Walk in Hell

VII

Among the butternut uniforms in the West Virginia prisoner-of-war camp were a few dark gray ones: Navy men captured by the damnyankees. Reggie Bartlett found himself gravitating toward them. For a while, he wondered why; he’d never had any special interest in the Confederate States Navy before the war began. After a bit, he found an answer that, if it wasn’t the whole picture, was at least a good part of it.

The trouble was, soldiers were boring. He’d done as much hard fighting as any of them, and more than most-war in the Roanoke valley was as nasty a business as war anywhere in the world. He’d seen almost all the horrors there were, and heard about the ones he hadn’t seen. Soldiers told the same kinds of stories, over and over again. They got stale.

Navy men, now, Navy men were different, and so were their stories. They’d been in strange places and done strange things-or at least things Reggie Bartlett had never done. Those tales made the time between stretches of chopping wood and filling in slit trenches and the other exciting chores of camp life pass more quickly.

Even when things went wrong in the stories, they went wrong in ways that couldn’t happen on dry land. A senior lieutenant who somehow managed to look clean and spruce and well-shaved in spite of the general camp squalor was saying, “Damnyankees suckered me in, neat as you please. There sat this fishing boat, out in the middle of the Atlantic, no ships around her, naked as a whore in her working clothes. So up came my boat to sink her with the deck gun-cheaper and surer than using one of my fish-”

“One of your what, Lieutenant Briggs?” Reggie asked, a beat ahead of a couple of other prisoners who had gathered around the Navy lieutenant for reasons probably similar to his own.

“Torpedoes,” Briggs explained. Under his breath, he muttered, “Landlubbers.” But he resumed after a moment, as glad to tell the story as the others were to hear it: “You can’t always trust a whore, though, even when she’s naked. And sure enough, this was the badger game. The fishing boat was towing a Yankee sub on a cable with a telephone line attached. I let the fishermen go over the side before I sank their boat, and what thanks did I get? Their damned submersible blew me out of the water.” His face clouded. “Only a couple-three of us lived. The rest went right to the bottom, never had a chance.”

“It’s almost like what the Mormons done to the damnyankees, blowin’ up all that powder right under ’em,” somebody said.

“More like sniper’s work,” Reggie contradicted. “A lot of times, a sniper’ll be hiding, and he’ll try and make somebody on the other side look up to see what’s going on further down the trench. And if you’re dumb enough to do it, the bastard with the scope on his rifle, he’ll put one right in your earhole for you.”

“Good analogy,” Briggs said, nodding. He wasn’t a whole lot older than Bartlett, but better educated and also stiffer in manner; had he been a civilian, he would have been something like a junior loan officer at a bank. He was steady, he was sound, he was reliable-and Reggie would have loved to play poker against him, because if the Yankees could play him for a sucker that way, Reggie figured he could, too.

He’d just noticed that his analogy, whether Briggs approved of it or not, took things back to the trenches when the U.S. guards started shouting, “Prisoners form by barracks in parade ranks!”

Senior Lieutenant Briggs frowned. “This isn’t right. It’s not time to form parade ranks.” The break in routine irked him.

“Probably got some kind of special announcement for us,” Bartlett said. The guards had done that before, a time or two. The special announcements they handed out weren’t good news, not if you backed the Entente.

He didn’t get the chance to learn Briggs’ opinion of his guess; he had to hurry off to form up outside his own harsh, chilly building, a good ways away from where the Navy man was holding forth. The uniforms he and his comrades in misery wore would have given a Confederate drill sergeant a fit, but the ranks the men formed were as neat and orderly as anything that sergeant could have wanted.

“What do you reckon this is?” Jasper Jenkins asked, taking his place beside Bartlett.

“Dunno,” Reggie told his friend. “I hope it’s that we’ve had a couple more escapes, and they’re gonna make the rest of us work harder on account of that. I don’t mind paying the price they put on it. Worth it, you ask me.”

“Yeah, that’d be good,” Jenkins agreed. “They haven’t figured out that we’re gonna keep on tryin’ to break out o’ here no matter what they do. Only a fool’d want to stay, and that’s a fact.”

A U.S. captain strode importantly to the front of the prisoners’ formation. He unfolded a sheet of paper and read from it in a loud, harsh voice: “The Imperial German government, the loyal ally of the United States, has announced the capture of the city of Verdun, the French having evacuated the said city after being unable in six weeks of battle to withstand the might of German arms. Victory shall be ours! Dismissed!”

