After the war and a brief posting in Texas, Autie was commissioned lieutenant colonel of the newly created 7th Cavalry and sent to Fort Riley, Kansas. Autie and Libbie put a good face on it for each other, but both were devastated. They had been famous, feted like celebrities in New York City. Even when alone, Libbie had been singled out in Washington by no less than President Lincoln and asked if the Boy General really had such a lovely wife.
All that traded in for endless empty prairie, crude clapboard buildings, poor rations. Anonymity. It was a reckoning. As if their pride had grown out of proportion, and they were being slapped down into their places. Autie spent long evenings in his study in silence. His moods, he called them, though she heard other soldiers had the same. She knew better than try to speak to him at such times. They no sooner moved into one rude hovel than a higher-ranking family arrived to lay claim to it, and in turn they took a lower officer’s, a domino effect that left all feeling ill used.
Part of the voyage out to Kansas they rode in a train. Through one valley there were reports of Indians having waylaid a small group of wagons. The settlers had been rescued by the army, but the provisions had to be left behind. Before the story was out of the officer’s mouth, they could see those same wrecked wagons out the window.
A dozen or more Indians were still picking through the spoils, ransacking supplies. A hatchet busted open a sack of flour that flumed up in a cloud. The warriors were in high spirits, and one tied a bolt of calico to the tail of a pony. As the train passed, the rider took off at a dead run to outrace the locomotive, the calico unfurling in long curls like a streamer behind him.
The hairs stood up on Libbie’s forearms at the unexpected wonder of the sight. How to describe his appearance? The body undressed except for a breechclout, the limbs lean, muscled, and bronze. Both rider and horse painted with yellow stripes so that they appeared melded together. The rider raised his arm and shook it at the train then veered away. Libbie realized with astonishment that he was playing with them. It was a magnificent sight. Despite herself she felt like clapping and noticed Autie was thrilled as she by the startling beauty and ebullience they witnessed. The weight of their exile lightened the smallest bit.
* * *
THEY WERE A MODEST, ill-fitting troop dropped in the great, desolate wasteland known as the Great Plains, which stretched through the territories in all directions, with hardly a soul per square mile in population. It was still commonly referred to as the Great American Desert—a desert of the senses most certainly if not of the land. The vastness all around dwarfed its inhabitants. The wind was a constant that varied from breeze to gale, wicking away every drop of moisture and replacing it with dust. From the ramshackle, mud-spattered little fort one looked out on … emptiness … a maddening, gloomy landscape in its lack of feature. In every direction were gently undulating mounds of grass that changed from green to gold to gray as the seasons passed. The only objects above a man’s height were the thirsty cottonwoods that huddled the reed-choked, stingy rivers.
The sky made up for the land’s neglect, blooming in crimsons and yellows in the morning, turning all shades of blue during the day until the very deepest hue, settling down to greens and purples at dusk. The moon rode high in the dark lead of night and gave one the sensation of a boat at sea. Libbie herself felt cut adrift, removed from all she had known, waves of land locking her in place.
* * *
ALMOST AS SOON as they were installed at the forlorn Fort Riley outpost, Autie was called away to Washington, and he claimed he could not afford the additional expense of taking her with him. Then began a series of letters describing his being wined and dined, enjoying the company of famous and wealthy women. He postponed his return for the ostensible reason of seeking advancement within the military, or alternatively, securing a more lucrative position outside it. The Kansas assignment had been a great blow and accounted for his many silences. Still, his prolonged absence made Libbie a prey to doubt.
Did he regret marrying so quickly, just on the cusp of the possibilities his fame offered? His effect was no less in New York City and the capital than it had been in poor, provincial Monroe. Although the War was now two years past, his status as hero still had the power to charm heiresses and actresses. He always dressed in his self-styled uniform that had irked so many and now was thought to be dashing. The cavalier. An affectation, but he continued to wear it through the streets and into the parlors of New York. He understood more than anyone the ebbing tide of fame, knew that the more time passed, the less bright his star shone. Libbie’s loneliness spurred unkind thoughts of his character.
He reveled in his conquests, eagerly sharing them in his letters to her, just as he had shared his earlier liaisons with Fanny. Did he not understand a woman’s heart? Especially hers, riddled with insecurity? Or did he purposely ignite her jealousy? At an exclusive party, he met a baroness wearing such a low-cut gown that he wrote he had not seen such sights since I was weaned. Another night he and a group of male friends flirted with nymphes du pave. In the same breath, he assured her it was all done in fun and never did he forget his husbandly duties of faithfulness. Libbie was forced into the part of fool.
Alone at night, she was serenaded by howling bands of coyotes. The wives were instructed to never leave the fort unescorted for fear of Indian attack, so what could have been unimaginable physical freedom instead became confinement. The only liberty she took in her isolation was to loosen her hated corset so that it barely changed her natural waistline. Surely she didn’t need to follow the rigorous standards of New York or even Monroe out in the middle of the plains, with no one to watch or care? She wouldn’t bother tightening back up until Autie came home.
