Wolves of Eden

by Kevin McCarthy

  The two soldiers stand back as the Pawnee scoops a poultice of what looks like mud mixed with leaves and stems from the buffalo hide satchel. “Whiskey,” he says.

  “What is that you’ve made?” Kohn says.

  Jonathan looks at him for a moment before answering. “I do not know the name in English. I need whiskey.”

  Kohn nods at Rawson and the private takes the bottle from beside Molloy, handing it to Jonathan.

  The Pawnee takes a mouthful and, pursing his lips, sprays it over Molloy’s bare leg. Molloy opens his eyes and mouth but does not scream when Jonathan begins to pat the site of the protruding shinbone with a layer of poultice. He does this several times until there is a thick layer of the stuff on the wound and then, without warning, grasps the officer’s lower leg in two hands and bends roughly inwards. Molloy screams and faints and the tent is filled with the rough pop of setting bone. Jonathan does not seem to notice but rises and goes to his horse again, returning to the tent with a square cut of soft buffalo hide and several long leather strips. He covers the poultice with the hide and wraps it tightly with the strips. He then binds the officer’s two legs together, inhibiting any movement.

  “Will his blood not be constricted?” Kohn asks. He knows some field medicine. No more than most soldiers, less than many. Jonathan does not appear to understand and makes no effort to do so.

  “We ride tomorrow,” the scout says.

  Kohn can’t take his eyes from the bright red shirt Jonathan is wearing, or from the specks of dried blood on his face, but he is thankful for his presence. There is some comfort to be taken in the confidence the Pawnee has shown, as if he has done this many times before.

  Later, Jonathan makes a travois from the lodgepoles and a buffalo skin, a stretcher of sorts to be dragged by horse or mule, and Kohn is again glad of the Indian’s attendance. The journey will be hard on the captain, Kohn thinks, but he would have tied him to a horse and that would have been far worse.

  “Fine work,” Kohn says but the scout ignores him.

  “Tomorrow,” Jonathan says, wondering now, with the officer incapacitated, could he track down the band of Sioux and take one of the squaws hostage. He could tell the bluecoats he took her to nurse the captain. He looks at the sky. Too late today. “You,” he says to Rawson. “You cook now.”

  Rawson looks to Kohn and Kohn ignores him.

  SNOWFLAKES DRIFTING IN HALOS of lantern light. The horses breathe heavy bolts of steam. Safe, Kohn thinks. Safe, goddamn it all. They have been led from the Fort Phil Kearny gates by infantry soldiers in thick buffalo coats and hats to the hospital barracks, a building of planed logs and a pitched sod roof. Light emanates from the few buildings that sport window glass and Kohn pictures a warm bath, a bed, a hot meal and a bottle.

  It has taken six days, not four, the going slow, sleet and rain turning much of the trail to mud for a day, frozen ruts the next and the jostling, bouncing travois causing the captain to scream until his voice was but a dull rasp. They finished the whiskey dosing him. One more day would have been the death of him.

  They dismount and tend to an unconscious Molloy. In the days since Molloy’s injury Kohn has grown used to command but wishes now to be free of it.

  “Stable the horses and mules, Rawson. And see to it they’re well fed and watered. See the quartermaster if you must and if he’s got a problem with your asking report back to me. Tell him we’re under General Cooke’s orders.”

  A surgeon’s orderly helps Kohn lift Molloy onto a stretcher. Supervising, the surgeon orders some men to bear the officer inside by lantern light.

  Jonathan watches from his horse. He will set up a tipi, using the travois poles and buffalo hides, outside the fort while he waits for the bluecoats to finish their business and return to Omaha. The lieutenant will need some weeks to recover, maybe the whole winter. He will be here for some time, he thinks.

  The scout has seen the loafer Cheyenne outside the fort and he will not camp with them but may trade or pay for one of their women to keep him warm and do his cooking. He will hunt in the mountains for fur to trade with the bluecoats. If he comes across any Sioux or Northern Cheyenne, he will take more scalps and maybe a hostage. Or he could set out for home with the two scalps he took for his wife to dance with and come back here for the bluecoats in the spring. He thinks of how proud his wife is when he returns to her bearing scalps and he has a pang of longing for her. But the scalps he took on the trail are only the pelts of young braves and will be worth less to the creator of all things—​Tir a wa—​in the scalp dance or as sacrifice in the New Fire in spring. They are an excuse to return home to her but only that. He will watch the weather and then decide.

