A Summer Affair

by Susan Wiggs

  “Well, I’m not.”

  “I can see that now, sir.”

  He wasn’t proud of having earned such a reputation. The years had turned him hard from the inside out. Now even relative strangers thought him grim and unapproachable. Consciously easing the perpetual scowl from his brow, he made an appointment to meet with Miss Mundy at the waterfront facility. She scribbled down the day and time, and as she did so, curiosity got the better of him.

  “Are you familiar with the Brolin case?” he asked.

  “I am, sir. It’s a privilege indeed. In fact, Dr. Vickery might elect to publish something about it.”

  Blue hesitated, but only for a moment. Some doctors were territorial and did not welcome input or commentary on their active cases. Vickery, on the other hand, was a teacher. Surely he would not object to one of his students being quizzed by another doctor, a colleague. “Have you come to any conclusions about the case, Miss Mundy?”

  “The patient has been rendered comatose from a gunshot wound to the head.”

  “Yes, Miss Mundy, but what do you make of it?”

  “A brain injury is an unpredictable and challenging trauma. Dr. Vickery is keenly aware of the public interest in Officer Brolin. But you know, sir, I find it curious—” She hesitated. Her eyes flickered to Blue, and he read a struggle there. “May I speak frankly, Dr. Calhoun?”

  “Of course.”

  “There has been no surgical treatment of the injury.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  She carefully aligned the edges of her charts and hugged them closer. Clearly she had questions about the case. He wondered why she was asking him rather than Vickery. “The operation takes place tomorrow,” she said. “In the meantime, Officer Brolin is being sedated, sir. Those are Dr. Vickery’s orders. I asked him if he supposed the sedative could impede the patient’s regaining consciousness, and he assured me it’s necessary for his recovery.”

  The woman was as talkative as a magpie. As different as she was from him, Blue could hear echoes of his own past in her questions. He recognized the busy speculation in her wide, clear eyes, the quest for answers that must be buzzing through her mind. She was becoming a physician in her own right, forming strong opinions but hesitant to challenge convention.

  They walked together toward the lobby. Sharp smells and muffled voices drifted from the wards on either side. Nurses in wimples swished past and orderlies pushed trays and carts up and down the corridors. Miss Mundy seemed agitated. An orderly jostled her, and she dropped her charts.

  “Oh, clumsy of me,” she murmured and stooped to pick them up.

  As he helped her, Blue’s gaze slipped past the clinical notations and orders, and stuck on a name that ripped through him like a jolt of electrical current. He stood and handed the chart to Miss Mundy.

  “Nathan Glasscock Skinner is your patient?” he asked.

  She nodded. “He’s in the war veterans’ ward and failing fast, I’m afraid.”

  Since they’d parted ways so bitterly, Blue had seen his former army commander off and on through the years. Skinner was a chronic alcoholic with a history of violent encounters, and more than once he’d staggered into the Rescue League to be patched up, given a meal and discharged. Much as he despised the man, Blue took no satisfaction in Skinner’s misery. That would have been too easy.

  The fact that Skinner had wound up here neither surprised nor moved him. But it did make him curious to see the ruins of a man who’d ruined so many lives.

  He made his way to the men’s medical ward, feeling Miss Mundy shadowing him. Her worry hovered like a cloud. She could not know his thoughts, but perhaps sensed his mood.

  They came to the end of the corridor and stepped into a long room with a high ceiling and rows of beds along two walls. The men were charity cases for the most part, and they’d brought the blight of their misfortune with them. Despite the liberal use of boric acid and lemon oil, the airy room reeked of refuse-strewn alleys, waterfront hideaways and ships’ holds. At the far end of the ward, a weary intern was trying to keep a victim of narcotics poisoning on his feet, slapping him with a wet towel and marching him around the bed.

  Blue was startled to see a woman in a feather-decked hat and wasp-waisted green dress, standing at the bedside of a seemingly unconscious man, reading scripture from a leather-bound book. “Clarice?” he said.

  She turned in an elegant sweep. “Don’t look so shocked, Theodore. I often come to minister to these poor unfortunates.” She closed the book and smiled up at him. “Perhaps I’ve discovered a way to see more of you.”

