Winter Rain (6 page)

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.

H
E 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 chief 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.

Now of a morning as he waited for his Negro manservant to bring him sweetened coffee in the white china cup he so favored with breakfast, Jubilee remembered the end of that long ride to Bridger’s fort. He sat here beneath the
awning at the front flaps of his tent, hearing no sound from the woman. She had been his for … something like four years now, since he took her off that farm in southern Missouri, along with the chattel of a daughter and two sons.

The boys he had sold into slavery to the comancheros. Bound for Chihuahua, likely they were already somewhere in northern Sonora, Mexico, where they would be worked hard to repay the handsome price paid Usher for them. And the girl, ready any day for womanhood, was herself traveling with another company of Danites, commanded by his chief lieutenant, Major Lemuel Boothog Wiser. Tidy now, things were. Which left only the woman for Usher to concern himself over. He had a passion for her—that blond hair and those pale eyes a blue he had never before seen. Those eyes seemed to grow all the more pale with each passing day, as if the light behind them were flickering out, ever so slowly—as one would roll a lamp wick down until the lamp’s glow grew ever so faint. And finally snuffed itself out.

Still, he did not underestimate the woman. Jubilee allowed nothing sharp to be brought around her. Nothing that could be used as a weapon. Not that he feared she would use it on him. Far from it. He was, instead, afraid the woman would use most anything to kill herself. Clumsily she had tried it twice before and had to be constantly watched when he was not with her.

“Thank you, George,” Jubilee said to the Negro who poured him his coffee. Around them the camp buzzed to life with men loading wagons, finishing breakfast, saddling horses.

Sweeping some of the long black curls from his shoulder, Usher sipped at the thick, steamy brew and gazed off through the trees to the south. It would not be that many more days before they would march into the streets of Deseret—a homecoming after lo, these many, many years
of self-enforced exile in the border states. Doing God’s bidding.

So it was with bitterness that Jubilee again recalled how a dozen of Jim Bridger’s old fur-trapping companions had held off Brigham’s well-armed band of Danites back in fifty-three, until a blizzard had settled on the land. In their hasty retreat back to Salt Lake City, Usher had vowed he would never allow himself to be that cold again, nor allow his pride to suffer such a stinging wound as he had suffered at the hands of those smelly old trappers.

“Damn them,” he now said quietly over the lip of his white china cup. “Damn their heathen souls to hell.”

He heard the rustle of blankets and cloth inside the tent. A moment later Jubilee recognized the sound of the woman at her chamber pot. At least she was taking care of herself again. For a time there after Major Wiser had been ordered to take the girl off with his company, the woman simply gave up all moving on her own and was constantly wetting the bedding. Making for a smelly mess Negro George had to tend to every day.

But for the past few weeks now, the woman seemed to be pulling herself back together. There was an admirable strength to be found in her, this beautiful woman wasting her life away on a farm, married to a man who sweated over the soil, grunted over the animals, dirt and worse forever caked beneath his fingernails.

Strange that Jubilee always thought of the farmer’s woman in that impersonal sense, even after these past four years. She had a name. Wiser had discovered it in a family Bible found in the cabin they ransacked at the homestead there in Missouri. Her folks had come from Germany, settling in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia. Her name was Gritta Moser. Married to a man named Jonah Hook. Mother of three live births. All three children gone now the way of these blasted prairie winds.

He had cleaved the wheat from the chaff, much to his own liking. He smiled for it again.

“Rider coming in, Colonel!” announced one of the camp guards as the sentry loped up to Usher’s awning. He flung an arm east.