For This We Are Soldiers: Tales of the Frontier Army

by Carla Kelly

  She finished first. “Yes, Suh,” was all she said, but it said the earth, moon, planets, and a galaxy or two.

  No expert, he kissed Audra Washington. She kissed back, no expert either. They were both in good health; they had years to improve.

  In the cool of the enlisted men’s canteen, he told her of his plans to take the medical boards in the fall, and to find a little town that needed him in a territory with nothing but little towns. “I’ve saved for years. I can set up an office.”

  “I’ve saved too. We can have a house with running water.”

  She was on his lap then, both arms around him, head pressed to his chest, where his heart was doing things that, in a big city, would have landed him in a cardiac ward.

  “I wish … I wish we could tell that dear old man. Would you mind … If Deadwood doesn’t work out for Mr. Locke, we could find a place for him with us, couldn’t we?”

  “Certainly.”

  Lysander Locke could wait. Colm Callahan wanted to kiss Audra Washington a few more times before Mr. London got curious. Maybe they could honeymoon in Deadwood. Colm did like to check up on his discharged patients.

  A Season for Heroes

  Ezra Freeman died yesterday. I don’t usually read the obituaries; at least I didn’t until after Pearl Harbor. With four grandsons in the service now and one of them based in the Solomons and missing over a place called Rabaul, or some such thing, I generally turn to the obituaries after the front page and the editorials.

  There it was, right at the bottom of the column, in such small print that I had to hold the paper out at arm’s length … Ezra Freeman. There was no date of birth listed, probably because even Ezra hadn’t known that, but it did mention there were no surviving relatives and that the deceased had been a veteran of the Indian Wars.

  When I thought about Ezra Freeman, I ended up thinking about Mother and Father. Still carrying the newspaper, I went into my bedroom and looked at the picture of Mother and Father and D Company hanging on the wall next to the window. It was taken just before Father was promoted and bumped up to a desk job in San Antonio, so he is still leaning on a cane in the picture. Mother is sitting on a bench holding quite a small baby, and, next to her, his shoulders thrown back and his boots together, is Sergeant Ezra Freeman.

  The picture was taken at Fort Bowie, Arizona Territory. I was ten or eleven then, and that memory was one of the first that really stuck in my mind. It was where Father nearly got killed, my little brother was born, and I discovered a few things about love.

  My mother was what people call lace-curtain Irish. She was born Kathleen Mary Flynn. Her father owned a successful brewery in upstate New York, and Mother was educated at a convent, where she learned to speak French and make lace. She never owned up to learning anything else there, although she wrote with a fine copperplate hand and did a lot of reading when Father was campaigning. The nuns taught her good manners and how to pour tea the right way. Father could always make her flare up by winking at her and saying in his broadest brogue, “What’ll ye hev to dhrink now, Kate Flynn?”

  She had beautiful red hair that curled every which way. Little springs of it were forever popping out of the bun she wore low on her neck. She had a sprinkling of light brown freckles that always mystified the Indians. I remember the time an old San Carlos Apache stopped us as we were walking down Tucson’s main street. He spoke to Father in Apache. Father answered him, and we could see he was trying to keep a straight face.

  We pounced on him after the Indian nodded, gave Mother a searching look, and walked away.

  “What did he say, Father, what did he say?”

  Father shook his head and herded us around the corner where he leaned against the wall and laughed silently until tears shone on his eyelashes. Mother got exasperated.

  “What did he say, John?”

  “Oh, Kate Flynn,” he wheezed and gasped, “he wanted to know … Oh, sweet merciful me …” He went off in another quiet spasm.

  “John!” Mother didn’t approve of even wooden swearing, as she called it (which made garrison life a trial for her at times).

  “Sorry, Kathleen.” Father looked at her and winked. I could feel Mother stiffening up. “He wanted to know if you had those little brown dots all over.”