The neat ranks of prisoners broke up into pockets of chattering men. Jasper Jenkins tugged at Bartlett’s sleeve. “Hey, Reggie, where’s this Vair-done place at?” he asked. Before the war, he probably would have asked the same thing about Houston or Nashville or Charleston; his horizon had been limited to his farm and the small town where he sold his crops and bought what little he couldn’t raise for himself.

Reggie could have done better at the geography of the Confederate States. When it came to foreign countries, even foreign countries to which the CSA was allied…“I dunno, not exactly,” he admitted. “Somewhere in France, it has to be, and I reckon somewhere near Germany, or the Huns wouldn’t have been fighting for it. Past that, though, I can’t tell you.”

“Damnyankees sound like losin’ it’s about two steps from the end o’ the world for the Frenchies,” Jenkins said.

“I know they do,” Reggie answered, “but you’ve got to remember two things. First one is, for all you know, they’re lying just to get us downhearted. Second one is, even if they’re not, I expect they’re making it out to be more important than it really is. What are we going to do, call ’em liars?”

“They’re damnyankees-of course they’re liars,” Jenkins said, as if stating a law of nature. “You got a good way of lookin’ at things, pal. Thanks.” He went off, whistling a dirty song.

Having made his friend happy, Reggie discovered he was unhappy himself: Jenkins had made his bump of curiosity itch. He went off looking for Senior Lieutenant Briggs. The naval officer being an educated man, he would be the one to know where Verdun was and what its fall meant.

He found Briggs without much trouble, then wished he hadn’t. The Navy man sat on the ground in front of his barracks, head in hands, the picture of misery. Bartlett didn’t think the news the Yankees had announced could do that to a man, and wondered if Briggs had just got word his brother had been killed or his sweetheart had married somebody else.

But when he asked what the matter was, Briggs, like Poe’s raven, spoke one word and nothing more: “Verdun.”

“Sir?” Reggie said. Losing one town didn’t sound like that big a catastrophe to him. The Confederacy had lost a good many towns, all along the border, but was still very much in the fight.

“Verdun,” Briggs repeated, and climbed heavily to his feet. “From everything I heard, the French were swearing they’d defend the place to the last man. Now they’ve pulled back instead. The Germans have hit ’em such a lick, they couldn’t afford to keep on fighting where they were, not if they wanted to hang on. Best they think they can do now, looks like, is make the Huns pay such a price for the land they get that they decide it’s not worth the cost.”

“That’s not so bad,” Reggie began, but then corrected himself: “It’s not so good, either. The Germans, they’re inside France, and the French, they don’t have any soldiers inside Germany.”

“Now you’re getting the picture,” Briggs agreed. “Same sort of picture we’ve got over here, too-a goddamn ugly one.”

“Yes, sir.” Reggie tried to look on the bright side: “We’ve still got us Washington.”

“For now,” the Navy man said-the report from France seemed to have taken all the wind from his sails. “I tell you this, though, Bartlett: our country is going to need every man it can lay its hands on if we’re going to give the American Huns what they deserve.” He paused to let that sink in, then added in a low voice, “It is the positive duty of every prisoner of war to try to escape.”

Reggie felt a sudden hollow in the pit of his stomach having nothing to do with the hunger that never left. “The Yankees can shoot you if they catch you trying to escape,” he remarked. “They catch you after you’ve got out, they can pretty much do what they want to you.” Under the laws of war, Confederate guards had the same rights with U.S. prisoners, but he didn’t dwell on that.

Briggs just nodded, as if he’d remarked on the weather. “If we once get out, we can get away. We wouldn’t be like Frenchmen stuck in the middle of Germany. We speak the same language as the Yankees.”

“Not just the same language,” Reggie objected. “They talk ugly.”

“I think so, too,” Briggs said. “But I know how they talk and how it’s different from the way we talk. I can teach you. Come with me.” The last three words had the snap of an order. Bartlett followed him into the barracks. The senior lieutenant picked up an object made of galvanized sheet iron and walked across the room with it, asking, “What am I doing?” as he walked.

“Why, you’re toting that pail, sir.” Reggie stated the obvious.

But Briggs shook his head. “That’s what I’d be doing in the CSA,” he said. “If I’m doing it in the USA, I’m carrying this bucket. You see?”

“Yes, sir,” Bartlett said, and he did see. For that last part of the sentence, Briggs hadn’t sounded like a Confederate at all. He’d not only chosen different words, he’d sort of pinched his mouth up, so all the vowel sounds were somehow sharper. “How’d you do that?”

“Got started in theatricals at the Naval Academy down in Mobile,” Briggs answered. “If we can get outside the wire, it’ll come in handy. Like I say, I can teach you. Do you want to learn? Do you want to do the other things you’ll have to do to get outside the wire?”

