Her Hesitant Heart (11 page)

He went into the parlor and returned with her clothes draped over his arm. He set them on the small kitchen table but did not leave the room. “I’m going to turn my back on you and create the specialty of Chez Randolph—cheese sandwiches
made with army cheese and army bread. It is my sole accomplishment in the kitchen. You will eat one sandwich. I will not leave you alone.”

True to his word, he turned his back and started to slice the bread. “If you need help, you only have to ask. I know what women look like,” he said, his voice so noncommittal that he might have been telling her a straight line was the shortest distance between two points.

With a sigh, Susanna dropped her towel and dressed herself. At the same time, Major Randolph, imperturbable, kept up a commentary of Fort Laramie news, spending the most time on Katie O’Leary’s delivery of a daughter. “I believe they are going to name her Mary Rose,” he said. “I suggested Josephine Randolph, but Katie gave a most unladylike snort at my idea. Where is the gratitude, I ask you?”

Susanna laughed softly, surprising herself that she could still laugh. Light-headed, she sat down on the chair, her stocking in her hand. “Major …” she began. “I just can’t bend over to do this. Makes me dizzy.”

“Call me Joe,” he said as he turned around and pulled her stocking up one leg, and then the other one. He did it with some expertise, which made her smile. “You can do the garters, Susanna,” he said, handing them to her and turning back to the bread. “I had some butter for these sandwiches, but I think it has gone rancid.”

“This is a strange conversation,” she said as she finished dressing.

“No stranger than any conversation I have ever had with Nick Martin,” he told her, setting the sandwiches on tin plates. “Incidentally, he asked me quite seriously if he could set fire to the Dunklins’ quarters.”

Susanna gasped. “I hope you discouraged him!”

“I did. Told him you would be very disappointed in him. He agreed finally, but I could tell his heart was not in it.” Joe indicated the sandwiches. “This, Susanna Hopkins, is what passes for luncheon in my quarters.
Bon appétit
.” He smiled then, his eyes kind. “I plan to brush up on my French. Perhaps you can help. How is your French? I will resign my commission when this latest Indian war is over.” He struck a pose that made her smile again. “I intend to travel to Paris and study with Pasteur! You have inspired me to blow the dust of gossipy, hypocritical army forts off my boots. I am in your debt.” He bowed then, and sat down, handing her a sandwich. “Army cheese, Susanna. Let’s see …
fromage?
”

Amazed at him, she accepted the sandwich. “This is wretched,” she said after several bites. “How can you mess up a cheese sandwich so completely?”

“It’s a mystery.” He chewed and swallowed. “I only eat to stay alive. I hear there are excellent restaurants in Paris.”

Susanna stared at him. “You are the strangest man,” she murmured.

“Standard issue, that’s all,” he replied. He leaned his elbows on the table, and there was no mistaking how tired his eyes looked.

“Do you ever sleep?”

“Not much.” He finished half his sandwich. When he looked at her, his expression was serious. “I went to Major Townsend this morning, and told him to hire you to work with Private Benedict.”

“I’m too ashamed to walk across the parade ground, let alone teach,” she said.

“You will. All I ask is that you be brave a little longer. Please. Private Benedict needs your help, and company funds will cover the cost. Maeve Rattigan has rounded up three other women who would like to learn to read. Perhaps you can teach them two evenings a week. I doubt you will make more than a dollar a week with the evening classes. Private Benedict’s school is scheduled to run until the end of May, the same as yours was.”

He returned his attention to his sandwich.

“Didn’t you just hear me say I wouldn’t do it?” she asked.

“I ignored it. This would be better with butter.” He finished his sandwich as she fumed. “By May you will have a hundred dollars, plus whatever you earn from evening classes. That will give you enough to get to Cheyenne, and maybe beyond.”

“To go where?” she asked, setting down her half-finished sandwich.

He put it back in her hand. “That will depend upon you.”

Joe felt like a bully as he sat there, making sure she finished the miserable sandwich. He bullied her into another bowl of breakfast oatmeal and warm canned milk with cinnamon. By the time fatigue call sounded and the fort began afternoon duties, she had finished eating, and brushed her hair. He hadn’t thought to ask Emily for a hairbrush, but it cost him not a single pang to get Melissa’s hairbrush from the chest where he kept those articles of her life he could not part with.

