"And a merry Christmas to you, Zeke," Roosevelt replied. Zeke Preston wasn't the preacher. He was a reporter. Most of the men who had swarmed into Montana Territory to cover the British invasion were gone now. Of the handful still in Fort Benton, Preston was probably the best. Not only that, a lot of papers back in New York State printed what he wrote. Thus Roosevelt knew it behooved him to stay on the reporter's good side. "What can I do for you today?"
Preston came down the steps and kicked his way through the snow. "Can I trouble you with a couple of questions before you go in?" He was a lean man in his thirties who wore a walrus mustache that didn't go with his pale, narrow face; Roosevelt wondered if he was consumptive.
"Go ahead," Roosevelt said. "You've caught me fair and square."
"Good." The reporter reached into an overcoat pocket and drew out a notebook and pencil. "Lucky I don't have a pen," he remarked. "Weather like this, the ink'd freeze solid as Blaine's head." He waited for Roosevelt's chuckle, then said, "The more time passes after the battle by the Teton, the more credit General Custer takes for himself. What do you think of that?"
He'd told Colonel Henry Welton exactly what he thought of it. Welton was his friend. He knew reporters well enough to know they had their own axes to grind. "He was the overall commander, Zeke. If we'd lost, who would have ended up with the blame?"
"He says your men fought well—for Volunteers." Sure as hell, Preston was trying to goad him into saying something that would make a lively story.
"It's Christmas. I'm not going to pick a quarrel on Christmas." But Roosevelt couldn't quite leave that one alone. "I will say that the Unauthorized Regiment was the force running Gordon and his men back toward Canada when word of the cease-fire reached us and made us hold in place."
Preston scribbled, coughed, scribbled again. "What's your opinion of Gatling guns, Colonel?"
Roosevelt had been over that one with Henry Welton, too. For the reporter, he put on a toothy grin and answered, "My opinion is that I would much rather be behind them than in front of them. If you ask General Gordon, I expect you will find his opinion the same."
"I've heard some argument about how those guns should have been positioned," Preston remarked after an appreciative chuckle at Roosevelt's comment. "Where do you stand on that?"
"They did well where they were," Roosevelt said. "I saw no point to moving them from the front line—and they were not moved, if you'll recall. General Custer was persuaded they belonged there."
He waited for Zeke Preston to ask him about that persuading. Maybe, belatedly, Colonel Welton wouldn't be an unsung hero after all. But Preston flipped the notebook shut and stuck it and the pencil back in his pocket. "Thanks very much, Colonel. I won't bother you any more, not today I won't. Merry Christmas to you." Off he went, breath smoking in the chilly air.
Roosevelt sighed and went up into the church. It was Methodist, which would have to do; that faith certainly came closer to his own than the one preached in the two Catholic churches Fort Benton also boasted. When he walked in, the congregation was singing "Away in the Manger," a good deal more tunefully than the same carol would have been managed in the saloon.
He added his own booming baritone to the song. His voice, his uniform, and his upright carriage drew the notice of the folk who crowded the little church, almost all of them in their holiday best. Roosevelt gave notice as well as drawing it; some of the women were worth noticing. A blonde in a deep blue princess dress with a satin jabot and laced, pleated cuffs—it would have been the height of style in New York City five years earlier—caught his eye and held it.
When he'd had enough of caroling—and more than enough of the prune-faced Methodist preacher—he made his way toward the door. The pretty young woman contrived to leave the church at the same time. They walked down the narrow stairway side by side. She smelled of rosewater.
"Merry Christmas to you, miss," Roosevelt said when they were down on the tracked, snowy ground once more.
"The same to you, Colonel." She kept walking along beside him. His hopes rose. In a casual tone of voice, she went on, "If you care for some mince pie, I baked one yesterday. I'd be days and days eating it all by my lonesome."
"Why, that's very kind of you—very kind of you indeed." He smiled. "If your family won't mind sharing, I'd be delighted."
"I am a widow," she answered.
