An Obituary for Major Reno

by Richard S. Wheeler

  At least Richler was paying attention.

  “I had spent my life in the army. Before that, years at West Point …” Reno paused, remembering the troubles he had getting through the school. “I was orphaned at a young age, raised by relatives, and always alone. And then, suddenly, Mary Hannah, with her glowing eyes and long curls and slender form was there, and I wasn’t alone anymore, and she was smiling at me, and pulling me out of myself at last, and making much of me and my dress blues, and suddenly there wasn’t anyone else I cared about, and I knew I loved her and she loved me, and that was all that mattered. It mattered more than my career, more than the cavalry, more than honor.”

  Reno stared at Richler’s blank pad. Reno’s last time of conversing would end with a blank page. If he ever saw Richler again, it would be with his own notebook and pencil in hand, to respond to men with tongues.

  “I asked permission to court Mary Hannah, and her mother granted it. Her father had died the year before. I was suitable enough, even for a wealthy family. I had no wealth, but I was an officer in command there, given responsibilities, and the family felt protected by men in blue. So I was offered the chance and I took it. Now I could take Mary Hannah by the hand and walk the riverbank.

  “I remember her voice, soft but with a bright lilt to it, making melodies in my heart. I am not a talker, but she evoked talk from me, and we laughed, and I held her hand and pined for her, and kept honor bright. She didn’t ask about my life as a soldier, but she listened solemnly to talk of war. She listened while I told her about selecting remounts for the cavalry, checking on hooves and pasterns and looking for splints and fistulas and bad teeth and evil temper.”

  He saw not a word in Richler’s notepad, and knew the interview had already failed. He wasn’t sure what he had expected; only that he wanted to use this last day that he possessed speech to talk about things that mattered, things that might change the trajectory of his sorry life.

  “Mary Hannah said yes. Yes to me! Yes, she would be my own, my bride! But that came later, after another tour of duty with the Army of the Potomac as escort for General Ambrose Burnside’s headquarters command. Later I was wounded at Kelly’s Ford, and breveted a major for gallantry. I spent several weeks in Harrisburg, recovering from my wound, a hernia from having a horse shot from under me, and sealing my joy with Mary Hannah. I was put on detached duty in Harrisburg but now the Confederates were marching north, Ewell’s Second Corps, and we had to defend. I was made General Baldy Smith’s chief of staff. Ewell had captured Carlisle Barracks and was but a stone’s throw from the capital.

  “Mary Hannah and her family fled to New York, and after the danger had passed I was given the briefest of leaves. But it would be long enough to ride to New York with a minister the night of the thirtieth of June, marry my beloved the morning of July the first, and go back to war on the next train.

  “It was the best thing I ever did,” Reno said. “Captain Marcus Reno, Mary Hannah Ross. At the Astor House, the Reverend Cattell officiating. They were waiting for us, the Haldemans and Rosses and a few of her friends, smiles and flowers and champagne. She greeted me, white lace and cream silk embracing her slender form, greeted me with warmth and something flaming in her eyes that I cannot put into words.

  “You cannot know how hard it was: we spoke our vows while the clock ticked, her family congratulated us. Mary Hannah and I clung to each other for a few moments of fever and joy and yearning, and then we were torn asunder by necessity; torn from each other’s arms by some terrible force. I had to catch an express and go to war, and we didn’t know if we would ever see each other again, or whether our union … would ever be fulfilled, for that’s the soldier’s lot.”

  Richler had not written a word.

  CHAPTER THREE

  RICHLER PITIED THE MAN AND LISTENED PATIENTLY. RENO WAS HOURS away from the time he would have no voice to love with, or give thanks with, or rejoice with.

  Reno slurred his words more and more as the interview wore on, and Richler knew the major was suffering. That swollen cancerous tongue tormented him. He had to pause and spit now and then into a jar. The spittle was tinged with blood. But the major didn’t stop; his last words flooded out, driven by some terrible need.

