by Sarah Bird
I heard them shuffling about, standing up, getting ready to move on me, and I whirled around, faced all them broad-shouldered miners, shirts Sunday-clean for the day, nails grimy-black forever, making the few chairs in the parlor look like dollhouse furniture, and, since I was still always willing to let anger burn away pain, I said with plenty of pepper, “Any y’all not happy with the way Miss Kate’s is run, you’re free to go on live wherever you please.”
That shut them up quick for, tough as they were, weren’t a one of them tough enough to make it through a Colorado winter living in a tent. I went back to straightening my perfect table. All that came from the parlor behind me were the sounds of stomachs grumbling and some low muttering. Gradually, though, the muttering built in volume.
Of course, Charles was ringleading. “She actually believes that the Commanding General of the U.S. Army’s gon come here to her sorry ole boardinghouse,” he said.
L.J., a slit-lip boy who was an expert with black powder, grumbled, “Hell, woman actually believe she was a Buffalo Soldier.”
“I hear y’all over there!” I hollered, continuing to line gleaming forks and spoons up next to gleaming plates. “Folks can believe any fool thing they want. I know what’s true. I know I got a letter saying General Sheridan is coming to my boardinghouse. And I know that when the General says he is coming, he comes. I should know. I rode with the man.”
Charles snickered. “Rode with the man? She maybe rode under him one night somewhere.”
L.J. added, “One real dark night somewheres.”
Curtis, a small man, only good for load cleaning, piped up, “Oh, yeah, she was a Buffalo Soldier. Buffalo Soldier laundry gal.”
“That’s right. That’s right,” Charles said. “Washed out them Buffalo Soldier drawers!”
“When she wasn’t trying to get into them,” a fourth man whose voice I couldn’t pick out said.
They were all snorting and chuckling when I stepped into the parlor. I had near half a foot of height on one or two of them and I used every inch of it when I boomed out, “You all got something to say, say it to my face.”
That shut them up. Until Charles stood. Charles towered over me and answered back, “Yeah, matter of fact, I do got something to say.” He glanced at the other men who nodded him on. “We all got something to say. You all the time going on about how you was a Buffalo Soldier. How you tracked the Indians. Got the Marksman medal. Now you telling us the Commanding General of the United States Army is coming? Here? To a colored boardinghouse? To pay a call?”
Whispered words like peas out of a shooter snapped into me. Liar. Crazy.
Charles went on, getting hotter with every word. “Our Sunday dinner’s been sitting out there on that damn table getting cold going on two hours now. How much longer we got to play pretend?”
“No pretend to it,” I shot back. “Now, sit back down fore I shove you down.”
But Charles didn’t sit down. Instead, one by one, the miners stood. Maybe in the past, when I was stronger, I could of faced down a full-scale mutiny, but seeing now that the General wasn’t coming, that he wasn’t going to get me my pension, and that I’d never have even the least little bit of Wager to hold, to smell, again, unstrung me. Before the men caught the scent of my weakness, I stomped off to my room.
Their voices, puffed out now, crowed, “She a Buffalo Soldier, where the proof? Where the pension check?”
“She got some old uniform ’bout et up by moths, could of belonged to anybody. That ain’t proof.”
“Don’t know about y’all, but I ain’t waiting another second for no pretend general ’fore I eat my supper.”
Chairs were scraped out, cutlery rattled against plates, serving spoons clinked against bowls.
“Take and rake!” Charles bellowed his version of grace.
I slammed the door of my room to cut out the sound of my perfect meal being treated like slop in a trough. I went to my trunk, opened it, and took out my old uniform. I’d stuffed a few bits of the bindings that the orderly back at Fort Arroyo had cut off me into the pocket and they hung from it like old, dead weeds. I had to touch my chest to remember the feel of them chafing, to believe again that it had all really happened the way I’d said it had.
