Winter Rain

“Ute,” he had told Jonah as they both had begun to scan the bare flesh of this high country for some kind of hole in all that nothingness where they could make themselves scarce.

“You get along?”

“When we …” Then Two Sleep shook his head and shrugged. “Sometimes.”

But Jonah did not like the look in the Indian’s eyes. Something there like a farmer watching the approach of a spring thunderstorm rumbling headlong for his fields—wondering if that storm meant needed moisture for his newly planted seed, or if those clouds foretold wind, hail—disaster.

It had been so long since he had thought of things like a farmer. Was he anymore, that? Was farming any longer in his blood? People of the soil stood ankle-deep in the land. Did a man ever forget those roots gone back generations? German stock like Gritta’s, or the Irish poured in on his mother’s side back a ways. Some Scotch too—Jonah figured it was that blood which made him taciturn and not given to a lot of talk like the old man Sweete.

For so long now he had been a man-hunter, someone ready to kill for the sake of cause, or heart. And now as he lay watching the half dozen approach across the dusty plain below, two of them on familiar animals, Jonah wondered if he ever would be anything else—wondered if he ever would be blessed enough to work again in the soil with his hands and the sweat of his brow, the strength of his back, driven by sheer will alone at times … or if the rest of the days in his life were of a set pattern already.

To follow the faint spoor of his family.

Forced to kill those who were sent back to drive him from the trail—perhaps to be killed by them once and for all.

No longer did he nurture and grow the plants of the field and their farm animals.

Now he knew he had become a destroyer. Like the dark side of nature’s own hand.

His mother had taught him better. And Gritta too was of the same mold as his mother’s family. At her knee he had oft learned that man was made to wage peace in God’s kingdom.

What was a simple man like Jonah to do? So often had he grappled with that dilemma—knowing Gritta would disapprove of his tracking after her, killing for her—all the bloodletting in her name. He knew she would shame him for all the sins he had committed in coming after her and the children. He should have turned his cheek, she would say the Bible admonished them.

“An eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth,” he said almost under his breath after a long time.

“What?”

He shook his head at the Shoshone and fell silent again, thinking hard on that biblical command he continued to follow all these lonely days on the wind. He thought back to the last time he saw her, standing in the yard with the children around her long skirts like autumn-dried leaves windheaved against the base of a corral gatepost. One last time he had turned and waved, then forced himself to walk off down the lane to the road where others were waiting. His war was just beginning.

For some weeks already a few zealots on both sides of the states’-rights question had been tramping back and forth across the forests and fields of southern Missouri, gaining converts and picking up what money they could when they passed the hat. Fires of smoldering southern passion burned anew in Jonah’s breast when Confederate General Sterling Price showed up down in Cassville. The farmer, father, and husband told his family he had to go, to fight for all that he held dear.

Price had kept his swelling legions on the move: destroying bridges, removing rail ties, setting fires beneath the iron rails until they could be bent shapeless, firing into passing trains until most rail traffic slowed and eventually halted. Yet within a matter of weeks Brigadier General Samuel R. Curtis, that West Point man out of Iowa, marched in with his Yankee army to destroy the Missouri State Guard. A week later the Union soldiers met Price’s ragtag band of volunteers at Springfield, down near Jonah’s home where Gritta and the children had stayed behind to work the fields.

In their bloody clash Curtis turned Price around and drove the ill-equipped rebel army farther south still, beating the Confederate’s rear flank like a man would flog a tired, bony plow mule.

It turned out to be so bad a beating that Price could count less than twelve thousand left in his army by the time they reached Pea Ridge in northern Arkansas that cold, sleety March of 1862. There Price finally rejoined General McCulloch and turned like a whipped dog ready to stand and fight. As much passion as those farmers put into that battle, General Earl Van Dorn and Iowan Curtis still made quick work of the southern plowboys on that bloodstained ridge strewn with bodies torn asunder by grapeshot and canister.

Price barely escaped with some remnants of his command: those who could still fight; those who had not already headed home, shoeless and demoralized, their spirits broken.