Winter Rain

24

Winter 1870

THE TRAIL HAD gone cold.

Two winters came and passed; each day they hoped against hope that some clue would turn up, some slip of a tongue, some word of Jubilee Usher’s Danites passing through the country. But, nothing.

Back that October of sixty-eight, Two Sleep had taken Jonah on west from the land of the red desert beside the Sandy, crossing Green River, then pushing on to Fort Bridger. Like the back of his leathery, walnut-colored hand, the Shoshone knew the lay of that land and the caliber of those men in army blue. Jonah stayed quiet for the most part, letting the Indian ask the questions needing answers.

But none of the soldiers stationed at Bridger could remember a big outfit of horsemen, wagons, and an ambulance coming through of recent. Anything on the order of that many armed men would have surely caused that undermanned garrison at the frontier outpost to stand right up and take notice, what with so few civilian travelers moving east or west out in this infernal country. As it was, for the most part the soldiers said things had gone quiet to the north: up where the Sioux and Cheyenne had appeared to settle down after wrenching the big treaty of 1868, and the abandonment of the forts along the Bozeman Road, from the white man’s army. With that summer of sixty-eight fading into history, the troops assigned the Montana Road had filed back down toward Laramie, for all time quitting the hunting ground granted the wild tribes.

“We just got tired of fighting,” explained an aging captain commanding at Bridger. “After that four years of hell fighting the secesh back east, we were ordered out here to pacify this land, make it safe for the California argonauts, safe for business trade and what settlers was to move in.”

As Jonah and Two Sleep listened, the captain sighed in the autumn shade of that brushy porch awning outside his mud-walled office. “We’re taking a well-deserved retreat right now—this army that just got tired of fighting. You’re aware this land along the great immigrant road once was ruled by the Cheyenne and Sioux, you know? Still, they haven’t deviled us in a long time.”

“Wasn’t always that way,” Jonah said, feeling the captain’s eyes shift in his direction. “I fought them—the Cheyenne and the Lakota—to keep this road open.”

“You with the galvanized volunteers, were you?”

“Sixty-five.”

“Serve at Platte Bridge?”

Jonah only nodded, remembering Lieutenant Caspar Collins’s brave ride across the bridge to break through a cordon of a thousand warriors and rescue an incoming squad of soldiers.

The aging captain had gone back to staring at the sun setting beyond Utah and that land of Brigham Young, lighting the leaves in the trees with fall’s gold and crimson fire. “Yes, Mr. Hook. For a while now, the army got tired of fighting.”

“Can’t say as I fault ’em,” Hook replied quietly.

Jonah ended up selling to the army four of those horses taken from the Danites, keeping what they needed for packing. And with the credit the outpost’s commander gave them in trade for the animals, Fort Bridger’s contract sutler resupplied Jonah and Two Sleep with cartridges and powder, coffee and sugar, flour and a few looking glasses, along with a modest amount of some Indian trade goods the man had been a long time in getting shet of. Hook was anxious to push on after a matter of days.

But pushing on southwest into the land of Zion had been as big a waste of time as Jonah could ever remember.

The closer he rode toward the City of the Saints, the more Hook felt he was treading on foreign ground. He had been north of a time in his life, twice he could remember as a youngster crossing what became the Mason-Dixon. And he had been hauled to the land of the Yankees after his capture at Corinth. That had been war—and he a prisoner of that bloody struggle. Yet even then, with the exception of a few sadistic guards who beat their prisoners for the manic love of seeing the pain and blood and suffering, Jonah remembered being treated better at the hands of the blue-belly civilians than in the land of Brigham Young’s Saints.

No more was he merely a southern boy come north with his kin to conduct some commerce. No longer was he a Confederate soldier captured in the vain, brutal struggle waged by the South against a far mightier North. Now with the coming of another winter, Jonah Hook all the more felt like nothing less than a feared and distrusted stranger come to this foreign land. Not one with the religion of these quietly industrious people, he found himself treated civilly in few places, with cool indifference in most others, and outright hostility at many stops he and Two Sleep made.

