Winter Rain

by Terry C. Johnston

  Yet the eight young warriors urged no herd ahead of them as they clambered up the south bank of the river and plunged through the plum brush and swamp willow, where the shouts of the white men and the crackle of their guns faded on the far shore behind them.

  Two only could they claim: a pair of the enemy’s ribby mules noisily dragged their picket lines through the brush, frightened and braying, with the warriors close on their tail roots.

  Two only. Bad Tongue’s stampede had proved a failure.

  Angrily Bull reined up, bringing his pony around. He watched the backs of the other young warriors disappear to the west, heading upstream with their two hard-won prizes. They had really won nothing at all—save for alerting the enemy.

  “What’d they get?” a voice bellowed across the river.

  “Two of the damn mules!”

  “Ammunition?”

  “No, sir.”

  A new voice warned, “They’ll come now that it’s light, Major!”

  “Saddle up, men!” the high-pitched voice shouted above the clamor of cursing men, their frightened animals still being quieted. “Sergeant, have these men stand to horse!”

  As the white men sorted themselves out on the far side of the river, Bull turned slowly, letting his ears guide the position and pitch of his head, sensing something coming. Then, there it was. He listened to the distant coming of thunder: a sound to stir a warrior’s heart.

  On the far bank it appeared very few of the enemy heard it too—its faint presage given birth out of the western horizon. Now his young heart leapt, soaring with its day-coming song of death.

  “Lookee here, Major!” a ragged baritone voice rang out across the shallow river.

  “Damn you, Trudeau!” sang the high-pitched white war chief. “No one gave you the right to scalp that—”

  “No one tell Pierre not to take scalp! Sioux, it is—”

  “Get that damned thing out of my face!”

  “At least it means I kil’t one of the red bastards!”

  “Stand to horse!”

  “Listen! You hear that?” someone asked at last. “Listen, goddammit!”

  “I do. Goddamn!”

  “Major! Best be moving your boys now!” one of them bawled loudly, already yanking his horse behind him.

  Then Bull felt the hair rise on his arms as the rumble grew closer, like distant thunder rolling toward them out of the west. As he took his eyes off the far bank to gaze quickly to the east, the far end of the sandbar grew pale in the coming light, where the lone cottonwood stood.

  “They’re coming!”

  “To the island!”

  “Cross to the island!” arose the chorus from more of the white throats.

  Its urgent call was immediately echoed by the rest of the half-a-hundred in tatters of voices and the hammering of white men clambering to their saddles.

  “Make the island!”

  The heart-stopping thunder of more than a thousand hooves hammered the sun-cured prairie.

  Bull thought he could see them now, at long last after the breathrobbing seconds of waiting, able only to hear their coming. The pulsing horde emerged from the dark like some swelling, ghostly apparition Bull couldn’t quite see yet—not really. More so did he sense its coming.

  As the white men bolted from their camp beside the river, plunging their horses into the shallow water, fighting their way toward the narrow sandbar, others stood hollering orders, waving the rest into the river as the first phalanx of mounted warriors erupted with star-flung muzzle flashes, diamond light pricking the horizon of that crimson dawn.

  Bullets whistled overhead, splattering in the water. The nearby river bluffs echoed the war cries from hundreds of throats.

  “There they are! They’re on us now!”

  “God—will you look at ’em!”

  Then there arose yelps right across the river from Bull. Some of Roman Nose’s or Pawnee Killer’s warriors had chosen not to join in the general charge on the island, but instead had swarmed down across the flat near the river where the white men had been camped around their fire pits only moments before. These daring, willing-to-die warriors plopped to their bellies among the willow and plum brush only yards from that sandbar, there to begin their sniping at the white men milling about the narrow sandbar, confused and leaderless for the moment, their horses stumbling on the uneven, river-washed sand.

  “Shoot the goddamned horses!” one of the enemy yelled.

  “Bring ’em down!” came the echo again and again.

