Cry of the Hawk jh-1

by Terry C. Johnston

  That’s when he saw the carcass in the yard, not yet gone completely to bone. Decomposed by time and merely tormented by robber jays and crows content to sup on carrion. Not one of his stock—a small animal. Standing over it, he recognized the carcass as the dog who had followed him and Gritta from Virginia, tongue lolling as it loped alongside their cart, before darting into the dark forest, scenting a rabbit.

  Kneeling slowly, he touched Seth’s skull, gently placing a fingertip into the big bullet hole.

  Who’d want to kill an old, half-blind dog and leave him lying in the middle of the yard anyway?

  But the tiny shred of gray denim still clinging between the skull’s canines made Jonah wince in imagined pain.

  Seth had him a good hold of somebody when he was shot.

  Jonah stood, sensing the cold now fully seeping into his marrow like no loneliness and despair ever had. Even sitting out day after day in Rock Island, waiting … waiting.

  No one was going to tell him to move. No one ordering him now. He was a free man again, at last. So he had to order his own feet ahead of each other, one at a time—inching toward the barn. He had to know.

  And then Jonah became suddenly conscious that he was not breathing.

  The barn was empty. Even the pegs where he hung tack and bridle and hackamores. Just the moldy hay in the stalls gone too long without mucking. The wild stench of it—gone to rot now.

  Jonah pushed himself hard toward the cabin, certain now he would not be surprised. Certain he wouldn’t find a body. They had gone. But that still did not explain the dog. And the denim of someone’s britches Seth had a death hold on when he was killed.

  Hook stood at the door, listening to the rustle of the field mice as they suddenly recognized some sound other than their own and scurried off the table and out of the dry sink, off her sideboard Gritta had carried in the back of their little cart from the Shenandoah Valley. The cold had made him numb, and with a shudder he remembered now too what some of the Union guards at Rock Island had told him about how that Yankee general Phil Sheridan had made a wasteland of the Shenandoah in the final summer of the war.

  About like this, he sobbed quietly.

  Nothing, nobody to come home to after all that praying and counting and hoping that had kept him alive and putting one foot in front of each other, marching from Illinois to Kansas and on to the Dakota Territory where he had to fight Injuns just to keep his hair and stay alive so that he could get back home to Gritta and the children but no one was left anymore and he had counted so much on them being here he didn’t know what to do next but sit here in the broke-down chair where he collapsed beside the wobbly table, lay his head down on his forearm and cry.

  The nature of the light slipping through the broken windows and door frame had changed subtly over the afternoon that he wept and dozed off into some unconscious state then awoke to sob some more, all without ever raising his head from his arm laid on the dusty tablecloth Gritta used to shake free of crumbs out the front door after every meal.

  The same arm grazed by a Cheyenne bullet so long ago was numb now. His feet had gone so cold he could no longer recognize them as his own inside the soaked stockings and cracked, dry-split boots. He shivered, realizing the need for fire. If he was going to live, he’d have to stay warm tonight.

  And just get through till tomorrow.

  The wood box beside the stove was still filled. He pushed the trivet aside and grabbed a chunk of wood, from which he shaved some kindling. On the top of the stone mantle, he found the small wooden box that contained the fire-steel and char and flint and in minutes had a fire beginning to crackle as soon as the chimney heated enough to draw.

  For a few distinct moments from the rest of the whole day, the sun dipped below the leaden clouds and shot its rays obliquely through the gaping windows and door hole.

  The place had been looted, everything in shambles. All of it—too damned much for a simple man to absorb all at once.

  The whispering feet of mice came alive in the rafters overhead and at the far walls. Perhaps not mice at all, but more so the whispering voices of someone or something that could tell him what went on here and where they had gone.

  For the longest time Jonah had clung to the hope that Gritta had taken the children and left. But with Seth in the yard and some things took and more things left here in the cabin, belongings Gritta would never leave behind, Hook grew certain that something—or someone—had claimed his family.

