Winter Rain

by Terry C. Johnston

  Jonah would learn no more from that one.

  The closer he drew to the seat of Mormon power, the colder the trail felt to that unnamed lightning rod he carried in his belly. It grew colder all the time until on the outskirts of Salt Lake City itself, Jonah decided he was likely riding into a blind canyon. The horsemen passed on through the City of the Saints without stopping, swinging south and east toward the Green once more, marching through Zion’s outlying communities, their neatly platted streets and arithmetically plowed fields becoming more and more sparse as the horsemen pushed deeper into the southwest while November’s sweet taste of autumn unraveled into the first bitter days of winter.

  At one settlement Jonah asked how far the Church’s settlements stretched toward the Mexican provinces.

  “On deep into Arizona Territory. Down yonder to New Mexico too,” came the answer given him from beneath the shading of a hat brim, where the eyes peered up at the horsemen in cool suspicion.

  Women worked these fields beside their men. Indeed, lots of women. More than once Jonah found himself unconsciously studying the faces and figures of those most lanky, those fair of hair, those who best fit the dimming remembrance of a particular female. A gamble, it was, to hope with so much of his fiber, to discover himself yearning for her all the more in this land of the Saints—here, where a man found so many white women. And he gone so long without his eyes blessed with the sight of any pale-skinned female, any white-skinned woman at all.

  And now came this sudden feast of setting a hungry man down before all these who belonged to the polygamists, laboring in the fields for their husbands and the greater glory of their God.

  So used his eyes were to the frontier garden of dark-skinned females. To Jonah it seemed that damned near all of the alabaster-skinned ones a man would run into in making his way back and forth across the West were businesswomen. The painted, perfumed, softer, and whiter sex had followed the gamblers and gamers, the saloon keepers and drummers, to make their share where a fortune might not be guaranteed, but where there would never be a shortage of eager customers.

  The cold emptiness gnawed through Jonah’s belly. How he felt starved of a sudden, his eyes looking over those fair-of-skin women. His rage returned, robbed as he was of these years with her: the months and days and fleeting moments stolen from them both, never to share again. And as he sat looking out upon those busy in their fields, or as he gazed at all the industrious of the gentle sex he saw moving up and down the streets of the small communities founded by these Saints, Jonah sensed the first stirrings of doubt.

  Was he chasing so much wind? Hadn’t Gritta’s trail gone just about as cold as the boys’ trail had in drifting off toward Mexico?

  For the first time he considered giving up the chase while he still had time to make some kind of life for himself. Maybe, he told himself, he should beggar his losses and give up the trail, lonely and unforgiving as it was. Close this dark chapter of his life and start anew—make a life for Hattie and perhaps find a widow for himself, someone who could cool the burning rage and pain he suffered, who could take away the hurt and fill this hole gnawing in his chest. Yes, Hattie would finish her schooling, then come live with him and her new stepmother….

  A vision of Hattie swam before him. Almost four years back he had found her in Nebraska. Lord, how she had grown into a young woman who looked more like her mother now than he ever had imagined she could. When he’d wrenched her from the clutches of the Danites, Hattie was damn near the same age as Gritta when he had married her. Jonah’s only daughter had grown to be every bit as beautiful and smitten with life as her mother.

  No, he realized he would never be able to look at Hattie again without seeing Gritta’s face. Never able to gaze into his daughter’s eyes without cursing himself for quitting the chase.

  “Goddamn you,” he grumbled aloud that evening as the black-bellied clouds quickly shut down the last shreds of fading light left in the sky. “Damn you if you go and give up when this ride gets hardest. Remember how you lost the trail before? But still you never lost hope, Jonah. Never give up before.”

  He was of this life to suffer the pain—one sort or another. He had decided this was his lot to bear. And if he was called upon to endure, then his choice was simple: the pain of pushing on until he found them or could push on no more—that hurt seemed much, much easier to bear than the pain of living with himself knowing he had played out, folded, and given up.

