Winter Rain

by Terry C. Johnston

  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.

  2

  August 1868

  HER BODY GLISTENED beneath his.

  Hungrily Jonah licked salty droplets from the crevice at the base of her throat, savoring their musky bitterness on his tongue like a man thirsty too long for the earthy taste of her, the strong womanness that rose to him now, filling not only his nostrils, permeating everything in him to bursting.

  Still, somehow he held back, savoring the exquisite pain of waiting. Hook had promised himself that he would not be too anxious this first time back in the shelter of Gritta’s arms. Lying with her at long last, just as he had dreamed so deliciously, for so many lonely nights.

  Those nights swam before him the way smarter folks claimed a man’s life swam before his eyes when he was dying. All those nights of bitter reverie—from the first cold morning he had marched out of their valley, taking off to fight for General Sterling Price gone to drive the Yankees out of Missouri. After Confederate blood had flowed freely on the slopes of Pea Ridge down to Arkansas, Jonah had been one of the few who stuck with the barefooted brigades to march behind Price, tramping east to Mississippi where he was wounded and left for dead, left behind in a pell-mell retreat, left for capture by the blue-bellies after the Confederate debacle at Corinth.

  All that came bubbling up from his memory, seeping through remembrances of long winter nights suffering with the predead stench of the human sties the Yankees called prison cells at Rock Island in Illinois. Nothing would ever drive from his nostrils the stench of that repugnant offal of human waste: not just the decaying feces, but as well the slowly rotting dead, the moldering flesh, the puffy, gassy, bloating corpses the Yankee guards came to collect of every morning.

  Yet this sweet, fleshy, earthy fragrance of Gritta moving beneath him drove that stench of remembrance far, far from his mind now.

  How musky was this perfume about her taut, smooth body. Smells of a fresh-scrubbing of lye soap and dashes of lilac water were quickly gone the way of her own heated fragrance as Gritta’s hunger readied her to receive him. That heady smell near drove him crazy with anticipation of just how she would feel around him when at last he sank his own flesh deep inside her.

  As if she sensed his very need, Gritta took his rigid weapon in both her hands. It proved more than enough to make him gasp in surprise, shock, wonder at that singular, profound sensation dreamed of timeless nights of the past. He had wondered all those years apart from her on just how it would feel when finally back within the circle of her legs and arms, lying against her with nothing but the cool night air between their naked bodies.

  Gently, so very gently, she kneaded his swollen flesh between her two hands, sensing it throb and leap in his growing anticipation. Those woman’s hands coarse and hardened to daily toil, the lot of a settler’s wife, mother to children and the land itself. Yet at this moment Gritta’s hands wrapped him with a touch like the finest of silk gloves, grasping him gently—so gently urging him with a furious insistence of her own.

  “You do any more of that,” he rasped at her ear, licking a droplet of sweat from the earlobe, “I can’t save myself for you.”

  Gritta immediately guided him toward her waiting moistness. With him started within, she urgently clawed at the small of his back, fervently pulling him to her—burying him firmly.

  Jonah groaned at the sweet ecstasy of that first full thrust, at long last feeling the heated liquid fire of her engulfing all of him as her legs drew up, encircling his hips, allowing Jonah to sink within her as far as a man dared go. It seemed as if he filled her like never before.

  Gritta’s head sank back, her eyes rolling in her own private, savage fury. And from somewhere down deep in her throat, a rumbling growl freed itself—a low, primitive coursing of bestial release like nothing he could remember hearing from her before.

  Perhaps it was as he had feared. His wife was now a changed woman. Those years with the Mormon zealot had scarred her soul, taken their toll. This animal hunger in her now confirmed it: what the time apart from Jonah had done to her… what Jubilee Usher had wrought to change Gritta.

  For a moment Jonah slowed his own fury, in a way wanting his old Gritta back now. Then as quickly he realized he did have her, telling himself there was nothing changed about her as he put his mind to think on it. This was the same woman, the same passion, the same furious swallowing of him that she had thrown herself into that second time their wedding night, not long after their first painful, hurried coupling. And then a third—and every time since.

