Winter Rain

by Terry C. Johnston

  “For generations to come: as the old ones pass down their winter counts and battle stories,” Bull added. “A charge when the great Roman Nose knew he was destined to die. Still, he led his warriors into the face of those hot-mouthed white-man guns spitting fire into our ranks. It was a day to be proud of my Shahiyena blood—to watch a great man lead the rest, riding to your certain death.”

  Roman Nose’s eyes found those of High-Backed Bull. “To be a man—this was enough in my life.”

  “You die having carried our struggle with the white man onto the island itself when so many others turned away,” Bull said. “Watching you this day has given me the courage to take a vow on the blood of my war chief: to ride now into the white man’s world and face my own destiny.”

  Roman Nose almost slipped away then, his lids fluttering, but he opened them slightly, his eyes glazing as he asked, “Your father?”

  Bull nodded. “I vow to kill him.”

  “This is dangerous medicine,” Porcupine warned. “Your blood is his blood.”

  Weakly reaching out with his trembling fingers, Roman Nose sought Bull’s hand, took it, and squeezed as tightly as he could. “I faced the guns on that island because my medicine told me that it was here my end would come.”

  “Our chief is right, Bull,” Porcupine agreed. “You have had no vision telling you to seek out and kill this white man.”

  Like a duck shaking water from its back, he shrugged off any fear of offending his personal spirits. Bull’s eyes clearly showed he wanted no fraternal touch. “I need no vision to tell me,” he said softly, a distinct edge to his words. Then he tapped his heart with a finger. “What vision I need to complete my vow comes from here. Where I am told what I need to do.”

  “If your heart is strong, then you must go,” Roman Nose said, his eyelids flickering with a spasm of pain.

  “It is a fool’s errand,” Porcupine protested. “To go alone … why, he is only one man—when you can ride with us against many more—”

  “Would Porcupine call my ride into the face of those guns a fool’s errand?” the war chief asked, his eyes gazing directly overhead into the deepening twilight.

  Bull could see the eyes were nearly glazed in death-seeing. “Your spirit will ride with me, Roman Nose,” he said. “As I go to kill white men wherever I can find them—you will be by my side.”

  “If you remain true to your heart, High-Backed Bull,” Roman Nose said with a noisy rasp as he struggled with a wave of great pain crossing his gray face, “then my spirit will forever ride with you.”

  Bull watched the great war chief’s eyelids open widely, then slowly fall with his last, painful breath. The hand that held his own loosened, sagging. He rose from the body.

  Going quickly to his pony Bull galloped off—unshod hooves spitting spirals of golden dust into the purple twilight—riding toward the deepening gloom of night.

  Into the night he raced, north by east. Where High-Backed Bull knew he would one day find the man who had fathered him.

  “I seen two of them horses before,” Jonah said quietly to the Shoshone lying against his shoulder in the steamy midmorning air after the passing of summer’s late thunderstorm. Slattish cloud banks hurried on east toward South Pass and that great divide of the continent.

  “The riders—these have your family?” Two Sleep asked, his words hushed among the rocks where they lay studying the overland trail that skirted this Red Desert Basin country east of the pass.

  Together they had traveled west from Independence Rock, that great turtle’s hump rising solitary and magnificent from the tableland of the central plains, from Devil’s Gate, where the Sweetwater tumbled off the continent’s spine toward the North Platte, rushing ever onward to feed the great Missouri. Climbing through the treeless, sage-pocked arid desolation that would take them to the high pass through this unpeopled country, they had decided to pull off the trail, hunker back in the high rocks and have themselves a look in both directions. Less than two hours’ ride from where they now lay, every melting snowflake, every drop of rain that fell to kiss this high, dry land, would either flow east or to the Pacific. From here on out to the top of the pass it was country where a man had little choice but to expose himself against all that sky, against all that naked ground.

