Trail Angel (7 page)

Entering the Herndon's grand dining room, she knew better than to be flattered by the attention. Her attire probably scandalized the women, and the reaction of the men felt no different than the attention paid by dogs at the dinner table.

As the room quieted, Annabelle realized the foolishness of her venture.
What do I have to prove? It won't matter to Sherman that I am unafraid.
Eager for a friendly face, Annabelle gladdened when a voice called her name.

As she crossed the room to greet the Colonel, Josey Angel at his side, she failed to suppress a smile. The old man possessed a charm that made it easy to forget he had worn Union blue. His eyes were kind, and he was quick to smile beneath his mustache. He reminded Annabelle of her late grandfather, who had a spritely way even in his dotage. After her grandmother died, there were jokes that the widower might court one of Annabelle's friends, a notion no one could quite deny.

The Colonel greeted her with a deep bow and gallant sweep of his arm. He had left his hat in camp and his balding head freckled with age spots left him looking older and frailer than when he sat in a saddle. “I was just telling Josey how even in mourning wear you outshine every lady here.”

From Josey Angel, she received a curt nod and a soft, “Ma'am,” though his dark eyes never left her. He looked uncomfortable in a dark, loose-fitting frock coat that seemed at least a size too big for him.
I wonder who loaned him that.
Without his guns and in his borrowed suit, he could have passed for a young tutor come to teach in the town's schoolroom.

“Gentlemen,” she said. “Dinner clothes suit you in a fashion I would not have anticipated.”

“She means we clean up good,” the Colonel said to Josey with a gruff laugh. “Tell her how pretty she looks, Josey.”

Whatever Josey Angel might have said was lost in another man's booming greeting.

“Marlowe.”

Marlowe?

“You old warhorse. When I said I expected to see you in a rocking chair telling war stories to girls too young and too pretty for your likes, I didn't think you would start tonight.”

The words came in a torrent, and before Annabelle even registered his presence, General Sherman towered over her. He looked down and laughed, slapping a hand on the Colonel's back, with a knowing wink. “Where's your rocking chair?”

The remark drew good-natured laughter from the circle of junior officers who trailed after the general, hyenas to his red-maned lion. Annabelle blushed at the implied compliment, then grew angry, whether at the man's presumptuousness or her own reaction, she wasn't sure.

Sherman was a large-framed man, bigger than Annabelle expected, and filled with an energy that accelerated the pace of everything around him. She breathed faster. Her thoughts raced. When he turned his attention to Annabelle, she felt caught in the beam of lamp light.

“Where are our manners, gentlemen. Is this fair lady one of the emigrants in your care?”

Introductions followed. Annabelle forgot the names of the junior officers attending Sherman as soon as she heard them, and she expected similar treatment from the general. Instead, he made her the focus of conversation, speaking as if they were the only two in the room.

Though just in his mid-forties, Sherman looked older, the lines of his broad forehead and face deeply creased. His hazel eyes moved restlessly about the room, even when he spoke. The constant motion made him look nervous, though he commanded the conversation and everyone in it. “I see you are in mourning, madam. Let me express my deepest sympathies for your loss.”

Though perfectly mannered, the words failed to make their mark on Annabelle. “With all respect, I question your sincerity, sir, as you played no small part in the cause of my grief.”

For a moment, it seemed as if all conversation in the room stopped. While the junior officers appeared horrified, she caught in a glance the tug at the side of Josey Angel's mouth she now recognized as a smile. After struggling to keep her voice from quaking, Annabelle determined to hold her ground, setting her shoulders back and returning the general's unblinking gaze.

If her comment angered him, he disguised it well. His response was spoken so softly, the junior officers had to lean in to hear.

“Would you permit, my lady, that a man can feel sympathy for the consequences of actions dutifully performed under regrettable circumstances?” His pace of speech slowed, lacing his words with more sincerity, yet he still spoke too quickly to permit interruptions.