  How she murmured now in his ear—those secret, provocative things that drove him crazy atop her. Gritta clearly sensed what effect she had on him. And she brazenly used that power to her advantage. Seeking her own private brand of pleasure from the man who drove himself in and out of her now with an increasingly fevered pace.

  He not only felt her tightening her legs around him, but he actually sensed her tensing that heated moistness around the rigid flesh he rammed into her with a heated intensity. Losing contact with everything else around him—Jonah became like a man possessed.

  Then he forced himself to open his eyes and gazed down into the inky indigo-blue of hers. And slowed his hammering as he noticed that peculiar mix of passion and helplessness and total abandon he saw welling in Gritta’s eyes, swimming there with the tears that began at last to spill down her cheeks.

  Jonah stopped, his flesh no less hard, yet at rest inside her moist insistence. Gritta’s legs locked around him, her fingernails still brushing at the small of his back. Like that, they gazed at one another for a long moment, unmoving.

  “It … it has been so long, Jonah,” she whispered past the sob threatening to choke off her words.

  Gently swiping the hot tears from both of her cheeks, he felt his own eyes smarting, moistening suddenly.

  “It won’t happen again, Gritta. Us being apart. I promise you.”

  Fighting back his tears, Jonah looked up, finding the room familiar: this place that brought him contentment. “Just look around you, woman. This is our home. I finally brung you home.”

  She nodded, biting her lip. Of a sudden unable to speak, she clenched her eyes shut, tears seeping forth beneath the lashes. It moved something within him, something that had too long remained untouched.

  “We’re back home, Gritta. Believe it. You must believe it—as surely as you are here. As surely as I can take my hand and place it here … on your soft, sweet breast.”

  Jonah encircled her small, perfect breast with one hand, cupping it so that the nipple stood rigid at its center when he bent over it, kissing, licking, sucking on it while Gritta moaned, freeing that animal sound from the far back of her throat, a sound that emanated from the deeper recesses of what she was as a woman in need.

  “This breast that has given life to our children, Gritta,” he went on, whispering, his hot breath on the breast, his lips still near the swollen nipple that seemed to quiver as he spoke, yearning for more of his gentle, insistent touch. “Your body, sustaining the life of our babies.”

  She sobbed. “Only my dream of you, Jonah … my memory of you—only that sustained me for those years waiting for you to come for me. To find me. To bring me back home.”

  “We are home. I never gave up. Lord knows it was your hope and your prayers led me to you.”

  “I never gave up waiting for you, Jona
h.”

  He stroked her wet cheek with his roughened fingers. “Now I brung you home, woman. Here beneath Big Cobbler Mountain. To our Shenandoah Valley. Where we first fell in love and married and began our family. Here is where I had to bring you again before lying with you like this.”

  Jonah had built up the fire in the stone fireplace to scare the chill from the place before he had gone to sit beside her on their rope-bed, that old tick emptied and stuffed anew with fresh-cut Virginia grass. Like the young lover she had been their wedding night, Gritta had taken his hand in hers, then slowly laid it over her breast.

  “This is what I’ve been waiting for, Jonah,” she had told him there at the side of their wedding bed.

  He had said nothing, but had instead covered her mouth with his, his tongue parting her lips fiercely, seeking out hers the way his swelling flesh strained to be free of his britches, yearned to sink inside her. Jonah had pushed her gently down atop the old comforter fattened with down, so fragrant with this sanctuary of their memories. Here in the valley of the Shenandoah, where he had first laid eyes on young Gritta Moser. And been instantly smitten the way only his mother could describe it.

  According to Mother Hook, a man was a carnal animal, desirous of but one thing from a woman. So to control that man, to keep him in line and force him to practice his Christian industry, a woman had to portion out her sexual favors a little at a time—never could she truly enjoy that shameful travail she had to undergo in the name of God’s high command to be fruitful and replenish the earth.

  Yet right from first jump Gritta had been different. After that first painful, and blessedly short-lived, episode on their wedding night, Gritta had thrown herself into lovemaking with such an abandon that it surprised Jonah, a young man fully expecting no more from a woman than for her to lie there while he did his business and finished, when at last she would pull her nightshirt back down over herself and roll away to fall asleep like her husband.