  “Shoot the horses!”

  As bullets whined over the willow where he hid, Bull watched the white men put their pistols to work, dropping their big American horses.

  “This will turn Bad Tongue’s heart to fire,” he whispered to himself as he led his pony upstream quickly. “These white men kill what Bad Tongue wanted so badly.”

  Behind him the hundreds of brown horsemen reached the upstream end of the sandbar, where they dropped to the far side of their ponies in a spray of grit and watery jewels, firing beneath the animals’ necks at the enemy trapped on the island. Here and there the white men began to return some fire poorly, but most started to dig in behind the heaving bodies of their dying horses, clawing frantically at the sand with their hands to form rifle pits.

  In the red light’s dance across the valley that dawn, the full coming day reverberating off the ridges to the west, echoing with the curses and pain-filled yammer of the white men, the war cries and high-pitched victory calls of the eagle wing-bone whistles, the angry bellow of the horses and mules going down in a bloody spray of gore and bowel-ruptured, urine-soaked sand—Bull decided this had to be the most beautiful dance he had ever witnessed.

  Now he had only to take his scalps from the dead when this day’s crimson dance was done.

  10

  17 September 1868

  HE GNAWED ON the bone, the same bone the big staghound clamped its jaws around, growling, hissing at him menacingly. Jealously wanting the bone for itself.

  Jubilee Usher laughed, stroking the crown of the animal’s head. That only provoked an even angrier growl for its keeper, a growl drenched with all the more threat.

  Glaring into the yellowed eyes of the vise-jawed staghound from his end of the bone, Usher met the dog’s gaze unflinchingly, knowing as he did that there were others gathering at the periphery of his vision to watch the standoff. They were interrupting their breakfast this morning as the colonel’s army went about striking camp, loading the four wagons and ambulance for the next leg of their journey back into the land of Zion. Those who had been with him from the start already knew they weren’t bound for family and friends among the Saints in the City of Deseret. At last night’s firelit meeting—half church service for the faithful, half an occasion to study his flock for the weaker of his avenging angels—Jubilee had begged understanding and obedience.

  Without fail, without stop did Usher complete this chore of leadership: studying his ranks for those who might buckle at the knees this close to home, this close to all that they might remember

  Now more than ever Jubilee needed to be sure of those closest to him. Now that word from the center of the faith said that Brigham Young drew his own faithful to him—as if the Prophet himself sensed the coming danger in those who flocked to the Usher clan.

  So it was that Jubilee had moved this band of gun-toting, iron-hardened men last night beneath the stars, made this rough lot of scarred, unsentimental men get down on their knees as he strode among them, lightly touching their heads with his anointed hand, dipping that hand empowered by God Himself in water he told them had come from the river Jordan in far-off Palestine. From the land of Christ, he instructed, the land where the Gentiles of old had crucified the one and only Lord—hung him upon a cross to die in sweet, redeeming agony—before that Christ arose three days later so that he might appear to the ancients in America, their very own ancestors: the chosen Saints of this Latter Day.

  “When a man moves his h
and with the will of God—then he of rights will be called the Prophet of our beloved Church!” Jubilee had told them. “But … when that man fails time and time again to raise his hand against the Gentiles who caused to suffer the Christ our Lord—the very Gentiles who persecuted and hanged Joseph Smith and his brother Hyrum—then that man no longer carries the will of God mantled about his shoulders!”

  “Brigham Young has failed, Colonel!”

  He had smiled when that voice raised itself out of the firelit darkness, row upon row of the tight crescent of his faithful gathered at the flaps of his tent. He moved again among them, touching, anointing their heads from the carved clay bottle, blessing them every one, praising them for their good, godly works of terror and bloodletting among the Gentiles, telling each of the place carved out for him in the land of immortal spirits as reward for his defense of the Kingdom against the heathens in this wicked, temporal land of America.

