Winter Rain (7 page)

“He alone?”

The picket nodded. “Appears to be.”

“Bring him on in when he arrives.”

The horseman proved to be one of Lemuel Wiser’s men—sinking wearily from his mount, winded and wind-burned, gaunt from the miles and weeks.

“You’ve been on the trail for some time, my good man,” Usher cheered as he rose, dusting both hands off on his flowered silk weskit, tugging on the points of the embroidered vest. “What news do you have from the major? I trust he’s not lollygagging far behind you?”

The man swallowed, his tongue flicking at his cracked, bleeding lips, greedily accepting a canteen of water from one of the pickets, with a half-done nod of appreciation. “Boot—… Major Wiser’s dead, Colonel.”

Jubilee sensed something seize him cold and low. “You joke with me, man—I’ll feed your heart to my hound!” Usher growled, instantly alarmed by the news. He took a moment to turn away from the rider to let this unfortunate disclosure wash over him.

Then Usher wheeled on the courier suddenly. “How did this happen? A card game? Perhaps a jealous husband? Such a dandy that Wiser thought himself to be.”

Indeed, Boothog Wiser was—or had been—a devilishly handsome man who loved his women and his gambling with unerring and equal passion. Both were vices Usher frowned upon. Perhaps one or the other had caught up to Jubilee’s young lieutenant at last. Perhaps a man faster with his gun discovered Wiser cheating at cards. More likely a jealous husband caught Wiser alone and dallying with his strumpet of a wife.

Although it came as a shock that Wiser could actually be dead, still it came as no surprise.

“Tell me all of it—or I’ll slice your tongue in ribbons!” Usher roared.

“It was a man,” the rider began, water droplets tracking dark veins from his sun-swollen lips, streaking down the fuzzy, dust-coated chin. “A man what’d been follering the major for some time.”

“Explain it!”

The courier’s eyes went small, like a ferret’s, as he flicked them toward the colonel’s tent. “The girl’s papa,” he answered in a small, trapped, feral voice.

That stung Usher to the quick. He straightened, still glaring at the rider. “The girl’s … father?”

The courier only nodded, greedily swiping another drink from the canteen.

Jubilee Usher slowly turned himself to gaze at the closed tent flaps—behind which the woman, Gritta Hook, kept herself hidden. He could only wonder if she was listening at this moment.

He turned back on the messenger. This, like any fear, always filled him with all the more rage.

“Then … I take it we’re being tracked by the woman’s husband.”

A week out
of Fort Laramie and this was the last of his meat.

Jonah Hook speared the long sliver of flank steak on the end of the peeled willow and held it suspended over the low flames of the fire he had built at the bottom of a deep pit scooped from the sandy soil. There were no bright flames to be spotted by wandering eyes scouring the black of prairie night. When he finished his meal, Jonah planned to move on another three or four miles west, away from this creek bottom, there to make another cold camp for the night, far from fire and the odor of food that would hang
about a place, far from any chance of some owl-hoot rider sneaking up on him out of the darkness.

He liked this moment of the day best, Jonah admitted. The long ride behind him, the warmth and cheer of the little fire close at hand, the fragrance of the sizzling meat rising to his nostrils, accompanied by the crackle of spitting grease as the antelope loin seared over the glowing embers. And with it a drink of the cold, clear waters taken from these streams that rushed down from the high country, eventually to join the North Platte and the Missouri and ultimately the Mississippi in its headlong rush to the sea.

That order of things really didn’t matter to Jonah. He had never seen an ocean, and doubted he ever would for that matter. All he knew was that right here in this high country, the water was found cold and sweet, unsullied by alkali salts and untouched by the sun’s heat.

Around his face swam a vapor of mosquitoes. As long as he stayed put, right where he was in the midst of what little smoke his fire put off, he held the troublesome winged tormentors at bay. True, they buzzed past his ears from time to time, but never seemed to land.

Out there in the beyond a lone coyote set up the first yammer of the night, calling for hunting partners to join in on the evening’s stalk.

