The Sgt. gave a grunt & turnt away before turning back. Says he, “Once he understands orders Pvt. O’Driscoll I don’t care a D___ if he got that wound when your draft horse stuck his prick in his mouth but you boys are veteran Yankee Bills or veteran Johnny Rebs from the War like myself or my mother’s a whore & my daddy the Devil.”
But he winked at us to show there was no hard feelings between us & I thought that from then on we would be in that New York Cavan Sgt.’s good books & sure enough we were. It pains me now to think of what did happen to him later God Rest Him for oft it be the good ones who roll 7s as if there is no God at all sitting judge in the Heavens.
And well the Sutler Kinney who the good Sgt. had his deals with only outlived the Sgt. by some hours & in a way their deaths are 2 links in a chain that begun for all of us back there in Columbus.
As I write this now I think on how many other ways things could of gone. If 1st Sgt. Nevin had not of hauled us up over the cleaning kits we would never of grown so fond of him maybe. If Kinney had been licensed a Sutlery at some other Depot or post. If a snake (a lowly cold blooded snake!) had not of crossed a mule team’s path. You could go on & on. Your head would spin with all the things that might of changed what happened later.
We had little else to do with that Sutler at the Depot & 3 weeks later after having our fill of Soup House slumgullion & setting up drills Tom & myself did volunteer for an early posting with the 18th & with a mob of men deemed ready to be shipped Westward.
The good Sgt. Nevin was with us for much of the journey & he would catch us up in the Powder River country once we arrived here in Ft. Phil Kearny some time after. He did last but 3 months here in this Valley. 4 years of the Great Rebellion & scarce 3 months of this smaller one. But you know well Sir both kinds can kill you if your number comes up.
II
WESTERING
For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire.
—ROBERT PENN WARREN,
ALL THE KING’S MEN
11
December 7, 1866—Fort Phil Kearny, Dakota Territory
DECEMBER COLD. SLEET AND RAIN AND THAWING MUD. Daniel Kohn crosses Fort Phil Kearny’s parade ground. The flag lies heavy and limp against a towering flagpole. Rawson had woken Kohn. Told him the bastards were trying to steal their horses. Use them anyway. Like they belong to the ground-pounding, infantry sonsofbitches, he had said, Rawson forgetting he is just such an infantry soldier and no more than that himself; Rawson thinking perhaps that, like a pig among dogs, he has become a cavalryman. Still, Kohn is thankful for the kid calling the alarm.
The stables are dark and smell of freshly cut pine. The whole fort smells of pine sap, Kohn thinks. Go up like a powder keg, if you put a match to it.
“Get those saddles off our goddamn horses, Private,” Kohn says, turning to look for Rawson and finding him absent. Kohn forgives him this. Rawson has to bunk with these men most likely. Play cards, filch from them. He will not want enemies so soon into their stay.
The private halts, halfway to Molloy’s horse, a standard army saddle over his forearm. Another soldier stares at him in the gloom. Shavetails, Kohn notes. No roughness in them yet, just the lazy, hopeless stupidity that might drive a boy to join the regular army now that the war is over. He knows what they will say before they say it.
“We got orders to saddle all available. And these is available,” one of them says, his mate looking on, setting the saddle he lugs onto a rough barked rail, happy to do nothing until the conflict is resolved.
“Whose orders?”
“Cap’n Brown. The quartermaster. You got stink with the music, Corporal, speak to the organ grinder. We just monkeys here. No need to kick the poor goddamn monkeys.”
Fair enough, Kohn thinks. Not these boys’ fault. “Where will I find the quartermaster?”
“He’ll be taking his breakfast. You can talk to our first shirt, you want. He’s in barracks, putting his toes to the fire. He was sergeant of the guard and just in now.”
Kohn considers it. It is always easier dealing with another enlisted man. But a hungry one, just off picket, likely not aware of the order at all?
