Queering Benedict Arnold

Queering Benedict Arnold 6 Lathrop Bed & Breakfast, Norwich, Connecticut: July 22, 2012 By: Jake Preston

"Queering Benedict Arnold" is historical gay fiction. The story alternates between twenty-first century scenes in which Jake Preston and Ben Arnold (a descendent) investigate Benedict's life, and eighteenth-century scenes imagined by Jake and Ben. Some characters and allusions hark back to "Wayward Island" (in nifty's file on Beginnings). Jake Preston is the narrator in both works.

Most episodes are faithful to history, except for sexual encounters, which are fictional. You should not read this story if you are a minor, or if you are offended by explicit gay sex.

Benedict Arnold was an American military genius who was treated unfairly by jealous rivals while he lived. After his death, he was demonized as the archetypal traitor in history and folklore, but he was a target of inexplicable hatred long before his treasonable conspiracy with John André to surrender the fort at West Point to the British. Taken as a whole, "Queering Benedict Arnold" is an attempt to discover the origins of that hatred. Comments welcome: contact Jake at jemtling@gmail.com.

Nifty stories are free to Readers, but donations are encouraged.

In Norwich we visited a campground called Strawberry Park. It was crowded with RVs, too motorized for me and just the sort of thing that would make Ben crazy at night, what with headlights flaring and music blaring from car radios. Ben agreed that we should look for a motel in the historical district. When we got to 380 Washington Street, imagine our surprise to find the home of Dr. Daniel and Jerusha Lathrop, now functioning as a bed & breakfast. The long, rectangular, two-story riverside house, with sideboard stained reddish-brown, nestled in a luscious three-acre lawn surrounded by elm trees. Before we approached it, we went to a gas station where Ben changed into his Marine dress uniform. We figured we'd get better treatment if Ben looked his patriotic best. It was Sunday, so we had a choice of rooms. Ben asked if we could stay in the room where Benedict Arnold slept when he worked as an apprentice in the Lathrop apothecary.

"So you know your history, Mr. ... or should I say Lieutenant?" The landlady remarked. She looked apprehensively at the burn-wounds that made the left side of his face rough and asymmetrical, but soon she regained her composure.

"Arnold," Ben said. "Benedict Arnold, the fourteenth or fifteenth or sixteenth of that name, depending on how many Benedicts you're counting. Jake and I are tracking down the places where my ancestor lived. We're constructing a biography, based on family traditions, and archives in Calgary, and on the evidence of our own eyes."

"All but one room is vacant," the landlady said. "The Benedict Arnold room is available. It has only one bed, but it's queen-size."

"We don't mind sharing," I said. "We'll take it, ma'am, for three nights at least." I asked about the cost. The landlady ignored my question.

"You can have the room through Friday morning," the landlady said. "Beginning on Friday, all the rooms are spoken for." She introduced herself as Mrs. Eliza Jethrop—a colonial-sounding name for a woman whose life's work was to preserve a bit of colonial history. "It's a nice room, with a fireplace, but I have bigger rooms that might suit you better."

"Nothing could be better for Ben than Benedict Arnold's old room," I said.

"Tell you what, boys, my price is your company at dinner each night you're here, if the Lieutenant will allow me to take photos of him in some of the rooms. I'll want you in some of the photos, too, Mr. Preston."

We agreed about the photos, and dinner at 7:00, on the condition that Mrs. Jethrop would call us Jake and Ben. Mrs. Jethrop said the photos could wait until morning, when the light was good. She gave us a tour of the house from parlor to kitchen, six bedrooms on second floor, a seventh in the attic. I asked about the wide floorboards throughout the house. "The ones in the attic and on second floor are original," Mrs. Jethrop said, "but some of the floorboards on first floor are modern replacements. Fortunately, the previous owners kept to the original style of the woodwork, including the floors." The second-floor hallway was lined with framed photographs of distinguished guests who had stayed at the manor, and below the photos, placards explaining who they are and giving the dates of their visits. The master bedroom, painted robin's egg blue, sported a four-poster bed with light blue coverings. We counted seven fireplaces. We dropped Ben's rucksack and my backpack in the Benedict Arnold room. Ben liked the view of the back yard from the windows. I checked the door for a chain, and tried it out. "The door-chain is secure, Ben," I said.

"You boys needn't worry about privacy here," Mrs. Jethrop said.

"It's not about privacy," Ben said. "Sometimes I walk in my sleep, Mrs. Jethrop. Jake is always looking for ways to prevent me from hurting myself."

"Ben's been known to unbolt doors in his sleep," I added, "but he hasn't unchained one yet." We didn't need to explain that Ben suffered from PTSD, and that sleep-walking was one of its manifestations.

"The Arnold Mansion had eight fireplaces," Ben said, changing the subject.

"That place was torn down long before any of us were born," Mrs. Jethrop said. "It was replaced by a Victorian farmhouse, which itself was replaced by a modest rambler in the 1950s." She wrote down the address.

Our tour ended in the library on first floor. The shelves were stocked with modern books. Only one shelf held older books, mostly nineteenth century, but a few were earlier. "The Arnold library was sold off in 1760 to pay off some of the debts of Benedict III," Mrs. Jethrop said. "The older books are for ambience. If any of Benedict Arnold's books still survive, I don't know where they might be."

"Why, Jake, look at this!" Ben said, excited: "a complete set of Kenneth Keene's `Jackson Sands' mysteries set in Oberlin." He stepped to another column of shelves. "And here's Marianne Holmes: the Mike Peterson vampire-mysteries, set in northern Minnesota!"

