Murder at Medicine Lodge

by Mardi Oakley Medawar

  I have yet to alter from this opinion.

  * * *

  We found William washing dishes. He was very friendly, teasing us about our recent ordeal.

  “But that last part was good,” I said, patting my stomach appreciatively. “What was it?”

  William said, “Apple pie.”

  Those were the first English words I ever learned. Billy nudged me and said, “He wants to know if you would like more.”

  I nodded with my entire body. William laughed as he stood, flinging sudsy white soap from his dark arms.

  He gave me an entire pie, and not one of the busy soldiers working in the large cook tent seemed to care that I ate from the metal plate with my hands. Between gobbling bites, I asked William questions. Savoring each mouthful, I listened to what William had to say.

  “I have been in the army for three years. I joined after my old master’s place was burned. That was in Georgia. The officer that freed me, gave me a place in the army, was Lieutenant Danny. He is the bravest man I have ever known.”

  I stopped eating, raised my eyes and fixed on William’s. His description of a brave young officer did not fit with the lieutenant I’d known out on the prairie. The even more glaring discrepancy was my memory of the two sergeants roughing up the lieutenant, as well as his appearing to be mortally afraid of them. William seemed to understand my thoughts.

  “During the war,” he said softly, “the lieutenant wasn’t afraid of anything. Men followed him without question.” William looked away, the side of his face twitching as he lapsed into deep thought. Taking a deep breath, letting it go with a sad sigh he said, “It’s only been lately that he’s been … nervous.” Vexed by this, William stood up from the little three-legged stool he’d been perched on and cried, “He doesn’t talk anymore. He used to talk all the time. And laugh—Lord, that man could laugh. He was always with us, his brown boys.” William stabbed his chest with his thumb. “That’s what he called us, his brown boys. He’d sit right down and eat with us and laugh at all our jokes. He was part of us and he made us feel like we were part of him. We didn’t think nothing about following that man right into the mouth of hell because he was Lieutenant Danny, and where he went, we went. No questions asked.”

  William’s expression became indescribably sad. “Since coming to the Territory, he doesn’t come around us much. Everything is changed. We hardly ever see him, and when we do, all he says is, ‘What do you want, Trooper?’ We can’t go to him like we used to, we can’t count on him like in the old times. Now all we got is Captain Mac, and that man wouldn’t care if we all fell off the world tomorrow. This army has become a sad piece of work. I’d quit if I had somewhere else to go.”

  “You have no family?” I asked.

  William barked a laugh. “You don’t understand about slave days, do you? Slaves didn’t have families. All we had were masters. Now we don’t even have that.” His eyes locked with mine. “I know you’re hunting up a way to help Little Jonas, but if you got time during your hunting to look for the man we once called our friend, we’d appreciate it if you’d tell him that he’s missed.”

  Listening, I heard more “I” than “we” but what I said was that I would do my best to find the Buffalo Soldiers’ missing hero.

  Rising from the stool, I handed over the emptied pie tin and William took it. I signed that I would like to wash away the stickiness of the apple pie. William pointed back to the big pot with the low fire burning underneath it. I went there and took a good long time about scrubbing my hands, arms, and face in the hot, sudsy water. That kind of bath felt good and that pot held a lot of water. What I liked best was that a fire could be kept going directly under it. I just knew that Crying Wind would love to have a pot like that. Picking it up and casually carting it off would require the combined strengths of three stout men and one highly enthusiastic boy. That pot was not like the shovels. It wasn’t something I could simply fold up and hide under my vest. But still, I knew my wife would want it. She could use it for just about anything—but my mind kept telling me that it would be perfect for winter bathing, that this pot would end forever my turning blue in an icy creek or river. It takes hours to feel warm again after a bath like that. And sometimes the pain is incredible. Yet every bit of this is endured winter after winter because my people have always had a deep-seated need to be clean. The worst insult a Kiowa can give is to say someone is dirty.

