Breakthroughs

XVII

In Augusta, Georgia, Scipio didn’t turn around every few seconds, as if afraid his own shadow were about to rise up and stab him in the back. It wasn’t that a price didn’t remain on his head. It did. It probably would, as long as he lived: certainly as long as Anne Colleton lived. However unenthusiastically, he’d played too big a role in the Congaree Socialist Republic for that to change.

But, with the Confederate States tottering on the brink of losing the war against the USA-actually, the war was lost, but the CSA hadn’t yet been able to persuade the USA to stop advancing on the fronts where fighting went on-earlier victories over the Socialist Republics were forgotten. Whites on the streets in Augusta went around with stunned, dazed expressions on their faces. They’d never lost a war before. They’d never imagined they could lose a war. The Confederacy had gone from one triumph to another. Now the whites here were learning what the United States had learned half a century before: what defeat tasted like. Next to that, chasing Reds was of small import.

The other side of the coin was that Scipio had got to Georgia. Whatever he’d done in South Carolina, he might as well have done in a foreign country. Confederate states often seemed proud of paying no attention to what went on in their neighbors’ backyards. Georgia had reward posters up for its own Red Negro rebel fugitives, but none for those from South Carolina. Here, Scipio was just one more anonymous black man looking for work.

He was looking harder than he’d expected, too. Factories weren’t hiring the way they had been a year before. “We’re already letting people go,” a clerk told Scipio. “What’s the point of bringing more onto the lines when the war orders are gonna dry up and blow away any minute now?”

“I understands that, suh,” Scipio said, “but I gots to eat, too. What is I s’posed to do?”

“Go pick cotton,” the white clerk answered. “Reckon that’s what you were up to before the war started. Won’t hurt you to get on back. When the Army shrinks, the soldiers’ll need their own jobs back again.”

White men will need their old jobs back again, Scipio thought. And the Negroes who were doing those jobs? Well, the hell with them. They might have been good enough to help out for a little while, but now they’re going to have to learn their place again.

He’d got rebuffs from every factory he tried. For a while, he’d wondered if he would have to work in the fields. The money he’d earned from odd jobs as he made his way across South Carolina was almost gone. His life at Marshlands had convinced him of one thing: he did not want to be a field hand. But he did not want to starve, either.

And then he passed a little restaurant on Telfair Street with a sign in the window: WAITER WANTED. He started to go in, then shook his head. Reluctantly, he spent a couple of quarters on a shirt and a pair of pants that, if long past their salad days, were not ragged and falling to pieces. Then he went back to his flophouse in the Terry, the Negro district in the southeastern part of town, and bathed in a tin tub that plainly hadn’t been used as often as it should have. Only after his clothes and he were as fresh as he could make them did he head back toward the restaurant.

Inside, a colored fellow was setting cheap silverware on a table. “What you want?” he asked in neutral tones as he slowly put down the last couple of pieces.

“I seen the sign in the window,” Scipio answered. “I’s lookin’ for work. I works hard, I does.” He wondered if the proprietor had already hired the other man, in which case he’d parted with money he couldn’t afford to lose.

But the other Negro just shrugged and asked, “You wait tables befo’?”

“I’s done that.” Scipio nodded emphatically. He pointed to the place setting the fellow had just finished laying out. “De soup spoon belong on the udder side o’de teaspoon.”

Smiling now, the fellow reversed them. “You has waited tables.” He raised his voice: “Hey, Mistuh Ogelthorpe! I think we got you a waiter here.”

A white man in his late fifties came out of the back room. He walked with the aid of a stick. Scipio wondered if he’d been wounded in this war or the Second Mexican War. More likely the latter, by his age-or, of course, he might just have been in a train wreck or some other misfortune. He looked Scipio over with gray eyes that were far from foolish. “What’s your name, boy?” he asked.

“I’s called Xerxes, suh,” Scipio replied. He’d been called a lot of different things lately. He was glad he could keep them straight and remember who he was supposed to be at any given moment.

Ogelthorpe turned back to the other waiter. “How come you reckon he’s a waiter, Fabius?”

“On account of he knows the difference ’tween a soup spoon and a teaspoon, and where each of ’em goes on the table,” the other Negro-Fabius-said.

“That a fact?” Ogelthorpe said, and Fabius nodded. The white man who owned the restaurant turned to Scipio and asked, “Where’d you learn the business, Xerxes?”

“Here an’ dere, suh,” Scipio answered. “I been doin’ factory work since de war start, mostly, but de factories, dey’s shuttin’ down.”

“Here and there?” Ogelthorpe rubbed his chin. “You tell me you got anything like a passbook, I’m liable to fall over dead from the surprise.”

“No, suh,” Scipio said. “Times is rough. Lots o’ niggers ain’t got none dese days, on account of we’s moved around so much.”

“Or for other reasons.” No, Ogelthorpe wasn’t stupid, not even close. A frown twisted his narrow mouth. “Wish you didn’t talk like you been pickin’ cotton all your born days.”

Had Scipio wanted to, he could have talked a great deal more elegantly than Ogelthorpe. He’d used that ability to speak like a polished white man to help escape from the swamps of the Congaree. But, if he didn’t speak like a polished white man, speaking like a field hand was all he could do. He’d never before missed his lack of a middle way. Now he did, intently.

“I’s powerful sorry, suh,” he said. “I tries to do better.”

“You read and write and cipher?” Ogelthorpe looked as if anything but a no there would have surprised him, too.

But Scipio read the names and prices of the soups and sandwiches and stews and meat dishes on the wall. He found a pencil and a scrap of paper on the counter and wrote his name and Fabius’ and Ogelthorpe’s in his small, precise script. Then he handed Ogelthorpe the paper and said, “You write any numbers you wants, an’I kin cipher they out fo’you.”

He’d wondered if his demonstration would make Ogelthorpe not bother, but the white man scrawled a column of figures-watching, Scipio saw they were the prices of items he served-and thrust back the sheet and the pencil. “Go ahead-add ’em up.”

Scipio did, careful not to make any mistakes. “They comes to fo’ dollars an’ seventeen cents all told,” he said when he was done.

Ogelthorpe’s expression said that, while they did indeed come to $4.17, he rather wished they didn’t. Fabius, on the other hand, laughed out loud. “You got anything else you want to give him a hard time about, boss?”

“Don’t reckon so,” Ogelthorpe admitted. With a sigh, he turned back to Scipio. “Pay’s ten dollars a week, an’ tips, an’ lunch an’ supper every day you’re here. You play as good a game as you talk, I’ll bump you up a slug or two in a month. What do you say?”

“I says, yes, suh. I says, thank you, suh,” Scipio answered. He wouldn’t get rich on that kind of money, but he wouldn’t starve, especially not when he could feed himself here. And he’d be able to get out of the grim Terry flophouse and into a better room or even a flat.

Ogelthorpe said, “You can tell me I’m crazy if you want, but I got the idea you ain’t got a hell of a lot of jack right now. You’re clean enough, I’ll say that, but I want you to get yourself black trousers an’ a white shirt like Fabius is wearin’, and I want you to do it fast as you’re able. You don’t do it fast enough to suit me, back on the street you go.”

