I felt the prick of the needle, the thrust of that steely shaft, and the long drawn out procedure of the thread dragging through the puckered edges of my parted flesh. “Sweet Jesus!” I howled within. “Holy Mother!” But I do not believe Turtle Dove suspected my sensational anguish, as I kept it well hidden. She went about her work like a seamstress stitching up a torn petticoat.
Strangely, for all the great discomfort I was experiencing otherwise, I marveled at how my penis did not seem to mind in the least. He was not even marginally intimidated by my excruciation otherwise endured, and if anything, found himself more stimulated and engorged. It seemed as if the little beast considered pain a sort of aphrodisiacal stimulator, and the more torturous the suffering, the more intense was his eagerness to perform. I lifted my head and glanced down my body at the elongated lump in the front of my baggy new trousers.
A marvel of virile zeal!
Turtle Dove bent over my leg, one palm cupped behind my calf to hold it steady. Her shaggy hairdo was sticking out in the sun. I saw the white scar peeking out from under her brown jawline. Her feminine shapeliness moved about with a suggestion of sensuality inside the loose-fitting shell of her buckskin dress.
And that, in a flash, is when I again revisited my old nightmare – the same one in which Turtle Dove and I had first met, so many years ago, when I was adolescent. We are but the stuff of dreams, I thought. And then I marveled at how thin was the line between everything in this world. For surely dreams and waking life are not so far apart as we make them out to be. I recalled in that old dream how this same woman, with her painted white face, had come to me, teased and tortured me, and then, in the end, satisfied me in a way I have been trying to rediscover ever since. At the time, it had seemed to my young mind like the most confusing mix of sacred and profane a person could possibly endure. Quite horrifying. And quite wonderful. Assuredly it was the epitome of all that Father Bartholomew had ever warned me against. But it was a dream, out of my control, so where, I ask, was my sin?
“Donc!” said Turtle Dove. And then she put away her needle.
I lifted onto my elbows, greatly relieved to have it over with. But then the woman took up the piece of bark she had laid in the grass, and daubed at the goo with a stick. She then proceeded to slather the unguent over my freshly stitched foreleg.
“Zut!” I cried, and jerked up straight.
It felt as if the witch had applied a hot coal to my tattered flesh. I fairly sniveled. I regret that I might have allowed a tear or two to escape from the reservoir stored up inside my head.
“What have you done to me, woman?”
She only held up the bark and made a gesture toward my lower leg. “Une fois, tous les jours.”
“Not on your life,” I said. “Never again!”
She shook her head. “Oui! Tous les jours!”
I was in no position to put up a fight. “We shall see,” I said.
Then she moved toward my head. When I jerked away from her, I experienced a stab of pain in my ribs, and automatically grabbed at my side. Turtle Dove noted this, but it did not deter her from her intention of applying the fiery ointment to the seared skin on my face.
“Non!” she said, and whacked my thigh hard with her open palm, giving me to know that I was in deep trouble if I did not hold myself still. Perhaps it was the memory of my old dream that caused me to obey, but I behaved as she commanded and allowed her to administer her torture once again, this time to my cheek.
“Zounds galore!” I groaned, no longer hiding my physical anguish.
“Ouvrez votre chemise,” she said, and I opened my shirt, just as she instructed.
Turtle Dove placed her hands inside my shirt and ran them gently over my back. I could feel her fingers investigating each bump of my ribs until – “Ouch!” – she found the ones that were broken. She drew out her hands and covered one palm with the herbal tincture. She then placed her sticky paw back into my shirt and laid it flat against my bruised and damaged ribcage, holding it there for a good long while.
I became aware of the air inflating and then evacuating my lungs, in and out, again and again, as the Indian woman’s hand raised and fell with my breath. What had started out as quite a misery began to progress toward something more pleasing, even serene. It was good to have her hand there. I began to feel sorry for my earlier behavior. “Thank you,” I said. “Merci beaucoup.”
She nodded.
The intimacy of the moment moved me to a boldness I might not otherwise have displayed, and I was inspired to ask her a question.
