An Obituary for Major Reno Read online

  It was too late now. He could not call in Richler and try again, this time dwelling on his memories of the Little Bighorn. Impulse had been the bane of his life; impulse had caught him a peck of trouble from his West Point days onward. Impulse had steered him away from saying anything meaningful to the shrewd Washington correspondent of the most brilliantly managed newspaper on earth.

  Even as Reno was thus absorbed, chastening himself for wasting yet another opportunity, the very man who occupied his thoughts arrived, shed a black cape, pulled off his plug hat, unwound his scarf, and clasped the major’s hand.

  “I wanted to see how you’re doing,” he said. “Can you talk at all, even a little?”

  Reno shook his head.

  “I see you have a notepad. Give me a nod or a shake; do you want me here?”

  Reno nodded. Give the man one minute. After that he wished to be alone.

  “You’re hurting, eh?”

  Reno nodded.

  “Morphia help any?”

  A nod.

  “I have to think how to phrase things so you can answer. I’ll get the hang of it. I’m glad you came through. Soon you’ll be back at the pension office. I’ve been thinking ever since I last saw you that you did something beautiful when I visited you. Instead of dwelling on your … the thing that’s absorbed you all these years, you talked about Mrs. Reno. You gave her your last utterances, like a bouquet. When I walked away from your flat I was puzzled at first; odd that a man in your position would do that, talk about Mary Hannah, talk so passionately that somehow I came to know what a beloved and special woman she was.

  “But it was not what I expected, you know. Before I got there I thought to myself, Reno’s going to blister the hides of a few officers. He’s going to scorch a few congressmen. He’s going to savage a few Custer partisans, like your nemesis, Whittaker, who has wanted you hanged, drawn, and quartered ever since his hero Custer met his reward. But you didn’t. You turned to something larger.”

  Reno could not imagine what to say, even if he had a tongue to say it. So he nodded.

  “You’re not what I thought. You’ve awakened my curiosity. You asked me for help; it was one of the last things you said before the operation. I agreed, but frankly, not with any enthusiasm.

  “I’ve been thinking, major. Maybe it’s not a correspondent’s office to help you, but I am feeling like it. Once you’re on your feet, I’m going to consult with you. Oh, it’ll be slow, and you’ll have to write out your answers, but we’ll make progress. You’ve a story to tell, and I think no one’s told it. Maybe there’ll be a story for me, for the Herald—in fact I’m counting on it.”

  Reno nodded. Please do help me.

  “You want to write down some names? Show me where to start? I know some of it, but start from scratch.”

  Reno nodded again. His mind was too clouded to remember all the names, and he didn’t doubt they would be drugging him again soon, because his mouth was tormenting him.

  He plucked up the pencil and wrote:

  My army records.

  Sherman

  Sen. Cushman Davis

  Congressman Dan Ermentrout

  Every surviving man at LBH

  Every officer Seventh Cav

  Esp. Benteen

  Terry

  Gibbon

  That was enough. He couldn’t think of others, though they would number in the hundreds. He tore off the sheet and handed it to Richler, who pocketed it.

  “Major, I don’t know why you interest me, but you do. I’ll report to you soon, and meanwhile, heal up fast.”

  Reno watched the man don his outerwear and leave, and then he lay abed, alone.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  THE PRESS OF NEWS OCCUPIED RICHLER THE NEXT TWO DAYS, AND when he did finally stop in to see Major Reno at Providence Hospital, he was shocked.

  Reno stared up at him from feverish eyes set in black sockets. His right hand was swathed with a huge, soft bandage. Reno barely acknowledged the newsman’s presence with the slightest nod.

  One of the nursing nuns, this one named Sister Carmelita, appeared at once.

  “Mr. Reno has a fever and erysipelas, Mr. Richler. It’s very contagious, and you should keep your distance.”

