The last dress found its way to a grateful sergeant’s wife by midmorning the next day. By then, Private München had finished three more doll bodies, down to the black yarn hair, which he neatly sewed into black braids. He left the faces blank because neither of them knew how Sioux, Arikara, and Crow felt about personification. They cut out little dresses until after dark, then plotted tomorrow’s strategy.
They decided on simple dresses, held together by two hooks and eyes and a ribbon sash. Mary dashed back to the Mastersons’ and returned with four of the lieutenant’s handkerchiefs, begged for and given to her by a surprisingly cooperative Victoria. Perhaps word had gotten around that Sergeant Blade was even more formidable than anyone had previously imagined and Mary should be helped, for the good of the garrison. Mary was far too wise to question anyone’s motive.
The lawn handkerchiefs turned into nightgowns, on which Mrs. Hayes herself obligingly crocheted scalloped edges. The surgeon’s wife found scraps of blue wool uniform fabric and hand sewed cloaks herself, to Mary’s amazement.
“Hats would have been nice,” Mary told Private München when night came on, “but I promised to help Sergeant Blade.”
She went to the quartermaster warehouse to sew the blue-and-white mattress ticking into lining for Mathilde Frere’s coffin.
Rowan had scrounged a mattress pad from the post surgeon’s supply. He helped her tack the lining down and sat back, his eyes tired, to watch her sew it in place. She glanced over at him a time or two and watched him sleep sitting up.
She finished at midnight. Sergeant Blade walked around the coffin, running his hand over the sanded pine, then making sure the hinges didn’t squeak. “I’ll paint it early in the morning, and then we’ll wait,” he said.
She would have gone directly home, but as Rowan walked her by the guardhouse, Mary heard the sound of the treadle louder than usual, which meant someone was pushing down extra hard through stiff fabric. Curious, she dragged herself up the few steps and peeked in the window.
She opened the door to see Private München finishing the last of four bags made of canvas, just the right size for dolls with wardrobes. He looked up with a guilty expression, so she knew better than to ask where or how he had acquired canvas.
“You’ve been working so hard for me,” she said.
“It’s cold in the cell,” he told her. “This is better.”
“I wish I could pay you.”
“You have, fräulein.”
Rowan walked her home. “Tomorrow’s the big day?”
“Yes. Since Mrs. Masterson and Mrs. Hayes have been surprisingly helpful today, I told them I would assist with finishing touches on what I will laughingly call the ballroom.”
“They’ve been stringing Fourth of July bunting today, and the band has been practicing. A person could almost dance to their music now.” He chuckled. “The commissary clerk has developed a tic in his eye, but he’ll recover.”
“I think refreshments will be limited, at best,” Mary added. “I wish a supply wagon had been able to get through.”
“No one wishes that more than I do.”
“You were expecting something?”
“I was, but there might be an advantage to this isolation currently foisted upon us,” he said as they walked up the front steps. He put his hands on her shoulders. “It might mean you can’t leave as soon as you want to.”
Mary looked into his tired eyes and knew they mirrored her own. She rested her cheek against his chest, and his arms went around her.
“Don’t be in such a hurry to leave, Mary,” he said.
The day of the calico ball was like the day before, but with less wind and snow. Mary looked out her small window that was growing increasingly iced over, longing for a place where spring came when it was supposed to, then ushered in a mild, humid summer, the kind that left her cheeks smooth and soft and not peeling and tough from high plains wind.
She missed the little picture she had loaned to Mathilde Frere. Rowan had told her that Bill Curly had hung it right by her bed. He said she looked at it all the time now.
Mary lay in bed, steeling herself to throw back the warm covers and rush into her clothes. Lately she had started dreaming of dresses and dolls and charitable women who chased her around the guardhouse duty room, demanding this and that. And what could she do about that, since she was a spider? Oh, enough. She made the leap from bed, dressed quickly, and laid a fire in the kitchen range.
The little house was starting to smell fragrant with coffee when someone knocked. She hurried to the front door to see Sergeant Blade. She took his arm to pull him inside. He shook his head and pulled back.
“Mathilde died this morning, while I was painting her coffin.”
“I’m so sorry,” she said, and meant it. Who would take care of her three daughters? She thought Bill Curly was a good man, but what happened when a good man went on detached detail with his troop? What then? So many questions.
“Rowan, take the three dolls. Maybe the girls will want them right now. Leave me the one doll for my own particular urchin.”
He smiled at that. “She’ll be by for more raisins any day.” He touched his hand to his hat brim. “No dance for us tonight?”
“No dress,” she reminded him. “I’m truly sorry, because it would have been fun.”
The sergeant seemed to take the disappointment in good cheer, which left Mary a little irked, because she was still Mary, after all, and wanted a few more years to mature and improve her character, or so she reasoned.
“A person can plan and plan, and everything still changes,” he said. He tugged the collar higher on his overcoat. “On the bright side, a supply wagon from Fort Russell is stuck at Hunton’s stage station. With any luck at all, it might be here tomorrow or by the Fourth of July, depending.”
“Alas, too late,” she said with a laugh. “Mrs. Masterson told me the ladies were wishing for those canned oysters to arrive in time for stew tonight.”
She waved him into the cold again, wondering if there would be a funeral, wondering how the little girls would manage without their mother, and wondering why she wasn’t so overjoyed at the prospect of leaving. She wanted to go home. Didn’t she?
The day passed quickly. As promised, Mary swept the commissary warehouse floor over and over, looking each time for some improvement and seeing little. She quickly hemmed the last remaining yards of her pretty, dark-blue fabric on the Singer still in the duty room. By the time she finished, the hospital steward had drafted two nearly healthy patients to return the sewing machine to the post surgeon’s quarters.
She asked the duty sergeant if she could say goodbye to the tailor, only to be informed that Private München had been released to D Company again. He had left behind four doll hats woven of broom straw and lined with calico. She took the little dainties with a smile. She would wait a few days, then drop the hats off to their new owners, because every lady needs a hat.
She took her ironed material to the commissary warehouse and let Victoria arrange it on the white bedsheet loaned by the medical department. Her employer set the punch bowl on top and pronounced it successful.
“I’d like the fabric square back when the evening is over. I’ll take it back to New York as a souvenir of the dress that wasn’t and the dance where I didn’t,” she joked, and Victoria laughed.
Mary strolled home in the gathering twilight. The wind had died down, and the sun was setting in a fury of vivid pinks and purples that softened into lavender before it turned ordinary again. She heard laughter behind her and saw Victoria and her lieutenant walking arm in arm. Maybe there was hope for the Mastersons. It couldn’t be easy for a spoiled girl to turn into an army wife overnight. Perhaps things would work out, and fifty years from now in 1921, when the lieutenant was a general and Victoria terrorizing servants in Washington, DC, the Mastersons would look back on their time at Fort Laramie with fondness. Stranger things had likely happened.