An Obituary for Major Reno

by Richard S. Wheeler

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  PART ONE: 1889

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  PART TWO: 1876

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  PART THREE: 1876

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  PART FOUR: 1889

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  EPILOGUE

  THE GIRL I LEFT BEHIND ME

  BY RICHARD S. WHEELER FROM TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES

  AUTHOR’S NOTES

  Notes

  Copyright Page

  For my brother, Timothy J. Wheeler

  PART ONE

  1889

  Being an Account of Major Reno’s Request

  CHAPTER ONE

  RICHLER DIDNT WANT TO INTERVIEW RENO, THE COWARD, REPROBATE, and whiner, but newspaper correspondents don’t always have a choice. Bennett had cabled Richler from Paris, which is where the great man ran the New York Herald these days, and that was command enough. Do it or turn in his press card and cease scribbling for the greatest paper on earth.

  The Herald’s ace Washington correspondent Joseph Richler made his way through a bitter March rain to a nondescript redbrick neighborhood north of Capitol Hill, found a sawed-up apartment building priced just about right for a six-hundred-a-year Interior Department pension clerk, climbed two flights of creaking stairs, and located the correct four-panel door, varnished almost black.

  He knocked and was admitted to a gloomy two-room flat by a fleshy, dark, and dour man whose gray skin and bagged eyes suggested illness.

  “We’ve met,” Reno said. It wasn’t exactly a friendly welcome.

  “Several times.”

  Reno motioned Richler to a wooden chair and relit a much-gummed cigar. The flat exuded the rank stink of cigar smoke. Gray light filtered through tobacco-stained lace drapes from the single window.

  “It’s simple,” he said. “You get the last interview of Major Reno.”

  “Are you planning on dying?”

  “Not if I can help it. Tomorrow they’re cutting out my tongue. Or most of it, anyway. After that, it’s silence and paper and pencil.”

  “Surgery on your tongue?”

  Reno looked annoyed. He sucked on the yellow cigar, bringing its half dead business end to bright life. “Providence Hospital, tomorrow at eight, March fifteen, eighteen eighty-nine. I lose my tongue. Cancer. After that, I’ll talk Swahili.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Good riddance.” He smiled at Richler, and the newsman saw life in those agate eyes at last. “The tongue is the second most important member.”

  Reno was running true to form.

  “So you want to talk before the knife silences you. You told Mr. Bennett it would be the last interview, and he cabled me, and here we are, and you get your last shot at Whittaker and Elizabeth Custer and the rest, courtesy of the Herald.” Richler pulled out a notepad and a couple of soft-lead editing pencils.

  “It’s honor I want. I want my rank back. I want my record cleared. I want my good name. That’s all a man has in life, his good name. I want the true story of what happened on the record. I want the name of Major Marcus Reno to be sunlit and bright. I want my boy to grow up proud. I want the whole damned nation to know what I gave to it in the wars I fought for it.”

  There was passion in his voice. And maybe other things as well. Anger, bitterness, desolation, defiance. Richler discovered a malevolent light burning in Reno’s eyes, the first opening into the man’s sulphurous soul.

  “And if that doesn’t happen in your lifetime?”

  “My ghost will walk the halls of justice until it’s done. I’ll rattle every flagstaff, and the Seventh will never know peace until I have peace.”

  Richler thought about the petitions to the president and the army, the private bills introduced in each session of congress to restore Reno’s name and rank, and the great wall of pained opposition each of those efforts had encountered. He thought about Reno’s rejected writings, the ones no one would publish, his version of the horrendous events of June 25 and June 26, the centennial year of the Republic.

  “Good luck,” he said wryly.

  “I thought your publisher might be interested,” Reno said.

  “He is. That battle is always good copy.”

  “Here’s the usual newspaper story,” Reno said, scorn underlying the word newspaper. “I disobeyed orders at the Little Bighorn, turned my tail and ran, was eaten by guilt, turned into a drunk, got court-martialed and convicted twice, the second time for conduct unbecoming to an officer, their way of calling me a Peeping Tom, and I’m responsible for the death of two hundred brave men of the Seventh Cavalry, along with its illustrious leader. And I was cashiered, with a dishonorable discharge.”

  Richler nodded. The interview was going about the way he supposed it might. His pencil had yet to touch paper.

  “You haven’t written one damned word. During the big war I fought in twenty-four engagements. I started as a lieutenant, was breveted for gallantry in action, to brevet brigadier general of volunteers. Phil Sheridan and others stuffed my files with warm commendations. No one called me a coward. In those days I was Sheridan’s kind of sonofabitch.”

  Richler waited for something new, something he could print. The whole interview would amount to a six-inch story, the way it was going.

  “My speech is slurred. My tongue has a big cauliflower lump on it, and it hurts. But I’m used to slurs.”

  Richler elected not to smile at Reno’s witticism. The major’s speech was indeed slurred, oddly inflected by the painful lump on his tongue. He pitied the man.

