Cut Hand Read online

  “Why does that matter?” he asked, pulling me to him. Nonetheless, I noticed he sought to muffle his exclamation of release when I took what I wanted.

  Happy, I lay back on my blanket and sighed as his hand set me afire. Afterward, Cut left the wagon to look for signs of danger. He was back within an hour, rolling himself into our blankets and settling his big form beside mine.

  MY BACK was virtually broken before everything was unloaded back at the meadow with the hollow hill behind it. The place was now called Teacher’s Mead by most. These people named everything. I wanted to sleep in the wagon again, but Cut refused. It was not long before I understood why. Had he made love as violently in the wagon as he did beneath it, we would have rolled into the Yanube and floated downstream. He took me again in the middle of the night, his mouth at my ear whispering beautiful love poetry. Everything was right with the world.

  I created a marquee, a shelter similar to a military officer’s large field tent, from the wagons’ canvas covers to serve as our quarters while we constructed our permanent dwelling. Then I gleefully tore down the Wacky Wigwam and moved the rest of our belongings to the Mead. Thereafter, Cut declared us married before the council. Although it was obvious Yellow Puma was not pleased by the idea, he chose not to make things uncomfortable for us.

  From time to time, the young men of the tiospaye dropped by to lend a hand constructing our permanent home or to sit and smoke while they harassed others for doing woman’s work. In their vale, the women made and owned the lodges. Yet this was no simple tipi and clearly required a man’s strength. Before it was finished, most of the village aided our endeavor in some measure.

  The exterior was native rock, cemented with a tabby of clay and small stones surpassing the hardness of plaster. The gavel, or gable, faced south so the main door opened up onto the meadow. The women scraped animal hides incredibly thin to serve as paper lights for admitting brightness through the window casements. I did not wish to live in a dungeon. When time allowed, I would construct stout drawn windows with gun slots for defense.

  The two keeping rooms, the big parlors, were fire rooms with large fireplaces backed onto one another and vented by a double stack. Each was fitted with lug poles and reckon hooks to hang pots and other vessels for cooking. A windowless interior room at the rear of the western porthern served to store weapons and other precious goods. The east side was one big room for sleeping and general living with a sizeable pantry for dry goods and a bathing room at the rear. With the ready availability of good water, I intended to use gravity to bring it directly into the house.

  WITH THE approach of the summer solstice, a great excitement gripped the tiospaye as invitation sticks passed from village to village for something called the Sun Dance. Indians from all the tribes in the area converged at a chosen spot north of us for a holy ceremonial to demonstrate the continuity of life and interdependence of all nature. A Men’s Cycle Ceremony, it was dedicated to tatanka, the buffalo, who willingly sacrificed himself so the People might live. A win-tay from another tiospaye opened the ceremony by blessing the Sun Pole of the Sun Dance Lodge. Men danced four days without rest or food to induce visions. Some endured self-mutilation to contribute blood to the Sacred Circle of Death and Rebirth. All this was described to me, as I was not allowed to attend. Cut remained at the Mead, missing the ceremony for the first time in his life.

  While Cut worked on the drawn windows, I excavated the ugly gash in the earth running from the north hill down to a jetty beneath the house, roofing the tunnel and covering it with stones and dirt to create a secret passageway to the cavern. Thereafter we barred both entrances to the cave with strong doors and secured with stock locks I found among the dead traders’ goods.

  THE DAY that scouts reported tatanka was coming, the Yanube village was deserted within an hour. This time Cut joined his people, as the buffalo provided the band’s food for the coming winter. I remained behind to build my necessary on the windward side. Cut thought my plan laughable. He could not imagine performing toilet duties in such a close and smelly place.

  Concealed pipes made from reeds and pitch pine tar carried water into the house. Carved hardwood spigots controlled its flow. A small fireplace in the bathing room heated water for a shower made of an elevated basin held together by tar and gravity. Upon his return, an exhausted and filthy Cut gratefully made use of the device and then fell into his blankets to sleep the night away.