The hours crawled along in a series of halfhearted efforts at self-improvement—reading inspiring tracts, painting vignettes, including one of a dog smoking a pipe as a present for Autie’s return, knitting a misshapen sweater that her peacock of a husband would refuse to wear and quickly give away. She consoled herself that within a few years she would have the care of a family to distract her.
His absence lengthened, and she spent the spring without him. Then he wrote that he would be yet another month, saying that time hung heavily while he waited on the decisions of Very Important Men. In the meantime he distracted himself with operas and plays, late-night dinners. A drawing in a fashionable New York magazine showed him at a costume ball, dressed as the devil with two of their mutual women friends as his consorts. Libbie thought the costume fitting, then chastised herself for the uncharitable notion. She felt much the country mouse and was on her way to turning into a shrew. What really did being the belle of Monroe amount to? Jealousy was eating away at her.
The last straw was when he began to escort a famous singer about town. He spoke of going backstage during performances at her request. She would leave the door only a few inches open as she dressed, but still he caught occasional glimpses of a beautifully turned leg encased in purple tights.
* * *
LIFE ON THE KANSAS PRAIRIE proved an enervating combination of boredom and terror. That year the papers were full of the lurid details of a massacre that had occurred at Fort Buford in Dakota Territory. Indians had overwhelmed the garrison and butchered every white person there, soldiers and civilians alike. The part that especially haunted the women was that the commander of the fort, a Colonel Rankin, had shot his wife to prevent her capture. Even as Libbie longed for Autie’s protection, she wondered if she might need fear it instead. The implications of the story hung heavily on all of them until a month later the newspapers announced the even more shocking news that it had been only a false rumor, and that the fort and its occupants, including the colonel’s poor wife, were all safe. But the damage had been done to her peace of mind.
Libbie made the acquaintance of many gentlemen who arrived at the post as officers of the 7th, and either stayed on or moved to even more isolated forts. Entertainments became essential to everyone’s sanity, and as distraction she set her energy on organizing them. Dinner parties were arranged. In the background there was always Eliza’s disapproving presence—her loyalty was to Autie, and she had a puritanical idea of a wife’s duties—but Libbie ignored her. She led a crowd who spent long nights singing and dancing in the parlor.
One particular officer became a great friend. Thomas towered above the other men, sporting a big square face and the most fantastic of mustaches. He would take the wives out riding when they could no longer stand their restriction.
Alcohol was the great scourge of frontier life, and a bottle regularly kept Thomas company. It was his only failing. She counseled him to give it up, undergo conversion as Autie had, yet he only smiled at her, changing the subject to a new amusement, knowing how easily she could be distracted. He especially liked to tempt her with the excuse of dances.
Libbie now became quite the flirt. She was surprised how she enjoyed it, both the pleasure it gave to the days and how it took the sting from Autie’s neglect. With the protection of a wedding ring, she could be more bold than she’d ever dared as an eligible young lady.
She conquered her loneliness in this way, even as Autie’s letters grew more passionate with the many months of separation, his suspicions mounting as he read between the lines of her letters, which commensurately grew more spare. Sensing their coolness, he chided her and reminded her of their infamous coach ride in Texas, how the window somehow broke. She wrote back that she’d quite forgotten. He was clever to remind her of their secret life, rocking in the saddle each morning as sunlight streamed down on their bed, bare flesh against white sheets. He owned her soul yet he did not know what to do with it. Autie was all about the chase and so she would pretend to run.
Urging her to join him at last, he wrote in their special language that he wanted
something much, very much better and be sure you bring it along. I am entirely out at present and have been so long as to forget how it tastes.
Letters months old that freshened at the moment of rereading quickened her pulse.
Thomas’s eyes studied her as she folded the incendiary letters away. She sent Eliza to her room for the night. The girl’s eyes flickered over the two before she left.
“You’re flushed,” he said, accusing when they were alone.
She would never belong to another man. Why had Autie delayed so long inviting her?
“I’m going to my husband.”
The prairie wind howled ceaselessly, bending the grasses, bending the will of them all. Yet she had grown a liking for it over the last months. She had been weaned, developed a hunger for the chalky bite of freedom—the most irresistible elixir once one developed a taste for it. She loved Autie, but also what was beyond him, the whole untamed world out there in its infinite liberty.
She walked between houses to go visiting the other women, and the wind raised her skirt to reveal petticoats. She grabbed them down, but not before Thomas’s eyes were on her, thirsty, as if she were the whiskey in his bottle. She waited an extra moment, too long for propriety, blood on fire, and then let the cloth slip through her fingertips to fly free again. Only after Autie returned did she sew lead weights in the hems like the other good wives.