  But here they lay in the shadows of the outcrop overhead, their stock tied below and behind the jagged bluff, grazing on summer’s last dry offering of grass. They had watched the half-dozen horsemen riding stirrup to stirrup, fanned out and coming on at an easy lope as if they were about their mission with a deadly zeal.

  Not long after sunup and a cold breakfast of some hard-bread and what leavings of meat they’d fried the night before, the Shoshone warrior had spotted the first wisps of dust faintly smearing the horizon to the southwest. In this clear-aired country, that was too much sign to be just one man, even two. Even enough dust was raised to be a small war party.

  “Ute,” he had told Jonah as they both had begun to scan the bare flesh of this high country for some kind of hole in all that nothingness where they could make themselves scarce.

  “You get along?”

  “When we …” Then Two Sleep shook his head and shrugged. “Sometimes.”

  But Jonah did not like the look in the Indian’s eyes. Something there like a farmer watching the approach of a spring thunderstorm rumbling headlong for his fields—wondering if that storm meant needed moisture for his newly planted seed, or if those clouds foretold wind, hail—disaster.

  It had been so long since he had thought of things like a farmer. Was he anymore, that? Was farming any longer in his blood? People of the soil stood ankle-deep in the land. Did a man ever forget those roots gone back generations? German stock like Gritta’s, or the Irish poured in on his mother’s side back a ways. Some Scotch too—Jonah figured it was that blood which made him taciturn and not given to a lot of talk like the old man Sweete.

  For so long now he had been a man-hunter, someone ready to kill for the sake of cause, or heart. And now as he lay watching the half dozen approach across the dusty plain below, two of them on familiar animals, Jonah wondered if he ever would be anything else—wondered if he ever would be blessed enough to work again in the soil with his hands and the sweat of his brow, the strength of his back, driven by sheer will alone at times … or if the rest of the days in his life were of a set pattern already.

  To follow the faint spoor of his family.

  Forced to kill those who were sent back to drive him from the trail—perhaps to be killed by them once and for all.

  No longer did he nurture and grow the plants of the field and their farm animals.

  Now he knew he had become a destroyer. Like the dark side of nature’s own hand.

  His mother had taught him better. And Gritta too was of the same mold as his mother’s family. At her knee he had oft learned that man was made to wage peace in God’s kingdom.

  What was a simple man like Jonah to do? So often had he grappled with that dilemma—knowing Gritta would disapprove of his tracking after her, killing for her—all the bloodletting in her name. He knew she would shame him for all the sins he had committed in coming after her and the children. He should have turned his cheek, she would say the Bible admonished them.

  “An eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth,” he said almost under his breath after a long time.

  “What?”

  He shook his head at the Shoshone and fell silent again, thinking hard on that biblical command he continued to follow all these lonely days on the wind. He thought back to the last time he saw her, standing in the yard with the children around her long skirts like autumn-dried leaves windheaved against the base of a corral gatepost. One last time he had turned and waved, then forced himself to walk off down the lane to the road where others were waiting. His war was just beginning.

  For some weeks already a few zealots on both sides of the states’-rights question had been tramping back and forth across the forests and fields of s
outhern Missouri, gaining converts and picking up what money they could when they passed the hat. Fires of smoldering southern passion burned anew in Jonah’s breast when Confederate General Sterling Price showed up down in Cassville. The farmer, father, and husband told his family he had to go, to fight for all that he held dear.

  Price had kept his swelling legions on the move: destroying bridges, removing rail ties, setting fires beneath the iron rails until they could be bent shapeless, firing into passing trains until most rail traffic slowed and eventually halted. Yet within a matter of weeks Brigadier General Samuel R. Curtis, that West Point man out of Iowa, marched in with his Yankee army to destroy the Missouri State Guard. A week later the Union soldiers met Price’s ragtag band of volunteers at Springfield, down near Jonah’s home where Gritta and the children had stayed behind to work the fields.

  In their bloody clash Curtis turned Price around and drove the ill-equipped rebel army farther south still, beating the Confederate’s rear flank like a man would flog a tired, bony plow mule.

