Calico Ball Read online

  “Liar,” he said, which made her laugh, too. Maybe she was all right.

  Victoria Masterson came running, but not too fast, because she was a lady, and not too close, because of all the mud.

  Then Sergeant Blade astounded Mary, amazed her, and warmed her heart to a profound degree. “Mrs. Masterson, Miss Blue Eye leaped into the water to save your china.”

  Two thoughts seemed to collide inside Victoria Masterson’s admittedly roomy brain: Her china was gone. Her servant-friend had risked her life for it.

  Victoria gasped and started to cry. She didn’t go so far as to embrace her soaking wet servant, but she held out her hand. “Thank you, Mary,” she said. “I’ll never forget this.”

  Yes, you will, Mary thought, even as she wanted to laugh at the sergeant’s adroit interpretation of the event. And you, Sarge, should be a diplomatist.

  “Do you have dry clothes in the baggage wagon?” Sergeant Blade asked.

  Mary nodded, her face warm because it was a delicate subject. He helped her into the wagon, told the driver to back away, and organized a few troopers to travel downstream to see what they could salvage from the crate, if anything.

  Dry except for her hair and at least partly clean, Mary took a seat beside the driver, who looked at her with some awe now as the selfless attempted rescuer of a doomed china crate. She watched Sergeant Blade ride to the head of the column beside his officers, touched in her heart that his artless lie had made her a heroine and smoothed a path.

  She was certain the army didn’t pay him enough.

  But how did a body find an opportunity to get to know such a man better? Mary still stood before the mirror, which was not getting any silver polished. She sat down at the dining room table and applied herself to tarnish.

  It wasn’t a dining room. Second lieutenants were entitled to four rooms, if available, and none were. The Mastersons had crammed the table into a corner of the tiny parlor. Victoria had made quite a show of insisting that they call this side the dining room and the other side the parlor.

  Mary knew better than to argue. She had known Victoria all her life, well aware that once she dug in with an idea, it was there to stay, no matter how ridiculous. A new husband, Silas hadn’t learned his lesson yet. Mary had to pretend she didn’t hear a spirited argument that night. By morning, he was calling that corner of the room the dining room, and peace reigned.

  Mary’s room was a curtained alcove off the kitchen, probably meant for a cook. Once a bed had been crammed into the small space, there was room for little else.

  A cook. Another lively fight involved a question from the lieutenant, sounding both aggrieved and aghast: “You can’t cook anything?” At least, that was all Mary heard before he slammed the bedroom door.

  The Mastersons had solved that thorny issue by hiring a corporal’s wife from G Troop who claimed she could cook. The wary woman appeared for dinner, but took Mary aside to give her a shake and order her to manage breakfast and luncheon for Mrs. High-and-Mighty. “Boil eggs and make biscuits,” she snapped, then made it worse. “Even an Indian can do that.”

  Mary had set the last of the spoons in warm water when Victoria Masterson came home, quite the reverse of the confident woman earlier, answering a summons from the company commander’s and post surgeon’s wives, acknowledged leaders of Fort Laramie’s elite, at least according to them.

  The lady of the house sank into a chair and stared at the dishpan holding her spoons. Mary waited, confident that her friend/employer/who knew? would eventually speak.

  A massive sigh came first, followed by the drama. “I do not know what I have got myself into,” she said.

  Mary remained silent. Her mother had taught her the virtue of silence when dealing with “those of lighter skin,” as Mama put it. She waited.

  “Or rather, what two perfectly capable women have got me into,” Victoria amended, and glared at Mary, probably because she was handy.

  Silence still seemed wise to Mary.

  “Mary, have you heard of a calico ball?”

  Mary thought of an excruciating time ten years ago when she was eleven and her tribe had suffered through a poor harvest, followed by diphtheria. The Blue Eye family had been largely immune, since they lived on Judge Wilkins’s property, away from contagion.

  “Yes, I have,” she said. “Remember that bad winter when so many babies died?”

  Victoria shook her head, which came as no surprise to Mary.

