Wolves of Eden Read online

  WOLVES OF EDEN

  A NOVEL

  Kevin McCarthy

  W. W. NORTON & COMPANY

  Independent Publishers Since 1923

  NEW YORK LONDON

  To my father,

  Colonel Geoffrey McCarthy MD USAF Retired

  and

  To the memory of the American Indian peoples who suffered and died defending their homeland and the impoverished immigrant soldiers who suffered and died in the U.S. government’s efforts to take it from them.

  CONTENTS

  The Bozeman Trail and Its Forts, 1866

  I. A JOB OF WORK

  II. WESTERING

  III. CITY OF LOGS

  Historical Note

  Bibliography

  Acknowledgments

  WOLVES OF EDEN

  I

  A JOB OF WORK

  Something startles me where I thought I was safest,

  I withdraw from the still woods I loved,

  I will not go now on the pastures to walk,

  I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea,

  I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me.

  O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?

  How can you be alive you growths of spring?

  How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?

  Are they not continually putting distemper’d corpses within you?

  Is not every continent work’d over and over with sour dead?

  —WALT WHITMAN,

  “THIS COMPOST”

  1

  December 21, 1866—​Fort Phil Kearny, Dakota Territory

  THERE IS A JUDAS HOLE IN THE HEAVY WOODEN DOOR. Peering through it, the cavalry officer can see the prisoner sleeping under a buffalo hide rug on a rough, grass-​stuffed mattress, his forage cap pulled as low as it will go against the cold. The officer tries to summon the prisoner’s face from days past, from the war.

  It is bitter winter and the cavalry officer can see his own breath, the dirt floor of the fort’s guardhouse frozen solid under his boots. In his hand is a hardbacked quartermaster’s accounts ledger belonging to the prisoner and in it is the prisoner’s story. The officer cannot be certain that this story is the truth but he feels it is a kind of truth, a strain of verity.

  In his account, the prisoner has written that he and the officer have met once before but there is much about the war that the officer has forgotten, wishes to forget. He was drunk for much of it. Has been drunk since and is drunk again now.

  A truth. There are as many truths as there are witnesses to a thing, the officer thinks. But it does not matter. Murder cannot matter. If it did, there would be little left to do in the world for men such as himself. Men such as the prisoner sleeping behind this door. For if God loves us and has put us here for a reason, then surely He means for us to do what we have found we do best? It does not matter.

  2

  THE TRUE TESTAMENT & CONFESSIONS OF A SOLDIER IN THE 18TH INFANTRY IN THE REGULAR ARMY OF THE UNITED STATES AT FORT PHIL KEARNY IN THE MOUNTAIN DISTRICT

  —​December 18, 1866—​YOU WILL WANT TO LAUGH WHEN I tell you it was a General who did give me the idea to write down an account of my days here in the far & forlorn West. It was a General you would hardly believe it but it is True As God.

  At Ft. Caldwell in the Nebraska Territories it was & I labouring for Mrs. Carrington & while packing the madam’s things for transport I overheard the great General William T. Sherman himself tell Mrs. Carrington & the other officer wives that to venture so far West with their husbands in the service of the Army & not record their sentiments & observations would be pure criminal. “A crime on the historical record!” the General said & the ladies did all agree & swear blind to him they would keep account of the adventures to befall them.

  Well there was I no better than an ox porting crates & bed frames as the ladies took their coffee & cakes with our beloved Uncle Billy Sherman but says I to myself that day, “Well why not you Michael?” Why do you not keep an account of your adventures & travails? Why not? You did soldier alongside boys who kept journals in the War & who did adorn them with fine drawn pictures & cartes de visits & all shades & colours of ribbons & stories cut from the papers so to record the events of battles they fought in.

  One fellow I remember well he just wrote down the songs sung & stories told about the camp because he did not like to think too much on the fighting but all of them boys somehow made testament to a time in their lives when they were chucked into the roaring flames of history. So if they could do it well why not you Michael? I did wonder that day with the crates I carried for Mrs. Carrington dragging the arms near off me.