  A great weariness overtook him. With darkness coming on quickly as the foxes who came out to hunt the low places by the creeks at dusk, Hook decided he would stay the night here, although there was no food and nothing but a gaping despair threatening to swallow him. No matter, he wasn’t hungry. And in the morning when the gray light nudged him awake from their dusty, abandoned wedding bed, Jonah would push on up to Uncle Moser’s place. There to find some answers.

  He could sleep here by the fire, he finally decided, going to the table and tipping it over, dishes and pots clattering to the plank floor. He dragged the table over by the fireplace for a windbreak. Jonah then brought the dusty blankets and the old tick prairie mattress into his windbreak and settled down to watch the flames dance in the stone fireplace.

  And feed on bitter loneliness.

  There was nothing else for him to eat.

  Artus Moser was heading north along the rim of that same valley, while the sun sank from that same sodden, gray sky.

  He was hoping to find some answers, some help, maybe a warm meal up at a neighbor’s place. Skirting past the farm where Jonah’s wife and children had evidently waited for his cousin’s return. Then given up and most like gone on back to Virginia, where the Mosers had put down some tough taproots. Gritta came from such stock.

  But it was getting too late, Artus told himself, too late for him or anyone else to expect Jonah to be coming home from the war. Couldn’t blame Gritta for taking the children east. Any man coming home from the war or the Yankee prisons was already back among family by now. The rest was already laid in the ground, stacked three and four deep, most likely too. The ones blessed enough to have themselves a grave on so many of those unnamed battlefields.

  Three days ago Artus had walked over here to Jonah’s place for the first time since he had himself come back home, to tell Gritta that his daddy had gone. But instead of Jonah’s family, he had found the place empty, and eerily silent. Artus had turned about and run most of the way home. Afraid of the ghosts that he was sure haunted that place now.

  For two days now, he had been sitting inside the house where he had been born and raised, where he hoped one day to raise his own children. Waiting for what, he did not know. Only that this afternoon he had finally decided to start walking. To leave this tainted soil and start walking out of the valley. Find someone north of here who would have warm food for his belly and an ear to listen to his laments.

  It had taken him months of walking to get home from the war to southern Missouri. Hiding out, stealing food where he could, getting arrested many a time for vagrancy. Even Southern folk didn’t take all that kindly to a lonely Rebel making his way back to his kin. Everybody all had their own problems.

  Day after day on that long, barefoot walk Artus had hoped that each night he would find someone kind enough to offer him a half a loaf of old bread, perhaps a potato or an apple set by last fall.

  And when he got home to his daddy’s place back there in the southern end of the valley after that long walk away from the war, Artus found a cross leaning like a stoop-shouldered old woman over a grave gone to weed out to the side of the house, finding his daddy terrible sick and taken to his bed inside the cold cabin. No telling how long the man had been in the musty bed reeking of age and sickness, his flesh going cold and his whole skinny body racked by a fluid-filled cough that reminded Artus of so many who had died of typhus or diphtheria or pneumonia during the war trying to drive the Yankees back out of the South.

  His daddy had been such a st
rong, vital, filled-out, and fleshy man of a time.

  Moser almost didn’t recognize his father, eyes half-lidded, black, and sunken, like the skin of his cheeks sinking away below the high cheekbones, sallow, waxlike skin like a rumpled tablecloth that rattled with each noisy breath the old man took.

  The thirty-year-old Artus tried to feed his daddy some broth he’d made, more hot water than anything. But the old man was plumb gone, and everything Artus poured into the slack mouth just seeped back out from the old man’s lips, onto the pillow and sheets and that patchwork comforter.

  Lord, how cold his daddy’s skin was.

  For seventeen days, Artus stayed there beside his daddy’s bed, day and night. Then rose at last to dig a grave beside his mama’s and finally laid the old man to rest. A new cross standing beside hers.