  “Some of the ladies in the First Presbyterian Church held a calico ball, with proceeds and dresses going to my people,” Mary told her. Mama had politely handed back the dress Victoria’s own mother thought to give her, after the ball. She didn’t need it. When Mrs. Masterson insisted, Mama cut it down for Mary, who didn’t need it either.

  “I remember now. That was so kind of the church ladies,” Victoria said. Another sigh, then, “Mrs. Hayes and Mrs. Stanley are organizing a calico ball, with dresses and proceeds for the poor of Chicago, who lost everything in that fire.”

  Mary had a sudden vision of thousands of poor ladies lined up for perhaps twenty dresses headed their way from a four-company garrison in the middle of nowhere. “It might be a worthy project,” she said cautiously.

  “Might be,” Victoria said, with barely controlled distress. “Who is put in charge but the wife of the lowest-ranking officer on post? Me!”

  “Hmm,” seemed like the wisest reply.

  Then came The Look, which Mary recognized. She steeled herself.

  “I assured those two biddies that I have the perfect solution to calico dresses on demand. Surely you can guess.”

  “No, I can’t.” Mary said. Dread began to loom over her shoulder like a perched vulture.

  “You can make the dresses!”

  Mary stared at her employer and perhaps by this time, former friend. “But . . . With only a needle and thread? Victoria, I . . .”

  “Better call me Mrs. Masterson. I know it seems so formal, but you do work for me now,” Victoria said. “Mrs. Stanley has already corrected me about that.”

  Definitely former friend. Thank goodness the Union Pacific ran both west and east throughout the coming winter. “How many dresses?”

  “Perhaps fifteen. That would take care of the officers’ wives, who, I scarcely need tell you, don’t sew.” She laughed. “Don’t look so stunned! Heaven knows why, but Mrs. Hayes has a sewing machine. You have plenty of time. The dance is in four weeks.”

  Four weeks. Mrs. Masterson obviously had no idea how long fifteen dresses would take. “And my other duties?”

  “Oh, pish posh. You’ll have time.” Victoria looked at the clock. “Let’s go to the sutler’s store and look over the calico.”

  After which I will run away, Mary thought. Too bad Fort Laramie was surrounded by hostiles who wouldn’t stop to politely inquire if she had any Indian blood before scalping her.

  The sutler’s supply of calico proved to be nonexistent. Mary watched Victoria stand in front of the dry goods counter and stare, as if hoping that bolts of fabric would suddenly—poof!—materialize. Alas, no.

  Next stop was Mrs. Hayes’s quarters, where Victoria gave the captain’s wife the sad news.

  Mrs. Hayes took it in true army stride. “Simple. We’ll send uh—Mary, is it?—Mary to Cheyenne with a cavalry troop in a day or two. She can pick out fabric, hurry back here, and start sewing.”

  Mary knew better than to look around. Am I invisible? Can you ask me? she thought.

  “I should go, too,” Victoria said.

  “Heavens no, my dear! Hostiles are out and about. It would never do if something happened to you,” Mrs. Hayes said. “Mary can go.”

  Mary realized two things: first, she was expendable; second, perhaps Mama and Papa shouldn’t have spoiled her so much, going so far as to assure her that she was as good as a white woman. Maybe there was a third matter. In the eyes of these people, Victoria Masterson included now, she was an Indian servant in a place with no use for Indi
ans.

  The walk back to the Mastersons’ quarters featured nothing beyond the crunch of shoes on gravel, Victoria well beyond her usual languid stroll. Indecisive, she stood in the tiny alcove they laughingly called a foyer. Her mind made up, she mashed her hat down more firmly.

  “Start luncheon, Mary. I’m going to find Lieutenant Masterson.”

  Mary warmed the soup and buttered the bread. When they first arrived at Fort Laramie, the two of them had sat down together for lunch and chatted. That ended after Mrs. Stanley popped in unannounced one day and found them sitting together.

  Almost, but not quite, in a whisper, Mrs. Stanley set the new bride straight as Mary listened from the kitchen, hearing enough words to be chastised, which was probably the entire intention of the surgeon’s wife: “Not done . . . she’s your servant . . . remember her place . . .” Mary heard the unkind words long after Mrs. Stanley flounced away.