  Richler nodded but did not step back. He knew at a glance that Major Reno would not survive for long. The man could convey nothing now, lacking voice and hand, and yet the correspondent understood clearly what the major desperately sought to convey. It took no words. That burning gaze, that slow searching of Richler’s face, that transfixing minute when the failing man conveyed every dream, every hope, every resolve, did not fail to reach Richler. And slowly the newsman nodded.

  “Yes, major,” he said. “Yes, count on me.”

  Reno closed his eyes and did not reopen them. Richler tarried a minute longer, and then left the ward, only to run into Doctor Hamilton in the corridor.

  “How long?” Richler asked.

  “Double pneumonia. His lungs are filling. It often follows erysipelas, you know, textbook case. I don’t know how long. Hours now. We all hoped he would have many more years. But unless there’s a miracle …”

  There would be no miracle.

  “Have you notified his son?” Richler asked.

  The doctor seemed slightly offended. “He’s in Tennessee and expected here the first of April.”

  “Too late, I imagine.”

  “Who knows? Best you wash up in that basin, Mr. Richler. It’s a dangerous disease.”

  Richler nodded, cleansed his hands, and walked into the March sun.

  He had made a commitment to a dying man. A half-hearted commitment, though the major didn’t know that. Richler had no great desire to pursue the matter of Major Reno’s honor and reputation. Yet he knew that he would do what he could.

  Two days later, the morning of Saturday, the thirtieth of March, Major Reno died. No one other than the doctor and the sisters were attending him; no one from his family. No friend, no colleague, no officer, no survivor of the Little Bighorn, who owed his life to the major.

  The remains were moved to the John W. Lee Funeral Home where they were embalmed. All this Richler followed in the papers. News was breaking during that period, and he had much to cover. Congress had enacted, in February, enabling legislation to bring four northwestern territories, North and South Dakota, Montana, and Washington, into the Union as states, and now these vast domains were gearing up for statehood.

  It struck Richler that Reno’s demise coincided with Montana’s statehood. Only thirteen years before, most of Montana was utter wilderness, the domain of the Sioux and Crow and Blackfeet and Assiniboine, and there Reno had met his fate on the banks of the Little Bighorn River. Now it would be electing senators and a representative, erecting a capitol building, and running cattle where buffalo had roamed.

  There was, at last, the newspaper notice of a visitation on the first of April, and Richler hastened to attend. He found few names in the guest registry, and none proceeded by a military title. Mostly pension office people, Reno’s last contacts. The plain dark coffin was closed, and no flag of the United States lay upon it, nor any military decorations, for this man had been dishonorably separated from the army, and his enemies thought that even that was not enough; he should be forever calumniated and scorned.

  A great pity filled Richler; here was the barest of tributes to a gallant soldier who had served his country for almost three decades.

  The silence was eerie. The mortician hovered about, keeping candles lit, but no other guests or mourners arrived.

  If the visitation was mournful, the funeral was even more so. Now at last Richler got a glimpse of Reno’s son, Robert Ross, who appeared to be someone of the flashy sort, dandied up for the occasion. The man had married into a substantial Nashville family that operated a wholesale liquor business, bought a quarter of the business with funds from the trust provided by his mother, and began spending heavily.

  Ross, as he was called, and his wife Itty,
were there for the brief service at the funeral parlor Tuesday, April 2, 1889. And so was Richler, who came alone and sat at the rear. Reno’s roots were French; his name was an anglicized version of Renaud, but he was nominally Protestant, of Huguenot descent, and the brief and toneless service unfolded in that manner.

  A graveside service at Washington’s Glenwood Cemetery was neither the time nor place to talk to the son, so Richler put it off. But he had been struck by Ross Reno’s indifference. It was as though the son had disowned the father and was eager to get these unavoidable matters behind him. There was good Tennessee whiskey to be distilled and sold … and drunk. Itty Reno obviously cared much more, and wept at the last. Richler was touched. Itty barely knew her father-in-law, by all accounts, but now her heart went out to the old warrior.

