It was something he was coming to think on less and less now. Only out here on the plains was the wind always blowing. Not like this back where he was born, nor in that Missouri valley where the curtains still hung, motionless in the broken windows like the eye sockets on buffalo skulls. Out here, the wind always blew.
It cleansed the land and the air that moved over it. Without stop, he figured. Nothing lasted for long out here. But then, everything stayed the same forever here too. Funny, but to his way of thinking right now as he sat in a little patch of shade beside the limestone walls of Fort Wallace, Kansas Territory, that fit in some type of symmetry.
Nothing lasted long out here. Yet everything stayed the same forever.
Victory … or death. He thought often on that now. Seeing that the doomed dozen had been given little choice but to die with as much honor as each of them could muster. Dying was lonely, even with others around you. No man do it for you. It came down to it, Jonah had seen enough of the dying already. Came close a couple times himself. The coldest he had ever been. Wondering at the time if he’d ever be warm again.
And here he sat, sweating in this piece of shade as the sun settled. A Monday he was told by Wheeler, the contract post commissary agent, 15 July.
Custer strode out of the post commander’s office into the easing of the sun minutes later, yanking on his sweat-stained deerskin gloves. He tugged down the big, cream-colored, broad-brimmed hat and adjusted the blood red tie at his Adam’s apple, letting the breeze nudge it over his shoulder among the strawberry curls.
He was a sight, Jonah had to admit. The man who had cut a swath through one Confederate horse outfit after another. Twelve mounts shot out from under him. The Yankee who whipped J.E.B. Stuart at Gettysburg back to sixty-three. And the one who bottled up the old man himself, Robert E., in the wood down to Appomattox near McLean’s new farmhouse.
Custer.
By God, the man was pulling out from this run-down motley collection of limestone buildings and adobe dugouts with an escort of four officers and seventy-two troopers, leaving the rest behind with Major Elliott and what soldiers the Seventh’s own Captain Frederick W. Benteen already commanded here at Wallace. Custer was hurrying east as fast as those with him could follow.
Upon arriving here yesterday, the lieutenant colonel had greedily read dispatches wired from Fort Harker far to the east along the Smoky Hill, learning of the terrible flood that had required Harker to be abandoned. Word had it cholera was ravaging the forts of central Kansas. No other news had been received at Fort Wallace. Nothing from Sherman nor Sheridan. No letters from his beloved wife either.
Jonah cursed Custer for that, then smiled. At least the lieutenant colonel, that Yankee from Michigan, knew now how it felt not knowing where his wife was.
What’s more, the Seventh needed fresh horses to continue their stalking of the plains tribes.
Food enough here at Wallace. Enough to last until Custer was back again with those horses. After the man had sworn to find Libbie and hold her in his arms for one, perfect, summer day.
Jonah watched the man with the cinnamon curls fling his arm forward and set off at the head of his detail, that crimson tie fluttering.
Damn you anyway, Custer, he thought, dragging himself to his feet as the sun eased out of the sky and the air became a squeeze more tolerable.
“You go find your woman, Custer. This goddamned campaign’s over—and you ain’t killed yourself a Injun one. Gone off and shot your own men though … and found the bodies of dozen more good soldiers killed trying to get dispatches to you. But you—you ain’t shot a Injun one.”
Jonah watched the backs of the last pair of the seventy-seven dusty troopers lope out of sight. Custer set a blistering pace.
Yet as much as he hated Custer, Hook understood just how a man could feel down in the private, blackened, buried pit of him—afraid for the not knowing. Not sure if he ever would know what had become of his own woman.
If nothing else, at least he shared that in common with the Michigan Yankee with the long strawberry curls.
33
August, 1867
SHE ALWAYS PUT her mind somewhere else.
For weeks—or had it been months? She had been afraid of allowing her mind the freedom to go elsewhere. Fearing that she might forget where she had put it. Afraid she might not even care to go back to get it when the time came.