  “I earn six hundred a year in the pension office.” Reno waved a hand at his humble gray surroundings. “It fits. I was comfortable once, earning better than three thousand as a major in the regular army. But those were other times.”

  “You had my publisher send me here because you have something new to tell me?”

  Reno ignored him. “I inherited my wife’s estate. A farm, city lots, houses, real estate mainly, but cash too. Lawyers have it now. My honor has cost me thirty thousand dollars. My second wife, Isabella, wants the rest. She’s suing me for divorce, for ‘insults to her person.’ You will wonder about those insults. I kissed her with
a mouth full of cigar smoke. She took offense at my body and then took offense at my empty purse.”

  Richler doodled on his notepad. He had scarcely asked a question and doubted that he would have to. He would listen. He could do that much for the man, then walk out and write a few words for a pitiable devil who would slide into perpetual silence in a day or two. He disliked Reno. Hardly anyone liked him. The man put off people, and that seemed ingrained in his very nature.

  “It didn’t start with the Little Bighorn, you know. It started earlier.”

  Richler was interested at last. Here would be a confession that Reno and Custer had been at odds for years, that this thing had roots deep into the origins of the Seventh Cavalry.

  But that was not it at all.

  “In eighteen and seventy-four, Mary Hannah died. It started then.”

  “What started?”

  “The curse, the bad luck.”

  “You were far away when it happened,” Richler said. He knew that story.

  “With the boundary commission on the Canadian border. I had some cavalry and infantry under me and we were keeping the Sioux off the backs of the commission while they surveyed the line. Then she died. For years she had taken care of her mother in Harrisburg at the family home, and then her mother died, and then she died of kidney disease, and I was a widower with a boy who needed a mother.

  “I couldn’t get away. I applied for leave at once, but they were shorthanded, with so many officers away and they wouldn’t let me go. Not until a month later. So she was buried in her Ross family plot in the Harrisburg Cemetery, and I wasn’t there, and I couldn’t go there for several more weeks, and the Rosses held it against me, even though I explained that my orders kept me there on the boundary.”

  Richler knew that was leading somewhere, at least in Reno’s thinking, though he couldn’t fathom it. Not yet.

  But then Reno stopped talking, as if a water gate had clamped down and the flood ceased. He was lost in his own world, a world he was not sharing with the correspondent. He smiled at last, offered Richler a green-leafed panatella, which the correspondent refused, nodded toward a bottle of Old Orchard bourbon, which the Herald man declined also, and settled at last in his battered Morris chair.

  “The Herald’s been fair to me,” Reno said. “Your man O’Kelly reported the Little Bighorn story accurately in the days that followed that fight. I think highly of Bennett and his rag. He’s put correspondents all over the globe, and taught them how to cable the news to New York. That’s why I went to him, and why you’re here now.”

  “I’m not quite sure why I’m here, major. You have not given me anything new.”

  “I suppose you want me to talk about the battle. I intend to.”

  “Actually, I want you to talk about the army’s court of inquiry in Chicago in 1879, held at your request, if I remember rightly. They exonerated you. ‘Major Reno did nothing that would merit the animadversion of this court,’ or something like that.”

  “It cleared me.”

  “But it didn’t change anything, did it? Your critics still want your scalp. It’s as if that court didn’t exist. They’ve never ceased laying the blame for that disaster on you. It was all your fault that Custer and his command perished. What I want to know is, why didn’t it change things?”

  Reno sucked, lighting up the end of the cigar, and exhaled noxious smoke.

  “You don’t feel exonerated, not even by an official inquiry. Why is that?”

  “I don’t know the answer,” Reno said.

  “You have enemies,” Richler said. “Who are they?”

  Reno stared sadly into the drifting cigar smoke, and turned at last to Richler.

  “Myself,” he said.

  CHAPTER TWO

  MARCUS RENO STUDIED THE GAUNT AND ILL-FED RICHLER AS UNOB-trusively as he could. The newspaperman exuded impatience and skepticism, and was ready to bolt. His bright blue eyes swept Reno with a glance, and noted the obvious signs of dissipation. Reno knew the correspondent was registering all that and everything else about him, including the dingy flat, the cigar-stained lips, and especially the halt in Reno’s voice. The story, if it appeared at all, would not flatter.

  The interview would last a few minutes and Richler would politely fold his notes into his pocket and retreat into the cold rain.

  Reno had wanted to tell the newsman about Mary Hannah, but had stopped abruptly. The subject was too tender. He didn’t even know how to put such deep feeling into words, as if things felt so profoundly could somehow be translated into something some other mortal could understand. So he did not tell Richler that something in life had shifted when Mary Hannah departed from him; things were never the same after 1874, and now, in 1889, his life and dreams were fading.

