by Sarah Bird
Greene stepped up and pronounced sentence. “That’s the last order you ever give, and you raise up to me now, they will also be the last words you ever speak on this earth.” As the mob left, Greene added with enough contempt to blacken a barn, “Little Man.”
Chapter 83
Bunny was alive.
“Wasn’t glanders after all,” Tea Cake, who’d helped me dress before we left the infirmary, said as he carried me to the barn.
After all that time out to pasture, Bunny smelled like earth, fresh turned in the sunshine, when I hugged her neck. Having Bunny gave me heart. Her living and being healthy enough to carry me to Mexico was a sign that things were going to work out.
Tea Cake got her tacked up, lifted me into the saddle, and led Bunny out of the stable.
Fernie Teague ran after us, demanding, “What you think you’re doing? You aiming to steal this horse?”
“Yes. I am,” I answered. “And the saddle, tack, and all the feed I got packed up back there, and the canteen I filled.”
“I don’t believe you can do that,” Fernie said, confused.
“I’m doing it.”
“I’m a report you.”
“I hope you do. Tell Drewbott to send a detachment. And tell them to be ready to shoot the woman he commanded for two years in the back because the only way I’m coming back here is dead.”
Outside, I found a couple dozen troopers waiting in the yard. They were a mournful crew, heads lowered, none of them even able to look my way. I took it as shame and a sort of apology for not stopping the mob and allowed as how they might not all be mangy curs.
Pinkney the cook stepped forward, dumped some potatoes and onions into my saddlebag, looped a couple of full canteens around my saddle horn, and said, “Cathay, before you go out there, I need to tell you something,” he started off, his old watery, stewpot eyes filling up.
“No need, Pinkney,” I cut him off. I didn’t have time to listen to him blubbering in the way drunks were wont to do while he told me how sorry he was he hadn’t stood up for me. They were all ashamed, thinking of what I was going to tell the Sergeant about them.
Unable to use my heels to spur Bunny on, I clicked my tongue and my sweet, loyal, good, and true mount ambled forward at the speed she preferred, a tortoise-slow walk. We rode on through the silent crowd of men. A couple of them glanced up, almost started to speak, then stopped. I guessed that shame was crushing the words right out of them.
Night was falling and the barracks Wager and me and the rest of the company had built were lost in shadow. My hitch had been hard and had ended bad, but I’d done it. Done every blessed thing any other trooper had done. And I’d met Wager. And that was worth it all. Worth another fifty years if it came to that.
Wager. Wager is waiting for me.
I sat up straight in the saddle. The barracks blocked my view of the open prairie beyond. Stars shone in the navy blue sky above them. It was stupid to set off this late, but I didn’t care. I’d keep the North Star shining on my back and ride south without stopping. To Wager who’d lift me gently from the saddle and take care of me.
The lone soapberry which had greeted me when we first arrived was a black silhouette now against a sky nearly as dark. As it had welcomed me to the fort, the tall tree would send me on my way as I passed beneath it heading south. As I drew closer, however, a broken limb dangling oddly from the soapberry caught my eye. The limb was thick and the branch it hung from bowed with its weight. Bunny shied back and I reined her to a halt.
Before I really knew what I was looking at, I had started praying to Iyaiya, all the ancestors, the Twin Goddesses, and Lord Jesus Christ to make the shadowed form I saw hanging from the soapberry tree a trick of the darkness. It couldn’t be a man, his face hidden by a hood. It couldn’t.
I was clucking Bunny forward, when from behind came the loud clicks of many rifles being cocked.
“Halt!” Drewbott ordered.
The white officers surrounded me. There were seven of them. They didn’t move or speak. Into the silence came the mournful hoots of a couple of billy owls. The snuffling and grubbing of a skunk pawing at a cholla root. The lonely sob of a Mexican wolf rose in the distance.
Drewbott faced me.
I knew what hung from the soapberry tree. “He crossed the border,” I charged Drewbott. “He was in Mexico. You’re not allowed to go after a man in Mexico. He was free.”
