Cry of the Hawk

15

Late January, 1866

THE TWO OF them spent that night talking, remembering. The empty hulk of the Hook cabin was for a time filled with glorious warmth between the two. With dawn come creeping gray out of the east, they lay down on that old tick, back to back to share their warmth, and slept through much of the next day.

In the golden dusk that night Jonah and Artus hunted together, bringing back to the cabin a small doe they fed on, jerking the rest of the meat before the fire.

As the sun rose the following morning, Hook and Moser set off on foot, intending to walk in one direction, then another, until they found a neighbor who could give them both some answers.

Or would.

At the Hosking place, north out of the valley on the way to Cassville, the pair was met by three rifles as they approached the house.

“It’s Jonah Hook, Mr. Hosking!” he called out across the yard splashed with January sunshine. Steam rose from the ice-slicked ruts running from all directions toward the barn, where old man Hosking and his two hands held guns on the newcomers.

“You remember us, don’t you? I’m Artus. My daddy was Amos Moser.”

“I know who you are, Artus. Your daddy grieved real hard after your mama passed on suddenly.”

“You know anything about my family?” Jonah asked, anxiously. “You remember we have the place just down the road from Artus—”

“I know who the living hell you are, Hook!” the man snapped. “Heard about you from some fellas got out of Rock Island.” The old man turned partway to address his hired men. “Boys, just look at that Yankee blue he’s wearing for his homecoming suit!”

The hired men laughed as the ground warmed around them, steam lifting from the moist, rich earth.

“He was out west fighting Injuns for the army—just to get out of prison,” Artus tried to explain.

“I been set free from a hellhole of a Yankee prison—Rock Island. Only joined the army to get out and fight Injuns.”

“There it is!” Hosking roared. “The truth comes from his own damned mouth.”

“Never did once raise my gun at a white man in a Confederate uniform,” Jonah said.

Hosking decided to amble a bit closer, his tall boots splashing across the muddy yard. “Way I figure it—that uniform of yours makes you a turncoat, Hook—folks took you in their hearts when you and your’n come to this valley. So why don’t you be a good boy and get on out of here before we have to fill your Yankee-loving carcass full of buckshot and leave it set for my hogs to grit on?”

“Lot of men died in that prison, Mr. Hosking. I didn’t want to be one of ’em.”

“Good men, I’ll bet they were—’cause they stuck it out. Now, kindest thing I can do for you and your loyal cousin there is to tell you to scat. It’s for him I didn’t open up on you first sight I got of that goddamned uniform.”

“It ain’t fair—what you’re doing,” Hook snarled, taking a step forward before Moser snagged his arm.

“Keep your gun down, Jonah!”

The rifles held by the hired men came up level, then Hosking waved his hand.

“Hold on a minute,” he ordered the pair. “I don’t want no blood on this ground. Been enough already. Lost my oldest boy at Pea Ridge, not far from here.”

“I was there, Mr. Hosking.”

The old man took another step closer, appraising Hook. “You was at Pea Ridge too?”

“I rode on from there with Sterling Price and didn’t give up till I was took prisoner at Corinth in Mississip.”

Hosking appeared to struggle within himself. He spat a stream of brown into the icy-scum puddle at his feet. “Lost both my boys in that war—killed by men wearing the same uniform you got on. I don’t much take to Yankee blue on a man. Nothing’s changed. Like I said, you and Moser best run on now.”

“I can’t go, Mr. Hosking.”

He wagged his head. “I’m telling you—get off my place, bastard traitor!”

“I ain’t no traitor!”

Moser stopped Hook as his cousin lunged for the older, bulkier man. Jerking Jonah around, holding tight to his wool coat, murmuring low to Hook about how foolish it would be with two other guns and them all Yankee-hating and shut-eared anyway. Hook kept twisting, making Moser dance as Jonah kept his eyes on Hosking.

“Let’s just go, Jonah. There’s others’ll help us.”

