by Carla Kelly
I didn’t think much about Mary until a year later. In the early spring of 1876, Mary came to my attention again.
I was officer of the guard. It was around eleven o’clock at night, and I had just stretched out on the officer-of-the-day’s cot. I hated sleeping in the guardhouse. It was infested with graybacks, and just the thought of that made me start to itch. Down below me that night in the cells were a private sleeping off a mighty drunk and a German corporal waiting for garrison court-martial.
It was the night after payday. The army was paid every two months then, and that usually meant pretty intense card playing and drinking until the money was in someone else’s pockets.
The sergeant of the guard came puffing up from Suds Row and hollered to me to come quick. A corporal in the band had been drinking and had knifed his wife.
By the time I got there, she was already dead. He had slit her throat from ear to ear, and there was a mild, surprised look in her wide-open eyes that made me turn away. Blood was everywhere—on the ceiling, on the walls, and splattered on the iron stove, where it bubbled and stank.
The corporal was drunk and just beginning to realize what he had done. The sergeant jerked his hands behind his back and bound them tight with a rawhide thong. The two of them lurched across the slippery floor, heading for the guardhouse.
I heard children crying in the kitchen. I went in there to look and to get away from the awful mess in the front room.
Mary Murphy sat there with the children. She was holding two blood-daubed little girls on her lap. She was in her nightgown, which was flecked with blood. Again, she gave me that patient, relieved smile, and, again, I didn’t know what to do for her.
“Can you take the children?” I asked her finally, “At least, for a while?”
“Yes, certainly, Lieutenant.” Her voice had the Irish lilt so common back then in the Indian-fighting army.
While I supervised the removal of the body from the front room, Mary must have left with the children. When I looked in the kitchen later, they were gone.
The next morning, sometime before First Call, the corporal worked his hands free and looped his belt with his neck in it over the bolt in the wall of his solitary cell. He wasn’t in my company, but as I filled out the report, the adjutant assigned me to track down any living relatives to find a home for the orphans. As was the case in too many of these situations, I couldn’t find anyone.
Mary kept the girls. I know now what a burden that must have been to her, because when Adele and I had children, we had trouble making ends meet on officer’s pay. Mary was doing it on a laundress’s wages.
A few weeks after the incident, our company was sent north in time to get all the stuffing beat out of us by Crazy Horse on the Rosebud. I took an arrow in the back and was invalided back to Fort Laramie. While I was recovering, I did a lot of walking and often went down to the river. Mary was always there with the other laundresses, dipping water in good and bad weather, and washing down there on the bank when it was hot. She scrubbed, pounded, and beat the clothes on her washboard, all the time singing and talking to Flynn and the two little girls who clung to her skirts. They played at the river’s edge and made mud pies on the ground near her washtub. A month later, I was promoted and transferred to Company B, Second Cavalry (I knew someone influential in DC), then posted to Fort Bowie, Arizona Territory.
I never saw Mary again. I met Adele in Massachusetts a few years later while on furlough, and we have spent much of our time here in the Southwest. Whenever Adele and I quarrel, which isn’t too often, I think of Mary and her patient smile and wonder whatever became of her. I imagine she raised those children by herself. They are probably married now, with children of their own.
Well, never mind. Mary Murphy. I think of her.
A Leader of His Troops
First Sergeant Hiram Chandler, C Company, Third Cavalry, knew better than to laugh at a superior officer, but he was hard put not to turn away and blame his chortles on a coughing fit every time Lieutenant Arthur Shaw, currently commanding C Company, popped into the adjutant’s office to check for mail. It was at least the second time since that morning’s Guard Mount, so Hiram had to wonder just how a letter was supposed to materialize, since nothing had arrived by courier yet.
Hiram had a bird’s eye view to watch his lieutenant, seated as he was on his remount and dragging some new recruits through a bit of equitation on the parade ground. The winter had been typically long and dreary at Fort Fetterman, located on a bend in the Platte River. One result was penned-up, snuffy horses needing exercise and seeming to feel no regret at tossing troopers.
