His fat wife gave us the onceover for a mere tick & then turned away with her hands tucked into a fox fur muff. For the like of us soldier filth did be of no interest to her but for what her bent Sutler husband could cull from us in coin. God Forgive Me for we know now what did befall the woman Lord Have Mercy On Her but that is how I felt. It is how I still feel. For I will tell you she had a black cruel heart bedded down under the fine fat tits of her & well what happened in the end she might of had it coming some would say.
But I only say this now after knowing her later & after that time on the wind roughed platform in Indiana we saw no more of them on the train. Nor did we see them that winter in Leavenworth & did not see that Sutler & his wife again until Ft. Caldwell in the Nebraska Territory when we set out from there on our journey to this place we call the Powder River Valley.
It is of no bearing on my testament at all but did you know Sir that this Valley is called Absaraka by the Indians who once lived here but lost these sweet lands to the terrible Savage Sioux? Absaraka means Home of the Crow. That is the tribe of Indians not the bird & that tribe might be fine allies in our fight with Red Cloud but they have no stomach for it at the moment. We do not see much of them.
I tell you it would make you laugh thinking on how the Crow got whipped by the Savage Sioux & run out rightly to the bad lands of dry grass & little game & now here are we the US Army trying to run them Sioux off just the same. It would crease you it would the joke of it. The 18th is made up nearly 1/2 of Irishmen & every Mick among us is doing to them Sioux what them Sioux did to the Crow & what the English (God Curse Them!) done to poor old Ireland. To hell or Connacht for the poor Indians only now it is us playing the b_______ Cromwell’s men. It is enough to make you laugh.
I did say it before & I will say it again but it is a fierce queer f_______ world we do live in.
13
December 8, 1866—Fort Phil Kearny, Dakota Territory
ON THEIR SECOND FULL DAY AT THE FORT, MOLLOY awakes and asks for Kohn. The morning is bright, the parade ground brilliant with snow beginning to melt under the winter sun.
Before entering the hospital barracks, Kohn stops and looks up into a sky as bright blue and clear as any he has ever seen. In the distance, beyond the half-mile surround of the log palisade, the Big Horn range rises up, snow-capped, glorious. Fifteen odd miles away, he has heard, and in the clear winter air the mountains look close enough to touch. This is the first time the weather has lifted, allowing him to see them. Something rare and wonderful about this place. Even he can see it, a Cleveland Jew with no more mind to open spaces than a tick in a sow’s ear. Still, a cavalryman for the better part of five years, Kohn can spot good grass as well as any man, knows the value of icy streams that run all summer long with snow melt.
A sergeant bunking in with Kohn has told him it is the best grazing he has ever seen in the most beautiful valley on earth and he had been around his share in the war. A great, good and pretty as punch place, all right, and Adam and Eve’s beasts didn’t graze half as goddamn good as they would here, the sergeant told him, if it wasn’t for the mob of red-skinned sons of bitches trying to give you a barbering every chance they got. Another NCO, a Marylander, had told Kohn he would burn the entire valley to a cinder. The whole goat-fucking place, like Sherman did on his march to the sea, and that would take care of the goddamn Injuns once and for goddamn all.
Molloy gives Kohn a faint smile from his bed when he sees him. “My Daniel,” he says, his voice deep and furred with sleep.
“Captain, how are you feeling, sir?”
“How do I look?”
“Like a shit left out in the rain, sir.”
“And there’s your answer . . .” He pauses, noticing Kohn’s uniform tunic, cleaner, sharper than usual. He remembers asking Cooke for Kohn’s promotion, amazed that he does. “Look at you, Daniel, all striped up and polished nicely. You look like bait for a rich widow, Sergeant Kohn. A fine thing for your army career, Danny my chum, coming to this terrible place.”
Kohn smiles back at him. “My last promotion, sir. I am throwing in the towel when my take-on ends. You watch me.”
“Kohn, you will be heelballing my belt and boots long into decrepitude.”
The surgeon joins them at the bedside. He is a balding man in his thirties, with mustaches hanging below his chin, spectacles at the end of a nose surprisingly free of gin blossoms for an army doctor.