“I’d rather see the organ grinder, Bill,” Kohn says, calling the infantryman Bill, the name any private in the army will answer to, as if to show him there is no blame attached to his actions. “These are cavalry mounts and our own, personal horses, in need of a week’s rest easy. Not even the quartermaster can up and requisition the like of these.”
Kohn thinks this is true. He’s not certain. If Molloy were up and about there would be no question of it.
Private Bill shrugs. Not his problem. “Cap’n Brown ain’t gonna like it none, you innerupt his breakfast to tell him he got three less horses for the woodtrain guard.”
“It’s not a question of like or not like, Bill. They’re our horses.”
“You ain’t met the captain.”
Kohn finds the quartermaster tightening the saddle on his own mount in front of the log and daub quarters he shares with several other of the fort’s officers. Kohn notes that some of the quarters along the row are rough constructions of barked logs, earthen roofs and stovepipe chimneys, while others are clad with boards planed and washed white, roofed with wooden shingles. Must have rushed the construction as winter came on, Kohn thinks. He notes the headquarters barracks nearby, with its viewing platform and a fine, whitewashed building next to it. The fort commander’s quarters. A doe antelope is tethered in front of it, licking at the paint.
“Sir,” he says. “Captain Brown? May I have a word about our horses, sir?”
Brown looks up. “Whose horses?”
“Ours, sir. 7th Cavalry, out of Fort Riley in Kansas. I’m Corporal . . . Sergeant actually. Sergeant Daniel Kohn, sir.” His newly elevated rank sounds odd to his own ears.
“Custer’s boys?”
“Yessir.”
“I met that bastard once. West Point peacock.”
Kohn says nothing to this.
“Where’s your stripes, Sergeant Actually?”
“I learned of my promotion only last night, sir. When I read my captain’s orders. He’s incapacitated, sir. I haven’t had the chance to find a tailor or to visit the sutler for the stripes.” As he says this, he wonders if there is any sutler to be found now on the post. They are here, after all, to investigate the murder of the post’s original contracted king of robber’s row. He will ask later.
“Well until you do, you are a corporal to me unless you can show me orders that says different.” Brown winks at two soldiers who have arrived holding their mounts by the reins. Rough men, Kohn sees, much different from the two in the stables. Fighting men. Big, the QM’s special detail, their buffalo coats worn open, the heavy hide coats hooked behind Colt pistols stuffed in belts from which also hang cavalry cutlasses and Bowie knives the length of a man’s forearm. There is something of the frontier in these men, something savage and untethered. He fought against rebel boys like these in the war. Tread wisely, he thinks. Still, our goddamn mounts and nobody’s borrowing them or otherwise if I can help it.
“Our orders, sir.” Kohn hands the oilskin wallet to the quartermaster and watches as the officer removes and reads the pages inside.
Brown hands the wallet and pages back to Kohn and says, “The good general might have sent us fresh horses and the oats to feed them in place of jumped-up NCOs, but mine is not to reason why.”
Brown closes his eyes and turns his face to the sky as if to a warm sun instead of the winter murk that hangs over the valley like a burial shroud.
In a voice more suited for recitation than conversation, the quartermaster continues, “For I would ride into the goddamn vall
ey o’ death if I had sixty horses, much less six hundred, but I’ve barely six that are worth riding and these three alone that can keep up with or run down any of Mr. Lo’s ponies, and now you want us to leave your goddamn horses to luxuriate in our stables while my men go into battle on illfed asses fit for the knacker’s yard, Corporal?”
A poem or song of some sort, Kohn reckons, bastardized by this strange captain. Is there a single officer in the whole of this army not cracked in some way or other? Brown opens his eyes and gazes with an odd ferocity at Kohn and Kohn knows better than to answer.
“Well, Corporal Kohn?” There is some distaste in the way the quartermaster pronounces his surname. Jew hater? Find me a Christian man in America these days who isn’t. I should have been a profiteer. A banker, lending money for the Reconstruction. Fat on the spoils of war. If you are to be hated, you might as well be rich, Daniel, you no good fool. No better than any of these men. Worse in ways for you should have known better than to sign up to fight. And then stay on after the fighting is done? God damn it all to hell, Kohn, every word your father ever said against you was true.
