Winter Rain jh-2

by Terry C. Johnston

  Then with his next sharp-tanged breath, the rain came hard upon that place.

  And when it did, the breeze freshened like a cold slap against his bare cheek. He gasped in the sudden explosion of the summer-tanged ozone as the huge, wad-sized drops hurled themselves onto that crude porch, wetting his bare feet and soaking the bottoms of the canvas dungarees he had wisely purchased back in Omaha before journeying west to northern Wyoming.

  Deidecker did not mind summer’s reeking, prairie cold, really. Nor the chilling, bone-numbing wet of the storm’s fury driven at him. Rather than fleeing, he instead settled there in the woman’s chair, puffing bowl after bowl of his favorite pipe, brooding on all the old man had spoken of just the day before, thinking on all that he wanted to ask Hook with the thunderous coming of this second day among the memories and the ghosts of years and lives gone the way of summer snows. His bare skin warmed with the closeness of those strikes of green, phosphorescent lightning, and his mind electrified with all the old man had already told him. Then he began to dwell on all the old man had kept from telling him.

  So Deidecker sat a long time, riding out summer’s late storm there in the old woman’s rocker, sensing for himself the chair’s singular place worn down in those two ruts she had scoured into the rough boards of the porch over her years of roosting here below Cloud Peak. He could almost feel some of the woman’s warmth remnant in the worn cotton pad, sense the touch of her flesh against his as he laid his bare forearms along the tops of the yellowpine armrests worn white from those endless hours gone in staring up into the hulking immensity of these mountains.

  Only when Nate realized the storm was passing onto the plains below, its fury headed east for South Dakota, did he become aware of the subtle change in the quality of light in the yard beyond, the texture of skylight drenched over the nearby hills and flung up against the tall peaks, uplifted like a young woman’s breasts yearning for her lover’s touch. So close. So damned seductively close.

  Of a frightening sudden he became aware of the old man.

  Hook was standing in the open doorjamb, as frozen as a winter-gaunt wolf caught in the action of hunting snow-shoe hare, one paw in the air and the other three ready to spring, his eyes intent on Deidecker.

  As much as Nate was startled to find the old scout staring at him in the murky, ashen light of predawn, he quickly reassured himself it was as natural a thing as could be: To find an old plainsman like Hook sneaking up on a man unawares, studying him as that hungry wolf would his quarry. Nate swallowed down his surprise like the most bitter, metallic taste of cold fear. And tried to smile.

  “G’morning, Mr. Hook,” he whispered as cheerfully as he could muster.

  Hook tore his eyes from the newsman’s, staring off into the darkness that reeked with the scent of the storm’s passing. “I’ll allow you didn’t know,” began the old man without budging from the open doorway. “But that there’s Gritta’s chair, Mr. Deidecker. No one ever sits in Gritta’s chair. So I’ll allow you didn’t know any better, and pass it off this time.”

  Deidecker sprang up like he’d been bit, wheeling to stare at the chair, its flattened, faded seat pillow seeming to glare back at him accusingly.

  “No … I didn’t know,” he stammered. “But … I’ll … next time I won’t—”

  “Care for something to eat, Mr. Deidecker?” Hook asked, abruptly changing the subject. He turned slowly in the doorway, inching back into the cabin that filled ever so slowly with the seep of predawn’s gray light. “Course you do. What man in his right mind don’t want something to eat come morning get-up time?”

  “I’ll be fine till later. Usually don’t get up this … really no sense in your making something to eat right now on my account. I’ll wait till you and Mrs. Hook are ready to eat.”

  Hook stopped at the wood stove, turned, and gazed at the newspaperman strangely. “You best eat now, son. Lots of ground for us to cover this day—and you’ll be needing your strength.”

  Deidecker smiled at that. “Don’t take much for me to push my pencils over my paper, Mr. Hook. But thank you just the same—”

  “Wasn’t talking about us covering ground on your paper there,” he interrupted, flinging a veined gesture at the corner of a small table, where Deidecker had stacked his writing tablets and a bundle of lead pencils. Hook gazed at the younger man with those cold gray eyes of his, wrinkled and chiseled at their corners with deep clefts, and turkey-tracked like a piece of barren earth gone too long without the blessing of rain. “We’re riding today, Nate. Out there.”

