Winter Rain

4

September 1868

TILL DEATH DO us part….

Gritta Hook tried desperately to remember more of the words, her mind clawing at the marriage vows like her fingers once scraped at the damp earth clodding up on the blade of her hoe as she weeded the long rows of crops she and Jonah had planted together that last season before he went off to war.

She could remember only faintly how it had been left up to her and the three children to plant the crops the spring after Jonah marched off on foot behind Sterling Price to fight the Yankees plunging down from northern Missouri.

“Till death do us part,” she whispered, touching her lips with her fingertips afterward, not so much to test their swollen flesh for the oozing cracks as much as to remind herself of Jonah’s kiss after he had looked into her eyes with those deep gray ones of his—holding her hand on that day when they stood before the preacher, before all their family and friends come from up and down the length of the Shenandoah.

A cold splash of fear shot down her back as that word came back to haunt her.

“Death,” she murmured as the old army ambulance lurched, then swayed side to side gently, rocking among the ruts worn deep in this trail south by west toward Mormon country.

She was good as dead now, Gritta decided. And if she wasn’t by the time Jonah somehow found her by the grace of the Lord … well, she wasn’t really sure just how she felt about that—him coming to get her now. Not after all this time with Usher.

She knew the man’s name. More so, she knew the smell of him, how he kept himself scrupulously clean. By now she had learned there seemed to be a particular smell to each man.

Perhaps it was nothing more than the cinnamon oil he worked into his long black curls. So dandified. She thought about that long hair of his falling to his shoulders, what with Usher almost totally bald on top of his head.

But when she smelled that musk of his mingled with the cinnamon scent to his hair, and saw the look Usher got to his eye, she knew he had come to take her. It had been such a long time since last she had resisted. Gritta couldn’t remember when she had tried to fight off the huge man. Slow she had been to learn that her struggles only drove Usher all the more mad with desire.

So she had given up resisting, retreating inside herself instead. Even there, far and away from everything painful, she still hated herself for conspiring with Usher to abuse her—a married woman vowed to give her years and love to her husband only. Tortured with guilt, unable to find any other direction to turn to for salvation, Gritta sank lower and lower into despair, never sure from moment to moment if she should go on living. What was the purpose in living when hope was gone?

God knows she had tried to end the pain for herself: snatching up a knife Usher had carelessly left lying about, dragging it across her wrists until the man wrenched it from her grasp. The next time it was a pair of scissors the Negro had forgotten in the tent after trimming the colonel’s hair. But as those first days rolled into weeks and the weeks stretched into months, Usher had eventually learned enough not to provide her with anything that could remotely be used to take her own life.

He even left his brace of ivory-handled pistols with George when he came through the tent flaps with that evil in his eye.

One of these days, she promised herself, when he’s lifting me into the ambulance, perhaps helping me down from it as his men begin to make camp for the night—I’ll grab for one of those pistols and shoot Usher … no, I’ll turn the gun on myself.

Then he can stand there watching me bleed to death, seeing the smile on my face as my life drains away at last. Long, long last.

“Till death do us part,” she whispered the words again within the rattle and clunk of the squeaky, swaying ambulance.

What life there is left in me. The way Usher has drained me of everything already. The boys …

And for a moment Gritta went cold, more lost than ever.

… what—oh, God—what were their names?

She strained for their faces, yanking at her memory like fingernails scratching at damask curtains.

“Little Zeke,” she finally said with a faint smile as she remembered.

Surprising herself that she had.

• • •

He watched the distant rider. Two Sleep knew it was a white man—the way he sat his horse, the way he pulled a second horse with its burdens behind.

But the man was not like so many who knew little of travel in country so open as this. He clung to the bluffs and rock outcrops. He rode hugging the timber when possible. And at last night’s camp the white man had cooked his meal in a pit, eaten, and remounted. Then he rode another of the white man’s two, perhaps three, miles before the rider dismounted in a copse of trees and made his cheerless camp among the willow and alder, hidden from any roving eye.

That is, hidden from any but the eyes of Two Sleep.

From the man’s still-warm fire, the Shoshone warrior knew the white man had eaten antelope. From the bones left, the way they had been stripped clean and gnawed. Two Sleep guessed it might be the last meat the white man had along.

“He will be hungry before the day is out,” said the aging warrior as he had climbed from his blankets in the gray light of early dawn that next morning. There came more and more tight complaints along his muscles with the waning of every moon. They felt much like the knots he would crimp in a new buffalo-hair lariat or green rawhide to make hobbles for his war pony.

“There isn’t much game from here for the next day’s ride.”

