by Carla Kelly
As he waited, she spent a few minutes in conversation with Private Benedict. Joe helped her into her coat when she joined him, relishing the feel of tendrils of her escaping hair on his hand.
“A good day, Susanna?” he asked as they faced into the wind toward Suds Row.
“A very good one,” she assured him. “Tomorrow we will take some time during luncheon to construct lesson plans.”
“Sounds like you are teaching the teacher.”
“I am, but he has a fine natural instinct for the profession.”
It was harmless, innocuous conversation and it took them across the footbridge. He yearned to tell her of the letter he had written that day, and finally blurted it out as they approached the sergeant’s quarters. The result was most gratifying. Susanna turned her beautiful brown eyes full on him and touched his sleeve. She didn’t say anything, but the pleasure on her face made words unnecessary. Her obvious approval made him realize how much he had missed sharing the details of his life with a woman.
“It’s well and good, but I have no way of knowing if Monsieur Pasteur will even consider me as a student,” he said. “My French is barely workable.”
“Perhaps I should teach you this spring, Joe. I know a little.”
She knocked on the Rattigans’ door because he seemed to have forgotten. The mention of his name on her lips had sent him into a schoolboy sort of euphoria.
Supper was over too quickly. Sergeant Rattigan kissed his wife’s check and ushered Joe out the door.
“Maeve is so excited,” the man confided as they crossed the footbridge, Rattigan to return to his company’s barracks and continue his own school of instruction for the coming winter campaign to his lads. After a quick check on Mary Rose O’Leary, who was already putting on weight, Joe returned to his quarters to pace the floor for an hour and a half before returning to the Rattigans to escort Susanna home.
He was accompanied this time by Nick Martin. Susanna’s school may have changed venue, but the man seemed determined that his mandate to assist in every way possible would continue. It gratified Joe to watch the enigmatic fellow show his own loyalty to a lady others had been only too willing to cast off.
They went first to Company A barrack to collect Sergeant Rattigan, who had been sitting there, a palpable presence requiring good order. Joe knew that many of the married sergeants did just that in January and February, when restless privates grew more tired of each other, and fights were common. Joe appreciated the effort, since it relieved him of patching up men who had nothing better to do in winter than plague each other.
“Sir, something is different about Mrs. Hopkins today,” the sergeant began as they walked toward the footbridge, Nick trailing along behind. “At least, that’s what I think I noticed over supper.”
“I, too, Sergeant. Perhaps she is just glad to be teaching where she is appreciated.”
Whatever had happened to spark Susanna Hopkins must have continued during her first teaching session, Joe decided, after a few minutes of polite chat with the Rattigans, and then their own retreat to the other side of Fort Laramie. Susanna’s exhaustion was stamped all over her face, but something more remained.
“Tired?” he asked her, hoping she would hear the professional tone, and nothing more.
“I am worn-out, but, Joe, you should have seen the ladies! They are so eager to learn.”
“Then you’re not tired at all,” he said, offering her his arm, which she took.
“It’s all I ever wanted to do here,” she said simply. She looked over her shoulder at Nick, who trailed along. “Nick, Private Benedict told me that you are welcome to sit in the back of the classroom, if you’d like to learn.”
“Maybe, if the surgeon doesn’t need me.”
“Come when you can.” Susanna increased the pressure of her hand on Joe’s arm. He even thought she leaned into his shoulder a little. “Joe, I did a wise thing this morning. I decided to forgive my cousin for being stupid.”
He couldn’t help a chuckle, even though what she said touched him. “You’re a lady of considerable forbearance! I’m not sure I could do that.”
“Then it’s a good thing the matter didn’t fall to you,” she said. “Seriously, I decided I could live with what happened. People like my former husband have a way of muddying their nests. I don’t know when, but eventually the whole matter will come out. I am a patient woman.”
He heard the hesitation in her voice, amazing himself how aware he was of every nuance from Susanna Hopkins, almost as if he studied her. The idea charmed him. “What more?” he asked, raising his voice a little because the wind was strong. Never mind; he knew Nick Martin would tell no tales.
