by Judy Alter
But the water was receding, and we were alive. We were grateful.
Tom stumbled toward me in that early-morning light. "Libbie, you saved my life. I'm... I'm grateful...."
"Tom, you're my brother," I said, "and I would do anything for you. But I'd have worked as hard to save any soldier last night."
He looked humbled as he said, "God bless you, Libbie. I hope Autie knows what a jewel he has."
I wondered if Tom would ever again be the laughing, carefree boy I had known all these years, the one who had teased me so in Louisiana and Texas, even the man who drank too much in Kansas and led other officers astray. While I might have hoped for his reform, I would not have had it come this way.
"Miss Libbie, look!" Horror was etched in Eliza's voice. "No, don't look!"
But I did, and saw a soldier's drowned body embedded in the side of the bank, swollen beyond recognition. No one could reach it, and we could not escape the sight of it. That vision remains etched in my mind, along with the terrible screams.
We were three days on that strip of land, until the water receded enough for us to be moved across the soggy prairie to an even higher spot. They were three sodden, sleepless days and nights, and Diana, Eliza, and I suffered from exhaustion. Mrs. Gibbs, who with her two sons had been marooned with us, maintained a rare composure that I envied but could not copy. I would never, I thought, be the perfect army wife.
* * *
Fort Hays after the storm was a dreary place, but still I was devastated when word came that we women were to return immediately to Fort Harker, because Hays was considered unsafe for us. We left with two officers—James Coker was not one of them—and an escort of ten mounted soldiers.
"Libbie, look at that soldier." Diana spoke under her breath and barely nodded her head in the direction of a soldier riding directly behind our ambulance. When I looked, I gasped aloud, for he reeled in the seat so badly that he was in imminent danger of falling out of the saddle. Within minutes steadier hands removed him from his horse and dumped him, unceremoniously, in the wagon that held forage for the mules and the horses.
"Drunk," I muttered in disgust.
"Plains whiskey," Eliza said. "They only needs to smell it, it's such deadly poison."
Autie had told me that sometimes a barrel of tolerably good whiskey, sent from the East, was made into several barrels on the plains by the addition of drugs. Such a brew had the power to lay out like a dead person even a hard-drinking old cavalryman in no time at all.
And one by one, that's what happened to our escort. The teamsters, who fortunately remained sober, laid them in the supply wagons, and we rode across the prairie without an escort. Had the Indians only known, here was their golden chance for a free attack.
In that country, the air is so clear that every object on the brow of a small ascent of ground is silhouetted against the deep blue of the sky. The Indians placed little heaps of stones on these rises to hide behind, and to my strained eyes every little pile of rocks seemed to move, an effect heightened by the waves of heat that hovered over the surface of the earth. At each rise we looked anxiously into the depression ahead, no sooner relieved to find it safe than we were torn with terrors about the next rise. Had I been going over such ground to join Autie, I've no doubt the prospect of reunion would have quieted my terrors—but I had no such joyous prospect to distract me.
In spite of my fright, I could not help being struck by the wildflowers—their reds and oranges made the earth glow, and yet I knew that no soldier would allow me to stop and gather some as I had done in other days—the danger now, in this strip of land, was too great. I thought of James Coker and the night we had gathered wildflowers but soon brushed the thought from my mind.
Buffalo, antelope, black-tailed deer, coyote, and jackrabbits all scurried out of our way, and I thought how delighted Autie would have been to take off after one or all of them. Once we saw a herd of wild horses, with the leader bearing his head in a proud, lofty manner, mane and tail flowing, neck splendidly arched, proud head carried loftily. But we saw them only momentarily, for wild horses run like the wind when they are alarmed—and we alarmed them.
At Fort Harker we were all invited to stay with the commanding officer, but I thought that too much of an imposition. Sending Mrs. Gibbs to accept that hospitality with her two young sons, I announced that Diana, Eliza, and I would sleep in the ambulance. It was, after all, perfectly covered and for our comfort was placed in a narrow space between two storehouses.
