Her Hesitant Heart (18 page)

When she woke up in tears that first morning, he held her close, singing a ribald song he must have learned in the late war, so vulgar that she gasped and then laughed.

“It takes no imagination to rhyme
luck
and
pluck
,” he joked. “Those Ohio regiments were full of farm boys with saucy tongues and vivid imaginations.” His eyes grew distant. “I wish I could have saved more of them.”

“You saved all you could, didn’t you?”

“I did.”

She knew Joe was a man of duty, but she had to chuckle to herself how he had to drag himself out of bed every morning to ride his borrowed horse to Fort Russell for the court-martial of a captain that Crook had found wanting during the Powder River campaign.

“I’d rather spend two hours just staring at your nice ankles than listening to fifteen minutes of why the army should slap this poor captain’s wrist because he decided to dismount his men for a while on a freezing cold morning to boil coffee. It made no difference in the outcome of the battle. He convinced me; hell, he convinced all of us. Court-martial duty is a pain,” Joe told her one evening, as he lay with his head in her bare lap.

And so it went. She recalled him to duty each morning, laughed when he grumbled, sent him out the door, and slept for another hour or two. A
court-martial honeymoon was not for the faint of heart, she decided, at least for the major. For her part, it was idle luxury to lie in bed, think about the night before, then take a long soak in the tub down the hall and think about the night to come. She decided her husband had a certain talent. Maybe that came from knowing more about female anatomy than most men.

She spent her afternoons with more purpose, writing to her uncle in Shippensburg, asking to be kept abreast of attempts to find Tommy. Joe suggested that she compose a notice to be sent to Pennsylvania, Illinois, Iowa and Nebraska papers—following a probable path to Cheyenne—asking for the whereabouts of a tall twelve-year-old with a dark blaze in his blond hair, and brown eyes, with a mole on his cheekbone, answering to the name of Tommy Hopkins.

One night, lying satiated with her equally sated husband, Susanna composed the announcement, pausing a long time over Nick Martin’s description. “We daren’t mention Saint Paul, or no editor will print this, no matter how much money we send,” she told her husband, who looked nearly comatose. “Joe, you are surely the most satisfied-looking man in the territory.”

“I expect I am,” he told her, all complacence. “Certainly the happiest man at the court-martial table. I show up every morning with a big grin on my face. They all hate me now.” He took a nip of her neck and looked over her shoulder at her announcement.

“‘Tall, silent, long dark hair’ should do it. We dubbed him Nick Martin. I wonder what his name is.”

She took the announcement to the newspaper editor, who promised to send it out. He looked at her with some sympathy. “Your son, ma’am?” he asked.

She nodded, unable to help the tears that welled in her eyes. She left the newspaper office as quickly as she could, and spent the next hour composing herself by feeding pigeons in a straggly park that was Cheyenne’s attempt at gentility. The sun was warm on her face, now that it was nearly May.

She walked back to the hotel, suddenly wishing to return to Fort Laramie and the post surgeon’s house, to cook for him, to smooth his way however she could, and to teach her pupils in the commissary storehouse. It was time to plan a year-end program for the parents, before the fathers had to mount up or march out for Montana Territory and a summer of campaigning. There would be recitations and maybe a play, and refreshments. She would plan and work and love her husband and try not to think about Tommy any more than most of everyday.

She calmed herself, grateful that every night she would be in the capable arms of a man who knew her sorrows, knew his own, and who seemed to have no trouble comforting her. She couldn’t help smiling.

He was waiting for her in the hotel room when
she returned, surprising her. She was grateful she had spent some time composing herself, but he seemed to see right through what she thought was her calm demeanor.

“I thought it might be hard for you to go to the newspaper office,” he said, putting down the paper he was reading and holding out his arms for her.

She sat on his lap. “How on earth did you get away early?” she asked.

“
I
requested an early adjournment,” he replied, and chuckled. “You can imagine the ribbing I got, complete with suggestions on how I should spend my extra free time! They’re so envious.”

She poked him in the chest, then kissed him. “You’re going to make it hard for me to ever meet these gentlemen without blushing. Why
are
you early?”