  Deidecker sensed the rising chill of goose bumps as he watched Hook point an arm out the open door at the tall peaks slow a’coming purple, their snow touched with the dusty rose color of the east as he watched, without a thought on what to say. Struck dumb he was: choking on his own fear of where Hook was vowing to take him—that great, gaping void of wilderness that few men had ever wandered, a land most men of the last generation had wisely skirted in their business of bringing civilization to the West.

  Hook turned away and dragged a huge cast-iron skillet off the stove, opened the griddle, and dropped in some wands of dried kindling before striking a lucifer to some char he then pitched into the inky netherworld of the squat black frog of a stove.

  “Riding?” Deidecker asked when he found his voice. “You’ve got a saddle horse I can use instead of that buggy animal?”

  Hook turned with a smile gone warm, something around his mouth that also brightened his eyes in that murky, gray gloom. “Of course, son. You’ll need a more proper animal where we’re going. One of mine. That buggy horse ain’t fit for what we got to do today. Rustle together what you feel you need. We won’t be back in here till late tomorrow. Maybe next day.”

  Something cold seized in Deidecker’s chest. “We’ll … spend the night … o-out?”

  “’Less you figure on some other way to get the whole story you’re hankering for from me.”

  “N-no, I want the whole story, Mr. Hook. Just that, I’m not used to sleeping out. L-like you probably are.”

  “It’s all right, son,” Hook said quietly as he turned back to the stove stuffed back in its dark corner, said it in that fatherly way of his that reassured. All the edge and abrasiveness that had been in his voice at the doorway was gone now. “You best get over there and roll up your shuckings. We’ll be riding out right after I rustle us up breakfast.”

  “Before sunup?”

  Hook only nodded, snatching up the bail on the battered coffeepot and starting past Deidecker for the doorway.

  “I’ll just take some coffee, Jonah. Usually don’t eat any breakfast.”

  Hook stopped. “You’ll eat breakfast today, Mr. Deidecker.” The old frontiersman said it in that most particular way that left no room for discussion. Then he turned back to the newspaperman. “Out here in this country, a man eats when he can—not when he necessarily wants to. So when the opportunity presents itself, a man eats.”

  “I understand.”

  Hook wagged his head. “Not so sure you really do understand, Nate,” he replied quietly. “Not just yet, anyways.”

  Deidecker felt himself bristle with that challenge from this old man. True enough, Hook was thin and sinewy still with all his miles and all his rings. But Nate felt certain he could answer the call of anything physical the old scout could hand out. “I figure I can travel well enough as the next man on an empty stomach, Mr. Hook.”

  But with the way the old man gazed at him from the doorway, backlit with gray light seeping like alluvial mud off the high places in the Big Horns, Deidecker suddenly felt a little unsure of himself, with this man, in this place. Getting ready to push off into that immense unknown.

  Of that moment a little bragging on his own manly qualities seemed antidote enough to help allay some of Deidecker’s apprehension. “And besides, Lord knows, Mr. Hook—I’ve done my share of drinking on an empty stomach as well.”

  The old scout snorted with a single wag of his i
ron-flecked head. “Only two things I’ve found a man can do on an empty stomach, Mr. Deidecker. And drinking’s sure as hell not one of ’em.”

  Deidecker sensed the seizure of even more uncertainty in that next long and painful moment as his thoughts whirled. “What, then?”

  Hook came two steps back toward the newspaperman, with his free hand dragging off the top of the lard container beside the seasoned cast-iron skillet. “Only two things a man can do on a empty stomach?”

  He plunged one of Gritta’s wooden spoons into the lard and plopped a gray curl down into the gut of the skillet. Only then did his eyes narrow on Deidecker.

  “Make love to a woman … and kill a man.”

  1

  Moon of Drying Leaves 1868

  HE ROLLED AWAY from his attackers and vaulted onto his feet, crouching warily as he brushed the talclike powdery dirt from his eyes and mouth. He did not like the taste of it. But even more, he hated the taste of his own blood.

