The Congress of Rough Riders

by John Boyne

  ‘And General Custer,’ asked Bill. ‘Do you think that he knows where I live?’

  ‘Sure he does,’ said Tom. ‘I mean he must do since he—’ He broke off suddenly, realising where this conversation was going. Bill raised a finger and wagged it in the air, grinning mischievously.

  ‘If the general wants to see me,’ said Bill, ‘he can do what you did. He can get on his horse and ride on over here. I’m at no one’s beck and call in the middle of the night, not even a man like George Armstrong Custer. You go back and tell him that. You tell him what I said, you hear me?’

  The blood seemed to drain from Tom’s face and he opened his mouth, trying to find the words to express how little he wanted to be entrusted with such a task. ‘You don’t mean that, sir,’ he said. ‘You don’t want me to say that to the general?’

  ‘Sure I mean it,’ said Bill. ‘I’m not a man to waste my words or my time. You get on back over there and tell him that I’m about ready to turn in for the night and if there’s anything that won’t keep till the morning then he best get on over here himself and let me know what it is. End of story. What’s the matter with you, boy? What do you think he’ll do to you?’

  ‘Shoot me, sir.’

  Bill laughed. ‘He won’t shoot you,’ he said. ‘You’re just the messenger. Go on now. Tell him what I said. But tell him he’s welcome here at any time, night or day, if he wants to come and do us the honour of paying us a visit,’ he added graciously.

  Tom nodded sadly, still fearful of the response he would get from General Custer when he delivered this message. ‘If that’s what you want, Mr Cody,’ he said.

  ‘Buffalo Bill,’ said Bill patiently.

  ‘Should he come tonight?’ asked Tom, turning to leave now, hoping that Bill might change his mind before he had to return to the fort. Bill shrugged.

  ‘It’s like I said,’ he answered. ‘Anytime he wants. If it’s urgent.’

  It must have been deemed urgent because an hour later Bill sighed when he heard the sound of a horse galloping towards his home and he knew immediately who was its rider. Custer wasted no time on ceremony and marched straight into the house, slamming the door behind him as he entered. ‘You always ignore the orders of a ranking general, Cody?’ he shouted, standing tall with his hands on his hips, the cold air outside making steam appear to rise from the general’s head so that he appeared like a man possessed of a devil.

  ‘Orders, General?’ asked Bill, not standing up but looking the general directly in the eyes nevertheless. ‘Tom Barton merely told me you’d like to see me, that’s all. He never mentioned anything about orders. If I’d known it was an official command from a United States general, why, I would have put on my best suit and ridden right over there to see you. Even though I’m not actually in the army and therefore not responsible to you,’ he added quietly.

  ‘Don’t play at word games with me, Cody. When I ask to see someone, I expect them to come running. Enlisted man or not.’

  ‘Expectations can be cruel things,’ admitted Bill. ‘I once thought I was going to be able to live a nice quiet life, running my own town, making a pot of money, and having women and whisky at my beck and call. Didn’t work out that way. Speaking of which, there’s whisky over there if you want a glass.’ He nodded in the direction of a side table, where he had laid a bottle and a fresh glass a few minutes earlier in anticipation of his visitor. Custer shook his head in frustration and poured himself a glass before offering it to Bill.

  ‘You’re a hard man to talk to, Bill Cody,’ he said. ‘And don’t ask me to call you by that ridiculous name either,’ he added, raising a hand in the air as Bill prepared to say his nickname. ‘You can save that for the newspaper reporters and the boys who think you’re some kind of American hero.’

  ‘You don’t think I’m a hero then, General? I who killed sixty-nine buffalo in one day. That’s not heroic?’

  ‘Heroism is for the battlefield, Cody,’ he replied. ‘Not the Big Top. I don’t doubt you’re a brave man. A fool of a man, I’ve thought sometimes, but there we are. Nicknames are for schoolboys, that’s all. What is it with you egotists and your need for these things? There’s that other fellow now, Hickok, you know him?’

  ‘I know of him,’ replied Bill. ‘We haven’t had the pleasure of each other’s company yet.’

