7

November 30, 1866—​Bozeman Trail, Dakota Territory

THREE DAYS OUT OF FORT LARAMIE—​WHERE KOHN had purchased buffalo coats and hats against the chill of autumn that had, in their previous two weeks of travel, turned to the cold of winter—​and they are descending the muddy, rutted Immigrant Road for the banks of the North Platte, where they plan to cross and pick up the Bozeman Trail. They spy covered wagons in the distance. Kohn extends his field glass and puts it to his eye. Oxen teams, three, and two more of mules. Slow going, women and children walking beside the wagons to lighten their loads on the sandy North Platte banks.

Kohn says to Molloy, handing him the telescope, “Small party, sir. And late in the season. If they are heading north, they’ll be held up at Fort Reno until a larger group assembles. They’ll probably have to winter there. Maybe at Phil Kearny if they’re lucky with the weather.”

Molloy grunts and ignores Kohn’s offer to look through the glass. He is conscious but only just, having passed the three days of their stay to rest the horses and mules at Fort Laramie drinking with a detachment of 4th Cavalry officers out of Texas who regaled Molloy with stories of Comanche raids, of terrible butchery and wild pursuit. He has passed much of the last three days’ travel vomiting from his saddle and has dropped his flop-​brimmed Hardee hat several times so that Rawson is weary of dismounting and fetching it. It is a hat unbecoming a cavalry officer, Kohn has told Molloy more than once, though Kohn supposes the tall, furred buffalo cover is no better.

The officer’s face is bright red with windburn and winter sun and sickness. He wears spectacles of dark green glass against the sun which he purchased in Louisiana, these being the fashion among men of means there, and Kohn cannot see Molloy’s eyes behind them. Kohn views the glasses as ridiculous, a foppish affectation, particularly when worn with the Hardee hat.

Kohn continues, “Cooke’s orders. Not safe to make your way to the gold fields in groups of fewer than sixty, with twenty armed men at least. It makes for bad reading in the papers back east and ill affects the price of gold when prospectors are opened up like herring on the Bozeman and their women taken for Indian wives.”

Jonathan smiles at this, though not so the bluecoats see it. And how many Pawnee women, he thinks, have been taken by white soldiers? Too many to count.

“You are talking like a Jew now, Kohn,” Molloy says.

Kohn laughs. “And you reek like an Irishman, sir, but you are awake at least. Will we dismount here and make ourselves presentable before we ride up on those wagons, sir? There may be women present.”

At least Molloy has been listening. Anything to bring him back. Worst I’ve seen him, Kohn thinks. He has eaten little more than porridge oats and brown sugar in the past how many days. And most of that left in the mud of the trailside.

“You may be right, Kohn. Rawson, Jonathan, pull up. I’d ask for my strop and razor but for lack of water.”

Kohn and Rawson dismount and Kohn aids Molloy down from his saddle. The Pawnee scout stays mounted and scans the trail, the grassy hills around them. The air is cool, the sky clear blue. Autumn on the edge of winter. The month best on the plains, the scout thinks. More of the lieutenant’s whiskey, if he offers, to keep the chill from my bones. Not so much though. Sioux about. Signs of unshod ponies crossing the trail half a morning behind. Fresh. Young braves or women. Close by but no danger. Still, watch, notice everything.

“We’ve enough,” Kohn says, “for a wash of your face. And a run of the comb, sir.”

“Splendid, Daniel, splendid. And a drop for my canteen too. We will water down the whiskey some. I believe it may be time to wean myself in anticipation. . . .”

He does not finish his sentence, as has been happening more and more lately, but Kohn is happy that Molloy has seen the need to taper off his consumption. It would be suicide to stop outright. The word is prominent in his thoughts lately. Suicide. Kohn has done the drying out with Molloy before. He knows the drill. A slow and steady readmittance to the slaughterhouse of sobriety, to the grim gauntlet of memory. Kohn is not without his own sorrows.

“Of course, sir. Rawson, get a cloth and basin from the mule, the lieutenant’s set of combs and razor. I will make a fire and heat the water, Captain. We’ll scrub up nicely, sir, and go a-​visiting.”

He smiles and Molloy smiles feebly back at him.

“Lieutenant, for all that is holy, Kohn, I’ve told you a thousand times how to address me.”

