except to the bedside. I guess we’ll be in boys’ clothes awhile longer.
“Papa,” Juneau Jane cries, shaking head to toe and praying in French. She signs the cross on her chest, over and over again. “Aide-nous, Dieu. Aide-nous, Dieu…”
He tosses and blinks and thrashes on the pillow, moans and moves his lips, then quiets and pulls long breaths, drifts farther away from us.
“Don’t expect overmuch,” the doctor warns again from his desk by the fireplace at one end of the room.
The wagon driver told us the tale on the ride upriver. He takes the route regular, to the fort and to Scabtown that’s across water from the fort. Old Mister was brought here from the jail in Mason to plead his case and tell the post commander what he knew about the man who sold him the horse that was the army’s, but he didn’t make it that far. Somebody bushwhacked them on the way, shot one soldier before they could get to some cover to fight it out. The soldier died right off, and Old Mister was nicked in the head. He was in pretty poor shape by the time he got carried on into the fort. The post doctor worked on Old Mister in the hopes to revive him and learn if he knew who had set on them and why. They supposed it might be somebody Mister knew and maybe even the horse thief who’d sold the stole army horses. They wanted to catch him pretty bad. Even more if he’d killed a soldier.
I can tell them about the Irishman, but what will it help? He was already in the army’s hands in Fort Worth town, so he ain’t the one who done the bushwhacking. If Old Mister knows the man to blame for it, he won’t tell. The only person Mr. William Gossett might know down here is the one he come all this way seeking. A son who don’t want to be found.
I hold my peace about it, keep quiet all day and the next day and the next, though I’d like to tell them of Lyle, and how Old Mister sent him from Louisiana two years back, a boy only sixteen, running from a charge of murder. And how Lyle had care of the land in Texas, the land that was meant for Juneau Jane’s inheritance someday, and Lyle sold it when it didn’t belong to him. A boy who’d do that might shoot his own papa.
I don’t tell a soul. I’m afraid it won’t go good for us here if I do. I keep my secrets while our days pass at the fort, Old Mister trapped twixt living or dying. The doctor’s wife looks after us and gets us into proper clothes, collected up from the other wives at the fort. We look after Old Mister and each other.
Juneau Jane and me spend time with The Book of Lost Friends. Regiments of colored cavalrymen live here at the fort. Buffalo soldiers, they’re called. They’re men that hail from far and wide, and men who travel far and wide, too. Way out into the wild lands. We ask after the names in our book, and we listen to the soldiers’ stories, and we write the names of their people in the book and where they were carried away from.
“Stay clear of Scabtown,” they tell us. “It’s too rough a place for ladies.”
Feels strange to be womenfolk again, after all this time as boys. It’s harder, in a way, but I wouldn’t go out from the fort or to that town anyhow. A knowing’s been brewing in me again. I feel something coming, but I can’t say what.
It’s a bad thing, though.
The knowing keeps me close to soldiers and never out farther than the hospital building, which sits away from the others so’s not to spread sickness if there is some. I watch the officers’ wives move round, and their children play. I watch the soldiers drill, form up their companies, play bugles, and leave to the West in long lines, side by side on their tall bay horses.
I wait for Old Mister to breathe his last.
And I watch the horizons.
We’re two