"I confess to an interest in mysteries," Mrs. Jethrop said. "I've read all these books."

"I haven't read any of them," Ben said, "but Jake told me the stories."

Mrs. Jethrop looked puzzled. "You read these books, too, Jake?" she asked. I liked it that she called us by our first names, even though we insisted on calling her "Mrs. Jethrop" out of respect for her age.

"Jake didn't read them. He wrote them. Kenneth Keene and Marianne Holmes are Jake's noms de plume," Ben said with playful emphasis on the pretentious French phrase.

"Another addition for the Lathrop Hall of Fame!" Mrs. Jethrop exclaimed. She was thinking about the gallery of photos in the second floor hallway.

For two hours before dinner, Ben and I walked to the lot where the Arnold Manor had stood. It was replaced by a rambler, a style popular in the 1950s and 60s. (In some parts of the country it's called a `ranch style' home.) We took a downhill trail from there to Mystic Cove and the eighteenth-century harbor. The Lathrop Manor was the only surviving home from Benedict Arnold's time, but we enjoyed knowing that Benedict and his friends trod the same ground 250 years earlier.

Conversation at dinner turned to Afghanistan. Ben talked about the tense relationship that the U.S. Marines always had with the Afghans: "We were supposed to be advisors. Our job was to train the Afghans, but most of them were too undisciplined for military life. Whenever we got into firefights with the Taliban, it was the Marines who planned tactics and did most of the fighting. And our Afghan allies were divided. Some of them were cops, not soldiers, and all of the cops were corrupt and unreliable—always looking out for opportunities to steal equipment and skim gasoline to sell on the black market. The others were Askars, military men. They were more trustworthy than the cops, but most of them spaced out on hashish every night, and some of them skimmed gasoline and stole equipment, just like the cops. Neither the cops nor the Askars were from Kunar province, the Pakistani border region where we were stationed. They were outsiders just like the Marines, and had no idea which natives were Talib and which weren't. Most of them didn't care whether a village was influenced by the Taliban or not. Still, there was hope. Some of the Askars were sincere and loyal to the cause. All the Marines trusted Aziz Rahul, my counterpart lieutenant on the Afghan side. We became good friends."

"It was Aziz who carried Ben from the battlefield at Ganjigal," I said. "Aziz saved his life."

"I'm sorry to say I was unconscious—dead weight at the time," Ben said. "I don't know what happened, except that my Marine buddies told me later that Aziz pulled me out a fire that had started. Just before I was evacuated from Afghanistan, I had a chance to tell General Petraeus that Aziz wanted to become a U.S. Marine, and a U.S. citizen. I don't know if this will ever happen."

Mrs. Jethrop wanted to hear at least one `war story' about Afghanistan, so Ben took us back to August 20, 2009, the day of the presidential election, when the major rivals were Hamid Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah. "Our job was to protect the polling site in Dangam. We didn't like it that a week earlier, the Mayor of Dangam announced that voting would take place in a building next door to the central mosque. This gave the Taliban time to prepare an attack (which they did). Aziz came to me with a plan. He said we should wait until August 19 and change the voting-place—but he thought it would be better if the Marines insisted on the change, on grounds that they couldn't defend voters in a dense urban location. I got an interview with the Mayor, accompanied by Aziz as my translator. Next morning, starting at 7:00 AM, four Askars and four Kabul cops were on hand near to mosque, to redirect voters to the polling site—a feed store at the edge of town. Minutes later, one of the Askars was killed by a 107-millimeter rocket fired by the Taliban. The building was demolished. If it weren't for the Askars sending voters to the edge of town, dozens of Afghani would have been killed. We saw very few people voting, but by the end of the day the ballot box was stuffed with hundreds of ballots; in fact, there were more ballots than there were people in Dangam. Everyone knew that the election was rigged, and that Karzai would be the winner. Weeks later—after Ganjigal—the election was disputed, and thousands of ballots were thrown out. A run-off vote was held between Karzai and Abdullah. Karzai won that election, too."

"So much for democracy," Mrs. Jethrop said.

"The American notion of nation-building is just that, a notion," Ben replied. "Any people who really want democracy have to get it for themselves. It can't just be handed to them. It doesn't work that way. On election day in Dangam, the Marines saved some lives, but it's an illusion to think that we did anything for democracy."

"What did Aziz think of that?" I asked.

"He wished he was American, so he wouldn't have to deal," Ben replied. He gave me a glance that told me there was more to the story. He would tell me about it later.

"And the price you paid at Ganjigal..." Mrs. Jethrop's voice trailed off.

Ben changed the subject: "Reliving the life of my infamous ancestor, that's my obsession," he said. "When a veteran comes home from war, his nostos—his `return story'—is always a hypallage: he comes home with great expectations, but finds disappointment. He thinks he can pick up his life where he had left off, only to find that his former employer has hired someone else for his job, his fiancée has married someone else, his civilian buddies have moved away, or they are too busy with young families to spend time with him. If he has PTSD, even his folks might seem distant. Agamemnon returned from the Trojan War and was murdered by his wife and her lover, Clytemnestra and Agistheus. It took Odysseus ten years to return from the war, and when he got back to Ithaca, he found his estate occupied by forty young men who imposed on his wife (Penelope) to choose one of them for a husband. It's a perennial theme. In Faulkner's Soldiers' Pay, Donald Mahon, an aviator in the Army Air Force, came home from World War I to his small town in Georgia to find that his fiancée, Cecily Saunders, was dating other men and was no longer interested in him. His father, an Episcopalian rector, spoke of Donald in the past tense, as if he were dead already. Donald survived with the help of a new friend, Margaret Powers, whose husband, a lieutenant, had died in the trenches in a fragging. Donald was slowly dying. Except for Margaret, people around him wished that he would get on with it."