“I takes care of it,” Scipio promised. He thought Fabius was dressed up too fancy for the kind of food the place dished out, but realized his own tastes were on the snobbish side. One more thing I can blame on Miss Anne, he thought. Maybe, now that he was outside of South Carolina, she wouldn’t be able to track him down. He hoped to Jesus she couldn’t.

Outside, a clock started chiming noon. A moment later, two steam whistles blew. “Here comes the lunch crowd,” Ogelthorpe said. “All right, Xerxes, looks like you get baptism by total immersion. Me, I got to get my ass back to the stove.” He disappeared into the rear of the restaurant.

Fabius just had time to hand Scipio a Gray Eagle scratch pad before the place filled up. Then Scipio was working like a madman for the next hour and a half, taking orders, hustling them back to Ogelthorpe, carrying plates of food to the customers, taking money and making change, and trading dirty china and silverware for clean with the dishwasher, an ancient black man who hadn’t bothered to come out and see whether he’d be hired.

Some of the customers were white, some colored. By their clothes, they all worked at the nearby hash cannery or the ironworks or one of the several factories that made bricks from the fine clay found in abundance around Augusta. Whites and Negroes might come in together, sometimes laughing and joking with one another, but the whites always sat at the tables on one side of the restaurant, the blacks at those on the other.

Scipio wondered if Fabius would wait on the whites and leave the Negroes for him. The whites would undoubtedly have more money to spend. Scipio presumed that would translate into better tips. But the two waiters split the crowd evenly, and Scipio needed less than half an hour to find out his idea wasn’t necessarily so. The idea of tipping a colored waiter had never crossed a lot of white men’s minds. When they did tip, they left more than their Negro counterparts, but the blacks were more likely to leave something, if often not much. Taken all together, things evened out.

By half past one, after the last lunch shift ended, the place was quiet again, as it had been before noon. Panting like a hound, Fabius said, “Reckon you see why Mistuh Jim hired hisself a new waiter. We got more business’n two can handle, let alone one like I was doin’.”

“You one busy nigger ’fore today, sure enough,” Scipio said.

“You done pulled your weight,” Fabius said. “Never had to hustle you, never had to tell you what to do. You said you know about waitin’ on tables, you wasn’t lyin’.”

“No, I weren’t lyin’,” Scipio agreed. “We git our ownselves somethin’ to eat now? Plumb hard settin’ it in front o’ other folk wif so much empty inside o’me.”

“I hear what you say.” Fabius nodded. “I done et ’fore the rush started, but you go on back there now. Mistuh Ogelthorpe don’t feed you good, you take a fryin’ pan and whack him upside the head.”

Ogelthorpe also nodded when Scipio did head back to the cooking area. “You know what you were doin’, sure as hell,” he said.

“Yes, suh,” Scipio said. Compared to the fancy banquets Anne Colleton had put on, this was crude, rough, fast work, but the principles didn’t change.

“Chicken soup in the pot,” Ogelthorpe said. “You want a ham sandwich to go along with it?”

“Thank you, suh. That be mighty fine.” Scipio had carried a lot of ham sandwiches out to hungry workers. He knew they were thick with meat and spears of garlicky pickle and richly daubed with a mustard whose odor tickled his nose. He’d just ladled out a bowl of soup when Ogelthorpe handed him a sandwich of his own.

The first bite told him why people crowded into the restaurant. Miss Anne would have turned up her nose at such a rough delicacy, but she wasn’t here. Scipio was. He took another big bite. With his mouth full, he said, “Suh, I’s gwine like this place jus’ fine.”

“Here you are, ma’am,” the cabbie said to Flora Hamburger as he pulled to a stop at the corner of Eighth and Pine. “Pennsylvania Hospital.”

“Thank you,” she answered, and gave him half a dollar, which included a twenty-cent tip. That was enough to make him leap out of the elderly Duryea and hold the door open for her with a show of subservience that made her most uncomfortable. Socialism, to her, meant equality among all workers, no matter what they did.

But she had no time to instruct him, not now. She hurried past the statue of William Penn toward the front entrance to the hospital, whose cornerstone, she saw, bore an inscription dating from the reign of George II.

A soldier walked past her, smiling and nodding as he did so. By his stick and the rolling gait he had in spite of it, Flora knew he was using an artificial leg. Because of what he’d gone through, she smiled back at him. Without that, she would have ignored him, as she was in the habit of ignoring all the young men who smiled and nodded at her.

She went up the stairs to the second floor. One wing had private rooms; the best doctors gave the patients in them the best care they could. That was an advantage David Hamburger would not have had without his sister’s being in Congress. Using it went against every egalitarian instinct she had, but family instincts were older and deeper.

She almost ran into a nurse coming out of her brother’s room. The woman in the starched gray and white uniform with the red cross embroidered on the breast gave back a pace. “I’m sorry, Congresswoman,” she said. “I didn’t realize you were coming in.”

“It’s all right, Nancy.” Flora knew a lot of the nurses who helped take care of David. She came to the Pennsylvania Hospital as often as she could. She felt bad about not coming more often than she did, but sitting in Congress and handling the endless work that went along with sitting in Congress was a trap with huge jaws full of sharp teeth.

David lay quietly in the bed, his face almost as pale as the white linen of sheets and pillowcases-being at war with the CSA and the British Empire had made cotton scarce and hard to come by. Under the covers, the outline of his body seemed unnaturally small-and so it was, with one leg gone above the knee. But the rest of him seemed shrunken, too, as if losing the leg had made him lose some of his spirit. And if it had, would that be so surprising?

He managed a smile. “Hello, Flora,” he said. He sounded very tired, even now. Flora was glad he sounded any way at all. Loss of blood and an infection had almost killed him. If the infection had been a little worse…How would Flora ever have been able to show her face to her family? She had enough trouble showing her face to her family now. They didn’t condemn her. She condemned herself, which was far harder to bear.

“How are you?” she asked, feeling foolish and useless.

“Not too bad,” he answered, as he did whenever she asked-which meant she couldn’t take the words seriously. He’d lost a lot of flesh; parchmentlike skin stretched tight over the bones of his face. His dark eyes were enormous. Then he did seem to pick up a little energy, a little life, as he asked, “Are the Rebs really and truly trying to surrender?”

Back in New York City, he’d never called them Rebs; he’d picked that up in the trenches. Flora didn’t like it. It made him sound as if he endorsed the war even after what it had done to him. She said, “Pieces of the cease-fire are in place, but Roosevelt won’t give them all of it. He’s still driving in Virginia and the West. I wish he weren’t, but he has the bit between his teeth.”

“Bully,” David said, as if he were Roosevelt. “After everything it’s cost us, we’d better get the most we can out of this war. If we stop too soon, why did we go and fight it in the first place?”

“Because we were mad,” Flora replied, staring at her brother with a new kind of horror: he did sound like the president, where he’d been growing up a Socialist like everyone else in the family. She asked, “How can you say that, after what happened to you?” Only after she’d spoken the words did she notice she’d slipped from English into Yiddish.

David answered in the same language: “How can I say anything else? Do you want me to lose my leg and the country to have nothing to show for it?”

“I never wanted you to lose your leg at all,” Flora said. “I never wanted anyone to lose his leg, or his arm, or his eye, or anything. Even if we win, we have nothing to show for it. We never should have fought at all.”

