by Sarah Bird
Though I had never heard a whisper of such things, when John Horse spoke I could hear my grandmother through him. Her stories of six thousand women warriors defeating armies of men twice that size might also have sounded like a pack of lies to anyone who didn’t know that we weren’t slaves. We were captives. John Horse had the same iron in his soul that was never going to be bent nor beaten into another shape. I believed he had done everything he recollected and a deal more besides.
“The barren land they moved us to,” Horse continued, “was in the territory of our enemy, the Creek. These devils had fought alongside the slavers. They kidnapped us and they enslaved us. The Black Seminole will never be slaves. Not for the white man. Not for the red man. So, again, I led my people to freedom. We escaped to northern Mexico, where the government gave us sanctuary if we would help them fight the Comanche and Apache raiders. This we did. I became el Capitán Juan Caballo and, for many years, we were happy in Coahuila. And then, once more, the betrayals began.
“Because of this, I now come here to Fort Clark. The U.S. Army has invited us to fight the Apache and Comanche with them for, in this, the American soldiers are helpless children. They now offer us good land beside this creek and good rations. Still, my people fear another betrayal and we did not know whether we should accept or go back to Coahuila. And then we saw you. Black men wearing the uniform of the U.S. Army, riding the horses of the U.S. Army, and carrying the guns of the U.S. Army.
“Because of you, we are convinced now to leave Mexico and come to Fort Clark. Then, no matter what betrayals might come, we shall always have allies by our side. But first, my people and I need an answer to a question.”
“And what might that question be?” the Sergeant asked, his tone peppery with suspicion.
“We want to know why you are fighting for your enemies, for the ones who enslaved you?”
“You mean the United States Army?” the Sergeant asked, his suspicion turning to annoyance. “Just exactly who do you think you and your men will be fighting for?”
John Horse translated the comment for those who didn’t savvy English then answered, calmly, “We will not be fighting for those who enslaved us because the white men never owned us. They never sold one of our children from her mother or used our women as broodmares as they have done to your people. If an enemy had ever done such things to my people, and then, if a great war had been fought to free us, we would never become slaves again.”
Peevishness crinkled the Sergeant’s fine features and he said, “We are free men, we are fighting for those who freed us, and we are paid well for our service.”
At this, a great murmur went through the crowd, the Sergeant was pulled to his feet, and one of John Horse’s lieutenants handed him a small bundle wrapped in the plaid wool some of them had tied about their heads as turbans. The Sergeant took the bundle, which caused a wave of happy murmurs of hink-lah-mas-tchay and es bueno. Though a general jolliness settled over everyone, the Sergeant’s uneasiness sharpened. He stood there staring at the bundle like John Horse had placed a bag of boll weevils in his hands.
At that moment, all the ladies, led by the old one I took to be John Horse’s wife, rose up as one and headed straight for me. I scrambled to my feet. Though I feared what they had figured out, I didn’t think they had any way to blow me as it did not appear that the women spoke English. Then I glimpsed the gift John Horse’s wife held in her outstretched hands and I saw that no words would be needed for they were stepping forward with one of the long, flounced skirts that only the women wore.
I pivoted smartly and ran from the gathering. Though a tsk-tsking chorus of hull-wax-tchay and no es bueno followed me into the darkness, I had no other choice. Even then, I feared they’d exposed me. That the Sergeant would put together the two and two of them presenting me with a damn skirt and me bolting and my secret would be revealed.
I was trembling when the Sergeant caught up with me. I was sure he’d have that skirt in his hands and demand to know what it meant. Instead, he said, “Good work, Private. I’d have left myself except that I was too stunned by their proposal.”
“Oh,” was all I could manage.
“I salute you for your very swift, very correct response to their treasonous suggestion.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You’ve a nimble mind, Private. And a loyal heart.”
“Sir.”
“You saved us by not accepting their bribe. I should have done the same. Instead, they tricked me into allying myself with them in rebellion against the United States.”
