of Green Grass. Already the endless, rolling waves of it were growing tall against the legs of their ponies.

Tall One had never dreamed he would see so many
warriors together, all riding north by west, nearing the earth-lodge settlement where the buffalo hunters gathered. A wildly independent tribe, never before had the Comanche banded together in numbers anywhere near these. And with them rode the fiercest of the Kiowa and Cheyenne.

First they would strike the buffalo hunters there at the earth lodges, then spread out like the fanning tail feathers of an eagle as war parties leveled one after another of the white settlements they found trespassing on buffalo ground. How glorious would be this ride behind the war chiefs for him and Antelope!

It was to be the last summer of the white man in the land of the Comanche.

They were timing their arrival at the white man’s earth-lodge settlement, wanting to get there when this first moon of the summer had grown full and fat. Beneath the silver light of that moon they would charge in and club the hide hunters while the white men slept in their beds.

As decided by the war chiefs, the many wandering bands came together a few days ago at the mouth of Elk Creek on the North Fork of the Red River. It was there, within the boundaries of the Kiowa-Comanche Reservation itself, that the shaman Isatai had commanded a sundance lodge be erected. By the hundreds The People had come until there were more than any could ever remember celebrating this ancient ritual. Even avowed peace chiefs Horseback and Elk Chewing came south to the great sun—praying with their bands.

And after that celebration of dancing to the sun for renewal of their People, the chiefs of those warrior bands held their council of war. Kiowa under Satanta and Lone Wolf. Shahiyena under Medicine Water, Iron Shirt, and Gray Beard. Each of them came carrying the war pipes sent them by the gray-eyed Kwahadi war chief.

Still, there were holdouts. Like the Shahiyena Little
Robe, who upon hearing the talk of war immediately fled with his people back to the agency. Fearing most what everyone knew was coming, the Shahiyena Stone Eagle sat arguing with himself about what path he should set his feet upon.

For the rest, the path lay clear and straight.

They had come to believe in the prophet called Isatai, come to believe that this shaman might truly be more than a mere magician. Perhaps through this powerful medicine man the Comanche finally could drive the white man from their ancient hunting ground, for all time to come.

So it had seemed most fitting, before they undertook the bloody work of war, that the Comanche chose to immerse themselves in more of the frenetic symbolism of the sun dance, excusing themselves from most of the “formalities” practiced by the Kiowa and Shahiyena. That symbolism of the sun dance had for many generations been unequivocally tied to the buffalo. And now more than ever the threat posed by the white buffalo hunters had become most real.

If the buffalo disappeared—the Comanche would be next.

At Elk Creek the bands had gathered the poles and branches for the great sun-dance arbor. At the center they raised a tall, forked ridgepole, and ringing the outer circle stood the twelve shorter poles, each one connected to the center with long streamers decorated with scalps of their enemies and scraps of fluttering calico and trade cloth. A newly killed buffalo calf, its body cavity emptied, then stuffed with willow branches, was raised to the top of the huge center pole. There it would gaze down upon the dancers, granting them its buffalo magic.

Masked clowns smeared with mud cavorted and swirled among the gathered villages, throwing mud balls at the unsuspecting and lending a carnival atmosphere to this important undertaking. These were the Comanche “Mud
Men,” the
sekwitsit puhitsit
, a comical diversion to an otherwise deadly serious occasion: invoking the power of the supernatural to bring about the salvation of a dying way of life.

Four days of searing sun and short, chilly nights filled with the endless drumming and prayer singing by the old men. For Tall One and Antelope it proved to be a frighteningly beautiful celebration to watch. While dancers among the northern tribes hung themselves from the rawhide tethers or dragged buffalo skulls from skewers driven beneath the muscles of their backs, the Comanche did not believe it necessary to torture themselves to be heard by the Spirit Above. Still, the dancers allowed themselves no food nor water for the duration of the celebration of the sun. While these warriors danced, men and women came forward and hung small offerings of food and tobacco and scalps from the center pole. Young boys hoping one day to become full-fledged warriors tied their gifts to their tiny arrows and shot them into the sun-dance tree, far above the dancers.

And when the celebration to the sun was over, the voices of the hundreds were raised exultantly to the heavens. Never before had there been such a gathering on the southern plains: Kiowa, Shahiyena, Kiowa-Apache, and Comanche. The hot summer breeze toyed with Tall One’s single feather lashed to one of his braids. His heart filled standing there, witnessing that grand union of fighting men.

“We want to follow the buffalo herds as in days of old!” the chiefs bellowed.

“We wish to stay a strong people, needing nothing from the white man!” cried others.

Isatai had harangued the chiefs, bellowing, “The strong of heart will prevail in the coming war. If we take to the warpath and wipe our land clear of the white man-only then will the buffalo return to blanket our hunting ground.”

“Unless we drive the white man out now, the buffalo will disappear!” shouted one.

“The white man must go!” agreed another in the same fervor.

“No!” Isatai barked at them, worked into his own blood frenzy. “The white man must die! All of them. Man. Woman. Child!”

Tall One sensed what the rest felt: that magnetic charisma of the shaman, able to think of nothing else at that moment but slaughtering all whites where the warriors would find them. Amid the great noise of celebration and the fury of the war council, he paid little heed to the quiet voice inside that reminded Tall One he had of a time been white.

In the end it was the old and proven chiefs of the Shahiyena Nation who decided what would be their first objective.

“We think the Kwahadi need first to wipe out the buffalo hunters gathered on the Canadian River,” White Wolf told the gathering. “Kwahadi go accomplish that first. Then I think your hearts will be ready for war. You kill all the buffalo hunters—then we follow you to make war on Texas.”