“Nu?” David said. Even raising an eyebrow seemed to cost him no small physical effort. “Maybe you’re right, Flora. Maybe we shouldn’t have gotten into it. But once we did decide to fight, what can we do but fight as hard as we can to win?”

That dilemma had dogged the Socialist Party from the beginning. Cutting the war short once a treasure of money and an even greater treasure of lives had been spent had proved not just impossible but, worse, unpopular, as the majorities Roosevelt and the Democrats brought in showed.

As David had learned new ways of talking and thinking in the trenches, so Flora had on the floor of Congress. Being without a good answer, she changed the subject: “Have they said anything more about fitting you with an artificial leg? As I was coming in, I saw a man walking very well with one.” She was stretching a point, but not too far.

“They’ll have to wait a while longer,” he said. “The stump’s not healed well enough yet, and the amputation was pretty high.” His mouth twisted. “Maybe I’ll be a one-crutch cripple instead of a two-crutch cripple.” Flora’s expression must have betrayed her, for her brother looked contrite. “It’s better than being dead, believe me.”

Reluctantly, Flora nodded. Her sister’s husband, Yossel Reisen, had been killed in Virginia bare days after he married Sophie; he had a son he’d never seen and never would see now.

A doctor came in. “Congresswoman Hamburger,” he said, polite but not obsequious: he’d dealt with a lot of important people. “If you’ll excuse me-” He advanced on David.

“Maybe you’d better go,” David said to Flora. “The stump looks better than it used to, but it’s still not pretty.”

She was glad of the excuse to leave, and ashamed of herself for being glad. Here was her baby brother-or so she remembered him, at any rate-dreadfully mutilated, and here he was, too, wanting the fighting to go on so others could suffer a like fate or worse. He obviously meant every word he said, but he might as well have started talking Persian for all the sense he made to her.

She went downstairs. A soldier with no legs was moving along in a wheelchair. He was whistling a vaudeville tune of some sort, and seemed happy enough with his world. Flora didn’t understand it. Flora couldn’t understand it. And, had she asked him, she was sure he would have told her the war had to go on, too. She didn’t understand that, either, but she was sure of it.

She went back to her office, but accomplished little that truly resembled work. She’d expected nothing different; seeing David always left her the worse for wear. After a while, realizing she’d read a letter three times without having the faintest idea what it was about, she put it away, got up, and told her secretary, “Bertha, I’m going over to my apartment.”

“All right, Miss Hamburger,” Bertha answered. “I hope your brother is better. I pray for him every night.” She crossed herself.

“Thank you,” Flora said. “He’s doing as well as he can, I think.” She’d said that so many times. It was even true. But as well as he can was a long way from well. And still he thought the United States should keep on with the war. Flora shook her head till the silk flowers on her hat rustled and rattled. She could live another hundred years without having it make sense to her.

She was standing in front of the Congressional office building waiting to flag a taxi when someone in a Ford called to her: “Where are you going, Flora?”

It was Hosea Blackford. “To my apartment,” she answered.

The congressman from Dakota pushed open the passenger-side door. “I’m heading that way myself,” he said. “Hop in, if you’ve a mind to.” She did hop in, with a word of thanks. She had very little to say on the short trip back to the apartment building. Blackford glanced over at her. “You’ve been to see your brother, or I miss my guess. I hope he hasn’t taken a turn for the worse?”

“No,” Flora said, and then she burst out, “He still thinks we have to go on pounding the Confederate States!”

Blackford drove in silence for some little while before finally saying, “If your own brother feels that way after he was wounded, you begin to get an idea of what the Democrats would have done to us if we had tried hard to cut off funds for the war after it began. This country thirsts for revenge the way a drunk thirsts for rotgut whiskey.”

“But it’s all mystification!” Flora exclaimed. “The capitalists have tricked the workers into going to war against their class interest, and into being thankful while they’re getting slaughtered. They’ve even tricked someone like David, who ought to know better if anyone should.” To her dismay, she began to cry.

Congressman Blackford parked the Ford across the street from the apartment building where they both lived. “Mystification is a notion that sounds more useful than it is,” he observed as he got out and went around to open her door for her. “What people believe and what they’ll do because they believe it is a big part of what’s real, especially in politics.”

“It’s one of the planks in the platform,” Flora said, taking his arm as she got out of the motorcar. “The capitalists and the bourgeoisie mystify the proletariat into going along with their desires.” She raised an eyebrow; he’d shown before that his ideology wasn’t so pure as she would have liked.

He shrugged now. “If you run a campaign that doesn’t do anything but shout ‘They’re tricking you!’ over and over, you’re going to lose. That’s one of the things the Socialist Party has proved again and again. The other thing the Democrats have proved for us-or against us, rather-is that, right now, anyhow, nationalism is stronger than class solidarity.” He shrugged again. “I’d say the whole world has proved that for us.”

“What about the Negroes in the Confederate States?” Flora asked.

“What about them?” Blackford returned. “They rose up and they got smashed. You’re still learning the difference between being an agitator and being a politician. Listen to me, Flora.” He sounded very earnest. “Compromise is not a dirty word.”

“Maybe it should be,” she answered, and strode into the apartment building ahead of him. She could feel his eyes on her back, but she did not turn around.

Gordon McSweeney prowled along the west bank of the Mississippi, looking for Confederate soldiers to kill. He didn’t find any. The United States had this stretch of the riverbank under firm control these days. He felt frustrated, as a lion might feel frustrated looking out of its cage and seeing a cage full of zebras across the walk in the zoo.

Not even the new, shiny captain’s bars he wore made him feel any easier about the world. He knew he’d been lucky to wreck one Confederate river monitor. Asking God to let him be that lucky twice was pushing the limits of what He was likely to grant.

Across the Mississippi lay Memphis. It might as well have lain across the Pacific, for all McSweeney could do to it. U.S. artillerymen still pounded the city; the cease-fire did not hold west of the Tennessee River. McSweeney was glad of that. Watching smoke rise from the foe’s heartland gave him a certain amount of satisfaction, but only a certain amount. He hadn’t caused any of that devastation himself, and acutely felt the lack.

Ben Carlton came up alongside him. Carlton wore new sergeant’s chevrons on his sleeve. He was a sergeant for the same reason McSweeney was a captain: the regiment had gone through the meat grinder taking Craighead Forest, and not nearly enough new officers and noncoms were coming up to replace the dead and wounded. Very few veterans were still privates these days.

“Pretty damn soon, the Rebs’ll pack it in here, too, I expect,” Carlton said.

“Every blasphemy that passes your lips means a hotter dose of hellfire in the world to come,” McSweeney answered.

“I’ve seen enough hellfire right here on earth,” Carlton said. “The kind the preachers go on about don’t worry me as much as it used to.”

“Oh, but it must!” McSweeney was shocked out of anger into earnestness. “If you do not repent of your sinful ways, the things you have seen here will be as nothing beside the torments you will suffer there. And those torments shall not pass away, but endure for all eternity.”

Instead of giving a direct answer, Carlton asked, “What are you going to do when the war’s finally done?”