  It turned out to be so bad a beating that Price could count less than twelve thousand left in his army by the time they reached Pea Ridge in northern Arkansas that cold, sleety March of 1862. There Price finally rejoined General McCulloch and turned like a whipped dog ready to stand and fight. As much passion as those farmers put into that battle, General Earl Van Dorn and Iowan Curtis still made quick work of the southern plowboys on that bloodstained ridge strewn with bodies torn asunder by grapeshot and canister.

  Price barely escaped with some remnants of his command: those who could still fight; those who had not already headed home, shoeless and demoralized, their spirits broken.

  Jonah stayed on, determined to see the war through, walking barefoot as he followed Price’s legion east into Mississippi where the great Corinth campaign was shaping up.

  It was after the sound of the cannon and muskets, the screams of the dying, all fell silent, after the Confederates withdrew that the Yankees discovered Jonah at the bottom of a scooped-out depression left behind by a canister explosion—a raw scar of a hole in the rich, black soil where the Missouri farmer had crawled when he could not retreat with the others, unable to move any farther with that bleeding leg that seeped his juices in a greasy track across the forest floor.

  The Yankee surgèons had wanted to take his leg off, saying it was the only way to save his life. Jonah had stared at the nearby pile of bloody limbs the hospital stewards were slow in burning, and swallowed down his pain, refusing their offer of knife and saw. If he was to die, he told the Yankee surgeons, then let it be here in the South. So be it.

  “Better to die quick with two legs on southern soil than to die the slow death of a cripple prisoner of the Yankees, with no hope of ever making a run for it,” he had snarled at them, his words sounding braver than he felt as he gritted his teeth on the rising pain that tasted like sucking on a rusty iron nail.

  Instead of amputation, Jonah had asked for whiskey—been given brandy instead, which, along with sulfur, he poured into the open, ghastly wound. Two days later he dug the Union minié ball out while the surgeons themselves watched, unashamedly in awe at the rebel’s grit. Pinching that smear of lead bullet up between his fingers, and slowly opening the pink-purple muscle with slow, steady strokes of a surgeon’s straight-razor, Hook finally poured more of the brandy into the empty bullet hole, then promptly passed out.

  After his capture in Mississippi, Jonah had been marched and wagon hauled, then put on rails mile after mile northward to a squalid prison that swelled with new prisoners arriving every week: Rock Island, Illinois.

  For the longest time Jonah had feared Rock Island would be the last place he would close his eyes, never again to sleep in Gritta’s warm, sheltering arms.

  But after weeks and months that became years of waiting, forced to watch others die the slow death of starvation and typhus, diphtheria and scurvy, Jonah was offered the chance to wear Yankee blue, to go west to fight Indians while the Union finished cleaning up the southern rebellion.

  To wear Yankee blue meant to survive, to live out enough days until he could get back to that valley in Missouri where Gritta and the children waited. As long as he did not have to turn a gun on a southern patriot, Jonah agreed to come west with the eighteen hundred who were herded onto railroad cars for Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, from there to march farther still to the Great Platte River Road where the telegraph wire required protection from the Sioux and Cheyenne.

  It was here in this very country where he and Two Sleep watched the half dozen approach that Jonah Hook had first battled the red lords of the central plains.

  He smiled grimly. For now in this very same country, things had once more come down to the simple matter of blood choices, the simple matter of him or the Danites likely sent back to eliminate him.

  Kill, or be killed.

  The longer he spent out here in the West, Jonah brooded now as he filled the long barrel tube on the sixty-six Winchester—the easier the choices were for him to make.

  13

  October 1868

  AUTUMN NIGHTS IN this high desert were enough to make a man’s blood run cold all of its own. You didn’t have to be waiting out the fall of the moon before you went about killing to feel the cold all the way to your marrow.

  Beneath a cloudy glitter of stars Jonah shivered slightly within the single blanket as he sat with his back propped against the rock wall. Beside him squatted the Shoshone. The sky was still too light for what they had planned and polished together throughout that day of watching the approach of the six gunmen. Watching them ride on past.