Kansas did it once again! A storm arose in the night, and the flapping of the tarpaulin over our ambulance awoke us. With ropes and picket pins thrashing, it was finally lifted on high and soared off into space. Still, we had the curtains and cover of the ambulance, and we huddled together, trying to hide our eyes from the lightning and our ears from the roar of the storm—I had heard enough of storms to last me a lifetime. The rain beat in and soaked our blankets, and then the curtain at the end of the ambulance jerked itself free, and water deluged us from a new direction.
I longed to scream out for the sentinel, but one of the earliest lessons Autie had taught me was that one never spoke to the guard on post. We saw that poor soldier with every lightning flash, tramping his way around our wagons without ever looking at us.
But then, suddenly, we found ourselves in motion, spinning down the incline behind the wagons. And I screamed, regardless of military rules and procedure. The sentinel rushed to our aid—bless him for answering a higher law that forbids neglecting a woman in danger.
The wagon was dragged back and secured with stronger picket pins, but sleep was murdered for the night. The guard had, of course, reported to the commanding officer, and soon there came a lantern or two zigzagging over the parade ground in our direction. There was no arguing—we were fished out of our watery beds and followed the officers to drier quarters, those that I had first resisted because I wished not to make trouble.
Next morning I prepared to regain control of my world, but was startled by the approach of the commanding officer.
"Mrs. Custer? I'm sorry to say I cannot offer you the hospitality of Fort Harker. You and your party are to return to Fort Riley immediately."
"Return to Fort Riley? I had hoped, sir, to be going in the other direction, to join my husband." I fought for composure as I spoke.
"I know that," he said kindly, "but the way west is too dangerous... and you cannot stay here, because we have an outbreak of cholera. We've lost platoons of soldiers within days. I cannot... will not take responsibility for your health and well-being."
Chapter 12
There was nothing for it. We returned to Fort Riley, with every step taking me farther from Autie. As we rode, each turn of the ambulance wheels seemed to raise a new question in my troubled mind. I'd endured a summer like none I'd ever known—floods and fire, pestilence and mutiny—and I'd survived just fine without Autie. When I tried to imagine those same catastrophes with Autie present, my stomach churned uneasily and I saw myself cowering before his stern discipline of rebellious soldiers or his cavalier disregard for disease, which he made plain he regarded as an affliction of the weak. I saw myself, to speak flatly, embarrassed for my husband, uncomfortable about his behavior.
And yet I loved Autie, did I not? Was ours not the passionate storybook romance? And was he not the reason I was traipsing around the West, exposing myself not only to the dangers I'd already met but to the ever-present threat of Indian violence—or, as James Coker had told me, the threat of a supposedly merciful bullet from a friend in case of enemy attack. Why, but for love, had I chanced out to the remote posts of Hays and Harker? Of course I loved Autie—there could be no doubt about it—and if I loved him, then I must spend every possible minute with him. So returning to Riley was a setback.
"Libbie, are you all right?" Diana spoke from her perch next to me as the ambulance bounced over the prairie. "I saw a tear, I thought...."
"Must be Miss Libbie got some dust in her eye," Eliza said
with a mischievous grin. "Can't be that she's missin' the ginnel."
I gave her a long look and said nothing.
Later I learned that the company that would have escorted me to Wallace was ambushed by Indians and caught in a fierce battle. I remembered James Coker and the bullet he saved for me, and I decided the Lord was looking after me by returning me to Riley. But I never told Autie about that feeling.
* * *
Days at Fort Riley dragged on for all of us. Mrs. Gibbs had also returned there, and we had a little community of wives whose husbands were off fighting John—the frontier name for the Indian. Autie wrote frequently, as did the other men, and we lived for the mail, spending long hours on the gallery of the house we occupied, watching for the door of the office to open.
"Here he comes, one step at a time," Mrs. Gibbs said wryly, and we all turned to look.