  Not long thereafter, Spotted Hawk decided upon an auspicious day to begin the band’s journey down the near side of the Yanube: two full days and a broken sleep to join related bands in the winter camp. As the tiospaye was capable of moving about thirty miles a day, Cut would be separated from his loved ones by twenty-five leagues for the entire winter. Would he be happy? His sour visage made no promise in that direction when the move began.

  I was well on the way to completing a sturdy front door by the time Cut returned from accompanying the band a distance. Recognizing his disquiet, I allowed our labor to provide its own balm. The door was soon hung against the coming weather, fitted not only with a sturdy stock lock, but also backed by two solid beams to guard against battering. Teacher’s Mead was now virtually a fort.

  Although northers soon rattled the gables, we tried to get out every day to avoid cabin fever. Like any two people cooped up together, we sometimes became miffy. Fortunately we recognized the danger signs before minor spats became blazing anger. One or the other would go to the west side of the building and busy himself with a solitary task until his grum estate qualified. It was particularly hard on Cut, who would have duties aplenty to distract him had he been where his heart said he belonged—with his people. Neither of us strayed far from the house alone. Sometimes the snow drifted four or five feet deep, but rackets, which Cut called snowshoes, expanded our environ a few leagues, except when it was storming.

  I braved the cold to construct a wooden linter, a commodious lean-to on the outside of the house to provide some meager shelter for our animals. By next winter they would be snug in their own barn, I vowed. During the short, cold days, we worked on furnishings to make us more comfortable, including a bed, a big-framed affair with extra cords strung to support the vigor of Cut’s nighttime exertions. Both the mattress and the undermattress were rude until I could lay hands on the proper materials. Cut used the bed as an accommodation to me, but he appreciated the spring of the thing when he flanked me.

  Our first time in the bed, he laid his exciting body against me from head to toe with Dark Warrior pressed against my belly. His kiss set me afire. Cut went slowly, reinvestigating all my secret places, and drove me wild.

  After his strong, shattering orgasm, he pulled me atop him and allowed Pale Hunter his time. Shot through with exquisite convulsions, my body ultimately reclaimed itself from wherever it had gone, and I could finally speak of my deep, undying love.

  The long nights were spent teaching Cut to play chess and checkers on rudely carved sets. I studied the Holy Bible, seeking insight into my deviancy. The Old Testament railed against lying with your own kind, as well as denouncing Onan’s sin and adultery. It also prescribed eating rituals and other behavior widely ignored by much of the Western world. Why then did these not carry the same stigma? Nowhere did the Lord Jesus decry my kind. I remained confused but also cautiously reassured.

  Once, when I wrote something in one of the traders’ ledger books, Cut demanded to learn to read and write. A piece of flat planking covered with sand served as writing paper, and our fingers became pencils, just as in my earliest schools. Once he mastered some new lettering, he would ply it to precious scrap paper to see what it looked like for real. He did well except for paying proper attention to his tittles, those dots over i’s and j’s. As he learned quickly and easily, I was struck anew by the realization this was truly a man of many parts.

  THAT FIRST winter with Cut was one of the happiest times of my life, and I am convinced he came to feel the same despite the strain of separation
from the tiospaye. The cold clung hard to the land that year. Late in the season, the nearby clamor of howling wolves pulled us out of the safety of the house. The animals proved a problem at times, harrying our horses as food grew scarce.

  Mounted on rackets and armed with two rifles and a hatchet each, we followed the baying wolves over the west hummock to the edges of the thin forest, where a pack harassed four moose driven down from Canada by the long winter. Wolves are medicine animals, and Cut was as reluctant to destroy one of them as he would have been to shoot a kinsman. They were brother warriors. Yet, though skeletal, the moose would yield considerable fresh tallow for the People. Four shots brought them down, but it required six more and some flailing with the hatchets to ransom our bonanza from the wolf pack. It took three days to butcher the meat and hang it in the cavern.

