Page 29 of For This We Are Soldiers
She was crying in earnest now. Ted didn’t hesitate to put his arm around her. She turned her face into his side and he felt her shake. He handed her his handkerchief this time and she blew her nose.
“I brought the rest back here because I … I … Corporal, I wanted to fix you something good for supper,” she finished in a rush. “Your face looks thin.”
“It always has,” he said, thinking of meals skipped and rough half-rations on campaign, and even poorer meals years earlier on a hardscrabble farm. The fact that she had been observing him touched Ted in a place so deep he knew he could never find it, even with a compass. “That’s not new.”
“Maybe not,” she told him, and he heard firmness in her voice now, a resolve that told him he might someday be in capable hands, if he played his cards right with this kind woman. “I was too impulsive, Corporal, and I should apologize for what I did.” She sat up, but didn’t move too far from his orbit, to his relief. “Since you were corporal of the guard, I felt I owed you the explanation. Should I pay three dollars to the post surgeon? I could slip it on his desk and he would never know.”
“I think he can stand the strain, Millie,” Ted replied, trying out her name and finding it much to his liking. “Let’s just call the whole matter a mystery.”
Sergeant Drummond nodded. “She won’t do it again, corporal.”
“I wish she could,” he said frankly. “What say you that I talk to the post surgeon and ask if there is anything we can do for those Indian women who beg for scraps? I helped inventory the commissary warehouse today and we have an amazing amount of rations.” He chuckled. “And barrels of surplus raisins.”
“Could you do that?” she asked, eager now, tears forgotten.
“If you call me Ted,” he said, then amended it. “Or even if you don’t. I may not succeed, but I can try.”
He looked into her eyes again, those deep brown pools of kindness and compassion and concern for others, and decided right then to be a better man than he had been only minutes ago, when he was just a pretty good fellow. He thought if he spent more time around Millie Drummond, he would become better still. He knew he loved her.
“Your wonderful soup is getting cold, corporal,” Sergeant Drummond said.
Ted gave Millie a slow wink and turned back to his cream of oyster soup, with its buttery sheen and little oyster crackers bobbing about as he stirred. He savored every mouthful, and then ate his bread and butter with relish. Her own dark eyes smiling, Mrs. Drummond brought out vanilla cream pudding, which made Corporal Sheppard laugh out loud.
When everything was devoured and Mrs. Drummond busied herself in the kitchen, Ted reached down into his growing vault of courage and asked Sergeant Drummond if he could sit for a while in the front room with his daughter.
“You may, corporal,” replied the sergeant he had once feared. “I’m headed back to my barrack to check on my boys. I trust you’ll dismiss yourself when the bugler sounds Tattoo.” He smiled. “But come back anytime, eh, Millie?”
His stomach full, his heart more full, Ted Sheppard sat on the family sofa, made from a packing crate, and cuddled Millie Drummond. He had a million things to say to her, but they could all wait. He held her close and inclined his head toward hers. Maybe in a few more visits he could ask her opinion of Bismarck and photography, or her views on women’s rights, or if she preferred dogs to cats, or any of those stupid little things that matter only to lovers.
It was enough now to hold her. He gave a discreet belch from all that rich food, and Millie laughed, but softly, so as not to alert her mother in the kitchen.
“I made butter cookies too,” she whispered in his ear.
Mary Murphy
Imet Mary Murphy on a train heading west to Fort Laramie. But I can’t really say that I met her, because no one introduced us then, and no one ever did later, either.
I was just out of the academy. It was August, and after graduation in June, I had rushed through a furlough at Newport Beach with my folks, and then received my orders to Company K, Second Cavalry, garrisoned at Fort Laramie, Wyoming Territory. According to my orders, I was to stop at Omaha Barracks long enough to attach myself to ten new recruits for Company K and escort them West.
I remember even now the feeling I had as I stood in the middle of the parade ground at Omaha Barracks and watched the heat shimmer off the quarters on Officers Row. I wondered what I was supposed to do. I had been assigned to the cavalry arm of the US Army, and Omaha Barracks was my first look at a cavalry post.
I eventually found my ten recruits. Some of them had served in the recent War of the Rebellion and reenlisted after busting out in civilian life. The others spoke German or Irish-accented English that I could barely understand. Most of them were older than I was. Luckily for all of us, a Sergeant O’Brien from Fort Laramie showed up before we departed. He piloted us West.
Mary’s name was on the company roster the sergeant handed me before we pulled out— “Mary Murphy, twenty, white, single, laundress.” The army hired females as laundresses to wash the company clothes. Each company of fifty to eighty men employed two or three laundresses, who received rations like the men and were paid one dollar per month by each soldier for doing his laundry. By 1877, most of the laundresses were replaced by wives of the soldiers, but this was 1875, and Mary was our laundress.
I noticed her when she got on the train, clutching a knotted bundle of clothing, a baby crooked in one arm, and a toddler dragging behind her. She was sweating like the rest of us, with half-moons of perspiration under her arms and a streak of sweat soaking through the back of her shirtwaist. That surprised me. I never really thought about women sweating. My mother never did nor any of the women I had even known.
The baby in her arms wasn’t more than a few months old. It had her dark hair and a placid expression that seemed out of place on the hot, crowded train. The toddler had the bored look of a child who has been on the move constantly. He ran ahead of his mother, found an empty seat, and crawled up on it. He smiled when the soldier across the aisle handed him a sugar candy.
Mary came down the aisle, swaying a little to keep her balance as the train started to move. She saw me, paused, and smiled. It wasn’t the usual ingratiating smile of an inferior but a relieved, patient kind of smile, as if I could help her.
The train lurched down the track, gathering speed, and the sudden motion threw Mary against the back of the seat in front of me. She stumbled and dropped her bundle but hung onto the baby, who started to cry. The soldier behind her put a hand on her waist for balance, and she blushed as the other men in the car nudged each other and snickered.
She sat down next to her boy, across the aisle from me. To quiet the baby, she opened her shirtwaist and began to nurse. I had never seen anything like that before. Mother had wet nurses for all of us, and the door to the nursery was always closed during feedings. Mary covered herself as best she could with her shirtwaist, and most of us looked away—including me.
The men who didn’t turn their heads divided their time between staring at Mary, making low comments to their bunkies, and laughing at me. I knew that my face was red. I could feel it.
Mary’s children were quiet most of that long, hot trip. The older boy (his name was Flynn) whimpered a bit in the heat as we chugged across Nebraska. I have never enjoyed crossing Nebraska, either by train or on horseback. It is either hot and flat or cold and flat. Anyway, Flynn was passed from soldier to soldier, and by the time we reached Cheyenne Depot, he had accumulated two revolvers carved out of soap, a wooden horse, and some jelly beans which melted and got all over my new boots.
