by Sarah Bird
Though I had accepted that there never was and could never be anything between me and “my” soldier, still the fact that Allbright considered me either a bad apple spoiling his barrel or a hell-bound sodomite made me so dumpish that I set myself to winning back his good opinion.
I was the first one out in the morning and the last one in at night. No one worked harder or backtalked less than me. Bit by bit, over the next few weeks, I became the prize pig at that hog show. More important, I made sure that if there was measuring to be done that I’d be the one with the tape and the one marking down the feet and inches. The Sergeant needed to be reminded of my ciphering skills. Needed to be reminded of me.
Chapter 56
Near the end of the summer, we finished setting the roof over the first set of barracks. Vikers and those he favored immediately occupied it and left the rest of us to continue sleeping rough. Which didn’t trouble me a bit as it was cooler outside than in and I was where I wanted to be: off by myself. I was away from Vikers, had the privacy I needed, and a good friend in Lem. All in all, my life in the army, though not what I wanted it to be, was proceeding in a tolerable fashion. Right up until the moment that everything changed overnight.
As usual, on that day, it was barely light when we all tumbled out for roll call and formed up in front of the Sergeant. Each of us sounded off strong when our names were called then slugged down our daily dose of pulque. It was Sheridan who’d ordered that all his troops out West be given a daily dose of the sulfur-smelling cactus juice. As we didn’t yet have vegetables, it was meant to guard us against scurvy. It must of worked for no one was taken by that ailment, though a fair number of the men developed a fondness for the fermented sludge and became pulque pots.
“Men,” the Sergeant said that morning, “congratulations on your exemplary work on our second barracks. We’re so far ahead of schedule that we’ve completely outrun the sawmill. So, I am shifting some of you to mill duty. The rest of you will begin chinking the walls of ‘B’ Barracks. If I call your name, go on to the sawmill and ask Corporal Masters for your assignment. Pool. Day. Childress. Abernathy. Kirk. Coleman, and…”
As the Sergeant paused to pick the last man, the chosen ones stepped forward smartly, happy to be spared a day of working with the harsh mixture of clay, ashes, sand, and masonry lime that we used to chink up the gaps between pickets. Never expecting the Sergeant to pick me for anything ever again, I was surprised when I saw him eyeing me.
Now, as I’ve shown, I was like a crab with my eyes swiveling around on stalks up top my head when it came to observing that man. Not his tiniest wince or squint escaped my notice. And that was how, in the dim light of early morning, I saw him consider me in a manner that made it clear that I was a puzzle to him. One he’d already spent some time trying to solve. So, when he called out the final name, “Cathay,” I nearly floated out of the line.
At the mill, Masters put me to switching the mule that turned the sawmill wheel while the rest of them rode off in the wagon to cut timber in the German Mountains. My mindless occupation allowed me ample opportunity, not only to enjoy the view sweeping out all the way to Mexico, eighty miles south, but to recall every glance and word that had ever passed between me and the Sergeant. For, though I might have truly buried Wager Swayne, I could do nothing about my one-sided feelings for the Sergeant.
Absorbed as I was in my memories, the day passed pleasantly. It was late afternoon when the horses in the quartermaster’s corral began nickering uneasily. I paid them no mind. Nor did I notice that the prairie dogs had stopped chattering or that the steady, old mule, broke as she was to the harness after twenty years of service, suddenly turned so balky I had to snap the quirt on her several times before she was convinced to continue plodding along on her round path to nowhere. It wasn’t until she lifted her head and bared her long, squared-off teeth in a shrieking bray that I turned away from sunny Mayheeko and saw clouds moving in from the north. The desert liked to tease that way, promising rain it never delivered, so I turned back south, harred up the mule and went back to work.
It had been another blazing-hot, wearying day and we were dead asleep that night when in comes a gully washer would of set Noah to hammering. The rain poured down in buckets heavy enough that a wave of waist-high muddy water sluiced down off the hills behind the fort and rolled right through our tents and swept them away.