  It was hard enough to talk to a reporter; hard enough to talk to anyone. He had always been solitary, even among his fellow officers, his real thoughts veiled from scrutiny. No one on earth knew Marcus Reno except Mary Hannah. She alone was his friend as well as his wife and lover. And she was dead. And he could not tell Richler anything about that.

  No life had been more lonely, but as long as he had a tongue and words to form, it was not hopeless. Now he faced the horror of silence. He had spent a while trying to speak without moving his tongue, depressing it with a spoon, and knew the cruel truth: he would soon plunge into a world of silence and guttural grunts, a world of penciled notes and signs, a world of mute despair. The thought had been frightening, and he had wildly cabled Bennett, told him he wanted one last interview to make his case while he could still speak.

  And the interview was about to fall apart. It was hard enough to talk at this hour, with a swollen tongue that hurt sharply whenever he formed the simplest word but it was much harder to release the flood of words dammed in his heart.

  John Hamilton, his doctor, didn’t know how much tongue would be removed, but most of it would go. The carcinoma was large; a mass of cauliflower-like flesh with a pulpy crater in the center that kept bleeding. The whole mass hurt and kept words from forming. The surrounding tissue was affected.

  So Marcus Reno stared at his interrogator, aching to pour out a justification of his life, desperate to do so because it was his last chance and he was a poor scribbler, inept with words, and he saw nothing but loneliness and despair and dishonor on the dark road ahead.

  But then Richler helped him.

  “Let’s start with the fight, major.”

  Reno nodded, gratefully, and the officer within him took over and filled his mind.

  “I was the ranking officer in the Seventh at Fort Abraham Lincoln when George Custer was here in Washington, testifying against the Grant administration’s Indian policy. I should have led that command. If I had …” Reno wanted to say that the disaster would not have happened, which is what he fervently believed. And that the Sioux and Cheyenne would have met their match. But he checked himself.

  “If you had?”

  Reno ignored the prompt. “Colonel Custer pulled strings and got back just in time. I had trained some green troops, mixing them thoroughly with seasoned soldiers to hasten the process. The Seventh Cavalry was full of new men, some of them scarcely able to ride a horse. It was not anything that the lieutenant colonel took into account.”

  “How do you know that, major?”

  “I knew the man, watched him for years.”

  That was a weak answer, and Reno knew it.

  Reno stumbled on, cavalry politics, personalities, Benteen, Weir, Keogh, George Armstrong Custer, Tom Custer, Boston Custer, the task assigned to the Seventh, marching out of Fort Abraham Lincoln to the strains of “Garryowen,” the meeting of three corps on the Yellowstone River, Reno’s scout, looking for the Indians, in which he violated orders and found them, or at least some recent village sites.

  Richler hadn’t written a word.

  “What are you waiting for?” Reno asked, pointing at the naked paper.

  “For you to say something new, major. Everything you’ve
said has been hashed out in the press over and over. The partisans of George Custer blame you; others blame Custer himself. Have you anything to add to that?”

  “My record, Mr. Richler. I was cited for gallantry several times in the late war. Isn’t that enough to put the lie to my enemies?”

  Richler wrote not a word.

  Reno saw how it would go, and how the rest of his life would spin out. A man without a tongue was a man without a voice.

  “I met Mary Hannah Ross at a dinner in Harrisburg in the fall of sixty-two,” he said. “She was the granddaughter of my host, Mrs. Haldeman. I’d been buying horses for the cavalry there, on detached duty, while I healed up from a wound. Established people, the Haldemans and Rosses, banks, farms, all of that. I’ll never forget that dinner.”

  Richler’s eyes betrayed little interest.

  Talking tormented Reno’s tongue. It ached savagely. What he was about to say tormented him even more, but something was knocking down ancient reticence.

  “I was taken with her. She was eighteen, slender, bright, and her gaze kept drifting my way. I was older, twenty-eight, you know, and I imagine my blue uniform didn’t harm my appearance any.”

  Reno managed a smile. Richler still had not penned one word.

  “We looked a little like each other, you know, except she was slim and I never was. But that wasn’t the attraction. Who can say what it was? She only had eyes for me, and I saw no one else or even remember what was spoken that evening, though the people of Harrisburg, so close to the South, were wary of a Confederate thrust their way, the state capital being a prize of war.”

  “And when the thrust came, you defended, if I recall.”

  “We were ready. I helped organize the militia. But Jeb Stuart’s cavalry never arrived, and Harrisburg was spared. And meanwhile, there were other things on my mind.” He sucked hard on the cigar and exhaled a plume of blue smoke. “Mary Hannah. It’s a mystery, isn’t it? A man and a woman see each other and everything is predestined. Something stirs in the heart, something takes hold. We found ourselves at several dinners, and there was something about her that caught me. She was not a flirt, and met my gaze shyly, but her eyes held my own. She was accomplished socially and schooled too, as so few young women are, and we were soon sending unspoken messages to each other, and those messages were simply, Yes. Yes.”