Winter Rain

by Terry C. Johnston

  Her black eyes smoldered, shiny and as dark as chimney soot. With a growing frenzy of whimpers come to growls, the woman climbed and climbed evermore until he spent himself in her, causing the whore to cry out as she shuddered savagely atop his lap each time he pulled her hips downward atop him brutally.

  “Sí! Sí! Ahora, Señor—sí!”

  She sat huddled against him as he grew soft, murmuring something unintelligible into the side of his neck not bruised by the passionate clamp of her crooked teeth. When at last Jonah felt he could trust his knees not to turn to water beneath him, he rose unsteadily, still holding her against him, and carried the woman to the small bed. There he dragged back the musty, threadbare blankets and laid her atop the bare tick mattress.

  He tried to stand, to look for his clothes, but she pulled insistently on his hand, bringing him down beside her before pulling the blankets over them both. She fell asleep quickly, her head nestled in the curve of his shoulder, his now-soft flesh curled protectively between her two hands.

  When Jonah awoke, it came of something easy: moving only his eyelids, and those barely opening, sorting his place in things. Through those gritty slits he first saw the fading of the night’s darkness and the graying of the light. It was raining again and he was warm here beside the woman, in her blankets, sensing the rise and fall, the slight rasp of her breathing. So he closed his eyes again, knowing after all this time on this trail, there was nowhere he needed to go in any great rush.

  The next time he awoke, Hook found her gone. The damp air chilled him as he sat up, the blankets sliding away. He dressed quickly, listening to what few distant sounds announced the village coming awake. As Jonah pulled on his last boot, the woman pushed open the door and reached down, ushering in a small child, who heaved herself over the doorsill, then immediately stopped in fright, wide eyes locked on the gringo. In the crook of the whore’s arm she carried a second child, a bundled infant.

  She closed the crude door behind her, shutting off some of the chill, shutting out the rain-soaked breeze, and pulled the long black rebozo from her head, shaking the drops from it as she asked, “You go before breakfast?”

  He glanced at the small earthen oven built into the corner of this mud-and-wattle hut. It would serve as oven, stove, and fireplace, easily heating the small jacal.

  “I have miles to go,” he said quietly, gazing down at the small child, a girl, who squeezed up-against her mother’s leg with a thumb pressed against her lower lip, gazing up at the stranger with doe-eyed fright.

  “Please, Señor. You can eat. Go get your friend. He will want something hot to eat too. Go, get him and I will heat up some coffee.”

  Hers was a smile that warmed him from the inside out. Jonah finally relented. “Yes. I will let you cook us breakfast … if you let me give you what you will cook in your pots.”

  She nodded at last. “It is settled. Go get your friend and I will settle my children.”

  As he pulled on his coat and set his hat down upon his hair, the woman laid the sleeping infant in the bed, then motioned the older child over. She was taking the thin, crudely sewn coat from the girl’s arms as Hook ducked from the door and crossed the muddy street to claim Two Sleep from his warm, fragrant bed atop the stable hay. While the Indian climbed from his blankets, Jonah stepped to the jakes out back, a stinking room made of thin tree limbs daubed with mud to hold back the wind and rain.

  Returning to the mud hut with the Shoshone, Hook shut her small door behind him. She knelt at the corner fireplace, a small fire already warming the tiny room. Motioning for the Indian to sit in one of the two chairs beside a narrow table, the woman went back to her work over the blackened skillet. Jonah dropped his oiled canvas bag beside her. From it the woman pulled some hard-bread, a small sack of cornmeal, and an oiled paper wrapped about nondescript strips of dried meat, as black as the bottom of that skillet of hers.

  Jonah turned back to look over the rest of the room and noticed the small child again. His heart went to her as quickly, those big eyes so filled with fright of him and the tall Indian. She stood frozen at the edge of the firelight, there at the foot of the bed, gazing anxiously at the two strangers.

  “She is afraid of men?” he asked the woman. “That is a good thing, perhaps.”

  Turning her head slightly, the woman said, “No. I think she is most afraid of your friend. Indians.”