A plainsman in tattered, trail-worn clothing, riding in the company of an aging Indian warrior, found himself nothing less than suspect of all color of crimes against the State of Deseret. Clearly a man of the prairie, and most certainly a Gentile, his companion none other than a member of a dark, heathen race of Lamanites said to be fallen from the grace of God—Hook was regarded more with pitying curiosity than with any desire on the Saints’ part to offer anything in the way of assistance.

Already he had steeled himself, prepared to find the Mormons closing ranks around their own, this Danite, this leader of avenging gunmen, this mongol lord of the plains. Instead, what Jonah discovered was that Jubilee Usher might actually be one Prophet too many in his own land.

“Who was it you said you were looking for again?”

“Jubilee Usher’s the man’s name,” Hook would answer those he would stop along the road, those who would come to the edge of the manicured fields long enough to listen as Jonah prodded for information. “Leader of the Danites.”

Hearing that, most of the shopkeepers and farmers eyed him severely before they moved off without so much as answering. Most, but not all.

“And why would you be looking for this Jubilee Usher?” asked the rare one.

“Heard of the man by reputation,” Jonah would say.

“Never met him, have you?”

“No, never,” Jonah answered truthfully, remembering to recite the keys he had learned while riding with Boothog Wiser’s Mormon battalion, keys he had sworn himself to use when at last the time had come to unlock the mysteries of Zion. “Rode with Lemuel Wiser—Usher’s right hand. Decided I’d come here to Zion. Aim to join Usher’s Danites.”

That shopkeeper in a small agricultural settlement northeast of Salt Lake City flicked his eyes over at his wife as she swept the plank floor of their dusty establishment that frosty November day in 1868. What he had to say, he said guardedly, almost under his breath: “You got that right, stranger. That’s Usher’s band of Danites. Not Brigham’s no more, they’re not. That bunch belonged to Jubilee Usher for some time now.”

The woman cleared her throat loudly above her busy broom, as if to utter a warning. And kept on sweeping without once raising her eyes to look at her husband.

Hook had summoned up the patience to keep asking. “Then I suppose this Brigham Young you spoke of would know where I might find Jubilee Usher?”

The Mormon’s dark eyes moved to the window, beyond which the Indian waited in the autumn cold with their animals, clearly an Indian who knew and kept to his place among these whites who practiced a strict theocratic pecking order.

The shopkeeper said, “The Prophet would be most happy to know where Jubilee Usher is, stranger—if you’re one to know yourself.”

“I wouldn’t have to ask you if I knew where to find Usher my own self,” Jonah said.

“That much is clear. Still, it would be well worth your while to let Prophet Young know anything you might be privy to about Jubilee Usher.”

“Said I was just looking for the man.”

A cool smile darkened the face of the shopkeeper. “So is Young—looking for Usher, that is.” He eyed his wife quickly again, then whispered to the counter secretively, “You take the offer of my help: you’ll not go join up with that bunch.”

“Why shouldn’t a man be about God’s work with Jubilee Usher?” Hook asked, a bit too loud.

He shook his head, whispering, “Usher ain’t all that—”

“William!” the woman called out, standing there midfloor with her waxy hands draped over the top of her corn broom. “There’s lots of work you could be doing in the back if our customer is finished buying what he needs so he and that Indian can be on their way.”

Jonah would learn no more from that one.

The closer he drew to the seat of Mormon power, the colder the trail felt to that unnamed lightning rod he carried in his belly. It grew colder all the time until on the outskirts of Salt Lake City itself, Jonah decided he was likely riding into a blind canyon. The horsemen passed on through the City of the Saints without stopping, swinging south and east toward the Green once more, marching through Zion’s outlying communities, their neatly platted streets and arithmetically plowed fields becoming more and more sparse as the horsemen pushed deeper into the southwest while November’s sweet taste of autumn unraveled into the first bitter days of winter.

At one settlement Jonah asked how far the Church’s settlements stretched toward the Mexican provinces.

“On deep into Arizona Territory. Down yonder to New Mexico too,” came the answer given him from beneath the shading of a hat brim, where the eyes peered up at the horsemen in cool suspicion.