It was a good question. If he stayed here, Reggie could sit out the war, if not in comfort, at least in security. If he tried to escape, he guaranteed himself all the risks involved with Yankee guards and patrols. If he managed to evade them and got back to the CSA, what would happen next? He knew exactly what would happen: they’d pat him on the back, grant him a little leave, and then hand him a new uniform and a Tredegar and put him back in the line. Hadn’t he had enough of that for a lifetime?

“I’m carrying the bucket,” he said, trying to pronounce the words as Briggs had. He wasn’t getting them right. He could hear that.

“Listen.” Briggs repeated the phrase. Bartlett tried it again. “Better,” the Navy man said. Reggie didn’t know exactly how he’d agreed to try to escape from the prisoner-of-war camp, but, by the time he left Briggs’ barracks, he had no doubt he’d done just that.

“Closing time, gentlemen,” Nellie Semphroch said as the clock in the coffeehouse finished striking nine. When none of the Confederate officers-or the Washingtonians who’d grown rich dealing with them-showed any sign of being ready to leave, she added, “I’m following the regulations you people set down. You wouldn’t want me to break your own rules, would you?”

A plump, gray-haired colonel who did not look to be the sort for late night adventures rose from his chair, saying, “We must set an example for the lovely ladies here.” He tossed a half-dollar down on the table and walked out into the night.

With him taking the lead, the rest of the men and the handful of women-loose women, Nellie thought, for what other kind would consort with the occupiers? — drifted out of the coffeehouse. Last of all went Nicholas H. Kincaid, who paused outside the doorway to send a mooncalf look back at Edna till Nellie almost broke his nose by slamming the door in his face.

“Ma, you keep doin’ things like that, he won’t come back no more,” Edna said, gathering up cups and saucers and plates and tips, some in scrip, some in good silver money.

“God, I hope he doesn’t,” Nellie said. “He’s not here for the coffee and victuals. He’s here because he’s all soppy over you.” The reverse, as she knew, also held; she’d caught them kissing and well on their way to worse a year before, and had watched Edna like a hawk ever since.

Her daughter just tossed her head. “He’s all right,” she said carelessly. “There are plenty of others, though.” That was calculated to make Nellie steam, and achieved the desired effect. Nellie was bound and determined that her daughter should go to the altar a maiden-she knew too well how grim the alternative could be. But Edna, and Edna’s hot young blood, weren’t making things easy.

Work helped. Running the coffeehouse kept the two of them hopping from sunup till long past sundown. If you were busy, you didn’t have time to get into trouble. Nellie said, “Start doing up the dishes. I’ll help in a minute-I want to count up what’s in the till first.”

“All right, Ma,” Edna said. She would work, Nellie admitted to herself, more than a little grudgingly. She wasn’t a bad girl, not really, just a wild girl, wild for life, wild for anything she could get her hands on, wild to let life-and the men crawling through life-get their hands on her.

The cash box was nicely heavy. Nellie had thought it would be. If she could do any one thing, it was gauge how busy the place had been through the day. Most of the take was in silver, too; as her place had become a favorite stop for the occupiers, they became more likely to give her real money and fob off their nearly worthless scrip on merchants whose goodwill mattered less to them.

“A couple of dollars less than I thought there would be,” she murmured, and then shrugged. She was doing well enough that a couple of dollars one way or the other mattered much less to her than they would have before the war started. She had no use for the Rebs, she spied on them whenever their loose talk gave her the chance, but she was getting, if not rich, at least well-to-do off them. Serves them right, she thought, and went to help her daughter clean up.

Artillery rumbled, off to the north and northeast, the noise clearly audible through splashing and the clank of china on china. “Louder these days,” Edna remarked, glancing in the direction of that deep-throated roar.

“Were you listening to the Rebs tonight?” Nellie asked. Edna shook her head. That exasperated her mother; Edna saw the war only in terms of how it affected her-not least by supplying her with handsome young Confederate officers to meet. Nellie went on, “They say they think they can stop our attack out of Balti-more, but it didn’t sound to me like they were real sure about it. If we’re lucky, we may run the Rebs out of here this summer.”

Edna kept right on drying saucers. She didn’t say anything for a while. The way she stood, though, suggested she wasn’t altogether sure it would be good luck. She liked the way things were going. Business wouldn’t be the same with the USA holding Washington again.

That wasn’t all that wouldn’t be the same. Mother and daughter spoke together. Nellie said, “The Rebs won’t want to give this town back,” while Edna put it more gamely: “They’ll fight like bastards to hold on to Washington.”

They finished doing the dishes in gloomy silence. There wouldn’t be much left of Washington after a big fight for it. The city had been badly damaged when the Rebels overran it in 1914, and they’d taken it pretty quickly. What would it look like if they chose to defend it street by street, house by house?