“I have an idea. I was sitting there, bored, doodling little blonde ladies with big eyes, when it occurred to me that I possibly have an ace up my sleeve—Allan Pinkerton.”

“Of the detective agency?”

“The same. I knew him as Major E.J. Allen, when he was doing undercover work around Atlanta in ‘64. He had a rather nasty case of diarrhea.”

“You are descriptive.”

“Ah, yes. He owes me one or two. Mr. Pinkerton isn’t active in the agency now, but his sons are. I came home early to get a bank draft—over there
on the desk—and write a letter. We’ll put the National Detective Agency on Tommy’s trail.” Joe kissed her. “Don’t cry, Suzie. I’m just sorry it took me this long to think of it.”

They put their heads together over the letter. An hour later Susanna had finished writing it, because she knew her penmanship was better than a physician’s. Joe looked at the letter a long time.

“I know you’ve described him down to the mole under his eye, but I wish you had a photograph,” he said finally.

She almost didn’t want to tell him. She had promised herself she would never let it out of her sight.
Do you want him found or not?
she asked herself.

“I do have a photograph,” she told her husband. “I carry it everywhere with me.”

“We need to send it to Will Pinkerton, Suzie.”

“It’s all I have,” she said as she took it from her carpetbag and handed it to him. “It was taken just before Frederick nearly killed me, and thank God Frederick had forgotten all about it.”

Joe looked at the photograph a long time, a smile playing around his lips. “He looks so much like you.” He pointed to the picture. “That’s interesting—he really does have that same blaze of dark hair on his temple like you.”

“He’s my son,” she said simply. “Just make sure Mr. Pinkerton knows I must have the photograph back.”

The court-martial ended two days later, to her husband’s obvious relief. He came into the hotel room carrying a large pasteboard box and wearing a grin from ear to ear. “General Crook will be so disappointed,” he told her, setting down the box. “All we did was issue a rather tepid reprimand, because that was all the matter deserved.” He followed the trajectory of her expression. “And what is this, you’re thinking?”

“It’s too big for flowers, and you hardly seem like someone who would waste money on flowers,” she said.

“It’s for you, and you don’t even need to do anything extraordinary for it.”

When she said, “I already
did
that last night,” he laughed and handed her the box.

She felt her breath catch when she took off the lid. Nestled inside were two dresses, one a dignified royal-blue and the other made of summery lawn, little purple flowers on a pale green background.

“You dear man,” she whispered, shaking out the blue dress. It was simple, with long sleeves and a plain round neckline.

“There’s a lace collar in the box, too,” her husband said, his eyes lively. “I really liked the one you borrowed from Mrs. Burt for our wedding. I have a very nice opal necklace in my quarters that should go fine with the dress and collar.”

“Only if you really want me to wear it,” she said quietly.

“I do. One Mrs. Randolph wore it, and now another one should.” He touched her face. “I have other pieces, too. What I have is yours.”

She wrapped her arms around both dresses. “I don’t have anything special for you!”

“
You’re
my something special, Suzie. I don’t need anything else. Try it on.”

He didn’t need to ask twice, unbuttoning the plaid dress she had worn several days now, and helping her step out of it. The blue dress buttoned up the front, but her fingers were shaking, so he helped her. It fit perfectly.

“How did … how did …”

“I asked Emily for your measurements.” He was unbuttoning the blue dress now, his hands inside the tight-fitting basque, gentle on her breasts. “Perfect. Want to try on the other one, or do we go right to the payment?”

She gave him such an arch look that he burst out laughing. “All right! Let me help you into the next one.”

The summery dress fit as beautifully as the dark one. “Oh, my,” she breathed, looking in the mirror. “I’ve never had such a pretty gown.” She stopped and turned to him. “How on
earth
did you find a dressmaker in Cheyenne? That can’t have been part of your general wisdom.”

“Certainly not.” He looked all around the room,
anywhere but at her. “Fifi and Claudine suggested her.”

Susanna gasped, then put her hand over her mouth as the implication sank in. “If Claudine was still alive, that had to have been before you proposed!”

