That shopkeeper in a small agricultural settlement northeast of Salt Lake City flicked his eyes over at his wife as she swept the plank floor of their dusty establishment that frosty November day in 1868. What he had to say, he said guardedly, almost under his breath: “You got that right, stranger. That’s Usher’s band of Danites. Not Brigham’s no more, they’re not. That bunch belonged to Jubilee Usher for some time now.”
The woman cleared her throat loudly above her busy broom, as if to utter a warning. And kept on sweeping without once raising her eyes to look at her husband.
Hook had summoned up the patience to keep asking. “Then I suppose this Brigham Young you spoke of would know where I might find Jubilee Usher?”
The Mormon’s dark eyes moved to the window, beyond which the Indian waited in the autumn cold with their animals, clearly an Indian who knew and kept to his place among these whites who practiced a strict theocratic pecking order.
The shopkeeper said, “The Prophet would be most happy to know where Jubilee Usher is, stranger—if you’re one to know yourself.”
“I wouldn’t have to ask you if I knew where to find Usher my own self,” Jonah said.
“That much is clear. Still, it would be well worth your while to let Prophet Young know anything you might be privy to about Jubilee Usher.”
“Said I was just looking for the man.”
A cool smile darkened the face of the shopkeeper. “So is Young—looking for Usher, that is.” He eyed his wife quickly again, then whispered to the counter secretively, “You take the offer of my help: you’ll not go join up with that bunch.”
“Why shouldn’t a man be about God’s work with Jubilee Usher?” Hook asked, a bit too loud.
He shook his head, whispering, “Usher ain’t all that—”
“William!” the woman called out, standing there midfloor with her waxy hands draped over the top of her corn broom. “There’s lots of work you could be doing in the back if our customer is finished buying what he needs so he and that Indian can be on their way.”
Jonah would learn no more from that one.
The closer he drew to the seat of Mormon power, the colder the trail felt to that unnamed lightning rod he carried in his belly. It grew colder all the time until on the outskirts of Salt Lake City itself, Jonah decided he was likely riding into a blind canyon. The horsemen passed on through the City of the Saints without stopping, swinging south and east toward the Green once more, marching through Zion’s outlying communities, their neatly platted streets and arithmetically plowed fields becoming more and more sparse as the horsemen pushed deeper into the southwest while November’s sweet taste of autumn unraveled into the first bitter days of winter.
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?