  To a man they had willingly pledged themselves to him anew. Impassioned, pledging their service, they would give their lives up for his, so that he might one day right the path of the one true Church for all time and the glory of God’s plan on earth. Their flesh was all any one of them had to offer now that they vowed to abandon the circle of family and friends they would leave behind in the land of Deseret controlled by the crazed and jealous, power-hungry Brigham Young.

  “Let Young’s most dangerous fear now become his greatest undoing!” Jubilee had roared at them, his eyes finding those of George, the Negro manservant who dutifully stood nearby, outside the wall tent where the woman lay.

  He knew George did not believe in the way of the Church, yet steadfastly believed nonetheless in Jubilee Usher. It did not matter, Usher had decided long ago. For, after all, for those of color—the black African, the red-skinned Indian, and the yellow-hued Oriental—the feet of none were yet taking the right path. None but the white man had been blessed by the Christ and his mighty angels come to visit ancient America. From time to time people of color were placed in Usher’s path to serve him and the greater good Jubilee was to play in this life on earth.

  Still grappling with the dog, with one hand now he reached behind him and found the plate of bones George had collected at last night’s supper. Seizing the biggest his fingers could blindly determine, Usher presented his favorite hound a dilemma. Slowly he brought the big bone up before the animal’s eyes, where it could plainly see the temptation. All the while the dog never loosened its tension on the bone held perilously between it and its master’s jaws. Jubilee watched the eyes, glorying in that instantaneous indecision he caused the animal. He saw the first flicker of bestial desire flame into jealousy, then the moment of action as the hound opened its great, salivating jaws and lunged for the bone Usher held in his hand.

  As quickly Usher flicked away the temptation.

  Rather than chase down the new treat, the hound immediately lunged back for the bone it had been tussling with its master for—yet it too was gone. Usher had risen. All of it in smooth, seemingly orchestrated movements, calculated precisely. Knowing animals the way he did, perhaps Usher was able to read eyes the way he did better than any man he knew—to act before others had time to react.

  The menacing growl rumbled from the animal’s throat as it rocked farther back on its legs, as if ready to spring with its teeth exposed, staring up at its master now in anger, robbed of not just one, but both the bones.

  “You’d love to gnaw on my flesh, wouldn’t you, Alexander?” he said, reaching out to pat the top of the great head.

  The hound snapped at the hand. And as quickly that huge, manicured hand batted the dog’s head aside with a ringing snap. It lay whimpering a moment, sprawled in the grass, then picked itself up, a totally different being from what it had been a moment before: now contrite and pleading for its master’s beneficence. Usher stroked its neck, presenting the hound the bone.

  “Go on now, Alexander. There are more where that came from.”

  Jubilee straightened and held his hands out before him. George hurried up, a china bowl cradled between his ebony paws like a pale offering of a full moon in the blackness of the firmament, a crisp hand towel draped over one forearm. Usher washed hands and face, dabbed them dry, then dropped the towel over the Negro’s shoulder.

  “Time I should awake the woman,” he told no one in particular, as those who had gathered began to move off of their own accord, back to the breaking of camp, the loading of the wagons, and the saddling of horses brought in from the good grass down by the river where they had been hobbled of last night.

  Yes, he thought. How he loved gazing upon her skin in the morning, slowly disrobing her, taking her hands and placing them around his own flesh to arouse himself, bring himself to readiness. At long last across these years, he had finally brought her flesh back to a pristine, milky purity by keeping her out of the sun—and the horrendous toll that it took on a woman’s beauty, aging her before her time. Usher had instead stopped the clock, allowing the woman only the shade of a tree, the depths of the shadowy ambulance, or the protection of their oiled tent. With such vigilant protection, she would stay every bit as beautiful as this, for many a year to come.

  Her eyes found his as he came in and closed the flaps behind him. Then those same blue eyes crawled to and held the top of the tent. And did not move as he unbuttoned his britches, took her hands, and wrapped the unwilling fingers about his swelling flesh.

