Well for a time the Capt. did eye up the brother’s gob & the horses began to once again shift around the pen nibbling at the hay in the racks or dipping their heads to the trough as if their work for the day was done.
Finally the Capt. spoke. “What happened to your face Pvt.? Pvt. whatever your G__ D___ name is.”
“O’Driscoll Sir,” says I.
Says he, “What happened to your face Pvt. O’Driscoll?” He did turn to me then. “And if you don’t let this soldier answer my G__ D___ pig f______ question for himself I will take the skin from your Greenhorn back with this f_______ rope.”
I said nothing to this of course.
Says he again, “What happened to your maw Pvt.?”
“Took a minie ball Sir,” says the brother.
“And where did you take it?”
“Tennessee Sir. Chickamauga.”
I kept shtum at this though my heart leapt in my breast like a hooked salmon wondering oh wondering why to God the brother saw fit to tell the truth of his wounding for the 1st & only time since we took on with the Army in Columbus some 5 months past under the name of O’Driscoll. Every man who asked since then we told it was a horse that did it & lying as is the way of things becomes easier than the truth over time. But here was my brother telling the truth to an officer. An officer! I tell you there is no accounting for Tom’s ways.
But if I think on it now perhaps Tom saw something in Brown that he felt to be inside himself as well & so he could trust him. It was like Tom smelt the same poison running in that Q.M.’s veins the way red blood runs under yours & my own.
“Chickamauga. Well,” says Brown. “You got it in the face so that tells me you are a fighting man at least. You can tell a great deal about a man from where his wounds are. Did you know that Pvt. O’Driscoll?”
Says Tom without pause, “I have heard it said Sir. And sure my arse does be all of one piece.” This did come out clear as a church bell when he said it & I closed my eyes at this & thought to myself, “Oh Tom you dunderhead. You innocent f_____ you done it now boy.”
But didn’t the Q.M. just laugh right at him giving a big fine bellow from his guts up. And maybe this was because Capt. Brown could see the same thing in my brother that my brother saw in him so laugh he did fairly pissing himself with the laughter. When he was after righting himself & wiping down his eyes with his kerchief he handed over the coil of rope to Tom.
“Here,” says he. “Just loop that G__ D___ beast & be quick about it.”
He laughed again & repeated my brother’s words to Lt. Bisbee. “Sure, my arse does be all of one piece Sir! Where do we get them Lt.? Where do we G__ D___ get them?”
Well in a tick my brother lassooed that white stocking mare & in an hour he was on her back & by the next day he had a saddle on her that horse licking brown sugar from his palm like a kitten from a bowl of milk & that next very day Mad Capt. Brown came back to the pen & mounted her.
Over the weeks we broke that horse to the gun with the help of Lt. Bisbee & a cavalry Sgt. up from Texas. And though that mare never in truth settled to the Capt. for he does ride a horse like a boy riding a barrel down a river well she settled rightly enough when Tom was nearby. All it took was a soft look or tender word from that crooked gob of his a few words from him in the Gaelic that even I could not understand & she would heave to & be a show of great pride for Mad Fred to have beneath him.
And as a reward the Capt. gave us pick of the mounts for ourselves while warning the other officers off taking our new beasts from us when they saw what warhorses we made of them.
So there was reward in being the first 2 Berserkers in Mad Fred’s Dragoons but it is in me now to think that we would of been better off to be mere Run of the Mill Bills instead. There is less wildness in it less of the madness that can slip from one part of your mind to the other & so direct of its own bidding the hand that holds your weapon. But there was no knowing this then.
In truth I do think life is a series of things we do without thinking leading on & on until blood is spilt & when it spills everything seems such a surprise to us God Love Us All.