“They are our own private mounts, sir. The captain’s especially. He’s had her since the early days of the war. The pack mules, and the third mount, they are army beasts, sir, and we would happily offer them up to you if they are needed.”
The QM has one hand resting on the butt of his Colt. He too wears a long, open buffalo coat over his uniform which appears, from what Kohn can see of it, ill-used and stained dark in places. “Your own private mounts that you feed and stable with my scarce oats in my stables?”
Kohn meets the captain’s eyes. The man is as obvious as a filthy postcard. How simple things are, sometimes, in the army. “Sir, I . . . we, Captain Molloy, sir, will pay the going rate for what we use. Once our horses are let be.” He goes into his tunic once again and comes out with his billfold and removes a five-dollar note. “Perhaps you’ll take this to start with, sir. I’ll leave it to you to draw up a bill for Captain Molloy. He is incapacitated at the moment and I do not know how long we will require your generosity.”
Brown pockets the note. “You will be informed when further payment is called for.”
“Thank you, sir.”
Brown jabs a boot into a stirrup and hoists himself awkwardly onto the back of his horse. The two soldiers are also infantrymen, Kohn notes with the disdain of the true dragoon, though he cannot see their uniforms clearly or any insignia. They are not cavalrymen anyway. He has seen sacks of grain tossed onto wagon beds with more grace than these men show when mounting their horses. All three are now looking down at Kohn, his boots in thick mud, lodged there as if set in tar.
Almost as an afterthought—but not quite, Kohn feels—the quartermaster says, “And what’s this about a murder, Sergeant? An investigation, it says there in your orders. I thought you boys were cavalry. Is your captain there a provost marshal’s man? Some kind of constable?”
“No sir. I’m not certain why Captain Molloy was sent here, only that he was. General Cooke must have had his reasons.”
“Murder?” Brown shakes his head. “Do you know how many men we’ve had murdered since arriving here in this valley, Corporal?”
“No sir, but I don’t imagine many of them were in-laws to the Secretary of the Treasury.”
Again the quartermaster looks to the two privates and back to Kohn and this time he smiles. “The same army that cannot send me the goddamn ammunition and horseflesh I need to run a war can manage to send you two bucks to investigate the murder of a shit-heel whoremaster cut down by Indians. Just when you think you’ve seen all the bug-fucking foolishness this army can come up with, they come up with something else.”
“General Cooke seems to think that it may not have been Indians, sir.”
The three men on horseback stare down at Kohn and gooseflesh peppers his back. There is something flat and dead in their eyes. It is as if he does not matter as a man to them, as if he is but an obstacle to be ridden round on their way to some place grave and dark.
“Poppycock,” the quartermaster says, gathering his reins in a gloved fist. The leather has been cut from the index finger of the right glove, leaving the captain’s trigger finger exposed. A man who takes shooting seriously, Kohn notes. And does it often.
“Poppycock and nonsense and you tell that to General Cooke back there behind his desk in Omaha. And then you tell him to send me a hundred horses and five thousand cartridges of .58. You tell him that. And get your stripes sewn on, Corporal, if you’re going to be swaggering round this post as a sergeant.”
“Yes, sir.”
The quartermaster spurs his mount and his rough sentries do the same, steering a berth around Kohn, standing there in the mud.
12
THE 2ND TIME WE MET THAT MAN (& HIS WIFE) ON ROUTE TO LEAVENWORTH
WELL BEFORE YOU GIVE YOURSELF OVER TO FITS OF fine humour at the very notion of two veteran Bills such as ourselves volunteering for any D___ thing in the Army (as if we would not know better!) you may well note that even in the Army there comes a time when stepping forward is better for a body than stepping back. And this was 1 such time though a fellow could argue it was the wrong thing to do knowing what would come next for us.
