For This We Are Soldiers: Tales of the Frontier Army Page 8

  It was just after Stable Call that I heard the singing. The sound came up faintly, and for a few moments, I wasn’t sure I heard anything except the wind and the stable noises to the south of us. But there it was again, and closer. It sounded like “Dry Bones,” and that had always been one of Father’s favorite songs.

  I turned to call Mother, but she was standing in the doorway, her hand shading her eyes as she squinted toward Apache Pass. People popped out of houses all along Officers Row, and the younger children began pointing and then running west past the administration building and the infirmary.

  There they were, two columns of blue filing out of the pass, moving slowly. The singing wasn’t very loud, and then it died out as the two companies approached the stables. Mother took her hand away from her eyes. “He’s not there, Janey,” she whispered.

  I looked again. I couldn’t see Father anywhere. She stood still on the porch and shaded her eyes again. Then she gave a sob and began running.

  So many nights in my dreams I’ve seen my mother running across the parade ground. She was so large and clumsy then, and, as I recall, she was barefoot, but she ran as lightly as a young child, her arms held out in front of her. In my dreams, she runs and runs until I wake up.

  I was too startled to follow her at first, and then I saw her run to the back of the column and drop down on her knees by a travois one of the horses was pulling. The animal reared back and then nearly kicked her, but I don’t think she even noticed. Her arms were around a man lying on the travois. As I ran closer, I could see him raise his hand slowly and put it on her hair.

  I didn’t recognize my father at first. His hair was matted with blood, and I thought half his head had been blown away. There was a bloody, yellowish bandage over one eye, and his face was swollen. He turned his head in my direction, and I think he tried to smile, but he only bared his teeth at me, and I stepped back.

  I wanted to turn and run, and I didn’t see how Mother could stand it. But there she was, her head on his chest. She was saying something to him I couldn’t hear, and all the while, he was stroking her hair with that filthy, bruised hand.

  I backed up some more and bumped into Ezra Freeman. I tried to turn and run, but he held me there. “Go over to him, Janey,” he urged and gave me a push. “He wants you.”

  I couldn’t see how Ezra could interpret the slight movement of Father’s hand, but he was pushing me toward the travois. “Pa? Pa?” I could feel tears starting behind my eyelids.

  He said something that I couldn’t understand because it sounded as if his mouth was full of mashed potatoes. I leaned closer. He smelled of blood, sweat, dirt, and wood smoke. As I bent over him, I could see under the bandage on his face and gasped to see teeth and gums where his cheek should have been.

  Mother was kneeling by him, her hand on his splinted leg. She took my hand in her other hand and placed it on his chest. He tried to raise his head, and I leaned closer. I could make out the words “Janey” and “home,” but what he was saying was unimportant. All of a sudden I didn’t care what he looked like. He was my father, and I loved him.

  He must have seen my feelings in my eyes because he lay back again and closed his eye. His hand relaxed and let go of mine. I helped Mother to her feet, and we stood back as two orderlies lifted him off the travois and onto a stretcher. He moaned a little, and Mother bit her lip.

  They took him to the infirmary, and Ezra Freeman walked alongside the stretcher, steadying it. Mother would have followed him, but the post surgeon took one look at her and told her to go lie down, because he didn’t have time to deliver a baby just then. Mother blushed, and the two of us walked back to our quarters hand in hand.

  Mother spent an hour that evening in the infirmary with Father. She came home and reported that he looked a lot better and was asleep. We went upstairs then, and while she tucked Gerald and Pete in bed, I sat on the rag rug by Pete’s army cot, and she told us what happened.

  “The two companies had separated from the main detachment and after a couple days, they found an Apache rancheria. It was at the bottom of a small canyon near Deer Spring. When they tried to surround it before daybreak, they were pinned down by rifle fire from the rim of the canyon.” Mother paused, and I noticed that she had twisted her fingers into the afghan at the foot of Pete’s bed.

  He sat up. “What happened, Ma? What happened?” He pulled on her arm a little, and his eyes were shining. He had been down at the creek that afternoon and hadn’t seen Father yet. The whole thing was still just a story to him.

