All right, what’s past is past. I have spoken to a few people, and smoothed your way back into civilian life. I have succeeded in buying out the last year of your term of enlistment in the Police. As of July 31st your obligations to the force are legally fulfilled – at considerable cost to me. The question remains as to what is to be done with you. I have spoken to Sir John A. Macdonald about the possibility of finding a safe riding for you. He did not commit – unlike you, he looks before he leaps – but he left the impression your candidacy is not out of the question, which is his way of saying he wants to hear the ring of gold in the bottom of the party bucket. I will oblige him by producing that sound. All signs point to an election within the year so you must get back here to Ottawa, reacquaint yourself with and make yourself pleasant to the men who count. You are university educated, you can turn a phrase, you are more intelligent than your actions testify to, and I shall provide all necessary funds for a campaign. A seat in the House is yours for the asking. If you apply yourself, in a few years you might find your lazy bum on the Front Bench. Let me emphasize, my friends will be your friends if you offer them your hand. Return home and we will begin to sort all this out. I anticipate you at the earliest possible date. There is no time to lose.
Since I could not take him by the shoulders, shake him, shout, “Let me be!” I blew out the candle, consigning Father and his blather to the shadows. It is the place for him; he is a shady man. So why do I take the trouble to copy choice selections of his tirade into this journal? Because at some future date I shall surely wish to relive my triumph over the Baron. He may puff himself up for unlocking my cell door, assume that I will meekly do his bidding, fulfill his defeated ambitions by becoming his parliamentary proxy, but if he thinks that will happen, he has another think coming. In the two months since this letter arrived I have had plenty of time to make my own plans, to prepare to roll the dice and become a rancher. A chancy business, but I have enlisted Joe McMullen to help me bring it to fruition. So to hell with Father. The struggle between his higher organ, which prompted him towards the world of politics, and his lower organ, which urged him towards Solange, was settled long ago. His lower organ won. Let him live with the consequences of it.
Certainly he could not have foreseen the present situation when he decided my future and delivered it to me in this damnable letter. But by now he surely has realized that by springing me from the Police before my term of service has run out, hehas inadvertently rubbed more dirt on the family name. Everyone will assume that this was done to save my topknot from the Sioux. As long as three weeks ago, when a civilian dispatch rider for the U.S. Army brought us the report of Custer’s defeat, I understood that this would be how my early exit from the Police would appear, a coward scampering out of danger.
The courier had few details of exactly what had occurred at the Little Bighorn and what the consequences of it would be, except to say that deliveries of mail and supplies from Fort Benton to Fort Walsh were suspended until the Sioux threat passed. Deliveries have not yet resumed. Which means that no message from Father can reach me. I am certain that out there somewhere, a letter penned by him is held captive in a mailbag, a letter that pleads with me to immediately re-enlist, that reminds me how useful that act would be in future political campaigns. Wesley Case out on the stump, parading himself as the man who rallied around the flag in his country’s hour of need.
When Major Walsh galloped back to the fort on a lathered horse a few days ago, completing the last stage of a mad dash across the continent that carried him from Hot Springs, Arkansas, to Ottawa, then on to Fort Benton, he immediately assembled the men to address them. Unfortunately, he did little more than confirm that Custer and the troop he had personally led into battle at Little Bighorn had, in fact, been utterly annihilated. Walsh related this calmly, as if to leave the impression that he gave us the whole truth and nothing but the truth. His quiet authority did a good deal to steady the men. But I found his silence about where the Sioux were, or what steps the Americans had taken to pursue them, a significant omission.
As Father is fond of saying, connections are the harness that pulls your wagon. I did not hesitate to use them to my advantage with Major Walsh. I may be a lowly sub-constable now, but he has not forgotten the time we spent together training at the School of Cavalry in Kingston. The Major believes he owes me some consideration as a former colleague; my request for a few words with him was not refused. When we met, I tried to leave the impression that I had come simply to inquire after his health and to remind him that my term of service expires at the end of the month. But the Major, clearly preoccupied with weightier matters than my departure from the Police, only acknowledged my imminent return to civilian life with a brusque hitch of the shoulders.