“Turtle Dove,” I said. “Do you remember that we have met before?”
She narrowed her dark eyes, and looked at me.
“In a dream,” I said. “When I was younger.”
She smiled ambiguously, and shrugged. I got the impression that she had probably been asked this same absurd question before, perhaps even by her own husband. For she was a type as much an individual. She was the quintessential wild woman, to some extent, every man’s idyll, and had most likely occupied more than one fellow’s most primordial dreams.
Still, I persisted.
“Turtle Dove,” I said. “Do you suppose – under the right conditions, of course – once my hair grows back, to be sure – that you could ever love a man like me?”
She drew her hand from out of my shirt and sat back on her heels, scrutinizing my expression. “Love?” she said.
One got the impression that it was the first time she had ever spoken the word. It came out sounding a bit foreign and innocent, and like nothing I had ever heard before. It came naked of meaning, as if it had been newly coined right there on the bank of that mineral spring.
“Yes,” I said. “Amour.”
She shook her shaggy head and grinned. “Qu’est que c’est – Amour?”
“What is love?”
She nodded.
I must say, I was stymied by the question. “Well,” I said. “It is…” I looked past her to the pool. “It is…”
She knelt before me, waiting. I suddenly felt like a dictionary replete with blank pages. How does one define love for a child? How does one say it is the stuff that makes stars shine and poems weep and hearts to ache with hopeful yearning? How can such a sacred thing be defined?
The yellow bird had returned, and he warbled a long and drawn out refrain. I saw a flash of his sunshiny plumage in the willows across the pool.
“I suppose I do not know,” I said. “There was a time, but…” I hunched my shoulders helplessly. “What is love? Je ne sais pas.”
She wiped her hand in the grass and then leaned toward me, commencing to button up my shirt. That is when she spied my tattoo. She parted the lapels and squinted curiously at the drop of water inked onto my chest.
“Ooh!” she said.
Timidly, she reached out with her finger to the lobular glyph. White or brown, I have never met any woman who could resist doing this, and I will advise the young man considering a tattoo of his own – have it printed in a place on your person where you most want to be touched.
Turtle Dove’s fingertip went hypnotically round and round the perimeter of my water drop. I could feel my heart picking up speed beneath her undulating touch.
“Syatapis?” she asked.
I recognized it as the same word she had uttered upon first meeting Virtue. I surmised that it was a favorable adjective to have directed at oneself, but could not guess its complete meaning.
“Que veut dire?” I asked. “Syatapis?”
She leaned back, taking her finger away from my chest. She pointed to the pool, and then made a gesture where one open hand undulated under the other. “Les personnes qui habitant la monde sous l’eau.”
The people who live under the water.
“Vous-ětes Syatapis?”
“Me?”
She nodded.
Now I had heard that the Blackfoot revered all the spirits of the underwater world, and I surmised that it might just be to my advantage to
lay claim to such a lineage. After all, I had a water drop tattooed onto my chest, my name was Rain, and no one you will ever meet likes a cold draught of water better than myself, so perhaps I was one of these Syatapis without even knowing it. Surely it was a possibility. And so I nodded at the Indian woman kneeling before me.
“Oui,” I said. “Je suis Syatapis.”
Turtle Dove’s eyes grew large.
“And Virtue, too,” I continued. “We are both Syatapis.”
Turtle Dove smiled knowingly, as if she had always suspected this, but now had the proof she needed to truly believe. “Ooh,” she said. “Ooh.” Then she stood before me. I do not know what I expected exactly – something more familiar and stimulating, I suppose – but the Indian woman pointed back toward camp, indicating that that is where I needed now to be. “Partez-vous,” she commanded.
“Sure,” I said. “Yes, of course. I will go see to Virtue.”
She waited for me to go.
I limped away through the willows and into the trees, peering once over my shoulder to where Turtle Dove was now standing on the edge of the pool. She pulled her dress off over her head, and moved toward the water. I feigned to continue on, but once I was behind a thick stand of brush, I dropped down out of sight. I crept with a stalker’s skill back toward the pool, staying low, careful not to bump any of the willows or otherwise shake the foliage and give myself away.