  For though it is usually the Generals & Admirals who write down memories of their wars while Sailor Jack or Soldier Bill does the dying for them it does not state anywhere in the Articles of War that a plain fighting man such as myself cannot write down his own account of what such flames do look like from inside of history’s fire.

  But did I take to writing when I heard the Great Sherman say this? Of course I did not no more than I would of done it in the War. Never once before this moment did I write a single thing about myself or my brother to spite thinking much of the notion that day at Ft. Caldwell in the Nebraskas. It is only now when I am not free at all but instead have the time & the quiet of the Guardhouse that I can write of how my brother & myself come to be in such a tight spot as we are in now with you Sir breathing down our necks like I do not know what kind of beast in the forest.

  I think it strange & sad it comes to this but I will do it anyway & it will be an account of sorts but it will not be a diary or story for my children to read or their children or for myself to look back on when I am old & grey. No. I will write it for you Sir. For though you surely will not recall it we met once before myself & my brother & yourself & at that meeting you did save us from certain harm or death indeed in a place called the Slaughter Pen at Chickamauga in Tennessee. I am in your debt Sir. We are in your debt & because of this you will have my record of events when a different man sent to hang us would not.

  But do not expect this to be an easy record of my guilt because I have learnt that a man can be convicted of a thing by law & feel nothing about it one way or the other in his heart while guilt can eat him alive for a thing different altogether even though this may be something that the law will never know or care a thing about.

  I tell you Sir things may be different altogether to how you might reckon them. Or perhaps things are exactly as you imagine them to be. It does not matter for if I have the time & lamp oil enough for it I will try to lay things out for you. As you know yourself we have a saying a shanockal as we call it in the language of home we both share which goes Ni few dada scall gan udar. I do not know how to write it properly but it means in English that a story told by a man with no knowledge of it is a worthless thing. So I say to you that while you may of heard stories about what happened that night in Sutler Kinney’s shebeen well all such tales are worthless things nothing but nonsense & gossip & slander.

  But I do know the story worth telling. Perhaps it is only myself & my brother Tom who know it in full. Most of the others well they are no more of this world May God Give Them Rest. (Some of them but not all.)

  So you will have the truth of things but I must first beg you Sir to forgive my poor show of letters here for I am not a learned man. Our father would only allow his children go to lessons when their labouring was done & since then I have only the back East newspapers & borrowed books for a school master so you must go easy with me.

  Is it strange that I feel in my heart I should write this in the tongue I was rared up with that is as gwaylga or the Gaelic? I feel
it is wrong that I cannot do it but the Master did not teach us to write in it while mother & father could not write anything in any language for they had no schooling. And though the Master’s Irish was lovely & fine for a foreign man from Tipperary he always said that we had enough of the Rough Tongue at home & what we should acquire was the language of the conquering Crown if ever were we to get on in the World of Men. For the Gaelic is fine for songs & yarns but it will get a body nowhere at all in the Courts of Law or at Market the Master did warn us more than once. He fell down to the bloody flux in ’46 or ’47 so that was the end of my schooling but he gave me enough English to write this I do hope.

  All of which is a fine joke because for all the Bearla we now speak you may see here in these pages how well my brother & myself have got on in this World of Men because for the poor man there is no language not even the Queen’s Own English that will keep his neck from the noose if his betters want it in there God Help Us.

  (Well God has not done that as you will soon see.)

  3

  November 12, 1866—​Dept. of the Platte HQ, Post of Omaha, Nebraska Territory

  “HE DRUNK AGAIN, CORPORAL?”

  “There’s no again in it when it comes to the captain.”

  “He ain’t no captain, neither. There be only one pumpkin rind apiece on them shoulder straps there.” The young private points to the chair where the sleeping officer’s uniform tunic is hanging.

  “Brevet captain. He was knocked back in rank like all the others when the war ended. He’s still a captain, though he’s no longer paid as one and doesn’t like being called it.”

