Her Hesitant Heart

chapter Twenty



All the regiments except Jim O’Leary’s troop left Fort Laramie four days later, leaving behind a scattering of infantry borrowed from other posts. The infantry marched out first, and the cavalry later that afternoon, heading to Fort Fetterman to rendezvous with other regiments. Susanna felt tears in her eyes as she watched Private Benedict march away with his company, and Sergeant Rattigan with his. And there were the other fathers of her students; it was really too much, and she told her husband so that night in bed.

“I envision a long campaign,” he said. “I sent Al with everything we could spare from the hospital.”

“Emily is crying in her quarters, and even Katie looks grim, although Jim and his troop are still here.”

“Katie’s a veteran campaigner. She knows how busy he will be, patrolling between here and the Black Hills. She’ll barely see him, and when she does, he’ll be so worn down that it will break her heart every time.”

Susanna thought about that, as her husband pulled her closer. “You’re saying maybe it’s better the ladies don’t know how their husbands will look by the time this is done?”

“I probably am.”

She raised herself up on her elbow for a good look at her man. He was tired, too, but she didn’t state the obvious, beyond asking if he was going to get any extra help.

“A contract surgeon is coming, Suzie,” he told her. “The wounded who survive the transport back here will come to us. We’ll be busy.”

She stayed in their quarters the next morning, watching the under-strength garrison carry on guard mount with a ghost crew. There was constant activity at the Rustic Hotel as more miners headed for the gold fields. The post felt deserted, which gave her no peace of mind, considering all the local Indian activity recently. The Indians who hadn’t fled the reservations to join the Northern Roamers considered it their duty to disrupt life elsewhere.

She spent the afternoon with Emily, soothing her dear cousin, who cried and worried like every other woman on Officers Row. Then Susanna played jackstraws with Stanley. A welcome walk took her to Maeve Rattigan’s quarters, where Maeve and Maddie tended Mrs. Hanrahan’s children.

“Your husband has even hired Eddie to sweep floors for him,” Maeve said. “He says he has a discretionary fund.”

Susanna smiled at that. He does, indeed, she thought as she took a crying baby from Maeve. He’ll be in the poorhouse someday and no man will be happier.

She looked at Maeve, healthy and smiling, color in her cheeks again, where last winter she had been ghost-pale.

“You’re looking ever so good, Maeve. I know Maddie agrees with you.”

She nodded. “It’s more than that, Susanna. Ask your husband.”

Susanna asked Joe that night over supper. “Is she anticipating, and just too shy to tell me?”

He reached for the last roll. “No. The blessing is that she’s not. I sometimes get to experiment, and Maeve’s the beneficiary.”

Susanna listened, fascinated, as he told her of the article by George Drysdale, and his theories about fertility at certain times of the month. “If the Rattigans could time their lovemaking to keep her from getting pregnant, she might have time to heal, grow less anemic, and stay alive. I doubt she will ever carry a child to term—some women can’t—but at least she won’t suffer from miscarriage after miscarriage. It was killing her, Suzie, in her mind and in her body.”

She thought about that all evening, after Joe returned to the hospital, then thought about Louis Pasteur and his Paris lycée. If ever a physician was suited for scholarship, it was Joseph Randolph. Too bad they had heard nothing from France.

There was a letter for them the next day, delivered in person by Captain O’Leary, back from patrol, standing on their porch and practically swaying with exhaustion. She thanked him, looked at the return address—Pinkerton National Detective Agency—and hurried to the hospital.

She stood in the entrance to the ward a moment, catching her breath. Wordless, she held out the letter to Joe.

“It’s addressed to you, but I couldn’t have opened it anyway.”

He certainly knew his hospital steward. All it took was a look in Ted Brown’s direction for the man to take over. His arm around her waist, Joe headed her toward his office, closing the door behind them. He opened the envelope and offered the letter to her. He took it back when she shook her head.

“Calm down, Suzie,” he admonished, then sat with her on his lap. “This better?”

“Just read it, then tell me.”

She closed her eyes and rested her head against his chest while he read the letter.

“This is the damnedest thing. No, it’s not bad news. I’m not sure what it is. Go ahead. It won’t bite.”

She took the letter from him and read. When she’d finished, she just looked at him. “He thinks he saw a tall man and a blond boy around Omaha, and they gave him the slip?” she asked, hardly believing it.

