Cut Hand

by Mark Wildyr

  Later, I challenged him to a game of euchre, which he accepted with false cheer. What a mistake I made in not insisting he remain with his people for the winter! After the first game, he announced he wanted his bath. We lifted the hot water to the shower, and I heated another pot. Otter’s back was to me, allowing me to briefly admire muscles I never noticed before rippling down its length.

  His bath complete, Otter helped prepare my shower. I took a long time with it, in no hurry to reach my solitary bed. The bathing room was snug and comfortable. I likely kept things too warm, wasting fuel I would rue later, but our move to the same side of the house saved firewood.

  One lamp burned low as I stepped into the common room. Otter was not at the table or in his own blankets, so he must have gone to the other side of the house for some reason. I padded naked to my dressing table and drew a comb through hair in need of cutting, something I despised doing. Movement caught my eye in the mirror. I turned. Through the gloom of this unlighted corner of the room, I discerned his form. He lay belly down on my bed, brown flesh glowing golden in the faint lamplight. My throat seized up. I moved bedside to protest that he did not have to do this for me, but no sound escaped my larynx.

  My struggle for words died as he reached for me. He pulled me onto the bed and nuzzled me with his lips. As I started to speak, he put a hand to my mouth.

  “I want to, Teacher. I’ve wanted to for a long time. But you never looked at me like you did the others.”

  “You were a child, Otter! How could I look at you that way?”

  “I love you, Bil…. Billy,” he said, faltering over my given name, which was unfamiliar to his lips. “I understood Cut Hand. He found you and brought you here. You belonged to him. But when that was over, I wanted you to see me. Lone Eagle thought it was fun to watch you and that army officer do it, but I didn’t like it. It hurt. And then Lone Eagle coveted you. I could see it happening, but I kept hoping you’d look over him and see me.”

  “You weren’t yet sixteen when Lone Eagle took me.”

  “I got hard for you all the time. I used to go out in the barn and take care of it so you wouldn’t see me that way. And at the same time, I wanted you to see.”

  “You are a beautiful young man, and so help me, I want you.”

  “Then lie back and let me do it for you.”

  So I lay sprawled across the mattress while he ministered to me. His inexperience showed, and once he raised his head to apologize. “How can that yellow-headed officer do it so easy?”

  “Practice,” I gasped, anxious for him to resume.

  Once he was finished with what he had started, he moved up beside me. Then he kissed me gently and murmured, “I want to be your wife, Billy.”

  My heart jittered. This tall, virile young man was offering himself to me in any manner I wanted. His excitement was evident, proving his desire. This was not a favor to me—it was his own true list, his own need.

  So I cautiously took his virgin body, glorying in his unselfish acceptance of me until we were both exhausted. We slept then, and I woke fearful of his reaction to our intimacy. He lay studying my features intently. I moved to take his pipe, but he stopped me.

  “A husband doesn’t do that for his wife!” He sounded shocked.

  “You have a lot to learn.” I smiled, acquiescing for the moment. I mounted him and watched his handsome, beardless face as I worked over him. Then I was consumed, not only by a magnificent climax but also by a love that penetrated every part of my body, mind, and soul.

  I fell back onto the mattress and gasped for breath. “That was magnificent, Otter. Truly wonderful.”

  “For me as well.” His black eyes wandered my features as if burning them into his memory. “Just like I imagined it would be. It… it was my first time, you know.”

  “I thought maybe that Carlos fellow managed to corner you before he left,” I tickled. “He disappeared once while you were in the barn.”

  My young companion—nay, my young mate—took umbrage. “I didn’t do it with him! How could you say that?” His outraged features softened into a smile. “But he tried.”

  I chuckled at his sour expression. “And what did you do?”

  “I turned the hay fork on him. He almost fell out of the loft.”

  “He was handsome,” I continued my teasing.

  “Not like you.” Otter reached up a hand to touch my cheek. “Nobody is handsome like you.”

  “Nay. Many are more seemly than I. You, for instance.”