Kohn’s persistence in calling him Captain annoys Molloy as it reminds him of the war, of a time he has done his bloody best to scour from his mind with whiskey. Still, good health to him, for he does bear up well under the cross, my Daniel. Never a finer man in the whole of the world’s armies, Molloy thinks. He holds your worthless life in his hands and holds it gently. As if it is worth preserving. Not like that thieving ape of an orderly in Italy. Have not thought of him in years. Took a ball in the neck on the last day of the siege of Ancona. With the Devil now, no doubt.

Molloy’s service in the Irish Brigade in defence of the Papal States, only six years earlier, seems ancient to him now. A lark for a lad on the lookout for adventure; blessed escape for the youngest son of Catholic landowners, for a boy with no hope for the priesthood, no prayer of adequate inheritance. Twenty-​four years old and happy to see the back of benighted Ireland—​God keep her from all harm—​a foreign war in need of Catholic boys then a blessing to him.

From Ancona’s fall and parole d’honneur prisoner of the Piedmontese to the mud and blood of Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and Georgia. A terrible rending of a nation, a great rebellion in need of quelling, and the Union Army in need of professional soldiers, the priest from Washington had told him that fine spring day in Dublin after his release and return from Italy. Men with experience of war, of command, he’d said. And you do look the part, Capitano Molloy.

From capitano to lieutenant to captain to lieutenant in three different armies. Molloy had known he looked the part and had learned to play the part as well. He had succumbed to the American recruiting father’s flattery along with a number of other of Pius’s veterans, to bolster Union ranks in the early days of the war. His own mother had once told him he could never resist the lure of kind things said about him. You are as simple to see through as that pane of glass, my sweet Martin. He remembers his mother’s face. Not so simple now, my dear mother. Filthy with the muck of my sins, the pane cloudy and opaque. God bless and keep her. He has not written to her in months or has he? He cannot remember. Quell the thirst. Barley water and cherry juice for me now. Small beer. Why now? Don’t dwell on it, Molloy. There are those who depend on you.

“Sir.” Rawson hands Molloy a tin basin with an inch of warm water in its bottom. Not much but enough for a wash and a shave.

“Splendid, Rawson. Good man. And a drop from your canteen into mine, young sir, if you please.”

“Will I fetch another bottle from the mule, sir?” Rawson says. Molloy has given him the first draught of every bottle he has cracked since they left Fort Caldwell. He has been near as drunk as Lieutenant Molloy for much of the trip.

“You might as well,” Molloy says. “Take a draught yourself, give a sup to Kohn and Jonathan and the last bit for myself. This will be all for some days, I fear. The last supper . . .” Again his words tail off to nothing. But he smiles.

Jonathan sees terrible sadness in the smile. He thinks he might be better deserting the white soldiers. Or he could kill them and report back that they were killed by Sioux while he was scouting ahead. Then he could take work with other soldiers who would bring death to the Sioux and Cheyenne instead of hoping for death to come to them.

Ablutions complete, they mount and ride to meet the wagons which now have stopped and formed into a loose and porous circle into which the oxen and mule teams are being led. Early for camp, Kohn thinks. Two-​thirty in the afternoon but perhaps they have been travelling longer than normal or need repairs. He glasses them again and sees why they have stopped.

“Jonathan,” he says, offering the scout the field glass. “Are they Indians? Can you see them?”

“Women and children. Old folk,” Jonathan says. “Maybe Sioux. Maybe not Sioux. No warriors with them. Maybe more up the trail. We will watch for them.”

It is the first time any of them has heard the Pawnee speak. He prefers to listen rather than talk. Even when he is drunk on whiskey, he does not often talk. The taakaar—​the white soldiers—​are the other way around mainly. He thinks they might better understand the country they are in, the enemy they are fighting, if they talked less and listened more. Still, he thinks the curly-​headed corporal named Kohn may be piita, a warrior. There are not many of them among the bluecoats but there are some.

