Tie My Bones to Her Back (20 page)

Colonel Richard Irving Dodge was a bluff, red-faced man, but understanding. He called in the post surgeon, Dr. Wallace. It was clear to Jenny from the major’s tone that there was no love lost between the two officers. The surgeon was a gray-whiskered, potbellied gentleman with a whiskey tan and small blue eyes as hard as tin-alloyed musket balls. He had served with Sherman during the war. “Mr. Dousmann suffers severely from frostbite,” the major explained in Jenny’s presence. “He is a veteran of the Iron Brigade, a former sergeant, 2nd Wisconsin. You will do your best to see that he recovers with the
full use of all his limbs
. Save every finger, every toe if you can. Don’t just break out your bone saw because it’s easier, Doctor. And that’s an order.”

D
R.
J
OHN
W
ALLACE
amputated Otto’s right arm to the elbow. After long consideration, he took the thumb and first two fingers of his left hand and the toes on both feet. It was the best he could do.

“Gangrene,” he told Jenny when he came out of the operating room. “Once it starts, it never stops, unless you amputate. Skin, muscle, bone, blood—they all die, and finally the patient himself. I saved as much of the man as I dared. If only you’d brought him to me sooner.”

She glared at him and he looked away, brushing nervously at the blood that was drying on the backs of his hands.

“How could I have brought him any faster?” she said. “We’d been attacked by Indians, betrayed by our friends, we were down on the Buffalo Range in Texas and there was a blizzard—three feet of snow on the ground.”

“I’m truly sorry, miss,” Dr. Wallace said, still avoiding her gaze. “But these things happen. I’ve seen a lot worse. Your brother will live, he’s a strong man. Oh, certainly, he won’t be able to shoot a buffalo rifle any longer, or even handle a knife and fork, and perhaps for the rest of his life he’ll walk with a severe limp from the loss of his toes. But that’s better than no limbs at all. I saw many such cases during the war. He’ll suffer awhile from the megrims—melancholia, lethargy, dejection—but I’m sure that if you’ll try your jolly best to cheer him, perhaps read to him from the Good Book, soon enough he’ll be right as rain. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

He hurried back to the bottle of rye that awaited him in his quarters.

T
HE FIRST WORD
that came to Otto’s mind when he awoke from the Lethean anesthetic was “Beasley.” I’m a washtub case, he thought. Though it seemed that he could feel his fingers and toes throbbing under the wire-mesh baskets and sheets that covered his extremities, he had talked with enough sawbone victims during the war, in one field hospital or another, to know about ghost limbs. They would be with him for a long time, itching where he couldn’t scratch—even if he had fingers left to scratch them with. Reminders of what was gone.

No more walking, he thought. No more riding, no more shooting. No more . . .

But then as his mind cleared he grew hopeful, finally certain, that at least his legs and his left arm were still with him. He flexed his knees and saw them rise beneath the blankets. He could feel the weight of the lower legs beneath them. But when he flexed his elbows, only his left forearm moved. And though he felt certain that his fingers and toes had been amputated, at least he would still be able to ride once his strength returned to him.

He called for an orderly. Dr. Wallace himself entered the ward.

“What’s the trouble?”

“You know what the trouble is. I make my living by hunting. Couldn’t you have saved me just one goddamned finger to pull a trigger with?”

“No. Quite frankly, my good man, if this had been a field hospital during the war, with a battle raging, I’d have had no choice but to take off both your legs to the knee and both your arms to the elbow. You should be grateful to me for my solicitude.”

“You bastards and your bone saws.”

“Call me what you like, soldier,” Dr. Wallace said. “It’s water off a duck’s back. If I had a penny for every time I’ve been called a bastard by an awakening amputee, and another for every limb I’ve hacked off, I’d be richer than Astor. I saved your life with what I did. You still have your legs and one arm. Now just take a slug of this and stop feeling sorry for yourself.”

