Walk in Hell

XVI

Arthur McGregor tramped through the snow toward the barn. The harvest was in, and just in time; freezing weather had come early this year. But the livestock still needed tending. He shook his head. Alexander should have been out here helping him. But Alexander still languished in the Rosenfeld gaol. If he ever got out-

Sometimes, now, hours at a time would go by when McGregor didn’t think of his son’s being freed. Every fiber of him still hoped it would happen. (How could it not happen? he thought. The only thing the boy did was hang about with a few of the wrong people and let his tongue flap loose. Not one in a hundred would be left free if you locked up everybody who did that.) He didn’t count on it or expect it as he had right after Alexander’s arrest, though. Scar tissue was growing over the hole the extraction of his son from the family had left.

He fed the horses, the cows, the pigs, the chickens. He forked dung out of the stalls. He gathered eggs, storing them inside his hat. The hens pecked at his hands, the way they always did when he robbed their nests. The rooster couldn’t have cared less. All he had eyes for was his harem, as splendid to him as the Ottoman sultan’s bevy of veiled beauties.

McGregor’s breath smoked as if he’d just lighted a cigarette when he left the barn. The first inhalation of cold outside air burned in his lungs like cigarette smoke, too. After a couple of breaths, though, he felt all right. Once winter really came down, he’d feel as if he were breathing razors whenever he stuck his head out of any door.

Off to the north, artillery coughed and grumbled. It was farther away than it had been halfway through the summer, when Canadian troops and those from the mother country had pushed the Yankees south from Winnipeg. “But not south to Rosenfeld,” McGregor said sadly. Winnipeg still held, though. So long as Winnipeg held, and Toronto, and Montreal, and Quebec City, Canada lived. The Americans had claimed Toronto’s fall a good many times. Lies, all lies. “What they’re good for,” McGregor told the air, and started back toward the farmhouse with the eggs.

As usual, the north-south road that ran by the farm was full of soldiers and guns and horses and trucks on the move, most of the traffic heading north toward the front. What went south was what didn’t work any more: ambulances full of broken men, trucks and horses glumly pulling broken machines. The more of those McGregor saw, the better he reckoned his country’s chances.

And here came an automobile, jouncing along the path toward the farmhouse. The motorcar was painted green-gray. Even had it not been, he would have known it for an American vehicle. Who but the Americans had gasoline these days?

As if it had not been there, McGregor brought the eggs in to Maude. “Trouble coming,” he said. His wife didn’t need to ask him what he meant. Automobiles were noisy things, and you could hear their rattle and bang and pop a long way across the quiet prairie.

“Americans,” Mary said fiercely, sticking her head into the kitchen. “Let’s shoot them.”

“You can’t say that, little one, not where they can hear you,” McGregor told his younger daughter. “You can’t even think it, not where they can hear you.” Mary’s nod was full of avid comprehension. She had an instinctive gift for conspiracy the war had brought out young in her, as a hothouse could force a rose into early bloom.

The automobile sputtered to a stop. A door slammed, then another. Booted feet-several pairs of booted feet-came stomping toward the door. “Shall we open it?” Maude whispered.

McGregor shook his head. As quietly, he answered, “No. We’ll make ’em knock. They have to know we’re here-where else would we be? It’ll annoy them.” By such tiny campaigns was his war against the invaders fought. Mary’s eyes glowed. She understood without being told the uses of harassment-but then, she had an older brother and sister.

“Damn Canucks,” said one of the American soldiers outside. McGregor nodded, once. Mary giggled soundlessly.

“Quiet.” That was a voice McGregor recognized: Captain Hannebrink. All the farmer’s pleasure at annoying the occupiers changed to mingled alarm and hope. What was the man who had arrested Alexander doing here? He hadn’t come out to the farm since the day of the arrest.

Maude knew his voice, too. “What does he-?” Her voice cut off in the middle of the question. Hannebrink was knocking at the door.

It was an utterly ordinary knock, not the savage pounding it should have been with a car full of American ruffians out there. Stories said they used rifle butts. Not here, not today.

McGregor went to the door and opened it. The captain nodded, politely enough. Behind him, the three private soldiers came to alertness. They had rifles, even if they hadn’t used them as door knockers. Hannebrink didn’t say anything, not right away. “What is it?” McGregor asked as silence stretched.

From behind him, Mary asked, “Are you going to let my brother go?”

“Hush,” Maude said, and pushed Mary back to Julia, hissing, “Take care of her and keep her quiet”-not an easy order to follow.

Captain Hannebrink coughed. “Mr. McGregor, I have to tell you that over the past few days we obtained information confirming for us that your son, Alexander McGregor, was in fact an active participant in efforts to harm United States Army occupying forces in this military district, and that he should therefore be judged as a franc-tireur.”

“Information?” McGregor said, not taking in all of the long, cold, dry sentence at once. “What kind of information?”

“I am not at liberty to discuss that with you, sir,” Hannebrink said stiffly. He scratched at the edge of his Kaiser Bill mustache, careful not to disturb its waxed perfection.

“Means somebody’s been filling your head up with lies, and you don’t have to own up to that or say who it is,” McGregor said.

The American shrugged. “As you know, sir, the penalty for civilians resisting in arms the occupying forces is death by firing squad.”

Behind McGregor, Julia gasped. He heard Maude stop breathing. Through numb lips, he said, “And you’re going to-shoot him? You can’t do that, Captain. There has to be some kind of appeal, of-”

Hannebrink held up a hand. “Mr. McGregor, I regret to have to inform you that the sentence was carried out, in accordance with U.S. Army regulations, at 0600 hours this morning. Your son’s body will be released to you for whatever burial arrangements you may care to make.”

Mary didn’t understand. “Father-?” Julia said in a halting voice; she wasn’t sure she understood, and desperately hoped she didn’t. Maude set her hand on McGregor’s arm. She knew. So did he.

They shot him at sunrise, he thought dully. Before sunrise. It would have been dark and chilly, even before they wrapped a black rag over Alexander’s bright, laughing eyes, tied him to a post or stood him up against a wall or did whatever they did, and fired a volley that made him one with the darkness and ice forever.

The American soldiers behind Captain Hannebrink were very alert. McGregor would have bet they’d had this duty before, and knew hell could break loose. “If it is any consolation to you, sir,” the captain said, “he went bravely and it was over very fast. He did not suffer.”

McGregor couldn’t even scream at him to get out. They had Alexander’s body, the body that, the Yank said, had not suffered, but was now dead. “Take it,” McGregor said, stumbling over the words, “take it to the Presbyterian church. He’ll go in, in the graveyard there.”

Julia shrieked. So did Mary-she knew what the graveyard meant. She sprang for Captain Hannebrink as she had for the U.S. officer in Rosenfeld when he’d wanted to arrest her father. McGregor grabbed her and held her. He didn’t know what those narrow-eyed soldiers behind Hannebrink might do to an attacker, even an attacker who was a little girl, and he didn’t want to find out.

“I shall do as you request,” Captain Hannebrink said. “As I told you, sir, I deeply regret the unfortunate necessity for this visit.”