  He would not fool himself into thinking he deserved a better hand, nor cash in his chips and back away from the table. No, he would play out the hand dealt him. A man would, that.

  As Two Sleep became Jonah’s brother of the blanket, they inched over the first heavy snows carpeting the passes of the Uintahs, then eased down the east slopes pushing on south. From time to time they crossed freight roads the Mormons used, choosing whether or not to follow them into the distance toward a small community of clapboard shacks, more usually of sod or adobe, settlements of fields and irrigation ditches and laundered clothes hung on a line behind the dirty shacks where dim trails of smoke rose into the cold air of that first winter in the land of the Mormons.

  Only once more did he ever allow himself the sweet luxury of wanting to give up—halting the Indian as they gazed upon a cluster of mud homes in a nameless little settlement appearing all the more squalid with the early coming of winter night, dark of shadow and gray of twilight snow, the small windows in each shack lit with the warm beacons of light, figures passing between the light and those two lonely sojourners out in the cold. Back and forth the shadows moved as the fish-belly gray of evening descended to night upon that naked land of red escarpment and ancient geologic upheaval.

  A warmth beckoned him in from the cold, those shadows no more than suggestions of ghosts from his past, ghosts of happier days calling the lost and wayward one to join them at the fire of remembrance on brighter times and lighter cares.

  “Come, Jonah Hook,” Two Sleep said finally.

  Eventually he tore his eyes away from the window and its seductive corona of light and found the Shoshone staring at him with what the plainsman took to be sympathy.

  “You don’t gotta feel sorry for me, Injun.” He looked back at the distant windows now that twilight’s purple had faded to winter’s cold squeeze of black. “Never, never feel sorry for me. You hear?”

  “Make camp. Food, then sleep. Tomorrow we go.”

  “Always tomorrow, Two Sleep. How many more will there be?”

  “Every morning I think we find them,” the Indian replied quietly, following the white man’s gaze at the distant spots of saffron light.

  “You tell yourself that too?” Jonah asked, then sighed. “At times I just feel like …”

  When Hook’s voice drifted off without finish, Two Sleep said, “You give up this trail, Two Sleep stay on it. This trail no more just for you, Jonah Hook. It mine too now.”

  He finally nodded, feeling his shoulders sag, reluctant to release the anticipation of giving in to his fondest dream. Here at last vowing that he would never again grant himself the delicious ecstasy of the dream that took him down a far different path.

  “Sometimes it feels like there’s just too damn much trail left to cover, Injun.”

  “Tomorrow is the day,” Two Sleep reminded.

  “Yes,” Jonah replied, urging his horse off gently. Once and for all he struggled to convince himself he had the patience of the eternal rocks themselves. “Tomorrow morning is the day.”

  It was weeks later as they followed a course slightly east of south that the riders no longer came across any outflung settlements of white men. Instead, they rode toward the distant, gleaming, snow-draped walls of the adobe huts that seemed to squat on the valley floor, what proved to be a settlement of farmers and sheep herders nestled among steep-sided bluffs on one side, those buttes and canyon walls taking the unwilling eye and leading it upward toward the clouds and peaks mantled in white one upon the other.

  “Yo
u s’pose we’re in Mexico already?” Jonah asked.

  With a shrug Two Sleep replied, “Never ride this far. Ute country. Far into Ute country. Don’t know, Jonah Hook.”

  “Long as it’s been since we left Brigham Young’s City, it still don’t seem we’ve come far enough to be in Mexico. Maybe these here Mexicans live north of Mexico.”

  “No matter, Jonah Hook. We still go south—still ride till the land of the traders who buy your sons.”

  “Comancheros.”

  “Yes, comancheros. We ride into land of the comancheros.”

  They had pushed off the sangre-hued hills, colored by the blood of infinite sunsets spread prayerfully on this ancient land, wending their way down, down to that village of adobe shacks, mud-and-wattle jacales, cramped streets of solid-wheeled carretas, a village where farmers and shepherds knew little English. But unlike Brigham Young’s Mormon settlers, these brown-skinned people would in their own way try to help the stranger come among them that waning winter as Jonah learned 1868 had died and 1869 had already ushered itself in.