McSweeney hadn’t thought about that, not since the day the United States had joined their allies in the fight against the Confederate States and the rest of the Quadruple Entente. He didn’t like thinking about it now. “I work on my old man’s farm,” he answered reluctantly. “Maybe I’ll go back-don’t know much else. Or maybe I’ll try and stay in the Army. That might be pretty good.”

“Well, I’ll tell you, sir, you can have my place when they turn me loose,” Carlton said. “I’ve done enough fighting to last me all my days. Don’t rightly know what I’ll do afterwards-I was sort of odd-jobbing around before I got conscripted-but I’ll come up with something, I figure.”

“Not cook,” McSweeney said. “Anything but cook. When you’re good, you’re not very good, and when you’re bad, even the rats won’t touch it.”

“Love you, too…sir,” Carlton said with a sour stare. He looked thoughtful; he might have been a lousy cook, but he knew all the angles. McSweeney cared nothing for angles. He always went straight ahead. After a few seconds’ contemplation, Carlton went on, “You want to stay in the Army, I figure they’ll let you do it. You’ve picked up so many medals, you’d fall forward on your kisser if you tried to pin the whole bunch on at once. If the Army tried to cut you loose and you didn’t want to go, you could raise a big stink in the papers.”

Raising a stink in the papers had never crossed Gordon McSweeney’s mind. He’d seen a newspaper but seldom before he had to do his service; when he read, he read the Good Book. So now it was with genuine curiosity that he asked, “Do you think it might help?”

“Hell, yes,” Carlton answered, ignoring McSweeney’s fearsome frown. “Can’t you see the headlines? ‘Hero Forced from Uniform!’-in big black letters, no less. Think the Army wants that kind of headline? Like hell they do. They want everybody proud of ’em, especially now that we’ve finally gone and licked the Rebs.”

It sounded logical. It sounded persuasive. McSweeney knew little of logic. What he knew of persuasion he actively distrusted: it struck him as a tool of Satan. With a sigh, he said, “The Army won’t be the same after the war is over.”

“That’s right,” Carlton said. “Most of the time, you’d sleep in a barracks. You’d get your meals regular, from a better cook than me. Nobody would be trying to shoot you or gas you or blow you up.”

McSweeney never worried about what the enemy was trying to do to him. His only concern was how he could kick the other fellow in the teeth. How to put that into words? “After the war,” he said slowly, “how can anything I do seem better than lukewarm?”

“You’re stationed in a nice, cozy barracks, you can go into town and find yourself a pretty girl.” Carlton had an answer for everything.

Most of the time, though, it was the wrong answer by Gordon McSweeney’s reckoning. “Lewdness and fornication lead to the pangs of hell no less surely than blasphemy,” he said, his voice stiff with disapproval.

Carlton rolled his eyes. “All right, Captain,” he said, using the rank in a way that reminded McSweeney he’d known him when he had none, “go into town, find yourself a pretty girl, and marry her, then, if that’s how you feel about it.”

It is better to marry than to burn. So Paul had said in First Corinthians. To hear the same advice from Ben Carlton was jolting; few people struck McSweeney as being less like Paul than did the longtime and stubbornly inept company cook. “Do I tell you how to arrange your life, Carlton?” he demanded.

“Only when you open your mouth,” Ben answered. “Sir.”

McSweeney gave him a dirty look. “You are godless,” he said. “You have made my life a trial since the moment we began serving together. Why God has not called you to Him to judge you for your many sins, I cannot imagine. By failing to call you, He proves Himself a God of mercy.”

“Reckon you’re right about that, Captain McSweeney, sir,” Carlton said, but the gleam in his eyes warned that he did not expect to be taken altogether seriously. “Maybe He figures that, with you riding herd on me, He doesn’t have to do any nagging of His own.”

“Get out of my sight,” McSweeney snarled. Then he held up a hand. “No. Wait. Get down.” Carlton was already throwing himself flat. No more slowly than McSweeney, he heard the screech of cloven air and, intermixed with it, the roar of a river monitor’s big gun.

The roar of the shell was like the end of the world. Face down in the black, sweet-smelling mud-McSweeney could tell by his nose how rich the soil was-he felt the world shake as the round thudded home. Splinters hissed and squealed past overhead. Dirt pattered down on him and Carlton both. The Rebs hadn’t missed them by much. The crash of the shell left his ears stunned, battered.

Dimly, as if from far away, he heard Carlton shouting, “I hate those goddamn fucking monitors-unless they’re ours!”

Foul language aside, McSweeney agreed with all his heart. That was why he had sent one of them to its no doubt less than heavenly reward. The U.S. Army still had not brought up guns that could match the monitors’ firepower. As a sergeant, he would have guessed about why that was, and only his strong belief would have kept his guesses from being profane. As an officer, he heard official explanations in place of guesses. The only trouble was, the explanations changed from day to day.

Once, he’d been solemnly told that all the really large-caliber cannon were in service east of the Mississippi. A few days later, he heard that the roads down from Missouri were too bad to let the Army move super-heavy cannon down as far as Memphis. The roads were bad. He knew that. Whether they were that bad, or whether the other half of the explanation was true, he did not know. He did know the U.S. artillery that had made it down opposite Memphis could not match what the Rebels’ river monitors carried.

Another shell came whistling down out of the sky. This one struck even closer than had the first. The force of the explosion sent him tumbling along the ground. He felt something wet on his upper lip. When he raised a hand, he discovered his nose was bleeding. If he’d been breathing in rather than out, he might have had his lungs torn to shreds inside his chest, and died without a mark on his body except blood from his nose. He’d seen that happen. After almost three years, he’d seen everything happen.

Ben Carlton was screaming. Because his ears had taken a beating, McSweeney needed longer to realize that than he would have otherwise. He crawled toward Carlton, then stopped and grimaced and shook his head. A shell fragment had gutted the company cook like a trout. His innards spilled into the mud. It put McSweeney in mind of the last time he’d butchered a calf.

“Oh, Mother!” Carlton wailed. “Oh, Jesus! Oh, Jesus fucking Christ!”

That was not the way McSweeney would have called on the Son of God, but he did not criticize, not here, not now. As he took a better look at Carlton’s wound, he became certain the cook was beyond his criticism, though not beyond that of a higher Judge. Not only were his guts spilled on the ground, they were also gashed and torn. If he didn’t die of blood loss or shock, a wound infection would finish him more slowly but no less surely.

He wasn’t in shock now, but too horribly aware of what had happened. “Do something, God damn you!” he shrieked at Gordon McSweeney.

McSweeney looked at his contorted face, looked at the wound, and grimaced again. He knew what needed doing. He’d done it before for wounded comrades. It never came easy, not even for him. He drew the trench knife he wore on his belt and showed it to Carlton. The wounded man was awake and aware and deserved the choice.

“Yes,” he groaned. “Oh, God, yes. It hurts so bad.”

McSweeney got up on his knees, used one hand to tilt up Ben Carlton’s chin, and cut his throat. His comrade’s eyes held him for a few seconds, then looked through him toward eternity.

Looking at Carlton, McSweeney hardly noted yet another shell screaming in. Had he noticed, it would have mattered little. The shell burst only a couple of feet away. For an instant, everything was gold-glowing light. Then it was dark, darkness absolute. And then Gordon McSweeney found out whether or not everything in which he had so fervently believed was true.