“Somebody went out and told you one more lie, Captain, and you piled it on top of all the other lies you heard, and it finally gave you enough of a stack so you could shoot my boy, the way you’ve been looking to do all these months,” McGregor said.

“We do not believe it was a lie,” Hannebrink said.

“And I don’t believe you,” McGregor said. “Now get out of my sight. If I ever set eyes on you again-” Maude’s hand tightened on his upper arm and brought him a little way back toward himself.

“Mr. McGregor, I understand that you are overwrought now,” the U.S. officer said, trying to be kind, trying to be sympathetic, and only making McGregor hate him more on account of it. He turned to his soldiers. “Come on, boys. We’ve done what we had to do. Let’s go.”

All the men walked back to the Ford. Hannebrink got in. So did the private soldiers, one at a time, ever so warily. When one cranked the engine back to life, another covered him. McGregor wondered how often they’d been fired on after delivering that kind of news. Some people, after hearing it, wouldn’t much care whether they lived or died.

He didn’t much care whether he lived or died himself. But he did care about Maude and Julia and Mary. His family. All the family he had left.

He turned back to his wife. Tears were running down her face. He hadn’t heard her start crying. He was crying, too, he suddenly realized. He hadn’t noticed that start, either. They clung to each other and to their daughters-and to the memory of their son.

“Alexander,” Maude whispered, her faced pressed against his shoulder.

“Alexander,” he echoed slowly. His mind raced ahead. Look ahead, look behind, look around-if you didn’t look at where you were, you wouldn’t have to think about how bad things were here at the focused moment of now.

He saw Alexander laid to rest in the churchyard, the grass there already sere and brown. He saw past that. His son had said-had no doubt said up until the very moment the rifles fired-he’d had no part in the things he was accused of doing. McGregor believed him.

Someone had lied, then. Someone had lied to bring him to death before sunrise. Someone, probably, whose son really had done the things Alexander stood accused of doing, and wanted to see the McGregors suffer along with him, no matter how unjustly. Whoever it was, McGregor figured he could find him, sooner or later. An eye for an eye. A tooth for a tooth.

And the Americans had believed the lie. They must have known it was a lie. But they hadn’t shot anybody lately, and maybe they needed examples to keep the Canadians quiet.

Whatever their reasons, he vowed they weren’t going to keep him quiet. They’d shot Alexander for a franc-tireur. He hadn’t been one. McGregor was sure of that, down to the marrow of his bones. But in shooting him, they’d made themselves a franc-tireur, all right.

“I’m twenty years out of the Army,” he murmured. Maude stared at him. She would know what he was thinking. He didn’t care, not now he didn’t. He’d forgotten a lot of things over half a lifetime or so. If he had to use them again, though, he expected they’d come back soon enough.

Having wished that, after so long in river monitors, he might go back to sea, George Enos was repenting of his decision. He had gone to sea in fishing boats since before the time when he needed a razor. Going to sea in a destroyer was an altogether different business, as he was discovering day by day.

“It’s like you’ve ridden horses all your life, and they were the horses the brewery uses to haul beer barrels to the saloon,” he said to Andy Conkling, who had the bunk under his. “Then one day they put you on a thoroughbred and they tell you you’ll do fine because what the hell, it’s a horse.”

Conkling laughed at him. He had a round red face and a big Kaiser Bill mustache, so that he put George in mind of a clock with its hands pointing at ten minutes to two. He said, “Yeah, she does go pretty good, don’t she?”

“You might say so,” Enos answered, a New England understatement that made his new friend laugh again. To back it up, he went on, “She cruises-just idles along, mind you-at fifteen knots. No boat I’ve ever been on could do fifteen knots if you tied down the safety valve and stoked the engine till it blew up.”

“Not brewery horses,” Conkling said. “Mules. Maybe donkeys.”

“Yeah,” George said. “And the Ericsson gives us what, going flat out? Thirty knots?”

“Just under, at the trials. Some other boats in the class made it. But she’ll give twenty-eight easy,” Conkling told him.

Fifteen felt plenty fast to Enos. He stared out at the Atlantic racing past under the destroyer’s keel. The USS Ericsson was a bigger, more stable platform than any steam trawler he’d ever sailed, displacing over a thousand tons, but the waves hit her harder, too. And besides-“You’ve got to remember, I’m just off a river monitor. After that, any ocean sailing is rough business.”

“Those things are snapping turtles,” Andy Conkling said disdainfully. “This here is a shark.”

From what Enos had seen and heard, deep-sea sailors had nothing but scorn for the river-monitor fleet. From what he’d seen aboard the Punishment, the monitors didn’t deserve any such scorn. Trying to convince shipmates of that struck him as a good way to waste his breath. He kept quiet.

In a thoughtful tone of voice, Conkling went on, “Of course, this here is a little shark. That’s why we need to be able to run so damn fast: to get away from the big sharks on the other side.”

“Yeah,” Enos said again. He looked out across the endless sweep of the Atlantic once more. That was no idle sightseeing-far from it. Spotting smoke on the horizon-or, worse, a periscope perilously close-might mean the difference between finishing the cruise and sliding under the waves as smoking refuse. “The limeys are out there looking for us, too.”

“You bet your ass they are, chum,” Conkling said. “They don’t want us running guns to the micks. They don’t want it in a really big way. If they can, they’re gonna keep us from doing it.”

“I know about micks,” Enos said. “Coming out of Boston, I’d damn well better know about micks. If the ones on our side of the ocean can’t stand England, what about all the poor bastards over there, living right next to it? No wonder they rose up.”

“No wonder at all, at all,” Conkling said, winking to make the brogue he’d put on seem funnier. He set a finger by the side of his nose. “And no wonder the good old Kaiser and us, we all got to give ’em as big a hand as we can.”

“Hell of a mess over there, if half what you read in the papers is true,” George said, though that was by no means guaranteed. “Shooting and sniping and bombs on the bridges and the Ulstermen massacring all the Catholics they can catch and the Catholics giving it right back to ’em and more limeys tied down there every day, sounds like.”

“England’s got to do it.” Now Andy Conkling made himself sound serious, as if he were a Navy Department bigwig back in Philadelphia. “They let the Irish go and we or the Germans put men in there, that’s curtains for the King, and they know it damn well.”

“I don’t know it,” Enos said. “The Kaiser can’t supply soldiers in Ireland. When the Germans send guns to the Irishmen, they have to do it by submarine. And look at us, sneaking in like we’re going to bed with somebody else’s wife. Don’t suppose we can go at it any other way, not in England’s back yard.”

“Say you’re right,” Conkling replied. “I don’t think so, but say you are. How come England’s making such a big to-do over something that can’t happen?”

“A lot of times people make a big to-do over things that didn’t happen.” For about the hundredth time, George wished he hadn’t had to tell Sylvia where he’d been going when the Punishment was wrecked. I was drunk when I went and I was drunk when I told her, he thought. That tells me I shouldn’t get drunk. She still blamed him for what he hadn’t done. She probably wouldn’t have been much angrier if he had gone and done it, which made part of him wish he had. Only part, though: Mehitabel, looked back on in memory rather than at with desire, wasn’t much.

