Page 31 of For This We Are Soldiers
While I supervised the removal of the body from the front room, Mary must have left with the children. When I looked in the kitchen later, they were gone.
The next morning, sometime before First Call, the corporal worked his hands free and looped his belt with his neck in it over the bolt in the wall of his solitary cell. He wasn’t in my company, but as I filled out the report, the adjutant assigned me to track down any living relatives to find a home for the orphans. As was the case in too many of these situations, I couldn’t find anyone.
Mary kept the girls. I know now what a burden that must have been to her, because when Adele and I had children, we had trouble making ends meet on officer’s pay. Mary was doing it on a laundress’s wages.
A few weeks after the incident, our company was sent north in time to get all the stuffing beat out of us by Crazy Horse on the Rosebud. I took an arrow in the back and was invalided back to Fort Laramie. While I was recovering, I did a lot of walking and often went down to the river. Mary was always there with the other laundresses, dipping water in good and bad weather, and washing down there on the bank when it was hot. She scrubbed, pounded, and beat the clothes on her washboard, all the time singing and talking to Flynn and the two little girls who clung to her skirts. They played at the river’s edge and made mud pies on the ground near her washtub. A month later, I was promoted and transferred to Company B, Second Cavalry (I knew someone influential in DC), then posted to Fort Bowie, Arizona Territory.
I never saw Mary again. I met Adele in Massachusetts a few years later while on furlough, and we have spent much of our time here in the Southwest. Whenever Adele and I quarrel, which isn’t too often, I think of Mary and her patient smile and wonder whatever became of her. I imagine she raised those children by herself. They are probably married now, with children of their own.
Well, never mind. Mary Murphy. I think of her.
A Leader of His Troops
First Sergeant Hiram Chandler, C Company, Third Cavalry, knew better than to laugh at a superior officer, but he was hard put not to turn away and blame his chortles on a coughing fit every time Lieutenant Arthur Shaw, currently commanding C Company, popped into the adjutant’s office to check for mail. It was at least the second time since that morning’s Guard Mount, so Hiram had to wonder just how a letter was supposed to materialize, since nothing had arrived by courier yet.
Hiram had a bird’s eye view to watch his lieutenant, seated as he was on his remount and dragging some new recruits through a bit of equitation on the parade ground. The winter had been typically long and dreary at Fort Fetterman, located on a bend in the Platte River. One result was penned-up, snuffy horses needing exercise and seeming to feel no regret at tossing troopers.
His own, well-mannered gelding gave a shake to the reins, as if dismayed at the horses and riders and wondering how on earth these soldiers would survive an upcoming season of endless patrol.
“They’ll figure it out,” Hiram said out loud to his horse, but not loud enough for the troopers to hear. “Amazing how an Indian war whoop sharpens the intellect.”
As for his lieutenant, Hiram admitted to feeling some of the man’s pain. This morning, Lieutenant Shaw had given Hiram a bleak look that said “No letters.” When they walked together to company barracks to make fatigue assignments, Shaw had heaved a mighty sigh.
“I as much as proposed in that last letter, sergeant, and did Miss Hinchcliffe bother to reply? Not on your tintype. What is wrong with women? It’s 1878! These are modern times!”
Maybe she’s saying no by her non reply, you dolt,Hiram thought. “Give her time, sir. Marriage is a big decision,” was the best he could offer. He had his own concerns.
Thinking about those concerns made him choose mercy over justice and release the troopers with enough time to feed and groom their horses and answer the bugler blowing Mess Call. Hiram ate his beans and bread with grape jelly with C Company’s other sergeant, who looked scarcely more cheerful than their lieutenant.
They knew each other pretty well. A raised eyebrow in Sergeant Crosby’s direction had given the man permission to unload about his own troubles with the US Mail and why in the Sam Hill nothing ever seemed to come his way from Connecticut.
Hiram listened, something he did well. His impromptu training had begun early in his army career, after the Battle of Cold Harbor. Hardly anyone else in his company survived and his commanding officer, a grim-lipped lieutenant, had needed a sergeant, any sergeant, in the worst way. The job was Hiram’s, for good or ill. Since he was only sixteen and greener than grass, he learned to listen. The less he said the wiser he looked, and truth to tell, if the man with the grievance talked long enough, he could usually solve his own problem.
The technique did not fail him even now, when he really wanted to spill out his own problems, instead of listen to someone else’s. Almost against his will he listened, and sure enough, Sergeant Crosby solved his own problem.
“Ah, well, Hiram, my sweetheart and I have weathered other assaults by the US Mail,” he said, after chasing the last bean around his tin plate. “This is my last five-year enlistment.”
“Then it’s back to Connecticut and a wedding?” Hiram asked, even though he knew the answer. It had been the subject of many a sergeants’ gathering.
“High time!” Sergeant Crosby gave up on the bean and stood up, ready for work and cheerful now, because Sergeant Chandler had listened. “You ever going to do something similar?” he asked Hiram, but didn’t wait for an answer. He left the mess hall whistling.
“I’m in love with Birdie O’Grady,” Hiram said softly to the retreating back. “I’m waiting for a letter too.”
Mary Bertha O’Grady, to be proper. He had met her at distant Fort Laramie at the same time Lieutenant Shaw had met Miss Virginia Hinchcliffe because Birdie was Miss Hinchcliffe’s maid. Birdie had been struggling with her mistress’s luggage at the Rustic Hotel, where the Cheyenne-Deadwood stage had dropped them off last year, and C Company had chanced to be escorting the mail from Fetterman.
Lieutenant Shaw had been a no-hoper from the first, when Miss Hinchcliffe batted her pretty blues at him and asked for help to Major Dunlap’s quarters. “Mrs. Major Dunlap is my sister,” she said, “and I’ve come to help out.”
“Help out” was generally a euphemism for providing nursemaid services for a new baby, and giving the Eastern damsel a chance to look over prospects in the unmarried officer corps. In Miss Hinchcliffe’s case, Birdie O’Grady had been saddled with nursemaid duties, while the ladies played and Miss Hinchcliffe flirted.
She had been selective in her flirting, not wasting a moment’s time with officers who had no useful Eastern connections. The Shaw name and the Boston locale had caused her to target Lieutenant Shaw whenever he appeared at Fort Laramie from Fort Fetterman. Somehow that summer he appeared a lot, which meant Hiram invariably came along too.
Having caught the eye of the most congenial Birdie O’Grady, Hiram began to press his own advantage. It had been a simple matter to drop in on the pretty maid when he saw her on the Dunlap porch, pushing a cradle on its rockers. By the time autumn arrived, which meant sudden cold and snow far too early, he knew she was from County Kerry, twenty-two, and fortunate to have caught the Hinchliffes’ eye when they toured Ireland five years ago.
“No future in Ireland, so I went to Philadelphia with the Hinchcliffes,” she said.
An observant listener, he saw and heard her little sigh. “Do you miss County Kerry?” Hiram had asked.
She nodded and said nothing, but turned her attention to the baby. He kept watching her face, and saw her dab at her eye when she probably thought he was paying more attention to something on the parade ground.
