After a week of fixing horseshoes and feeding our mounts up on corn and us on the turkey, antelope, and deer that ran plentiful about, to say nothing of the sunfish, bluegills, bass, and walleyes that fairly leaped from Mulberry Springs, we left Fort Clark.
The second day on the trail, the Sergeant, who believed that I had saved him from turning traitor on the U.S. Army and took my flight from the Black Seminole camp to be the act of a true patriot, graded me up so considerable that he asked me to come on a scouting expedition with him.
First thing the next morning, the two of us rode out ahead of the long column of men. We headed north and reached a plain covered by grass high enough to tickle Bunny’s belly. We cut through it leaving the trail of our passing behind. We climbed to the top of a rise and found the vast, flat table land they called a mesa at the top. A cooling breeze swooped up the rise and we halted in the scant shade of a mesquite. The Sergeant pulled out his spyglass and we went to searching for signs of hostile activity.
Glass still at his eye, the Sergeant said, “He was telling the truth.”
“Sir?”
“John Horse. I asked one of the white officers. Everything he claims to have done, he did. And a deal more.” He took the glass from his eye but did not look at me when he asked, “Cathay, you were a slave, were you not?”
“I was, sir.”
“Perhaps I’d feel differently about his treason had I ever been in bondage.”
“Yessir, I expect you would, sir.” I jumped on the Sergeant’s new willingness to talk to me and quickly asked, “So, you were born free, sir?”
He perked up at this question and answered back proudly, “My family was free New Englanders of color.” With no other troopers about to overhear him, the Sergeant fell to speaking like a normal man instead of a commander, and went on. “As soon as my grandfather was freed by his Quaker master, he left for the one place where race didn’t matter.”
“Where would that be, sir?”
“The sea.”
After a long silence, I repeated, “The sea,” hoping to coax him into saying more.
We watched a flock of killdeer pass overhead and listened to an antelope buck snort in the distance before he went on. “My father signed on as cook with a whaling ship and sailed out of New Bedford, Massachusetts, for months at a time. He hunted the deep waters on expeditions from Greenland to the west coast of Africa. He was a seaman who sailed under the great Captain Pardon Jones, himself a man of color. Pardon’s was one of the first ships to hunt sperm whales off the coast of Japan. Like the other New England whalers who made it around the Horn to fish in the Pacific, they wintered in San Francisco. There he met my mother. Daughter of a prominent San Francisco whaling family, I’m told.” He worked his jaw a bit before he added, “She perished in childbirth.”
“I am sorry to hear that, sir.”
“Yes, well.” He shrugged, brushing the comment off like he was talking about a misplaced button hook. Since commanders in this peacetime army rarely even revealed their first names, the Sergeant surely couldn’t be caught moping about his dead mama. As I knew only too well, it was dangerous, possibly fatal, for one man to show such weakness in front of another man.
But I wasn’t a man. I was one of the other ones. The ones men told their secrets to. The ones who knew their sorrows and shame. The ones who would not kill them for being weak. The ones men loved and hated for knowing they weren’t made of stone.
I was a woman.
I felt the Sergeant’s sadness and longing and the weight of that burden, and because I knew he wanted to tell me, I asked, “What do you know about her?”
“My mother? Oh. Well. Her father came from the Barbados Islands, the son of a Scottish sugar planter. Her mother was a Creole Indian. She was said to be a beauty. But I wouldn’t know. I have no memory of my mother’s family as my father left San Francisco soon after she died to make his fortune in the gold fields.”
“Did he? Make his fortune?”
“Yes. But not from gold. In the way of most who were not broken by that merciless hunt, his fortune was made selling the prospectors overpriced salt pork and potatoes. To the end of his days, which came when I was fourteen, he dreamed of returning to the sea. He gave those dreams to me. He told me I’d be a captain to rival Pardon Jones.” The Sergeant gave a hollow chuckle, pretending like he believed the thought was foolish. “Instead,” he went on, “I found my home not at sea but in the army.”
After a long silence, he raised his spyglass to his eye and asked, “What’s that?” He jerked his chin toward a plume of dust rising in the distance.
Miles away, across the grassy valley, the land rose to a ridge gulleyed by runoffs like the backbone of a starved cat with every rib poking out. A few puffs of what might have been dust rose there, though the noon sky was bleached to such a blinding intensity that I couldn’t say for sure.
With the Sergeant occupied, I took the opportunity to study him up close. There was no doubt that he had come from a long line of men who’d had their eyes fixed on the far horizon. I saw the seaman in his profile, the man who would of been captain in a better world. And I saw something else that only revealed itself now, with close observation. The skin of his cheeks and forehead was lightly mottled with a faint pattern like the tiniest of stars on a dark night. I figured it to be scars left by smallpox. But it didn’t have the look of pox for the scars were too small and they stopped around his eyes and temples in a band.