Smoke poured from the Ericsson’s four stacks. George thought the design was ugly and clumsy, but nobody cared what a sailor thought. The destroyer picked up speed, fairly leaping over the ocean. “Getting close to wherever we’re going,” Conkling remarked.

“Yeah,” George answered. Nobody bothered telling sailors much of anything, either. Ireland the crew knew, but only a handful knew where they’d stand off the coast of the Emerald Isle.

Officers and petty officers went up and down the deck. “Be alert,” one of them said. “We need every pair of eyes we’ve got,” another added. A third, a grizzled CPO, growled, “If we hit a mine on account of one of you didn’t spot it, I’ll throw the son of a bitch in the brig.”

That drew a laugh from Conkling, and, a moment later, after he’d worked it through, one from Enos as well. He said, “If they’ve laid mines, how the devil can we spot ’em, going as fast as we are? The monitor I was on just crawled along the Mississippi, and we had a sweeper go in front of us when we thought the Rebs had mined the river.”

“Turtles,” Conkling said again. That didn’t answer George’s question. After a few seconds, he realized the question wasn’t going to get answered. That probably meant you couldn’t spot mines very well when you were going full speed ahead, an imperfectly reassuring idea.

“Land ho!” somebody shouted. George stared eastward. Sure enough, in a couple of minutes he saw a smudge on the horizon too big for a smoke plume and too steady to be a cloud. After a moment, he realized that, if he could see land, people on land could also see the Ericsson. Someone might be tapping on a wireless key or cranking a telephone even as he stood on the deck, in which case the boat would have visitors soon.

Moved by that same thought, Andy Conkling murmured, “The limeys on shore’ll take us for one of their own. Always have before.” Whether that was expectation or mere pious hope, George didn’t know. He did know it was his hope, pious or not.

“Landing parties to the boats,” a petty officer shouted. Enos hurried to the davits. He had more practice in small boats than most of the men aboard the Ericsson, and less experience on the destroyer herself. That made him a logical man for the landing party.

Each boat had a small gasoline engine in the stern, and each was packed with crates that bore no markings whatsoever. Enos scrambled up into a boat. “Steer between Loop Point and Kerry Head,” the petty officer told him and his five comrades. “Ballybunion’s where you’re going, on the south side of Shannon-mouth past the lighthouse. You’ll know the place by the old castle-a big, square, gray, ugly thing, I’m told, not hardly what you think of when castle goes through your head. Your chums’ll be waiting for you a little west of the castle. Good luck.”

Hoists lowered Enos’ boat and two more into the sea. They rode low in the water. Those crates weren’t stuffed with feathers. George got the motor going and steered for the distant land. “Jesus,” said one of the sailors in the boat with him, a big square-head named Bjornsen, “I feel naked in something this small.”

“Italians go fishing out of T Wharf back home every day in boats smaller than this,” George said.

“Crazy damn dagos,” Bjornsen muttered, and fell silent.

“Should have taken along a line and some hooks,” Enos said. “Might have brought back something the cooks could have fried for our supper.” He peered down into the green-gray sea. “Wonder what they have in the way of fish over here.”

That sparked another couple of sentences from Bjornsen: “Fish is one thing. I just hope they haven’t got any cooked goose.”

Loop Point boasted a lighthouse. Enos hoped nobody was staring down from it with a pair of field glasses. If somebody was staring down from it with a pair of field glasses, he hoped his boat and the two chugging along behind it looked enough like little local fishing boats to draw no notice.

The land was low and muddy and not particularly green, in spite of Ireland’s fabled reputation. Here and there, George spotted stone houses with turf roofs. They looked little and cramped and uncomfortable, a small step up from a sodbuster shack out on the prairie. He wouldn’t have wanted to live in any of them.

A petty officer named Carl Sturtevant had a map. “There’s the Cashen River inlet,” he said, pointing to a stream that, as far as George was concerned, wasn’t big enough to deserve to be a river. “A couple-three miles to Ballybunion.”

Ballybunion Castle had, at some time in the distant past, had part of one wall blown out of it, making it worthless as a fortification. Enos saw it only in the distance. Closer, some men were waving cloth caps to signal to the boats. “There they are,” he said happily.

“Yeah, those should be our boys,” Sturtevant agreed. “If those ain’t our boys, we’re in a hell of a lot of trouble.”

“Shit, if the limeys were wise to us, they wouldn’t waste time with no ambush,” said Bjornsen, a born optimist. “They’d haul a field piece out behind a haystack, wait till we got close, and blow us so high we’d never come down.” He glanced at those anonymous crates. “One hit would do the job up brown, I calculate.”

The men in baggy tweeds came trotting toward the boats. Out from behind a haystack came not a British field gun but several carts. “We’ve got more toys here than they can haul away in those,” George said as his boat beached.

“That’s their worry,” Sturtevant said. He and the other sailors, Enos among them, started unloading the crates.

“God bless you,” one of the Irishmen said. His comrades were lugging the Americans’ presents to the carts. He had a present himself: a jar with a cork in it. “Have a nip o’ this, lads.”

Quickly, the jar went from sailor to sailor. The whiskey tasted different from what George was used to drinking, but it was pretty good. He took a long pull. When he swallowed, he felt as if he’d poured lava down his gullet. The Irishmen didn’t water it to make it stretch further, as bartenders were in the habit of doing.

Wise in the ways of the sea, the Irishmen helped the sailors shove the boats back into the water, some calling thanks in brogues so thick, Enos could barely make them out. Free of the crates, the boats bobbed like corks. He headed out to sea once more, out toward the Ericsson.

“How about that?” Sturtevant said. “We just bit the King of England right in the ass.”

“Now all we have to do is see whether we got away with it,” George said. He wished the boat would go faster.

“Will you look at that crazy son of a bitch!” Vic Crosetti burst out.

Sam Carsten looked. The Sandwich Islander in question was indeed crazy, as far as he could tell. The fellow was skimming over the waves toward shore standing upright on a plank maybe nine or ten feet long and a foot and a half or two feet wide.

“Why the devil doesn’t he fall off and break his fool neck?” Sam said. “You wouldn’t even think a monkey could do that, let alone a man.”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Crosetti said. “But I ain’t gonna let him hear me call him a monkey. He’d break me in half.” That was undoubtedly true. The surf-rider, who came up onto the beach with the plank on his head, was a couple of inches above six feet and muscled like a young god, which was all the more evident because he wore only a dripping cotton loincloth dyed in bright colors.

“Hey, pal,” Carsten said, and tossed him a dime. “That’s a hell of a ride you had there.” Crosetti coughed up a dime, too.

“Thank you both very much, gentlemen,” the fellow said. Like a fair number of his people, he talked like an educated Englishman, which made it hard to treat him like a nigger. His skin was only a couple of shades darker than Crosetti’s, anyhow.

“Where did you learn to do that, anyway?” Sam asked. The moment the words were out of his mouth, he realized he’d been stupid. Too late to do anything about it then, of course. That was the way the world worked.