“It was.” He began unbuttoning the dress, pulling it down from her shoulders and kissing them. “I guess I was just waiting for a romantic spot to propose, like a ward full of wounded men. Oh, Suzie.”

He didn’t say any more; he just held her.

T
hey left in the ambulance early the next morning, sharing it this time with Major Townsend, who had also been part of the court-martial board. If Susanna thought she would feel uncomfortable around him—she had barely spoken to him since the Dunklins’ house—it never happened.

The weather was a far cry from the bleak January when she’d made this same trip, sad, defeated and trying to start over. This time she sat close to her husband, deriving so much simple comfort from the pressure of his arm that she had no fear of the man who had commanded Fort Laramie.

And who would again, apparently. She listened as the two officers discussed the coming campaign, with Townsend’s Ninth Infantry taking the field this time.

“That means you’ll be losing Private Benedict,” Townsend said.

“Anthony … Private Benedict and I have been planning a special day for our pupils and their parents. Would the quartermaster let us build a small stage in his warehouse?”

“Consider it done, Mrs. Randolph,” Townsend said. “The fort’s best carpenter is languishing in the guardhouse. He’ll do it.”

She hesitated, wanting to ask one more thing, but still not sure of herself. Major Townsend’s eyes were kindly, though, so she worked up her nerve.

“Sir, I know I was only contracted to teach through the middle of May, but I would like to continue teaching, even though it will be summer.”

“Why?”

“It’ll keep the children occupied and not thinking all the time about their fathers,” she replied, her voice soft. “I know what it’s like to dwell on someone absent.”

The pressure on her arm increased and she silently thanked God for her husband.

Townsend considered the matter. “Why not? We have the funds for another term. Do it, but it can’t be mandatory in the summer.”

“Thank you!” she exclaimed, delighted, then remembered something she should have told him earlier, but was too shy to say. “I should also thank you for that extra ten dollars a month you have been giving me for teaching the women. They’re ever so …”

She stopped, watched the significant glance that
passed between the two men, and smelled a rat. “
What
has been going on?”

“Nothing,” the majors said together.

“I don’t believe either of you,” she replied, suddenly aware of what her husband had been up to. “Not for a minute!”

“Blame your husband, not me.”

She turned slightly, but not enough to escape the touch of his shoulder. “Well, let’s see,” she said, thoughtful. “Obviously, you’ve been paying that ten dollars from your own money, Major Randolph.”

“Fooled you, though, didn’t I?” he teased.

She turned her attention to Major Townsend. “And you, sir, probably have it written in stone somewhere that the army will pay for only
one
teacher for the enlisted men’s children, no matter what the circumstances.”

“I do,” he said with a straight face.

Susanna looked at her husband, loving him with a fierceness that she could never have imagined in that bleak January, the worst of her life.

“You have been paying my twenty dollars a months, plus the additional ten,” she said. She glanced at Townsend. “Should I take over the Randolph financial responsibilities?”

“Maybe you should.” Townsend leaned forward. “There’s a rumor that he has been buying expensive dresses in Cheyenne, too. Perhaps you should look into that, as well.”

“Oh, I think not,” she said immediately, which made both prevaricators laugh. “He has such good taste in women’s wear.”

Two days later, nothing felt better than to be home, even if the bed was lumpy, the kitchen woefully ill-equipped, and the sheets and towels threadbare. She looked around her new bedroom in the dining room, with the army blankets tacked up for blackout curtains, and called it good.

Her cup of plenty ran over when Emily came by for a hug, and was followed at intervals during the day by most of the officers’ wives, some bringing food, and others towels and good sheets. Where these gifts came from, considering the shortage of such items in the post trader’s store, she had no idea, but her thanks were sincere.

“Emily, why are they doing this?” she asked later in the afternoon, when they were alone.

“I organized a hen party last week. I suggested that we needed to atone for some real stupidity,” her cousin, that most clueless of women, told her. “We were all wrong.”

She helped Susanna remake the bed. “While you were in Cheyenne, I received a letter from Mama and newspaper clippings, and I shared those with the ladies.” Emily lowered her voice, as though all of Shippensburg crowded around her in the bedroom. “Susanna, Frederick left debts everywhere and seldom had a sober day.”

