Wastelakapi…Beloved

PrologueThe Moon of Hard Winter (November) 1891 Turtle Crick Farm, South Dakota He managed to function in the ordinary hours, reclaiming his farm and working the smithy. But his days no longer raised the grand lust for life they once evoked. The appearance of moon glow inevitably conjured images of his Other Heart, the man 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 infected his mind. The simple extinguishing of his lamp upon retiring opened his splintered brain to the past, to reliving great love and crippling loss. Visions of the m******e at Wounded Knee and the fight 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 walked 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 handsome 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 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.