Her Hesitant Heart

chapter Nineteen



They 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. She 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?”

Your discretionary fund comes right out of your salary, she thought. “It’s a lovely idea. Mrs. Hanrahan, you are needed there.”

“The surgeon said I can work when Eddie is in your school this summer. Maeve has already agreed that she and Maddie will watch my two little ones,” Mrs. Hanrahan said, her eyes full of relief and gratitude.

“It was either that or heaven knows what, Suzie,” he whispered after Mrs. Hanrahan left. “The army would send Corporal Hanrahan’s dependents home, except that home is County Wicklow. Her pension alone is too small to live on. Ted Brown will need more assistance this summer.”

Susanna kissed his cheek. “When did I last tell you how magnificent you are?”

“I think it was about three this morning,” he teased, his eyes lively. “See you for supper, Mrs. Randolph. Bring along any leftover cake, if there is any. If not, you are dessert.”

In a few minutes the bugler that regulated their lives blew recall from fatigue, and the storehouse cleared out, except for the older students who had agreed to help Private Benedict store the props and remove the curtain. Susanna went back to her corner of the classroom to tidy her desk. She glanced up after a few minutes, surprised to see General Crook standing there.

I can smile and say nothing, she thought. He doesn’t know me from Adam.

“General?”

“I enjoyed the program, Mrs. Randolph.”

He does know who I am; he must. “Thank you, sir.”

He stood there and she didn’t know why. Probably nothing she could say would make matters better, but she wasn’t the same cowed woman now, the one with no hope and no future and too much past to ever forget.

“Would you sit down for a moment, General?” she said, her voice soft. She sat next to him. “Sir, you know who I am.”

“I do.”

“First, let me wish you all success on your travel north.”

“We’ll do our best.”

“I don’t doubt that for a minute. Sir, I’m in no position to tell you what to think or do, but I love my husband.”

He smiled at that, and looked away.

“Sir, the only mistake he made in that aide station at South Mountain was to practice good medicine. He turned away from a dying man to a man he could save, if he worked fast.”

Crook was on his feet now, headed for the door.

“I’m not through yet,” Susanna said, putting all her conviction behind her words. “You have to understand—doctors don’t look at uniforms. They look at injuries.”

He turned back to her, and she saw the anger in his eyes. In January, his expression would have terrified her into silence. In May, it didn’t. No matter what happened in the next few moments, she knew she would be going home to cook dinner for a wonderful man who loved her; so simple, but so profound to her heart. What General Crook thought of her didn’t matter. She could live with that.

“It happened almost fourteen years ago. I wish you would let it go now. That’s all.” She said it to his back, because he had turned away.

She turned her attention to the papers on her desk. She knew he stood there a few more moments, then she heard his footsteps going through the warehouse. She finished gathering together her end-of-term papers, stacked them neatly on the desk and left the warehouse.

The sun was angling lower now, but the retreat gun hadn’t sounded yet. Holding the rest of the cake, Susanna stood for a long moment on the edge of the parade ground. The new guardhouse was almost completed. Major Townsend must have put more soldiers at work on the building, now that most of the regiment had assembled for the upcoming campaign, and he had more men to work with. Other men policed the grounds, and still others moved more supplies into the other quartermaster and commissary storehouses. There was a fair amount of cussing coming from the direction of the quartermaster’s corrals as mules were introduced to new wagons. She smiled to herself, thinking of the little boys watching on the other side of the fence, who were probably going to dismay their mothers with an appalling increase in their vocabulary. At least her nephew, Stanley, wasn’t there, and Emily was willing now to admit where his bad language had come from.

On the parade ground itself, sergeants were taking their companies through the manual of arms, each company trying to outdo the other. She waved to Sergeant Rattigan, and he gave her a smart salute, which made her pink up. “Maddie, you are a lucky girl to have such a father,” she murmured. “He’ll make your beaux toe the mark someday.”

She shook her head over the shabby red buildings. Too much quartermaster red, too many raisins, liniment by the barrel, but not enough wool socks. Next year the shortage might be tenpenny nails and India ink, and the surplus pickles. “It’s the army way, Suzie,” Joe was fond of telling her as he coped with his own shortages and taught one of the blacksmiths how to make forceps.

Joe’s timing was exquisite. He came through the front door calling, “Bonsoir, mon petit chou” at the same time she took the roast out of the oven and put in the pan of rolls. Stewed tomatoes, humble indeed, made up the rest of dinner. She resolved again to plant a garden in her backyard, almost tasting tender lettuce and a radish or two already, provided the deer weren’t oversolicitous.

She could tell by his squint that he had a headache, so she made small talk about that afternoon’s school program. By the time they reached the leftover cake, the squint was gone, and she knew she should confess.

“I may have done a bad thing, dearest,” she said after he had eaten two bites of cake.

“What could that possibly be?”

She told him about General Crook’s visit. Joe just continued to eat the cake, saving the icing for last, because he liked it so well.

“I told him it had been fourteen years, and he should just let it go.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing. I don’t know why he came to my classroom. Do you?”

“Not a clue,” Joe replied. He put down the fork and took her hand, kissing it and leaving little sugary crystals behind. “You’re going to fight my battles for me?”

“You fight mine.”

“Of course. You’re my wife.” He picked up the fork again and finished the piece of cake, then eyed hers. She snatched it away and he laughed.

“Funny thing,” he told her later, when they were both crowded into his armchair. “General Crook came to the hospital, probably after he left you.”

“Goodness. What did you do?”

He shrugged. “I was busy, of course, so I just saluted with a pair of scissors in my hand—so military—and said hello.” Joe tugged her back to rest against his chest, his hand on her hair. “It was funny, but I didn’t feel tense, or defensive, or … or anything, really. I just said hello, and went back to work.”

“Did he say anything?”

“Not a word. He just stood there a little longer, then left.” Joe kissed her cheek. “I wonder … maybe it’s too hard for some people to apologize, if that’s what he was trying to do.”

They sat close together in silence, until Susanna closed her eyes and slept, content in her husband’s arms.