Trail Angel

by Derek Catron

For the past hour, Josey had pretended to study the elaborate wood molding and pilaster-framed doorways of Omaha’s finest hotel. He kept to the fringes of what he heard described as the social gathering of the season. The swirling motion of people and their clamor reminded him of a battle.

  The hotel staff created a field by removing the imported furniture from the dining room. A mirror hanging over the large fireplace reflected the light of the gas lamps lining the far walls, making the room appear large enough for a battalion. Waiters in dark broadcloth suits moved about like messengers. Instead of officers’ orders, they delivered trays crowded with flutes of sparkling wine.

  The important men of Omaha wore uniforms of Sunday-best suits tailored to conceal expanding paunches. They maneuvered individually or in small groups, more like guerilla fighters than a unit. Sherman’s junior officers, tall, straight-backed men with clean uniforms and shiny boots, opposed them. They guarded their commander’s flank, quick to block any unwanted incursion or to rally to his support in an engagement.

  Josey tried to distract himself with different thoughts, yet too often his mind turned to Annabelle. He was a fool for not anticipating her reaction to the news of the general’s arrival. The brutal campaign through the South had been necessary to end the war, yet many Southerners would never forgive or forget Sherman’s march. Maintaining his distance from the fiery woman would be smart, but he couldn’t forget how she looked facing down those fools in the street or how she smelled standing close to him.

  Thinking of Annabelle brought back memories he preferred to bury. The bad days in Kansas. The little farm along the border. The woman with straw-colored hair who lived there.

  Josey had been hunting that afternoon, seeking something to add to the stew pots in camp. He heard her cries before he saw her. He saw the men first. They were bummers and dressed for the part, scavenging for supplies. Their disheveled uniforms made it difficult to determine which side they were on. One carried a squawking chicken upside down by its legs. Two others held armfuls of sacks. The fourth, a sergeant, held the woman, her arm twisted behind her. He released her with a shove, and she fell to the ground. Her light cotton dress tore at the shoulder, revealing smooth skin tight against sharp collarbones. The men stopped when they saw Josey.

  “What’s going on, Sergeant?”

  The sergeant was a burly man with a stomach that hung over his belt and a mustache so thick and long he must have tasted it at every meal. “Just following orders, sir.”

  “Your orders include mistreating women?”

  The sergeant scowled, his manner betraying his resentment for cavalry. “Orders were to get what we can to feed the battalion. These Southern bitches will hide everything.” He pointed to a box by the door of the house that held a collection of candlesticks and flatware. “We found that buried behind the barn.”

  “Soldiers can’t eat silver.”

  The sergeant stared at Josey, his breath coming in heavy puffs that stirred the hairs of his mustache. They both knew the silver wasn’t going back to camp. Bummers who stole household goods shipped them back home as plunder. The sergeant wore a gun belt with a pistol in a covered holster. He moved his hands to his waist and looked to either side. With their hands full, the others wouldn’t be much help, and they didn’t appear in a hurry to make themselves targets. They seemed plenty aware of the two guns Josey wore on his waist and the rifle in its saddle scabbard at his side.

  With a heavy sigh, the sergeant said to the others, “We’ve gotten enough here. Let’s move on.” He looked back at the box of silver but made no move toward it.

  The woman looked up at Josey. Even with a dirt-streaked face and pain-dulled eyes, she was pretty. Josey wondered what else the sergeant might have taken if he had not come along. “They’ve left me with nothing,” she said. “I’ll starve.”

  Josey looked away. “I can’t help you, ma’am. An army’s got to eat.”

  The sergeant smirked as he led the bummers away. Josey dismounted, offering a hand to the woman. She ignored it, rising on her own with a grimace. She limped to her house, stooping to drag the box of silver inside, then closed the door.

  It should have been the last time Josey saw her. He should have never returned to the cabin, and over the last two years he’d lost track of how many times he wished that had been true.