He says, “Well, it appears you will live, Captain Molloy. And we shall wait another day but, with the help of the gods, you may keep that leg. Whatever it was your scout put on the wound, it appears to prevent infection from bedding in. The set was rough and you may limp some if you keep it but there are worse ways of getting from one place to another.”
“Limping preferable to hopping, surely,” Molloy says, distracted, looking about his bedside.
The surgeon sees this. “I’ll dose you with more tincture of laudanum and you may have a bottle of stout for your lunch, but I am afraid you will be having no more whiskey while fighting for Company Q, Captain.”
Molloy’s face darkens. Get myself out of Company Q soon enough, off the sick list and back with . . . with whom? He has only Kohn and no proper company of men, no regiment. He remembers now why they have been sent to this distant fort. God help us, it’s bloody Pinkertons we’ve become. Cooke in want of a head on a plate for the Secretary’s wife.
“And when will the captain be up and about to start his work here, Doctor? If his leg takes to healing?” Kohn asks.
“A number of weeks, I would imagine, Sergeant, all going well. His work will have to wait, I’m afraid. And after that I cannot see him traveling back south until the winter has relented. You are in for a stay of some length. I do hope you enjoy the place.” The surgeon smiles, amused but without rancor.
“Thank you, sir,” Kohn says. “Can I bring the captain his grub, sir, or is he fed here?”
“We will feed him for the time being, until we see there is no infection. And under no circumstances are you to bring him whiskey. That’s an order, Sergeant, and if it is disobeyed you will be court-martialled, is that clear?”
“Yessir.”
Kohn is happy that this has been said in front of the captain for he knows that as soon as they are alone, he will be asked to bring libations. A wee dram. A drop. The surgeon’s orders will make his refusal easier.
The surgeon goes away and returns with a small glass vial of claret-colored liquid. “Drink this, Captain. Into the arms of Morpheus for you, sir.”
Molloy drinks and savors the taste of the laudanum. Mostly alcohol, he thinks, thanks be to God. Do the work of whiskey for now. Odd dreams it gives a man. Odder than the ones I have without it? Hardly possible. Odder? Blacker. Darkness hedges against his consciousness. He feels it, prays the laudanum will keep it at bay the way whiskey sometimes fails to do.
“Well then, Daniel, tell us what mischief you’ve been making since we arrived. And what of the young Virginian? And our Indian . . .”
“Jonathan, sir. He’s set up a bivo outside the stockade with the other Indians. Near them anyhow. And he’s found himself a winter wife, lucky fellow.”
Molloy smiles. “Surely there must be an establishment for you to find one for an evening at least, Daniel. Even here. Where there are Bills and Jacks there are surely Jills about the place and a soft patch to lie down in.”
Kohn smiles back. “The only such place for two hundred miles was the one run by the man who was killed and the cause of our being here. Alongside his sutler’s store, on post, he ran a hog ranch outside. A musket shot away, I’m told. I have seen it from the wall but was waiting for you to go down and take a closer look. It’s been burned out.”
“By whom?”
“Everyone I’ve mentioned it to says it was Indians. They killed him and his wife and, some days later, put a torch to the place. Mr. Lo, they call them, the Indians, God only knows why. Ah, that goddamn robber got skinn
ed by Mr. Lo. Murder? Bad luck, more like and now there ain’t no whores for a sojur to pass a time with.”
Molloy’s speech is somewhat slower, the rasp in his throat eased by the tincture. “You are a mimic of the highest, highest . . . the stage, Kohn. You should be on the stage. I saw The Colleen Bawn in New York five, seven times. In Dublin . . .” The officer’s eyes close and soon he is snoring lightly.
Kohn finds the surgeon behind a curtain at the back of the barracks tending to a civilian contractor who crushed his hand felling timber. He waits while the surgeon doses the timberman. Seems to be the potion of choice, Kohn thinks. Will have to do for the captain as I am not bringing him one goddamn drop of whiskey no matter how hard he implores me to bring it.
