The real first day of the army for me was the day Sergeant Allbright said to us, “As of this moment, I take command of Ninth Cavalry, Troop J. Today we begin training to become the finest troop in not only any colored regiment, but in any regiment anywhere in the United States Army!” From the first word he spoke, we believed Sergeant Allbright and wanted to follow where he led.
All the bullshit assignments stopped immediately. I was pulled off guardhouse detail. The rest who’d been parceled out laying bricks and weeding the officers’ wives’ flower gardens stopped that nonsense and we all fell to drilling. I am not bragging just stating a simple fact when I say, as far as marching formations, no one in the troop could touch me. After my time with Sheridan, I’d already been in the damn army for near a year. Plus, the way I came up with Mama? I knew how to hold my head up and tamp down every bit of emotion might ever threaten to play across my face.
The third day, the Sergeant pulled me out of formation and put me at the head of the line so that the fumble-footed could copy me. Out of the whole sorry company, it delighted me to see that Vikers was the sorriest. The man was almost white in how long it took him to get in the habit of following an order. Corporal’d say “Right,” and that brain of his, always so busy figuring out the angles, would balk and he’d go left. Ended up there were only five boys out of our troop of nearly ninety privates who had to have straw and hay tied to their feet. And Vikers was one of them. Every night in the barracks he went on about how marching was for “ground-pounders” and that he refused to learn it since “equitation” was his “natural means of conveyance.”
He didn’t have long to wait, for, very next day, when we formed up on the parade grounds, the Sergeant greeted us from high atop his noble steed, saying, “Today you become cavalry soldiers. Today we begin riding. Most of you have never ridden anything but narrow-headed mules and swaybacked plugs. Many of you have been forbidden by law, perhaps upon pain of death, from even swinging a leg over a fine mount. You have been told that people of color do not make good horsemen. I am here to tell you that that is a lie!
“How do I know? I know because I have seen the Comanche and there are two things I can tell you about those fearsome warriors. They are the finest horse soldiers the world has seen since Genghis Khan and his Mongol hordes. And, like the Mongols, they are men of color. Do you hear me? Men of color!”
“Yessir!” I sang out first and loudest.
“Men, let me tell you this. They are going to give us the worst horses, the worst gear, and the worst duty! And do you know what we are going to give them back?” Silence greeted his question and he asked again, “I said, do you know what we will give them back!”
“What, sir?” I sang out.
“I will answer you with another question: tell me, gentlemen, can I smite my enemy, the enemies of the United States of America, of which we are citizens, with one finger?”
He held his pointer out straight, and tipped off by that Bible word “smite,” we called back way you’d call back to a preacher on Sunday, “Uh-uh!” “No, sir!” for we knew a lesson was coming.
“Can I smite him with my thumb?”
“No, sir!”
“Can I smite him with my fist?” He raised a fist mighty as a blacksmith’s hammer.
We liked this smiting business just fine. It was what we’d signed up for and we thundered back, “Yessir!”
“Yes!” he said. “We are going to come together like separate fingers clenching tight to make one mighty fist! We are going to drill and practice until no man on earth is our equal on the back of a horse or behind the sight of a Spencer repeating carbine. We are going to abjure pettiness and rise to levels of greatness that the U.S. Army has only dreamed of before!”
His voice hummed through us like a pitch pipe calling out the note that brought every one of us into harmony.
“I repeat, they are going to give us the worst horses, the worst gear, and the worst duty! And, I ask you again, what are we going to give them back?”
He raised his fist high in the air and, without thinking, every one of us did the same. A stillness fell as we waited, fists to the sky, for First Sergeant Allbright to deliver the answer unto us.
“I said, do you know what we are going to give them back!”
“What, sir!” I hollered back.
“Gentlemen, we are going to give them the best damn horse soldiers the world has ever seen! Am I right?”
A roar ferocious as any lion’s answered him then. With me roaring loudest of all. Though I had seen my folly in believing Allbright was my dead soldier, damn if his words didn’t cause a power to move in me that was not of this mortal earth. It was the same power he’d used back at the recruiting. Same one that had made me feel like he recognized me, saw me, knew me personal. And now, that power was working on every man in the troop. All of us, friend and foe alike, were bound up together. If Allbright had asked us to dump coal oil over our heads and spark a flint to it, not a one of us would of hesitated.
The Sergeant’s four corporals began leading saddled horses from the stables and went to matching up mount with rider. I saw right off that most of the nags should have been heading for the glue factory. They were windblown, spavined, swaybacked, trappy, long-toothed, and droopy-lipped. And I couldn’t wait to get mine.
A corporal name of Masters came up to Lem and me, took one look and called the Sergeant over.
“Private Cathay?” Sergeant Allbright’s lips formed my name, but it was a full ten seconds before I could piece together that a question had been asked of me and that I was standing there with my fly trap open. I cringed at the sorry, tongue-tied impression I was making.
“Sir! Yessir!” I snapped off a salute sharp enough to chop hickory.
“You and Private Powdrell, you are too tall for cavalry.”
I tipped my head back to meet his eyes, for Allbright was as tall as Lem. Allbright sussed out my question and informed me, “I was riding with the cavalry before they instituted the height limits. We demand a great deal of our mounts. The gear we require them to carry along with our weight places a heavy burden on them. Were you two not measured and weighed at the recruitment depot?”
“I sure was,” Lem said. “And they were going to put me afoot but for I’m a farrier.”
So that was it. Lem was a horseshoer. This was news to me and gives you an idea of how different men were with their friends. Had Lem and I been girls, of the normal sort rather than my tomboy brand, we’d of known everything about each other from favorite color to which of our friends riled our nerves so bad one of us was bound to stick an ice pick in her. I surely would of known that my best friend shoed horses, making him the one person, giant or midget, no cavalry outfit could do without.
“Excellent,” Allbright exclaimed. “I was afraid we’d have to train someone. A suitable mount will be found for you, Powdrell. What about you, Cathay? Did some gin-soaked local doctor simply wave you on without so much as a thump on your chest?”
“No, sir,” I answered. “I was examined in minute-most detail.” It always amazed me how, when I most needed him to, Daddy would place the correct words and the correct manner of speaking them in my mouth. “My minascular abundance of height, so to speak, got shrunk down on account of my conspacious knowledge of horseflesh, having been a groom or, actually, more of a barn foreman.”
“You’re saying you know horses?”
“I am, sir. That’s percisely what I am saying.”
The Sergeant narrowed his eyes, showing that he half believed me, half thought I was full of shit, and that fifty percent was about all he could ever expect from me. He told his corporal that since I was a lanky, low-weight sort to bring me whatever they had from the stable.
The corporal paused and asked, “Do you mean…?”
“Indeed, I do, Corporal,” Allbright answered, appearing to already know what horse Masters was referring to.
The corporal led two horses from the stable. One was a large chestnut near as tall as the General’s heroic black steed. He handed the reins of that prime mount to Lem who lit up from grinning so big.
Masters had a specimen of an entirely different sort for me. He made a show of calling out, “And you, Private Cathay, here is the very special horse you will be riding.” Everyone was watching when he handed over the reins of a swaybacked gray with knock knees and the longest set of ears ever seen on a horse. Also the strangest. For they drooped. Hung down like a hound’s on a hot day.
By the time Masters announced, “We like to call her Bunny,” men all up and down the line were hooting. And though Vikers wasn’t a hooter, he fixed me with a smug look that said he had the goods on me. Again.