Our “special” assignment turned out to be rebuilding the old fort and adding new barracks.
“Didn’t sign up to come out here to swing no pickax,” Lem said, after our second week of construction.
One thing I will say, you put ninety strong, young men who’ve bonded themselves over to the U.S. government to working on anything, you will achieve miracles. We hung the doors and windows that had been freighted out from San Francisco. Rebuilt porches, railings, roofs. Even dug a garden for every officer’s wife. After that, we patched up the bachelor officers’ barracks.
When we started digging the foundation for our own new barracks, Lem was pulled off stable duty and put on our crew. A few of the older men who weren’t fit for heavy duty ended up as what were known as strikers, house boys working for the officers and their families. Just like back on the plantations and farms, this was how we found out all the important information that never made its way up or down any chain of command. One of the first bits of information the strikers passed along was that Colonel Drewbott was no more popular with his own men than he was with us.
We learned that most of the officers and their wives were decent enough fellows, but that some of the wives believed that they wore their husbands’ rank and demanded the special treatment that went along with those stars and bars. Worst of that group was Drewbott’s wife. Mrs. Drewbott was one of those Southern women bred to be pretty and helpless who, though a porcelain doll baby on her wedding day, went to fat straight after getting that ring on her finger.
Drewbott’s striker, Milton Favor, the Illinois wheelwright, reported that the colonel worshipped none other than Sheridan’s pet, George Armstrong Custer. Favor told us that Drewbott never tired of pointing out to Mrs. Drewbott how slim and pretty Custer’s wife, Libby, was and how Sheridan was so taken with her that he’d bought the very table upon which Lee and Grant had signed the Appomattox surrender agreement just to give to her as a present. Drewbott also liked to yell at his fat wife that she was the reason he’d gotten such a “hind-teat assignment commanding a bunch of jackamammies.”
Most of the white ladies at Fort Arroyo, though, were all right. Just doing the best they could to keep a clean house and raise their children in the strange and hostile world the U.S. Army had tossed them into.
In any case, hadn’t been for Drewbott and a couple of other officers, we’d of been well on our way to creating a paradise there in the desert. Fortunately, Drewbott had no more desire to see us than we did him, and after that first day’s “welcome,” he channeled nearly all his communications to us through the Sergeant.
Mostly what Allbright had to say was: work harder. Summer was ending and we needed to have some walls between us and the sharp bite of the “blue northers” that the Sergeant warned us were going to be howling down on us all the way from the North Pole. Every morning, the bugle sounded at 4:45. After roll call, breakfast, and stable duty, the Sergeant worked side by side with us, pulling a plumb line, swinging a pick, what have you. After a day of busting rocks and pounding nails, we dropped hard as felled timber into our bunks. Some too tired to even collect their rations.
The Sergeant, though, he had a whole day’s work to do at night for he kept all the company’s records. As the highest-ranking noncommissioned officer on post, the Sergeant had a tidy little room at the end of the bachelor officers’ quarters. Though he chose to sleep rough out in tents with the rest of us until the barracks were built, he conducted all troop business in that little room. It had a window through which I peeked many a night, watching Allbright work by the light of a lantern filling out forms, making reports, requisitioning supplies. He was meticulous in his duties, sitting up so straight that it was rare to ever see his spine touch the back of the chair.
Many a time, while I peeped at the Sergeant, I saw Drewbott storm into his quarters, just bust in through the door without so much as a knock. The Sergeant would jump to his feet and salute. And Drewbott never once returned his salute. I couldn’t hear what the colonel said, but it was obvious that he was giving Allbright hell about one thing or another. I watched the colonel peel strips of hide off the Sergeant and use them to flog him. To make it even worse, when the fussbudget colonel left, it wasn’t like Allbright could buy himself a gourd of tonsil varnish from the sutler like so many of the men did, then cuss the colonel out with the boys in the barracks. No, he was our commander and he had to keep himself set apart every bit as much as I did.
Though I had accepted that there never was and could never be anything between me and “my” soldier, still the fact that Allbright considered me either a bad apple spoiling his barrel or a hell-bound sodomite made me so dumpish that I set myself to winning back his good opinion.
I was the first one out in the morning and the last one in at night. No one worked harder or backtalked less than me. Bit by bit, over the next few weeks, I became the prize pig at that hog show. More important, I made sure that if there was measuring to be done that I’d be the one with the tape and the one marking down the feet and inches. The Sergeant needed to be reminded of my ciphering skills. Needed to be reminded of me.