by Kelly, Carla
Mostly he was kind, not a trait his men probably saw too often, considering that he had to be a firm leader. He was kind to her, and that was what mattered.
And so Mary passed a pleasant time. When the dress-to-be turned onerous—knife pleats, boning in the basque—she let her lively mind venture deeper, to whether Sergeant Blade liked children, and whether he had much experience with women. She worked in silence and no one knew her thoughts.
Between her other duties, the first dress took her two days. At this rate, Mary knew she would still be basting pieces together while the ladies danced in petticoats and shimmies. This would never do.
How was it that Sergeant Blade seemed to know precisely when her web had been trampled by too many badgers?
She had laid out the next fabric on the parlor floor over Victoria’s strenuous objections that it wasn’t proper and should be done somewhere else.
“Suppose one of the other wives comes to call?” Victoria wanted to know.
Mary asked herself what Shell would do, when faced with a ninny of startling proportions, and acted. She set down her shears. “Victoria Masterson, you want these dresses. If you will not let me do it my way, I will go into my room and close the door. I never agreed to any of this. There is a Thirteenth Amendment now, and I am not your slave.”
She wasn’t certain which of the recent amendments had abolished slavery, but she was equally positive Victoria Masterson had no idea. She narrowed her eyes and tried to look ferocious like His Pony.
“If you must,” Victoria said, after a long pause.
“I must. I have to spread out the material to cut it.”
“This will go in a letter to my mother, after this wretched business is finished and I have done my duty,” Victoria said with something of a flourish, as in, So there.
“I will take that letter to your mother when I leave here in January,” Mary said, equally firm.
Oh, the panic! Oh, the sudden consternation! Victoria Masterson turned pale. “You’re . . . you’re . . . leaving?” She suddenly sounded like a child who has thrown away her favorite old doll and realizes she misses it.
“I only promised you six months.”
Victoria’s lips quivered. “Very well,” she said, and reached for her coat. “Do what you want.”
Mary sighed. Now the dratted woman was off to terrorize the captain’s wife, who would carry the news of Mary’s impertinence to her husband, who would do who-knew-what to placate tearful females. If that was the price of getting to use the floor to do her work, so be it.
When there came a knock on the door a half hour later, Mary looked up from her position on her hands and knees on the floor, cutting fabric. “Come in,” she said, ready for the worst.
The door opened, and there stood Sergeant Blade. She sat up, her face red.
“Miss Blue Eye, you have fair terrified your employer. She’s sobbing all over my employer’s desk.”
“Good! Maybe she will leave me alone so I can cut out material on the floor.”
He shook his head. “I’m to escort you to the guardhouse.”
Mary gasped. He grinned at her. She threw the tape measure at him, which he caught, strung around his neck, and lolled there, as if hanged. She laughed until tears ran. He helped her to her feet and grabbed her in a bear hug.
“Resistance is futile! I know all the moves to subjugate nearly anyone except, well, probably you. There you go. Laugh some more, and then seriously, come with me to the guardhouse. I think I can solve your problem.”
“Seriously. I get on my coat and follow you to the guardhouse?”
“I never lie about duty, Miss Blue Eye.”
He helped her into her coat and waited while she debated a hat. “Too windy,” he said. He unwound his yellow muffler and draped it over her hair. “This is better.”
The force of the wind made her gasp. He pulled her arm through his so she couldn’t blow away, and they struggled across the parade ground to the small stone building on the banks of the Laramie River.
“No one is going to live in Wyoming Territory for long, and it will never become a state,” she announced, when she stood, shivering, inside the guardhouse, where the sergeant of the day grinned at her.
“Shall I bring up the prisoner, Sergeant Blade?” the man asked.
“Absolutely.”
She gave Rowan such a look that he backed away and held up his hands in a defensive posture. “Miss Blue Eye, whether you believe me or not—and I have never and will never lie to you—Private München is the answer to . . . to . . . Captain Hayes’s prayers.”
He was right. Enter one Private Heinrich München, a thin, furtive-looking fellow with worried eyes, probably as worried as hers.
“Make a bow to Miss Blue Eye, Private München,” Sergeant Blade said.
The little German obliged, clicking his heels together like a Prussian, and nearly toppled from the effort. While the duty sergeant leaned against his desk and tried not to laugh, Sergeant Blade introduced Mary to a drunkard, a scoundrel, and a tailor. “This is Private München. He drinks too much, and this guardhouse is his second home. He is also a tailor of some renown.”
“My goodness,” Mary said. “Really?”
“Jawohl, fräulein. You ask. I do.”
“Could you cut out pattern pieces for me?”
“Nothing simpler,” Private München said. “I do all button holes. My specialty.” He bunched his fingertips to his lips and kissed them.
“That will save me hours,” Mary said.
“He’ll be able to stay up here and work. With proper supervision, of course,” Rowan said.
“Of course,” she repeated, amazed at her sudden good fortune. She eyed the tailor. “We’ll need another pair of shears and dressmaker pins.”
“In my locker for foots in the infantry barrack,” he said promptly, which made Rowan grin.
Mary looked around the room, which, with four people in it, was hardly spacious enough for cutting out fabric. “Somehow we can make this work, but . . .”
