The Colonel's Lady (4 page)

The First Sergeant nodded and went back to the orderly room, leaving the barracks in sudden uneasy silence.

“Did you know them?” I asked, to break the silence.

“I soldiered with Wilson and McCambridge in Indian Territory. The Lieutenant was a pup, just out of the Point.”

Skiborsky had a drink and silence took over again. There were other troopers in the barracks who hadn't paid any attention to the uproar. Probably they were used to scenes like this after Skiborsky had finished “schooling” a man. Now they seemed to be watching, waiting for something to happen.

Morgan, who had been listening vaguely with glazed eyes, was quite drunk by now. “What we ought to do,” he said in a measured, cool voice, “is mount this damn cavalry and go after the redsticks. Teach 'em a damn good lesson, that's what we ought to do.” He shook his bottle, studied its-, contents, and had another drink. “Teach the redsticks a lesson,” he said, nodding ponderously. “That's the thing to do.”

Skiborsky, apparently sober now, studied him pityingly. “Trooper,” he said softly, “there are a lot of things I can't teach you, and about redsticks is one of them. But you'll learn. You'll learn.”

“Sure,” Morgan said, grinning crookedly. He seemed to have forgotten that he hated Skiborsky. “Have a drink.”

“Thanks,” the Sergeant said dryly, accepting his own whisky from Morgan. The bottle went around. Steuber snored.

“When will we be getting patrol duty?” I asked, mostly to break the silence, which was becoming uncomfortable.

Skiborsky shrugged. “Pretty soon. Don't be eager, trooper, you'll get your gut full of it.”

“I want to see this Kohi,” Morgan said dreamily.

“And you,” Skiborsky said soberly, “don't be gettin' any wrong ideas about Kohi. Where you came from maybe you had a reputation as a hardcase, maybe you were fast with a gun and had people afraid of you—I don't know about that. Kohi won't know about it either. And he won't care.”

“A redstick,” Morgan sneered.

“And a damn smart one,” Skiborsky said patiently. “He's outgeneraled every officer Washington has sent north of the Gila.”

The other troopers in the barracks went back to whatever they had been doing—shining boots, brushing uniforms, playing poker, or just thinking their own private, unknowable thoughts. It seemed strange, when I thought of it, that only a few hours ago Skiborsky and I had been fighting like savages. He wasn't a bad one, and I had an idea that the Dutchman had been right in his estimation of the Sergeant. More than likely he was a damn good soldier.

The whisky had dulled Morgan's mind, as well as his hatred, and I listened to his rambling, aimless talk go on and on. But he never talked of himself. He would never get drunk enough for that.

The whisky had gone full cycle with Skiborsky. He was right back where he started, sober and weary and full of disgust. He was beginning to regret the money he had spent on the whisky. No doubt he was also regretting the fact that he had let us see that he was human after all. Familiarity breeds contempt, the officers say. And Skiborsky was an officer—a noncommissioned one, but still an officer of sorts, with authority. I could see him turning the idea over in his mind. For a moment he grinned that old fierce grin of his and I knew that it was over. He stood up abruptly and snatched what was left of his whisky from Morgan's lax hand.

“That's all you get, trooper,” he snarled. “From here on out you can buy your own goddamn whisky.”

Morgan blinked, puzzled. I could see him trying to figure out what had happened, but his numb brain was not capable of coping with anything that complex. Skiborsky jutted his chin out. The old Skiborsky again. He grinned that grin at us and stalked out of the barracks.

“Now what happened to him?” Morgan started to ask, and then he forgot all about it and lay back on the bunk and kicked his boots into the aisle down the center of the barracks. “You know,” he said lazily, “that Skiborsky's not so bad. I hate his guts—don't misunderstand me—and someday I'll probably kill the sonofabitch... but he's not so bad.”

“You won't think so tomorrow,” I said. “If I know Skiborsky, he's already thinking up ways to make us start hating him all over again. He wouldn't be happy if everybody didn't hate him.”

“I don't hate him.” Whisky had a strangle hold on Morgan's brain, squeezing the life out of it.

