by The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King- A Novel of Teddy Roosevelt
“Jessup, was there any hint of foul play?”
I scrutinized his brittle mustache; the chief coroner was unkempt.
“None, Commissioner. Not one bruise or laceration or break in the skin. It was like fishing a mermaid out of the sea. But I fear she was a troubled creature, perhaps prone to severe neurasthenia.”
His words hit like a procession of hammer blows. I didn’t want to have the Roosevelt colic, not at this death house.
“Jessup, I see a dead woman with a blue sheen. Where are any signs of this damn neurasthenia business?”
“Look at the eyelids, Commissioner, how narrow they’ve become, how they’ve lost their elasticity. That’s an indication of damage to the human spirit, a kind of rigor mortis of the soul.”
I was growing savagely irritated at this unkempt cockatoo. “Jessup, are you some metaphysician now?”
He fondled the ragged ends his mustache. “Commissioner, I deal only in clinical reports.”
I had half a mind to send him back to Philadelphia.
“You won’t include her on the paupers’ run to Hart. I want her buried at Greenwood. I’ll provide the plot.”
“Understood,” he said. “Another Jane Doe from the deep.”
I took Elliott’s cigarette case and the cache of billets-doux, which Mrs. M. had bundled into a pigskin pouch. I never signed for them—that was the privilege of a Police Commissioner. Still, I felt remorse as I walked out of Bellevue. I’d violated that woman, stolen her love letters.
I gave my roundsman the leather pouch. I had no interest in reading about Elliott’s romance. I would have burnt the letters in Bysie’s fireplace, with the pouch.
“You tell Jessup, tell him now, that this item must not appear in any ledger. The pouch is to be buried in Jane Doe’s box.”
I waited, stood under the wrought-iron balconies, with the nagging odor of the East River in my nostrils. I could see the madmen perform on the balconies, in the wisps of light. They must have been actors of some kind, players who had lost their reason. I couldn’t quite understand their garbled tongue. Perhaps they were speaking nonsense at Bellevue. Like dogcatchers bearing giant nets, their keepers chased them back into the hospital, but they would reappear at another balcony, as if they were irresistible somehow. I wanted to toss up some coins to them, but I didn’t dare. I might have been the only spectator, an audience of one. And then the roundsman returned, with a curious light on his back—the noisome smells had abated, as the fog lifted for a moment. His hair was utter gold.
“You told Jessup? Nothing written. No ledger.”
“That pouch never existed, sir.”
The sun was gone, all gone, and we were back in that nocturnal gray.
I had emasculated Elliott, gutted him, like a trapper, in the name of Roosevelt morality. And I, who had boxed, wrestled, hunted, and remade my pathetic body with an iron will, fell victim to my own wild thoughts. I was on another kind of ramble, voyaging somewhere. By Jupiter, I could see Mrs. M. marching toward the river without her shoes, steadfast, alert—this was no suicide, no leap into the currents. The woman had her own iron will, a sweeping panorama of bliss. Monstrous, yes, but not without a touch of divinity. She’d loved Elliott beyond the point of madness—that, that was a gift. She had turned her own body into a sepulcher with letters she must have memorized and recited in her sleep. And she would have them under the riptides, under the rowers’ oars to Hart Island, under all the suicide runs.
The patrol wagon, drawn by an old lame mare, had come through the fog. We climbed aloft, the roundsman and I, sat among nightsticks, battering rams, and other police paraphernalia at our feet.
The driver, a young sergeant in the horse patrol, bearing a handsome set of whiskers, asked in the gentlest voice, “Where to, sir?”
The Dakotas, I wanted to say.
“Ramble a bit.”
And we did.
MISS MINNIE SERVED BISCUITS to one and all, biscuits she had baked herself in her tiny Brooklyn flat and had carried across the ferry like one of Morgan’s own bank messengers. She couldn’t stop sobbing.
“We will never learn to survive without you, Commissioner Ted.”
She’d been my police “wife,” who kept the ogres from my door. I waltzed her around my desk until her crying jags disappeared.
“You’ll do fine,” I said.
I did not believe in sentimental attachments. I walked where I had to walk like a whirlwind, and then ripped that whole panorama from my mind. I had been that way as a rancher in the Badlands, as deputy sheriff, or Civil Service Commissioner, and President of the Police Board.