Women worked these fields beside their men. Indeed, lots of women. More than once Jonah found himself unconsciously studying the faces and figures of those most lanky, those fair of hair, those who best fit the dimming remembrance of a particular female. A gamble, it was, to hope with so much of his fiber, to discover himself yearning for her all the more in this land of the Saints—here, where a man found so many white women. And he gone so long without his eyes blessed with the sight of any pale-skinned female, any white-skinned woman at all.

And now came this sudden feast of setting a hungry man down before all these who belonged to the polygamists, laboring in the fields for their husbands and the greater glory of their God.

So used his eyes were to the frontier garden of dark-skinned females. To Jonah it seemed that damned near all of the alabaster-skinned ones a man would run into in making his way back and forth across the West were businesswomen. The painted, perfumed, softer, and whiter sex had followed the gamblers and gamers, the saloon keepers and drummers, to make their share where a fortune might not be guaranteed, but where there would never be a shortage of eager customers.

The cold emptiness gnawed through Jonah’s belly. How he felt starved of a sudden, his eyes looking over those fair-of-skin women. His rage returned, robbed as he was of these years with her: the months and days and fleeting moments stolen from them both, never to share again. And as he sat looking out upon those busy in their fields, or as he gazed at all the industrious of the gentle sex he saw moving up and down the streets of the small communities founded by these Saints, Jonah sensed the first stirrings of doubt.

Was he chasing so much wind? Hadn’t Gritta’s trail gone just about as cold as the boys’ trail had in drifting off toward Mexico?

For the first time he considered giving up the chase while he still had time to make some kind of life for himself. Maybe, he told himself, he should beggar his losses and give up the trail, lonely and unforgiving as it was. Close this dark chapter of his life and start anew—make a life for Hattie and perhaps find a widow for himself, someone who could cool the burning rage and pain he suffered, who could take away the hurt and fill this hole gnawing in his chest. Yes, Hattie would finish her schooling, then come live with him and her new stepmother….

A vision of Hattie swam before him. Almost four years back he had found her in Nebraska. Lord, how she had grown into a young woman who looked more like her mother now than he ever had imagined she could. When he’d wrenched her from the clutches of the Danites, Hattie was damn near the same age as Gritta when he had married her. Jonah’s only daughter had grown to be every bit as beautiful and smitten with life as her mother.

No, he realized he would never be able to look at Hattie again without seeing Gritta’s face. Never able to gaze into his daughter’s eyes without cursing himself for quitting the chase.

“Goddamn you,” he grumbled aloud that evening as the black-bellied clouds quickly shut down the last shreds of fading light left in the sky. “Damn you if you go and give up when this ride gets hardest. Remember how you lost the trail before? But still you never lost hope, Jonah. Never give up before.”

He was of this life to suffer the pain—one sort or another. He had decided this was his lot to bear. And if he was called upon to endure, then his choice was simple: the pain of pushing on until he found them or could push on no more—that hurt seemed much, much easier to bear than the pain of living with himself knowing he had played out, folded, and given up.

He would not fool himself into thinking he deserved a better hand, nor cash in his chips and back away from the table. No, he would play out the hand dealt him. A man would, that.

As Two Sleep became Jonah’s brother of the blanket, they inched over the first heavy snows carpeting the passes of the Uintahs, then eased down the east slopes pushing on south. From time to time they crossed freight roads the Mormons used, choosing whether or not to follow them into the distance toward a small community of clapboard shacks, more usually of sod or adobe, settlements of fields and irrigation ditches and laundered clothes hung on a line behind the dirty shacks where dim trails of smoke rose into the cold air of that first winter in the land of the Mormons.

Only once more did he ever allow himself the sweet luxury of wanting to give up—halting the Indian as they gazed upon a cluster of mud homes in a nameless little settlement appearing all the more squalid with the early coming of winter night, dark of shadow and gray of twilight snow, the small windows in each shack lit with the warm beacons of light, figures passing between the light and those two lonely sojourners out in the cold. Back and forth the shadows moved as the fish-belly gray of evening descended to night upon that naked land of red escarpment and ancient geologic upheaval.