Then I went to work to find out what he had avoided saying at the assembly. After all, what happens in Montana has a bearing on my future. If one prods Walsh gently, circumspectly, he opens up. Soon he was giving me the substance of a brief meeting he had had with Major Ilges, commandant of the Fort Benton Army detachment. Ilges confided to him that rumours of what the troops sent to recover the corpses at the Little Bighorn had seen are circulating throughout every Army post in the West. Bodies stripped of every stitch of clothing and left to bloat in the sun. Faces pounded to mush with stone hammers. Corpses quilled with arrows. Private parts lopped off and stuffed in mouths. One of the officers of the 7th Cavalry, who sported a magnificent set of sidewhiskers, had his cheeks cut off to decorate a scalp shirt. Now, Ilges says, every man in the Army with a pair of Burnsides is in a panic to shave them off. He intimated to Walsh that these reports of atrocities have demoralized the rank and file to an extraordinary degree. Nightmare has walked out into the daylight. The shock given to the generals’ systems by the Sioux victory appears to have induced paralysis in the high command. It is all dithering and hand-wringhoothe top. Few steps are being taken to see that the Sioux are swiftly dealt with.
If there is paralysis in the Army, the rest of the country is having a fit of hysterics. That much is evident from the stack of newspapers that Walsh collected hurtling his way to Fort Benton and which he passed on to me before I left his office. What a farrago of lunacy they contain. Glowing approval for schoolboys in Custer’s hometown, who laid their hands on their McGuffey’s Readers and swore a solemn oath to make short work of Sitting Bull if he ever crosses their paths. Praise for the showman Buffalo Bill, who portentously announced that he was abandoning his Wild West Show tour because his country requires his services in the wilds of Montana. Ludicrous claims that Sitting Bull is no Indian at all, but a dark-skinned former West Point cadet expelled from the academy, who, nursing an implacable hatred for the Army, has made common cause with the Sioux and is ready to vengefully employ his knowledge of military science against his former colleagues. There can be no other explanation for Custer’s whipping than that he received it at the hands of a white man. The buck-naked, dirt-worshipping polygamist savages that the newspaper scribes denounce could not have dealt him such a blow.
And if this renegade is not to blame, others are plainly culpable. The Army is crammed with bummers, drunks, the dregs of the slums, foreigners. The Indian Department is a nest of pacifist, mollycoddling Quakers who teach the Indian one thing and one thing only: contempt for the weakness of the white man. Cleanse the Augean stables, the journalists cry, sweep them clean, clear this stink from the public’s nostrils.
Adding to the hysteria is the timing of the defeat. News of the disaster at the Little Bighorn reached the Eastern Seaboard shortly after July 4, and not just any ordinary July 4 but the grand celebration of the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the Republic. A country feeling its oats, flexing its muscles, vigorous and rich, cocksure and confident, has seen the impossible happen, the unthinkable become fact. Sitting Bull has spoiled their glorious Centennial, pissed on Custer’s golden head, the head of a genuine Civil War hero, the head of someone who has recently been touted as a future President of the United States.
Somehow a wedding and a funeral got booked for the same hour in the same church. The joy of the Centennial, the joy of the great Exposition in Philadelphia, is drowned in a wave of gloom.
But after a little reflection I realized that I had witnessed this madness before. Papers are papers, I suppose. I remember the days when the tone of our own respectable Canadian journals was every bit as frantic. The savage stalking the land then was the dipsomaniacal, ring-kissing, bony-shanked bogtrotter. Beware, the Irish Republican Army is massing on our border, a tribe of drunken pillagers and arsonists. Take heed, the secret society of Fenians in our midst is readying a massacre of Protestants that will make the gutters of Toronto and Montreal run with blood. The Irish in our customs service are passing on shipments of contraband arms and ammunition to their coconspirators. Priests are turning their churches into weapons depots; the sacristies are heaped with revolvers, rifles, and pikes. Come St. Patrick’s Day, Catholic graves will be opened and weapons retrieved from coffins for a dreadful day of murder and destruction; the countryside will be lit with burning barns and granaries.
A particle of truth feeds any panic. When I learned of D’Arcy McGee’s death at the hands of a Fenian gunman on Sparks Street, a byway so familiar to me that I could feel the cobblestones through the soles of my shoes as I read the column announcing his demise, the word peril became real for me. And the invaders did come. I fought them. The bright brass IRA button of that young dead soldier still burns in my eyes. But for the rest, the nefarious priests, the plotting Irish hod-carriers? Ghosts of our invention, steam rising from overheated imaginations. Run a bayonet through steam, it passes blindly through a fog. Any flesh it strikes is likely to be innocent, any damage done, done to a bystander.
