by John Jakes
Trump beat his breast with an aggrieved air. “Yes, my dear.” He studied her from under his eyebrows, laid the skull aside, and put a fatherly arm around her. “You look unhappy. Am I the cause?”
“Not really.”
“Charles has left, then.”
“It’s more than his leaving, Sam. He’s managed a commission in the Army again.”
“The Army’s the right place for him. It’s what he knows.”
“It’s the right place for the wrong reason.” In a few sentences she described what had happened to Wooden Foot and Boy. By the end, Trump was pale. “He wants retribution. When he talks of it there’s a blazing fury in him.”
Cautiously, Trump said, “Is it the end for you two, then?”
“Oh, no.” A rueful shrug. “It should be, but it’s too late. I love him. I know it may bring me grief, and I can’t do a thing about it. Mr. Congreve was right about love being a frailty of the mind.”
She tried to smile and instead burst out crying. Sam Trump put his arms around her and tugged her in, gently patting her back with both hands while the sobs shook her.
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ALL OUR GREAT GENERALS, LEADING STATESMEN and prominent politicians buy their hats at KNOX’s.
Go, then, and do likewise. In the present political campaign, all the things being equal, the candidates who buy their hats at KNOX’S, No. 212 Broadway, are sure of election.
26
“LIEUTENANT AUGUST? COME QUICK.”
Charles shot up from the desk. “Someone hurt?”
“Nosir,” puffed the recruit. “They taken’ down those tents you told us to put up an hour ago. They was ordered to take ’em down.”
“What stupid noncom—?”
“It’s some general. Krig?”
“Krug. Damn.” He grabbed his hat. What a way to start his third day in uniform.
“With all due respect, Captain, what’s going on here?”
Krug’s gray eyes spiked him. “You’ll address me as general.”
In a weedy field a half mile outside the main gate, five black recruits, none in uniform yet, struggled to dismantle two A-frames. Tangled canvas hid the fallen poles. Red-faced, Charles pointed at the men. “Why are they striking those tents?”
The raw autumn wind snapped the elbow-length cape of Krug’s overcoat. “Because I ordered it. They’re to move to the ground immediately west of the steam pump.”
“That field is full of standing water.”
Krug jutted his jaw. “Change your tone, mister, or I’ll have you up on charges. Three quarters of the men on this post would like to see you gone.”
Including most of my own, Charles thought. The five recruits watched him as though he were old Salem Jones, Mont Royal’s overseer before the war. Through gritted teeth he said, “The barracks assigned us—General—is infested with rats, bats, roaches—it’s a damn zoo. While we fumigate it, these men need temporary quarters. Why must they move?”
“Because, August, General Hoffman rode past this morning. He doesn’t like to look at nigger soldiers. He wants them out of sight when he travels to and from Leavenworth City. Is that clear enough?”
Charles recalled Grierson’s warning about Army bigotry. “Sir, if you insist on this, we’ll have to put down lumber to floor the tents. Build walkways—”
“No lumber. They sleep on the ground. They’re soldiers, or so we’ve been led to believe.”
“Why the hell are you so angry at me, Krug?”
“Two reasons, mister. One, I still consider you a traitor. Two, the North fought for preservation of the Union, not the glorification of darkies. General Hoffman shares that view. Now move those men.”
Krug marched to his horse, mounted, and headed for the gate.
Charles approached the recruits. Slate-colored clouds filled the sky. Dead weeds rattled in the wind, and canvas flapped and snapped. The five black men stared at him with expressions ranging from stoic to sullen.
“Men, I’m sorry. Guess you’ll have to move for the time being. I’ll try to commandeer some lumber somewhere.”
A large walnut-hued man stepped forward. Potiphar Williams, formerly a cook in a Pittsburgh hotel. He could read and write; he’d learned as an adult, in order to understand recipes and prepare menus. Charles had marked him as promising.
Williams said, “We’ll hunt the wood. Sir.”
“It’s my responsibility to—”
“We don’t need favors from a white man who rode for the rebs.”
