Next business is to find Winona and find out how she fares. Two weeks with Starling Carlton would wear out St Paul. I’m so hungry I could eat the head of John the Baptist but first I go searching. Starling is captain of A Company and that’s where I find her. She’s sitting by the stove in her new attire and by God for a second I think she’s a boy right enough. She got her shining black hair stuffed into her forage cap. But up she springs and rushes over to me. The most affectionate drummer boy in the history of the army. How that Starling treat you? I says. He never spoke the whole way, she says. He never said a word? Only gived me orders, where to sit, to lie. Goddamn strange and blighted soul, I said. Then Starling hisself clumps in making the wooden floor bounce. He stops to gauge what I’m about and he draws out his revolver. You step back from her, he says, or I shoot you now, you filthy Judas. Holy Christ, Carlton, I says, hold your horses. I ain’t gainsaying you.
It’s with strange and darksome tread that I go over to the requisition depot and draw my corporal’s uniform. I dress right there among the shelves and the quartermaster’s clerk does his best as always to fit such a wren-sized man and he gives me my belt and accoutrements and I keep my own shoes. Ain’t going to suffer in a pair of army brogues. The armoury issues a rifle and a gun. And as I’m tying my shirt and tucking in my balls I don’t know what gets into me. The years fall away and it’s like the first day in barracks with John Cole. St Louis a thousand years in the past. And in my mind’s eye too I see him lying in bed in Tennessee with the hole in his thigh. I see him just a ragged gossoon the first moment I met him under a hedge in Missouri. I am dizzy with visions of John Cole. I wonder am I betraying this man most dear to me. Maybe I am, maybe I am. But I’m also praying for things I don’t even have names for and that sit in the dark of my mind unknown.
That German trader’s been busy as a dung-fly. He’s going to lead us to the meeting place. Don’t know where the dollars are in it for him but he’s a little cross man with no hair and a foreign-looking hat. I’m told he got shares in the new railroad town of Laramie a hundred miles to the south but I don’t credit that. He’s donned a white striped suit that wasn’t washed since the Flood receded. Someone says his name is Henry Sarjohn which don’t sound very German to me. Mr Sarjohn likes his tobacco anyhow and chews it in a big wet froth in his mouth. When he talk to the major he keeps turning his head and spitting. We’re going to be two days riding and we ain’t bringing cannon that I can see. There’s five regiments full-brimmed with men in the fort because fear of the Sioux has made inroads on government hearts. They went into another treaty in ’68 but the railroad beginning to bust out the land. I could fancy riding with five thousand. But only two companies are allowed by Caught-His-Horse-First for this fandango. That’s two hundred soldiers and his band is said to have growed to three hundred. Doesn’t bother the major. He’s going to get his daughter. Maybe he thinks if he don’t it don’t matter how many soldiers in the field. He’ll be happy to die. He got that look to him. Desperate and gathered. Like a man on a high bridge thinking to jump. You’d nearly be a-feared of him. Starling Carlton is mounted on a big grey horse and it’s the coldest day yet in the year and of course he’s sweating. Pouring down into his collar and it hangs on his eyebrows in tiny icicles. He surely is the most unnatural bugger in Christendom. We ride at the back of the companies and Winona’s tucked in close to us. You sure, I say, you sure? I can run us out of here easy, just give me the signal. I sure, she says, and gives me her smile. Goddamn it, I say. Didn’t they give you a drum with that uniform? I say. No, they didn’t, she says. She’s laughing then. I ain’t laughing, I ain’t laughing. If I still got a heart it’s breaking.
Trying to figure out this plan. We going to give Winona to her uncle and then take back Angel Neale. What happens to Winona after? They think she’s going to don Sioux skirts and speak Sioux again? Not sure folks are thinking about Winona. I know they are not. Starling Carlton just loves his blessed major and will effect all in his power to succour him. Of course he will. Major the fairest man I ever met but he been filleted out with the knife of grief. Men I knew well in former days still in the company and it’s so strange to be clad in blue again. Little Sarjohn he rides out ahead and bobs about on his mule like he know what he’s doing. Those familiar hills now dressed in the lace and shawls of winter. Even in distress the land seems to solace you. Guess the black truth is it crosses through our hearts.
Starling Carlton leads my old company and I got my corporal work to do. There’s a strange yellow-faced fella called Captain Sowell who leads Company A. Looks like his cheeks were shaved from wood and he got Dundrearies just like Trooper Watchorn years ago. Man’s got a thorn bush each side of his nose you’d say. Starling Carlton ain’t inclined to speak to me so I don’t ask him nothing. I doubt if he trusts me but I ain’t planning nothing but to keep Winona safe. Now she’s ordered up beside the major who’s mounted on his fine black mare. When you see a horse like that you know you been riding a sorry nag all through Nebraska and Wyoming. Her coat gleams in the silvery glamour of the snow-light. It’s a long time since I rode with the major and all the old medicine of loyalty floods into my heart. Suddenly I feel sorely four or five sorrows. The loss of old comrades in times past. The dead in battles. The murder of Mrs Neale, a gentle woman. Somewhere in the back of all that are other matters. The shady ghosts of my family long gone by in Sligo. Sligo. A word I hardly even sounded in private thought in a decade of years. The filthied dress of my mother floats behind my eyes. My sister’s pinafore ruined by Death. The thin cold faces. My father lengthwise like a smear of yellow butter. A stain. His tall black hat as crushed as a squeezebox. Sometimes you know you ain’t a clever man. But likewise sometimes the fog of usual thoughts clears off in a sudden breeze of sense and you see things clear a moment like a clearing country. We blunder through and call it wisdom but it ain’t. They say we be Christians and suchlike but we ain’t. They say we are creatures raised by God above the animals but any man that has lived knows that’s damned lies. We are going forth that day to call Caught-His-Horse-First a murderer in silent judgement. But it was us killed his wife and his child. The first Winona. And many more that were kin to him. Our own Winona was wrested from these plains. We took her like she were our natural daughter. But she ain’t. What is she now? Plucked all two ways and there she is dressed as a drummer boy in the cavalry of the United States and easily laughing. She pleased to her soul to be answering the hurt of the major because the major’s wife once showed her kindness. Winona, the queen of this o’erwhelming country. God damn it but a corporal best not weep. And John Cole lying in our bed at home and wondering what I’m doing. Ain’t I treasoned him and gone back on my true word? The world ain’t all just grasping and doing. It’s thinking too. But I ain’t possessing the brain to think it all clear. A snowfall made mostly of dark gaps and wind starts to fall on my black folly. The companies ride on with a German jackanapes in front. But no man such a jackanapes as me.