  ‘I met him ten months ago over near the Ohio border,’ said Custer, spitting a piece of chewing tobacco towards the fireplace and missing, the sticky mess landing on the floor instead. He ignored it. ‘Damn fool of a man if you ask me. He got up on a stage and started to sing songs and dance with the girls and I don’t know what else. You call that a man?’

  ‘I don’t call anyone a man until I have the mark of him and like I said, we haven’t—’

  ‘Well that damn fool, he goes around calling himself “Wild Bill”. And more of an idiotic, mother’s sop of a man I’ve never met in my life. Wild indeed! There’s nothing wild about that man but his behaviour. Still,’ he added after a thoughtful pause. ‘I suppose you’ve got the manners of a buffalo.’

  ‘I’ll save you the trouble of saying that I smell like one too, on account of the fact that I know I do since I spend most of my time around them. But then rather a herd of buffalo, I think, than a cavalry of stinking, teenage soldiers.’

  ‘I speak my mind, Bill, you know that.’

  ‘You do, General. And I’m sure you haven’t made this distance at this hour to insult me or talk philosophy. You must need me for something. You may as well just get on with it so there’ll be some chance of a little sleep before whatever it is needs to begin.’

  Custer nodded and drank back his whisky in one shot, reaching for the bottle again almost immediately. ‘President Grant is coming to visit us,’ he said. ‘Bringing some newspaper men along for the ride, it seems. They’re looking for interviews.’ He uttered the word as if it sullied his mouth.

  Bill’s eyes opened wider and he sat up, more alert now than he had been all evening. The word ‘publicity’ was beginning to sound in his ears. ‘What’s that?’ he asked. ‘What newspaper men?’

  ‘It’s all a lot of nonsense, of course, but Grant needs to gain a little more popularity. This first year hasn’t gone well for him, you know that much. Seems he wants to have a little piece of my glory reflected on to himself. Nationally speaking. Make the American people see him as a man of action and valour.’

  ‘Your glory?’ asked Bill. ‘If it’s only your glory he’s after then what are you doing here? I can’t help him with that.’

  ‘Our glory then,’ admitted Custer. ‘Damn it, Bill, what do you want me to say? We’ve got our reputations, you know that. For right or wrong, we’ve established names for ourselves and what’s wrong with putting those names to some good use? The president thinks he can seem like more of a popular figure if he’s seen to associate with us more.’

  ‘If he’s seen to command us more, you mean. He wants to take credit for our accomplishments.’ Custer said nothing, unwilling to appear disloyal towards his commander-in-chief. Bill waited long enough to make the general feel uncomfortable before speaking again. ‘Makes sense, I suppose. When’s he coming then?’

  ‘Day after tomorrow. Wants us both to greet him. Wants an enthusiastic welcome, I’m told, because the reporters will be there and they’re going to be watching every word. There’s been talk that the president and I don’t get along and they’re just hoping that something amiss happens.’

  ‘Like you blow his head off when your shooting goes astray?’

  ‘Bill,’ cautioned the general. ‘Remember who you’re talking to. There’s only so much I can listen to.’

  Bill laughed. ‘Well everyone knows you don’t get along,’ he said. ‘That’s supposed to be the news, is it?’

  ‘Whether we do or whether we don’t is neither here nor there. I’m a military man, I’m a general, and he’s my commander-in-chief. I’ll do whatever he tells me to do, no questions asked. If he wanted me to blow my
own head off, I’d do it. Or yours for that matter. And if he sent someone to tell me he wanted to see me in the middle of the night, I can damn sure tell you that I’d get on my horse and go see him and not tell him to come see me if he’s all that interested. That’s what respect is all about.’

  Bill took the rebuke in good cheer but said nothing for a moment. ‘And I suppose,’ he said eventually, ‘they’re going to be watching you and me too.’

  ‘I suppose they will.’

  ‘And I suppose you’re going to tell me that I’ve got to be deferential towards you the entire time. Is that it? You want to make that clear right from the start?’

