December 17, 1866—Fort Phil Kearny, Dakota Territory
“SHOW ME SOME OF YOUR TINTYPES, SIR,” MOLLOY SAYS to the photographer, noticing now, sitting beside him on the cot, that Ridgeway Glover is not as young as he had thought. In his thirties, most likely, but there is something innocent, youthful about him. Or once there was. The innocence has been washed from his features, Molloy thinks, taking a sup from the bottle of whiskey. Recently, he reckons, so that only up close can one witness its absence.
“Mostly they are not tintypes,” the photographer replies. “Tin is too heavy to transport without a wagon. I put the glass ambrotypes to paper card. It’s easier for me to carry. And to send back East. Glass breaks. The images are lost. Tin would be best . . .”
“Men about the camp speak highly of your work. I’ve heard tell you worked for Mr. Brady in the war.”
“Yessir, I did.”
“A fine Irishman, Mr. Brady. I met him once. That man and his camera showed the world what that war was, what it could do to a body or a town. I imagine his pictures may have helped put an end to the fighting. Yours as well, sir. What service to mankind.”
The young man smiles sadly. “Few of my photographs were printed in the papers, sir. No paper would print a picture of a hundred amputated legs in the bed of a wagon. They were . . .” The photographer pauses as if reckoning something in his head. “I never could think of it all beyond the light and shadow. How the image transferred to glass or tin or paper. I made pictures of terrible things but I only now remember the pictures, the process of making them. As if the things that happened in the war—the bodies, the ruination and wreckage—didn’t exist until I captured their essence on glass. But I only look at the pictures and see the faults, the imperfections in the image, not the thing itself. I try to decide if it was myself or the solutions or the light that was at fault. I don’t see, sometimes, what is happening in front of my lens.”
“The world needs such men, sir.”
Glover shrugs and remains silent, as if self-conscious suddenly, as if he has said too much.
“May I see your work?”
The photographer gets up from the cot and takes a handful of prints from the table. He hands them to Molloy and sits back down beside him.
“I will take a sip of your whiskey now, sir.”
“Of course you will,” Molloy says, handing him the bottle.
He studies each picture. Most are taken at what appears to be a conference or meeting, officers, white officials and Indians in headdress posed together.
“Laramie. The Laramie treaty,” Glover says. “I was asked by the Smithsonian to record it and I attempted to remain true to my mission. I tried to let the camera be a witness, a recording device. Some of the pictures are fine, I think, and would have served the historical record, though I don’t imagine they will have much relevance now, considering how both sides have so dishonored all agreements made there. You have perhaps seen how . . .” Glover sips from the bottle, winces and takes a bigger sup.
“Oh I have seen it,” Molloy says, leafing through more photographs. Indian women in various poses Molloy vaguely recognizes as classical. In various states of undress, turned this way and that. Like nymphs or Greek goddesses in old paintings. Their poses strike Molloy in his drunkenness as ham-fisted, almost comical. And yet they are strikingly beautiful in a way. They are whores, he knows, and yet something else emerges in this man’s photographs. Humanity. Nobility. It’s in their eyes, Molloy thinks, a maudlin tide washing through him. What would show in my eyes? It has been several years since anyone has taken his photograph. They would be photographing a different person now, he thinks. He blinks and accepts the bottle, drinks and hands it back to the photographer.
“Your work is beautiful, sir,” he says, and he means it.
“Thank you.”
“This one . . .” Molloy holds out a photograph of a group of soldiers. They are outdoors, in a field of long grass and wildflowers. In the center of the group one soldier holds a dead wolf up under its front legs and the wolf, held upright, tongue lolling in death, is nearly as large as the man holding it. A big wolf. A bigger man, his face scarred and damaged. Unbidden, memory comes to Molloy of Miss Two Doves and the man she described as having a broken face.
He taps the picture. “These men, Ridgeway. May I call you by your name? You don’t mind do you? These men. What are their names, Ridgeway, can you tell me?”
Glover is silent for a moment. He takes a sip from the bottle and clears his throat. “I don’t know all the names, sir. Not all of them of course.”
“Just the ones you do know, Ridgeway. Can you do that for me?”
