Page 2 of For This We Are Soldiers
“You’ve been ranked.”
Emma shook her head. Whatever was he talking about? Ranked?
“I don’t understand, Lieutenant.”
He took a step toward her, but he was careful to stay near the door. “Well, you know, ma’am, ranked. Bumped. Bricks falling?”
She stared at him and wondered why he couldn’t make sense. Didn’t they teach them English at the academy? “I’m afraid it’s still a mystery to me, Lieutenant.”
He rubbed his hand over his head and shifted from one foot to the other. “You’ll have to move, ma’am.”
“But I just did,” she protested, at the same time surprised at herself for springing to the defense of such a defenseless house.
“I mean again,” the lieutenant persisted. “Another lieutenant just reported on post with his wife, and he outranks your husband. Yours is the only quarters available, so you’ll have to move.”
It took a minute to sink in. “Who? I can’t …”
She was interrupted by the sound of boots on the front porch. The man who stepped inside was familiar to her, but she couldn’t quite place him until he greeted her; then she knew she would never forget that squeaky voice. He was Hart’s old roommate from the academy, and she had met him once. She remembered that Hart had told her how the man spent all his time studying and never was any fun at all.
“Areyoutaking my house?” she accused the lieutenant.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Sanders,” he said, but he didn’t sound sorry at all.
“But … but … didn’t you just graduate with my husband two months ago? How can you outrank him?” she asked, wanting to throw both of the officers out of her home.
He smiled again, and she resisted the urge to scrape her fingernails along his face. Instead, she stamped her foot, and white flakes from the ceiling floated down.
“Yes, ma’am, we graduated together, but Hart was forty-sixth in class standing. I was fifteenth. I still outrank him.”
As she slammed the pots and pans into a box and yanked the sheets off the bed, she wished for the first time that Hart had been a little more diligent in his studies.
Two privates moved her into quarters that looked suspiciously like a chicken coop. She sniffed the air in the one-room shack and almost asked one of the privates if the former tenants she ranked out had clucked and laid eggs. But he didn’t speak much English, and she didn’t feel like wasting her sarcasm.
Emma swept out the room with a vigor that made her cough, and by nightfall when she crawled into the rustling bed, she speculated on the cost of rail fare from Cheyenne to Sandusky.
The situation looked better by morning. The room was small, to be sure, but she was the only one using it, and if she cut up a sheet, curtains would make all the difference. She hung up the Currier and Ives lithograph of sugaring off in Vermont and was ripping up the sheet when someone knocked at the door.
It was the adjutant again. He had to duck to get into the room, and when he straightened up, his head just brushed the ceiling. “Mrs. Sanders,” he began, and it was an effort. “I hope you’ll understand what I have to tell you.”
Emma sensed what was coming and braced herself, but she didn’t want to make it easy on him. “What?” she asked, seating herself in the rocking chair and folding her hands in her lap. As she waited for him to speak, she remembered a poem she had read in school called “Horatio at the Bridge.”
“You’ve been ranked out again.”
She was silent, looking at him for several moments. She noticed the drops of perspiration gathering on his forehead and that his Adam’s apple bobbed up and down when he swallowed.
“And where do I go from here?” she asked at last.
He shuffled his feet and rubbed his head again, gestures she was beginning to recognize. “All we have is a tent, ma’am.”
“A tent,” she repeated.
“Yes, ma’am.”
At least I didn’t get attached to my chicken coop, she thought, as she rolled up her bedding. She felt a certain satisfaction in the knowledge that Hart’s roommate and his wife—probably a little snip—had been bumped down to her coop by whoever it was that outranked him. “Serves him right,” she said out loud as she carried out the whatnot and closed the door.
The same privates set up the tent at the corner of Officers Row. It wasn’t even an officer’s tent. Because of the increased activity in the field this summer, only a sergeant’s tent could be found. The bedstead wouldn’t fit in, so the private dumped the bed sack on the grass and put the frame back in the wagon. She started to protest when they drove away, but remembering his shortage of useful English, she saved her breath. They came back soon with a cot.
She had crammed in her trunks, spread the army blanket on the grass, and was setting up the rocking chair when someone rapped on the tent pole.