“I doubt that, Artus,” declared the old man. “You go dragging along that traitor in that Yankee suit with you—I don’t figure a soul in these parts is going to help you none.”

Hook relaxed, his heart still like thunder in his ears. Artus stayed close, but eventually freed his grip on Jonah’s coat.

“Just tell me,” he rasped, weary, afraid, angry. “Tell me what happened to my family.”

Hosking wagged his head. He glanced at the other two, who likewise shrugged. “Don’t know. From the talk going round, it’s been some time since anyone seen life out to your place. Don’t have an idea where your family went.”

“They didn’t go nowhere.” Hook balled his fists again, so filled with despair he would hit anyone just to feel the crunch of his knuckles against their cheek and jaw and nose. “They was took.”

Hosking regarded him a moment, stepping closer as he brought his rifle up. “How you so sure they was took, boy?”

Jonah watched the wariness of the man, moving his hands from the holster where rested the .44-caliber army pistol he had been allowed to keep with him when the army bade him farewell back at Leavenworth, Kansas.

“I’m sure. Just know from the looks of the place.”

“It will give a man the willies just going there, Mr. Hosking,” said one of the hired men with a jerky nod of his shaggy head.

“It will, eh?” Hosking replied.

“Things left there my Gritta would’a took, had she been of a mind to leave on her own. Up to the loft, the children left things belonged to them. Special things a child don’t leave behind if they’re moving out for good.”

“And down at the springhouse,” Moser said as he jumped in, “we found milk and butter gone sour and dried in the churns—left like someone was never intending to leave such victuals behind.”

Hosking licked his lips, his eyes flicking the hillsides on either side of them.

“I did hear of ’em coming through here some time back.”

“Who?” Jonah asked, taking a step forward that caused the old man to snap the rifle up.

“Keep your ground, traitor!”

“I—ain’t—no—traitor,” he growled each word as menacingly as he could. “Tell me who come through here?”

“They was like a army,” the hired hand volunteered.

“Shuddup!” Hosking shouted at his man, his eyes flicking into the hills again.

The old man’s furtive look now meant something to Hook. He recognized it for what it was. “You’re afraid they’ll come back—whoever it was. Ain’t you, Hosking?”

“We got no way of knowing, Hook. Now—for your own sake and your cousin’s hide—just turn around and get!”

“I ain’t leaving till I got me some answers.”

He wagged the muzzle menacingly. “You’re gonna get—and you ain’t never coming back.”

“C’mon, Jonah,” Artus pleaded, pulling, yanking. “We go on and find someplace else … somebody else what can tell us.”

Over Moser’s shoulder, Hook called to the hired man who had let too much slip from his tongue. “What army was they? Reb, or Yankee? How many, goddammit! Where was they headed?”

Hosking raised the muzzle of his rifle and fired it into the air, shocking both unwelcome visitors.

“C’mon, Jonah! Now!”

“You best listen to your cousin, boy,” Hosking’s voice followed them doggedly down the lane. “Get your ass outta here—and forget you ever had that family of your’n. Just g’won and count ’em gone ’cause your people is good as dead!”

Sometimes Jonah Hook could downright scare a man.

Even his own cousin.

Artus Moser shook his head over the smoky fire where they were roasting five squirrels. Thinking maybe he really didn’t remember all that much about Jonah, like he thought he did. What with the way he had acted down at Hosking’s place yesterday, it had given Artus the willies.

Like what Hook had done out west fighting Injuns or maybe even something that Moser couldn’t begin to figure out—something had gone and made Jonah different from the man who left this valley with General Price back in sixty-two. Jonah sat on the far side of their little fire cleaning and recleaning those guns of his.

“Yankees let you keep your pistol?”

Hook looked up, squinting through the smoke as a gust of breeze snuffled it toward him. “You carried yours home, didn’t you, Artus?” He pointed his cleaning rod at Moser’s hip.