The photographer takes the picture, its surface glossy, minor blots of aberration at the margins of the print but otherwise perfect. The men are proud, clearly rendered, the light in that clearing allowing for a short exposure, the humid, dew-laden air in early morning perfect for treating and fixing the print in the portable tent he used as a darkroom in the field. His paper stock and curing solutions, those months ago when he made the print, fresh and plentiful.
“This is Private Napoli,” Glover says, pointing to soldier with a thin black mustache who is not smiling but is on the verge of it. “He is dead now. And this one, he is Jackson, I think. This one they called Henrik the Swede but I don’t know if that is his real name either. He is also dead. The others . . .” He takes a swig from the bottle. “I don’t know the others. I . . .”
Molloy taps the photograph, his cheroot smoldering between his index and middle fingers. “This fine fellow, holding the wolf. You remember his name surely.”
The photographer takes another drink and stares at the canvas wall of the tent, pale daylight flaring and dimming inside the flimsy structure as clouds mask and unmask the winter sun far above them. The weather is turning and the loose entrance flaps of the tent stir in the harbinger wind.
“I don’t remember . . .”
Molloy puts a hand on Glover’s knee. “You may not believe it but I’ve no mind to have a man hang for anything that has passed before my coming here. I know how things come to happen. Things no man wants to happen but they happen, and God in the heavens lets them happen and, it’s said, He stands to forgive those things that are not intended. At least that is what I’m told and I am inclined to believe it. I pray it is true, sir, though it makes no odds for some of us. But I won’t stand in judgment over what a man’s done that he’s not meant to do. I won’t see a man swing, not on my word. Nor on your word, Ridgeway.”
“I don’t . . .” Glover takes another drink and tears now shine in his eyes.
“This is Thomas O’Driscoll, isn’t it? And this, this boy here is his brother.” Molloy points to another soldier in the picture standing to the right of the one holding the wolf. Despite the damage to the big man’s face, there is a clear resemblance between the two. “His name is Michael.”
The photographer blinks and the tears tilt under his lashes and run down his cheeks. The tears make the man look younger again, Molloy thinks, and sadness fills his heart. He squeezes the young man’s knee gently.
“They were there that night. They and maybe some others, when the sutler was done for, weren’t they?”
The tears flow freely now but Glover sits in silence.
“They are friends to you aren’t they, sir? Good men, I imagine.”
Glover nods so slightly, it is barely perceptible to Molloy.
“I don’t wish to see any man swing for the sutler, a man who kept women as little better than slaves. Do you trust me when I say that?”
The photographer nods.
“Help me to my feet, sir.”
Glover wipes the tears from his face with a rough swipe of his hand and stands, helping Molloy to rise, handing him his crutches.
“You are good friend, sir. A fine friend to those men and you will not be sorry for it,” Molloy says, crutching himself to the tent flaps. “Rest easy, sir. You have told me nothing I did not know before.”
Ridgeway holds out the bottle to Molloy, nearly three-quarters empty now. “Keep it, sir,” Molloy tells him. “I will find another soon enough.”
“WELL, WHAT DID HE TELL YOU? Was it Private O’Driscoll and his brother there in the hog ranch?” Kohn asks.
Molloy continues past him on his crutches, making for the gate wicket to pass into the quartermaster’s stockade. Kohn follows him. “Captain, was it O’Driscoll who killed the sutler and his wife, sir?”
“For the love of all that’s holy in the world, Daniel, leave it go. You are a full chisel bastard every waking hour of the day and it is not becoming of a friend, much less a soldier. Has the army taught you nothing?”
“He was there, wasn’t he? And his brother?”
Molloy crutches on in silence, sweat running from beneath his Hardee hat. They reach the gate wicket, unmanned in the daylight, and pass through.
“Sir, what did the picture-maker tell you?”
“He told me nothing, Daniel.”
“He told you they were there, didn’t he, sir?”
Molloy halts his progress. A long-haired billygoat trots up to him and noses his palm. Molloy pats its snout, takes a long, curved horn in his hand and roughs the goat. The goat playfully butts Molloy’s thigh. “That’s right, billy,” Molloy says. He digs under his buffalo coat and comes out with a boiled hard candy, thick with lint and flaked with loose tobacco, and feeds it to the billygoat. “That’s right, billy.”