  “Perhaps,” he said, mystified by her presence.

  “Unfortunately I must be going. I shall see you soon, Theodore, at the Benevolent Aid Society Ball.”

  “Of course,” he said, and found himself standing in a waft of her perfume as she departed. He turned to Miss Mundy. “Is it true? She visits the charity ward?”

  “This is the first time I’ve seen her, sir.”

  Blue gave his attention to the man in the bed. Captain Nathan Glasscock Skinner was unrecognizable from the square-jawed military man he’d once been. To call him a ghost of his former self would be generous. He was simply a skeleton draped in dying gray flesh, jaundiced eyes glassy and staring at nothing. He lay supine beneath a thin blanket, his hands folded across his chest, thick yellowed fingernails embedded with dirt. Old beyond his years, he was the embodiment of the cautionary tales favored by fiery Temperance League sermonists.

  As Blue stood at the foot of the painted iron frame of the bedstead, Skinner’s eyes cleared for a second or two. “I know you. You’re that doctor, down at the end of Mission.”

  Blue said nothing. He felt Miss Mundy beside him, waiting and worrying.

  Clouds of confusion moved through Skinner’s eyes, but then he said the last thing Blue expected to hear.

  “You’re Lieutenant Calhoun.”

  Lieutenant Calhoun. He remembered the name being barked from this man’s snarling mouth. The rank had been stripped from Blue upon his discharge. But in that weak and wavering voice, worn out by drink, Skinner brought back memories of the moment Blue Calhoun’s soul turned to ash….

  It was the sort of bright, crisp fall day that made even the smallest child in the Wyoming stockade volunteer to help with the apple harvest. Women bracing themselves for the frozen darkness of the coming winter seized the opportunity for a picnic in the blessedly warm sun while the youngsters played chase, climbed trees, skipped stones across Carrington Creek.

  Sancha and Lucas had set out together that day to visit their friends in the Arapaho tribe across the creek. Blue stood at the stockade gate watching them go. He would have joined them, but he’d been called away to tend to a wood gatherer who had injured himself cutting alder and poplar to dry for the winter.

  It didn’t bother him in the least to see Sancha and Lucas heading off to visit the Indian camp. They had done so frequently throughout the summer. To the relief of most in the stockade, the tribe was peaceable—except when some of the young braves drank whiskey. However, women and children were never involved in the noisy skirmishes, and the occasional friendship formed between the whites and the Arapaho. Like ladies at an ice-cream social, soldiers’ wives and Arapaho women traded sewing tips, methods of smoking meat, child-rearing dilemmas. Only that morning, Sancha had confessed to Blue that she’d be sorry to see the tribe break camp and seek winter quarters in the lowlands, where the herds of elk went to graze.

  Holding hands to steady each other as they waded across the rocky creekbed, Sancha and Lucas forded the swift-moving, shallow water. In her other hand, Sancha clutched her shoes and the hem of her skirt. She wore her hair in two shiny black braids, like a schoolgirl. Though raised in the strict manner of the Spanish aristocracy, she had never concerned herself with modesty.

  Sunlight struck the water with fierce intensity, as though to deny the signs of the dying summer. Framed in turning leaves and flashing water, Sancha appeared to be s
urrounded by diamonds and gold. Above the rushing burble of the creek, Blue could hear her laughter and Lucas’s squeals of delight as he splashed about.

  The next events were cobbled together from a patchwork of accounts, none of which were particularly reliable. All became part of the official reports later.

  After waving to his wife and son as they crossed the creek, Blue returned to his patient.

  That day, Sancha and her friend Efrena Nightshade, an Arapaho whose education in a Christian convent had given her a strong foundation in speaking Spanish and English, intended to exchange parting gifts. Sancha’s offering was a supply of corn relish and pickles and a warm knitted shawl. Efrena gave Sancha a beaded white doeskin jacket Sancha had long admired. She must have been so delighted with the gift that she had put it on, right over her shirtwaist.

  She was wearing the Indian jacket when the first shots were fired.