Rigid, Charles said, “You get this straight. I didn’t go to war to preserve slavery, or the Confederacy, either. I went to fight for my home in South Carolina.”
“Oh, yes, sir,” Williams said. “My brother and his kin in North Carolina, the only home they had to fight for was the slave cabins they lived in.” He turned his back. “All right, boys. Let’s pick up and go where the white man tells us.”
Ike Barnes, already miserable and in bad temper because of a case of piles, turned the air blue when Charles reported the incident. Grierson went to Hoffman. The general refused to rescind the order. Two of the recruits caught pneumonia from camping on the wet ground. They were sent to the post hospital, causing three white patients to walk out in protest.
The next week, a gaudy troupe of travelers appeared, bound for Fort Riley. The troupe consisted of two white women, a former slave who did the cooking, a little black jockey from Texas, four horses, including a pacer and a racing mare, and dogs: a greyhound, a white pit bull, several hunters.
“Is this a circus or the Army?” Barnes grumbled. “Whatever it is, it’s a damn disgrace.”
“Agreed,” Grierson said. “But you notice we’re here, aren’t we?”
The two of them and Charles, along with two dozen more of the curious, had gathered to see the elegant young soldier who headed the troupe. As George Custer supervised the loading of his colt Phil Sheridan into a special rail car on the post spur, he shouted boisterously and cracked jokes, playing to the crowd.
Charles remembered Custer vividly from the war. He was still dandified: flowing hair, walrus mustache, bright red scarf, gold spurs. Charles said to Barnes, “I rode against him at Brandy Station. I know he fights to win, but he’s too reckless to suit me. I’m thankful I’ll never have to serve with him.”
The fall produced a smashing Republican victory in the national and state elections. Johnson’s catastrophic “Swing Around the Circle” had worked against him and for the Radicals. When Congress eventually convened, the course of Reconstruction would be in Republican hands more surely than ever.
At Fort Leavenworth, meanwhile, in spite of trouble with white men because of their prejudice, and trouble with black men because of his background, Charles again began to savor Army life. He liked the measuring of the days by bugle and trumpet, drum and fife. It had been part of his bone and blood since West Point. In his monastic cubicle in bachelor officers’ quarters, some internal clock wakened him every morning at 4:30, fifteen minutes before trumpeters’ assembly.
Reveille, guard mount, call for first sergeant’s report, mess, fatigue, evening retreat with a formal parade in good weather—he relished every call. His favorite was 4:30 p.m. stable call. At that hour he supervised the new soldiers, many of whom found horses frightening. While trying to correct that and familiarize the men with horse furniture, Charles sneaked in some pleasurable minutes looking after Satan.
Then came some of the day’s sweetest music: the gongs and triangles announcing evening mess. The music usually surpassed the fare: hash or slumgullion, baked beans or contractor’s
beef of dubious color and odor.
Each company of the Tenth was supposed to contain ninety-nine men. But recruits arrived so slowly, Charles wondered if Grierson would ever have a full-strength regiment. The reputation of the Tenth wasn’t helped when one recruit ran off, and word reached Leavenworth about trouble in the all-black Ninth Cavalry down in San Antonio. Recruits in the Ninth had clashed with local police and started a riot. Many of them went to jail. “Fine,” Grierson snorted when he heard the news. “Just what Hoffman needs to confirm his opinions.”
Charles freely admitted responsibility for the desertion. The surly recruit had mistreated one of the horses. Charles had stopped it and assigned extra fatigue duty. “Sure, you would take the side of a nag over a nigger, you piece of Southern shit,” the recruit said, and punched him.
Charles had to be pulled off the black man; they said later he was on his way to killing the recruit with his fists. Two nights later the recruit ran away. He was recognized over in City of Kansas, captured and quickly processed with a bobtail discharge. When a man got a bobtail, the section of the discharge dealing with character was snipped off. It was a lifetime mark of dishonor.
C Company was formed. Dee Barnes was the commander, and Floyd Hook, a boyish innocent, the first lieutenant. Charles took the third spot. Sometimes Barnes allowed Floyd or Charles to welcome a new man. Charles developed a little speech that was not entirely facetious.