  Cullen was a dirty person. I thought about Cullen as I finished cleaning myself. When I returned to William, I said, “I have one last question for you. I want to know how you got that wound to your leg.”

  William was instantly alarmed, then became agitated as he went into a great long tale. According to him, Little Jonas had attacked him for no reason.

  “He hit me. Hard enough to knock me down.”

  “You had no idea what he was talking about?”

  “No!”

  “When did you discover that your spare trousers were missing?”

  “The next day. I went right to Captain Mac but, as usual, that man was about as helpful as a bug bite. I saw him take out the report forms but I wasn’t allowed to stay around and make sure he filled them out, so on my own I started asking around and then here comes Little Jonas again, this time saying that everyone in the camp was telling him how I was calling him a thief. Well, that made me mad because I hadn’t said a word about him to anybody, except maybe that he’d had no right to hit me the way he had, so I yelled right back, told him I knew he had taken my pants. That’s when we really got into it. I was peeling potatoes and had a knife in my hand. In the fight, I ended up sticking myself with it and that’s how my leg got cut.”

  “How long did you take care of the wound before seeking medical aid?”

  “Three days.” He eyed Billy for a second, then looked away. “I don’t trust army doctors. They’re the cause for a lot of nubs getting tossed out of the army.”

  “Nubs?”

  William raised his voice. “Men missing an arm or a leg! We call them nubs. I didn’t want to be a nubby black man trying to look for work or be begging for handouts, so I took care of myself as long as I could. When it got so bad that it hurt all the time and made me feel sick in my belly, I started thinking that being a live nub was better that being a dead trooper. If you hadn’t been where you were the day I got taken into sick call, most likely I wouldn’t be walking around like I am, ’cause those army doctors do love to cut off arms and legs. You did me a big favor. I won’t ever forget it. As long as I’m on mess duty, when you want pie, you’ll get pie.”

  “Thank you,” I smiled. William and I sat down and I asked another question. “When we were all out on the prairie, I did not detect any hard feelings between you and Little Jonas. Not until the final moments when we were preparing to leave. I saw the two of you argue, but then when you came into the camp with the horses, the two of you acted as if there was no argument. Your friendly natures caused me to doubt my own eyes.”

  William laughed an easy laugh. “That’s an old slave trick. No matter what, outside our own kind, we never let on what we’re thinking or feeling. We especially don’t complain about each other to officers.”

  “But you complained about your uniform to Captain Mac.”

  “Well, I had to do that!” he cried. “If I didn’t report about my missing pants, next inspection would see my pay packet docked.”

  As I opened my mouth, preparing to ask Billy what that meant, William raised a silencing hand and spoke to him directly. In turn, the matter was fully explained.

  “When there is an inspection, all of our things have to be laid out just so. We have to have one complete uniform on our bodies, another in good repair folded up with our blankets, towels, and socks. If anything is missing, the sergeants get mad. They can’t get mad if we have reported anything lost to a senior officer. I tried to talk to Lieutenant Danny but I couldn’t find him. That’s why I went to Captain Mac.”

  “Your sergeants are Hicks and
Cullen?”

  “That’s right. We report to them. They’re the ones who do the regular inspecting.”

  “Why didn’t you report the loss to either of them?”

  William shrugged. “Couldn’t find them, either.”

  I thanked William for both the conversation and the pie, and then Billy and I left. As I walked I noticed with a smile that the hot soapy water had left me smelling almost like William. Raising my arm, I sniffed at myself and laughed.

  “Where are we going now?” Billy wanted to know.

  “I want to find Lieutenant Danny. I have something of his.”

  THIRTEEN

  It was a guess, but then everything in life, especially decisions, are nothing more than best guesses. My guess was the watch remaining in my carry pouch belonged to Lieutenant Danny. My second guess was that he would want that watch back even more badly than Sergeant Hicks had wanted his.