And while sitting in the graveyard on the hill, surrounded by revenants and wraiths, moodily gouging the sandy soil with the toe of my boot, another ghostly presence intruded. I sensed a stirring, a flickering against the trees on the hillside to my right. It froze me on my boulder; I strained to make it out. A trembling cloud of midges, a vague form drifting out of the forest shadows, swimming into the meagre moonlight, bit by bit knitting itself into a horse and rider.
A Sioux wolf, a scout? A horseshoe clinked against a stone, and I knew then whoever the man was, he was white. Another five-hundred-dollar-a-day dispatch rider bringing a warning from Fort Benton? Feeling my presence, the horse halted. Its startled whinny roused the man dozing in the saddle. Peering blindly up into the darkness, he called out, “Who’s there?”
There was a querulous confidence in his voice. The cemetery hill shielded Fort Walsh from his view so he had no reason to assume he was addressing a white man. I shouted down to him, “No need for alarm! I am with the Police!” and got to my feet to show myself.
There was no reply; he simply sat gazing up at me, immobile as an equestrian statue planted in a town square. I relit my candle and held it aloft to reveal myself. The night so calm the flame stood up like an exclamation mark.
Horse and rider crossed to the foot of the hill and began to leisurely negotiate the clumps of cactus and scrubby juniper that scatter the slope. Guided by my tiny beacon, the rider took his own sweet time, keeping me foolishly standing there. At last he jerked his horse to a stop before me, offered no word of greeting or acknowledgement, and again sat looking at me. The candle carved a closet of illumination, a space of uncomfortable intimacy out of the night. He remained absolutely still, lips frozen in a queer, dismissive smile. His dress was as odd as his manner. Nothing suitable for rough travel, a black derby squared on his head, a black frock coat, black trousers, a soiled white shirt, an equally filthy celluloid collar. A bank clerk cruising the wilds. But the body stuffed into those clothes was not the body of a pen driver; it was a block of solid flesh hammered into the notch of the saddle. Face cut square, jaw nearly as wide as the broad forehead, small, neat ears laid flat to the temples as if pinned there by tacks. The eyes, almost colourless, pale as rainwater in a pan, flat, depthless.
“My name is Case. Constable Wesley Case,” I said. His eyes slid away, a furtive movement, as if the name had pushed them off me and turned them to the whitewashed walls of the fort. Stupidly, I said, “You are at Fort Walsh.”
His head swivelled back to me. The mute found his voice and it was unequivocally rude. “Is Major Walsh back?”
“He returned several days ago. Do you bring a message to him?”
“Why would I have a message for Walsh?”
“Because most men with a scrap of common sense know better than to go traipsing about in the wilds putting their hair on offer to any Sioux warrior who happens along,” I said, irritably. “I presumed only important business would bring you here. And that would be business with Walsh.”
“Looking for a man name of Gobbler Johnson is my business. You know a fellow called Gobbler Johnson?”
“The name means nothing to me.”
“Well, maybe he found it convenient to trade that name for another. But he can’t lose a turnip-size goitre.” A huge fist went up, pressed itself to his throat. “That ring a bell?”
“No.”
He shifted his weight in the saddle, causing the leather to gasp a complaint. “I guess I’ll have a look-see round here. Turn a few rocks over, see what’s under them.”
“If you’re looking to make trouble with this Gobbler Johnson – think twice. Major Walsh knows how to deal with mischief-makers. Fair warning,” I said.
“Fair warning,” he repeated. “Don’t concern yourself on account of me. I’m mild as milk.”
“Maybe, but give me your name. For Walsh.”
“That’s very policeman-like of you.” He ran his pale eyes up and down me. Then he said, “Michael Anthony Sebastian Dunne.” He pointed to the journal that hung forgotten in my hand. “Last name ends in an e. Maybe you’d like to write it down for the Major.”
“I’ll remember.” I blew out the candle and went to step around his horse. Dunne pulled his foot from the stirrup and thrust out his leg, barring my way.
“Put your damn leg down,” I said.
He eased his boot back into the stirrup. “I do hope Major Walsh found relief for the St. Anthony’s fire in those hot springs down in Arkansas. I hear it’s a most plaguing condition. What he’s facing, he’ll need to be fit as a fiddle.”