Nellie lighted a candle at one of the downstairs gas lamps, then turned them out. She and Edna went up the stairs to their bedrooms by the light of the candle. She used it to light the lamps in those rooms, then blew it out. “Good night, Ma,” Edna said around a yawn.

“Good night,” Nellie answered, hiding a smile. Keep Edna busy enough and she wouldn’t have time for mischief, all right. Maybe she wouldn’t. Nellie undid the hooks and eyes that held her skirt closed, then unbuttoned the long row of mother-of-pearl buttons on her shirtwaist. She tossed it into the wicker clothes hamper. The hamper was almost full; she’d have to go to the laundry soon. The corset came off next. She sighed with pleasure at being released from its steel-boned grip. She put on a long cotton nightdress, turned off the gas lamp, and climbed under the blankets.

Falling asleep seldom took her long. She’d almost done it when the Confederates sent a column marching up the street in front of the coffeehouse. The tramp of boots on pavement, the rattle of steel-tired wagon wheels, and the clop of horses’ hooves made her sit up. It was a good-sized column; they hadn’t sent so many men north in a while.

She tried to figure out what that meant. Was it good news or bad? Good, if the Rebs were moving because they needed men against the U.S. attacks. Not so good, if these were troops freed up because the Negro uprisings in the CSA were collapsing. She’d have to see if she could find out tomorrow.

When the column had passed, she settled back down again. She was drifting toward sleep when someone knocked on the door. The knock was soft but insistent, as if whoever was there wanted to make sure she and Edna heard but also wanted to be equally sure no one else did.

She got out of bed in the dark. Her first suspicious glance, when she reached the hall, was to Edna’s bedroom. But Edna was in there snoring. She’d never been able to fool her mother about being asleep. Scratching her head, Nellie slowly and carefully went downstairs.

The knocking persisted. She wished she had a pistol down there by the cash box. She’d never thought she’d need one, though, not with so many Confederate soldiers always in the coffeehouse. And the Rebs had made it against their rules for locals to keep firearms, with penalties harsh enough to make her not want to take the chance of hiding one right under their noses.

They hadn’t made any rules against keeping knives. She picked up the biggest carving knife she had, one that would have made a decent sword with a different handle, and walked to the door. “Who’s there?” she asked, making no move to open it.

“It’s me, Little Nell.” Bill Reach didn’t name himself, confident she could identify his voice. She didn’t, but no one else these days-thank God! — used the name from her sordid past. When she neither said anything nor worked the latch, he hissed, “Let me in, darlin’. I got nowhere else to go, and it’s late-way past curfew.”

Nellie knew what time it was. “Go away,” she said through the door, quietly, so as not to wake Edna. That he had the nerve to call her darling filled her with fury. “Don’t you ever come here again. I mean it.” Her hand closed on the handle of the knife, hard enough to hurt.

“Listen, Nell,” Reach said, also quietly, “if you don’t let me in, I’m a dead man. I can’t stay on the dodge any more, and they-”

“If you don’t get out of here this instant,” Nellie told him in a deadly whisper, “I’ll scream loud enough to bring every Confederate patroller for a mile and a half around this place on the dead run.”

“But-” Reach muttered something under his breath. Then he grunted, an involuntary, frightened sound. “Jesus, Nell, here they come-it’s a whole goddamn Confederate column. They see me here, I’m dead and buried.”

For a moment, Nell thought he was trying to trick her. Then she too heard the rhythmic thump of marching men and the jingle of harness. Another column-probably another regiment-heading up toward the fighting. Nellie bit her lip till she tasted blood. She didn’t want the Rebs to lay their hands on…anyone. Even Bill Reach? she asked herself silently, and, with great reluctance, nodded. Even Bill Reach.

She opened the door. Reach scurried inside like a rat running into its hole. “God bless you, Nell,” he said while she closed it as quietly as she could. “If they’d have caught me, they’d have squeezed everything out of me, about you and this place and the shoemaker and-guk!”

Nellie held the tip of the knife against his poorly shaved throat. “Don’t you talk about such things, not to me, not to them, not to anybody,” she said in a voice all the more frightening for being so cold. “I’m not the foolish girl I was, and you can’t blackmail me. When that column marches past, you’re going out the door again. If you come around here after that, I’ll shove this in”-she did shove the knife in, perhaps a quarter of an inch; Reach moaned and tried to pull away, but she wouldn’t let him-“and I’ll laugh while I’m doing it. Do you hear me? You laughed when you shoved it into me, didn’t you? My turn now.”