If that jury of the good men of Shippensburg
had believed me, I would still have my son
, Susanna thought, unwilling to say it out loud, because Emily seemed sufficiently remorseful. “Imagine,” she said instead, smoothing down the sheets that she knew would be quite rumpled before morning, if she and the post surgeon were of similar mind.

Emily sat down and smoothed out a pillow slip, remorse obvious in her eyes. “I also told them it was my idea to call you a Civil War widow. I never should have done that.”

Susanna sat beside her cousin and hugged her. “You just tried to do the right thing. I know you did.”

When Joe came home for supper that night, she told him about her day, and what Emily had said. He nodded, and there was no overlooking the admiration in his eyes.

“Why are you so pleased?” she asked, happy to sit on his lap when he tugged on her apron.

“It takes a strong person to apologize—I obviously underestimated your frivolous cousin—and it takes a stronger person to forgive. I’ve never underestimated you.”

She kissed him, and decided that the odor of carbolic must be an aphrodisiac. “I wish General Crook were a strong person.”

Joe kissed her back. “But then I would have to be a stronger person to forgive him.”

“You could,” she said simply.

“Did Mrs. Dunklin form part of today’s officers wives’ brigade?”

“No.” Susanna rested her head against Joe’s chest, her face warm again as she remembered that horrible evening. “Just as well, because I’m not certain I can forgive her yet. Maybe later.”

She watched time slip by in May, as more and more companies gathered at Fort Laramie. The flats by Suds Row bloomed with tents as the army took to canvas, in preparation for the coming roundup of Northern Roamers onto the Great Sioux Reservation. It became harder and harder to concentrate on school in the commissary storehouse, as more and more rations for the Big Horn Yellowstone Expedition piled into the building. And Private Benedict’s teaching days became numbered.

Finally Susanna and Anthony declared classroom learning over, and spent the rest of the week fine-tuning the play
Our Century of Progress
, which Susanna had written about famous inventions of the nineteenth century, from telegraph key to Colt.45. All the boys clamored to demonstrate the latter. Joe was happy to loan an old stethoscope to the student portraying Arthur Leared.

Rehearsals began in earnest as soon as the prisoners from the guardhouse finished the stage, which Susanna knew was an engineering marvel. Two corporals’ wives sewed a curtain from lightweight canvas, and Susanna assigned the student who simply couldn’t memorize anything to open and close it, to the envy of his classmates.

Even in her classroom, the talk centered around the coming campaign. “I’m astounded what my students know about pincer movements and a three-pronged attack,” she said to Joe early one morning when neither of them felt inclined to get up.

“What have they told you?” he asked.

“They tell me Colonel Gibbon has already started east from western Montana, General Terry is eventually going to move west from the Dakotas, and our own dear General Crook will head north from here and Fort Fetterman.”

“Your students are already strategists.” He kissed her breasts, which ended the discussion for a while. She made it to school on time, but Joe was late to the hospital.

Her own cherubs practiced their poems, with one little prodigy happy to learn Longfellow’s lengthy
Hiawatha
. He came to class disgruntled, saying it made his father, an infantry sergeant, groan and assure him that Plains Indians bore no resemblance to anything created by the New England poet.

“Everyone is a critic,” Susanna grumbled to her husband, trying to make him laugh.

He laughed a little, but she knew it was just to humor her. General Crook had arrived from Omaha to lead this expedition, and the general turned Joe silent. She made no comment, but made sure her husband had his favorite baked oatmeal
for breakfast, and she took hot meals to the hospital on those evenings he was too busy to come home.

“Soldiers are everywhere,” she remarked to Anthony Benedict on the morning of their school program.

“No one’s bothering you, are they?” he asked as he handed a student the telegrapher’s key. “There you are, Mr. Morse.”

“No. In fact, as I crossed the parade ground, three soldiers rushed to help me carry baked goods and costumes! Of course, that meant I had to dip into the cookies in payment.” Susanna took a deep breath. “Anthony, I’m going to miss you. Please be careful.”

Private Benedict sent another student behind the canvas curtain. “I’ll be careful, Mrs. Randolph.” He took a piece of paper from his uniform pocket. “If anything happens, here’s my special girl’s address.”