And for that moment Two Sleep sensed some sorrow for the lone rider. But instead of going down the slope to share his dried meat with the white man, the Shoshone had instead quickly lashed his blanket over his saddle pad and made ready to leave—but only when the other one left his cold camp among the willow below.

“He sleeps long,” the Shoshone had murmured to himself at dawn.

To the east the red sun came up beneath purple rain clouds, to be swallowed in the time it took the sun to travel from one lodgepole to the next. Far to the west above the uplifted land, the worrisome clouds were already unloading their long streamers of rain upon the parched, high land.

Small wonder the white man had decided to sleep late. There was little sunlight to awaken him, and all that he had to look forward to was a day of rain. The late days of summer in this country could be like that, Two Sleep had mused as he watched some stirrings of movement in the camp below, the plains grown hot as the bottom of a cast-iron skillet, the air cooling in the high, snow-covered places rising all around this land. Clouds created above those high places were ultimately sent scrambling over the hot valleys to spill open their rain-swollen bellies accompanied by noise and torment.

It had come and gone—that storm battering the distant rider for more than two hours along the westward trail before he gave up and sought some shelter among the cottonwoods beside the narrow river. At those first drops Two Sleep had slid from the back of his pony and stripped himself naked—everything but his moccasins—then rolled his dry clothing up within the blanket covered by a small piece of oiled hide.

Soon he grew used to the cold of the rain, the hammer of the cold drops pelting his unprotected body. Soon it began to feel good, cleansing.

He wondered if the lone white man knew about bathing. So many didn’t. Two Sleep thought on all the white men he had known, most of them encountered along the Holy Road that took the whites to the western sun, or those men met at Big Throat’s fort near the Shaded River. It was the one called the Green by the white men. Among them Big Throat was known as Bridger. He was called Big Throat among most of the tribes because of the swollen flesh of the goiter at the old scout’s neck.

It had not been all that long since Two Sleep had heard rumor that Big Throat had abandoned the mountain West, had gone to Fort Laramie and beyond, even beyond the string of forts along the Platte River Road. East, it was said, to a home Bridger had not visited for many, many winters.

“I call you Two Sleep,” Jim Bridger had said many winters before to the young Shoshone warrior distantly related to the mountain fur trapper through marriage. Big Throat was the husband to Two Sleep’s cousin, cementing a bond with the Snake Indians many, many summers back in time, when both Bridger and Two Sleep had been younger and full of the rising sap of youth.

“Why you give me this new name?” the Shoshone had asked as he passed the pipe on around the circle of warriors come to visit Bridger where the white man had erected his log fort.

Bridger had smiled, his eyes merry. “Because I have never known you to sleep, my friend. On our hunts, when I go to sleep, you are still awake. When I wake up, you are already awake. So I think when you finally go to sleep, you will sleep for two men, eh?”

The old men had liked Big Throat’s reasoning, giving their approval to the name. So it was sanctioned, this new name: Two Sleep.

From that wedding day Chief Washakie had added his blessing not only to Bridger’s marriage, but to Two Sleep’s new name as well. The two men became even closer friends. Hunting together, making war on the enemies of the Shoshone together, loving their women and the Snake people and this land the tribe fiercely called its own.

“I will fight alongside you, Big Throat,” Two Sleep had told the trapper when word came that white men were riding out of the south against Brid-ger.

The old trapper had gathered a double handful of his old friends, all men who had spent years among the mountain snows and valley streams with Brid-ger, men who moved a little slower these days but still aimed true and shot center. Those few punished the other white men come cocky and bold on their big American horses, giving the attackers a solid drubbing, these old warrior friends of Brid-ger’s did. It was these that Two Sleep came to know as friends when the Shoshone warrior came to live among the whites, instead of living among his own.

But in the end some of those old friends abandoned the country. Some went west, some back to the east, where it was rumored the white man numbered like the stars above Shoshone country. Still, Big Throat and Sweete had stayed on, guiding for the pony soldiers who marched against the Lakota and Shahiyena warrior bands. It was good work for the friends of the Shoshone to do—this tracking and guiding, leading the soldiers against the camps of the Snake’s most hated enemies.

Only Big Throat and Sweete had stayed on in this country spread high and wide beneath the setting sun that now dipped out of the clouds like a raindrop slowly loosening itself from a cottonwood leaf. For a moment the land flared red-orange as the sun appeared, then lost itself almost as quickly behind the far foothills and vaulted peaks.

Gone was the day.

Like the rumor said of Big Throat. He was gone east, back among his original people, the ones he belonged to before he had been adopted by the Shoshone.