He takes the scope from Kohn and looks through it, though he saw the Indians at the pilgrims’ wagons while the others were still shaving and combing their locks. He assumes they are Sioux, or maybe Cheyenne, but he cannot be certain until he is closer. There do not appear to be any warriors among them. Some young braves perhaps but through the glass he confirms that they are mostly women and children mingling with the pilgrims. Some young boys on ponies, some travois pulled by dogs. Jonathan has heard talk of all the bands of the Lakota and Northern Cheyenne and Arapahoe meeting together in alliance to fight and drive the white soldiers from the Powder River valley. These could be a band or some families en route to such a meeting place. Perhaps the warriors are waiting further up the trail in ambush or maybe they are away hunting or on a war party, the scout thinks and wonders would the lieutenant let him take a woman or a child as a captive. His wife at home would like another child and he would like to bring her one. A girl child—​for she has only sons—​to help with the hides and the cooking and to keep her company when he is away. A pang of longing for his wife comes to him, a piercing arrow high in his chest. He doubts he will be let and it will be difficult to travel and scout with a captive in tow but then the lieutenant may well be dead before they reach the fort where they are headed. On this he would bet ten horses. The afterlife will not be kind to the lieutenant; he can see it in his face. He is destined to follow the Morning Star to the spirit village in the south. A cold place. Dark.

Rawson takes out his rifle.

“Put it away, Rawson. Unless I tell you,” Kohn says.

“You heard the Pawnee. They is Sioux most likely.”

“Put it away, Private,” Molloy says from behind his green spectacles. “I wouldn’t want you to hurt yourself.”

Kohn smiles and urges his horse forward.

They arrive at the wagons and there is no threat from the Indians but consternation and ill temper among the travelers. Black clothes and round-​brim hats and beards, the women in bonnets and plain dresses, the pilgrims running to and fro after a group of Indian children. One of the traveling women swings a broom at an Indian child who laughs and darts under the wheels of a wagon. Kohn notes a group of sullen boys on ponies, young, thirteen to fifteen years old perhaps, sitting just off the trail. They are speaking among themselves as if deciding on something. Kohn looks to Molloy and sees that he has noticed them as well but knows that there is little chance of him engaging them, even if they do become aggressive. There is too much about them that is similar to that day in Tennessee. Young boys acting as men.

“Good afternoon, friends,” Kohn says.

Instead of returning Kohn’s greeting, one of the pilgrims says, “Please, they steal from us. Drive them away from us please. They—​”

The man—​in his thirties with blond hair and the black clothing of an Amish or Mennonite—​turns and catches an Indian boy of four or five climbing down from the back of one of the Murphy wagons with a fistful of brown sugar. The pilgrim holds tightly to the Indian boy’s arm and slaps him across the face, causing the boy to cry out.

One of the pilgrim women shouts something in German at her husband or at the Indian woman who is holding her baby. Until now the white woman has been smiling and trying to take her baby back from the Indian woman, who is teasing the Mennonite mother, making to hand back the baby and then pulling it away. The Indian woman holding the baby sees the Mennonite man slap the boy and shouts something back. She shoves the baby into its mother’s arms, nearly dropping it.

Kohn can comprehend some of the German spoken by the woman to her husband. It is a dialect he is unfamiliar with—​and nothing like the Silesian German spoken by his father until his father learned enough English to never speak it again, but many of the words the woman shouts are close enough to his mother’s Yiddish that he can make out the admonishment in them—​“Stop” and “Don’t hit”—​and there is much about God and something about peace and the Book, and as he scans the group of pilgrims and the Indians intermingled among them he does not sense threat but there is confusion and an atmosphere of antagonism. Indian children chase one another, oblivious, under the wagon wheels, and another of them, older than the first, climbs out of the covered back of another of the wagons holding a rag doll. One of the Mennonite children begins to cry and another mother shouts up at the soldiers.

She shouts something in German and then in accented English. “Please, make them depart! They take things from us.”

Kohn answers her in a rough, simple German that is much colored with eastern Yiddish. Though his father mostly abandoned his native German soon after arriving in America, his mother raised him and his siblings with Yiddish in the home and it was much spoken in shul. There was a time when Kohn spoke it fluently. But like every immigrant kid on the streets around his Cleveland tenement home, he turned to English on entering school and soon was answering his mother’s Yiddish—​he thinks she must also have spoken Polish though he cannot remember hearing her ever do so—​in a language she often only barely understood. It pains him to remember this and so he rarely does. The only time his childhood Yiddish—​and the faint remaining traces of his father’s German—​is of any use, he thinks, is when he occasionally barks orders in pidgin German at immigrant Bills but does not think a soldier should be coddled in his own tongue when he is in the employ of an English-​speaking army and so rarely does it. The words feel awkward in his mouth.

