Nakoa's Woman
Authors: Gayle Rogers
THE
CAPTOR
CAPTIVATED!
He had lain with naked women before, but never had he felt a desire like the one that overpowered him now. He wanted to kiss and caress every part of her, and yet he knew that he wanted her too strongly to have her when she was not ready for him. Deprivation had long been part of his training to be a man, and now this was no different. While she slept he kept his lips from her, and he kept himself from going inside of her, but gently he caressed every part of her anyway, and the lightness of his touch and the continuance of her sleep was the sweetest agony he had ever known.
“LOVE, VIOLENCE, MYSTICISM AND SUSPENSEFUL ACTION SET AGAINST AN AUTHENTIC INDIAN BACKGROUND… A HAUNTING STORY OF LOVE!”
—
Burlington Free Press
Copyright © 2011 Gayle Rogers
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1-4538-8940-X
ISBN-13: 9781453889404
E-Book ISBN: 978-1-61397-690-6
Contents
The Second Kiss
For every man there are two kisses.
The first kiss is of the mother, the earth,
With her food and warmth and light for growing.
The second kiss is the golden kiss.
It is the kiss of the self,
And its fire and light and warmth
Is greater than all of the suns in the sky!
With the second kiss, the mother is needed no longer.
She is for the children yet crawling upon her surface.
With the second kiss darkness has light,
Coldness has warmth,
And all strangers are accepted.
Blessed be the dead. Blessed be the receivers of the second kiss.
They feel not with hands of clay,
But with the beating of the universe.
If they remained in our shadow,
We would hear them wailing for us
From the Wolf Trail itself!
Nakoa looked out upon the morning with new vision. Celebration burst within his soul and his only response was stillness. He had become a part of the complete, moving now in a force so beautiful, so powerful and beyond imagination that he was awed just standing in its outskirts.
Prairie grass lay all around him, shimmering and green from the winter’s snows. It was life; it was an extension of himself and of the miraculous flowing of every living thing. He wanted to kneel and weep. He wanted to lose himself in his recognition that he was an eternal part of an eternal whole. Napi, Napi, giver of all and receiver of all, had flooded his heart and soul. His body was a vessel to bear His wine.
Nakoa had found his Nitsokan, the vision that made him a man, a sacred sign from the sun. For days he had deprived his body of food and drink, and finally he had melted into the morning mists and had found not an animal for his Nitsokan, but a woman! He had never known a man’s sign to be a woman before; but she had come to him so clearly that there was no mistaking her. She was the other part of his incomplete soul. Her face had been as pale as the mists around them, her lips as red as if she had just eaten fresh berries. Her breath had warmly touched his face. When he looked deeply into her eyes he knew that she was a part of him that had been taken away long ago. She had moved seductively against him and when he felt the touch of her bare flesh he shuddered with an ecstasy he had never known before. She had been a white woman, the first white woman he had ever seen.
Now he moved noiselessly and dreamlike into the morning. All of the night’s shadow was gone. The prairie grass hummed in full sun, its pungent odor making him smile with pleasure. He stopped and looked toward the east. There the whites lived, beyond the land of the Crow. Suddenly, he knew that this white woman had been more than his Nitsokan, more than a mystical vision. She would come to him again from the white man’s land, and he would possess her, and what had been joined from the first would be joined again in the endless circle of reality.
Tears ran down his cheeks as he walked through the tall bunch grass toward his home. Near him came the sound of a meadowlark calling out sweetly, a benediction.
The Indian moon faded into the Indian sun, and as year after year passed, word from the white man’s settlements in far-off Oregon reached Americans east of the Mississippi. Fires burned in the smithies day and night. In the red shadow of the bellows, men pounded and hammered and sweated to outfit the wagons, horses, and mules that would carry them out into the silent prairie.
May of 1845 was budding green and warm with the promise of an early summer. To Maria Frame the whole world responded to the joyous calling of her own youth, to the singing of the blood within her veins. She was aching to move out into the great American desert, because it was unknown, and to her spirit, the unknown was a thing to conquer.