“Wait until tomorrow.”

“Tomorrow....”

The troopers began getting ready for bed, and one by one the candles and coal-oil lamps were blown out, and the night was laced with a bright ribbon of sound as the regimental bugler sounded extinguish lights. Steuber was still snoring under my bunk and I wondered if I ought to get up and try to put him in his own bunk. I thought about it for a while, but it didn't help the Dutchman. He stayed where he was and I stayed where I was, and the barracks was plunged into darkness as the last notes of the bugle died in the night.

The whisky was warm inside me and I lay there, not moving, not even getting out of my uniform. I knew that tomorrow I would start hating Skiborsky all over again, and that one of these days maybe Morgan would make good his threat and kill him. If I didn't beat him to it. But tonight wasn't tomorrow. Tonight I didn't hate anybody. Not even Caroline.

“The sonofabitch,” Morgan muttered over and over, heaving the piles of filth.

“You thought he was all right last night,” I reminded him.

“The sonofabitch.”

Steuber forked away like a well-oiled machine, not seeming to mind the blazing sun or the filth or the stinging sweat that dripped into our eyes and plastered our shirts to our backs.

When we straightened to get our breath or to wipe the sweat from our faces, there was a corporal in the front of the wagon to remind us to keep working.

“We got to finish the stables before recall,” he insisted. “That's what Skiborsky said.”

“To hell with Skiborsky,” Morgan grated.

“Keep working, trooper, or you'll be carryin' the log again.”

Toward noon we saw the horses appear on the desert horizon. Four horses, weary-looking, stumbling clumsily over the rocks of the desert in their exhaustion. We stopped working, watching them in the distance, trying to make out the riders.

“My God,” we heard the corporal say softly. “It's the Boulders patrol.”

“The what?” Morgan asked.

“The Boulders patrol. What's left of it, rather. Twelve men rode out on it four days ago; they were supposed to meet the Star Creek patrol and then circle through the mountains and come back to Larrymoor. But,” he said, as if he didn't quite believe his own words, “they were supposed to be gone eight, nine days.”

Morgan studied the approaching figures quietly. His eyes had that steely look again.

“Get the stuff forked out,” the corporal said. “We'll go back to the fort and see what happened.”

We knew what happened. Everybody knew, but we had to hear somebody say it. We forked the wagon clean and got back to the fort about five minutes after the patrol arrived.

Skiborsky had the word, and Sergeant Roff, and Captain Halan too, although he didn't talk about it. Ten good tough troopers dead, that was the word.

“What is it?” we asked Skiborsky.

“Apache's dancin', that's what it is,” the Sergeant snarled. “Every goddamn redstick in the White Mountains is dancin'. Kohi's bringin' all the Coyotero clans together, and some Chiricahuas and Mimbrenos too, so the story goes. God knows how he's doin' it, but he's doin' it, and there's goin' to be hell to pay in Arizona, you can bet your enlistment pay on that.” He grinned evilly. “We'll see now what you troopers use for guts. We'll see....”

Sergeant Roff, speaking for Captain Halan, said, “There will be no change in post routine until we find out what Kohi's up to. His braves are assembling off the reservation. The Boulders patrol had a stiff brush with them, but headquarters isn't sure yet if the Apaches were acting on Kohi's orders or if they were just some outlaw Indians doing some raiding on their own. Until we find out, reviews and fatigue and drills will go on as usual. Patrols will be strengthened to fourteen men and they will skirt Kohi's old stamping grounds and try to find out what the devil's up to. Maybe,” he sighed, “it will cool off.”

It wouldn't cool off. I knew it and the others knew it. Kohi's people had been pushed as far as they were going to be pushed. The great white fathers in Washington had made big peace medicine, putting their fine promises down on stiff white official parchment, and affixing their signatures with great piousness. And then they figuratively tore the treaties into a million bits and pieces and let them flutter with the wind.

