Ten miles outside of Fort Arroyo, we passed through a pitiful collection of weather-beaten buildings attempting to be a town by the name of Matanza. A few of the townspeople pulled back curtains or stood at doors cracked open an inch or two to watch us pass. All the citizens were male, white, and every bit as pitiful as the town they’d made. Their mean stares reminded me of Solomon’s warning about Southern men. It was clear that though they might run cattle instead of raise cotton, these were still Southern men. I lifted my head high so as to stare down my nose at the sullen ingrates. I mean, it was their sorry, traitor hides we were coming to protect.
On the edge of Matanza were heaps of pickets, remnants of the abandoned jacale dwellings the Mexicans who’d founded the town favored. The information filtered back from the Sergeant that the town’s name meant “slaughter” in honor of all the times the Apaches had swept through doing just that.
A mile east of the fort, we pulled up at Agua Dulce Creek to make ourselves presentable for our new commanding officer, Colonel Ednar Drewbott. The men washed and shaved, a good number of them using Dupree’s whalebone-handled razor which I borrowed out.
Lem stropped the instrument to a fine edge and spent several minutes marveling over the tiny ship etched into its handle, something he did each time he borrowed it, before reluctantly handing it back, asking, “How’d they do that, Bill?”
When the men were all occupied, I took my canteen behind a pile of boulders and did my best to scrub off a few layers of trail dust and sneak a wet rag down amongst my folding parts.
Boots and tack were shined. Buttons replaced. Tears stitched up. After a quick inspection by the Sergeant and his corporals, we set off to see our new home and meet the white officers who were waiting there.
Fort Arroyo set just off Emigrant Trail on flat ground guarded in the back by a set of sheer cliffs. Out front, we were greeted by a lone soapberry tree that rose up a good thirty feet, the only bit of green above knee-high for miles in any direction. I took that tree as a good sign for it had to of been planted and watered by the first troopers who came here back in ’54. Like Fort Lewis, this Union fort had been captured then abandoned by the Rebels after they gave up on their dream of conquering the West for the Confederate cause. Agua Dulce Creek ran nearby and the German Mountains were close enough to hand to supply us with wood. It seemed a decent enough setup.
We passed the soapberry tree and, just before we entered the fort, the Sergeant ordered parade formation and we rode in with our company guidon snapping in the breeze and every man sitting his horse pretty enough for a grand review.
But Fort Arroyo appeared deserted. We halted on the large, flat drill field, surrounded on one side by the remnants of rows of adobe buildings that were melting back into the earth. Yellow sunflowers blossomed here and there atop the scabby stumps of walls. The other two sides of the open rectangle of buildings were formed by the redbrick walls of the post hospital, and the walls of half a dozen officers’ houses and one two-story officers’ barracks. I say “walls” for that was all that remained of those structures as every bit of wood—the doors, porch railings, window sashes, even the wooden roof shingles—had been stripped off by the Mescalero and Warm Springs Apache Indians during the years the fort was abandoned.
There were signs, though, that the structures were occupied. Ladies’ bloomers and drawers flapped on lines out back. Big stones had been stacked up to where the doors had once been. Blankets flapped where those stolen doors had once hung. A couple of toy stick horses lay in the dirt. And, at all the houses, the blankets hanging in doorholes fluttered as the white officers inside got a peek at us.
A feeling as familiar as it was unpleasant came over us: the feeling of being watched by white folks. Horses nickered and pawed as they felt their riders tensing up. Though not a one of us spoke a word or moved a muscle, we all drew closer under the gaze of our new masters. That awareness finished what those long weeks in the saddle had started. We were bonded, to each other and to our mounts. Just like the Sergeant had always wanted, we fused into a unit. Our time out on the open prairie was over. Once again, it was us and them.
So, when Sergeant Allbright ordered us to form up on the drill yard to wait for the Officer of the Day to come out and greet us like army regs specified, we swung into position smooth as any equestrian team you’d ever hope to see. Every boot toe peeking out of every stirrup was polished, every jacket was buttoned to the chin, every cap was centered just so, the swallowtails of our Union blue troop guidon unfurled so prettily above our heads that the feeling of being part of something fine and strong and a whole lot bigger and more important than I was welled up just the way it had when I’d marched with Sheridan.
And there we waited. And waited.
No one emerged to greet us.