  “Sí,” the little girl responded, her voice a’quaver “Comancherias! Comancherias!”

  “No, no,” the woman soothed, rising and going to the child. She took the girl in her arms and lifted her, stroking her black hair. “Not Comancheria. From far, far away to the north is where the Comancheria live.”

  When she brought her daughter into the greasy light of that flickering candle, into the spreading glow of the fireplace’s warmth, Jonah was not immediately struck with the child’s garb. Yet as he watched the whore calm her daughter, explaining that there were many tribes of Indians and they were not all the feared and hated Comanche, who rode back and forth through this country plying their seasonal raids into Sonora before they returned to their homes in the southern reaches of the Staked Plain—Hook was eventually taken by something strange in the girl’s clothing. Rather than dressing the child in a small chemise and skirt, smaller copies of adult clothing, the woman had instead draped her daughter in what appeared to be a boy’s shirt, long enough to reach the crude, wet moccasins the child wore. It was plainly a pullover, three-button style, the sort to be found among most households on the southern plains, the sort offered for sale in any sutler’s or mercantile.

  Yet this was not a white settlement, his thoughts boiled as he studied the child again.

  “Step over here,” he told the woman gruffly, with roughness taking her elbow in his hand.

  “Señor?”

  “Come over here to the light,” he said, his voice low. “I don’t mean to frighten you.”

  Her eyes pleaded with him. “My child, Señor.”

  “Yes, I know,” he replied, trying to smile at the young girl. “Just … just bring her into the light.”

  That look of fear still captured on her face, the whore did as Hook demanded, reluctantly bringing her young daughter closer to the light.

  When he reached out to touch the long hem of the shirt, the child shrieked and the woman pulled back. “No. Just tell her not to be afraid. I won’t hurt her. Only want to look at this shirt”

  “She grows so fast, Señor,” the woman began to explain, apologetically. “I can’t keep her in nice things—a child that plays in the streets when my mother watches her. I go to work and my mother watches—”

  “All right,” he interrupted the whore, having inspected the dingy, faded hem of the shirt. “Turn her around. I want to see in the back of the dress, Señorita. Please, turn your daughter around so that I can look.”

  In curiosity the woman turned her daughter’s back toward Hook. He gently pushed aside the child’s long hair and twisted open the back of the collar.

  “Over here—to the light more.”

  She cooperated by leaning the child more into the candlelight on the narrow table where Two Sleep sat watching the whole process with curious eyes of his own.

  Jonah felt it rush over him as he let go the collar of the shirt. He touched it with his fingertips, running his hand down the full length of the child’s back until his hand rested on the woman’s bare forearm.

  “What do you want for the dress?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Señor?”

  “How much will you take for the child’s dress?”

  “I do not understand—”

  He turned abruptly and dragged up his outer coat, stuffing his hand into a small inside pocket. Pulling out a small skin pouch, Jonah brought forth a single eagle into the candlelight. She gasped slightly at the sight of the gold piece, her eyes grown even bigger while the frightened child buried her face in the crook of her mother’s shoulder.

  “I’ll pay for the dres
s.”

  “Señor, I do not know what to say—”

  “Say yes,” he interrupted, his mind scratching for more of the Spanish words to express it. All of it was coming so hard—staring at that scrap of shirting hung over the small child like a simple sack dress: … how dingy, dirty, sun faded, and stained. Across all these years.

  Then he thought to remind her, “You won’t earn this kind of money in a week. In a month. Will you?”

  Reluctantly, the whore shook her head, clutching her daughter ever tighter. “I … I am not sure I should—”

  Dragging out another single eagle, Jonah told her with a low, even voice, “All right, I’ll give you the two of them. For that dress your daughter wears. With this you can buy her, and yourself, many dresses now.”

  She swallowed, as if something dry and unforgiving were lodged in her throat, then reached out for the two shiny coins.

  Jonah pulled them back, just out of reach—tantalizing. “But first, you tell me if there are any comancheros in this village.”