“Welcome to your new home, sometimes called the government workhouse. In addition to learning to be an outstanding cavalryman, you can look forward to carrying bricks, painting walls, and cutting timber. It’s called fatigue duty. Sometimes it’s called being a brevet architect.”
The black recruits never smiled. It wasn’t just the word brevet that threw them, Charles knew. It was his accent.
Patiently, he showed each greenhorn how to roll a pair of socks and stuff it inside his shirt to save bad shoulder bruises at rifle practice. He watched over first attempts to saddle and mount horses. As soon as the recruits didn’t fall off, he started revolver and rifle drill, yelling at the men to take their time, hold their pieces steady as they banged away at piles of hardtack boxes, first with their mounts walking, then trotting, then galloping.
“Steady—steady,” he would shout. “The odds are that you’ll never see combat more than once in your Army career. But on that day, you could live or die by this drill.”
The officers became surrogate parents, protecting the newest as best they could from hazing by the old hands—an old hand being someone who had arrived the week before. One new youngster broke down and wept.
“They tol’ me, go get your butter allowance from the mess. Cook’ll try to keep it and spend it himself, they said. So watch out. I went to him and said, give me that butter money an’ no damn argument.” He beat his thighs. “They ain’t any butter allowance.”
“No. It’s an old trick. Look, every new man’s hazed. You got through it. You’ll be fine.”
“But now the others, they call me Butter Head.”
“When you get a nickname, it shows they like you.”
The recruit wiped his eyes. “That the truth?”
Charles smiled. “The truth.” Members of the small officer group in the Tenth were known as Iron Ass and Friendly Floyd.
“What’s your nickname, Cap’n?”
The smile grew stiff. “It’s lieutenant. I don’t have one.”
A benefit of duty with the Tenth was the chance to see little Gus often. Charles managed to visit him almost every day for a few minutes. The boy was warming to his father, no longer so intimidated by him, because Charles’s demeanor was softening.
Christmas drew near. For gifts, Charles refused to buy any of the handiwork of the hang-around-the-forts, though the quilled and beaded articles were attractive and cheap. Instead, he shopped in Leavenworth City. He bought a set of brushes for Duncan, perfume for Maureen and Willa, a wooden horse—brightly enameled head and stick with a satin rope rein—for his son. The season brought hops, which he didn’t attend, a small candlelit fir tree in Duncan’s parlor, and caroling by officers and wives in the cold and starry prairie night.
Then, four days before Christmas—December 21, 1866—the Army got a present it didn’t want.
Fort Phil Kearny guarded the Bozeman Trail, which led to the Montana gold fields. The fort’s mere existence was provocation to the Sioux and Northern Cheyennes who claimed the land around it. War chiefs with names well known on the Plains—Red Cloud of the Sioux; Roman Nose of the Cheyennes—descended on Kearny with two thousand braves.
Bravado overcoming good sense, one William Fetterman, a captain, said he could smash through the attackers with eighty men. He claimed he could smash through the entire Sioux nation. So he took his men to guard some wagons bringing wood back to the fort, and for Christmas the Army got the Fetterman Massacre. Not one of the eighty survived.
Something unrelenting within Charles took satisfaction from the bad news. Given the massacre, and the resulting outcries for retribution, he believed the Army might move against the Southern tribes. When it did, he’d be there.
For Christmas Willa sent him a small cased ambrotype—their photograph—and a gold-stamped, leatherbound edition of Macbeth with a romantic inscription about the bad-luck play becoming her good luck, because it had brought them together. Accompanying the gifts was a letter full of endearments.
My dearest Charles,
I shall strive to remember that your new-minted last name is August, and swear a vow never to speak your real one aloud, though it is very dear to me …
It went on for several paragraphs, pleasing and warming him despite his unaltered concern about entanglement. He had reason for that wariness, he was soon reminded.
