Winter Rain Read online

  That’s what he had expected from the tales told him by a stone-faced Mother Hook.

  But Gritta had been different from that first jump. She had come to him eagerly that second time, awakening him, every bit as hungry as he was for her, if not more so. It had startled him, perhaps even frightened him a little, to find such eagerness in this woman he had vowed to spend out his years with. He was worried too at first with what monster he had unleashed in his new wife. Yet he quickly came to enjoy and savor, to love, ultimately, that most secret person Gritta proved herself in bed with him. So quiet and strong before the rest of the world—it was like he alone knew her true self: a woman who became a ravenous temptress once they were alone beneath the covers. He loved her for it—if for no other reason than she wanted love, wanted to be loved as much as he wanted her to love him, answering his needs and hungers with the unquenchable fires of her own.

  So it was they found themselves in this bed below Big Cobbler Mountain in the Shenandoah of Virginia once again. Countless miles and endless years it had taken in bringing her back here where they both began a life together standing to make their vows before the circuit rider, their families, and God Himself.

  That was before they had pulled up deep family roots and resettled to Missouri with young Hattie. Before the two boys come along. Before the Yankees and Sterling Price and Pea Ridge and bloody Corinth, where he had to lie in the damp, rain-soaked forest waiting for the Yankees to find him—afraid the tremble-fingered blue-bellies would shoot him on the spot, simply because Jonah had dragged himself on his belly across a few yards of wet grass on that forest floor, crawled toward a dead Yankee to steal the young soldier’s rations. Some crumbs of hardtack and a handful of moldy salt beef. As bad as it was, Jonah had mused as he gulped it down greedily, at least the. Yankees had something to eat in this god-blamed war.

  Yankees had boots and shoes too, while most of the boys Jonah marched with come along to fight the blue-bellies with an empty belly and bare, bleeding feet.

  The nights had been cooling off so suddenly in those days before the battle at Corinth that Jonah had coveted the dead soldier’s boots like nothing he had ever coveted before. He took them, not without a struggle from the stiffening carcass, along with rank, torn stockings too. Not that it was hard getting those socks off the dead soldier. Just that everything was a struggle to Jonah what with the welling pain in his leg wound and the lost blood that made him faint, ready to puke with most any ounce of exertion he made.

  But now it was over. His hunt for Gritta complete, and Jonah had brought her back to the Shenandoah Valley.

  “Make love to me like you never have before,” she whispered to him as his left hand cupped, stroked the other breast.

  “Like never before?”

  “Now, Jonah—now,” she growled the words, insistent as she tightened herself around him, thrust herself up toward him, arching her back as he planted himself more firmly into her heatedness.

  It drove him near crazy when she did that, never ashamed was Gritta of asking for what it was she wanted. She was so unlike what his mother had told him he was to expect of a woman on that morning before the preacher joined the young couple. So unlike what even his father had already confessed a man had right to expect of a wife and her duties to her sworn husband.

  So this felt like that second time their wedding night, all over again: her crying out in pleasure as he hurled himself against her, frantically gripping her, holding her for fear their damp, sweaty bodies would slip loose and fly asunder when what he hungered for most right now was to melt together with her as one and never be apart. He was fearful with the savageness of their lovemaking that he would fling himself free of her: lose her again, if only for a moment.

  That fear was something he could almost taste. Like the salty sting of the sweat he bent to lick from the crevice between her breasts.

  Yet Gritta stayed with him, rocking with a fury that drove him ever higher.

  “Let me feel you explode inside me, Jonah—please,” she begged at his ear, biting it tenderly, her fingers raking the back of his neck. “I want to feel your heat,” she moaned.

  There was no more holding back once she did that to him. It was one command he had never been able to deny. Whereas he had spent a life of choosing what orders to obey, Jonah Hook was helpless when his woman demanded his immediate compliance.

  The release came like a long-awaited volcanic shock quaking the entire Shenandoah Valley. Tingling from his belly down through his thighs, Jonah exploded in a growing crescendo of thrusts as he sought to plant himself deeper and deeper into her body—wanting never to free himself of this moistness, this heat, this joy of ultimate togetherness with her.

