Libbie Read online

  Libbie

  Real Women of the American West

  Book One

  by

  Judy Alter

  Award-winning Author

  LIBBIE

  Reviews and Accolades

  "Libbie is probably the book Mrs. Custer would have written had she not been determined to protect her husband's name."

  ~Elmer Kelton

  ~

  "A wondrous, intimate story of an unsung heroine of the West."

  ~Romantic Times

  ~

  "Rings authentically true.... Brilliant and memorable.... Kudos to Ms. Alter for a refreshingly unique story."

  ~Affair de Coeur

  Published by ePublishing Works!

  www.epublishingworks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-61417-224-6

  By payment of required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this eBook. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented without the express written permission of copyright owner.

  Please Note

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  The reverse engineering, uploading, and/or distributing of this eBook via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the copyright owner is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author's rights is appreciated.

  Copyright © 1994, 2012, 2013, 2015 by Judy Alter. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  Cover and eBook design by eBook Prep www.ebookprep.com

  Thank You.

  For Colin, Megan, Jamie

  and Jordan with love and thanks.

  Author's Note

  Elizabeth Bacon Custer left very public records of her life with General George Armstrong Custer. Her three books—Tenting on the Plains, Boots and Saddles, and Following the Guidon—might fairly be called propaganda pieces, designed to glorify the reputation of the late General Custer. Similarly, biographies of Libbie tend toward idealization, describing her as always good-natured, self-sacrificing, devoted to Custer. Only occasionally—in books about Custer, in some surviving correspondence—do hints surface of conflict in the marriage, of Autie's wandering eye, of perhaps even a glance or two in another direction taken by Libbie herself. What, one wonders, was life really like with the brilliant and erratic boy-general? What kind of woman married him—and then remained so selflessly devoted to him?

  This novel will not answer those questions definitively. It is but one attempt to see inside the life of Libbie Custer, and it is, above all, fiction—an attempt to tell a story about life on the frontier and one particular woman there. So, read and enjoy, but do not hold the storyteller accountable for some slight deviations from history. The truth of history forms a foundation upon which I've tried to build a novel.

  Courtship

  and

  Marriage

  Chapter 1

  I knew that history would make a plaything of Autie, and when that happened, all my battles would be lost again. Autie rarely lost a battle—save that last big one—and his fights were always glorious, painted on a broad screen by the clamoring newsmen if not by himself. My battles were small and silent and private, but oh! they were important to me, and I had managed to hold the line. I would not see it all wiped away with the muckraking cry that Autie's overweening ambition had led him to disaster at Little Bighorn. I would make sure that the world saw the George Armstrong Custer I wanted seen. Only this private journal—to be burned upon my death—records my own wars.

  Twelve years is not very long in a lifetime, yet it seemed my whole life was lived in those brief years of marriage. I had fought battles of my own, hard battles, to marry Autie, and once married, I thought myself the happiest and luckiest of women—married to the great boy-general, the hero of the Civil War. We would, I knew, grow old together, savoring the best of life, the last for which the first was made, so the poet wrote. I'm not sure when, exactly, that I knew that dream was not to be, that a love as intense as ours could not survive, that two people as willful as we could not be bound so tightly together. And yet, when all was said and done, I would not have traded those twelve years for anything on earth. Were they worth a lifetime? There is no answer, but even to think about it, I must begin earlier, back in Monroe.... I remember yet one snowy night when I was but sixteen years old.

  Voices woke me—distant, yet loud. For just a moment I froze in fear, and then, shivering, I crept out of bed. There had been an early November snow in Monroe the night before, and the wind off Lake Erie was strong and cold, sneaking in through cracks around the windows. Papa had let the fires die down for the night, and the house had its winter chill. I pulled on my robe and padded to the window, pulling back the lace curtain liner so that I could look out on the street.

  At first it seemed empty, with nothing but the moon shining on the snow and glistening off the ruts made during the day by carriages. The street lamp in front of our house gave off a sort of dull glow, as though hopeless against the dark of winter.

  Then two men staggered into sight, their arms locked around each other, their voices raised in some kind of unrecognizable song. It was the sound that had wakened me. I watched curiously as they drew into the dim circle of light directly outside our gate. For a moment their very momentum propelled them apart, and laughing and calling loudly, they held their arms out to each other. Then, wobbling, they made their way together again and blundered off down the street, out of the light. I could tell little or nothing about them except that one of them was tall and thin and had extraordinary long blond curls.

  When they were gone, I went quietly back to my bed, just in time to hear my father plod up the stairs in his bedroom slippers. "Drunken louts," he muttered, and I could picture the look of disapproval on his stern face. He would, I knew, be wearing his long nightshirt, which hung ridiculously about his knees, and carrying a candle in the brass holder my mother had once given him. My stepmother, waiting in the hall outside my door, breathed the question on my mind.

  "Who were they?"

  "That Custer boy was one of them," Papa said in tones of disgust. "I didn't know the other one. Come, let's go back to bed, now that the night is quiet again."