I wasn’t always fond of souvenirs. But it was Raddison who pierced my armor. I was loath to leave him and the flying squad. His wheelers had chipped in to buy their boss a parting gift, a nautical cap stitched in silver thread. I wore that cap with honor—and with ease. I’d never had a cop with Raddison’s magnificent bearing, a swimmer’s broad shoulders and the waist of a girl. I remember how we rode like banshees to that bridal shop in the fog and made a fool of Taggart, who had no one to arrest, not even mannequins in a window.
Still, I couldn’t avoid Taggart and his beady-eyed detectives, who serenaded me from my own stoop at headquarters.
He’s the lad who won our hearts
With his four eyes and white teeth
Terrible, terrible ted
I sauntered down the stairs and met Taggart on the stoop with his Pinks. He was smiling like a wicked jack-o’-lantern, wrapped in a silk scarf. “Ta, Mr. Ted.”
I bowed to him as uncivilly as I could.
“You, sir, are Morgan’s pet tiger. You will not grin the next time we meet. That is certain.”
I had a departing Commissioner’s final privilege, as I rode across to Long Island City on a police barge, filled with water cannons and firemen’s hooks, the captain tooting his foghorn in my honor, while the river roiled beneath us and sprayed my prize nautical cap in foam. I took the rails to Oyster Bay, and pedaled from the station on my final lap as Police Commissioner, on the lookout for the familiar gray wisdom of Sagamore Hill and its slanting roofs.
LITTLE TED WAS THE FIRST of our bunnies to attend a public school, a little clapboard one-room affair at Cove Neck, with sunken floorboards and a potbelly stove. I’d had scant time until now to meet with Ted’s classmates, the sons and daughters of local farmhands and silver polishers, several of whom worked at Sagamore Hill. Edith had been far more attentive than I. She’d gone to Bloomingdale’s with Baby Lee and had bought out almost half the toy department. She told the clerks that these toys were for public school children at Glen Cove, none of whom had ever had a toy from Bloomingdale’s; the clerks met for a moment and decided to chip into the bounty.
And my wife and daughter marched out of Bloomingdale’s with a bulging sack of toys. Edith wouldn’t distribute the treasure until I spoke to the children.
“The wilderness is all we will ever have,” I said. “Animals are our future—and our friends. If you find a bird with a broken wing, you must mend it.”
A blond boy, the son of a nearby farmer, raised his hand. “And foxes, kind sir, are they not our friends?”
This lad would become a lawyer, I could tell—another Velvet Bill in the making.
“I found a wounded fox, Mr. Roosevelt; he had escaped one of your hunting parties with a broken leg. I hid him in Father’s barn, mended him with a splint. I did not want to return him to the forest—and the fox hunters. I kept him, sir. And he is my friend.”
“Your pet,” I told him with a certain shiver. I could not lecture to this boy about hunters and the hunted, how his red fox invaded chicken coops, devoured birds and squirrels. I could see the perverse pleasure on Edith’s face. She did not admire my trophies, my kills. Neither did Baby Lee. Edith had never been mistress of the hunt. I was incoherent with this blond boy, babbling to him about game preserves, and farms where foxes were bred. It was his teacher, Mrs. Cummings, who came to the rescue and asked me ab
out birdcalls. I warbled a duet between a male and female sparrow, the male’s constant chirrup, chirrup, and the female’s brusque, almost belligerent chatter. Even the blond boy lost a little of his glumness, as the children imitated my birdsongs.
That’s when Edith opened her sack. She asked the children to shut their eyes, count to three, and express their own deepest desires.
“Skates,” said the son of a silver polisher. And Sissy plucked a pair of roller skates out of the sack. The boy nearly liquefied.
“A sled,” said the daughter of a carpenter. And Sissy pulled out a toy sled with a team of hand-crafted reindeer. Sissy had dolls and fire engines, cap pistols, and windup mice on wheels. . . .
“Mr. Roosevelt,” asked the same blond boy with the red fox in his father’s barn, “would you have something for my new companion? A toy, perhaps, that a red fox would relish.”
I had not been to Bloomingdale’s with Sissy and Edith. I had not ravaged the entire toy department.
“Oh, we have a perfect pet,” Sissy sang. She dug in with both hands and pulled an article out of the sack’s deep well. It was a silk spider on a string.