Joe was silent a moment. “We’ve been underestimating Nick Martin,” he said finally. “If I’m reading this right, Nick knows he’s being tailed, but he doesn’t know by whom! Do you think I should call off the Pinkertons and just trust Nick to get Tommy to us?”

After some consideration, Susanna nodded. “I think you’d better, else Nick might go to ground and we’ll never find Tommy.” She started to cry.

Her husband’s arms were around her then, holding her close. “I’ll send a telegram today.”

“Pray Nick won’t try to get here on foot!” she said, wiping her eyes. “There are so many Indians between here and Omaha.”

“We have to trust him.” Joe kissed her hair. “This is another moment when you’re going to have to be brave a little longer.”

“It’s so hard,” she whispered.

“Good thing you’re equal to it.”

“Not at this moment.”

“No shame in that. See my cot over there? Curl up, take a nap, and I’ll walk my best girl home for supper.”

The contract surgeon arrived, fresh out of school and greener than grass, which meant more supervision rather than less. Joe tried to make light of it, making her smile with his description of the new doctor, who went through four methods to determine death, where one would do.

“I swear his eyes turned into saucers when I leaned over, put two fingers against the patient’s neck and covered his face with his sheet.” Joe shook his head at his colleague’s afternoon antics. “Shame on me, but I peeked back in the ward later, and there was Dr. Petteys, making really sure that the dead man I’d pronounced dead really was dead.” He gave Susanna his tired smile when she massaged his back. “Maybe I used to do that, too.”

The nights were long. She feigned sleep after they made love, just so Joe would sleep, too, and not stay awake worrying about her. The sick, and those wounded by carelessness or other accident on the march north, came dribbling back to the fort to be evaluated, cured or buried. Joe looked almost as tired as the men of Company K, riding their ceaseless patrols.

Susanna lay awake long into the night, wondering where Tommy was, and if Nick Martin had the slightest idea what he was doing. She was awake when someone banged on the door in the middle of the night. She leaped from bed, tugging at her nightgown, even before Joe had raised his head from the pillow.

Bobby Dunklin stood there, his eyes wide with fright. Susanna grabbed him to her and pulled him inside, kneeling by him, her hands around his face as he began to cry. “It’s my mother,” he said.

Susanna sat him down in the parlor and ran to shake her husband awake. “It’s Mrs. Dunklin. Bobby’s here.”

Joe was dressed in a moment and hurrying into his home office for his medical bag. “Keep Bobby here,” he ordered as he ran outside, his suspenders down around his hips, and wearing his moccasins with no stockings.

She took Bobby into the kitchen, talking with him about summer, and the pony she knew he loved to ride, and the games of catch he and his friends played near the stables. She dried his tears, made him blow his nose, then held him on her lap with no protest as he ate the cinnamon rolls she had promised Joe for breakfast.

“Bobby, what happened?”

“I don’t know. Mama called me from her bed and told me to get the post surgeon.”

He clung to her and Susanna held him close, forgetting every slight, every humiliation that still made her turn her face away when she passed the Dunklin quarters.

“She won’t die, will she?” he asked finally.

Two months ago Susanna might have wondered that any boy could love the vindictive woman she remembered from that awful night. She didn’t wonder now. “Bobby, she has the most wonderful post surgeon in the army looking after her,” she murmured into his tangled hair. “She couldn’t be in better hands.” Please, Joe, she thought, do your best.

When Bobby Dunklin slept, she carried him into the parlor and made him comfortable on the packing crate settee. Quietly she pulled a chair from the kitchen and sat there as another hour passed.

She was about to doze off when she heard the door handle turn quietly. She was up in an instant, tiptoeing across the room to open the door and step outside into the warm June night.

“He’s sleeping on the settee,” she whispered, her lips close to Joe’s ear. She kissed him for good measure.

Joe shook his head and sat on the bench by the front door, tugging her down beside him. “A miscarriage. I hate those! She lost a lot of blood and she’s weak. No telling how long she called for Bobby before he woke up.”

“What should I do?”

“I cleaned up what I could, but can I ask …”

“You know I will.”

“I thought so. I’ll wake up Katie and take Bobby there after I talk to him.”

Susanna opened the door quietly and looked back at her husband. “I don’t even know her first na me.”

“Lavinia.”

He had sent for Mrs. Hanrahan, who waited by the Dunklins’ door. They completed the work Joe had begun, washing Lavinia Dunklin, her face a mask of sorrow, and easing her into a clean nightgown. Mary Hanrahan made up the bed with clean sheets, carefully rolling Mrs. Dunklin from side to side while Susanna held her steady. When they finished, Mary went downstairs and came back soon enough with a cup of tea.

