On the Trail to Moonlight Gulch

by Shelter Somerset

  Franklin, panting with anguish, stopped pacing and faced a barren corner of the cabin. Suddenly ashamed Wicasha had learned the truth, he formed a tight fist and froze in disgust. The rumple of Wicasha turning the pages of the letters sounded like chalk dragging against a blackboard. But didn’t Franklin deserve the humiliation? Appropriate punishment for entrusting his future to a periodical? Franklin wandered to a chair by the door, where he sat, slumped, clenching his fist between his quaking legs. Wicasha finally placed the last letter on top of the others and nudged them aside.

  “I’m sorry, Frank.”

  His words were enough to send a shock through Franklin’s system. The reality of his calamity descended over him like a thick rain, drenching him in despair. He hunched forward until his knuckles touched the floor. The misery no longer perched solely in his mind. He had shared his dark secret with another. Wicasha’s knowledge of the whole affair solidified his disgrace and hopelessness.

  He stood, rigid, and pushed the chair over. Heat burning his ears and eyes, he stormed from the cabin and headed into the far reaches of his land, past the storage barn and the field where the irrigation ditches still needed a good cleaning, to a hillock, where he stood on top and peered around his homestead under the cloudy afternoon sky. He heard the hogs jostle and squeal in the pen. The hens rattled. Wind parted the alfalfa growing along the edge of the field. What had at one time brought him joy now brought him gloom. He loathed his homestead. Loathed every inch of it, barbwire and all. The entire Black Hills had turned against him.

  Later that night when Franklin lay alone in his feather bed, sleep taunted him. He kicked at the sheets, clutched the mattress, fumed at the ceiling in his misery. He could smell Tory (or should he refer to him as Torsten?) enmeshed in the bed sheets. He balled his sheets and threw them into a corner. He cursed heaven for mocking him.

  He jumped from bed and paced the cabin, the wood floor cold and callous beneath his bare feet. Under a flickering gas lantern, he forced himself to reread the letters Thomas Persson had sent him—the ones Franklin had sent Torsten P. He had wanted to toss the bundle at Tory while he had sat in his wagon in Spiketrout, accusing the lying rascal of his crime. But why let him have the satisfaction of reading them? His tender expressions were meant for someone who had never breathed life, never walked the earth. And he had wanted to marry that illusion? Even worse, he had wanted to share a bed with Tory, the master of that falsehood, for the remainder of his life.

  A duplicitous villain had deceived him—Tory Pilkvist and Torsten P. One creature, cloven in half, had achieved the destructive undertaking of two.

  He screamed, bellowed into the night, revealing to the world his anguish in one continuous heartfelt roar. And after he stopped, his cry lingered, carrying over the Hills far and wide, riding on the wind rushing off the mountain peaks. Then he realized—no echo chased after his screams. Somewhere near Moonlight Gulch, a lone wolf was howling at the world. Franklin cried out again. His and the wolf’s sorrows formed into one vortex of agony.

  If Tory had shot him, the pain would have proved less severe.

  “I know how you feel,” Franklin shouted at the wolf howling into the night. “I know. I know.” Sobs stole away his voice. He broke down, his body convulsing. He wondered if he might die from the relentless spasms. He wouldn’t care if he did.

  TWO days after the horrible revelation, Wicasha informed Franklin that Bilodeaux and Burgermyer’s trial was set for Friday. When the day came, Franklin traveled with Wicasha to the Gold Dust Inn, where the trial was to be held. He shuddered at thinking he’d have to face Tory. During the trial, he did his best to avoid his crystal-blue eyes. In a moment of weakness, he glanced at him. He regretted the rash move as soon as he noticed his red, swollen eyes. Only briefly did he wonder where he’d been staying, what he’d been doing. Three hours of agonizing deliberations passed before the jury declared Bilodeaux, Burgermyer, and the third accomplice, Jack Parker, guilty of kidnapping, extortion, and bodily assault. The verdict failed to lift the desolation cemented in Franklin’s soul. Judge Blanchard sentenced Bilodeaux, Burgermyer, and Parker to the maximum—seven years at the territorial prison in Bismarck.