“I wanted to thank you for looking after Captain Molloy, Doctor,” Kohn says when the surgeon comes out from behind the curtain.
“No need for it. You were fortunate to have that Indian with you. I tried to ask him what he used in his concoction but he only grunted and said he did not know the names of the things in English.”
“He said the same to me, Doc.”
“A fortune a man could make, if it was indeed the poultice that prevented infection. Of course, your captain could just be in possession of a strong constitution.”
“Well, he is strong enough in body all right,” Kohn says.
The surgeon says nothing for a moment. Then, “You served under him in the war?”
“Yessir.”
“Then you know maybe why he drinks. He is not the only man to come out of that affair with such an affliction.”
“I know officers who spent the entire war drunk, sir. I wonder do they remember a single ball fired. But the captain . . .”
Sensing his reluctance, the surgeon says, “You are here, I understand, to investigate the killing of our sutler.”
“Yessir. The captain is.”
“It will be some time before he is able for it.”
“Yessir.”
“And by then memories will have been scrubbed free of the detail you may need by the passing of time. It has already been a month since I submitted my report on the deaths to Colonel Carrington.”
“Report, sir?”
“Of course. It was I who examined the bodies. Declared the deaths. I have done it forty-nine times since arriving here in July, both soldier and civilian.”
Kohn offers the doctor a cigar from a box he purchased in the new sutler’s store when he bought his sergeant’s stripes. The doctor accepts it and lights a piece of kindling through the open stove door. He puts it to both cigars.
“And those forty-nine, sir—they were all killed by Indians?”
The doctor puffs his cigar until its tip is red with heat. He inhales and speaks on the exhalation. “All but four. One crushed by a falling tree, one broken neck from a fall from a horse. One a suicide, one a presumed suicide; there are questions I would ask of that one but no one else would as the deceased was a lowly and thus expendable private and an unpopular one at that. It is difficult to beat oneself to death before shooting oneself in the head but that is the way of things here.”
Kohn thinks for a moment. “Can I read your report, sir? On the deaths?”
“You could if I had it. But I gave it to Colonel Carrington, who of course forwarded it to General Cooke because that is what any officer would do when faced with the brutal killings of civilian employees under his command.”
“You don’t believe he sent your report? How did Cooke come to hear of the killings then? How did it come to be assumed that there was more to the deaths than an Indian attack?”
The surgeon puffs at his cigar, then says, “Well that I do not know, but there are five hundred-odd people, soldiers and civilians, attached to Fort Phil Kearny and every one of them knows that it was no more Indians who killed the sutler and his wife and the other fellow than the man on the moon.”
“And do any of the five hundred know who did it if it wasn’t Indians?”
“Only those who did it know for certain, Sergeant, but there is talk.”
“And what does that talk say?”
The surgeon washes his hands in a tub of soapy water atop the wood stove, his cigar clamped between his teeth. When he has dried his hands, he says, “That you will have to discover yourself. I will not be a party to men hanged on hearsay. I am aware of Mr. Kinney’s familial links to certain parties back East and know that is the only reason you and Lieutenant Molloy are here, Sergeant. I don’t doubt your honesty . . . or the lieutenant’s, but as a man of science I will not trade in rumors.”
“Of course, sir.”
“I can, however, show you pictures of the death scene and of the bodies. Come with me.”
The surgeon leads Kohn past a row of beds to the back of the barracks where he has hung a sheet weighted with lead shot to cordon off an office for himself. He unlocks a strongbox under the sturdy desk which would not be out of place in a grain merchant’s store and Kohn wonders how the doctor has come to have it; did he transport it all the way into this wilderness? The doctor lays out a series of photographs on the desk.
“You made these, sir?”
“Of course not. We have the good fortune to have on hand the services of one Ridgeway Glover, a professional photographer from Philadelphia. I asked him to make these pictures. He was not pleased to be asked but he did a fine job of it nonetheless, don’t you think?”
