The Perilous Adventures of the Cowboy King
Page 23
“Sergeant Bellows, do you know who I am?”
He blinked once. “Teddy Roosevelt, sir, of the Riders.”
“Well, I’m sending you back down to the field hospital. I’ll find an orderly.”
But Bellows twisted right out of my grasp. “And miss my chance to take Kettle Hill with the Buffalos? I didn’t come here to have beetles and tarantulas bite my ass.”
He took his neckerchief, knotted it into a sling around his wounded shoulder, and went back into the haze. I had my specs now. I saw Trooper Antonia with our flag, a dozen boys behind her. Antonia’s flag must have blinded the Spanish regulars. We arrived at that mammoth cast-iron kettle that must have been used for sugaring once upon a time at this hilltop hacienda. More troopers congregated behind that kettle. The snipers couldn’t get to us from this iron mass. We weren’t scarecrows, straw men. We kept hearing loud, metallic pings. The Spanish regulars were shooting at us from their stronghold in the red-tile fort of the hacienda. But all they could catch was their own damn kettle—on Kettle Hill. Then the whole hacienda began to shiver, and there was a groundswell under our feet, like a minor earthquake. A nitroglycerin shell from our dynamite gun must have landed on the hacienda; the red tiles began to crumble.
We charged the red-tile fort, with Trooper Antonia grimacing while she clutched our flag. We screamed until our throats were raw.
YA-HA-HAW!
The sheer ferocity of the Rough Riders’ cowboy call must have frightened the Spanish regulars, who didn’t want another shell from the dynamite gun to burst on top of their skulls. They dropped their rifles and fled. They left wine bottles in their wake. Their trenches were filled with corpses, splayed like tatterdemalions and rag dolls. Through the mist and wavelike ribbons of heat, we caught glimpses of Santiago emerging from its own mirage, with a shimmering rattle of red tiles and white, white streets, as if the Yankees had never come to Cuba. . . .
Yet the Spanish regulars were firing at us from the blockhouse and rifle pits on that hill across the ravine, six or seven hundred yards from the sanctuary of our kettle. They had their own big guns and sharpshooters. A Spanish regular had been creeping near the kettle in his blue and white coat. He had a bad case of battle fright, I imagine. I shot at the son of a bitch. I’m not sure what happened next. Suddenly the Spaniard crumpled up and crashed to the ground. My own orderly, Bardshar, winked at me through the feathers of smoke and little sparks of gunpowder.
“Nice shot, Colonel.”
Our own regulars were attacking the blockhouse on San Juan Hill and getting shot to pieces, so I decided to lead a charge down that ravine. But I let out a rip that was lost in all that smoke and thunder. I had to run back up Kettle Hill to collect Rough Riders and stray Buffalos here and there. The constant drum of the Gatlings had created a deafening roar that diminished every other sound. I felt like an idiot, leading a charge where no one came. I found Bardshar wandering about, with blood everywhere. A shell had exploded near him, and two Rough Riders had been hit by the fragments—it was their blood that covered his face and his clothes. He seemed like a random dummy as I shouted at him. He did a pantomime and pointed to his ears.
“Colonel, I’m a little deef.”
I did my own pantomime and pointed to the San Juan blockhouse.
“We’re gonna enfilade that cozy little nest of theirs.”
We were a crazy mix of Rough Riders, smoked Yankees, and white regulars. A bullet cut down one of my boys in the crossfire. “Medic,” I cried, but there were no hospital orderlies on this charge. The Vaqueros were still in their royal palms, and the orderlies wouldn’t go near a battlefield. We could not seem to make that final charge to the San Juan blockhouse. The Vaqueros had pinned us down.
“Sir, it’s a suicide run,” Raddison said.
“Maybe so. But we’ll have to risk it. We can’t shake the sons of bitches out of their trees.”
We ran into a blistering storm of bullets. Ripped to shreds, Trooper Antonia’s standard still flew like a regimental rag. But she never stopped once, never faltered. She used that flag as a lance, stabbing into arms and legs as she ripped up Spanish regulars and cried—Ya-ha-haw!—with a demonic grin that sent those regulars as far as they could from San Juan Hill.