“Works wonders,” she whispered, and set it by the bedside. She touched Susanna’s shoulder and left the house as quietly as she had entered it.

Mrs. Dunklin slept and Susanna kept watch over the woman she should have hated, in a house full of terrible memories. She remembered what she had told General George Crook’s back as he had walked away: Just let it go. As the sun rose and the bugler attempted to play reveille—the good buglers had gone with Crook—Susanna Randolph let it go.

Like most boys, young Joe Randolph had had his heroes. From Washington to John Marshall to James Madison, most were Virginians, as he was. He had admired Robert E. Lee for years, until his own adult leanings kept him in the Union army when Lee followed the South. General George Thomas, another Virginian and Union exile like him, became his hero then, being all that an officer should be.

Joe had a heroine now, his wife. Until Lavinia Dunklin was safely out of the medical woods, Suzie had sat by her bed, holding her hand, cleaning her, feeding her, crying with her. She did it without complaint or much comment, keeping her own counsel even at night in bed, when other officers’ wives took over night duty, and Suzie was released to sleep beside him.

She curled up beside him as always. He used to think he wouldn’t care for that much closeness during summer, when it was hot and two people could get sticky being together; he was so wrong. Suzie just naturally went into his arms when the light was out. So what if they sweat? He didn’t want her any farther away than his fingertips.

He knew how tired she was, but she hesitated not a second when he wanted her, loving him and letting him know with a gentle sigh—as if he needed a prompt—just how deep her own pleasure was. He had never met anyone remotely like Susanna Randolph. If word ever got out what a lover she was, what a friend, he’d have been stabbed and dumped in a borrow pit.

She continued to amaze him. He asked her if Lavinia Dunklin had apologized for her reprehensible behavior.

“No. I think it’s too hard for her. I let it go” was Suzie’s serene reply.

He also knew she cried as quietly as she could as the sun rose, mourning a beloved son she feared she would never see again, no matter how cheerful her face throughout the day. Joe allowed her those private moments of sorrow, because to interfere with them would have been unkind. After his own sorrow with Melissa’s death, he knew better than to mess with someone else’s grief.

He lay awake worrying sometimes at night after she slept, wondering where Tommy was, wondering if he should have sent Nick Martin to an asylum, as Al Hartsuff had advised. Maybe Joe was wrong to trust a man three-quarters insane.

His happiest moment came when Suzie met him at the door nearly jumping up and down in her excitement. “You won the poker jackpot at the Rustic Hotel today?” he teased, and laughed when she thumped him.

“Even better, my love,” she said, sitting with him on the front porch, her hand in his. “Today, all the officers’ wives with children, Lavinia Dunklin excepted, brought them to my summer school.” She mentioned a stickler who had held out longer than some of the others in forgiving Susanna for being human. “Joe, she told me I was the best thing that had ever happened to education at Fort Laramie.”

“I could have told her that,” he said, his lips against her cheek now.

“She invited us to play cards tonight.”

“You know I hate cards,” he said.

“But you love me, and you’ll go.”

Something in the words smacked of enormous confidence. As a doctor he could not have diagnosed what had happened to his wife. As a husband, he knew she was whole again.

As June passed the halfway mark, disquieting rumor made its way to Fort Laramie. It came as it always did, a thief in the night, carried by Indians, or Black Hills gold seekers. News of battle began to flicker like heat lightning. Joe never talked about it, knowing that a row of officers’ wives and a small community of enlisted men’s wives worried enough, without borrowing rumor. But there it was, and the feeling only grew stronger.

He didn’t say anything to Dr. Petteys, but he didn’t need to. When he sent Petteys south to Fort Russell for more medical supplies to bolster their depleted stores, the contract surgeon had made no comment beyond, “I’ll be back as soon as possible, Major.” It was as if talking about the possibility of high casualties was better not voiced, or it would be worse. Joe never had time to hang around the telegrapher’s shack, but he noticed others doing that.

Suzie didn’t know the rules of rumor-laden warfare and asked him at breakfast, “There’s been a battle, hasn’t there?”

He was a little short with her, but she knew him too well to take offense at such childishness. She gave him that level stare that reminded him of Melissa. Maybe it was a woman thing.

He nodded, reluctant to voice his concerns. Susanna stopped moving between the stove and the table to sit beside him, take his hand and hold it to her breasts.