A warmth beckoned him in from the cold, those shadows no more than suggestions of ghosts from his past, ghosts of happier days calling the lost and wayward one to join them at the fire of remembrance on brighter times and lighter cares.

“Come, Jonah Hook,” Two Sleep said finally.

Eventually he tore his eyes away from the window and its seductive corona of light and found the Shoshone staring at him with what the plainsman took to be sympathy.

“You don’t gotta feel sorry for me, Injun.” He looked back at the distant windows now that twilight’s purple had faded to winter’s cold squeeze of black. “Never, never feel sorry for me. You hear?”

“Make camp. Food, then sleep. Tomorrow we go.”

“Always tomorrow, Two Sleep. How many more will there be?”

“Every morning I think we find them,” the Indian replied quietly, following the white man’s gaze at the distant spots of saffron light.

“You tell yourself that too?” Jonah asked, then sighed. “At times I just feel like …”

When Hook’s voice drifted off without finish, Two Sleep said, “You give up this trail, Two Sleep stay on it. This trail no more just for you, Jonah Hook. It mine too now.”

He finally nodded, feeling his shoulders sag, reluctant to release the anticipation of giving in to his fondest dream. Here at last vowing that he would never again grant himself the delicious ecstasy of the dream that took him down a far different path.

“Sometimes it feels like there’s just too damn much trail left to cover, Injun.”

“Tomorrow is the day,” Two Sleep reminded.

“Yes,” Jonah replied, urging his horse off gently. Once and for all he struggled to convince himself he had the patience of the eternal rocks themselves. “Tomorrow morning is the day.”

It was weeks later as they followed a course slightly east of south that the riders no longer came across any outflung settlements of white men. Instead, they rode toward the distant, gleaming, snow-draped walls of the adobe huts that seemed to squat on the valley floor, what proved to be a settlement of farmers and sheep herders nestled among steep-sided bluffs on one side, those buttes and canyon walls taking the unwilling eye and leading it upward toward the clouds and peaks mantled in white one upon the other.

“You s’pose we’re in Mexico already?” Jonah asked.

With a shrug Two Sleep replied, “Never ride this far. Ute country. Far into Ute country. Don’t know, Jonah Hook.”

“Long as it’s been since we left Brigham Young’s City, it still don’t seem we’ve come far enough to be in Mexico. Maybe these here Mexicans live north of Mexico.”

“No matter, Jonah Hook. We still go south—still ride till the land of the traders who buy your sons.”

“Comancheros.”

“Yes, comancheros. We ride into land of the comancheros.”

They had pushed off the sangre-hued hills, colored by the blood of infinite sunsets spread prayerfully on this ancient land, wending their way down, down to that village of adobe shacks, mud-and-wattle jacales, cramped streets of solid-wheeled carretas, a village where farmers and shepherds knew little English. But unlike Brigham Young’s Mormon settlers, these brown-skinned people would in their own way try to help the stranger come among them that waning winter as Jonah learned 1868 had died and 1869 had already ushered itself in.

There would be days and weeks, months and seasons to come learning more and more of the language as he and Two Sleep pushed on east of south, struggling over mountains and crossing valley floors, only to recross and return time and again to familiar villages and ranchos when a fickle clue or rumor ran itself out like the trickle of water in this arid land. As the miles became years, Jonah knew more of the right words to use, better to pose his questions while the seasons turned and the winds cleansed the land with each unfathomable tilt of the earth away from the sun.

As they had realized that first winter afternoon riding into that first village where nothing but Spanish was spoken, the two strangers come from the land of the north had long known the one word that was sure to get a map drawn with a stick in the dirt, perhaps scratched on a table or stone hearth with a chunk of charcoal—or only as simple a gesture as a nod and a pointing of the arm with the name of a new village to try.

That lone, powerful word never changed across the last four winters as Jonah Hook asked his one question—his first and last question in this distant, sunny land.

“Comancheros?”