Richmond shocked Anne Colleton. She hadn’t been in the capital since the night of the first big U.S. bombing raid, most of a year before. It had taken a beating then; she’d seen as much as she made her way to the train station. But that had been a house gone here, a shop gone there, and a few piles of rubble in the street.

Now, after months of nighttime visits from U.S. bombing aeroplanes, Richmond was a charred skeleton of its former self. Whole blocks had been burnt out. Hardly a building had escaped getting a chunk bitten out of it. Windows with glass in them were rare enough to draw notice. More were boarded over; still more gaped empty.

“Things have been hard, sure enough,” the cab driver told her as he pulled up in front of Ford’s Hotel. “Last time they were this hard, I was a little boy, and the Yankees were comin’ up the James instead of down from the north.” He wore a neat white beard, at which he plucked now. “We druv ’em back then, but I’ll be switched if I know how we’re going to do it this time.”

A colored attendant took charge of her bags. When she registered, she smiled to find her room was on the same floor as it had been during her last visit. The smile held a hint of cat’s claws; she’d kept Roger Kimball out of her bed then, much to his annoyance.

After she’d unpacked, she telephoned the president’s residence. The aide with whom she talked seemed surprised she’d come into Richmond so nearly on time, but said, “Yes, Miss Colleton, the president looks forward to seeing you. You’re booked for tomorrow at ten. I trust that will be acceptable.”

“I suppose so,” she answered. “Or will we have surrendered by then?” The flunky spluttered. Anne said, “Never mind. That will be fine.” She hung up in the middle of an expostulation.

Supper that evening wasn’t what it had been the year before, either. “Sorry, ma’am,” the Negro waiter said. “Cain’t hardly get food like we used to.” He lowered his voice. “A couple o’ the bes’ chefs went an’ joined the Army, too.”

Anne sighed. “I wish I’d known that before I ordered. I think this so-called beefsteak would neigh if I stuck a fork in it.”

“No, ma’am, that really an’ truly is beef,” the waiter insisted. He dropped his voice to a whisper again: “But if you stick a fork in the rabbit with plum sauce, it’ll meow, sure as I’m standin’ here. Roof rabbit, nothin’ else but.” Having thought about ordering the rabbit, Anne let out a sigh of relief.

U.S. bombers pounded Richmond again that night. Anne grabbed a robe and went down to the cellar of the Ford Hotel, where she spent several crowded, uncomfortable, frightened hours. Even in the cellar, she could hear the crump! of bursting bombs, the barking roar of the antiaircraft guns, and the seemingly endless buzzing snarl of aeroplanes overhead. She realized how isolated from the war she’d been in South Carolina. It left no one here untouched.

Just after she’d managed to fall asleep in spite of the racket, the all-clear sounded. She went back to her room and lay awake again for a long time before finally dropping off once more.

Ham and eggs the next morning tasted fine. The coffee was muddy and bitter, but strong enough to pry her eyes open, which counted for more. She walked outside, flagged a cab, and went up Shockoe Hill to the presidential residence.

Antiaircraft guns had sprouted on the lawn since her last visit. Holes-actually, they were more like craters-had sprouted in the lawn. Boards took the place of glass here as elsewhere in Richmond. Other than that, the mansion seemed undamaged, for which Anne was glad.

Inside, a flunky of higher grade than the one with whom she’d confirmed her appointment said, “Ma’am, the president will see you as soon as he finishes his meeting with the British minister.”

President Semmes stayed closeted with the British minister till nearly noon, too. Had he been with anyone else save perhaps the secretary of war, the delay would have offended her. But the British Empire and the Confederate States were the last of the Quadruple Entente still in the fight against the USA and Germany (Anne didn’t count Japan, and didn’t think she should-the Japanese were fighting more in their own interest than as allies of anyone else). It was only natural for them to take counsel together.

When the British minister left Semmes’ office and came out through the antechamber where she was sitting, she grimaced. His expression would have had to lighten to seem grim. He hurried past without looking at her. Without false modesty, she knew that any man who did that had a lot on his mind.

“The president will see you now,” the flunky said, appearing in the waiting room as if by magic.

“Thank you,” Anne said, and went into the office from which presidents of the Confederate States had led their nation from one success to another for better than half a century. Gabriel Semmes still led; where the success was to come from, however, Anne could not imagine.

Semmes seemed to have aged a decade since Anne had seen him the previous year. He was grayer and balder than he had been; his skin hung slack on his face, and dark shadows lay under his eyes. When he said, “Come in, Miss Colleton. Do come in,” his voice was an old man’s voice.

“Thank you, your Excellency,” Anne said, and then, as she sat, “Are things really so bad as that?”

“By no means.” President Semmes let out a gallows chuckle. “They are a great deal worse. The British Isles will starve-save, perhaps, that part of Ireland that has risen in revolution-and we are taking blows not even an elephant could hope to withstand for long.”

“But the truce in Tennessee is holding,” Anne said. “Why would Roosevelt let it hold if the United States weren’t also at the end of their tether?”

“So he can hammer harder at other fronts,” Semmes said. “So he can threaten us with starting up the war again there, too, if we do not lay down our arms on all fronts. If he does…” Semmes shook his head. “We could not hold the Yankees at the line of the Cumberland. I do wonder if we should be able to hold them at the line of the Tennessee.”

He shook his head again; Anne got the idea he wished he hadn’t said so much. “They’ve licked us, then,” she said. “Colored soldiers and all, they’ve licked us. We might as well not have bothered with them.”

“As it turned out, that is true,” Semmes said, “though they did buy us some extra time. Had Russia not collapsed, had France held out, our own circumstances would be very different. And then, when the Empire of Brazil stabbed England in the back…our Allies are in a bad way, Miss Colleton, even as we are.”

“We had better cut our losses, then, and get out of the fight with the best bargain we can make,” Anne said.

“For one thing, that would mean casting aside our allies once and for all,” the president answered. “For another, but for the cease-fire in Tennessee, I have seen no sign that the United States want to bargain. All they want is to rub our faces into the dirt. The men I have sent forth to treat with them leave me in no doubt as to how much they want to rub our faces in the dirt.”

“We did it to them twice,” Anne said, “and they’ve been burning for revenge since the Second Mexican War.”

“We’ve embarrassed them since, too,” Semmes said gloomily. “With Britain and France at our backs, we’ve been too strong for them to challenge, and so, up till now, we have for the most part had our own way.”

“Up till now,” Anne echoed. “Can we yield? Or do they aim to wipe us off the face of the earth? If they do, I already know how to use a rifle. Teaching the rest of the women in the CSA wouldn’t take long.”

“I admire your spirit, Miss Colleton,” the president said. “But we are not in the state we are in because of any want of spirit. We are in our present state because our allies have failed, and because our Negroes rose up against us, and most of all because the United States outweigh us by about two to one. They outweigh us and Canada combined, and they have been able to take advantage of it. I wish I had something more hopeful I could tell you.”

“We must never let this happen again,” Anne said.

“In principle, I agree with you,” Gabriel Semmes replied. “In practice…in practice, I fear, living up to that principle shall not be so easy. The Yankees will grow as a result of whatever peace they force upon us; we shall shrink correspondingly. They will not make it easy for us to gain redress for the grievances they leave us.”