“Whatever I can do to help,” was all she said, and then got about her business again, which meant her little classroom in the commissary warehouse.

He was grateful for the school, and not because he thought any great learning was going to take place during a Fort Laramie summer. He appreciated that it kept Susanna busy and took her mind off Tommy, if only briefly. He came to love her animated description of the day’s events in her school, which were always more interesting than his stories of pus, diarrhea and dry cough.

When the news came, it hit hard. There was no school on Saturday, and Petteys was on duty, two reasons for Joe to lie in bed and explore his wife’s body thoroughly. He had taken his leisurely time providing sufficient foreplay to earn a final objection from Suzie, in her own eagerness, who was ready and getting impatient. She typically climaxed twice, so the third time came as a testimony to the rare leisure of Saturday, leaving them both calm and content.

At least they would have been if the bugler hadn’t blown officers call. In a fort so understaffed, it was a summons closely akin to a fire bell in the night. Joe got up quickly, doing a quick wash while Suzie watched him, her blond hair so pretty and disheveled around her face, and her eyes drooping, tribute to his amazing prowess.

“What’s that call?” she asked. “I can’t remember.”

“It’s trouble, Suzie.”

“Comb your hair,” she called after him as he ran down the stairs, his mind already off Venus and centered on Mars.

He ran his fingers through his hair and hurried to the admin building, joining the small cadre of officers still at Fort Laramie. No one looked too soldierly, so no one commented on his own dishevelment at an hour when proper gentlemen were more sedately clothed.

Major Townsend, his eyes two coals in his head, cleared his throat. “Bad news, gentlemen. General Crook suffered a defeat at Rosebud Creek last Saturday and has withdrawn to the Big Horns. The wounded are at Fetterman now and headed our way.”

No one said anything; they had been expecting battle. But defeat? Good God, Crook had twenty companies in his part of the pincer movement. Joe looked around, and knew every man there was thinking the same thing.

Training took over. Townsend told the cavalry lieutenant on loan from his Nebraska post to saddle up two fast riders and locate Jim O’Leary and K Company. “If they’re near enough, tell them to ride to Fetterman and offer support,” Townsend ordered. The lieutenant left on the run, not bothering to salute.

Townsend issued orders that sent everyone moving, then looked at Joe, the only officer remaining. “Do what you do, Joe,” he said, sounding infinitely weary. “They’ll be here Monday. Expect the worst and be ready to transport.”

Monday turned into the blur he remembered from the Civil War, with his ward full of dirty men and dirty wounds. He dismissed ambulatory patients to make room for hard cases. His hardest case was a captain of the Third Cavalry, shot through the face, maybe blind and with teeth missing. Joe tended him in Ted Brown’s quarters behind the hospital, desperate to keep the man nearby, but in a quiet place.

Without asking, Suzie and Mary Hanrahan took over his ward, washing the men and sitting with them. Joe steeled himself for Suzie’s gasp when she saw Private Benedict, his leg ruined and full of gangrene. She was a novice around that kind of gross wound, but he still had to pry her away so he could remove Anthony’s leg below the knee.

He and Petteys, a veteran overnight, doctored for two days straight, taking turns sleeping on his cot. Suzie brought food for both of them, then sat with Anthony Benedict, just holding his hand. Joe watched her droop and knew it was too much, but he needed her.

Other wives came, too, unable to stay away, some more useful than others, but all a cheerful presence. He spent more time in his hospital steward’s quarters, watching the captain suffer in silence, his iron will evident.

Finally the ward was quiet, filled with clean, well-fed men who lay half awake, half asleep, in that curious somnolence of the wounded. The ward was just the way he wanted it, so the steward could watch tonight. Joe went to Anthony Benedict’s bedside and tapped Suzie’s shoulder.

She looked up, pleased to see him.

“Private, I’m taking my wife home. Go to sleep, and that’s an order.”

To his amusement, Anthony snapped his eyes shut.

“You’re a faker,” Suzie told the private, but she let Joe lift her to her feet.

They strolled down the hill hand in hand, silent. Inside their quarters, he took her in his arms.

“You know, Suzie, after two days of the three Ds—death, dirt and dismemberment—all I want to do is make a baby.”

She understood exactly what he was trying to say. Her clothes came off at the bedroom door, and she helped him out of his.

“You could use a bath, but I don’t care,” was all she said as she took care of his needs, her own, and proved to him how competent was woman—specifically, his woman.