  Her brow knitted in concern. “Sí.” She nodded. “There are a few. Why do you—”

  “Good.” He glanced at Two Sleep, seeing the interest there lighting the Shoshone’s face. “Now we are making ground. I think you got this dress from one of the comancheros, yes?”

  She nodded again. “Yes.”

  “Take it off your daughter and give it to me.”

  “I have … don’t have nothing else to put her in. Not another dress.”

  “Put her coat on her now and give me the dress … that shirt.”

  As her eyes fell away, the woman sought to apologize. “Yes, Señor—it is a shirt. The only thing I could afford when the comancheros bring clothing to sell.”

  As she set the girl on the hearth beside the fire and took up the threadbare coat, preparing to pull the thin, faded garment from the child’s skinny frame, the woman gazed up at Hook, her eyes pleading. “You are really … really going to give us those coins?”

  “Yes,” he answered, holding them out to her. “I am an honest man. I will never steal from a mother. Never would I steal from a child.”

  As she pulled the garment over her daughter’s head and quickly put the thin coat on the child, Jonah felt Two Sleep step up beside him in the firelight. Hook asked the woman, “How do the comancheros have clothing to sell?”

  Her eyes went to the floor again as she rose and handed him the limp, much-washed shirting. “It was so dirty when I bought it. But I knew it was big enough, it would fit her for some time to come.”

  He pressed the two coins into her hand. “How did the comancheros have this?”

  With abject apology in her eyes, the woman looked up from the coins in her palm and replied, “They take the clothing from the American children they buy from the Comancherias.”

  His mouth went dry, his tongue almost pasty, slow and clumsy to move of a sudden. “Where did the comancheros go with the child who wore this?” He held its faded shadows out before him, as if beckoning for her to answer.

  Instead, she shook her head, her lips trembling. “Please, Señor. Take that and go. Give me your money, or no. But just go.”

  Jonah took a step closer to her, towering over the small woman now. “I will go, but only when I have your answer. Where did the comancheros take the child who wore this shirt?”

  Again she shook her head, gazing up at his face, her eyes swimming with tears, imploring him, her words coming hard. “There was no … no child. Only this.” She touched the garment, then knotted her hands in the front of her chemise, beginning to sob. “I think I know now why you came here. To our village.”

  He was slow putting it into order in his mind. “You are telling me you don’t know of the child the comancheros took this from? The child who wore this shirt?”

  “All I know,” she answered, dragging a hand beneath her nose, “I heard them tell a story that they had bought that with some other clothes from a band of Comancheria.” She pointed. “To the north in the forbidden land where the comancheros go to trade with the Indians.”

  “Wait,” he said angrily, confused. “You are telling me there was no child sold to the comancheros? Only the shirt?”

  She nodded, her eyes fluttering to the old Indian before she answered. “That is right. The story the Comancheria told the traders was that their warriors had killed another band of bad comancheros—distrusted ones—then the Indians took the white children from the traders they killed. When the children outgrew the clothing, the Comancheria decided to trade it to other comancheros, as they did with other things the traders wanted.”

  “Did the traders say … did anyone say anything about the children? How old they were? Boys?”

  She wagged her head in resignation. “Nothing like that, Señor.”

  “All right,” Jonah finally said, his tone softened now. Looking quickly at Two Sleep, he said in English, “We got a fresh trail to follow now, my friend.”

  When the Shoshone had nodded, Hook turned back to the woman. He reached for her hand and laid another gleaming coin in the charcoal-stained palm. Then spoke in Spanish, “I have been waiting a long time to give this money to someone who can help me find someone I love.”

  Her damp eyes filled to brimming as her lips sought words, but found none.

  Folding her fingers over the three coins, Jonah continued, “Buy your children clothes to wear. Fill their bellies and keep them warm, woman. It matters not what you do to feed them—for there is no shame in doing what you must in caring for your children.”

  Her face filled with hope. “You … will you ever come back, Señor?”

  He shrugged. “It is not likely that I will ever ride this way again.” Looking quickly at the infant asleep on the bed, at the young daughter clutching her mother’s leg, Jonah spoke. “I never asked you: is your youngest another girl?”

