sniffs by keeping her eyes on the blurry page, and promising the men that their next book would be a comedy.
She wanted to laugh, until she looked in Joe’s office one night. She had finished reading and wanted to say good-night. She was going to knock on the door, but it was open a fraction, so she merely opened it wider, to see the major slumped forward, his hands over his eyes.
Her first instinct was to tiptoe away. But then her face grew hot with shame as she thought of what might have happened to her if this man, sitting there so sadly, had ignored his instincts after that disastrous encounter at the Dunklins. She opened the door wider and walked in quietly, determined to help if she could. She put her hand lightly on his shoulder.
He started, then looked up at her. She couldn’t help her sigh; she knew what that kind of misery felt like. She pulled a chair up beside him and just sat there, her hands in her lap now.
With a great effort, he sat up straight. She silently handed him her handkerchief and he blew his nose. He looked at her again.
“Susanna, I treat his men for frostbite, I patch and stitch where needed, but George Crook can never overlook that moment when I turned my attention from a dying soldier in blue to a living one in gray, no matter that fourteen years have come and gone. Hippocrates himself could argue with him, and it would make no difference.” He smiled faintly. “Crook will punish me forever, but you know how that feels, don’t you?”
Susanna nodded, not trusting herself to speak, until she had taken several deep breaths. “You told me that living well is the best revenge. Is that a lie?”
He shook his head, and his expression went from sorrowful to rueful. “I have it on good authority that Crook is still trying to get me cashiered from the army.”
“No!”
“Yes. Luckily, no one listens to him on this matter, and I practice good medicine, no matter what he thinks.” His smile was no smile. “I suppose I have stayed in the army mainly because I do not want General Crook to think he drove me out.” Joe grasped Susanna’s arm. “A good gambler knows when to fold a bad hand, but I don’t gamble any better than I cook.”
“All the more reason for you to improve your French,” she said, covering his hand with her own briefly. “When the letter comes from Pasteur himself, admitting you to his lycée, you can walk away with no regret.”
“I can,” he said, after a moment’s reflection. “I had better study my French.”
“Mais oui, monsieur.”
To her relief, Colonel Reynolds and General Crook led four troops of horses north to Fort Fetterman in early March, including Dan Reese’s and Jim O’Leary’s cavalry companies. Susanna listened to both wives crying through the walls, silently took her cousin by the hand and walked her next door. Her eyes red, Kate O’Leary opened the door. She swallowed her amazement and opened her arms wider, folding her difficult neighbor into her generous embrace.
“Good!” Susanna exclaimed, and closed the door on them, clutching each other and crying. She went back to the Reeses’ quarters, cooked Stanley a toasted cheese sandwich and spent the evening, shoes off, reading to him in his bed. By morning, all was serene.
“I’m glad you’re infantry, Private Benedict,” Susanna said that morning, as they stood at their classroom door—set apart from the rest of the warehouse by flour sacks—and ushered in their students, some of them uncharacteristically sober because their fathers had ridden away.
“If the summer expedition goes as planned, you’ll have the whole classroom, because even the infantry will go, which means yours truly,” he told her. “I think that’s why the army favors school terms that end in May, when summer campaigning starts.”
“Could I keep the school going this summer?” she asked him.
“If the administrative council says yea, why not?”
What am I thinking? she asked herself later, as her little ones concentrated on simple addition and subtraction. I’m going to be gone from here by June. Where, I do not know yet. It would keep, she decided, returning her attention to her pupils.
Not long before recall from fatigue, Susanna looked up to see Majors Townsend and Randolph in the flour-sack doorway. Standing behind them, hat in hand, was a man she did not know.
“Oh, please, no,” she said, suddenly terrified, thinking of Tommy and Frederick.