After all, they were only Indians, weren't they? What did Indians understand about such things? Anyway, what could scattered bands of savages do against the might of the United States Cavalry? Let the settlers move on into the Indian lands. Let the cavalry take care of the savages if they didn't like it. Our “manifest destiny,” they called it, our great white fathers.

But they weren't in the frontier cavalry. And, probably, they had never even heard of the White Mountain Apache general... Kohi.

“No, sir,” I said.

Halan rubbed his jaw thoughtfully. “I thought...” he started, and then he let the words trail off. “Well, it doesn't matter, I suppose. I have a special detail for you. You're to go over to Colonel Weyland's quarters and repair the steps on his back porch.”

The Captain must have seen the surprise in my eyes. “You can do the job, can't you?”

“Yes, sir. I guess so. Did the Colonel ask for me, sir? I mean, did he pick me out especially for the job?”

“Why, I suppose so. Someone asked for you, either the Colonel or Mrs. Weyland. Probably a mix-up with the records at headquarters. Somebody got you mixed up with an ex-carpenter.” He sighed wearily, his mind more on Kohi than on the minor problem at hand. “Of course,” he said, “we could get the thing straightened out at headquarters and get the right man on the job. But if you think you can do it, it would save trouble all around.”

It was Caroline, I knew. She couldn't stand it any longer, knowing I was on the post and not knowing why. She had ordered me to come, the way she would order a houseboy to bring in more wood for the fireplace, and she had known all along that I would come.

“I can fix whatever's wrong, sir,” I said, and Halan looked relieved.

“Then get to it, Reardon. And when you've finished, get your field gear together. I have you down for patrol in the morning.”

I got a carpenter's kit from the quartermaster's and walked across the parade toward Officers' Row. The post was unnaturally quiet, even quieter than usual after a noon mess. I had a feeling that Larrymoor should be working with feverish activity, that every man should be working around the clock at strengthening the fortifications. I was the only man on the parade. The bachelor officers were still at mess, the married officers were eating leisurely in the privacy of their adobe huts on Officers' Row, or perhaps smoking a noontime cigar, or napping. The troopers were in their barracks, or in the sorry little knock-up shacks reserved for married noncommissioned officers, near the stables, thinking about the ten men who had died that day, probably.

Somehow I couldn't bring myself to believe that the men were actually dead. Their names would appear on the morning report as “from duty to killed in action,” even as the dead horses would be reported in the horse book. The next of kin would be notified, whenever another supply train headed south with the mail. None of it concerned me.

I hadn't known them. The American flag—the Yankee flag, as Morgan would call it—still flew high from its flagpole in the center of the parade. There was no grave detail working in the cemetery outside the post, no metallic clang of picks and shovels striking the sun-baked clay earth. The bodies hadn't been brought back.

I wondered vaguely if there were other bodies out there now, from other patrols, and what it would be like out there. Would it be as bad as Gettysburg, or Antietam... or Three Fork Road? Or would it be more like the skirmishing of pickets, or the harassing action of screening cavalry before an army? There was no way of knowing. The men who had seen it wouldn't say; the men who hadn't seen it couldn't know.

I kept Caroline out of my mind as long as I could, but there are limits to how long you can keep a woman like that locked in the back of your brain. And besides, I had reached the Colonel's quarters.

The post commander's house stood at the end of Officers' Row, next to the headquarters buildings, a squat, sturdy affair of cottonwood logs and adobe bricks, slightly larger than the other houses on the row. Usually the post commander has his house outside the fort's walls, but not at Larrymoor, so deep in the enemy's own country. I want around to the back door. Colonel Weyland was just coming out.

He glanced at me without interest, returned my salute absently, as though he had something else on his mind. “You're the carpenter?” he asked.

“Yes, sir.”

“I expect you'll have to ask Mrs. Weyland what she wants done. It's the step, I think.” He glanced vaguely at the steps, without seeing them.

“Yes, sir,” I said again. It was the first time I had seen Weyland up close, but my first impression of him didn't change. He was just an ordinary man, cast in the same rigid mold that turned out cavalry officers by the hundreds. He looked tired, the way a man looks when he hasn't slept well for a long while. He looked as weak or as strong as the next man; he never would be the kind to lean to the extreme in anything, I thought. He nodded absently and walked off toward headquarters, straight as a ramrod, his uniform and high dragoon boots immaculate.

