Winter Rain

by Terry C. Johnston

  “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 ti
me they called Jeremiah a squaw man. Got so it didn’t bother him none.”

  “Squaw man, eh? What’s the name of the woman Jeremiah married?”

  Jonah looked up from stirring the chunks of onion in the kettle, as much a look of surprise on his face as Deidecker had ever seen.

  “You didn’t understand … when we was talking about the picture back at the cabin?”

  “Understand what, Jonah?”

  “That was Prairie Night.”

  “Prairie … Zeke’s squaw? Uh, wife?”

  He went back to stirring. “A custom among the uncivilized savages, don’t you know. A downright civilized one, I might add. Jeremiah done what any Kwahadi would’ve done for his brother killed in battle: he took in his brother’s wife and children. They became his wife and children. He’s raised them two like they was his own. And he took that woman as his own wife.”

  Nate blinked, thinking on the beauty of sentiment practiced by those he had heretofore regarded as savagely primitive in every way.

  “Did she go back to Fort Richardson with you, then back up to Missouri to bury Zeke?”

  Hook shook his head. “She run off with the rest of the village that escaped the soldiers that day. Escaped with the two young’uns, one still small enough to nurse at her breast those first cold nights without no lodges, nary a blanket for the three of ’em.”

  “How’d you … how’d Jeremiah—”

  “After we left Missouri, heading for the land of the Mormons, I took Jeremiah back to the Fort Sill Agency. I knowed the agent there, Haworth. We found my daughter-in-law there. My grandchildren.”

  “What became of her while you two went off hunting Jubilee Usher?”

  “Jeremiah told her he’d come for her and the children soon as he finished some unfinished business. Told her he intended to marry her when he got back. She told him she figured they was already married—him being Antelope’s older brother. The gal waited for him, all right—raising them young’uns while Jeremiah was gone.” Jonah looked up from the kettle again, his eyes brimming once more. “I figure Jeremiah was tore apart between his two families: called to go find and put back together the one he was raised with … called to return to the bosom of the family he was raising of his own.”

  “He went back among the Comanche?”

  “Yes, Nate. I s’pose it was for the sake of them children that he raised ’em among the Kwahadi. Jeremiah been a close friend of Quanah Parker’s all these years. Time or two the chief’s even said Tall One is the one friend he can count on. Proud that my boy’s doing what he can to help his old friend bring the bones of his mother home to the Comanche reservation.”

  “Cynthia Ann Parker’s remains?”

  “Jeremiah does what he can, speaks to those’ll listen—writes letters for Quanah, asking the Parker clan down in Texas to let the woman’s boy take his mother’s bones home to the prairie she’d come to love.” He raised his eyes to the treetops. They glistened in the dancing fire glow. “Jeremiah’s made his pa so damned p-proud.”

  The old man’s voice cracked as he said it, so Hook turned and rose slowly, unsteady at first, then moved off to fetch up one of the packs that he brought back to the fireside. He untied the thongs from the cowhide case and from it began pulling some utensils they would need for their dinner.

  An object tumbled to the ground as Hook pulled free a green bottle of pepper. Curious, Nate leaned over and retrieved it, intending to straighten up the spill. “Here, let me help.”

  Then he stopped, turning that object over slowly: a small cloth-wrapped bundle he moved into the flickering light of their fire. At one time the cotton fabric had been brightly colored, a fine calico fabric. Now it lay in the newsman’s hands a dull, grimy scrap of once-vibrant cloth. It smelled deeply of many camp fires. Bringing it under his nose, Nate felt something hard wrapped within the folded bundle of old cloth.

  “Something special, Jonah?” he asked, wanting to open it, but afraid he would never get permission. Thinking maybe it contained the ear of an enemy, perhaps one of those shriveled fingertip necklaces he had seen on display in the Smithsonian Institute.

  Hook put his hand out to take it, then shook his head, dropping his hand, empty. “No.” His eyes leveled on Deidecker. “I figure it’s time you looked at what’s inside there.”

  “This cloth, whatever is the story—”

  “Zeke’s shirt. The one I come on down there in Texas.”

  “The shirt the whore’s child wore?”

  “Same.”

  Through the folds of cloth Nate of a sudden sensed something strange, wild, and unnamed communicated to his fingers. As if the years were reaching out to touch him.

  “Go ’head, Nate. It’s time you saw the … saw what’s there.”

