Winter Rain (60 page)

“Me and Two Sleep going after your ma,” Jonah said, turning to look across that empty grave at the Shoshone with what his eyes made of an unspoken question.

The warrior nodded, his dark, ropy hands folded in front of him here among the spirits in Jonah Hook’s own private burial ground.

“I’m going with you, pa.”

The words came so strong, so sure, no faltering as they were spoken, that Jonah took his eyes off the Shoshone to look back at the face of his son. “Don’t think I could take you, Jeremiah. Gonna be a dangerous trail I’m taking now.”

“Look at you, pa. All stove up.”

“I’ll heal.”

“I know you will. Still, it don’t make no matter what you say.”

“I’m your pa, Jeremiah.”

He shook his head, his eyes brimming. “But I ain’t a little boy no more.”

That stung him, then as quickly filled Jonah with pride. “I … I plainly see you ain’t no little boy no more.”

Jeremiah reached out and folded his father into his arms. “But that don’t mean I ain’t your son no more. Nothing ever gonna change that. I know now that nothing ever could change that.”

Refusing to believe what his heart told him, Hook started to choke out the words, “I ain’t so sure I should—”

“She’ll always be my mother,” Jeremiah interrupted, turning to look down into the dark hole in the midst of all of that white swathing the ground. A wet, spring snow. “I owe her just as much to try as you do, pa.”

His heart leapt, burning with his love for that youngster he hadn’t watched grow up. Burning with love for his son who had swiftly crossed all those years they had been apart by bridging that great gulf with his own love. For a moment Jonah wondered where Jeremiah could have ever learned that sort of love … then he knew, thinking suddenly on Gritta once more, here beside her empty grave.

His voice cracked as he said, “You always did sort of favor your mother, son.”

Jonah realized Jeremiah had gotten the best his mother had to give him. It was always that way with Gritta: giving everything to her man and their children.

“I want to do this for you too, pa.” Jeremiah helped his father stand in the cold as the wind shifted, swinging out of the south.

“You sure about this, son?”

He nodded, straightening his strong back. “I ain’t really asking you, pa. I’m
telling
you what I’m going to do. With you … or without you: I’m going after my mother.”

Jonah brought the young man into his arms and hugged him fiercely. Holding him like he had never held Jeremiah before. As a man.

“Son, let’s go find your mother.”

And as they turned from that open black hole, so like the empty place torn through the middle of Jonah’s heart, the snow became a cold rain.

A slow, tearful, winter rain.

N
ATE
D
EIDECKER DARED
not admit it, but he was relieved to know that Jonah Hook would be getting him back to the cabin tomorrow afternoon.

Still, with all his fears, this horseback ride into the splendid serenity of the Big Horns had been one of the singular events in the life of the young newsman. Something he vowed he would tell his grandchildren about when they gathered at his knee. Funny to think on that now, for there had been times in the past three days Nate had entertained serious doubts of ever living long enough to father any children, much less come to enjoy his grandchildren.

What stories he would regale them with, sons, daughters, grandsons, and granddaughters all—tales to make them cringe, tales that would make their hair stand on end, make their eyes grow wide and their mouths O in surprise. These true tales of Jonah Hook.

The sun was glorious beyond belief falling into the west beyond their camp that night on the western slope of the mountains. Out there beyond, yonder in Teddy Roosevelt’s Yellowstone Park, it seemed to be settling, as here the light bled away to magnificent stillness. How the air of these evenings hummed with a radiant alpenglow, cooling quickly as the old frontiersman puttered about the camp he made them that night. Having started the fire and left Deidecker to tend it, Hook had proceeded to erect the newsman’s small dog tent, unfurling in it Deidecker’s canvas bedroll wrapped around its wool blankets. Then Jonah had unpacked the cast-iron skillet and small kettle, along with that monster of a battered pot capable of making a gallon of coffee. From a nearby freshet running through the meadow Hook had drawn them water, then set the blackened vessel on the flames to boil.

The haunch of a young doe Jonah had shot at mid-morning was sliced, and two thick slabs of the bloody meat now covered the bottom of the old man’s skillet, ready for frying when the time came. The singular, invigorating smell to the air of these mountain evenings made Nate all the hungrier. If Jonah hadn’t protected the loin steaks, Deidecker might well have tried to raise a slice or two and wolf it down raw.

