Page 22 of For This We Are 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.
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.