He didn’t say anything. That was the smartest thing he could have done. A little moonlight came through the plate-glass window from outside. His eyes glittered. The fear smell, sharp and acrid, came off him in waves.

The Confederates tramped past the coffeehouse. Maybe the noise of their passing woke Edna. Nellie would have sworn she hadn’t been noisy enough to disturb her daughter. But, from the hall, Edna asked, “Ma, what’s going on? Who’s this bird? And-” Edna’s breath caught sharply. “What are you doing with that knife?”

“He’s trouble, nothing else but.” Nellie’s voice was grim. “But he’s in trouble, too, so he can stay here till the Rebs have gone by outside. After that, he’s gone forever.”

“I knew your mother, before you were born,” Bill Reach said to Edna, “back in the house at-” He drew a frightened breath of his own, for Nellie had stuck the knife in farther. How deep do you have to stab to kill a man? she wondered. A couple of more words out of Reach and she would have found out.

The sounds of marching feet, clattering wagons, and clopping hooves drowned out the drone of aeroplane engines high overhead. Maybe someone in the Confederate ranks was unwise enough to strike a match to light a cigar or pipe; maybe the moonlight let a U.S. pilot spot the column even without such help. However that was-Nellie had no way of knowing-a stick of bombs came falling out of the sky.

“Oh, Jesus!” Reach said when he heard the high-pitched shriek of air rushing past the bombs’ fins. Nellie needed a split second longer to identify the noise; U.S. bombers hadn’t come over Washington all that often.

A split second after that, sharp explosions left no possible doubt of what was going on. One bomb fell a little in front of the head of the Confederate column. Then two more in quick succession landed right in the middle of it. Either the U.S. bomb-aiming was extraordinarily good or the bombardier was trying for another target altogether and got lucky-again, Nellie never knew.

Glass sprayed inward. A sharp shard caught Nellie in the leg. She yelped. Edna screamed. Bill Reach let out a groan and clutched at his midsection. Nellie staggered back from him. He sank slowly to the floor.

A moment later, the front door opened, hitting him and knocking him sideways. It wasn’t another bomb; it was Confederate soldiers, seeking shelter from the rain of destruction from the sky. Outside in the street, injured soldiers screamed and groaned. A horse screamed, too, on a higher note. Officers shouted for medical orderlies and Negro stretcher-bearers.

Seeing Nellie, one of the Rebs pointed to Reach and said, “This here your husband the damnyankees done hurt, ma’am?” Even at such a time, he worked to separate the people of Washington from the government of the USA.

“I should say not,” she answered, and raised her voice, hoping Reach wasn’t too far gone to pay attention: “He’s a burglar. I caught him breaking in here. I was going to give him to you.” If they thought him an ordinary criminal, they wouldn’t ask him questions about anything but burglary. She didn’t know how he knew what else he knew, or exactly how much that was. She did know it was too much.

One of the Confederate soldiers said, “All right, ma’am, we’ll take charge of him-throw him in a wagon till we find somebody we can give him to. Don’t want to leave him bleedin’ all over your floor here. Come on, you.” He and a buddy got Bill Reach to his feet and out the door.

The bombs had stopped falling. The rest of the Rebels who’d tumbled into the coffeehouse took their leave. Some of them even apologized for bothering Nellie.

“-And your pretty daughter,” one of them added, which did him less good in her eyes than he would have guessed.

Nellie shut the door after the last departing Reb, a futile gesture with the window smashed. She looked around at glinting, drifted glass. “Go on upstairs and get me some slippers, Edna,” she said. “I’ll cut my feet to ribbons if I try to walk through this stuff.” She sighed, but went on, “It’s not near so bad as it was after the Rebs shelled us.”

“No, I reckon not,” Edna agreed. She started toward the stairway, then stopped and looked back at Nellie. “What was that crazy fellow talking about houses for? I ain’t never lived in a house, and I didn’t think you had, neither.”

Not all houses are homes, ran through Nellie’s mind. “I never did live in a house,” she answered. “He’s crazy like you said, that’s all. Get me those slippers-and get me a blanket, too, will you? With the windows gone, I think I better stay down here till sunup.”

“All right, Ma,” Edna said. “But I still think that feller knows you a whole lot better than you let on. If he didn’t, you wouldn’t let him get you all upset like you do.”

“Just get me my things,” Nellie snapped. Shaking her head, Edna went upstairs. Nellie shook her head, too. Sooner or later, the tawdry tale would come out. She could feel it in her bones. And what would she do then? How would she keep Edna in line at all?

Out in the street, wounded Confederates kept on groaning. They did give her a sense of proportion. You didn’t die of mortification, however much you wished you could. Bombs falling out of the sky were something else again.

