December 12, 1866—Fort Phil Kearny, Dakota Territory
FOR TWO DAYS, KOHN HAS DONE NOTHING. HE HAS passed his time visiting Molloy and hoping to speak again with the surgeon but has been unable find a time when the man is not busy tending to wounded men. And the surgeon has not appeared anxious to speak with him. Molloy is improving, an orderly told him, but needs rest and is dosed heavily with laudanum. He is rarely conscious when Kohn visits.
Kohn has called on Rawson in his quarters, a barracks room behind the horse stables he shares with other visiting enlisted men, and is concerned that Rawson has little work to do each day besides tending to their mounts, the Virginia private’s idleness a danger to his safety and the personal goods and monies of other men. Kohn takes him for a saunter around the stockade walls and warns him off the thievery that has landed him on their mission.
“You don’t got to tell me, Corp . . . Sergeant Kohn. I be a reformed man. Reformed. Been to church on Sunday. I did not see you there.” Rawson smiles, his face all innocence.
Kohn stares at him until the smile dims and Rawson looks away. He thinks he may volunteer him for the woodtrain guard but, despite Rawson’s misdemeanors, Kohn does not wish to be responsible for his scalping. The woodcutting is done, Kohn has learned, in a forest six miles from the fort and the train of wagons that goes out in the morning—as he witnessed from the viewing platform with Colonel Carrington—and returns each evening is attacked almost daily. In the week since they arrived at the fort three men have been killed, another six wounded. Several more are missing and it is not thought they have deserted for the gold seams of Virginia City this late in the season.
“Straight as a rail, Rawson, or I will have your head. I will have you riding guard on that goddamn woodtrain every single day until Red Cloud cuts your hair if I hear you’ve so much as looked at another Bill’s purse.”
“I hear you, Sergeant. I’ve a mind to keep my hair on, pretty as it is.”
So Kohn plays cards with the men he bunks with, unassigned or winter-stranded NCOs like himself. Some of these are fine company, and some a burden, the army guaranteeing only close quarters. Kohn visits the sutler’s store for tobacco and beer, examining the new proprietor each time, hoping to catch him alone and have a word but unconcerned that he cannot. Molloy will be up and about soon, and will know better how to proceed. Or will know better how not to.
In a fit of boredom Kohn buys whiskey from a timberman in the fort who has brought enough for the winter and sells it at extortionate prices. He drinks some, and then some more, passing two days this way but finds the whiskey makes him weary and sad and prone to thinking of times past; of Cleveland, of his father, his mother, his brothers and sisters he will never see again, the shul he will never again visit, the wife he will never have, the bolts of cloth he will never cut and the suits of clothes he will never sew. He joined the army to escape these things. He joined the army so he would not have to think or to remember. Drink and idleness do not suit him. He pours his last pint of whiskey into the snow and walks again to the sutler’s store.
There are a few men at the tables in the store drinking beer, as is allowed on most Western posts. On some posts whiskey and rum are sold during certain hours but Kohn has heard that Carrington is a dry commander and has forbidden it. Had he allowed it, perhaps Kinney would not have established his tavern off-post but that is vaser unter’n brik. He hears his mother’s voice in the Yiddish and his heart stumbles. A woodstove warms the store and Kohn begins to sweat under his coat.
The men at the tables look at him and then back to their weeks-old newspapers. Kohn knocks on the counter and waits as the new sutler enters from a back room. The sutler’s store, Kohn notes, is a far grander building than any other on the post, having a duckboard floor and wall boards planed and painted. It is a rarity in that it has more than one room and doors in place of blankets between them. There is a glass window beside the front door and the late afternoon light is weak through it. Lanterns hang from beams high enough that a man must have to stand on a ladder to light them.
“How can I help you?” the young sutler says.
Kohn has heard that he is the son of the sutler at Fort C. S. Smith and arrived some weeks earlier to take over the concession on the death of Mr. Kinney. Wracked with grief, no doubt, the new sutler. Hapworth is his name, and it is newly painted in fine lettering on a sign outside the front door. His father was a judge in Pennsylvania until he decided to tap his Republican cronies for a far more lucrative concern selling overpriced beer and tobacco, clove candies and woollen socks to soldiers stranded out West.
