Reap the Whirlwind (58 page)

There among the wounded on that hillside above the Rosebud, Anson Mills vowed he would not forget those who had sacrificed so much to redeem the honor of the gallant Third.

He had knelt beside Anton Newkirken, who served with Vroom’s L Company gone to the top of the crest to support Royall’s third retreat. Nearby he found John Kreemer and Trumpeter William Edwards. Not far away the other five from L Company, army blankets as their only funeral shrouds.

As he was crouched beside William Edwards, Vroom’s trumpeter, Mills heard his name called weakly.

“Colonel … Colonel Mills, is it you?”

“I’ll be back in a moment,” he promised the private. Mills rose and moved over to the soldier who had called him, expecting to find yet another of the troopers, perhaps one of the many who had served with Captain Andrews in Royall’s battalion—one of the men who had recognized his voice and called out.

For a moment he stood staring down at the wounded soldier who was surrounded by three attendants and John Finerty, the correspondent from Chicago. Blood from the ghastly facial wounds had drenched the front of the trooper’s tunic, turning the dark-blue wool instead a murky black in drying. As much as the surgeons and their stewards had tried to clean up the oozy wounds, both sides of the man’s face were clotted with new blood, darkly shiny in the midafternoon light. Both eyes were swollen shut, tissues already grown purplish. His mustache and beard were clotted beneath a bruised and battered nose. From all the years he had been practicing war, it didn’t take long for Mills to realize this hapless soldier would not likely make it through the night.

It wasn’t until he knelt at the man’s side that Mills noticed the bloody shoulder-board. This … was a captain.

“Colonel Mills—are you there?” the wounded officer asked as his head turned, his voice failing, coming in no more than a whisper, parched as sandpaper drawn across cast-iron.

“Guy? Guy Henry?”

Henry sighed through his cracked lips. “Anson.”

“Lord!” Mills exclaimed, his belly knotting, going cold in finding a friend nearing death’s door. He brought one of Henry’s hands between his two. “I had no idea. Are … are you … is there anything I can do to make you comfortable?”

“My friend—I asked the doctors for the truth, and they told me that I must die,” Henry answered stoically. “But I told them they’re mistaken.”

“Bully for you, Guy. Damned bully for you.”

As brave as it sounded, the others kneeling there around their captain did not bear such confident countenances. A man with Mills’s experience in the ways of war and wounds and sudden death knew in his gut that Henry had chances of something less than one in ten.

“The man’s strong,” said Julius Patzki as he came up behind Mills.

The captain looked back at the assistant surgeon. “He’ll make it. If anyone can ride through hell and come back whole, it’s Guy Henry.”

Surgeon Patzki nodded. “That may well be what made Colonel Henry order me to patch him up so he could go back to the fight when they first brought him here to me.”

John Finerty said, “I’ve done everything I could to cheer him up, Colonel Mills. All my best jokes, and we’ve talked about the finest of watering holes to visit in Chicago.”

“A good job of cheering me you did too,” Henry responded.

“I asked the Colonel how bad he hurt, and he told me it was nothing,” Finerty explained. “Said that’s what fighting men like him were here for.”

A ball of sentiment stuck in Anson’s throat. “I heard your battalion was hit hard.”

“We were surrounded several times, Anson.”

John Finerty looked up at Mills and said, “I told Colonel Henry here that I rode with you toward the enemy village, and he said I should have stayed and gone with him.”

Henry whispered through his dry, cracked lips, “Told Finerty he would have a much better story to write for his readers back east, Anson. He could write about Indian fighting, instead of Indian chasing.”

My, how the man clung to life tenaciously, even trying to laugh at his own joke.

“That’s about all it seems I’ve done this day—chase Indians,” Mills admitted gravely. “Is there anything I can do for you, Guy? Anything I can bring you?”

“Maybe you can help me talk Finerty here into signing up.”

“Can you believe that, Colonel?” Finerty snorted, wagging his head in disbelief. “Henry here said I should join the goddamned army!”

“That’s my army, mind you, Finerty,” Henry growled in a whisper that, while being hushed, was nonetheless valiant.