Sergeant Raddison lost a finger in the skirmish, but that couldn’t even break his stride. One of the Pinks fell, and then another. The Vaqueros fired at us from their royal palms with impunity—those damn bullets of theirs landed like plops of soft silk in the rustle of leaves. Still, our Gatlings ripped across the blockhouse. And once our black and white warriors arrived at the crest of the hill, some with torn shoulders, others with missing pockets and welts on their backs from all the flying metal, the Spanish regulars abandoned the blockhouse for the safety of Santiago. Their officers had left big iron kettles on the stoves filled with beef stew and boiled rice; there were decanters and demijohns of rum—rum, a river of rum.
THE GENERALS IN SANTIAGO, who hadn’t taken part in a single skirmish, hadn’t raised or lowered a flag, wouldn’t surrender the city unless we fired upon them—it was a matter of honor, they said; and their demands were as surreal as the war itself. Shafter didn’t want to maim women and children with cannonballs. But civilians began to flee Santiago in anticipation of some big surprise attack. We did not have enough grub to feed them—our rations were running low, while the Spanish generals had shuttered all the markets and warehoused whatever food there was in their garrisons. We worried about a scourge of yellow fever—“the black vomit,” clotted with blood. The negotiations continued. More refugees arrived, dragging wobbly piles of furniture in little three-wheeled carts, with a grandma or two at the very top of the pile like some reigning queen in a ripped mantilla.
Shafter, in desperation, had Santiago shelled for three days and nights. He did not want it to become a city without roofs and without water, with bits of red tile in the roads—he’d have had to send in nurses to care for cases of yellow fever, and gravediggers to bury the dead, or the city itself would have become one vast graveyard. So he bombarded Santiago above the rooftops—it was the madness of a general laid up with gout. He still left a lot of debris. Meanwhile, the Spanish generals vanished with a mule train of gold. I broke into the garrisons and fed as many people as I could—all I could provide was rotting potatoes and blackened cobs of corn. I reopened every hospital, every clinic, often with Antonia Little Feather at my side, and her rumpled flag.
Raddison warned me not to enter Santiago alone. “We’ll be your honor guard, Colonel.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “There isn’t a Spanish regular within miles.”
“And what about the snipers, sir?”
“Sergeant, what would they do in a provincial town? They’ve hired themselves out to other generals, for the next war.”
And so I wandered into that dusty old town in my yellow suspenders and blue denim shirt—a colonel without the least sign of my rank. I marched through the narrow, winding streets, passing little shops with empty windows, squat little houses of stained stucco, with fanciful wrought-iron balconies, and arrived at a plaza with a white cathedral and a watering hole called the Café Venus, with plaster chips on its awning. I knew the fates had brought me here, like Philoctetes stranded on the rocky isle of Lesbos, but this island café was full of wild men, Vaqueros, and I had a misshapen knuckle rather than a festering foot, from the shrapnel I’d caught in the crossfire, charging San Juan Hill.
He was sitting there at the center table, still wearing his green uniform, guzzling rum, while the walls and little narrow bar of the Café Venus were decorated with souvenirs and relics, our souvenirs, it seems—Red Cross brassards, ripped campaign hats, and Rough Rider neckerchiefs with the distinctive polka dot.
“Don Rueben, I have the right to arrest you. You’re a criminal. You’ve murdered my men with your Mausers.”
He laughed. “And you come into my headquarters in your suspenders and your red mustache, without an escort.”
; “Is the Café Venus really your headquarters, señor?”
“Yes. Do you think I live in trees, Colonel? We should go into business together. You will never leave this town. Don’t you understand the business of war? The generals in Washington will say that you have mingled with the locals and have become infected with the black vomit. And Santiago will become your charnel house. You will spend your days roaming among the red tiles.”
“I could still arrest you, Don Rueben.”
“Not likely,” he said, surrounded by Vaqueros in the Venus Café.
