Reap the Whirlwind (17 page)
Read Reap the Whirlwind Online
Authors: Terry C. Johnston
“Sweet Mither of Christ!” Seamus exclaimed. “I’ll bet John was a believer after that!”
Closter was near tears in laughter as he replied, “Johnny told me he’d never try again to cipher on the character of Injuns.”
“A wise decision for any man contemplating living long enough to have grandchildren,” Donegan added.
The second of June greeted the column with a raw, blustery cold in the wake of the passing storm. With coffee and hardtack down for the morning march, Crook moved the column out, their noses pointing north by west, where they began to catch glimpses of the magnificent Big Horn range, mantled in pristine white shawls clear down to the foothills. Off to the east, any man with field glasses could make out the dark concentration of the Black Hills, where hordes of miners dug and drank, gambled and rioted in the shadows of those sacred places where the Sioux and Cheyenne came to pray. And finally, just to the east of north, Seamus could begin to discern the hulking plateaus of Pumpkin Buttes that would run north almost all the way to old Fort Reno itself.
That noon during the midday rest with Donegan and Finerty, Robert Strahorn quickly penned his observations of the general as Crook passed by the knot of correspondents gathered in a circle to light their pipes and share comments on the march.
The general rode at the head of the column, his long blonde side-whiskers wrapped in twine after the manner of an Indian scalp-lock…. He is a strange man. Singularly quiet and reticent, he is thought cold and perhaps heartless by many. Certainly his face indicates ambition, determination, and a crafty—almost fox-like—shrewdness.
… One who knows him well said, “He’s just like an Indian. He can live on acorns and slippery elm bark,”—and I believe it.
On their march that Friday afternoon Crook’s column passed by some hastily dug rifle pits. Investigation by the scouts showed the pits had been used by a party of miners passing through the country of late. In one pit the scouts discovered a board with a message carved in it. Another board showed that firepit charcoal had been used to scrawl a notice to passersby, stating that Captain St. John and Captain Langston had their combined civilian parties, numbering some sixty-five men, here on the twenty-seventh of May while on their way out of the gold fields in Montana and making for the Whitewood mining district of the Black Hills.
One of the newsworthy messages read:
DRY FORK OF THE POWDER RIVER, May 27, 1876
Captain St. John’s party of Montana miners, sixty-five strong, leave here this morning for Whitewood. No Indian trouble yet.
(
s
) Daniels, Silliman, Clark, Barret, Morrill, Woods, Merrill, Buchanan, Wyman, Busse, Snyder, A. Daley, E. Jackson, J. Daley
While another and more humorous inscription declared:
DRY FORK OF THE POWDER RIVER May 27, 1876—
Tony Pastor’s opera troupe of emigrants from Montana, on their way east, camped here. Don’t know how far it is to where they can get water, so have filled nose-bags and gum boots, and ride on singing, “There’s Room Enough in Paradise.”
2 June 1876“L
isten to this, ladies!” Martha Luhn squealed, waving the
sheets of letter paper she had just unfolded and begun to read.
Interrupted in her own hurry, Samantha Donegan looked up from tearing at the seal holding her envelope closed. On that wrinkled envelope, in her husband’s hand, were written the words:
Samantha Donegan
in care of
Post Commander’s Officers Quarters
Fort Laramie
Wyoming Territory, U.S.A.
“What’s he say?” begged another of the army wives gathered in the post commander’s small parlor, where they had been called this morning to receive the mail posted down from Fort Fetterman, the last post they could expect to receive from their husbands for some time. How long, not one of those long-suffering soldier wives could answer for Samantha.
“Gerhard says he got the bread!” Mrs. Luhn gushed,
holding the letter against her breast for a moment as she caught her breath in the excitement. “I can’t believe it got there without getting eaten by someone! Here, let me read you this first part, ladies. Oh, my! Gerhard says the general ate supper with his F Company their last night at Fetterman before marching off to Indian country. Here he writes, ‘General Crook dined with us and praised your rye bread very highly.’”
While some of the others went on to chat back and forth among themselves, sharing this tidbit of news with that latest rumor from Fetterman, Samantha eased herself down into one of the ladder-back rockers and let her eyes again rush over Seamus’s scrawl on the much-handled envelope. Like someone yearning to tear into that letter, yet feeling reluctance for the experience to be over all too quickly, she finally succumbed and pried open the sheaf of pages.
My dearest heart,
We set off tomorrow. Again to Indian country. This time I will not be in the van with the scouts. Crook hires only three this campaign. All three are good. Two are friends of mine.
Instead, I will work for my wages. And truly work. My job is to convince some nasty, singleminded animals that they should carry the burdens I have lashed to their backs all the way to the villages of Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, then back home again.
Home again to you, Samantha. And our child.
To wait until autumn for the event. Ah, but I will. I must, for God Himself heeds not man’s desires, but commands all in His own time. It will be here before we know it. Do not fear for I will be at your side. Nothing will keep me from being at your side at the moment of birth, Sam.
Word is that we should capture the enemy villages without delay. There are two other columns in the field this spring. Not like the winter’s march when Crook and Reynolds was the only army marching. Now we are assured of capturing the
hostiles between us, driving them back to their agencies and marching back home before the leaves begin to turn there on the cottonwoods beside the river where we have walked on so many afternoons.
I hate the idea of marching north with this army as a packer, not able to have the freedom to ride and roam. But I am assured in one thing, and you can find solace in this too, that I will not be on the front of any fighting. The packers are not hired mercenaries. Crook has ordered some Crow down from Montana, as well as some Shoshone coming over from Camp Brown on the Wind River Agency. Our job is only to see that the general’s soldiers get to the battlefield with their ammunition and rations, and back to Fetterman again.