  We children screamed with laughter. Mother blushed. A lesser Victorian lady would have swooned, I suppose, but Tucson’s streets were dusty then, and Father was laughing too hard to catch her on the way down.

  Mother and Father met after Father’s third summer at West Point. He had been visiting friends of his family in Buffalo, and Mother had been a guest of one of the daughters. They had spent a week in each other’s company; then Mother had gone back to the convent. They corresponded on the sly for several months. Father proposed during Christmas furlough. They were married after graduation in June.

  There had been serious objections on both sides of the family. Papa Flynn made Father promise to raise any children as Catholics, and Grandpa Stokes wanted to be reassured that he and Grandma wouldn’t be obliged to call on the Flynns too often.

  Father agreed to everything, and he would have raised us as Catholics, except that we seldom saw a priest out on the plains. Besides, Mother wasn’t a very efficient daughter of the Church. I think she figured she’d had enough, what with daily Mass at the convent for six years straight. In spite of that, she always kept her little ebony-and-silver rosary in her top drawer under her handkerchiefs, and I only saw her fingering it once.

  I don’t remember what my father looked like in those early years. I do remember that he wasn’t too tall (few of the horse soldiers were), and that the other officers called him Handsome Johnny. Mother generally called him “the Captain” when we were around. “The Captain says you should do this, Janey,” or “Take the Captain’s paper to him, Gerald.” When he was promoted, she called him “the Major,” and the last name before he died was “the Colonel.” Fifteen years later, just before she died, Mother had started over and was calling him “the Lieutenant” again.

  I was born about a year after they were married. Pete came along two years later at Fort Sill, and Gerald was born at Fort Robinson near the Black Hills.

  When I was ten, we were assigned to Fort Bowie, Arizona Territory. That was in the fall of 1881, more than sixty years ago. Father commanded D Company of the Tenth Cavalry (the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry were composed entirely of Negro enlisted men, serving under white officers). The Indians called them Buffalo Soldiers, I suppose because their kinky black hair reminded them of the hair of a buffalo. Father always swore they were the best troops in the whole US Army and said he was proud to serve with them, even though some of his brother officers considered such duty a penance.

  My favorite memory of D Company was listening to them ride into Fort Bowie after duty in the field. They always came in singing. The only man who couldn’t carry a tune was my father. I remember one time right before Christmas when they rode out of Apache Pass singing “Star of the East,” Mother came out on the porch to listen, her hand on my shoulder.

  D Company had two Negro sergeants. Sergeant Albert Washington was a former slave from Valdosta, Georgia. He was a short, skinny little man who never said very much, maybe because he was married to Clara Washington, who did our washing and sewing and who had the loudest, strongest voice between the Mississippi and the Pacific.

  The other sergeant was Ezra Freeman. Ezra wasn’t much taller than my father, and he had the biggest hands I ever saw. They fascinated me because he was so black and the palms of his hands were so white.

  Ezra had a lovely deep voice that reminded me of chocolate pudding. I loved to hear him call the commands to the troops during Guard Mount, and I loved to watch him sit in his saddle. My father was a good horseman, but he never sat as tall as Ezra Freeman, and Father’s shoulders got more and more stooped as the years passed. Not Ezra’s. Last time I saw him sitting in his wheelchair, his posture was as good as ever; I think he would have died before he would
have leaned forward.

  Once I asked Ezra about his childhood. He said that he had been raised on a plantation in South Carolina. At the age of twelve, he and two sisters and his mother and father had been sold at the Savannah auction to help pay off his master’s gambling debts. He never saw any of his family again. A planter from Louisiana bought him, and he stayed a field hand until Admiral Farragut steamed up the Mississippi and ended slavery on the lower river. He sometimes spoke a funny kind of pidgin French that made my mother laugh and shake her head.

  But she never got too close to Ezra or to any of Father’s other troopers. None of the white women of the regiment did, either. Mother never would actually pull her skirts aside when the colored troopers passed, as some of the ladies did, but she had a formality about her in the presence of the Buffalo Soldiers that we weren’t accustomed to. At least, she did until the summer of 1882, when we came to owe Ezra Freeman everything.