  Then as he lay there atop Gritta, his breath slowing raggedly, for the first time sensing the sweat pouring from his own body and hearing at his temples his own heart hammering like it wanted free of its cage, Jonah marveled at what he had found with this woman—marveled that they had seen their special bond through the long years of his search to reclaim her.

  The breeze of that evening felt good on his cheek as he snuggled closer to her, listening for the beat of her own heart, the slowing of her own breathing, the last of the whimpers in the back of her throat as the crescendo washed from her in eddying waves.

  Gritta trembled beneath him like a frightened animal again, like she always did as he pulled his softened flesh from her. He drew the woman into his arms and brought her against him as he rolled onto his back. The breeze felt good and clean and cool and dry.

  A sky above their bed hung dusted with more stars than he had ever recalled seeing over the Shenandoah before.

  Jonah blinked, and blinked again. Drinking deep of the air as the Big Dipper whirled silently overhead.

  The sky. The air.

  Different somehow.

  The coarse wool blanket beneath his hand startled him. Not the soft, years-worn goose-down comforter whereon he had made love to her.

  As he sat upright, he trembled like a wet dog with distemper, the sweat on his brow and face and chest gone quickly cold and stale now in the breeze. Jonah drank deep of the night air. Only one place smelled like this—the high plains. Sage. But more than sage.

  Wildness. Unfettered wildness.

  He swallowed hard, near choking on disappointment.

  “Goddamn,” Jonah muttered, his head sinking backward in an arc atop his shoulders as he clamped his eyes shut angrily, cursing the dream that had come to haunt him again.

  That haunting vision returned less and less with every year now, yet still it remained a torture he practiced on himself—forcing himself to believe again each time the dream returned that he was actually making love to his wife back home in Virginia.

  How real it had been. The touch and smells and tastes of her. The utter warmth of her wrapped around him.

  So cold now in the aftermath that he began to tremble uncontrollably, drawing his shirt to him across the dry grass. Dolefully Jonah dragged it over his head as the tears began to well in his eyes. So alone.

  So damned alone, after all. Halfway gone to hell and back all these years. Having finally found his girl. Hattie.

  The boys were gone—sold off somewhere into the Southwest. At least that was what he had learned from one of those who ripped his family from their homestead during the bloody days of the war.

  And his woman—said to be the property of some maniacal bastard who laid claim to her in the name of his own God.

  Jonah flung an arm at the night sky, shaking his fist at God, at everything that God wasn’t for Jonah. God wasn’t there to answer a lonely man’s prayers, his pleas to put back together the shattered pieces of his family, his life, the circle of those he loved.

  Instead, on that trackless high prairie sat a bitter, angry, lonely man filled with unrequited rage as he wavered to his feet and stood shaking beneath the great night sky—but more from the fury unspent within him than from the cold of this desert night in southern Wyoming Terr
itory.

  “Damn you for this!” he roared.

  Damn you for hurling your anger down at my family the way you done—when you should have taken out your wrath only on me!

  Yanking his pistol from its holster, Jonah fired and fired and fired again until the hammer clacked repeatedly on empty cylinders. Each bullet sped into the black face of the heavens—perhaps into the face of God Himself—in futile hope of getting the Almighty’s attention to his private pain, this hell only God Himself could be putting this lonely man through.

  Jonah whirled and flung the pistol down onto his rumpled bedroll. He collapsed onto his knees, crumpling forward as he began to sob in earnest, not understanding why he had been cursed this way, not knowing just what he had done to merit having his family wrenched from him.

  After all, he had grown to be a man who had never knowingly hurt a soul, never so much as harmed another until the Yankees had come to Missouri. Any man worthy of his backbone had to stand and be counted to turn back the blue tide.

  Here he sat crumpled, knowing nothing more than that it hurt him beyond all endurance, this being without her. Not knowing if she was still alive, or dead by now.