Determined to spend the rest of the night inside, we stomped through the mud to the finished barracks. The door was barred. Vikers’s face appeared in the nearest window. The lantern held beneath his chin cast dark, devil-type shadows upward on his face. “Price of admission into our nice, dry barracks is one month’s salary,” Vikers announced. “I have the wage garnishment orders waiting for your Xs.”
“How can you do us like this?!” demanded Tea Cake.
Ivory backed him up with, “You gon keep us out here in this rain pouring down like Satan hisself pissing all over us? You gon make us pay for a dry spot in some barracks we helped build?!”
“That ain’t right!” Baby King threw in.
We pounded on that door until it rattled on its hinges.
Vikers must have promised cuts to his boys, for they made a show of stretching out on their nice dry beds and fluttering their fingers at us in mocking waves.
After a few more of our drenched crew yelled threats and insults through the glass, Tea Cake shrugged and announced, “What good’s thirteen dollar to me if I be dead of the new moany?”
Pretty soon, they had all agreed to sign Vikers’s IOUs.
“No!” I thundered, startling them for they’d gotten used to me with my mouth shut. “What is the matter with y’all? You acting like you’re too slow to catch the itch. No! Dammit, no. You ain’t paying that man a month’s salary to spend the night on the damn floor of a barracks we built.”
“Well, what the hell you suggest, Mr. Fancy?” Tea Cake asked, “Mr. Fancy” being one of my nicknames. Along with “Missy Bill” and “Candy Ankle.”
They were listening to me now, though, and I said, “I suggest we make us a roof to sleep under. We got all that tar paper we’re going to use to roof in our barracks. We take that, go to quartermaster’s corral, spread it out across the stone posts, over the top of that chimney, make us the coziest tent you ever seen.”
“We’ll still be sleeping on mud,” Tea Cake objected.
“Like you didn’t spend the entire war sleeping on mud,” I answered back. “You that particular, get you some hay to put up under you.”
They grumbled back and forth, but when Lem said, “Does look mighty cozy in there,” I knew that I had lost and Vikers had won.
“No,” a familiar voice said. “Cathay’s right.”
We snapped to attention.
“At ease,” the Sergeant said, stepping forward to stand next to me in the small pool of light cast by the lantern. The instant Vikers saw the Sergeant’s face, the door was unlocked. I made to follow the others, but the Sergeant said, “Private.”
I stopped as the others went in, and he said, “You were looking out for your unit and forestalled a bad decision. Good work.”
That hardwood barracks floor felt like a feather bed under me that night.
Chapter 57
After the night of the flash flood things changed fast. The Sergeant put Vikers on the Black List to punish him for creating discord in the ranks, and he caught every nasty assignment that came along. Seeing Vikers cleaning out latrines brought him down a peg or two and he lost some of his hold on the men. And, though I was never destined to be a troop favorite, I was generally accepted as one could be counted on to haul his own weight without bellyaching and to stand pat with his friends. But the real change, the only one that mattered, was with the Sergeant. He started treating me like any of the other men. Then better than any of the other men.
First, he made me his puller. I’d be the one walking the tape out that he held so that he could check measurements. Then he handed me his notebook a
nd had me enter the figures. Then he asked me to do a few sums. Then some takeaways.
After a week of double-checking my figures, he pulled me aside and said, “Private, I could use your assistance in keeping the company records. I have too much to do filing all the reports that the army requires. If you could take over the accounts, it would be most helpful. I can offer you a monthly pay raise of fifty cents.”
Though I was doing cartwheels inside and bursting to yodel out with joy, I buried such nancy-boy capers and replied solemnly, “Yessir. That’d be fine, sir.”
“Good. Be at my quarters after retreat.”
That evening, soon as the flag was lowered and the sun had set as the bugler played the last notes of retreat, I knocked softly on the Sergeant’s door.