  Worried by the prolonged winter, we increased the feed to our horses a sennight—a full week—before Cut sensed a change in the weather. By the time the first break came, the team horses were in shape to drag the Conestoga over a half-frozen, half-thawed trail. Even though the spring runoff had not yet fully begun, the river was high, and walks normally easy to ford roiled with angry, white water. Cut said that when warm weather arrived, even the trail we now traveled would be inundated. It required four full sleeps to make the two-and-a-half-day trek.

  The village, swollen by other bands to some hundred lodges, was in decent shape. While winter game was not plentiful, the population was in no danger of starving thanks to stores of jerky and pemmican. Nonetheless, the supply of green meat provided by the Canadian moose was welcome and immediately shared among other tiospayes. The People were not known for what they had, but for what they gave away.

  When another storm threatened a few days later, Cut and I headed back home to find wolves had pulled down one of our smaller animals. A barn was definitely the first order of business when the weather turned.

  We knew spring was really upon us when a group of Yanube raised three tipis at the south edge of the meadow almost in the tree line. As soon as they were set up, Cut and I took gifts of food and discovered Bear Paw and his family, as well as Little Eagle and Otter, were among our guests. We got little work done that day and talked far into the night. When the last Indian had gone back across the clearing, Cut and I lay in our bed, not the least sleepy.

  “Do they treat you differently?” I asked, studying his strong, handsome face by the firelight.

  “No,” he answered easily, stroking the back of my head slowly, “but some of the girls are jealous of you, and right now I am going to give them something to be jealous of.” He lifted my head and touched his broad, generous mouth to my eyes, my forehead, my lips. Tonight it was loving, but he achieved an orgasm no less forceful, no less exciting.

  Afterward, he studied my face as if seeing it for the first time. “I love you, Billy Strobaw. I love you with the nagi that makes me Cut Hand. I cannot imagine my life without you.”

  No sooner had he spoken the words than I frowned. Cut understood what puckered my brow.

  “We will find a way,” he said.

  Chapter 6

  LOOKING BACK, it is amazing that first year among the People worked out so well. How I chose to live my life often defied the vogue of a male wife, but as Cut Hand and others often observed, I was a strange win-tay. I was masculine, refusing to soften to people’s expectation. I hunted, fished, and played stickball with the men. Of course, I also performed the housekeeping chores and kept us in presentable clothing. Becoming swept up in the idea of fancy dress, I added to my red suspenders and belt and leg ties with a crimson hatband and dyed buckskin shirts, truly earning the sobriquet of the Red Win-tay.

  Perhaps it was because I was white they allowed me to blur the line between man and “not-woman.” Or mayhap it was my total lack of interest in women, except to develop friendships and gain knowledge from them. The most valuable thing I learned about my adopted people was that they were human.

  Buffalo Shoulder was constantly in his cups, half a dram short of an outright sot. Bear Paw, while a good, decent man, tended toward sloth. No, that’s too harsh a judgment. He merely did the minimum required to get by. Little Eagle? Suffice it to say he was an adolescent, with all the ills that condition conveys: a bit of a bite and always seeking advantage over others. Cut was the best of the lot but drawn toward taking personal risks. Otter was a pure delight, mayhap too young and unformed to have developed his own eccentricities. If pressed for a fault, I would say he was too eager to please. Overall, I deemed them as fine a group of people as I have encountered. I did not find James Fenimore Cooper’s “Noble Savage,” but I met many noble men and women.

  Thanks to the buffalo, the Indians of the area were prosperous. Even so, the life span of a tribesman was often short. Therefore many men married more than one wife to ensure a succession of children to replace the loss of his own life. A slain warrior’s wives often went to his brothers for protection and succor. None of the People were abandoned to hunger or the elements upon the loss of a provider.

  This relative wealth allowed the bands to remain small and widely dispersed except when gathered in a large winter camp. Akicita, or warrior clans, what whites called Soldier Societies, often spanned bands and even nations. Dog Soldiers existed among both the Sioux and the Cheyenne. Cut Hand belonged to the Porcupine Society, which acted as policemen for the villages, keeping order and providing protection when the people were on the move. Cut was often away from home scouting the tiospaye’s territory.