  While the candle on the nightstand burned lower and lower, Mother told how Father had been shot while trying to lead the men back to the horses. He had lain on an exposed rock all morning until Ezra Freeman crawled out and pulled him to safety. The two men had stayed in a mesquite thicket, firing at the Apaches until the sun went down. They withdrew in the dark.

  Peter fell asleep then, but Mother went on to say that the men had holed up for several days about sixty miles south of us because they were afraid Father would die if they moved him. When it looked like he would make it, they started slowly for the fort.

  Gerald fell asleep then, and as Mother pulled the sheet up around him, she said to me, “I can’t understand it, Jane. Everyone else thought the Captain was dead. Why did Sergeant Freeman do it?”

  She tucked me in my bed, but I couldn’t sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I kept seeing Father on that travois and the look in Mother’s eyes as she knelt by him. I got out of bed and started into Mother’s room.

  She wasn’t there; the bed hadn’t even been slept in. I tiptoed down the stairs, stepping over the third tread because it always squeaked. As I groped to the bottom in the dark, I saw the front door open and then close quietly.

  I waited a few seconds, then opened it and stood on the porch. Mother was dressed and wrapped in a dark shawl, despite the heat, and walking across the parade ground. She wasn’t going toward the infirmary, so I trailed her, skirting around the parade ground and keeping in the shadow of the officers’ quarters. I didn’t know where she was going, but I had a feeling that she would send me back if she knew I was following her.

  She passed the quartermaster’s building and the stables, pausing to say something to the private on guard, who saluted her and waved her on. I waited until he had turned and walked into the shadows of the blacksmith shop before I continued.

  I could see now that she was heading for Suds Row, where the enlisted men with families lived. Halfway down the row of attached quarters she stopped and knocked on one of the doors. I ducked behind the row until I came to the back of the place where she had knocked. There was a washtub in the yard, and I staggered with it to the window, turned it over, and climbed up.

  Ezra lived in the barracks with his company, but Mother must have found out he was visiting Sergeant Jackson Walter of A Company and Jackson’s wife, Chloe. Mother and Ezra were standing in the middle of the room. She had taken off her shawl. Freeman offered her the chair he had been sitting in, but she shook her head. I could see Chloe knitting in the rocking chair by the kitchen.

  Mother was silent a few moments. “I just wanted to say thank you, Sergeant Freeman,” she said finally. Her voice sounded high and thin, like it did after Grandpa Flynn’s funeral three years before.

  “Oh … well … I … heavens, ma’am, you’re welcome,” Ezra stammered.

  She shrugged her shoulders and held out her hands. “I mean, Sergeant, you didn’t even know if he was alive, and you went out there anyway.”

  He didn’t say anything. All I could hear was the click of Chloe’s bone needles. I barely heard Mother’s next word.

  “Why?”

  Again that silence. Ezra Freeman turned a little, and I could see his face. His head was down, he had sucked in his lower lip, and he was crying. The light from the kerosene lamp was reflected in his tears, and they shone like diamonds on his black face.

  “Well, by the Eternal, ma’am … he’s the only man I ever serv
ed of my own free will.” He paused. “And I guess I love him.”

  Mother put her hands to her face, and I could see her shoulders shaking. Then she raised her head, and I don’t think she ever looked more beautiful. “I love him too, Ezra. Maybe for the same reason.”

  Then she sort of leaned against him, and his arms went around her, and they held onto each other, crying. She was patting him on the back like she did when Father hugged her, and his hand was smoothing down her hair where it curled at the neck.

  I am forever grateful that the white ladies and gents of Fort Bowie never saw the two of them together like that, for I am sure they would have been scandalized. As I stood there peeking in the window, I had the most wonderful feeling of being surrounded by love, all kinds of love, and I wanted the moment to last forever.

  But the moment passed too soon. They both backed away from each other, and Mother took out a handkerchief from the front of her dress and blew her nose. Ezra fished around in his pocket until he found a red bandanna and wiped his eyes. He sniffed and grinned at the same time.

  “Ma’am, I ain’t cried since that Emancipation Proclamation.”