Rowan indicated the closed door, which he opened. “Take a look, Miss Blue Eye, and tell me what you think.”
She followed him into the adjoining room, which contained a long, wooden shelf about knee high and wide, and a potbellied stove. “What in the world?”
“The perfect place to cut fabric, although Private München will have a backache from bending over. This sleeping platform can hold four soldiers on guard duty. It will become Private München’s cutting board tomorrow.”
No one else was in the room. Mary stood on tiptoe and kissed Sergeant Blade’s cheek.
He smiled at her. “No bumbling badgers to disturb that industrious little spider, eh?”
“Not one. She can make those dresses.” Mary looked out the little window to the parade ground, wishing she still had fabric for her own dress.
“A penny for your thoughts.”
“With Private München helping me now, I would have had time to make my own dress, if I still had the material. I would need a miracle.”
“Oh, you never know.”
Private München was as good as his word, cutting out each newspaper pattern, giving her tailoring tips, and demonstrating a superior way to make knife pleats. Mary moved the sewing machine into the room adjacent to the duty sergeant’s office and sewed in there. When the German tailor tired of cutting fabric, they traded duties.
Beyond the blessing of working with a talented tailor for longer hours, Mary hoped that Sergeant Blade would feel at liberty to drop by, something that could never happen in the Mastersons’ quarters, because he had no business there.
To her delight, Rowan stopped in several times a day. He never seemed to mind holding out a skirt to make certain the pleats were even, although he wouldn’t wrap it around himself. When she made a mistake and had to rip out a seam, he obligingly did that for her so she could move quickly to another task.
“Did you help your mother sew when you were a boy?” she asked,
on the third day of dress production.
“My parents died of typhoid, and I was raised in an orphanage,” he told her as he concentrated on the seam. “No brothers or sisters. Just me.”
When she was silent, he didn’t even look up. “Mary, if your eyes get blurry with tears, you’ll run over your fingers when you sew.”
“How do you know I’m crying?” she asked, as she sniffed back tears.
He did look up then. “I know you pretty well. You have a soft heart.”
“It’s no crime,” she said and blew her nose.
“Hardly. I think it’s charming.”
What could she say to that?
Then he stopped coming. Two days passed, and she found herself looking out the window so often that she sewed the wrong side of the material to one of the skirt panels.
Sobered up, Private München was a true Prussian taskmaster. “Fräulein Blue Eye, focus the mind.”
She gave him a tragic look, which allowed the man to relax his standards, as far as fabric was concerned.
“Fräulein, he’ll be back.”
“I don’t know who you’re talking about,” she assured him.
Sergeant Blade returned the following day. Private München was ironing pleats in the duty sergeant’s office next door.
Rowan came in quietly and sat in München’s chair. There was no overlooking the sorrow in his eyes. Mary stopped treadling and gave him her attention.
“What has happened?” she asked, wondering if she was prying or if he had come to her—whether he knew it or not—for sympathy.
“It’s a bad business. The wife of one of my Ree scouts is dying.” He hitched the chair closer. “The surgeon doesn’t know what to do, but she’s losing weight and in pain nearly all the time now. I like Bill Curly and Mathilde, and I’ve been sitting with them.”
“Is there anything I can do?” Mary asked.
“Not really. I guess I don’t care much to be sad by myself.”
She thought of the longhouse back home, when families used to all live together and bear one another’s burdens. She remembered sitting with other cousins, aunts, and uncles, bored and tired, but aware even as a child that families drew together in times of grief.
The sergeant seemed to take heart as Mary told him about the longhouses and the smokes, sweats, chants, and tears. “I used to think it was alien somehow, since we lived in a modern house with wood floors and hinged doors,” she said.
“You don’t think it is alien now?”
She shook her head.
“What changed?”
“I did.” She said it softly, as if trying out the words. She found them to her liking and repeated them. “I did. I want to go home.”
He sighed at that, which told her heart more than words could have. She glanced at the locket watch pinned to her shirtwaist. Her back ached from doing close work, and the afternoon light was fading fast. She knew she should be heading back to the Masterson quarters soon to hear Victoria’s complaints about everything, but she didn’t want to.
“Let me go with you to your scout’s house. Maybe I can help.”
“It’s pretty humble,” he said.
“Why would that bother me?”
“Let me get your coat.”
He insisted on holding her hand as they crossed the footbridge over the Laramie that separated Suds Row from the main garrison. “It’s icy,” he said, although she couldn’t see any ice.
Her arm crooked through his now, he took her past the attached quarters for the families of sergeants and corporals down a trail that led to another attached row, this one for scouts. Beyond that, she saw ragged tipis and wondered if the Laramie Loafers existed there.
“I don’t even know what a Ree is,” she said to Rowan as they hurried along, night coming fast.
“Arikara. They hate the Sioux with a great loathing and make excellent scouts, among those Bill Curly. His wife is Mathilde, the daughter of a French trapper and—I think you’ll like this—an eastern Indian.”
“Oh, I do,” she said. “Children?”
“Three girls.”
He tapped on the door of the house on the end, then opened it and ushered her in.