Thunder filled the air. Artillery was pounding ever closer to St. Matthews, South Carolina, from the south and from the east. Negroes streamed back through the town. Some of them wore red armbands and carried the rifles with which they had fought their white, capitalist oppressors so long and so hard. One or two even wore helmets taken from Confederate corpses. They still had the look of soldiers to them. More, though, had thrown away armbands and weapons and were looking for escape, not more battle.

Scipio wished he could have fled, too. But he was too prominent, too recognizable to escape the square so easily. He’d been one of the leaders of the Congaree Socialist Republic from the beginning-from the beginning till the end, he thought. The end could not be delayed much longer.

I tried to tell them. He hadn’t sought the revolution. He’d been drawn into it, that seeming a safer course than letting himself be eliminated for knowing too much. And it had been a safer course-for a little more than a year. Now, with everything ending in fire, he saw-as he’d seen from the beginning-that going along with the Reds had bought him only a little time.

The rest of the leaders of what had been the Congaree Socialist Republic and was falling to pieces still refused to admit the game was up. Cassius stood in the town square, shouting, “Rally! Rally, God damn de lot of you! Rally ’gainst de ’pressors! Don’ let dey take yo’ freedom!”

He had picked men with him, men who could have formed a line and stopped-or tried to stop-the collapse, but who stood with their rifle butts trailing in the dust and watched men who had been fighters but were now only fugitives running past.

Cherry’s appeal to the faltering followers of the Republic was more fundamental: “Kill de white folks! Got to kill de white folks! Dey catches you, dey kills you sure!”

She was probably right. No-she was almost certainly right. But the men who had done so much had concluded they could do no more. Neither her fiery words nor her even more fiery beauty were enough to turn them back toward the trenches they could not hold.

She rushed over to Scipio and, to his startlement and no small alarm, threw herself into his arms. Her breasts were firm and soft against his chest. “Make dey stop, Kip,” she said in a bedroom voice. “Make dey stop, make dey fight. You de best talkin’ man we gots. Make dey go back an’ fight and I is yours. I do whatever you wants, you make dey stop.” She ran her tongue over her full lips, making them even moister and more delicious-looking than they had been. Every sort of promise smoldered in her eyes.

Scipio sighed and shook his head. “Cain’t,” he said regretfully-not so much regret that he would not have her, for she frightened him more than he wanted her, but regret that this collapse would get so many people killed, with him all too likely to be among them. “Cain’t, Cherry. It over. Don’t you see? It over.”

“Bastard!” she screamed, and twisted away from him. “Liar! Quitter!” She slapped him, a roundhouse blow that snapped his head sideways on his neck and left the taste of blood in his mouth. Blood on my hands, too, he thought. Blood on all our hands. Cherry cared nothing about the blood on her hands. He counted himself lucky she hadn’t pulled out a knife and gutted him with it.

In spite of haranguing the Negroes who didn’t want to be soldiers any more, Cassius heard the exchange between Cherry and Scipio. Cassius, as best Scipio could tell, never missed anything. He came trotting over to the two of them. Scipio’s guts knotted with fear all over again. Cherry was Cassius’ woman. No-Cherry was her own woman, and had been giving herself to Cassius. That wasn’t quite the same thing, even if, from Cassius’ point of view, it probably looked as if it were.

But Cassius didn’t want to quarrel. The ex-hunter, now chairman of what was left of the Congaree Socialist Republic, sadly studied Scipio. “It over now, Kip?” he asked. “You t’ink it over now fo’ true?”

“Don’t you?” Scipio waved his arms. As he did so, a shell landed only a couple of hundred yards away, black smoke with angry red fire at the core. Dirt leaped upward in graceful arcs, beauty in destruction. “We done everything we kin do. Dey gots too many buckra, too many rifles, too many cannons. Dey whip we, Cass.”

“Too many buckra,” Cassius said bitterly. “Dey don’ rise fo’ dey class int’rest, de fools. De ’ristocrats got dey all mystified up.” He lifted a weary hand. “We been over this before. I know. We make de struggle go on.” He pointed north, toward the swamps of the Congaree. “Gwine make de stand up there. De niggers in de ’pressed zones, dey always gwine know de struggle go on. De white folks, dey never takes we fo’ granted again.”

That, no doubt, was true. Scipio wished he thought it likelier to help than to hurt. It was liable to be another fifty years before the Negro cause revived in the CSA. He didn’t say that. What point, now? What he did say was, “I cain’t go to de swamp with you, Cass.”