“Colonel Mills?”

He turned to find John Bourke approaching. “Yes, Lieutenant?”

“The general’s compliments. Wants to inform you he’s decided on making another march on the village.”

Mills peered into the summer sky, finding the sun less than halfway between midsky and the western horizon. “Perhaps we will have time to make that march after all, Lieutenant. I’ll be only a moment here.”

Then Anson turned back to Henry, squeezing the hand again. “I’ll come back when we return, Guy. If we strike the village, it might not be for another day or more.”

“It doesn’t matter. When … when you get back.”

“Yes. We’ll talk some more.” Mills arose.

Henry was able to follow Anson’s rising as the captain blocked the sun from striking his face. He did his best to keep his sightless, swollen eyes fixed on the sound of Mills’s
voice. “I’d like that, Colonel. Do come see me as soon as you can. When our job’s been done here on the Rosebud. And see to Crazy Horse personally for me, will you?”

“That I promise you, Guy. Everything in my power.”

For the past ten days Samantha Donegan had been worrying herself out of eating and right into sleeplessness.

None of the women who had initially learned of the report wanted her to get wind of it. But she had overheard them whispering of the rumor back on that fateful Thursday, the eighth of June.

“An Indian courier just came in from the north country,” one of the officers’ wives said in a hurried whisper.

From that single tiny window in her room upstairs, Sam had seen the woman coming at a hurry across the parade, skirts and petticoats aswirl around her ankles as she waved over three more wives who were standing outside sutler Collins’s store, chatting. A woman knew from all the signs that the anxious one had something important to share. Perhaps a bit of post gossip. Maybe a new copy of an eastern magazine brought in the week’s post. Perhaps even a new pattern they could pass around among themselves. That is, if a woman had the desire to make herself a new dress.

All Sam wanted was to have a dress that she didn’t have to keep letting out and out even more until she was left with nothing else to do but sew in a panel over her ever-expanding belly.

So in seeing the woman coming, and being as curious a creature as she was, Sam had begun to make her way slowly down the narrow staircase there at married officers’ quarters, so slowly, step by step, that the others had not heard her coming—so intent were they on the news brought them that Thursday afternoon from the faraway north country.

Where George Crook had gone to do battle with Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.

“Oh, dear!” one of them had gasped.

“Hush!” another chided.

Likely, she had even rolled her eyes heavenward, if for no other reason than to indicate they were being careful
not to alarm the pregnant one upstairs. The wife of one of those who went north with the army.

A different voice asked, “You hear this from someone reputable?”

“This isn’t another one of those rumors, is it?”

“No,” answered the first with indignation in her voice as Sam drew down the last flight. “The news comes from Fred. I overheard several of them talking as I was on my way into the office to take him some lunch. Well, let me tell you—they shut right up when they saw me. So it must be true.”

“Must be true,” another agreed. “If they shut up when Maggie showed her face.”

“Go on, Maggie. What’s the whole of it?”

“The news given them by this Indian courier said there was a great concentration of hostiles near the mouth of the … oh, dear! I wanted so to get this right!”

“The mouth of a river?”

“Yes. Help me remember!”

“The Powder, the Tongue—”

“The Tongue! That’s it—the hostiles have concentrated near the Tongue.”

“Go on now. Hurry!” the voice grew whispery as gauze.

“Listen to this, ladies. The enemy village is said to consist of twelve hundred seventy-three lodges.”

“I don’t believe you remembered that exact number and you couldn’t remember the name of the river!”

“Please, Hannah—I was always better at arithmetic than I was at geography. And the best tidbit of all is what the courier said there at the last.”

“What was it—tell us!”

“The Indian reported that the big village was on its way to crush George Crook on the Powder River!”

“Dear merciful God!” Samantha shrieked at the doorway to the tiny drawing room.

Spinning about, surprised to find Samantha there listening to them, the others saw her keel, lunged out to catch her, carried her to the tiny love seat where they brought her a cool drink and a cold towel for her face.

Ever since, Sam had thought of little else. With not one shred of other news come out of that north country where
Seamus had gone traipsing along with that damned George Crook—

What was that? she thought, immediately lifting the hand that had been resting on her growing belly.