I put the jacket on. It actually fit better now than it had when it had been issued to the half-starved girl I’d been over twenty years ago. I pushed aside the scraps of Bunny’s last saddle blanket I’d saved and the muslin shirt that had belonged to the husband I’d had for three months, a no-account drunk who’d stolen my pocket watch and twenty dollars and run off. At the bottom of the trunk was a cedar box I’d had made special to keep what was inside as safe from insects and time as possible.
I opened it and lifted out the yellow kerchief Wager Swayne had tied around my neck as we lay beneath the cottonwoods and that scarf had made me his more surely than any wedding ring ever could. Though the years and that long-ago soaking in a mud seep had stolen the silk’s bright daisy color, I still pressed it to my nose and hunted for his smell amid the fragrance of cedar. It was gone. I had nothing and I never would. Carefully, I returned the kerchief to its cedar box and shut the trunk.
I thought I’d barricaded myself from grief, but imagining what might have been in Wager’s box of personal effects—his leather gauntlets, his folding knife, maybe the notebook he’d carried—swamped me with longing for what I’d never have. I’d never stroke my own cheek with the glove that had cradled his hand. I’d never trace my fingers across the words he’d written. I cursed myself for making the same tragic mistake as Wager had and believing in a white man’s army.
“Cathy!” Clemmie burst through the door.
“What!” I snapped, hiding sadness with anger as I whirled around. “Don’t you ever knock?”
Clemmie stood there, her mouth working but no words came from it.
“Sister, what is it?” I grabbed her plump shoulders, fearing for a second that she, too, would slip away from me. “What’s taken you?”
Finally, she stammered, “The General. His carriage. It’s pulling up out front.”
In the dining room, the miners, all staring through the screen door out at the street, had been turned to stone. Their hands, reaching for the pitcher of sweet tea or wiping a napkin across a mouth, were frozen in the air. I froze for a moment, too, when I saw that a four-wheel brougham, lacquered a shiny black and pulled by a handsome pair of mahogany bays, was parked on the dirt road.
The screen door blurred the scene outside, making it appear as though it was happening far away. Or in a dream. For a moment, I feared I was imagining that fine coach just because I wanted it to be there so bad. But if I was cooking the vision up in my head, so were all the miners and their families peeking out the front doors of their small company houses and gawking in wonder.
The driver clambered down, set a stool beneath the carriage door, opened it, and helped the first of the two passengers out.
Was my General always so short?
That was what I wondered when a stooped old man emerged. The trim cavalry officer who had ridden out of Winchester, Virginia, like Lucifer was on his tail to save the Union Army from rout and help Lincoln win re-election had gone to fat. An apron of blubber hung beneath his chin. My General’s hair, once patent-leather black and smooth, was wispy and gray as ash. Most befuddling of all, though, was that he wore civilian clothes. How could Smash ’em Up be Smash ’em Up without a saber and gauntlets? A high-collared jacket buttoned to his chin and riding boots up to his knees?
A young colonel stepped out and buzzed about the General in the wifely way of an aide-de-camp and I wondered if Terrill had retired or died. The colonel glanced around uncertainly at all the black faces and whispered in the General’s ear. Annoyed, Sheridan waved him off and then snapped his fingers. The aide-de-camp fetched a small pine box and my heart lurched.
He approached. Though he’d slowed down, Philip Henry Sheridan was still the bulldog who put his head down and charged
forward no matter who the enemy or what the odds. When he came close enough, Iyaiya put a vision in my head and I saw a cloud of black crows circling his head. Death winged about my General. Death was the enemy he was charging now and the only one he would never whip.
“He’s coming,” Charles said. “Here.”
I stepped out into the deep shade of the front porch.
The boarders, napkins still tucked into collars, followed. The front yard had filled with neighbors who stared from me to the Commander of the United States Army, trying to conjure up a world wherein the two of us belonged together.
The General stopped short of the porch steps, visored his eyes, peered into the shadows, and asked, “Cathy, is that you?”
Not a soul made a sound except for Charles who gave out a grunt of astonishment.
Every salute, every drill formation, every inspection, they all reclaimed me. I gathered myself up straight as a flagpole, stepped into the light, descended the steps, formed up in front of my old commander and knew sure as gun is iron that he hadn’t come to give me something. He was there for what only I could give him.
