Winter Rain

Jonah had seen a lot of good men die, all of them ordered to wrench this godforsaken ground from the red men.

He clenched his eyes shut for a moment, pushing away the hoary vision of those pale bodies left behind when the warriors withdrew after every skirmish. Butchered, mutilated, limbs hacked free, desecrated in every way inhumanly possible. He doubted he would ever forget the sight of a soldier’s manhood chopped off and stuffed in his gaping mouth, death-frozen eyes staring in mute wonder at the sky.

“Damn,” he muttered, then shuddered as the light grew purple with hints of night’s fall.

He brought the willow and his steak close, testing the flesh first by rolling the braised meat between thumb and forefinger. Then he gingerly ground a bite off between his teeth. Not quite done—but getting there.

He liked it rare.

As he hung the loin back over the flames and the grease began to fall once more among the rosy embers, Jonah thought of young Hattie. Surely there had been enough days for his daughter to make it to St. Louis from Kansas, where he had last hugged and kissed her good-bye.

He wanted to trust Riley Fordham, wanted to trust the Danite turncoat in the worst way—although Jonah had come to trust few men.

Still, Fordham was the type who had taken to Hattie in a brotherly way, offering to escort the girl east for her safety while Jonah continued on his quest to reunite his scattered family. Fordham vowed to enroll the young woman in a boarding school where she would be safe until Jonah came to fetch her once more.

Hook had killed more than a handful of gunmen to free Hattie from that handsome, fast-handed Boothog Wiser. And in the end it looked as if what he had ultimately accomplished was to warn the one called Jubilee Usher that Jonah was indeed somewhere on the Mormon’s backtrail, following, his nose to the ground like old Seth on the scent of possum or coon.

Across these last three summers, Jonah had learned a piece of tracking from one of the best—an old trapper named Shadrach Sweete. Hook was no longer a novice: he was becoming one with the land, just like any good Injun.

There was a bittersweet quality to that thought as he tried the meat again. Done enough for a man gone all day without proper victuals. He would eat his antelope now and think on the dark, black-cherry eyes of Shad Sweete’s half-breed Cheyenne daughter, Pipe Woman. Her dusky face swam before him among the wisps of firesmoke drifting up into the branches of the Cottonwood, branches that would quickly dispel much sign of Hook’s camp fire here at twilight.

At times Jonah found himself ashamed that his thoughts of her got all tangled up with his remembrance of Gritta. It was like he would take a stick and swirl it back and forth at the edge of a stream. Stirring up mud and sand and pebbles until everything grew murky. Until nothing was clear anymore. Resentment for himself boiled up in Jonah like sour whiskey a day late to do a drunk man any good.

All he knew as he sat there over the fire, one hand holding that antelope steak while the other dragged in dirt and sand to snuff out the glowing embers, was that he had to see this thing through.

Had to find out if Gritta and the boys were alive, or dead.

Only then could he put them out of his mind and heart—and open himself to Pipe Woman.

4

September 1868

TILL DEATH DO us part….

Gritta Hook tried desperately to remember more of the words, her mind clawing at the marriage vows like her fingers once scraped at the damp earth clodding up on the blade of her hoe as she weeded the long rows of crops she and Jonah had planted together that last season before he went off to war.

She could remember only faintly how it had been left up to her and the three children to plant the crops the spring after Jonah marched off on foot behind Sterling Price to fight the Yankees plunging down from northern Missouri.

“Till death do us part,” she whispered, touching her lips with her fingertips afterward, not so much to test their swollen flesh for the oozing cracks as much as to remind herself of Jonah’s kiss after he had looked into her eyes with those deep gray ones of his—holding her hand on that day when they stood before the preacher, before all their family and friends come from up and down the length of the Shenandoah.

A cold splash of fear shot down her back as that word came back to haunt her.

“Death,” she murmured as the old army ambulance lurched, then swayed side to side gently, rocking among the ruts worn deep in this trail south by west toward Mormon country.

She was good as dead now, Gritta decided. And if she wasn’t by the time Jonah somehow found her by the grace of the Lord … well, she wasn’t really sure just how she felt about that—him coming to get her now. Not after all this time with Usher.

She knew the man’s name. More so, she knew the smell of him, how he kept himself scrupulously clean. By now she had learned there seemed to be a particular smell to each man.