I should have hated him, because I had planned to hate him. Somehow I felt sorry for him. I felt anger, but it wasn't for Jameson Joseph Weyland. Then the back door opened and Caroline stood in the doorway, smiling.

“Trooper Reardon?” She said it calmly, without turning a hair. Weyland was still within hearing distance.

I heard myself saying, “Yes, ma'am.”

“Come in, trooper, and I'll explain...” She let the words hang. The Colonel had disappeared into the headquarters building and there was no reason now for pretending.

I had made no plans. I didn't know what I was going to say or do. For a while it was enough just to stand there and look at her. Time, it seemed, had no effect on Caroline. She looked the same to me as she had five years ago; still beautiful with a pale, almost fragile beauty. Her hair was blonde and her eyes were as blue and as deep as the Arizona sky. Too blue and too deep, like the sky, to look into long at a time.

Still smiling, she said, “Come in, Matt.”

It was a fool thing to do, with the headquarters building less than fifty yards away. But I found myself going up the steps.

“You've changed quite a lot, Matt,” she said lightly, conversationally, in the tone of voice you would use in meeting an old vaguely remembered acquaintance, but not a friend.

I set the carpenter's kit down. “You haven't.”

She laughed lightly, musically. “That's nice of you,” deliberately ignoring the real meaning. “After all, it's been five years, hasn't it, Matt?”

“Five years, four months, and a few days.”

“My,” she smiled, “I hadn't imagined you would remember that well.”

“It isn't often that a cavalry officer loses his entire command, killed or captured. I remember the date without any trouble.”

Her smile flickered, almost went out. I could smell the cleanness of her, the lavender sachet and the briskness of crinoline and laces. It was an exotic, heady scent when you're used to the stench of the stables and the man smell of the barracks. “Come into the front room, Matt,” she said abruptly. “We can talk better in there.”

“What would the Colonel say, Mrs. Weyland?”

“Does the Colonel need to know, Matt?” She turned, layers of petticoats rustling, and walked through a doorway toward the front of the house. I followed her, as she knew I would.

The house must have had five rooms; a mansion in a place like Larrymoor. The first thing that struck me about the front room was that there were curtains at the windows, starched, stiff white lace curtains rustling softly in a hot desert breeze. I had almost forgotten that there were such things. There was a big leather post-made chair, stuffed with horsehair and covered with horsehide; a massive tea table supporting a heavy silver tea service, two porcelain coal-oil lamps with hand-painted figures on the bases, a braided rug on the floor, wallpaper and pictures on the wall. Furnishings and luxuries that, on Caroline's orders, had been freighted half a thousand miles across the desert, simply because she was used to such things and had to have them around her. For me it was like walking into another world.

Caroline stood in the center of the room patiently waiting for me to say what I had to say. I walked slowly around the room, touching things, feeling of them and bringing back part of an almost forgotten past. On one wall there was a copy of Titian's moody St. Margaret in live greens and sober browns, contrasted on the other wall with the sharp, sure colors of El Greco. Those would belong to Caroline. I didn't think the Colonel would care much for painting, or for any kind of art, for that matter, except perhaps the art of war.

On a table by the leather chair, beside a cut-glass decanter of amber wine, were Weyland's books. I picked one out just for the sensation of touching it. Wallhausen's “Art militaire a cheval.” I glanced at the others. Machiavelli's “The Arte of Warre.” Romer's “Cavalry.” Nolan's “Cavalry Tactics.” Wood's “Cavalry in the Waterloo Campaign.” They were all there.

“Well, Matt,” Caroline said.

I put the book down and turned. “It's been a long time since I've had a book in my hand or seen a painting, even a copy. But an old Alabama gentleman doesn't wander about touching things, does he? I guess you were right. I've changed.”

“What do you want, Matt?” she asked coolly.

“I'm not sure.”

“Why did you come here?”

