Winter Rain jh-2

by Terry C. Johnston

“It ain’t just a matter of you trusting me.” Then Jonah wagged his head, saying, “Besides, until I looked back of the collar, I couldn’t be absolute certain it come from one of my boys.”

  Two Sleep reached up to tap the back of his own shirt. “Collar?”

  “Gritta sewed the boys’ names in their shirts. I imagine it were handed down from the older boy to his brother.”

  “What name you see in the collar?”

  “Ezekiel. That’s my youngest. Ezekiel Hook.”

  But as he spoke his son’s name, Jonah sensed again that unrequited pang of doubt. The gnaw of something so tangible it felt real. Yet there was nothing to fight, nothing to grapple with, nothing he could get his hands on so as to settle the doubt then and there.

  Little Zeke hadn’t been much older than the Mexican whore’s daughter when Jonah last saw him, when Jonah marched off with Sterling Price’s volunteers to drive the Yankee army back north. Three years old was all he had been. Only six when he was taken from his home by Usher and his gunmen.

  Like old Seth would chaw on a big bone, Jonah worked over it in his mind, scratching hard for an image of the boy, trying to see how he just might age that mental picture of Zeke he had been carrying so that when the time came, he would recognize his own son: older, taller, filling out as boys always did.

  What was it John Bell Hood’s old soldier had told him? Was it really eighteen and seventy-three already? If Zeke was born in the spring of fifty-nine, that would mean Jonah’s youngest was already fourteen. A time to set aside childhood things, time to take up the mantle of a man.

  And Jeremiah. A dim, wispy portrait of his eldest son swam before him in that frosty darkness by their smoky fire. He was two years older than Zeke. Sixteen now and almost a full-growed man. Would either of his boys know him as their daddy?

  What pierced him with all the more pain was his own self-doubt. Would he recognize his own sons, the flesh and blood of his own body, when at last the time came to find them? So many, many years gone. So much doubt lay waiting there in the cold darkness, enough to make him wonder if the time ever would come to find them both.

  Huddled beneath his cold, wet blanket steaming beside the fire, Jonah counted off the years on his fingers. Eight of them gone. That meant Jeremiah had spent half of his life with the Comanche. Even more than half of little Zeke’s life was with the savages.

  It had been even longer since last he had laid eyes on his boys. An eternity since they had last known their father.

  His eyes grew hot despite the cold drizzle of earlyspring rain come to bring its resurrection to this winter-starved southern prairie, here on the precipice of what many had called the most dangerous country in the whole of the continent.

  His lips moving silently within the dark curl of his beard, Jonah cursed this land for granting these poor people so little of life that they fell easy prey for the ricos. And he cursed the rich ones who funded the expeditions into the land of the Comanche that traded in human misery.

  The wealthy hired the poor wastrels—turning them into drivers, wagon packers, cooks, guards, and even gun handlers for the dangerous plunge into enemy territory, the last two brought along as some minimal insurance against the terror of what lay ahead in Comancheria. In this land blessed with little hope, between the poverty of Mexico and the far edge of nowhere, a rico could buy what and who he wanted to put together his wagon train bound for Indian country, and not only buy the services of a man who might want nothing more than to earn enough to feed his family for one more season—the rico bought as well that poor man himself, body and soul.

  Many times, Jonah had learned, the poor and expendable hadn’t returned from Comancheria. No matter to the ricos, though. There were always a dozen or more out there, each one eager to step into those empty tracks and embark on the next trip out come trading season.

  When he thought on it, Jonah had to admit he really knew little more than he had four or five years ago. Only now Jonah was certain that the boys were not among those Mexicans—they were held by a band of Comanche. Every bit as bewildering, perhaps, as looking for a particular outfit of comanchero traders was looking across this trackless waste for the comings and goings of a particular band of horse Indians. True, he had learned to track and read sign, to tell if he was following a village on the move fleeing soldiers or a war party riding out to avenge themselves on far-flung settlements.