“You look well,” my General said. The smell of smoke no bath would ever scrub away poured off of him. Black powder smoke from all the terrible battles. Campfire smoke from every pot of water I’d ever boiled for his cups of “tay.” Wood and crop and corpse smoke from the Burning. Tobacco smoke from when he burned Old Mister’s farm and took me from Mama.
Seeing no reason for anything but the truth at this point, I answered, “You appear about ready for the undertaker, General.”
A few in the crowd, fearing the retribution that was sure to be visited upon us all for such insolence, slipped away for they did not know that I had just given Philip Sheridan the gift that only all that smoke, all those fires could allow me to give him.
They were surprised when the General laughed, but I wasn’t. It was a fine, rich sound that pulled pain and stuffiness, even age, out of him with each gust until he was, again, the cocky cavalry commander who could sleep on the ground, spring into the saddle the next day, and charge after Rebels like an avenging angel. Wanting nothing more than to be that young soldier again, even if for only a moment, even if only with the lowliest, most fraudulent trooper he had ever commanded, my General asked, “Remember the first thing you ever said to me?”
“Yessir. I told you I’d be singing at your funeral.”
I knew that the General had asked the question to hear again the rough exchange of his younger years that no one but me could give him now that he was powerful and old and sick. He smiled. That’s what he had come for: to be young again for a moment. Not to be dying.
“Ah, you were a cheeky one,” the General said, the accent of his boyhood creeping in. “We always had that in common.”
“Outcast of West Point,” I said.
A murmur passed through the crowd. Charles said, “She ain’t lyin’. She really knows him.”
“What?” Sheridan demanded. “‘Know her’? Why, this woman held our line at Cedar Creek. Took an old muzzle-loader off a Johnny Reb and opened up! Woman could shoot, too.”
“You pinned the Marksman medal on me yourself,” I put in, and waited for the General to give me what it was that I wanted. I waited for him to recognize me.
But Sheridan said nothing.
“Back at Fort Arroyo,” I prodded.
His eyes narrowed, but still he made no answer. A second time, he denied me, denied my service. He was angry I’d mentioned it. He wanted me to be a sassy cook’s helper.
When the silence went on too long, Clemmie stepped up and said brightly, “Well, come on in here into the mess, General. Cooked you a meal, make you feel like taking Cedar Creek all over again!”
“Solomon’s sweet potato pie?” he asked.
“Enough for a regiment,” Clemmie answered.
“Just thinking about it,” Sheridan said, looking straight at me, “makes me so hungry I could eat—”
Though he had denied me my young years as a soldier, I couldn’t do a dying man the same way and finished up, “The hind legs off the Lamb of God.”
“Ah.” Sheridan sighed. “We had some grand times, didn’t we?”
“We did, General. That we did. We showed them all.” I stepped aside. “Come on inside, sir. I even have you a cup of your Paddy tay.”
Sheridan took one eager step forward before his aide-de-camp stopped him to mutter something in his ear that caused the General’s brow to lower.
“Blast it all, Colonel!” Sheridan exploded. “Why did you allow that ______ of a mayor to keep us so long? Surely there’s time for a piece of pie with my old campaigner.”
“I’m sorry, General,” the colonel said. “But if we don’t leave immediately, we shall miss our connection and you shall be late for your nine A.M. meeting with the President on Tuesday.”
“‘Meeting.’” The General spit the word back at the colonel. “Cleveland’s going to set a gaggle of ______ Quakers and other ______ Indian sympathizers on me for ‘eradicating’ the redskins. As if that were not the direct order of the American people twenty years ago. Now that it has been carried out and the savages herded onto reservations, I am to be the scapegoat.”
He went on a bit longer, cursing the Southern newspapers for blackening his name. Suddenly, he turned to me and finished up as though I was the jury and him the condemned man pleading his case. “Sherman, who left most of a state in cinders, Grant, who issued the ______ orders, they’ve been welcomed back to the South. Honored. I alone have been barred, reviled.”
