Winter Rain (59 page)

Of a sudden there Jonah also saw the horror of something come to contort the face of his son.

“No-o-o-o-o-o!” Jeremiah shouted, drowning out everything else around them.

At first Jonah only sensed the dull pressure of it. No real pain. Just an instant of burning in his back, a metallic skittering along his ribs … then the cold.

A gunshot roared so close, Jonah flinched.

And the icy-hot pressure was gone, gone as quickly as he had realized it was there. For a moment he gazed back at the face of his oldest son, realizing that he was slipping, slowly releasing his grip on everything—losing consciousness.

Oh, God! his mind cried out, not sure if his lips really formed the words or not … dear God! To come this close. To hold Jeremiah so close and now to lose it all. Not this way, God. Not this way!

He had some distant recognition that men were shouting all around them now as Jeremiah heaved himself up on his knees, catching Jonah as he crumpled slowly, slowly,
his lips moving wordlessly, muttering prayers … tears flooding his eyes.

As he closed them for that last time, Jonah recognized the tears in Jeremiah’s eyes, saw their tracks streaking down through the shiny, smeared, dust-furred war paint.

Tears.

Antelope had tumbled
down the loose, snow-crusted side of the arroyo onto the icy sand without stopping, racing headlong for his brother as the white man spun Tall One onto his back and jammed the knife along his brother’s throat.

Shrieking his powerful war song as he closed on the enemy, Antelope hurtled forward through the cascades of ice and stinging sand thrown up by others colliding, grunting, locked together in deadly combat. He had first to save his brother from this enemy ready to cut Tall One’s throat.

His own throat filled with the screech of the Kwahadi death song as he pistoned back his powerful right arm. At the end of that arm he brandished the haft of a long war club cruelly studded with three eight-inch iron blades. His father had given him that weapon when Antelope went on his first scalp raid.

Tall One’s eyes saw him coming.

Antelope’s brother yelled out, screaming something in the confusion and the noise as Antelope’s own blood hammered hotly in his ears. No worry—soon enough Antelope would save Tall One’s life.

In a white-hot fury he swung the war club downward with all the force he could muster in that arm and shoulder. Tall One pushed against his enemy at that moment: instead of burying the three blades deep in the white man’s back, Antelope struck the shoulder blade, slicing down against the collarbone itself. Blood spurted into the air flecked with icy crystals as the weapon slid deeper still through layers of muscle and tendon.

Still not deep enough.

Tall One screamed again, putting up an arm as if to stop him as Antelope drew the club back for a second swinging blow. The one he hoped would be the killing strike. Finish off the enemy—

His chest burned, like a rope of fire pulled taut to sear through it. Then feeling was gone in him. Not all, but most, as control fled his body on hawk’s wings and the club tumbled out of his hand, spilling into the sand. He went to his knees.

He stared at the club, trying to reach out for it, helpless as he saw the blood splattered all over him. Not knowing in that moment if it was the white man’s, or his own. Another … then a third rope of fire burned through his chest.

Antelope crumpled sideways to the sand. Alone. His eyes staring blindly at his older brother … not understanding why Tall One cradled the white man.

The enemy.

He died, blank-eyed, hoping he had killed the
tai-bo
, hoping he had dispatched his enemy’s soul to hell.

There was little
time for Jeremiah to react, hardly more time than it took him to holler out—throwing his arm up to try to fend off the war club, an instant to try pushing his father to the side when Antelope came careening off the slope of the arroyo, that weapon held high as it sailed downward in its arc of death.

Jeremiah cried out again, watching the first bullet hit Antelope, jerking his body upward, blood splattering as the lead exited the chest in a crimson corona. His young brother wobbled to his knees, crouching there suspended over their father as the blood came coughing from Zeke’s mouth, dribbling from his nose as a second, then a third bullet smashed into his chest. Blood flung over Jeremiah as his brother crumpled to the side.

How he yearned to go to gather Zeke into his arms as he cradled his father’s limp, bloody body. He could only
kneel, clutching his father as in horror he watched his brother’s legs convulse, watched the red-stained fingers in that now empty hand twitch. Saw those dark eyes in the midst of that sand-caked war paint staring back at him.

Blank and wide. Without expression.

