by Carla Kelly
I have to live here until I earn enough money to move on, Susanna thought as she stepped into the Reeses’ entry hall. She wished she had agreed to Major Randolph’s willingness to stand by her, but this was for her to do. She took a deep breath and walked into the parlor, where Emily sat frozen in place, dreading whatever Susanna was going to say or do. With a shock, Susanna recognized that look. It was the same look she used to direct toward Frederick Hopkins when he frightened her. She resolved that no matter how badly her cousin had used her, she would do nothing more to cause fright.
“Emily, I didn’t mean to frighten you,” she said immediately. “I’m sorry for what I did.” Her glance took in Dan Reese, sitting almost as still as his wife. “I was just so discouraged that I thought I wanted to die. I won’t do that again.”
Susanna sat down beside her cousin. “I am going to be teaching in the school for enlisted men’s children. I will also be teaching reading and writing several nights a week to some of the enlisted men’s wives.” She waved off the comment she knew was coming. “It doesn’t matter that your friends talk and think me past redemption. I promise that when I have earned enough money to leave this place, I will.”
Cautiously, Emily nodded.
“In no time at all, you’ll forget I was ever here!” she said, unable to resist a little smile, because she knew it was true. “Do this for me, cousin, even if you have to pretend. Just … just entertain the notion that maybe I am not entirely at fault, and maybe you haven’t heard the whole story. Just do that, dearest, and we will manage. Can you?”
Emily nodded again, though not willingly. Susanna rose.
“That’s all I ask. If you have a spare lard can, I’d like to use that for my lunch bucket.”
“Could you find something more dignified?”
Susanna sighed inwardly—Emily and her appearances. “I have nothing,” she said with all the dignity she could muster. She nodded to them both and went to the stairs.
Someone had reattached the blanket that Major Randolph had ripped down that morning. It seemed so long ago now. Susanna stepped behind it and closed her eyes, tired and still weak. She prepared for bed, grateful the upstairs was warm. On impulse, she looked out the little window over the porch and saw Sergeant Rattigan walking back across the parade ground. He must have come from Major Randolph’s quarters, and she hoped Maeve hadn’t taken a sudden turn. No, he would be hurrying, and Major Randolph would be with him. It was more the stroll of a man with something on his mind.
For the first time in well over a year, she knelt beside her cot and prayed, first for Tommy, and then for the Rattigans and the O’Learys (she could hear an infant’s wail through the wall, and it warmed her). It was easy to pray for Private Benedict and his school that was hers, too, but less easy to pray for Major Randolph, who sometimes looked as though he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders. She told herself it was foolish to be shy about prayer, since her words were probably going nowhere, and she was whispering into her pillow. “I pray not to be a nuisance to him,” she concluded. “That’s enough to ask.”
Chapter Thirteen
Susanna Hopkins woke up early. There was that moment of panic when she wondered where she was—whether Frederick was drunk, sober, demanding, compliant, suddenly sad or bent on mischief. Once the moment passed, she lay there and made a raft of decisions.
The first one was the most important, because she knew it affected all the others: on that morning in a place where she never thought her life would take her, Susanna decided to forgive her cousin Emily Reese for being stupid. She decided to overlook the enormous lie that Emily had concocted to make her divorced cousin somehow more palatable to censorious people who knew too much about each other. Emily was too stupid to think of consequences, and she had probably meant well.
“I can live with that,” Susanna mouthed more than whispered, not wanting to wake anyone. Of course, the only people awake were the O’Learys through the wall. She smiled and listened to the baby’s tiny wail, and then silence, followed by two parents talking softly to each other. The voices were indistinct, but they were a mother and father sharing a moment with Mary Rose O’Leary, the army’s newest dependent.
Susanna lay there and reminded herself that for a time, she and Frederick had done that after Tommy was born. She reminded herself that those had been wonderful, drowsy moments, shared with a baby she was getting acquainted with, created with a husband she loved. Matters may have gone terribly wrong five years later, when business concerns started to collapse and rye whiskey became an enticing substitute for reality, but they hadn’t always been bad.
“I can live with that,” she murmured again. “We had good times.” She soothed herself with the fact that she never would have married a man she hadn’t loved. There was a time when Frederick Hopkins would have made any woman look twice. She knew, even now, that if he had not pushed her face into the mantelpiece, and blind instinct hadn’t made her flee for her own safety, she would be there still, protecting Tommy, as if nothing was the matter. She suspected there were many women in precisely her position.
“I can live with that, too, even though it is unfair to women,” she whispered. She had heard stories about women crusading against “Demon Rum,” and been aghast at such unladylike behavior. Didn’t those rabble-rousing women know that a woman’s sphere was the home? She understood that kind of courage now. Liquor had probably destroyed more homes and hopes than marital infidelity, and wives often suffered in silence. Bravo to the brave crusaders, she thought.
Time passed and both duplexes were silent now, Mary Rose back to sleep, maybe slumbering between her parents. On her side of the wall, Susanna heard Daniel Reese snoring, the sound more comforting than grating. She decided to forgive him for being light-headed, too. He loved his son and wife, and was probably a pretty good commander of a company of infantry, out here in the wilds of Wyoming Territory.