“We’re the goddamn United States Army,” Drewbott barked, his voice still shrill from being dried out in the desert. “No one’s free until we say they’re free. Carter, seize this … this deserter.”
“Colonel,” Carter said, his voice low. “Are you sure you want to do that?”
“Why? Do you have another bright idea? Your brilliant plan to let Vikers and his men go to the infirmary and ‘deal with the problem’ didn’t quite pan out, did it, Carter? What else do you suggest?”
“Let her leave.”
“Wouldn’t that be a fine example to set? If we let desertion go unpunished, the darkies will turn on us. We’ll have a full-scale mutiny on our hands. They’ll come for us. All of us. Our wives. Our childen. Is that what you want, Carter? The deserter must hang.”
“Sir, are you sure you want such a, uh, public proceeding?”
“What would you have me do? It’s too late now for the sniper. Sheridan himself has taken an interest. He telegraphed. This person is known to him. A report must be submitted. Protocol must be observed.”
“Yes, yes, of course,” Carter said. “But isn’t this just the sort of story that might whet the appetite of a newspaper reporter? Woman goes undetected in a peacetime army command? That’s news, sir. In any event, a trial means there will have to be an official admission that—”
Drewbott finished Carter’s thought. “That I had a … a … female under my command for two years.”
“Under all of our commands,” Carter added. “After the recent events…? The deaths in the desert? The unsuccessful hunt for Chewing Bones? There is certain to be an investigation. Maybe even—”
“A court-martial?” Drewbott said, his voice wavering.
The men’s conversation meant less to me than the wolves howling in the distance. It was too dark now to see even the outline of Wager’s body hanging from the soapstone tree. My thoughts were muddled. All I’d been certain of from the instant I knew that Wager was dead was that I no longer had any reason to go on living. Since I had no weapon to turn on myself, I decided to charge the men. They would be my firing squad.
My mind was made up, I was bracing for the final pain of thumping my heels against Bunny when Drewbott said, “Yes, yes, Carter, I see your point. We simply let her ride away. We’ll muster her out later. Discharge her for medical reasons. Have the quack in town sign the papers. You’re right. Who cares if she tells her story? No one will ever believe that a woman served for two years in the Buffalo Soldiers. Most citizens can’t believe niggers of any sex can be real soldiers. Yes, let her go.”
I don’t know if Wager or Iyaiya put this knowing into my head or if it came to me on its own, but I saw clear as day what was going to happen: these white men would erase us. Not just me, but all of us. The noble and the wicked. Wager and Vikers. Lemuel and Caldwell. No history book would show us putting up the telegraph lines and guarding the stagecoaches, tracking Indians and making the West safe. Hell, they might not even show the armies of black cowboys that rode the Texas ranges. Or any of our boys who fought in the Rebellion. Solomon? Would they erase Solomon, too?
I’d been as good as dead the instant the soapberry tree came into view and I cared naught for my life. But Wager? And Solomon? Lem? And all my people who’d died serving the United States of America? I’d be damned if I would let them bury us all twice.
I came to the sad conclusion that I had to live.
I made to ride off and Drewbott spurred his mount forward. “Give me that jacket,” he demanded. “You’re not leaving here with any evidence of your … your treachery!” he e
xploded.
“Drewbott,” I answered, forever done with “sirring,” “if you want this jacket, you’re going to have to give me all the sweat I put into it first.”
“Go,” Drewbott hissed. “Get out of my sight.”
“Happy to, you half-witted, yellow-bellied horse’s ass.”
A burst of chain lightning stitched across the black of the north sky. From way off in the night the Mexican wolf called out his sobbing wail. His mate up North answered with her own heartbroken cry. Bunny and I headed in her direction.
BOOK FOUR
Up High
Chapter 84
I rode into darkness and that is where I remained for many a year, not caring if I lived or died. Though I’d of preferred to die, the fear of being bullyragged through all eternity by Iyaiya for taking my life stilled the knife in my hand and kept me from seeking the high cliff. To give you an idea of how low I slipped, I became a laundress. It was as such that I made my way to Trinidad, Colorado.