“You don’t say.”
“I couldn’t believe it either, Cathay. Just by accepting their gift, I betrayed the oath of allegiance I swore when I enlisted.”
He heaved the bundle into the woods, said, “Good night, Private,” and took off at a fast trot back to his encampment. I started to leave, then went back, peeked twice in all directions, bent down, and plucked up the Sergeant’s bundle.
Back at my camp, I unwound the plaid wool. The women had fine weaving skills and the cloth was surprisingly light and soft. It became my new binding. I pulled my muslin shirt on over it. I now had two secrets to hide. The second was: far from being horrified by John Horse’s tale, the news that slaves had beaten back the U.S. Army electrified me.
Chapter 52
After a week of fixing horseshoes and feeding our mounts up on corn and us on the turkey, antelope, and deer that ran plentiful about, to say nothing of the sunfish, bluegills, bass, and walleyes that fairly leaped from Mulberry Springs, we left Fort Clark.
The second day on the trail, the Sergeant, who believed that I had saved him from turning traitor on the U.S. Army and took my flight from the Black Seminole camp to be the act of a true patriot, graded me up so considerable that he asked me to come on a scouting expedition with him.
First thing the next morning, the two of us rode out ahead of the long column of men. We headed north and reached a plain covered by grass high enough to tickle Bunny’s belly. We cut through it leaving the trail of our passing behind. We climbed to the top of a rise and found the vast, flat table land they called a mesa at the top. A cooling breeze swooped up the rise and we halted in the scant shade of a mesquite. The Sergeant pulled out his spyglass and we went to searching for signs of hostile activity.
Glass still at his eye, the Sergeant said, “He was telling the truth.”
“Sir?”
“John Horse. I asked one of the white officers. Everything he claims to have done, he did. And a deal more.” He took the glass from his eye but did not look at me when he asked, “Cathay, you were a slave, were you not?”
“I was, sir.”
“Perhaps I’d feel differently about his treason had I ever been in bondage.”
“Yessir, I expect you would, sir.” I jumped on the Sergeant’s new willingness to talk to me and quickly asked, “So, you were born free, sir?”
He perked up at this question and answered back proudly, “My family was free New Englanders of color.” With no other troopers about to overhear him, the Sergeant fell to speaking like a normal man instead of a commander, and went on. “As soon as my grandfather was freed by his Quaker master, he left for the one place where race didn’t matter.”
“Where would that be, sir?”
“The sea.”
After a long silence, I repeated, “The sea,” hoping to coax him into saying more.
We watched a flock of killdeer pass overhead and listened to an antelope buck snort in the distance before he went on. “My father signed on as cook with a whaling ship and sailed out of New Bedford, Massachusetts, for months at a time. He hunted the deep waters on expeditions from Greenland to the west coast of Africa. He was a seaman who sailed under the great Captain Pardon Jones, himself a man of color. Pardon’s was one of the first ships to hunt sperm whales off the coast of Japan. Like the other New England whalers who made it around the Horn to fish in the Pacific, they wintered in San Francisco. There he met my mother. Daughter of a prominen
t San Francisco whaling family, I’m told.” He worked his jaw a bit before he added, “She perished in childbirth.”
“I am sorry to hear that, sir.”
“Yes, well.” He shrugged, brushing the comment off like he was talking about a misplaced button hook. Since commanders in this peacetime army rarely even revealed their first names, the Sergeant surely couldn’t be caught moping about his dead mama. As I knew only too well, it was dangerous, possibly fatal, for one man to show such weakness in front of another man.
But I wasn’t a man. I was one of the other ones. The ones men told their secrets to. The ones who knew their sorrows and shame. The ones who would not kill them for being weak. The ones men loved and hated for knowing they weren’t made of stone.
I was a woman.
I felt the Sergeant’s sadness and longing and the weight of that burden, and because I knew he wanted to tell me, I asked, “What do you know about her?”
