Winter Rain

Usher whirled on the speaker, his present victim still dangling at the end of his huge arm, legs dragging behind like a clumsy, ill-stringed marionette out of control. The man had already wet himself, a dark stain down one leg.

“You dare tell me he meant nothing by his sordid transgression?” Usher spat into the speaker’s face as the man backed a hurried two steps, suddenly stopped by the solid cordon of his cohorts.

“I found him with her,” Jubilee continued, sensing his victim’s grip loosen at his wrist. The man was dying, if not already dead. “He had the woman’s dress up … well, let’s just say he had shamefully embarrassed the woman by near disrobing her when I discovered him … surprised him, those filthy britches of his opened. Ready to commit his nameless sin against this helpless woman. And you say he couldn’t help himself!”

“J-just that, Colonel …,” the man stammered, dragging his own hand across his throat as his eyes bounced between Usher’s and the bloated, ashen face of his friend, “none of us, we ain’t had no … no women since’t—”

“This is not the first time I’ve demanded chastity from you, men!”

He swallowed and nodded eagerly as a pup who wanted to please a master. “And the woman likely was looking … she was—”

“Looking?” Usher bent over to scream in the man’s face, spittle flung across the henchman’s unwashed, sun burned cheeks. “You mean to tell me you’ve been casting your eyes at her too?”

“N-no!”

With an audible crunch of the last of the trachea’s cartilage, Usher hurled his arm around, flinging the dead man at the end of it into the brash speaker. Screeching in sudden fear as he fell over backward, sprawling on the ground beneath the body, the Danite pushed and struggled to get out from under the corpse of his dead friend as it voided its bowels in a noisy, gaseous explosion. Jubilee stood over him as the man finally clambered to his knees, almost whimpering, staring up into the bright afternoon light until the sun’s own rays were eclipsed by the huge form.

“Just whose side are you on in this battle of God versus evil?” Usher inquired, this time so quietly that it caught every man of them by surprise. “This final battle at the end of the world, a battle between the faithful and the heathen? Between the clean”—then he pointed down at the dead man crumpled beneath his feet—“and the unclean. Where stand you?”

“Colonel Usher!”

Jubilee wheeled about at the call, the rest turning with him. A rider came skidding to a halt in a spray of dust that sent golden spires through the slanting afternoon sunlight. The dust settled in a cascading cock’s comb that Usher strode through to reach the horseman. Two more riders came to a halt on the heels of the first.

“Heber—what changes have the years wrought in our City of the Saints?”

As Heber Welch slid from the saddle, wind galled and dry as a high-plains buffalo wallow in late summer, Usher caught him up and gave the man an immense, intimate embrace. It was meant only for this sort of trusted friend—the one Jubilee had chosen weeks before to ride ahead without delay, reaching Salt Lake City to determine the condition of affairs for Usher’s return after these many years away from the real seat of Mormon power.

Welch’s eyes flicked over the rest quickly, then hung on Usher’s as Jubilee pulled back to arm’s length. “Your father, Colonel … he—”

“You saw my father? He was your namesake.”

“I am his godson. His namesake.”

“So you have been like a brother to me,” Jubilee said, studying the man’s face for the portent of the news brought him at a gallop.

“He is ill.”

Jubilee sensed the very real stab of remorse as the news pierced him through. “I have done my best over the years to correspond with him. To apprise him of my good works …” Then his eyes went half-lidded of a sudden, suspicious. “He is still a member of the Council of Twelve?”

“The others have … they’ve removed him, Colonel.”

Swallowing that news like something foul, fetid, and raw, Usher gazed into the distance, a bit south of due west. “The rest—they cower before Brigham Young, yes?”

“Your father …,” Welch started to say, paused, then finished, “it seems—he doesn’t want you to come back to the City.”

Usher turned back to Welch slowly, his face gone almost expressionless below the smooth skin of his bald head, its long fringe of coal-black, curly hair hung from ear level to drape far past his shoulders like a silken shawl. He pushed a perfumed ringlet behind an ear. “Not back to the City. Why in God’s name would my father tell me not to come back?”

Welch gulped slightly. “Your father …”

“What does this have to do with my father any longer?”

“Only that your father says the Prophet has … has—”

“Has what?”

“Declared you without the grace of the Church.”

That seized Usher cold, low in the pit of him. “He has cast me out?”

“Your father told me—”

Jubilee clamped his hands on Welch’s shoulders as a man would seize a brother in crisis. “Is he bedridden?”