  That was the summer Ignacio and his Apaches left the San Carlos Agency and raided, looted, burned, and captured women and children to sell in Mexico. The troops garrisoned at Bowie knew that Ignacio’s activities would touch them soon, and the early part of the summer was spent in refitting and requisitioning supplies and ordnance in preparation for the orders they knew would come.

  Mother wasn’t receiving any callers that summer. That was how we put it then. Or we might have said that she was “in delicate health.” Now, in 1942, we say, “she is expecting,” or, “she is in the family way.” Back then, that would have been altogether too vulgar and decidedly low class.

  Neither of them told us. I just happened to notice Mother one morning when I burst into her room and caught her in her shift. She bulged a little in the front, and I figured we were going to have another baby brother sometime. They seemed to lose interest in having girls after me. She didn’t say anything then, and I didn’t, either. Later on in the week, when we were polishing silver, she paused, put her hand on her middle, and stared off in space for a few minutes, a slight smile on her face.

  At breakfast a few mornings later, Father came right out and asked Mother if she wanted to go home for the summer to have the baby. The railroad had been completed between Bowie and Tucson, and it would be a much less difficult trip.

  “Oh, no, I couldn’t, John,” she replied.

  “Why not? I’ll probably be gone all summer anyway, and you know the surgeon travels with us.” Father wiped the egg juice off his plate with one swipe of his toast and grinned when Mother frowned at him.

  “Oh, I just couldn’t, John,” she repeated, and that was the end of that.

  Two weeks later, three of the cavalry companies and two of the infantry were detached from Bowie to look for Ignacio. Mother said her goodbyes to Father in their bedroom. As I think of it, few of the wives ever saw their husbands off from the porch, except for Lieutenant Grizzard’s wife, and everyone said she was a brassy piece anyway.

  We kids followed Father out onto the porch. My little brother Pete wore the battered black felt hat Father always took on campaign, and Gerald lugged out the saber, only to be sent back into the house with the useless thing. Father let me carry out his big Colt revolver, and I remember that it took both hands to carry it.

  He took the gun from me and pushed it into his holster. He put his hand on my head and shook it back and forth. Then he knelt down and kissed me on both cheeks.

  “Keep an eye on Mother for me, Janey,” he said.

  I nodded, and he stood up and shook my head again. He plucked the black hat off Pete’s head and swatted him lightly with it. He knelt down again, and both Pete and Gerald clung to him.

  “Now, you two mind Janey. She’s sergeant major.”

  D Company rode out at the head of the column after Guard Mount, and the corporal who taught school for the garrison’s children was kind enough to dismiss us for the day.

  Summers are always endless to children, but that summer of 1882 seemed to stretch out like cooling taffy. One month dragged by, and then two, and still the men didn’t return. In fact, another company was sent out, and Bowie had only the protection of one understrength company of infantry and the invalids in the infirmary.

  The trains stopped running between Bowie and Tucson because of Ignacio and his warriors, and I recall how irritated Mother was when the last installment of a serial in Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly never showed up. The only mail that got through was official business that the couriers brought in.

  But Mother was irritated with many things that summer. She usually didn’t show much until the eighth month, but this time she had Clara Washington sew her some new Mother Hubbards before her sixth month. Her ankles were swollen too. I rarely saw Mother’s legs, but once I caught her on the back porch one evening with her dress up around her knees.

  “Oh, Mama!” was all I said.

  It startled her, and she dropped her skirts and tucked her feet under the chair. “Jane, you shouldn’t spy on people!” she scolded, and then she smiled when she saw my face. “Oh, I’m sorry, Jane. And don’t look so worried. They’ll be all right again soon.”