Instead of hollering for me to come in, he opened the door himself and said, “Private, good, you’re here.” He wore only his muslin shirt. His suspenders dangled loose from the waist of his pants. His jacket hung from a nail.
He closed the door and, though he always kept the curtains open so the whole company could view us, we were alone together in that small room. I knew every inch of his room from the outside, but now standing inside the four walls of chinked cedar posts made it new. A lantern glowed on the table where he worked. The room smelled of cedar and kerosene and pencil shavings and the Sergeant’s scent, which was his own combination of bread baking and sweat and lye soap and clothes dried in the sun. I breathed it in and felt like I’d reached a destination I hadn’t known I was heading for. I was where I was always meant to be.
“You can take the stool,” he said. Waving his hand at a stack of papers, he added, “These are the company accounts from the day we arrived. Up until this point, they’ve been kept by Lieutenant Banfield. I suspect there might be…” He paused before adding dryly, “Errors in the lieutenant’s calculations.”
The pages were filled with lines of numbers so smeared and scrawled my daddy would have been disgusted. Even if I was just forming my numbers with a stick in the dust, ready to be patted away should a white appear, he taught me to respect them. To give the four its tidy little roof and the sixes and nines their pretty, curled tails. His rule was, “If the dullest of dullards cannot immediately say what your figure is, you have failed.” The lieutenant had failed.
The Sergeant continued, “Since the army demands triplicate of every report, supply order, sick call tally, and disciplinary action, I haven’t had time to review these accounts.”
He gave me a tall, narrow book, bound with a green cover. The pages inside were blank. With a trembling hand, I picked up a pencil he’d already knife-sharpened to a fine point, and held it above the bright, clean page.
“Just copy these”—he tapped the crumpled sheets, then the page in front of me—“to this. Tally up each page and move on to the next.”
My first few entries were a sight and I feared the Sergeant would kick me out. But all he said, after glancing over only once, was, “Easy there, Private. Easy. I’ve seen you do better than that.”
My fingers loosened up then and my numbers were as neat and tidy as any Daddy ever showed me.
From that evening on, I spent the days whistling through any chore set before me, counting the minutes until retreat. Then, after everyone else was settled in for the night, I’d go to the Sergeant and we’d work together in a silence broken only when I finished one long column and needed him to enter in the corrections I had found. And corrections there were aplenty.
Pretty quick it came clear that the lieutenant was either pitiful bad at ciphering or he was a crook robbing the company.
“What are you going to do?” I asked the Sergeant. “You can’t charge a white officer.”
He patted my green book and said, “That’s insurance, Private. You’re creating insurance for us. When charges are made, we’ll be protected. We’ll have the truth.”
Him believing the truth would protect a black man was another way he reminded me of Daddy. Much as I knew it wasn’t how the world worked, I admired that belief. Like Daddy, the Sergeant needed a woman strong enough to protect him when he found out that the truth was whatever the white man said it was.
Night after night, I sat beside him as silent and companionable as a cat. Over time, he started talking. I quickly sussed out that the one subject he could not resist was his idol, Frederick Douglass. Like that great man, the Sergeant was dedicated to uplifting our race and he figured he’d start with me. Many an evening passed with our reports and accounts ignored as he schooled me in Douglass’s teachings.
The Sergeant knew nearly every one of Douglass’s speeches by heart and, instead of passing the time talking while we worked, he recited whole chunks of them, a thing he could do without ever slowing down on his reports. The one he favored most, though, came from the same speech he’d quoted us at the recruitment back in Appomattox. He’d stop his work completely and glow like a new-saved sinner when he recited this part.
I know that Congress has been pleased to say in deference to prevailing prejudice that colored men shall not rise higher than company officers. They might as well have passed a law that black men shall not be brave; that they shall not learn to read; that they shall not shoot straight; and that they shall not grow taller than five feet nine inches and a half. The law is even more absurd than mean. Enter the army and deserve promotion, and you will be sure to get it in the end.