  Custer sat back and shook his head. ‘Look, Bill,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what it is I’m supposed to have done to you to earn your contempt but do I have to point out again that I’m a general in this army?’

  ‘But I’m not in this army,’ Bill pointed out. ‘I’m a freelance operative. Always have been. I don’t take orders. I take assignments. And you’re wrong anyway; I’m not contemptuous of you. Not at all. I admire you if you want to know the truth.’

  ‘Well you make sure not to show that.’

  ‘We’re different people,’ he said. ‘We’re looking at the world in different ways. You seek order, advancement, a career path. Tell me you don’t want to be sitting where Ulysses Grant is sitting now one day in the future. Can you tell me that?’

  ‘What’s wrong with ambition? You’re ambitious. You try to make your name known as often as possible. I would have thought this was a perfect opportunity for you. What the hell is that goddam nickname for if not for that? Mixing with the president and the army’s most celebrated general for an evening with a bunch of newspapermen hanging off your every word? I would have thought that was the kind of opportunity you would have killed for. And all I’m asking you to do is show a little understanding of the order of things. That’s all I’m asking. I don’t think it’s too much to look for either.’

  Bill stood up and threw a log on the fire. He stared into the flames and thought about it. Custer was right about one thing; he was ambitious and he did like to see his name in print as often as possible. And this was a good opportunity for some national publicity. ‘All right then,’ he said, turning around and stretching his arms out to indicate that he had been bested for once. ‘I’ll do just as you ask. For one night only I will be the perfect subordinate and follow your every command, hanging off your utterances as if they’re a bunch of new commandments sent down from Moses himself. That’s what you want to hear, isn’t it?’

  Custer smiled. ‘You shouldn’t make everything between us into a battle, you know,’ he said. ‘You never know. It might be fun.’

  Bill frowned. ‘Don’t let your men hear you saying that,’ he muttered.

  The Regis-Roc Circus travelled the length and breadth of England from its inception in 1851 until its eventual closure just before the outbreak of the First World War. During that time many of the most famous circus entertainers of the time – David Rickton, the celebrated trapeze artist; Elijah and Eliza Hunter, the Siamese twins; Richmond Tappil, after Houdini the most famous escape artist of the era – performed their acts under its Big Top tarpaulin, and as a child Ellen Rose managed to see and be enthralled by all of them.

  Her childhood was an unusual one as her father and mother, Russell and Bess, led such curious lives. She came to appreciate her father the most when he was suspended one hundred feet above the ground, balancing on a high wire or flying through the air with the ankles of one of his colleagues gripped between his fists; on the ground they had little to say to each other. Bess was her prime educator. When she was not peeling potatoes or cooking soups for the acts, she took to the task of educating her daughter with the kind of determination which had never been shown to her in her own childhood. She was determined that the girl would grow up with more possibilities in her future than she had ever been afforded. Bess had one simple ambition: that Ellen would never have to cook for or clean up after anyone but herself.

  Ellen, however, was not a captive student, finding her lessons dull and pointless. Even as a very young girl, she knew there was only one thing she wanted to do with her life and that was to follow her father up the ladder and join him as part of his trapeze company.

  ‘By the time you’re old enough to go up there, I’ll be too old to catch you,’ he told her, shaking his head as if he wished that things were different but there was nothing he could do about it.

  ‘You could train me now,’ she suggested. ‘I’m seven years old.’

  ‘That’s too young to be flying trapezes,’ he insisted. ‘I’m not going to be held responsible for you falling and breaking your neck.’ In truth he was torn between his own love of the act and his terror that his daughter would seek to copy him.

  ‘Jane Shallot flew the trapezes with you in Edinburgh at Christmas,’ Ellen pointed out, her precocious memory having stored up the dates and times of many of the performances and the guest artistes that her father had worked with in different cities. ‘And she was only twelve.’

  ‘Jane Shallot had been working in the circus for years,’ Russell Rose replied. ‘She knew the trade. Nothing was going to happen to her. She was a legend before she hit double figures.’