"At least you're not blind, or dying, Ben," Mrs. Jethrop said.

"Some vets are dead men walking," Ben said. "Like Paco in Larry Heinemann's Paco's Story. At first it seems as though Paco wanders from one town to another because no one wants to know him, but then, in a small town in Texas, when the owner of a diner gives him a job and finds him a place to live, he gives it all up to continue wandering. Some people, especially liberals, were shocked when Paco's Story won the National Book Award in 1987. They thought that the award was predestined for Toni Morrison's Beloved, and they were outraged that the winner should be Vietnam vet with a war story. That novel won its share of awards, but when Heinemann's critics spoke about Paco's Story in a dismissive way, as if the award was politically incorrect, they revealed their ignorance of the essentially tragic nature of nostoi.

"Then there was Bao Ninh, a North Vietnam Army veteran. After the war, he became a compulsive writer of horrific war-stories. That's the story behind the story in The Sorrow of War.

"I feel closest to Frank Palmos, the Australian journalist," Ben continued. "In 1968, when he was 28, he and four other journalists were ambushed by a VC squad in the Chinatown section of Saigon. Palmos escaped by playing dead. He ran away while the VC commandos were reloading their rifles. Twenty years later, he still suffered from PTSD and survivor's guilt. He returned to Vietnam to reconstruct the story. He was able to interview some Vietnamese who saw the attack, but he never found his attackers, so he was unable to achieve the reconciliation he was hoping for. He wrote about this in Ridding the Devils. The title reveals Palmos's first-hand knowledge of PTSD."

"You've followed this theme in your reading," Mrs. Jethrop remarked.

"I had lots of time to read, in San Diego," Ben replied. Mrs. Jethrop was astonished at the depth of his knowledge. "From war novels and memoirs, I realized that PTSD vets keep themselves sane by following an obsession. Some are compulsive long-distance runners, or bikers, or bicyclists, or wanderers like Paco. Others are compulsive writers. My compulsion is to discover the historical Benedict Arnold, to relive the life of my ancestor."

"And you, Jake, how do you fit into this picture?" Mrs. Jethrop asked.

"I've got a commission from a magazine to write some articles about Native Americans in the Revolutionary War," I replied. "We met at one of the battle sites at Saratoga—a moment of glory for Benedict Arnold." (That was the closest I got to mentioning our glory-hole meeting in a defunct outdoor toilet.) The mainstream histories about the Revolution say little about Native Americans, and when they do, they talk about Indians' in general, as if they were all the same. Some historians don't even mention Indians, as if they weren't there. Biographical information about eighteenth-century Native Americans is sketchy, so I'm visiting places that were important in the Revolution. As a method for fleshing out details, I'm basing each article on one of those historical places—but a book on the subject is starting to form in my mind. I'm thinking of my project as remainder-history', the story of the `remainder'—about people and events that were left out when history came to be written."

"That's very postmodern of you, Jake," Mrs. Jethrop said.

"Maybe," I replied. "I'm not much into theory, but the most important thing I learned from Ben is that Benedict Arnold grew up in Norwichtown with Mohegan friends, and later he was on good terms with the Abenaki, who had a history of war against the colonials. That's one reason why many colonials hated him. They despised him as an Indian-lover."

Mrs. Jethrop asked me for an example of remainder-history. "I've got one that's based on the Lathrop mansion," I replied. "But for the details, I'm totally dependent on Ben for his knowledge of family history."

That was Ben's opening to say what he knew: "Historians are silent about Benedict Arnold's life from the day of his mother's funeral (August 16, 1759) to the day he returned to the British Army in Fort Ticonderoga on March 30, 1760. That's six and a half months of absence from history. I can fill in some blanks. On August 17th, Joshua Lathrop commissioned Benedict to drive a cartload of medical supplies to the Army at Lake Champlain. Years earlier, Joshua had taken Benedict on this route as a teenaged boy, but this time he would act as the Lathrops' agent. Still, he didn't want Benedict to go alone. Red Feather wasn't available: the Mohegans required his presence (as their future Shaman) at a festival. The idea came to Benedict that Caribou Brave could accompany him, disguised as a colonial. Chief Benjamin Uncas agreed to the plan. The Lathrops liked it, too, since the boys would be driving through territory claimed by the Abenaki. What better protection for Benedict than the companionship of an Abenaki prince? Caribou Brave welcomed the opportunity to get out of Norwichtown. He was impulsive and adventurous, like Benedict.

"Both men had a talent for lateral thinking: what José Saramago calls pensamento oblique in his História do cerco de Lisboa, I said. "Lateral thinkers have a gift for unconventional solutions to conventional problems. They make enemies easily, because their ideas are unconventional. Had it been up to Daniel and Joshua Lathrop, they would not have approved Caribou Brave's temporary departure from Connecticut. But as a war-prisoner, Caribou Brave was paroled to Chief Benjamin Uncas, and he approved of the plan."

"History of the Siege of Lisbon," Ben translated the title of José Saramago's historical novel.

"Yes, I know," Mrs. Jethrop said. "We have many Portuguese families living here in Norwich. But was this a realistic disguise for Caribou Brave?"