But lately now, not really sure how long that meant, Gritta Hook had come to the not caring, or not fearing anymore.
It was a victory for her to remember her name today.
Just … remember … her … name …
To this private place where she took her mind she came each time the giant bald-headed man came close with that look in his eye. She recognized it. Every man had it when he wanted a woman in that way. Even … Jonah.
Yes—Jonah.
She remembered him now. In a fuzzy, outlined sort of way. Less and less every day, the picture of him in her mind growing dimmer and dimmer, shadowed more and more darkly by the big man the rest called Usher.
She hated him for pushing the memory of Jonah away. Hated Usher, and Jonah just as much for not pushing Usher away.
Gritta had given up a long, long, long time ago trying to push the man off when he got that way and hung close to her. Smelling her, lifting her long hair to sniff at the nape of her neck the way he did when he wanted her in that way.
This way.
The way he was using her right now.
But—it was like he was using someone else too.
Standing outside herself and watching, arms crossed and haughty, chin jutted, watching the two of them sweating in the summer heat. She was sure it was late summer, standing here, looking at herself sweating with her eyes opened and unblinking, staring at the shocking white of the canvas roof of the wall tent. How he grunted, like a boar planting his shoat seed in the sow back to home.
There was no more home, she reminded herself, scolding as she looked down on the woman lying beneath the half-naked man. She was half-naked herself, with her dress pulled up and her chemise torn down, breasts open for the whole world and God Himself to see.
How shameless that she should lie there and not fight off that rutting, stinking, brute of a man, Gritta thought, looking down at herself and clucking her tongue as she would to one of her errant children.
No, she did not want to think of them any longer. Her daughter—Gritta saw Hattie sometimes, but never close enough to talk. And the boys. She knew they were gone now. Usher had told her a long, long time ago … so long she barely remembered their faces—they were sold off for good Yankee dollars to buy bullets and beans and flour and whiskey. Usher had laughed.
And she loathed her womb for ever giving birth to her children, that they should suffer.
It was meant for her to suffer, her alone. Stand here and look down on that poor woman lying perfectly still beneath that sweating, heaving animal as he drove his hot, hard flesh in and out of her flaccid body, taking her when he wanted, how he wanted.
Long ago she had ceased to protest each time he circled her, flung back her hair, and bit her shoulder. It was the same each time. No more did she fight him with her fists and knees and teeth. Now she just fought him by going outside herself until he was done with her. She wasn’t really that body, after all, was she?
She clucked again. Shameless, how that body just laid there letting the brute abuse her with his privates, doing his business on her, in her, up to her womb where she knew she must never again have another child only to have it taken from her to suffer.
They would never get her mind. Not Usher. Not any of them. She would keep coming here, out of herself. That shrinking shell of what she had been, something that seemed to dry up and fall in of itself when she left her body, each time Usher wanted it for himself.
She left her body behind and feared going far away, forcing herself to remember, and look, and still feel something. But felt something less and less each time.
Afraid now the last few weeks … or was it months? She had no way of knowing and grew afraid of that as well. Afraid mostly that she was losing her soul.
More and more now it was like stepping first with one foot, then the other, into that wide, yawning pit of quicksand—with nowhere else to go but into the pit. Then turning, reaching out for a limb, something hanging over the pit to help pull her out.
For the longest time there, she remembered the faceless man standing at the edge of the pit. And felt, more than knew, it had been Jonah. Him—reaching out for her … first with his hand. Then with a stout limb … then there was nothing left for him to do but stand on the edge of that pit helplessly watching her sink deeper and deeper into the quicksand of insanity.
After all, if she couldn’t help herself …
Hancock’s campaign along the Republican River and Custer’s campaign along the Platte had accomplished nothing but to stir the tribes to a boil.