  Mary ate in the kitchen, then went onto the porch to watch for Victoria. “I could have told you, had you asked me, that it’s bad form to go traipsing after your husband in a garrison,” Mary said under her breath.

  She sat in a rocking chair and indulged in her favorite fantasy of imagining herself aboard an eastbound train. She heard a small noise and glanced over the railing to see an Indian woman with a little girl and a baby on her back. Mary had noticed them last week at the slaughtering floor behind the commissary storehouse. Some of the more bedraggled women stood there during the slaughter, begging silently with their eyes for whatever the army didn’t want.

  Victoria had sent her to the storehouse for another pound or two of the endless raisins that some harried clerk had sent their way from Omaha, perhaps mistaking an order of one hundred pounds for one thousand, which meant enough raisins to see them into the twentieth century.

  The private in Fort Laramie’s storehouse was equally harried and insisted that she needed ten pounds instead of the more modest two that Victoria had requested. “I don’t care what you do with them,” he said, then gestured toward the slaughterhouse. “Find some Indians.” His face grew solemn. “They’re always hungry.”

  Mary had done precisely that. She stopped a woman carrying a bloody bucket of entrails and brains and handed her small daughter a brown paper parcel bunched together and tied with twine. Gesturing with her fingers to her mouth, the universal sign for food that Mary knew from back home, she took some loose raisins from her basket and held them out.

  After a glance toward her mother, who nodded, the little one popped the raisins in her mouth, chewed, and smiled. She was a pretty child, with snapping brown eyes and hair neatly bound into two braids.

  Here they were again, standing silently at the edge of the porch, looking hopeful. They must have watched her return to this house last week, after she left the storehouse. Gesturing that they come closer, Mary hurried inside to the kitchen and poured more raisins into parcel paper.

  She opened the side door and gave the raisins to the child, receiving smiles in return, ample payment. Mary watched them walk toward the slaughter yard again. She noted the child’s ragged dress and wondered if the poor women of Chicago were better off, even with half of their city burned. Mama had told her more than once that charity begins at home.

  She walked around to the porch to see Sergeant Blade standing there, looking where she had looked.

  “They don’t have much, do they?” he commented. “The clerk in the storehouse told me last week that he was liberal with raisins, and you were, too.”

  “I hope that won’t get me thrown in the guardhouse,” Mary said, not certain if levity was the better part of valor, concerning a sergeant.

  “No. I expect a lot of us would like to help,” he said, and followed her onto the porch. “I know I would.”

  “Can’t you?” she asked, curious.

  “That’s a problem with being a first sergeant, Miss Blue Eye. We’re supposed to follow all regulations. Even stupid ones,” he said. “I’ll leave the charity to you.”

  What did one do with a sergeant on the porch? Mary knew she couldn’t ask him inside; it wasn’t her house, and no one was home. He solved her problem by indicating the rocking chair while he perched on the porch railing, somehow managing to look dignified while doing it. She decided this was not a man bothered much by inconvenience.

  “I’m here to warn you,” he began, with no preliminaries other than a glance over his shoulder toward the parade ground. “You are going to Cheyenne for calico.”

  “Apparently your captain’s wife told Mrs. Masterson that the trip was too dangerous for her, but not for me,” Mary said. She wished she could hide the edge to her voice. “After all, we must have calico.”

  “You will be all right. I guarantee it. I’m leading the patrol. We are also to escort the paymaster, who is arriving tomorrow from Fort Fetterman, on his way to the railroad in Cheyenne.”

  He stood up and didn’t disguise the edge to his voice. “He wants the ambulance to himself.” She saw the discomfort on his face. “That’s partly my doing. I asked if a lady could share it with him. He asked who she was, and I . . .”

  “. . . told him Miss Blue Eye, whereupon Major Pettifog decided it was a small ambulance and couldn’t possibly accommodate another person,” Mary finished.

  “Bravo, Miss Blue Eye!” Sergeant Blade exclaimed. “Major Pettifog, indeed. Actually, his name is Pettigrew, so you were close.”

  “And he doesn’t much care for Indians.” Mary said what she knew he would not say. “I’ve heard it before.”