She took her thoughts to another level, right down into her own hesitant heart. She had begun her journey from Pennsylvania with hope and the promise of a useful life. Events had taken a terrible turn, but she was still alive, her brain was agile and she was beginning to suspect that she was a resourceful woman. She had a skill people needed. There were six young children in a commissary warehouse, sitting at packing crate desks, who needed her. There was a private teaching a school for fifty cents extra duty pay a day, and in over his head, who needed her. There was a post surgeon with sorrows at least as great as hers, perhaps greater, who was determined she would not give up on his watch. And there was Maeve Rattigan, denied the one thing she wanted most, who cared to read and write.
“I can live with this, because I have work to do,” she murmured, and closed her eyes, content. When she woke later to the sound of reveille, Susanna Hopkins made a conscious decision to live well. Maybe Major Randolph was right; maybe living well was the best revenge. Or maybe it was the right thing to do.
It was not so hard to make small talk that morning with her cousin, who only wanted to forget her disastrous part in Susanna’s ruin. She told Emily her plans for the garrison school, and her night school for women. “I came here to teach.” She said it firmly and not defensively, and in the saying, believed it.
Emily found her an empty lard bucket and made her laugh by drawing a flower on the tin lid. “To make it more genteel,” Emily said, with a grin that Susanna remembered from years ago, when they had been much younger. Bread and butter, dried apples and the everlasting raisins that made them look at each other and giggle went into the bucket, along with a cloth napkin and two small pieces of chocolate from Dan Reese’s secret stash.
“Thanks, Emily,” Susanna said after guard mount, which they watched together, Stanley between them, from the warmth of the parlor window. She put on her coat, wound her muffler tight and went out to slay dragons.
The task was made much simpler, because Nick Martin escorted her to the warehouse complex south of the parade ground.
“M
ajor Randolph told me to make sure you got there and that’s all,” he confided. “I’d like to learn, too, but he needs me to sweep out the ward.”
We all need to be needed, she thought, touched. “I understand, Nick.” She looked at him more closely. “It is Nick, isn’t it? I expect Saint Paul is busy on those missionary journeys.”
“I expect he is,” Nick said. “I’ll ask him someday.”
Susanna thought about that. She nodded and looked back at Officers Row. The major in question stood on his own porch. He lifted his coffee mug to her and she waved.
Before she married Frederick and left the teaching profession, Susanna had taught at a private school in Carlisle. Her classroom had come with brocaded draperies, a carpet on the floor and hand-turned desks bordering on elegant. She discovered that day in her warehouse school that packing-crate desks had a certain utility, and the fragrance of dried apples and raisins, stacked in kegs next to coffee beans, reminded her of favorite kitchens.
With all her heart and mind, she concentrated on her six pupils, finding out what they knew, and creating a term full of lesson plans in her head. At first, she knew Private Benedict was conscious of her quiet presence in the back of his classroom. By mess call, he had turned all his attention to his older students, and looked up with surprise when he heard the bugle.
“Compositions and recitations this afternoon,” he called after his pupils as they hurried home for lunch. He took his own back to her corner after she had ushered out her little ones and sat down again with her lunch. “I have permission to eat here, instead of in the mess hall,” he explained. “Sometimes there are children who stay.”
They spent the hour eating and discussing the morning’s work. Private Benedict had a few questions she answered, and he liked her suggestion that they teach together in the afternoon occasionally.
“I noticed in my … my first school how well-tuned to the local flora and fauna these children are,” she said. “Let’s have them tell us what they know, and build some lessons around it.”
Private Benedict looked at her with an expression she recognized: that of an educator with an idea. “We could spend a day or two outlining interesting topics such as buffalo, wolves and Indians, and have our students compose letters on these subjects to their friends in the States.”
“Bravo, Private Benedict,” she said. “That’s certainly more interesting than a mere composition! My pupils will draw and we can put together a letter of our own.”
She observed him then, investing more than just her mind in what he had said. Something in his face drew her attention, and there was no sense in hanging back, now that she had decided to live. “Private Benedict, something tells me you already send letters like that home to …”
“Connecticut,” he said, and there was no overlooking the blush that rose from his neck. “There’s a young lady in Hartford who gets letters like that.”
Susanna nodded. “I thought so. I hope she saves all of them. Think what a wonderful look at the West you are providing.”
“She sends them to the newspaper.” He stopped, his face fiery-red now. “Well, at least part of them. It’s become a regular column—Life and Times on the Frontier.”
“Bravo again!” Susanna said, delighted. “Tell me, is she a teacher, too?”
The look he gave her nearly took her breath away. There was everything in it of pride and gratitude. “So you really think I am a teacher?”
“I know you are,” she said quietly.
He drew a deep breath, and there was no overlooking that Private Benedict was a man in love and a man with a plan. “Yes, she’s a teacher. My enlistment is up at the end of summer. I’m going to attend the normal school in Hartford, after I marry her this fall.”
Susanna clapped her hands, then handed him one of Captain Reese’s prized chocolates and popped the other one in her mouth. She smiled at him in perfect charity and something else: for the first time in a long time, she was happy.