“Like jabbing a stick into a hornets’ nest,” Shad Sweete had told Jonah that late August afternoon as the entire command finally marched back to Fort Hays. A hot, steamy summer evening coming down slowly on the central plains.
“There’s talk everything west of here’s shut down,” Jonah said.
“Construction on the K-P ain’t no more. Workers skedaddled back east to safety. Wagon road from track’s end west to Denver City is closed down. No man willing to take the ride into Injun country now. What I was a’feared of most is just what happened.”
“What didn’t you want to happen?”
“I came along with Hancock and Custer to try my level best to see that the army talked with the tribes this time out—’stead of charging in shooting and slashing.”
Jonah had snorted quietly, without needing to say a word.
“I know,” Sweete agreed. “A foolish thing for me to think, weren’t it, son? Figuring I could help these bands by going along with the army.”
“Don’t grumble so much, Shad Sweete. After all, you was the one talked me into going along with you.”
“Should’ve listened to Toote all along.” Sweete looked up from the lodge peg he was carving on to watch his wife hauling water up from Big Creek.
“She figure it wasn’t such a good idea riding with the army?”
“Not so much that as much as she just wants us long gone from this country.” He jabbed the pointed end of the lodge peg into the dry, flaky soil. “We ain’t got no business staying around here where so much trouble’s bound to boil over. She wants to wander on west, over the mountains again. Says we’ll be safer … she’ll be happier there.”
“Maybe you should listen to her.”
Shad watched Toote carry the sloshing kettle of water in through the lodge door. “It ain’t like I never thought of it myself, Jonah.”
The voices from inside the lodge grew louder, more strident. Sweete glanced up at Jonah’s face as the angry words penetrated the buffalo hides.
“It’s hard on them both,” Shad explained, seeing Jonah become self-conscious when the ex-Confederate was discovered overhearing the argument. “They been doing the best they can, what with being Injun and Cheyenne and come up here to this soldier fort looking for a white man to boot.”
“Ain’t that many women around, Shad. And them two happen to be some of the best looking a man could set his eyes on.”
“I oughtta send the two of ’em north—live up there with the Northern Cheyenne on the Powder and Tongue.” He scratched at the ground with the peg. “It isn’t that the soldiers give ’em a hard time here—we all come to figure on that. It’s something else—something Toote or me can’t put our finger on. Unless …”
“Unless what?”
Shad gazed at the Confederate’s face a moment before answering. “Toote says it’s the girl’s white blood making her crazy the way she is.”
He chuckled. “That’d explain a whole lot, wouldn’t it? We white men seem just about as crazy as folks can get to the Injun, don’t we?”
He sighed, feeling better for having talked about it. “Perhaps you’re right. We don’t do anything what makes sense to an Injun. Especially an Injun woman. And when you mix in my white blood with that girl’s growing up a Cheyenne half-breed—it just makes things all the harder—”
The young woman burst out the lodge door, shoving aside the antelope hide roughly, storming off as Toote burst out on her tail, squawking her disapproval in a sing song Cheyenne. Pipe Woman kept right on going, headlong for the creek and the timber, where she could disappear, while mother ground to a dusty halt a few yards from the lodge, balled her fists on her hips, and stomped a foot angrily into the dried grass.
Shad rose as she trudged back toward the lodge. She plunged right past him as if he were not there. He reached for her. Toote yanked away from him angrily and dived back into the darkness of the lodge.
After a moment he shrugged his shoulders and returned to Jonah Hook.
“Seems sometimes I don’t do nothing right. Got a mark against me from the first whack, just because I’m a white man. She thinks I made Pipe Woman’s problem. Maybeso, I should send ’em north.”
“Let ’em simmer down. Both of ’em. Time was—” Jonah paused a minute, stared off across the prairie. “Gritta and me’d go for days not talking. Better for it—getting over being mad, rather’n saying something cruel or hateful, and being sorry for it later. A woman needs her time to get shet of it, and heal what made her mad at you to begin with.”