The black crows beat their wings louder. They made the sound of the judgment my General had begged Mary to pray away now and at the hour of the death that was coming to him.
It was gone. The moment of being young that I had given him was snatched away.
“The box,” Sheridan ordered testily, gesturing for the colonel to deliver it to me. With a sweep of his hand in my direction, he turned and began to hobble back to the carriage. The colonel rushed ahead to open the carriage door.
“General,” I called out. “Sir.”
But the old man couldn’t hear me, wouldn’t hear me.
“Little Phil!” I shouted. “Smash ’em Up!”
Again, I called back the young soldier, and pivoting his whole body, he looked at me.
I was bound to have what was mine. I stood at attention. My hand quivered at my forehead like a shot arrow and I became every soldier he had ever ordered into battle. At Opequon Creek. At Tom’s Brook. At Fisher’s Hill. At Cedar Creek. Every soldier who was loyal and true to him and to the country that they both served.
General Philip Henry Sheridan returned my salute.
The silent crowd expelled the breath it had been holding in a gasp of astonishment: the Commanding General of the U.S. Army was saluting a woman. A black woman.
The weight of years of denial and disrespect lifted off me until I was nearly light enough to float up the stairs as I hurried into the kitchen to fetch the prettiest pie.
When I returned, Sheridan was shaking away his aide’s helping arm as he heaved himself into the coach. Once he was settled in, I passed the pie through the window. His eyelids closed of their own accord as the smell called him back to his green and eager years.
Then he regarded me for a long moment before asking, “We showed them, Cathy, didn’t we?”
I nodded and answered, “We did, indeed, General. We showed them all.”
General Philip Henry Sheridan slapped his hand against the roof of the coach and it jerked to life. As it carried him away, my boarders and neighbors crowded around, eager now to hear my story, but I would not speak. I watched in silence until the black coach was but a speck lost in the distance.
Chapter 86
Late that night, while the big house slept and the only sound was the coughing of the men whose lungs had gone black, I sat on the edge of my narrow bed with the pine box perched upon my knees. Shadows cast by the lantern’s jittery flame j
umped across it.
The box was light. I shook it. There was a muffled rattle. That meant there wouldn’t be uniform, I wouldn’t have Wager’s living scent to inhale. But something. I would have something of his.
My fingers trembled to where I could barely open the box. When I lifted the lid the trembling stopped and my hands fell still as death onto my lap when I saw what was inside: a straight-edge razor with a fine four-masted sailing ship scrimshawed upon its whalebone handle nestled upon a faded yellow kerchief with a tear through it stained by blood that had turned the color of rust.
I picked up the razor to make sure I wasn’t seeing things then dropped it for I had to cover my mouth and stuff down the bark of bewilderment that leaped out of me. I fetched my own box, the small one made of cedar that I had returned Wager’s kerchief to only a few hours before. Inside, folded neatly again, was the only kerchief Wager Swayne had owned. The one he had given me, leaving his own neck bare.
I ran my fingers over the engraving of the sailing ship. It was exactly as it had been when I gave it to Lem to tell him I was sorry. Next I studied the kerchief. I scratched at the splotches of blood that surrounded one of the holes in the cloth and saw my friend again, an arrow shot through his throat.
The body hanging from the soapberry tree had been Lem’s.
My heart slammed against my chest once, twice, three times.
The patrol had found Lem’s grave at the springs and taken him back to the fort. But instead of a proper burial, Drewbott had hooded my friend’s face and hung him in Wager’s place as a warning to those who would mutiny. Who would not be captives.
Wager had escaped.
For a long time I sat there still as a stone while the north of my life for the past twenty years became south and all the meridians I’d pegged that life to shifted and reset themselves to a whole new compass.
Wager had escaped.
I rose to my feet. I would leave tonight. Now. I would ride to Mexico and find Wager. But after punishing my ruined feet all that long day, no amount of want to would make them hold me up. I tottered a moment or two before coming down in a heap onto the bed.