  Billy and I walked all through the camp without finding Lieutenant Danny, but we did find Hawwy and Stanley. They were seated at a little table that had been set up in the shade of the medical-tent awning, and were playing a game of cards. When I told Hawwy I was looking for the lieutenant he said, “Oh, you just missed him. He was just here telling me that he felt ill. I’ve confined him to his tent until he feels better.”

  “He needed permission to be sick?”

  “Yes. Otherwise he’d have to stand his duty.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  Hawwy shrugged, removed a card out of the fan of cards in his right hand, placed that card on the top of the small table. Seeing the marks on the card, Stanley let go a howl. Hawwy laughed. I pushed Hawwy’s shoulder to regain his attention.

  “It isn’t anything serious,” he said. “He’s just not feeling well. I told him to stay in bed for a while.”

  “Which tent is his?”

  Seemingly anxious for me to go away so they could go on enjoying their game, Hawwy threw his arm in the general direction of the ailing lieutenant.

  After some searching and being told to “Get out!” by disgruntled officers not pleased at all by the sudden appearance of my face through their flap doors, I found Lieutenant Danny. He was not in his bed. Dressed in uniform trousers and a very nice white shirt—the nicest I’d ever seen worn by an officer—he sat at his desk, writing a letter, the long black pen pausing as Billy and I entered.

  Lieutenant Danny looked frail and shaky, and given this state, it was understandable why Hawwy had mistakenly believed him to be ill. Had his attention not been diverted by the cloying Stanley, he would have seen that the lieutenant was a mental wreck, that what he needed more than bed rest was the relief of talking through his problems with someone he could trust. He had turned to Hawwy, but had been sent away. Hoping to persuade him that I was a man he could trust, I took out the watch, opened it, and held it out to him.

  “I believe this is yours.”

  What little color remained in his face, effectively drained. His gaze intent on the small portrait, his jawline twitched rapidly. After lengthy consideration, he said to Billy in a flat, gravelly tone, “What are your demands.”

  This was not a question. It was a statement of hopeless resignation. Utter defeat. What a sad miserable thing, for a young man William had described as being fearless, bold, full of laughter.

  “Nothing,” I said softly.

  His hand was unnaturally cold as I lifted it, placed the watch in his palm. Emotions battled across his too-white face as he sat back in the chair, held the watch, and gazed silently at the portrait. Billy and I used this quiet moment to ease ourselves down on the nearby cot. We waited a considerable amount of time, at the end of which, Lieutenant Danny snapped the watch lid closed, set it down on the small desktop.

  Turning in the chair, he spoke with a gentle, apologetic tone. “I’m afraid you’ve caught me during my preparations to leave.”

  While this was being translated I stared at the revolver resting on the desk, just above the pay-paa, pen, and inkwell, and knew just how Lieutenant Danny had meant to leave.

  For a moment, I didn’t know what to say, so I simply listened as a playful breeze bumped at the canvas walls of the tent. Then, my tone just as somber as the moment, I managed to say, “Then I’m very glad to have found you before … your departure.”

  His manner became brusque. “Yes, well, if you’ve come to pick my bones, I’m afraid there’s nothing left.”

  “I am a healer, not a vulture.”

  His lips turned up in what would have to pass for a smile. In a voice we both had to strain to hear, he said, “Mercy from a savage, none from my own.”

  “Tell me about your troubles,” I urged.

  He readjusted himself in the chair. “I don’t suppose any of that matters now, does it?” His eyes slid toward the desk, the letter he’d been writing. He took a deep breath, expelled it slowly, then, in carefully measured tones, this is what he said.

  “I was born in Connecticut. I have visited the South exactly ten times. When I was a small child, I was first taken there by my mother who was Southern born, and desiring her son to know her side of the family. All I remember of that time is the astonishment I felt, that my mother’s people lived so very differently than the world I knew. I did not see any of her relatives again until I was an adolescent, and then only because my mother’s father was dying and his last wish was to see all of his children and grandchildren. It was during this sad time that I met my fourth cousin. She was not actually considered to be a member of the family, but as a distant relative she and her parents did attend my grandfather’s subsequent funeral.

