Winter Rain

by Terry C. Johnston

  No matter what other description might be given of him, the Ranger was a fighting man.

  It took a lot of doing in the years after the revolution, but the few eventually subdued many of the tribes—formerly warlike—such as the Tonkawa and Caddo. The Rangers began pushing back their wilder cousins like the Kiowa and Comanche just before Texas went from being a republic to joining the Union itself, when Texans disbanded their Rangers, believing that it was now the duty of the federal government to protect them.

  After more than a half-dozen years of waiting for the troops to come make a stand against the renewed raids of the wild tribes, Texans figured they had endured enough. In the late fifties the Rangers flourished once more. Again they issued the call, and young men rode in to answer the clarion. Again they sent out the companies to construct their modest outposts strung like distant beads on a strand of spiderweb, all the way from the Brazos on the north clear down to the Rio Grande flowing against the border of Mexico itself. Small bands of a dozen or more were scattered to live among the far-flung pioneer families tenaciously dug in like hermit bugs out there in that brutal, beautiful country. The Rangers were ready to ride out at a moment’s notice—to track down and punish any and all who cast a shadow of lawlessness and savagery across the whole of west Texas.

  Years later when the South ripped itself away from the Union, the call went out for men to join the likes of John Bell Hood. Fighting men answered that resounding trumpet, leaving gaping holes in the fabric of Texas’s frontier defense. Quickly sensing the change, the wild tribes brought out their drums once more and danced over the scalps. Again the red tide savagely pushed against the scattered white settlers, reversing all the good the Rangers had accomplished.

  When the men of Texas returned home after Appomattox, they found they had been defeated on two fronts. Not only had the Yankees whipped them in those four bloody years of war back east, but while they were gone, off to save the Confederacy, the savage horsemen of the southern plains had risen up to reclaim their buffalo ground. While some of the sons of the South continued to cry out that they would never surrender, a few even fleeing across the Rio Grande to continue their war, most accepted their defeat and rode home to put family and life back together once more.

  And wound up staring right into the blood-flecked eye of another war.

  How could a man think of plowing and planting when there were warriors roaming about, ready to undo everything a man might accomplish?

  The Rangers offered a private $1.25 per day for pay, rations, clothing, and the services of his own mount. To sign on, each of them had to be ready with a trail-worthy horse, saddle, bridle, and blanket, along with a hundred rounds of powder and ball. Officers—the captain and his lieutenants, in addition to the sergeant of each company—were paid a pittance more. For most the pay did not really matter.

  No more were these men mere green recruits. While most were young, very few weren’t proficient with a gun—most had been proven in battle.

  To Hook it seemed that most of the men who rode with Company C were hard-wintered and humped in the loin. Seemed too that they could stare eyeball to eyeball with death itself, ride for days in the saddle and gallop straight-up into daunting odds.

  So it was that Jonah found comfort in this irregular company of men. Nothing like Sterling Price’s Missouri Confederates. Further still from the galvanized U.S. Volunteers he had joined to fight Indians in Dakota Territory after the Great War. Probably as far from the Army of the West as any civilians could be, the Rangers still weren’t anything like militia. No matter, their captain stood them to a grueling inspection each morning. While Company C did not dress in uniform, their captain nonetheless did expect the men to wear clothing that was clean and functional, demanding that the men keep their horses fit and their weapons in fighting trim.

  “We may not be military,” Lamar Lockhart had reminded them before they rode out from Jacksboro. “We may be nothing more than irregulars—but we have no need of looking like bobtails, do we?”

  Irregulars indeed: a Ranger furnished all his own needs and arms. Never did these men ride beneath any flag, nor with a surgeon along. And all matters of rank came about through a man’s ability to lead and inspire his own company of staunch individualists—not through some political appointment or timely graduation from the U.S. Military Academy.

  It did not take long for Jonah to come to admire the saddle-hardened men in this crude bunch he rode with, marching northwest from Fort Richardson toward the Staked Plain of the Penateka and Kwahadi Comanche.

