On the Trail to Moonlight Gulch (30 page)

They toiled in silence, Franklin ruminating on Wicasha’s blatant warning. Carlotta nickered as she followed the men. Eventually, they came to an even part of earth where, nine years before, Franklin had cultivated the soil for his field. He had chosen the site near a dense spruce grove that abutted the granite rock face, wanting to take advantage of the winds that came off the higher elevations. Whenever toiling in the field long hours, he always appreciated the invigorating breeze on his weary limbs, especially on harvest moon nights.

Franklin had to tread carefully with Wicasha. He did not wish to reveal the new development in his and Tory’s relationship. Yet he worried what ammunition Bilodeaux might unleash now that he’d discovered him and Tory in bed. “Do you think if Bilodeaux knew something about me… a secret that he thought might cause me trouble, that he’d use it against me?”

Franklin noticed only a fleeting flicker of curiosity flash in Wicasha’s black eyes when he lifted his head toward the cooling breeze off the rock face. Turning back to his work, Wicasha said, “He would use anything he could. He’s getting more desperate. To him, all is fair in war. The French have a saying:
Le vainqueur rafle la mise.”

“What does that mean?”

“To the victor go the spoils.”

Franklin considered this. Wicasha was right. Bilodeaux had no scruples. Anything was just to a nefarious bandit like Bilodeaux if he thought it would carry him closer to his aims.

Should he warn Wicasha of the calamity that might come? He could risk losing the Lakota as a faithful friend if he confessed to him what even Bilodeaux now knew. At the moment, revealing his relationship with Tory seemed unwise. Best to keep the truth cached away, like his cured bacon and root vegetables in the storage barn.

A few posts later, with thoughts of Bilodeaux still banging inside his head, Franklin chose to ask Wicasha a question that had stewed in his mind for almost as long as he’d known him. Why he thought to ask at that precise moment, while they strapped wire to a series of wooden posts, when so many other worries splintered his brain, he was uncertain. Perhaps he was digging for something. The barbwire signified a shutting out of the world, more than even Franklin had wanted. A subconscious balance would be to open up to one another. Since Franklin was unprepared to reveal the truth about him and Tory, perhaps the alternative was to pry buried truths out of Wicasha.

“Wicasha,” he said, “why did you go against your own people and fight alongside the cavalry during the Indian wars?”

Wicasha stretched to his full five-ten frame. After a quick reprieve, he bent back to aiding Franklin. “It’s a long complicated story,” he said. “Not sure how or where to begin.”

“You don’t got to tell me,” Franklin said. “I guess the question just slipped out. It’s none of my business.”

“I figured you’d been wondering all these years. You should probably know. We’re good friends.” He had stated the last three words more like a question. Franklin jumped in to confirm.

“Yes.” He nodded while wiping sweat from his forehead. “Yes, of course, Wicasha. We are the best of friends.”

Wicasha rested his sweaty forearms atop a post that Franklin had just secured with soil. “Then I will tell you the story.”

Franklin took a respite from his toil and gazed at his friend with expectation. Carlotta seemed to sense a break had come, and she began nibbling on the grass that grew in a swath next to the field, her ears folded back.

“Have you ever heard of a winkte?” Wicasha asked him.

Franklin eyed Wicasha. “No. I haven’t.”

Wicasha seemed to chew on his words before speaking, as if he wanted to express himself precisely without pretense, as was the Lakota custom. He motioned for them to continue working. Franklin followed along.

“A winkte is a Lakota word that means ‘third sex’,” Wicasha said as they went about placing more posts. “A man who is a third sex is said to be attracted to other men in a way that most men are attracted to women.”

Franklin stiffened. Had Wicasha read his mind? He tried to steady his arm so that Wicasha would not think he was so utterly shocked he would hold back from telling him more. Yet the astonishment on Franklin’s face at what Wicasha might be alluding to could not be lost to the sharp Lakota.