  The wisdom of constructing a double house, done solely by instinct, was proved countless times. When Cut and I were at home, there were usually young men puttering about. Little Eagle and Otter oft times slept in the west fronting room. Only at night were we truly alone in the private east half of our home.

  One day I walked around the corner of the house to find Cut’s friends teasing him about me. Unobserved, I backed away in embarrassment.

  “Cut Hand doesn’t have to worry about a toothed vagina,” Bear Paw ventured.

  “How about it, Cut Hand?” Little Eagle’s young voice asked. “Does his backside have teeth?”

  “No, but his mouth does,” Bear Paw rejoined.

  “How does it feel to stick it in a man?” Buffalo Shoulder asked. As usual, he was halfway into his cups.

  “If you want to know, you’ll have to find out for yourself!” came Cut’s easy retort. “Bear Paw, drop down on your knees. Or maybe Little Eagle should bend over and bare his buttocks.”

  In a flash of understanding, I realized this was a good and natural thing. They were always teasing one another, and none of the banter was mean-spirited. Reassured, I stomped around the corner and said the first thing that came to mind.

  “Why don’t you do that, Little Eagle? That butt looks good to me. Cut Hand, you’d better watch out or he’ll take me away from you!”

  Little Eagle manfully laughed with the others. “You’re the one who better look out, Teacher. More likely, I’ll bury my big prong between your white buns!”

  “Better try mine,” Bear Paw chuckled. “You will think his little thing is a grub worm.”

  “Hah!” Buffalo Shoulder snorted. “Everybody knows a bear’s bone is short. Now if you really want to see what a man—”

  “Too late,” I interrupted. “The best man here has already plowed a furrow the size of which none of you can match!”

  They chortled and poked at Cut Hand playfully. Thereafter, none bothered to guard his tongue around me.

  My newly constructed outhouse—what we called a barn back home—was built of stone with a wooden roof topped by thick sod to moderate temperature extremes and discourage fire. It possessed a loft that allowed for storage of winter fodder. Warm weather required a different approach. Collecting enough fallen timber for a horse walk, we built a Pennsylvania worm fence, one of those zigzag structures of stacked rails, around a large area to the west of us.

  In a moment of inspiration, I traded for four
pups that promised to grow into large, aggressive animals. We devoted long hours to training each dog to guard a certain territory. At nightfall, we had four efficient sentinels, one in each cardinal direction. Whether we were at home or away, no stranger could approach nearer than a hundred yards without dealing with a big, mean dog. They were self-hunters, so we fed them only to supplement their diet and bind them to us.

  That spring we were called away for two days to celebrate Butterfly’s marriage to a young man who recently joined the band. He was a likely buck, and Butterfly was eager for his hand. Yellow Puma was pleased with the bride price, which virtually beggared the young couple. Cut and I each gave a gift of horses, one a young colt my mare recently dropped. Broad Fist, named after the big hands at the end of his strong arms, seemed a good man.

  Cut drank to excess on their wedding night, the first time I saw him in that condition. Fortunately he was not the low, glowering drunk I encountered so often in ordinaries, but grew playful, hazing and harassing the newlyweds mercilessly until the wee hours. If the couple consummated their union, it must have been near unto dawn, because as Cut wore out, Bear Paw took over.

  When he finally staggered into the bachelors’ tent sometime in the middle of the night, Cut fell on me, totally unmindful of anyone else in the place, all of whom vacated immediately. While his performance was drink-impaired, he still managed to get the job done quite adequately before sleeping the sleep of the innocent, his nose hard against my neck. I loved him even more than before.

  AS SPRING blossomed, the sap rose not only among the flora, but also among the young bloods of the tiospaye. The drums and rattles came out as they danced themselves into a frenzy. When the drums fell silent, talk turned to raiding parties to harass their enemies. Of course, my hot-blooded mate organized a Porcupine foray against the Pipe Stem. Fearing his penchant for pursuing personal danger, I demanded to go along. Rather than forbid it, he begged me to help protect the tiospaye in case of attack in his absence. We closed up the house, left the dogs on guard, and departed for the village, taking our stock with us for safety’s sake.