  Jubilee eagerly set about slowly pulling apart the folds of her sleeping gown, aroused at the pure, unsullied beauty of her.

  Truly, this was one woman worthy of him—worthy enough to be the wife of the new Prophet of Zion.

  Bull drove the pony relentlessly down into the shallow riverbed, sandy spray glittering like a thousand gold-starred nights in this red-tinged coming of day, galloping to join the rest as they surged down the north bank of the Plum River, completely filling the riverbed, screaming and screeching, their guns barking, iron-tipped arrows snarling in the cool dawn air at the half-a-hundred. Scarlet light played off the ten-foot buffalo lances bedecked with colorful streamers and scalp locks of many hues, every man resplendent in feathers fluttering from rifle barrels brandished overhead as they came on.

  Bull was now among them, deep in their throbbing midst, a part of that massive flow like a red tide, a crimson coursing of a heartbeat destined to pound all life right out of the half-a-hundred. The leaders swept close to the sandbar, forcing their wild-eyed cayuses into the river itself, circling north of the island as they dropped to the off side of their ponies, there to hang by nothing more than a heel and wrist clutched in the matted, beribboned manes, from first to last of them firing, yelling, lobbing hissing arrows among what frightened, milling horses the white men had not already killed themselves.

  The scene had almost a surreal effect on the young Shahiyena: this great flood of warriors washing over the river valley. Never before had he been part of something so overwhelming, so savage, so undeniable. It not only gave his heart strength for the coming fight, but gave his spirit rebirth for the days to come when he would hunt the one he sought more than any other.

  The hundreds had appeared out of the west as if out of nowhere, as if the ground itself sprouted the naked horsemen. Suddenly blooming out of the thickets, up from the streambed itself, they magically appeared at the top of every hill, in every direction as they swarmed toward the helpless whites, every mouth screeching its own irreverent death songs.

  There had been no sound when first he had drawn off and stopped to look back on the white men reaching the island—then nothing more than the echo of hammering hooves. But with his next heartbeat, the riverbed flooded with screeching, painted horsemen sweeping past the island. High-Backed Bull had actually felt the breast of the earth tremble beneath his pony’s legs before he urged the animal into that great cavalcade two thousand hooves strong.

  Yipping like coyotes out on a bloody spree, waving blankets, firing their bows and rifles, the whole heavy pro
cession became a blurred parade of colors running out in water-strewn streamers of new light seeping into the valley of the Plum River.

  As Bull brought his pony about and in a wide sweep to the west once more, to make a second pass along the north end of the island, he caught a glimpse of three of the whites who had not joined the rest among the thrashing carcasses of their horses on the sandbar. While most hurled themselves down in the tall grass and swamp willow, hiding behind the plum brush and the first of the dying horses, there were three who hung back, hugging those murky shadows beneath the low, overhanging riverbank. From there the trio could not be seen by the onrushing warriors until it was too late and the horsemen were directly in the teeth of the white man’s guns.

  In the first charge the three had done their greatest damage. As the great red wave split at the western end of the sandbar, the horsemen were forced to veer sharply to drop off the low bank into the dry part of the riverbed. Now a handful of the Shahiyena and Brule already lay in the sand. More fell in their second charge as the three rifles exploded in the face of the red man’s attack, forcing its way down the bank into the very gut of the river itself.

  Bull reined up and watched a moment, horrified, three more heartbeats. Brown-skinned warriors crawled, wounded and bleeding, dragging themselves up the dry wash into the willow and plum brush, into hiding. Those that were spotted by the white men were shot where they crawled.

  He had to let others know. Roman Nose … Pawnee Killer, anyone. Yet Bull reined up, knowing he alone was called upon to drive the three from their burrow.

  His medicine alone had shown him where the trio hid, firing their rifles into the face of each renewed charge. His medicine alone had chosen him to wrench the badger from its hole.