He pulled a medicine bottle from his hip pocket and unscrewed the cap.

“What is it?”

“The Waters of Lethe,” Dr. Wallace said. “More prosaically known as Wallace’s Cordial. My own special concoction to alleviate the pain and worry of human existence, replacing it with the warm, bright fizz of forgetfulness. It’s a variant on the world-famous Godfrey’s Cordial, popularized by the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy. I dissolve 2½ ounces carbonate of potash in 26 pints of water, add 16 pints of molasses, heat them together over a gentle flame till they simmer, remove the scum, and, when sufficiently cool, add a half ounce of oil of sassafras dissolved in two pints of rectified spirit, and 24 fluid ounces of opium. I’ll give you my recipe. The concoction contains about 16 minims, more or less, of pure laudanum—rather more than a grain of opium in each fluid ounce. A slug or two will, I assure you, alleviate the mischief of your post-operative humors.”

With raised eyebrows, he offered the bottle to Otto.

“No thanks, I’d rather you brought a pistol next time.”

“Without fingers you’d have a hard time using it.”

“I’ll find a way.”

15

B
Y ORDER OF
Colonel Dodge, civilians—especially Indians—were allowed within the gates of the fort only during daylight hours. But the colonel had been kind enough to let Jenny use a suite of vacant rooms—kitchen, parlor, and bedroom—in the bachelor officers’ quarters, since she wished to be close to her brother during the critical period following surgery. It would be at least two weeks before he could be moved. Tom Shields was required to sleep outside the fort with the rest of the Indians. Half Indian is all Indian, she thought, as far as the U.S. Army is concerned.

Her rooms were on the ground floor at the far end of the B.O.Q. A coal stove stood in the parlor. On the night following Otto’s surgery she could not sleep and sat up, wrapped in a blanket, on an ottoman beside the stove. She had borrowed a book from the post library, one volume from a set of six of the works of an English poet she’d never read, John Donne. Poetry always settled her when she was worried. She found the verses hard going, written in antique English, and looked at the title page. The book had been published in 1839, she saw, which should have made the writing sound normal. But then she noticed that Donne had lived more than two hundred years earlier, his dates being 1572-1631. She was about to close the book when it fell open on her lap to an obvious favorite of the original owner. It was titled “On His Mistris.” Jenny knew what a “mistris” was.

She read on. It seems a woman wanted to accompany the poet, her lover, on a long trip through Europe—there was mention of France, Italy, and either Holland or Germany—maybe to war or maybe just on a business trip. But she wanted to go disguised as a boy. Donne discouraged her. All Frenchmen are fops and lechers, he said, while Italians love boys. The “Dutch” (and Jenny bristled at this, since it was what Germans were often called in this country by people too ignorant to know the difference between a Hollander and an
echt Deutscher)
were libeled as having “spungy” wet eyes.

But there was a nice sentiment, nicely put, right at the end:

She flipped to the flyleaf to see who had owned the book before donating it to the post library. The name, written in a gentlemanly hand, was “George Frederick Ruxton, Lieutenant, H.M. 89th Regiment.” The “H.M.” stood for “Her Majesty’s,” Jenny knew, so George Ruxton was a Britisher. She wondered what had brought him to the Great West.

Next morning at breakfast in the officers’ mess, she asked Colonel Dodge. “Yes, Ruxton,” he said. “A great adventurer and explorer, he was. An Englishman who’d fought as a mercenary in Spain during the Carlist Wars, decorated there by Queen Isabella II, later tramped around in the wilder parts of Canada and southern Africa. He’d been to Sandhurst briefly, bought a commission in an English regiment, but peacetime Army life was too quiet for him and he sold it. He traveled alone through Mexico, riding up clear into Colorado, where he made many friends among the mountain men—Old Bill Williams, Joe Walker, Black Harris, and William Bent, among others. Hunted the Bayou Salado, traveled the
Jornada del Muerto
when the Apaches were making it truly a Journey of Death. Later he wrote a fine book about his time in the mountains,
Life in the Far West
, that was serialized by
Blackwood’s
magazine. It was published in this country, in book form, three or four editions, I believe. I think we have a copy in the library. Some say he was an undercover British intelligence officer, sent to map the southern approaches to the United States. He could have been. It was just after the Mexican War that he came over here, after all, and the British were certainly worried about American expansion.”

