she gave the letter to Nick Martin, who carried it to the post office. She had no hopes that Tommy received her letters, but she persisted.
French lessons were the most unpredictable part of her week, mainly because illness or injury always trumped parlez-vous francais. On those nights when there was a note tacked to his office door—”Diarrhea” or “Bone to set” or the everlasting “Catarrh”—she went to the ward, supervised by Theodore Brown, and read to the patients. At first she wondered why the post surgeon did not tack such a note to the Reeses’ door, and save her the effort to go to the hospital. Then she realized he wanted her there, visiting his patients.
She had dredged up volume one of Little Women for herself in the fort’s library, but none of the men objected, especially since it was all she had with her that first night, except for Joe’s French textbook. When she was well into Little Women, with no volume two in sight, she had suggested they read something else, since there was no way to know the ending. The storm of manly protest surprised her, so she kept reading and overlooking, to her private amusement, the sniffles and nose blowing that had nothing to do with illness.
“Your patients are a bunch of softies,” she told Joe one night when he was actually in his office for a French lesson. “Do you realize that even the men you have discharged keep returning to hear the story? I confess we all cried when Beth took a turn for the worse. I tell you, Joe, that these men can read, but they keep returning! We’ve run out of chairs, so they sit on the floor.”
“Aren’t you aware how much fun it is to be read to?” the post surgeon had asked. “I’d sit in there, too, but you’d probably frog-march me back to my office to conjugate another verb. I know you would!”
She had laughed long at that. What did bring tears to her eyes in February was the evening one of the discharged patients, a former tough from New York’s notorious Five Points, presented her with volume two. He had been on detached duty at Fort Russell, and confessed to “lifting” the copy from that garrison’s library. She made him promise to return it, but not until they finished the book. He assured her it would go back on the shelf as quietly as it left, and no one would know. “I’m good at that,” he confided.
“I am aiding and abetting criminals,” she told the surgeon, and he only grinned.
She noted that he had nothing to smile about as the end of February brought troops from other forts to Laramie, preparing for the Powder River winter campaign, and then General George Crook from Omaha arrived, not so much to lead the expedition, but to watch Colonel J. J. Reynolds lead it.
“What will he do, ride along and peer over Colonel Reynolds’s shoulder?” she had asked Joe one night, when she’d returned a much-corrected French essay to the surgeon.
“Basically, that’s as good a description as any. Georgie does like to be in charge,” Joe said, wincing at the red marks on his essay, and changing what was obviously an unpleasant subject. “Susanna, is there any hope for me? Will I have to take you with me to the lycée to sit in class and translate in my ear?”
“I’m a woman. They would never let me near Monsieur Pasteur’s classroom!” had been her retort, even though the idea of being in Paris with Major Joseph Randolph gave her something to think about that evening as Nick Martin escorted her back to Officers Row.
The arrival of more troops and companies to Fort Laramie meant that the flats by Suds Row suddenly blossomed with tents, even in the cold days and still-longer Wyoming nights of late winter. Inadequate housing meant cases of frostbite and more catarrh, so she was not surprised when Joe suspended his French lessons.
“I haven’t time,” he told her. “Do keep coming to read to the men, though. I have it on good authority from my steward that some of my patients and former patients are placing bets on whether Laurie will marry Jo, or whether Professor Bhaer will carry off the palm there.” In a surprising bit of spontaneity that charmed her, he nudged her shoulder. “No one wants to think what will happen to Beth!”
She did as he said, suffering through Beth’s illness and death, overlooking everyone’s