Sometimes that was a euphemism for a streetwalker. Sometimes it wasn't. If she was a woman of easy virtue, she was cleaner and, by all appearances, better-natured than most of her fallen sisters. "Mince pie, then," Roosevelt said—and if she felt like giving him more than mince pie, that would be fine, too.
She lived in a tiny, astringently neat cabin next door to a saloon— not that anything in Fort Benton was far from a saloon. Sure enough, a mince pie sat on the table. She cut Roosevelt a slice. It was good. He said so, loudly, adding, "Thank you for making a soldier far from home happy."
"How happy would you like to be?" she asked, and walked around the table and sat down on his lap.
The bed was close to the stove. Everything in the cabin was close to the stove, which helped keep the place tolerably warm. Roosevelt had had a couple of other women throw themselves at him since he rode down to Fort Benton a hero, or as much of a hero as this hash of a war offered. The experience had been both new and delightful. He wasn't sure whether this was another hero's reward or a business transaction. As he fumbled with the buttons of his trousers, he resolved to worry about it later.
"Oh," she said when, presently, he went into her. She was quiet after that, working intently beneath him, till she stiffened again and quivered and cried out, "Oh, Joe! Oh, God, Joe!" He didn't think she knew what she was saying; he hardly knew what she was saying himself then. His own ecstasy came less than a minute later. Afterwards, he decided she probably was a widow after all.
Being twenty-three, he would have been ready for a second round in short order, but she got off the bed and started dressing again, so he did, too. He was left with a puzzling problem in etiquette after that. If she was a streetwalker as well as a widow, he'd anger her if he didn't offer to pay. If she wasn't, he'd offend her if he did.
He stood irresolute, a rare posture for him. Without answering the question behind it, she solved the problem for him: "Merry Christmas, Colonel Roosevelt."
"Thank you very much," he said, and kissed her. "I don't think I've ever had a nicer present, or one more charmingly wrapped." She smiled at that. He opened the door, and grunted at the cold outside. He'd gone several steps back toward the Unauthorized Regiment's encampment before he realized he'd never learned her name.
Chapter 19
The clock in Frederick Douglass' parlor chimed twelve. All over Rochester, clocks were striking twelve. Douglass raised a glass of wine to his wife and son. "Happy New Year," he said solemnly.
"Happy New Year, Frederick," Anna Douglass said, and drank. "When I was young, I never reckoned I'd live to see such a big number as 1882."
"May you see many more new years, Mother," Lewis Douglass said.
"You're not drinking, son." Frederick Douglass had emptied his own glass, and was reaching for the decanter to refill it.
"No, I'm not," Lewis said, "for the year ahead looks none too happy to me."
"Compare it to the year just past," Douglass said. "When seen from that perspective, how can it fail of being a happy year?"
Lewis gravely considered that. He showed the result of the consideration not by words but by downing the wine in front of him in a couple of quick gulps. When Douglass held out the decanter, he poured his glass full again, too. "Compared to the year just past, any year save perhaps 1862 would seem happy."
Anna cocked her head to one side, listening to bells ringing un-constrainedly and to firecrackers and pistols and rifles going off in the street, some quite close by. "It don't sound the way it ought to," she said.
"It doesn't, does it?" Douglass said. "Something's missing."
Lewis supplie
d the deficiency: "No cannon this year. No cannon, by order of the mayor and the governor and whichever soldier makes the most noise around these parts. They all fear the British gunboats out on the lake will mistake the celebration for an attack on themselves and use it as a pretext for bombarding the city. A happy new year indeed, is it not?"
"They might do it, too," Douglass said gloomily. "They might enjoy doing it, the better to coerce the president into yielding to their demands."
"He might as well," Anna said. "Things ain't gwine get no better on account of he don't. They done licked us, so they gets to tell us what to do."
Anna's grammar was not all it should have been. That did not make what she said any less true. Lewis must have thought as much, for he said, "Mother, we ought to send you to Washington, because you sec these things a lot more plainly than President Blaine is able to."