But sure only God could of known what was to follow that we would land here in the vast nowhere of a Valley where only bloody murder & lonely death waits for white men & God did stay shtum about it as the Dutchy boys say. Honestly a man might wonder what God gets on with all the days just watching over us but doing nothing to warn us from harm that He must surely know is coming? It can drive a man wild wondering on the things that lead a man to where he is come. It could make you a lunatic altogether recalling the notions that seemed grand at the time but were as far from grand as they could be.
Anyway it did suit us at the time to bid our leave to the Depot in Columbus & ship West this being our plan from the beginning. The 18th were in need of men & we were ready to roar Good Riddance! to that depot & its barking sergeants & parade drill & its pig fit vittles & calisthenics. I do not need tell you that in all them weeks of training to be soldiers we never fired 1 single musketball & nor did any other recruit. As you can see it would not be long til we would learn how remiss were our masters in leaving this ignorant scumtide of men with no means to fight or to die fighting at the very least. After all the Army is paying them as soldiers so that you might get to thinking the Army would instruct them in how to load & shoot like soldiers. But you know well Sir that would be too sensible by far for the Army. No word of a lie that Depot was more in the way of a workhouse than a place where a man might learn the first thing about proper soldiering.
Tom & myself knew already more than any man needed about parade drill & we were lucky enough to know even more us about musketry so out of there we did get & onto a troop train bound for Ft. Leavenworth in Kansas.
The less said of the journey the better for the air inside the train cars was as cold as a coffin & every inch of that train was stuffed full of men in every posture of ill repose with each car choked with tobacco smoke & steam & engine ash that coated the innards of a man’s nose like a whore powdering herself from the inside out no matter how tight we tried to shut them windows.
Tom & myself & a gentle Ohio boy some years younger in age to us did stay drunk for the duration on homestilled whiskey we bought at whistle stops & arrived in Kansas in no fit state to fight off so much as a head cold never mind your red savages but sure by then they were mostly peacified round Ft. Leavenworth anyway. But little did that matter for every other man on the train was drunk as well & there was a fine lot of fighting on the journey between some Dutch boys over bad cards & the way certain words be pronounced in their language. I am sad to write that one well juiced soldier God Keep Him did fall to his death trying to piss from between cars & more than one man ended that journey in the Leavenworth Guardhouse. The Provost squad on that train had its work cut out & well for them
the b______.
But never mind because as is the way of things in the Army well when we did arrive what did we do but set up waiting there. It was cool the boots I tell you for most of that bitter flat Kansas winter.
Now I may as well say here (for it be of some importance to my story) that on that journey we met for a 2nd time the Sutler Mr. Kinney whose fate we now know but could never imagine then.
You see we never once returned to his Stores at the Depot though we did purchase the odd bobbin here & there by giving our money to other Bills for to get it so as to avoid his evil eye & ill will after rumbling his & Sgt. Nevin’s ruse. And though we never saw him on the train we came across him at a whistle stop somewhere West of Indiana outside the hired car (1 in front of the caboose) which he shared with his wife & all his goods & wares & which was guarded by 4 sentries with sidearms & Springfields.
We would bide time by strolling up & down the platform at whistle stops looking for a fellow with a bottle & some boiled eggs to sell as there did be more than 1 such lad at each junction. This was the 3 of us myself & Tom & the Ohio boy who had a fine way about him which endeared him to many. He was a kind & harmless thing who in the end did get a bottle stuck in his neck in a hog ranch outside Ft. Riley so I later heard tell & I always wondered who could of done such a thing. This country is chock full of terrible violent men. But that is by the by for as we did amble that snowy Indiana platform one of the days we came upon that dirty nuck of a Sutler there in his gleaming beaver coat & you will not believe it but he smiled when he saw us.
“You might of bought a 2nd cleaning kit after all boys the way you are looking now,” says he & I smiled back at him but the brother did not.
“The coal ash does get in even with the windees closed,” says I tipping my kepi to him but he only winked his eye & said no more turning to one of the soldiers minding him for a match for his cigar.
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