  No—not for pay, nor for glory did this company of Rangers ride into the breach.

  For most of these it might be but the memory of a loved one killed, scalped, and savagely mutilated that spurred them to join. Mothers and fathers, perhaps a sister or brother. Blood kin captured and enslaved, outraged or butchered.

  This was something that Jonah Hook understood right down to the very core of him.

  These were men who rode into Comanche country with a score to settle.

  33

  Summer 1874

  SUMMER’S LONG DAYS of oppressive heat were almost more than Gritta Hook could bear.

  Year after year her days flowed like this, agonizingly slow from one to the next. Season after season Usher marched them north when autumn kissed the trees with color, south again when those trees bloomed in spring—into the land of desert and cactus and dark-skinned, raven-haired people who stared at her from the side of the dusty roads where rumbled the ambulance George drove.

  It was good she remembered. She tried so hard to remember names nowadays. Jubilee Usher … and the old colored man called George and … her name was Gritta.

  The big man never called her by her name. How she wished he would. If only once. To say her Christian name. Not the one she took when she married long, long ago. But her own name. Gritta.

  So she said it to herself when the days grew long and the nights became lonely. She devised conversations between herself and Usher, between herself and the old colored man, long conversations about nothing of any great consequence. Something—anything at all—to keep her mind from slipping over the edge where she already teetered precariously.

  And so many times she came back to recalling snips and snatches of Bible verses, remembrances of things faceless folks had said to her of a dim time long ago, perhaps fragments of a song heard on a hot Sunday morning as a child, lullabies sung as a mother to children of her own.

  Sunday-morning sunlight had always poured like creamy white butter in through the isinglass windows of that tiny church—just the way the sun’s light was magnified as it penetrated the creamy white canvas of this wall tent where she was imprisoned most every day while Usher’s men roamed the deserts and mountains. Horses and men coming and going. Celebrating their bloody work, then taking their leave once again in a new direction.

  Here in the tent the air began to hum like a hot summer Sunday at church, listening to the preacher drone on and on. The way Usher droned on and on, ranting before his faithful.

  Gritta began to whisper, faintly caressing each bright note belonging to the melody of an old Baptist hymn.

  Do not wait until

  Some deed of greatness you may do.

  Do not wait

  To shed your light afar.

  To the many duties

  Ever near you now he true:

  Brighten the corner where you are.

  Brighten the corner where you are!

  Brighten the corner where you are!

  Someone far from harbor

  You may guide across the bar.

  Brighten the corner where you are!

  Her eyes found the corner where the canvas seams came together, bunched to make for a shadowy place. How she longed to be there, where it would be cool. Right where a spider hung in the dark midst of her web. She had hung there, balled up for the better part of two days, likely hibernating after a feast on the moth snared in her sticky trap day before last.<
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  Up there in the shadows, where things looked all the cooler.

  They had learned the old songs from her, the three children had. Learned to say grace before their meals. No matter that they might eat nothing but plain food, there was always some meat on the table, along with potatoes and an abundance of other vegetables in season. Always plenty of food for their growing bodies to eat. That is, until Jonah marched off to fight that war he never come back from.

  Grace. Thanking God for all His bounty. For what the Lord had seen fit to bless them with.

  Gagging, she physically swallowed down the sour bile as she fought the nausea, slowing her hand at work with the smooth, peeled twig between her legs.

  It made her as sick to think of what blessings had been given her family as it did to plunge the twig deep inside herself, searching out the demon seed that had attached itself to her womb.

  “Dear heavenly Father, we are grateful for the bounty Thou hast set before us this day. Thy gifts are the fruit of our hands. Bless this plentiful harvest to nourishing our bodies, and Your holy word to nourishing our hungry souls,” Gritta whispered quietly, her lips barely moving as she fought back the waves of nausea bordering on pain.

  What needed doing now had needed doing more than once since that bright day the man had come and took her from the home she had made for her family.