"What Blaine can see and what he can do are liable to be two different propositions," Douglass said, regretting every word of defense he spent on the man who had had the best chance since the presidency of Abraham Lincoln to do something about the Confederate States—had it and squandered it. "He's made his bed, and now—"
"And now the whole country has to lie in it," Lewis broke in. He reached for the wine decanter once more, then yanked his hand away. Bitterness filled his voice as he went on, "I'd get drunk, but what's the use? Things wouldn't be any better when I sobered up again."
"Well, I don't aim to get myself drunk any which way," Anna Douglass said. "It's a sinful thing to go and do. What I aim to do is go to bed." She struggled to her feet. "Frederick, you'll help me up the stairs."
"Of course I will, my dear." Douglass rose, too. His body still responded readily to his will. He helped his wife up to the bedroom, helped her out of her dress and corset, and made sure she was comfortable before he went back down to talk with his son a while longer.
Lewis was taking short, quick, furious puffs on a cigar when Frederick Douglass came back to the parlor. "What's the use, Father?" he asked as Douglass sat down once more. "What in God's name is the use? Why don't we all pack up and move to Liberia? We might accomplish something there."
"You may, if you like," Douglass answered evenly. "I've thought about it once or twice—maybe more than once or twice." His son stared at him. He nodded, his face grave. "Oh, yes, I've thought about it. In Liberia, the pond is so small as to make me—or you, should you ever choose to go—a very large fish indeed, which cannot help but feed a man's pride. But if I left, I should be giving up the fight here, and as much as proving the Confederates right when they say the black man cannot compete equally against the white. Every column I write here shows the CSA to be founded on a lie. How could I do the same in Africa?"
Lewis did not answer right away. He took the cigar from his mouth and sat for some time staring at the glowing coal. Then, savagely, he stubbed out the cigar. "Well, you're right," he said. "I wish to heaven you weren't, but you are." He got up and clapped Douglass on the shoulder. "Happy New Year, Father. You were right about that, too. Set next to the one we've escaped, the year ahead can't be so bad. Good night. You needn't get up—rest easy."
Douglass rested easy. He heard his son take his overcoat off the tree in the front hall, put it on, open the door, and close it after him. Bells on the carriage jingled as Lewis drove home. Douglass looked at the decanter of wine. Like a voyage to Liberia, it tempted him. But, ever since his escape from slavery, he had seldom run away, and he had never been a man who drank alone. Picking up the cut-glass stopper, he set it in its place. Then, with a grunt, he rose once more and went off to bed. He listened to clocks striking one. He expected he would also listen to them striking two, but drifted off before they did.
Other than having a new calendar, 1882 seemed little different from the vanished 1881. Warships flying the Union Jack remained outside Rochester harbor, as they did outside other U.S. harbors along the Great Lakes. No warships flying the Stars and Stripes came out to challenge them. That sprang in part from the cease-fire, but only in part. The rest was that the U.S. Navy's Great Lakes flotilla was incapable of challenging its British counterpart.
One day in the middle of January, the War Department announced that the troops of the Army of the Ohio were returning to U.S. soil. By the way the announcement sounded, no one would have guessed it meant the U.S. Army was abandoning the last foothold it held in Kentucky. The telegram made the move sound like a triumph.
"Look at this!" Douglass waved the announcement in his son's face. "Look at this. How many dead men in Louisville? They won't be coming back to Indiana. And for what did they die? For what, I ask you?"
"For President Blaine's ambition," Lewis answered. "Nothing else." The abject failure of the U.S. war effort had left him even more estranged from and cynical about the society in which he lived than he had been before the fighting started.
But Douglass shook his head. "The cause for which we fought was noble," he insisted, as he had insisted all along. "The power of the Confederate States should have been kept from growing. The tragedy was not that we fought, but that we fought while so manifestly unprepared to fight hard. Blaine gets some of the blame for that, but the Democrats who kept us so weak for so long must share it with him. If we are to have a return engagement with the Confederacy, we must be more ready in all respects. I see no other remedy."
"I never thought I'd live to see the day when you and Ben Butler were proposing the same cure for our disease," Lewis said. "The Democrats like him, too."