  “Like Custer don’t still like being called General?”

  “You ever met Custer, Private Rawson?”

  “No I have not.”

  “Did you fill the bath?”

  “I filled it. And there be soap. I found some soap.”

  “There’s a medal for that. Warm but not too warm?”

  “The soap or the bath?”

  Corporal Daniel Kohn turns and stares at Private Rawson, searching for sarcasm but settling on stupidity because that is mostly what one encounters in the army.

  “The bath, you dunderhead. The captain’s nerves don’t take to too hot water on waking. You’ll hear him roaring all over the goddamn post if that water’s too hot.”

  “Well you check it then, Corp. It ain’t too hot for me, but how’s I supposed to know ‘just right’ for Captain Mucky Muck?” The young private looks down on the sleeping officer with distaste. It is a distaste his orderly, Corporal Kohn, often shares.

  “Just grab an arm and aid me. By the time we wake him and get him stripped down, it should be all right.” Corporal Kohn leans over the officer. “And for God’s sake, don’t light a match. We’d all go up like I don’t know what.”

  Private Rawson says, “Like a goddamn cotton barn.”

  Kohn smiles. He had set more than one of those alight only recently. A year ago. More? It seems like yesterday.

  He pats the captain’s cheek lightly at first. “Captain Molloy? Captain? You need to wake up, sir.”

  The pats turn to slaps. A bar of sun flares through a gap in the canvas curtains and lights the officer’s face. His eyes squeeze shut in response.

  “Captain, you need to rouse yourself. General Cooke’s summoned you, sir. You’ve got one hour.”

  The officer’s eyelids flicker.

  The private says, “He’s right and properly fucked. He be worse than General Cooke hisself.”

  “He’s worse than most.”

  Private Rawson says, with some relish, “You know Cooke can’t abide a tardy man. Can’t abide an early man neither. He be a crochety sonofabitch.”

  “I know that.” Slap. “Captain, wake up.”

  The officer’s eyes open, gluey lips part to speak. “I’ll have you shot . . .”

  “I hope not, sir, but you’ll have to rouse yourself to do it.”

  The officer rolls over and drags a blanket across his eyes. Sour sweat and whiskey fumes in the small barracks room. Don’t light a match. An empty jug on the small desk, another upturned on the floor. Belts and cavalry cutlass in a tangle in the corner.

  Corporal Kohn takes up the officer’s tunic and inspects it, picks at something encrusted on the dark blue wool. Dry food. Puke? A damp rag will have to do, he thinks. Damp rag and a brush to the tunic and run the britches under a hot iron. Time for it? Have to be. Rawson can give the boots and belts a wipe. Drunk again? Drunk still. Two years of it nearly. Kohn knows the day and the hour when drunk sometimes became drunk all the time.

  “Take an arm, Private. We don’t have all day. And then heelball his boots and belts as best you can. We can’t have him meeting the General looking like he’s been dragged ass backwards through a bush.”

  WITH ONLY A SCARRED, paper-​strewn desk between himself and the general, First Lieutenant Martin Molloy, 7th Cavalry, tries to keep himself from smiling. Poor, poor Cooke, he thinks. General Philip St. George Cooke. Bitter bastard. Bitterest bastard in the whole godforsaken army. The bitter root. You’d be bitter too if your son-​in-​law whipped you like a thieving housemaid in the war. And Cooke’s own son even, John Rogers, another rebel Sessioner who will not speak to his father. Poor man.

  I am three sheets to the breeze still, God bless us, Molloy thinks. Coffee and brandy and a lukewarm bath. A shave and manhandled into uniform. What would I do without Daniel, my lovely, loyal Daniel Kohn? God bless and save his snipped prick. Court-​martialled five times over, no doubt, but for him. He knows me. The one man in the world. Knows my ways, knows why, thank God. So, coffee and brandy, thank Daniel. And when the coffee and brandy burn off? God help me, torment surely. Terrible things to be seen behind the eyes. Nothing to smile about. Hell to pay if I sober up before we’re done here. Set your face straight to bitter Cooke, Molloy tells himself. Mighty, bearded, bitter Cooke. Molloy winks at Kohn, who is standing at parade rest in front of the office door, but Kohn is inscrutable.