She didn’t argue that nothing would happen, or put on die-away airs. These weren’t men to fool with silliness. “I’ll take care of it, Anthony.”

Private Benedict peered around the edge of the stage. “We have a full house, Mrs. Randolph. Think how they will exclaim over that McCormick Reaper that the guardhouse crew constructed. Good thing no one invented a flying machine in this century. We’d have needed a bigger stage!”

Thanks to Emily, Susanna had located a portable pianoforte on Officers Row, which Mrs. Burt obligingly played, Captain Andy Burt turning the
pages for her. Susanna stood beside the stage, looking with pride at her students, their parents, all smiles, and a phalanx of officers along the back row, her husband among them. Her smile faded. There on the opposite end from Joe was General Crook himself.
S
he resisted the urge to march to him and give him a generous helping of her mind. Instead, she took her seat in the front row next to Private Benedict.

She knew Maeve and Maddie had finished painting Fort Laramie on the curtain late last night, using the fort’s endless supply of quartermaster red. The elegant scrollwork was a fitting testament to Maeve’s confidence with letters and words. She was backstage with Mrs. Hanrahan, ushering each group of thespians forward for their part in the program. Susanna wasn’t surprised that the star of the production was Samuel Morse and his telegraphic key, which tapped out the sentence “Fort Laramie will defeat the Northern Roamers.” Children holding placards with each syllable came across the stage as though sprung from the key. True, “will defeat” was transposed by two children frozen with stage fright, but the sentiment received its due applause.

After a brief intermission, the students sat cross-legged on the floor and took their turns onstage for recitations. “The boy stood on the burning deck,” as interpreted with true martial fervor by the son of an Arikara scout, drew such applause that he
stared at Private Benedict in wide-eyed alarm, then ran to his mother.

Susanna took turns with Private Benedict, coaching where needed and nodding her encouragement when that was called for. She remembered other assemblies at the elegant girls’ school where she’d taught, or the quality academy where Tommy had given his own rendition of that boy on the burning deck. Here she was in a commissary storehouse, the audience seated on planks and cracker boxes, with a stage built by convicts, and she felt nothing but contentment.
There is nowhere I would rather be
, she thought, as her last pupil, Eddie Hanrahan, whose father had been left behind on a cold battlefield, recited the Preamble to the Constitution, bowed and left the stage with all the aplomb of Daniel Webster himself.

As the applause went on, she thought through the past five months. In January, she wouldn’t have thought such peace of mind possible. In May, she knew anything was possible. She turned to look at her husband, who was looking directly at her and applauding. “I love you,” he mouthed, and her heart was full.

Major Townsend took the stage then and held up his hands until his audience was silent and seated again. It didn’t take long in a military gathering. He looked down at the children.

“My dears, you amaze me.” He looked at Susanna and Anthony next, with a slight inclination of his head. “Thank you, teachers. You’ve discharged
your duties well.” He smiled. “I
know
the army doesn’t pay you enough!” He glanced at the back of the audience. “And in some cases, the army doesn’t pay you at all.”

Susanna laughed softly at that. “I’ll tell you later, Anthony,” she whispered, when her colleague looked at her, a question in his eyes.

“Mrs. Randolph informs me that she is a glutton for punishment. She has every intention of teaching a summer term, if any of you—and I include the officers’ children—are inclined to more study.” He looked at Anthony. “Private, is there anything else?”

“Only cake with actual icing and cookies with no raisins, over there in what we have dubbed the lob by, sir.”

“Then let us adjourn. Dismissed!”

Susanna wanted to go to her husband, but there were students to congratulate and then parents to thank, and even a kiss on the cheek from Major Townsend. She walked toward Joe, who was talking to Mrs. Hanrahan. If there was a better doctor anywhere, Susanna couldn’t imagine who it might be.
To think I share a bed with all that excellence
, she reminded herself, amused.

He saw her and motioned her closer. “Susanna, I’ve convinced Mrs. Hanrahan to come and work for my hospital steward. He’s been complaining of overwork for years now, and I have enough discretionary funds to hire this kind lady. What do you think?”