  Joseph Richler hurried home to Nadine, depressed by the entire episode. His bride was nursing their sickly son and he did not disturb her, but sat in their ornate parlor at his cluttered desk trying to make sense of a life and death, of glory and dishonor. He could make no sense of it.

  He owed an obituary to the Herald, but first he would cable Bennett with a request: a factual barebones obituary now; the full story on the controversial major after he had done some legwork. Yes, he would do that. He had already gathered most of the material. The rest he could get easily enough from the army, and he would wire the obituary to New York in a few hours.

  He tapped gently on the bedroom door, and at Nadine’s soft summons, entered. The little pink boy, Joseph, Jr., lay swaddled in her arms asleep.

  “Was it well attended?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “He had few friends left in the army; either that or they were reluctant to make their sympathies known.”

  “I would hate to die like that, without anyone. But his son …”

  “He came, and his wife too, I’ll say that.”

  “And no one else?”

  “I had hoped to see someone, anyone, from the command. There must be things I don’t know.”

  “Major Reno was a lonely man.”

  Richler thought that was true, and that Reno probably brought his isolation upon himself, with a nature that repelled most people. But he did not say that to his wife.

  “I have to write it up,” he said.

  He headed out into the seductive April day, with life blooming about him, and headed for the Herald’s offices off DuPont Circle, which consisted of two cubbyholes for the three Washington correspondents and the telegraph man.

  There he spread the material he had gathered and stored in a folder, and studied it. Then he pulled a pen from a rack of them, unstoppered his ink bottle, and began to write.

  Saturday last saw the passing of Major Marcus Reno, formerly of the United States Army, of pneumonia. Mr. Reno was born in Carrollton, Illinois, November 15, 1834, entered West Point Military Academy in 1851, graduated in 1857, and devoted the next decades of his life to the service of his country, departing from the army in 1880.

  During his period of service, he saw action in the Indian wars, the Civil War, and in the Reconstruction Period. During the Civil War he fought in the First U.S. Cavalry in a number of engagements, including Yorktown, Williamsburg, Mechanicsville, Gaines Mill, Glendale, Malvern Hill, Crampton’s Gap, Antietam, Sharpsburg, Kelly’s Ford, Hagerstown, Hawes Shop, Cold Harbor, Trevillian Station, Darbytown Road, Winchester, Kearnysville, Smithfield, and Cedar Creek.

  For gallant and meritorious service at Kelly’s Ford he was appointed brevet major. For gallant and meritorious service at Cedar Creek, he was appointed brevet lieutenant colonel. At that point he mustered into the volunteer service as colonel of the Twelfth Pennsylvania Cavalry, where he engaged Mosby’s guerillas, and for gallant and meritorious service was appointed brevet colonel, United States Army, and brevet brigadier general, United States Volunteers.

  After the war he returned to duty as captain, and then was promoted to major in the Seventh U.S. Cavalry in 1868. He continued to serve his country in various capacities, including infantry tactics instructor at West Point, Judge Advocate of the Military Commission at New Orleans, service in the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen and Abandoned Lands in New Orleans, and then as Acting Assistant Inspector General, Department of the Columbia, as well as Board of Survey and court-martial duty. He commanded an army post at Spartanburg, North Carolina, where he suppressed the unlawful activities of the Ku Klux Klan, then commanded the army escort for the northern boundary commission. In 1876 …

  Richler wasn’t sure how to say it, and paused.

  Major Reno fought at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, and commanded the regiment from June 26 until September 22. He subsequently commanded at Fort Abercrombie, Dakota Territory, and later commanded at Fort Meade, Dakota Territory.

  And now he would leave holes in the obituary, Richler thought. Court-martialed and found guilty May 8, 1877, suspended from rank and pay; defended before a court of inquiry concerning his conduct at the Little Bighorn, Chicago, 1879, court-martialed and found guilty of conduct unbecoming to an officer and a gentleman while at Fort Meade in April, 1880 and suspended from service.

