Cut Hand Read online

  The night we arrived at the nameless river, Cut and I sat beside a fire and practiced our language skills while Splitlip and Wild Red went about their own business. Cut’s argot was beginning to make sense to me now, and I found it less exacting than English. Cut was as hard a taskmaster as I, insisting on the correct pronunciation and not allowing laziness with the language. That would come later, as it always does when one grows comfortable with a tongue.

  “Damnation!” Red flared suddenly. He had been on the nettle all afternoon. “Don’t you never shut your trap? Bad enough the red belly’s mangling good American, but your grunting in that pig tongue is gitting me down! Another thing. Tell that heathen to shut his mouth tonight. Like to never got no sleep, him moaning like he done last night.”

  My ears reddened, and I opened my mouth to decry a false accusation when I realized it would accomplish nothing. “What put you in such a heat?”

  “Aw shat!” he spat a vulgarity. “You wanta be this red heathen’s luffee, I ain’t gonna grutch you, but we hadn’t run onta this ’un”—he threw a thumb Cut’s way—“we’d be long down the trail now. We gotta find work ta git us a poke we wanna handle next spring.” By “handle” he meant trade. “We oughta git going ’stead a setting around here watching two growed men making moon eyes at one another. Never seen nothing like it. I had a gittern, I’d pick you a tune so’s you could serenade him.”

  Sensing Cut beginning to bristle, I snapped back. “Climb down off your horse! This man is here to help build a boat to make your journey easier and faster. He doesn’t deserve that from you!”

  “Fawk!” Red cursed. “Jest leave me be. And don’t go disturbing my sleep, neither.” With that he turned away from the fire and tossed down his roll.

  Taking us all by surprise, Cut moved the bedding he claimed from one of the dead warriors over beside Red.

  The carrottop sat up. “How come he done that? Tell him to git outa here!”

  “You tell him,” I replied, moving to the other side of the man. Now a heathen lay on his left and a deviant on his right.

  Splitlip Rumquiller let out a laugh like a donkey’s bray. “Tarnation, Red.” He gulped between chortles and hiccups. “You sweet-talked yourself into two bed partners!”

  Red gave him a murderous glance and flopped back down.

  WILD RED wasn’t on such a high rope the next morning. After a breakfast of fraise with lap, or rabbit, in the pancakes instead of bacon, we set to work on the boat. As Split preferred a dugout to a birchbark, we felled a cottonwood something over four English feet in diameter. Without adze or proper axe, using only fire and forged hatchets taken from the slain Pipe Stem warriors, the four of us slowly crafted a twenty-foot canoe. The sides were a more-or-less-uniform width of two finger knuckles. The bottom we left a full finger length thick. Two solid strips of wood left in place served as bulwarks to strengthen the craft and hold cargo more securely.

  It was a sight watching the Irishman and the Indian work together. Occasionally the redhead would pause to look at the youth laboring alongside and shake his head. He simply could not believe a man like that could lust after a boy. Occasionally I caught Red seeking the sodomite in me, and from his puzzled look, he didn’t find it. Good! Even if I say it myself, there is nothing of the priss about me.

  The afternoon the boat was finished, Cut washed himself in the river and strode over to put the question to me.

  “I’ll answer you on the morrow,” I hedged. He frowned. “Morning,” I said.

  Spinning on his heel, he went fishing and provided our evening meal.

  The conversation around the fire was less jadish that night. Split spoke slowly, taking care to draw Cut Hand into the conversation. Even Red exchanged a few words by way of unspoken apology for his previous outburst, the cause of which still escaped me.

  “Damnation,” Split lamented as he slapped at a nighttime gallinipper. “What I wouldn’t give for a twist! Even some of that Indian weed. Course a button or two’d be a sight better.”

  “Me, I’d settle for a cag a Spanish wine.” Red grinned. “Or maybe a low bunter with big dugs and no expectation I’d take it easy on her.” I easily imagined the kind of common woman Wild Red described.

  “How about a honey-soaked gammon?” I pictured the fat ham so vividly my mouth watered.

  Red made an effort to be civil. “What about you, Cut Hand. What’d you like to have?”