  ‘I was born in the circus,’ insisted Ellen. ‘I’ve been watching you up there since before I can remember. I don’t even know what you did before joining the circus.’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Russell sadly. ‘If you want to know the truth of it. I did nothing. But at least that nothing was something in itself. You don’t want to be born, grow up, live and die in the circus, do you? There’s so much more out there. Isn’t your mother educating you to better yourself?’

  Ellen thought about it and her brow furrowed deeply as it always did when she was deep in concentration. Russell couldn’t help but smile and felt an urge to reach out and trace the lines in her forehead, smooth them out, make her happy again. She opened her mouth but thought about what she wanted to say before uttering a word. When she did, her statement was clear and concise and she uttered each syllable with determination. ‘I want to do what I want to do,’ she said. ‘And I don’t think anyone should be able to stop me.’

  Russell shook his head sadly. ‘Well I’m not training you and I can tell you for sure that neither Jimmy nor Elizabeth will either.’ These were his colleagues who would do whatever Russell told them when it came to his daughter. Ellen was dissatisfied with this answer and stormed off to their wagon, refusing to speak to her father for two full days. In the meantime, he recounted the conversation to his wife, Bess, who agreed with him and insisted that Ellen be allowed nowhere near a trapeze or a high wire.

  ‘She’s so angry though,’ said Russell, feeling like making a conciliatory gesture. ‘Isn’t there some way of cheering her up?’

  ‘She’ll see sense. Just let her be.’

  ‘I don’t like fights, Bess. You know that. I’m always afraid that something will happen to me whenever I have a fight with you or Ellen and then I’ll be dead and there’ll be no way of taking back the things that were said. I don’t like to leave a quarrel.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ his wife replied. ‘I told you she’ll snap out of it. She’s a child. Children sulk. And what’s she going to do, after all? Run away and join a circus?’

  Russell smiled and shook his head. He had the impression that Bess had been waiting seven long years to use that line.

  I left Japan within three days of receiving Isaac’s letter. Although we had spoken infrequently since I had left England almost two years before, the realisation that he was about to die shook me as nothing before ever had. I liked knowing he was still there and that I could most likely count on him if I needed him. I had no choice but to return to him. However, there were things to be taken care of before I could go home. I quit my job with the newspaper, an act which upset me as I had grown to love my work there. My boss, a middle-aged man named Ryu Mori who had shown no
emotion towards me whatsoever in my time there, seemed close to tears when I told him that I had to go and his reaction brought me close to embarrassing myself as well. He hugged me as I prepared to leave, an act that amazed me from one so generally self-contained. I cleared my desk and packed a portfolio of my work; even in distress I was aware that I would need to find employment back in Britain and although the prospect of work on a newspaper there did not fill me with excitement, it was important to be prepared for any eventuality.

  I tried to contact Hitomi but she refused to take my calls. I was sure that she was upset about my departure and didn’t want to aggravate the situation by meeting again. She had made it clear that she didn’t want to come to England with me but I didn’t know whether I had impressed upon her the fact that I had no choice but to go. For someone who believed so much in family, I was surprised that she could not see this.

  My flight was scheduled for a Thursday morning and on the Wednesday afternoon I went to the school where we had first met to say my goodbyes. Walking up the small side stairs which led to her office, I had a sense of déjà vu, recalling those early days in Kyoto when I had known nothing of the place, the people or the language; the feeling of isolation returned to me and I wondered whether the time I had spent in Japan had been profitable or not. For some reason, I could remember very little of it other than the time I had spent with Hitomi. To me, she was Japan. She was what had kept me there more than anything else. I needed to tell her that.

  I heard a sound from her office, the sound of a desk drawer being firmly closed, and paused to take a deep breath. It was important that I decide exactly what I wanted to say to her and yet an opening phrase would not come to my mind. Instead I took a step forward, assuming that when we laid eyes on each other, anything that needed to be said, would naturally appear. However, just as I was about to open the door to her office, its occupant emerged, almost bumping into me, and to my surprise it was not Hitomi at all, but her brother Tajima.