The mail was delivered by a cavalryman who had been left behind, ostensibly to take care of company property. Privately we believed it was because his brain was addled. He had become inflated with his importance from the joy with which we greeted his daily visit, and now his walk across the parade ground became a spectacle. This soldier—whose name I never did learn—was over six feet tall, a lumbering, bearish kind of a man, but one set on military perfection. Stalking across the parade ground, he would not demean himself by hastening but took one measured step after another, as though he were on drill. When he drew near enough to see us watching—which we always were—his head went back loftily, and his steps seemed to slow even more.
"Napoleon would not have run for an impatient woman," Diana giggled, "and neither shall he." Then she looked long at me. "Autie wouldn't either."
Once this mutton of a man presented himself before us, he insisted on observing all the form and ceremony he considered suitable to the occasion. I wanted merely to grab the letters from his hand and dismiss him, but no such luck.
With a flourish of his huge arm, he gave me a salute that took in a wide semicircle of Kansas air. "Good morning, Mrs. General George Armstrong Custer."
"Good morning," I answered as courteously as I could manage.
When the mail was at last safely handed over—he always gave it to me to deliver, presumably because he was in Autie's command and considered me therefore in command of the wives—he turned on his heel with military precision, a perfect "right about-face," flourished that arm again, and marched away as slowly as he'd come.
"What does Autie write that you want to share?" Diana asked impishly.
Scanning the pages, I said, "That he is desperate with worry because he believes we are at Harker, where cholera is raging." Autie was then at Fort Wallace. The Seventh had its first outright fight with the enemy when a band of 300 Cheyenne, under Roman Nose, attacked a stage station near Fort Wallace and ran off all the stock. Inflated by success, they then proceeded to attack Wallace, a pitifully indefensible group of log huts and mud cabins. When attacked, though, the cavalry charged out in defense and fought as bravely as though they had a battery of artillery behind them. In overwhelming numbers the Indians countercharged, lances poised and arrows on the string, and Autie wrote me of hand-to-hand combat. He did not say exactly that he had been involved, but my heart leapt in fear at the thought of Autie locked in a death struggle with an Indian. And when I read that "one of the soldiers" wounded Roman Nose himself with a Spencer rifle, I of course assumed that it was Autie who had fired that rifle.
Much later Autie told me the wonderful story of a black trooper who rushed into a dangerously unprotected place during that battle. Those watching in horror saw him throw up his hands, kick his feet in the air, and collapse—dead to all appearances. "He's a goner," said one soldier to the other. But after the battle, the dead man—restored to life—walked back to the post, gun in hand. "I just did that to fool 'em," he said. "I thought they'd try to get my scalp, thinkin' I was dead, and then I'd git one of 'em."
Within months, Wallace, a small fort of 200 men, sprouted sixty new graves, the result of repeated Indian attacks. The stage stations they were sent to protect were repeatedly attacked, men mercilessly butchered. Inside the fort things went from bad to worse—bacon and flour, stored unprotected out of necessity, went rancid and moldy. Men deserted, many to seek their fortunes in the gold mines in the Rocky Mountains—an easy escape that was seldom tracked, though many of them probably lost their lives to Roman Nose's warriors instead of finding their fortunes. Usually the deserters took arms, ammunition, horses, and food with them, knowing that officers could not search for them without leaving the fort dangerously undermanned.
Autie wrote to me of all these discouragements, and my heart went out to him. One battle does not make a war, and the fight with Roman Nose had not been enough to mesh Autie's units into a fighting army. They were, instead, involved in a battle they didn't understand, with an enemy who didn't follow the rules they knew. Autie's depression increased, and with it my concern.
One day I sat alone on the gallery sewing a new gown for Eliza—she had complained about being the worst-dressed darkie in the garrison—when I heard the peculiar sound of military steps approaching, far too rapidly for the mail carrier. Biting off the thread with which I worked, I looked up... and saw Autie standing before me.
"Autie?" My sewing fell from my lap as I stood to walk toward him, expecting to be enfolded in a passionate embrace.
Instead Autie stared at me, arms held stiffly at his side. "I've just come from Harker," he said, his voice stiff and strained. "Coker's been hurt."