  Franklin left immediately after the judge uttered the sentence. He resented Wicasha when he told him on the drive home that he had already visited Tory on two occasions and had carried his satchel to him. When Wicasha tried to relay to Franklin that Tory meant no harm in coming to the Black Hills, Franklin silenced him.

  As the days passed, Franklin transformed his anger into energy to focus on his homestead. It was spring. Much work was needed to keep the homestead functioning. Wicasha, as usual for the time of year, stopped by regularly to help with the new crop of carrots, onions, potatoes, and green beans. At last, they cleaned the mud and debris from the irrigation ditches. Together they repaired the hole the heavy winter snowfall had left in the roof of the barn.

  Wicasha remained silent about Tory while they toiled side by side, even when Franklin had known he’d traveled back to Spiketrout after the trial, most likely to meet with the Chicagoan again. The stillness covered them like an itchy blanket. Days of choring left Franklin exhausted. He relished his burning muscles and knotted neck. But his bitterness toward Tory never waned.

  A grazing mule deer seemed somehow sinister with its large dark eyes. A rare black bear emerged from the woods like a demon from hell. Franklin got no satisfaction from cultivating the land, refurbishing the barn, henhouse, and pigpen after the long winter. He was sickened by the squeal of the newly born piglets and the sight of their greedy, ravenous suckling.

  Franklin resented Tory for snatching his awe for nature from him.

  He now even considered panning for the gold in the creek pool. What a joke that would be on Bilodeaux! Now that the bandit was imprisoned, Franklin would do what the greedy French Canadian had long wanted. What did it matter to Franklin if he succumbed to the greed, the wanting of more and more until it transformed him into a drunken beast who lived only for more easy-gotten loot?

  A part of his humanity had already deserted him anyway.

  He reread the letters Torsten had written him last spring and summer for no reason other than to see if he had missed something. Had Torsten’s mastery of deception blinded him from realizing the letters had been written by the hand of a male prankster? Through one letter after the next, all seven of them, he failed to distinguish between Torsten P., the woman, and Tory, the man who had robbed him of dignity. They even smelled like Tory.

  Seething, he kicked the letters across the room, where they lay scattered like leaves churned in a wind.

  He fumed, remembering how he had rejected the other responses to his advertisement. Dozens of others had written him. He wondered how different his life might be if he had responded to one of their letters instead of Torsten’s. A tear fell hot against his cold cheek. He wanted to toss the letters into the fire, but he held back.

  Why couldn’t he burn them? Why couldn’t he end that terrible chapter in his life and simply toss them into the fire and incinerate all his pain?

  TEN days after Franklin abandoned Tory in Spiketrout, Wicasha finally spoke to Franklin in his familiar straightforward manner. They were sitting outside by the fire under the nighttime sky after a hard day working the field. Franklin, leaning against a tree stump, whittled a spoon out of a fallen pine branch, while Wicasha sipped coffee at the roughhewn table.

  “Frank,” he said, setting down his coffee, “you once asked me why I turned against my own people in the war against the Sioux. I gave you my best answer. I was angry they had tossed me aside like an outsider and stole away my lover, Bua Ishte. Why did you turn against your people in the Civil War?”

  “My people?”

  “Southerners like you. Southern states surrounded you, yet you went against them, defended the Union.”

  “In Knox County, most of us sought secession,” Franklin said into the fire. The flames burned his eyes, but he welcomed the grit
ty sensation. “We despised the Democrats and their pro-slavery. If you opposed us, we considered you a traitor.” He glanced at the dark, starless sky and chuckled. “I guess even among outcasts, there are outcasts.”

