by Sarah Bird
A cool breeze lifted up the yellow tails of the kerchief Wager had tied about my neck and they floated behind me as we hurried through the night. In the distance, a pack of coyotes celebrated a kill with yodeling howls. A pair of owls called back and forth, their songs a funny woofing sound that bounced higher with every note. A screech owl hooted its mournful call from the branches of a mesquite. Deer and armadillo rustled through the scrub brush. A peccary snorted and grunted nearby. Each noise caused Wager to smile at me as though the animals were clowning just for us. He took my hand and held it for most of the way back to the fort.
As soon as we came in sight of the flag snapping smartly in the breeze, for it was brand-new, having just added a thirty-seventh star after the Territory of Nebraska became a state, I dropped Wager’s hand and took off his kerchief. When I tried to give it back, he refused. I straightened my uniform, and whisked away a few blades of grass from my trousers.
The fort still slept and we crept in silent as two Indians. Though it was dark, I felt exposed, as if a bright light shone on me and eyes I could not see were trained my way, tracking me like hunters in a blind. I shrunk back down into my uniform, slouching and slumping so that the familiar pinch in my shoulders and ache in my back returned. I feared for myself, but I feared even more for Wager since, in that big-brained way of his, when an idea seized him, it seized his whole being. And he had been seized by the idea that I was really a woman. A woman strong enough to be his. I was terrified that he was too honest to hide what had happened between us. To hide what I was. But he had to or we would lose everything.
So, when we stopped in the darkened corner beside the barracks door, and he leaned in to kiss me, I jerked away as if a rattler were perched on his shoulder. Glancing about nervously, I tried to duck into the barracks before the first rays of sun exposed us. He grabbed my shoulder and whispered, “Cathy—”
“No,” I silenced him, fear making my command sharper than I’d meant it to be. “You can’t,” was all I could say, adding before I slipped into the barracks, “We’ll talk. Later. When it’s safe.”
I lay in my bunk trembling, more scared than I’d been since that first, long night back in Jefferson Barracks. Wager claiming me as a woman had turned me into more of one than I had ever been. I had to reverse that. Fast. Before the near hundred men sleeping about me woke. But every tender, yearning, astonished thought I had about Wager stripped me back down to a frail girl. I made myself think about what Vikers’d do to me if I didn’t snuff out that girl. That thought was the knife at my throat that forced me to harden back up enough to meet the new day. By the time we formed up for assembly I was Private William Cathay again. At least until Wager strode onto the yard.
Wager.
I thought his name one last time, wobbling and unbreathing as I did, then I banished it. Here, in the fort, he had to be Sergeant Allbright. And I had to be Private Cathay. If I wasn’t, if he wasn’t, the future I’d kissed into the palm of his hand, ours, together, would be destroyed. I did not meet his glance and, without another peek in his direction, I marched off with my detail.
Lem and I worked together on the colonel’s latest project, a bakery. After a few hours of digging post holes, Lem said, “You steady her and I’ll tamp her in,” as he raised a double jack with both hands to drive a cedar post deeper into the hole we’d dug. Everyone in our crew, Caldwell, Greene, the Georgia boys, had their shirts off. As usual, Vikers kept to the shade, pretending to be busy, but mostly he watched. Me. I always hated the feel of his spectacled gaze, but that day, his peeping brought a hot, prickly sweat to my brow and the back of my neck, making me aware of the Sergeant’s kerchief tied there. I was certain he’d see the Sergeant’s bare neck and guess everything.
“Bill?” Lem asked. I’d let the shaggy cedar post in my hand list to the side while craning around to keep an eye on Vikers keeping an eye on me. I straightened it up and the hard wood thrummed in my hand with every pound of Lem’s hammer.
“You’re mighty quiet today, Bill,” Lem said, as we moved on to the next spot.
I humphed in answer and we got busy with our long iron digging bars, jabbing them into the dry, sandy earth. Out of the corner of my eye, I watched Wager, no, I watched Sergeant Allbright off to the side with Drewbott and Carter. They were studying the plans for the bakery Drewbott had ordered us to build. The colonel held his hand out to indicate where a wall was meant to go and the Sergeant left his side, pulling a string line off that way.