To his surprise, the ex-hunter burst out laughing. “I knows that-you was just a house nigger, and you don’t know nothin’ ’bout that kin’ o’ life. What you gots to do is, you gots to blend in. Don’ let nobody know you got dat white folks’ talk hidin’ in your mouth. Git work in de field, in de factory, be a good nigger till de heat die down, then hurt they white folks however you kin.” He slapped Scipio on the back. Then he and Cherry, hand in hand, headed north along with some of the other Negroes who still had fight in them.

Scipio stood in the St. Matthews square till shells started landing a good deal closer than a couple of hundred yards away. Then he turned on his heel and ran, along with so many other blacks, men and women both. From behind came shouts of, “De buckra! De buckra comin’!” He ran harder. The leaders of the Congaree Socialist Republic, unlike their Confederate counterparts, hadn’t gone in for fancy uniforms. In his undyed cotton homespun, he could have been anybody at all.

And anybody at all was just who he aimed to pretend to be. Once white control washed over this part of what was again South Carolina, he’d lie low, find work, eventually find better work, and spend the rest of his life trying to pretend this whole unfortunate business had never happened.

He stopped running about half a mile outside St. Matthews. That was partly because his wind wasn’t all it should have been; before the uprising, he had lived soft. It was also partly because he calculated that a Negro overrun while fleeing was more likely to be killed on sight than one who looked to have some business where he was. If he seemed a field hand or a farmer, maybe the white soldiers wouldn’t figure he’d been in arms against them. And, as a matter of fact, he hadn’t. He’d never once fired a weapon at the duly constituted forces of the Confederated States of America.

Not that that mattered. His laugh came bitter as Cassius’. If the white folks ever figured out who he was, he’d hang. He wouldn’t simply hang, either. What they’d do to him first…

He moaned a little, down deep in his throat. He’d never been a physically brave man. The idea of being tortured made him want to piss himself with fright. He forced himself to something dimly resembling calm. Your wits are all you’ve got now, he thought. If you don’t use them, that will kill you.

Gunfire and faint shouts rose behind him. That would be the white folks, entering St. Matthews. He nodded to himself. The Congaree Socialist Republic was dead, all right, even if Cassius could keep a nasty ghost of it going in the swamps.

When Scipio came to a patch of woods, he chose a winding path through them over going around. In the woods, he thought, he would be perceived as doing something in particular rather than simply trying to escape from the victorious whites. That again might help keep them from shooting him for the fun of it.

Maybe there was a farm on the far side of the woods. Maybe the world had just gone topsy-turvy. Whatever the reason, a fat hen walked out from among the pine trees and stood in the path, staring at him from beady black eyes. For a moment, that didn’t mean much to him. Then it did. Food, he thought. No more communal kitchens, no more suppers arguing the workings of the dialectic. If he was going to eat, he’d have to feed himself.

Slowly, he bent and picked up a fist-sized stone. The chicken kept watching him from about ten feet away. He drew back his arm-and let fly, hard as he could. The bird had time for one startled squawk before the stone hit. Feathers exploded out from it. It tried to run away, but had trouble making its legs work. He sprang on it, snatched up the stone, and smashed in its little stupid head.

He wore a knife on his belt. He cut off the broken head and held the chicken by the feet, letting it bleed out. Then he gutted it. He worked slowly and carefully there; he’d seen the job done in the kitchens at Marshlands more times than he could count, but couldn’t remember the last time he’d done it himself. He saved the liver and gizzard and heart, putting them back inside the body cavity.

He’d just tossed the rest of the offal into the bushes by the side of the path-a fox or a coon or a possum would find a treat-when a white man called, “You there, nigger! What are you doin’?”

“Got me a chicken, suh,” Scipio said. He turned toward the white man-a Confederate major-and put on a wide, servile smile. “Be right glad to share, you leave me jus’ a little bit.” That was how sharing between blacks and whites worked (when it worked at all) in the CSA.

“Give it here,” the major said: a lot of the time, sharing didn’t work at all in the CSA. Scipio handed the bird over without a word. The officer took its feet in his right hand. His left hand wasn’t a hand, but a hook.

Scipio stiffened in dismay. He’d dealt with this white man, arranging to exchange wounded prisoners. Maybe, though, the fellow wouldn’t recognize him. One raggedy Negro looked a lot like another, especially when you hardly saw them as human beings at all.

But Major Hotchkiss, even if he was mutilated, wasn’t stupid. His eyes narrowed. “I know your voice,” he said, half to himself. “You’re the nigger who-” From narrow, his eyes went wide. He didn’t bother saying, talks like a white man, but dropped the chicken and grabbed for his pistol.