  “Watch over and protect these three children of ours, the youngest of your creation,” she continued her recitation of grace. “May we never turn from Your face, our heavenly Father—forever praising You in the name of the Savior of man, Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

  She felt the warm, sticky flow over her hand then. Hoping she had torn Usher’s seed from her womb, praying her body would flush it as she had each time before.

  Exhausted, Gritta sought out something more to hang her thoughts on as the pain rose low in her belly. Slowly she dragged the smooth twig from her body and lay panting, sensing in some dull, primitive way that she was bleeding again. That was good. Only through the bleeding would she flush the demon seed.

  “Now I lay me down to sleep,” her voice came from deep within her, as deep perhaps as she had been probing with the twig. It was a child’s voice that rose quiet and eerily from her throat. “I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die … if I should die …”

  Gritta clenched her eyes shut, trying to hold back the hot tears of pain, of failure at her attempts to kill herself.

  “Before I wake,” she sobbed. “I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

  She knew God would not take her now. Not after what she had done with Usher. Not after all this time. How she wanted to die and have it done with—just how much worse could hell be than where she was right now?

  Pulling her closer and closer to death was Gritta’s belief that her children had gone on to a better place. Too long since she last saw the boys.

  “Now I lay me down to sleep.”

  Remembering how she always got down on her knees beside the bed the boys shared, kneeling between them. Each night Hattie knelt at her small bed nearby.

  “I pray the Lord my soul to keep.”

  She hadn’t seen her daughter in almost as long as she had missed the boys. Couldn’t remember—Hattie’s face. For so many years there it had been like looking back on her own childhood, so much did Hattie look like her mother.

  “If I should die before I wake.”

  But she would never see them again. Not living. Not in death. They had gone on to heaven, and she was going to hell for all that she had done with Usher.

  “I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

  How fervently she prayed that last line, repeating it over and over as she grew more and more faint, without the strength to hide the smooth, peeled twig beneath one of the table’s leg supports. It was there she had kept it over all these seasons and miles and operations she performed on herself.

  Cursing her womb that had given birth to three children who now lived with God. Cursing her womb, desiring to scar it irrevocably so that no chance would the devil’s own seed stand of finding sustenance there and growing.

  How long had it been? She dug at the thought the way her fingers dug at the hard, flaky soil.

  She sensed again that fleeting remembrance of being bedside with the children, saying the prayer before diving between the cold sheets and blankets and the thick comforter.

  Then Gritta was struck with the fact so cold and smooth, it was like the limestone walls of the springhouse where they kept the milk and butter cool. She could not say where she was, how long it had been, nor how old she had become. Nothing to relate to space and time.

  The warmth between her legs was turning slightly colder now.

  None of the rest mattered anymore, for the children were all gone and with God now. Only her regrets that she would not live for eternity with them in the glory of the Lord’s love. And J—…Jonah himself must surely be dead. Not come home from the war for so long. Not come after her. He was surely dead. Killed by the Yankee soldiers Sterling Price wanted to drive out of Missouri. How much longer would they be fighting?

  She knew these men who rode with Usher fought and then marched back north to spend the winter. It must be a long, long war for the fighting to go on and on and on this way.

  When the war ended, would she no longer be Usher’s slave? How that made her battered soul rejoice, sending tiny shards of light against all the darkness of her gloom. Not that she saw anything to change in the way things had worked out for her: getting took off that farm of theirs in Missouri was probably the best thing after all—what with Jonah killed by the Yankees and her unable to do a lot of the work it took a man to do. Better that she was took by Usher now that Jonah was dead.

  Only regret she had was those children of hers dying so young.

  As sure as she was about anything, she would be going to hell eventually—if this wasn’t it already.

  This heat. This singing, buzzing, hot air. This endlessness. This despair and lack of any hope. Where she was, it must surely be hell.

  “I pray the Lord my soul to take.”

  The first day of the Moon of Green Grass. Already the endless, rolling waves of it were growing tall against the legs of their ponies.

