Most Mormon women were flannel-mouthed and all too often kept their legs locked together so that a man could never have any randy fun for fun’s own sake. But not this one.
He could never think of giving her up.
A year after Jubilee’s army first came to winter in Cedar City, Brigham Young himself had given Usher’s father the directive to forward a message for the elder’s son, in whatever manner he could contact Jubilee:
Give up the woman. Give her back. Sell her if you must. She is nothing more than a slave for your carnal needs and will never belong in the holy company of the Saints.
Little did the Prophet know what needs this woman truly satisfied in Jubilee Usher.
Oh, Young made much of the fact that in February of 1870 Utah had followed Wyoming’s 1869 lead in granting women full suffrage rights. But in this realm of the Church Empire women served their greatest function not as political tools in the electoral process—but as repositories of future Saints. It was through the woman’s power to conceive, carry, and give birth to babies that the Mormon faithful grew. Evermore were the disembodied spiritual star-seeds required to find earthly, temporal homes among the Latter-day Saints. A woman’s greatest role on this earth, her spiritual gift, lay in giving birth to a baby where would rest another wandering, disembodied soul come home at last to Zion.
What, after all, was more important now? Jubilee wondered. After all these years of building and grooming his army? Should he obey Brigham Young and abandon the woman?
Damn that heretic who had allowed his feet to wander away from the path that led to the throne of Almighty God!
Usher took one of the woman’s hands and wrapped the soft, wrinkled fingers around his oak-hard shaft, holding that hand in both of his as he worked hers up and down, sensing the approach of climax.
Or, Usher thought as he brought himself to full arousal, in the end was he called upon by the Almighty Himself to challenge the false Prophet?
This woman was here of a purpose. And here she would stay.
There would come a day when he had it alclass="underline" the throne of power in Zion and this woman there beside him.
Closing his eyes as he began to erupt in the warm, soapy water, furiously dragging her hand up and down the length of his hardened flesh, Usher trembled slightly.
She was the only weakness he allowed himself.
His flesh throbbed at the boiling surface of the bath water.
He would kill all who attempted to take her from him.
His heart hammered at his temples.
Jubilee Usher would strip away all obstacles that stood in his road to achieving leadership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
And he would joyfully kill any man—Prophet or no—who dared separate him from the woman he loved.
Not just kill him … but revel in that man’s destruction.
30
Moon of Popping Trees 1874
IT SEEMED THE wind had howled for days, the frozen icy snow driven against the crusty side of the buffalo-hide lodge, rattling like hailstones against a hollowed log.
It was February. The heart of winter on the central plains.
She was alone again.
Long before last winter young Pipe Woman had bundled up her few possessions and rode off with Porcupine and his band of Dog Soldiers, heading north into the land of Two Moon and the rest of the wild tribes. It was said Sitting Bull’s Hunkpapa and Crazy Horse’s Hunkpatilla Oglalla roamed that land up there. Shell Woman remembered that country from her childhood. With the fondness of those memories, she had allowed her daughter to go with the young Hotamitanyo warriors hurrying north to the last great hunting ground of the roaming bands.
After all, she had reasoned with herself, what else could she do? No one believed the thin one called Hook would be coming back. Gone more than four winters, with no word of where he was, when he would return. Pipe Woman was growing old waiting for a ghost to return. Reluctantly, with a real pain in the parting, Shell Woman let her daughter go, to roam the north country with the bands wandering in the footprints of the nomadic old ones.
She had not let her daughter see the tears. But that was more than a winter ago and long enough to get over it.
So now she was alone again.
Six sleeps ago Shell Woman had watched her husband ride off to find work, called to the place called Kan-sas by the army, to guide the Bear Coat General.
Outside her lodge the rattling, bare-bones wind was finally dying, like a living creature itself, slowing its raging howl into a keening whine. For a night it had lowed like a snuffling rodent outside the frozen lodge walls. And now the wind whimpered in its last gasps of the blizzard.
Miles: the American name her husband used when he spoke of the soldier chief. Her man had gone off to find work in a faraway place he said was called Kan-sas, where he said the army was preparing to crush the southern tribes. Kiowa. Comanche. And her own people too—the Shahiyena. All those who would not come back in to register themselves on the reservations staked out for them in Indian Territory. It was common knowledge that many bands had never ventured in to the reservations, had vowed they never would.
The army knew they were out there raiding, stealing, killing—kidnapping again. And the Bear Coat General was gathering his warriors to take up the war road against the southern tribes one last time. He needed scouts: eyes and ears and noses—wolves to track the scent of his enemy, the warrior bands.
Her man, the one her people had named Rising Fire, had held her body close against his through that last long winter night before riding off of a cold gray dawn that grew no brighter for Shell Woman.
For the most part he hadn’t left her side ever since that autumn day four winters ago when he returned to her camp in the shady copse of trees where she had raised her lodge. Already the cottonwood had begun changing, going to gold when the man named Sweete had come riding slowly into her camp where she waited, there near the soldier fort called Laramie. He had an extra pony with him: a gift for High-Backed Bull’s mother that he said came from Porcupine.
“Why does Porcupine send me a gift of this pony?” she had asked the big white man who stood over her, reaching to take her in his arms.
In his eyes Shell Woman had seen the answer.
Through the days of her grief that followed, time and again her husband repeated the story. Telling and retelling the details to give them permanence in the heart of Shell Woman. It was there in the heart of a mother that High-Backed Bull would live on.
It was the scars she touched now, running her callused fingertips slowly, gently over the long, stiffened worms of discolored flesh that laddered up the length of her arms the way the ancient rivers made a lattice across the great plains on their relentless march to the big water she had only heard stories of, but had never seen. In time her hair had grown after she hacked off the long braids in mourning the loss of one born of her womb. Now it hung nearly gray, streaked with the iron of more and more snow come every winter. So old now, she thought—and never would she see the children her son might have fathered.
Had he not hated his own blood. His own father.
Shell Woman lay back down; resting her head on an arm, and closed her eyes. Time enough to venture into the cold for more firewood. Enough left there by the door if she was frugal—for she ate so little anymore. And if she stayed wrapped in her buffalo robe, she would not need to keep a big fire burning day and night like those in other lodges. Only what was needed to drive most of the frost from the inside of the dewcloth.