“The state of his erysipelas is no concern of yours.”
“Sundays we pray for the health of the Queen. And Walsh is as good as a prince in these parts. Ain’t it natural to ask?”
I tapped the insignia of rank on my sleeve. “Walsh does not confide personal information to a mere sub-constable.”
“Oh, I don’t think you’re no mere constable, Wesley Case. Far from it.”
His impudence was irksome. “Do you pretend to know me, sir?” I said.
Dunne looked past me down to the settlement’s wan lights. He remarked, “Somebody in Fort Benton give me the name of a fellow who rents beds hereabouts. It just went and lost itself. Maybe you know it.”
“Claggett,” I said.
He nodded. “That’s it.”
“I put you a question, Dunne. I want an answer. Do you pretend to know me?”
Gravely, he shook his head from side to side. It was like watching a boulder teeter. “No, I don’t know you from Adam,” he replied, giving a twitch to the reins. His horse gave a crow hop of surprise, brushed my shoulder with its flank, and broke into a shambling trot. I watched Dunne roll down the hill, broad shoulders tossing about like the gunwales of a barge in a heavy sea. Then horse and rider dissolved back into the liquid blackness from which they had emerged.
Midnight has come and gone hours ago. I have missed lights out and there will be hell to pay for it. Sergeant Major Francis will have me back on punishment detail. A small price to pay for a night of privacy. I write at a table in the back of the Billiard Emporium, which Mr. Halston Turncliffe has frugally outfitted with Fort Benton castoffs, two pool tables with cracked slate beds, and cues crooked as a d
og’s hind leg. At my back are three shelves of tattered books and newspapers. For a one-penny fee, two-month-old copies of the Illustrated London News, and slightly newer editions of the Minnesota Pioneer, can be rented. For books, Mr. Turncliffe charges a nickel a day: blood-and-thunders that offer a corpse every chapter, higher literature for the higher minded, a spine-cracked, dog-eared miscellany that includes Carlyle’s History of the French Revolution, the collected works of Sir Walter Scott (minus Rob Roy, Ivanhoe, and Old Mortality), and seven or eight Dickens novels.
Tonight, I play scholar in the Bodleian of the Cypress Hills. About eleven, when the last of the billiard players left, Mr. Turncliffe threatened to evict me, but relented and provided me with a coal-oil lamp and pen and ink when I waved two bits under his nose, enough to send him happy to his bed in the backroom.
“You might think of keeping notes,” I remember Father saying to me at the Ottawa train station when he sent me off to the Police. We were wrapped in a cloud of locomotive smoke and cinders. “Adventures in the West and so on. More than one man has done well from a thing like that. It could get your name about, even if it’s only a pamphlet for distribution on the hustings. Something patriotic, with mustard in it. That would set you apart from the average pol.”
Both parents demanding I produce an account of my life. One, so I might find myself. The other, so I might find fame, the brightest currency in politics. Mother suggested a few lines; Father a pamphlet. Now that I have begun to spill, I wonder where it will stop.
TWO
WALSH’S RECENT RETURN has put B Troop on its mettle. By night, the men diligently thumb the Regulations for the Instruction, Formations and Movements of the Cavalryand the Instructions for the Sword, Carbine, Pistol, and Lance Exercise; by day, they execute the prescribed drills under the watchful eye of officers. The Major wants them ready to fight. Today, as midday approaches, two seven-pound mountain cannons and their gun teams wait for the artillery instructor Standish’s command to go into action. The horses stamp, toss their heads, lash their tails, their trace chains jingling. Standish bellows, the drivers whistle, slap reins down hard on rumps, the guns surge forward, wheel spokes blurring, dust boiling, caissons bouncing, cannon barrels wagging as Standish roars above the din, “Look lively, you damned unwashed limbs of Satan! Turn them bloody horses! Bring them guns about, hard!” The gun carriages cut a savage arc, the barrels swinging round on target, a distant hill beyond the thin silver thread of Battle Creek. The drivers haul back on reins, the caissons skid to a stop, gunners scramble down from the boxes to unhook and sight the artillery. But they do not fire. Ammunition is in short supply. Every precious round is being held in reserve because it may be needed if the Sioux come.
A Good Man Page 2
