The summer of 1874, the women waited.
Each time Autie left on campaign felt like a small death. Libbie called it her black hour, when she lay in bed unable to talk, eat, drink, or even think clearly. Eventually by sheer strength of will she would rouse herself and go about the routine of her day in a kind of fugue state.
Due to the high threat of attack in the Black Hills, she was not allowed to accompany him. She and the other wives held vigil at Fort Lincoln as if they were on an island stranded on the vast sea. Their sea, though, was a parched one. The sun beat down but gave no life. It was the year of the great drought on the northern plains, and the landscape dried from brown to gray. There was never enough water at the best of times, and now they had to make do with even less.
Libbie learned to sponge bathe in a teacup’s worth, and not drink more than half a cup a day. Each morning they woke to a crackling heat and stayed inside, the shutters drawn in semidarkness until evening.
A great plague of grasshoppers descended, which seemed entirely unfair given their other numerous trials, and she wondered how the pests managed to survive the drought. Survive, though, they did. Thrive, even.
The sky would be without a wisp of vapor, a hard mineral bowl set down on the land, and then without warning a scrim would descend between sun and earth. Thinking it was a cloud, one looked up to see a brown mass of flying insects. They fell to the earth, destroying everything in their path.
The women screamed and ran inside. Soldiers stabled the horses, who otherwise went mad as insects covered and bit them, crawled in to invade eyes, ears, and mouth. The only thing in which they were lucky was that the land was too barren to tempt the insects for a long stay, and after their devastation they flew off in one day. Their damage, on the other hand, lasted.
Libbie’s vegetable garden was only a memory, as were the gardens of the other families. The newly planted cottonwoods were stripped not only of leaves but also bark, the denuded remains resembled toothpicks. She found holes in her clothing. Whole pages had been eaten out of books.
* * *
THE BLACK HILLS EXPEDITION was to be gone two months, with regular mail drops during that time. The arrival of the mailbags was akin to Christmas, Thanksgiving, and the Fourth of July rolled together. The wives tittered in anticipation like children and went off separately to each savor her “treasure.” In the evening a group made the ascent of the hill behind the fort and stood guard with the sentries, squinting into the far distance, hoping to conjure scouts carrying messages from their loved ones. If they could not have that, they gladly would have settled for an approaching rainstorm, but most days they received neither.
Libbie was going stir-crazy at the small circumference of her world, warned off going outside the limits of the fort and hill. It was then she began to ride the surrounding prairie in her sleep. Over many nights her dreams changed from riding over dull prairie to traveling through lush meadows filled with flowers. She imagined stuffing her mouth full to choking on luscious berries and letting icy mountain water cascade down her throat. When she woke she realized Autie’s letters from the expedition had quite invaded her imagination.
* * *
A SMALL BLACK SPECK, a high whine, and then the sting. Libbie swatted and found a small spat of blood on her arm. With an almost biblical vengeance, the grasshoppers made way for the mosquitoes. Instead of staying just one day, though, the mosquitoes took up permanent residence. She had considered the Red River in the South the ultimate in mosquito persecution, but Fort Lincoln put the Southern mosquitoes to shame. The wind blew and the insects hitched a ride, arriving to torment them.
In the heat of the day, the women escaped inside, but in the evening they longed for fresh air and any bit of coolness they could find. At Libbie’s suggestion, therefore, the ladies concocted the most outrageous uniforms against the scourge. They wore overcoats on top of dresses, scarves around their necks, hats and gloves to cover any exposed flesh. Libbie took honors for a device made out of reeds covered with netting that fit over the head, resembling a kind of demented beekeeper’s bonnet. Another lady discovered that if they wrapped their legs, ankles, and feet in newspaper, then put on stockings, they were well protected down to their shoes. They shuffled along in these uncomfortable costumes, fanning the air clear around themselves. It did not pay to examine oneself in the mirror, nor to look too closely at one’s neighbor. Their lives took on a dreamlike unreality. In this way they sat on their porches and held vigil.