  There would be days and weeks, months and seasons to come learning more and more of the language as he and Two Sleep pushed on east of south, struggling over mountains and crossing valley floors, only to recross and return time and again to familiar villages and ranchos when a fickle clue or rumor ran itself out like the trickle of water in this arid land. As the miles became years, Jonah knew more of the right words to use, better to pose his questions while the seasons turned and the winds cleansed the land with each unfathomable tilt of the earth away from the sun.

  As they had realized that first winter afternoon riding into that first village where nothing but Spanish was spoken, the two strangers come from the land of the north had long known the one word that was sure to get a map drawn with a stick in the dirt, perhaps scratched on a table or stone hearth with a chunk of charcoal—or only as simple a gesture as a nod and a pointing of the arm with the name of a new village to try.

  That lone, powerful word never changed across the last four winters as Jonah Hook asked his one question—his first and last question in this distant, sunny land.

  “Comancheros?”

  25

  Winter 1872-1873

  HE HATED THE taste of tequila.

  Like someone had boiled down a winter-old pair of longhandles in a copper kettle as they distilled the cactus juice. It turned his stomach just hitting his tongue. Not like the corn whiskey a man got back home in Virginia, even Missouri. Corn whiskey betrayed its punch and potency behind a taste more genteel on the tongue. Like a proper southern gentleman who could shake your hand with civility or kick you in the head like a mule.

  But not this tequila. It was a drink as crude as the people who brewed it behind every poor mud-and-wattle jacal huddled beneath the never-changing sky like trail droppings from the passing of the sun itself. Some varieties proved to be more bitter than others, but the best of them no better than sour. He hated having nothing else to drink—warm, milky water, or this goddamned tequila.

  But that never stopped Jonah from pouring more of the saddle varnish from the garrafas, the pitchers of fired clay. Never stopped him from bringing the glazed cups to his lips at every stop, every village and cantina, every brothel or barn. More times than he cared to remember, Jonah and Two Sleep had spent nights in any sort of dosshouse where they might lie with the whores for the cost of a few centavos. When there were no beds to be had, no matter the price, sleeping with their animals among the fragrant hay of barns and liveries at no cost at all had done nicely.

  Eventually he gave up sleeping in the brothels. Too often had he carried away on his flesh and in his clothing the biting torment infesting those beds and those who made their living in them. Bitterly Jonah remembered the cursed lice up at Rock Island, remembered how that prison vermin tortured a man so that he never really slept soundly, how a man was forced to make a truce with weary sleeplessness. Back then he had wished the lice would freeze to death simply to stop the incessant biting at his whiskers, down in his groin, across his unwashed scalp. Back in that death hold of a prison he scratched himself till he bled, and still the lice lived on. Vermin that moved from the dead men the guards dragged from the cells each morning, and migrated to the living still left in those cages of rotting humanity.

  Squashing those painful, bitter memories, Jonah Hook sensed the warmth of the cactus juice spread from his belly, radiating out in spidering fingers of comfort, amazed that he already felt a lightness come to his forehead, his nose seemingly grown bigger. It always swelled on his face with the cactus juice. He hoped he would not suffer the cactus thorns before morning. Just get a bellyful of beans and some of that goat meat down—keep it down—then a night’s sleep. This could be one of those rare nights under a roof and out of the howling cold: small respite for a man who hadn’t been home for ten years.

  Oh, he had gone back to Missouri, to the valley, to the cabin he had built for Gritta, of a time in sixty-seven. But Jonah would never count that as going home. Not with nothing there he could call home. Everything was gone, even the window glazing stole. He hadn’t stayed long.

  No, Jonah had been on this trail away from his family for ten years now come spring. Spring? If winter ever released its grip from this desert land.

  Such different country from southwestern Missouri, different still from that heady richness of the Shenandoah Valley. Fleeing the land of the Mormons, they had kept their noses pointed south into the land of the Navaho in New Mexico Territory. For the most part the Navaho kept off by themselves and weren’t at all curious enough to cross the path of the two horsemen, perhaps content now that they were a defeated people not to know the mission of any sojourner.