The native laughed at him. It wasn’t a snotty laugh, it was a friendly laugh: maybe because the surf-rider was a friendly guy, maybe because he knew better than to get himself in trouble squabbling with the U.S. Navy. Both, Sam judged. The fellow said, “Having grown up here in Honolulu with the sea as my neighbor, so to speak, it was a sport I acquired as a boy. I confess I can see how surprising it might appear to those born in other climes.”

“Other climes, yeah,” Carsten said, while Vic Crosetti did his best, which wasn’t any too good, to keep from snickering. As always, every inch of Sam’s flesh the sun touched was cooked red and juicy.

“How come you talk so damn fancy?” Crosetti asked.

“This is how English was taught to me,” the Sandwich Islander said with another shrug. “Since you Americans came here, I have learned the language may be spoken with a number of different accents.”

“Haven’t heard anybody here who’s got quite as much mush in his mouth as you do,” Crosetti said. Was he looking for a fight in spite of denying it before? He hadn’t had that much to drink yet; he and Sam had only just come on leave from the Dakota.

The surf-rider sighed. “You must understand, gentlemen, that under the previous administration my father was assistant minister for sugar production, thus enabling me to acquire rather better schooling than most of my contemporaries.”

Sam needed a moment to realize that under the previous administration meant when the British ran the show. He needed another moment to realize something else. “Your father was assistant what-do-you-call-it, and you took our dimes? Christ on His cross, I bet you can buy and sell both of us and hardly even notice you’ve done it.”

“It may be so, but, for one thing, we Hawaiians-we prefer that to Sandwich Islanders, if it matters to you-have discovered expediency to be the wiser course in dealing with the occupying authorities. Had I refused your money, you might have thought I was insulting you, with results unpleasant for me.” The fellow’s smile revealed large, gleaming white teeth. “And besides, you both chose to reward me for my skill out of what I know to be your small pay. Especially in wartime, acts of kindness and generosity should not be discouraged, lest they disappear altogether off the face of the earth.”

“Whew!” Carsten couldn’t remember the last time anybody had done that much explaining. “You ought to be a chaplain, uh-”

“John Liholiho, at your service.” The surf-rider’s bow could have been executed no more smartly had he been wearing top hat, cutaway, and patent-leather shoes rather than gaudy loincloth and bare feet. “And with whom have I had the pleasure of conversing?”

Carsten and Crosetti gave their names. Crosetti plucked at Sam’s sleeve, whispering, “Listen, do you want to spend the time chewing the fat with this big galoot, or do you want to get drunk and get laid?”

“We got a forty-eight, Vic-don’t have to be back on board ship till day after tomorrow,” Sam answered, also in a low voice. “God knows it’s easy to find a saloon and a piece of ass in this town, but when are you going to run across another real live aristocrat?”

“Ahh, you want to be a schoolteacher when you grow up,” Crosetti snarled in deeply unhappy tones. But he didn’t leave. He hooked his thumbs into the pockets of his tropical white bell-bottoms and waited to see whether Sam could make standing on the beach banging his gums with a native more interesting than a drunken debauch.

John Liholiho peered over toward the jutting prominence of Diamond Head while the two sailors talked with each other. The presumably British school he’d attended had trained him in more things than an upper-crust accent; he showed very plainly that he was not listening to a conversation not intended for him. Carsten wished most of the sailors he knew had a matching reserve instead of being snoops.

He didn’t really know how he was going to make this more fun than getting lit up and having his ashes hauled, either. After a little thought, he asked, “So how do you like it, living under the Stars and Stripes?”

The Sandwich Islander-no matter how he thought of himself, that was how Carsten thought of him-frowned. “You do realize, of course, that this is a question on which circumspection might be the wisest course for me?” Seeing Sam hadn’t the slightest idea what circumspection was, he translated his English into English: “I might be wiser to keep quiet or lie.”

“What am I going to do, shoot you?” Sam said, laughing. Crosetti plucked at his sleeve again. He shook off his pal.

Liholiho gave him a serious look. “Two friends of my father’s of whom I know for certain have suffered this fate. It does give one pause. On the other side of the coin, the protectorate the British exercised over these islands was also imperfectly humane. Mr. Carsten, would you prefer to be thought of as a bloody wog or a nigger?”

Since Sam had been thinking of John Liholiho as a nigger not ten minutes before, he had to work as hard at keeping his face straight as when he was raising on a pair of fives in a poker game. “Anybody called me either one of those things, I’d punch him in the teeth.”

“Yeah.” Now Vic Crosetti’s attention was engaged. “I get called a fuckin’ dago or a wop, that’s bad enough.”

“People seldom call me these things to my face, though I have heard nigger in a mouth or two since you Americans came.” The surf-rider seemed to have a British sense of precision, too. He went on, “What one is called, however, sometimes matters less than how one is seen. If the powers that be reckon one a wog or a nigger, one is not apt to be taken seriously regardless of the potential value of one’s contributions.”

“That’s too complicated for me,” Carsten said, thinking he should have headed out and got drunk after all.

But Crosetti got it. “He’s saying it’s like he’s an ordinary sailor, and he’s trying to convince an admiral he knows what he’s talking about.”

John Liholiho beamed at him. “Mr. Crosetti, I am in your debt. You Americans and our former British overlords do tend to look at race as if it were rank, don’t you? — yourselves being admirals, by the very nature of things. I shall have to use the analogy elsewhere.”

A Sandwich Islander as near naked as made no difference…with whom would he use an analogy (whatever an analogy was; Sam gathered it meant something like comparison, but it was another word he didn’t think he’d ever heard before)? Then Carsten remembered that, even though John looked like a savage, he was a local bigwig’s son. That he had to think twice before the fellow’s station came to mind went a long way toward making his point for him.

Dipping his head again, the brown-skinned man said, “And now, if you will excuse me-” He turned and, carrying his surfriding board, trotted out into the Pacific. Once in the water, he climbed up onto the board, lay on his belly atop it, and used his arms to paddle farther from shore.

Sam turned to Vic Crosetti. “All right, now we can have all the fun we want to. That didn’t take real long, and it was sort of interesting.”

“Yeah, sort of.” Crosetti stared out at John Liholiho’s receding shape. “I bet he’s a limey spy. He sure talks like a limey spy, don’t he?”

“He talks like a limey, anyway,” Carsten answered. “But so what? Even if he is a spy, how’s he going to get word off the island? And if you’re going to start seeing spies under every bed-”

“If I look under a bed,” Crosetti said with great assurance, “it’s to make sure I can hide there if her husband comes home before he’s supposed to.” Both men laughed, and headed into town to see what kind of damage they could do to the fleshpots there.

Reggie Bartlett trudged wearily into Wilson Town, Sequoyah. Seeing houses around him felt strange after so long on the prairie with no human-made artifacts close by but the occasional oil well…and the trenches, and the shells, and the other appurtenances of war.

Lieutenant Jerome Nicoll called, “We got to hold this town, boys. Ain’t a whole hell of a lot of Sequoyah left to us, and we have to hang on to what there is, not let the damnyankees run us out of the whole state. Remember, the Germans don’t hold all of Belgium even now.”