  Later that spring Jonah finally admitted to himself that he did not know how to find any one single band of the Comanche.

  Spring slipped into the first warming days of early summer as they left Fort Concho and crossed the Rio Colorado, moving north for the headwaters of the Brazos. The two were traveling lighter now, trading a Danite saddle if they could, a belt gun if they had to, to buy beans and bacon, flour and coffee, along with those twists and plugs of tobacco gone black as sorghum molasses in the tin cases sutlers opened for smoke-hungry travelers come in from the sun and the dust of the western prairie.

  The Fort Concho trader had eyed Jonah’s rifle with envy as he stacked the horseman’s provisions on the counter to begin his total. He was a pie-faced man of simple features, most certainly a face nothing usually happened to. “That a sixty-six Winchester, ain’t it?”

  “Yes, it is. But it ain’t for sale.” Jonah had long hesitated selling his own, or a single one of the rifles taken from the Danites years before.

  The trader shifted his approving gaze at the Spencer carbine Two Sleep carried. “Give you top dollar for that repeater the Indian’s carrying. Ask anyone in these parts—they’ll tell you. I give a man top dollar for good weapons.”

  Hook wagged his head, determined not to be taken in. The pistols they could let go for the food and cartridges and smoke, if need be and they ran out of scrip money. “Gonna hang on to our saddle guns, mister. Trade you some army belt guns if the price works out.”

  “Got enough belt guns to do me,” the Concho sutler replied sourly, his mouth pinched up in sudden anger. “Just remember, you’ll never get a better price for them rifles than I’ll give you here, and now.”

  “Just tell me what these here provisions gonna cost—and I’ll pay you in coin.”

  The trader leaned back a bit in admiration, the furrows between his eyes softening. “Not in army scrip, eh?”

  “No paper money: so take your cut off what you usually charge for scrip. I got a few pieces of gold.”

  With a smack of his lips, the sutler put his pencil to work on his pad. Jonah wanted to pay and be gone, getting farther north where someone might be more willing to answer questions about what lay out there in the immense beyond, where a man would likely find the wandering warrior bands, which creeks and streams and rivers they haunted. Hereabouts the soldiers spent a lot of tongue wagging telling him much of nothing useful. Seemed the army was every bit as intent on keeping white folks out of the Llano Estacado as were those Comanche horsemen.

  What with them pushing north just like the tribes that were following the buffalo herds into the summer winds, to be gone from the forts and still have all those rifles strapped behind them on the pack animals, it was a wise thing, having those weapons that might well come in handy one day, Hook figured. Might well make the difference between him wearing his hair or losing it if things came down to making a fight with a band of these elusive Comanche. Might and firepower it was, the language of these southern plains: a matter of simply having more lead and powder and repeating weapons than a man’s unseen enemy.

  When it came down to a real fight of it, Jonah figured to be ready.

  By midsummer they had left Fort Concho behind, having crossed and recrossed the southern half of west Texas. By then Hook had finally come of the conclusion that it would take a stroke of real luck for him to run across the path of that particular band holding his two boys prisoner. Perhaps, he decided, it would take more than any pure gut-strung, man-made luck from here on out.

  Bound to take something more on the order of a godsent miracle.
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  The long green pods suspended in the trees were ripe. Whenever the village camped in these river valleys and deep canyons, the women picked them, loading blankets and shawls with the beans that would be pounded and mixed with water to make a delicious paste. Something cooked on hot stones beside the fires, to be served with the meat the men brought into camp.

  Tall One was clearly a man now: in his sixteenth summer already, lean and gangly, made all of sinew and bone and wrapped with skin cured to a rich brown hue. He liked the way some of the girls looked at him behind their black eyelashes. But he would wait. Enough time for marrying, he thought.

  Antelope, now he was another matter altogether. Tall One’s younger brother had eyes for the girls and talked incessantly about girls, about marrying, about starting a family and raising his children in the way of the Kwahadi.

