C Company was formed. Ike Barnes was the commander, and Floyd Hook, a boyish innocent, the first lieutenant. Charles took the third spot. Sometimes Barnes allowed Floyd or Charles to welcome a new man. Charles developed a little speech that was not entirely facetious.
"Welcome to your new home, sometimes called the government workhouse. In addition to learning to be an outstanding cavalryman, you can look forward to carrying bricks, painting walls, and cutting timber. It's called fatigue duty. Sometimes it's called being a brevet architect."
The black recruits never smiled. It wasn't just the word brevet that threw them, Charles knew. It was his accent.
Patiently, he showed each greenhorn how to roll a pair of socks and stuff it inside his shirt to save bad shoulder bruises at rifle practice. He watched over first attempts to saddle and mount horses. As soon as the recruits didn't fall off, he started revolver and rifle drill, yelling at the men to take their time, hold their pieces steady as they banged away at piles of hardtack boxes, first with their mounts walking, then trotting, then galloping.
"Steady — steady," he would shout. "The odds are that you'll never see combat more than once in your Army career. But on that day, you could live or die by this drill."
The officers became surrogate parents, protecting the newest as best they could from hazing by the old hands — an old hand being someone who had arrived the week before. One new youngster broke down and wept.
"They tol’ me, go get your butter allowance from the mess. Cook'll try to keep it and spend it himself, they said. So watch out. I went to him and said, give me that butter money an' no damn argument." He beat his thighs. "They ain't any butter allowance."
"No. It's an old trick. Look, every new man's hazed. You got through it. You'll be fine."
"But now the others, they call me Butter Head."
"When you get a nickname, it shows they like you."
The recruit wiped his eyes. "That the truth?"
Charles smiled. "The truth." Members of the small officer group in the Tenth were known as Iron Ass and Friendly Floyd.
"What's your nickname, Cap'n?"
The smile grew stiff. "It's lieutenant. I don't have one."
A benefit of duty with the Tenth was, the chance to see little Gus often. Charles managed to visit him almost every day for a few minutes. The boy was warming to his father, no longer so intimidated by him, because Charles's demeanor was softening.
Christmas drew near. For gifts, Charles refused to buy any of the handiwork of the hang-around-the-forts, though the quilled and beaded articles were attractive and cheap. Instead, he shopped in Leavenworth City. He bought a set of brushes for Duncan, perfume for Maureen and Willa, a wooden horse — brightly enameled head and stick with a satin rope rein — for his son. The season brought hops, which he didn't attend, a small candlelit fir tree in Duncan's parlor, and caroling by officers and wives in the cold and starry prairie night.
Then, four days before Christmas — December 21,1866 — the Army got a present it didn't want.
Fort Phil Kearny guarded the Bozeman Trail, which led to the Montana gold fields. The fort's mere existence was provocation to the Sioux and Northern Cheyennes who claimed the land around it. War chiefs with names well known on the Plains — Red Cloud of the Sioux; Roman Nose of the Cheyennes — descended on Kearny with two thousand braves.
Bravado overcoming good sense, one William Fetterman, a captain, said he could smash through the attackers with eighty men. He claimed he could smash through the entire Sioux nation. So he took his men to guard some wagons bringing wood back to the fort, and for Christmas the Army got the Fetterman Massacre. Not one of the eighty survived.
Something unrelenting within Charles took satisfaction from the bad news. Given the massacre, and the resulting outcries for retribution, he believed the Army might move against the Southern tribes. When it did, he'd be there.
For Christmas Willa sent him a small cased ambrotype — their photograph — and a gold-stamped, leatherbound edition of Macbeth with a romantic inscription about the bad-luck play becoming her good luck, because it had brought them together. Accompanying the gifts was a letter full of endearments.
My dearest Charles,
I shall strive to remember that your new-minted last name is August, and swear a vow never to speak your real one aloud, though it is very dear to me. ...
It went on for several paragraphs, pleasing and warming him despite his unaltered concern about entanglement. He had reason for that wariness, he was soon reminded.
There is much talk of the Fetterman tragedy. I pray it will not provoke wholesale retaliation. I cannot any longer hide from you that I have joined the local chapter of the Indian Friendship Society, which seeks to promote justice for those long victimized by white greed and deception. I enclose a small Society leaflet which I hope you will find —
At that point, he tossed the letter into Duncan's sheet-iron stove, without reading the rest.
On Christmas Day he realized he had forgotten Willa's twenty-first birthday.
27
To remedy his blunder, Charles turned to Ike Barnes's wife, Lovetta, a tiny woman who could make her voice loud as a steam whistle if necessary. Lovetta took some of Charles's pay and promised to find something a young woman would like. Two days later she brought him an Indian pouch with a shoulder thong and an intricately beaded flap. The sight of it angered him. But he thanked her and dispatched the gift to St. Louis with a note of apology.
Soon after New Year's everyone at Leavenworth began talking about General Hancock's taking the field in the spring to demonstrate in force against the Indians, perhaps even punish those responsible for the Fetterman Massacre. Grierson, meanwhile, despaired of getting his regiment to operational strength. So far the Tenth had but eighty men.
Almost all of them had to enroll in Chaplain Grimes's special classes, to learn the three R's. The low level of recruit literacy put extra burdens on the officers. They handled all the paperwork that would normally be picked up by noncoms.
Still, Charles grudgingly admitted that whatever the city boys lacked in education, they more than made up for with their enthusiasm and diligence. With few exceptions, they behaved well. Insubordination, drunkenness and petty thievery, while not altogether absent, occurred with much less frequency than among white soldiers. Charles guessed motivation had a lot to do with it. The men wanted to succeed; they'd picked the Army, not fled to it.
Motivation and performance failed to impress General Hoffman or his staff. Hoffman ordered surprise inspections of the Tenth's barracks, then cited the soldiers for dirt on the floor and stains on the walls. Dirt blew in because doors and windows didn't fit. Leaky roofs caused the stains. Hoffman ignored explanations and refused requests for repair materials.
The commandant's campaign against what he called "nigger dregs" was relentless. If one of Grierson's officers tried to give a literate recruit some responsibility, the man's reports or memoranda came back from headquarters marked Sloppy or Incorrect. By Hoffman's order, the Tenth had to stand at least fifteen yards from white units during inspection formations. When the weather was mild enough for an evening parade, Hoffman required the Tenth to remain at parade rest; they couldn't march with the white troops, because Hoffman refused to review them.