I no longer knew what to believe. Shafter must have had grave news from the War Department. Even with his gout, he summoned us to Santiago for a council of officers, and I went back into those winding streets. We met in the governor’s mansion, a rambling little palace with boarded windows, across from the white cathedral. Shafter had a funereal look. A buckboard had to carry him from his headquarters in an abandoned sugar factory to a palace full of floating white dust. We were all sentenced to the black vomit, it seems. Shafter was whimpering now. I could see the sores in his scalp, red pockmarks that looked like little swollen mouths.
“We must either stay here, in Santiago, or move into the mountains,” he mumbled. I had to strain to catch his words. “Lads, the Army will not release us. We have become worse than vultures. We are not considered safe.”
As the one maverick and irregular at the council, I was enlisted to write a letter to General Shafter that could be circulated among ourselves and used later as live ammunition.
“Make it pungent,” Shafter said. “Make it wise—and very dire.”
I did have help from Winters-White, whose pen had all the craft of a poisonous snake.
General Shafter:
Our clothes are in ribbons and rags. My officers do not possess a decent pair of socks. Our boys sit idly in their dog-tents, with nothing to do. Each day the torrential rains and blistering sun sap our energy. There’s no quinine—nothing. No supplies. Our Gatlings have gone to rust. The Red Cross nurses have vanished with all their medical kits and hospital cots. The last padre has left. We will not survive Santiago. . . .
The letter was leaked to the press, of course. And within three days our invasion force of regulars, Buffalos, and Rough Riders was ordered to assemble and sail for home. We’d gone from saviors to stumblebums in less than a month.
CHAPTER 13
MONTAUK POINT
1898
REPORTERS GRABBED AT THE ROUGH RIDERS, GAUNT AS they were. And they grabbed at me.
“How are you, Colonel?”
“Disgracefully well.”
I’d thrived in the tropics.
“Will you be our next Governor?”
I knew that Boss Platt and his cronies were desperate for a white knight to stave off a Democratic landslide in November. They had none. And I wasn’t in the mood to banter. I had to wait until the Miami’s decks were cleared, and I walked a mile and a half with my boys to the “detention camp,” and a detention camp it was, with guards at the gate. I’d asked my wife not to come with the bunnies to meet the Miami; I wasn’t certain when we would dock. And I didn’t want her near all the brouhaha about politics and war atrocities—what we did to the Spanish regulars, and what the regulars in their conical hats did to us.
Nothing pleased me more than the fact that the Rough Riders had their own “street” at the camp, a ragged carousel of tents, but there was little to chew on at the mess hall, as if we were still somewhere in the Cuban jungle. I had to order eggs, milk, and oranges from a local market. And then I had to wheedle a bit to get around this ridiculous quarantine. I was able to convince a young officer to place a cryptic call to the druggist at Oyster Bay—we didn’t have a telephone at Sagamore Hill.
“He’s to have his boy bicycle up the hill to Mrs. Roosevelt and tell her the coast is clear.”
And this same kind lieutenant, who might have been jeopardizing his own future, met Edith at the gate the very next morning and smuggled me out of camp in one of his raincoats. There was a Red Cross hut across the road, with a little lunchroom. And that’s where we had our secret rendezvous, in plain sight of the Red Cross. She wore a veil of white tulle. I didn’t know whether the veil was in remembrance of her soldier husband, or the boys we lost in Cuba. I clasped her hand. She was trembling.
“I wasn’t certain I would ever see you again. . . . ”
“But I’m your Sinbad. And Sinbad is a survivor.”
She unclasped her hand with a slightly violent gesture and put it to my mouth. “Don’t say that, darling. We cannot always reside in a fairy tale.”
We had so little time. The lieutenant had granted us a reprieve of half an hour. Then he would be replaced by another duty officer. And I would be denounced as a deserter.
“How are the bunnies?”
“As lonely for you as I am. I did not dare break down—or that terrible suspense would sweep over me and I would have been helpless against it. I am helpless now.”
I undid her veil. She clasped it again. She did not want me to remember her with puffy eyes.
“Talk to me,” my wife said with a whimper. “I so love the sound of your voice.”
I prattled on about my grievances. “Shafter has recommended me for the Medal of Honor. I’ll never get it. I’m persona non grata at the War Department. That’s why we’re all here in this bloody camp. There is no yellow fever epidemic among the troops, and there never was.”