The blond boy was dee-lighted. “Thank you, sir. You are most gracious.”
I was rattling off about myself when I had a vision of the rescued red fox bounding across the classroom. The fox had a bit of silver on its coat, a silver spot, like a healed wound. It had the wanton, moonstruck eyes of a hunter, and a slivering black tongue. This room could have been the fox’s private henhouse.
But it did not harm the children. Its eyes were emblazoned on me alone. I waited, waited for it to leap. And then this renegade fox began to chirrup like a male sparrow, which was maddening enough, until it broke into human speech.
—Teedie, you will go from hunter to being hunted, it intoned.
I would not converse with this fox.
—You will wear a wounded flag, and walk like a blind man without your specs.
I could feel a tug at my arm. “Theodore,” Edith whispered, “you’ve been staring at the wall.”
The fox had fled. But I could not catapult myself back into this sunken classroom. I was lost, alone, in a land of chirruping children at Glen Cove.
PART THREE
CHAPTER 11
SINBAD
1898
MY LUCK WAS LEONARD WOOD. HE HAPPENED TO BE A Harvard man, with his ruddy color and bullish neck, a football player, and the President’s personal physician. A veteran of the Indian Wars, he’d served with the Fourth Cavalry and helped capture Geronimo and his renegade band, running them aground while he was still a medical officer in Arizona, put in temporary command of turncoat Apache warriors—these warriors crouched among the high chaparral and tracked Geronimo the way no cavalryman ever could.
Leonard had bristling blue eyes and would often box my ears back in the basement gym at the State, War, and Navy Building. Sometimes I felt like Captain Wood’s orphan child.
But he did have the President’s ear.
“Well, Wood, have you and Roosevelt declared war yet?”
“We don’t have the time, Mr. President,” the Indian fighter answered with that golden smile of his. “We were waiting for you.”
McKinley had the soft, sunken heart of a chocolate éclair, but he couldn’t linger too long, not while the Maine sat like a broken relic in the mudflats of Havana Harbor, with 260 casualties to haunt its prior existence as a battleship. Edith had always said I was Sinbad the Sailor, who sallied forth from adventure to adventure, outwitting all his foes, and Sinbad I was. The Secretary of the Navy and the Secretary of War were no match for Sinbad. I requisitioned whatever war supplies I could. The Cuban insurrectos were growing stronger with the matériel we gave them. The Spanish regulars rounded up peasant farmers—campesinos—and their families in the hillside and herded them into towns that soon became prison camps without a drop of potable water. It was the start of a great famine, with the regulars seizing whatever produce they could find. The farmers lost their teeth. And when our chocolate éclair of a President complained to Madrid about the prison camps, the Spaniards decided to declare war.
It was plain to tell that our Army was in a pathetic grip. The damn generals had been asleep for years. So McKinley grasped at the simplest straw he could find. America would have to scramble for an Army of volunteers, and he settled upon three regiments of cowboy cavaliers—sharpshooters on horseback who could help the insurrectos hurl the Spaniards out of Cuba. I won’t lie. The myth of the magic horseman had come from me. I had whispered the rewards of a cowboy cavalry as I wandered on the black-and-white tiles of the State, War, and Navy Building, that monolithic castle on Pennsylvania Avenue that looked like a monstrous stone and wrought-iron layer cake.
I was summoned to the offices of Russell Alger, Secretary of War. There he sat, a gigantic stuffed parrot with his committee of generals. “What’s this, Roosevelt? You’re going to abandon your roost in the Navy Department to command your own regiment of cowboys?” He paused for a moment and winked at the generals. “Well, we decided to give you that regiment.”
Having never been a soldier, I did not have the combat readiness to train cowboy cavaliers. I’d have brought chaos and dust balls to my own regiment. That would have dee-lighted the War Department. “I’d prefer to be second in command, Mr. Secretary.”
“That’s downright insane,” said Secretary Alger. “You won’t get another offer like this again. The Navy says it’s tantamount to an act of war, abandoning your own desk. The Department is in disrepair. . . . And who should command your regiment, Mr. Roosevelt?”
“Captain Leonard Wood.”
The generals snickered and rolled their eyes. “He’s the President’s physician, for God’s sake,” said Secretary Alger.
