How Few Remain (86 page)

The saloons were open. As far as he could tell, the saloons in Fort Benton never closed. Somebody was playing a piano, not very well, in the first one past which he walked. Several people were singing. The words had nothing to do with the holiday season. Even so, the saloon boasted a Christmas tree, with candles gaily burning on all the branches and a red glass star at the top. Why the tree didn’t catch fire and burn down the saloon and half the town was beyond him, but it didn’t.

Two doors down stood another saloon, also tricked out with a Christmas tree full of candles. Inside, people were singing carols
in the same loud, drunken tones the folks in the first place had used for their bawdy song. Would God be happy to hear carols sung like that? Roosevelt chewed on the question as he made his way toward church.

Before he got to the white clapboard building, a man came out, spotted him, and extended a forefinger in his direction. “Colonel Roosevelt!” the fellow called. “Merry Christmas! May I speak with you for a moment?”

“And a merry Christmas to you, Zeke,” Roosevelt replied. Zeke Preston wasn’t the preacher. He was a reporter. Most of the men who had swarmed into Montana Territory to cover the British invasion were gone now. Of the handful still in Fort Benton, Preston was probably the best. Not only that, a lot of papers back in New York State printed what he wrote. Thus Roosevelt knew it behooved him to stay on the reporter’s good side. “What can I do for you today?”

Preston came down the steps and kicked his way through the snow. “Can I trouble you with a couple of questions before you go in?” He was a lean man in his thirties who wore a walrus mustache that didn’t go with his pale, narrow face; Roosevelt wondered if he was consumptive.

“Go ahead,” Roosevelt said. “You’ve caught me fair and square.”

“Good.” The reporter reached into an overcoat pocket and drew out a notebook and pencil. “Lucky I don’t have a pen,” he remarked. “Weather like this, the ink’d freeze solid as Blaine’s head.” He waited for Roosevelt’s chuckle, then said, “The more time passes after the battle by the Teton, the more credit General Custer takes for himself. What do you think of that?”

He’d told Colonel Henry Welton exactly what he thought of it. Welton was his friend. He knew reporters well enough to know they had their own axes to grind. “He was the overall commander, Zeke. If we’d lost, who would have ended up with the blame?”

“He says your men fought well—for Volunteers.” Sure as hell, Preston was trying to goad him into saying something that would make a lively story.

“It’s Christmas. I’m not going to pick a quarrel on Christmas.” But Roosevelt couldn’t quite leave that one alone. “I will say that the Unauthorized Regiment was the force running Gordon and
his men back toward Canada when word of the cease-fire reached us and made us hold in place.”

Preston scribbled, coughed, scribbled again. “What’s your opinion of Gatling guns, Colonel?”

Roosevelt had been over that one with Henry Welton, too. For the reporter, he put on a toothy grin and answered, “My opinion is that I would much rather be behind them than in front of them. If you ask General Gordon, I expect you will find his opinion the same.”

“I’ve heard some argument about how those guns should have been positioned,” Preston remarked after an appreciative chuckle at Roosevelt’s comment. “Where do you stand on that?”

“They did well where they were,” Roosevelt said. “I saw no point to moving them from the front line—and they were not moved, if you’ll recall. General Custer was persuaded they belonged there.”

He waited for Zeke Preston to ask him about that persuading. Maybe, belatedly, Colonel Welton wouldn’t be an unsung hero after all. But Preston flipped the notebook shut and stuck it and the pencil back in his pocket. “Thanks very much, Colonel. I won’t bother you any more, not today I won’t. Merry Christmas to you.” Off he went, breath smoking in the chilly air.

Roosevelt sighed and went up into the church. It was Methodist, which would have to do; that faith certainly came closer to his own than the one preached in the two Catholic churches Fort Benton also boasted. When he walked in, the congregation was singing “Away in the Manger,” a good deal more tunefully than the same carol would have been managed in the saloon.

He added his own booming baritone to the song. His voice, his uniform, and his upright carriage drew the notice of the folk who crowded the little church, almost all of them in their holiday best. Roosevelt gave notice as well as drawing it; some of the women were worth noticing. A blonde in a deep blue princess dress with a satin jabot and laced, pleated cuffs—it would have been the height of style in New York City five years earlier—caught his eye and held it.

When he’d had enough of caroling—and more than enough of the prune-faced Methodist preacher—he made his way toward the door. The pretty young woman contrived to leave the church at the same time. They walked down the narrow stairway side by side. She smelled of rosewater.

“Merry Christmas to you, miss,” Roosevelt said when they were down on the tracked, snowy ground once more.

“The same to you, Colonel.” She kept walking along beside him. His hopes rose. In a casual tone of voice, she went on, “If you care for some mince pie, I baked one yesterday. I’d be days and days eating it all by my lonesome.”

“Why, that’s very kind of you—very kind of you indeed.” He smiled. “If your family won’t mind sharing, I’d be delighted.”

“I am a widow,” she answered.

Sometimes that was a euphemism for a streetwalker. Sometimes it wasn’t. If she was a woman of easy virtue, she was cleaner and, by all appearances, better-natured than most of her fallen sisters. “Mince pie, then,” Roosevelt said—and if she felt like giving him more than mince pie, that would be fine, too.

She lived in a tiny, astringently neat cabin next door to a saloon—not that anything in Fort Benton was far from a saloon. Sure enough, a mince pie sat on the table. She cut Roosevelt a slice. It was good. He said so, loudly, adding, “Thank you for making a soldier far from home happy.”

“How happy would you like to be?” she asked, and walked around the table and sat down on his lap.