“A few nights ago, I told the O’Learys everything and asked their forgiveness for the lie,” she said.
No need for her to know that Jim O’Leary had already told him, not when the subject was so frank and terrible. “I’m certain they assured you that you had nothing to ask forgiveness for.”
“They did. How kind they are,” Susanna told him, almost as if it still amazed her. “After the ladies left tonight, I … I told Maeve, too.” She sighed. “She just hugged me.”
“What else, Susanna?” he asked, some instinct telling him there was more.
“I decided there is only one thing I cannot live without, and see no solution at present.” She took a deep breath. “My son. He should be with me.”
Joe had nothing to say to that. They walked in silence to Emily Reese’s front door, where he said good-night.
He doubted she would say more, suspecting her thoughts were of Tommy Hopkins. She surprised him. He had released her arm, but she took his hand and looked him in the eye. He knew how much that cost her, since she was a reticent woman.
“Joe, I am glad you sent that letter to Monsieur Pasteur,” she said. “And I meant it about French. I brought my textbook with me, thinking perhaps there would be a pupil advanced enough to learn a little. Maybe it will be you?”
“Oui, madame,” he replied, and raised her mittened hand to his lips. The result was a laugh.
“We can learn more than that, monsieur,” she said. “Name a night and I will bring my textbook to the hospital.”
Joe was a long time getting to sleep that night.
Chapter Fourteen
Susanna fell into the rhythm of work, fitting her mind to the never-changing routine of an army garrison. The regularity of bugle calls and order was a balm to her soul. Now that she had made her personal peace with her cousin, she discovered how little it mattered to her what anyone else felt.
She called it victory the morning Elizabeth Burt brought her younger son to the garrison school. “You’d have my other two, as well, except they are back East with my sister for their education,” Mrs. Burt told her.
The woman also had the courage to apologize for signing that letter. “I shouldn’t have done that,” she said quietly. “Forgive me.” She opened her mouth, closed it, then spoke. “Major Randolph told us what had happened to you. I have passed on what he said to some others. What will be the result, I cannot say, but please believe me when I say Andy and I are sorry.”
No other families unbent enough to send their children to the warehouse, but Susanna was not one to search for grand success. Life had taught her how unlikely that was. Her heart warmed to know that Joe had her interests at heart.
The pattern of each day moved into the next with soothing regularity: breakfast with Emily in the kitchen; stopping to pick up Rooney O’Leary; a brisk walk across the lower parade ground with Nick Martin, her self-appointed guardian; the bliss of school; lunch and ideas with Anthony Benedict; a walk back to Emily’s or to Maeve Rattigan’s, depending on the day; night school with two Irishwomen, a German lady and one Polish woman, all eager to read; French lessons one evening a week with Major Joe Randolph. Once a week she wrote to her son, telling him about her pupils, and enclosing some of their drawings and small attempts at writing. Once a week she gave the letter to Nick M
artin, who carried it to the post office. She had no hopes that Tommy received her letters, but she persisted.
French lessons were the most unpredictable part of her week, mainly because illness or injury always trumped parlez-vous francais. On those nights when there was a note tacked to his office door—”Diarrhea” or “Bone to set” or the everlasting “Catarrh”—she went to the ward, supervised by Theodore Brown, and read to the patients. At first she wondered why the post surgeon did not tack such a note to the Reeses’ door, and save her the effort to go to the hospital. Then she realized he wanted her there, visiting his patients.
She had dredged up volume one of Little Women for herself in the fort’s library, but none of the men objected, especially since it was all she had with her that first night, except for Joe’s French textbook. When she was well into Little Women, with no volume two in sight, she had suggested they read something else, since there was no way to know the ending. The storm of manly protest surprised her, so she kept reading and overlooking, to her private amusement, the sniffles and nose blowing that had nothing to do with illness.