  Neither knew that I was awake and had seen the tableau, nor did I ever tell them. I knew "the Custer boy" from two brief but important encounters in my childhood, but I had not seen him in several years. Talk in town was that he was freshly graduated from West Point, an officer in the army—younger by far than most officers, they said—and he'd come to Monroe to stay with his sister, Mrs. Reed, while he was on sick leave. But the Reeds were Methodists, and we Bacons were Presbyterians, so we never met at church and seldom anywhere else. If he'd cut off those blond curls, I wouldn't have known George Armstrong Custer if I'd run full into him in the street. But ever after that evening there was a wildness about him that caught my imagination.

  Next morning at breakfast Papa asked if I slept well, and I, thinking he would not talk to me of the scene I'd witnessed, said mischievously, "Something woke me in the night. Some commotion in the street."

  "Young men who'd indulged in whiskey," he said scornfully from behind his newspaper. Papa was a judge, and somehow he often seemed to sit in judgment on people,
even outside his court. This morning, as usual, he wore his dark-gray suit with a gold watch chain stretched across his large middle. His jowls had sunk, as they will in middle-aged men, and his chin had the look of turkey wattles. My father had not been a young man even when I was born, and he was now well into middle age. His voice was stern as he warned me, "See that you stay away from such kind."

  "Yes, Papa," I said, while my imagination was even then caught by the blond curls. "Do you know who they were?"

  "Yes," he said, and stopped cold, making it clear he wouldn't tell me.

  "Daughter, you might meet them at some party," my stepmother said, hovering over me, "and we wouldn't want you to be prejudiced against these young men. Surely it was an indiscretion not to be repeated."

  No need to tell them that I knew perfectly well who one of the young men was, and that he held a special place in my heart. They knew of neither of my previous encounters with him.

  Mama, as I called her, sat opposite Papa at the table, wearing a practical linsey-woolsey wrapper against the cold. But her hair was perfectly groomed, and she had dusted her face with powder. Mama never disagreed with Papa, and sometimes I wanted to demand, "Don't you have a thought of your own? Why do you echo everything Papa says?" She had made Papa happy in the two years since their marriage, but I still burned with resentment that he had not given me a chance to make him happy, that he had taken a second wife after the death of my mother.

  We sat, very formally even at breakfast, in the dining room of our large house at the corner of Second and Monroe streets. Behind me, a sideboard held dishes of eggs and bacon and potatoes. Pots of sweet cream butter and apple butter sat before us on the table. Mama rang the tiny bell on the table, and Betsy, the hired girl, bustled in with fresh, hot rolls.

  I buttered my roll and let my imagination dwell on those blond curls.

  * * *

  Monroe was a grand town in which to grow up. It was on the Michigan side of Lake Erie, in a country of thick forests, cold winters, and cool summers. It was not a new town, even in the 1850s when I was growing up, and its streets were lined with tall trees, its houses solid and comfortable. Our house had cleanly painted white siding, with bottle-green shutters and a white picket fence that Papa always kept in good repair and fresh paint. In front a neat lawn was surrounded by elm trees, and in the back there were cherry, apple, and pear trees, along with a swing built for me when I was ten.

  Monroe had farmers as well as the bankers and merchants who lived in the big houses, and somewhere, off on one edge of town where I never went, people like Betsy lived in one-story wooden houses, gray from weathering without paint. Those people worked for the people in the big, clean houses on Monroe Street.

  The Reeds were among the farmers, and Armstrong, whose parents lived in Ohio, spent summers working for his brother-in-law, David Reed, from the time he was quite young. When he was fourteen, he moved to Monroe to stay with the Reeds and attend the Stebbins Academy for Boys—even then everyone was looking out for Autie's education, though I suspect it was because they hoped he'd be a preacher. Vain hope that! I later heard that he used to hide wicked novels behind his geography book, reading them with relish while he appeared to be studying.

  Monroe valued its lakeside setting. You could travel by steamship from Monroe to Buffalo, New York, making the trip much more pleasant than the previous long-way-about over land. Steamships brought their loads of grain and wood and furniture and all manner of things to the wharves on the lakefront. I loved to visit the wharves with Papa—the air blowing off the lake smelled of water and fish and freshness, and the steamships sounded loud horns as they approached. When they were unloaded, the scene was one of confusion—men running everywhere, ship owners shouting at the men who did the unloading, store owners trying to watch out for the goods they had ordered to see that they were handled carefully. Papa once told me the whole process was without order, as though he would have imposed some order on it if he could. I loved the noise, but I never told Papa that.

  The railroad came to Monroe, too, so we considered ourselves a major and important town. It reached Monroe in the late 1840s and made us very up-to-date—not all towns in Michigan had trains. Once, when I was about five, Papa took Mother and me on a trip just to the next station, and back on the return train, so we would know what train travel was like. I remembered the noise and cinders, but even more I remembered the sensation of watching trees fly by the window.