  She smiled at him and put her hand on his arm but didn’t say anything. Then she nodded to Chloe, put her shawl around her head again, and turned to the door. “Good night, and thank you again,” she said before she went outside.

  I jumped off the washtub and ran down the little alley behind the quarters. Staying in the shadows and watching out for the guards, I ran home. I wanted to be home before Mother because I knew she would look in on us before she went to sleep.

  She did. She opened the door a crack, and then opened it wider and glided in. I opened my eyes a little and stretched, as if she had just wakened me. She bent down and kissed me, then kissed Gerald and Pete. She closed the door, and soon I heard her getting into bed.

  One week later, a couple of troopers from D Company carried Father home on a stretcher. The doctor insisted on putting him in the parlor on the daybed because he didn’t want him climbing the stairs.

  The post surgeon had done a pretty good job on Father’s face. The bandages were off so the air could get at his cheek, which was a crisscross maze of little black sutures. He had lost his left eye and wore a patch over the socket. Later on, he tried to get used to a glass eye but never could get a good fit. He gradually accumulated a cigar box full of glass eyes, and we used them to scare our city cousins and play a kind of lopsided marbles game. His mouth drooped down at one corner and made him look a little sad on one side. None of the other officers called him Handsome Johnny again.

  The day after he had been set up in the parlor, Mother went into labor. The post surgeon tried to stop him, but Father climbed the stairs slowly, hand over hand on the railing, and sat by Mother until their third boy was born.

  An hour later, the doctor motioned my brothers and me into the room. Mother was lying in the middle of the bed, her red hair spread around the pillow like a fan. Her freckles stood out a little more than usual, but she was smiling. Father sat in an armchair near the bed holding the baby, who had a red face and hair to match.

  “What are you going to name him?” I asked, after giving him a good look.

  Mother hesitated a moment, then looked over at the baby and Father. “Ezra Freeman Stokes,” she replied quietly, her eyes on Father.

  He said something to her that I couldn’t understand because his face was still swollen. Mother kept her eyes on his and snapped back to him in a low voice that sent shivers down my back. “I don’t give a … a flea’s leap in that hot place what the garrison thinks! He’s going to be Ezra Freeman!”

  None of us had ever heard Mother come that close to swearing, and Father nearly dropped the baby. That was how Ez got his name. A month later, Father was promoted to major. By the end of the year, he was awarded the Medal of Honor for “meritorious gallantry under fire at Deer Spring.” I remember how he pushed that medal around in its plush velvet case, and then closed the box with a click. “I’m not the one who should be getting this,” he murmured. No one could ever prevail upon him to wear it. Even when he was laid out in his coffin years later, with his full dress uniform and all his medals, I never saw that one.

  With his promotion, Father was transferred to the Third Cavalry, a white regiment. We didn’t see Ezra Freeman after that and never did correspond with him because he couldn’t read or write. Somehow we always heard about him from the other officers and men of D Company, and every year, at Christmas, Mother sent him a dried apple fruitcake and socks she had knitted. We knew when he retired twenty-five years later and learned in 1915 that he had entered the Old Soldiers’ Home in Los Angeles.

  Before Father’s stroke, he paid him one visit there. I remembered that it was 1919, and Father went to tell him that Captain Ezra F. Stokes had died in France of Spanish influenza.

  “You know, Janey,” he told me after that visit, “Ez may have been my son, but I ended up comforting Sergeant Freeman. I almost wish I hadn’t told him.”

  After Father passed away, Mother paid Ezra a yearly visit. She insisted on going alone on the train up from San Diego, but when her eyesight began to fade, she finally relented and let me come with her once. As it turned out, it was her last trip. I think she knew.

  Sergeant Freeman was in a wheelchair by then, and after giving me a nod and telling me to wait there, Mother pushed Ezra down the sidewalk to a little patio under the trees. She sat next to him on the bench, and they talked together. After about half an hour, she took an object out of her purse, leaned toward Ezra, and put something on the front of his robe. I could tell that Ezra was protesting. He tried to push her hands away, but she went ahead and put something on him. It flashed in the sunlight, but I was too far away to make out what it was.