Susanna took the hairbrush and just looked at it for a long moment, her eyes troubled. She opened her mouth to speak, then closed it. She brushed her hair, and he felt his own heart lift, as though that simple, womanly gesture had brushed aside years of cobwebs.

“What was her name?” was all she asked.

“Melissa Rhoades. She was from Ohio and very pretty.”

Susanna smiled, her eyes not so troubled. “Would you … would Melissa have any hairpins?”

She did. He took them from the cedar chest and returned to the kitchen, as Susanna finished braiding her blond hair and coiling it into the black hairnet that Emily had thought to include. With Melissa’s hairpins, Susanna Hopkins was tidy again, but still unwilling to leave his quarters.

Joe helped her to her feet anyway, steadying her. He had second thoughts about hauling her across the parade ground. Maybe she was still too weak.
He appraised her as a physician. Her color was good, her eyes lively. She trembled a little, but she stood erect.

Then his mind took a sudden, great leap and he looked at her as a husband would. He asked himself if he would have treated his beloved Melissa this way. He could arrive at no conclusion, beyond the obvious fact that while Mrs. Hopkins was too thin, she was so lovely. He could see something in her eyes that looked a little bit like resolution; maybe a thin, wavering resolution, but resolution. Where it came from, he had no idea, considering how beaten down she was.

He took a chance then, and folded her in his arms, pushing her head gently until it rested against his chest. To his relief, her arms went around him and she clung to him. Whether it was from exhaustion or emotion, he couldn’t tell.

“I just want to put the heart back in you, Susanna,” he whispered. The thought struck him that maybe she was doing the same thing to him, probably without even knowing it. “Can you make it across the parade ground? It matters.”

She pulled away from him, her hands on his chest now, not forcing him back, but steadying herself. She looked like a woman tired of the fight, but a woman not quite ready to concede, if she thought she had an ally.

“I believe I can,” she said. “If you insist.”

“I do, but this will be the last time I insist you do anything.”

“What do you mean?”

“There is a job waiting for you in the commissary storehouse. It will be up to you to decide if you wish to take it, after spending an afternoon with Private Benedict.”

Joe knew he had not convinced her, but he could tell he was close. “Does Private Benedict know I am coming?” she asked.

“I told him you might. By the way, his first name is Anthony. Are you up to it?”

She flashed him a look of irritation, which pleased him, because it was not a bland look of someone on the point of surrender. “I told you I would! Don’t you listen?”

The parade ground was deserted because it was too cold for outdoor activities. They walked slowly, Susanna looking straight ahead, her sights fixed on the commissary storehouse. She closed her eyes once, so Joe stopped until she had command of herself again.

It wasn’t a big parade ground, as parade grounds go, but he knew it taxed her. He was on the verge of turning around with her, except that her straightforward gaze never wavered. She stopped again, and he knew she was exhausted.

“I suppose you’ve heard my story from Captain Reese,” he said. “Since there was no real reason to cashier me, George Crook used his influence to have me removed from the Army of the Potomac and sent to Florida. I’ve never been so humiliated. General George Thomas rescued me. I owe him a
debt I cannot repay, because he is dead now. I’m paying that debt today. We’re almost there.”

The commissary storehouse was warm and there was no mistaking Susanna’s sigh of relief. Joe helped her off with her coat, steadied her again and walked with her to the last bay in the long storehouse, their destination. A sideways glance at the woman who walked beside him showed her lips set tight in a firm line and her eyes looking into that distance he knew very well from warfare. She amazed him.

Private Benedict offered her a chair, which she sank into immediately. He looked at his students. “We have just become extraordinarily lucky,” he said. “Mrs. Hopkins is thinking about joining me here to teach. Let’s be on good behavior so she will agree. Major Randolph, thank you for escorting her. We’ll take over from here.”

Joe had never been so adroitly dismissed by a private, and he thought about it as he nerved himself to leave Susanna there: tired, weak, discouraged and not entirely certain she wanted to stay. He decided the private was right. Joe nodded to Benedict and touched Susanna’s shoulder lightly.