But to her sister, Ana, two years her junior, the Oregon Trail portended disaster. She had grieved at the selling of their farm in St. Louis; her mother’s grave had been too new for other feet to have trod her orchards, for other hands to have prepared food upon her stove. Still, she could not hold back her father, or Maria. It would have been like trying to stop the rushing waters of the swirling river that had carried them up from St. Louis, or like trying to silence the lusty shouting of the emigrants camping along the shore. To Ana, the whole world had become awry, with everything tilting as crazily as their boat had, as it made its way past treacherous sandbars and snags. But her father and Maria had not noticed the dangers of the river or the discomforts of the constantly flying water, the smell of the horse and mule dung, the cramped quarters of the boat. For them, this trip had been only the beginning of an adventure, a new life, which they anticipated with growing enthusiasm.
By the middle of May they were on the trail to Fort Leavenworth where they were to join a large wagon train leaving for the Oregon Territory. The Indian apple was in full flower, the maples already in red bud, and numerous little streams crisscrossed their path. The woods were deeply shadowed and filled with bird song. But still Ana felt an inner chill, a quaking that even this beauty failed to dispel.
“There are two thousand miles ahead of us,” she said to Maria.
“That we have never seen.” Maria’s voice was brimming with excitement.
“But there are only four small trading posts.”
“For us to discover!” Maria almost laughed.
“How can you be so happy?” Ana asked sadly. “You know that there is a war between the Snake and Dahcotah Indians. And the Oregon Trail crosses their warring grounds!”
“We will be all right,” Maria said firmly, and then looked tenderly at her little sister. “Father and I will never let anything happen to you,” she said. “Life will be beautiful for us, Ana.” She looked ahead at the cool ribboned trail and began to hum.
Ana frowned and turned away, wanting suddenly to weep. The beloved and familiar land was sinking irrevocably from her sight. Sensing Ana’s growing pain, Maria stopped her humming and became silent. “We should have stayed on the farm,” Ana whispered.
“Our life lies at the end of the trail before us, Ana, not behind us.”
“For me, this trail will end in the sky,” Ana whispered.
The train they joined was a great one, its one hundred wagons stretching across the prairie for over four miles. The day it first moved out, Maria was in a frenzy of delight. The first slow turning of the great wheels, the dust from the bawling oxen, the excited shouting of the children—even the cursing of the men prodding the mules made Maria ache to get rid of her dragging skirts and be out in the midst of the dust.
“It is beautiful! Beautiful!” she cried.
“It is hardly a painting,” said Ana.
“It is better than a painting because we are in it!” Maria’s eyes shone with joy.
For three hundred and sixteen miles the wagons struggled through the flat land. Then the Oregon Trail met the great Platte, and the wagon wheels cut into the Pawnee trail. Game became plentiful; small antelope came boldly up to the creaking wagons and watched them curiously, their white throats and soft black eyes just showing above the rank grass. Buffalo were seen, first a few lone bulls against the sky, and then a bull leading a few cows single file in a stately and deliberate fashion. The tall grass stretched ahead without end like a hungry sea.
In time the wagon just ahead of the Frames’ was emptied of all of its children, one at a time, but so quickly that they all seemed to have died at once. Then the mother who had held the new baby next to her breast was gone too, buried farther along the trail, beyond the graves of her children. The land devoured them. There were so many mounds freshly dug and left to the lonely sky and the hungry white wolves. But in the end it would make no difference, for the land would devour the wolves too.
Mary Ann
Age three
Died June 20, 1845
Willie Walker
Age eleven
Died June 20, 1845
Bertha Johnson
Age twenty-four
Died June 22, 1845
Maria saw the markings and grieved with Ana. She had not known Bertha Johnson. Had she been pretty? Had she been much in love with her husband, and he with her? Had she been happy? What might Willie Walker have become? Would he have been a pride to his father’s heart? And Mary Ann, who died at the age of three. How many more days might she have seen the sun?
And so the wagons were emptied of children, of men, and of women, and deeper and deeper in despair, Ana waited to die. From the high wagon seat she saw pieces of furniture that the wagons ahead left behind, a child’s chair, a woman’s bureau, a table once carefully waxed and rubbed, and now left to crack in the hot sun.
In July they reached Laramie. Ana looked at the fort’s high bastions and perpendicular walls in disbelief. She was still alive. They were all alive, she, her father, and Maria. They had survived the green sea. If they had lived to reach Laramie, they would live to reach Oregon, and now she was as confident of living as she had been of dying.
