“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 to subdue her tears. As he listened, he heard muffled weeping.
All he knew of Susanna Hopkins was that she was divorced and her son taken from her. He knew she was a lady looking for a second chance. He listened to her, wondering how to best alleviate her suffering. Medically, he had no reason to throw back his covers, pick up his greatcoat and tiptoe around the partition, but he did it anyway.
“You’re probably cold,” he whispered as he lowered the overcoat on her bed. She had gathered herself into a tight little ball—whether from fear or cold, he had no idea.
“Go to sleep,” he whispered. “I’m of the opinion that most things generally turn out for the best.”
Joe tiptoed back to his side of the partition and lay down again. He was warm enough, because Walters radiated body heat. Joe closed his eyes, listening. Soon he heard a small sigh from the other side of the blanket, which told him she was warmer now. He remembered that Melissa used to sigh like that, when she was tucked close to him and content.
For a change, the memory of Melissa soothed him to sleep. I miss you, M’liss, he thought.
Two more days and they arrived at Fort Laramie, not a minute too soon for Dr. Randolph. Ignoring the startled expression from Major Walters, Joe had kept up a running commentary with Captain Dunklin any time the man had so much as looked in Susanna Hopkins’s direction to make a comment.
Joe knew Major Walters was puzzled. He said as much during a break, when they stood next to each other and created circles of steaming yellow snow.
“Joe, I like conversation as well as the next man, but with Dunklin?” Walters commented.
Joe finished his business and buttoned up. He spoke cautiously, not wanting to expose the real reason. “Dunklin is a busybody.”
“The whole Ninth Infantry knows that,” Walters replied, amused.
“I think Mrs. Hopkins would rather keep her late husband to herself,” Joe said, cringing inside as he continued the lie begun so stupidly by Emily Reese.
“I think you deserve a medal,” Walters teased.
Joe’s heart warmed to watch Susanna Hopkins, who quickly discerned what he was doing and why. She still sat too close to the ambulance’s stove for his total comfort, but she kept her nose in her book, giving Dunklin no reason to speak to her.
Joe’s head well and truly ached by the time the ambulance stopped at the fork where Major Walters’s escort from Fort Fetterman waited, walking their remounts to keep them warm. Joe helped Mrs. Hopkins from the vehicle.
The three of them walked toward the patrol and Major Walters took Mrs. Hopkins by the hand. Joe noticed her slight hesitation, followed by a deep, careful breath, and he wondered how hard it was for her, in this world of men. He was beginning to understand her wariness.
“Mrs. Hopkins, so pleased to have made your acquaintance,” Walters said.
He turned to Joe. “Do you figure you’ll take part in the spring campaign, probably being planned in Washington as we speak?”
“It’s unlikely,” Joe replied, as his face grew hot. “You’ll recall who heads the Department of the Platte. General Crook has no use for me.”
“Maybe someday he’ll change his mind.”
“When pigs fly,” Joe said, wishing now for the conversation to end, as much as he liked Walters.
Walters mounted the horse waiting for him, and the patrol loped away to the north and west. Mrs. Hopkins seemed in no more hurry to return to the ambulance than Joe was. He wondered if she would ask him what the major had meant.
What she said surprised him. “You have a headache.”
“I do, indeed,” he told her, touched at her discernment.
“All in the service of distracting Captain Dunklin,” she said. “That’s not written anywhere in Hippocrates’s oath.”
Her concern touched him, she who had bigger problems than he did. Perhaps she wouldn’t mind a tease, since she seemed brave enough to voice her own.
“I’m certain Hippocrates intended it,” he told her. “The gist was perhaps lost in translation.”
To his pleasure, she smiled at his feeble wit. “Would it help if I feigned sleep this afternoon? That way, he won’t try to talk to me, and your headache will abate.”
She did precisely that as the ambulance bumped and rolled toward Fort Laramie, feigning sleep so expertly he wondered if she really did doze off. If she wasn’t actually asleep, then she knew precisely how to pretend.
He thought suddenly of his late wife, who had never feigned sleep because he never gave her reason to. He recalled Melissa’s pleasure at waiting up for him in the tent on that fatal march to Texas. Not for Melissa the hope that he would think