"He was taller than most Indians, almost Benedict's height. Like most Indians he was dark in hair and complexion, but so was Benedict," Ben said in response to Mrs. Jethrop's question. "For the occasion, he rolled his hair back in a bun and streaked it with white powder—a gentleman's style in the eighteenth century. By contrast, Benedict seemed darker. If you looked at his face knowing that he was Abenaki, you could see Indian features in his high cheekbones, but when he dressed in colonial costume, what stood out was an intense gaze from piercing brown eyes. You look like a handsome colonial', Benedict said, and one whose honor is not challenged with impunity. That's the look we want at Fort Ticonderoga'."

"You make Caribou Brave sound like an Abenaki version of Benedict Arnold himself," Mrs. Jethrop said. And so he was.

Ben continued his story: "They made the ride with two horses pulling the Lathrops' best chaise, the one with the coat of arms. At the front of the chaise they flew a British flag on a staff—a sign of their military mission. In addition to medical supplies, they loaded the chaise with items from the apothecary to use as gifts: a supply of books and maps; cinnamon, pepper, sesame and other spices; tobacco in leather pouches; shirts, jackets, and boots; wine and rum in leather flasks."

"The apothecary seems more like CVS or some other American drugstore," I remarked—"unlike the pharmacies in Europe or Mexico, which specialize in medical supplies."

"That's true," Mrs. Jethrop replied: "Drugstores have their critics, but most people don't realize that from early colonial times, apothecaries were more like general stores. They sold all sorts of merchandise, especially foreign imports, in addition to herbal remedies and medical supplies."

Ben continued his story: "It was a four-and-a-half day journey to Ticonderoga. Benedict and Caribou Brave stopped at town taverns for meals, but at night they avoided taverns and towns, nocturnal places of thievery. For their encampments they selected secluded places off the road. When they got to New York, they camped near streams tributary to the Hudson River. There they could bathe and wash their clothes. The next day they wore fresh clothes while the old ones dried atop the chaise."

Some things were left unsaid in the presence of Mrs. Jethrop. Ben didn't describe how Caribou Brave got naked by the campfire and flexed his body. Caribou crept between the blankets while Benedict followed his example. Their mutual attraction was based on friendship and on their masculine profiles. "Nudité, o parure parré!" Ben exclaimed, reminding me that in Canada, everyone studied French in school, even in Alberta. Nudity itself was their ornamental apparel, decoration upon decoration.

"Benedict was only an apprentice apothecary, but at heart he was a Mohegan warrior. He felt the thrill of skin to skin, lying next to the naked form of Caribou Brave, a real-life Abenaki warrior. Caribou Brave felt the same thrill. To him, Benedict was a man of mystery, a man to be admired, mainly because of his obedience to the Mohegan Shaman, who had told him that he must learn the Abenaki language. At this point in time, the Abenaki and the colonials were enemies, fighting on opposing sides in the French and Indian War, but the Shaman—possessed of two spirits—saw beyond the present, to a moment in time when Benedict and the Abenaki would come together in history in some ineluctable way. Their first sexual encounter was an inevitable cog in the wheel of history.

If you asked Caribou Brave who started it, he would have said it was Benedict when his hand roamed the warrior's inner thigh. If you asked Benedict, he would have said it was Caribou Brave when he shifted the weight of his body toward Benedict. The truth is that desire and the surrender of flesh came to them simultaneously. Their kiss was an urgent necessity. Benedict's whiskery face scraped the smooth cheeks of Caribou Brave like a carpenter's application of sandpaper to the smoothness of cedar. Caribou Brave responded with a bit of rough axillingus: he kissed Benedict's pits and chewed them in a toothy ministration that defined their sexual encounters as a marriage of pleasure and pain. Nips were brought to erection with mutual pinching and biting; cocks throttled in fists; foreskins stretched like weasel-pelts; navels fingered abruptly; testicles squeezed or sucked in like acorns in the cheeks of a squirrel. No intimate outrage was omitted, but each was atoned by fondling and loving kisses. They knew that their destination was buggery. Nature demanded it, but was indifferent to the question of who buggered whom; her only requirement was that Caribou Brave and Benedict should share the same space and time in the cosmos. This could be done the easy way, with seduction, or the hard way, with force, no matter, as long as their physical union took place. For Benedict and Caribou Brave, force was seduction by other means.

Benedict knew from the outset that he would bugger Caribou Brave. He relished the thought of turning the warrior into his Abenaki squaw. Caribou Brave had other ideas, as Benedict learned when he felt the first insertion of the warrior's fingers in his portal. He didn't resist. Neither man spurned the touch of his partner. Benedict countered by groping Caribou's arse. "That's nice, Benedict, but I got here first," he whispered.

In matters of buggery Caribou Brave was a master negotiator, or maybe the exquisite surrender of flesh made Benedict comply when Caribou frog-legged him and pistoned his portal in a brutal thrust of shaft. From a farmhouse window a mile away, a farmer told his wife that he saw the bright eyes of a wolf on the opposite side of the barley-field. He could tell from its howl. But the werewolf that night was Benedict, responding to burns in his sphincter, registering pain in Caribou's ear while Caribou captured his rear in a frontal attack.

"I'm getting fucked by a caribou stag," Benedict whimpered. Lust flashed in Caribou's eyes. The thrill of conquest came at the moment of howling. The sudden thrill morphed to stern resolution in response to Benedict's prolonged whimpering and the helpless look in his eyes. Caribou claimed his prize. "None but the brave deserve the fair," he said, quoting a line that he had heard in the Lathrop apothecary. For a time that seemed endless to Benedict, the marriage of pleasure and pain was asymmetrical: Caribou enjoyed the pleasure; Benedict endured the pain. Had Benedict offered resistance, Caribou would have buggered him anyway. Benedict would have done the same, had their roles been reversed. They had Destiny to fulfill, and the course of Nature to follow.