With my job done I can return to Laramie for you. And once more we can ride north to the gold diggings in Montana. Where the muscles of my back won’t have to pack mules, but will wrench our fortune from the rocks and soil of that rich land. That done, I can finally dress you in the velvet and lace and silk you so deserve. Our fortune made, I can build you the house where we both want to live out the rest of our days, raising all the children we have talked of, until we are both gray and lined with years. Ah, to dream of those days yet to come, Sam. Thinking on our grandchildren coming to visit us on those special holidays.
Is it so strange for me to think about my grandchildren already? When I have only just come to accept that I am going to be a father?
Why, I’ll make a d—–d good father, and a d—–d good grandfather! Of that there is no doubt in my mind.
Nor in my heart where you rest now. If only you could rest on my shoulder, in my arms. Here, with me on the edge of this Indian country. Where I could once more lay my head against that
growing belly of yours, and hear the faint thumping, the recognition in that young life that his father was indeed near.
If only I could hold you, Sam. Remember I am there with you in the days and weeks to come, until I can return to you and this land will at last be at peace. I am with you, remember during the longest nights and all those days to come. I am with you, my heart traveling to you over the miles and the hours until I can hold you as tightly as I hold this paper now, the paper you will touch and hold to your breast in only a matter of days, a matter of a few sunrises.
I am with you, my dearest heart. And soon, very soon, I will once more hold you in my arms, and feel your lips softly, sweetly, laid on mine, murmuring my name.
Your loving and faithful husband
,
Seamus
She looked up, blinking, her eyes brimming, to gaze around at the faces of those other women who had come west with their husbands, come to the edge of this wilderness with the men they loved. She had that in common with these new friends. With them she felt such abiding kinship at this moment. With them she shared the unfairness that life dealt the wife of an army officer: the frequent and most untimely changes of duty station; the hard lot of a wife forced to camp in the open on the march between stations; the politics of rank and command and the impolitic scramble for private quarters; the shortage of servants on the frontier; the dull sameness of army rations; the low pay and the drudgery of life with a husband away on campaign; as well as the harsh limitations on properly educating the sons and daughters of those officers assigned the farthest-flung outposts of the Republic.
As she peered through the smoky window to the parade beyond, the sun glittered off the patches of snow left behind by the recent storm. She wondered how he had fared, if he had stayed warm and dry as the spring blizzard blew down on Crook’s army. She looked back at Martha Luhn,
wishing now she had baked something for Seamus too, and sent it north to Fetterman for him to eat before setting off for Indian country. Something for her husband to taste, if he could not right then taste her mouth.
But then, she wasn’t yet used to this life of being married to a man called to protect the frontier. A man called to tear himself away from his wife.
Sam peered down at the letter, rereading those few precious words he had written in his ungainly scrawl, trying to imagine feeling his lips laid softly, sweetly against hers. It made her yearn so, made the ache grow and gnaw within her. Filling her eyes with those tears so many in that room shared at that very moment.
So, as lonely as she was, as dark and interminable as these nights seemed, as long and endless as the days to come would be, Sam decided she was not alone. She carried his child within her, growing bigger and stronger with every day.
She would go on and do what Seamus had asked of her. To wait for his return. To wait for his arms. To wait for his first eager, hungry kiss.
To wait.
Martha Jane Cannary had fixed on the mule-packer, that big tall one with the long, wavy hair and the gray eyes who looked like a man who knew his way around a woman as much as he knew his way around animals and weapons and Injun fighting.
He had the mark of a man Martha Jane wanted to paw her.
Wagon master Russell said the packer was known as the Irishman. He didn’t know no more about him.
But then, Martha Jane knew she’d find out. When she fixed her sights on any man, she always found out everything she could. Especially how big his equipment was.
She was a teamster now. In full disguise, strutting and cursing, chewing and spitting with the best of them hired by Charlie Russell to lace the backs of those six-mule hitches with solid rawhide and curl the air with profane invective. Calamity Jane, in the company of better than a thousand men! All alone on this road to old Fort Reno and
Injun territory—and not a one of ’em knew she had breasts yearning for fondling, not a one knew of that moist place between her legs where she wanted that Irishman to diddle her good, back in the bushes where no others would know her secret.
Back in bushes beside Powder River, where she would let that big Irishman in on her secret.
How she wanted to have him breathing hot and wet at her ear as he humped her good, on top of her or behind, pawing at her breasts freed from what little restriction there was beneath the loose-fitting calico shirt, her pants down at her ankles just like his would be as the one called the Irishman hammered her like a blacksmith seating hot iron upon his anvil.
It usually happened this way in recent years out here on the frontier. She would fix on one particular frontiersman whom she found a beautiful specimen of western manhood and desire his intimacy for a week or more while on the trail. Then, again, there had been times when Janey had encouraged a handful or more rawhiders and bull-whackers of chance meeting, and with a loud screech of delight take them all on with equal ferocity after throwing lots for who would climb atop her first, second and on and on in ribald order until every last one of them was spent and she no longer hungry. Yes, indeed—there were spells when she just could not get enough of men, Martha Jane easily admitted. It was times like that she took a bunch of them on, one after another, again and again and again.
But for now, it was the Irishman she wanted to paw her and diddle that place where she grew hot thinking on him.
A thousand soldiers! Ain’t that some! she thought. Maybe it was just the unadulterated closeness of so much male equipage that gave her the heat she felt. She was the only woman—the only
white
woman—within hundreds of miles. And all these men to satisfy her longings with! Whoooooo, doggee!