“I’ll be back for you at recall from fatigue, Mrs. Hopkins.”
Please look at me
, he thought.
Let me know I’m not a fool
.

To his immense gratification, she did. The resolution he saw put the heart back in his body.

I
t would have taken a much sterner teacher than Susanna Hopkins not to be charmed by Private Benedict’s students. She sat there too tired to move, and grateful for a warm place. By the time an hour had passed, she was involved. By the end of two hours, she had gathered the smaller pupils around her, ready to teach them.

She had no idea what Major Randolph had told him, but Private Benedict acted as though worn-out women came into his classroom every day. He handed her a McGuffey’s Reader, helped her to another seat farther away from the blackboard, where he was teaching multiplication tables, and channeled the little ones in her direction. She started to read to her students, transferred so seamlessly from him to her that she didn’t even realize it until she heard recall from fatigue.

She looked up then and smiled at Anthony
Benedict, who was watching her with a smile of his own. After he dismissed the class, her pupils brought her their coats, mufflers and hats for help, as though she had been their teacher since the first day of the term. When they left, she sat there barely allowing herself to feel what she felt.

“What do you think, Mrs. Hopkins?” the private asked, sitting beside her.

“I can do this, if you’ll have me.”

The look he gave her didn’t need words—it was a combination of relief and agreement that she remembered from her early teaching days, when she had been the novice.

“I’ll expect you here every morning after guard mount,” he said. “I like to go Saturday mornings, too, and just read to them.”

She nodded, overwhelmed. Private Benedict got up to give her a cup of tea, and some bread and butter. She accepted them gratefully.

“Major Randolph arranged for my own stash of food, in case some of my pupils come here unfed,” he said, sitting down with a cup of coffee. “Maybe it’s for teachers, too, although I expect you to have breakfast every morning.”

It was gentle reproof from someone with little rank, much younger than she was, and no real teaching skills beyond willingness and interest, but she took it to heart, grateful for his kindness.

“I’ll bring my own lunch,” she said with playful dignity that made him laugh.

They were sitting there discussing lessons for
tomorrow when Major Randolph made his way through the warehouse to them. Private Benedict watched him.

“I never met a better man,” he said, his voice low.

“I’m not sure I have, either,” she whispered back. “He wants me to succeed.”

“Then I expect you will.”

Susanna thought about Private Benedict’s comment as she put on her coat and bent her head a bit, even before the major held open the warehouse door for her. She knew the wind was coming.

Surprise. The afternoon was still for a change and there was something indefinable in the air. She glanced at her escort. “Dare I mention the word
spring?
”

“No. This is the January tease,” he said. “Seize the moment, I say, because that’s all it will be.” He extended his arm for her and she took it. “We’ve been invited to dinner at the Rattigans’. I don’t know what your plans are, but you’ve seen me at work in my kitchen, and I never turn down meals fixed elsewhere.”

“Wise of you,” she murmured. “Besides, I am not certain I can face my cousin yet. Maybe after dinner.”

“I’ll go with you. No sense in facing Emily alone.”

Susanna stopped, overwhelmed again at his kindness.

“Is something wrong?” he asked, all solicitation in a way that seemed both professional and friendly at the same time.

She shook her head, not even certain she could put into words the sheer pleasure of having someone who wasn’t bent on destruction take an interest in her. “It’s hard to explain,” she said, as they walked toward the footbridge spanning the Laramie.

“Try.”

She thought a moment as they strolled across the footbridge. “You’re not measuring me for a coffin.”

“I couldn’t possibly,” he replied promptly.

“Would Hippocrates revoke your oath?” she teased.

“Hippocrates has nothing to do with my regard for you,” he said suddenly, then looked at her as if he was as surprised as she was by what had come out of his mouth ….

We’re both too old to blush
, Joe thought as Sergeant Rattigan showed them into his parlor and Susanna beat a hasty retreat to the kitchen, where Maeve was putting the final touches on dinner. Happy not to contemplate his impulsive comments of mere moments before, Joe sniffed the air appreciatively.

“Sergeant, I could live on this planet far beyond my alloted three score and ten, and my kitchen would never yield such fragrance,” he said.

“It might if you remarried, Major,” Rattigan said.