Nature corrected itself, as it always does. As their intercourse continued, in diverse positions of Caribou's choosing, Benedict's pain was relieved with moments of pleasure. Eventually his pleasure was punctuated by pain, at moments when Caribou's rod rammed some secret space in his rectum that had not yet been probed, or so it seemed to Benedict. It seemed miraculous to Caribou, the colonial courage of Benedict and his transformation to a receptive lover. They fucked frontally. Caribou swung his hips from side to side. In the friction, volcanic spooge erupted from Benedict. He rewarded Caribou with a joyous kiss. Caribou flipped Benedict and humped from behind until his rigid rod melted in silken ooze.

"It must be breeding season for caribou," Benedict whispered while Caribou lay athwart his back and breathed in his ear. He felt the tickle of homuncular tadpoles wriggling in spooge in his rectum. Caribou's body on him, and simultaneously in him, was felt as an extension of orgasm, as microscopic images of Caribou imprinted his flesh from the inside.

Later that night, Benedict awoke to the sound of Caribou feeding wood to the campfire. He lay on his abdomen, and told Caribou to lie atop him to warm his back. He felt Caribou's cock harden in his cleft, and arched to facilitate his entry. Their humping was energetic and long. No less sensible to the sexual touch than his partner, Benedict orgazzed at the moment when his Abenaki warrior spooged him. "Second time seals the deal. It's an unwritten law of Nature," Benedict said softly. In the end he asserted their respective sexual roles with greater insistence than Caribou Brave.

Ben resumed his story in its sanitized' form for Mrs. Jethrop: "At Ticonderoga, Benedict and John Lathrop' (that was the name used by Caribou Brave on this occasion) presented gifts to the British officers in charge. They were given a tour of the fort. When they to the place where prisoners-of-war were confined, they spoke with eighteen French prisoners, and noticed two teenaged Abenaki boys, both wounded and needing medical attention. Glances of recognition were exchanged between the boys and Caribou Brave. Benedict saw this, though no one else did. The boys were prudent. They said nothing, and averted their eyes from their prince-in-disguise.

"Benedict knew what to do. He spoke with the Lieutenant in charge, and offered to take the boys off his hands. They look like they might die anyway', he said, but if they live, they'll be indentured as servants in the Lathrop apothecary. We really could use the labor. It would be a more economical way to keep them as prisoners. I'll keep them in irons, if you think that would be good policy'. After another presentation of gifts, the Lieutenant agreed, but said he couldn't spare the irons. If they try to run away, they won't get far', said John Lathrop'.

"The homeward journey was hard on the wounded boys. Benedict offered to detour into Abenaki territory, where they could join their own people. No, don't do that', Caribou Brave said. You'll give the game away. Besides, a trek through the forest would be even worse than traveling in the back of a chaise. Our task is to save two lives, not deliver two corpses to the Abenaki'.

"South of Poughkeepsie, Benedict turned off the road and took a rugged path to the farm of Pieter Van Heuveln. I'm going to have to give Pieter what he wants, but these boys need a place to rest, and they've got bayonet wounds in their sides that could use some doctoring', Benedict said. Caribou Brave wondered what he meant. To shorten a long story, Pieter, Benedict, and Caribou Brave carried the boys to the waterfall to cleanse their wounds and cool the fever that they had from fighting infection. They warmed the boys with blankets, while Pieter killed a chicken and boiled a stew loaded with vegetables. Pieter stitched the bayonet wounds with silken thread. Between Pieter's home remedies and herbal compounds remaining in the Lathrops' chaise, we dressed the boys' gashes. Benedict and Caribou Brave coaxed them to eat soup and drink water. The boys slept in Pieter's bed, while the men slept on the floor. You must stay here as long as the boys have fever', Pieter cautioned. `Otherwise they might get pneumonia'. They stayed four nights. Only then were the boys ready for travel.

This was the sanitized version of what happened at Pieter Van Heuveln's farm. In the presence of Mrs. Jethrop, Ben omitted what occurred on the floor, where Pieter lay between Benedict and Caribou Brave. Arms and legs sidled under a shared blanket. The thrill of flesh drove them to sex. After fondling and mutual fellatio in foreplay, Benedict suggested that Caribou should bugger both of them. Pieter agreed, at first because he had no choice in the matter, and then because he found it intensely erotic to kneel side by side with Benedict while the two men arched for Caribou. Usually in a threesome, one guy ends up sacrificing his butt for the good of the cause. Not so with Benedict and Pieter, who made a trial of Caribou's manhood while he shuttlecocked their palpitating arses. It was an awkward position for Benedict to orgazz, but when he did, the fragrance of jizz spurred Pieter and Caribou to lust for a strong finish. Pieter reclined with his head in Benedict's lap, and jizzed the room while Caribou buggered and bred him frontally.

Caribou had conquered two arses for the night. He took full advantage, and tried to treat them as equals on the floorboards of his nocturnal harem. In truth he was partial to Pieter, but his fuck-strokes could not be counted, so neither Benedict nor Pieter had any complaints.

Late in the morning, when it was warm enough outside, Pieter, Benedict, and Caribou bathed their two patients in the pool by the waterfall. Pieter redressed their wounds, and coaxed them to eat the chicken soup that he had prepared. When the boys fell asleep, Caribou invited Pieter to walk in the woods with him. On this excursion, Caribou told Pieter about his life as an Abenaki warrior. "I've slept with more than my share of women," he said, "but I've never known love until now. I didn't know how it felt to be in love, until now."