  A commotion from the other side of the room drew Josey’s attention back to the party. A haze of cigar and pipe smoke hung over the room like a cloud of black powder. A cacophony of countless conversations assaulted his ears. Banalities about weather. Women’s gossip about the marriage possibilities for the plain-looking daughter of a merchant. Soldiers’ tall tales of valor. Mingled with the party noise, they sounded like battlefield commands. His throat tightened. His breath came in quick gasps. He put his back to the wall. Scanned the field for a line of retreat.

  The Colonel’s light touch on his arm jolted him. “Everything all right, Josey?”

  Josey swallowed. He breathed easier in the space created when a circle of admirers closed around Sherman on their side of the room. “Let’s take a minute,” the Colonel said. “We’ll wait until the crowd clears before talking with the general.”

  Before that happened, Sherman lost his position as the center of attention.

  A young woman in a black dress commanded the notice of every man in the room. Just as quickly, every woman studied the newcomer’s dark hair, tied up in ribbons to match her dark dress, and appraised the low cut of her gown. She spurned the hoops worn by the other young women so that the material clung to her slender figure. With her shoulders held back, her head high, the woman glided across the room.

  Directly toward Josey.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Annabelle began dying her dresses black after her brothers’ deaths nearly four years earlier. The subsequent loss of her husband left her no reason to alter her wardrobe. Her mother occasionally inquired when the mourning period might end. She still dreamed that Annabelle would remarry and make her a grandmother. The truth hurt too much, so Annabelle told her she felt no need to move on.

  “Black is a forgiving color for a woman enduring the privations of war,” she said when pressed on the matter. So long as she overlooked the sheen where the fabric had worn thinnest, the dark color concealed the wear of material too scarce to be replaced.

  Standing before a mirror in her room at the Herndon House, the sounds of the merriment downstairs drifted in from the hallway. Annabelle rethought her plan to confront the man responsible for so much grief to the South.

  On returning to the hotel late that afternoon, she found a crowd gathered. Blue-coated soldiers moved with purpose across the hotel’s wooden boardwalk and under the awnings that covered the first-floor windows of the Union Pacific Railroad office. The place resembled a camp quarters more than a luxury hotel. Townspeople in business attire turned out to watch in hopes of seeing the great man.

  William Tecumseh Sherman.

  The news staggered Annabelle. In the last months of the war, Sherman’s approach terrified all of Charleston. It was a relief when he marched instead on Columbia. On hearing how Sherman’s troops razed that city, Annabelle’s guilt at drawing comfort at others’ suffering transformed her fear into hatred for the man leading the marauding bluebellies. She wished then that Sherman had come to her city. She would have faced him herself.

  Now she had her chance.

  Her mother helped tie her hair for the occasion, and Annabelle was pleased enough with the results, which would have qualified as fashionable even in Charleston. As for the rest . . . She forced herself to look away from the mirror. Loss of weight when food was scarce made her cheekbones too prominent, like one of the stern-faced Indian women she saw in pictures. Annabelle had altered her dresses for travel and nearly discarded this one, for the décolletage made it impractical for what she imagined life to be on the frontier. It seemed fitting for this night, even though without crinoline the dress clung to her frame in an unseemly fas
hion.

  Entering the Herndon’s grand dining room, she knew better than to be flattered by the attention. Her attire probably scandalized the women, and the reaction of the men felt no different than the attention paid by dogs at the dinner table.

  As the room quieted, Annabelle realized the foolishness of her venture. What do I have to prove? It won’t matter to Sherman that I am unafraid. Eager for a friendly face, Annabelle gladdened when a voice called her name.

  As she crossed the room to greet the Colonel, Josey Angel at his side, she failed to suppress a smile. The old man possessed a charm that made it easy to forget he had worn Union blue. His eyes were kind, and he was quick to smile beneath his mustache. He reminded Annabelle of her late grandfather, who had a spritely way even in his dotage. After her grandmother died, there were jokes that the widower might court one of Annabelle’s friends, a notion no one could quite deny.