Coal had been discovered there and I was sudsing for the black miners who brought up that soft bit coal. Worst job I ever had. Worse even than chopping tobacco. Every man with fourteen cents to pay for getting a dozen items washed—two bits if I supplied the soap—believed he was my boss. Believed he was better than me.
I tried a time or two, two hundred maybe, to set those coal-grubbing nitwits straight. I let them know that though I might appear to be nothing but a bedraggled scrubwoman, I had served for two years in the Buffalo Soldiers. All that got me, however, was a reputation as a flannel-mouthed liar. The mockery of those gum-booted gophers got so bad that back in January of 1876, ten years after I rode away from Fort Arroyo, I agreed to let a reporter from the St. Louis Daily Times who had heard a rumor about a female soldier interview me. I expected my life would change when the facts came out printed up in a newspaper. And my life did change. Just not in the direction I reckoned it would.
Where I thought my reputation would climb out of the muck that had been thrown on it and shine the way it ought, it went south in a hurry after the story appeared under the title “She Fought Nobly.” That soft-palmed dandy of a reporter got that much right, the “fought nobly” part. He even got a few of the bones of my life, but there wasn’t a bit of the real meat left on them.
As I said way back at the start, what stank the whole deal up was that he wrote that I had “an assumed formality that had a touch of the ridiculous.” “Assumed”? With just a few words, he made me out to be a fraud and every word out of my mouth a lie.
From that day on, the snickering behind my back stopped. Instead it came right round to the front door and the sorriest souse in Trinidad, Colorado, felt free to throw off on me and call me a liar direct to my face.
I showed them, though. When the mining company built a few rows of cheap houses for the black miners who had families, they also opened up a boardinghouse for bachelors. And guess who the single, solitary black female in town able to manage it was?
Since I was tired of my name getting dragged around in the mud, I called the house Miss Kate’s. As Miss Kate’s was the only place in town’d take single black men, the louses and souses figured out double-quick they could either show me some respect or sleep out with the prairie dogs. The slow learners, I helped along with some tutoring from my right hook and a swift eviction. Once I was set up proper, I sent for Clemmie.
She arrived on my doorstep having acquired the helpful ability to read and a shiftless husband that I sent packing. Me and my baby sister, together again. Running a respectable business. I had Clemmie with me. Our bellies were full. We were sleeping indoors on beds. No one told us what to do or when to do it. In this way, we passed a dozen happy years. Without hunger driving me, though, I began to dwell on what I did not have. Which was, first, the pension I was rightfully owed by the United States Army for my years of service. And second, Wager’s personal effects.
All I had of him was the yellow kerchief he’d given me after I became his woman and it wasn’t enough. I wanted that pretty little personal effects pine box that regulations required the army to put aside for the time when loved ones came to claim it. Well, the time had come for the army to do right by me. By Wager. I was his loved one.
Of course, it was possible that the army never put Wager’s belongings aside on account of him being hanged as a traitor. One way or the other, though, I needed to know for certain sure, and there wasn’t but one man who could give me my answers.
Clemmie helped me with the letter to the General. I had her put in that there’d be sweet tater pie waiting for him at Miss Kate’s if he’d care to noon with us. Three months later, when she read the letter that arrived from Washington, D.C., her face went pale. She looked up from the fine parchment paper trembling in her hand and squeaked out, “He’s coming. The General is coming to Trinidad.”
Chapter 85
May 12, 1888
I didn’t need the rooster to wake up that morning as I’d been in the kitchen most of the night, filling it with the cinnamon and vanilla smell of pies baking. In the letter I’d received from the General’s current aide-de-camp he’d said that Trinidad was Sheridan’s last stop on a tour of the Territories and that “the item” I had requested would be delivered on Sunday, the fifth of August, “as the General’s schedule allowed.”