  “But you were still surrounded by states loaded with people loyal to the Confederacy. Even the majority of Tennesseans loathed your Republican loyalties. You understand what it’s like to face scorn,” Wicasha said. “We both do. You have to remember that when you try to understand why Tory did what he did. A man like Tory will always live in an environment where he is an outsider, surrounded by those who detest him. He’ll always be peering in at the world from behind bushes. Where most people find each other out in the open, Tory must search in secret places.”

  “There never was anyone named Tory.” Franklin spit into the fire. A fierce hiss lashed back at him. “Or Torsten, for that matter.”

  “Frank, my point is, for Tory, growing up the way he is, well, there aren’t many ways for him to find true love.” Wicasha gripped his coffee cup, his eyes transfixed on the liquid. “You can find physical needs about anywhere—hurdy-gurdy houses, desperate soldiers, or cowboys lonely for women. It’s not unusual to come by. But love? That’s another thing altogether. For men like me and Tory, it’s a treasure rarer than opal stone.”

  They were quiet, gazing into the flames, listening to the whisper of the smoldering spruce logs, as if they held some secret to tell. A rush of wind off the eastern mountain peaks brought the lingering chill of a departed winter. The flames darted, cowered, reemerged stronger.

  “I know where he’s staying and what he’s doing,” Wicasha said on the tail end of the gust.

  Franklin sat up straight, his shoulders squared and rigid. “I don’t care,” he said. “It’s no matter to me.”

  “He’s working as a cook at Madame Lafourchette’s,” Wicasha went on as if he hadn’t heard Franklin’s protest, which even to Franklin had reverberated in his ears as hollow and insincere. “He’s unhappy, Frank. More despondent than you are. Mostly because he fears he’s made you unhappy. I talk to him when I’m in town. You’re the only person he asks about. He only wants a chance to explain why he did what he did. I can get word to him, if you want.”

  “No,” Franklin snapped. “He’s no longer any of my concern.”

  “Frank, I saw you flinch when I mentioned he works at Madame Lafourchette’s. You still care about the chikala wasichu. You want him back by your side.”

  “Don’t put thoughts into my head, Wicasha.”

  “I’d give anything to stand in your boots.” Wicasha stared beyond the fire, through the ponderosa bordering the creek, where the sound of gurgling water pierced the breeze. “To have a chance at love again,” he whispered to the wind. “What a joy that would be. Don’t ruin this for yourself, Franklin Ausmus.”

  Franklin snapped the wooden spoon in two with his one hand and dashed it to the ground. “Don’t you understand English no more, Indian? I told you, mind your own damn business.”

  Wicasha set down his tin cup on the table and stood with a crack of his large bones. “Suit yourself, Frank. But I have to say, you’ve become lousy company since you’ve left Tory in Spiketrout.”

  Chapter 35

  HOT grease leaped at Tory and stung his cheek. He jumped back, unaccustomed to the endless steamy work even after two weeks on the job. As he flipped the pork chops over on the grill and listened to the sizzle, his persistent worries hardened—he had lost Franklin. And yet, he believed, he most likely deserved the desolation residing in his heart.

  His father had spoken the truth. Walt Whitman, yearning for love by the moaning of poetry, was nothing but “Amerikanskt skräp.” Tory would die on the prairie alone, like so many before him who had ventured west for romantic and aimless dreams. Alone and, if he walked away from a job he found more intolerable each day, penniless.

  Madame Lafourchette paid him room and board. A stuffy old room in the basement, with only one window too high to look out or let in much light, and a cot that provided far less comfort than Franklin’s had. The only consolation was the two finches that nested by the window, waking him each morning with naïve chirping. He’d take the scraps he’d saved from the kitchen, climb on a chair, open the window ajar, and feed the birds like he had the pigeons back in Chicago. Little else lifted Tory’s spirits.

  Looking back at the past several months, Tory marveled that Franklin hadn’t learned the truth about him sooner. So often Tory had slipped with information only Torsten P. would know. He had lived half a year with his lies undetected—as precariously as Joseph when he’d perched himself on the twelfth-floor windowsill before his fatal fall—longer than he deserved.

