Seize the Sky

He turned, a strange and haunting look in those wintercold eyes of his. Eyes gone tired, like rumpled, worn baggage to Burkman. John glanced down at Custer’s hands, held out before him as if clutching something, gripping it for all it was worth. As if he would never let it go. Burkman’s eyes crawled back to Custer’s face, to those sapphire eyes, which now seemed to peer right through the striker.

“We’ll find them, John,” he whispered. “Once I find them, I’ll have myself a place in history.”

Burkman swallowed hard, trembling as he clutched the cream-colored hat he had been brushing clean of dust for Custer’s outfit in the morning. “Yes, General. A place in history—”

“Autie!”

With the sound of Tom’s voice hailing him from beyond the fire, Custer whirled on his heel. Three forms loomed into the light, all arm in arm, the trio eating ground in huge strides as they marched up to Custer’s tent.

“We’re headed over to take ol’ Terry up on that whiskey!” Tom held up one hand carrying five canteens.

“Those all yours, Tom?”

“Not all,” he answered with a snort. “One of ’em belongs to Lieutenant Harrington!”

“Four for you, brother?”

“’At’s right, General!” Keogh blared, holding aloft his own four canteens. “Thomas here’s a good lad—stout drinking bunkie, if ever there was one. He is, he is. We’d made good bunkies of it, in the old days of the war of rebellion, that is!”

“James,” Custer said as he stepped from the tent flaps, looking squarely at Calhoun, “you’ll see these two don’t get themselves into any serious trouble tonight, will you?”

“Aye, sir!” He saluted. “We don’t plan on drinking all that much tonight anyway.”

“Glad to hear that, fellas. Save it to drink a little at a time on the march.”

“Little at a time?” Tom snorted. “Autie, you’ve just never learned how to live. You’ll be dying a wretched old man—wondering what it was to have lived!”

“I’ve had my bout with whiskey, Tom—back to Monroe. Sworn off it completely.”

“How well we know of that. I’d be the last to blame a man for not holding his liquor!” Tom chuckled along with Keogh and Calhoun. His smile faded as he studied his brother’s face. “But you’ve not truly enjoyed yourself ever since … sixty-nine, wasn’t it? Sixty-nine when you had to send that Cheyenne gal away. I don’t remember her name, Autie.”

Keogh found Custer’s eyes on him, as if seeking confirmation. “That be the gospel, ’tis, General. You ain’t the same man since that Cheyenne girl. Whatever she done to you, it made you a happy soul.”

Burkman saw Custer swallow. “Well,” he said selfconsciously, “you boys take care this evening.” He worried a palm over the stubby bristles of his thinning hair a few times, as if he wanted out of a fix but didn’t reckon on getting his bearings. “Don’t get drunk and scalped while over there round Gibbon’s boys. I’ll need you three this time out, you know.”

“That barber Sipes isn’t getting anywhere near us!” Tom roared, slapping Calhoun on the back.

The scene was happy once more. Every bit as happy as it had been somber a brief moment ago. No more talk of the past. Only talk of a future borne up the Rosebud.

“Let’s be walking, laddies!” Keogh howled, prodding the other two from Custer’s tent. “That bleeming shoneen of a trader’s got whiskey … and Myles Keogh’s got him a thirst to match!”

“See you to the morning, General!” Tom’s voice came back from the thickening darkness swallowing the trio.

That stopped Custer dead in his tracks. He turned to stare after the men, certain it was Tom’s voice he had heard. Dead certain. But brother Tom had never addressed him by rank before. Tom had never called him General.…

As he and his friends were rowed over to the Far West, moored snugly against the north bank of the Yellowstone, Tom Custer studied the brightly lit steamboat gently rocking atop the river like a glittering tree ornament. From the sounds of the hurrahs and laughter, coupled with the sights of shadowy forms darting across the yellow splash of lights on deck, Tom figured Coleman’s whiskey kegs would do a hard business of it tonight.

Not all that unusual, he thought to himself as Keogh laughed with Calhoun.

There had been whiskey sellers dogging the trail of the Dakota Column once it marched away from Fort Abraham Lincoln. Seemed that out in this lonely part of the world, once anyone who had a way to transport cheap whiskey heard of an army unit marching into the field, a whiskey trader of one color or another would be attending each night’s stop. Tonight beneath an overcast Yellowstone moon, it appeared the government-licensed trader aboard the Far West would make himself a small fortune from army coffers at Terry’s behest, as well as taking out of each soldier’s pockets whatever the man had left in the way of loose pay after all this time on the trail.

True enough, Tom realized that trader James Coleman had made out quite well along the column’s way west.

Coleman and his partner Sipes stayed busy tonight minding their whiskey kegs. For all but the most hardened of drinkers, the traders’ whiskey seemed the best bargain offered beneath that canvas awning. The troopers believed they could get more mileage out of a dollar pint of cheap grain alcohol than they could out of damned near anything else Coleman had for sale. The trader rightfully worried of running out of whiskey this last night at the mouth of the Rosebud, what with so many men from the Seventh filling their canteens with his cheap corn mash.

Growling, Coleman constantly reminded that rowdy, shoving crowd beneath his awning that they had to leave him with something in his whiskey kegs for the party he’d throw after the regiment marched back down the Bighorn—the victorious Seventh Calvary once more.

“The men what bring me Crazy Horse’s scalp along with Sitting Bull’s … I’ll let those men finish a keg all on their own!” Coleman promised down at the end of the crude plank bar Tom leaned against.

The tent rang with exuberant voices of hundreds of shoving, sweaty soldiers, each one cursed of an undying thirst yet to be quenched. Coleman’s was a promise that made every dry recruit think hard on searching out those two infamous chieftains all on one’s own.

“Shit!” a soldier near Tom joked among his friends in a fevered, drunken knot, “how the hell is this trader gonna know if a scalp I raise come from the head of Crazy Horse himself anyway?”

“Hell!” another soldier shouted to the trader pouring his cup full of amber liquid. “Maybe this whiskey of yours’ll even stop my damned knees from rattling like nails in a hollow keg!”

Very few Seventh Calvary officers ended up playing poker or monte that night aboard the Far West. Most of the gamblers turned out to be members of Gibbon’s or Terry’s staffs. Custer’s officers chose better things to do with their time.

This inky night that had slithered over the mouth of the Rosebud found most of the young men, and old alike penning a last letter home. Their officers had informed them some Rees were heading east in the morning with some of the last mail to be dispatched for a week or more, suggesting the men use the time wisely. Those who couldn’t write had those who could pen still more letters. And for a few hours, most minds and hearts were on home. Even those old files who didn’t have any other home but the army now still possessed some dim, foggy memory of that warm, secure place where a man’s mind will go before he’s pushed to think of nothing more basic than staying alive.

Letters to family back in the States. Long, rambling, promising letters to sweethearts … pretty faces that stared out at a young, frightened man in blue from a little tintype he guarded in his hand as he scribbled some last words to that special someone back in Ohio or Michigan, New York or South Carolina. A tintype he would eventually slip inside his blouse and wear against his skin over the next few days as they stalked the mighty Lakota bands.

It would never change, no matter what war a man found himself marching off to. There was always someone he could write and tell of the secret fears he didn’t dare share with his fellow soldiers. Private words of longing and loneliness scratched across endless pages of foolscap that last night at the Yellowstone beneath a flickering of oil lamps and torches and firelight.

Small clusters of officers huddled in those late hours to pen their wills, then have those solemn testaments