“I ain’t seen any Germans in Sequoyah,” Nap Dibble said. Sweat cut ravines through the dust caking his face. “You see any o’ them damn Huns, Reggie? Yankees is bad enough, but them folks-”

“Haven’t seen any Germans, Nap,” Bartlett answered. He’d long since figured out Nap, while a good fellow, wasn’t what anybody would call sharp. When Dibble lined up in front of the paymaster, he signed his name with an X. No wonder he’d be on the lookout for Germans smack in the middle of Sequoyah.

“We have to save this town,” Lieutenant Nicoll repeated. A shell crashed down a few hundred yards off to the left, arguing that the Confederate soldiers didn’t have to do any such thing.

Bartlett would have been more impressed with the speech if the lieutenant hadn’t said the same thing about Duncan, which had fallen several weeks before. He’d heard the same kind of speech on the Roanoke front, too. There it had sometimes presaged a retreat like this one, and sometimes a counterattack that left dead men piled high in exchange for retaking a couple of hundred yards of chewed-up, worthless ground.

Nicoll tried something new. Pointing south, he spoke in dramatic tones: “There are the people who depend on us to protect them.”

As far as Reggie could see, the people of Wilson Town weren’t depending on the Confederate Army for any such thing. A lot of houses already looked to have been abandoned. More folks-Indians, whites, a handful of Negro servants and laborers-were throwing whatever they could into buggies and wagons and hightailing it south toward the Texas line.

Sergeant Pete Hairston spat in the dust of the road. “If the damnyankees want a pack of damn redskins, they’re welcome to ’em, far as I can tell. Weren’t for the oil round these parts, hell, I’d give Sequoyah to the USA and say, ‘You’re welcome to it.’”

“Will you look at that?” Bartlett pointed to a side-curtained grocery wagon and to the tall, gray-bearded man in a black suit and homburg who was, instead of loading things into it, selling things from it. “Crazy Jew peddler, doesn’t he know he’s liable to get blown to hell any minute?” He raised his voice to a shout: “Hey, you! Hymie!”

That got the peddler’s attention. He wasn’t just big; he looked strong and tough, too, in spite of those snowy whiskers. “Vot you vant?” he asked, his voice wary-no matter how tough he was, he had the brains not to argue with anybody toting a Tredegar.

“You’d better get out of here before you get killed,” Bartlett told him.

“Oh. Dot vot you talk about.” The peddler shrugged. “Soon I go.”

Hairston made money-counting motions. “Business is good, huh?” He laughed. “Damn fool Jew. Money ain’t worth your neck.”

The Jew muttered something under his breath. Reggie didn’t think it was a compliment. He didn’t think it was English, either, which was likely to be just as well: if he didn’t understand it, he didn’t have to notice it. That made something else occur to him: “Hey, Hymie, you sell a lot to the Indians around here?”

“A lot, yes,” the peddler answered. “Is most of folk.”

“How do you talk to ’em?” Bartlett asked. The Jew stared at him, not following the question. He tried again: “What language do you use when you sell to them?”

“Oh.” The Jew’s face lit with intelligence. “They speak Henglish, same like me.” Reggie burst out laughing; from what little he’d seen of them, most of the local Chickasaws and Kiowas spoke English better than the peddler.

“Go on, get the hell out of here,” Hairston said, and the peddler, not without a sigh or two of regret for business lost, scrambled up into the wagon and rattled south out of Wilson Town, almost the last one to leave it.

Methodically, the troops of Lieutenant Nicoll’s company began to dig in. Nap Dibble said, “Wish them niggers what was in this town would’ve stayed a bit. They could have done this here entrenching for us.”

“Back on the Roanoke front, we had us lots of nigger labor battalions,” Reggie said as he made the dirt fly. “Haven’t seen so much of that here out west.”

“Ain’t that much of it,” Sergeant Hairston said. “Like I been tellin’ you since you got here, Bartlett, ain’t that much of anything.”

“Except Yankees,” Reggie said.

“Yeah, except them,” Hairston agreed. “But they ain’t got any more’n-well, ain’t got a whole lot more’n-what we do, ’cept maybe soldiers.”

“Except,” Reggie said again. He dug and dug, steady as a steam shovel. The ground was the perfect consistency: not so hard that he had to labor to force his entrenching tool into it, not so soft or muddy that the edges of the trench he was digging started falling down into what he’d already dug. He flipped the dirt up in front of his excavations to form a parapet. “Wish we had some more barbed wire.” He scooped out another couple of shovelfuls. “Wish we had any barbed wire.”

“Wish for sugarplums for Christmas while you’re at it,” Sergeant Hairston said. “Oh, we may get some wire-we had a good bit in front o’ Duncan, once we’d stayed there a while. But this here ain’t the Roanoke front-that kind of good stuff don’t grow on trees here. I just told you that a couple seconds ago, dammit. Ain’t you listenin’ to me?”

“Yeah, Sarge. I always listen,” Bartlett answered, so mildly that Hairston went back to digging for another stroke or two before giving him a dirty look. Reggie grinned back, a grin that had occasionally softened even the Yankee prison guards in West Virginia. He looked around, not to see if the Yankees were coming or the Chickasaws getting the hell out but to spot his company commander. “Now that the fighting’s picked up again, what’s the lieutenant going to do for his hooch?”

“Damned if I know.” As if reminded of what he’d traded to the men in green-gray for Lieutenant Nicoll’s supply of whiskey, Hairston rolled himself a cigarette. He sucked in smoke before going on, “Hope nothin’ bad’s happened to Toohey. He ain’t a bad guy.” After another drag, he chuckled. “Crazy sayin’ that about one of those Yankee bastards, but it’s so.”

“I know what you mean, Sarge,” Reggie replied. “Fellow who captured me, there in the Roanoke valley, he could have shot me and my pals easy as not. I ever run into him once this damn war is over, he can do all the boozing he wants. I’ll buy till he can’t even see, let alone walk.”

The sporadic Yankee shelling had been falling short of Wilson Town, so much so that the Confederate soldiers had gone on about the business of digging in without pausing at the explosions a couple of furlongs to the north. Now, suddenly, the U.S. gunners began to find the range. Hearing the hideous whistle of a shell that might have his name on it, Reggie dove headlong into the stretch of trench he’d just dug. The round hit behind him. Fragments and shrapnel balls hissed through the air. One of the lead spheres with which the shell had been loaded drilled a neat hole in the dirt he’d heaped up in front of the trench. It would have drilled a neat hole in him, too.

He got back up and started digging again. A hoarse shout from the southern edge of town made him turn his head. The Jewish peddler didn’t care for artillery close by. He was getting his horses up to a gallop so he could escape Wilson Town in jig time. Others who had lingered, the last few, now delayed their departure no more.

Reggie laughed. “Look at ’em go,” he said, pointing. After a moment, though, it didn’t seem funny. “If two guys are in a dangerous place, and one leaves while the other stays, which one of ’em is stupid?”

Hairston laughed, too, but singularly without humor. “That’d be funny, Bartlett, if only it was funny, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah, Sarge, I do. Wish to Jesus I didn’t.” Bartlett looked out across the broad Sequoyah prairie. “Here come the damnyankees. I don’t think they think we’re ready for ’em yet.”

