Winter Rain

1

Moon of Drying Leaves 1868

HE ROLLED AWAY from his attackers and vaulted onto his feet, crouching warily as he brushed the talclike powdery dirt from his eyes and mouth. He did not like the taste of it. But even more, he hated the taste of his own blood.

“Your lip, it is bleeding,” sneered one of the older boys.

Another one of his attackers nodded as the group inched toward him, saying, “Would you like to give up now and see to the cut for yourself?”

With a shake of his head, the youngster prepared for these older boys to lunge for him again.

Long ago Jeremiah Hook had learned not to take any of what the other boys dished out. They took pleasure in tormenting him because he was white. Both Jeremiah and his younger brother Zeke.

As the biggest brown-skinned youth suddenly rushed him, lowering his head like a bull on the charge, Jeremiah slid aside, whirling to snag the boy’s head under an arm. As much as the older youth tried to free himself, Jeremiah had that big boy secured in a headlock and began pummeling the sweaty, screwged face with blows from his small fist.

“Arrrghghg!” Coal Bear growled until Jeremiah clamped all the tighter, cutting off the youth’s protest.

Unable to catch his breath, much less speak, Coal Bear hammered Jeremiah with a fist, connecting again and again above the back of the white youth’s hip, right over the kidney.

Jeremiah crumpled, spinning to his knees in pain, dazed, as the big youth and his friend, Snake Brother, drove the white boy to the ground.

“Brother!”

Through the stirring dust and sweat stinging his eyes, Jeremiah watched his younger brother come flying in a leap, sailing out of nowhere beyond the edge of the lodge circle. Zeke hurled himself on the back of the biggest of Jeremiah’s tormentors. There he clung like a blood-swollen tick to an old bull, his arms clamped in front of the boy’s throat.

“Get this little gnat off me!” Coal Bear hollered raspily, as loudly as he could, the words strangling in his throat. Around and around he lumbered into a spin, trying to throw off his troublesome attacker.

“Get up, brother!” Zeke yelled as the whirling drew closer to Jeremiah.

“What goes on here?”

At the sound of that particular voice, both Coal Bear and Snake Brother came to a dead stop. Both started to talk at once, but the tall war chief raised his hand and shook it at them, signaling for their silence.

“Does this little tick want to cling to his enemy’s back all day?” asked the warrior.

Jeremiah watched Zeke glance his way for approval. He nodded. Only then did Zeke slide from Coal Bear’s back.

The gray-eyed war chief smiled. “Now, will someone tell me what is going on here?”

“We were playing only,” the youth said.

“From where I stood,” the gray-eyed one replied, gesturing back to a shady spot among the buffalo-hide lodges raised among the leafy cotton woods along the creek bank, “the two of you were making sport of our young friend here.”

Jeremiah swiped more troublesome sweat from his eyes, where it stung and muddied the dirt thrown at his face by his two opponents.

“If he is to be one of us, uncle,” said Snake Brother, using a term of respect for the warrior, “then he must learn. It has been said by the elders’ council.”

The handsome war chief scratched his chin. “So let us see if he can hold himself against only one of you.”

That instantly wounded Jeremiah’s pride. “I can take them both!” he shouted back in that tongue still unfamiliar. Yet he struggled to learn the language. Just as he would learn to fight like these Indian boys.

The warrior smiled knowingly. “It is good that you do not shy away from what trouble comes calling on you.”

“We will never turn our faces away from trouble,” hissed little Zeke in his near-perfect Comanche.

Jeremiah glanced at his younger brother, sensing a swell of sentiment for Zeke. He was all Jeremiah had now, with his father gone off to war many winters before. And the band of looters who came to lay waste his father’s farm but ended up instead carrying off those his father had left behind. Early on Jeremiah had determined that if he could not escape his circumstances with those bloodthirsty thugs, fleeing back to southwestern Missouri and home … if nothing else, he would then forge a family of the two of them. Little Zeke and Jeremiah Hook.

That little family was all either of them had had for so long.

Riding bareback tandem on a stolen horse into the Creek Nation over in Indian Territory with the band of white freebooters who had kidnapped them from the family home, Jeremiah rarely saw his sister or mother in those first few weeks. Then months had crept by.

It was only time, a lot of it. So much time that Jeremiah could not be sure how many months had slipped past. Perhaps even years. He was certain only that there had been several long summers broken by the cold of winter. And once more they were in the days the Comanche called the Moon of Drying Leaves.