“Sir, where are we going? We must arrest the O’Driscoll brothers. We have to find out where they are and put them in irons. You know the men in C Company will tell them we’ve spoken to the picture-maker. The two of them will be on French leave before we can get to them.”
“We, Daniel? I am going to call on the one-armed sawyer to get another bottle. We are going nowhere.”
Kohn stares out at the snow-capped peaks of the Big Horns beyond the palisade. He clears his throat, spits. “You are drunk, sir. You have finished already a bottle and it is not even two bells in the afternoon.”
“I did not finish the bottle, I gifted it to the good photographer.”
“Quakers are not known as to take a drink, sir.”
“Because things are not known does not mean they do not happen, Daniel. You know that well enough from the war. And there is not a man on earth of any persuasion who will not bend temperance given the right or wrong circumstance.”
“You are drunk goddamn it, sir.” Kohn shoves the goat away roughly.
“Not drunk enough, Daniel.”
“I’ll go and lift them myself, sir. They killed that man and his wife.”
Molloy turns to Kohn and there is life, rage, in his features that has not been there for some time. “Cooke sent me to do his bidding, Daniel, not you. And not his own bidding, either. Not the bidding of a general officer in time of war but the cess work of a fat, cocoa-sipping fucker back in Washington with no more manners or care for a soldier’s lot than this goat. A politician, for the love of God. No, a politician’s wife’s bidding, Daniel. I am not inclined to carry some politician’s nightsoil nor his wife’s. Nor will I be Cooke’s executioner so that he may receive a posting more suited to his glorious and wholly blinkered view of his abilities as a fighting man. Damn Cooke and damn the Secretary of the Treasury’s wife. I will see no man, no soldier hanged for them.”
“They are murderers, sir, not soldiers. The picture-maker, Glover. He told you as much.”
“What do you know of them, Daniel?”
“I know they were there when Kinney and his wife—a woman, sir—harmless, unarmed, were cut down in cold blood. That’s not soldier’s work. Soldiers don’t kill unarmed women, children. It is not a soldier’s work . . .”
Kohn realizes his mistake and goes silent. Part of him wonders if he is glad to have said it, if only to hurt Molloy.
Molloy smiles sadly at Kohn and shakes his head. “It is not soldier’s work. You are right about that, Daniel. Neither is being a stinking constable, a filthy Pinkerton man turning over stones to read trails of snail shit beneath. That man told me nothing, Daniel. Nothing. A good friend to them and no informer. A fine friend.” Molloy’s words are beginning to slur.
“What will we do then, sir?” He has difficulty keeping the disgust from his voice.
“I will get a bottle and so should you. We will wait out the winter and when the thaw comes and my leg heals, we will decide what we are to do but no one will hang on account of my word.” He heaves his crutches into motion in the direction of the timber contractor’s workshop.
“I am going after them, sir. I’ll go to Carrington if you forbid it. I’ll go to Cooke himself.”
Molloy stops and turns back to Kohn. “You are a terrible man, Daniel. There is nothing to be gained from it.”
“There is justice. Justice will be—”
“Justice? Did you ever stop to think that justice may have been done already?”
“You don’t know that, sir. We have been assigned—”
“Fuck Cooke’s assignations and fuck his promises, Kohn. Can you not see we are nothing to Cooke? Nothing to anyone. For the love of God all of this will be forgotten by spring. Another few deaths among many. Can you not just do nothing? Can you not just wait for the thaw?”
“You will be dead by then, sir.”
Molloy turns away. “Better me than any other man.”
“They are guilty of murder, sir.”
“So am I, Daniel. Would you have me hanged, would you?”
“I’m going after them.”
“Do what you will, Daniel. I find it hard to care any further, what you or anyone else sees fit to do . . .” Molloy begins to crutch toward the timber contractor’s workshop across the yard.
Kohn watches him for a moment and spits again into the half-frozen mud. The goat dips his head to investigate the spittle, then follows Kohn to the gate wicket, staring after the sergeant as he passes through into the military stockade, heading with purpose for the stables and his horse.