Winter Rain

His eyes came up, hooded and accusing, gazing at the newsman. “It’s for me to say who I’m gonna blame. And that’s the last we’re gonna speak of it.”

He understood Hook had just told him something important: declared something off-limits from here on out. Feeling chastised, Deidecker contented himself with watching the old man crack one of the doe’s thick leg bones on one of the rocks ringing the fire. Jonah then scraped out the marrow into the small kettle. It began to melt, sizzle, and spit as soon as the old man suspended the kettle over the fire from the iron tripod. Jonah dropped the chopped onions through his fingers into the warming marrow, then sat back and sighed, staring into the flames cradling the bottom of the kettle in yellow-tipped tongues of blue.

“Tell me about that woman in the picture then. She was Jeremiah’s wife?”

“Zeke’s. And those are my grandchildren. Got fourteen grandchildren now, between Jeremiah and Hattie.”

“Where did Hattie end up after going east to get her schooling?”

“Lots of stories there too, Nate.”

“I don’t want to push too hard again, Jonah.”

Hook chuckled softly. “She married her a wealthy man. S’pose nowadays they call that sort of man influential. He’s a U.S. senator from Pennsylvania.”

“Time comes, you’ll tell me his name too?”

Hook wagged his head. “No. But you could go and find out—a fella like you could.”

Nate nodded. “I suppose I could, Jonah. Each state has only two senators.”

“Sort of narrows it down, don’t it, Nate? But you digging around for it won’t do the young fella no good—no good to see you write up his name in your paper, saying his father-in-law’s this high-plains desperado and his mother-in-law was this …” Hook stopped of a sudden, wiping the knife off on the front of his pants leg before he held it pointed at Deidecker across the fire. “Let’s just get this straight—I don’t wanna hear that Hattie and her husband and their young’uns ever get mentioned in your stories. We agreed on that, Nate?”

Deidecker glanced down at the knife blade glinting in the firelight. “You aren’t threatening me to keep it out of the story are you, Jonah?”

“No. I’m not threatening you. Never threatened a man in my life. All I’m doing is promising that if you say anything hurts that man, it’ll hurt my daughter. And, well—Nate. You know how I feel about folks what go and hurt my family.”

The newsman swallowed, not really sure how to read the look on the old man’s seamed face, the cold-banked fires in his eyes. “All right, Jonah. It isn’t really important, is it? This is, after all, really your story.”

“I see them, my grandchildren from time to time. Hattie brings ’em out here of a summer, occasional. Figure it’ll be about time next year for them young’uns to see their grandpappy, go fishing and ride horses back into these hills. You see, Gritta and me don’t have all that much time left, you know.”

“You must be joking, Jonah. You’re … you seem as strong as a mule.”

“Thanks, Nate. I do get by, and that’s probably what is important in the end.”

“Do you get to see Jeremiah’s family much?”

“When I can. He’s brought ’em up here a time or two. Mostly I’ve took Gritta down there to the Territories.”

“Oklahoma.”

“Yes, to Oka-lahoma. To the reservation where he lived with his wife for years after Quanah Parker’s people come in and surrendered to Mackenzie later on in June that year.”

“That was seventy-five?”

Hook nodded. “For a long time they called Jeremiah a squaw man. Got so it didn’t bother him none.”

“Squaw man, eh? What’s the name of the woman Jeremiah married?”

Jonah looked up from stirring the chunks of onion in the kettle, as much a look of surprise on his face as Deidecker had ever seen.

“You didn’t understand … when we was talking about the picture back at the cabin?”

“Understand what, Jonah?”

“That was Prairie Night.”

“Prairie … Zeke’s squaw? Uh, wife?”

He went back to stirring. “A custom among the uncivilized savages, don’t you know. A downright civilized one, I might add. Jeremiah done what any Kwahadi would’ve done for his brother killed in battle: he took in his brother’s wife and children. They became his wife and children. He’s raised them two like they was his own. And he took that woman as his own wife.”

Nate blinked, thinking on the beauty of sentiment practiced by those he had heretofore regarded as savagely primitive in every way.

“Did she go back to Fort Richardson with you, then back up to Missouri to bury Zeke?”

Hook shook his head. “She run off with the rest of the village that escaped the soldiers that day. Escaped with the two young’uns, one still small enough to nurse at her breast those first cold nights without no lodges, nary a blanket for the three of ’em.”

“How’d you … how’d Jeremiah—”

“After we left Missouri, heading for the land of the Mormons, I took Jeremiah back to the Fort Sill Agency. I knowed the agent there, Haworth. We found my daughter-in-law there. My grandchildren.”

“What became of her while you two went off hunting Jubilee Usher?”