Turtle Dove’s brown backside was to me. The nut-brown lobes of her derriere. The shallow dimples on each side of the small of her back. I lay in the grass, watching. She let herself sink into the pool and it was as if she had let herself become submerged in my very own soul.
“Oh, Turtle Dove,” I whispered, full of longing.
I could feel my member all warm and full between the ground and my belly. He, if anything, was more than ready to take advantage of the fair maid. But I held back. I exercised my gentlemanly respect for the female sex of my species. I am not saying it was an easy thing to do, but I knew that a lasting love could not be built on a man’s spontaneous primality. I needed to bide my time. I needed to go through the proper courtship rituals, show her my plumage, if you will, and then make my move when the time was right. It was the most painful abstinence I have ever endured, but most noble. It was made all the more excruciating by the full frontal view now offered up of Turtle Dove’s nudity.
“My mistress eyes are nothing like the sun,” I whispered, and then swallowed at the large lump of anticipation stuck sideways in my throat. “If pale be fair, her breasts… her breasts are dun.”
I licked my lips, took one last look, and then crawled slowly backwards out of my hiding place.
I did not want to leave, but the torture was too intense, and besides that, I was beginning to feel I had left Virtue too long unattended.
WE DECIDED TO STAY put for a while.
The horses were battered and bruised from their previous tribulations, and it made sense to let them have a good rest before putting them through the next perilous leg of our journey. I, too, was in need of some mending. The thought of bouncing all day in the saddle with my broken ribs was quite abominable to contemplate, so I was perfectly content with lollygagging by the pool. Yes, time was against us. And again, yes, winter was prowling out there somewhere over that western horizon. But how could we face the pending snows if we were all crippled up and in a weakened condition? It seemed best to wait a few days, allowing our bodies to heal.
The site was an earthly paradise – or near to it – right there on that wide lonesome prairie, and it might have been perfect if not for the profusion of sulfur and gypsum in the water. After a few days of drinking from the stream, I am embarrassed to say, it caused one to produce a vile wind. The horses blew continually, and I soon learned to give them a wide berth. I encouraged Puck and Brownie to graze far from the center of camp.
“The grass is so succulent and tasty in that direction,” I urged. “Way over there, downwind, beyond the willows.”
But then of course when they left there was no one else to blame for the lingering stench.
*****
After my daily bath, Turtle Dove continued with her treatment to my wounds. Oddly, I found myself becoming somewhat addicted to the sting and pinch of her pungent potions as they were applied to my shinbone, and it was with an irrational regret that one day I noticed my lesion was beginning to heal. It seemed a slow progression toward intimacy was indeed occurring between the widow and myself, but at this lethargic snail’s pace, I figured we would both be too old to consummate before we ever reached our amorous and matrimonial climax.
Yes, I will confess, I had grand designs on the Indian woman. In my most current daydreams I had constructed a scenario in which Turtle Dove and I lived in a little cabin just north of the City of Rocks. This would procure us privacy enough to enjoy our conjugal existence, while allowing us proximity to easily visit our dear Virtue, and her Prophet husband. I could not fully imagine this idyllic situation, as it was bursting with fancy and yet to be discovered details, but I knew at least that Turtle Dove and I would have a western window in our bedroom, and that we would lie under the blankets at night, cuddling and listening to the small rain tapping on our roof.
“Do you like the rain?” I asked one day, as my wife-to-be pressed her salve-covered palm against my healing ribcage. It was my best effort at leading small talk, but as Turtle Dove was a woman with a mix of disparate tongues, my meanings often were misunderstood as she substituted one wrong word of a language for another.
“Aimez-vous?”
“Oh,” I chuckled. “Yes, my name is Rain. That is true. But I was referring to the heavenly substance that sometimes falls from the clouds.” I held my open palm to the blue sky. “Sky tears,” I said.
Turtle Dove gave me a confused grin, and then pointed at my tattoo. “Vous-ětes pluie?”
She thought that I was telling her that I was a drop of rain. I smiled at her childlike innocence. For she was appealingly naïve.