“And your Rough Riders?”
“Bitten to the bone. Half of them are like skeletons, Edie, and the other half . . . I worry what will happen after they’re mustered out. There’s been so much attention, so much press. They can’t all be—”
“Sinbad.”
Cash was pouring in from wealthy friends at the Boone & Crockett Club. I intended to parcel it out with a fierce devotion—to Rough Rider widows, and to the Riders themselves, after the bravura of the regiment began to unravel, and they were cowpunchers again on some nondescript ranch, with tall tales to tell—everyone had a tall tale.
I had to return to the detention camp. But Edith clung to the Red Cross, and volunteered as a nurses’ assistant at the camp hospital for the next four days. I did not have to worry about her quarters. She slept with other nurses in a Red Cross hut. And even a quarantined colonel could visit his own wife at the hospital.
It was a dismal hugger-mugger of shacks and tents, with a shortage of cots, so that the sick and the wounded had to sleep on a “kit” of crumpled blankets. Pale as she was, Edith had to wipe each soldier’s forehead with a damp cloth and feed him chicken broth. The head nurse had flaming red hair and freckles the size of walnuts.
“I cannot nourish these men—I cannot.”
I probed her. “What do you need, Sister Nell?”
Her eyes lit with a kind of delirium. “Eggnogs,” she said. “And we have no eggs or milk or cream—or bourbon.”
“Well,” says I, “there’s always a simple solution.”
And the next day an enormous tureen with a silver ladle arrived, and a hundred flutes packed in straw, with a note dangling from a piece of wire:
DELMONICO’S EGGNOG SUPREME
DIET TENT
MONTAUK
Nurse Nell, with her face full of freckles, basked in the glory of that tureen. She herself had a bit too much bourbon. And we had to plunk her down in a chair. I devoured the moments I had with Edie, wandering from blanket-bunk to blanket-bunk, with Rough Riders and Army regulars. They were all curious about Sagamore Hill.
“Do ya grow corn, Colonel?”
“Yes, it’s a working farm.”
“And do ya till the soil, Mrs. Colonel, ma’am?”
“Sometimes,” Edie said. “In our garden. But we do have a resident farmer.”
Our words seemed to comfort them in this rag-and-bone hospital. But I couldn’t escape politics, not even in Sister Nell’s Diet Tent.
“Don’t disappoint us, hear? Run for Governor.”
&
nbsp; Edie wanted me to retire to Sagamore Hill and write my books. “You’ve had enough of Boss Platt for one lifetime.”
“And he’s had enough of me. I don’t intend to make a pilgrimage to his Amen Corner when the quarantine is over.”
My wife had to get back to our bunnies. We hadn’t spent a single night in my tent. I couldn’t even burgle a kiss.
“Darling,” she said, “it’s like Tranquillity. When you courted me in the icehouse.”
“And got walloped for all my efforts.”
“Shame on you—you didn’t have the mind or the willpower to engage yourself to a girl.”
“You were fourteen,” I said.
“And no less a woman than I am now.”
An Army wagon then drove her to the railroad station. And I marched back across this madness that the War Department had designed for us—a Sahara of tents. I shared my own wall tent with Winters-White. Yes, he was here, too. Will had to remain in quarantine, as if he’d been one of the troops—he had been our spotter and had fired his gun. And, wouldn’t you know, the War Department treated him with the same contempt. But we weren’t alone in our exile. I had a mysterious guest—Senator Thomas Collier Platt, resplendent in a white summer suit. It didn’t startle me that he had enough sway to walk into a quarantined camp, but the real miracle was that he’d left his Amen Corner. He glared at Will, who excused himself. I wasn’t going to rescue the Easy Boss. Finally he spat out his venom.
“Roosevelt, you are a perfect bull in a china shop—everything around you crumbles.”
He hadn’t lost his old bravura, that sense of dash.
“Then why are you here? I haven’t asked for this interview, Senator.”
He stroked the silk of his beard. “I’m not here. What you have, son, is my emanation.”
“Then I’ll profit from it. What does the Easy Boss’s emanation want?”