  For years now his clumsy prayers had remained un answered. He knew that much. Still, he had been told a man called Jubilee Usher waited for Jonah somewhere out there with his army of Mormon gunmen—cutthroats protecting the Mormon zealot and his woman captive as they marched back toward the City of the Saints.

  With a dirty hand Jonah swiped at his nose, slowly gaining control once more. He swallowed the sting of the salty tears, promising himself that one day soon he would stand in the streets of that Mormon stronghold and cry out the name of Jubilee Usher—calling the godless bastard forth to atone for his crimes against the family of Jonah Hook.

  Drenched in starlight, he reloaded his pistol quickly, ramming home powder and wad and ball, capping all six cylinders in the indigo loneliness, the sweat encasing his flesh grown cold and stiff, gone stale and rank in the freshening breeze of postmidnight.

  Where once his body had tingled with her touch, he now felt the cold seep of anger swollen into a furnace of rage.

  It was like nothing Jonah had ever compelled himself to do in all his life.

  This having to find her.

  3

  August 1868

  HE STOOD TALLER than most. Every bit as tall as the biggest men he had known in his forty-one years. Still, it remained the oxlike frame that made near every man give him wide berth.

  In his corduroy cutaway and pegged trousers stuffed into the tops of his boots that sported an instep as high as a lady’s, his fingers interlaced across his weskit of corded silk, and with that smile caressing his sensuous, Cupid’s-bow lips full beneath the curl of his waxed black mustache, Jubilee Usher cut a most imposing figure.

  Born in the hill country of western New York State, not far from Lake Ontario in Mendon Township, young Jubilee had grown up the eldest son of one of the closest friends to Mormon Prophet Joseph Smith, founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Smith himself lived but eighteen miles away in Palmyra. However, while it was the Church’s founder who had the elder Usher’s religious loyalty, it would prove to be another who earned young Jubilee’s fierce and undivided obedience.

  Brigham Young.

  With the faithful the Usher family migrated, farther and still farther west to escape the persecution of the hated and blasphemous Gentiles. With his own eyes witnessing the terror those heathen nonbelievers wreaked among the Mormon flocks, Jubilee came first to hate all those who were not Saints, then quickly grew to nurse an unquenchable rage for the nonbelievers who he saw as solely responsible for the hardships suffered by his people.

  The faithful had followed Prophet Smith from New York to Kirtland, Ohio, in 1833. But over the next five years a rival Mormon sect grew in power and ultimately joined forces with the Gentiles in the surrounding countryside to again drive Smith’s loyal followers west. It was during that five years of terror and uncertainty that Jubilee’s father, Heber Usher, became himself a Pentecostal Mormon—a Saint who believed in the reality of spiritual manifestation.

  That limb on the tree of Mormon faith proved itself to be the rock of belief where Jubilee clung for the next thirty years. With unshakable conviction he claimed he had been visited by the angel Moroni himself, commanded by the Lord to take up the sword of the one true Church against all heathens. And it had not been merely one visitation. No, Moroni came often to speak to Usher through those three decades, guiding the man—girding him with strength for the struggle against the devil and the Gentiles.

  Preparing Jubilee Usher for greatness among the land of Zion.

  “Cleave the Gentile from the land!” Moroni had commanded Usher years before. “Take thy sword and cleave the head from the body of these Gentiles!”

  By 1840 at their new settlement of Nauvoo, Illinois, Joseph Smith had announced his own divine revelation regarding the doctrine of plural wives.

  It made Jubilee smile now as his huge frame settled into the huge oak chair he had his Negro manservant tote around for his comfort. Here Usher sat of every morning and evening. Big as it was the day they discovered it among the possessions of a settler’s farm they plundered, with its crowning back and leonine arms ornately carved, his Danites came to call the heavy chair Colonel Usher’s throne.

  This morning they would move out, continuing their march down the slope of South Pass, into the Pacific watersheds. And his old nigger George would once more struggle to make a place for the chair in the army ambulance they had captured back in Missouri, home of the Gentiles who had killed Joseph Smith. Where Brigham Young had been anointed as the Saints’ new Prophet.