Sweete watched Jonah’s eyes focus on something a long, long way off. If not in distance, then something far away in time.
“Sometimes you love a woman more for the arguing,” Shad said quietly.
“I want to find her, Shad,” he said almost in a whisper. “Like a hole’s opened up in me and it won’t close up without her. I got to find them.”
Sweete reached out with one of his huge hands and squeezed Jonah’s shoulder.
“Your time’s coming soon.”
A tall dark-skinned young man bolted from the lodge door as Jonah Hook strode toward Shad Sweete’s lodge days later.
Jonah stopped, watching in surprise as the young man leapt atop his pony, bareback, and reined off, hooves spewing clods of dry soil and long, unbound hair flying.
Toote Sweete emerged into the sunlight, followed by her husband. She called in Cheyenne to the young man as Shad stood watching the rider disappear over the nearby hills. He dropped the hand shading his eyes to find Hook staring, motionless, at the scene.
“You come just in time, Jonah.”
“What’s that all about?” he asked, striding up to the lodge. Toote turned, fuming once more, her eyes filled more with sadness than anger as she dived back into the lodge. “Some young suitor come to pay court to your daughter?”
Sweete put an arm around Jonah’s shoulder and led him a few yards from the lodge. “No one courting Pipe Woman.” He stopped, standing right in front of Hook. “That’s my son.”
Jonah found it hard to believe. “Your son? Didn’t know he—”
“Just didn’t tell you.” Shad turned and trudged over to a tree.
When the old trapper had settled against the trunk, Hook came over and plopped down as well.
“Pretty important thing—not to go tell a friend, don’t you think?”
“He ain’t lived with us for some time. Never quite did get used to the idea he’s a half blood. Damn his hide anyway. Always has a way of showing up at the worst of times. Here I thought Toote might be getting over the boy—and he comes a’waltzing in on her again, making life miserable for his mama.”
“What about you, Shad? He’s your blood kin. Your boy.”
“Don’t I know. But there’s something in him that ain’t in either his mother or me, Jonah.”
“Where’s he go off to, if he ain’t living with you?”
“Ah, hell—he’s been old enough for some time now, twenty-one winters. He can live on his own.”
“Where?”
S
had shook his head, his lips curled up in clear disappointment. “Don’t have any idea most times.”
“He come back to stir up trouble?”
“Just to stir his mother up,” Sweete answered. “Always does him a dandy job of that too.”
“Better that he’s gone then,” Hook replied, hoping his friend would see sense in his appraisal of the situation.
Sweete sighed. “No, this time he’s really tore his mother up. Always before it was something little, but this time he’s gone and made a real ruckus between us.”
“Between you and him.”
“No. Between Toote and me. Bull’s doing a good job driving a wedge between that woman and me. Back there minutes ago, he just spit on his white blood. Then he spit on his mother for laying with a white man and giving birth to him—cursing him with his white blood.”
“She’ll get over it, won’t she?”
“I damn well hope she does, Jonah.”
“Give her time—like we was talking the other day. Better that High-Backed Bull’s gone, ain’t it? So’s he can’t go causing her no more trouble.”
“But he can cause us a whole lot of trouble.”
“If he just stays away, things simmer down—”
“He’s run back to a band of Cheyenne he’s been with for a little over a year, to hear him talk about it.”
“They trouble?”
“Tall Bull’s band of every outlaw and renegade and outcast from every village on these plains. That bunch ain’t just warriors who will fight to protect their women and children. The bunch Bull been running with loves the stalking, the raiding, the killing just for the sake of fun. They’re bad from the word go.”
Jonah fell silent, not knowing what to say to the man, except that he understood. “Family is trouble when you have ’em. Trouble when you don’t.”
“Man comes to realize that, Jonah. But it don’t stop you loving ’em as much as you do.” His face brightened a moment. “Tell me about Grass Singing. You find out anything? Run across word of her?”
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