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.
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 strong, 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.