“Can’t wait for them to get that bakery built. Can you, Bill?”
“Yeah, a bakery’d be good,” I managed, watching the Sergeant drive a stake into the ground and tie the string line to it to use for a guide in building the south wall. When he finished, he glanced up and caught me staring at him. Though I whipped my gaze away, praying no one had noticed, I’d seen a tender expression on his face that made my hands go cold in the heat.
“I’m tired of cracking my teeth on hardtack was stale back when the Rebs fired on Fort Sumter,” Lem said.
“Uh-huh,” I muttered, my throat suddenly dry.
“Fresh bread,” he sang out. “Can smell it now. Slather some butter on it warm out of the oven. Nothin’ finer on this earth. Ain’t that right, Bill?”
I uh-hummed and we continued in this way, me unable to pull my eyes from the Sergeant, ready to burst out singing one minute then wet my pants from terror the next.
Which is why Lem caught me off guard when he said, “Heard you creep in near dawn. What in blazes was you and Sarge doing out there all night? Then you tossed and turned in your bunk like you were breaking a fever. Something happen on that run, Bill?”
A sharpness in his tone put me on alert that he didn’t want any more lies from me and I mumbled about being put off the stage by the damn town folk and having to walk back to the fort.
“Yeah, but that’s not no all-night walk, is it, Bill? Could of made it back by nightfall easy.”
“We were tired. Camped out.”
“Why’d you do that? Didn’t bring no gear with you.”
“We made do, all right?” I snapped back.
“Yeah, I ’spect you did,” Lem said. “Way you’re acting. Eyes glued on the sergeant. ’Spect you made do just fine.” He winked at me and, because he was my only friend and had saved my life, I winked back.
“Knew it,” he gloated. “Knew Sarge was one of us.”
For the next hour the only sound was our digging rods clanking into rocks and the pound of the sledge as we drove the posts in. I refused to so much as cut my eyes in the Sergeant’s direction. Pretending like nothing had changed, I said, “Never signed up for no post-hole diggin’. When we gon go out hunt them renegades like we’re supposed to be doing? Can’t believe Drewbott’s held Sheridan off for a whole year. This here’s infantry work we’re doing?”
“Ain’t right,” Lem amened.
It calmed me to settle into our normal to and fro. “I mean,” I said, “it’s been so long since we rode out proper ain’t even any horses need shoeing. Here you are, the best farrier this side of the Mississippi, and they got you pounding fence posts. Ain’t right. Just ain’t right.”
“Strikers say Drewbott sends Sheridan fake reports just to keep him off his back. Man is terrified of redskins.” Lem leaned in close, his face lit up the way it did when he had some juicy gossip to share, and whispered, “Way I heard it, Drewbott makes his wife sleep on the side of the bed closest to the door. Figures on making the redskins go through her carcass fore they can get at him.”
“Well, at least Chewing Bones isn’t on the warpath.”
There had been no attacks in our area since Chewing Bones and his band had been herded onto a reservation.
A few swings of the heavy sledge later, Lem yelped in pain, dropped the hammer and held his hand out to show me where a blister had burst. The skin was pale where it sagged away from the red flesh left exposed on his palm. “I got to go wrap this,” he said, hurrying off in search of something
to bandage the oozing sore with.
I picked up the heavy sledge he’d dropped, choked up on the hammer, and steadying the post with my free hand, tried to tap it in myself. I was so intent on the job that I started when a hand reached out and grabbed the post. “Here. Let me hold that for you. Private Cathay.”
The Sergeant said my name too loud, calling it out for others around us to hear like it was a joke between him and me that none of the others would get. He took the hammer from my hand and pounded the post in for me.
I whipped my head around, praying no one, especially not Vikers, was watching, and hissed, “What in billy hell are you doing?”
“Just helping out one of my men.” He near hollered the last word.
“Shut up,” I whispered, looking away so’s it’d appear I wasn’t speaking directly to my CO. “For God’s sake, Sergeant, please shut your mouth.”