Jeremiah prayed that meant Zeke had died without pain.

There was, after all, no pain he could see in his young brother’s eyes as Jeremiah rocked and rocked, and rocked his father, calling out for someone to come help him. Then realized he was screaming in Comanche.

That was when
Two Sleep had come over to kneel with Sergeant Coffee and June Callicott beside the warrior who had his bloodstained arms locked around Jonah Hook.

Slowly, concentrating on how finally to say it after all these years of hearing the name, the Shoshone had asked, “Jeremiah?”

And the Comanche had nodded. Then finally said in crude, stuttering English, “Jeremiah Hook … me.”

Coffee and Callicott had gently rolled Jonah over before Two Sleep tore strips from his own cotton shirt to make bandages to lay on the gaping wounds: muscles torn asunder, lying purple and red against the whitish-purple of bone. Jonah’s breath whistled through his blood-flecked nose, and at the back of his throat he gurgled slightly.

They had to tell Jonah about all that days later when he had the strength to listen in those rare times he came to and opened his glazed eyes. Two days after the fight, after burning and destroying the village, Colonel Davidson’s buffalo soldiers had pulled out for the east. Two more days and Captain Lockhart had started his own men south. Two Sleep helped John Corn and June Callicott craft the half-dozen travois they used to pull their wounded behind captured Comanche ponies.

The Rangers buried their dead there in the middle of that small circle of frozen horseflesh.

Jeremiah cleaned his brother’s body, then wrapped Ezekiel Hook in a blanket and buffalo robe he claimed from the lodges before the whole village was put to the torch by the buffalo soldiers.

When at last it came time for the Rangers to go, Jeremiah had knelt over his father, gently awakening him before Lockhart started Company C south.

“You bring Zeke along?” Jonah had asked that cloudy morning that promised an afternoon squall of sleet boiling on the horizon.

Jeremiah had nodded. “Like you asked.”

Now his son’s English had gotten better for all the practice over the past weeks as they followed Company C south by east toward Jacksboro and Fort Richardson. It was there that Jonah looked up after that awful, bouncing ride he suffered in the travois and beheld Captain Lamar Lockhart come back on foot, removing his hat. The Ranger chief stood above him a moment, as if that courageous man were of a sudden fiddle-footed and shy.

“Time for you to head on home, I s’pose, Jonah Hook,” Lockhart had said.

“S’pose I can. Least I found my boys.” His eyes had stung as he stretched the healing flesh to reach into his pocket, the only one he had, a pocket sewn in the greasy shirt over his heart. It was there the Rangers carried their badges.

Jonah pulled out his six-pointed star and offered it to the sad-eyed captain. Lockhart took it reluctantly.

“Won’t be needing it now,” Hook said, tiring from the talk already.

“You keep it, Private,” Lockhart said, backing off a step and putting his hat back on his head while more of the company gathered in a crescent behind him. “Just want you to know, Jonah Hook—the Rangers will always be in need of men like you.”

“By damn if that ain’t the Lord’s honest truth,” Deacon Johns added.

When Lockhart saluted the man lashed to the travois, there was a rustle as the others of Company C did the same.

“We wish you God’s speed as you take this long trail back home,” the deacon said, coming forward to squeeze Hook’s hand with his strong, veiny paw.

“Going home only for as long as I can’t sit a horse, Deacon. Still got another out there I swore I’d find.”

“May the good Lord watch over you and keep you in the palm of His hand,” Johns said, squeezing Hook’s hand again before he turned away to join Coffee, Callicott, Pettis, and the rest.

“Don’t make yourself a stranger you ever come down into Texas again,” Lockhart said, his voice cracking, though it filled with cheer. “You ask for me—or Company C. Ain’t nothing you’ll ever want for in west Texas.”

That had been painful, bouncing weeks ago. Watching Lamar Lockhart and his company of Rangers move off quietly. Good men he would remember for the rest of his days.

Two Sleep had done most of the bartering for provisions. Jeremiah’s halting English still came hard those two days they hung close by at Richardson and Jacksboro before finally pushing north one dawn as the yellow light stirred up into the blue-gray of a late-winter sky. They were heading east by north for Missouri: two riders and five horses, a wounded man slung on one bouncing travois, along with a long, narrow bundle encased in a buffalo skin and bound by rawhide strips for its journey.