“What happened to him?” Jenny asked.

“Went under,” the colonel said.

“Indians?”

“No, dysentery,” he said. “In St. Louis, back in ’48. Indians alone couldn’t kill a fellow that tough. Took a bug to do it.”

And a blizzard to destroy my brother, Jenny thought. She excused herself. It was all too sad.

T
HE FORT WAS
busy preparing for an inspection by Lieutenant General Philip Henry Sheridan, the hero of Winchester, Cedar Creek, and Yellow Tavern during the war and now commanding officer of the Military Division of the Missouri. A dinner for officers and their ladies would follow, and Jenny was invited as the colonel’s guest.

“The general is particularly fond of buffalo hunters,” Dodge told her, “and the fact that your brother served during the late war will make him even happier to meet you.”

The adjutant’s wife, a kindly woman named Abigail Augustine, provided Jenny with an exquisite dress of strawberry-colored
poult-de-soie
shot with white for the occasion, along with a lace cape and appropriate shirtwaist, shift, and pointy-toed white pumps that pinched horribly. She felt rather silly in the outfit, but pleased nonetheless. It seemed like years since she had dressed as a full-blown, out-and-out woman, though never as elegantly as this. It felt. . . luxurious.

She studied herself in Mrs. Augustine’s mirror. Apart from the darkening of her skin to a rich golden tan from exposure to wind and sunlight, and a rather unfeminine strength to her neck and arms from all the lifting, pulling, and cutting she’d been engaged in for the past few months, she thought she looked rather good. Her freshly washed blond hair, blanched even paler by the weather, hung nearly to her shoulders, secured in artful swoops and swirls by mother-of-pearl barrettes. A hint of lavender rose from her warm flesh, courtesy of Mrs. A’s bath oil. The
moiré antique
cape was secured across her bosom by an ivory brooch into which was etched the profile of Queen Victoria (a sour-faced prig, she looked, like so many German widows Jenny had known in Wisconsin), the only jarring element in Jenny’s borrowed ensemble.

General Sheridan, at the age of forty-one, was a stouter, shorter man than Jenny had imagined, not even five and a half feet tall. Actually, he would have been quite tall had his legs been in proportion to the length of his upper body and the size of his large, fierce-looking head. But the muscular legs were short and, like Tom’s, slightly bowed from too much time in the saddle. She recalled a remark of Abraham Lincoln’s she’d read somewhere. In a classic case of pot and kettle, Lincoln—no Adonis himself—had described Sheridan as “a chunky little chap with a long body, short legs, not enough neck to hang him by, and such long arms that if his ankles itch he can scratch them without stooping.” Yet there was something compelling about the man. Dark-haired and highly colored, he had immense, wild, dark eyes, like those of some great war hawk, she thought. He exuded an aura of what the romances called “animal magnetism” that she found faintly exciting. She was seated on his left during dinner, across from Colonel Dodge, and found herself watching the general’s every move.

“Miss Dousmann has only recently returned from the Texas Panhandle,” Colonel Dodge told him when they had finished the soup course (a somewhat acrid consomme). “She was down there hunting buffalo.” The great man’s shaggy brows arched as he focused those fiery eyes on her. She soon found herself relating the story of the hunt. General Sheridan wanted to know details of the routes they had followed, available forage and waterholes found along the way, Indians encountered, the shape of the terrain, the strength of rivers in spate and at normal levels, the makeup and consistency of their bottoms at the fords—more questions than Jenny could imagine being asked on any subject. When she got to the norther and Otto’s misfortune, he frowned.