  His eyes widened. “Me? I’m ordinary.”

  “If you are ordinary, my love,” I replied, using those words for the first time with him, “then I am coarse beyond description.”

  He moved his hips, and I responded. I thought I was sexually exhausted before, but that was nothing to the shell of a man I was when Otter finished with me.

  After that, the long winter months seemed ridiculously short. I sampled that beautiful young man’s delights endlessly until we finally came to our senses and went about pursuing goals other than draining one another of seed.

  Otter went out alone to run traps on the upper creek, and I ran shivering after him at the cry of a hungry wolf. He looked up in alarm as I came running over the hill frightened out of my wits. His mood turned to indignation when he learned I was afraid for him. He had been taking care of himself for ten years now, he reminded me. Then he grew delighted over my fear for him. He laughed aloud and asked if we were married yet. I told him yes. As soon as the band came back, I would declare it before the council.

  WHEN THE People returned, Cut Hand was first across the river for a change. He looked at the two of us sitting our ponies and grinned.

  “Teacher, River Otter, I am happy for you,” he said.

  “Thank you, Cut Hand. I will declare it to the council this evening.”

  “Good. But make it tomorrow night, and we will drink to it.”

  “Agreed. It is proper that Cut Hand gets drunk with my husband.” With those words, Otter dispelled any doubts about our situation.

  “My friend,” Cut Hand said, “this time you have found a passion that will last. This young man has loved you since his voice changed. By the way,” he added, “Lone Eagle is a father. Little Yellow Flower greeted the world just before we started our move.”

  I was happy for my former husband. Maybe a daughter would settle him down. I told him as much when he splashed across later, cradling a small bundle in his arms. His wife rode behind looking tired and weak.

  “She is a beautiful child.” I made my pronouncement over the small, wrinkled face squinting up from a cocoon of blankets.

  “No, but she will be when she becomes human,” he answered with uncharacteristic modesty. “What is it I hear? I am happy for you. Otter will be good for you, and you have always been good for Otter. It is a natural thing.”

  The following night, I stood beside Otter and declared to the council that I had taken him to wife. He acknowledged this as his true wish, and it was done. No one seemed surprised since he had been a part of my household for a good part of his life. If the roles we played were unexpected, no one let it show.

  On the way home, barely conscious from Cut Hand’s promised drunk, I mused that in March of this year, 1840, I turned twenty-and-nine-years, and my handsome win-tay wife was a full decade younger.

  My win-tay wife poured me into bed, where I soundly slept away our wedding night.

  Chapter 21

  I HAD three marvelous years with Cut Hand and six additional moons marred by the presence of Morning Mist. Even so, he was the one who set me on my life path, bringing me face-to-face with my true nature and introducing me to those who became “my people.”

  Poor Butterfly was but a brief sonata. I have often wondered at our future had fate not intervened to deprive me of her sweet presence and that of the child that would have been mine—though not of my blood.

  Lone Eagle and I enjoyed one another for two tumultuous years. Our couplings—both of the
body and the mind—were aggressive and explosive. In the end, I failed him as I failed Cut Hand. Alas, a woman’s womb was stronger than what I offered.

  The next ten snows with Otter were magnificent. That beautiful young man was attentive but unassuming, eager but not demanding, loving but not possessive. His feelings were easily damaged, yet he was difficult to raise to anger. I finally understood what Cut Hand and Lone Eagle meant about a proper Indian wife. He ran my household efficiently, worked beside me on our farm, hunted with me, and when desperadoes appeared, fought for me.

  Mindful of his vulnerability should something befall me, I revealed my hoard of gold and silver coins and spent hours drilling him on the worth of ducats, pieces-of-eight, sovereigns, half-joes, and all the coins in my treasury. I pounded the value Americans gave these scraps of metal into his skull. He shook his head, amazed they were coveted above horseflesh. In fact, I feared he did not truly comprehend the lengths to which some white men would go to possess such a bonanza as they represented.