Clemmie read from the Trinidad Chronicle that the mayor, a brass band, a troop of old veterans, and most of the town would be meeting General Sheridan’s train at nine oh five. A choral concert in the park, a “Review of the Troops,” and an “Official Proclamation of Gratitude to General Philip H. Sheridan” would follow.
And though it wasn’t printed up in the Chronicle, Clemmie and I knew that the General would then proceed to Miss Kate’s Boardinghouse for Sunday dinner. Though my feet were never the same after running across cactus, and had gotten so bad since then that the doc wanted to take both of them, I ignored the pain and hobbled about best I could, determined to pass inspection again.
“Just how many pies you intend on making?” Clemmie’s question startled me.
“Enough to get it right,” I snapped back at her.
“What?” she demanded, tying an apron on over her skirt. “Those six you got cooling on every windowsill in this kitchen ain’t right enough?” The kitchen was hot as I’d had the oven roaring most of the night and sweat beaded her face. Her beautiful face. Clemmie’s beauty seemed made of hard maple, for the years had done nothing but polish it up even more.
Not wanting to let my willful, prideful sister see my admiration, I ordered her, “Get that table set and best not let me hear so much as a saucer land wrong.”
“I cannot believe that—”
“Not now,” I cut her off. What she could not believe was that I’d bribed the head steward at the Claremont Hotel Restaurant for the loan of some fine china and glasses. I’d of perished before I served the General off the house’s collection of battered tin plates and chipped mugs.
For the next few hours, Clemmie and I cooked and cleaned together smooth as a span of mules been working in harness for years. The house filled with the smell of fried chicken, corn bread, fried okra, greens seasoned with ham hock and vinegar, and, of course, sweet potato pie. By noon, we had the finest meal ever served at Kate’s Boardinghouse laid out on the long dining table set for that one day only with real-glass glasses and china plates didn’t have a single crack on them.
At one o’clock I went to ferrying the chicken and greens in and out of the oven so that the General would have his food the way he liked it: hot and on time. A bit after two, Clemmie burst into the kitchen and announced, “Your boarders is getting narrow at the equator. They already been waiting on their dinner for two hours.”
Since Clemmie had been giving me this alert every ten minutes since noon, I ignored her.
“You hear me?”
I didn’t answer her foolish question.
“Cathy, you might ought to consider that he’s not coming.”
&nbs
p; “‘Not coming’? What’s that supposed to mean? The General says he’s coming, the man is coming. Just got held up by the mayor giving his speech and a pack of old shipping-clerk soldiers won the war from behind a desk in Washington, D.C.”
“Cathy, you invited him, but he never said he was coming.”
“The hell he didn’t! What else are the words ‘be delivered’ supposed to mean?”
“Sister, this ain’t exactly what you’d call his side of town.”
“When you’re General Philip Henry Sheridan any side of town you want is your side of town!” I stabbed a serving spoon into the bowl of collard greens I’d just reheated for the third time.
“Calm down. I just don’t want you getting riled up the way you do when folks don’t believe you did all you did.”
“I don’t give a red piss about what folks believe,” I lied. “They’ll see the truth of it soon enough. Letter said the General’s going to ‘honor my request,’” I reminded her. “Clemmie, the General’s bringing me Wager’s things.”
Though I jerked away before Clemmie could see the water come to my eyes, she heard the soppiness in my voice and patted my back, saying, “I know, I know. It’s just that the newspaper said he’d be done with all his events by noon and that was nearly two hours ago and that means…”
I knew what it meant: Sheridan wasn’t coming. Probably never intended on coming. I had a choice then: bust out boohooing or carry on. I grabbed up that bowl of greens and, though my feet ached, I stomped heavy into the dining room where my beautiful table waited. Also waiting, right around the corner in the parlor, were my boarders, all nineteen of them. House rule was no one was allowed in my kitchen and no one ate before I said so.
Charles, a head miner who could bring up three thousand pounds of coal a day, clean of rock, demanded, “When we gonna eat?”
I gave him my back and put the bowl on the table.
“You hear me?” Charles shouted. “Already two hours past dinnertime. We tired of waiting!”