  What did it matter that the major poured out the story of his great love instead of dwelling on the Little Bighorn? Now, in his extremity, his love for Mary Hannah enveloped him, and nothing else mattered. Richler listened, not for the sake of a story, for there was none that he could discern, but for the sake of charity. This was Reno’s last will and testament and the Herald correspondent could not turn a deaf ear to it.

  “Mary Hannah and I finally had some time to ourselves in mid-July, after the Confederate threat was over. I was posted to Carlisle Barracks. The Rosses and Haldemans returned from New York. We stayed with Mary Hannah’s mother on Front Street, in Harrisburg.

  “We danced. Do you know, Richler, how it is to dance with a woman who is a feather in your arms, her every movement anticipating yours? For two months we danced, and never was I so happy. And never did a woman give so much love, so perfectly and generously offered. Though war raged about us, I cannot remember so blessed and exalted a time, when the touch of her hand upon my cheek sent me into ecstasy. And to make that time all the more sacred to me, it was then that Mary Hannah conceived.”

  He hawked up some phlegm and spit, a horrible expulsion of vile liquids into the jar he kept at hand. The contents of that jar were unspeakable. He wiped his lips with a grimy gray cloth, and sighed.

  “But all things end, and I was posted to the First Cavalry, commanding a squadron, under Merritt and I was back in the war again. Picket duty, skirmishing, reconnaissance, I won’t go into all that. We were out in cold and wet, and by Christmas I had gotten lumbago and was sent to a hospital in Washington City. My recovery was slow, and I was given thirty more days.”

  Richler listened patiently. There were certain charities that only a newsman could perform, and listening was one. He had heard many stories and written some of them. In some cases, he had heard stories and charitably had not written them. Now he listened to an embittered and rejected and friendless man who was remembering those fleeting moments when all of life was aglow. It was good to listen, and Richler didn’t mind squandering the time.

  Reno doggedly continued, the story of the miracle of the outgoing and ever-cheerful Mary Hannah foremost in his mind. He skipped past battles and horse purchasing duty—he knew horseflesh so the cavalry put his knowledge to good use—and tours of inspection, and focused on the one thing that obsessed him that rainy March day.

  “Mary Hannah brought a boy into the world in April, and it had been a hard time for her, her slight build, you know. She was slow to recover, abed and melancholic, and I worried about her. But Robert Ross Reno had come into my life, a son at last, and no man could ask for more.”

  Reno’s face had contorted into a rictus intended to conceal from Richler the torment he was imposing on his tongue. He careened from West Point to New Orleans to Kansas, and always Mary Hannah absorbed him: Mary Hannah charming the dour defeated Rebels of New Orleans; Mary Hannah turning their miserable quarters on the Kansas plains into magical havens of warmth and camaraderie and love. Mary Hannah soldiering through the worst that the cash-starved post-war army could throw at its officers.

  Then suddenly he stopped and wiped red spittle from his tormented mouth. “Nothing there for you to write about,” he said, eyeing Richler’s empty notepad.

  “There might be.”

  “This is my last gasp, and this is how I choose to spend it.”

  “You’ve spent it well. I’ve been listening to a tribute to a woman of rare courage and grace. I know now what a loss it was when she departed.”

  He nodded, his face crumpled, and Richler thought the major was on the brink of tears.

  “I imagine you want some rest,” Richler said, preparing to leave.

  Reno stood. “Mr. Richler, do something for me,�
� he said. Richler discovered urgency in the man’s voice. “Defend my good name. I’ll write notes after the surgery. Help you do it. When I have no voice … I’ll need a voice. More than words on paper, a voice. Be my voice. That’s why I got you here.”

  Richler nodded. By all accounts, Reno deserved his dismissal from the army. Something had gone haywire in the man since the battle of the Little Bighorn in 1876; in less than four years that were marred by fights, drunkenness, indiscretion, insult, obsessive pride, and finally the episode involving Ella Sturgis, Reno had rendered himself a boor, a drunk, and anything but an officer and a gentleman.