  When the hoof dust from the half dozen had reached the limits of the horizon, Two Sleep agreed that they could take up the backtrail of the Danites.

  For the longest time there in the shrinking shadows of that rock shelf as they had waited to ride out, the Shoshone had argued against going after the six.

  “Better to go on. Ride where you finish this,” he had told the white plainsman.

  Jonah figured he had studied on the situation just about every way a man could, and come out with only one solution: he had to rid his backtrail of the six.

  “Can’t go on west,” he had told the warrior. “Having them at my backside. Not knowing really where those six are. When they’ll show up on me.” He shook his head. “No. There’s only one way—and that’s to take care of ’em.”

  “Want to follow them? Kill one, by one?”

  Jonah shook his head again. Then stared into the Shoshone’s eyes. “No. I don’t have that much time to burn now. I got the scent of that bastard strong in my nose right now. After all these years—at long last I can smell him. Nawww, I ain’t bound to lose him—to lose my woman again just ’cause I messed up watching things over my shoulder.”

  The warrior had pushed up from the rock shelf, stood brushing his hide leggings before they went to their horses. “I don’t go now—you still ride?”

  “I will.” Jonah had nodded, confirmed. “A man must. You don’t go—it’s all right. I’ll go on alone.”

  “Yes. You alone before I come. You go do what is right anyway. That is why I go with you now.”

  There had been no more words, nothing more between them but the clasp of hands in that practice of solidarity between men.

  And now it had been hours since the Shoshone had declared his allegiance to Hook’s plan to go after the six, to take them off his backtrail in one fell swoop. Hours since they had really talked. Having seen where the Danites had camped, found what side of camp the horses were grazed, seeing the size of their fire as autumn’s twilight squeezed down early on this land—the two sat propped against a handful of man-sized boulders less than a mile from the Danites’ fire, waiting for moondown, waiting to move in and put an end to Hook’s backtrail problem.

  Jonah finally said what he had been thinking ever since they emerged into the bright fall sunlight in the Red Desert Basin earlier that day and reined their horses into the tracks
left by the six.

  “Thank you, Two Sleep.”

  “You say so when we are done, Hook,” the Shoshone replied. “When we go back to go on get your family.”

  He sighed, gazing up at the spinning sky overhead, stars clear as dewdrops on corn silk of an early summer morning, the whole shiny glitter of them seeming almost close enough for him to reach out and knock those droplets off with a flick of his fingers. Not knowing why he couldn’t reach that far.

  “You don’t have to do this, you know.”

  “I know,” Two Sleep replied. “I do it with you.”

  “That’s just it. Can’t figure out why you’d want to walk in there with me—when the odds are agin us.”

  The Shoshone looked over at the white man riding beside him. “Odds better when I come, no?”

  “This bunch is likely good at killing, Two Sleep. They didn’t get into Usher’s group—they didn’t stay alive in that bastard’s outfit less’n they were awful good with guns.”

  “This Usher you tell me—he send the best back for you, yes?”

  Jonah nodded. “I suppose he would. His best. Do it clean and quick.”

  It was the warrior’s time to sigh and contemplate. “Then—you … me. We do much more to be better.”

  After he had patted the Shoshone’s arm reassuringly, Jonah gazed a moment at the aging warrior in the pale starlight. “It still doesn’t tell me why you come along. This ain’t your fight. Not riding on with me to the land of the Mormons neither. Can’t make sense of why you just don’t ride off down that road where you was heading when you bumped into me.”

  “Told you. Like your whiskey. Like your company.”

  “Don’t have any more whiskey, goddammit. You seen to that.”

  Two Sleep nodded, pursed his lips. “So all I got is a friend to ride with, yes?”

  “No. It’s gotta be more than that. More reason for you to pick this same bloody road as I picked for myself. Some good goddamned reason to put your life down for me. Why? Why you doing this for me?”