  Perhaps to marry and have children would be Antelope’s way of proving himself to the band, in that way to show that he had truly become one of them, had married one of their daughters and begun fathering Kwahadi children. More important, he was fathering Kwahadi warriors to keep up the struggle against the white man. Yes, perhaps Antelope wanted to begin having sons of his own to prove to the rest that he was no longer white.

  Or perhaps it was nothing more than Antelope liked girls.

  Tall One himself would grow hard at times thinking about girls, looking at their bodies when he came upon some of them bathing in a river pool. This past spring Antelope had coupled with an older girl who desired him as a partner. Tall One had laughed at that, until the girl also presented herself to Antelope’s big brother.

  He had been more than a little afraid of the girl, of her father, of this coupling and what it meant to father a child. Frightened, Tall One had run away from her and ever since had never failed to believe Antelope’s stories about the girls in camp. Only fourteen summers and Antelope was already possessed with the prowess of a man. It was whispered among the boys that many girls boasted that Antelope was an admirable lover.

  Still, Tall One was the fighter. He had already killed two men. Funny to think about it, but Antelope was the one who sang his praises even more than Tall One sang of his own exploits in battle against the Tonkawa and the Caddo, against the white man and his pony soldiers. His young brother bragged on him more than he would have ever boasted on himself. Riding into battle was something Antelope had not yet done, though he had accompanied many a raiding party. Instead of scalps, Antelope had returned with ponies and some of the white man’s cattle to his credit.

  “I want a scalp,” Antelope said many times.

  “Here, take mine.” Tall One tried joking his brother, gathering his hair in one hand and pulling it upward, straight over the crown of his head. He drew the index finger on the other hand around the scalp lock as if slashing it off with a knife.

  At first it had been funny to offer his own hair to his brother. Then, sometime this past winter, it had ceased being something to laugh at. Antelope had lost his sense of humor. He had even swung his short bow at Tall One, catching his older brother across the cheek and laying open the skin in a long gash where the browned skin lay taut over the bone. Still, it was more the wounded look on Antelope’s face that brought pain to Tall One.

  He never joked about taking scalps again. No more did he offer his own to Antelope.

  Whereas Tall One could wait to become a man in the blankets with one of these squat Comanche women, young Antelope was impatient to fully become a man by taking the scalp of the enemy.

  “No, I don’t want to go with you to find a Tonkawa,” Antelope snarled when Tall One suggested the two of them go on their own raid into the land of the tribe that served as guides and trackers for the pony soldiers.

  “You want to wait to go with many others?” Tall One had asked, wondering if his young brother might still be frightened.

  “No,” Antelope said severely. “I don’t want an Indian scalp. I want the hair of a white man to hang from my belt.”

  It would be the last time. Tall One vowed, that he would offer to take his brother on a raid. Better that someone else go with Antelope when he took his scalp. Perhaps his young brother did not remember much of what had gone before after all this time. More than eight summers now might make him forget. After all, they had been so young. Antelope … Zeke, yes! Zeke had been so young.

  Tall One sensed the warming joy that it brought him to remember his brother’s white name: so long unthought, so long unspoken.

  “Zeke,” he murmured it quietly, the sound sent into the wind in his face.

  Far to his right his younger brother stalked through the brush, tracking deer into the wind. These last few years with the Kwahadi they had become proficient in riding the short-backed ponies, slipping to the side to hook a hand in a loop of rawhide lashed to the mane, one foot hung over a bony rump. Now they both handled the short sinew-backed bows as well as any Comanche boys their age. And Tall One could not remember the last time he had experienced any trouble in following the Comanche tongue. After all this time, both he and Antelope were proficient in their adopted language.

  Long, long ago had they ceased speaking in English. There for a while, in private, stolen moments only, had they conversed in their birth tongue. Yet as the days grew into moons and the moons turned into seasons, then one winter after another drove this warrior band into the shelter of the deep canyons, the two brothers had spoken less and less of that birth tongue to one another.