Their kind hunted almost silently, Jonah thought to himself, pulling down their quarry without much of a sound. Not like he had to with one of the big-bore guns he carried along on the pack animal. He glanced over at the two horses now, both hobbled and content to browse on the good grass he had found for them near the stream bank.

Jonah dared not shoot, as hungry as he might be for the next two or three days in crossing South Pass. He remembered this country. Three years it had been since last the southerner set foot along the Sweetwater River. His uniform was cut of Yankee blue then—galvanized out of that Rock Island Prison with the rest come west to fight
Injuns. He had grown smaller and smaller every black night in that prison, afraid he was dying more and more every day like the others the guards dragged out by their heels most every morning. Desperate to do anything to escape that half-living, slow death, Jonah had joined with hundreds of others who vowed allegiance to the Union as long as they did not have to turn guns on their Confederate brethren.

Far from the Yankees’ plans to ship us south to fight, he thought now, then snorted humorlessly. The Union had no desire to make their “galvanized Yankees” engage the southern secesh. Instead, Jonah and the rest were freighted west to the high plains, there to fight Indians and keep the freight roads open, fight Indians and keep the great transcontinental telegraph wire up, and just plain fight Indians.

This was, after all, the land that the Sioux and Cheyenne would hold on to so jealously.

Jonah had seen a lot of good men die, all of them ordered to wrench this godforsaken ground from the red men.

He clenched his eyes shut for a moment, pushing away the hoary vision of those pale bodies left behind when the warriors withdrew after every skirmish. Butchered, mutilated, limbs hacked free, desecrated in every way inhumanly possible. He doubted he would ever forget the sight of a soldier’s manhood chopped off and stuffed in his gaping mouth, death-frozen eyes staring in mute wonder at the sky.

“Damn,” he muttered, then shuddered as the light grew purple with hints of night’s fall.

He brought the willow and his steak close, testing the flesh first by rolling the braised meat between thumb and forefinger. Then he gingerly ground a bite off between his teeth. Not quite done—but getting there.

He liked it rare.

As he hung the loin back over the flames and the
grease began to fall once more among the rosy embers, Jonah thought of young Hattie. Surely there had been enough days for his daughter to make it to St. Louis from Kansas, where he had last hugged and kissed her good-bye.

He wanted to trust Riley Fordham, wanted to trust the Danite turncoat in the worst way—although Jonah had come to trust few men.

Still, Fordham was the type who had taken to Hattie in a brotherly way, offering to escort the girl east for her safety while Jonah continued on his quest to reunite his scattered family. Fordham vowed to enroll the young woman in a boarding school where she would be safe until Jonah came to fetch her once more.

Hook had killed more than a handful of gunmen to free Hattie from that handsome, fast-handed Boothog Wiser. And in the end it looked as if what he had ultimately accomplished was to warn the one called Jubilee Usher that Jonah was indeed somewhere on the Mormon’s backtrail, following, his nose to the ground like old Seth on the scent of possum or coon.

Across these last three summers, Jonah had learned a piece of tracking from one of the best—an old trapper named Shadrach Sweete. Hook was no longer a novice: he was becoming one with the land, just like any good Injun.

There was a bittersweet quality to that thought as he tried the meat again. Done enough for a man gone all day without proper victuals. He would eat his antelope now and think on the dark, black-cherry eyes of Shad Sweete’s half-breed Cheyenne daughter, Pipe Woman. Her dusky face swam before him among the wisps of firesmoke drifting up into the branches of the Cottonwood, branches that would quickly dispel much sign of Hook’s camp fire here at twilight.

At times Jonah found himself ashamed that his thoughts of her got all tangled up with his remembrance of Gritta. It was like he would take a stick and swirl it back
and forth at the edge of a stream. Stirring up mud and sand and pebbles until everything grew murky. Until nothing was clear anymore. Resentment for himself boiled up in Jonah like sour whiskey a day late to do a drunk man any good.

All he knew as he sat there over the fire, one hand holding that antelope steak while the other dragged in dirt and sand to snuff out the glowing embers, was that he had to see this thing through.

Had to find out if Gritta and the boys were alive, or dead.