“Your patients are a bunch of softies,” she told Joe one night when he was actually in his office for a French lesson. “Do you realize that even the men you have discharged keep returning to hear the story? I confess we all cried when Beth took a turn for the worse. I tell you, Joe, that these men can read, but they keep returning! We’ve run out of chairs, so they sit on the floor.”
“Aren’t you aware how much fun it is to be read to?” the post surgeon had asked. “I’d sit in there, too, but you’d probably frog-march me back to my office to conjugate another verb. I know you would!”
She had laughed long at that. What did bring tears to her eyes in February was the evening one of the discharged patients, a former tough from New York’s notorious Five Points, presented her with volume two. He had been on detached duty at Fort Russell, and confessed to “lifting” the copy from that garrison’s library. She made him promise to return it, but not until they finished the book. He assured her it would go back on the shelf as quietly as it left, and no one would know. “I’m good at that,” he confided.
“I am aiding and abetting criminals,” she told the surgeon, and he only grinned.
She noted that he had nothing to smile about as the end of February brought troops from other forts to Laramie, preparing for the Powder River winter campaign, and then General George Crook from Omaha arrived, not so much to lead the expedition, but to watch Colonel J. J. Reynolds lead it.
“What will he do, ride along and peer over Colonel Reynolds’s shoulder?” she had asked Joe one night, when she’d returned a much-corrected French essay to the surgeon.
“Basically, that’s as good a description as any. Georgie does like to be in charge,” Joe said, wincing at the red marks on his essay, and changing what was obviously an unpleasant subject. “Susanna, is there any hope for me? Will I have to take you with me to the lycée to sit in class and translate in my ear?”
“I’m a woman. They would never let me near Monsieur Pasteur’s classroom!” had been her retort, even though the idea of being in Paris with Major Joseph Randolph gave her something to think about that evening as Nick Martin escorted her back to Officers Row.
The arrival of more troops and companies to Fort Laramie meant that the flats by Suds Row suddenly blossomed with tents, even in the cold days and still-longer Wyoming nights of late winter. Inadequate housing meant cases of frostbite and more catarrh, so she was not surprised when Joe suspended his French lessons.
“I haven’t time,” he told her. “Do keep coming to read to the men, though. I have it on good authority from my steward that some of my patients and former patients are placing bets on whether Laurie will marry Jo, or whether Professor Bhaer will carry off the palm there.” In a surprising bit of spontaneity that charmed her, he nudged her shoulder. “No one wants to think what will happen to Beth!”
She did as he said, suffering through Beth’s illness and death, overlooking everyone’s sniffs by keeping her eyes on the blurry page, and promising the men that their next book would be a comedy.
She wanted to laugh, until she looked in Joe’s office one night. She had finished reading and wanted to say good-night. She was going to knock on the door, but it was open a fraction, so she merely opened it wider, to see the major slumped forward, his hands over his eyes.
Her first instinct was to tiptoe away. But then her face grew hot with shame as she thought of what might have happened to her if this man, sitting there so sadly, had ignored his instincts after that disastrous encounter at the Dunklins. She opened the door wider and walked in quietly, determined to help if she could. She put her hand lightly on his shoulder.
He started, then looked up at her. She couldn’t help her sigh; she knew what that kind of misery felt like. She pulled a chair up beside him and just sat there, her hands in her lap now.
With a great effort, he sat up straight. She silently handed him her handkerchief and he blew his nose. He looked at her again.
“Susanna, I treat his men for frostbite, I patch and stitch where needed, but George Crook can never overlook that moment when I turned my attention from a dying soldier in blue to a living one in gray, no matter that fourteen years have come and gone. Hippocrates himself could argue with him, and it would make no difference.” He smiled faintly. “Crook will punish me forever, but you know how that feels, don’t you?”
Susanna nodded, not trusting herself to speak, until she had taken several deep breaths. “You told me that living well is the best revenge. Is that a lie?”
He shook his head, and his expression went from sorrowful to rueful. “I have it on good authority that Crook is still trying to get me cashiered from the army.”
“No!”