  How horrible to mislead Franklin merely for his own selfish aim to lessen his loneliness. He’d chased Franklin for the same reason he had sought men at the cabaret on 35th Street in Chicago, only with higher stakes and a more elaborate scheme. Traveling one thousand miles by train and stagecoach, Tory had set Franklin up to fall into his hands. He had never imagined Franklin would fall in love with him, but hadn’t he done all he could to ensure he might?

  Tory did love him, loved him with all the power his body could contain. He wanted to tell Franklin he had meant his words in those letters, and that the subsequent sharing of their lives since September was as real to him as life itself. Another letter to him explaining himself, conveyed away by Wicasha, would only add a sarcastic insult to Franklin’s grieving.

  Wicasha’s visits were minimal comfort. He had tried to talk Tory into coming back with him to Franklin’s homestead. Tory wanted to, but the thought of facing Franklin’s wrath stymied his determination.

  “Does he want me back?” Tory had asked during Wicasha’s latest visit, his eyes probing.

  Wicasha’s downturned head and silence had said enough. Franklin was still fuming over Tory’s wicked stunt. He never wished to see Tory again.

  And Tory could not blame him.

  What he had done was inexcusable.

  Tory hated himself too.

  Working at the hurdy-gurdy house (a place he never even would have considered stepping inside seven months ago, much less work and live in), surrounded by foul-mouthed and nefarious men and women, seemed fitting for Tory. Just punishment for his actions. He took to his chores as a prisoner in a chain gang, living out his sentence.

  Madame Lafourchette, pleased Tory’s cooking had increased her business, kept him busy in the kitchen. “I actually got people stopping by just for the food,” she had said, laughing, a few days before. “Some don’t even look at my girls.”

  She had whispered something else to him, alluded to a proposition. “Just between you and me, honey. I’ve had a couple of the men ask about you. They seem interested in making a deal with me like most do with the girls.”

  Had the madame insinuated she wanted Tory to become a renter? He had tolerated the renters in the cabaret on 35th Street. Never did he want to become like them. Madame Lafourchette’s proposal had filled Tory with horror.

  “They think you’re awful pretty,” she had gone on. “It’s a steady income and comes with fringe benefits between you and your suitor. I won’t say anything more, I’ll just let you stew on it, and you can tell me what you think when you’re ready.”

  After nights of tossing and turning, Tory had considered consenting to Madame Lafourchette’s offer. But did Tory hate himself enough, after everything, to stoop to such a degrading means to earn income? He detested knowing such a practice even took place under his nose. But where else was he to go?

  As the pork chops hissed and spit at him with greasy rancor, he pondered if perhaps his destiny might not be to work as the lone male renter in a hurdy-gurdy house. Perhaps he should accept Madame Lafourchette’s proposal. What difference would it make? He was already enmeshed among whores and gamblers and drunks. Working as one of them, after all, might be proper punishment for his ugly betrayal of Franklin.

  Chapter 36

  FINALLY, the spasms
stopped. In their place emerged a complacent calm. A strange tranquility settled in his veins. Good feelings shivered down his spine and constricted his throat. Listening to the rain patter the roof as he lay in bed, his head cleared. The night became retiring, gentler.

  What had happened? Where had his misery gone? Had the rain washed it away, down the gully and into the creek?

  Franklin understood. His agonizing sorrows had reached so low, there remained nowhere for his emotions to carry him but out of the abyss. On the wings of rising emotions, soft considerations began to bloom. Had he meant his words when he’d cursed Tory for wronging him worse than Bilodeaux? Was it “subterfuge” that had propelled Tory’s actions?

  Wicasha had said Tory existed in a world of desperate loneliness. Perhaps he’d had no choice but to masquerade himself as Torsten P. Wasn’t it loneliness that had driven Franklin to take out a silly advertisement in that matchmaker periodical in the first place?

  And hadn’t Torsten P.’s words been the same as Tory’s? If Torsten’s letters had moved Franklin, then in reality, Tory’s words had moved him, too.