Near the end of the summer, we finished setting the roof over the first set of barracks. Vikers and those he favored immediately occupied it and left the rest of us to continue sleeping rough. Which didn’t trouble me a bit as it was cooler outside than in and I was where I wanted to be: off by myself. I was away from Vikers, had the privacy I needed, and a good friend in Lem. All in all, my life in the army, though not what I wanted it to be, was proceeding in a tolerable fashion. Right up until the moment that everything changed overnight.
As usual, on that day, it was barely light when we all tumbled out for roll call and formed up in front of the Sergeant. Each of us sounded off strong when our names were called then slugged down our daily dose of pulque. It was Sheridan who’d ordered that all his troops out West be given a daily dose of the sulfur-smelling cactus juice. As we didn’t yet have vegetables, it was meant to guard us against scurvy. It must of worked for no one was taken by that ailment, though a fair number of the men developed a fondness for the fermented sludge and became pulque pots.
“Men,” the Sergeant said that morning, “congratulations on your exemplary work on our second barracks. We’re so far ahead of schedule that we’ve completely outrun the sawmill. So, I am shifting some of you to mill duty. The rest of you will begin chinking the walls of ‘B’ Barracks. If I call your name, go on to the sawmill and ask Corporal Masters for your assignment. Pool. Day. Childress. Abernathy. Kirk. Coleman, and…”
As the Sergeant paused to pick the last man, the chosen ones stepped forward smartly, happy to be spared a day of working with the harsh mixture of clay, ashes, sand, and masonry lime that we used to chink up the gaps between pickets. Never expecting the Sergeant to pick me for anything ever again, I was surprised when I saw him eyeing me.
Now, as I’ve shown, I was like a crab with my eyes swiveling around on stalks up top my head when it came to observing that man. Not his tiniest wince or squint escaped my notice. And that was how, in the dim light of early morning, I saw him consider me in a manner that made it clear that I was a puzzle to him. One he’d already spent some time trying to solve. So, when he called out the final name, “Cathay,” I nearly floated out of the line.
At the mill, Masters put me to switching the mule that turned the sawmill wheel while the rest of them rode off in the wagon to cut timber in the German Mountains. My mindless occupation allowed me ample opportunity, not only to enjoy the view sweeping out all the way to Mexico, eighty miles south, but to recall every glance and word that had ever passed between me and the Sergeant. For, though I might have truly buried Wager Swayne, I could do nothing about my one-sided feelings for the Sergeant.
Absorbed as I was in my memories, the day passed pleasantly. It was late afternoon when the horses in the quartermaster’s corral began nickering uneasily. I paid them no mind. Nor did I notice that the prairie dogs had stopped chattering or that the steady, old mule, broke as she was to the harness after twenty years of service, suddenly turned so balky I had to snap the quirt on her several times before she was convinced to continue plodding along on her round path to nowhere. It wasn’t until she lifted her head and bared her long, squared-off teeth in a shrieking bray that I turned away from sunny Mayheeko and saw clouds moving in from the north. The desert liked to tease that way, promising rain it never delivered, so I turned back south, harred up the mule and went back to work.
It had been another blazing-hot, wearying day and we were dead asleep that night when in comes a gully washer would of set Noah to hammering. The rain poured down in buckets heavy enough that a wave of waist-high muddy water sluiced down off the hills behind the fort and rolled right through our tents and swept them away.
Determined to spend the rest of the night inside, we stomped through the mud to the finished barracks. The door was barred. Vikers’s face appeared in the nearest window. The lantern held beneath his chin cast dark, devil-type shadows upward on his face. “Price of admission into our nice, dry barracks is one month’s salary,” Vikers announced. “I have the wage garnishment orders waiting for your Xs.”
“How can you do us like this?!” demanded Tea Cake.
Ivory backed him up with, “You gon keep us out here in this rain pouring down like Satan hisself pissing all over us? You gon make us pay for a dry spot in some barracks we helped build?!”
“That ain’t right!” Baby King threw in.
We pounded on that door until it rattled on its hinges.
Vikers must have promised cuts to his boys, for they made a show of stretching out on their nice dry beds and fluttering their fingers at us in mocking waves.
After a few more of our drenched crew yelled threats and insults through the glass, Tea Cake shrugged and announced, “What good’s thirteen dollar to me if I be dead of the new moany?”
Pretty soon, they had all agreed to sign Vikers’s IOUs.
“No!” I thundered, startling them for they’d gotten used to me with my mouth shut. “What is the matter with y’all? You acting like you’re too slow to catch the itch. No! Dammit, no. You ain’t paying that man a month’s salary to spend the night on the damn floor of a barracks we built.”
“Well, what the hell you suggest, Mr. Fancy?” Tea Cake asked, “Mr. Fancy” being one of my nicknames. Along with “Missy Bill” and “Candy Ankle.”
They were listening to me now, though, and I said, “I suggest we make us a roof to sleep under. We got all that tar paper we’re going to use to roof in our barracks. We take that, go to quartermaster’s corral, spread it out across the stone posts, over the top of that chimney, make us the coziest tent you ever seen.”
“We’ll still be sleeping on mud,” Tea Cake objected.
“Like you didn’t spend the entire war sleeping on mud,” I answered back. “You that particular, get you some hay to put up under you.”
They grumbled back and forth, but when Lem said, “Does look mighty cozy in there,” I knew that I had lost and Vikers had won.
“No,” a familiar voice said. “Cathay’s right.”
We snapped to attention.
“At ease,” the Sergeant said, stepping forward to stand next to me in the small pool of light cast by the lantern. The instant Vikers saw the Sergeant’s face, the door was unlocked. I made to follow the others, but the Sergeant said, “Private.”
I stopped as the others went in, and he said, “You were looking out for your unit and forestalled a bad decision. Good work.”
That hardwood barracks floor felt like a feather bed under me that night.