  Cut looked the redhead in the eye and uttered a single word. “Bil-lee!”

  I don’t know if I was more embarrassed or more prideful.

  Split killed off the evening regaling us with tales of the tub, cock-and-bull stories of his travels. I was surprised to learn he was at the fourth Fur Trapper’s Rendezvous on the Great Salt Lake in 1828 and claimed to have been on close terms with Jedediah Smith.

  OVER THE past few days, I had wrestled more aggressively against the idea I was offensive to the Lord God, that I was reprobate, abandoned in sin. Despite my Christian upbringing, the power of my need for Cut Hand ate away the base and exposed the noble in my emotions. And there were noble elements: loyalty, companionship, steadfastness, friendship, love. Perhaps love made our coupling acceptable.

  I toyed with the idea Cut should come with us to Fort Wheeler but soon purged that worm from my mind. Nowhere in my world would a union such as ours be tolerated.

  When I touched his shoulder in the middle of the night, Cut sat up immediately, alert to some unknown danger. I found his hand and clasped it in mine. “Splitrum. Red,” I whispered in his ear, raising both our hands and motioning toward the river. “Cut. Billy.” I waved to the north.

  His smile broke the night. “Cut…. Bil-lee good life. Good!”

  “Yes,” I agreed, and was seized by shivers at the arrival of a myriad of fresh doubts.

  Chapter 3

  THE NEXT morning, Red and Cut tested the dugout on the river’s iron-gray water while Split instructed me in dialect. Although I spoke the tongue childishly, Cut and I knew enough to permit fluency to eventually flourish.

  Dividing up the boodle fairly gave Split and Red the extra rifle while Cut and I took possession of the axes and horses. We took more of the cate—the store-bought food—since they would likely encounter white civilization long before I did. My new companion and I took leave of my friends at high sun on a day I calculated to be a Saturday in April, Year of Our Lord 1832.

  Cut claimed the mustang, which he named Arrow Wind because the beast was as swift as an arrow’s flight. We called the pinto Long Wind. He was slower but clear-footed and could run the other horse into the ground. When we first acquired the mounts, I twice boarded the pony from the left and found myself sprawled on the ground. Long Wind was Indian broke and accustomed to riders mounting from the right or offside. The saddle was a mean thing, merely a surcingle fastened around the pony’s barrel with some sort of stirrup leathers and scraps of buffalo robes as cushions.

  The open forest cast an airy green blanket over broad glades little troubled by thickets of underwood, quite unlike the brushy woods of my youth. Occasional fire scars heralding past conflagrations provided clues to the likely reason. The vicinage teemed with shy wildlife: white-tailed deer and squirrels and the barking wolf—the coyote—that slunk away at our approach.

  A distance down the trail, I dismounted. Cut appeared at my side, worry burning in those strange eyes. He was, I realized, concerned that I had changed my mind.

  I tried out his tongue. “Not easy to leave friends. Maybe never see again.”

  “We will see Splitrum again,” he replied with certainty, correctly perceiving where my affinity lay. We walked in unaccustomed silence a few steps. “Did you do wrong to come with me?” he finally asked what preyed on his mind.

  “Never!” I answered in dialect before going back to English. “That is the only thing I am certain of. Whatever the future holds, I want to face it with you.”

  He nodded emphatically. “Good. You see. Be good.” His English words
exhausted for the moment, he switched. “It is good we can talk to one another.”

  I gave a rueful laugh. “I speak your tongue like a child.”

  “But every sleep you get older. By the time we get home, you will talk like a man. I’m five winters old in American,” he added proudly. “Soon I’ll get to the age when hair grows down there.”

  Cut’s people measured years by winters, months by moons, and days by sleeps. A broken sleep was a partial day.

  “What Splitrum say for Cut, Cut now say to Billy. Billy take Cut heart!”

  I had finally gotten him to pronounce my name correctly. Next I would work on pronouns, else he would wear out our appellations.