The bed was close to the stove. Everything in the cabin was close to the stove, which helped keep the place tolerably warm. Roosevelt had had a couple of other women throw themselves at him since he rode down to Fort Benton a hero, or as much of a hero as this hash of a war offered. The experience had been both new and delightful. He wasn’t sure whether this was another hero’s reward or a business transaction. As he fumbled with the buttons of his trousers, he resolved to worry about it later.

“Oh,” she said when, presently, he went into her. She was quiet after that, working intently beneath him, till she stiffened again and quivered and cried out, “Oh, Joe! Oh, God, Joe!” He didn’t think she knew what she was saying; he hardly knew what she was saying himself then. His own ecstasy came less than a minute later. Afterwards, he decided she probably was a widow after all.

Being twenty-three, he would have been ready for a second round in short order, but she got off the bed and started dressing again, so he did, too. He was left with a puzzling problem in etiquette after that. If she was a streetwalker as well as a widow,
he’d anger her if he didn’t offer to pay. If she wasn’t, he’d offend her if he did.

He stood irresolute, a rare posture for him. Without answering the question behind it, she solved the problem for him: “Merry Christmas, Colonel Roosevelt.”

“Thank you very much,” he said, and kissed her. “I don’t think I’ve ever had a nicer present, or one more charmingly wrapped.” She smiled at that. He opened the door, and grunted at the cold outside. He’d gone several steps back toward the Unauthorized Regiment’s encampment before he realized he’d never learned her name.

XIX

The clock in Frederick Douglass’ parlor chimed twelve. All over Rochester, clocks were striking twelve. Douglass raised a glass of wine to his wife and son. “Happy New Year,” he said solemnly.

“Happy New Year, Frederick,” Anna Douglass said, and drank. “When I was young, I never reckoned I’d live to see such a big number as 1882.”

“May you see many more new years, Mother,” Lewis Douglass said.

“You’re not drinking, son.” Frederick Douglass had emptied his own glass, and was reaching for the decanter to refill it.

“No, I’m not,” Lewis said, “for the year ahead looks none too happy to me.”

“Compare it to the year just past,” Douglass said. “When seen from that perspective, how can it fail of being a happy year?”

Lewis gravely considered that. He showed the result of the consideration not by words but by downing the wine in front of him in a couple of quick gulps. When Douglass held out the decanter, he poured his glass full again, too. “Compared to the year just past, any year save perhaps 1862 would seem happy.”

Anna cocked her head to one side, listening to bells ringing unconstrainedly and to firecrackers and pistols and rifles going off in the street, some quite close by. “It don’t sound the way it ought to,” she said.

“It doesn’t, does it?” Douglass said. “Something’s missing.”

Lewis supplied the deficiency: “No cannon this year. No cannon, by order of the mayor and the governor and whichever soldier makes the most noise around these parts. They all fear the British gunboats out on the lake will mistake the celebration for an attack on themselves and use it as a pretext for bombarding the city. A happy new year indeed, is it not?”

“They might do it, too,” Douglass said gloomily. “They might enjoy doing it, the better to coerce the president into yielding to their demands.”

“He might as well,” Anna said. “Things ain’t gwine get no better on account of he don’t. They done licked us, so they gets to tell us what to do.”

Anna’s grammar was not all it should have been. That did not make what she said any less true. Lewis must have thought as much, for he said, “Mother, we ought to send you to Washington, because you see these things a lot more plainly than President Blaine is able to.”

“What Blaine can see and what he can do are liable to be two different propositions,” Douglass said, regretting every word of defense he spent on the man who had had the best chance since the presidency of Abraham Lincoln to do something about the Confederate States—had it and squandered it. “He’s made his bed, and now—”

“And now the whole country has to lie in it,” Lewis broke in. He reached for the wine decanter once more, then yanked his hand away. Bitterness filled his voice as he went on, “I’d get drunk, but what’s the use? Things wouldn’t be any better when I sobered up again.”

“Well, I don’t aim to get myself drunk any which way,” Anna Douglass said. “It’s a sinful thing to go and do. What I aim to do is go to bed.” She struggled to her feet. “Frederick, you’ll help me up the stairs.”

“Of course I will, my dear.” Douglass rose, too. His body still responded readily to his will. He helped his wife up to the bedroom, helped her out of her dress and corset, and made sure she was comfortable before he went back down to talk with his son a while longer.

Lewis was taking short, quick, furious puffs on a cigar when Frederick Douglass came back to the parlor. “What’s the use, Father?” he asked as Douglass sat down once more. “What in God’s name is the use? Why don’t we all pack up and move to Liberia? We might accomplish something there.”

“You may, if you like,” Douglass answered evenly. “I’ve thought about it once or twice—maybe more than once or twice.” His son stared at him. He nodded, his face grave. “Oh, yes, I’ve thought about it. In Liberia, the pond is so small as to make me—or you, should you ever choose to go—a very large fish indeed,
which cannot help but feed a man’s pride. But if I left, I should be giving up the fight here, and as much as proving the Confederates right when they say the black man cannot compete equally against the white. Every column I write here shows the CSA to be founded on a lie. How could I do the same in Africa?”

Lewis did not answer right away. He took the cigar from his mouth and sat for some time staring at the glowing coal. Then, savagely, he stubbed out the cigar. “Well, you’re right,” he said. “I wish to heaven you weren’t, but you are.” He got up and clapped Douglass on the shoulder. “Happy New Year, Father. You were right about that, too. Set next to the one we’ve escaped, the year ahead can’t be so bad. Good night. You needn’t get up—rest easy.”