  She took a handkerchief out of her pocket and wiped his eyes. She sat down again beside him, and they sat there together until his head nodded forward, and he fell asleep. She wheeled him back to the far entrance of the building, and I never had a chance to say goodbye.

  She was silent on the trip home. After we got to the house, she said, “Jane, I feel tired,” and went to bed. She drifted in and out of sleep for the next two days, and then she died.

  After the funeral, I was going through her things when I came across the plush velvet case containing the Medal of Honor Father had been awarded for Deer Spring. I snapped it open but the medal was gone. I knew where it went.

  And now Ezra’s dead.

  Well. I can see I’ve spent more time on this than I intended. I hear the postman’s whistle outside. I hope there’s a letter from my daughter, Ann. It’s her oldest boy, Steve, who has been missing over Rabaul for more than a month now. I don’t suppose I can give her much comfort, but I can tell her something about waiting.

  Take a Memo

  Not for the first time, Corporal of the Day Theodore Sheppard wondered why someone, likely an officer, had decreed the officer of the day building be constructed so far away from the commanding officer’s quarters. The morning had proved quiet, so he leaned in unsoldierly fashion against the doorframe, looking south.

  Granted, there were many reasons why a distant figure would be striding in front of Officers Row, headed toward him. Ted could tell the figure getting closer and closer walked with more purpose than someone out for a mere stroll. As soon as he saw a piece of paper in the soldier’s hand, he knew the matter would soon involve him. Ted straightened up and then relaxed again when he discerned no gold bars on shoulders.

  Whatever the concern, the corporal of the day hoped for an outdoor assignment. Each warm and sunny August day at Fort Buford in Dakota Territory was a jewel attached to the crown of summer, which would soon turn—and quickly—into howling winds, endless snow, and temperatures registering so low in the bulb that he hadn’t the courage to look at the infernal glass tube.

  The only thing better than time spent outdoors now would be a summons to the post hospital. Corporal Sheppard didn’t care for the sickbed
more than any other healthy man, but the hospital held an attraction that almost made him want to whine about fictitious illness at sick call—Millie Drummond.

  A higher-than-normal round of catarrh, pleurisy, and bronchitis in January year of our Lord 1880 had compelled the post surgeon to search for an assistant hospital matron. He had found one in Millie, after promising her mother that Millie wouldn’t be called upon to bathe soldiers, or help the surgeon beyond dealing with the more socially acceptable parts of a person for an unmarried woman to tend.

  Even that wasn’t good enough for Millie’s father, first sergeant in A Company, Seventh Infantry, who had told Ted all this one night when both of them were filling in for others in the guardhouse. “She’s no delicate girl, is Millie,” Angus Drummond had said in his Lowland Scots brogue. “She’s a girl, though, and doesn’t need to see men’s parts yet. She’s spending her time in the kitchen. Her mother and I insisted.”

  Ted could have argued that Millie was more than a girl. He knew she was almost twenty, and back from several years of schooling in Chatfield, Minnesota, where other Drummonds had settled. She was red of hair like her father, but slightly tan of cheek like her mother, who had not-so-distant relatives among the Minnesota Leech Lake Ojibwe. Oh, and her brown eyes were deep pools of possibility. Ted reasoned that to a father, Millie would always be a little girl.

  The corporal knew several of his equals in rank and one or two sergeants had proposed to Millie. Each time he heard of this, Ted prepared to bow to the inevitable. So far, no one had convinced Millie Drummond to leave the parental nest.

  He had spent many a night lying in his solitary room—one unimaginably wonderful benefit of corporal status—wondering what he could possibly offer Miss Drummond. He was tall and sturdy, as a good corporal of infantry should be, and well on his way to advancement to sergeant. He had all his hair and all his teeth and had recently been selected as Fort Buford’s superior marksman. He subscribed to the Indiana Herald in his hometown of Huntington, and frequently checked out books from the post library. He was temperate in his habits and neither smoked nor chewed. Whether he was a lover or not was probably open to dispute, considering the paucity of opportunity in Dakota Territory. He knew he had the confidence; time would tell.