Just as if a blindfold or a bandage had been tied around his eyes.
I was seized by the image that had long haunted me of my soldier, dead and cruelly thrown into a pit, lye powder being sprinkled down upon his blindfolded face.
“Sir,” I asked as he twisted the spyglass about with his extended left hand, adjusting the focus.
“Private.”
“Sir, those marks on your face? Did you have smallpox?”
“The pox, no,” he answered, bringing his free hand up to touch the light speckles on his cheek. “Surprising you should notice. No one has in so long that I thought the marks had faded completely. It is quite a tale…”
His words drifted away. When it seemed none were likely to follow, I asked, “How’s that, sir?”
He lowered the glass, stared off as though transfixed by the far horizon, and rolled his lips inward, bottling up the words trying to escape. A time passed before he shook his head and puffed out a little laugh, pretending to make light of what he was about to say. “Every trooper out here must have a sad, lost sweetheart tale. Mine is no different from the rest, though I’m sure it is among the most curious.”
I rose out of the saddle and leaned forward as far as I could, straining to catch every word. But none came. He was done. “Sir?” I prompted again.
“Yes, Private?” he asked, pretending not to recall what we were talking about.
“Your story? Why is it curious?” Bunny’s flanks quivered beneath me as I’d put a crushing grip on her with my thighs while I tensed, waiting for Allbright’s answer. I eased off and reminded myself to breathe.
“Oh, nothing really. The circumstances of our meeting. I was wounded, my eyes were bandaged, and she saved my life. But most curious, ridiculous, really, if examined logically, is the fact that though I never actually saw the woman, I fell in love with her.”
Love.
Every sound—the clop of our horses’ hooves as they shifted their weight, the soughing of the wind rustling through the tall grass, the jangle of tack as the beasts moved—fell silent.
Wager. Wager Swayne. He was my soldier.
Jubilation and an odd shyness collided and kept me from calling out the name I now knew to be his on the spot.
“Stupid, isn’t it?” he asked before I could gather my wits. “Yet nothing can erase her memory from my mind. And here’s the strangest part.” Though he paused for some time, I did not have to urge him to go on. “Though I only ‘saw’ her face with the tips of my fingers, I know just from that touch and from how she comforted and nursed me that she is the most exceptional of women. I know that she will stand apart from all others because of her many superlative qualities and because of that one day I will find her.”
I’d of told him then, “You have found her,” but he had long since stopped speaking to me. His promise had been sent to the far horizon, to the place of freedom and equality he dreamed of. To the destination that was forever out of reach in this vast land.
Still, I would have said his true name then, I would have claimed him, except that, with unshakable faith, he concluded, “I will most especially know her because of her womanly beauty.”
Beauty.
I sunk back down into the saddle. I had been gut shot.
Womanly beauty.
I knew then clear as glass what would happen if I told him that I was the woman who had saved him, the woman he’d dreamed about, the woman he held above all others. He would not believe me. For, truth be told, I wasn’t that woman. I wasn’t the woman who’d kept him alive. That woman was beautiful and womanly. I wasn’t beautiful. I was barely a woman. I was a woman who could pass for a man.
“What the deuce?” he said, leaning forward toward the patch of movement shimmying through the grass. Abruptly he pivoted in the saddle and thrust the spyglass back at me. “Have a look, Cathay. Tell me what you make of—”
He went silent the instant he caught sight of my face and I knew what he saw written there: love, heartbreak, and a yearning so naked and so deep it all but swallowed me up.
The brass instrument hung in the air between us. I took it from him. The Sergeant spurred his mount and rode on without a word.
The sun was still two fingers above the horizon when the Sergeant halted, but night was coming on and the prairie had already gone violet. He waited until I drew abreast of him. We sat there for a long, silent moment. Without a word or a glance in my direction, the Sergeant stuck his hand out and I placed the spyglass in it. He tucked the spyglass back into its case on his saddle but did not spur his mount forward.
The shadows we threw made long scarecrow shapes behind us. He cleared his throat and, still staring off into the distance, said, “Private, I’ve seen boys like you before. Never been off the plantation. The first time they see a black man give an order, it…” He struggled for a moment to find the right word. When he couldn’t, he said, “Well, it has a powerful effect. Sometimes they think it’s the man. Do you get my meaning, Private?”
He didn’t expect me to answer and I didn’t.
“It is not the man, Private,” he added sharp and hard. “It’s giving the order. Do you hear me?” he asked and repeated, “It’s giving the order. It’s being the man in the blue suit atop a horse. Do you understand what I’m saying?”
“Yessir.”
“Never confuse the two again.”
“Yessir.”
He rode on ahead, putting enough distance between us so as to remove even the tip of his long shadow from my touch.