  The Colonel greeted her with a deep bow and gallant sweep of his arm. He had left his hat in camp and his balding head freckled with age spots left him looking older and frailer than when he sat in a saddle. “I was just telling Josey how even in mourning wear you outshine every lady here.”

  From Josey Angel, she received a curt nod and a soft, “Ma’am,” though his dark eyes never left her. He looked uncomfortable in a dark, loose-fitting frock coat that seemed at least a size too big for him. I wonder who loaned him that. Without his guns and in his borrowed suit, he could have passed for a young tutor come to teach in the town’s schoolroom.

  “Gentlemen,” she said. “Dinner clothes suit you in a fashion I would not have anticipated.”

  “She means we clean up good,” the Colonel said to Josey with a gruff laugh. “Tell her how pretty she looks, Josey.”

  Whatever Josey Angel might have said was lost in another man’s booming greeting.

  “Marlowe.”

  Marlowe?

  “You old warhorse. When I said I expected to see you in a rocking chair telling war stories to girls too young and too pretty for your likes, I didn’t think you would start tonight.”

  The words came in a torrent, and before Annabelle even registered his presence, General Sherman towered over her. He looked down and laughed, slapping a hand on the Colonel’s back, with a knowing wink. “Where’s your rocking chair?”

  The remark drew good-natured laughter from the circle of junior officers who trailed after the general, hyenas to his red-maned lion. Annabelle blushed at the implied compliment, then grew angry, whether at the man’s presumptuousness or her own reaction, she wasn’t sure.

  Sherman was a large-framed man, bigger than Annabelle expected, and filled with an energy that accelerated the pace of everything around him. She breathed faster. Her thoughts raced. When he turned his attention to Annabelle, she felt caught in the beam of lamp light.

  “Where are our manners, gentlemen. Is this fair lady one of the emigrants in your care?”

  Introductions followed. Annabelle forgot the names of the junior officers attending Sherman as soon as she heard them, and she expected similar treatment from the general. Instead, he made her the focus of conversation, speaking as if they were the only two in the room.

  Though just in his mid-forties, Sherman looked older, the lines of his broad forehead and face deeply creased. His hazel eyes moved restlessly about the room, even when he spoke. The constant motion made him look nervous, though he commanded the conversation and everyone in it. “I see you are in mourning, madam. Let me express my deepest sympathies for your loss.”

  Though perfectly mannered, the words failed to make their mark on Annabelle. “With all respect, I question your sincerity, sir, as you played no small part in the cause of my grief.”

  For a moment, it seemed as if all conversation in the room stopped. While the junior officers appeared horrified, she caught in a glance the tug at the side of Josey Angel’s mouth she now recognized as a smile. After struggling to keep her voice from quaking, Annabelle determined to hold her ground, setting her shoulders back and returning the general’s unblinking gaze.

  If her comment angered him, he disguised it well. His response was spoken so softly, the junior officers had to lean in to hear.

  “Would you permit, my lady, that a man can feel sympathy for the consequences of actions dutifully performed under regrettable circumstances?” His pace of speech slowed, lacing his words with more sincerity, yet he still spoke too quickly to permit interruptions.

  “War has existed from the beginning. Even the Bible is full of it. Some men die, while others are forced to kill. It has always been so. And while the former’s loss is complete, his suffering on Earth is done. For that, it is right we mourn. But we should not discount the latter, those for whom the suffering goes on even after triumph’s fifes are played.”

  Sherman looked past Annabelle as he spoke, and she followed his gaze to Josey Angel. Their eyes met, then his flickered away, but in that moment she saw across hundreds of miles and as many days to the source of a shared grief. She shuddered, the shiver stiffening her spine. What could these men know of my grief? My husband. My brothers. My way of life. She lost all of these things. Sherman knew pain, too, but war also endowed the man with fame and a sense of purpose. The general took her silence as permission to continue, though it sounded to Annabelle as if he lectured his junior officers.