  We had long since taken in Dog Fox and a dozen of the band’s children to implant foreign information into their bright little minds. Morning Mist gave Cut grief at turning over her child, but he put his foot down firmly on her small toes, and the boy became an eager learner. When her time came, Yellow Flower attended our impromptu school, and was later joined by a brother and sister. It was a matter of vast pride that I remained friends with both my former husbands.

  As smoothly as my personal life was proceeding, it was not the same for the Great Plains. Westward pressure continued at a steady pace. Strange Indians appeared each year, not always peacefully. The Sioux were finally goaded into reprisals against white encroachment. Murders of individual Indians occurred without punishment, but armed resistance brought harsh reprisals. Many times over those ten years, the Blue Coats came through our territory on their way to punish some band prodded into revolt. Cut’s young men became increasingly restive, and a few joined other chiefs who were not so doggedly committed to peace. The buffalo came in dwindling numbers.

  In that distant world east of the Missouri, the United States suffered growing pains. The Iowa Territory, established by Congress in 1838, encompassed much of the lands the Yanube occupied. General Winfield Scott and seven thousand soldiers forcibly removed fourteen thousand Cherokee from Georgia and Tennessee to Indian Territory in Arkansas and Oklahoma. Joshua R. Geddings of Ohio, a Whig, became the first abolitionist congressman. The following year some fool proposed cutting a canal from the Atlantic to the Pacific across the Isthmus of Panama.

  The census of 1840 counted some seventeen million souls in the United States, and I tried in vain to make the Yanube understand what a host that represented. The war hero, William Henry Harrison, got elected to the White House, but old Tippecanoe’s lungs killed him with pneumonia, and his vice president, John Tyler, became president. In ’44, the country annexed the Republic of Texas as a territory, occasioning the long-threatened war with Mexico the following year during the administration of yet another president, James K. Polk, a Democrat. The fighting went on for a couple of years, seemingly so Old Rough and Ready, General Zachary Taylor, could vie with Old Fuss and Feathers, General Winfield Scott, to determine who could best whip the Mexicans. Somewhere in the middle of it, Texas was admitted as the twenty-eighth state.

  In 1848, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the war, costing the Mexicans Texas and some five hundred thousand square miles from New Mexico across to California and up into parts of the Colorado and Wyoming territories. Soon afterward, somebody discovered gold near Sacramento, California. Hopes the rush would drain off some of our own settlers failed to materialize. Zachary Taylor must have killed more Mexicans than Winfield Scott, because he got himself elected the twelfth president, but he didn’t last long either. They say cholera put Millard Fillmore in his chair.

  Closer to home, by the year 1850 we began hearing talk of proposed solutions to the Indian Problem in the West. Treaties protecting the Miami, Shawnee, Delaware, and others were scrapped by settler aggression. After another defeat at Fallen Timbers, the resulting Greenville Treaty of 1795 ceded most of Ohio and parts of Indiana to the Americans, although it also recognized the principle of Indian sovereignty. But now the talk and trend were unmistakable.. The nations would be herded into reservations. To what mean piece of fallow earth would my beloved Yanube be shipped?

  I tried to prepare them for what was to come, but my concepts were no longer the vague notions of eighteen years ago. Now I was talking about the reality of the army rooting them out and carrying them off to some foreign land. Cut was cautious in his embrace of my warnings because he would face a revolt if the tiospaye truly believed what I was saying. We held a long private discussion the evening before the band left for winter grounds in the late fall of 1850. He listened patiently to my alarms and reminded me he was widely known to favor peace.

  Cut considered leaving Dog Fox with Otter and me that winter so he could complete his studies. Nearing fifteen, the boy was as handsome and well-formed as his father. His presence was sweet pain to me, since he looked out of his father’s deep black eyes studded with golden points of light. He was acquiring the arrogance of his warrior class without the awkwardness Lone Eagle suffered at that age. Unfortunately he adored both Otter and me too much for Morning Mist to turn him over to us for the winter.