Kohn nods. The photographs are clear in their composition and terrible to look at. He can understand why the poor picture-maker would have balked at the job. Kohn has seen as much death as the devil and yet there is something about seeing it preserved in the utter stillness of the pictograph that adds to the horror. Like insects or fish frozen in the ice of a winter pond, the victims laid out for all eternity in the posture of their violent deaths. What value are these? He feels sordid, ashamed almost, to be staring at them.
“I had to get some of the men to tear away the roof to let enough light into the tavern for the pictures to be made. The camera’s eye requires more light than you would find in such a hovel.”
Kohn moves on to the pictures of the bodies laid out on the operating table he has seen at the far end of the barracks. Cleaned of blood, naked as God brought them into the world, the wounds like gaping mouths, so many in the woman’s body you couldn’t hope to count them all. A bullet wound, two, in the torso of the bigger, younger man. His scalp and hair gone, leaving only skull bone showing. One wound only, to the back of the head of the older man. Kinney. The sutler. The man we’ve been sent to avenge, Kohn thinks. He knows the type of wound.
“This younger man is scalped, sir. Surely . . .”
“Our soldiers also take scalps. It is a fact not widely disseminated in the Eastern papers but the habits of one side in a war are often enough adopted by the other. I will grant you, the younger male—no one seems to know his name—was scalped in such a way as to suggest that Indians had killed him. Perhaps they did, but . . .” The surgeon points to the two bullet wounds in the photograph with his cigar.
“But?” Kohn says.
“But I took two balls from these wounds. Curiosity, you see. A theory of mine. His death was not caused by scalping. I have tended to men who have been scalped and then lived on, God knows how.”
“But the Indians have guns, Doctor. Why does his getting shot rule out Indians?”
“It doesn’t. You are correct. A goodly number of Indians have taken to the gun. Our own government, in its wisdom, has traded rifles and ammunition to them, as do all the private traders in the West. Would you care to see the bullets that killed this man?”
Kohn shrugs.
Again into the strongbox, the surgeon removes an envelope and from it tips two spent, deformed ingots of lead into Kohn’s palm. Kohn studies the rounds. They are damaged from their fatal transit within the victim’s body, but recognizable. He says, “Colt pistol rounds. .36 caliber?”
“Correct. And that is not t
o say that the Sioux does not carry the odd handpiece, but if you ask any of the men about the camp who have encountered them in battle, they seem to rarely use them. Ammunition is hard to source and expensive. The bow and arrow is equally, if not more, effective at close range and there is a lifetime’s habit of use in it for an Indian brave.”
Kohn looks up at the surgeon.
The surgeon continues, “Which proves nothing, of course. But it does leave one thinking.”
Kohn is silent for a long moment. Then, “Can you advise me where I might begin with . . . ” He nods at the pictures. “. . . with all this?”
The surgeon sits down at his desk and looks up at the rough ceiling boards. “I have to live here, Sergeant. And work here. My work is valued and needed in such a place.”
“I don’t doubt that, sir. But if I could make a start of it. For the captain. . . .”
The surgeon smokes in silence for some moments. Then, “There are the Irish to think of certainly. You might start with them though if you are possessed of any sense of self-preservation you might not. Hatred of the informer and the constable extends beyond the shores of Ireland, but in present times one might take into consideration that the men of Erin consider any attempt to even so much as impose common army discipline upon them as a Masonic or English conspiracy. They do tend to react badly to things and . . . Well, you serve the lieutenant in the bed there, Sergeant, so surely you have some idea what they are like. You are not a Mason, Sergeant, are you? An Englishman?”
“No sir.” Kohn smiles. “I’m a half-Polish, Silesian Dutchie Jew. An American, I suppose.”
The surgeon smiles back at him. “Then you are only at minor, rather than major, risk of the knife or bludgeon.”
Kohn has not thought of this. Molloy may be of some help with the Irish when he is fit for it. Until then, I am on my own. I could sit and do nothing, he thinks. I should, perhaps, do nothing.
“Now, as an officer, it would be my duty,” the surgeon says, “to ask have you presented your orders to the officer commanding? To Colonel Carrington, as commander of this post and the Mountain District? Have you done this?”
Wolves of Eden Page 10
