At one settlement Jonah asked how far the Church’s settlements stretched toward the Mexican provinces.
“On deep into Arizona Territory. Down yonder to New Mexico too,” came the answer given him from beneath the shading of a hat brim, where the eyes peered up at the horsemen in cool suspicion.
Women worked these fields beside their men. Indeed, lots of women. More than once Jonah found himself unconsciously studying the faces and figures of those most lanky, those fair of hair, those who best fit the dimming remembrance of a particular female. A gamble, it was, to hope with so much of his fiber, to discover himself yearning for her all the more in this land of the Saints—here, where a man found so many white women. And he gone so long without his eyes blessed with the sight of any pale-skinned female, any white-skinned woman at all.
And now came this sudden feast of setting a hungry man down before all these who belonged to the polygamists, laboring in the fields for their husbands and the greater glory of their God.
So used his eyes were to the frontier garden of dark-skinned females. To Jonah it seemed that damned near all of the alabaster-skinned ones a man would run into in making his way back and forth across the West were businesswomen. The painted, perfumed, softer, and whiter sex had followed the gamblers and gamers, the saloon keepers and drummers, to make their share where a fortune might not be guaranteed, but where there would never be a shortage of eager customers.
The cold emptiness gnawed through Jonah’s belly. How he felt starved of a sudden, his eyes looking over those fair-of-skin women. His rage returned, robbed as he was of these years with her: the months and days and fleeting moments stolen from them both, never to share again. And as he sat looking out upon those busy in their fields, or as he gazed at all the industrious of the gentle sex he saw moving up and down the streets of the small communities founded by these Saints, Jonah sensed the first stirrings of doubt.
Was he chasing so much wind? Hadn’t Gritta’s trail gone just about as cold as the boys’ trail had in drifting off toward Mexico?
For the first time he considered giving up the chase while he still had time to make some kind of life for himself. Maybe, he told himself, he should beggar his losses and give up the trail, lonely and unforgiving as it was. Close this dark chapter of his life and start anew—make a life for Hattie and perhaps find a widow for himself, someone who could cool the burning rage and pain he suffered, who could take away the hurt and fill this hole gnawing in his chest. Yes, Hattie would finish her schooling, then come live with him and her new stepmother….
A vision of Hattie swam before him. Almost four years back he had found her in Nebraska. Lord, how she had grown into a young woman who looked more like her mother now than he ever had imagined she could. When he’d wrenched her from the clutches of the Danites, Hattie was damn near the same age as Gritta when he had married her. Jonah’s only daughter had grown to be every bit as beautiful and smitten with life as her mother.
No, he realized he would never be able to look at Hattie again without seeing Gritta’s face. Never able to gaze into his daughter’s eyes without cursing himself for quitting the chase.
“Goddamn you,” he grumbled aloud that evening as the black-bellied clouds quickly shut down the last shreds of fading light left in the sky. “Damn you if you go and give up when this ride gets hardest. Remember how you lost the trail before? But still you never lost hope, Jonah. Never give up before.”
He was of this life to suffer the pain—one sort or another. He had decided this was his lot to bear. And if he was called upon to endure, then his choice was simple: the pain of pushing on until he found them or could push on no more—that hurt seemed much, much easier to bear than the pain of living with himself knowing he had played out, folded, and given up.
He would not fool himself into thinking he deserved a better hand, nor cash in his chips and back away from the table. No, he would play out the hand dealt him. A man would, that.
As Two Sleep became Jonah’s brother of the blanket, they inched over the first heavy snows carpeting the passes of the Uintahs, then eased down the east slopes pushing on south. From time to time they crossed freight roads the Mormons used, choosing whether or not to follow them into the distance toward a small community of clapboard shacks, more usually of sod or adobe, settlements of fields and irrigation ditches and laundered clothes hung on a line behind the dirty shacks where dim trails of smoke rose into the cold air of that first winter in the land of the Mormons.
Only once more did he ever allow himself the sweet luxury of wanting to give up—halting the Indian as they gazed upon a cluster of mud homes in a nameless little settlement appearing all the more squalid with the early coming of winter night, dark of shadow and gray of twilight snow, the small windows in each shack lit with the warm beacons of light, figures passing between the light and those two lonely sojourners out in the cold. Back and forth the shadows moved as the fish-belly gray of evening descended to night upon that naked land of red escarpment and ancient geologic upheaval.
A warmth beckoned him in from the cold, those shadows no more than suggestions of ghosts from his past, ghosts of happier days calling the lost and wayward one to join them at the fire of remembrance on brighter times and lighter cares.
“Come, Jonah Hook,” Two Sleep said finally.
Eventually he tore his eyes away from the window and its seductive corona of light and found the Shoshone staring at him with what the plainsman took to be sympathy.
“You don’t gotta feel sorry for me, Injun.” He looked back at the distant windows now that twilight’s purple had faded to winter’s cold squeeze of black. “Never, never feel sorry for me. You hear?”
“Make camp. Food, then sleep. Tomorrow we go.”
“Always tomorrow, Two Sleep. How many more will there be?”
“Every morning I think we find them,” the Indian replied quietly, following the white man’s gaze at the distant spots of saffron light.
“You tell yourself that too?” Jonah asked, then sighed. “At times I just feel like …”
When Hook’s voice drifted off without finish, Two Sleep said, “You give up this trail, Two Sleep stay on it. This trail no more just for you, Jonah Hook. It mine too now.”
He finally nodded, feeling his shoulders sag, reluctant to release the anticipation of giving in to his fondest dream. Here at last vowing that he would never again grant himself the delicious ecstasy of the dream that took him down a far different path.
“Sometimes it feels like there’s just too damn much trail left to cover, Injun.”
“Tomorrow is the day,” Two Sleep reminded.
“Yes,” Jonah replied, urging his horse off gently. Once and for all he struggled to convince himself he had the patience of the eternal rocks themselves. “Tomorrow morning is the day.”
It was weeks later as they followed a course slightly east of south that the riders no longer came across any outflung settlements of white men. Instead, they rode toward the distant, gleaming, snow-draped walls of the adobe huts that seemed to squat on the valley floor, what proved to be a settlement of farmers and sheep herders nestled among steep-sided bluffs on one side, those buttes and canyon walls taking the unwilling eye and leading it upward toward the clouds and peaks mantled in white one upon the other.
“You s’pose we’re in Mexico already?” Jonah asked.
With a shrug Two Sleep replied, “Never ride this far. Ute country. Far into Ute country. Don’t know, Jonah Hook.”
“Long as it’s been since we left Brigham Young’s City, it still don’t seem we’ve come far enough to be in Mexico. Maybe these here Mexicans live north of Mexico.”
“No matter, Jonah Hook. We still go south—still ride till the land of the traders who buy your sons.”
“Comancheros.”
“Yes, comancheros. We ride into land of the comancheros.”
They had pushed off the
There would be days and weeks, months and seasons to come learning more and more of the language as he