"So you're in love with Benedict?" Pieter asked.

"No, not Benedict," Caribou said. Pieter was puzzled. "When I saw how you stitched the wounds of those two boys, how you threaded their skin with silken thread without hurting them..."

"I'm quite sure it hurt. The boys were semi-conscious, and they are Abenaki, so they had the discipline not to complain," Pieter said.

"And when I see how modest you are, and so full of kindness, how could I not fall in love with you?"

On the way back to the house, Caribou Brave led Pieter on a detour to the barn, where they huddled in the hayloft. Through the boards of the barn, streaks of sunlight glowed over Caribou's bronze body as Pieter helped him get naked. Pieter had license to probe naked flesh with fondlings and kisses. Caribou surrendered to Pieter's explorations, which increased in intimacy while his erection bulged in his trousers. Caribou repeated his declaration of love.

"I love you, too, Caribou Brave, now that you've shown me who you really are," Pieter said.

"You were such a good sport last night, the way you let me bugger you, Pieter, I want you to be my first," Caribou said. "You don't have to be gentle. I know I was rough on you last night. I just want you to know that I'm offering myself to you as a virgin."

Pieter frog-legged Caribou and kissed the virginal portal. In barnboard- streaks of sunlight it was three or four shades of brown with pink tinges, and tight. The darker parts matched Caribou's prick, which was considerably darker than the bronze of his torso. Pieter tongued the portal in a powerful administration of analingus. He got naked while Caribou waited apprehensively.

"This is going to hurt without grease," Pieter said, but even as he spoke, he aimed his prick at the target.

"Bugger me anyway. I want to feel your strength inside me," Caribou said. Pieter applied spittle to the virginal button, and to his throbbing cock. He rewarded Caribou's courage with a thrust of his cock that made the Abenaki warrior regret his decision to admit an unlubed rod into his rectum. Caribou clenched his teeth and swallowed the howls that his spirit wanted to send to the rafters of the sun-streaked barn. It took several thrusts from Pieter to complete the penetration. Then he lay still to give Caribou time to adjust.

"I can feel your canal reshaping itself into a sex organ, just for me," Pieter said. "And I can feel your pulse beating wildly on my prick."

A strange sensation of fullness came to Caribou Brave. He knew he was in for a wild ride, but it was too late to turn back. "You've got such a big prick!" he exclaimed.

"Give me a squeeze with your butt," Pieter said. "Ah! That's it. Again!"

Caribou liked it that he could participate actively in his own defloration. "Bugger me!" he exclaimed, commanding Pieter to do what he was already doing, for the cock up his arse was restless and roved on its own, slowly at first, while Pieter tested how much his partner could take. When it felt like caribou-pussy had wrapped itself around his prick, Pieter moaned and made romantic protestations of love.

"Bugger me! Fuck me!"—Caribou's expressions of love were more primal, and uttered between clenched teeth, but music to Pieter's ears. Nothing else that Caribou could have said would have pleased him more. Caribou got what he asked for, though it cost him a groaning and more before the friction in his rectum gave way to hints of pleasure. When Pieter kept still, giving his partner a respite from pain, Caribou felt odd sensations in his arse; they registered in his brain as sounds of popping and crackling. "I think you just turned me," he said. Pieter was puzzled, but knew enough to alternate the action between heavy humping and gentle massages in Caribou's lacerated canal. "Yeah, you turned me," Caribou said when the anal orgasms returned.

Under the stress of getting fucked, Caribou was unaware that his cock went flaccid, but with its return to erection, the appetite in his groin grew gargantuan. Never had Pieter enjoyed such an enthusiastic lover, or a more powerful orgasm than the one he experienced when his spooge exploded into Caribou Brave.

The lovers embraced. Caribou's prick was still rigid, but he basked in the glow of brand new pleasures. "Give me a little time and I'll be hard for you again," Pieter said. "Next time it'll be easier, since your arse is well-lubed and refitted to the shape of my prick."

While they waited, they talked about their prospects for a future together. It's what they both wanted. This was more than sex. It was love. "I'm still a prisoner of war, even though I've been given a lot of freedom," Caribou said. "I must remain in Connecticut until the end of the war. But I think that will be soon. It's no secret that the Abenaki have grown dissatisfied with their French allies, because of their military incompetence. They lost Ticonderoga, and Crown Point."

"It depends on what's happening in Europe," Pieter said. "The decision will be made in London, and in Paris. Still, when the British Army drives the French out of Canada, as they will do, King George will have nothing more to gain by prolonging the war. The fighting in Europe is just diplomacy by other means."

"I'm a warrior, not a farmer," Caribou said. "But I guess I could take up farming, if that's what we must do."

"We could both take up trading," Pieter replied. "In less than three years' time, Benedict will turn twenty-one, and the Lathrops will set him up in business as an apothecary. The Lathrops are famous for generosity, and besides, he's their nephew. He'll be looking for a few loyal men to work for him."

Caribou's cock was still hard, but Pieter sucked it to throbbing firmness. He entered Caribou frontally, fucked gently, and frigged Caribou's cock. "I've heard tell that when you fuck a guy the second time, you've got yourself a lover," he said. His every move was intended to please Caribou. Still, he was in no hurry. He prolonged their love-making, to heighten Caribou's orgasm. When Caribou came, he moaned and cried out some words in Abenaki. Pieter didn't understand them, but Caribou's joy needed no translation. Afterward, Caribou flipped so Pieter could fuck furiously from behind.

