Winter Rain

Perhaps it was nothing more than the cinnamon oil he worked into his long black curls. So dandified. She thought about that long hair of his falling to his shoulders, what with Usher almost totally bald on top of his head.

But when she smelled that musk of his mingled with the cinnamon scent to his hair, and saw the look Usher got to his eye, she knew he had come to take her. It had been such a long time since last she had resisted. Gritta couldn’t remember when she had tried to fight off the huge man. Slow she had been to learn that her struggles only drove Usher all the more mad with desire.

So she had given up resisting, retreating inside herself instead. Even there, far and away from everything painful, she still hated herself for conspiring with Usher to abuse her—a married woman vowed to give her years and love to her husband only. Tortured with guilt, unable to find any other direction to turn to for salvation, Gritta sank lower and lower into despair, never sure from moment to moment if she should go on living. What was the purpose in living when hope was gone?

God knows she had tried to end the pain for herself: snatching up a knife Usher had carelessly left lying about, dragging it across her wrists until the man wrenched it from her grasp. The next time it was a pair of scissors the Negro had forgotten in the tent after trimming the colonel’s hair. But as those first days rolled into weeks and the weeks stretched into months, Usher had eventually learned enough not to provide her with anything that could remotely be used to take her own life.

He even left his brace of ivory-handled pistols with George when he came through the tent flaps with that evil in his eye.

One of these days, she promised herself, when he’s lifting me into the ambulance, perhaps helping me down from it as his men begin to make camp for the night—I’ll grab for one of those pistols and shoot Usher … no, I’ll turn the gun on myself.

Then he can stand there watching me bleed to death, seeing the smile on my face as my life drains away at last. Long, long last.

“Till death do us part,” she whispered the words again within the rattle and clunk of the squeaky, swaying ambulance.

What life there is left in me. The way Usher has drained me of everything already. The boys …

And for a moment Gritta went cold, more lost than ever.

… what—oh, God—what were their names?

She strained for their faces, yanking at her memory like fingernails scratching at damask curtains.

“Little Zeke,” she finally said with a faint smile as she remembered.

Surprising herself that she had.

•  •  •

He watched the distant rider. Two Sleep knew it was a white man—the way he sat his horse, the way he pulled a second horse with its burdens behind.

But the man was not like so many who knew little of travel in country so open as this. He clung to the bluffs and rock outcrops. He rode hugging the timber when possible. And at last night’s camp the white man had cooked his meal in a pit, eaten, and remounted. Then he rode another of the white man’s two, perhaps three, miles before the rider dismounted in a copse of trees and made his cheerless camp among the willow and alder, hidden from any roving eye.

That is, hidden from any but the eyes of Two Sleep.

From the man’s still-warm fire, the Shoshone warrior knew the white man had eaten antelope. From the bones left, the way they had been stripped clean and gnawed. Two Sleep guessed it might be the last meat the white man had along.

“He will be hungry before the day is out,” said the aging warrior as he had climbed from his blankets in the gray light of early dawn that next morning. There came more and more tight complaints along his muscles with the waning of every moon. They felt much like the knots he would crimp in a new buffalo-hair lariat or green rawhide to make hobbles for his war pony.

“There isn’t much game from here for the next day’s ride.”

And for that moment Two Sleep sensed some sorrow for the lone rider. But instead of going down the slope to share his dried meat with the white man, the Shoshone had instead quickly lashed his blanket over his saddle pad and made ready to leave—but only when the other one left his cold camp among the willow below.

“He sleeps long,” the Shoshone had murmured to himself at dawn.

To the east the red sun came up beneath purple rain clouds, to be swallowed in the time it took the sun to travel from one lodgepole to the next. Far to the west above the uplifted land, the worrisome clouds were already unloading their long streamers of rain upon the parched, high land.