Cry of the Hawk

“I pray my woman and child are safe down in Indian Territory right now, where no soldier going to touch ’em, Jonah.”

Hook swallowed hard.

“Lord, Shad—it’s like all this is a big hole gets opened up in me, and I can’t fill it or close it no way I try. Lord watch over me, but how I wish I was home with Gritta and the young’uns. Home.”

Shad turned away to stare at the sky when he saw the tear tumble down the young soldier’s dirty cheek.

The next day, after Sweete and the Shoshoni had delivered their urgent dispatch and the hostiles had apparently cleared out, Captain Lybe led his detail of Third U.S. Volunteers on down the Laramie Road. They had pushed several miles east of Deer Creek Station when Shad spotted a cloud of dust ahead of them.

“Indians?” Lybe inquired.

“Don’t think so. Leastways, not down there. Don’t make sense—them bringing a big camp with women and children this close to Laramie. Sioux and Cheyenne like to fight the soldiers off and away from the fort.”

The captain wiped the back of his hand across his cracked, rosy lips. “Go see for yourself, Sweete.”

Shad came back a half hour later to find Lybe’s men sitting in what shade they could steal among the alder and cottonwood, escaping the late July sun.

“Soldiers, Captain,” Sweete announced as he rode in among the anxious soldiers.

“Thank God,” Lybe said.

“Thank General Connor and Jim Bridger,” Shad replied.

“Connor?”

“Bridger’s leading him this way.”

“How many troops?”

“A shitload.”

“Bet he’s coming this way, loaded for bear. For certain he’s heard of the attack on Platte Bridge Station.”

General Patrick E. Connor was indeed marching upriver to bolster what forces he had left along the upper North Platte. There was some considerable cheering when the general ordered his troops into a short halt there with Lybe’s men bound for Laramie.

“Going in for supplies, General. And the men haven’t been paid since they were assigned posts in May.”

“You’ve got reason to celebrate then, Captain Lybe,” said Connor as he knocked dust from his blue tunic with his gauntlets.

“Getting out of that scrap against the hostiles with our hair?”

“Perhaps that,” Connor said as Sweete and Bridger walked up to the soldiers. “Perhaps because the war’s over.”

“War’s over, General?”

Connor was smiling. More soldiers surged around him suddenly. The troops with the general from Laramie were joyously informing the upriver boys of the news as well.

“Lee surrendered to Grant in Virginia.”

“Lee surrendered?” Jonah Hook croaked, unable to believe it.

“War’s over, son!” Shad Sweete pounded the Confederate on the shoulder. “You’ll be going home soon.”

“Soon as I get mustered out,” Hook said, his eyes moist and his voice colicky with emotion, “that’s where I’m heading, straight off. Home.”

Her eyes smarted with the stinging sweat.

Gritta Hook stopped her hoeing and took the tattered bandanna she wore around her neck to swipe across her forehead, leaning against the hoe handle.

“You go get us another bucket of water from the well, Zeke,” she said to her youngest, six and a half years old now, and more help in these fields with every week.

Without a word he pitched his hoe aside and went galloping past the other two children, Jeremiah and Hattie. It was hard enough raising these three on her own without Jonah, but with the added burden of working the fields behind the mules twice a year, clearing the irrigation sluices, and chopping the wood all added to what she had done before Jonah took off to ride with General Price to keep the Yankees out of Missouri—some days she just ran off to the cool cellar her husband had dug down by the spring and there she cried where no one would hear her.

And it always made her feel better, stronger, able to walk back up the slope to the cabin once more and face her three children and what she had to do alone to hold this family together. More and more during the hard seasons like this, Gritta found herself falling asleep at night as her head hit the feather pillow, her arm by rote going over to Jonah’s side of the rope-and-tick-mattress bed. Dropping immediately into sleep before she could even whisper her prayer for Jonah—and for herself and the children.

But standing here beneath the hot sun of late July, Gritta prayed, for the strength to remain in her thin body until her man came marching home. The war had been over a few months and she dared not think about him never coming home—just pushed that thought out of her mind the way she had learned to shove and muscle the mules around in the corral, or shoulder over the milk cow when the old girl did not particularly want to give up on a morning.