  “Your lip, it is bleeding,” sneered one of the older boys.

  Another one of his attackers nodded as the group inched toward him, saying, “Would you like to give up now and see to the cut for yourself?”

  With a shake of his head, the youngster prepared for these older boys to lunge for him again.

  Long ago Jeremiah Hook had learned not to take any of what the other boys dished out. They took pleasure in tormenting him because he was white. Both Jeremiah and his younger brother Zeke.

  As the biggest brown-skinned youth suddenly rushed him, lowering his head like a bull on the charge, Jeremiah slid aside, whirling to snag the boy’s head under an arm. As much as the older youth tried to free himself, Jeremiah had that big boy secured in a headlock and began pummeling the sweaty, screwged face with blows from his small fist.

  “Arrrghghg!” Coal Bear growled until Jeremiah clamped all the tighter, cutting off the youth’s protest.

  Unable to catch his breath, much less speak, Coal Bear hammered Jeremiah with a fist, connecting again and again above the back of the white youth’s hip, right over the kidney.

  Jeremiah crumpled, spinning to his knees in pain, dazed, as the big youth and his friend, Snake Brother, drove the white boy to the ground.

  “Brother!”

  Through the stirring dust and sweat stinging his eyes, Jeremiah watched his younger brother come flying in a leap, sailing out of nowhere beyond the edge of the lodge circle. Zeke hurled himself on the back of the biggest of Jeremiah’s tormentors. There he clung like a blood-swollen tick to an old bull, his arms clamped in front of the boy’s throat.

  “Get this little gnat off me!” Coal Bear hollered raspily, as loudly as he could, the words strangling in his throat. Around and around he lumbered into a spin, trying to throw off his troublesome attacker.

  “Get up, brother!” Zeke yelled as the whirling drew closer to Jeremiah.

  “What goes on here?”

  At the sound of that particular voice, both Coal Bear and Snake Brother came to a dead stop. Both started to talk at once, but the tall war chief raised his hand and shook it at them, signaling for their silence.

  “Does this little tick want to cling to his enemy’s back all day?” asked the warrior.

  Jeremiah watched Zeke glance his way for approval. He nodded. Only then did Zeke slide from Coal Bear’s back.

  The gray-eyed war chief smiled. “Now, will someone tell me what is going on here?”

  “We were playing only,” the youth said.

  “From where I stood,” the gray-eyed one replied, gesturing back to a shady spot among the buffalo-hide lodges raised among the leafy cotton woods along the creek bank, “the two of you were making sport of our young friend here.”

  Jeremiah swiped more troublesome sweat from his eyes, where it stung and muddied the dirt thrown at his face by his two opponents.

  “If he is to be one of us, uncle,” said Snake Brother, using a term of respect for the warrior, “then he must learn. It has been said by the elders’ council.”

  The handsome war chief scratched his chin. “So let us see if he can hold himself against only one of you.”

  That instantly wounded Jeremiah’s pride. “I can take them both!” he shouted back in that tongue still unfamiliar. Yet he struggled to learn the language. Just as he would learn to fight like these Indian boys.

  The warrior smiled knowingly. “It is good that you do not shy away from what trouble comes calling on you.”

  “We will never turn our faces away from trouble,” hissed little Zeke in his near-perfect Comanche.

  Jeremiah glanced at his younger brother, sensing a swell of sentiment for Zeke. He was all Jeremiah had now, with his father gone off to war many winters before. And the band of looters who came to lay waste his father’s farm but ended up instead carrying off those his father had left behind. Early on Jeremiah had determined that if he could not escape his circumstances with those bloodthirsty thugs, fleeing back to southwestern Missouri and home … if nothing else, he would then forge a family of the two of them. Little Zeke and Jeremiah Hook.

  That little family was all either of them had had for so long.

  Riding bareback tandem on a stolen horse into the Creek Nation over in Indian Territory with the band of white freebooters who had kidnapped them from the family home, Jeremiah rarely saw his sister or mother in those first few weeks. Then months had crept by.