Maria was delighted with the fort and the tall mountains that loomed behind it. She traveled happily among the wagons near them, joking with the men and talking with the women as the cooking fires started to burn out. She loved to see the evening fires winking out in the darkness; she loved the smell of fresh bacon and coffee in the late dusk. Now there would be wood for their evening fires, and relaxed conversation without fear of the Indians. Serenity swelled in Maria’s heart. The worst of the trip was over. Someday Oregon would have cities and then Ana could have her wish of spending her days in the peace of an elm-shaded street.
Edith Holmes was well enough to leave Laramie by the spring of 1846. The fever and even some of the nausea had passed, and she and Jim and the boys could move out with the next train without her losing the baby.
“How do you feel now, Edie?” asked Jim. They were in bed together, husband and wife, married five years. Edith stiffened, as his hand touched her back. “Are you well enough; are you really well enough for us to leave the fort?” he asked plaintively.
“Of course,” Edith said sharply. “If any families go on, we’ll go with them.”
“I don’t know whether it would be right,” Jim said uncertainly.
“If you sit around waiting for things to get right, they’ll never be,” Edith answered.
Her husband sighed, and placed her head upon his shoulder. For a moment he was still, and then his hands moved softly across her stomach, and up to her breasts.
“No!” Edith said impatiently.
“You said you feel all right.”
“I don’t want that!”
“Damn it, Edie, you are already pregnant! When you aren’t you are afraid you will be, and when you are, you’re always sick! You aren’t going to have one of those spells now. It’s been too Goddamned long!”
Edith shuddered. His coarse hands were rough against the tender nipples of her swollen breasts. “You’re hurting me!” she said furiously, but she accepted his embrace. Then satisfied at last, he gave her a rough and affectionate pat and fell into immediate sleep.
Edith lay awake beside him. He was snoring now, his mouth wide open. He was satisfied. She was the one seven months’ pregnant with a swollen belly and a baby inside of it that flopped and turned all night long.
One of her boys cried out from under the wagon, and, alert, she realized he was calling her in his sleep. Even in their sleep they called her. Three boys she had had in five years of marriage, and now probably another on the way, and they all wanted her every minute. This was not what marriage should be: a snoring husband, the bone exhaustion, the nausea and having to cook, cook, cook anyway. How could she ever have let herself get pregnant again? She had been so pretty everyone had said—was she still pretty? She had been so little—little—and now she sobbed at her bigness, the coarseness, the sickness with it that probably never would end until she died.
Jim turned to his side and stopped snoring. Edith looked at the shadow of his back. Jim Holmes was her husband, but he was not a man. He was a moth that fluttered through life, without any purpose but just to flutter. He had never earned a living in his father’s business. Even before the panic of ‘37 he was just too indecisive to work for himself. In Oregon he said it would be different, with good land just for the taking, and with the boys to help him. If only they had gone on to Fort Bridger last year, Edith thought. They had reached Laramie too late to go on, even if she hadn’t caught the fever that had almost killed Ana Frame. She thought of Ana Frame jealously, for Ana was seventeen, and slim and beautiful. Maria Frame was nineteen, and she was beautiful too because she was unmarried. What would it be like to be Ana’s age again, and go to bed, and sleep all night long, and not have to wake up to the feeding of a baby? What would it be like to sit down and to eat and feed only yourself?
In the spring of 1846 there were only twelve families of emigrants at Laramie. Four wagons had remained behind the train that had gone on to Oregon in the summer of 1845. There had been sickness among them, and they had elected to stay at the fort, although there was no doctor or medicine within its walls. But there was more comfort in dying with a roof over your head than out on the prairie beneath the open sky. Eight more wagons had arrived in October to wait for an early start the next spring, and, if possible, the twelve wagons were to travel together. It would be a small train, but there had been smaller ones. Now the snows were melting; there would be an early and long summer. The men who had been confined to Laramie for so long were restless and kept looking out over the land. What was there, after all, that waited ahead for them? The prairie was quiet, the sun was warm and the grass was growing. Why not jump off early and beat the summer heat? Why not be in Oregon planting new orchards when the next wagons from Leavenworth were choking on trail dust?
Edward Frame wandered away from the fires and the voices of the excited men talking around them. What kind of a bastard was he to bring his girls out into a wilderness like this? Ana had been so ill. In her he had seen his wife’s face, still and white upon their bed, still and white in her coffin. If Ana had died, he would have believed himself forever branded for what he had done with Meg. He sat down and covered his face with his large rough hands. “You were already gone, my darling,” he said to his dead wife, and felt tears flow unchecked against his beard.