“They waited fifty years and more for their revenge,” Anne said. “If we have to, we can do the same. But I hope and pray it will come sooner.”

“They also spent a lot of time and money preparing that revenge,” Semmes pointed out. “Can we do the same, under their watchful eye?” Just when Anne thought his manhood altogether quenched, he added, “Whether we can or not, I don’t know, but we shall have to try.”

“Yes,” Anne said. “I never understood what drove them to want the revenge so badly. Now I do. Nothing like losing to make you want to take back what you’ve lost and to get even with the fellow who took it from you.”

She thought of Jacob, gassed by the Yankees and murdered when the Negroes raised the red banner of revolution. She’d had some measure of revenge-not enough, but some-on the Reds. How could she avenge herself upon the United States of America?

“I do want to thank you for the support you have shown for my policies since I succeeded President Wilson,” Semmes said. “I hope that support will continue as we head toward the end of this war.”

I hope you still have some money and some influence left, was what he meant. Anne hoped the same thing. She wished she’d sold Marshlands before the Red uprising-that would have given her more capital to invest. Her investments, at the moment, were disasters, but Marshlands was a catastrophe. Not only was it bringing in no money, the taxes she paid on the land were sucking the life’s blood from her veins.

She said, “I’ll do what I can. We need to get our strength back as quickly as we’re able to.”

That wasn’t a promise that what she would do would involve supporting Gabriel Semmes, although she would not have been brokenhearted to have him take it as one. And so he did, saying, “I knew I could rely on you. And let me say that, even now, I have some hope that the Army of Northern Virginia will yet halt the Yankees’ inroads, for which they are paying a dreadful price. If we stop them, if we can drive them back, we may yet get terms more nearly acceptable to the national honor.”

“I hope we do,” Anne said, and meant it. At the same time, though, she still held to the thought she’d had before: if the war was lost, best to escape it as soon as might be. With this war behind them, the Confederate States could start thinking about the next one.

It was, Lucien Galtier thought, a grand day for a wedding. He felt not the least bit sorry to hold the ceremony in the little tin-roofed church of St.-Antonin rather than the grander structure up in Riviere-du-Loup. Father Pierre, the local priest, got on very well with Father Fitzpatrick. Bishop Pascal would have made a fine show of getting along with Dr. O’Doull’s friend, and, while making that fine show, would have done everything in his power to undercut him. Lucien had seen Bishop Pascal in action before.

He fiddled with his wing collar and cravat. Marie had gone on and on about how handsome he looked in his somber black suit. Whether he looked handsome or not, he disliked the way the collar grabbed him around the neck. He sniffed at his sleeve, hoping neither the suit nor the white shirt under it smelled too overpoweringly of mothballs. They spent most of their time in a chest in the closet, coming forth for hardly anything but funerals and weddings.

His sons stood around fiddling with their collars, too. He’d had to tie their neckties for them: it was either that or spend half an hour waiting while they botched the job and then do the tying. Neither of them had had much practice at the art. He hadn’t had much himself, and hoped the knot in his own cravat was as straight as those he’d tied for Charles and Georges.

Had Nicole been marrying some young man of the vicinity, he too would have worn a black suit of no particular age (and no particular shape), and like as not a cravat his father had tied for him. Dr. Leonard O’Doull, on the other hand, wore a cutaway, white tie, trousers pressed into creases scalpel-sharp, and a stovepipe hat. When Georges saw him in his splendor, he whistled and said, “I thought I was getting a doctor for a brother-in-law, not a Rockefeller.”

“And I thought I was getting a troublemaker for a brother-in-law, and I see I was right,” Dr. O’Doull returned. He refused to let Georges get his goat. Lucien reckoned that the best way to handle his younger son, who was indeed a troublemaker.

Father Fitzpatrick came up to them, a little man with a beaky nose and hair the color halfway between rust and a sunset. “We’ll do it in just a few minutes, now,” he said. He spoke Parisian French with a peculiar lilting accent. When he spoke English with Dr. O’Doull, the lilt remained.

“This is good,” Lucien said. “This is very good.” He slowed his own speech a little for the priest’s benefit. Turning to his daughter’s fiance, he asked, “Are you nervous?”

“Of course I’m nervous,” O’Doull answered. Georges looked disappointed; had O’Doull tried to deny it, Lucien’s son would have made him pay. The American doctor went on, “Weren’t you nervous when you married your wife?”

“Now that I think on it, it could be that I was,” Galtier said, and pursed his lips to show he knew he was understating things. He’d been as nervous as a man getting a half-grown lynx out of a tree, and he’d known Marie since they were both children. O’Doull had known Nicole only since they began working together at the hospital. No wonder he was nervous.

Friends and relatives filed into the church. Most of them waved to Lucien; some came over to shake hands with him and O’Doull. A few went inside with rather sour expressions. They were families with young men who might possibly have been matched to Nicole had her father not chosen this outsider. In their shoes, he would have shown a long face, too.

And then it was time to go inside, and for Lucien to lead Nicole down the aisle toward the altar. In her dress all of white, she looked very young and very beautiful. She beamed at him through the veil. He patted the hand she’d set on his arm. If she was happy, he would be happy. And, even if Dr. O’Doull was an American, he struck Galtier as a solidly good fellow.

So did Father Fitzpatrick, though he gave Lucien a start by pronouncing the Latin of his prayers in a most peculiar fashion. Galtier glanced sharply over at Father Pierre. The local priest remained calm. That let Lucien also remain calm. If Father Pierre thought Father Fitzpatrick’s pronunciation acceptable, God likely would, too.

After Dr. O’Doull had opened Nicole’s veil and kissed her, after he had set a ring on her finger, people headed across the street to the hall Lucien had hired for the reception-the money Major Quigley had paid for back rent for the land on which the hospital stood was proving useful in all sorts of ways. Once there, Lucien got a drink and then found an excuse to get Father Pierre in a corner and ask him about Father Fitzpatrick’s Latin.

Father Pierre was also holding a drink. He knocked it back, chuckled, and answered, “You need have no concern over that. English and Irish and American priests are in the habit of pronouncing their Latin as they believe the ancient Romans would have spoken.”

“And you, how do you pronounce your Latin?” Lucien asked.

“In the same way as does His Holiness the Pope,” Father Pierre said. “I think I have made the better choice, but the other is in no way evil, merely different.”

“I also think you have made the better choice,” Lucien said. “In your mouth, Latin sounds splendid. In Father Fitzpatrick’s mouth, I found it harsh and rather ugly.”

“Part of that is because you are not used to it,” the priest of St.-Antonin replied. “Their way does have a certain majesty to it-although, as I say, I prefer our own.” He rolled his eyes. “Trust English-speakers to pay no attention to what the rest of the world does.” Galtier laughed at that.

“Where is the joke, mon beau-pere?” Leonard O’Doull asked. He could properly call Lucien his father-in-law now.

“Yes, Father, where is the joke?” Nicole echoed. Instead of Galtier’s arm, she clung with proud possessiveness to her new husband’s.

“It is a matter of Latin,” Lucien answered. With any luck at all, that would impress and confuse both the newlyweds.