Wicasha chuckled. “Yes, Frank. I’m a winkte,” he said. “I’m attracted to my own sex.” He hesitated, as if waiting for Franklin to speak, gauging his face. When Franklin remained mute, he looked away and continued. “I’ve known I was a winkte since I was a little boy, no taller than a pine marten standing on hind legs. In my band, a winkte was not frowned upon as the white man sometimes does. There were those Sioux who laughed, sneered, even taunted, but mostly it was tolerated. It was thought to have a purpose, a part of the balance of nature. And so, when I was sixteen, I was brought before our chief, and he decided to make me part of his large group of wives. That is just how things are with my people. I had no choice but to obey.”

Franklin worked in a trance. He brought the face of the sledgehammer against the post, but he no longer felt the vibration travel through his arm and across his shoulders and down his back. The sensation of Wicasha’s words was all that shook him.

“Do you want me to go on, Frank?” Wicasha asked.

“Yes.” Franklin swallowed. “Yes, please. Go on.”

Wicasha continued his story with only minor pauses between for their work. “I did not like living as someone’s concubine. The chief ruled the village. We obeyed his orders. The chief had asked for me, and I had to stay with him. For the next two years, I lived as his companion. Then I began to grow. I was a late bloomer, you might say, like the lupine that waits to blossom until fall, when all the other flowers have mostly faded. I grew tall, and my muscles expanded. I thought then that the chief would ask me to leave his harem since I had become larger than even him. I was wrong. He actually began to ask for me to sleep with him inside his lodge more often. His other wives grew to dislike me. They were jealous.”

They had almost reached one of the many narrow trails that wound toward the creek. Franklin was near sapped of strength listening to Wicasha. He could hardly believe his ears. Wicasha was—what had he called it?—a winkte. A man who liked other men in the same way most men liked women.

Rumors that the High Plains Indian chiefs took on spouses of both sexes had reached his ears in the past, but never had he heard it straight from a tribe member’s own mouth. Until now. It explained why Wicasha kept mostly to himself. And why he’d never frequented the Gold Dust Inn, where Madame Lafourchette took customers of any race or creed, as long as they carried plenty of greenbacks or gold dust. Negros, Indians, Chinamen, white men—they all frequented the whores. Even Franklin had, a handful of times. But never Wicasha.

Did Franklin have needs like Wicasha? Was it possible that he might be a winkte too, at least in part? For the past several nights, he had made love to another man, drunk only from passion, unlike that time with the renter in Richmond, when whiskey had taken him by the hand. He hardly identified with Wicasha’s history of his attraction to the same sex. Franklin had only felt such urges a handful of times, and only twice—that was, only with two men—had he acted upon them—the renter when he was sixteen and Tory Pilkvist, whom he had made love to at least a dozen times since their first time together four days ago.

Tory was different from the Richmond renter, of course. Franklin had already admitted that to himself. Uncertainty still poked around in his mind. Had desperation for affection—for love—forced him to turn to the closest human being in his life at that moment? Transforming himself into something he wasn’t? Had Tory evolved into a mere stress reliever from another war, the war waged between him and Henri Bilodeaux?

Were his feelings for Tory the same as the Lakota chief’s were for the young Wicasha?

Carlotta bellowed. They left her grazing by the trailhead while they carried armfuls of posts into the grove and filled the holes they had dug leading to the creek’s bank. This time, Wicasha took the sledgehammer while Franklin held the posts in place with his hand and feet. Between posts, Wicasha continued with his riveting story.

“As I grew with strength and confidence,” Wicasha said, “I began to wander more on my own. I would travel for days, taking old trails into Paha Sapa, the Black Hills, which the Sioux had taken from the Crow many generations before. I would follow the ravens and see what they wanted to show me. Sometimes I would find them guiding me eastward to the Badlands, where I’d fast for several days and listen to the spirits tell me my future. I valued my time alone. The chief knew about my wanderings, and he’d said he understood. Yet he had cautioned me to remain nearby the village. Winkte were given more liberty than the women of the village; some were even honored as shamans. We are men, after all. Not really a ‘third sex’, as the Sioux like to call us. Mostly, it’s just a term to explain the aberration.