“Seien Sie ruhig, meine Frau.” Be calm, missus. “We will try to be rid of them.” He turns in his saddle and Jonathan appears to understand what he will ask before he asks it.

The Pawnee slaps his mount with the reins and gives a whooping shout that reminds Kohn and Molloy of the rebel yell that so many times froze their blood in the war.

“Do not harm any of them, Jonathan. Not a hair on their heads, do you hear me?” Molloy shouts, as if sober. “And put that bloody rifle back in its scabbard, Rawson, or I’ll plug your arsehole with it.”

Kohn smiles again. Something of the old Captain in the words and the way he says them.

He turns to watch the Pawnee maneuver his pony among the wagons, whipping the Indian children with long cavalry reins, lashing out with his moccasins. The Sioux women appear to see him for what he is for the first time and begin to shout and call their children. Kohn and Molloy can hear the concern in their shouting and watch carefully as Jonathan goes among them, whipping and kicking the children, once snapping an old man across the back with his reins and saying something to him and laughing. The older Sioux shuffle away, averting their eyes from the Pawnee, and the boys on ponies gallop in among the wagons now. One of them, a chubby boy in a bright red shirt and breechcloth, his hair in two long braids, swings down from the bare back of his horse, holding onto the pony’s flanks with just his legs, and swoops up an Indian toddler by the arm as he rides past. Kohn smiles at the feat. Five years a dragoon and he has never seen horsemanship like it.

Another of the boys rides dangerously close to the Pawnee in a show of swagger and defiance. Jonathan laughs and rides at a small cluster of them to see if they will attempt to touch coup on him. He knows that for the Sioux boys, striking an enemy on the body with a stick carved and blessed for the purpose is as honorable an achievement as killing the enemy in battle. If they try it he will grab their coup sticks and dismount them. He cannot kill them—​the bluecoats won’t allow that and there are too many pilgrims who may not want him to do it either—​but he is taking some pleasure in terrifying the Sioux women and the old folks. Like lice, the Sioux, he thinks. Everywhere, lording it above all other tribes. Butchering, taking slaves. Jonathan’s sister was captured in a Sioux raid when she was only a girl of seven summers and every time he encounters the Sioux he looks for her though he knows he will not recognize her. There is a sore part of his heart that will never heal, for he loved his sister and watched her taken, hidden as he was in the scrub with his mother. Every day he has lived since, he remembers the shame of hiding and watching her taken by Sioux and remembers the sound of his mother’s weeping when she thought she was alone.

He gives a war call and turns his horse and rushes at a group of retreating women and children, their dog following, a lodgepole travois bouncing in the rutted track behind it. A pot stolen from the pilgrims is dislodged from the travois and rolls onto the trail and Jonathan, like the boy in the red shirt, swings down from his mount at speed and collects it. The Sioux women seem to know that he would happily rape and gut them and hurl their babies into the river and they do not look him in the face. He whoops and lunges from his saddle at one of the boys whose eyes go wide with terror. He slaps the boy on the back of the head with his reins as the boy turns and flees. He prays that he will meet the boy’s father, farther up the trail.

Soon it is over, dust settling, the pilgrim women repacking crates inside the wagons, folding linen. Some of the Indian women took a dress or two, a fry pan or cook pot, and the young Mennonite girl still howls for her rag doll but not much of value is missing.

“Thank you, sir,” a man says, his English better than the woman’s. “I am Willem Vogl and we are Vogls and Hitzelburgers. We go to Montana for farming and not gold. We are not gold-​seekers.”

Molloy tips his slouch hat to the man. “Lieutenant Molloy, at your service, sir. Corporal Kohn, Private Rawson. And that is Jonathan. You won’t have to worry about him stealing your sugar.”

“I am pleased to meet you, sir,” the Mennonite man says, and he is joined now by an older man wearing a beard that covers his jawline, but no mustache. This man says something to the younger, then speaks in German to Kohn.

Molloy and Rawson look to the corporal. Kohn says, “It’s Swiss. Or Schwabian or some such. I can understand some of it. He thanks us, anyway, for driving off the Indians.”

