Don Travis: WASTELAKAPI… Beloved, a Guest Post by Mark Wildyr

Thursday, September 24, 2020

WASTELAKAPI… Beloved, a Guest Post by Mark Wildyr

dontravis.com blog post #408

A shout out to my readers from Hong Kong, who still led the pack last week. Russia had moved into second place the last time I checked, and stateside readers came in third.

This week, my fellow Okie, Mark Wildyr, is posting the preface and first chapter to his fifth Strobaw Family Saga series called Wastelakapi… Beloved. Wastelakapi is the Lakota word for beloved… ergo, the title.

End of Trail (statue)/ Courtesy of Enwikipedia.com

*****

WASTELAKAPI… BELOVED

By Mark Wildyr

We wither like weeds before flames.

Oppressors herd us to far patches of barren ground.

Drums fall silent in misery.

Flutes become forlorn.

Stanza from the poem, Echoes of the Flute, by Mark Wildyr.

Prologue

The Moon of Hard Winter (November) 1891, Turtle Crick Farm, South Dakota

He managed to fumble his way through the ordinary hours, functioning well enough to reclaim his farm and work the smithy. But his days no longer raised the grand lust for life they once evoked. At odd times, he found himself staring at his medicine bag without realizing he’d taken the tiny sack holding a bit of his umbilical cord and a lock of Shambling Bear’s hair from its customary place nestled against his sore heart.

The appearance of moonglow inevitably conjured images of his Other Self, who had been taken from him in the hours between the death of 1890 and the birth of the new year. Specters from that recent past crowded his nocturnal dreams and gripped him so firmly he feared ghost sickness had infected his mind.

The simple extinguishing of his lamp upon retiring opened his splintered brain to the past, to reliving boundless love and crippling loss. Visions of the massacre at Wounded Knee and the conflict at Drexel Mission made real the gunfire and blood and slaughter. The stink of black powder and the musk of shredded entrails came near to suffocating him. The crash of cannon and the bark of rifles vied with the cries of dying men, women, and children to haunt the shadowed corners of his bedchamber.

Better than ten months of the new year, as whites counted time, had run their course before he rose from his bed in the dark of night. The unsteady light of the candle he’d lit mirrored his shaky resolve. He paused, exhibiting uncharacteristic indecision. Eventually, he shuffled through the great room–still warm and redolent of spicy stew and yeasty bread–to enter another where the flickering glow of the wick’s flame revealed a striking young man sleeping peacefully. Even as the watcher’s blood heightened, his intent faltered.

He would have backed away and returned to his solitary bed had not the handsome sleeper awakened at that crucial moment. Recognition replaced confusion in those brown, soulful eyes. Then understanding, the man on the bed swept back the covers and murmured a single Lakota word.

“Wastelakapi!”

Beloved.

Chapter 1

Six Months Earlier, April 1891, Turtle Crick Farm, South Dakota

Winter Bird spotted the riders first. At his whistle, I reined in the plow horse and followed his gaze. The horsemen did not appear to be uniformed, so they weren’t army. That was good. The sight of six bluecoats would not have been tolerable at the moment. Recollections of death and mayhem were too raw. Still, half a dozen riders of any sort pounding toward the farm portended nothing promising.

After trailing Bird to the porch, I waved a warning as he picked up his rifle. We needed our weapons at hand but ought not to be brandishing them when this group rode into the yard. As we stood side-by-side on the porch, he leaned his Winchester against the railing near my Henry.

“You recognize them, John?” he asked.

“Nay, not yet.”

The horses were almost to the bridge over Turtle Crick before I identified Sheriff Charles Landreth as the man leading the muster. My stomach churned. He’d been holding a six-gun on me the last time we talked. The riders pulled up in a cloud of dust.