“But he served in the field,” I said. “He was awarded the Medal of Honor. Geronimo and his renegades are prisoners of war thanks to Captain Wood. He captured them using some of Geronimo’s own stealth.”
The generals snickered again. The fattest of them all, General Shafter, who suffered from the gout and had to sit with his swollen toe on a separate stool, had once served in the same desert with McKinley’s current physician and wouldn’t mock Leonard’s pursuit of the Apaches. “But those savages aren’t Spanish sharpshooters, son. We’ll be in the tropics, with boa constrictors, mosquitoes, and elephant flies.”
The generals squinted hard but saw that I wouldn’t relent. “Wood it is,” the Secretary said. “Colonel Wood, and you’ll wear the rank of lieutenant colonel . . . in your cowboy regiment.”
The Secretary was convinced that I’d stumble hard and fast and would be back at my desk in a matter of weeks. “You can’t turn rough riders into a regiment. It’s never been done.”
Fightin’ Joe Wheeler was the only one I respected among that whole lot. He was a little over five feet tall in his cavalryman’s boots. He had a wizened beard with gray streaks, and he wore a pair of women’s white gloves to hide his tiny hands. He’d fought on the Confederate side as cavalry master and the youngest general in the Army of Tennessee. General Joe knew how to dance on a horse, and here he was in his women’s white gloves.
“Roosevelt,” he said in his Southern lilt, “I suppose Wood will have you hike to Florida and pardon Geronimo’s Apache warriors.”
“Why in hell would he do that?” asked General Shafter, shaking his swollen big toe.
“Because,” said that bantam rooster of a general, “Injuns make the best damn scouts.”
The other generals barked in their tunics and brilliant white galluses, but Wheeler wasn’t wrong. The regiment would have to rely on Indian trackers and scouts.
“What about the colored cavalry?” the Secretary asked. “Ain’t you gonna enlist some Buffalo Soldiers?”
“Well,” said General Shafter, “Injuns are one thing, but we wouldn’t want to mix colored and white.”
“The Comanche feared the Buffalos,” said Little Joe Wheeler.
Shafter kept
wiggling his toe. “Still, they’re with the Ninth and Tenth Cavalries, and they’ll stay there.”
“Say,” the Secretary said. “Weren’t there black cowboys? Roosevelt, you must have met a few.”
I did, indeed. They were among the finest ropers I had ever seen, and they could have walked through a blizzard in their chaps.
Shafter stared the Secretary down. “You can’t have black cowboys in a cowboy regiment. It won’t do. We’d better leave our lieutenant colonel to his business.”
And I was dismissed by Shafter with a wave of his hand. These Army men had a club all their own, and I was an interloper, a stray pigeon.
Our recruitment office was in the underground labyrinth of the War Department’s castle, cluttered with meandering passageways and foyers, which also served as the recruitment office of Shafter’s Fifth Army, but his was a deserted pavilion. We had little else but cardboard signs for the First United States Volunteer Cavalry Regiment. The War Department vilified us, announced that our regiment wouldn’t last. The generals called us “a red ribbon of noise.” Yet candidates arrived from everywhere, one by one. Possible recruits found a path to our little dungeon. Some were half blind; others were octogenarians or were missing an arm or a leg. And I had to turn them away without much of a remark. “We’re looking for cavalrymen.”
“I can ride like the wind,” said the man with a missing arm.
But we’d acquired a sudden fame, as we captured America’s fancy. There were articles about us in Harper’s and the Nation, and in the jingo press. We were dubbed “Roosevelt’s Rough Riders,” even if it wasn’t really my regiment, and some of the riders weren’t rough at all. Reporters pecked at us like a pack of hens. I appeared in all the papers, and my lieutenant colonel’s uniform hadn’t even arrived from Brooks Brothers. I had to pose without my gauntlets and campaign hat, with the regiment’s crossed sabers insignia. We were marginal at first, basement bums and bravos. But candidates kept coming out of nowhere, covered in dust. We had ten thousand volunteers in two weeks. I sat like a deacon behind my little desk, within a welter of rat holes and warrens that belonged to the Army regulars. I couldn’t accept much more than one out of twenty volunteers. We had polo players from the finest clubs, quarterbacks from Harvard and Yale, five or six masters of the hounds, frontier marshals, mounted policemen from my bailiwick in Manhattan, cattle drovers, and cowboys.