Page 32 of For This We Are Soldiers
After a moment of fussing with the little one, she turned her attention to him, her expression most kindly. Gadfreys, but she was a pretty girl, with deep red hair and brown eyes.
“Did you cry the first time you left home?” she had asked straight out, no varnish.
He had not, and he knew the truth was in order, because he did not want to lie to this charming woman. He told her about waiting to get up the nerve to leave the tyranny of his father’s farm, where so much labor fell to him because his older brothers had joined the Union Army. He didn’t say too much about that tyranny; even now it was a sore spot.
“Did you ever go back home, Sergeant?” she asked.
“Once,” he admitted, and continued his truth telling. “We were all uncomfortable and I was soon on my way to Fort Hays in Nebraska.” He shrugged. “I write now and then.”
She had given him a sympathetic eye, as if wondering about families who did not love and cherish each other. “I cried a lot of nights,” she told him, “and then I realized that was pointless. I am here, and here I’ll stay. Honestly, I like America.”
Hiram found his way to the major’s porch two or three more times before C Company, led by an even more reluctant Lieutenant Shaw, dragged itself away from Fort Laramie and returned to an isolated and suddenly more dreary Fort Fetterman.
Once he got over the mopes on that return journey, Lieutenant Shaw went into mile after mile of rapture over Miss Hinchcliffe. Since Captain Harvey, titular head of C Company, wasn’t the man for a lieutenant’s small talk, and the company’s second lieutenant was on detached duty, Sergeant Chandler ended up listening, whether he wanted to or not.
“She is of the Philadelphia Hinchcliffes,” the man had crowed, which only made Sergeant Chandler, raised on a poor and pathetic farm, wonder just how many breeds of Hinchcliffe inhabited the thirty-eight states. “We’re going back to Fort Laramie in December for the Christmas party,” the lieutenant had declared. “I don’t care how deep the snow is.”
Privately, Hiram didn’t care, either. He wanted to see Birdie O’Grady. Publicly, he worried as the thermometer crowded down deep in the bowl. Eighty miles was nothing to C Company in the summer, but in the winter?
The journey had to be accomplished, and not only because Lieutenant Shaw was a self-absorbed, spoiled young officer. Their company captain finally received a long-sought, three-month furlough to see his family in Rhode Island. C Company’s bold little band of volunteers was to escort Captain Harvey as far as Fort Laramie, where he could catch the Shy-Dead stage to Cheyenne and the Union Pacific.
“Only volunteers for the escort,” Captain Harvey had stipulated firmly. “That’s eighty nasty miles of frostbite I don’t want on my conscience.”
There were enough takers, knowing most Indians had more wisely hunkered down on reservations, where they would idle away a winter, then bolt in late spring to harass the US Army, as usual. Say what you want about the Lakota, they were nobody’s fool.
Captain Harvey had surprised Hiram by taking him aside in his quarters the day before they were to leave. He even poured him a glass of better bourbon than the sutler’s store sold and took Hiram into his confidence.
“When I’m home, I’ll try for another three-month extension,” the captain said, after clinking glasses. “That puts Lieutenant Shaw in command for six months. I’m certain I don’t need to tell you that he bears watching.”
“Yes, sir,” Hiram said, aware of Shaw’s many failures of command, most of which he had smoothed over because he was a long-time first sergeant and knew his business. “I am to keep him alive and teach him something without him knowing it.”
Captain Harvey had the good grace to laugh. “That is why men like you are so valuable to the army.” He leaned forward until the distance separating them had narrowed. “Sadly, Lieutenant Shaw is one of those pea-greeners who doesn’t even know how little he knows. Do your best, Sergeant; the army is counting on you.”
The captain laughed, maybe loosened up by the bourbon. “Shouldn’t admit this, but every night I pray, ‘Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I die before my time, please make Artie Shaw resign.’”
A huge smile on his face, Hiram assured his commanding officer he would make every effort to keep C Company alive and well, and so the matter stood. The trip to Fort Laramie had been accomplished with no frostbite, and Captain Harvey was seen off on a well-deserved furlough. C Company was granted two glorious days to enjoy Fort Laramie and the annual enlisted men’s ball, to which officers and ladies were invited.
The corporal and four privates who had volunteered had brought along their dress uniforms. Sergeant Chandler hadn’t bothered. Wise in the ways of humanity, he had no doubt that Birdie O’Grady would be collared for baby-tending duty. A less self-assured man would have brought along his own dress uniform, with its admittedly impressive hashmarks denoting years of hard service. That man was not Hiram Chandler. If Birdie admitted him into Major Dunlap’s quarters, he wasn’t going to waste a minute on small talk, or be uncomfortable in a high collar.
For all he knew she had captured some Fort Laramie sergeant’s eye and was married already; such things happened frequently at army posts. Not a wagering man, Hiram was still willing to bet that she had remained single. There had been something in her eyes when they said goodbye after their first meeting, a tenderness he had seen once before in another lady’s eyes before war and then death had separated them.
With no patience at all, Hiram waited until eight o’clock, when the dinner and dance were underway, then walked to Major Dunlap’s house. His heart skipped a medically impossible beat when Birdie O’Grady opened the door, baby in her arms.
He knew he had never seen anyone lovelier. Her hair was untidy and stuck into a funny little bun. Her eyes looked full of tears, which caused him some alarm. Maybe she had been hoping someone else would tap on her door. But no, the dimple in her left cheek appeared, and her eyes grew a little smaller as her smile increased.
“Why in the world were you crying, Miss O’Grady?”
“Birdie to you,” she said, and tucked the baby on her hip. Her gaze grew suddenly clear-eyed and he realized she was not a small talker, either. “I was afraid you had gone to the dance, like any sensible man who lives in an awful place like Fetterman, if I can believe rumors.”
Heavens almighty, that voice! He could listen to her read the Manual of Arms and be entertained for hours. Her Irish lilt did more strange things to his heart. His was an Irish and a German army, this US Army after the war, and Hiram had heard many an accent. Not one of them had ever inclined him to want to kiss the speaker. He knew better, even now, but just barely.
She had asked him in, pointing him to the sofa and not an armchair, because she must have wanted to sit beside him. He sat and she lowered herself carefully next to him, her hand on the baby’s head now, the child protected against any jostling. A little worm in Hiram’s ear suggested she would be even more watchful of her own babies, and his face grew warm. He doubted he had blushed in twenty years, but here it came.
“I didn’t think you would be at the dance, Birdie,” he told her, and took a deeper breath. “I also wasn’t sure you were still a single lady. I know the frontier army.”
She laughed at that, a hearty sound that warmed him down to his toes. “Miss Hinchcliffe made me promise I would do no such thing.”
That same little ear worm inclined him to speak up. “True, I suppose, but what punishment could she enact if you had accepted some … some …”
