I could include my own career, I suppose, but I like what I do.”
She didn’t know how it happened, but the major had tucked her arm through his as they strolled along.
“I was a state regimental surgeon during the late war, on loan from the regulars,” he said. “The Medical Department has placed me in the Department of the Platte. There are three companies of the Second Cavalry at Fort Laramie, plus more companies of the Ninth Infantry.”
“You are everyone’s surgeon?”
“I am. The number of surgeons varies. One surgeon, the estimable Captain Hartsuff, is on detached duty at Fort Fetterman, and the contract surgeon—he’s a civilian—is hoping for furlough as soon as I return to Fort Laramie. He’ll be lucky to get it. Contract surgeons have less seniority than earthworms.”
Susanna smiled at that.
“I tend to anyone’s needs—from the garrison, to teamsters, to sporting ladies at the nearest cathouse, to any Indian brave enough to try white man’s medicine.”
He peered at her, and she saw nothing but kindness in his expression.
“But this surgeon is digressing,” he said. “Fort Laramie—a run-down old post—is full of social climbers, backbiters and talebearers. That’s what happens when people live in close quarters and know each other’s virtues and defects.”
She couldn’t help her sigh.
“Yes, it’s daunting. They are a censorious bunch.” He glanced at her again. “If you just do your job, you should brush through this awkwardness with Captain Dunklin.”
“I’m an expert at keeping my head down,” she assured her escort. “But the captain worries me.”
“Dunklin is a tedious bore,” the post surgeon told her. “Let me engage him in conversation so you can escape to your room, which I doubt will be anything fancier than a blanket serving as a sort of amateur wall. A warning—we all snore.”
Major Randolph was as good as his word. She took a bowl of stew from the kitchen to her blanketed-off corner of the sleeping room, while Major Randolph, an efficient decoy, chatted with Captain Dunklin.
Her tiny corner was frigid, the small window opaque with ice, the logs rimed with frost. Huddled on the bed, she drank her soup, which cooled off quickly.
She debated about removing her clothes, then decided against anything beyond her shoes and dress. She drew herself into a ball, her arms wrapped around her knees, wishing for warmth.
There was a gap in the blanket wall and she looked into the main room at Major Randolph’s profile. He was reading now, looking up occasionally to add his mite to the conversation between the other officers. He had an elegant mustache, which he tugged on as he read. She could see no obvious military bearing there; he looked like a man built more for comfort than warfare. He looked like someone she could talk to.
They observed rank even in bed on the men’s side of the curtain: two majors in one bed, and Captain Dunklin in the smaller bed. The two privates who took turns driving the ambulance rolled in their blankets and lay down in front of the cookstove, which looked to Joe like the warmest place in the roadhouse. He hoped Dunklin was cold, sleeping by himself.
John Walters was soon asleep beside him. Joe closed his eyes and did what he always did before sleep came. Starting with South Mountain in 1862, when he had been a new surgeon, he performed a mental inventory of his hardest cases. If he was tired, he never got much beyond South Mountain, because it had been the worst, for reasons that continued to plague him.
The cases that stood out were the ones where he still questioned his decisions. For years, he had wondered if he was the only surgeon who did that. Just last year, he had asked Al Hartsuff if he ever rethought his Civil War cases. Al nodded, drank a little deeper and replied, “All the livelong day, Joe.”
On a bad night, he rethought the whole war. On the worst nights, he relived the death of his wife, as her skirts caught fire on a windy evening by a campfire, and she blazed like a torch. No amount of rethinking ever changed that outcome. Her screams had echoed in his head for years.
He didn’t get that far tonight; he had Susanna Hopkins to thank. After all his companions started snoring, she must have felt secure enough to cry, knowing she would not be heard.
He was on the side of the bed closest to her flimsy partition. First he heard deep gulps, as though she tried