“Yeah,” Artus answered, still uneasy and unable to know why. “But that don’t explain the rifle. Yankees don’t give away rifles, Jonah. Been meaning to ask—”

“No, the goddamned Yankees didn’t go and give me this rifle. I brung it here all the way from Virginia,” he replied quietly, shutting his cousin off.

“Lord, how come them raiders didn’t—”

“Gritta kept it hid for me. Under the stones of the hearth. I put in a special place there for hiding things when I built the fireplace.”

“Thank God you got your hands on it, Jonah.”

“Thank me for putting that hiding place there.” He wagged his head, dragging the cleaning rod and oil-soaked rag up and down the full length of the barrel. “Maybe if she’d had the rifle out to use—wouldn’t she and the kids be gone to who knows where now.”

“Then again, Jonah—Gritta might be dead.”

Artus watched that jerk Jonah’s head up, a hateful, glaring look smeared across his thin, wolfish face. About to leap across the fire at Moser, if not say something stinging. But in a moment he went back to wiping the oilcloth around the percussion nipple and hammer on the rifle’s action.

“I thought of that myself,” Hook finally admitted. “She used this gun when those riders come through, chances are her bones be laying down in my yard where I come across what was left of old Seth.”

“Least you got family to find. They ain’t dead like mine.”

“I know they ain’t dead. In my gut—I know all four of ’em is still alive. Somewhere. For sake of us both right now, you remember your daddy and mama was my family too, Artus. I grieve ’em bad as you.”

“Didn’t mean no offense, Jonah. Just that—if it weren’t for you—don’t know what kin I’d have.”

“We’re riding the same horse, cousin. We both got to shuffle back to the Shenandoah down under Big Cobbler Mountain if we’re to look up any kinfolk of ours now. That”—Jonah nodded into the growing darkness of the hardwood forest thick around them—“or out yonder.”

“Lord, how I’d like to believe strong as you that we’ll find Gritta and the young’uns.”

He looked hard at Artus across the smoke made a sickly orange color as it rose from the coals. “I gotta count on finding ’em. Every last one of ’em. I’ll keep looking till I do. If I didn’t believe I could do it—I’d curl up and die inside and couldn’t go on.”

With his belt knife, Hook picked a string of meat from one of the squirrel haunches. “I’ll find every last one of my family—and them that took ’em—if it takes the rest of my life.”

Moser rolled himself in his blankets that night after eating. Hook turned away and settled into his bedroll without having said a word while they ate. Both knew morning would come soon enough. And the silence between them was all right.

The gray of dawn nudged both awake, scraping tongues around the insides of their mouths. Without saying it both men realized they shared a deep desire for the heady taste of a cup of coffee. The two men pulled at scraps of meat on the squirrel carcasses and sucked at the bones to satisfy the gnawing they likewise shared in their bellies.

“I hope we don’t have to go all the way to Neosho,” Artus said as they started north and east down the rutted road toward Cassville.

“You counting on us not getting any help in town?”

Moser said, “No. We got to get you some other clothes.”

“Goddammit—folks round here oughtta know me for what I am—not for wearing this Yankee uniform.”

“I wanna shet myself of this raggedy old uniform myself.”

“Then we gotta do it in Cassville.”

“They know you there.”

“That’s what I’m counting on. That, and sneaking into see Boatwright without being seen.”

“What you wanna see him for?” Moser asked, his suspicions pricked.

“He’s sheriff, ain’t he?” Hook waited a moment. “He’ll know about who come through here in the last few months—any bunch looking suspicious and up to no good.”

But when they found Boatwright, he was no longer sheriff.

They had slipped into the small town, hugging the treeline until they got to the man’s house, tried the back door, and found it unlocked. Figuring to let themselves in and wait until Boatwright came home, they instead walked into the kitchen and found the old peace officer sitting in a chair, pointing a double-barrel scattergun at the intruders.