The sheriff, a lanky man with legs too long for the rest of him, cultivated a thick, grizzled mustache flowing out of his nostrils to conceal his upper lip. The lawman walked his mount close enough to drive me back a step. The animal was a beautiful white with black rigging. I hadn’t seen this ride before. Of course, I’d not gazed on Landreth in nearly six years. His badge had apparently survived Statehood as it now read “Sheriff of Gadsby County.” Honoring that crooked, English magistrate, Julius Gadsby, with a county named after him came near to making me ill.

The Sheriff nodded. “John Strobaw. Thought we was done with you. Heard you was back.” He paused, but I didn’t respond. “You’re like a lame gelding that shows up at every horse trade.”

The word “gelding” snagged my attention.

“At least we got rid of Brandt,” he said. “Or so I hear, anyways.”

My gorge rose until I realized he was deliberately provoking me. I’d never dealt this man a penny’s worth of trouble, so there was no reason for ending up on his wrong side but one: he could not abide Indians.

“How come you didn’t have the good grace to catch a bullet like Brandt?” he went on.

I stared rudely into his pale, mean eyes. “Shambling Bear’s time was up. Mine wasn’t.”

“Shambling Bear. So that was his Injun name, huh?” He turned to my companion. “Who’s this ‘un? Wait a minute, I know you. I run you outa town a couple a times. You that buck that did some trading with Mr. Brown down at the Emporium.”

Bird’s black eyes were hooded, but his answer was an easy, “I am Winter Bird.”

“Ain’t you supposed to be on a reservation?”

“I hired him to help out since my brother’s not with me now. The farm and my cattle operation are too much for one man.” It pained me to refer to Matthew Brandt as my brother. I wanted to proudly proclaim he had been my life-mate and lover, but that would serve none of us well.

“Don’t see no cattle.”

“I’ll be buying when next month’s calf crop’s on the ground.”

“After all the troubles, you got money for that?” As if to reinforce his point about the recent hostilities, his gaze wandered to the stone house looming over him. “Bit grander’n what stood here before the cavalry burned you out. I hear the family at Teacher’s Mead come and rebuilt it while you was hiding out on the reservation.”

The comment about “hiding out,” nearly swamped my self-discipline, but I held my tongue. The part about the house was true. My whole family had come to rebuild the farm buildings out of rock quarried near Teacher’s Mead. Unlike wood, rock doesn’t burn. Landreth’s next words brought me alert.

“You ever heard tell of a Injun called Medicine Hair?”

His mention of the name was a surprise. Not many white men knew of it. No use putting this off. I’d have to face it sooner or later. “Some call me that.”

“I figgered. Cause of that yella hair mixed in with the black, I reckon. Looks like big medicine to the heathens, don’t it?”

All my life, stray strands of my ma’s yellow hair had mingled with pa’s black, marking me as different. With a conscious effort, I moved my mind from the hate-filled man in front of me to the faint, dry aroma of creek bed cottonwoods riding a western breeze. The odor brought an appreciation of the dawning spring and the rich smell of freshly turned earth. I could almost imagine tender new shoots rising like new-born infants from mother earth.

“I hear you bossed one of them bands at Wounded Knee.” Landreth’s tone hovered between a question and an avowed fact.

“Then you heard wrong.”

“That so? You know a place called Rivers Bend?”

My stomach rolled. Landreth was better informed than I thought. And if he knew these things, so did the army. “That’s where I lived on the Pine Ridge Reservation for five years. And yes, I was head man there.”

He allowed an uneasy silence to grow before saying something strange. “You know the war’s over and done with, don’t you?”

The intensity of his voice gave me pause. “Yes, Sheriff, I recognize that.”

He shifted attention to Bird. “How ‘bout you?”

My friend shot a puzzled glance my direction before answering. “The war’s done.”

It seemed for a moment Landreth was going to pursue the subject but instead, he back-walked the white and turned away, nodding in Winter Bird’s direction. “I’ll check with the military about this buck. You’ll be hearing from me again if I don’t like what I hear.”