“You sent for me, didn't you, to do some carpentering, on your back doorstep?” I felt more at ease now. At least I could look at her without having to look immediately away. “By the way, how did you manage it? I'm not down on the records as a carpenter.”

Her sudden laughter didn't sound like laughter at all. “I simply told the Colonel that I wanted a carpenter by the name of Reardon. I told him that you had done some work for Major Burkhoff's wife.”

“But I haven't.”

Her face sobered. “What difference does it make?” she said impatiently. “I had to talk to you. It doesn't make any difference how I managed it.”

The thing that had been going around in my mind ever since Captain Halan had mentioned Three Fork Road began to take shape. Caroline could see it taking shape and she didn't like it.

“Answer me, Matt. Why did you come to Larrymoor?”

“Is that sherry?” I asked, nodding at the decanter on the table. “It's oloroso.”

It had to be oloroso. Nothing but the best for Caroline. I poured a wineglass half full and drank it, throwing it down without tasting it, the way Skiborsky would throw down the sutler's whisky. I poured the glass full and replaced the glass stopper and sat down in the Colonel's chair. Not because I wanted the sherry or because I was so tired that I couldn't stand up. I wanted to see what Caroline would do.

She didn't do anything, didn't even blink.

“I've heard,” I said, “that Weyland was at the battle of Three Fork; led the Union cavalry charge there, in fact. But you wouldn't know anything about that, would you, Caroline?”

She still didn't move, but I saw a certain uneasiness in those eyes of hers.

“It's the truth,” I said, “about not knowing why I came to Larrymoor. Maybe just to see you again. To look at you and wonder what kind of woman you really are. I'm not even sure why I came to Arizona, except that there wasn't much left for me in Alabama after the war. The plantation's gone. When I got back, the darkies were too drunk with their new freedom to work for any wage, so the cotton went to pot. What cotton we had baled went to the treasury agents. And there were a lot of debts. Well...”

I looked at her over the wineglass.

“You remember our place, don't you, Caroline? And the time you came down from Virginia, to visit your cousins the Blackwelders, and the parties we had in those days? The South isn't the same, Caroline, but I don't suppose you would know about that. There's not much there. Old families are broken up, and the great plantations are broken up too, or in weeds. You knew it was going to be that way, didn't you? After the Wilderness campaign there wasn't much doubt about who was going to win the war. And you didn't want to be on the losing side, did you, Caroline?”

She reacted to that. She took three quick steps toward me and slashed my face with the flat of her hand. “Get out!” she rasped like a den of stirred-up rattlers. “Get out before I scream!”

But I wasn't ready to leave now. I had too many things inside me that had to come out, and I had to be sure of things. I had waited a long time and had come a long way, and now I had to know.

“Are you going to get out?”

“No. Not yet.”

“I'll scream.” Her voice was cold with anger. “Do you know what they will do to you? I'll tell them—I'll tell them you attacked me!”

I had to smile at that. She wouldn't scream and I knew she wouldn't, because she had to know why I had come to Larrymoor. She took a deep, shuddering breath and got hold of herself. She sat stiffly in a graceful little dark mahogany chair and glared at me.

Maybe she was afraid of me. Maybe she was hating me. But she pulled the shutters behind her eyes and I couldn't tell. I knew now that I had never been able to tell what Caroline was thinking, not even in the old days when I thought I knew everything, and the thought was disturbing.

So I talked.

“Do you remember, Caroline...?”

She remembered, all right.

Before the war we had had a plantation that we called Sweetbriar. It was my family's plantation. Not the greatest in Alabama, but not the smallest, either, especially along the Black Warrior River, where we lived. The land was black and rich and earthy smelling, not like it was here on the desert, where the land is baked to lifelessness under the blast of an everlasting sun. We had seventy-four slaves one year—although that was an exceptional year and so long ago that I hardly remember—and in the fall of the year the darkies would begin preparing for the great barbecues we used to have, and the parties. That was the time for parties, the fall and winter. It was at one of those wonderful parties that I saw Caroline for the first time.