17
December 10, 1866—Fort Phil Kearny, Dakota Territory
KOHN SITS ON A ROUGH LOG BENCH IN FRONT OF ONE of the three company barracks across the parade ground from the commander’s quarters. Carrington, he has surmised, shares the quarters with his wife and son. The doe antelope is again tied by a rope to a post in front of the quarters, a pet no doubt acquired on the Carringtons’ travels. Sheets and clothing flap bright white in the gentle wind on a line running from the side of the quarters to a staked-out post in the grass. A good drying day despite the cold. Kohn can think of no other way to proceed with his investigations but to sit and watch and hope to catch sight of the Indian girl the surgeon mentioned. He is no Pinkerton man, no constable or sheriff. His feet ache with the cold in the mud under the bench. He has smoked all of his cheroots but is afraid the hours he has spent here will be wasted should he leave for the sutler’s store to purchase more. This is no kind of kosher soldiering, Kohn thinks. No kind at all.
He considers again heading to the sutler’s for tobacco. It could be a place to start, he thinks. He has been there already, to buy his sergeant’s chevrons and various sundries and has heard that a son of the sutler at Fort C. S. Smith now maintains the murdered Kinney’s store on post. Half an idiot the lad, Kohn has heard, but just bright enough to make money in a place where the closest competitor is several hundred miles away. Greed surpassing intelligence when it comes to the running of a sutler’s concession, Kohn thinks, and then wonders if the lad might be in possession of sutler Kinney’s account books.
An idea stirs within him. I could look at the books. Discover a motive within them perhaps. Kohn sees the error of his thinking. He laughs to himself. Probably three hundred of the five hundred men in the fort owe money to the sutler’s store. It is common for wilderness-posted soldiers to be almost indefinitely indebted to the baron of robber’s row, his pay never full for what is docked in monies owed to the sutler. There must be another way.
He rises from the bench intent on renewing his tobacco supply and slaps his deadened thighs. As he does, as if he has summoned her, a brown-skinned woman in a cotton dress and heavy woollen sweater emerges from the Carringtons’ quarters. Her hair hangs down her back in a thick black braid and Kohn watches as she takes an empty crate with her to the laundry lines and begins to remove and fold the aired sheets and clothing.
He approaches across the parade ground and as he does feels there is something amiss about the woman’s appearance but cannot determine what it is until he is standing before her. Though she is aware of his presence, she continues folding sheets, ignoring him and moving down the line, removing pegs and loosely folding a shirt, setting it in the crate atop the folded sheets. Kohn sees what it is about her now and recoils slightly. The girl is missing her nose. Scar tissue rigid and welped around the nostrils. Leprosy? he wonders, never knowingly having seen it before but aware that it is common enough in the West. Syphilis? He has heard that galloping syph left long untreated may take the nose or ears. Even the eyes. He has heard many things and knows not what is true. But the woman looks otherwise healthy and the colonel and his wife would hardly have a diseased woman folding their linen. An accident, perhaps. A wounding.
“Excuse me, miss,” Kohn says, unsure what he will say next.
The woman glances at him but does not stop her labors. She moves to a woman’s nightdress and Kohn averts his eyes so as not to be indelicate. “I was told . . . I was led to believe that you worked . . .” He does not know how to put this. “. . . that you were in the hog ranch. In the tavern?” He points in the general direction of where the brothel once stood outside the walls. “That you worked for Mr. Kinney, the sutler.”
The Indian girl glances at Kohn again at the mention of the name—Kinney—and he notices that despite her disfigurement, she is beautiful. To
Kohn, in his limited experience, she is tall for an Indian woman. Her eyes are caramel-colored, wide and liquid. She has full breasts and thick round hips under the sweater and cotton dress. She could be anywhere from eighteen to thirty years old and Kohn feels the stirrings of desire for her. He wonders if it is because he knows she was once a whore. Once a whore, he thinks, and regrets thinking it. He has known many wives of men he has soldiered with who had been taken from the ranks of the laundresses and upstairs girls to become solid, upright women. Whoring is no more a permanent curse than soldiering, he thinks. Once a soldier . . . He shrugs these thoughts away.
“Mr. Kinney,” he says again and the woman looks away. The sun is low in the sky, resting for a moment in the nadir between two of the Big Horn mountains, setting aglow the rich brown of the woman’s skin. “Do you speak English?” he asks.
“She doesn’t speak much at all . . .”
