Food enough here at Wallace. Enough to last until Custer was back again with those horses. After the man had sworn to find Libbie and hold her in his arms for one, perfect, summer day.
Jonah watched the man with the cinnamon curls fling his arm forward and set off at the head of his detail, that crimson tie fluttering.
Damn you anyway, Custer, he thought, dragging himself to his feet as the sun eased out of the sky and the air became a squeeze more tolerable.
“You go find your woman, Custer. This goddamned campaign’s over—and you ain’t killed yourself a Injun one. Gone off and shot your own men though … and found the bodies of dozen more good soldiers killed trying to get dispatches to you. But you—you ain’t shot a Injun one.”
Jonah watched the backs of the last pair of the seventy-seven dusty troopers lope out of sight. Custer set a blistering pace.
Yet as much as he hated Custer, Hook understood just how a man could feel down in the private, blackened, buried pit of him—afraid for the not knowing. Not sure if he ever would know what had become of his own woman.
If nothing else, at least he shared that in common with the Michigan Yankee with the long strawberry curls.
33
SHE ALWAYS PUT her mind somewhere else.
For weeks—or had it been months? She had been afraid of allowing her mind the freedom to go elsewhere. Fearing that she might forget where she had put it. Afraid she might not even care to go back to get it when the time came.
But lately now, not really sure how long that meant, Gritta Hook had come to the not caring, or not fearing anymore.
It was a victory for her to remember her name today.
Just … remember … her … name …
To this private place where she took her mind she came each time the giant bald-headed man came close with that look in his eye. She recognized it. Every man had it when he wanted a woman in that way. Even … Jonah.
Yes—Jonah.
She remembered him now. In a fuzzy, outlined sort of way. Less and less every day, the picture of him in her mind growing dimmer and dimmer, shadowed more and more darkly by the big man the rest called Usher.
She hated him for pushing the memory of Jonah away. Hated Usher, and Jonah just as much for not pushing Usher away.
Gritta had given up a long, long, long time ago trying to push the man off when he got that way and hung close to her. Smelling her, lifting her long hair to sniff at the nape of her neck the way he did when he wanted her in that way.
This way.
The way he was using her right now.
But—it was like he was using someone else too.
Standing outside herself and watching, arms crossed and haughty, chin jutted, watching the two of them sweating in the summer heat. She was sure it was late summer, standing here, looking at herself sweating with her eyes opened and unblinking, staring at the shocking white of the canvas roof of the wall tent. How he grunted, like a boar planting his shoat seed in the sow back to home.
There was no more home, she reminded herself, scolding as she looked down on the woman lying beneath the half-naked man. She was half-naked herself, with her dress pulled up and her chemise torn down, breasts open for the whole world and God Himself to see.
How shameless that she should lie there and not fight off that rutting, stinking, brute of a man, Gritta thought, looking down at herself and clucking her tongue as she would to one of her errant children.
No, she did not want to think of them any longer. Her daughter—Gritta saw Hattie sometimes, but never close enough to talk. And the boys. She knew they were gone now. Usher had told her a long, long time ago … so long she barely remembered their faces—they were sold off for good Yankee dollars to buy bullets and beans and flour and whiskey. Usher had laughed.
And she loathed her womb for ever giving birth to her children, that they should suffer.
It was meant for her to suffer, her alone. Stand here and look down on that poor woman lying perfectly still beneath that sweating, heaving animal as he drove his hot, hard flesh in and out of her flaccid body, taking her when he wanted, how he wanted.
Long ago she had ceased to protest each time he circled her, flung back her hair, and bit her shoulder. It was the same each time. No more did she fight him with her fists and knees and teeth. Now she just fought him by going outside herself until he was done with her. She wasn’t really that body, after all, was she?
She clucked again. Shameless, how that body just laid there letting the brute abuse her with his privates, doing his business on her, in her, up to her womb where she knew she must never again have another child only to have it taken from her to suffer.
They would never get her mind. Not Usher. Not any of them. She would keep coming here, out of herself. That shrinking shell of what she had been, something that seemed to dry up and fall in of itself when she left her body, each time Usher wanted it for himself.
She left her body behind and feared going far away, forcing herself to remember, and look, and still feel something. But felt something less and less each time. Afraid now the last few weeks … or was it months? She had no way of knowing and grew afraid of that as well. Afraid mostly that she was losing her soul.
More and more now it was like stepping first with one foot, then the other, into that wide, yawning pit of quicksand—with nowhere else to go but into the pit. Then turning, reaching out for a limb, something hanging over the pit to help pull her out.
For the longest time there, she remembered the faceless man standing at the edge of the pit. And felt, more than knew, it had been Jonah. Him—reaching out for her … first with his hand. Then with a stout limb … then there was nothing left for him to do but stand on the edge of that pit helplessly watching her sink deeper and deeper into the quicksand of insanity.
After all, if she couldn’t help herself …
“Like jabbing a stick into a hornets’ nest,” Shad Sweete had told Jonah that late August afternoon as the entire command finally marched back to Fort Hays. A hot, steamy summer evening coming down slowly on the central plains.
“There’s talk everything west of here’s shut down,” Jonah said.
“Construction on the K-P ain’t no more. Workers skedaddled back east to safety. Wagon road from track’s end west to Denver City is closed down. No man willing to take the ride into Injun country now. What I was a’feared of most is just what happened.”
“What didn’t you want to happen?”
“I came along with Hancock and Custer to try my level best to see that the army talked with the tribes this time out—’stead of charging in shooting and slashing.”
Jonah had snorted quietly, without needing to say a word.
“I know,” Sweete agreed. “A foolish thing for me to think, weren’t it, son? Figuring I could help these bands by going along with the army.”
“Don’t grumble so much, Shad Sweete. After all, you was the one talked me into going along with you.”
“Should’ve listened to Toote all along.” Sweete looked up from the lodge peg he was carving on to watch his
