Winter Rain

While the Mexicans did once beat the two boys when Jeremiah and Ezekiel failed to do as they were told in that foreign tongue, at least the comancheros did not sodomize their terrified treasure as the procession of carts and horsemen began their trip south by west across the land haunted by the Comanche. The sores on Jeremiah’s back and buttocks began to heal. The long, oozing welts started to shrink, becoming long, ugly red scars that laddered up the boy’s body from shoulder to thigh. Those were hypnotic days spent beneath the hot sun in those carts rumbling across the shimmering heat of the frying-pan plains, bound for a place where Jeremiah somehow sensed no decent white man had ever set foot.

Then one chill night on that trackless prairie, a handful of the comancheros had argued over little Zeke. Jeremiah understood what it was they wanted, so he offered himself to them, hoping they would leave his little brother be. But they took Zeke, anyway. Took both of them.

He remembered the fury of his anger as they lashed his hands and ankles to the side of a cart, then ripped down his torn and bloody britches as he cried out to his mother’s God for help.

But her God never came to take away the pain, the suffering, little Zeke’s pitiful sobs. They were beaten savagely every time they cried out that night and for many nights to come.

Along about that time Jeremiah began wishing, even praying, that they could be killed and through with this torment. Or that they would be taken prisoner by the savage Indians that had so filled his childhood dreams for years.

Indians, yes—instead of white men who beat and sodomized them.

Blood-loving savages who would just outright kill the boys and be over with it. Hideous, painted, smelly warriors come to take away this torment.

It was of a cold, forbidding morning, the cloudy undergut overhead threatening to burst, that the two dozen comancheros suddenly jabbered excitedly, their voices raised stridently, some pointing to the southeast, where Jeremiah saw the sun was rising as red as the blood pouring from the neck of one of the hogs his papa would butcher back to home.

“Pa,” he had whispered to the miles and the years in that noisy confusion, “why you never come for us sooner?”

That was the moment Jeremiah knew he would wait a long time for his answer, the same moment he learned the cause of the comancheros’ anxiety.

Never before had the boy seen real live Indians. Oh, there had been those red-skinned men, women, and children he had gaped at from the back of a horse as the white looters journeyed into Indian Territory. But those Indians had dressed like white men, their faces charred with whipped expressions surrounding hound-dog eyes, the eyes of a people beaten and not liable to push themselves back up again.

But these Jeremiah looked at in wonder this morning—these were real warriors, by God! Just like the boyhood stories said Indians should be: long hair flowing, the color of a satiny blackbird’s wing. Silver trinkets and round conchos were braided into those lustrous locks. Each man of them was naked to the waist where a thong held the breechclout in place. Most of the fifty or so riders had painted their bare legs with magic symbols, stars and hail stones and lightning bolts streaking all the way down to their moccasins.

None of them rode on saddles, no feet stuffed into stirrups. Jeremiah had marveled at that, wide-eyed, as the fifty rode up, slowed, and spread out around the comanchero camp before coming to a halt.

As much as he yearned to understand what was said between the Indian leaders and the leaders of the comancheros, as much as he sensed it had something to do with Zeke and him, Jeremiah knew only that the voices on both sides grew angry all too quickly for this to be anything close to barter. He sensed the charge to the air as the comancheros eased behind their carts, their hands seeking out their guns; as the horsemen on their hammerheaded cayuses grew increasingly restless, shifting their fourteen-foot lances from one hand into the other and pulling forth their short, sturdy bows.

Then a shot thundered from one of the comanchero pistols, breaking the impasse. In answer ten arrows hissed among the Mexicans before the rattle of gunfire grew too deafening, swallowing up the sounds of the Indian war cries and the thung-thung-thung of their short bowstrings. He remembered clutching little Zeke in his arms as they collapsed to the ground, rolling, pulling, dragging his brother beneath one of the wagons while the ground around them swirled with men’s legs and ponies’ hooves in clouds of stinging dust.

When it was over, the air became quiet, deathly still for a few moments before Jeremiah dared open his eyes.

“They gone?” Zeke had asked in his seven-year-old voice.

“Don’t know,” Jeremiah had answered, blinking his eyes into the gray gloom beyond their little haven beneath that wagon.