  Reverently he slowly peeled back the layers of faded, worn calico folded over and around the object. Fold by fold he exposed the object he finally pulled out of his lap and into the firelight that sundown in the Big Horns. A rawhide-wrapped wheel about as wide as his hand. Dividing the wheel into four equal quadrants were two twisted rawhide strands, each quadrant a maze of rawhide netting. At their center was lashed a hard, textured object, almost resembling a blackened peach pit.

  “Go ahead, Nate. Take a close look.”

  “Is this what you call a medicine wheel?”

  “I suppose folks back east call ’em that. Out here the Injuns call that a dream catcher.”

  Over Deidecker’s hands spilled the long, black tendrils, some of which were flecked with gray. He figured it had belonged to an old warrior.

  Just inside the circumference of the stiff rawhide wheel had been lashed a crude circle of stiffened skin from which dangled that thick patch of long, gleaming hair. No more than four inches across. Just the topknot no doubt, Nate thought as he began to stroke, that fine black hair flecked with snow. He felt a sudden, evil chill and figured it was nothing more than the thrill of holding such an artifact against his own skin.

  “A scalp? A real honest-to-goodness human scalp?” Nate asked.

  “Ain’t ever seen one before?”

  “In museums. Never held one in my own living hands. And I never did see one of these wheels … a dream catcher, with a scalp sewn on it.”

  “That travels with me, wherever I go, Nate,” Hook said as the old man bent over the fire, sliding the skillet with the two loin steaks atop the flames.

  The fire’s glow in the deepening mountain twilight gave the shining hair reflections like a candle in a mirror. Glittering, gleaming beads of light, like black diamonds dancing up and down the full length of the silky strands. “Never knew many Indians, Jonah. And from what I’ve seen, I can’t say as I ever realized an Injun’s hair could be so fine to the touch.”

  “That ain’t a Injun’s scalp.”

  Nate’s mouth went dry. His heart thundered at his ears. He swallowed and forced the words around his parched tongue. “A … a white man’s sc-scalp?”

  “Yep.”

  “Who … whose scalp is it, Jonah?”

  Hook gazed evenly at the newsman. The fire crackled and popped between them, spitting fireflies of sparks into the deepening dark of that immense, all-consuming land. Tiny, iridescent shooting stars born of their wilderness fire sent spiraling skyward toward the great heavenly bodies.

  “The one Gritta took herself.”

  TERRY C. JOHNSTON

  1947–2001

  Terry C. Johnston was born on the first day of 1947 on the plains of Kansas and lived all his life in the American West. His first novel, Carry the Wind, won the Medicine Pipe Bearer’s Award from the Western Writers of America, and his subsequent books appeared on bestseller lists throughout the country. After writing more than thirty novels of the American frontier, he passed away in March 2001 in Billings, Montana. Terry’s work combined the grace and beauty of a natural storyteller with a complete dedication to historical accuracy and authenticity. He continues to bring history to life in the pages of his historical novels so that
readers can live the grand adventure of the American West. While recognized as a master of the American historical novel, to family and friends Terry remained and will be remembered as a dear, loving father and husband as well as a kind, generous, and caring friend. He has gone on before us to a better place, where he will wait to welcome us in days to come.

  If you would like to help carry on the legacy of Terry C. Johnston, you are invited to contribute to the

  Terry C. Johnston Memorial Scholarship Fund

  c/o Montana State University-Billings Foundation

  1500 N. 30th Street

  Billings, MT 59101-0298

  1-888-430-6782

  A Preview of

  RIDE THE MOON DOWN

  In the sequel to Terry C. Johnston’s bestselling frontier trilogy, Carry the Wind, BorderLords, and One-Eyed Dream, readers watch the mountain man Titus Bass continue his heart-wrenching journey through the perils of the Wild West.

  Ride the Moon Down is another triumph of the master of frontier fiction, Terry C. Johnston, who brings to life once more vivid slices of America’s history.

  Here is a preview of the opening chapter of this fascinating novel.

  The baby stirred between them.

  She eventually fussed enough to bring Bass fully awake, suddenly, sweating beneath the blankets.

  Without opening her eyes, the child’s mother groggily drew the infant against her breast and suckled the babe back to sleep.

  Titus kicked the heavy wool horse blanket off his legs, hearing one of the horses nicker. Not sure which one of the four it was, the trapper sat up quiet as coal cotton, letting the blanket slip from his bare arms as he dragged the rifle from between his knees.

  Somewhere close, out there in the dark, he heard the low warning rumble past the old dog’s throat. Bass hissed—immediately silencing Zeke.

  Several moments slipped by before he heard another sound from their animals. But for the quiet breathing of mother and the ngg-ngg suckling of their daughter, the summer night lay all but silent around their camp at the base of a low ridge.