  Monroe was built around mills—it had flour mills, a woolen mill, and a sawmill. But by the time I was a child, it also had an iron foundry and a tannery, three banks, two mercantile stores, a daily newspaper (which was small but, as Papa said, "informative"), three lawyers and two doctors—a strange proportion—a few other businesses, and six churches. We attended the Presbyterian Church, where the Anglo formality suited Papa perfectly, and at home we prayed together as a family every day. I grew up thinking most folks, at least in Monroe, were that devout and that I was probably the only wayward child whose mind wandered while her father implored the Lord to teach us humility and thanked him for the too-generous bounty he bestowed upon us.

  * * *

  Everyone in town knew the Bacon family, especially Papa, whom they called "the Judge," as though there were no other judge in the world. I was petted and spoiled by the whole town. Everyone fussed over me because I was the Judge's daughter, and then, later, they worried over me because my mother died suddenly the summer I was twelve.

  I remember her as bright and laughing and pretty, with dark hair and dark, gentle eyes. When I was little, she sang with me—later when I thought of my mother, the words and melody of "All Through the Night" played over and over in my mind, and I saw her sitting at the edge of my bed, singing softly until I slept. But she stopped singing one day, and a few days later my father came to me, more stern than ever, to tell me that Mother had gone to live with angels.

  "Do they sing?" I asked.

  "Who?" He was startled.

  "Angels," I replied. "Mother won't like it there if they don't sing."

  He patted my shoulder awkwardly and wandered away, lost in sadness.

  For three days my mother lay in our parlor, wearing her best gray silk, a dress she had dearly loved. I wasn't allowed to see her—Papa thought it would upset me—but her sister, Aunt Harriet Page from Grand Rapids, told me how lovely she looked. Those were her very words, and I tried to smile in appreciation, but I couldn't imagine Mother looking lovely without her smile or her voice.

  I wasn't so young and naive that I didn't know about death. I knew that, contrary to singing with angels, Mother was in a coffin—hadn't that very coffin been in our parlor for three days?—and that she would be buried in the earth and that I would never, ever see her again. But no one talked to me about that or even about her—they just fussed over me as though I were five or six. I never asked uncomfortable questions about the grave and eternity, because I knew that Papa would not answer them. But in the night, by myself, I sobbed, brokenhearted, for my mother.

  Just as he kept me out of the parlor, Papa didn't allow me to go to Mother's funeral. "It might upset her," I heard him tell the minister. And so three days after he'd told me about Mother and the angels, I found myself alone in that big house with Betsy, who patted me on the head and murmured, "Poor, poor dear" every time she walked by me. I sat in the window seat watching for the people to come back from the graveyard until, frustrated, I slammed out the front door.

  "Elizabeth Bacon, you come back in here this minute," Betsy called. "It isn't fitting for you to be outside, them burying your poor dear mother and all."

  I ignored her and went to swing on the gate, an activity strictly forbidden by Papa because he said it would pull the gate off its hinges.

  "Libbie!" Betsy called again, and again I ignored her.

  A young boy, obviously a farmer from his clothes and heavy boots, came sauntering down the street, walking as if he owned it. I recognized him as Armstrong Custer becaus
e all the girls at school had twittered over his long blond curls.

  "Hey, you Custer boy!" I called, and he turned toward me, smiling. But then his smile faded.

  "You're Libbie Bacon, aren't you?"

  "Yes," I said.

  "Your mother just died, didn't she?"

  I swung furiously on the gate. "Yes."

  Real tenderness crept into his voice. "I'm sorry," he said. "It must be awful hard on you. Are you all right?"

  He was the first person who'd done anything but pat me on the head. I had to bite my lip hard to keep from bursting into sobs. "I'm... fine, thank you," I managed to utter.

  "No, you're not," he said perceptively. "But you will be. You're strong, I can tell."

  No one had ever called me strong—in fact, Papa constantly hinted that I was frail and must take care of myself. Yet here was this strange boy telling me I was strong. Tears streaming down my face, I turned and ran into the house, flying past an openmouthed Betsy to end sobbing into the pillow on my bed.

  By the time everyone returned from the cemetery, my tears were dried and the red was gone from my eyes. I wandered through the house letting people pat me on the head and call me "poor, poor dear." But inside I said to myself, I'm strong.

  Two days after the funeral, Aunt Harriet took me to the cemetery. Papa was shut in his bedroom, where he was to remain for weeks, and I doubt she even told him where she intended taking me.

  "It's a nice spot," she said to me, "under a maple, with a cool breeze. It's a place your mother would like."

  I wasn't at all convinced of this, but Aunt Harriet meant well, and I went along quietly. The cemetery was pretty, if those places ever can be. It sat on a hillside, ringed on two sides by thick Michigan forests, and in the distance you could see the shining waters of Lake Erie. Mama's gravesite was indeed the kind of place she would have liked—if she were alive and could picnic there. Dead and in the grave, she might not, I thought, be as enthusiastic about it.