His own, well-mannered gelding gave a shake to the reins, as if dismayed at the horses and riders and wondering how on earth these soldiers would survive an upcoming season of endless patrol.
“They’ll figure it out,” Hiram said out loud to his horse, but not loud enough for the troopers to hear. “Amazing how an Indian war whoop sharpens the intellect.”
As for his lieutenant, Hiram admitted to feeling some of the man’s pain. This morning, Lieutenant Shaw had given Hiram a bleak look that said “No letters.” When they walked together to company barracks to make fatigue assignments, Shaw had heaved a mighty sigh.
“I as much as proposed in that last letter, sergeant, and did Miss Hinchcliffe bother to reply? Not on your tintype. What is wrong with women? It’s 1878! These are modern times!”
Maybe she’s saying no by her non reply, you dolt, Hiram thought. “Give her time, sir. Marriage is a big decision,” was the best he could offer. He had his own concerns.
Thinking about those concerns made him choose mercy over justice and release the troopers with enough time to feed and groom their horses and answer the bugler blowing Mess Call. Hiram ate his beans and bread with grape jelly with C Company’s other sergeant, who looked scarcely more cheerful than their lieutenant.
They knew each other pretty well. A raised eyebrow in Sergeant Crosby’s direction had given the man permission to unload about his own troubles with the US Mail and why in the Sam Hill nothing ever seemed to come his way from Connecticut.
Hiram listened, something he did well. His impromptu training had begun early in his army career, after the Battle of Cold Harbor. Hardly anyone else in his company survived and his commanding officer, a grim-lipped lieutenant, had needed a sergeant, any sergeant, in the worst way. The job was Hiram’s, for good or ill. Since he was only sixteen and greener than grass, he learned to listen. The less he said the wiser he looked, and truth to tell, if the man with the grievance talked long enough, he could usually solve his own problem.
The technique did not fail him even now, when he really wanted to spill out his own problems, instead of listen to someone else’s. Almost against his will he listened, and sure enough, Sergeant Crosby solved his own problem.
“Ah, well, Hiram, my sweetheart and I have weathered other assaults by the US Mail,” he said, after chasing the last bean around his tin plate. “This is my last five-year enlistment.”
“Then it’s back to Connecticut and a wedding?” Hiram asked, even though he knew the answer. It had been the subject of many a sergeants’ gathering.
“High time!” Sergeant Crosby gave up on the bean and stood up, ready for work and cheerful now, because Sergeant Chandler had listened. “You ever going to do something similar?” he asked Hiram, but didn’t wait for an answer. He left the mess hall whistling.
“I’m in love with Birdie O’Grady,” Hiram said softly to the retreating back. “I’m waiting for a letter too.”
Mary Bertha O’Grady, to be proper. He had met her at distant Fort Laramie at the same time Lieutenant Shaw had met Miss Virginia Hinchcliffe because Birdie was Miss Hinchcliffe’s maid. Birdie had been struggling with her mistress’s luggage at the Rustic Hotel, where the Cheyenne-Deadwood stage had dropped them off last year, and C Company had chanced to be escorting the mail from Fetterman.
Lieutenant Shaw had been a no-hoper from the first, whe
n Miss Hinchcliffe batted her pretty blues at him and asked for help to Major Dunlap’s quarters. “Mrs. Major Dunlap is my sister,” she said, “and I’ve come to help out.”
“Help out” was generally a euphemism for providing nursemaid services for a new baby, and giving the Eastern damsel a chance to look over prospects in the unmarried officer corps. In Miss Hinchcliffe’s case, Birdie O’Grady had been saddled with nursemaid duties, while the ladies played and Miss Hinchcliffe flirted.
She had been selective in her flirting, not wasting a moment’s time with officers who had no useful Eastern connections. The Shaw name and the Boston locale had caused her to target Lieutenant Shaw whenever he appeared at Fort Laramie from Fort Fetterman. Somehow that summer he appeared a lot, which meant Hiram invariably came along too.