The post surgeon knew he should probably apologize to Hippocrates for his morning’s inattention. At least he had not splinted the wrong leg on a streetwalker, as one of his unfortunate fellow medical students had done at the University of Maryland. Joe still remembered the look of astonishment on the poor woman’s face as she swore a round oath worthy of a sailor and raised her hands in an appeal to the Almighty to protect her from malpractice. Joe’s malpractice that morning had amounted to no more than prescribing a purgative to the patient in bed three with the runs. Luckily, raised eyebrows from his hospital steward had rectified that wrong. Joe had been big enough to apologize to his steward later, and thank the gods of medicine that his steward had been good enough to follow him after Appomattox to Reconstruction duty in Louisiana, then exile to Outer Darkness in the Department of the Platte.
No doubt Joe had been woolgathering. Nick had told him earlier that Mrs. Hopkins had walked across the parade ground that morning with a certain spring in her stride. “She’s a short one, but I had to hurry to keep up with her” was how Nick had put it.
Nick hadn’t been aware, but Joe had watched her, too, standing on his porch, a mug of his awful coffee in hand. He had admired at a distance Susanna’s pleasant sway and the purpose with which she moved. This wasn’t the frightened woman in the Shy-Dead depot; it wasn’t even the woman of yesterday with no hope in her eyes. This was a woman with a plan.
The notion nourished him all morning. Thanks again to his steward, the hospital ran like a top. After his early blunder, Joe had repented with a good save in what he always considered his specialty, debriding a nasty burn from Company A’s mess kitchen. At least, the look his steward gave him—the man hated debridement—had redemption written large upon it. Joe could retire to his office redeemed and at liberty to woolgather, when he should have been finalizing the list of pharmacopoeia for Omaha.
Other than that moment watching the poetry of a woman’s hips, Joe’s morning had two more gems in it. The first one came from Sergeant Rattigan, who returned his copy of George Drysdale’s article. The sergeant actually made himself at home in the office, less formal than usual. Well, the topic du jour was certainly not government issue; why be formal?
“I read the article to Maeve last night,” the sergeant said. “I didn’t know a lot of those words, but the meaning was clear—” he gave a self-conscious chuckle “—as Maeve so kindly pointed out to me. She’s a shrewd one!”
“We always knew that,” Joe said. “She’ll keep you on your toes, once Mrs. Hopkins teaches her to read. And?”
“We’ll do it, sir. We … we need each other, but I’d do anything to spare my darling Maeve one more heartache.”
The sergeant said it simply, but Joe heard every syllable of love. “I thought you would,” he told the man.
The sergeant smiled, stood up and snapped off one of his usual salutes, more precise than nearly anyone ever executed at Fort Laramie. He stopped at the door. “If you see Mrs. Hopkins today, tell her we’re expecting her for class in my parlor tonight, and we’d be pleased to serve her supper, too.”
“Include me in that invitation, and I’ll tell her,” Joe said.
“You’re included, sir, although I’ve been told by herself to vacate the premises for the evening. See you tonight, Major.”
The next gem of the day might have been called a milestone, if Joe had felt so inclined. After a satisfying hour standing around mostly idle while the capable wife of an Arikara scout presented the army with its newest Indian dependent, Joe had walked back to the hospital in that pleasant sort of euphoria that a successful birth always provided. It carried him into his office, where he loosened his collar and wrote a letter to the lycée in Paris where Louis Pasteur taught.
He had written such a letter once or twice in his head, and then on paper three times in the same number of years, only to scrap it. This time he wrote the entire letter, describing his medical training, his subsequent career, the war years and his own interest in microbiology. He had con
cluded with the hope that Pasteur might allow him entrance into the lycée in the autumn. He signed his name with a flourish, addressed an envelope and hurried the letter to the post office in the post trader’s complex before he lost his courage.
He had his first attack of nerves when John Collins, postmaster along with his post trader duties, raised his eyebrows at “Paris, France” on the envelope.
“Long way from here.” Collins tapped the letter. “Making some plans, sir?”
Joe had never known the post trader to pry, but he supposed it wasn’t every day that a letter to Paris crossed his desk. “I believe I am,” he said.
There was a small argument with Nick Martin after recall from fatigue, when the quiet man announced his intention of escorting Mrs. Hopkins back across the parade ground. Joe’s hospital steward intervened, claiming Nick for his own, which allowed the post surgeon to head for the commissary warehouse by himself.
He arrived just as the door opened to allow a flood of escaping students. A smile on his face, Joe watched as Susanna knelt by her little charges, making sure each one was buttoned, mittened and scarved against the omnipresent wind. He couldn’t help observing the smooth line of her hip and leg and then the pencil stuck at random in the bun of her untidy hair. Teaching took its toll on coiffure, obviously. Hardly mattered; blondes had a certain indefinable something.
As he stood in the door, letting in all that cold air, she looked at him, and took his breath away with the width of her smile.
“Close the door, Major,” she said in her teacher’s voice that allowed no argument. He closed the door, then helped her up. Her hand was warm and he wanted to hold it forever.
He didn’t, of course, but he noted with something approaching glee that she hadn’t been in a hurry to release his, either.