  No more did he find himself even thinking in that foreign language of a bygone time. It had been so long now, in fact, that Tall One genuinely surprised himself by remembering his brother’s name.

  “Ezekiel,” he said unconsciously.

  Antelope shushed him sternly from afar, pointing into the brush, making a hook of his right-hand fingers, setting the hand beside his head to show he was in range of their prey.

  Thinking the name in English, more so saying something in that old tongue, immediately washed over him with some of the old longings he had buried in those ancient days when he first came to live with those people. They were mostly impressions. Nothing really remained clear enough to remember anymore.

  True, what wispy memories there were flooded up to the surface from time to time, from season to season when certain smells reminded him of a life lived long, long ago. The feel of a blanket laid against his cheek in a certain way, the manner in which firelight fell on his brother’s face, casting shadows and flickering highlights, made his heart leap for an instant in unconscious recognition of someone important from that dim past, knowing he should remember a man who had the same nose, the same curve of the lips or the same solid, square chin—much of the same features as he and Zeke shared.

  Antelope stopped suddenly and threw up his bow, releasing the arrow in a fluid movement. Out of the brush bounded a doe, the shaft deep behind a foreleg. She took a fourth and fifth bounce, then crumpled, thrashing briefly, then lay still, only her side heaving.

  They both hurried to the doe, where Tall One knelt and dragged his iron knife across the soft underside of her neck. As the ground beneath the deep wound grew dark and moist, Antelope stuffed his bow away in the quiver and brought out his own knife. With it he opened the animal’s belly, then bloodied himself to his elbows gutting her.

  When he was done, Antelope rose, red nearly to the shoulders, standing there between the deer and the gut pile. What he had to say surprised Tall One—for his young brother talked not of hunting, nor of the dinner on such fresh and tender meat they would have this night.

  Antelope looked squarely at his brother. “I am going to marry.”

  Caught by surprise, he could only ask, “Prairie Night is the one?”

  The young brother nodded.

  He was a little afraid for his brother, so young he was to become a man so soon. “Can’t you wait?”

  “I could,” he replied with a shrug. “After all, there are so many other ones every bit as pretty and firm and willing.”

&nbs
p; “Then wait.” He tried smiling at his little brother, who had so serious a look on his face.

  “I cannot, brother. Prairie Night … her father says we must marry.”

  “Let me go talk with him, tell him you have only been flirting with his daughter. Explain that you are not ready.”

  He wagged his head. “That will do no good. Not now. He knows I am ready.”

  “How can he know this? Look at you! You cannot marry Prairie Night. And her father cannot make you!”

  “His daughter is big with child,” Antelope explained, some sadness, some loss of innocence around every word. “My child.”

  “You are sure it … this is your child?”

  “She hasn’t been with another,” Antelope sighed. “Everyone in camp knows that.”

  Tall One put a hand on his short brother’s shoulder, wanting to embrace him—remembering that such a thing was a white man’s custom. Like the touching of hands. They two, they were no longer white men. They were Comanche hunters. Kwahadi warriors.

  Instead of hugging his young brother to tell him of his feelings, to tell him of all that made his heart brim over, Tall One said, “Then you must become a man and marry Prairie Night.”

  “Yes,” Antelope nodded with resignation. “I will marry to become a man in the eyes of our village. And one day, one day very soon, I will take a white scalp. Then—only then—can I become a man in my own eyes.”

  29

  Early Winter 1873

  MORE THAN THREE years had passed since the U.S. Army had crushed the resistance of Apache chief Cochise down in Arizona Territory. It had been some time since the Navaho and Zuni and the other quiet tribes had been all stirred up by the Apache.

  But that hadn’t stopped Colonel Jubilee Usher and his army from loading their Murphy prairie wagons and making their frequent forays down into northern Sonora.

  From time to time the Mexican officials were willing to part with gold and guns, bullets and whores, if only Usher’s pistoleros would rid a certain province of its Apache threat.