  Plunging farther still into the land of the sun, they marched past the feet of the emerald mountain peaks of Sierra de Tunecha and on to little clusters of the mud huts, where the jacales knotted around a common spring or well dug from the hardpan desert. Watering holes and villages with names that rang off the tongue: Bernalita and Corrales. Wandering farther east out of the mountains and onto the beginning of the great southern plains, they eventually turned back to the north again, sensing that their answers lay west of the Llano Estacado, on west of the Journada del Muerto itself, that high, hard-baked land the comancheros crossed in plying their profitable trade. The two horsemen rode on past the villages of Pacos and Vermilla, past Ojo de Nicolas and Salina de San Andres, stopping to ask for word at Joya and Cachilla and Albiquira.

  Without fail Jonah gave voice to the same question that seemed to rise from the hope that some day would bring him the answer he sought.

  Always he asked where a man might find the comancheros.

  Instead, the poor folk of those little towns, gathered around the common spring or dusty square, would shrug, point off in a meaningless direction, and gaze back with passionless faces, their black eyes reflecting the glare of the bright sun, or shaded beneath the protection of straw hat brims. All about Jonah were the mouths that said nothing to help, the faces that hid even more.

  “Just tell me where I can talk with comancheros who trade into Tejas,” he would plead in his halting Spanish.

  And always the poor of those towns went back to their work at the stunted corn they watered frugally, driving their bleating sheep from one patch of burned grass to another beneath an omnipresent cloud of gray dust that turned pink, then orange, and finally red with every sunset. Smiling, these people apologized with their shoulders, sorry they could not be of any help to the sojourners.

  Down at the settlement of Santa Fe they were told the nearby river would take them south into Mexico. Perhaps if there were no answers to be found up here, it was suggested, then south where the comancheros lived is where a man might go.

  “What river?” he had asked.

  One after another of the peons pointed. “That river.”

  They followed, staying with the Rio Grande south past the sprawling settlement of Albuquerque and on to th
e tiny ranchos of Belen. Sabina, Lumitar and Parida, Fra Cristobal and Valverde. Told they had only to follow the well-beaten path south, farther still, on across the Gadsden Purchase, where they would come to the old town of El Paso. The place crawled with army and border profiteers, every man suspicious of all whom he had not bought with his money.

  Still, by simply watching the constant activity along the road heading south, they had learned enough to know that Chihuahua was where they needed next to go. They were lured to that great center of commerce, that hub of riches from which manifold trade routes radiated like the spokes on the wheels of the crude carretas that carried forth all that was shiny and new, glittering and painted, hauling back the wealth of distant ports.

  “You ain’t got shit for a chance to find nobody the comancheros brung down here,” the Irishman told Jonah.

  It was in a tiny Chihuahua cantina that Hook ran across the fair-skinned, red-headed Irishman with the wild blue-gray eyes split by his swollen red nose. Jonah had been more than eager to lubricate the man’s tongue once he found out the Irishman might know something about the trade flowing back and forth across the Rio Grande into American territory. While the Irishman drank, Jonah and Two Sleep wolfed down steamy bowls of cornmeal porridge mulled by little chunks of raw brown peloncillo sugar.

  Hook wiped his mouth, suspicious that he’d been taken by the red-eyed drunk. “Maybe you can tell me who some of these comancheros are. Names. Where I can find them. That’s all I need. Nothing else from you.”

  The fleshy, corpulent Irishman weaved to his feet, a cup of the potent, homemade aguardiente in his hand, then crooked a finger for Hook to follow him from the table. When Two Sleep started to rise, the Irishman motioned the Indian to sit.

  Stopping at the open doorway, the Irishman swayed against Jonah, then swung an arm slowly across the scene.

  “Look there, Mr. Hook,” he said. “And say to me that you’ll find two boys in all of that dark, smelly nest of vermin. Unpossible.”