  All those years of war, with every step along every mile of icy or dusty or muddy or summer-blistered road he had marched, across every field of waist-high grass he had charged, muzzle loader out and bayonet gleaming in the sun, Artus Moser had promised himself he was fighting for his daddy and mama and the rights of folks back home in Missouri and for that little farm that would one day be his when at last the war ended and he could return home to help his family on that place that was his and he was its.

  Artus had dropped the spade at the foot of the fresh earth he had packed over the body. Dusted his hands, and turned away. Not sure if he wanted this place now. Of a time he might decide different. But there were two ghosts here already, and he didn’t want his soul to be a third, captive, made prisoner and left on this ground, a’mouldering.

  So deep in his need for human contact was he that when Artus saw the firelight below through the broken windows, he bumped into a tree in dumbfounded surprise, splitting his forehead. The warmth surprised him as well, as he dabbed his fingers in the swelling, moist flesh.

  No matter the pain, he had to find out who was in the Hook cabin, firelight flickering through the two yawning, paneless windows. Inching up from the side of the barn like he’d learned to hunt fox and coon and squirrel and hare, Artus saw that over the door, somebody had hung a blanket or some such. Blocking the light and the wind and hiding who was inside.

  Slowly, his breath clutched in his throat, Artus sidled toward the cabin, wishing he still had that old gun he had cradled and loaded and carried and dragged through years of fighting and starving and sleeping and crying and feeling homesick beyond relief. If it was any of the freebooters he’d heard tell of raiding up and down the countryside, their kind would have horses stalled in the barn or picketed outside by the cabin.

  No horses here.

  “You there! Turn around—slow!”

  Artus felt his heart leap to his throat. His hands shot into the air. Always had been a good one taking orders.

  Hoping whoever it was would see his arms up, if not the telltale color of his tattered butternut gray uniform.

  The figure moved out of the darkness, inching toward the dim light spilling out one of the windows. Then the man stopped, a black silhouette framed by the firelit window. Holding a rifle.

  Moser swallowed hard. “Didn’t mean no harm—”

  “Artus?”

  That confused him of a moment. The stranger knew his name. Then the man inched from the window, coming his way from the corner of the cabin, into the yard. Drawing closer.

  “Yeah? Artus Moser.”

  “It’s me, by damned, Artus!” shrieked the stranger as he dropped the rifle in the icy mud and dashed forward, arms outstretched.

  “Good God in heaven above—it’s cousin Jonah!”

  15

  Late January, 1866

  THE TWO OF them spent that night talking, remembering. The empty hulk of the Hook cabin was for a time filled with glorious warmth between the two. With dawn come creeping gray out of the east, they lay down on that old tick, back to back to share their warmth, and slept through much of the next day.

  In the golden dusk that night Jonah and Artus hunted together, bringing back to the cabin a small doe they fed on, jerking the rest of the meat before the fire.

  As the sun rose the following morning, Hook and Moser set off on foot, intending to walk in one direction, then another, until they found a neighbor who could give them both some answers.

  Or would.

  At the Hosking place, north out of the valley on the way to Cassville, the pair was met by three rifles as they approached the house.

  “It’s Jonah Hook, Mr. Hosking!” he called out across the yard splashed with January sunshine. Steam rose from the ice-slicked ruts running from all directions toward the barn, where old man Hosking and his two hands held guns on the newcomers.

  “You remember us, don’t you? I’m Artus. My daddy was Amos Moser.”

  “I know who you are, Artus. Your daddy grieved real hard after your mama passed on suddenly.”

  “You know anything about my family?” Jonah asked, anxiously. “You remember we have the place just down the road from Artus—”

  “I know who the living hell you are, Hook!” the man snapped. “Heard about you from some fellas got out of Rock Island.” The old man turned partway to address his hired men. “Boys, just look at that Yankee blue he’s wearing for his homecoming suit!”

  The hired men laughed as the ground warmed around them, steam lifting from the moist, rich earth.

  “He was out west fighting Injuns for the army—just to get out of prison,” Artus tried to explain.

  “I been set free from a hellhole of a Yankee prison—Rock Island. Only joined the army to get out and fight Injuns.”