“Yes. Luckily, no one listens to him on this matter, and I practice good medicine, no matter what he thinks.” His smile was no smile. “I suppose I have stayed in the army mainly because I do not want General Crook to think he drove me out.” Joe grasped Susanna’s arm. “A good gambler knows when to fold a bad hand, but I don’t gamble any better than I cook.”
“All the more reason for you to improve your French,” she said, covering his hand with her own briefly. “When the letter comes from Pasteur himself, admitting you to his lycée, you can walk away with no regret.”
“I can,” he said, after a moment’s reflection. “I had better study my French.”
“Mais oui, monsieur.”
To her relief, Colonel Reynolds and General Crook led four troops of horses north to Fort Fetterman in early March, including Dan Reese’s and Jim O’Leary’s cavalry companies. Susanna listened to both wives crying through the walls, silently took her cousin by the hand and walked her next door. Her eyes red, Kate O’Leary opened the door. She swallowed her amazement and opened her arms wider, folding her difficult neighbor into her generous embrace.
“Good!” Susanna exclaimed, and closed the door on them, clutching each other and crying. She went back to the Reeses’ quarters, cooked Stanley a toasted cheese sandwich and spent the evening, shoes off, reading to him in his bed. By morning, all was serene.
“I’m glad you’re infantry, Private Benedict,” Susanna said that morning, as they stood at their classroom door—set apart from the rest of the warehouse by flour sacks—and ushered in their students, some of them uncharacteristically sober because their fathers had ridden away.
“If the summer expedition goes as planned, you’ll have the whole classroom, because even the infantry will go, which means yours truly,” he told her. “I think that’s why the army favors school terms that end in May, when summer campaigning starts.”
“Could I keep the school going this summer?” she asked him.
“If the administrative council says yea, why not?”
What am I thinking? she asked herself later, as her little ones concentrated on simple addition and subtraction. I’m going to be gone from here by June. Whe
re, I do not know yet. It would keep, she decided, returning her attention to her pupils.
Not long before recall from fatigue, Susanna looked up to see Majors Townsend and Randolph in the flour-sack doorway. Standing behind them, hat in hand, was a man she did not know.
“Oh, please, no,” she said, suddenly terrified, thinking of Tommy and Frederick.
Joe crossed the room in a few steps and put his arm around her shoulder, holding her close to him. Major Townsend raised his eyebrows but said nothing.
“It’s not bad news,” Joe told her.
Townsend nodded to Private Benedict, who quietly dismissed the students. Susanna couldn’t help both her pride and relief when they marched out like little angels. Private Benedict saluted smartly and Susanna brushed the chalk dust from her dress, even as Joe continued to hold her close.
When Major Townsend and the strange man came into the classroom, Susanna exchanged an “Are we in trouble?” look with her fellow teacher. He gave her the slightest shrug.
“I’m all right now,” she told Joe, not wanting him to let go, but not willing to give Major Townsend any fodder for gossip. “Just for a moment … You know what I thought.”
Major Townsend turned to the civilian. “Private Benedict and Mrs. Hopkins, this is Jules Ecoffey. He, uh, owns the Three Mile Ranch with Adolf Cuny.”
Susanna could not help noticing the look that Private Benedict exchanged with Joe.
Anthony Benedict cleared his throat. “Major Townsend, I know I’m the lowest man on the totem pole in this room, but should Mrs. Hopkins be party to a conversation involving Three Mile Ranch?”
Silence. Susanna looked from man to man, mystified. Her gaze lingered longest on the post surgeon, not a man slow with cues.
“Private, the matter concerns Mrs. Hopkins most of all, because there is a potential pupil at Three Mile.” Joe glanced at Jules Ecoffey. “Jules, better explain Three Mile Ranch, if you can, or should I?”
“You do it.”
“Mrs. Hopkins, let me put this as plainly as I can, even though the matter is offensive. Among other more legitimate enterprises, Ecoffey and Cuny run a hog ranch.” He smiled, because he seemed to be reading her mind. “It’s not what you think. It’s a whorehouse, located three miles from the fort.”