In the past three days of travel through this wilderness he had come to understand why the plainsmen said what they did about eating when a man had the chance to—a man never knew when his next meal would come. Try as he might, though, Nathan Deidecker could not get used to rising early, even before the sun had warmed the air, to eat a big breakfast before they would ride all day without stopping for a midday meal. This pushing his body to its limits was something new to the reporter born and raised in Iowa, gone after six early years of news work to Nebraska when he had the offer of a position with the prestigious
Omaha Bee.

“So the chromo back at your cabin wasn’t you at all, was it, Jonah?”

With that question coming out of the blue after so much silence shared between them, the old man looked up from the prairie onion he was slicing with a belt knife. “You had it figured all wrong, Nate?” He chuckled easily. Then he stared somewhere past the newsman, saying, “No fault of your’n. Jeremiah did favor me in some ways. Near a spitting image of me in my younger days. That boy got the worst of me, Gritta always said. And I always answered by saying Jeremiah got the best of her.”

Then Hook’s eyes came back to Deidecker’s face as he said, “Proud to think you thought Jeremiah was me of a time. That boy was really a handsome lad—more so than I ever was. But, then, I always was proud of my boys … both of ’em.”

“You still miss Zeke, I can tell.”

“Shows that much, does it?” He sighed. “Yes. Proud of my youngest. He died defending his people. Died fighting for the ones he loved. I have to remind myself of that when I get feeling like there’s little else left for an old man like me. And then too I remind myself that I gave my boys a good legacy. There’s something real decent about my boy dying defending those he loved.”

Nate allowed the old frontiersman some time down in his thoughts. Later, as a breeze came up, Deidecker asked, “So Jeremiah did go with you to find her—Gritta—like you said he wanted to there at the side of the woman’s grave?”

Loose-shouldered, Hook shrugged, answering. “We’ll talk more about that last hunt when we get back to home tomorrow afternoon. After we see to Gritta.”

“She cook when you’re gone?”

He wagged his head. “No. Have to leave her food to eat. Can’t let her get her hands on matches. It’s just that … she’s got so forgetful, she might hurt herself. I leave her
food what I’ve already cooked if she gets to being hungry. It ain’t often that she eats more’n a mouthful at a time. For the life of me don’t know how she keeps up her strength way she does.”

“At first I thought—well, about that picture at the cabin—thought the woman in the picture was Grass Singing, the Pawnee woman you told me about meeting in Abilene. Then I later had it figured she was Pipe Woman.”

“Shad’s daughter?” Hook asked, his eyes gone wistful in looking at the sunset, the last rosy rays of Spanish gold streaking through the quaking aspen snatched and teased by the breeze. “That’s one woman would’ve been a handful for any man to tackle, Nate. In or out of the blankets. My, but was she ever a prize, that one.”

“Do I detect some old longing there, Jonah?”

He shrugged. “No doubt to it, son. Things been different … well, let’s just say other men might’n stayed on with her and give up what everyone claimed was a hopeless chase.”

“But you didn’t give up, Jonah. That’s the miracle of all of this to me—and you got Gritta back.”

“Me and Jeremiah brung her back, Nate.”

“Where is Jeremiah now? Does he live close?”

“No,” he answered, an immense sadness in that single word. “Down in the Territories.”

“Didn’t you know? Last year Congress made the place a state, Jonah.”

“They have, have they?” A faint smile crossed his face. “Good for them. The Injuns, that is.”

“Call it Oklahoma. Some say it means ’home of the red man.’”

“Home of the red man. Fitting, you know?”

“What’s Jeremiah do down there? Farm?”

“Last I heard, he was working for the army—training horses for the cavalry. Buys and trains mounts.” Abruptly Jonah beamed as proud as any father could, declaring, “He
rode with Roosevelt right up San Juan Hill into the teeth of them Spaniards’ guns, you know.”

“If that doesn’t beat all, Jonah!” Nate exclaimed, sensing at least one story that might come from Jeremiah’s remarkable life. Taken by the marauders; sold to comancheros; his years among the Comanche and his life as a warrior on the southern plains. Yes, Nate glowed, knowing he had more stories he could write: front-page, banner-headline stories.