Only then could he put them out of his mind and heart—and open himself to Pipe Woman.

T
ILL DEATH DO
us part….

Gritta Hook tried desperately to remember more of the words, her mind clawing at the marriage vows like her fingers once scraped at the damp earth clodding up on the blade of her hoe as she weeded the long rows of crops she and Jonah had planted together that last season before he went off to war.

She could remember only faintly how it had been left up to her and the three children to plant the crops the spring after Jonah marched off on foot behind Sterling Price to fight the Yankees plunging down from northern Missouri.

“Till death do us part,” she whispered, touching her lips with her fingertips afterward, not so much to test their swollen flesh for the oozing cracks as much as to remind herself of Jonah’s kiss after he had looked into her eyes with those deep gray ones of his—holding her hand on that
day when they stood before the preacher, before all their family and friends come from up and down the length of the Shenandoah.

A cold splash of fear shot down her back as that word came back to haunt her.

“Death,” she murmured as the old army ambulance lurched, then swayed side to side gently, rocking among the ruts worn deep in this trail south by west toward Mormon country.

She was good as dead now, Gritta decided. And if she wasn’t by the time Jonah somehow found her by the grace of the Lord … well, she wasn’t really sure just how she felt about that—him coming to get her now. Not after all this time with Usher.

She knew the man’s name. More so, she knew the smell of him, how he kept himself scrupulously clean. By now she had learned there seemed to be a particular smell to each man.

Perhaps it was nothing more than the cinnamon oil he worked into his long black curls. So dandified. She thought about that long hair of his falling to his shoulders, what with Usher almost totally bald on top of his head.

But when she smelled that musk of his mingled with the cinnamon scent to his hair, and saw the look Usher got to his eye, she knew he had come to take her. It had been such a long time since last she had resisted. Gritta couldn’t remember when she had tried to fight off the huge man. Slow she had been to learn that her struggles only drove Usher all the more mad with desire.

So she had given up resisting, retreating inside herself instead. Even there, far and away from everything painful, she still hated herself for conspiring with Usher to abuse her—a married woman vowed to give her years and love to her husband only. Tortured with guilt, unable to find any other direction to turn to for salvation, Gritta sank lower
and lower into despair, never sure from moment to moment if she should go on living. What was the purpose in living when hope was gone?

God knows she had tried to end the pain for herself: snatching up a knife Usher had carelessly left lying about, dragging it across her wrists until the man wrenched it from her grasp. The next time it was a pair of scissors the Negro had forgotten in the tent after trimming the colonel’s hair. But as those first days rolled into weeks and the weeks stretched into months, Usher had eventually learned enough not to provide her with anything that could remotely be used to take her own life.

He even left his brace of ivory-handled pistols with George when he came through the tent flaps with that evil in his eye.

One of these days, she promised herself, when he’s lifting me into the ambulance, perhaps helping me down from it as his men begin to make camp for the night—I’ll grab for one of those pistols and shoot Usher … no, I’ll turn the gun on myself.

Then he can stand there watching me bleed to death, seeing the smile on my face as my life drains away at last. Long, long last.

“Till death do us part,” she whispered the words again within the rattle and clunk of the squeaky, swaying ambulance.

What life there is left in me. The way Usher has drained me of everything already. The boys …

And for a moment Gritta went cold, more lost than ever.

… what—oh, God—what were their names?

She strained for their faces, yanking at her memory like fingernails scratching at damask curtains.

“Little Zeke,” she finally said with a faint smile as she remembered.

Surprising herself that she had.

•  •  •

He watched the
distant rider. Two Sleep knew it was a white man—the way he sat his horse, the way he pulled a second horse with its burdens behind.

But the man was not like so many who knew little of travel in country so open as this. He clung to the bluffs and rock outcrops. He rode hugging the timber when possible. And at last night’s camp the white man had cooked his meal in a pit, eaten, and remounted. Then he rode another of the white man’s two, perhaps three, miles before the rider dismounted in a copse of trees and made his cheerless camp among the willow and alder, hidden from any roving eye.