  “Is there something you find amusing, Lieutenant Molloy?”

  Lieutenant and not Brevet Captain or Captain, as is the customary address for those promoted during the war and then demoted at its end. He must have seen me smile. Don’t, for the love of all that’s holy, smile in the good general’s presence. Though why not, by God? All of this a dusty rag, a soiled ruse, Molloy thinks. Every day passed above ground.

  “No sir, not at all.”

  General Cooke shifts his gaze to Molloy’s orderly. “Kohn . . . ”

  “Yessir,” Corporal Kohn says.

  “I knew Spiegel in the war. A good officer, Spiegel. He was a Jew.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Blown to bits at Snaggy Point. Didn’t find much of him. Did you know the man?”

  “No sir, I was 5th Cavalry, sir.”

  “With Custer?”

  “Yessir. With Captain Molloy under Custer on 2nd Division staff in Texas and now in the 7th at Fort Riley, sir.”

  Cooke’s mouth folds in on itself. “Custer. You’re dismissed, Corporal.”

  Molloy stares at Cooke as Kohn leaves. Cooke was quick to spot Kohn for a Jew, he thinks. Everybody’s on the lookout for them now, the occupied South supposedly infested with leeching bankers and postwar profiteers. Molloy had never met a single Jew man among the many leeches he met while on occupation duty in Shreveport or Austin though he’d met many who were as Christian as Christ himself. What matter is Kohn’s race to Cooke? Didn’t profit much from the war himself, the good general. Or Kohn. Poor Kohn got nothing but scars and horses shot out from under him from the war. And me, God love him. He got me.

  Molloy keeps his face blank. I’d kill a priest for a drink, he thinks, pondering his chances in present company. Known to take a drop himself, Cooke. You’d know it to look at him. Molloy’s eyes drift to the ticking clock on the wall, roman numbers reading 10:20. His hope dies with the time. Not even a frontier posted general drinks at 10:20 of a November morning. Not as a rule. Mol
loy lets his eyes wander to the window at Cooke’s back. A large cottonwood tree with its sparse scatter of wet yellow leaves glinting in the sun. Autumn dying into winter. Jesus in heaven, where does a bloody year get to?

  Cooke is speaking.

  “Sir?”

  “I said Custer must not like you much. I’ve never known a first lieutenant, a company first, exiled as you’ve been with only a string of ponies for an excuse to be rid of him.”

  Exiled? The pot and the kettle, my dear General, Molloy thinks and again tries to keep from smiling. He hears himself say, “He has good reason not to like me, sir, as I most definitely do not like him. I have requested . . .” He clears his throat. “I have requested—​”

  “I understand Custer’s shunned the bottle. And ungentlemanly language.” Molloy hears mockery in Cooke’s words, though whether it is for himself or for Custer he does not know or care. Numb.

  He hears himself continue, “I have requested a transfer out of the 7th several times, sir.”

  “The regiment is larger than the men in it, Lieutenant.”

  “And only as strong as the men who lead it, General.” He feels safe enough speaking this way because he knows, without having considered it before, what Cooke thinks of Custer, the blond-​locked peacock: the youngest general in army history. A glorious, bold, battlefield brevet promotion—​like Molloy and so many others—​now back to colonel in peacetime though still called “General” Custer in the papers back East. Meanwhile, Cooke had found himself riding a recruiting desk for much of the war and now tasked with running the North Platte or Mountain District or whatever they are calling it these days while the papers talk high political office for George Armstrong Custer. No one talks at all of St. George Cooke. Not after the whipping he took in the war. Molloy knows in his bones Cooke despises Custer on his reputation alone.