Kohn turns to find a woman in her mid-thirties, a white woman he assumes to be Carrington’s wife, examining the yellow stripes on his arm before continuing. Not a natural or long-time army wife or she would not have to think about it. “. . . Sergeant.”
Kohn tips his kepi to the woman. “I’m sorry, ma’am, I didn’t know. I’m Sergeant Kohn. I spoke with your husband earlier. I’m investigating the deaths of Mr. Kinney and his wife, ma’am. I was told your serving girl might have been there when—”
“And if she was, Sergeant?” the woman says. She is stern and straight-backed and her diction denotes wealth and education to Kohn. Something else too. Kohn feels embarrassed suddenly, his task low and sullied in the presence of this gentlewoman.
“Forgive me, ma’am. I only thought that she might be able to tell me what happened. There seems to be some talk that it was not Indians who . . . did for the Kinneys, ma’am.”
Mrs. Carrington holds her gaze on Kohn for a long moment. She is a handsome woman and, though stern, there is kindness there as well, Kohn feels. An understanding of things. He does not feel she despises him.
“And what makes you think that, Sergeant?”
“I was told . . . I heard from men around the camp . . .” A low and sullied business this investigating. He wonders how he has come to this place, this set of circumstances. “. . . that she used to work for Mr. Kinney and might be able to aid me in—”
“Work?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“General Cooke sent you, did he?”
“Yes, ma’am. He sent my officer, my company first lieutenant, actually, but he is Company Q, ma’am . . .” He catches himself. “He is injured and in the hospital barracks. I am making the best of our orders but I am not much in the way of an investigator. I hardly know how to go about things.”
The Indian girl takes the last item from the laundry line, a boy’s shirt by the look of it, Kohn notes, not having seen children on the post but knowing there must be some about. She folds the shirt and lifts the crate from the winter-browned grass, looking to Mrs. Carrington, who nods to her. She leaves with the crate of laundered clothes and enters the colonel’s quarters. The sun begins to dip behind the mountains and Kohn and the colonel’s wife are now standing in shadow. Kohn feels the cold.
“Sarah has had a hard life, Sergeant.”
“I can see that, ma’am.”
“She understands some English but she cannot read or write, so I do not imagine she can help you. She has been delivered from that life and is happy now.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“What do you think of our fort, Sergeant?” The woman looks around her. The dying sun washes the sky winter pink behind the mountains. The flag stirs on the flagpost. The parade ground is hoof-cut mud that will freeze again overnight. Men loiter in the last of the day’s light outside of barracks. A cow lows from somewhere. Sentries with cradled muskets walk the stands along the stockade walls.
“It’s a good fort, ma’am. One of the better ones, I would say.”
“Do you really think so? You have the look of a man who has seen many.”
“I have, ma’am. And I do . . .” He feels the need to reassure this woman that it is, indeed, a fine fort. That it is safe and well-built. A beacon of civilization.
“If only General Cooke thought the same. If only he could see it,” the woman says.
“Yes, ma’am.”
“I don’t think Sarah knows anything, Sergeant. And I don’t think it matters much anyway. There are times in life, Sergeant, when we are . . . called to account for how we have treated others.”
“Called to account, ma’am? By who?”
The woman smiles at Kohn and again there is kindness in the smile. Pity, perhaps. “Are you a churchgoing man, Sergeant?”
“Not especially, ma’am. It is hard enough to find a rabbi west of the Mississippi.”
“Perhaps when you do find one, you might ask him who does the calling. Or perhaps you know the answer already. Good day to you, Sergeant.”
Kohn tips his kepi. “Ma’am.”
18
HOW WE MET YOU (THE GALWAY CAPT.) IN THE WAR
—Dec. 19, 1866—IT IS MORNING NOW THOUGH YOU would hardly know it so dark & cold is this Guardhouse cell. You might think that terrible Jew of yours Sir was burning his own wood for how little he will put in the stove for to heat this place but that is the Army for you. It is all Tyranny & the whims of bullies.
