Page 30 of For This We Are Soldiers
It did take time to reach Cheyenne Depot. We were delayed by buffalo on the tracks and more often by hotboxes, when the axle-bearing joints heated up. The train had to stop and cool down before proceeding.
Mary’s baby began to fret as we neared Cheyenne. Adele has told me since that Mary’s milk was probably drying up, and the baby wasn’t getting enough, but I didn’t know anything then. Mary spent most of her time walking up and down the aisle, rocking the baby (I never did learn its name), and making crooning sounds. The baby developed a thin cry, and I noticed that whenever it started to wail, some of the older soldiers would look at each other. Sergeant O’Brien crossed himself a couple of times.
At Cheyenne Depot, the horses were unloaded, and there was a Dougherty wagon from the fort to meet us. It filled up quickly. There were two captains’ wives and children from first class to fit in, plus some of their luggage. There wasn’t any room for Mary and her children in the wagon, so the tailgate was lowered, and they perched on that.
The other women stayed as far away from Mary as they could, and I heard one of the wives commanding her children not to play with Flynn. I’m sure Mary heard too, but her face was peaceful. She hugged her crying baby and sang to it.
The baby cried more and more, with a gasping sound that made me wish the surgeon was along. I found myself riding back by the Dougherty to check on the baby. They were eating dust back there. Flynn choked and sputtered until a private swung him up in his saddle and rode back toward the front of the column.
We camped that night at Lodgepole Creek, and Mary’s baby kept me awake. Not because it was crying, because by then, it wasn’t crying. It struggled and fought for breath in the heat that refused to leave us, even after the sun went down.
I found myself breathing along with the baby. I heard Mary whispering Hail Mary over and over, and my lips moved along with hers in the dark on the other side of the Dougherty.
I will never forget the second night out when we halted just before dusk at Chug Station. Mary jumped off the wagon before it rolled to a complete stop and hurried to the sergeant. She gestured to the baby, and I couldn’t hear what she said, but O’Brien dismounted as if his saddle were on fire and bent over the infant. He called to me.
“Lieutenant, this baby’s dead.”
Heads poked out of the Dougherty wagon and then were pulled in again.
The baby was dead. It was even getting a little stiff.
“How long, Mary?” the sergeant asked.
“Since before the last rest stop.” Mary’s voice quavered, and she looked at me. “I just couldn’t say anything.”
That was the first time I had ever seen anyone dead before. That dead baby touched me more than I care to remember, and I have seen much death here on the plains in the twenty years since. The baby’s eyes were closed, and the dark hair was curly and damp from Mary’s perspiration. Except for a china-doll appearance that made my knees weak, the baby looked asleep.
The sergeant detailed a couple of privates to dig a little grave under a cottonwood by the river. Mary wrapped her shawl around the body and handed it to me.
“Here, please,” she begged. “I can’t do it.”
I knelt by the hole and put the baby in. Mary covered her face with her hands, and I saw tears running through her fingers. The other women stayed near the wagon. I knew why. They had been taught, same as I, to avoid women like Mary, those bits of flotsam without husbands and with a string of children who followed the army from post to post. Mary needed comfort, but none of us gave her any.
Mary clung to Flynn the rest of the journey, her face wearing a white, transfigured look that I could see even under the road dust that covered all of us. She clutched her little boy to her and hung onto the chains that held the tailgate.
The remainder of the trip is still a painful memory. I was the ranking officer. With the death of that baby, responsibility for the lives of others descended on me and has been a burden ever since. And when Mary looked at me with her patient expression, I knew I was ill equipped.
Once we arrived at Fort Laramie, I forgot about Mary. Well, I did think about her every time my laundry was returned washed, ironed, and folded neatly on top of my campaign trunk. She did a good job with shirts. There were none of the little scorch marks and wrinkles I later came to associate with army life. I almost slipped a note in with my dirty clothes one day to let her know that I appreciated the good job, but I reconsidered. I didn’t even know if she could read.
I didn’t think much about Mary until a year later. In the early spring of 1876, Mary came to my attention again.
I was officer of the guard. It was around eleven o’clock at night, and I had just stretched out on the officer-of-the-day’s cot. I hated sleeping in the guardhouse. It was infested with graybacks, and just the thought of that made me start to itch. Down below me that night in the cells were a private sleeping off a mighty drunk and a German corporal waiting for garrison court-martial.
It was the night after payday. The army was paid every two months then, and that usually meant pretty intense card playing and drinking until the money was in someone else’s pockets.
The sergeant of the guard came puffing up from Suds Row and hollered to me to come quick. A corporal in the band had been drinking and had knifed his wife.
By the time I got there, she was already dead. He had slit her throat from ear to ear, and there was a mild, surprised look in her wide-open eyes that made me turn away. Blood was everywhere—on the ceiling, on the walls, and splattered on the iron stove, where it bubbled and stank.
The corporal was drunk and just beginning to realize what he had done. The sergeant jerked his hands behind his back and bound them tight with a rawhide thong. The two of them lurched across the slippery floor, heading for the guardhouse.
I heard children crying in the kitchen. I went in there to look and to get away from the awful mess in the front room.
Mary Murphy sat there with the children. She was holding two blood-daubed little girls on her lap. She was in her nightgown, which was flecked with blood. Again, she gave me that patient, relieved smile, and, again, I didn’t know what to do for her.
“Can you take the children?” I asked her finally, “At least, for a while?”
“Yes, certainly, Lieutenant.” Her voice had the Irish lilt so common back then in the Indian-fighting army.