  Acknowledging my happiness with Otter, Cut still ventured onto the thin ice of recollecting our own love. He laughingly recalled my bumbling attempt at fellatio as he lay bound to a tree. He described the startled look on my face that quickly turned blissful when he took me the first time. As he spoke, I felt a powerful, unrequited list for this handsome man.

  After we saw the tiospaye across the Yanube River, Otter and I went about preparing for the coming winter. Over the years we perfected our routine and were seldom afflicted with cabin fever. We saved sufficient chores and projects to keep us busy during the long winter months. This season promised to be a squaw winter, for although the People had already moved, the weather still held the warmth of the sun during the day, while the nights were merely chilly, not cold.

  We no longer had the dogs to warn of the approach of strangers. House, the last one, died the past summer. It was Otter’s sharp hearing that alerted us this time. James Morrow, sporting new captain’s bars, and a troop of hard-riding, dusty dragoons bore down upon us from the east. That surprised me. Normally he approached from the west. Both of us went to greet him with broad smiles. Otter held none of the jealousy that had infected Lone Eagle. My friend’s failure to return our cordial greetings alarmed me.

  “I fear I’ll not be welcome this time, Billy.” He dismounted wearily. “I have bad news. Tragic news!”

  A band of raiders had destroyed a farm located south of the Yanube on one of its small tributaries, murdering the farmer, his wife, and three growing children. The homestead lay just east of the route Cut Hand and his people likely took. Alarms went out to both Fort Ramson and Fort Yanube, some twenty miles closer. Captain Smith led a strong troop on a forced march and found signs of movement to the east and to the southwest.

  Smith took the bulk of the dragoons and followed a solitary set of tracks to the southwest, figuring they would unite with the broad lodge pole trail of a moving camp they cut earlier. The captain sent James to the east, where he intercepted a troop from Ramson in hot pursuit of the murderers, a gang of mixed bloods, renegade whites, and Indians. They overtook the raiders, recovering horses and other goods from the looted household. When James raced to report the success to his superior, he discovered a horror.

  As best he and others could piece together later, Smith had approached Cut Hand’s moving band of Indians from the rear. Cut’s scouts warned him of the dragoons’ approach. He had also been told of the farmer’s murder by the scout, whose tracks the soldiers followed. Knowing the local military commanders recognized him as a peace chief, Cut halted his column, wheeled about with some of his warriors, and rode t
o meet Smith.

  Captain Smith drew his troops into a skirmish line and cut down the Indians at point-blank range. Cut Hand fell in the first salvo. The others tried to flee but were shot from their horses. The remaining warriors rallied around their women and children, but the charge slew most of them.

  James, with tears in his eyes, looked down at where I collapsed to my knees and told me it was a massacre. Very few escaped. Smith returned with his own troop to Fort Yanube after instructing James to deal with stragglers. Instead, my friend came straight to me.

  “Why?” I wailed, not really expecting an answer.

  “I don’t know, Billy. He feared the Indians irrationally. The recent uprisings petrified him beyond reason. Maybe he panicked when Cut Hand approached with his warriors. Or maybe he’s just a rotten whoreson who took advantage of a situation simply because he could!”

  Fighting my way to my feet, I told Otter to bring the wagon. Understanding what I was about, James insisted on accompanying us. At that point I cared not what he did. The sight of that blue uniform was repugnant to me. Yet James had disobeyed orders to deliver the terrible news in person.

  Before I could gather the supplies we needed, shooting broke out in my meadow. I rushed to the porch to find the troopers running toward a fallen figure. With a moan, I leapt from the porch and elbowed them away. Lone Eagle’s bleeding body lay sprawled in the grass.

  “He jumped us, Cap’n!” one of the privates cried, pleading for understanding.

  I ignored them and gathered my dead husband in my arms, carrying him to the burial plot where Butterfly rested. James set some of his men to hacking out a grave. Before setting a foot toward the south, I saw that beautiful man wrapped in a blanket and covered with earth. The hairbine he left for me years ago went around his brow. His medicine pouch was secreted on his person.