As I lay there, waiting for the Sergeant to speak, every story the old sergeant back at Jefferson Barracks had told us and every one of the telegrams I’d heard read out came back to me with the words “mutilated,” “raped,” “unmanned,” and “burned alive” jumping out. My blood galloped through my veins harder than it had in my moment of cowardice back at Cedar Creek. Redskins were even more terrifying than Rebels, for at least Rebs weren’t murdering savages like the redskins, who were more animal than human, who gloried in killing the way a wild animal would.
“Have a look,” the Sergeant whispered.
With a trembling hand, I put the glass to my eye, and braced myself to see a treacherous brave, his mouth still red from eating the heart of one of his victims. Instead, the glass filled with the sight of a young mother gazing down at the infant sucking at her breast with a tenderness to break the hardest heart. Her long, black hair, parted in the middle, framed a face gentle and wary as a doe’s.
I glanced about at the rest of the band, camped out amidst a heavy growth of brush with a wallow dug in its center that had filled with muddy seep water. I counted half a dozen women and old men and twice that many youngsters, skinny specimens slinging rocks at each other with leather pouches. A small remuda of Indian ponies was picketed a ways down from the band. The women and old men sat with stiff blankets tented around their shoulders for the wind had picked up even further and was howling now so strong that we could of started shouting and they’d of never heard us.
This band wasn’t at all the fearsome gang of bloodthirsty murderers described by the old sergeant. First off, they were all half starved. The old ones were down to gristle. A couple only raised their heads to cough. Still, I reminded myself, sad and pitiful as they might seem, they’d slice my throat soon as look at me.
My heart was hardening toward them again when Iyaiya whispered to me, They were here first. They are warriors. They fight the enemy. They will not be captives.
As I took one last look, a big wind gusted up and lifted the mama’s long black hair so it rose off her blanketed shoulders like a raven taking wing.
The Sergeant had the sextant to his eye. I wanted to ask if we couldn’t just skip this one water hole. What would it matter if we let some women and babies and old folk live? But he whispered, “Coordinates,” and I fumbled in my pocket for the notebook. When I had it and the stub of pencil in my hand, he dictated to me the numbers that would reveal this secret spot to the army and they would come after us and blow it up or poison it.
I wrote the numbers down.
Progress back to our horses was slow as the wind was against us. The temperature kept dropping. When we reached the horses, the Sergeant had trouble untying the reins as his fingers had stiffened and he was shivering hard. I worried about him not having a jacket and wished I could give him mine. We mounted up and, for a minute, he peered about, looking almost dazed, like he was trying to recollect where he was and which way to go. I spurred Bunny ahead, he followed, and I led us out.
The Sergeant, though he was trembling so much he shimmied in the saddle, was able to pick up our trail when we left the arroyo and he took the lead. Though the wind cut straight through my jacket and set me to shivering, I figured we’d be okay. All we had to do was follow our trail back to camp.
The northern wind blew Bunny’s mane so hard it flew straight out from her neck like a black flag. My bare hands on the reins were numb as stones. Wind-whipped water streamed from my eyes, blurring my sight and chilling my cheeks. And then it started to rain. The icy rain blew in at us sideways by the bucketful, soaking us to the bone. Thunder boomed. Lightning cracked and the sky showed a poisonous violet in the flash. The signs we’d left coming out, the hoof marks chalked onto rocky ground, horse plops, trampled brush, they were all washed away. It was dark, we had no signs to follow back to camp, no light to see by even if we had, and nothing to shelter us from the cold and rain.
We went on by dead reckoning. I rode next to the Sergeant and saw that he’d stopped shivering. He looked calm and unworried. That eased my mind, until, stiff fingers fumbling at the buttons, he started to take off his shirt. I’d heard stories of men lost in the winter, stripping off and rolling in the snow. The stories always ended with them being found naked and dead. Like those poor souls, the cold had taken his mind.
“No!” I screamed, and he stopped. His face was blank. The reins dropped from his hands and he wobbled in the saddle. I tied his reins to my saddle horn and mounted up behind him on his horse. He slumped forward and didn’t resist. I opened my jacket and leaned forward, covering his back and giving him what warmth I had. I harred Bunny up, loosened up on the reins, and let her pick the trail. She was a good night horse and could see a sight better than me in the dark.
We trudged along, the Sergeant mashed up against my chest. He listed to the side. Even though the rain had stopped, we were both stiff and cold as boulders. I hugged him and whispered into the back of his neck, asking him not to die.
Of a sudden, Bunny picked her pace up to a jerky canter. I figured that her brain had frozen, too, and we’d die when she tripped on a hole. A minute later, I heard a tinny sound that turned to a clanging as we drew closer. A speck of light, so small it vanished when I blinked, appeared in the distance, growing steadier the closer we came.
“We made it, Sergeant,” I whispered. He slumped and it took all my strength to keep him from tumbling off.