Joe had heard this from others, with such a statement usually followed by more embarrassment, and apology, as everyone tried to step carefully around his widower status. Not Sergeant Rattigan, drat the man, who regarded him calmly, puffing on his pipe with a thoughtful expression not owed entirely to the comfort of tobacco.

Rattigan’s expression changed from thoughtful to tender when they heard the women laughing. For a moment, Joe envied the sergeant his charming wife.

“There aren’t any spare Maeve Rattigans,” Joe said, which might have sounded like bald envy, except he knew Rattigan understood.

“True,” the sergeant said. “Mrs. Hopkins is equally charming. Don’t you agree?”

Joe Randolph could not deny he had been considering the matter, on some level or other. Trust a sergeant to slice through the Gordian knot of convention and platitude, laying the matter bare. That’s what sergeants did.

Joe was spared a reply by the timely arrival of Maeve herself, who set a concoction of government beef and other anonymous ingredients on the table in the front room. He took a deep breath, appreciative. Susanna carried in biscuits and that was dinner. Joe hoped there would be plum duff, that homely dessert of the military, and Maeve did not disappoint.

The whole meal was larded with the conversation of people who shared the same profession: the
coming campaign, the latest gossip from Omaha Barracks, what late-winter oddities from the commissary department lurked for the unsuspecting. Joe had spent most shared meals in similar chat, but this was different. He glanced at Susanna Hopkins, who seemed to blossom before his eyes, because no one intimated anything concerning the last few horrendous days. He wondered how long it had been since she had enjoyed dinner and conversation.

He did want to turn the conversation her way. “Maeve, were you able to recruit any friends for a night school? Mrs. Hopkins gets bored easily if she’s not teaching someone something.”

Maybe he had blundered. After all, he hadn’t even asked Susanna if she was going to accept his offer to teach with Private Benedict. “At least, I believe she has her work cut out for her in the garrison school,” he added.

“I do,” Susanna said, to his relief. “I promised Private Benedict that I would arrive tomorrow with my own lunch in my own lard bucket. My evenings are quite free, Maeve. Find me ladies to teach.”

“I already have three. Is that enough?” Maeve asked.

“Even one is enough,” Susanna replied promptly. “Shall we begin tomorrow night? You name the time and place.”

Joe couldn’t help himself. Or maybe he didn’t try. Without a word, he leaned over and kissed Susanna’s cheek. “Bravo,” he said, then returned
to the plum duff in front of him, as though he did that every evening.

Maeve started to giggle, then Susanna. The women were still chuckling when they gathered up the dishes and moved back to the kitchen, that female sanctuary. Sergeant Rattigan wisely turned his after-dinner conversation to the upcoming campaign. By the time Joe ushered Susanna back across the footbridge, all was calm.

“Lights out any minute,” he told her as they walked more and more slowly across the parade ground, Susanna unconsciously moving at a snail’s pace, the closer they came to Officers Row. “You have to be in a classroom in the morning, looking chipper. I’d be derelict indeed if I monopolized any more of your time tonight.”

She stopped. “Thank you from the bottom of my heart,” she whispered.

“Just doing my job, as head of this year’s administrative council,” he said. They stood in silence as the bugler played taps. As the last note still lingered, he started her in motion again. The wind was picking up and winter had returned. “I’ll stop at the O’Learys, and tell them that you’ll be happy to escort Rooney to the enlisted men’s school, if you’re game.”

“I am.”

They were on the porch now. “Do you want me to come in? I could explain …”

She put her hand on his arm. “Thank you, no. This is for me to do.” She looked at the front door,
as though it were the gaping jaws of hell, and went inside.

Stay with me
, he wanted to say, but did not. He had nothing to offer her on the spur of the moment that was acceptable in any society, especially one as censorious as this one.

He stood a moment on the porch, then segued a few steps to the O’Learys’ front door, where he stood a few minutes with James O’Leary. The captain assured him that Rooney would be ready for school in the morning.

Joe returned to his cold quarters. He lit a fire in the parlor’s potbellied stove, because he expected a visit from Sergeant Rattigan. A whispered comment as Maeve and Susanna were kitchen-bound, and a nod from the sergeant, had assured him of that.