“No,” I said. “I am not rain; I am Rain.”
Her expression became more confused, and she shook her shaggy head.
“Just call me Didier,” I said, boldly touching my fingers to her bare knee. “And I will call you Dove.”
This intimacy was as close as I had come to forcing my hand with the lady, determined as I was to proceed with a gentleman’s decorum. But I must say that feeling my fingertips come in contact with her skin caused my whole being to tingle and become rigid with a boyish excitement I had not experienced since long ago, when I had first spoken with a girl I met in Cherbourg. This was that same experience, I would estimate, only better, as I was more mature now, and more assuredly suave.
Turtle Dove glanced down at my bold fingers. Even under her dark skin, I believe I sensed a hint of blush. The moment seemed ripe as a piece of fruit, and it was left only for me to pick it deftly.
“Oh, Dove,” I whispered with ardent innuendo, and leaned forward.
But this adjustment in my posture caused an abrupt and unexpected spasm in my bowels.
And that, I am dismayed to say, is when I unintentionally let flee a fart.
Rather loudly.
And with all the bouquet of a skunk who had just loaded up on a clutch of rotten eggs.
Turtle Dove recoiled with an expression of bemused horror. She held her hand over her nose and backed away, giggling and gagging, I thought, with uncalled for exaggeration.
“Pardon!” I said, and felt myself grow hot with shame. I waved at the polluted air between us, attempting to disperse the mustard cloud of gas, but there was no denying that the moment had passed in a switch from one of near bliss to one of pungent mortification.
Still laughing, Turtle Dove went to the pool and washed her hand.
“Ce n’est pas moi!” I exclaimed. “It is the water. C’est l’eau.”
But she just kept up laughing and making hyperbolic gagging gestures.
That stream, I decided, had betrayed me.
And although I know it was a childish thought to think, I found myself mad at it, and even, in the manner of an animist, granted it a persona – one I did not like. “You sewer!” I whispered, and directed all of my wrath and frustration at that snakish twist of liquid. But I suppose, in reality, that water was just water, and probably did not mind my insult so much, as it surely lacked a brain and human feelings to do so. Still, I seethed with humiliation.
“Phooey!” I said, and left Turtle Dove at the pool, stomping off through the willows, I am loath to admit, like an angry nipper.
I MARCHED OFF, SPITTING mad.
“Of all the cursed luck!”
I did not know to where I was going, only that I needed to put some distance between myself and the scene of my most recent disgrace. I blindly trudged through the trees, past the camp, and on upstream. I kicked dirt. I punched air.
“Goddam!” I growled. “Is there anything more fundamentally maddening than unreciprocated affection?”
I looked to the sky, still stomping, awaiting an answer.
But, of course, the sky was mute as a splash of paint.
And worse yet, in glancing away from where I was placing my footfalls, I stepped into a rabbit hole, lost my balance, and toppled forward down a steep bank.
“Ahh!” I cried.
When I came to rest, I was head down, lying on my back on an incline, with my boots uphill. I was quite dazed, and my confusion was compounded by the upside down scene playing out before me. There, a few yards away, was a sinuous young girl with blonde-white hair. A host of tiny blue butterflies danced on the breeze. They all fluttered around her head and shoulders. The girl held her arm out to her side, and the butterflies resting in her palm lifted off into the ether, which, from my tweaked vantage, was where the ground was supposed to be. Those colorful winged creatures became the myriad fragments of the sky. It was quite beautiful to witness, if not a bit surreal.
The girl – still upside down – turned to me with an expression of concern. “Are you all right?” she asked.
I felt a shooting sensation in my shin, a throb in my ribs, and a nauseation in my general personage. “I do not know,” I answered. The words came out of me with an amusing topsy-turvy voice. But for all my other bodily disorders, I found myself most self-conscious about my too-large hand-me-down clothes, and my blistered and peeling head. I must have appeared most ridiculous, something like a beat-up, par-roasted clown. “But I am certain,” I continued, “that my pride has never been more aggrieved.”
Delivering Virtue Page 12