  Tall One had never dreamed he would see so many warriors together, all riding north by west, nearing the earth-lodge settlement where the buffalo hunters gathered. A wildly independent tribe, never before had the Comanche banded together in numbers anywhere near these. And with them rode the fiercest of the Kiowa and Cheyenne.

  First they would strike the buffalo hunters there at the earth lodges, then spread out like the fanning tail feathers of an eagle as war parties leveled one after another of the white settlements they found trespassing on buffalo ground. How glorious would be this ride behind the war chiefs for him and Antelope!

  It was to be the last summer of the white man in the land of the Comanche.

  They were timing their arrival at the white man’s earth-lodge settlement, wanting to get there when this first moon of the summer had grown full and fat. Beneath the silver light of that moon they would charge in and club the hide hunters while the white men slept in their beds.

  As decided by the war chiefs, the many wandering bands came together a few days ago at the mouth of Elk Creek on the North Fork of the Red River. It was there, within the boundaries of the Kiowa-Comanche Reservation itself, that the shaman Isatai had commanded a sundance lodge be erected. By the hundreds The People had come until there were more than any could ever remember celebrating this ancient ritual. Even avowed peace chiefs Horseback and Elk Chewing came south to the great sun—praying with their bands.

  And after that celebration of dancing to the sun for renewal of their People, the chiefs of those warrior bands held their council of war. Kiowa under Satanta and Lone Wolf. Shahiyena under Medicine Water, Iron Shirt, and Gray Beard. Each of them came carrying the war pipes sent them by the gray-eyed Kwahadi war chief.

  Still, ther
e were holdouts. Like the Shahiyena Little Robe, who upon hearing the talk of war immediately fled with his people back to the agency. Fearing most what everyone knew was coming, the Shahiyena Stone Eagle sat arguing with himself about what path he should set his feet upon.

  For the rest, the path lay clear and straight.

  They had come to believe in the prophet called Isatai, come to believe that this shaman might truly be more than a mere magician. Perhaps through this powerful medicine man the Comanche finally could drive the white man from their ancient hunting ground, for all time to come.

  So it had seemed most fitting, before they undertook the bloody work of war, that the Comanche chose to immerse themselves in more of the frenetic symbolism of the sun dance, excusing themselves from most of the “formalities” practiced by the Kiowa and Shahiyena. That symbolism of the sun dance had for many generations been unequivocally tied to the buffalo. And now more than ever the threat posed by the white buffalo hunters had become most real.

  If the buffalo disappeared—the Comanche would be next.

  At Elk Creek the bands had gathered the poles and branches for the great sun-dance arbor. At the center they raised a tall, forked ridgepole, and ringing the outer circle stood the twelve shorter poles, each one connected to the center with long streamers decorated with scalps of their enemies and scraps of fluttering calico and trade cloth. A newly killed buffalo calf, its body cavity emptied, then stuffed with willow branches, was raised to the top of the huge center pole. There it would gaze down upon the dancers, granting them its buffalo magic.

  Masked clowns smeared with mud cavorted and swirled among the gathered villages, throwing mud balls at the unsuspecting and lending a carnival atmosphere to this important undertaking. These were the Comanche “Mud Men,” the sekwitsit puhitsit, a comical diversion to an otherwise deadly serious occasion: invoking the power of the supernatural to bring about the salvation of a dying way of life.

  Four days of searing sun and short, chilly nights filled with the endless drumming and prayer singing by the old men. For Tall One and Antelope it proved to be a frighteningly beautiful celebration to watch. While dancers among the northern tribes hung themselves from the rawhide tethers or dragged buffalo skulls from skewers driven beneath the muscles of their backs, the Comanche did not believe it necessary to torture themselves to be heard by the Spirit Above. Still, the dancers allowed themselves no food nor water for the duration of the celebration of the sun. While these warriors danced, men and women came forward and hung small offerings of food and tobacco and scalps from the center pole. Young boys hoping one day to become full-fledged warriors tied their gifts to their tiny arrows and shot them into the sun-dance tree, far above the dancers.