  Toward the middle of August, we began to hear rumors in the garrison. Ordinarily we just shrugged off rumors, but the men were now quite overdue, and Ignacio hadn’t been subdued or chased back across the border. One rumor had the troops halfway across Mexico pursuing Apaches, and another rumor had them in San Diego waiting for a troop train back.

  On the eighteenth of August (I remember the date because it was Gerald’s fifth birthday), the rumor changed. A couple of reservation Apaches slouched in on their hard-ridden ponies to report a skirmish to the south of us, hard by the Mexican border. Captain Donnelly, B Company, Fourth Infantry, was senior officer of the fort then, and he ignored the whole thing. The Indians weren’t students of the truth, and they often confused Mexican and US soldiers.

  I mentioned the latest rumor to Mother, who smiled at me and gave me a little shake. I went back outside to play, but I noticed a look in her eyes that hadn’t been there before.

  Two days later, the troops rode in. They were tired, sunburned, and dirty, and their remounts looked mostly starved. Mother came out on the porch. She leaned on the porch railing and stood on one foot and then the other. I saw that she had taken off her wedding ring and Father’s West Point ring that she always wore on her first finger. Her hands looked swollen and tight.

  The troops assembled on the parade ground and some of the women and children ran out to them. We looked hard for D Company, but it wasn’t there. Mother sat down on the bench under the parlor window.

  Several of the officers dismounted and stood talking together. One of them gestured our way, and Mother got up quickly. When Major Connors started walking over to our quarters, she backed into the house and jerked me in with her.

  “Listen to me, Jane Elizabeth,” she hissed, and her fingers dug into my shoulders until I squirmed in her grasp. “You take their message.”

  “But Mother,” I whined, trying to get out of her grip, “why don’t you?”

  “It’s bad luck,” she said and turned and went into the parlor, slamming the door behind her.

  Major Connors didn’t seem too surprised that Mother wouldn’t come out to talk to him. I backed away from him myself because he smelled so awful. “Jane, tell your mother than D Company and A are both a bit overdue but not to worry because we expect them any time.”

  After he left, I told Mother, but she wouldn’t come out of the parlor until suppertime.

  Several days passed, and then a week, and still no sign of either company. None of the other officers’ wives said anything to Mother about the delay, but several of them paid her morning calls and brought along baked goods.

  “Why are they doing this, Mama?” I asked her, after Captain O’Neill’s wife left an eggless custard.

  Mother murmured something about an early wake. I asked her what she meant, but she shook her head. My brothers and I downed all the cakes and pies, but Mother wouldn’t eat
any of it.

  One night when I couldn’t sleep because of the heat, I crept downstairs to get a drink of water from the pump. Mother was sitting on the back porch, rocking slowly in the moonlight. She heard me and closed her fist over something in her lap, but not before I’d seen what it was: the little ebony rosary she kept in her drawer. I could tell by the look in her face that she didn’t want me to say anything about it. She rocked, and I sat down near her on the porch steps.

  “Mama, what happens if he doesn’t come back?” I hadn’t really meant to say that; it just came out. She stopped rocking. I thought she might be angry with me, but she wasn’t.

  “Oh, we’ll manage, Jane. It won’t be as much fun, but we’ll manage.”

  “Would … would we move back east?”

  She must not have thought that far, because she was silent a while. “No, I don’t think so,” she said finally. “I like it out west. So did … does … your father.”

  She rocked on in silence, and I could hear, above the creak of the rocking chair, the click of the little ebony beads. I got up to go, and she took my hand.

  “You know, Jane, there’s one terrible thing about being a woman.”

  I looked down at her. Her ankles and hands were swollen, her belly stretched tight against the nightgown that usually hung loose on her, and her face was splotched. “What’s that, Mama?”

  “The waiting, the waiting.”

  She didn’t say anything else, so I went back upstairs and finally fell asleep after the duty guards had called the time from post to post all around the fort.

  Another week passed, and still no sign of the companies. The next week began as all the others had. The blue sky was cloudless, and the sun beat down until the whole fort shimmered. Every glance held a mirage.