Winter Rain

There then erupted a blood-chilling cry from one throat, answered by half-a-hundred more as the Indians came among the comanchero dead. They stripped the Mexicans of all clothing and danced about in their newly won coats resplendent with shiny buttons and braidwork, most still wet, stained dark with the past owner’s blood. From beneath the cart, Jeremiah watched as the warriors began to butcher and mutilate the bodies of his former owners. And his fear rose high in his throat to think that now he was no longer among civilized human beings.

“Indians are heathens who don’t believe in God,” his mother had taught him at her knee back on the homestead in southwestern Missouri. So close to Indian country were they that she thought such an education worthwhile.

“What do they believe in?” Jeremiah had asked, though for years he remained without an answer that made sense in his limited view of the way of things in the universe.

He was thinking back on those lessons from his mother’s Bible—how she told him what these savage, half-naked people would do to helpless white men—when Jeremiah turned about with a jerk, finding a painted, dust-furred face bending down into the shade to peer at his little brother and him. Jeremiah’s heart seized in his throat to think that so much evil had happened to Zeke and him at the hands of evil white men—what horrors must surely await them if they were taken prisoner by these naked savages?

He cried and fought the Indians, struggling to get away from the first warrior, slamming into the legs of a second as he tried to scoot away from his clutches. Then a third face appeared before him, the face of a man who looked into his eyes, then held out his hand to Jeremiah. Another he held down for little Zeke, motioning for them to come out from their hiding place. One of the others gave the warrior a Mexican canteen. He pulled loose the cork with his teeth, drank and swallowed, then handed the canteen to Jeremiah.

For weeks now, maybe many months, he hadn’t had a drink when he wanted it. He was never offered water except in the morning and again at each night’s camp. Now this simple gift of water. Now these hideously painted savages were offering him a drink, from a canteen held in the same bloodstained hands that had hacked the manhood parts from the comancheros and stuffed those appendages into the Mexicans’ mouths so that they draped from the brown chins like so many limp tongues.

Jeremiah gave Zeke the first drink, then took a long one for himself. Soon they took the warrior’s hand and emerged into the stormy light of that bloody place, staring down at the oak-pale, brown-skinned comancheros who had brought down so much pain and fear upon the two boys. Now the Mexicans were gone and the Indians were done going through the carts, stealing all that the warriors could carry on their horses or pack on the animals once hitched to the traders’ carretas.

At long last Jeremiah had his wish: that the Indians would come. For so long he had prayed for Indians to come kill them.

Instead the warriors hoisted little Zeke behind one of the older horsemen. He felt himself lifted from the ground, set on a pony behind a warrior whose skin smelled of camp fires and grease, slick with sweat. He smiled at Jeremiah and patted the white boy’s leg as if to give voice to something unspoken between two different peoples.

As if to assure Jeremiah that he was now among civilized people.

And as those riders suddenly pounded moccasins into their ponies’ ribs and shot off with a shout from half-a-hundred throats, Jeremiah thanked God that his prayers had not been answered.

Tears welled in his eyes as he hugged that nameless warrior, gripping the man as the pony raced away from that bloody place. Jeremiah looked back but once, barely able to make out the naked bodies sprawled on the ground. It was easier to see the black spires rising, adrift on the breeze above the burning carts.

For all that his young eyes had seen in that year gone from the Missouri homestead, for all that he had been forced to learn about the ways of white men and their evildoing in that same endless year, Jeremiah felt an overwhelming relief to be at last among a frightening, savage people.

These who killed and hacked and slashed off hair and manhood parts. These who nonetheless looked at the two boys with kind eyes and offered them water, then carried Jeremiah and Zeke off across the unmapped rolling plains, riding north toward the rocky escarpment coming purple beneath the gray light of that rainy morning.

So once more on this day, just as he had on every day since that morning the warriors had butchered the comancheros, Jeremiah understood he had been saved.

And came to believe that maybe his mother’s white God was not the only divine power out here in all this wilderness.

2

August 1868

HER BODY GLISTENED beneath his.