There it was again!

Now she was frightened, mystified, above all curious.

So she laid both hands gently over the apron she wore all the time to cover up the panel sewn into her dress, a panel that was far from matching the dress itself.

“Oh!” she exclaimed as her belly moved, as if it were rolling from one side to the other, left to right slowly.

Sam sensed the roll both from within, and with her hands felt the movement outside her belly. There was something almost hard there beneath her flesh, beneath the apron and dress panel and chemise and the slips. Something almost hard.

Gently, ever so gently, she began to push with the heel of her right hand against the hard object, finding that it moved a little at first, then withdrew, disappearing from her touch beneath the taut skin of her swelling belly.

As suddenly it exploded against the palm of her hand. As if it had kicked her from within. Protesting her pushing it. With a little … dear God! With a kick!

Rolling up on one elbow with a struggle, she tore off the apron, heaving it to the floor unceremoniously and began to frantically tear the shell buttons out of their holes, opening up her dress all the way down through the added panel. Next came the tiny buttons on the chemise so that she could bare her chest. Her chest—was it really her chest anymore? Sam hardly recognized her body anymore, all the changes that had come over it month by month, and week by week, changes almost by the day now. Skin so taut she was certain she’d awaken one night and find herself split in two like the rind of an overripe Texas melon.

But her hands went on down from those swelling breasts and tender nipples, down to push the buttons out of their holes on her two slips, shoving them aside so that she could finally look at the taut flesh for herself there in the afternoon light streaming like a shaft of golden benediction through the window.

She had always thought summer light the most flattering—

Sweet heaven!

Sam saw it.

It? Her baby wasn’t an
it!
He was moving around in her belly now, tumbling almost. There it was again—a big knot poking out from her already-tight skin, as if he were pushing to get out of her already, free himself with that foot or a fist or an elbow.

It was the very first time she had felt him.

Him.

She stopped, running her palm gently over that bony, pointed knot of flesh where the life within her was shoving to get out.

“Not yet, little man,” she said to him in a whisper, the tears coming to her eyes, starting her nose to dribble a little.

It sounded so right to call this little life a
he
, a
him.
So sure, as only mothers could be, she supposed. Sure that she was carrying Seamus’s
son.

Tumbling, active, kicking … it must be a boy. Without a doubt, Sam knew it was a boy. So active, and strong, and vital. So much like his father.

Dear God in heaven, please bring his father home. Pray you bring Seamus back to us both.

“
W
hen the Crows would not go another inch down that canyon,” John Bourke explained to Donegan and Richard Closter, “that’s when I think the general was finally convinced to give up on reaching the village.”

“The Crows?” Uncle Dick asked.

“When we got to the same place where Mills turned around earlier today, the Crow refused to go on,” the lieutenant replied.

“They act scared?” Donegan asked.

“Scared—yeah. Like scared of ghosts. Them, and Grouard too. He told Crook same thing he told Mills before: the Sioux had an ambush laid up ahead. It was suicide to go on.”

“Damn the general’s hide anyways,” Closter grumbled. “Him and his idea of using Injuns to fight Injuns. Ever
since they joined up, if them Crow ain’t been skittish, they’re outright skairt.”

“I don’t think I could ever call the Crow scared, Uncle Dick,” Bourke said. “Not after the courage and steadfastness they showed us today—holding back the Sioux until we were ready to go on the attack. And what about that attack they and the Shoshone made on the conical hill over there?”

The Irishman asked, “The Crow say anything about not budging another step down the canyon?”

“Big Bat translated a story they told, talk of a few summers back when a lot of their village had been killed by the Sioux who were coming into this country for the hunt. Bat said they called the place down the Rosebud something like the ‘Valley of Death.’ I wouldn’t really give it any credence, fellas—because one of the Crow named White Face even told Crook that the warriors we had been fighting were only a small war party!”

“Small war party! Shit!” Closter exclaimed, wiping some tobacco spittle from his lower lip. “Cain’t be—many as jumped us this morning!”