For the next two days on the farm, Pieter and Caribou Brave stuck together as lovers. They didn't exclude Benedict from sex, but Benedict knew that something wonderful had happened between them. He gave them their privacy, as much as he could in the intimate quarters of a one-room farmhouse.

Back to the Lathrop Bed & Breakfast: After a shower at dawn, I got dressed and we started our morning ritual: rubbing ointment over the wounds on Ben's left side from face to foreleg. Mrs. Jethrop knocked on the door. "I've brought coffee," she said.

"The door's unlocked. Do come in, Mrs. Jethrop," I said.

"I didn't mean to intrude," she said, seeing Ben separated from nudity by a towel draped over his thighs.

"After all that's happened to me since Ganjigal, I don't embarrass," Ben said. "A coffee break would be nice." Ben drank his coffee reclined on the bed. He invited Mrs. Jethrop to help. She rubbed ointment on Ben's lower leg and moved up. I continued the application on his shoulder and moved down. "You can meet in the middle," Ben quipped. When Mrs. Jethrop's hands reached his thigh, he pulled off the towel and lay naked. She continued the application of ointment, and imagined his body as it must have been before Ganjigal.

"You know, Lieutenant Arnold," Mrs. Jethrop said, "my son David was a Marine Lieutenant. He was killed in Iraq. Yesterday was the ninth anniversary of his death. He was one of 49 soldiers killed that month. All the news that day was about the death of Uday and Qusay, Saddam Hussein's two sons. My son's death wasn't news, except in Norwich, and even here it was felt as an unwelcome distraction from the thrill of victory."

In the silence that followed, Ben ran his fingers over the wounds on his face. We knew what Mrs. Jethrop was thinking: "If only I could care for David in this way, I would give thanks to God!"

"I thought we agreed that you would call me Ben," he said.

"And I will," she said, "after you've gotten dressed. Until then, you're Lieutenant Arnold." Her hands moved from his thigh back down to his leg. "These wounds are your friends," she mused. "You've kept your youth and your strength."

Ben wore his dress uniform for the photo session with Mrs. Jethrop that morning. I dressed up as best I could too. We posed by in the Benedict Arnold room, and by the hearth in the parlor. We helped Mrs. Jethrop compose the texts she would print in the placards below our photos. "It's an honor for us to become part of the history of the Lathrop home," Ben said. We spent the day touring the harbor where Benedict III kept his trading-sloops, and the lands where Benedict IV once hunted, trapped, fished, and played war-games with Red Feather and other Mohegan friends. All that remained of the gristmill was a stone foundation, but the waterfall was there, and above it the cliff from which a mysterious lady had watched while Red Feather gambled his arse on the proposition that Benedict was too sensible to ride on the blade of the waterwheel while it rotated above and below, into the foam of the Quinnebaug River. He emerged from the foam Aphrodite-like, a deity of love whose province was Red Feather, but his mastery evolved into love between equals in the Arnold Mansion, while his mother practiced the art of holy dying in the library below. Every historical site that we saw confirmed the stories that Ben had told about Benedict Arnold.

In the afternoon, Ben got a call from his mother in Calgary. She said he had received a letter from Aziz Rahul. "Was it mailed from Afghanistan?" Ben asked. "No," she said, "the postmark is Jacksonville, North Carolina, and the address is Camp Lejeune." She agreed to send the letter by UPS, `next day delivery'. "It should arrive tomorrow, or the following day," Ben said.

That night in Benedict Arnold's room, Ben could think of nothing else but Aziz Rahul. He wondered what news the letter might bring, and marveled at the possibility that Aziz was living in North America.

"Don't get your hopes too high," I cautioned. "You must allow for the possibility that the letter was sent from Afghanistan, and reached you by way of Camp Lejeune."

To take his mind off this, I asked Ben to tell me what happened in the Marine base at Monti on August 20, 2009, the day of the presidential election in Afghanistan. "You gave me an odd glance, as if to say there was something you couldn't say because Mrs. Jethrop was present," I reminded him.

"Yeah, well, it was a pretty long day, and a longer night," Ben said. "It was the night I got fucked by one of the cops from Kabul, a guy named Ali Abu Khan, a stocky, burly man, maybe five-foot-six, hook-nosed and rather homely. It was blackmail. I did it to save Aziz.

"It was dark when we got to Monti. While I was in the shower-house, Ali Abu came to our hut and accosted Aziz alone. He said he had proof that he was getting fucked by the Marines. He threatened to expose Aziz for a queer if his demands weren't met."

"And what did he want?" I asked Ben.

He wanted money. $2000 US, he said. `You ought to be able to get that much from your boyfriends', he said. And he wanted a piece of ass from Aziz. He said he'd come back to our hut in an hour to get his answer.

"Aziz hunted me down in the shower. As we walked back to the hut, he told me about the blackmail threat. I've got $1000, but no more', I said. But if you let Ali Abu fuck you, that'll be his proof, probably his only proof. He'll use that against you, for sure'.

"You have to understand lower-class Afghani male culture. For a man to power-fuck another man, or preferably a helpless boy, that's more or less acceptable, it's `what men do'. Romantic love between men is a different story— if they get found out, they get stoned, or worse. And a guy who gets fucked, he gets stoned, too, sometimes even if he's been raped. I've heard of cases where a straight man was ambushed and raped, and then put on trial and executed because he got fucked. It's an extortion racket in which sex is used as a tool.