To feel shy would have been a waste of time, as three little girls, all tidy with hair in neat braids, swarmed over the sergeant. He picked up the smallest and tickled her, which made her giggle and lean into his chest.
I love this man, Mary thought suddenly as she watched him. I do not want to live without him. She looked around, hoping she hadn’t spoken out loud, and found herself regarded by a thin woman propped up with pillows. The woman gestured to her, and Mary sat beside her bed.
She introduced herself, remembering how her papa taught her. “I am Mary Blue Eye of the Genesee Valley Seneca, Keepers of the Western Door.”
To her surprise, the woman nodded. “Sarge has told us about you. I am Mathilde Frere of the Oneida.”
“My goodness, we are nearly neighbors!” Mary exclaimed.
“Years have passed since I have been in the land of Ontario,” Mathilde said. Her tired eyes took on a wistful look. “Is it as beautiful as ever? Not so much wind? Green in summer?”
“Yes, yes, and yes,” Mary said, which made Mathilde laugh and hold her stomach. Mary leaned closer. “People here have no idea, do they?”
Mathilde’s eyes brightened. “We know. May I call you sister?”
Mary nodded. She understood Indian relationships.
“Hold my hand, and I will close my eyes.”
Mary did as Mathilde asked. She looked around the single room, with three small rolls of bedding against one wall, a dish cabinet made of what looked like an apple crate, and a table and stools. Everything was in its place.
“Lean closer.”
Mary obeyed.
“My man is going to ask your man to build me a coffin. Sarge will find it hard.”
How calm she was. Mary felt tears gather and spill onto her cheeks, quietly, quietly, because that was the Seneca way. She looked at Mathilde and knew it was the Oneida way, too.
“You are far from home, Mathilde,” she managed, after monumental effort.
The dying woman shook her head. “Home is here with my man and my children,” she whispered. “You will understand someday. You are still young.”
Not as young as I was, Mary thought, touched to the depths of her soul. She glanced at the little girls, who sat close together on the floor while the oldest one handed around what looked like jerky. Beyond them sat the scout and the sergeant, the scout’s hand on the sergeant’s back. As she watched, Rowan nodded, then leaned back, as if trying to distance himself from what she knew he must have just agreed to do.
She returned her gaze to Mathilde, then wiped the woman’s face with the damp cloth on the nearby table. She wiped around Indian eyes much like hers and hair wispy now but probably once as full and dark as her own. Disease was exacting a cruel toll, but Mary saw no complaint. She thought of uncomplaining, patient Spider, undefeated by Badger.
“Your mother trained you, too,” she whispered and received a tiny smile in answer. So did mine, Mary thought. I must thank her when I see her in a few months.
The men stood up. “Go now,” Mathilde said.
Mary rose, but Mathilde did not release her hand. “One thing.”
She sat again and leaned close.
“If you have a picture of your valley, could I borrow it?”
“Sergeant Blade will bring it back tonight.”
They left the house hand in hand, with no pretense about ice or snow. “I’m going to build a coffin,” Rowan said after they crossed the footbridge. “God help me, but life is hard.”
His arm went around her. She hesitated, then put her arm around his waist.
“Walk me home,” she said. “I don’t want to go there because the lieutenant and Victoria are either really silent or they are carping at each other. It’s not a good place now, and I don’t like it.”
“I wish you had a c
hoice.”
“Come inside with me, please. I promised Mathilde a picture of home.”
The lieutenant and Victoria were sitting on opposite sides of the postage-stamp parlor in stony silence. Sergeant Blade saluted, and his superior raised a languid finger to his forehead in return.
“I’ll only be here a moment, sir,” he said.
Mary felt her stomach ache. They must have interrupted them in mid-quarrel. She hurriedly took her favorite painting of the Genesee Valley off the wall in her room. Mama had insisted she take it with her. “So you don’t forget us,” Mama had said.
She thought of Mathilde so far from her green heaven in Ontario above the border, the white man’s line that separated one country from another, when every Indian in the area knew that drawing a line meant nothing. Ah, well.
She handed the small painting to Rowan, who ushered her out the door with him.
The porch was cold and windy, but far better than the parlor, where Mary suspected a brand-new marriage was coming apart.
“Tell Mathilde she can keep it as long as she needs it,” Mary said. “What will you line the coffin with?”
“The quartermaster clerk said there is plenty of bed ticking. I’ll try to stop by to see you at the guardhouse, but I fear I must hurry with a coffin.”
“I’m on schedule now, thanks to your German tailor,” she said, walking him down the porch steps, loath for him to leave her.
“I would like to have taken you to the calico ball,” he said.
She nearly said, There will be other dances, but there wouldn’t be, not if she was returning to New York. She gave the darkness overhead a quick glance, looking for wisdom or courage or maybe both, but there were only stars and a rising moon.
“I would have gone gladly,” she said, “even in this work dress.”
He started to say something, then closed his mouth. She touched his arm and hurried inside, only because her feet were cold and there was more web to spin.
There was no question now that Mary would finish the dresses on time. Private München mentioned that he could do more if she needed to be about her duties in the Masterson household. She assured him that Victoria Masterson could manage well enough.