  One or two of the bluecoats around the hospital barracks are staring at him. He meets their eyes and they look away. They are afraid. He can see it in them. Their scalps too would be nearly worthless.

  “I WILL TEND to the lieutenant and tell you what he’ll need, how he is. You get yourself a feed and a bath and come back to me in the morning,” the surgeon says to Kohn and Kohn is glad to hear it.

  Molloy is sleeping, delirious and drunk, but his fever is gone and his foot beneath the bindings and poultice shows no signs of gangrene. Kohn is happy to be relieved of the burden of his charge. My turn for a bottle, he thinks, as he undresses Molloy with a surgeon’s orderly, a young private who does not seem to know much English or want to speak it. Italian or Greek, perhaps. Doesn’t matter. As the orderly removes Molloy’s tunic, a flat oilskin pouch falls onto the bed and he hands it to Kohn, who puts it inside his own tunic. Cooke’s orders. He will read them later. Tomorrow. Now food, a drink. Blessed rest.

  10

  GAOL WITH PAY & MEETING THE MAN WHOSE DEATH DID BRING YOU HERE

  TOM AND MYSELF FOUND MUCH THAT WAS THE SAME about our mustering into this Regular Army & much that was different from the Union Army of the War. Sure some of the differences we did expect for we thought (well all America thinks it!) that the men enlisting with us had a raw edge to them now. You must of noted this yourself Sir. This Army is surely different from the one we both know from the War.

  Of course the Volunteer Regiments like the Ohio 10th in which myself & Tom fought did be locally drawn & made up of eager dutiful boys pals all from farms & towns & baseball clubs. The sons of doctors & school masters & mercantile men marching alongside the drovers & teamsters & labouring men of smoke belching cities & we Irish boys were many among them then as now. And all of them (or most of them in the beginning at least) were fired by duty to the Union or fired by local pride or even by fear of being shown up a coward for not taking up arms in defence of the Unity of States.

  Well we 2 brothers took on in ’61 for the grub & the wage as much as anything (which is no different in truth from this 2nd take on) but we too came to be moved by the spirit of the times & by the pride in Union blue shown by the Ohio boys around us then. Our patriotic fire was lit by the band concerts & pot luck suppers held in the fields where we made drill. The fire was lit I tell you by the local girleens with their pies & cakes & ice cold jugs of buttermilk brought to us fighting boys in them early days of the War them days before we saw anything of the War itself so that we felt soon enough like local boys ourselves. Hardly a month in the country & the first stirrings came on us of what it might feel like to be right & proper American boys & no longer just off the boat Micks signed up for cannon fodder. The war did knock much of that sentiment from us but it was there at the start & though there was surely some rum eggs in the Volunteers with us well most of our comrades you would call brother. I tell you Sir they were different from this lot we would serve with now.

  This time there was no sweet girleens bearing pies to the Regular Army Recruit Depot at Ft. Thomas of Columbus or to The Soup House as the local people called it. Gaol With Pay us soldiers named it & more than one lad had experience enough of both to say how true that was.

  Ft. Thomas was a place full of men 1/2 broke by drink or 1/2 starved for want of w
ork. There was Bowery toughs & former convicts & the generally work shy. They were likely not looking for it but all were given discipline & routine along with their rations of slumgullion stew or cold corn bread & white flour water gravy & coffee so bitter & thick you could trot a mouse on it. The idea was that given all this plus exercise & kit & clobber & the Army pride would follow.

  Sure it had worked on us once. Tom & I learnt our 1st time in the Army to bathe once a week at least when before but once a month did us grand. I tell you in the early days of the War it seemed to us that soldiering was the best thing we could be doing with our lives. We learnt to walk tall & proud like true American born gents with our chests out like cock roosters as if we were no lesser men than any other. All this we did learn in 10th Ohios only for the War to knock it from us. We had it shot & bled out of us on the battlefields of the South & then ground out of us as labouring men afterwards tipping our caps to any farmer who would give us a start for 50¢ a day & a warm rick of hay for to stuff a burlap sack for a mattress.

