Page 5 of For This We Are Soldiers
Mrs. Lieutenant Colonel Chambers was always happy to have Ozzie make the trip to the post office. While it couldn’t be said that Hattie Chambers was lazy, it could be said that she cared not to exert herself, especially in high summer when the wind blew, as it invariably did in Wyoming Territory. Ozzie knew the trick of weighting the hem of her dresses with fishing lures or lead shot, the better to fool the wind.
Seventeen years in the employ of the same family meant that Ozzie had them all well trained. The Chambers’ children had been trundled off to relatives in the East for schooling, which meant that life in the lieutenant colonel’s quarters was simple. When her chores were done, she was at her leisure to walk to the post office.
She tried to time her visit with the probable appearance of Hospital Steward Colm Callahan, but lately he had been less cooperative. Either the post surgeon was picking up his own mail, or the dratted man had given Suh other duties.
She always thought of Steward Callahan as Suh. Face red, he had told her once that he was no gentleman, so she needn’t refer to him that way. She had been just brave enough to continue calling him Suh, until he no longer objected. After that non-introduction, they had settled into the familiarity of frontier service, nothing more.
Ozzie admired the way he looked, even if his nose did peel in the summer, and he was too vain (or busy) to coat it with zinc oxide, as some of the other light-skinned men did. He burned and peeled regularly, which detracted in no way from his admirable height and high cheekbones, which gave his face a thin look. His eyes were a surprising brown rather than the expected blue. In a moment of rare candor for a man so reticent, Suh had remarked that her eyes were lighter than his. The fact that he’d noticed flattered her.
He once told her how much he enjoyed the gentle flow of her Louisiana accent, but she never worked up the nerve to tell him that she liked the clipped cadence of his New York speak with just a hint of the Irish. That his grammar was impeccable, even though he admitted his early years were spent in a ghastly orphanage, hinted something else: he was as ambitious as she was.
Her own ambition had been borne of desperation. Maybe someday she would tell Suh about those dark days as the war was ending. Thinking back, she knew that the time a war was winding down was the worst time of all.
While it was true that the port of New Orleans had been liberated by Yankees early in the game, coloreds on the state’s northern plantations had lingered in slavery. Ozzie thought she was twelve when the other slaves had simply dropped their tools or untied their aprons and walked off the LeCheminant plantation with not a word spoken. She remembered feeble protests from Madame LeCheminant and her daughters. What could they do, with all of the white men gone fighting in Lee’s army?
Ozzie was young, so she’d stayed and found herself saddled with all of the house chores the others had done. When it became too much, she knotted her other dress in a tablecloth, along with her rosary and an ebony-backed hairbrush she’d swiped from Lalage LeCheminant, a child her own age, whose companion she had been. Lalage had been the first to call her Ozzie because she could not pronounce Audra.
At twelve, Ozzie had slung her tablecloth luggage over her shoulder and left the house just after dark, when the haunts were out, which she did not believe in, being of a practical mind. A kindly man of color with a load of chickens trussed for market handed her up beside him in his cart and shared his sandwich with her.
He told her to find a Yankee woman to work for, that the best place was the US Army encampment where he was headed. When they arrived outside New Orleans two days later in the early-evening rain, he helped her down and pointed to a row of houses, Officers Row.
She knocked on the first door, tried to introduce herself, and received a swipe with a broom for her pains. At the second door, she introduced herself, recited her skills—some exaggerated, some not—and did not leave even when Mrs. Captain Chambers closed the door politely on her. She shivered on the porch through the night and was still there in the morning when Captain Chambers looked out the window and saw her, chin up and eyes determined, a child.
He let her in, and she’d been their servant ever since. Ozzie Washington worked hard at every task assigned her and saved her modest wages, which were paid every other month when the army was paid. She never looked back.
Maybe it was time to put that money to use. She’d liked the look of Cheyenne—it was more refined since the early days, when the rowdy Union Pacific crew went through. The days were gone when she could knock on a door, look both desperate and determined, and find work. She had true skill now in dressmaking.
Any day, she would bid the Chambersau revoir, catch the southbound stage at the Rustic Hotel, and land herself in Cheyenne. Every town of any size had a seamstress or two. She could find work with one of the dressmakers, see where the land lay, and start her own business.
Any day.
A
Where the story actually begins
“Things are slow, Callahan. If I have to treat one more case of diarrhea, I’ll take to drink,” Captain Dilworth had announced one morning.
Colm was far too wise to say that he alone had treated those so afflicted, because it was a homely duty beneath the notice of the post surgeon. As for taking to drink, Captain Dilworth was already lurching down that road. Again, Colm was too wise to mention it.
“Captain, are you thinking about a bolt to Cheyenne?” he asked instead.
“I was thinking more in terms of Omaha with the missus. We’ll catch the UP in Cheyenne and spend a week there. Can you manage? I expect no trouble.”
Yet again, Colm was far too experienced to suggest that the nature of medicine often meant a nasty surprise now and then, something beyond the official duties of a hospital steward. But who was he kidding? In the absence of post surgeons, Colm had extracted arrows, set bones, pulled teeth, prescribed probably useless medicine, done a successful shoulder resection because someone had to, and had even delivered a stubborn baby.
“I can manage, sir. When are you leaving?”
They had been through this conversation several times since Captain Dilworth had arrived three years ago. Colm had worked with better surgeons before, and worse ones. He could handle a hospital in a backwater garrison for a week.
The Dilworths were gone in a day, which made Colm Callahan happy; he liked being in charge. He had stood by his favorite window, looking down on the venerable fort below. “Bring it on, Old Girl,” he boasted.
A day later, Colm Callahan wished he hadn’t tempted Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine. That day began long before days should, with banging on his door by a frightened first-time father, a lieutenant of cavalry with the Fifth. Colm was pulling up his suspenders before the man finished knocking.
“My wife isn’t due for confinement for another six weeks, but … but, there’s water everywhere!”
So there was. When Colm arrived, Mrs. Lieutenant looked as frightened as her husband; he had two youngsters to calm down. He sent the lieutenant running down Officers Row to the Chambers’ quarters with a note for Ozzie. Five minutes later, she arrived, and the calming began. Ten minutes later, the sheets and Mrs. Lieutenant were changed and the mother-to-be was back in bed. In another twenty, there was an addition to the dependents at Fort Laramie, a little one who looked almost as surprised as her parents.
“Nothing’s ready!” the mother wailed.