  She shook her head. “No. He is a boy.”

  With a single nod Hook turned, went to the doorway. In opening it, Two Sleep slipped out into the drizzling rain of that gray spring morning. The breeze freshened, tossing a shaft of rain onto the pounded clay floor at the portal. Jonah turned to the woman, sensing suddenly the warmth on one side of his body beckoning from the little hut with its fireplace and family within. On the other side he sensed the cold already clutching for him, ready to embrace him fully—the rain ready to swallow him on the shelterless plains, leading him on a joyless trail as he shivered in the saddle, on to fireless camps and curling up in soggy wool blankets, fighting off the nightmares that he knew were now to return.

  Now that he had a fresh trail to follow. Now that he knew his own flesh and blood had not been sold into slavery by the comancheros.

  Now that Jonah Hook knew part of his family might still be alive … among the Comanche.

  “Take care of them both,” he told her softly as he stood there framed in the tiny doorway, half-warm, the other half of him grown suddenly cold in the leave-taking. “Your girl … and the boy. They are both, both so very special. Watch over them, as God would watch over them in your absence.”

  A gust of wind followed his prayer into that tiny mud hut as Jonah Hook closed the door, turning into the lancing sheets of rain.

  Hurrying into the cold once more.

  28

  Summer 1873

  “THE DRESS. WHAT of that dress?”

  When the Shoshone first asked Jonah that question, Hook hadn’t looked back at the Indian. Instead, he sat there in the shadows of their cheerless camp that first night riding north toward the land of the Comanche, surrounded by the immense prairie and soggy darkness, hulking buttes rising like ominous shadows against the sodden, seeping sky. Theirs had been a hard ride pointing their noses into that forbidden country, a long day of hardly ten words spoken between them after saddling and dragging their pack animals out of the tiny, nameless village in southwest Texas.

  All day they had watched low black clouds swirling out of the west like smoke off a greasewood fire, and
now the rain fell from gray sky gone mushy with twilight. Just before they had been forced to make camp, the wind came up, spitting a thin, driving rain between its snapping teeth. With night coming down, that wind became an ugly thing on these southern plains, whistling and whining like death’s own hollow bones.

  Hook sighed quietly. “It weren’t a dress, Injun.”

  “Did not look like no dress,” Two Sleep replied, wagging his head as he tried to sound out his best English. “A shirt, yes.”

  Finally, Jonah nodded. “A boy’s shirt.”

  “Sure it your boy’s?”

  Staring into the icy darkness of that sodden, moonless night, watching the grayish, ghostly curl of his own breathsmoke rise before his face, Jonah explained, “That shirt may be faded and old, for certain. But I knowed right off from the way the front placket was sewed that Gritta made it. Never in my days did I see another like it. The woman’s mother taught her to sew like that. Only folks in all the Shenandoah. But not just that—it were the cloth of it too. Gritta made our children clothes from her old worn-out dresses. That woman never let anything go to waste. Not Gritta.”

  “You sure, I trust you,” Two Sleep replied.

  “It ain’t just a matter of you trusting me.” Then Jonah wagged his head, saying, “Besides, until I looked back of the collar, I couldn’t be absolute certain it come from one of my boys.”

  Two Sleep reached up to tap the back of his own shirt. “Collar?”

  “Gritta sewed the boys’ names in their shirts. I imagine it were handed down from the older boy to his brother.”

  “What name you see in the collar?”

  “Ezekiel. That’s my youngest. Ezekiel Hook.”

  But as he spoke his son’s name, Jonah sensed again that unrequited pang of doubt. The gnaw of something so tangible it felt real. Yet there was nothing to fight, nothing to grapple with, nothing he could get his hands on so as to settle the doubt then and there.

  Little Zeke hadn’t been much older than the Mexican whore’s daughter when Jonah last saw him, when Jonah marched off with Sterling Price’s volunteers to drive the Yankee army back north. Three years old was all he had been. Only six when he was taken from his home by Usher and his gunmen.