“It was during one of my wanderings west of our village, north of what is now Spiketrout, many years before the white man had discovered gold in the Hills, when I ran into a fellow roving spirit. He was a Crow, about my age. We spied each other over the next few weeks but kept our distances. Our bands were instinctive enemies, yet I sensed we did not fear each other. Both of us pretended like we hadn’t seen each other. After a while, it was as if we were putting on a show for the other to see. I would do something to demonstrate my strength, and he would, in turn, do something to show his skills in skinning or trapping. I reckoned we were observing each other to see if we were friend or foe, despite our peoples’ heritage of warfare.

“Eventually, he was bold enough to approach me while I skinned the fox I had been tracking. I actually skinned it much like I had observed him doing on previous days. He cut along the hind legs and up into the rectum, causing less blood spill, something I had never seen in my village. For many hours we found ourselves talking in French, and sometimes in English, the only two languages we had in common. Often we used sign language to communicate when we stumbled over our words. The sky grew dark, so we decided it best to stay put until daybreak. We lay down on the earth by the boulders that had absorbed the day’s sun to provide us warmth. We kept a good distance from each other. But during the night, we rolled closer and closer. Soon, we were within arm’s reach. After many sleepless hours, we proved what we both must have suspected during our many days of scouting out each other. We were winkte.”

Franklin could not help but think of himself and Tory. The same scenario had transpired between them. Almost exactly. It had been at night, the darkness lessening his inhibitions, when Franklin had found himself staring down at Tory on his cot, so close that all he needed to do was reach out and lift him to his beating chest.

“We became lovers after that night,” Wicasha said, as if he were recounting the story of Franklin and Tory. “He was my soul mate, I was certain. We both agreed the spirits had brought us together and sanctioned our love. For many months, we would rendezvous between our two villages that sat many miles apart. The Lakota chief grew suspicious and one day had me followed. His scouts reported back to him that they had seen me with another man and that we had laid down together as man and wife by the boulders. When the Lakota chief learned of it, he banished me from his group of wives and said I was never to step foot inside his lodge. He permitted me to remain in the village, but no one could speak to me. The entire village shunned me, including my parents and siblings, of which I had at least ten.

“Unable to stand being around those who ignored me, I eventually found myself living in the backcountry, where me and my lover could spend more time together. When he learned of my predicament, he took me home with him to his village near Wyoming. I was delighted to see him night and day. But soon after I moved in with him, a Sioux raid on their village resulted in his capture, along with dozens of Crow women and children. I never forgave my people for taking him from me.”

For the first time, the need to respond to Wicasha’s narrative loosened Franklin’s throat, if only to lessen the pain that appeared in Wicasha’s dark face while he described his lover’s capture. “What was the name of your Crow, Wicasha?” he asked in a hoarse voice.

Wicasha stiffened. He seemed unsure about Franklin’s sudden bluntness but then composed himself. He lifted a post that had fallen and put it back into place. “Bua Ishte.”

“What does that mean?”

“Means Fish Eyes in his native Crow. He had wide, gazing black eyes like a fish. It was the first feature you would notice about him.” Wicasha seemed to reflect. He stopped momentarily from bringing the sledgehammer down onto the post. Resting the handle over his broad shoulder, he looked northwest toward the mountains, where beyond the granite peaks lay the Crow tribal lands of his former lover.

“I miss him,” Wicasha said as if he were answering the question of an unseen spirit. “But he’s living another life, most likely still a concubine of a Sioux chief after he was kidnapped by them, living in another world. If we met again today, we would not know each other. Life changes people. We take different paths, and those paths are what make a man who he is. We are not the same as when we had first met by the boulders.”

“So that’s why you took to scouting for the U.S. Army?” Franklin said. “Revenge for Bua Ishte?”

With his broad chest heaving and wide shoulders shaking, Wicasha laughed. “I reckon I answered your original question after all. Yes, that’s the reason. At least in part. After Bua Ishte was kidnapped, I still remained with his band. I became fluent in the Crow language, and eventually, I began scouting for the white man like most of my new brothers. We made très bon scouts, as the French would say. I had hoped by scouting that I might find Bua Ishte and take him back home with me, but I never did locate him.”

Wicasha and he had more in common than Franklin had ever considered, he realized, while tender images of Tory constricted his throat. Yet the notion of confessing to Wicasha about his and Tory’s own “rendezvous” still came with difficulty. What exactly would he be revealing?