That brought Douglass up short. Butler had no more kept silent about the proposals he had made in the meeting at the Florence Hotel outside Chicago than Abraham Lincoln had about his. Both men were stirring up turmoil all through the battered country, and each one's followers violently opposed the other's. As Lincoln had joined with the Socialists, so Butler was indeed drifting back toward the Democrats, from whose ranks he had deserted during the War of Secession.
Reluctantly, Douglass said, "An idea may be a good one no matter who propounds it."
"Nero fiddled while Rome burned," Lewis retorted. "You temporize while the Republican Party goes up in flames."
"I am not temporizing," Douglass said with dignity. "I have done all I could to hold the party together. I am still doing all I can. It may not suffice—I am only one man. But 1 am doing my best."
"You'd have a better chance if your skin were white," Lewis said. Douglass stared at him. Negroes in the U.S. seldom spoke so openly of the handicap they suffered by being black. Lewis glared back in furious defiance. "It's true, and you damn well know it's true."
But Douglass shook his head. "Not for me. Had I been born white—had 1 been born all white"—he corrected himself, to remind his son they both had white blood in their veins—"I suspect I would have drifted into some easy, profitable trade, never giving a second thought, or even a first, to politics. Being the color I am, I have been compelled to face concerns I should otherwise have ignored. It has not been an easy road, but I am a better man for it."
"I do not have your detachment, Father, nor, frankly, do I want it," Lewis said. "I wish you a good morning." He departed Douglass' home without much ceremony and with a good deal of anger.
Douglass had to go out himself a couple of days later, when his wife developed a nasty cough. The new cough syrups, infused with the juice of the opium poppy, really could stop the hacking and barking that seemed such a characteristic sound of winter. Thanking heaven for modern medicine, Douglass bundled himself up and trudged off to the nearest drugstore, a few blocks away.
He thanked heaven for the day, too. As January days in Rochester went, it was good enough—better than good enough. It was bright and clear and, he guessed, a little above freezing. Not too much snow lay on the ground. Even so, he planted his feet with care; the sidewalks had their share of icy patches.
"Half a dollar," the druggist said, setting on the counter a glass bottle with the label in typography so rococo as to be almost unreadable. His voice
was polite and suspicious at the same time. Douglass' fur-collared overcoat argued that he had the money to pay for the medicine. His being a Negro argued, to far too many white men, that he was likely to be shiftless and liable to be a thief.
He reached into his pocket and found a couple of quarters, which he set beside the bottle of cough elixir. Only after the druggist had scooped the coins into the cash box did his other hand come off the bottle. That care made Douglass want to laugh. He was stout, black, and well past sixty. Even if he did abscond with the medicine, how could he possibly hope to get more than a couple of blocks without being recognized or, more likely, tackled with no ceremony whatever?
He was carrying the bottle of cough syrup out of the store when three middle-aged white men started to come in. He stood aside to let them use the narrow doorway ahead of him. Instead of going on past, though, the fellow in the lead stopped, rocked back on his heels, and looked at him with an expression of mingled contempt and insult.
"Well, looky here, Jim. Looky here, Bill," he drawled. "Ain't this a fine buck nigger we got?" His friends laughed at what they and he thought to be wit.
Douglass stiffened. "If you gentlemen will excuse me—" he said, his voice chillier than the weather outside.
"Listen to him, Josh," either Jim or Bill exclaimed. "Talks just like a white man, he does. Probably got a white man inside him, that he ate up for breakfast." All three of them found that a very funny sally, too.
"If you gentlemen will excuse me—" Douglass repeated, bottling up the fury he felt. He took a step forward. More often than not, his sheer physical presence was enough to let him ease through confrontations like this.
It didn't work today. Instead of giving way before him, the white man in the lead—Josh—deliberately blocked his path. "No, we don't excuse you, Sambo," he said, and looked back over his shoulder. "Do we, boys?"
"No," one of Jim and Bill said, while the other was saying, "Hell, no."
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