The older man continues to speak to Kohn in his dialect.

Molloy says, “Well, you tell him he’s very welcome and that we would be much obliged to share a meal in return for escorting their train as far as Fort Reno.”

Kohn nods and speaks to the older Mennonite. His voice has taken on a harsh aspect that Molloy does not often hear from Kohn unless he is giving orders. Perhaps, Molloy thinks, it is just the language and the way it comes off the tongue.

“And tell them that we would be—​”

“He wants rid of us now, sir,” Kohn says. “He’s saying they are pacifists and cannot abide soldiery about their camp.”

“What’s pacifists?” Rawson says.

“They don’t believe in raising a hand in violence against another man. Or they’re just damn cowards who don’t mind if others do it for them.”

“Admirable. Admirable . . .” Molloy says, uncorking his canteen. He hands it to Jonathan, who drinks and hands it back.

“And they cannot abide liquor either,” Kohn says.

Whether Kohn is translating the old man’s words or stating a known fact, Molloy is unsure. He does not care. The Mennonites have ceased to interest him. He is beginning to feel poorly again. These arrogant, grasping, pious pilgrims. Thieving, urchin Indians and their howling matrons. He could be in Dublin or Genoa. Rare, he thinks, to meet a German who won’t take a drink with you. Or share a sausage. Should not have watered the whiskey down. Get Rawson to crack another bottle once we are away from these crawthumpers.

“That fella done raised his hand and slapped that Injun kid. I seen it,” Rawson says.

“They’re not supposed to, but of course it happens, Rawson. It’s more in the way of being against warfare and fighting, I imagine. Against soldiers.” There is disdain in Kohn’s voice and he does nothing hide it.

Rawson says, “Well, did you tell them they wou’n’t have no goddamn sugar or a stitch of goddamn cloth between them without us soldiery comin’ up on them? Them Injuns was only kids and old folk and they done near cleaned ’em out without us, without Jonathan there. Did you tell them that? I have heard of ungracious—​”

“Shut up, Rawson,” Molloy says. He turns to Kohn. “You tell him this, Kohn. Sir, I quite understand your position. I have no time for soldiery myself. Nonetheless, we will camp somewhat up the trail in case the Indians return. For this we would only beg a gallon of water for our pot. The river is brackish, we’re told, and not fit for man or beast for drinking.”

Kohn translates, adding some of his own sentiments to Molloy’s and the old man sends the younger off for water. “Get him a barrel, Rawson,” Kohn says, “and fill it up. Least the gentle sonsofbitches can do.”

Rawson dismounts, fetches a half-​barrel from one of the mules and follows the man. Molloy and Kohn and Jonathan sit in silence, the old man no longer speaking to them, and wait for Rawson to return.

Kohn says, “It’s common among these kind, sir. Mennonites and Hutterites and the like. Happy to avail of the protections offered by the soldiery but too good to share a meal with them all the same. And abolitionists, every damn one of them, but not an ounce of blood shed for the cause of it. Shit on them, sir, and let’s be on our own goddamn way.”

“No way to treat your Dutchie kinsmen, Kohn,” Molloy says. He swigs from his canteen. Kohn has not told him that he suspects a further reason the old man will not share a meal with them is because he has recognized Kohn’s German for the Yiddish it really is. Jews as bad as soldiers to them. Peace-​loving Mennonites have their hatreds too. Kohn spits into the dust between them and the old man. If the old man notices this, he does not react.

“Now now, Kohn.” Molloy spurs his mare and salutes the Mennonites. Rawson returns and stows the water barrel on the mule, climbing awkwardly onto his mount. The women and children, Molloy notes, are watching them from behind the wagons. He winks at one of the girls, who blushes under her bonnet and turns away.

A MILE DOWNRIVER they set up camp on a bluff above the North Platte banks and Jonathan takes the horses and mules away with him in a loose train to a watering spot he knows so they will not have to risk the brackish waters of this part of the river.

Kohn wonders is it wise to have the Indian away with all their mounts and the mule. They will be riding shank’s mare if the Pawnee sees their animals as more valuable than his wages. Vos Got tut, iz mistomeh gut. Yiddish in his head unbidden. Speaking with the Mennonites has awakened it. If God wills it, it is good. With the captain making such slow going, they’d be as fast walking to Fort Phil Kearny anyway.

