Winter Rain

Then as he lay there atop Gritta, his breath slowing raggedly, for the first time sensing the sweat pouring from his own body and hearing at his temples his own heart hammering like it wanted free of its cage, Jonah marveled at what he had found with this woman—marveled that they had seen their special bond through the long years of his search to reclaim her.

The breeze of that evening felt good on his cheek as he snuggled closer to her, listening for the beat of her own heart, the slowing of her own breathing, the last of the whimpers in the back of her throat as the crescendo washed from her in eddying waves.

Gritta trembled beneath him like a frightened animal again, like she always did as he pulled his softened flesh from her. He drew the woman into his arms and brought her against him as he rolled onto his back. The breeze felt good and clean and cool and dry.

A sky above their bed hung dusted with more stars than he had ever recalled seeing over the Shenandoah before.

Jonah blinked, and blinked again. Drinking deep of the air as the Big Dipper whirled silently overhead.

The sky. The air.

Different somehow.

The coarse wool blanket beneath his hand startled him. Not the soft, years-worn goose-down comforter whereon he had made love to her.

As he sat upright, he trembled like a wet dog with distemper, the sweat on his brow and face and chest gone quickly cold and stale now in the breeze. Jonah drank deep of the night air. Only one place smelled like this—the high plains. Sage. But more than sage.

Wildness. Unfettered wildness.

He swallowed hard, near choking on disappointment.

“Goddamn,” Jonah muttered, his head sinking backward in an arc atop his shoulders as he clamped his eyes shut angrily, cursing the dream that had come to haunt him again.

That haunting vision returned less and less with every year now, yet still it remained a torture he practiced on himself—forcing himself to believe again each time the dream returned that he was actually making love to his wife back home in Virginia.

How real it had been. The touch and smells and tastes of her. The utter warmth of her wrapped around him.

So cold now in the aftermath that he began to tremble uncontrollably, drawing his shirt to him across the dry grass. Dolefully Jonah dragged it over his head as the tears began to well in his eyes. So alone.

So damned alone, after all. Halfway gone to hell and back all these years. Having finally found his girl. Hattie.

The boys were gone—sold off somewhere into the Southwest. At least that was what he had learned from one of those who ripped his family from their homestead during the bloody days of the war.

And his woman—said to be the property of some maniacal bastard who laid claim to her in the name of his own God.

Jonah flung an arm at the night sky, shaking his fist at God, at everything that God wasn’t for Jonah. God wasn’t there to answer a lonely man’s prayers, his pleas to put back together the shattered pieces of his family, his life, the circle of those he loved.

Instead, on that trackless high prairie sat a bitter, angry, lonely man filled with unrequited rage as he wavered to his feet and stood shaking beneath the great night sky—but more from the fury unspent within him than from the cold of this desert night in southern Wyoming Territory.

“Damn you for this!” he roared.

Damn you for hurling your anger down at my family the way you done—when you should have taken out your wrath only on me!

Yanking his pistol from its holster, Jonah fired and fired and fired again until the hammer clacked repeatedly on empty cylinders. Each bullet sped into the black face of the heavens—perhaps into the face of God Himself—in futile hope of getting the Almighty’s attention to his private pain, this hell only God Himself could be putting this lonely man through.

Jonah whirled and flung the pistol down onto his rumpled bedroll. He collapsed onto his knees, crumpling forward as he began to sob in earnest, not understanding why he had been cursed this way, not knowing just what he had done to merit having his family wrenched from him.

After all, he had grown to be a man who had never knowingly hurt a soul, never so much as harmed another until the Yankees had come to Missouri. Any man worthy of his backbone had to stand and be counted to turn back the blue tide.

Here he sat crumpled, knowing nothing more than that it hurt him beyond all endurance, this being without her. Not knowing if she was still alive, or dead by now.

For years now his clumsy prayers had remained un answered. He knew that much. Still, he had been told a man called Jubilee Usher waited for Jonah somewhere out there with his army of Mormon gunmen—cutthroats protecting the Mormon zealot and his woman captive as they marched back toward the City of the Saints.