Deidecker said, “So Jeremiah was the handsome young man in the chromo you have back at the cabin.”

“Yes, Nate. That was took a few years after we went back to Cassville to fill in those two graves in seventy-five. Time I buried Zeke.”

Nathan studied the old man. Jonah was frozen, staring down at his hand held motionless over the onion and knife and the bark slab he was using as a cutting board. Deidecker’s heart lurched for the pain that remembrance must have caused the old man.

Quietly Deidecker said, “No one could ever blame himself for what happened to Zeke the way you’ve been blaming yourself all these years.”

For a long, long time Jonah did not answer. When he did, he began by working the knife down through the onion again. “Should’ve brung him back alive too.”

“Three out of four—good Lord … after all those years, Jonah—my God! Bringing back three out of the four from the clutches of that madman and all the hell he had caused your family.”

Jonah glared at the newsman. “Ought’n been different, Nate. Ain’t no one left for me to blame now but myself.”

“That’s the cruelest blame of all, Jonah.”

His eyes came up, hooded and accusing, gazing at the newsman. “It’s for me to say who I’m gonna blame. And that’s the last we’re gonna speak of it.”

He understood Hook had just told him something important: declared something off-limits from here on out. Feeling chastised, Deidecker contented himself with watching the old man crack one of the doe’s thick leg bones on one of the rocks ringing the fire. Jonah then scraped out the marrow into the small kettle. It began to melt, sizzle, and spit as soon as the old man suspended the kettle over the fire from the iron tripod. Jonah dropped the chopped onions through his fingers into the warming marrow, then sat back and sighed, staring into the flames cradling the bottom of the kettle in yellow-tipped tongues of blue.

“Tell me about that woman in the picture then. She was Jeremiah’s wife?”

“Zeke’s. And those are my grandchildren. Got fourteen grandchildren now, between Jeremiah and Hattie.”

“Where did Hattie end up after going east to get her schooling?”

“Lots of stories there too, Nate.”

“I don’t want to push too hard again, Jonah.”

Hook chuckled softly. “She married her a wealthy man. S’pose nowadays they call that sort of man influential. He’s a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania.”

“Time comes, you’ll tell me his name too?”

Hook wagged his head. “No. But you could go and find out—a fella like you could.”

Nate nodded. “I suppose I could, Jonah. Each state has only two senators.”

“Sort of narrows it down, don’t it, Nate? But you digging around for it won’t do the young fella no good—no good to see you write up his name in your paper, saying his father-in-law’s this high-plains desperado and his mother-in-law was this …” Hook stopped of a sudden, wiping the knife off on the front of his pants leg before he held it pointed at Deidecker across the fire. “Let’s just get this straight—I don’t wanna hear that Hattie and her husband
and their young’uns ever get mentioned in your stories. We agreed on that, Nate?”

Deidecker glanced down at the knife blade glinting in the firelight. “You aren’t threatening me to keep it out of the story are you, Jonah?”

“No. I’m not threatening you. Never threatened a man in my life. All I’m doing is promising that if you say anything hurts that man, it’ll hurt my daughter. And, well—Nate. You know how I feel about folks what go and hurt my family.”

The newsman swallowed, not really sure how to read the look on the old man’s seamed face, the cold-banked fires in his eyes. “All right, Jonah. It isn’t really important, is it? This is, after all, really
your
story.”

“I see them, my grandchildren from time to time. Hattie brings ’em out here of a summer, occasional. Figure it’ll be about time next year for them young’uns to see their grandpappy, go fishing and ride horses back into these hills. You see, Gritta and me don’t have all that much time left, you know.”

“You must be joking, Jonah. You’re … you seem as strong as a mule.”

“Thanks, Nate. I do get by, and that’s probably what is important in the end.”

“Do you get to see Jeremiah’s family much?”

“When I can. He’s brought ’em up here a time or two. Mostly I’ve took Gritta down there to the Territories.”

“Oklahoma.”

“Yes, to Oka-lahoma. To the reservation where he lived with his wife for years after Quanah Parker’s people come in and surrendered to Mackenzie later on in June that year.”

“That was seventy-five?”

Hook nodded. “For a long time they called Jeremiah a squaw man. Got so it didn’t bother him none.”