  Absent his shackles and shed of the restraint of strange men, Cut Hand became his true self, one fully as likeable as I anticipated. He turned the teaser—trying to convince me arboreal limbs rubbing in the wind were tiny tree squeaks, mythical birds of the imagination. He tested to see if I showed a dread of owls and the two-noted poorwills—his name for whippoorwills—night creatures he claimed were souls of departed warriors.

  “What did you think when you came over that ridge and found yourself in the middle of us?” I asked in English as we walked the ponies.

  “Run from grizzlies. Find wolves,” he answered in his tongue.

  “And that first night when I was trying to talk to you?”

  “Sounded like a loon going Billy-Cut Hand, Billy-Cut Hand!” he joked in argot.

  “And… and when I touched your chest?”

  “I thought of kicking you in the stones,” he answered in his tongue. “But you saved me from Red’s knife, so I let you feel around. Besides, I didn’t know when the Pipe Stem would show up.”

  “When we… laid on the blankets?” I pressed.

  He tried out his English again. “Billy do wrong thing, Billy die.”

  A shiver ran down my spine. He meant, of course, if I’d tried to roger his bum.

  “Were you sorry afterward?”

  “Why? Cut no do nothing. But feel funny when Billy shoot on belly.” He turned serious and went back to his own tongue. “I looked on you as a handsome man, but when you put your lips to me, I was confused. He’s a winkte, but he does not act like one… except when he plays with my pipe.” He pronounced the word win-tay. “But if he is not win-tay, then this is wrong,” he finished.

  His answer gave me my first inkling there was something more to this win-tay business than simply being his word for a sodomite. I broached the subject obliquely. “What does win-tay mean?”

  “It is what we call the special people who can see with the eyes of both a man and a woman. Win is a short way of saying winyan or woman. Kte means about to happen. So it is an about-to-happen woman, a not-woman.”

  That night he asked a question in English as I settled in his arms on the blanket. “Why Billy say no to Cut at river? Two times!” He held up dual digits.

  “Because of Red and Splitrum.”

  He responded in dialect. “What would that matter? As long as we were private about it, why would they care?”

  His question revealed the depth of the cultural gulf between us. “White men,” I started hesitantly using English, “at least Christian white men, don’t believe men lying with men is a natural state. They believe it is wrong. That God condemns it.”

  He turned to me, frowning uncertainly. “Two men lying together is against natural law, but a man lying with a win-tay is not wrong.”

  Recognizing this as a pivotal moment in our relationship, I replied carefully. “I am a win-tay, Cut Hand, but only yours.”

  He apparently perceived the danger as well, because he dropped the subject. It was some time before I felt confident enough to speak again.

  “Tell me the truth, what is it going to be like when we get to your village?” Some of my uncertainty leaked out with that query.

  “I always speak the truth. If you are proud of who you are… if you be yourself, everything will be good.”

  “Be myself?” I snorted. “I don’t know who Billy Strobaw is anymore.”

  “Stro-baw?”

  “Strobaw. That’s my family name. What we call a last name. All my immediate family was called Strobaw.”

  He stored that for future use and tried his English again. “Billy Stro-baw good and strong and brave… and pretty to look at.”

  Ignoring the “pretty” comment, I moved on to what concerned me. “Can win-tays be brave and strong? I’m scared I’m going to make things go bad for you.”

  “Why Billy worry? Cut like Billy. People like Billy like Cut does.”

  “I hope not!” I exclaimed. He saw the humor and laughed deep in his throat, raising my excitement level. “Your laugh makes my pipe hard.”

  “It has been seven sleeps since it did anything but pass water, unless you helped yourself to some pudding,” he said in his tongue. “It will be good, Billy. You will see. Now I’m going to laugh some more and see if Pale Hunter stands up.” Pale Hunter danced a jig in my pants.

  That night when his pipe, which I dubbed Dark Warrior, delivered its semen, he masturbated me so thoroughly that I shivered as if ague-stricken. Never had a decision seemed more right! I resolved to enter this new world with curiosity and hope rather than anxiety and despair.

  When I fell asleep to the subtle night sounds of the mountain forest, the Lord Jehovah raged at me and pissed in my face in disgust. I woke to thunder and a drizzling rain and experienced difficulty shaking that blasphemous image even after Cut Hand pulled me to his powerful body.