  It was as if the scathing criticism of his conduct at the Little Bighorn had blistered his soul and driven him to excess. As if those accusations of Frederick Whittaker, Custer’s biographer, and Libbie Custer herself, had burrowed into Reno’s heart and festered there, eating the soul of a gallant and much commended officer, the way the cancer was eating his tongue.

  “I don’t know that it’s a proper thing for a correspondent to be doing, major.”

  “Then I will have no one to defend me. I dream of only one thing: getting back my good name.”

  Richler didn’t like it, but he had no way to refuse a man sentenced to silence. “If the opportunity arises, major, and you can write out the things that would help me, I could do something to clear the name of Marcus Reno.”

  Reno clasped Richler’s hand and held it roughly, and for a moment Richler thought the major would topple without the support that Richler gave him. But the moment passed, and Reno saw the reporter to the door.

  Richler pulled his black cape about him and plunged into the rain, his mind on the odd interview that sailed so far from what he was sure Reno wanted to say about himself. There was no story; two hours of virtual monologue had yielded not the slightest defense of Reno’s conduct at the Little Bighorn, or any rationale for his subsequent barbarous behavior at various military posts in the west, nor a word about the court of inquiry into Reno’s conduct, and nothing about Reno’s determined, endless efforts, in congress after congress, president after president, to reverse his court-martial conviction and win reinstatement in the United States Army.

  Richler would rehash a little history for Bennett’s sake and write a few inches of copy, and be done with it. He was a reporter, not a lawyer or advocate. His promise of help would come to nothing, and there would be new stories and scandals and sensations to focus on.

  The rain dripped off his plug hat, but he made it to his somber rooms without getting soaked. Nadine was napping. He shook out his cape, hung his water-beaded bowler on the coat tree, and dropped into his creaking swivel chair, staring at the calendar on the wall. He didn’t know what he would cable to Bennett; there were no revelations or sensations and nothing had changed. But there was no rush, not on a little ancient history like this: he would cable Bennett that the Reno story would take some checking.

  And yet something had changed. Yes, out of the slow afternoon had come something: Richler was certain that Reno believed in his own case, that he was not a wily prevaricator looking for angles, but a man who felt wronged, a man who counted honor and good name higher than all else.

  He would grant Reno that much.

  The next day, Richler checked at Providence Hospital, run by the Sisters of Charity of Providence, for news about the major.

  “Yes,” a starchy nun named Sister Monica told him, “Major Reno is resting comfortably. He is heavily sedated with morphia. The operation on his tongue was a success. Doctor Hamilton is quite satisfied.”

  “May I see him?”

  “Are you related?”

  “No, I’m a friend.”

  She seemed surprised that such a man would have a friend, nodded, and led Richler down a dark varnished corridor and into a tan-painted ward where six patients lay on iron cots and a sharp foul odor hung in the air. It was not a rich man’s ward. Reno lay in the corner, covered with a wrinkled sheet and a thin brown blanket. He was lost to the world. His face had swollen, his lips distended cruelly, black and blue.

  “When will he come out of it?”

  “Not today,” the sister said. “And when he does, he won’t know you. It’s a painful surgery, and the doctor will keep him sedated for a few days.”

  “Will he be able to talk?”

  She shook her head, her white wimple twisting this way and that. “Never again.”

  “How much was taken?”

  “Not all. But he’ll never again use the Lord’s name in vain. We make words with the tip of our tongue and that’s gone.”

  “How will he … cope?”

  Sister Monica shook her head. “Pray for him,” she said.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  MARCUS RENO SAW HER THROUGH A MORPHIA HAZE AND THOUGHT she was Mary Hannah. He tried to speak to her, but words wouldn’t form.

  The woman was wrapped in white, and as his mind cleared he realized it was not his wife, long dead, but a nursing sister gently clasping a hand to his hot forehead. She had black eyes, pale lips, and a long face brimming with tenderness. A dark crucifix rested upon her bosom.

