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TBR Wednesday: Here's to the Ladies: Stories of the Frontier Army by Carla Kelly
  | Here's to the Ladies: Stories of the Frontier Army Carla Kelly Anthology of short stories 2003 Rating: B/B-
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Here's to the Ladies is an entirely appropriate pick for TBR Wednesday. I bought it new, special ordered, in 2003, and it has sat somewhere close to my bedside ever since. I think I picked it up once, read the first story, and put it down again. Otherwise is has languished unread in my TBR pile for five years. Five years. I don't even have a good explanation except that I'm not such a short story enthusiast (a fact that should be balanced out by the enjoyment I've received from Kelly's short stories in the past).
There are nine short stories or vignettes in this anthology. The shortest, at 8 pages, is Mary Murphy, a reflection about an "immoral" laundress who is a heroine in her everyday sacrifices. Such Brave Men, another brief one, is one young bride's introduction to the military tradition of ranking. She is moved from bad to worse accommodations repeatedly due to her husband's comparatively lower military rank.
Fille de Joie is a rather humorous tale about a long awaited reunion between newlyweds and the unfortunate consequences of their ardor. On the sadder end of the spectrum is We Shall Meet, But We Shall Miss Him, which is about miscommunication and missed opportunities. The hero only discovers how much he has lost when his base is closed and his long military career is terminated in retirement. There are some stabs of Kelly's humor here too, but the overall feeling is one of melancholy and longing.
Kelly's longest story, at 58 pages, is Kathleen Flaherty's Long Winter, the account of a young widow forced into a new marriage in order to survive the raw elements of a horrendously undersupplied garrison. This story is reminiscent, in some ways, of Kelly's Mrs. Drew Plays Her Hand. The stoic heroine, Kate, is already used to deprivation and discrimination being poor and Irish and married to an Irishman. But after her husband's death, she is unprepared for his superior's proposition: be his mistress or live in a tent all winter. Fortunately for her, there is a quiet, kind, sensitive, Kelly-type hero waiting in the wings, already more than half in love with her.
Casually at Post has a touch of the divine to it. A man claiming to be God shows up at Dr. Pierce's military base, and he has to decide if this drifter is clinically insane or not. God is smelly, dirty, undernourished, and apparently a drifter, but good things happen while he is around, including Pierce's ability to problem solve what to do with an orphaned Sioux baby his wife has been nursing. This story has a number of elements Kelly fans should be familiar with : the natural mother, orphaned children taken in, the noble colorblind doctor hero, the worshipful husband, subtle references to a joyous marriage bed, the military setting. It's your basic feel gooder. My problem with it was that here transracial adoption was presented as a simple solution, a noble one really, because of the baby's poverty but also because Pierce and his wife had become attached to the little boy. Win-win. But what if the baby had relatives searching for him? Little effort was made to find them, perhaps understandable considering the migratory pattern of the Sioux at this time in history [think: chaotic forced migration]. Still. I can't help but wonder about the baby's father and other relatives. Also about the baby's future, raised in a racist white society (not his parents, but others); raised white, but so clearly not white. How will this impact him and how will he view his adoption later? What would happen to him if his parents died? As an adoptive parent, these problems are one I'm familiar with and didn't aid me in enjoying this story.
The final story, Jesse MacGregor, is a shoot-'em-up western about a prank playing post surgeon who joins an ill-fated mission to escort civilians to an Arizona base. It has almost as much blood, guts and horror as Kelly's novel about the Pueblo Indian uprising of 1680, Daughter of Fortune, a book that has stayed with me for more than eight years.
Throughout all of Kelly's stories runs the theme of war's reality: it's ugly, it's bloody, it ruins people, there is nothing glorious about it. This theme shows up most prominently in The Gift, in which the hero remembers his experience in the Civil War but it's present throughout. Kelly seems to think the military is inefficient, difficult, full of ridiculous, inexplicable rules and regs, but character making - if you have the right stuff. Her view on war, however, is much bleaker.
My overall grade for this anthology is a B/B-. The stories are enjoyable if you can stand some melancholy and some blood, but none of them were real keepers for me or that strikingly different from other Kelly stories or novels. Still this book should not have languished so long in my TBR pile. It deserved better than that.