Page 4 of For This We Are Soldiers
Before the story begins
By August of 1882, Hospital Steward Colm Callahan, 34, had decided he was bored with army life. Perhaps it was just life at Fort Laramie, which used to be interesting during the Great Sioux War. That conflict had ended when most of the hostiles were trundled onto reservations. Someone had definitely waved a white flag and declared the war done when Sitting Bull and his ragged band left Canada and surrendered at Fort Buford in 1881.
The end of the Indian Wars had turned the grand dame of the plains into a backwater garrison. Arrow wounds and amputations had given way to catarrh with copious phlegm (hacks and coughs to laymen), and the occasional case of diarrhea—neither ever interesting. Women of the garrison still gave birth, but the post surgeon managed without help from his hospital steward. Even social diseases had slowed down, to the relief of the surgeon.
On the average morning now, Colm handled sick call with little or no interference from his post surgeon, Captain Dilworth. After nineteen years of army medicine, Colm knew when something warranted the more specialized attention of the post surgeon and in those cases, he summoned the surgeon from the breakfast table accordingly. When it was just catarrh or the dry heaves, he left Captain Dilworth to his newspaper and toast.
Handling sick call meant admonishing any malingerers trying to put one over on the Medical Department, physicking those who needed it and sending them back to the barracks for rest, or hospitalizing the promising few. His reports were done by 10 a.m. and left, squared away, on Captain Dilworth’s desk.
Then what? A steward could only count linens, roll bandages, and inventory the pharmacy so often. There was seldom anyone stiff and cold in the dead house to embalm. Lately, Colm found himself upstairs, staring out the window. Situated on a bluff, the hospital commanded a view of the whole garrison.
Depending on his mood, he would look in the direction of the iron bridge—out of his sight—which still saw traffic to the Black Hills, even though the major gold strikes were ancient history now. The Shy-Dead Road, the storied route from Cheyenne to Deadwood, was traveled mostly by law-abiders now. Worse still, rumor hinted that soon the cavalry would be withdrawn, leaving Fort Laramie with infantry only. Colm could almost hear the death knell of the Queen of the Plains.
More profitably, Colm might look out the windows that faced the parade ground. He watched children walking to school, which was held in the newly completed admin building by the Laramie River. Soon mothers with prams would stroll the wooden boardwalks, chatting with one another. That domestic sight sometimes sent him into melancholy, as he remembered desperate days in 1876 and ’77, when troops came and went, and war waged all around. Fort Laramie looked as gentrified as a Midwestern town now. Great Gadfreys and all the Saints!
If Colm was lucky, he might catch a glimpse of Ozzie Washington, easily the prettiest woman on the post, or so he reckoned. Depending on who might be ill among the officers’ wives, the lieutenant colonel’s wife was kindly inclined to send Ozzie, her servant, with a tureen of nourishing broth, or a loaf or two of bread to the House of Affliction.
Ozzie was not a time waster. Bowl- or basket-laden, she moved at a clip that set her hips swaying so nicely. She was grace personified, moving rapidly but with the dignity of her race. Once—perhaps on a dare from one of the lieutenant colonel’s children—Ozzie had set a bushel basket square on her head and wore it the length of Officers Row without mishap. During Reconstruction days in Louisiana, he had seen women of color carry goods that way. So much grace and symmetry had impressed him then and did so now with Ozzie.
Always the observer, he had noticed how nicely the races had mingled for at least a century in New Orleans, producing graceful women of café au lait skin calledmulattoor the regrettable “high yaller.” He had admired them because they were so different. Ozzie’s hair was wildly curly to a fault, and her skin was more olive than coffee, but her nose was straight and her lips at least fuller than his.
To say he admired Ozzie Washington was to minimize the matter. He was no expert, but Colm thought he loved her. He had met her seven years ago in 1875, when the Fourth Infantry was first garrisoned at Fort Laramie. The Medical Department had assigned Colm permanent duty there—barring field emergencies—so he had ample time to watch the movements of various regiments. Ozzie stood out because the hospital had been plagued with endless winter ailments, and then-Major Chambers, commanding, ordered her there to help.