  That pride we once felt well we would surely not be getting any of it back in Columbus. I looked around me at this raggedy shower this higgly piggly rabble of blaggards & drunks & thieves & defilers of gentlewomen & thought that the only thing an enemy might fear from this mob of men is losing his purse.

  I turned one day to say all this to Tom but as I did I saw in a flash my brother as others might see him standing there with his scars & hunting eyes & this did cause me to think that as much as this mob was different from the Volunteer Regiments who fought in The Rebellion we too were different now. We did be no different in many ways now to the men around us & it made me sad to see this. My own brother appeared every bit the boss of a murderous mob of brigands I could picture in my head slouching West in search of terrible mischief. (In this I was correct in thinking. As you can see Sir we here in Ft. Phil Kearny are just such a band of filthy highwaymen mostly & dangerous to gentle society but less so to the Indian I think though not for want of trying.)

  But 13 bucks a month & passage West I told myself. Grub & kit & clobber. There are worse places a fellow could find himself. Not many but some.

  All this is by way of telling you Sir how we made acquaintance with the man who is the cause for your coming here. That is Mr. Kinney the Sutler of course who would post West with us in the 18th & by cruel fate cross our path again May God Have Mercy On Him.

  We 1st met him with the issuing of uniforms which we would be buying the fee deducted from our wages. This is standard as you know well & we did not think much of it Tom & myself until our Recruit Company 1st Sgt. there in Depot (a lump of a Cavan man by way of New York & a veteran of the War like ourselves) insisted we were to buy not 1 but 2 cleaning kits from the Depot Sutler’s Store. (We thought that Cavan 1st Sgt. was rotten then but came to know him better after & he was a fine man but that was later God Keep Him.)

  2 kits that Sgt. made a point of saying causing Tom & myself to realise that while much may be different in this new Regular Army much was still the same. Of course you can see Sir that the 1st Sgt. & the Sutler were running a game together each scratching the other’s back fine & dandy.

  I can see him now that mean fisted b_____ of a Sutler as he set down 2 cleaning kits before the both of us brothers on the counter in his Stores.

  “We will only be needing the one,” says I to him the 1st words I ever spoke to him but not the last.

  That Sutler looked up at me & says, “You are to take 2 kits & you know it well.”

  “It was advised strongly we take 2 but not ordered,” says Tom. To me in Irish Tom said, “Tell this c___ what I said & make sure he ticks us down for only the 1 each.”

  I repeated Tom’s words to the Sutler changing some of them but he did not answer & instead looked round for the 1st Sgt. in his employ.

  Says I, “And make your mark to our names for only 1 kit each if you please. We would not want to be docked for kits we do not buy.” I smiled at him when I said it & perhaps this is what riled him so.

  “The guardhouse is where the clever buckos end up. You 2 boys think you are clever?”

  Says Tom in Irish, “Clever enough not to buy two cleaning kits when one is all that is needed.” Of course the Sutler did not understand Tom & I was glad of it.

  Still smiling I said, “No Sir we are not clever at all just poor soldier Bills like all the rest.”

  Well there was not much the robbing Sutler could say to that so says he, “Move your stinking Mick skins out of my stores before I call the Provost Marshals in & have you up in irons.”

  Now Tom & myself having some experience with the Provost Marshal’s men in the war did take our 1 kit each & left Kinney’s Stores knowing well we had not heard the last word on it.

  Sure enough it did not be 10 minutes later the 2 of us standing with some fellows smoking & waiting for the others in the Stores to finish up when that New York Cavan b_____ of a 1st Sgt. roared to me from across the parade ground. “You Private! Stand to boy & Quick Time! And bring that ugly f_____ with you.”

  Well we quick timed it over to him & I took a look at Tom for to judge how rough were his eyes because Tom does not care for being called ugly & more than a few fellows have paid dues for it in the past. But I knew what was coming from the Sgt. & so did Tom & his face Thank God had the cast of only squally weather & not a storm like it could take on when the climate was right for it.

  Says I sweet as sugared rum, “Yes Sergeant?”