Having caught the eye of the most congenial Birdie O’Grady, Hiram began to press his own advantage. It had been a simple matter to drop in on the pretty maid when he saw her on the Dunlap porch, pushing a cradle on its rockers. By the time autumn arrived, which meant sudden cold and snow far too early, he knew she was from County Kerry, twenty-two, and fortunate to have caught the Hinchliffes’ eye when they toured Ireland five years ago.
“No future in Ireland, so I went to Philadelphia with the Hinchcliffes,” she said.
An observant listener, he saw and heard her little sigh. “Do you miss County Kerry?” Hiram had asked.
She nodded and said nothing, but turned her attention to the baby. He kept watching her face, and saw her dab at her eye when she probably thought he was paying more attention to something on the parade ground.
After a moment of fussing with the little one, she turned her attention to him, her expression most kindly. Gadfreys, but she was a pretty girl, with deep red hair and brown eyes.
“Did you cry the first time you left home?” she had asked straight out, no varnish.
He had not, and he knew the truth was in order, because he did not want to lie to this charming woman. He told her about waiting to get up the nerve to leave the tyranny of his father’s farm, where so much labor fell to him because his older brothers had joined the Union Army. He didn’t say too much about that tyranny; even now it was a sore spot.
“Did you ever go back home, Sergeant?” she asked.
“Once,” he admitted, and continued his truth telling. “We were all uncomfortable and I was soon on my way to Fort Hays in Nebraska.” He shrugged. “I write now and then.”
She had given him a sympathetic eye, as if wondering about families who did not love and cherish each other. “I cried a lot of nights,” she told him, “and then I realized that was pointless. I am here, and here I’ll stay. Honestly, I like America.”
Hiram found his way to the major’s porch two or three more times before C Company, led by an even more reluctant Lieutenant Shaw, dragged itself away from Fort Laramie and returned to an isolated and suddenly more dreary Fort Fetterman.
Once he got over the mopes on that return journey, Lieutenant Shaw went into mile after mile of rapture over Miss Hinchcliffe. Since Captain Harvey, titular head of C Company, wasn’t the man for a lieutenant’s small talk, and the company’s second lieutenant was on detached duty, Sergeant Chandler ended up listening, whether he wanted to or not.
“She is of the Philadelphia Hinchcliffes,” the man had crowed, which only made Sergeant Chandler, raised on a poor and pathetic farm, wonder just how many breeds of Hinchcliffe inhabited the thirty-eight states. “We’re going back to Fort Laramie in December for the Christmas party,” the lieutenant had declared. “I don’t care how deep the snow is.”
Privately, Hiram didn’t care, either. He wanted to see Birdie O’Grady. Publicly, he worried as the thermometer crowded down deep in the bowl. Eighty miles was nothing to C Company in the summer, but in the winter?
The journey had to be accomplished, and not only because Lieutenant Shaw was a self-absorbed, spoiled young officer. Their company captain finally received a long-sought, three-month furlough to see his family in Rhode Island. C Company’s bold little band of volunteers was to escort Captain Harvey as far as Fort Laramie, where he could catch the Shy-Dead stage to Cheyenne and the Union Pacific.
“Only volunteers for the escort,” Captain Harvey had stipulated firmly. “That’s eighty nasty miles of frostbite I don’t want on my conscience.”
There were enough takers, knowing most Indians had more wisely hunkered down on reservations, where they would idle away a winter, then bolt in late spring to harass the US Army, as usual. Say what you want about the Lakota, they were nobody’s fool.
Captain Harvey had surprised Hiram by taking him aside in his quarters the day before they were to leave. He even poured him a glass of better bourbon than the sutler’s store sold and took Hiram into his confidence.
“When I’m home, I’ll try for another three-month extension,” the captain said, after clinking glasses. “That puts Lieutenant Shaw in command for six months. I’m certain I don’t need to tell you that he bears watching.”
“Yes, sir,” Hiram said, aware of Shaw’s many failures of command, most of which he had smoothed over because he was a long-time first sergeant and knew his business. “I am to keep him alive and teach him something without him knowing it.”