  “It is only Wakinyan cleansing the earth,” he murmured quietly, drawing a blanket over us.

  Wakinyan, whoever that was, thoroughly soaked us and put a chill on my flesh. The next day, however, the forest flourished from her ministrations. Mourning doves, which Cut called medicine birds, sang to one another from sodden tree limbs, and small game, invigorated by the night’s rain, flitted among damp boles. As the sun sent shards of warmth through the canopy and chased away my puckered flesh, I noticed how frequently we stopped to talk and scout the area. That led me to wonder how the Pipe Stem ambushed him. Likely he was besotted by some woman and staggered right into their arms. A pang of jealousy seized my innards.

  To stir me from my snit, I asked about the small leather pouch he wore around his neck. He explained it was a medicine bundle containing a piece of his umbilical cord and small rounded stones called tunkan, which protected him against negative energy—bad medicine.

  WE DAWDLED away most of the phase of a moon gaining fluency in one another’s languages. I shuddered to think I had been bound for the Santa Fe Trail, where I would have missed him. But even the joy of Cut’s presence could not purge the occasional guilt over my libertine practices.

  “Don’t you understand, Cut?” I snapped once when he challenged my mood. “I love you, but my God says that is wrong. Men don’t lie with men.”

  “This God of yours must be the same Great Mystery who made me. My creator gave me a hunger in the loins so I can make children, but he never said there was only one way to enjoy the act. Why would he make it pleasurable if it was not to be used?”

  “Even you said it was wrong for two men to lie together.”

  “Yes. And it is wrong for two women to lie together, and two win-tays to lie together. That is against nature.”

  “But I am a man,” I cried in anguish. “I have a yard and stones like you. We are two men lying together, Cut.”

  He went so quiet that I grew deathly afraid. “If that is true, I will leave you here and hang my head in shame. But a pipe and stones do not make a man, Billy. You are not a man because you were born with a penis. You are not a man because you are brave and strong and killed two warriors.” He tapped his heart. “Your spirit determines what you are, not your genitals.”

  “That can’t be right!” I protested. “God makes you a man or a woman. There isn’t anything else!”

  Then I learned one of the great differences between the red an
d the white worlds. To the European, life began, progressed, and ended along a linear. A man was a man and behaved as such or suffered for it; a woman traveled an even narrower pathway. They were opposite sexes.

  The Indian perceived life as a Sacred Circle. There was no “only-man” or “only-woman,” no opposite genders, merely complementary ones. Cut drew a hoop in the earth. Humans, according to his notion, might fit anywhere within the circle. A man was a man according to his spirit. A woman was a woman because of hers. A man became a man by accepting a man’s responsibilities. His sexual appetite had less to do with his orientation than his choice of responsibilities.

  If a boy child selected a bow as his toy, he was allowed to grow into what he would become, a man. If the boy chose a woman’s tool, he was allowed to grow into what he would become, a win-tay, a not-woman, a double-face, a human being with male genitals who accepted the responsibilities of a woman.

  One male might appear more manly than another, or less so, but his spirit determined his lifestyle. So men or two-spirits or women fit at various places on that great circle according to choices made before the Soul Journey ever commenced. The point was that humans belonged wherever they felt natural, and one man’s “natural” was not necessarily another’s. It was a powerful philosophy allowing a person to live where he fit, rather than fit where he lived—a staggering concept that brought me some ease of mind.

  That night Cut bestowed a new name on me. “You will be called Teacher by my people.”

  “Why Teacher?” I asked.

  “How many people would be speaking my tongue so well in so short a time? We haven’t said very much in American for several sleeps.”

  “English,” I corrected him automatically.

  “See… like a teacher. You will be a good teacher to my people. Teachers are important to my tiospaye, my band. Those called by the Double-Faced Woman are often teachers. She enters the dreams and instructs those who will be win-tays.” He pursued the significance of his new name for me. “They say all the tribes will have to face the white man someday. But with you as our teacher, we will learn his way without being infected by it. We will take what is useful and ignore what is not.”