  Well let me tell you that fellow did loom as much as stand over you a bigger man than even Tom & not afraid at all of the likes of my brother or of his face or the grim things brewing in his eyes. For like Tom 1st Sgt. Nevin had that shard of madness lodged in the back of his own eyes too though it did be tempered (we learnt later) by the good humour & kindness that makes for a fine leader of fighting men. Of course along side the madness there was a sharp mind too. He was in cahoots with the Sutler after all. (Sure for such reward who would not be?)

  Says I to myself, “Tread lightly around this b_____. There are no flies on him.”

  “1 cleaning kit is all you smart boys reckon you will be needing is it?” says the Sgt. a glop of tobacco juice spat onto my boots as if to mark his words like shit from a gull bearing bad luck instead of good. He did not bother staring me down but held his eyes to Tom’s & Tom being Tom held the Sgt.’s & did not look away.

  I will tell you I was afraid then though I had no regret in not buying a 2nd kit & have no regrets now & never will for any soldier with a day’s dust from the road on him can spot fixed Faro & has the right not to fall for a ruse once he has rumbled it. But I was afraid more for what might happen if that Sgt. did turn Tom the wrong way in his head.

  I weighed my words with some care while the big men eyeballed each other like 2 bulls in a pen with 1 heifer. I weighed also the music of my words as I spoke them the very tone & pitch of them.

  Says I, “We reckon 1 kit each will do us fine Sergeant.” I held up the leather cleaning bag. “1 each mind you making it 2 bought between us which will be more than enough we reckon. Or can you tell us why we might be needing 2 each?”

  The big man turned to me now & he smiled in an innocent way that was as far from innocent as dear Ireland is from Kingdom Come & I did think, “Oh no good will come of this for the sake of a dollar saved.” I gave a smile back to him with no challenge in it. The 1st Sgt. stared me out & I could see he was reckoning if the price of 2 kits was worth troubling the like of us for. 2 cleaning kits my arse! A master of arithmetic could only reckon what that Sgt.’s cut off the Sutler was for 200 cleaning kits sold to 100 men needing only 1. I was a small bit afeared of what may happen but a fair part of me knew the man would make little more of it for the greedy be as regular as cocks crowing the sun up in their ways. Smooth running was what he wanted & boys such as Tom & myself could only foul the wheels for him.

  Says he finally, “I will be checking your leather—​” He spat another tawny stream of tobaccy on m
y boots. “And your coats & collars specially. I will want to be able see the hairs up my f______ nose reflected in your boots & belts I am telling you boys now.” Another brown bark of spittle to mark his point. But he saw he met his match in the O’Driscoll brothers & fair play to him he did smile at us as if to say this.

  He gave a nod to Tom. “And you boy where did you ship that dint in your mug?”

  Says I, “It was trying to free a plough blade when a skittish whore of a draft horse spied a field rat & rared in her traces freeing the blade to shoot up into the brother’s gob. Terrible unlucky my brother is Sergeant.”

  “A plow blade.”

  “It was fierce freakish,” says I.

  Still the fellow smiled & I thought we might be all right with him in the future if we had to be. Says he, “Looks a terrible lot like the scar a minie ball might make. Straight through all the way like a dose. Which makes the 2 of ye Single Cleaning Kit Buying Chancers of Kerrymen—​”

  “Corkmen Sgt. Begging your pardon,” says I.

  “Making the 2 of yous seem all the more veteran fighting b_______ like myself. O’Driscolls are you?” He tested our name out in his mouth like a man bites a gold coin & finds the glint of tin beneath.

  “We are & fresh fish to the Army like all these other boys Sgt. We are so soon off the decks of the coffin ship you can smell the sea still on us. You know yourself the strange likenesses that may occur in the world that only God Himself can explain. Like the way the cut of a plough blade might show up as a minie ball scar in the ruins of a brother’s face May God Go Between Him & All Harm,” I said much relieved at the course our talk was after taking.

  “May He Go Between Trouble & All Of Us,” says the Sgt. “Can the f______ not talk for hisself?”

  “He can Sgt.”

  “Proper American lingo like you & me here?”

  “Not proper. But he does understand it well enough.”