“War has existed from the beginning. Even the Bible is full of it. Some men die, while others are forced to kill. It has always been so. And while the former's loss is complete, his suffering on Earth is done. For that, it is right we mourn. But we should not discount the latter, those for whom the suffering goes on even after triumph's fifes are played.”

Sherman looked past Annabelle as he spoke, and she followed his gaze to Josey Angel. Their eyes met, then his flickered away, but in that moment she saw across hundreds of miles and as many days to the source of a shared grief. She shuddered, the shiver stiffening her spine.
What could these men know of my grief? My husband. My brothers. My way of life.
She lost all of these things. Sherman knew pain, too, but war also endowed the man with fame and a sense of purpose. The general took her silence as permission to continue, though it sounded to Annabelle as if he lectured his junior officers.

The conversation turned to the logistics of their journey, the opportunities to resupply at Fort Kearny and Fort Laramie, and the expectations of a peace treaty with the Indians. Sherman confessed his initial pessimism that the warlike Sioux would treat, but his latest report from Fort Laramie's commander included news that all the tribes had agreed to talk. Annabelle interjected when he spoke of the additional forts the army intended to build along their route.

“Won't the Indians object to more forts on their lands?” she asked. “Wouldn't that incite them to violence?”

A junior officer stepped forward to guide Sherman away. The general shrugged him off. “The army can't guarantee the safety of every emigrant who crosses Indian lands, but I wouldn't send women and children into the territories if I weren't confident of what we can accomplish there.” He ran a hand through his hair, leaving disheveled, spiky, red tufts. “The colonel and many of the officers charged with building the forts are accompanied by their families. I've even encouraged the ladies to maintain journals. I believe the story of their time on the frontier will prove of value to history.”

The general's tone conveyed an air of finality on the topic. Still, Annabelle couldn't resist a final challenge. “If there's to be peace with the Indians, why do you need to build the forts?”

The general's accelerated speech had affected her own manner, and the words escaped Annabelle's mouth before she weighed them. The junior officers braced for an outburst, but the general's manners held. Indeed, he smiled at her, his eyes alight like a fencer enjoying an unaccustomed challenge. He offered her a quick nod. It was as close as he would come to a bow, she suspected, or a concession of defeat.

One of the other officers answered, a short, thickset man with a receding hairline and prodigious sideburns. He patted her arm as he said, “You don't think we can trust the red devils, now do you? We need the forts to make sure they stay in line.”

The others hastily agreed, but Annabelle noticed Sherman said nothing. The look he gave her was anything but patronizing, and she recalled that not long ago her family feared this man even more than Indians.
How wise are we to trust our safety to his assurances?

The wagons headed out the next day, moving west toward the Platte River, which they would follow until the river forked. From there, they would follow the North Platte to Fort Laramie and the shortcut promised by their guides. With favorable weather, the Colonel estimated it would take six weeks to reach the outpost. Annabelle found it beyond her imagining that they could travel for so long and still not even be halfway to their destination. Yet the Colonel said they would need another two months from that point to reach Virginia City.

On leaving Omaha, Annabelle's apprehension in abandoning everything she knew gave way to wonder at what she discovered. After weeks in town, everything smelled fresh. Even the air seemed lighter, bringing a crisp clarity to her vision as in moments after a rain. In one spot where the new telegraph line stood like a final tether to civilization, she counted more than a hundred poles. She tried calculating how many it would take to traverse the plains, but the numbers swirled in her head like driftwood bobbing among waves.

Walking behind the family's wagon, Annabelle's thoughts turned to the sea more than once. The tall grass that surrounded their path rose and fell in the breeze like ocean swells. Just as waves' peaks and troughs reveal themselves only once a boat is among them, the seemingly flat land unveiled a contoured terrain of rolling hills, thorny bushes and wildflowers as the wagons passed.