  So again Jubilee smiled to think on how Young himself had only sporadic visitations from the angels, much less from God Himself, while Jubilee had almost daily contact with the grand and martial angel Moroni.

  “Cause the fields of the Gentiles to winnow in the sun and their rivers to run red with their blood!” the archangel had commanded Usher.

  At fifteen, looking much older than those tender years due to his early physical development, he had joined Porter Rockwell, Joseph Smith’s personal bodyguard, with a handful of others in plotting the assassination of the anti-Mormon governor of Missouri, Lilburn W. Boggs. The Prophet himself had given approval to Rockwell’s plot to murder Boggs during a secret temple ceremony for the Saint-elect. While many of the faithful came to know of the plans, few among the plotters proved as brazen and fearless as the young Jubilee Usher. Rockwell’s avenging angels struck before scattering to disappear into the darkness of the middle frontier.

  Through 1843 and 1844 the nearby Gentile communities of Carthage and Warsaw became increasingly afraid of the growing strength of Smith’s theocratic community at Nauvoo. When a rival group of Mormons splintered off from the Prophet, printing their own newspaper as a protest over Smith’s polygamist doctrine, paranoia came to rule around the throne, and again the mighty hand of the Church elders reached out to smite the unfaithful.

  One of the fingers on that mighty, wrathful fist, brought forth to torch the upstart newspaper offices and destroy the evil printing press, was none other than a young Jubilee Usher, his face gleaming in the flickering light of those flames that brought to an end the threat to Joseph Smith’s hold on the one true Church.

  An unfaithful Mormon was as evil an enemy to God’s Empire as was a blasphemous Gentile.

  Fearing that civil unrest had come to that heated portion of his state, Illinois governor Ford declared himself in charge of the situation in June of 1844 and ordered the arrest of Joseph Smith, along with Smith’s brother Hyrum. Days later, on the twenty-seventh, a mob of citizens from nearby Carthage and Warsaw townships blackened their faces and marched on the town jail, dragged the Smith brothers from their cell, and lynched the Mormon leaders to a chorus of cheers and hallelujahs.

  Into that yawning vacuum of divine power now stepped the Prophet’s c
hief lieutenant—Brigham Young.

  And it wasn’t long before Young and his Quorum of Twelve decided that they must once and for all escape the land of the unclean, to flee forever the murderous Gentiles. They were commanded by God to seek out their own haven, a pure sanctuary in the West, where God Himself directed Young to take his faithful. By late in the winter of 1846, the first expedition bound for the valley of the Great Salt Lake embarked from the Saints’ nomadic Camp of Israel, bound for the unknown of that immense wilderness of the plains.

  Across the next five years the Saints persevered just as the Hebrews fleeing the bondage of Pharaoh had done: building their dreams of Zion—raising their glorious City of the Saints from the valley floor in the heart of the Rocky Mountains. All the while Brigham Young grew more jealous of the one man who seemed to possess more power than did the Prophet here in the mountain West: Jim Bridger. Young dispatched ISO of his Danites, his “Avenging Angels,” to burn Bridger’s post and ferry, steal Bridger’s stock, and kill Bridger if they could.

  The Angels, among them twenty-six-year-old Jubilee Usher, failed to find Bridger at home—but they did quench their blood lust by murdering every last one of the old mountain man’s employees at Bridger’s ferry on the Green River before turning around and marching back to the land of Deseret, mantled in glory.

  Still, the fact that he had not yet secured the scalp of Jim Bridger continued to nettle Brigham Young more and more with each passing month across those next two years, until in 1853 Jubilee Usher himself convinced the Prophet of the need to occupy Bridger’s fort, and to intermarry with the daughters of the Shoshone tribes as had Bridger, so that the Saints could wrest control and dominion of the various bands in that country from a handful of decrepit old mountain men.

  Jubilee had begun to position himself closer and closer to the throne, speaking to the Prophet’s own fears, and offering a solution that would certainly assure young Usher of a place at the right hand of Brigham Young himself.