  It came to him that he was in Providence Hospital, in Washington, D.C., and that his tongue had been butchered. He tried to move his tongue and found he could not and that it was not there. He tried to form a word to utter, and could not, and his utterance was a hollow groan. He could not say love, or honor or courage.

  She smiled at him. “Shhh,” she said. “Don’t hurt it.”

  His mouth felt strange. Something scraped about within it, and he realized he was feeling the sutures sewn into what was left of his tongue. A wild despair ripped through him. He could not speak the simplest thought or make the humblest request.

  He stared helplessly at her, not knowing how to ask for anything. He wanted paper and pencil so he could make his needs known. And he wanted a hand mirror. He wanted to see what horrors lay in his mouth.

  His mind had clarified enough so he could think a little, and finally he reached for her hand with his and tried to imitate writing, pushing his thumb and finger together as if they held a pencil or pen. She watched, puzzled, and then understood.

  “You need a paper and pencil,” she said.

  He nodded and tried to thank her, but only an odd foggy groan rose from within him. He sobbed and turned his face from her.

  She took his hand into her own. “I’ll fetch something to write with,” she said.

  He nodded. He tried one more gesture, this time holding his hand up as if he were gripping the handle of a mirror, opening his swollen mouth, and staring intently at the mirror in his hand.

  “I know you want something,” she said, “but I don’t know what.”

  Marcus Reno felt utterly frustrated.

  “Tell me in writing,” she said.

  He nodded. The young sister left him. He watched her walk away, this woman who had given her whole life to this mission of caring for the sick in the name of her Lord.

  He peered about the tan ward, aware of others for the first time. Most of the men lay still. One groaned softly, as if every breath hurt him. One dark-haired patient stared.

  Reno could not even speak his own name. He tried again, wanting words to form, wanting the tip of his tongue to perform its accustomed duties, clipping the air, shaping the words, cutting off sound, but he could manage nothing. He fell back upon his pillow, knowing he had entered a new world.

  The young sister returned, carrying a notepad and a stubby pencil.

  “Here you are, Mr. Reno.”

  It’s major, Major Reno.

  He took hold of the pencil and forced his tobacco-stained fingers to write. They did not want to write, and he knew the morphia had not left his body.

  Mirror.

  She read the message. “Yes, if you wish. You’ll look better soon, you know.”

  I want to see inside my mouth.

  “Pretty soon you’ll look just like new. No swelling, no bruises.”

  She patted hi
m on the hand and disappeared once again, and he waited some while. But then she returned bearing a small, ivory-handled mirror.

  “I found one in the women’s ward,” she said. “Men hardly ever want to look at themselves.”

  He struggled to sit up a little, grasped the handle, and opened his mouth.

  “Oh, you shouldn’t look in there, not now. Soon it’ll be better.”

  Doctor Hamilton had cut away a tablespoon-sized chunk of tongue, including the entire tip, and most of the left side. Reno stared into the red ruin, studied the coarse black sutures, wondered how he would eat, push the food back into his throat.

  The nursing sister sat beside him and held his hand. He returned the mirror to her. He had seen the future, and knew how the rest of his life would spin out. He would return to the pensions office where he was a clerk, and file papers the rest of his days, apply to Congress for the restitution of his rank and honor, and fend off Isabella, who was suing him. She had repeatedly sued him during their separation, wanting maintenance he could not pay. She had forced him into court and now wanted forty a month out of his six hundred a year.

  The estate was gone. There was nothing to live on or to pay to her. He was penniless. Still, a man had to go on, somehow, some way.

  He remembered that day before the surgery, the eighteenth of March, when he had hosted the Herald man, Joseph Richler, and spent his limited energy remembering a great love rather than making his case for honor. Why had he done that? It made no sense. He couldn’t imagine it, squandering his last words dwelling on his love of Mary Hannah, and that brief, glowing time in his life.

  She had married him before she was twenty, and had died at thirty. Not much time. Why had he bored Richler with a matter so private, so far removed from the public controversies surrounding him? No wonder Richler hadn’t written a word, but had sat there politely, a courtesy to the doomed, lending an ear.