“Yeah, well, if they don’t, they’re gonna be real sorry real fast,” Hairston said.

The artillery fire supporting the men in green-gray who trotted forward got heavier, but it didn’t turn into anything that would have been reckoned worse than harassment back in Virginia. Here and there, a Confederate soldier shrieked or abruptly fell silent, forever blasted from man to butcher-shop display in the blink of an eye.

But most of the C.S. troopers crouched down in the field fortifications they’d been digging and waited for the Yankees to get closer, so they could sting the enemy hard. Reggie wouldn’t have wanted to be trudging through that yellowed autumn grass, waiting for the machine guns to open up on him. He wondered how much experience the damnyankees up there had. Were they brave men advancing into what they knew would be awful or raw fish too ignorant to tell they were heading for a fish fry? In the end, it didn’t much matter. They’d kill him or he’d kill them. War reduced everything to a brutal simplicity.

Closer, closer…A couple of Confederate riflemen opened up on the Yankees. Men in green-gray started dropping, most not because they were hit but to keep from getting hit. Others kept coming forward, running now, not trotting, as if they knew they didn’t have much time to do before they were done by. Raising his rifle to his shoulder, Bartlett picked one.

He pulled the trigger at the same time as the first machine gun began spraying precisely measured death at the U.S. soldiers. More and more of the men in green-gray were falling, and taking cover had little if anything to do with it. A couple of hundred yards off to the left, the second Confederate machine gun joined its satanic chattering to that of the first. More and more Yankees toppled.

None of the foe got within a hundred yards of the position the Confederates had chosen to defend. As the attack finally broke down, cold rain began falling on U.S. and C.S. troops alike. Looking west, Reggie saw more and more clouds rolling his way. He pointed in that direction and said, “Looks like we’ve got ourselves a new commanding officer.”

“What are you talkin’ about?” Pete Hairston asked.

“General Winter,” Bartlett answered. Hairston did a double take, but then he nodded. If the rain kept coming, the way it looked as if it would, nobody on either side would go anywhere fast, not for a good long while.

“Ma’am?” Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid loomed over Nellie Semphroch. “May I speak to you for just a minute, ma’am?”

“What do you want?” Nellie knew her voice was cold, and did nothing to warm it. Speaking with the Confederate officer who’d seduced her daughter (or so she’d thought of it, not that Edna would have needed much seducing) was the last thing she wanted. “Whatever it is, you’d better make it snappy. We’re goin’ to be busy very soon, I expect.”

“Yes, ma’am. I know that, ma’am. That’s why I came here so early, ma’am.” Kincaid stood there, holding his butternut slouch hat in both hands. He kept twisting it every which way, though he didn’t seem to notice. He took a deep breath, held it so long he began to turn red, and then blurted, “Ma’am, me and your daughter, we’d like to get married, ma’am.”

Nellie’s head whipped around. There stood Edna, stacking cups on the countertop by the coffeepots so she and Nellie could serve a lot of coffee in a hurry. Edna’s face wore what Nellie could think of only as an idiot grin. “That’s right, Ma,” she said, and the grin got wider.

“You’re too young,” Nellie said automatically.

“I’m older’n you were when you got married,” her daughter retorted. “And I sure do want to marry Nick there.” It was the first time she’d called Kincaid that-no, the first time Nellie had heard her call him that. When she did, he started grinning an idiot grin, too.

And she was right. Nellie had been younger than Edna was now when her name abruptly became Semphroch. Her name had had to change abruptly. “Edna, are you in a family way?” she demanded.

Lieutenant Kincaid turned red, the blush starting at his collar and rising all the way to his forehead. Edna indignantly tossed her head. “I am not-no such thing,” she answered. “And I ought to know, too.” When Kincaid heard that, he got even redder.

“All right.” Nellie knew when to beat a retreat. She’d been in a family way when she got married, though she didn’t think Edna knew that. The less Edna ever found out about her unsavory past, the better she’d like it.

“Ma’am, your daughter and I, we really do love each other,” Kincaid said earnestly. “We’ll be happy together for the rest of our lives, I know we will.”

If I laugh at him, he’ll get angry at me, and so will Edna. Nellie made herself hold her face still. It wasn’t easy. He’d managed to get Edna’s corset off her once (maybe more than once; Nellie admitted to herself she didn’t know for sure about that) and both of them had liked what followed, so they thought they’d be happy together forever. Nellie knew better. She’d learned better the hard way. She wanted to pass on what she’d learned, but they wouldn’t listen. She knew they wouldn’t listen. The only way anyone learned those lessons was the hard way.

Off in the middle distance, artillery rumbled. Lately, days didn’t go by-hours hardly went by-without that sound in the air. It reminded Nellie of her second biggest problem with Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid, after his being a man. “Edna,” she said, as gently as she could, “he’s a Confederate. Do you want to go down there to live?” By the way she said down there, she might have been talking about dropping into hell for a visit.

Now Edna turned bright red. Like every child in the USA since the War of Secession, she’d been taught to think of Confederates as the enemy, with a capital E. That hadn’t worried her when Kincaid started sniffing after her. But maybe she hadn’t faced, even in her own mind, all the implications of what marrying him would mean. “I love him,” she said defiantly.

“You think you can stay here in Washington the rest of your days?” Nellie asked. The artillery rumbled again, louder this time. “How much longer do you think the CSA can hold on here?”

“We’ll hold Washington,” Kincaid said. “President Wilson said it was our capital by rights, and we’ll keep it. President Semmes says the same thing, so that’s how it’ll be.” He thrust out his already prominent chin, as if to stay the Yankee hordes with the granite contained therein.

Nellie thought about mentioning the jawbone of an ass, but forbore. What she did say was, “You Confederates have said a lot of things that haven’t come true. What makes you think this’ll be any different?”

“Don’t you rag on him, Ma!” Edna said shrilly.

When Nellie heard that tone of voice from her daughter, she knew the game was lost. Edna would do whatever Edna intended doing, and nothing and nobody would stop her. My God, Nellie thought. How am I going to explain this to Mr. Jacobs? The daughter of a spy for the United States running off and marrying a Confederate officer? He’d never trust Nellie again.

Edna, of course, hadn’t the slightest idea Nellie was a spy for the USA. A good thing, too, Nellie thought. She’d never imagined life could get so complicated. Knowing it was weak, she tried a new card: “Suppose I say no?”

Kincaid didn’t answer, which told Nellie the card was even weaker than she’d thought. He’d seemed so polite, she’d hoped a refusal might make him go away. Edna did reply, firmly: “Ma, we’d run off. Nick knows this chaplain-he told me so.” Kincaid blushed again, but after a moment nodded. Edna went on, “You can’t stop us, and you know it. You got to sleep sometime.”

“You’d leave me to run the coffeehouse all by my lonesome?” Nellie asked, shifting with the changing breeze as adroitly as a politician. “It’s too much for one person. It’s too much for two people, sometimes.”

