Page 13 of For This We Are Soldiers
“How long should I sleep?” she asked.
“Until Mess Call.” He made a face. “Wish it could be longer, but you know my kitchen skills.”
She just smiled.
“I’ll tend to sick call, and then make sure our patients are buffed and sparkling before I turn them over to you again,” he joked.
“And?” she prompted, when he seemed to hesitate.
“Ordinarily, I’d let you take another rest before Noon Mess, but I have to attend to the corpse in the dead house.”
“Glory, Suh, do youembalmtoo?”
“I am a man of amazing talents, Ozzie. Learned that skill in the war, as well as others.”
Suh took her arm and guided her to the side door, opening it onto a moonlit path. “Enough of that indelicate subject! I’ll wait right here until you go inside.” He indicated the two little buildings, pointing to the left. “That’s mine. The other one’s the dead house.” He chuckled. “Don’t mix them up.”
She stopped halfway down the path and took a few steps back toward him. He met her, a question in his eyes.
“Suh, I wonder just how successful Mr. Locke really is. His suit looks like it’s made of shoddy, and why on earth would anyone in Deadwood want to seeKing Lear?”
“I’ve been wondering that myself,” he replied. “D’ye think he’s putting on an act for us?”
She shrugged.
“If he wakes up with the chickens, I’ll see what I can learn. Go to bed, Ozzie. You’ve been more than kind.”
True to his word, he watched her until she stood on the porch of his quarters. His solicitude touched her. It wasn’t more than a stone’s throw to his quarters, but there he stood until she turned the doorknob.
“Lock the door,” he called. “This is still an army garrison.”
He had left a lamp burning in the small parlor. Even though she was ready to drop from exhaustion, Ozzie took the lamp and peered into his even smaller kitchen, which was tidy to the point of appearing unused. Considering his culinary skills—something he obviously hadn’t learned in the war—she figured he ate his meals in the hospital, when the matron wasn’t suffering from lumbago.
The other room was his bedchamber, with its narrow bed, three-drawer bureau, and a washbasin with a scrap of mirror at Suh-height for shaving. His night table had a lamp and two books:Les Miserablesand the US Medical Department Annual Report, more well-thumbed than Jean Valjean’s tale of woe and redemption.
No pictures hung on the walls in either room. The only thing she had noticed was a calendar of fetching, round-bottomed women in the kitchen. Suh had no more family than she did, a realization that saddened her.
Her eyes closed, Ozzie stripped down to her shimmy and crawled into bed. It was lumpy in all the right places, but the pillow smelled of that mysterious camphor. Her last thought was that she would have to ask him why on earth camphor.
A
Everyone slept, giving Colm time for the paperwork so dear to his heart. He discovered it was less dear than usual, mainly because he was picturing Ozzie Washington asleep in his bed. He was an organized, rational, intelligent, and efficient man. Even during those fraught days at the age of fourteen, when he stood beside his commanding officer in K Company, 69th Regiment of the Irish Brigade, drumming out the commands to direct soldiers into battle, he had not flinched or failed anyone. And here he was at thirty-four, a non-commissioned officer commanding some respect—mooning over a woman.
Dashed good thing I told you to lock the door, he thought in disgust.I am an idiot.
He was also disgusted with himself, too shy and ill-equipped to even make an attempt to court Ozzie Washington, as much as he wanted to. Life in an orphanage after his father had run off and his mother had died, then the army at fourteen, had promised him no childhood and no way to learn about the finer things.
Years had passed. The press of hospital work, the constant turmoil of fighting, and vast distances had meant no furloughs. The relative isolation of hospital life, and his neither-fish-nor-fowl rank as hospital steward, left him dangling in the vast gulf between enlisted society and the officer corps.
He belonged nowhere and to no one, and the sad fact chafed him raw. He was too shy to speak to Ozzie Washington of anything beyond commonplaces. He, Colm Callahan, organized man of considerable responsibility, didn’t know where to begin.
The ward was still shrouded in shadow, but Colm needed only one slat of light to assess his patients. He stood at the foot of the avulsed ankle’s bed, amused to see Ozzie’s careful handwriting—a contrast to his almost-doctor scrawl—listing each hour she had looked at the man and his condition.
My dear Ozzie, you are nearly as precise as I am, he thought. Private Henry slumbered on, just the way Colm wanted to find him at five o’clock before Reveille.
Private Jones was a different matter, tossing his head from side to side, the portrait of early-morning discomfort that Colm always associated with burns, his least-favorite injury. The soldier wasn’t quite awake yet, so the hospital steward pressed his hand on the private’s forehead. In a few minutes, he slept again. Funny how just a touch could calm. Some imp sitting on his shoulder suggested that he try touching Ozzie to see what happened. The thought made him roll his eyes.
As he sat with the private, thinking he might have to debride the burn when the light was better, Colm glanced toward Lysander Locke. The actor watched him with what appeared to be considerable interest. When Private Jones drifted deeper into sleep, he tiptoed to Lysander Locke’s bed and sat down. After a whispered conversation—at least as quiet as a man with vocal pipes like an actor could whisper—and a moment with the bedpan, Lysander appeared disposed to talk.