“I was only—”
“You are only going to get me mustered out or killed.”
“Cathy, calm down. You sound crazy. You’re safe. I’ll kill the first man lays a finger on you.”
“What?” I hissed. “You gon be by my side every minute of the next year until my hitch is up?’ Cause that’s what it’ll take to keep a woman alone safe amongst these jackals.”
“What am I supposed to do?” he asked.
It threw me to hear him asking me what to do until I realized that he was the one standing naked and scared as I’d been yesterday when I’d revealed my true nature to him.
“Forget what happened?” he asked in a whisper, leaning in closer than any commander ever would have. “Forget who, what, you really are? Forget how I feel?”
How I wished we were still alone on the prairie, but we weren’t, and even at that moment, Vikers was huddling up with Greene and Caldwell, staring hard at us.
“Yes,” I answered, refusing to look his way. “That’s exactly what I want you to do.”
“That’s not possible. Cathy, last night changed everything for me. Didn’t it for you?”
“What did it change?” I hissed “I’ve still got a year left on my hitch. It didn’t change that. You know that the army is all I’ve got in this world. Don’t take it away. Please.”
“We could get married.”
“Then what?” I whispered. “I trail around after you from post to post? They’re never gonna give a black soldier a little house where I can put flower boxes on the windows. That’s for officers. And the only officers this army will ever have are white. What about our babies? Who pays for a decent place for children to grow up in? For food? Shoes? Only job I can get is laundress or whore and I’ll die first.”
“Cathy, I make nearly twenty a month. Be a solid twenty-one soon as my promotion to sergeant major comes through.”
I snorted a dry laugh, astonished that such a smart man could say such a stupid thing. “Why are we even talking about this? The instant they find out what I really am, we’re both done. We’ll both be mustered out so fast your head will spin. That is, if we’re lucky. If we’re not, they’ll bring you up on charges and lock you up in Fort Leavenworth. Me? Think about what’ll happen when the barracks jackals find out they got a woman, all by herself, no one to protect her, who’s been tricking them for two years. Think about it. Think about what they’ll do to me. Vikers already hates me.”
The memory of the widow harnessed like a mule to a plow came back to me and I begged him, “Let me finish my hitch. Get that pension. You finish yours and then, maybe—”
“Not ‘maybe,’ Cathy. Then we’ll be together.”
“If you let me finish out my tour,” I said.
He didn’t answer.
“Sergeant, you got to understand the way Vikers and his boys watch me. Nothing slips by them. You can’t touch me, can’t say my name, you can’t so much as glance my way from now until the day I muster out.”
“I don’t think I can do that.”
“No think about it,” I said. “It has to be that way or we might just as well ride on out of here tonight.”
“Desert?”
I nodded.
He said, “They’ll come after us. Find us. Shoot us.”
“They will. I’ve only got eight more months on my hitch then, maybe—”
“I already told you, no ‘maybe’ about it. We’ll be together. If it means that until the day you muster out, you’re nothing but Private William Cathay to me, then that’s what you’ll be. But you have to give me your promise.”
I nodded.
“Say it,” he said.
“We’ll be together.”
“Say my name.”
I dared a glance into his face and said, “We’ll be together, Wager Swayne.”
Right then, I’d of taken it all back and we’d have run for the high line, but since the Sergeant was the Sergeant, he kept his word, he did the right thing. He stepped back and walked away. What had to be, had to be. We had a plan. We’d be together.
Chapter 71
Wager. Wager. Wager. Wager.
Only in the dark of the barracks when all around me were calling out in their sleep for their beloveds could I allow his name back into my head. And then only to heft it for the weight of the hope and the worry it brought and to calculate if I could bear either for another day. Another day that would bring me one step closer to finishing out my hitch, getting that pension, having a life with my all in all.
In July news came that helped knock my worries aside: Chewing Bones and his band had left the reservation and were raiding and massacring again. The news and rumors flew so thick and heavy that it was impossible to tell what was true. If I was to believe every tale of atrocity told in the barracks after lights out, I’d of had to give Chewing Bones credit for more devastation than what was wreaked upon the entire Shenandoah Valley by Sheridan and the Union Army.