Another Shahiyena, Otter Belt, agreed. “The real threat to the survival of our peoples remains the buffalo hunters. If we stop them—we stop the white man.”

“Those hunters have guns that shoot a long, long way,” came a voice from the council ring, filled with doubt.

Isatai whipped round on the doubter, banging a fist against his own chest. “Let them empty their guns shooting at me!” the shaman shrieked, scuffling around the center of the gathering, spitting his words into the faces of the gathered war chiefs. “Do any of you doubt that I can make medicine so powerful that it will protect our warriors as they charge down on the white man’s earth lodges? Do
you doubt the power of my medicine to turn their bullets into water?”

In the end not one of them doubted Isatai’s power. Not even the tall, handsome, gray-eyed Kwahadi war chief.

“When the white man wanted to put us all on a reservation six winters ago—he wanted us to live in one place as he does,” he had told the hushed assembly. “I was born of the prairie, where the wind blows free. Where there is nothing to bend the light of the sun. I was born where every living thing draws a free breath. I want to die in my own country—free—and not within the walls of the white man.”

That night as many of the Kwahadi were rolling into their blankets, anticipating an early departure at dawn, Tall One and Antelope hung close to the gray-eyed chief, hanging on his every word as he continued to exhort his faithful.

To Tall One it seemed the war chief was even more a mystic than Isatai. Even more perhaps a man who believed in the power of the human spirit over the powers of magic.

“No Comanche will ever again die a captive of the white man,” he promised his warriors at that late-night fire. “A warrior dies riding the prairie. A Kwahadi dies charging into the face of his enemy. We will take the power of our people to the buffalo hunters’ settlement. The white man’s days on this prairie are numbered.”

The war chief had made a tight fist he held up before them all as he concluded, “I hold the last days of the white man in my hand!”

T
HINGS WOULD HAVE
been hot in Comanche country even if it had been down in the deep days of January.

It wasn’t only the weather.

The southern plains had exploded in full-scale war.

First came the rumors of some of the bands moving off from the agencies, heading southwest to Elk Creek to attend a big war-talk. But by the time any of the army got around to checking out what sounded like the wildest of stories—the Comanche holding a sun dance and crazy whispers of a powerful shaman whipping the tribes into a blood lust against the white man—the whole affair was yesterday’s news. Why, just about the time the army was getting set to check out the rumors, word out of the Territories was that some of the Cheyenne were even coming back to their agency after the big medicine stomp of the war bands.

Still, that left the Kiowa and Comanche out there
roaming about, adding their numbers to the Kwahadi, who had never come in to their assigned reservation.

“Kwahadis led by one of Satan’s own,” Deacon Johns told Jonah. “The devil’s own whelp, that one.”

The old fellow with iron-crusted hair wore a set of dentures that gave Johns a pretty smile but were not too good for talking, what with all the clacking. He got in the habit of slipping them from his mouth behind his hand when he had a big piece to say. Which was most of the time with the deacon, his slack jaws at work like a well-used, wrinkled blacksmith’s bellows.

“Quanah Parker’s his name,” explained Lamar Lockhart.

“Got a English name, does he?” Hook inquired. “So the bastard’s a renegade, eh? Back to sixty-five, I rubbed up against my first half-breed renegade. North to the Platte Bridge fight. A Cheyenne name of Charlie Bent.”

“This one’s a half-breed too,” Lockhart replied. “His mother was took by the Comanch’ almost twenty-eight-some years ago, just a girl as I remember the story of it. Her seed’s turned out about as bad as they come, with a reputation as smelly as his breechclout.”

“He’s spilled blood from down on the Pecos all the way past the Prairie Dog Town Fork,” offered Niles Coffee, sergeant of Company C, his tanned, wind-seamed face a java color beneath a crop of red whiskers that gave the Ranger an air of raffish gaiety.

“We’ll get him,” Lockhart said sternly at the fire. “It’s only a matter of time.”

“Wanna see him swing,” murmured John Com, one of Hook’s messmates. His nose seemed oversized, it and his cheeks perpetually red, scored over with little chicken-track blood vessels. He was a walking barrel of a man, with toothpicks for legs.

“Shooting’s too good for that heathen fornicator,” Johns grumbled.

“Rest assured, he doesn’t have long to roam free,” Lockhart repeated.

Over the past months he had been riding with this company of Rangers, Jonah had come to have a real respect for the quiet captain of Company C. A year younger than Hook, Lockhart had been born late in the autumn of 1838.

“My parents came to Texas from Georgia when all this still belonged to Mexico,” Lockhart had explained one of those quiet prairie nights when men gathered at their cook fires just like this, watching the embers die slow at their feet, the stars dusting the dark canopy like coal water flecked with diamonds.

“My father came west to Texas like many of the rest in those days, intent on finding the length of his own stride. He fought in the revolution that drove out Santa Anna. When Mirabeau Buonaparte Lamar was first elected president of the Republic of Texas in thirty-eight, my folks named me after him—a man they both admired. He come from Georgia too, matter of fact. A dreamer, a poet—besides hating Injuns to the bottom of his craw. Probably why my father liked Lamar so much.”

“You hate Injuns as much as your father?”

“No. Not anymore,” the captain admitted thoughtfully. “Last couple of years I’ve been trying real hard to understand Injuns more than hate ’em. Hate will eat you up until you got nothing to feed on but it, Jonah. Still, I do understand men like my father. Men like Mirabeau Lamar. Neither one of them give a inch.”