There is much talk of the Fetterman tragedy. I pray it will not provoke wholesale retaliation. I cannot any longer hide from you that I have joined the local chapter of the Indian Friendship Society, which seeks to promote justice for those long victimized by white greed and deception. I enclose a small Society leaflet which I hope you will find—
At that point, he tossed the letter into Duncan’s sheet-iron stove, without reading the rest.
On Christmas Day he realized he had forgotten Willa’s twenty-first birthday.
27
TO REMEDY HIS BLUNDER, Charles turned to Ike Barnes’s wife, Lovetta, a tiny woman who could make her voice loud as a steam whistle if necessary. Lovetta took some of Charles’s pay and promised to find something a young woman would like. Two days later she brought him an Indian pouch with a shoulder thong and an intricately beaded flap. The sight of it angered him. But he thanked her and dispatched the gift to St. Louis with a note of apology.
Soon after New Year’s everyone at Leavenworth began talking about General Hancock’s taking the field in the spring to demonstrate in force against the Indians, perhaps even punish those responsible for the Fetterman Massacre. Grierson, meanwhile, despaired of getting his regiment to operational strength. So far the Tenth had but eighty men.
Almost all of them had to enroll in Chaplain Grimes’s special classes, to learn the three R’s. The low level of recruit literacy put extra burdens on the officers. They handled all the paperwork that would normally be picked up by noncoms.
Still, Charles grudgingly admitted that whatever the city boys lacked in education, they more than made up for with their enthusiasm and diligence. With few exceptions, they behaved well. Insubordination, drunkenness and petty thievery, while not altogether absent, occurred with much less frequency than among white soldiers. Charles guessed motivation had a lot to do with it. The men wanted to succeed; they’d picked the Army, not fled to it.
Motivation and performance failed to impress General Hoffman or his staff. Hoffman ordered surprise inspections of the Tenth’s barracks, then cited the soldiers for dirt on the floor and stains on the walls. Dirt blew in because doors and windows didn’t fit. Leaky roofs caused the stains. Hoffman ignored explanations and refu
sed requests for repair materials.
The commandant’s campaign against what he called “nigger dregs” was relentless. If one of Grierson’s officers tried to give a literate recruit some responsibility, the man’s reports or memoranda came back from headquarters marked Sloppy or Incorrect. By Hoffman’s order, the Tenth had to stand at least fifteen yards from white units during inspection formations. When the weather was mild enough for an evening parade, Hoffman required the Tenth to remain at parade rest; they couldn’t march with the white troops, because Hoffman refused to review them.
Horses given to the Tenth were blown-out wrecks from the war, some of them twelve years old. When Grierson protested, Hoffman shrugged. “The Army’s on a tight budget, Colonel. We are required to use the arms, ammunition, and mounts already on hand. I’d say those plugs are good enough for niggers.”
“General, I respectfully request that my men not be called—”
“As you were, sir. Your men wouldn’t even be here if the damned Congress wasn’t coddling the coons. I don’t have to coddle anyone. Dismissed.”
To his officers at mess Grierson said, “We have to pull this regiment together and get off this post. If we don’t, something dire will happen. I am not a violent man. I am not a profane man. But if we stay much longer, Hoffman’s dead. I will kill that bigoted prick personally.”
Charles laughed and joined the applause.
Grierson added, “If Alice knew about Hoffman’s effect on my character and vocabulary, she’d divorce me.”
Barnes—or the old man as he was commonly called—often lectured C Company on practical matters not taught in official Army texts.
“Men,” he said one day, striding down the ranks, preceded by his stomach, “you joined up to be proud of your uniform. That’s fine as long as we hang around the fort.” His eyes flicked across the earnest, attentive faces, tan and amber, mahogany and ebony. “However, I want each of you to get a new outfit for the field. I don’t care what it looks like so long as it’s warm, fairly loose, and can be peeled off a piece at a time if the sun’s broiling you. For the kind of fighting we may do, you don’t want to be weighed down with extra gear or heavy duds. So put together a new uniform—shirt, pants, coat, hat. Buy it. Trade for it. If you steal it, don’t get caught.”