It worked with his daughter, but not with O’Doull. The doctor thumped his forehead with the heel of his free hand. “But of course! I’m an idiot. Fitz learned his Latin the Ciceronian way, same as I did. But you folks here pronounce it as if the Romans had been Italians, don’t you? He must have sounded pretty funny to you.”

“If our way is good enough for the Holy Father in Rome, it is good enough for me,” Galtier said. Behind him, Father Pierre nodded. “And yes, your friend’s Latin did sound odd, though I am given to understand it is also good, of its kind.”

He wondered if that would insult the American. Instead, he saw that O’Doull was having a hard time not laughing. “Fitz’s Latin is certainly better than mine, these days,” his son-in-law said. “Who but a priest has the chance to keep his grasp of the language so fresh?”

“You have reason,” Father Pierre said. “I speak no English, I am sorry to say, and many priests who do speak English know not a word of French-unlike your friend Father Fitzpatrick, whose French is very good, if, like his Latin, spoken in an interesting way. But with such folk I speak in Latin, and I am understood. Even with the differences in pronunciation, I am understood.”

“It’s like the difference between the French of Paris and the French of Quebec,” O’Doull said.

“Why, so it is!” The priest of St.-Antonin beamed at him, then turned to Lucien and slapped him on the back. “You are a fortunate man, to have a scholar as part of your family.”

“I am a fortunate man,” Lucien said. “That is enough. And if I owe some of my good fortune to an American-why then, I do, that is all.”

Before either Leonard O’Doull or Father Pierre could say anything to that, shouts from the street distracted both of them and Galtier, too. A couple of people near the doorway called out to learn what was going on. Lucien heard the reply very clearly: “The flag of the Republic of Quebec flies over the city of Quebec!”

Several other people who also heard shouted for joy. A moment later, somebody punched one of them in the nose. Half a dozen men jumped on the puncher and threw him out. To Lucien’s dismay, he saw the fellow sprawled in the street with his trousers torn was a cousin he’d always liked pretty well.

Before the reception could turn into a free-for-all, he let out a great bellow: “Enough!” He was loud enough to make everyone turn around and notice him. Still at the top of his lungs, he went on, “This is a wedding, not a political rally. Anyone who wishes to make it a political rally will answer to me.” He cocked a fist, leaving no doubt about what he meant.

“And me!” Georges and Charles said in the same breath, standing shoulder to shoulder with their father.

That settled that. People horrified at the victory of the Americans and the Republic of Quebec (very much in that order) over the Canadian and British troops defending the capital of what had been the Canadian province of Quebec kept that horror to themselves. Lucien Galtier felt some, as he watched the world with which he was long familiar crack further. But his manner also persuaded those who were delighted with the success of the Republic to keep their mouths shut. The reception went on.

Marie came up to him and spoke quietly: “You did very well there.”

“Did I?” Lucien shrugged. “I do not know. What should I feel? I was torn in two when France lay down her arms to Germany. Now I am torn in two again. What we had is not what we shall have.”

“Change.” His wife spoke the word as if it were more filthy than tabernac. “Why can the world not stay as it has always been?”

Now it was Galtier’s turn to whisper: “You ask this at the wedding of your eldest daughter to an American doctor? How many American doctors would have come to the farm a-courting without the war? Not more than six or eight, I am certain.”

Marie stuck an elbow in his ribs. “And I am certain you are as much trouble as Georges, which is saying a good deal. I am also certain Dr. O’Doull is a fine young man, even if he is an American.”

“I am certain of this as well, else I should never have allowed him to join the family,” Galtier said. “And I am certain we have profited since the Americans came, when everything is taken all in all. But in doing so, we have turned our backs on everything that we knew and taken hold of everything that is new. Do you wonder that I worry on account of it?”

“I wonder that you worry so little on account of it,” Marie answered.

“This only shows that, wife of mine as you have been these many years, you do not know every dark place inside my heart,” Lucien told her. “I worry-how I worry! But I have got by…we have got by. And, old or new, we will go on getting by.” Now he spoke with great determination. After a moment, Marie nodded.

Lieutenant General George Custer was in a state, and, for once, his adjutant was damned if he blamed him. “On my front!” Custer shouted. “Roosevelt accepts a cease-fire on my front! Does he accept a cease-fire on any other front? In a pig’s arse he does! Why my front? Why my front alone?”

“He must have reasons,” Major Abner Dowling said, though he’d been hard pressed to find any that made sense to him.

“Oh, he has reasons, all right,” Custer snarled. He had no trouble finding them, either: “He wants to rob me of my glory, that’s what he wants to do. He always has, damn him. He never let me go to Canada, to lead our soldiers there. And now this is the front where we first broke through the Rebels’ lines. This is the front where the U.S. Army learned how to break through the Rebels’ lines. And this is the front Teddy Roosevelt chose to halt. Do I have to draw you a picture, Major?”

“Sir, you can’t mean that,” Dowling said.

He might as well not have spoken, for Custer ranted right through him: “That man in the White House has tried to rob me of the credit I deserve for the past thirty-five years. I was the one in command when we drove Chinese Gordon out of Montana during the Second Mexican War, but who stole the headlines? Roosevelt and his Unauthorized Regiment, that’s who. Tell me to my face, Major, that he’s not doing the same thing now. Look at the map and tell me that to my face!”

Dowling obediently looked. The longer he looked, the more he wondered whether the general commanding First Army didn’t have a point. If Roosevelt hadn’t accepted the cease-fire, how far would U.S. forces have advanced by now?

Custer, inevitably, had his own opinion about that: “Murfreesboro? To hell with Murfreesboro! We’d be pushing on toward Chattanooga by now, damn me to hell if we wouldn’t.” Fortunately for him, Dowling couldn’t do anything of the sort. Chattanooga was a long way away.

“I doubt that, General.” The voice came from the doorway. Dowling turned. His mouth fell open. There, grinning, stood Theodore Roosevelt. How much of Custer’s tirade had he heard? By the look of that grin, altogether too much. Dowling kissed his own career good-bye.

And Custer wasn’t finished. Custer wasn’t anywhere close to finished. “How dare you inflict this indignity on First Army, Mr. President? How dare you?” he demanded. “Whatever you may think of me, the brave soldiers who have given so much to the cause deserve to be in at the kill.”

Many of those soldiers would have agreed with him, too, though being in at the kill might have meant their dying. Dowling knew as much; complaints from the front kept flooding into Nashville.

Roosevelt said, “Either the Confederates will yield on all fronts in a week’s time, General, or you will be moving forward again. That I promise you. Maybe you will be able to aim toward Chattanooga after all.”

“Why the devil did you halt me in the first place?” Custer said, anything but mollified. “Even more to the point, why did you halt me and no one else? You do not serve your country well by bearing a grudge across so many years.”

If that wasn’t the pot complaining of the kettle’s complexion, Dowling had never heard any such. But Roosevelt didn’t rise to the bait. Instead, walking over to the map on the wall, he pointed to the ground First Army had seized south of the Cumberland. “I stopped First Army, General, because you have done something no other U.S. force has accomplished.”

“You halted us because we did better than any other force you have?” Custer howled. “You admit it?”