“‘Enter the army and deserve promotion,’” he repeated, “‘and you will be sure to get it in the end.’”
He didn’t need to say that part twice for me to understand that it was all ten of his commandments melted down to one word: deserve.
Chapter 58
The weeks passed, and one day we awoke to the ringing sound of pickaxes and pry bars digging into the stone that underlay much of the desert. Sooner than you’d think, twenty-foot telegraph poles sprouted, running from the far horizon right up to the fort. The black infantry soldiers working that detail shinnied up those poles easy as pie to hang those telegraph lines. The wire, looping from one pole to the next, shone in the setting sun, an endless row of gold necklaces.
Things changed as soon as the contraption was set up. Overnight we went from feeling invisible and invulnerable, lost way out on the prairie where no one and nothing could get at us, to feeling like a big, fat target. Though the only Indians we’d spotted, besides John Horse and his crew, had been lone riders on distant peaks, by the end of the first week of telegrams we felt we were under siege.
Every time a telegram came in, the operator, a white corporal with the wispiest mustache and biggest apple of Adam in the entire single-star state, would tear around the fort yelling the news about every single solitary redskin outrage that occurred anywhere in the entire country. Though it might have been the Sioux up in South Dakota stealing a couple of beeves off a Norwegian settler, or Comanche way off in north Texas burning down a barn, the wire made it seem like the heathens were a vast, united force closing in around us. Drewbott, who’d already shown himself to be a chickenshit of the first order, was powerfully affected by these alarms. He doubled, then tripled the night guard.
Though Drewbott squandered time and worry and scarce supplies on the threat of Indian attack, the fact of the matter was that, in the entire history of the Indian Wars, the heathens only ever attacked a U.S. fort once. They were too smart to hit the places where the men with guns were. Lone farms and stagecoaches were more their cup of tea. If you wanted to mess with Indians, you’d mostly have to go out and track them down. And that was not a chore Colonel Chickenshit much cared for.
Pretty soon, though, reports did start coming in from much closer to home. A band of Mescalero Apache led by a chief name of Chewing Bones had left the reservation they’d been herded onto by Kit Carson over in the Rio Grande Valley. Even though the telegrams kept getting grimmer with news of settlers being burned out, their livestock stolen, women and children kidnapped, and men mutilated in ways so flamboyant my grandmother would have a
dmired them, Drewbott still wasn’t inclined to leave the fort and go off in pursuit of the savages.
Then, late one evening, a telegram came in that changed everything.
As usual, I was in the Sergeant’s office, stuffing myself to bursting with the pleasure of keeping silent company with him. On that particular evening, I was toting up the number of days all the companies had lost to sick call. “Sergeant,” I said, soon as I recorded the totals. “We’ve only lost thirteen days this entire month. C and F,” I said, referring to the two new companies of infantrymen that had joined the regiment, “lost forty-three and twenty-eight.”
Sergeant hid his pride at our company and said, “Malingerers.”
“Shirkers, idlers, loafers, and deadbeats,” I added, parroting back the words I’d learned from the Sergeant. I clung to every word out of his mouth, stored them up, and presented them often as I could for I was ever trying to make a good impression.
“Wastrels, spongers, slouches, and—”
I never learned the next new word he was tossing into my vocabulary for the door burst open and there stood Colonel Drewbott. Sergeant and I sprang to our feet like a couple of jack-in-the-boxes.
The colonel wore a nightshirt stuffed into his britches, one suspender on his shoulder, one off. His hair stood up on the side it’d been slept on. He wobbled at the door, dazed as a goose with a nail in its head until he remembered the telegram in his hand, flapped it at the Sergeant and said, “This just came in from—”
The instant he noticed me, the colonel shut up and handed the wire to the Sergeant. With a sharp eye cast in my direction, Drewbott added, “Mention this to no one until tomorrow. Make a general announcement to all companies tomorrow at assembly. And then set to, boy, set to with a mighty vengeance.” He left without returning our salutes.