“Do you know who I am?” Kohn asks.
The sutler frowns and desultory conversations cease.
“I . . . should I? I don’t know, no . . .”
“I’m here with Lieutenant Molloy, 7th Cavalry, who is laid up in Company Q and we are sent here to investigate the death of your predecessor, Mr. Kinney. Did you know that?”
“No, I did not.” Hapworth is in his twenties, and blushes under Kohn’s gaze.
“I have General Cooke’s orders and Colonel Carrington’s sanction to investigate Mr. and Mrs. Kinney’s deaths. Do you understand me, sir?”
“Yes.”
“Good, then I will need to see Mr. Kinney’s account ledgers for this store.”
“His account ledgers?”
“Yes, get them for me please. I will wait here.”
The sutler smiles and Kohn takes it to be nervousness rather than spite. The sutler says, “But, well, I can’t because they were not here when I arrived. I packed his personal properties to ship back East myself and they were not among them. I would like to have seen them myself for there are many men owing for goods purchased who may not now be held to account but I could not—”
“And if I were to come back in there behind your counter and have a look myself, I wouldn’t find them, or anything like them?”
“Why, no, of course not. I am at a loss myself with the ledgers missing. I am out of pocket, Sergeant. The debts accrued by the soldiers on this post will not be honored because of it.”
There is laughter from one of the tables and words spoken sotto voce.
Kohn turns and walks over to the table, addressing a raw-boned private. “What did you say?”
The laughter stops and now the men stare at Kohn. The soldier says, “We didn’t say a thing, only that you must be the only Bill in the whole of the fort who wants to see them books found. There’s many a man happy they are gone and hope they stay there.”
The private is Irish as are, no doubt, the men at the table with him. A cursed, wandering race, like my own, Kohn thinks. And I am cursed to wander the world alongside so many of them.
“You’d do well to mind your own business, Private,” Kohn says.
“And you’d do well to mind yours . . .”
There is one empty chair at the table and Kohn pulls it out as if he will sit and join the men. Instead, he raises the chair over his head and swings it crashing down onto the table top, shattering beer mugs, gouging the table, sending the men scrambling away, falling from their own chairs. He brings the chair down onto the table four times, smashing it until it is kindling. The men at the other table rise.
“Go on,” Kohn says to the raw-boned private, holding one of the chair legs by his side. “Unsheath that knife. I want you to do it.”
The private leaves his hand on the knife’s butt at his belt for a moment and then takes it away, raising the hand up in supplication. “There’s no need for that, now, Sergeant, is there? No need at all. I was only jesting. Just easy talk is all, no need for the Black Flag.”
“Stow your ‘easy talk,’ you fucker. Is this how you speak to ranking men in this fort?”
The men are staring at him but none answer. Kohn turns back to the sutler. “How much for the chair?”
The sutler is too stunned to speak. Finally, “Four . . .” He cannot hold Kohn’s eyes. “Three dollars. Three.” He looks over to his customers. “It was a good chair.”
Kohn takes out the money and lays it on the sutler’s counter. Loud enough for all in the store to hear, he says, “There is a reward for those books. Ten dollars, for whoever turns them up.”
“It’ll be a dead man claiming them ten sheets,” one of the standing men mutters.
“Maybe you’ll claim it then, pay off whatever it is you owe in Mr. Kinney’s books,” Kohn says.
“Them books is ash I’d say.”
Kohn turns to the sutler. “Make it fifteen dollars. More than a month’s wage for most of the men on post, Mr. Hapworth. Easy leaves for some Bill.”
“Only thing easy round here is getting kilt, Sergeant,” the private says, stuffing his kepi onto his head and wiping the spilled beer from his tunic. “You’d do best to remember that.”
Kohn takes a step closer to him. “Pull that knife and I’ll show you how easy.” When the man just smiles, Kohn says, “I thought so.” He turns and passes by the men, close enough to smell the beer soaking their tunics. The transition from the heated store to the icy December wind is breathtaking in the dying daylight.
Later Kohn will curse his lapse, his temper. Now it feels good. He still has the chair leg in his hand as he crosses back to his quarters. He will burn it in the barracks stove. He has paid for it.