“Sounds like there’s two of you bastards,” Boatwright said, his milky eyes blinking in the gloom of midmorning. “That’s why lil’ Ethel here has two barrels: blow the balls off both of you.”

“Eldon? That’s you, ain’t it?” Moser asked.

The man’s face twitched a little, as if placing the voice there in the dark of the hallway separating the two rooms of the small house. “I know you?”

“Artus Moser.”

“Who’s with you?”

“Jonah Hook.”

“Jonah?”

“It’s me, Eldon.”

“C’mere and give this old man a hug.”

“You ain’t gonna shoot us?”

“I hear better’n I ever have these days,” Boatwright said. “Don’t see so good no more.”

“Jesus God!” Moser exclaimed as he moved closer to the old man in the chair. “What happened—”

“Let’s say I got burned.”

“Your eyes, Eldon,” Hook whispered.

“Sit. You boys come and sit,” he said, easing the scattergun off his lap and motioning for them to go into the far room. “No thankee,” he replied to the nudge of help from Hook at his arm. “I know where everything is.”

“Then—you’re blind,” Moser whispered.

“As a cave bat.”

“Fire, you said?” Hook asked.

“Freebooters.”

Both of them rocked forward from the bench where they had plopped.

“Freebooters? How long ago?”

“Not long. A few months. End of summer as I can remember. Hot as hell.”

“Why’d the bastards do this to you?”

Boatwright chuckled. “You don’t see no star on my shirt no more, do you, boys?”

“What’s that got to do—”

“They took it.” Boatwright sank back into his chair. “Don’t matter none. I don’t really need it now after all. Just me in this house, waiting for someone to come bring me something to eat, help me out. Jesus Lord! But you boys both been gone a long time—”

“Tell us about the freebooters and what they done to your eyes,” Hook said impatiently.

Boatwright turned toward the sound of the voice. After some thought he began, his scarred, whitish eyes seeping the moisture that no longer stung his fire-battered flesh.

“They had me tied down, not far north of your place, Artus. I had been down to call on your daddy and was heading out of the valley by way of Jonah’s place. That’s when I spotted a bunch of horsemen on the Hook farm. Sat there awhile, watching them gut your place for what you had, Jonah—and then I figured I’d better get back to town and get me some help. But I never made it into the saddle again. That bunch must’ve had guards on their backtrail, ’cause they came out of the woods on me.”

“How many of them was there altogether?”

“More’n thirty I’d say—by what I could see moving around on your place. I don’t figure I ever saw ’em all.”

“Why’d they tie you down?” Moser asked.

“Hold me down is more like it—’cause when their leader come up from behind where I was staked out, all I heard was his voice. Never saw his face. But he told the others I’d have to die ’cause I could identify ’em. I told him I wouldn’t dare—just let ’em get on out of the territory.”

“And what then?”

“He laughed some at me. Said that if I didn’t want to die—he’d make it so I would beg him to kill me soon enough. But … I didn’t ever beg, boys.”

“He burned your eyes?”

“With a hot poker.”

Something inside Artus curled up in a tight ball and would not loosen.

“We need clothes, Sheriff,” Hook asked.

“Told you, I ain’t sheriff no more.”

“You always will be to us. You stake us a couple sets of clothes?”

“Ain’t got much, but what there is—you’re welcome to it. You going after them?”

“They got my family, Boatwright.”

“Too many of ’em, Jonah.”

“How many guns you got in the house, Sheriff?”

It was as if by some unseen power, Boatwright’s smoky eyes behind the scarred lids and cheeks were staring right into Moser’s tall, skinny cousin for the longest time.

“Back there, behind that sideboard. You’ll find what you boys need. Just leave me the pistol and this here old bird gun. I do fine by them.”

“I’ll pay you back,” Jonah said, pulling the old sideboard away from the wall. “Don’t know how or when—but I’ll pay you back for everything you done to help me get my family back.”