But I did not always hate the Army as I do now. No Sir there was a time the fine blue Army of the Union was a salvation to us. The War Between The States was blessing & boon to Tom & myself as we set our boots upon the quayside cobbles of a Philadelphia summer in ’61. It was a blessing because the war was just running up to speed when we arrived from poor Ireland right in time for Uncle Sam to lift back his toasty counterpane & say “Hop into bed with me boys & I will feed you & clothe you & teach you the trade of killing Johnny Reb who wants to start up a new nation in the South & keep the poor black man in chains & in the cotton fields. And to top it all I will pay a fine wage in US Greenback Dollars for the privilege of putting the bayonet & musketball to old Seseshoner Johnny Reb!”
Not that Tom & I would of gave a tinker’s f___ for the black man’s plight at the time much concerned as we were with our own & nor could we of located the Carolinas or Georgia or grand old Virginia on a map at knife point but we could see no better start on offer & both of us liked the cut of a soldier’s bags with the warm dark wool of the Army tunic & the pretty duck egg blue of the kersey leggings & rakish set of a kepi cap on a soldier’s head. Never mind the hunger that made our bellies think our throats were cut for as I told you we spent all of our money in quayside pubs in Queenstown & so we had hardly more than a bean to eat since 2 days into the crossing. I tell we would of signed our souls over to the Devil for a plate of eggs.
So the Army it was for us & Thank God for it but we never planned (in so much as young lads as we were then can plan anything from 1 minute to the next) to spend so much as a single hour more in the Army than it took to get a fine fat lump of saved wages together for to buy a plot for grazing or some fields for tilling.
But in the beginning soldiering suited us just fine & dandy for the best part. We mourned brothers killed in our Company to be sure same as we do now for this is the most terrible thing in a War & like all men who fought in the Rebellion we blanched now & again at the sight of Johnny Reb all lined up like some grey & venomous snake a mere musketball away & like all men who fought on the Union side we did flee in terror at the horrible screams of the Rebel Yell that Johnny gave when he came down upon you in your trench or behind your stone wall out through smoke as thick as yearling’s milk. It did sound like a thousand banshee coming for you Tom said once & every Irish boy there knew well what he meant. But mostly alongside our new found brothers in Company J of the 10th Ohio Volunteers (which for reasons I still do not fathom that is where we ended up though we signed on right there on the Philadelphia quayside & you would think the Pennsylvania regim
ents would of been in want of men) well alongside them we mostly stood & fired & fought & stabbed & clubbed & roared our own savage roars when we bore down on poor Johnny Reb for we did it with all the might of the Union behind us & all the savagery of men thankful for the shirts on their backs & the fried mush & saltpork in their bellies. We begun as apprentices in the trade of killing & over time came to be proficient at it & did hone our talents sharp on the whetstone of the battlefield.
I tell you Sir we thought ourselves better off in most ways than we were in Ireland to spite the bloody business of the War. Well yes we did wake betimes from terrible & bloody dreams jumping & starting at loud sounds or sudden movement. Even after the War in the frail comfort of a barn amidst the warm breathing of beasts or in the flea racked bed of a tavern or doss house this can happen as if the war did burrow itself into our skulls & lays there in wait for the times when we take rest like some mad & sinister bugler calling Revellee.
But we could not complain overmuch for we had a notion Tom & myself to pool our hoarded wages & buy a small plot. It would be nothing grand or jumped up we thought but something small to work & live on & the Army would be our way of doing it if 1 or the other of us did not lose our heads to a cannon shot or leave our guts in the southern dirt. And if both of us did so fall our savings would be sent home to our brothers & sisters left in Ireland with no plan of ours mattering a winking star’s light in the heavens if we were dead & gone & buried.
It was the wager a boy made when he took on in Uncle Sam’s big show in the South seeking a new start in the world. Never mind the racking fear we felt or the night visions or nerves that snapped like bullwhips or jangled like a jailer’s keys. Never mind hands that shook & would not stop shaking so that a tin mug of coffee was hard to sip without slopping down a poor boy’s tunic. Never mind all that because in truth no soldier in this world does ever think he will be the one a bullet picks to visit.
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