  A fine career that fell apart in the years after the Little Bighorn. Almost three decades in the service of his country, and of that time, four years of hell, when all the demons in him were loosed to stir up trouble, and all the world’s blamers and scapegoaters heaped calumny on his head.

  Richler filled in the rest: survivors, funeral, and burial. It would do until he could write a real obituary. If he ever wrote one. He really wanted to escape the whole damned business. But he had reluctantly made a promise to a dying man, and he would reluctantly keep it.

  PART TWO

  1876

  Being an Account of the Battle

  CHAPTER SIX

  MAJOR MARCUS RENO DID NOT WRITE A LETTER. HE HAD NO ONE TO write to, save for Ross, and he scarcely ever wrote to his son. Most of the other officers who did not have their wives with them were writing this evening, telling them that in the morning, May seventeenth, 1876, the Seventh Cavalry would march west and come to grips with the Sioux and Cheyenne hostiles who had not knuckled under to the government’s edict to report to their reservations by January thirty-first.

  The Officers’ Club Room at Fort Abraham Lincoln was barren of men, save for the bartender, Rorty, an enlisted man who was rendered unfit for duty after being wounded in the elbow at Washita, but found a way to stay with the regiment as a civilian. Some officers, like George Custer, had their family here. The post was not without amenities and was not far from Bismarck, either, and several officers’ wives graced the post. Those officers wouldn’t be writing this evening; there would be sighs and tears in their households this evening, maybe a few small jokes, and a dark unacknowledged fear.

  It was very quiet. Major Reno had expected to find at least a few of the old stags present in their old haunt and enjoy some easy camaraderie, but this particular evening only eerie silence reigned. Maybe that was all right. Men going to war behaved strangely, and sometimes sullenly, and the drinking would be moody.

  Reno sipped some raw Kentucky bourbon mixed with Missouri River water and pond ice, and felt comfortable in the silence. He was more the solitary man than the convivial one anyway, and he didn’t mind the odd, hollow anticipation that hung over the post this taut May evening.

  The enlisted men were lounging in their barracks or tents, cleaning weapons, putting their gear in order. The post wasn’t large enough to accommodate all twelve companies of the Seventh, so some of the companies, which had gathered from far-flung corners of the nation, were bivouacked in orderly white rows on the flats two miles south. Behind the post, the craggy arid bluffs of the Missouri River topped out on the high plains, and the silent, mysterious prairie stretched westward endless miles, broken only by an occasional slow-moving stream, a rare butte, an occasional gulch filled with willows or cottonwoods. That land, beyond Dakota, in the Territory of Montana, was largely unknown, except to that primeval race
that had populated it for generations.

  Lieutenant Colonel Custer had just returned from the East, where he had testified before a congressional committee probing into corruption in the War Department, especially the kickbacks post sutlers had paid to War Secretary Belknap. In the process Custer had casually incriminated President Grant’s brother, which had offended the president even more.

  The testimony had been of no consequence because all of it was hearsay, but Grant had bottled up the boy general in St. Paul and meant to keep him off the field for this last great battle against hostile Indians, on this, the centennial year of the Republic.

  Reno had hoped to lead the column, had pleaded with General Terry for the opportunity, but Terry had refused him, saying that if Custer couldn’t command, two colonels currently on detached duty were eager to do so. In short, Reno was outranked.

  Terry knew the value of George Armstrong Custer, who was far more seasoned at fighting Indians than Reno and a better leader of men as well, so he had helped Custer prepare a good soldier’s petition to the adjutant general, asking that he be allowed to share the danger with his own command. The president relented, warned Custer to behave and keep the press away, and on the eve of the campaign, May thirteenth, Custer arrived at Fort Abraham Lincoln, and once again took command from Marcus Reno.

  Reno knocked back a whiskey and pushed his tumbler toward the barkeep, who sleepily filled it and set it next to a carafe filled with water. Reno downed that, and another, and stared sourly at the empty club.

  “Put it on my tab,” he said. “See you.”

  “Major, would you like to pay your tab?”