The speck became a bonfire. Lem was silhouetted in front of it, banging on a big tin kettle with a ladle. My friend was there to catch me and the Sergeant when I dismounted and my legs folded up under me. The Sergeant’s arm over my neck was stiff as old putty as Lem helped me carry him to the tent. We laid him on his cot. Lem lit the stub of a candle. His eyes were open, but he wasn’t seeing anything in this world. His wet clothes had frozen to his skin in spots and we had to melt them off before wrapping him in his blanket.
Lem left to hunt up more blankets. I knelt beside the cot. The Sergeant lay still as death, his eyes closed. In the light from the candle, he looked like he’d been carved out of marble. A statue or some other thing too perfect for this world. I pressed my ear against his chest, but I heard nothing.
I felt like I was falling from a great height and heard myself whimpering, “No, please, no. Sergeant. Please.”
I listened again. Only when I stopped breathing could I catch the sound of a slow thump. Something else came to me along with the faint beat of his heart: his smell. It was the first time I’d been close enough to smell of the Sergeant since those long days and endless nights when I had brought him back from death and, with just that one whiff, hard as I had tried to deaden him, Wager Swayne came alive again in my heart.
Just as I had saved my soldier then in that wagon rolling away from my girlhood, I would save him now. I opened my jacket, lifted the blanket, and pressed my warm chest against his. I laid my head against his neck and blew my warm breath against it.
For nearly the first time since that terrible moment when I accepted that I would never be the phantom woman he loved, I allowed his name, the name of my soldier, back into my thoughts. And then for the first time ever, I spoke it out loud. “Wager,” I whispered. “Wager Swayne.” When I said his name, it was in my own voice. The voice of the woman who’d kept him in this world once before and was bound to do it a second time.
“Wager Swayne. Wager Swayne. Wager Swayne,” I crooned. I let his name swell with all the love I had tamped down until it became a chant as strong as the one Mama had blessed me and Clemmie with. His heart thumped a tiny bit louder as I let my love pour forth. “Wager,” I pleaded, speaking directly to his spirit and calling it back. His chest rose and fell. But the breath that came forth was icy as death. I put my mouth on his and breathed up heat from the pit of my belly, but his lips against mine did not warm.
“Wager,” I whispered and became every woman he had ever loved. Every woman he’d ever wanted. Every woman who had made his life sweet enough to go on living. I became the woman he dreamed had saved him. I put my lips against his and pressed my need into them. His breath came back up then, stronger, warmer, heavier with life, and I kissed him even more deeply. He was alive. My love had brought him back from death and no one would ever tell me different. Not even after what happened next.
He yanked his head to the side, jerking his lips from mine, reared back and stared at me, his eyes snapped wide open in horror. With what strength he had, he shoved me away.
“It’s not what you think it—”
“Shut up, Private. Just shut up.” Anger unfroze his throat.
“I saved your life. I—”
“Shut your damn mouth, man. Stop talking in that strange voice. Stop. I warned you once before. And now, if you say one more word to me, ever, I will have you court-martialed for moral turpitude.”
“Sergeant, listen—”
“Get. Out. Of. My. Sight.”
Every word was a punch to the gut. I couldn’t of spoken if I’d wanted. I spun around. Lem stood at the tent opening. I pushed past him.
I went to Bunny and would of ridden off that night, but she was played out. I fed and watered her, staked her out for what was left of the night, and went to the tent I shared with Lem. Without making a sound, I wept. Lem lit his candle, came and sat next to me and wrapped his blanket around both of us, but nothing could stop my shivering.
“Bill,” he said, his words soft and consoling, “I’m sorry your heart is broke. I know there ain’t no pain to compare with lovin’ someone don’t love you back.”
Even if he was talking about a man loving a man, what he said was true and little shuddery gasps I could not hold back slipped from me.
“There now, Bill,” he said, pulling me closer. “It’s gon be all right. Just gon take time’s all. Trust Lem, okay?”
His kind words and friendship after being alone for so long caused all the sand to drain out of me. I leaned my head against his shoulder and wept, slumping more and more into him as the fight went out of me.
Lem wrapped both his arms around me and I snuggled against his chest. “I can’t stand to see you hurtin’ like this, Bill,” he said. A moment later, his mouth was on mine.
I tried to pull away, but it was like being trapped beneath a bank vault.
“I love you, Bill,” he murmured. “Loved you from the start. I’ll take care of you. Treat you good. You won’t never have no man treat you better.”
“Get off me!” I screamed. “I’m not like you!” This last I accompanied by pulling the razor from my pocket and holding the blade to his neck.
He stood, and asked, more hurt than mad, “You put a blade to my throat? After everything…? After…?” He did not have words for how wrong I’d done him.
“We’re quits, Bill. That’s the last time I ever speak your name and I’ll thank you not to ever say mine again.”