Help she had. Ozzie had no fear of the pukes or runs and did exactly what the surgeons required. She never complained, and she kept her mouth closed when other women on similar assignments objected long and loud.
During a welcome lull in sheet changing and basin dumping, Colm had mustered his courage and asked her how she remained so calm. She had given him a kind look, the sort of glance women reserved for the young and the addled, and said in her velvet voice, “Suh, if I didn’t help, who would?”
She was right. Colm assured her that he was no sir, just a hospital steward. She nodded with understanding, but everlastingly called him “suh.” He quit arguing about it, because he liked the languid way one word glided into the next when she spoke.
Ozzie Washington was exotic to Colm Callahan, who himself was an orphan from New York’s bleak Five Points slum, a drummer boy with the Irish Brigade, who had become an impromptu hospital steward at Gettysburg, when he had no choice—much like Ozzie.
Her kindness stood out more than her beauty. He remembered an endless night in 1876 when the post surgeon had stretched out onto the table in his operating bay to grab a nap. Colm had slumped to the wall in the corridor, weary nigh unto death of 36-hour days. With a tap on his shoulder, Ozzie had handed him a cup of tea and an apple already sliced, then sat beside him. When he forgot to eat, she put a slice in his hand. So kind.
Once he had mentioned her to a friend, a corporal in the Third Cavalry, tentatively expressing himself. The corporal had looked at him in shock.
“You know what she is,” the man had said, then said it anyway—a word Colm heard all the time, and had probably said a few times himself; everyone did. After that day, he never said it again, because it wasn’t a polite way to talk about someone as thoughtful as Ozzie Washington.
Any fears the corporal would blab to others that the Irish hospital steward was enamored with a maid of color ended at the Battle of the Rosebud, where the corporal died. Colm had never chanced his feelings again; he kept his thoughts about Ozzie to himself. He was too shy to ever act on them.
Still, during moments like this at the window, he wondered what he would do when the Fourth Infantry was ordered somewhere else and Ozzie went along as Mrs. Lieutenant Colonel Chambers’s trusted maid. When that happened, as it inevitably would, all he had left was resignation, leaving the army far behind. Another encounter with Ozzie would be more punishment than a shy man deserved.
A
Also before the story begins
Ozzie Washington knew it was time to visit the post office. Three weeks had passed since she had given her letter to a private in A Company, Fifth Cavalry, and asked him to mail it for her when the troop reached Fort Russell in Cheyenne. He’d never asked questions, because he couldn’t read, and she always gave him a dime for her errand. He would mail the letter she had addressed to Audra Washington, Fort Laramie, Wyoming Territory, which would arrive back here in a week or so.
The first time she had mailed herself a letter, the Fourth had been garrisoned in Fort Concho, Texas. Lieutenant Colonel Chambers, then a captain, had checked the mail, staring a long time at the envelope.
“Audra Washington? Who do we know named Audra Washington?” he had joked.
“My real name is Audra,” Ozzie had said.
He hadn’t handed the letter to her until he teased her about a beau, which made her smile. She had no beau. Even when the Fourth had been garrisoned with one of the colored regiments, she never had one; she was too white for those men, even if they were former slaves too. The corporals and sergeants of the white regiments considered her too dark for them. There would never be a beau.
She never wrote herself more than four letters a year. When the day’s work was done, she would make herself tea and open the letter she had written to herself. “Dearest Little Audra,” she always began, as if this letter were from her mother, an illiterate woman who had been sold away from her, screaming, when Audra was only five, and sent to an East Texas cotton plantation. In these letters, this mother she barely remembered was living as a seamstress in New Orleans, with her own shop and an elegant clientele.
As the years passed, Ozzie wove an intricate fiction of carpetbaggers and a fine man who courted her widowed mother, leaving her his fortune when he died of yellow fever. Her letters to herself were fabulous, and a welcome treat, because she had no one and would never have received a letter otherwise.