“That’s not what I said, General,” Roosevelt answered sharply. “Your unique achievement is easy to describe: in moving south of the Cumberland, yours is the only force to have captured territory I am willing to return to the Confederate States in exchange for concessions elsewhere. We go from the realm of war into the realm of diplomacy here-do you see?”

“Ahh.” That wasn’t Custer; it was Abner Dowling. He wasn’t sure he agreed with what Roosevelt was doing (not that the president would lose any sleep if he didn’t), but he was profoundly relieved Roosevelt was doing it for some other reason besides (or at least in addition to) pique against Custer.

Custer himself did not give over sputtering and fuming. “Why on earth should we give any land we’ve taken back to the Rebs? When I was a lad, this was all part of the United States, and so it should be again.”

“In principle, General, I agree with you,” Roosevelt answered. “In practice, the line we occupy-and what we can reasonably hope to take-will not give us a neat, defensible frontier everywhere along it. We’ll do some horse trading at the table, and this stretch south of the Cumberland I can trade without a second thought.”

“You won’t have to do much trading, sir,” Dowling said. “We hold the whip.”

“That’s true, Major, but I can’t wipe the Confederate States from the face of the earth, however much I might want to,” the president answered. “Kaiser Bill can’t make France go away, either. If we weaken them, though, and make them pay, they won’t trouble us for a long while.”

“Then, by thunder, when we do fight them again, we’ll put paid to them once and for all,” Custer said. He rubbed his age-gnarled hands together. “Damned if I don’t look forward to reuniting the country at last.”

He sounded as if he looked forward to commanding U.S. soldiers in the next war against the CSA. If, as Roosevelt hoped, the Confederates would have to lie quiet for a long time, the wait would put him up into his nineties-or beyond. Maybe he didn’t think about that. Maybe he thought about it and didn’t care: having gone on for so long, he might believe he could go on forever.

Major Dowling asked, “Mr. President, for what land might you want to swap what we’ve taken south of the Cumberland?”

“What I have in mind getting is the little chunk of southeastern Kentucky the Confederates still hold,” Roosevelt answered. “Lord knows it’s not worth much as far as land goes, but having the whole state in our hands will make life simpler after the shooting stops. The Confederates won’t be able to keep Kentucky in their Congress then, or to go on electing senators and a congressman or two who’ll spend all their time speechifying about how the Confederacy needs to take back their home state. I want it gone from their minds, altogether gone, and that will be that.”

“That makes a…good deal of sense,” Dowling said slowly. Because of his bulldog aggressiveness, Roosevelt didn’t get the credit he deserved either as a politician or as a statesman. “The Germans had no end of trouble from France when they took part of Lorraine after the Franco-Prussian War but let the froggies keep some, too. Better they should have grabbed it all, to make the break clean.”

Roosevelt beamed at him. “The very example I had in mind, as a matter of fact, Major.” Dowling beamed, too; looking smart in front of your boss never hurt. The president went on, “Our allies will correct that omission in the forthcoming peace, I assure you.”

Custer coughed, one of those coughs loosed for no other purpose than to draw attention to oneself. “This is all very well, your Excellency, I have no doubt, but why do it at the expense of what First Army has achieved? If you must trade the Confederates land for land, why not give them back some of the vast worthless stretches we’ve captured west of the Mississippi, in Arkansas and Sequoyah and Texas and Sonora?”

“Not all that land out there is worthless, General,” Roosevelt answered. “The stretch of Arkansas we hold puts Memphis under our guns, which emphatically is worth doing. Sequoyah is full of oil and gas, and we can use them: motorized machines grew ever more important as this war moved along. And as for the land that is largely worthless-that being so, why would the CSA want it back?”

“It still strikes me as unjust that my forces should be singled out for this halt,” Custer said. “We deserve better than that.”

I deserve better than that, he meant. Dowling had no trouble understanding as much, and neither did Theodore Roosevelt. He blew air out through his mustache before replying, “General, would you not say that, in your long and distinguished military career, you have already been treated better than you deserve?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea what you are referring to, Mr. President,” Custer said, bristling, “and I resent the imputation.”

“Resent all you like,” Roosevelt growled. Abner Dowling did his best to seem a large, corpulent fly on the wall. He listened avidly as Roosevelt continued, “When we were taking our position north of the Teton, you were the one who wanted to move back the Gatling guns that chopped the British infantry to dog-meat. If we had moved them, the limeys probably would have overrun us. The only reason you ever got to be a hero, you pompous fraud, is that Colonel Welton and I talked you out of it.”

“That’s a damned lie!” Custer shouted.

“The hell it is!” Roosevelt shouted back. “And if your brother hadn’t got himself shot, he would have said the same thing.”

“Another lie!” Custer turned a dusky shade of purple that had to, surely had to, portend an apoplexy. “Tom and I were two sides of the same coin.”

“Both tails, or maybe blockheads,” Roosevelt said.

“Damn you, you know why I always wanted to lead in Canada. You’ve always known, and you’ve always ignored my requests for transfer. Is it any wonder I resent that?” Custer said.

Instead of answering, Roosevelt shrugged off his coat. Custer cocked his fist and glared a challenge. The two men, one nearing sixty, the other nearing eighty, looked ready to swing at each other. “Gentlemen, please,” Dowling said, reluctantly reminding them of his existence. Even more reluctantly, he stepped between them. “If the two of you quarrel, the only gainers live in Richmond.”

Roosevelt recovered his temper as fast as he lost it. He’d always been volcanic, but his eruptions quickly subsided. With a nod-almost a bow-to Dowling, he said, “You’re right, of course.” He also nodded to Custer. “General, I apologize for my hasty words.” As if to prove he meant it, he put the coat back on. “I also assure you that, as I said before, I accepted this cease-fire for reasons of state, ones that have nothing to do with personal animus against you, with the memory of your brother, or with disrespect for the sterling fighting qualities the men of First Army have displayed.”

“Slander. Nothing but slander,” Custer muttered under his breath. Unlike Roosevelt, he stayed angry a long time. But, when the president affected not to hear him, he muttered something else and then said, “I must accept the assurances of my commander-in-chief.” From him, that was an extraordinary concession.

It wasn’t what most interested his adjutant, though. For years, Dowling had heard whispers about the combat in Montana Territory that said what Roosevelt had said out loud. It did not strike him as improbable. Where sound military judgment required pushing straight ahead, Custer could be relied upon to exercise such judgment. Where sound military judgment required anything else, Custer could be relied upon to push straight ahead.

“General, we’ve won the damn war,” Roosevelt said. “As your adjutant so wisely put it, Richmond laughs if we disagree among ourselves. I do recognize what you have done here. To prove it, when I get back to Philadelphia I shall propose to Congress your elevation to the rank of full general, and I am confident Congress will confirm that promotion.”

Where minutes before Custer had been ready to punch the president, now he bowed as deeply as his years and his paunch permitted. “You honor me beyond my deserts, your Excellency,” he said. By his expression, though, he did not for a moment believe he was being too highly honored. Dowling was inclined to agree with the modest self-appraisal Custer gave to Roosevelt, but then wondered if he might not be promoted, too. A rising tide lifts all boats, he thought, and the U.S. tide rose higher day by day.