  “There it is!” Hosking roared. “The truth comes from his own damned mouth.”

  “Never did once raise my gun at a white man in a Confederate uniform,” Jonah said.

  Hosking decided to amble a bit closer, his tall boots splashing across the muddy yard. “Way I figure it—that uniform of yours makes you a turncoat, Hook—folks took you in their hearts when you and your’n come to this valley. So why don’t you be a good boy and get on out of here before we have to fill your Yankee-loving carcass full of buckshot and leave it set for my hogs to grit on?”

  “Lot of men died in that prison, Mr. Hosking. I didn’t want to be one of ’em.”

  “Good men, I’ll bet they were—’cause they stuck it out. Now, kindest thing I can do for you and your loyal cousin there is to tell you to scat. It’s for him I didn’t open up on you first sight I got of that goddamned uniform.”

  “It ain’t fair—what you’re doing,” Hook snarled, taking a step forward before Moser snagged his arm.

  “Keep your gun down, Jonah!”

  The rifles held by the hired men came up level, then Hosking waved his hand.

  “Hold on a minute,” he ordered the pair. “I don’t want no blood on this ground. Been enough already. Lost my oldest boy at Pea Ridge, not far from here.”

  “I was there, Mr. Hosking.”

  The old man took another step closer, appraising Hook. “You was at Pea Ridge too?”

  “I rode on from there with Sterling Price and didn’t give up till I was took prisoner at Corinth in Mississip.”

  Hosking appeared to struggle within himself. He spat a stream of brown into the icy-scum puddle at his feet. “Lost both my boys in that war—killed by men wearing the same uniform you got on. I don’t much take to Yankee blue on a man. Nothing’s changed. Like I said, you and Moser best run on now.”

  “I can’t go, Mr. Hosking.”

  He wagged his head. “I’m telling you—get off my place, bastard traitor!”

  “I ain’t no traitor!”

  Moser stopped Hook as his cousin lunged for the older, bulkier man. Jerking Jonah around, holding tight to his wool coat, murmuring low to Hook about how foolish it would be with two other guns and them all Yankee-hating and shut-eared anyway. Hook kept twisting, making Moser dance as Jonah kept his eyes on Hosking.

  “Let’s just go, Jonah. There’s others’ll help us.”
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br />   “I doubt that, Artus,” declared the old man. “You go dragging along that traitor in that Yankee suit with you—I don’t figure a soul in these parts is going to help you none.”

  Hook relaxed, his heart still like thunder in his ears. Artus stayed close, but eventually freed his grip on Jonah’s coat.

  “Just tell me,” he rasped, weary, afraid, angry. “Tell me what happened to my family.”

  Hosking wagged his head. He glanced at the other two, who likewise shrugged. “Don’t know. From the talk going round, it’s been some time since anyone seen life out to your place. Don’t have an idea where your family went.”

  “They didn’t go nowhere.” Hook balled his fists again, so filled with despair he would hit anyone just to feel the crunch of his knuckles against their cheek and jaw and nose. “They was took.”

  Hosking regarded him a moment, stepping closer as he brought his rifle up. “How you so sure they was took, boy?”

  Jonah watched the wariness of the man, moving his hands from the holster where rested the .44-caliber army pistol he had been allowed to keep with him when the army bade him farewell back at Leavenworth, Kansas.

  “I’m sure. Just know from the looks of the place.”

  “It will give a man the willies just going there, Mr. Hosking,” said one of the hired men with a jerky nod of his shaggy head.

  “It will, eh?” Hosking replied.

  “Things left there my Gritta would’a took, had she been of a mind to leave on her own. Up to the loft, the children left things belonged to them. Special things a child don’t leave behind if they’re moving out for good.”

  “And down at the springhouse,” Moser said as he jumped in, “we found milk and butter gone sour and dried in the churns—left like someone was never intending to leave such victuals behind.”

  Hosking licked his lips, his eyes flicking the hillsides on either side of them.