Every night the rumors got more gruesome. Like the settler who was clubbed in the back of the head as he tried to run away then had his scalp lifted. And would of lived except that screw worms burrowed into his bald skull and ate his brain.
“Mutilation” was everything the savages did beyond the regular scalping and porcupining someone with arrows. The strikers brought the best stories back. With a fiendish glee that came straight from the officers’ dinner tables, we heard of the renegades chopping off fingers, hands, ears, eyelids, entire human hides. Chewing Bones himself was said to have hacked one fellow’s heart right out of his chest, leaving him alive long enough to see it give its final beat. Stories of such butchery, however, were always just a warm-up for the accounts of the ultimate outrage: when a man got his parts chopped off. In the mathematics of the barracks parts getting chopped off equaled up to a couple dozen killings by any other means.
And then there were the endless kidnappings and violations of “innocent white women and girls.” The nastiest stories always came by way of the colonel and his wife. They told of brave pioneer wives being hauled out of their cabins by the hair for all the braves to have a go at. Then they’d stake the white woman out in the sun with her eyelids cut off. The braves’d kidnap whatever girls were of age, or close to, to take back to their squalid teepees and use at their leisure. Or to let their women henpeck to death. Or, ransom back to the whites. Usually via a gang of comancheros who’d also use her in highly imaginative ways.
I’d heard variations on this tale so many times, I stopped paying attention until, one night, Vikers said, “The worst depravity has to be what happened to a young girl by the name of Matilda Lockhart who was carried off by the Comanche to the Guadalupe Mountain. She wasn’t but thirteen years old, though already well developed with a fine, high bust.”
Fine, high bust. Vikers played the barracks boys like a fiddle.
“The savages held her captive for two years. Every one of those lustful heathens used that little girl in the most despicable of ways.”
In the dark, I made a sour face thinking of how, night after endless night, they did nothing but brag on the despicabl
e ways that they themselves used women.
“But the squaws,” Vikers droned on. “Those redskin squaws were even worse. They beat little Matilda constantly. Even when she tried to sleep they’d torture her. Many a time they woke her by pressing a hot coal against her tender flesh. Especially her nose.
“When her family got her back after two years, her nose was burned down to the stump. She was so utterly degraded by those beasts that she couldn’t hold her head up again in civilized society and died two years later.”
I could of let this story go, should of let this story go for my own good, but Vikers had whipped even the Georgia boys up.
“Animals,” Tea Cake said, genuinely outraged.
“Rabid animals,” Ivory added. “Need to put them down like mad dogs.”
“First redskin I get my hands on,” Baby King swore, “I’ma burn his nose off, you just see if I don’t.”
The frenzy kept building until I had to point out, “You all know that this happened back in eighteen and forty, don’t you? This Matilda Lockhart y’all so het up about’s been dead now lot longer than she was ever alive, and yet she’s still got the U.S. Army and every settler ever headed west slaughtering Indians for her. And one other thing. It was the Comanche took her. Chewing Bones’s pack is Apache.”
“So what?” Greene said. “They’re all bad.”
“Eighteen and forty?” Tea Cake asked. “That true, Vikers?”
Vikers gathered himself up and came back, “I doubt that one true thing’s ever come out of Stanky’s lying mouth.”
“Yeah,” Caldwell said, “he got too many other things stuffed all up in there.”
Oh, they howled and slapped their thighs at that reminder of the unnatural acts I was supposed to be getting up to. When the cackling subsided, Lem spoke up and said, “Cathay’s right, I been hearing ’bout this burnt-nose white girl since I signed on. Seems a world of heathens been shot up, burned out, and starved on account of her. Now here we are gettin’ riled up all over again over little Matilda been dead longer than I been alive. It sets me to wondering. Makes me to ask y’all a question. Didn’t none of y’all never see a master do near as bad or worse to one of our girls? Back where I come from, they got used any way Master saw fit. And weren’t never no army riding out to venge those sweet baby girls.”