“Will I raise the dog for you, sir?” They are carrying two tents with them on the mules. They have thus far only had to use them once.

Molloy sits with his back to a rock and is writing in a journal, drinking from a fresh bottle. “I don’t smell rain, do you?”

Kohn looks at the late afternoon sky. Clear, cold blue cut with high streaks of white cloud that remind him of Spanish moss. Which reminds him of Louisiana and Texas, which in turn strikes him as far and many years away from here. He wonders how the boys in the 7th are getting on. Unlike Molloy, he does not hate the newly founded regiment though he has no love for Custer or Davidson. He considers the sky, not wanting to set up the dog tents if the weather does not demand it. On the plains it is hard to tell from one minute to the next. The weather can move in fast, as it could at sea or over the Lake Erie of his youth. His breath comes out as steam. If the temperature drops further, Kohn thinks, anything falling from the sky will likely be snow. “I don’t think so, sir.”

“Well then . . .”

“A letter, sir?” Kohn says, beginning to dig out a fire pit, setting stones around it. It has been years since he has written any letters of his own. He would not write his father if his father was the last living man on earth. His mother died soon after he himself joined up in ’61. His brothers and sisters look upon him as a shame to the family and he feels only anger and envy when he thinks of them. He would dearly like someone, anyone, to whom to write a letter. There was a girl, once, a French Jewish girl in Cincinnati. He imagines she is married now.

“Who would I be writing, Kohn?”

“Your mother, sir. You haven’t written her in a long while. And that time only because I hounded you to it.”

“What would I tell her, Kohn?” Molloy asks, and there is something so sad about the way he says it that Kohn does not pursue the matter. Molloy pulls from his bottle like an orphaned lamb fed from a teat of India rubber.

“Rawson, gather buffalo chips and wood for the fire,” Kohn says. To hell with it. Molloy would drive a man to drink. And Kohn wonders: does sympathy have its limits? Does love?

“Right-​o, Corp, and then we can make us some of these,” Rawson says, opening his haversack to Kohn and Molloy. Molloy does not rise but looks into the mouth of the pack with Kohn.

“God damn you, Rawson, did you steal those sonofabitching eggs from the pilgrims?” Kohn says, taking the haversack from him. He looks inside again and counts seven eggs.

“I did not, the man gave ’em to me. He was ’shamed he says, with the old fucker not sharing up their grub with us for chasin’ off them Injuns. He gave me the eggs in thanks.”

“I will put you in a hole, Rawson, you thieving scalawag bastard.”

“I did not steal them. Sir, you got to believe me.” He turns to Molloy.

Molloy smiles drunkenly at the two enlisted men. “I believe I would enjoy some eggs fried in bacon grease with my beans and pilot bread. I believe that, Rawson. Kohn, how many times did you liberate grub from civilians in the war?”

“Only in hungry times, sir. We have enough vittles by far to get us to where we’re going. There’s no need—​”

“I’m assuming they’d poultry with them, Rawson. The pilgrims?” Molloy says. He has reached that place in his drunkenness where the world appears designed for his amusement alone and all others be damned.

“They did, sir. An almighty pile of laying hens in crates the back of that Murphy. They ain’t gonna miss no dozen eggs.”

“There’s only seven here, Rawson,” Kohn says.

“Some got broke, sir,” Rawson says to Molloy. Then, as if he has remembered, “And a man don’t miss what he gives away as a gift.”

“True as God’s word, Rawson,” Molloy says, and goes back to writing in his journal. His skin is pale and sweaty even in the chill air. “Fetch fuel for that fire, Rawson. And a blanket, Kohn. I could use a rug round my shoulders while I await my eggs.”

Kohn fetches the blankets from Molloy’s bedroll, noting that the captain is cold even under the heavy weight of his buffalo coat. “That boy’s a thief, sir.”

“We are all the most frightful thieves, every one of us, Kohn. God forgive us.”

Kohn does not know or care what Molloy means. The officer has moved from the world as a source of amusement to the world as a pit of vipers, a dark and fatal place where no love or kindness lives. Kohn does not need whiskey to feel the world is such a place but he resists the idea. Someone has to.