"I persuaded Aziz to let me deal with Ali Abu Khan. Ali Abu was quite surprised when he entered the hut and found me there alone. Why would you think that Lieutenant Rahul would be here?' I asked him. Your complaint is with me. Your Lieutenant has nothing to do with it. You know you can't touch me, I'm an American'. (This wasn't true, but to draw a distinction between Americans and Canadians would confuse the issue.) Even so,' I said, I don't want you making trouble by spreading gossip', so I offered him $1000. He accepted the money, but he still wanted a piece of Aziz's ass, he said. `Aziz doesn't put out ass', I replied. He was skeptical.

"Tell you what, Ali Abu, I'll prove it to you by giving you what I've given to Aziz'. When?' he asked. `Right now, in this hut. You'll discover that Aziz is a man; he does not play a woman's part', I said. The language I used filled me with loathing, but I was compelled to speak in terms that he could understand. Ali Abu looked me over. Lust flashed in his eyes. This was before Ganjigal, so he saw me as a greater prize than he had expected. I led him to our little bedroom and turned on the battery-powered lamp.

"I let Ali Abu strip me naked. My cock grew erect in his hands. He was curious about my foreskin, so I demonstrated ways to finger it. I fondled his arms, and asked him to take off his shirt. I praised him for his muscles and his burly chest. (This was no lie.) I told him I preferred the company of a real man, like him. I kissed his nip, while he pinched mine. I gave him some heavy-duty axillingus while he pawed my ass and fingered my cleft. I ran my tongue up and down his torso and into his navel.

"Ali Abu got naked. He was a corrupt cop, but he had an attractive body, even though he was a bit stocky. Our scene turned testerostonic, for me as well as for him. He lay on the cot while I sucked his cock. When we sidled 69, he sucked mine, as well, and nibbled my foreskin while he fondled my ass. Whenever his finger touched my asshole, I moaned and parted my legs to let him know that this was his prize. We forgot about our blackmail-dispute and concentrated on the serious business of making love.

"I knelt between Ali Abu's legs while he sat on the side of the cot. I sucked his cock, and told him to lie back so I could kiss his balls. He frog-legged and rested his ankles on my shoulders. It was as if Ali Abu had disappeared, except for his six-inch cock, his heavy-duty balls, and a mean-looking hairy cleft that led to his asshole. I gave him a bit of tongue on his scrotum, and sucked his testicles into my mouth, one by one. Ali Abu held my head, and guided it downward. He moaned when I licked his perineum. I returned my attention to his cock. I jacked myself to get up the nerve to do what he wanted. He sighed when he felt the press of my lips over his nether-lips. He held my head firmly in place while I kissed his asshole and tongued it.

"After his first rim-job, Ali Abu got romantic. When he pulled me up for a kiss, I felt whiskery cheeks scrape my clean-shaven face like sandpaper. I told him to lay face-down on the cot while I ran my tongue up and down his cleft and rimmed his ass from behind. We tried it standing up. I lay with my head at the corner of the cot while he lowered his asshole to my mouth. The next time he kissed me, I whispered in his ear, I want to be your bitch'. It took a while for my meaning to sink in. When it did, he smiled broadly and gave me a passionate kiss. It was the kiss of the bridegroom', the way a top kisses a bottom when it's time to fuck.

"Ali Abu was eager to fuck. I lay on my back with my ass propped on the pillow, and frog-legged. He finger-fucked me with lube. He stepped forward and fucked my mouth with his cock. He knelt between my legs. I handed him a condom. He wrapped it over his cock. I handed him the lube-tube. He pulled the condom off, and lubed his cock. Before I could protest, his naked cock was all the way up my ass. He flipped me and fucked me from behind while I arched. He sidled and fucked from behind while I raised one leg over his leg. He fucked me frontally again, and spooged my ass. He lay over my body and kissed me. A few minutes later he was hard again. He flipped me and fucked furiously from behind until he spooged me a second time.

"Ali Abu wanted to watch me jack off. He straddled my face, looking back on my body, so I could rim his ass while I jacked myself. I gave him what he wanted. As he left, I offered to see him again—mainly to keep him quiet and in check. I never saw him again. The next day, I heard that he was killed by a sniper. I thought this was odd, since the Kabul cops were not sent out on patrol. Aziz never spoke of it. It happened while were on patrol, on the cliffs above the Kunar River, somewhere north of Monti. His death was a mystery, but the news of it was welcome."

"What about the money, the $1000? Was it ever found?" I asked.

"No."

"Then it's likely that Ali Abu was murdered by two or three of the cops from Kabul. They killed him and spilt the money between them," I suggested. "In a manner of speaking, he died by his own greed."

Ben embraced this theory, happy in the knowledge that Aziz had nothing to do with a murder.

The next afternoon, a UPS delivery man brought Aziz's letter to the Lathrop Bed & Breakfast. Aziz had been in the U.S. Marines for more than two years. He had been fighting in Afghanistan, but now was stationed at Camp Lejeune. He had been injured, and was awarded a Purple Heart, but his wounds had healed. In a few more months, he would be free to live anywhere in America. "How could I not have known?" Ben asked me. "All this time lost..."

"Don't forget, Ben: Aziz was in the Marines. As a foreigner, he would have been watched closely. He was in no position to write love letters to you," I said. We made plans to fly to Raleigh, and drive a rented car to Camp Lejeune.

"I hope that you'll visit me at the Lathrop house soon, and bring Aziz with you," Mrs. Jethrop said when we departed. "You boys are always welcome here. You know, my son David was gay, too."