When they stopped at midday for a meal and to rest the stock, Annabelle and her cousin Caroline collected flowers to press in a book. Annabelle couldn't remember the last time she'd pressed flowers. She must have been a child. Back then, she treated her younger cousin like a living doll, dressing Caroline in hand-me-down clothes, forcing her to sit still while she brushed her straight, blonde hair, making her learn her letters. Though no longer a child, Caroline's youth eased her adjustment to their new environment in ways Annabelle envied.

The first evening in camp, the Colonel showed the ladies what he called an old Indian trick—ridding blankets and bedding of lice and fleas by spreading them over anthills. Annabelle smiled to imagine the horrified reaction among the ladies of Charleston on learning the necessity of such a chore. Yet that wasn't the last challenge to Annabelle's sense of decorum.

Plainly put, there were no privies on the trail. Annabelle had known this, of course. What she hadn't counted on was how the damnably flat and treeless terrain denied any sense of solitude. Annabelle hoped a solution would present itself, but nature conspired to put the matter forefront in her mind as the first day trudged on.

Just before dinner, with everyone in camp occupied by the evening's chores, Annabelle slipped away with a sheet of Gayetty's medicated paper, waiting like a child at a cookie jar until certain no one watched.

Discreetly separating from a camp of so many people proved no easy task. Annabelle came across a copse of prickly bushes growing near the banks of a stream. Squatting behind them, she felt confident enough of her solitude to relax. The ridiculousness of her position brought on a fit of laughter she stifled for fear of drawing attention.

From Caroline, less inured by the inhibitions of propriety, she learned not to be so troubled by the chore. Annabelle watched with amazement one morning as her cousin walked not twenty paces from the wagon and squatted, her dress spread around her as a natural screen. She lingered but a moment before bouncing up as if completing a dance step and leaving the daintiest of puddles on the sun-scorched dirt.

Proof that youth had its advantages in these matters came in the example of Annabelle's mother, whom she suspected had not fully relieved herself for days after leaving Omaha. As willful as her mother could be, Annabelle wondered if she intended to reach Montana in her constipated state.

Then one night the sounds of her mother rising in the hours before daybreak awakened Annabelle. She smiled to realize her mother had stowed a sheet of medicated paper where it would be handy upon a nocturnal departure. Her father never stirred on her mother's return. Annabelle remained still, preserving her mother's sense of privacy.

Josey and Lord Byron rode to the meadow where the stock grazed, maneuvering around the herd to steer them to camp. Good grass wasn't hard to find this early in the season. While there was little to fear from Indians here, the oxen and cattle were safer within the wagon corral, where the men took turns standing overnight guard.

After an afternoon in the field, the cattle were contented and docile. The sounds of barking dogs and the clatter of tin plates and iron cookware carried from the camp as they approached. The waning sun brought a breeze that dried the sweat on Josey's back and carried the sweet smell of frying bacon from the cook fires. His stomach rumbled.

The men worked without speaking. They could ride all day while hardly exchanging a word, and then, when they did, not even finish a sentence before one understood the other's meaning. This habit drove the Colonel to distraction. When the three of them rode together, the old man maintained a running monologue to fill the silence and then cursed the other two for not interrupting. Sometimes Josey remained silent longer than he naturally would, just to wind up the Colonel. He suspected Byron did the same, though they never spoke of it.

The big man's silence came from a different place than his own. Byron had suffered not just through the war but all his life. He bore the scars of savage and repeated beatings that made Josey's battle wounds look like scratches. Years before the war, the man they first knew simply as Hoss had been taken from his wife and children. They died without him, and Josey knew his friend prayed for the souls of his family every night. Then he slept.

Josey envied the peace of mind that permitted such easy slumber. He tried prayer, too, but talking to God only stirred him up. As they settled in one night Josey asked Byron how he fell asleep so easily.

Byron must have thought the question a joke. Josey rarely japed, so he was eager to hear the rest. “I just close my eyes and breathe.”

Josey wondered if counting breaths would steer his mind from darker thoughts. “Do you think about your breathing?”