Through those Indian nations granted reservations in the Territories, they finally crossed the Arkansas and into the thickly wooded hills that Jonah began to recognize as winter whimpered its last. He was able to ride that last week, able to stay in the saddle a few hours more every day, his left arm lashed tightly to his chest to keep that broken collarbone from moving, to keep the pain down across the
shoulder blade. Doing what he could with the tightness of the muscles and his own damned hide, so tight it didn’t feel as if it were really his, more like he had tried on a suit of skin a size or two too small.

But he figured it would fit, eventually—like a pair of tight boots, once he got a chance to work those muscles and that new skin a bit. The wounds hurt, more than anything had hurt him in his life as he put the muscles and tendons, sinew and skin to work at last in early April. Hard, hard work.

The other two had pleaded with Jonah to let them help him as he resolutely drove the shovel into the old mound of dirt beside the first of the graves he swore he would fill.

“She’s my sister, pa,” Jeremiah said ultimately, struggling until he found the words.

Jonah saw his son’s eyes fill with pools, thinking that this must be just how his own young face must have looked of a time when he had asked a childlike Gritta Moser to be his wife and life companion, remembering how her acceptance had brought tears to his eyes.

“All right, son. I’ll be pleased to have your help.”

Jeremiah had taken their only shovel from Jonah’s hands and put his strong back into throwing the sod back into that dark, empty hole. He made short work of it, then straightened.

“Next one … my hole?”

“Yes,” Jonah answered softly. “Your grave. Fill it. I found you, Jeremiah. Fill it like you filled Hattie’s.”

Without reply, the young man bent to the work and soon had the second of the graves nearly full as Two Sleep looked on. Without the benefit of body nor coffin, and the effect of years of rain and snow eating away the mounds of dirt Jonah had left beside those empty holes back of a cold January in sixty-seven, the first two graves appeared more to be slight depressions than mounded scars marking a person’s final resting place.

Jeremiah came over to stand with his father beside the third hole. “This by mine hole—it for Zeke?”

Jonah could only nod, clearing his throat. He turned to the Shoshone, who stood close, his own eyes glistening, his jaw motionless. “Two Sleep—you help Jeremiah ease his brother down in that hole?”

Between the two of them they got Zeke lowered on ropes, then stood, waiting for Jonah as he stopped at the foot of the grave, when it started to snow. Hook knelt, scooped up some of the years-hardened soil, and tossed it in. Landing on the buffalo hide, the dirt made a dull but distinct noise there in the quiet of that late afternoon near the empty shell of the cabin the man had built for his woman and family years gone the way of time everlasting. Behind them among the hills the heavier snow crept down the slopes, falling softly without a sound but for the frosty breathing of those men and their animals near the private graveyard Jonah Hook had made of his private quest.

“I’ll always carry this pain in my heart for you, Zeke. Found your sister. Found your brother. It hurts, goddammit—hurts knowing I was a little late finding you, son. That’s a pain I’ll end up carrying in my heart for the rest of my days. As much a pain as having to think that you never really knowed me as a father … you was so young when I walked off to fight a war.”

The snow hit the shoulders of his canvas mackinaw with a soft hiss as Jonah stepped back and motioned with his free arm to the others. “A war I ain’t been able to come home from yet.”

Without a word between them Jeremiah and Two Sleep took turns hurriedly scooping dirt into Ezekiel’s grave. When they were finished, it was the only one of the three holes crowned with a rounded top. Jeremiah’s and Hattie’s had been filled with dirt only.

Yonder, on the far side of Hattie’s and right beneath the bare, skeletal, spreading arms of the elm, remained a
single dark, gaping hole that stood out starkly against the new snow thinly blanketing the ground.

Jonah was already kneeling at the side of that last empty grave when Two Sleep came up to stand across from him on the far side of the yawning hole. Jonah heard Jeremiah come up beside him. The young man knelt, laying an arm across his father’s wounded shoulder.

Jonah gazed briefly at his son, eyes wet again. “I’m going back out there again, Jeremiah.”

The youth nodded, able to keep his own eyes from spilling.