  In the stockade surgery, Blue heard the gunfire just like everyone else. A series of pops, like rocks in a campfire.

  Later testimony would claim the shots were fired by brewed-up braves, but Blue had always doubted that. In the first place, the shots came from east of the fort, and the Arapaho were camped to the west, beyond the creek. They’re skilled horsemen, was the explanation. They rode in stealth to the east in order to mount a sneak attack and steal the barrels of corn whiskey stored in the stockade.

  When the order to return fire was given, Blue had abandoned his patient, leaving the man’s wound half-stitched. In the official record, that was the first infraction—willful dereliction of duty.

  Over the protests of the stockade guards who were frantically bringing the civilians safely in from the orchard, Blue raced past the great log gates. Infraction Number Two—desertion of post.

  Troops formed a horseshoe-shaped defense ring inside the stockade. The guard towers bristled with long-barreled rifles. But defending the fort was not enough for the commanding officer. Riflemen and sharpshooters had already advanced across the creek. Above the rushing water, glaring sunlight speared through thick smoke. Skinner stood at his command post, a raised bluff at the creek’s edge. He had his feet firmly planted, his sword pointed in the direction of the attack. He was yelling himself hoarse, screaming at his men to fire at will.

  Breathless from running, Blue told him to order a cease-fire immediately. Skinner barked at him to return to his post. Like all great cowards in a position of power, Skinner was a dangerous man.

  Blue yanked out his sidearm, shoved it up against Skinner’s temple and directed him to give the command to cease fire. His final and most egregious infraction—assaulting a superior officer.

  Skinner had pissed himself. That detail never made it into the official record. With the fort doctor’s pistol still boring a hole in his head, the commander told his bugler to sound a retreat.

  The massacre had lasted only minutes. It didn’t take long to slaughter unarmed women and children.

  Before the smoke cleared, Blue was in the middle of the village, wading through bodies while survivors fled from him as he looked for Sancha. He would never forget the smells and sounds of that place. The stench of burning buffalo skin shelters and freshly spilled blood, the wails of women and the cries of children haunted him to this day.

  By the time he found Sancha, she’d lost consciousness. She still wore the beaded jacket, a gift from her dearest friend. A freshening wind cleared the gunsmoke from the air and golden autumn sun shone down on his wife.

  “Shh. Mama’s sleeping,” Lucas said.

  Efrena explained to Blue later that when the attack began, Sancha had shielded her small son’s body with her own. There was a bright smear of his mother’s blood across his forehead, a look of bewilderment in his dark eyes. Then he said, “Save her, Daddy, save her.”

  What he’d done next became part of the official record but he hoped Lucas didn’t remember. No child should ever be witness to a failed resuscitation effort, performed on a battlefield by a man half-mad with desperation.

  By the end of the day, there was enough evidence against Blue to court-martial and hang him. Nobody really thought a few drunken braves with rusty rifles posed a serious threat to a well-defended stockade. But nobody except Blue wanted to say aloud that Skinner had over-reacted.

  The only person prepared to speak on Blue’s behalf was Delta Beasley, but her testimony was dismissed because she was a woman and a Negro. However, in light of his tragic loss, the review board was prepared to be compassionate.

  The official report cited bloodthirsty braves crazed by battle frenzy and out for blood. The reality was a trio of drunken boys who could barely walk a straight line, much less discharge their weapons. The report claimed that Indians had shot the beautiful young wife of the stockade doctor. But the bullet Blue had found embedded in Sancha’s chest was standard army issue.

  The braves stole firearms as well as whiskey, Skinner asserted. The explanation had satisfied the army’s board of inquiry. Captain Skinner had acted properly in ordering aggressive counterfire against the village across the creek.

  The massacre of dozens of women and children was justified.

  Blue was cashiered and told to count himself lucky for not being thrown in the brig.

  He left Fort Carrington in a wagon filled with medical supplies, a son who cried himself to sleep every night, Nurse Beasley, who had resigned over the incident and Sancha’s friend Efrena Nightshade, who had no relatives or family and wanted to be with Lucas.

