Winter Rain

With a dirty hand Jonah swiped at his nose, slowly gaining control once more. He swallowed the sting of the salty tears, promising himself that one day soon he would stand in the streets of that Mormon stronghold and cry out the name of Jubilee Usher—calling the godless bastard forth to atone for his crimes against the family of Jonah Hook.

Drenched in starlight, he reloaded his pistol quickly, ramming home powder and wad and ball, capping all six cylinders in the indigo loneliness, the sweat encasing his flesh grown cold and stiff, gone stale and rank in the freshening breeze of postmidnight.

Where once his body had tingled with her touch, he now felt the cold seep of anger swollen into a furnace of rage.

It was like nothing Jonah had ever compelled himself to do in all his life.

This having to find her.

3

August 1868

HE STOOD TALLER than most. Every bit as tall as the biggest men he had known in his forty-one years. Still, it remained the oxlike frame that made near every man give him wide berth.

In his corduroy cutaway and pegged trousers stuffed into the tops of his boots that sported an instep as high as a lady’s, his fingers interlaced across his weskit of corded silk, and with that smile caressing his sensuous, Cupid’s-bow lips full beneath the curl of his waxed black mustache, Jubilee Usher cut a most imposing figure.

Born in the hill country of western New York State, not far from Lake Ontario in Mendon Township, young Jubilee had grown up the eldest son of one of the closest friends to Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Smith himself lived but eighteen miles away in Palmyra. However, while it was the Church’s founder who had the elder Usher’s religious loyalty, it would prove to be another who earned young Jubilee’s fierce and undivided obedience.

Brigham Young.

With the faithful the Usher family migrated, farther and still farther west to escape the persecution of the hated and blasphemous Gentiles. With his own eyes witnessing the terror those heathen nonbelievers wreaked among the Mormon flocks, Jubilee came first to hate all those who were not Saints, then quickly grew to nurse an unquenchable rage for the nonbelievers who he saw as solely responsible for the hardships suffered by his people.

The faithful had followed Prophet Smith from New York to Kirtland, Ohio, in 1833. But over the next five years a rival Mormon sect grew in power and ultimately joined forces with the Gentiles in the surrounding countryside to again drive Smith’s loyal followers west. It was during that five years of terror and uncertainty that Jubilee’s father, Heber Usher, became himself a Pentecostal Mormon—a Saint who believed in the reality of spiritual manifestation.

That limb on the tree of Mormon faith proved itself to be the rock of belief where Jubilee clung for the next thirty years. With unshakable conviction he claimed he had been visited by the angel Moroni himself, commanded by the Lord to take up the sword of the one true Church against all heathens. And it had not been merely one visitation. No, Moroni came often to speak to Usher through those three decades, guiding the man—girding him with strength for the struggle against the devil and the Gentiles.

Preparing Jubilee Usher for greatness among the land of Zion.

“Cleave the Gentile from the land!” Moroni had commanded Usher years before. “Take thy sword and cleave the head from the body of these Gentiles!”

By 1840 at their new settlement of Nauvoo, Illinois, Joseph Smith had announced his own divine revelation regarding the doctrine of plural wives.

It made Jubilee smile now as his huge frame settled into the huge oak chair he had his Negro manservant tote around for his comfort. Here Usher sat of every morning and evening. Big as it was the day they discovered it among the possessions of a settler’s farm they plundered, with its crowning back and leonine arms ornately carved, his Danites came to call the heavy chair Colonel Usher’s throne.

This morning they would move out, continuing their march down the slope of South Pass, into the Pacific watersheds. And his old nigger George would once more struggle to make a place for the chair in the army ambulance they had captured back in Missouri, home of the Gentiles who had killed Joseph Smith. Where Brigham Young had been anointed as the Saints’ new Prophet.

So again Jubilee smiled to think on how Young himself had only sporadic visitations from the angels, much less from God Himself, while Jubilee had almost daily contact with the grand and martial angel Moroni.

“Cause the fields of the Gentiles to winnow in the sun and their rivers to run red with their blood!” the archangel had commanded Usher.