“Hire yourself a nigger,” Edna told her. “Ma, you know you’re making good money. You can hire a couple of niggers, easy.”

Again, that was probably true. Kincaid said, “Edna, honey, when we get back down into my country”-he spoke as if to assure her the CSA was far superior to this benighted northern land-“you won’t have to lift a finger. You’ll have niggers doing all your work for you.”

Nellie did laugh then. She couldn’t help it. “Niggers doing all your work for you, Edna, on a lieutenant’s pay?” she said. “Likely tell. Besides, aren’t the Confederate States buzzing like a hornets’nest about how niggers aren’t going to be like servants no more?”

“I don’t reckon that’ll come to anything,” Lieutenant Kincaid said. He sounded none too confident, though, and he said not a word about how easy keeping Negro servants on a junior officer’s pay would be. That relieved Nellie; she’d feared he would announce that his father owned a plantation stretching halfway across Alabama, and that what he got from the Confederate War Department was less than pocket change to him.

Before the argument-the losing argument, Nellie was convinced-could go on, the door to the coffeehouse opened. The bell above it chimed. A fierce smile of triumph lighted Edna’s face. “Ma,” she said sweetly, “why don’t you go take care of Mr. Reach there?”

Not five minutes earlier, Nellie had wondered how life got so complicated. Now she wondered if God had decided to show her she didn’t know what complicated meant. Sure as hell, there was Bill Reach folding himself into a chair at a table by the window. He looked the same as he always had since he’d returned, all unbidden, to Nellie’s life: dark, unkempt clothes, stubbled chin and cheeks, bleary eyes.

As she went up to him, she heard Lieutenant Kincaid say, “I never did fancy that fellow, not from the first time I set eyes on him.”

Edna giggled. “I think he’s one of Ma’s old beaus.” Nellie’s back stiffened.

“Hello, Little Nell,” Reach said when Nellie reached his table. Edna giggled. Nicholas Kincaid chuckled. Nellie steamed.

Speaking very softly, she said, “If you ever call me that again, I will tell the Confederate occupying authorities exactly-exactly, do you hear me? — what you are.”

Those bleary eyes widened. “Me? I’m not anything much,” he said, but the certainty that usually informed his gravelly voice was missing.

“You heard me,” Nellie whispered. “I don’t ever want to see you round here again, either.” In normal tones, she went on, “Now what’ll it be?”

“Cup of coffee, couple fried eggs, and buttered toast,” Reach said, his tone grudging. He smelled of whiskey.

“I’ll be right back,” Nellie told him.

As she started frying the eggs and toasting the bread, Lieutenant Kincaid said, “Ma’am? Can you give me your answer, ma’am?” He sounded plaintive as a calf calling for its mother.

“No,” Nellie snarled. The Rebel officer looked as if she’d kicked him.

Edna set a hand on his arm. “It’ll be all right, Nick. Don’t you worry about it none. She’s just my mother. She ain’t my jailer, and she can’t hold me back when I go with you.” Not if I go with you, Nellie noted. When.

“I don’t know what this world is coming to,” she said, “when children don’t pay any attention at all to the people who brought them into this world in the first place.” Edna didn’t answer. She kept staring at Lieutenant Kincaid as if she’d just invented him. Nellie sighed and slipped a metal spatula under the eggs to turn them in the pan. She repeated what she’d said a moment before: “I don’t know what this world is coming to.”

Lieutenant Kincaid leaned over and pecked Edna on the lips. He set his hat back on his head, tipped it to Nellie, and went out of the coffeehouse whistling “Dixie” loudly and off-key. “Isn’t he wonderful?”

“No,” Nellie snapped. A couple of other Confederate officers came in. Nellie pointed their way. “You take care of them.” She slid the eggs out of the frying pan, took the toast from the rack above the fire in the stove, spread butter on it, poured coffee, and carried Bill Reach his breakfast. “Here you are. That’ll be a dollar ten.”

He winced slightly, but laid down a dollar and a quarter. “Don’t worry any about the change,” he said. He spread salt and pepper liberally over the eggs before he began to eat. Then he looked up at her. “Back in those days, I didn’t know you could cook, too.”

She glared. “Do you think I won’t turn you in?” she said in a low, savage voice. “You better think again. My daughter is going to marry a Confederate officer.” And then, to her helpless horror, she began to cry.

“Are you all right, Ma?” Edna came rushing over. She looked daggers at Bill Reach. “What’d he do?” Hearing that, the two Confederate officers jumped to their feet. They were nothing if not gentlemen.

Nellie waved everyone away. “It’s all right,” she insisted. “I’m just-happy for you, that’s all.” She’d told Edna a lot of lies for the foolish girl’s own sake. After so many, what was one more?

Doubtfully, Edna retreated. The Rebs settled back into their seats. In a half-apologetic mumble, Bill Reach said, “Hal told me not to come around here any more.”

“Then why didn’t you listen to him?” Nellie said. She sat down at the table with Reach, which made Edna stare in surprise but succeeded in convincing the Confederates nothing was wrong.

“Now that I found you, I can’t stay away from you,” Reach answered. He started to reach out to set his hand on hers, but stopped when she made as if to pull away. He sighed, then coughed. “All these years, all that water over the dam, and I never forgot even a little of what we did, and I knew it had to be the same for you.”

She wanted to cry some more, or maybe scream. If he’d been mooning after her since before Edna was born…that made him crazy, was what it did. Try as she would, she had trouble remembering him at all from those long-ago days. Just another face, just another cock-But nowadays, he was the USA’s number-one spy in Washington. She wondered if the people to whom he fed his information knew he was on, or over, the ragged edge.

He got to his feet, tipped his battered black homburg, and said, “I’ll see you again, Nellie, one day before too long.” His walk to the door was slow and deliberate, as if he was daring her to tell the Rebs who he was.

He hadn’t called her Little Nell. She kept quiet. But he hadn’t taken any notice when she’d told him to go away and stay away, either. What am I going to do? she thought. She had no more answer for that than for, What is the world coming to?

“Sir,” the truck driver in green-gray said to Lieutenant Straubing, packing what should have been a title of respect with all the scorn he could, “it ain’t right, us white men working alongside niggers.” He set hands on hips and glared at Cincinnatus, who happened to be the black man closest to him.

“See here, Murray,” Straubing said, “you will do as you are ordered or you will face military punishment.”

“Then we will, won’t we, boys?” Murray turned for support to the new truck drivers-well over half the unit-who had joined the transport company to replace the men killed, wounded, or captured in the Confederate raid south of Berea, Kentucky. He was a little, skinny, bandy-legged fellow, with a narrow face, a receding chin, a beaky nose, and a shock of red hair: all in all, he reminded Cincinnatus of an angry chicken.

But he had backers. The new men in the unit were fresh out of the USA. A lot of them, probably, had never seen a Negro before coming down to Covington, let alone thought of working alongside one-or rather, a good many more than one.

“Don’t want to maybe trust my life to a coon,” one of them said.

“Hear tell some of them get paid more’n white men,” another added. “Ain’t nobody can tell me that’s proper.”