  They buried Sancha on a bluff overlooking the creek, in the shade of three cottonwood trees whose leaves had turned to weightless golden coins. Delta warned him he’d regret leaving her there. He should seal her up good, transport her home to San Francisco. But Blue shut his eyes, pictured the alabaster effigy his wife had become and said, “That’s not where she is.”

  Now the architect of the tragedy, this corrupt creature, clinging to life for no purpose Blue could fathom, lay dying. Blue could summon no feeling whatsoever about seeing him again. Neither rage nor compassion, hatred nor vengefulness. Certainly not forgiveness.

  “They say he was a hero,” Leah Mundy commented. “Did you know him in the Indian wars?”

  “I did. And he was no hero. Has anyone besides Mrs. Hatcher come to see him?”

  “I’ve seen no one else since he was brought in early last Thursday morning.”

  The mention of that particular day caught his attention. On that day at dawn, he’d been extracting a bullet from the mysterious Miss Fish-Wooten. “He was admitted Thursday,” he repeated.

  “Yes, sir. Near dawn, it was.”

  He grabbed the medical record. “It says here he was brought in by police.”

  “He was.”

  “From the vicinity of East Street and the China Basin.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The attached report listed among his belongings a boiled wool derby hat, a pair of stitched boots and an army issue Bowie knife.

  “Did the police question him about the Brolin shooting?”

  “I don’t believe they did.”

  “Why not?”

  “Sir, I don’t know.”

  “One of their own was shot. He could have witnessed the incident. Surely he was questioned.”

  She shifted uncomfortably on her feet. “Perhaps I wasn’t aware of it.”

  Blue thought about Rory McKnight’s ballistics tests. And he thought about what he knew of Skinner’s character. There was no doubt in Blue’s mind that the man responsible for Sancha’s death was capable of gunning down a police officer and Isabel.

  Skinner mumbled something, pawed in agitation at the thin blanket covering his bony knees.

  For the first time, Blue directly addressed him. “You shot a man on Thursday.”

  Skinner responded with a violent shake of his head. “Wasn’t me, I swear. Couldn’t’ve been me.”

  “What were you doing at the waterfront that night?” Blue asked.

  “Sleeping. But I seen—” Ski
nner started to cough. The fit lasted several minutes, and in those minutes, Blue lived it all again—the massacre and the inquiry that followed, his trek to San Francisco with his tiny, confused boy. And then he relived that first morning with Isabel, remembering her anger and her agony and her courage. Now finally this bastard was dying. Yet Blue felt no satisfaction at all, no sense of justice.

  He turned to Miss Mundy. “Who’s in charge of his belongings?”

  “I believe they’re in a locker.” She gestured at a row of locked metal cabinets on the wall. She was looking at him with a mixture of bafflement and suspicion.

  His lips purple from coughing, Skinner lifted one shaking hand to signal that he wanted to go on.

  “Nod your head yes or no,” Blue directed. “You saw Officer Brolin get shot.”

  Yes. “You saw the person who shot him.”

  Yes. “Do you know his name?”

  No. A tremulous hand reached out, wavered in the air. “But…th’ shooter was…a woman.”

  Blue looked at Miss Mundy, then back at Skinner. “The person who shot the officer was a woman?”

  Yes.

  Fifteen

  Isabel paused dramatically in the middle of her narrative, making certain all her listeners were fully engaged. “I actually had to attend school in order to practice the proper way to curtsy to the queen.”

  “Imagine that. A school for curtsying.” Bernadette stood and executed a lopsided curtsy.

  “It’s required. And you must also practice walking backward. After being presented to the queen, one must never turn one’s back. Wearing a twelve-foot train makes it a bit of a challenge.” Sitting on an upholstered chair and wearing a white dressing gown, Isabel beamed at her visitors, gathered in the sunlit bedroom: Bernadette and Delta, Mrs. Li and her daughter June. Efrena Nightshade, the quiet Arapaho woman from the frontier, was painfully bashful and usually avoided these afternoon gatherings, but the others were always eager to spend time with her. Mrs. Li and June had set up a mahjong table and were teaching the game to Isabel and Delta while the others looked on. But the playing had yielded to Isabel’s chatter.