Captain Harvey had the good grace to laugh. “That is why men like you are so valuable to the army.” He leaned forward until the distance separating them had narrowed. “Sadly, Lieutenant Shaw is one of those pea-greeners who doesn’t even know how little he knows. Do your best, Sergeant; the army is counting on you.”
The captain laughed, maybe loosened up by the bourbon. “Shouldn’t admit this, but every night I pray, ‘Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I die before my time, please make Artie Shaw resign.’”
A huge smile on his face, Hiram assured his commanding officer he would make every effort to keep C Company alive and well, and so the matter stood. The trip to Fort Laramie had been accomplished with no frostbite, and Captain Harvey was seen off on a well-deserved furlough. C Company was granted two glorious days to enjoy Fort Laramie and the annual enlisted men’s ball, to which officers and ladies were invited.
The corporal and four privates who had volunteered had brought along their dress uniforms. Sergeant Chandler hadn’t bothered. Wise in the ways of humanity, he had no doubt that Birdie O’Grady would be collared for baby-tending duty. A less self-assured man would have brought along his own dress uniform, with its admittedly impressive hashmarks denoting years of hard service. That man was not Hiram Chandler. If Birdie admitted him into Major Dunlap’s quarters, he wasn’t going to waste a minute on small talk, or be uncomfortable in a high collar.
For all he knew she had captured some Fort Laramie sergeant’s eye and was married already; such things happened frequently at army posts. Not a wagering man, Hiram was still willing to bet that she had remained single. There had been something in her eyes when they said goodbye after their first meeting, a tenderness he had seen once before in another lady’s eyes before war and then death had separated them.
With no patience at all, Hiram waited until eight o’clock, when the dinner and dance were underway, then walked to Major Dunlap’s house. His heart skipped a medically impossible beat when Birdie O’Grady opened the door, baby in her arms.
He knew he had never seen anyone lovelier. Her hair was untidy and stuck into a funny little bun. Her eyes looked full of tears, which caused him some alarm. Maybe she had been hoping someone else would tap on her door. But no, the dimple in her left cheek appeared, and her eyes grew a little smaller as her smile increased.
“Why in the world were you crying, Miss O’Grady?”
“Birdie to you,” she said, and tucked the baby on her hip. Her gaze grew suddenly clear-eyed and he realized she was not a small talker, either. “I was afraid you had gone to the dance, like any sensible man who lives in an awful place like Fetterman, if I can believe rumors.”
Heavens almighty, that vo
ice! He could listen to her read the Manual of Arms and be entertained for hours. Her Irish lilt did more strange things to his heart. His was an Irish and a German army, this US Army after the war, and Hiram had heard many an accent. Not one of them had ever inclined him to want to kiss the speaker. He knew better, even now, but just barely.
She had asked him in, pointing him to the sofa and not an armchair, because she must have wanted to sit beside him. He sat and she lowered herself carefully next to him, her hand on the baby’s head now, the child protected against any jostling. A little worm in Hiram’s ear suggested she would be even more watchful of her own babies, and his face grew warm. He doubted he had blushed in twenty years, but here it came.
“I didn’t think you would be at the dance, Birdie,” he told her, and took a deeper breath. “I also wasn’t sure you were still a single lady. I know the frontier army.”
She laughed at that, a hearty sound that warmed him down to his toes. “Miss Hinchcliffe made me promise I would do no such thing.”
That same little ear worm inclined him to speak up. “True, I suppose, but what punishment could she enact if you had accepted some … some …”
“… sergeant’s?”
“Yes, for the sake of argument, some sergeant’s proposal? Fire you? You’d be married. So what?”
Again that laugh, but softer, because the baby seemed to be settling into her breast and neck. “Between you and me, Miss Hinchcliffe is not at her best whilst thinking.”
He mulled that over, imagining what a fine match Miss Hinchcliffe would be for Lieutenant Shaw, who had graduated somewhere near the murky bottom of West Point Class of ’75. But no, perhaps one of them should marry into brains. He shook his head and did his best not to snort.