  It was only time, a lot of it. So much time that Jeremiah could not be sure how many months had slipped past. Perhaps even years. He was certain only that there had been several long summers broken by the cold of winter. And once more they were in the days the Comanche called the Moon of Drying Leaves.

  Summer had come, and was retreating, burning the land quickly. Jeremiah had been but eight years old that last birthday before he was taken. He had counted three more summers since. He could celebrate no birthdays. There was no one to remind him of such a special event as one day flowed into the next, one week slipped into the next moon, each season cycled into the next winter until he began to sense just how much time had passed beneath his moccasins.

  “You there,” declared the tall warrior as he stepped over to the wary Jeremiah. “Seems you and your brother are such good fighters that we should put your white names away for all time now and give you the names of famous warriors of The People.”

  “Yes!” Jeremiah’s head bobbed. Zeke’s eyes grew as big as milk saucers.

  “In four days, then,” the warrior said, patting a hand on Jeremiah’s shoulder. His other hand patted Zeke’s too. “We will have our naming ceremony for you both.” The warrior turned to the pair of older boys. “Coal Bear, teach them well for four days—the bow and knife. How to ride on the side of your pony.”

  The two bigger youths nodded, their dark eyes flicking quickly to the two white boys grown so dark-skinned, their long and wavy hair bleached by the light from the summer’s sun.

  “As you ask, uncle,” replied the taller youth.

  “I already ride well,” Jeremiah said, catching up the warrior’s hand.

  He stopped. “You ride well for a white boy. But you have much to learn. Now you must learn to ride like a Comanche.”

  As he watched the young warrior stride away through the tall grass, Jeremiah swore he would learn to ride, just like a Comanche warrior. To mount and dismount from either side, to ride bareback, to ride even without a bridle—becoming one with a particular animal. This was a dream come true to a young boy of eleven summers. To become one of The People. To become a Kwahadi Comanche.

  For so long Jeremiah had wanted only to be dead.

  He and Zeke had been hauled up behind two of the looters come to their Missouri valley. Their mother and sister were thrown on other horses, behind other riders. After his warning barks, old Seth already lay dying in the yard, a bullet hole in his head, tongue lolling out like a swollen piece of pink meat dropped in the rich black dirt.

  That night the unspeakable horror had begun as some of th
e laughing, hard-handed men had taken their turns holding the two boys down, while others assaulted Jeremiah and Zeke, sodomizing their two young prisoners as the men cursed what they called “godless Missouri Gentiles.”

  That was but the first night of many more to come, each day a living hell, making it painful to ride the bony spine of the horses as the boys were plopped behind the saddles of the looters during the day, assaulted by the smelly men each night. At first Jeremiah grew frightened when he began to bleed. Then he became ashamed when he passed more and more blood, oozing and sticky, drying in his britches like the tears he and little Zeke cried almost constantly, calling for help as the men clamped their wrists and ankles, dragged their dirt-crusted fingers through the boys’ hair, and held their young faces against the stinking crotches. Laughing.

  Always the laughter rang in Jeremiah’s ears. The more he fought the men who held him down while others assaulted him, and the more he screamed, the more their wild laughter seemed to echo through the nightly camps where the two boys were beaten with the short rawhide whips the men used on their horses. It seemed so long ago now, like nothing more than another short lifetime, as Jeremiah remembered the shame of his tormented wounds weeping and oozing with a foul stench, his back aflame as flies laid their eggs where he could not reach to scratch.

  Jeremiah rarely saw his mother those first days out of Missouri, at least not the woman he thought was her. She had been limp, carried from horseback to a tent at night, then back to her horse, where she was tied every morning for the day’s travel. Later he saw the woman herded out of an ambulance the freebooters had stolen, looking as if she were half-asleep.

  It was the same with Hattie. He had wondered if those men were doing cruel, unspeakable things to her privates as well.

  But long as those days and weeks had seemed, the boys’ imprisonment with the white looters was over before the following summer. They were bartered off to some brown-skinned men when a camp of Mexican traders rendezvoused with the white renegades. When a high enough price was settled upon for the two boys, Jeremiah and Zeke were sold into slavery.