It could not be true: that Brid-ger would give up on this land and go back to the places where the white man clustered together in great groupings that reeked of his offal and the air hung gray in the sky. Out here the wind blew free enough that the land cleansed itself when a Shoshone village packed up and moved on.

But stories had Brid-ger gone from the high plains and snowy mountains for good. A grand era had come to an end.

This, Two Sleep had decided, he must see for himself.

So he took this journey to Brid-ger’s fort where the soldiers came to roost from time to time. That way Two Sleep would find out if the rumor was true.

For many days Two Sleep traveled without seeing another human being. Only the sweep of the red-tailed hawks circumscribing lazy loops against the sky. Only white-rumped antelope bounding off from the path Two Sleep had chosen, then stopping to look back at the solitary rider. No others ventured into this shimmering heat rising off the parched land—until the Shoshone spotted the two horses weaving like black water striders a’dance among the rising waves of heat along the far horizon.

It had proved to be this white man traveling alone along this road. A brave thing, Two Sleep decided. If he met the wrong Indians …

But at this time of the year, this far west—why, the Lakota and the Shahiyena were far to the north, hunting. Still, the Arapaho were a different matter. They were a fickle, funny people.

They were almost as amusing as the white men Two Sleep had learned to gamble with, learned to drink with. Whiskey and cards—the white man’s two most potent gifts to the Shoshone. He thoughtfully considered those gifts as he watched the solitary white man drag his saddles from the weary, rain-soaked horses down in the willow.

Two Sleep was compelled to draw closer to the stranger than he had wanted, mostly because of the thick, sluicing rain that seriously hampered his visibility. But as well, the Shoshone knew the rain cut down a man’s ability to smell danger, as well as softening the ground and everything on it so that the warrior would not betray himself in this stalk.

Yes, he loved the card games: monte and euchre. And with much practice at them in the shadow of Brid-ger’s fort, Two Sleep had become better than most of the white men he played. Better than them all, except that sour-faced Sweete. Never could read the man’s cards in that face. Sweete kept his hand too much a secret behind that impassive face.

Two Sleep wanted to get close enough to read this stranger’s face, to see if the white man packed along any whiskey in his spare packs. Two Sleep would show himself if there was a chance to drink some of the man’s whiskey. He would walk boldly in and announce his presence without fear, use some of his white-man words learned at the game table in Brid-ger’s fort.

Words like goddamn: the wagon the cursing white teamsters pulled behind his lagging oxen and mules as he yelled out, “Goddamn!”

Two Sleep guessed it meant something else too, for the white man used the word a lot at the card table.

Sumbitch, too. What the white man called himself, or some of his bad cards, or a balky mule. Or one another.

Two Sleep liked the way that Brid-ger and Sweete eloquently strung those flavorful words together when they talked among themselves, especially when excited or under the spell of whiskey. How Sweete especially put a lot of them together as he signed and spoke what little Shoshone he had learned from Two Sleep. Sweete knew Shahiyena; the white man’s wife was born to that tribe. Nonetheless, he tried to learn Shoshone at the card table.

Among white men there were a confusing number of words for one thing, Two Sleep thought as he saw the white man stop at the edge of the willow, unbutton his fly, and water the rain-soaked ground.

Especially that—all the words the white man had for his manhood. The warrior had learned from the best to call it many things: his cock, his dick, his peeder, his prick, and the funniest to his tongue, his love-stinger.

Why the white man did that, Two Sleep had decided he would never find out. Maybeso it was only to make his language seem all the harder to learn.

By now the lone white man was getting smarter, looking for dry wood beneath a tree thick with foliage. He started a small fire as Two Sleep watched, then stood long enough to take off all his clothing and drape his garments over low branches. The leaves of the tree suspended over his fire, and the heavy, wet air of the passing storm, muted the rising smoke.

With water on to boil, the white man rummaged through his packs until he found what he was looking for. He settled back against his saddle to drink, naked.

From the looks of the way the man drank, Two Sleep guessed the white man had some whiskey along. A bottle of it, perhaps more than one bottle—but at least the one the white man was sucking at with no small degree of satisfaction.

Frowning, Two Sleep brooded on how he would approach the camp—certain of only one thing. He would have to show himself before the white man got too much in the drinking way, or he might shoot a strange Indian—out of fear, or devilment.

Best to show himself and soon. Or, Two Sleep figured, he would simply have to do without any of that stranger’s whiskey.

Still, perhaps the white man would be willing to gamble away even more of his whiskey.

The Shoshone smiled.

Besides whiskey, maybe the white man had some cards too.

No reason either one of them had to be lonely ever again.

Not with a deck of cards, and enough whiskey.