Cincinnatus looked over to Herk. The two of them had escaped the Rebel raiders together, and had shared what food they could steal and what miserable shelter they could find till they came upon a U.S. outpost. Herk hadn’t treated Cincinnatus like a nigger then. Of course, Herk had needed him then. Now the white man stood silent as a stone, when Cincinnatus needed him.

“You men are making a mutiny,” Lieutenant Straubing warned. “A court-martial will take a dim view of that.”

Murray, who had enough mouth for any three men, laughed out loud. “No court’s going to say anything but that white men are better than niggers, sir, and that’s the truth.”

Under the tan he’d got from going out with his trucks, Straubing turned pale. Cincinnatus’ heart sank. His guess was that Murray knew what he was talking about. Without much conscious thought, Cincinnatus and the rest of the black truck drivers bunched together. The whites with whom they’d been driving stood apart from them. Those whites didn’t go over with the new men who backed Murray, but they didn’t support their colored comrades, either.

Reds are right, Cincinnatus thought bitterly. CSA and USA, it’s the same thing-whites are so mystified, they put race ahead of class.

“That’s your last word, Murray?” Lieutenant Straubing demanded tensely. When the redheaded driver nodded, Straubing hurried out of the warehouse depot, biting his lip. A chorus of jeers rang out behind him, as if chasing him away.

“Get you black boys hauling like mules, the way God made you to,” Murray said to the Negro truck drivers. The men at his back nodded.

“Don’t know why you so down on us,” Cincinnatus said. “We just doin’ our jobs, makin’ our pay, feedin’ our families.”

“Doing white man’s work,” Murray snapped. Like Lieutenant Kennan, he looked to be one of those U.S. whites who hated Negroes more savagely than any Confederate did, not least because he was so much less familiar with them than Confederates were. Cincinnatus, who had been driving a truck in the CSA before the war broke out, thought about pointing his old job out to the damnyankee. But he didn’t think it would help, and kept quiet.

The door to the depot flew open. In strode Lieutenant Straubing, followed by a squad of soldiers carrying bayoneted Springfields. Straubing pointed to Murray. “Arrest that man,” he snapped. “Charges are insubordination and refusal to obey lawful orders.”

Two of the men in green-gray stomped up to Murray, who looked comically amazed. One of them grabbed him by the arm. “Come on, you,” he snapped. Murray perforce came.

Straubing’s gaze traveled over the other new drivers. “Anyone else?” he asked in a voice that held nothing but ice. A couple of drivers stirred where they stood. “Vasilievsky, Heintzelman, you are under arrest, too. Same charges as Murray.”

“Come on, you two lugs,” one of the soldiers Straubing had brought said when neither driver moved for a moment. “You won’t like it if we have to come and get you, I promise.”

Numbly, their eyes wide with shock, the two white men obeyed. “Anyone else?” Lieutenant Straubing said again. None of the new drivers moved or spoke. As Cincinnatus had seen other soldiers do, they tried to disappear while standing in plain sight. Straubing nodded. “Very well.” He turned to the men he’d called. “Take those three to the stockade. Murray-this fellow here-is the ringleader. I will prefer formal written charges when I have the time, which I don’t right now. These shenanigans are liable to make me late, and I won’t stand for that.”

Saluting, the soldiers led Murray, Heintzelman, and Vasilievsky out of the depot. The three drivers looked as if they were standing in front of White trucks bearing down on them at thirty miles an hour. None of them could have been more astonished than Cincinnatus. He’d associated Lieutenant Straubing’s uncommon easiness on matters of race with a certain weakness. Evidently he’d been wrong.

Straubing glanced over toward the new truck drivers who hadn’t been arrested. As if they were puppets controlled by the same puppeteer, they stiffened to attention. “If this sort of nonsense happens again,” Straubing said pleasantly, “it will make me angry. Do you gentlemen want to find out what happens when I get angry?”

“No, sir,” the drivers chorused.

“Good,” Straubing said. “Now that we understand that, I am going to give you the idea behind what we’re doing here. What we’re doing here is moving supplies from the riverside here down to the fighting front. Anything that helps us do that is good. Anything that hurts is bad. If a man does his job, I don’t care-and you won’t care-if he is black or white or yellow or blue. If he can’t or won’t, I will run him out of here. If you are white and I order you to work with a Negro who is doing his job, you will do it. If you are white and I order you to work beside a trained unicorn who is doing his job, you will do that, too. Again, do you understand me?”

“Yes, sir,” the new drivers said in unison.

“Then let’s get on with it,” Lieutenant Straubing said. “We are going to have to press harder than we would have, thanks to this idiocy. You would be safer blaspheming the Holy Ghost than you would, tampering with my schedule.”

As the drivers went off to their vehicles, Cincinnatus approached Straubing and said, “Thank you kindly, suh.”

The white man looked almost as nonplused as Murray had when he was arrested. “I suppose you’re welcome, Cincinnatus,” he answered after a moment, “but I didn’t do it for you.”

“Sir, I understand that,” Cincinnatus said. “I-”

“Do you?” Straubing broke in. “I wonder. I did it for the sake of the United States Army. You Negroes have shown you can do this job, and if you do it, white men don’t have to, and we can put rifles in their hands. I would sooner have taken on more of you, but this new contingent got sent to me instead. We’ll see what we can make of them.”

“Uh, yes, sir,” Cincinnatus said. Straubing was indeed a good deal less sentimental, more hardheaded than he’d reckoned.

The lieutenant went on, “And no one who deserves to keep his rank badges will let himself be disobeyed, even for an instant. Is there anything else before you get to work?”

“No, suh,” Cincinnatus said. Maybe, instead of being kindly and sentimental, Straubing was the most cold-blooded human being he’d ever met, so cold-blooded that he didn’t even get excited about matters of race, matters Cincinnatus had thought guaranteed to stir the passions of every man, white or black, Yankee or Confederate.

Cincinnatus went out to tend to his truck. There a couple of vehicles over stood Herk, fiddling with the driver’s-side acetylene lamp on his own machine. He nodded to Cincinnatus, then went back to getting the reflector the way he wanted it.

He didn’t even notice he hadn’t backed Cincinnatus and the other colored drivers when Murray started running his mouth. Cincinnatus couldn’t help scowling. And then, slowly, his anger faded. Herk did his job. He let Cincinnatus do his job, too, and didn’t fuss about that. If he did so much, did Cincinnatus have any business expecting more?

“I can hope,” Cincinnatus mumbled. That made Herk look up from what he was doing, but only for a moment. Cincinnatus sighed. He might hope white men would treat him the same as they treated one of their own, but a lifetime had taught him he had no business expecting it.

Black roustabouts hauled crates from the wharves toward the line of trucks. With them came Lieutenant Kennan, raving at them to work harder, harder. Nobody put Kennan under arrest for abusing blacks. But he was following U.S. orders, not disobeying them as Murray had done. If he might have got more work from his crew without the abuse…who cared? No one in authority, that was certain.

With another sigh, Cincinnatus cranked his White’s motor into rumbling life. Lieutenant Straubing let him do his job, too. In the scheme of things, that wasn’t so bad. It could have been worse, and he knew it.