* * *
SHE DID NOT KNOW what to make of Autie’s first mail delivery, in which he went on at great length about the sublime beauty of the virgin territory they were reconnoitering: the pine forests, cold rushing streams, lush meadows of flowers and fruit that informed Libbie’s dreams. In that same mail delivery, another wife had a letter from her husband describing the unbearable hardship during the first two hundred miles of the trek before they reached the Black Hills: blistering heat, brackish and undrinkable water, a dust storm that almost overwhelmed them. Why did Autie omit all these details? What other unpleasant realities did he hide from her?
Since their marriage she had been aware of his purposeful shielding of her from the harsher facts of the soldiering life. He had not shared the horrors of the War nor later of the Indian battles; he did not admit to the myriad dangers he encountered on each campaign. She learned more about the Washita battle from the newspapers than from his lips, and yet she did not fault him the omission. Whenever possible she tried to ferret out the gory details he was exposed to, and yet she would never concede to the knowing. It was part of the myth of their marriage, their unspoken vow to each other to deny hardship.
She knew the dust storm was true, because it had reached the fort, too.
Libbie, unable to enlist any of the other women, had made the walk up to the sentry post alone. Alongside the guard, she squinted out in the direction from which the scouts would appear, realizing perfectly well that the last post had occurred scant days before. It would be a week or more before she again heard from Autie, but she needed to have a concrete task so she chose that. The horizon glowed like a penny. She called to the sentry, fearful of irritating him with her woman’s anxiety. He studied it for a few moments with his field glasses, and his face paled.
“Get the women inside,” he said.
Indian raids often made their appearance this way, the dust kicked up from the running ponies creating a voluminous cloud that heralded their warpath. The sentry checked for bullets in the chamber of his pistol, his hand shaking, then handed it to her with a gruff nod.
“Use it if you need.”
The penny cloud on the horizon was moving too fast and growing too large for Libbie to make it back to her house in time. It moved at an impossible speed for men on even the fleetest of horses. She stumbled on the loose gravel on her descent, scuffing her palms, kneeing a hole in her skirt. By the time she reached the house, her hand holding the pistol trembled. The usual blue-marbled sky overhead had turned the rust of dried blood. The door handle sparked to the touch, hot as an iron. Eliza opened the door from inside, using a kitchen towel to grip the metal.
Not Indians, but an attack nonetheless. A sirocco, one that turned air to metal. Libbie looked back, and it seemed the end-times. Her eyes felt abraded by sand as if she hadn’t slept in days. Skin became leathered. Whatever had somehow escaped the calamity of the insects earlier that summer was now incinerated. Green became a memory. Plant life petrified in the dry heat. The earth rang hard like an anvil.
An irrational anger took hold of Libbie. The poor souls of the fort had struggled in that purgatory for so long, this last blight seemed cruel and purposeful. A punishment. It would have been the greatest relief to her to fire the pistol at the sky, but the price in tarnished reputation was too steep. A few hours later both the storm and her fit of pique passed.
There was a code among the wives. They cheerfully accepted the hardships of the frontier, and it was a sign of dishonor to complain of the life to the outside world. They considered their own roles as important in their way as the men’s: they brought civilization, which would be the lasting victory, not the brute force being used at the moment.
Even among themselves there was rarely any admission of flaws in their spouses. Drunkenness, profligacy, gambling, these were part and parcel of outpost life. There were darker defects that only showed themselves as bruises on the women’s faces and arms, on parts hidden under clothing. A few suicides occurred over the years by soldiers and one by a laundress whose husband abandoned her. They could only pray that those despairing souls found a kinder life in the next world.
In subsequent mail deliveries, Autie wrote of finding a large hidden cave with the skeleton of a white man outside it. Among his belongings were initialed buttons that matched the letters of an old beau of Libbie’s. Autie, prankster, wrote that said beau must have escaped into the wilderness in order to avoid marrying her.
Autie went on to assure her that the regiment was maintaining healthful routines, no drinking or gambling permitted. Other wives received letters describing the exact opposite condition—considerable drinking and gaming. These were trifling disparities, though, when the main news was that Autie was safe. He wrote that there had been no fighting with Indians. Only later did she learn that it was because they were holding a Sioux chief hostage.