  “She was not a pretty girl, but she had such a shining goodness that I wanted to see her again under happier circumstances. We corresponded, and after a time, I returned to the South and called on her.” He looked earnestly at me now, wanting me to understand. “We each were barely fifteen years old, much too young to be thought of as a courting couple. War was spoken of more and more and with each visit I made to my southern grandmother’s home, I found myself less graciously received. By this time, my darling girl and I were desperately in love, but because of our age and the times, we only dared meet in secret.

  “Each of us now sixteen, we were of a passionate condition and despite the ever-present threat of war, we simply had to have one another. So, as secretly as we courted, we married. Then the war happened and we were torn from each other. She remained in the South and I was in a boarding school in the North. I was nineteen when I finally entered the war, quite glad that it was still going on when I reached majority. I loathed slavery, despised the very idea of it. Then, too, I was determined to battle my way toward my wife.”

  Tipping back his head, he sounded a humorless laugh. “Oh, I was a capable officer, and I did cut quite a dash, but I got nowhere near my endangered wife. And then I began hearing tales of a scourge by the name of John Singleton Mosbey.” He went quiet, allowing me a moment to appreciate this new gravity.

  I’m afraid I couldn’t.

  Little Bluff, our principal chief then, had intentionally kept the Kiowa Nation out of the war between the Blue Jackets and the Gray Jackets. It was the wisest thing that man ever did. Many Nations entered the war on one side or the other, and following that war, those Indians were punished, the degree of punishment dependent on which side the Indians had been on. The Gray Jacket Indians lost everything—homes, even reserved lands—and were made to suffer grinding poverty. The Blue Jacket Indians were hustled back to their reservations and treated like caged prisoners, needing authorization passes simply to travel from their homes to the trade stores. It needn’t be said they were no longer allowed to own rifles.

  Because the Kiowas were a separate people, had gone their own way (though admittedly there was considerable raiding against both white armies), Washington was now “handling” us differently. All that aside, Lieutenant Danny’s mention of a specific war chief belonging to the Gray army, other than to explain Hawwy’s angry reaction to t
hat name when Stanley had read the found love letter, meant not one thing to me.

  Trying to make me understand, Lieutenant Danny became a bit more lively. “John Singleton Mosbey,” he said, measuring each word carefully, “is my mother’s brother. He was a general and a great hero to the South, but because of his battle tactics, we from the North called him something else.”

  “What?”

  “The Gray Ghost.”

  That perked me right up. I instantly remembered that Skywalker had said something about a gray, ghostlike man looming over one of the Blue Jackets. He’d been right. This gray ghost was looming over Lieutenant Danny.

  Licking my lips, I said excitedly, “Your being closely related to him was a bad thing.”

  “Yes,” he smiled. “It was a very, very bad thing. I was afraid for anyone to find out.”

  “Why didn’t you leave the Blue Jackets after the war?”

  “Because I’m still trying to get to my wife. Where she lives is under military law. No one but the army or the reconstructionists are allowed in. I was promised that, after this duty at Medicine Lodge, I would be reassigned to the place where she is.”

  “Did the army men making this promise know about your wife?”

  “No. No one knew. Not even my mother who forwarded on what few letters I’ve received from my wife.”

  “Your mother didn’t read the letters?”

  Lieutenant Danny’s eyebrows lifted, then settled as he said in a sigh, “No, she did not. As far as my mother is concerned, my wife and I are nothing more than childhood friends. And as my mother is still a southern woman in her heart, she felt that her sending on any letters from the South was her patriotic duty. It was her mistaken faith that, if enough entreating letters were read by Union officers, we would cease further destruction of her girlhood homeland.”