“My mother? Oh. Well. Her father came from the Barbados Islands, the son of a Scottish sugar planter. Her mother was a Creole Indian. She was said to be a beauty. But I wouldn’t know. I have no memory of my mother’s family as my father left San Francisco soon after she died to make his fortune in the gold fields.”
“Did he? Make his fortune?”
“Yes. But not from gold. In the way of most who were not broken by that merciless hunt, his fortune was made selling the prospectors overpriced salt pork and potatoes. To the end of his days, which came when I was fourteen, he dreamed of returning to the sea. He gave those dreams to me. He told me I’d be a captain to rival Pardon Jones.” The Sergeant gave a hollow chuckle, pretending like he believed the thought was foolish. “Instead,” he went on, “I found my home not at sea but in the army.”
After a long silence, he raised his spyglass to his eye and asked, “What’s that?” He jerked his chin toward a plume of dust rising in the distance.
Miles away, across the grassy valley, the land rose to a ridge gulleyed by runoffs like the backbone of a starved cat with every rib poking out. A few puffs of what might have been dust rose there, though the noon sky was bleached to such a blinding intensity that I couldn’t say for sure.
With the Sergeant occupied, I took the opportunity to study him up close. There was no doubt that he had come from a long line of men who’d had their eyes fixed on the far horizon. I saw the seaman in his profile, the man who would of been captain in a better world. And I saw something else that only revealed itself now, with close observation. The skin of his cheeks and forehead was lightly mottled with a faint pattern like the tiniest of stars on a dark night. I figured it to be scars left by smallpox. But it didn’t have the look of pox for the scars were too small and they stopped around his eyes and temples in a band.
Just as if a blindfold or a bandage had been tied around his eyes.
I was seized by the image that had long haunted me of my soldier, dead and cruelly thrown into a pit, lye powder being sprinkled down upon his blindfolded face.
“Sir,” I asked as he twisted the spyglass about with his extended left hand, adjusting the focus.
“Private.”
“Sir, those marks on your face? Did you have smallpox?”
“The pox, no,” he answered, bringing his free hand up to touch the light speckles on his cheek. “Surprising you should notice. No one has in so long that I thought the marks had faded completely. It is quite a tale…”
His words drifted away. When it seemed none were likely to follow, I asked, “How’s that, sir?”
He lowered the glass, stared off as though transfixed by the far horizon, and rolled his lips inward, bottling up the words trying to escape. A time passed before he shook his head and puffed out a little laugh, pretending to make light of what he was about to say. “Every trooper out here must have a sad, lost sweetheart tale. Mine is no different from the rest, though I’m sure it is among the most curious.”
I rose out of the saddle and leaned forward as far as I could, straining to catch every word. But none came. He was done. “Sir?” I prompted again.
“Yes, Private?” he asked, pretending not to recall what we were talking about.
“Your story? Why is it curious?” Bunny’s flanks quivered beneath me as I’d put a crushing grip on her with my thighs while I tensed, waiting for Allbright’s answer. I eased off and reminded myself to breathe.
“Oh, nothing really. The circumstances of our meeting. I was wounded, my eyes were bandaged, and she saved my life. But most curious, ridiculous, really, if examined logically, is the fact that though I never actually saw the woman, I fell in love with her.”
Love.
Every sound—the clop of our horses’ hooves as they shifted their weight, the soughing of the wind rustling through the tall grass, the jangle of tack as the beasts moved—fell silent.
Wager. Wager Swayne. He was my soldier.
Jubilation and an odd shyness collided and kept me from calling out the name I now knew to be his on the spot.
“Stupid, isn’t it?” he asked before I could gather my wits. “Yet nothing can erase her memory from my mind. And here’s the strangest part.” Though he paused for some time, I did not have to urge him to go on. “Though I only ‘saw’ her face with the tips of my fingers, I know just from that touch and from how she comforted and nursed me that she is the most exceptional of women. I know that she will stand apart from all others because of her many superlative qualities and because of that one day I will find her.”