Summer had come, and was retreating, burning the land quickly. Jeremiah had been but eight years old that last birthday before he was taken. He had counted three more summers since. He could celebrate no birthdays. There was no one to remind him of such a special event as one day flowed into the next, one week slipped into the next moon, each season cycled into the next winter until he began to sense just how much time had passed beneath his moccasins.

“You there,” declared the tall warrior as he stepped over to the wary Jeremiah. “Seems you and your brother are such good fighters that we should put your white names away for all time now and give you the names of famous warriors of The People.”

“Yes!” Jeremiah’s head bobbed. Zeke’s eyes grew as big as milk saucers.

“In four days, then,” the warrior said, patting a hand on Jeremiah’s shoulder. His other hand patted Zeke’s too. “We will have our naming ceremony for you both.” The warrior turned to the pair of older boys. “Coal Bear, teach them well for four days—the bow and knife. How to ride on the side of your pony.”

The two bigger youths nodded, their dark eyes flicking quickly to the two white boys grown so dark-skinned, their long and wavy hair bleached by the light from the summer’s sun.

“As you ask, uncle,” replied the taller youth.

“I already ride well,” Jeremiah said, catching up the warrior’s hand.

He stopped. “You ride well for a white boy. But you have much to learn. Now you must learn to ride like a Comanche.”

As he watched the young warrior stride away through the tall grass, Jeremiah swore he would learn to ride, just like a Comanche warrior. To mount and dismount from either side, to ride bareback, to ride even without a bridle—becoming one with a particular animal. This was a dream come true to a young boy of eleven summers. To become one of The People. To become a Kwahadi Comanche.

For so long Jeremiah had wanted only to be dead.

He and Zeke had been hauled up behind two of the looters come to their Missouri valley. Their mother and sister were thrown on other horses, behind other riders. After his warning barks, old Seth already lay dying in the yard, a bullet hole in his head, tongue lolling out like a swollen piece of pink meat dropped in the rich black dirt.

That night the unspeakable horror had begun as some of the laughing, hard-handed men had taken their turns holding the two boys down, while others assaulted Jeremiah and Zeke, sodomizing their two young prisoners as the men cursed what they called “godless Missouri Gentiles.”

That was but the first night of many more to come, each day a living hell, making it painful to ride the bony spine of the horses as the boys were plopped behind the saddles of the looters during the day, assaulted by the smelly men each night. At first Jeremiah grew frightened when he began to bleed. Then he became ashamed when he passed more and more blood, oozing and sticky, drying in his britches like the tears he and little Zeke cried almost constantly, calling for help as the men clamped their wrists and ankles, dragged their dirt-crusted fingers through the boys’ hair, and held their young faces against the stinking crotches. Laughing.

Always the laughter rang in Jeremiah’s ears. The more he fought the men who held him down while others assaulted him, and the more he screamed, the more their wild laughter seemed to echo through the nightly camps where the two boys were beaten with the short rawhide whips the men used on their horses. It seemed so long ago now, like nothing more than another short lifetime, as Jeremiah remembered the shame of his tormented wounds weeping and oozing with a foul stench, his back aflame as flies laid their eggs where he could not reach to scratch.

Jeremiah rarely saw his mother those first days out of Missouri, at least not the woman he thought was her. She had been limp, carried from horseback to a tent at night, then back to her horse, where she was tied every morning for the day’s travel. Later he saw the woman herded out of an ambulance the freebooters had stolen, looking as if she were half-asleep.

It was the same with Hattie. He had wondered if those men were doing cruel, unspeakable things to her privates as well.

But long as those days and weeks had seemed, the boys’ imprisonment with the white looters was over before the following summer. They were bartered off to some brown-skinned men when a camp of Mexican traders rendezvoused with the white renegades. When a high enough price was settled upon for the two boys, Jeremiah and Zeke were sold into slavery.

“You’re going to Chihuahua!” roared one of the white looters as he dragged Jeremiah over to the Mexican carts. “Their kind is gonna like having a young, tender gringo like you to play with way down there!”

“Where?”

“Mexico!”

“M-mexico?” Jeremiah had gasped.

“Them greasers allays pays good money for slaves bound for the Mexican trade down there, boy!”

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.

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.