The sun rose and beat down. Sweat started to trickle then to pour out from under our caps. Finally, the blanket covering the door of the post hospital swung back. A captain stepped out, held the blanket aside, and a colonel, our new commanding officer, Colonel Drewbott, strode out, hiking his suspenders up onto his shoulders. Though disheveled, he was a pretty man with a head of downy blond hair and a wispy mustache that glinted gold beneath one of those miniature noses that didn’t seem capable of drawing enough air to keep a newt alive. At first glance, we took him to be what we all most wanted in a CO: a Northeastern Yankee. Preferably a rock-ribbed abolitionist from up Massachusetts or Maine way whose speech would be so jagged with “ars” and “ahs” that we would have to pretend to understand him.
A sense went through us that we’d lucked out with this colonel, so pale and blond he just had to be from way up North. With the Sergeant leading us, we all snapped into our sharpest salutes. So hopeful was I that I chalked up Drewbott’s lack of both jacket and hat as well as the fact that he just barely had his britches on, not to disrespect, but to a looseness that signaled he wasn’t a stickler.
As he and the captain sauntered forth, the Sergeant dismounted and called out, “Sergeant Allbright, sir! Troop J reporting for duty, sir!”
Drewbott stopped in front of him, planted his feet wide, and executed a mockery of a salute so sloppy that he might of been flicking a fly away from his face. We dropped our hands and pricked up our ears to catch our new commander’s first words. Shading his eyes with his hand, he considered us for a bit, heaved a sigh, and said, “Well, y’all finally made it.”
From the instant Colonel Drewbott opened his mouth, we commenced looking back at the long, grueling ride across the Trans-Mississippi as the best part of our service. For, instead of being assailed with the speedy, nasal Yank accent we’d been praying for, Drewbott’s words lumbered forth thick with the sludge of a Southern accent. Our hopes were dashed. His accent and insolence added up to only one thing: a butternut Yank. One of those who’d fought to save the Union. A slave-owning Union, that is. We’d heard of officers resigning their commissions in disgust rather than take a black command. Drewbott soon proved that he had decided to hang on to both his commission and his disgust.
“Sir, yessir!” the Sergeant said, staring straight ahead, his eyes fixed on the hulk of the basalt ridge rising up beyond this lonely clump of derelict structures. He pulled a copy of our orders from his pocket, and, still without letting his eyes meet Drewbott’s, handed them over. “Troop J, reporting for duty, sir,” he said. “Four days early, sir!”
Next to me, Lem let loose the tiny gasp of disbelief that all the rest of us were holding in: by raising his voice the slightest bit on “four days early,” the Sergeant had come back at Drewbott. Corrected him. Set him straight about us “finally” making it. Pointed out that the only “finally” around here was the time it took for him to come out of hiding. I wanted to cheer.
Southerner that he was, fine-tuned to the slightest hint, real or imagined, of disrespect, Drewbott bristled and thrust the papers at the captain who’d followed him out. “Obviously,” he boomed out in a big-dog voice meant to keep a pack of curs, or us, in our place, “we need to establish some ground rules.”
He clasped his hands behind his back and strutted back and forth in front of the line, hollering at the ground. “Any incident of drunkenness will be punishable by two weeks in the guardhouse! The highest standards of hygiene will be maintained! Gambling will result in the forfeiture of half a month’s salary! Any, and I do mean any, insubordination of any kind will be grounds for a court-martial!” He glared at the Sergeant and asked, “Is that understood?”
“Yessir!” the Sergeant answered, loud enough that Bunny flinched beneath me.
Drewbott made a sour face, turned, and addressed us. “Now, you boys, y’all listen here now. I’ma splain dese here rules so’s you kin follows me. You boys get likkered up, you don’ wash, you bring in yo’ whores, you get uppity, you don’t jump when I say jump, you be walking outta here on yo’ feets. No horse. No food. No water. Y’all hear me?”
No one spoke a word.
“Do you hear me, Sergeant?” Drewbott thundered.
The Sergeant did not answer.
At his refusal to “yessir” Drewbott’s insults, the admiration I held for Sergeant Allbright thundered up in me so furious I felt as if my chest would explode. That admiration was a powerful balm and went a long way toward healing the hurt of losing Wager Swayne and having to bury him a second time.
Drewbott’s pink face went red and he repeated, “Sergeant!”
“Yes. Sir.”
Drewbott clasped his hands behind his back again and worked his lips from side to side for some time before he said, “My adjutant Major Carter will issue your special assignment,” and left.
The Sergeant led us in saluting our new CO’s retreating back. I knew Allbright and I knew that we were saluting the U.S. Army and what it was supposed to be. His salute was not, and never would be, for Colonel Ednar Drewbott.