My friend was on the nettle as the sheriff and his men thundered across the wooden bridge. I was a little disturbed, as well. Landreth hadn’t made the seven-mile trip from Yanube City just to check up on me. Likely he’d heard there was another Indian on the place and wanted to make sure he hadn’t been given bad information about Matthew’s death. He didn’t need five men at his back to determine that; they were just to impress me that his interest wasn’t benign. The man’s hate ran deep, making me wonder at the cause of it. Lots of white folks didn’t like Indians, but Landry’s loathing had a keen edge to it.

But what was that baffling question about the war being done? And the comment about a gelding? Had he somehow learned of the man-love Matthew and I shared? I slapped the porch railing and tripped down the steps.

What did I care, anyway? This wasn’t living. Simply existing. Waiting. My heart waited to cease beating. My mind waited to awaken or perhaps go totally dark. My limbs waited to reclaim everyday skills. The whole of me seemed suspended as I drifted through each day accomplishing mundane tasks but tackling none of consequence.

It had been thus ever since the terrible, bloody slaughter at Wounded Knee and the battle at Drexel Mission where the better part of me, the bigger, stronger part of me, had been slain some four moons past.

Matthew Brandt–nay, Shambling Bear, since he died a warrior and not a farmer–fell along with hundreds of others to the murderous fire of the Seventh Cavalry but refused to die until we reached the supposed sanctuary of Drexel Mission. Why had I not been struck as I stood alongside him when a bullet tore into his chest? Why hadn’t I been taken instead of him?

After the Army’s indiscriminate slaughter of our people at that terrible place, Winter Bird and I had fought our way through a three-day blizzard to bring Matthew home. My shock at discovering Pa and the family had traveled fifty miles from Teacher’s Mead to rebuild the farm almost undid me. I’d last cast eyes on nothing but charred ruins after the army fired the place in late ’85 and drove us west to meet Bear’s destiny in a desolate gully on the Pine Ridge Reservation. The faith this demonstrated that I would survive the war was almost overwhelming, given what occurred, but there was no question my mother had been the driving force behind that effort.

What little interest I had in living each day was due to Winter Bird’s quiet strength and gentle encouragement. My friend had lost everything in those same tragic hours: home, family – his very way of life. While I had suffered a devastating blow, there were yet kith and kin to lend me support. Still, I seemed weighed down by my thirty-two years while Bird, who had not yet seen his thirtieth, buttressed me every minute of every day.

I, John Joseph Strobaw, endowed with the honorable names of War Eagle, Night Sky Hair, and Medicine Hair must surely stand revealed as a hapless weakling.

*****

It was a long passage, but I couldn’t bring myself to chop it off. I hope you enjoyed the reading. If you did, consider purchasing his first in the series, CUT HAND, from Dreamspinner Press. Mark likes contact with his readers and can be reached at markwildyr@aol.com. His blog is at markwildyr.com.

Thanks, Mark.

The following are buy links for my BJ Vinson mystery The Voxlightner Scandal. The next one, The Cutie-Pie Murders,

Dreamspinner: https://www.dreamspinnerpress.com/books/the-voxlightner-scandal-by-don-travis-11285-b

DSP Publications: https://www.dsppublications.com/books/the-voxlightner-scandal-by-don-travis-537-b

Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Voxlightner-Scandal-Vinson-Mystery-Book-ebook/dp/B07VL33P99

Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-voxlightner-scandal-don-travis/1132632844?ean=9781640809260

iBooks: https://books.apple.com/ca/book/the-voxlightner-scandal/id1473985039?mt=11&ign-mpt=uo%3D4

Google: https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=H3ilDwAAQBAJ

Kobo: https://www.kobo.com/ca/en/ebook/the-voxlightner-scandal

Universal Link: https://books2read.com/u/4AxPDo

Now my mantra: Keep on reading and keep on writing. You have something to say, so say it!

My personal links: (Note the change in the Email address because I’m still getting remarks on the old dontravis21@gmail.com.