  “Even back East?”

  “Not as much there. My skin is light, and I tend to blend in.” She looked at the woman and child in the distance now. “Not so much out here.”

  “No, and more’s the pity.” He waved his hand. “Change of subject. Can you ride horseback?”

  Mary couldn’t help her smile. “I’ve been riding since I was young. I brought my riding skirt along, but I don’t have a sidesaddle.”

  “I’ll find you one. It’ll be a fast trip. Major Pettigrew is eager to return to the comforts of Omaha. I am also informed by an unimpeachable source that there are many dresses for you to sew.”

  “Please don’t tell me that Mrs. Masterson made a scene, with tears and demands,” she blurted out.

  “I won’t, then,” the sergeant said, amused. “Suffice it to say we all heard a convincing argument for calico.”

  Mary sighed.

  “How did you get involved in this nonsense? It couldn’t have been your idea.”

  She looked over his shoulder to see the Mastersons walking across the parade ground now. “Here they come. I will blame Mrs. O’Leary’s cow back in Chicago. Think of the abuse that poor bovine will suffer in coming years.”

  The sergeant chuckled at that. “Tell me quick, because I want to know.”

  “Mrs. Masterson was put in charge of a calico ball because she is married to a second lieutenant who only outranks earthworms.”

  Aware the Mastersons were advancing, he laughed silently. “You are wise beyond your years, Miss Blue Eye. I suppose you can sew and she cannot, and you’ve suddenly become responsible for a lot of dressmaking because other ladies are equally helpless.”

  “Precisely, Sergeant.”

  “My name is Rowan.”

  “I’m Mary.”

  “Ready to ride the day after tomorrow?”

  “As I’ll ever be.”

  He gave her a small salute that made her smile. There was something in his eyes that reminded her of her own father, although they looked nothing alike. Maybe it was his genuine interest, which she knew she did not merit, because he barely knew her. She could probably tell him anything.

  “Sergea . . . Rowan,” she began.

  He inclined his head in her direction, an invitation to continue.

  “I think . . . I wish we could make dresses for that Indian woman and her little girl who are right here at Fort Laramie,” she said. “I don’t think they’ve rubbed up against much g
ood luck lately if they’re carrying buckets of guts.”

  “They haven’t,” Rowan agreed. “Over the Laramie beyond Suds Row, there’s a whole camp of them that get by on handouts. Maybe her man died in a buffalo hunt. Maybe disease took him. They’re on their own. Some people call them Laramie Loafers, but they work so hard to stay alive.” He clapped his hands together, and she saw his frustration. “The West is changing, Mary Blue Eye. It’s not a kind place for people who used to be the lords of the earth.”

  “I can understand that,” she replied. “I’ll be ready. Really early?”

  “Really early.”

  Two days later, with a pouch of money from ladies needing dresses, Mary found herself thrown into the saddle by a man who knew what he was doing. She smiled down at the sergeant, pleased to be riding with a well-organized, efficient troop, and not negotiating life, for a few days at least, with a childish employer and her increasingly baffled husband.

  I am with an adult, she thought, relieved and not a little amused. “Just tell me what to do, and I will do it,” she told Sergeant Blade. “I mean, I can stay out of the way however is most convenient.”

  “All you have to do is ride beside me. No eating dust on this trip. I’ll take better care of you.”

  Why should that make her face go warm? The perpetual wind blowing cool across her face helped tamp down the pink. Thank goodness the sergeant had turned away to speak to Major Pettigrew, department paymaster who had finished his circuit of forts and was headed to headquarters in Omaha.

  He turned back, and she noted that his face was red, too. Perhaps the wind was stronger than she thought. Or perhaps he wasn’t any more practiced in female conversation than she was with talking to men not of her family. Mama had been scrupulous about her only daughter’s deportment.

  “Miss Blue Eye,” he began more formally. She doubted the sergeant had mentioned to his troops that he was already calling her Mary.

  “Yes, Sergeant?” she asked, not slow by any means.

  She saw the appreciation in his eyes. “Major Pettigrew here has suggested you put the calico fabric money in the strongbox as we travel to the railroad.”