I’d of told him then, “You have found her,” but he had long since stopped speaking to me. His promise had been sent to the far horizon, to the place of freedom and equality he dreamed of. To the destination that was forever out of reach in this vast land.
Still, I would have said his true name then, I would have claimed him, except that, with unshakable faith, he concluded, “I will most especially know her because of her womanly beauty.”
Beauty.
I sunk back down into the saddle. I had been gut shot.
Womanly beauty.
I knew then clear as glass what would happen if I told him that I was the woman who had saved him, the woman he’d dreamed about, the woman he held above all others. He would not believe me. For, truth be told, I wasn’t that woman. I wasn’t the woman who’d kept him alive. That woman was beautiful and womanly. I wasn’t beautiful. I was barely a woman. I was a woman who could pass for a man.
“What the deuce?” he said, leaning forward toward the patch of movement shimmying through the grass. Abruptly he pivoted in the saddle and thrust the spyglass back at me. “Have a look, Cathay. Tell me what you make of—”
He went silent the instant he caught sight of my face and I knew what he saw written there: love, heartbreak, and a yearning so naked and so deep it all but swallowed me up.
The brass instrument hung in the air between us. I took it from him. The Sergeant spurred his mount and rode on without a word.
The sun was still two fingers above the horizon when the Sergeant halted, but night was coming on and the prairie had already gone violet. He waited until I drew abreast of him. We sat there for a long, silent moment. Without a word or a glance in my direction, the Sergeant stuck his hand out and I placed the spyglass in it. He tucked the spyglass back into its case on his saddle but did not spur his mount forward.
The shadows we threw made long scarecrow shapes behind us. He cleared his throat and, still staring off into the distance, said, “Private, I’ve seen boys like you before. Never been off the plantation. The first time they see a black man give an order, it…” He struggled for a moment to find the right word. When he couldn’t, he said, “Well, it has a powerful effect. Sometimes they think it’s the man. Do you get my meaning, Private?”
He didn’t expect me to answer and I didn’t.
“It is not the man, Private,” he added sharp and hard. “It’s giving the order. Do you hear me?” he asked and repeated, “It’s giving the order. It’s being the man in the
blue suit atop a horse. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yessir.”
“Never confuse the two again.”
“Yessir.”
He rode on ahead, putting enough distance between us so as to remove even the tip of his long shadow from my touch.
Chapter 53
The Sergeant believed me to be a degenerate.
From that awful moment through our final days on the trail as we rode to Fort Arroyo, the Sergeant kept his distance from me. It no longer mattered whether he was or was not my soldier, I had lost him forever. I learned what a grievous thing it is when a dream dies. To save myself pain, I erased the name “Wager Swayne” from my mind. From then on I was as insensible to my surroundings as a box turtle. I recorded the passing landscape but stopped feeling as if I was in it. The wondrous sights we rode through might have been paintings hanging on a wall.
I saw an ocean of beeves. Ranch owners who’d gone off to fight for the Confederate cause had turned their herds loose and those horned beasts had whiled the intervening years away mounting and being mounted and proliferating beyond anyone’s power to imagine. Cowboys, black and Mexican, worked gathering up the beasts and putting their bosses’ brands on the ones they got to first. We bought up all the beef we could eat.
One day, we found ourselves at the edge of a cliff that dropped a thousand feet down to the Pecos River. We had to ride a couple days north to find a crossing. On the other side those bountiful beeves were no more and we were back to beans. Even our salt pork was gone by then.
Near the end of that long ride, we topped a rise and saw a sight so wondrous that, for a moment, it overcame my sadness at losing the Sergeant’s regard, for, as far as the eye could see, buffalo covered the rolling plain. We’d seen herds before, but they’d always been far off in the distance. This was different. The entire world below looked to be carpeted with a wooly brown rug.
Lem was the first to break the stunned silence. “I heard they was good eating.”
I nodded, having no comment to make one way or another.