It was going to be a touchy subject, but maybe he had science on his side. Heaven knows, nothing else had worked for Maeve Rattigan. He was seated at his desk in his home office, looking at the
Journal for Homeopathy
, when he heard Rattigan’s knock.

Sergeant Rattigan gave Joe all his attention as the post surgeon fired the only shot left in his puny medical arsenal, an 1854 article from an obscure British medical journal. Professors at the University of Maryland had scoffed, but Joe had never forgotten it.

“I’m going to intrude in a monumentally intimate way, Sergeant,” he said. “You can stop me
at any time and there will be no hard feelings. I mean that.”

The sergeant nodded. He stared at his well-polished shoes. “Please don’t expect us to abstain, Major. I don’t think we could.”

Joe thought of his own wife.
Neither could we
, he remembered.
Tread lightly on Sergeant Rattigan’s heart. Maeve’s, too
. He sat back, then came around to the other side of his desk, to sit beside the sergeant. His professors in medical school had always encouraged distance between physician and patient, nonsense Joe had discarded right after the Battle of Bull Run.

“I won’t ask you to abstain. How could I? Here are the facts, Sergeant—every few months, your wife suffers a spontaneous abortion. Technically, it’s not a miscarriage, because she is not far enough along for that. It’s wearing her out, body and soul. If this continues, your darling Maeve will become a name on a gravestone that you have to leave behind when the regiment moves on.”

Sergeant Rattigan groaned out loud. The heartbroken sound shot a chill down Joe’s back, reminding him of other Irishmen keening after death of comrades in battle. The unearthly sound had haunted him many a night.

“I fear for her life. She is unquestionably anemic and this is taking a terrible toll,” Joe added for good measure.

Rattigan looked at him then, and Joe absorbed
all the pain and worry into his own heart, because that was part of medicine.

“Sergeant, would you try something?” He opened up the journal, ragged from being hauled from post to post, along with his other medical books. “This treatise by George Drysdale was published in London in 1854. I came across it in medical school. No one took it seriously. I do.”

Rattigan’s expression had changed from devastated to interested.

“I have no idea why Maeve suffers so. I doubt I will ever know, but try this. Confine your marital congress to directly
after
her monthly flow. Say, up to ten days after the cessation of menses, no more. Don’t resume again until after her next monthly.”

“What will that prove?” the sergeant asked.

“I think she will not get pregnant. Maybe others scoff, but as Maeve’s surgeon, I am desperate to help her. By God, I will grasp at any straw!”

He hadn’t meant to sound so adamant, but there it was, the practice of last-ditch medicine, the kind of medicine he seemed to practice all too often. He was almost afraid to look at the sergeant, but he did, and saw shock, followed by interest.

“It’s like this, Sergeant—the longer her body can rest and heal, the better Maeve’s overall health.” Joe held up his hands to stop the question he knew was coming from an Irishman. “I understand the tenets of your faith, but how could this possibly affect them? I am suggesting nothing artificial.
Besides, after years of this wretched pattern afflicting the dearest person in your life, how could God be upset with you?”

Tears started in the sergeant’s eyes. He bowed his head and cried. Joe hesitated not a moment before putting his arm around the big man and holding him close. “Just try it, John,” he urged, disregarding rank. “Please. I don’t know what else to do.”

They sat together until the sergeant dried his eyes and blew his nose on the handkerchief Joe handed him. He held out the journal, too. “Read the article. Some of it you probably won’t understand—I barely do. Talk to Maeve. I believe Drysdale’s science is sound.”

“We’re never going to have children, are we?”

The words were wrenched from the sergeant like an inflamed molar. Probably he had never voiced that dread before.

Joe shook his head. “No, you’re not,” he said softly, “but it doesn’t follow that you have to be miserable. Try it, just try it.”

Sergeant Rattigan stood up. He managed a faint smile, and then he saluted. “You’ll know we’re successful if there aren’t any more late-night notes tacked to your message board. I promise we’ll try it.”

Joe let out an enormous sigh when the door closed quietly behind the sergeant. He just sat there, then nodded to his bust of Hippocrates, scarred and banged around from travel between
garrisons. “Well, Hip, there you are. What am I going to do about Susanna Hopkins? Any ideas? I think I love her.”