  The conversation turned to the logistics of their journey, the opportunities to resupply at Fort Kearny and Fort Laramie, and the expectations of a peace treaty with the Indians. Sherman confessed his initial pessimism that the warlike Sioux would treat, but his latest report from Fort Laramie’s commander included news that all the tribes had agreed to talk. Annabelle interjected when he spoke of the additional forts the army intended to build along their route.

  “Won’t the Indians object to more forts on their lands?” she asked. “Wouldn’t that incite them to violence?”

  A junior officer stepped forward to guide Sherman away. The general shrugged him off. “The army can’t guarantee the safety of every emigrant who crosses Indian lands, but I wouldn’t send women and children into the territories if I weren’t confident of what we can accomplish there.” He ran a hand through his hair, leaving disheveled, spiky, red tufts. “The colonel and many of the officers charged with building the forts are accompanied by their families. I’ve even encouraged the ladies to maintain journals. I believe the story of their time on the frontier will prove of value to history.”

  The general’s tone conveyed an air of finality on the topic. Still, Annabelle couldn’t resist a final challenge. “If there’s to be peace with the Indians, why do you need to build the forts?”

  The general’s accelerated speech had affected her own manner, and the words escaped Annabelle’s mouth before she weighed them. The junior officers braced for an outburst, but the general’s manners held. Indeed, he smiled at her, his eyes alight like a fencer enjoying an unaccustomed challenge. He offered her a quick nod. It was as close as he would come to a bow, she suspected, or a concession of defeat.

  One of the other officers answered, a short, thickset man with a receding hairline and prodigious sideburns. He patted her arm as he said, “You don’t think we can trust the red devils, now do you? We need the forts to make sure they stay in line.”

  The others hastily agreed, but Annabelle noticed Sherman said nothing. The look he gave her was anything but patronizing, and she recalled that not long ago her family feared this man even more than Indians. How wise are we to trust our safety to his assurances?

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  The wagons headed out the next day, moving west toward the Platte River, which they would follow until the river forked. From there, they would follow the North Platte to Fort Laramie and the shortcut promised by their guides. With favorable weather, the Colonel estimated it would take six weeks to reach the outpost. Annabelle found it beyond her imagining that they could travel for so long and still not even be halfway to their destination. Yet the Colonel s
aid they would need another two months from that point to reach Virginia City.

  On leaving Omaha, Annabelle’s apprehension in abandoning everything she knew gave way to wonder at what she discovered. After weeks in town, everything smelled fresh. Even the air seemed lighter, bringing a crisp clarity to her vision as in moments after a rain. In one spot where the new telegraph line stood like a final tether to civilization, she counted more than a hundred poles. She tried calculating how many it would take to traverse the plains, but the numbers swirled in her head like driftwood bobbing among waves.

  Walking behind the family’s wagon, Annabelle’s thoughts turned to the sea more than once. The tall grass that surrounded their path rose and fell in the breeze like ocean swells. Just as waves’ peaks and troughs reveal themselves only once a boat is among them, the seemingly flat land unveiled a contoured terrain of rolling hills, thorny bushes and wildflowers as the wagons passed.

  When they stopped at midday for a meal and to rest the stock, Annabelle and her cousin Caroline collected flowers to press in a book. Annabelle couldn’t remember the last time she’d pressed flowers. She must have been a child. Back then, she treated her younger cousin like a living doll, dressing Caroline in hand-me-down clothes, forcing her to sit still while she brushed her straight, blonde hair, making her learn her letters. Though no longer a child, Caroline’s youth eased her adjustment to their new environment in ways Annabelle envied.

  The first evening in camp, the Colonel showed the ladies what he called an old Indian trick—ridding blankets and bedding of lice and fleas by spreading them over anthills. Annabelle smiled to imagine the horrified reaction among the ladies of Charleston on learning the necessity of such a chore. Yet that wasn’t the last challenge to Annabelle’s sense of decorum.

  Plainly put, there were no privies on the trail. Annabelle had known this, of course. What she hadn’t counted on was how the damnably flat and treeless terrain denied any sense of solitude. Annabelle hoped a solution would present itself, but nature conspired to put the matter forefront in her mind as the first day trudged on.