"James?" I asked. Then, fearing the worst, "Indians?" Now I saw that a yellowish bruise on Autie's cheekbone was just beginning to purple up, and he had plasters on the knuckles of one hand. His lower lip appeared to have been recently split, and there was a small scratch over his right eye. Before he spoke, I knew instinctively what had happened.
"No. I beat him senseless."
Even though I sensed the truth, my mind refused to comprehend the words. "Autie, what are you saying?"
"I beat him." His expression never changed. "He'll have some permanent reminders not to dally with my wife."
"I... what..." I stammered badly, but nothing sensible came from me. The scene was not real. I felt as though it were a dream, as though I were detached and watching myself from a distance and would soon wake to find it all changed. Or perhaps Autie would finally break into a smile and say, "Fooled you, old lady!" But neither happened.
At last, gathering a measure of calm, I suggested we go inside. "We need not discuss this with the whole world listening," I said, though in truth even Diana had disappeared.
"I don't care who knows, I will not be cuckolded," he said loudly.
Knowing that arguing with Autie was going to be pointless, I simply turned and went inside. He followed me, and soon we were in the room given me for a bedroom—since Autie was not officially at Riley, we had no house of our own, and I was charitably treated as a guest in another officer's home. There we faced each other across a double bed, and the mind taking one of its odd, unpredictable turns, I briefly saw us facing each other across a huge hotel bed in New York on the first night of our honeymoon. Then the air had crackled with anticipation; now it bristled with pent-up anger.
I took a deep breath. "I don't know where you got the notion that anything went on between James Coker and me, but you're wrong. Dead wrong."
"Coker was almost dead wrong," he replied with an ironic grin. "Word travels fast in an army, Libbie. I heard of your nightly walks on the prairie... from someone who cares about you... and the time you were nearly shot. I would have expected you to know better."
Autie still stood stiff as though on parade. What frightened me most was that he showed no sign of anger. His attitude was instead one of cold, calm deliberation. I would have preferred, I think, that he flew in a rage and threatened to begin throwing the china.
In spite of my almost uncontrollable anger, I began to do just what I knew I should not—apologize, explain, cajol
e. "I was lonely, Autie, missing you, and James was kind to me. He's had a bad marriage....
"James Coker never courted me," I said, willing him to believe me. Briefly I wished that I had Autie's control and could withstand his anger. Instead, his cold rage overpowered my own indignation and—yes, it frightened me—left me the one trying to make everything all right. "He was... and is... a friend... and if you've hurt him badly..."
"He'll recover."
Deep down I know that I should have at that moment confessed my love for Autie, reassured him that it was he and he alone whom I loved, but something—that remnant of anger, perhaps—held me back, and I never said those words. I had humbled myself, but there was a limit.
"Now what?" I asked, wondering if he planned divorce, disgrace, separation, or a brave face to the world.
"We will go on as usual," he said. "No one need know about this, and I trust it will not happen again."
All that I had said had been lost on him! It was too much for me. "Autie," I screamed, "it never happened at all. You're wrong—can't you get that through your head?"
"Libbie, you were the one who requested privacy for this discussion, and now you're inviting the entire post to hear it by your yelling. Can't you keep your voice down?"
Frustrated, I bit my knuckles and turned away. Autie would win our battle, just as he won on the battlefield. But Autie never understood those he had conquered, not even me.
We ate a silent meal that night, served by a cautious Eliza, whose eyes darted from one to the other of us without a word. Diana stayed wherever she had hidden, and Mrs. Gibbs had taken her two boys elsewhere, too. So the dining room, which had seen us all share happy meals, now housed two strained and uncomfortable souls.
"Autie, tell me how you got here. Do you have orders...?" I thought I should choke on food and toyed with the steak that Eliza had prepared.
He drew himself straighten "Of necessity, I wrote my own orders. We marched to Harker for supplies and new orders... but neither were there." He shook his head in exasperation and grew conversational, the old and familiar Autie. "This is a poorly run war, Libbie.... At Wallace, we have few rations, no decent horses, no medicine to fight cholera."