He was a split second too slow. Scipio hit him in the face with the rock he’d used to kill the hen. The Negro leaped on him as he had on the bird, pounding and pounding with the stone till Hotchkiss was as dead as a man ever would be.

Scipio reached for the major’s pistol, then jerked his hand away. He didn’t want to be caught with a firearm, not in these times. He didn’t want to be caught with a blood-spattered shirt, either. He stripped it off and hid it in a hole in the ground. A shirtless Negro would draw no comment.

The chicken was another matter. It was his. “You damn thief,” he muttered to the late Major Hotchkiss. He picked up the bird and got out of there as fast as he could, before any more white soldiers came along to connect him to the major’s untimely demise.

Paul Mantarakis strode warily through the ruins of Ogden, Utah. “Boy, this place looks like hell,” he said. “I can’t tell whether what I’m walking on used to be houses or street.”

“Hell was let loose on earth here,” said Gordon McSweeney, who still wore on his back the flamethrower which had loosed a lot of that hell. But then he went on, “Hell let loose on earth, giving the misbelievers a foretaste of eternity.”

Beside them, Ben Carlton said, “Feels damn strange, walking along where there’s Mormons around and not diving for cover.”

“They surrendered,” Mantarakis said. But he was warily looking around, too. He carried his Springfield at the ready, and had a round in the chamber.

“For all we know, they ain’t gonna go through with it,” Carlton said. “Maybe they got more TNT under this here Tabernacle Park, and they’ll blow us and them to kingdom come instead of giving up.”

“Samson in the temple,” McSweeney murmured. But the big Scotsman shook his head. “No, I cannot believe it. Samson worked with the Lord, not against Him. I do not think Satan could steel their souls to such vain sacrifice.”

“The whole damn state of Utah is a sacrifice,” Paul said. “I don’t know what the hell made the Mormons fight like that, but they did more with less than the damn Rebs ever dreamt of doing. Only way we licked ’em is, we had more men and more guns.”

Here and there, people who were not U.S. soldiers picked through the remains of Ogden. Women in bonnets and long skirts shoved aside wreckage, looking for precious possessions or food or perhaps the remains of loved ones. Children and a few old men helped them. The spoiled-meat smell of death hung everywhere.

A few men not old also went through the ruins. Most of them wore overalls, with poplin or flannel shirts underneath. Their clothes were as filthy and tattered as the soldiers’ uniforms, and for the same reason: they’d spent too long in trenches.

“If looks could kill…” Paul said quietly. His companions nodded. The Mormon fighting men no longer carried weapons; that was one of the terms of the cease-fire to which their leaders had agreed. They stared at the American soldiers, and stared, and kept on staring. Their eyes were hot and empty at the same time. They’d fought, and they’d lost, and it was eating them inside.

“My granddads fought in the War of Secession,” Carlton said. “I seen a photograph of one of ’em after we gave up. He looks just like the Mormons look now.”

They tramped past a five-year-old boy, a little towhead cute enough to show up on a poster advertising shoes or candy. His eyes blazed with the same terrible despair that informed the faces of the beaten Mormon fighters.

The women were no different. They glowered at the victorious U.S. troopers. The prettier they were, the harder they glared. Some of them had carried rifles and fought in the trenches, too. Soldiers who won a war were supposed to have an easy time among the women of the people they’d defeated. That hadn’t happened anywhere in Utah that Paul had seen. He didn’t think it would start happening any time soon, either.

But the Mormon women didn’t aim that look full of hatred and contempt at the Americans alone. They also sent it toward their own menfolk, as if to say, How dare you have lost? Even the Mormon fighters quailed under the gaze of their women.

Carlton pointed ahead. “Must be the park.”

Most of Ogden was shell holes and rubble. Tabernacle Park was, for the most part, just shell holes. The only major exception was the burned-out building at the southeast corner. It had been the local Mormon temple, and then the last strongpoint in Ogden, holding out until surrounded and battered flat by U.S. artillery.

Captain Schneider was already in the park. He waved the men of his company over to him. Pulling out a pocket watch, he said, “Ceremony starts in fifteen minutes. General Kent could have got himself a fancy honor guard, but he chose us instead. He said he thought it would be better if soldiers who’d been through it from the start saw the end.”

“That is a just deed,” Gordon McSweeney rumbled-high approval from him.

“Congratulations again on your medal, sir,” Mantarakis said.

Schneider looked down at the Remembrance Cross in gold on his left breast pocket, won for rallying the line south of Ogden after the Mormons exploded their mines. “Thank you, Sergeant,” he said. “I shouldn’t be the only one wearing it, though. We all earned them that day.”

Under his breath, Ben Carlton muttered, “Damn fine officer.” Paul Mantarakis nodded.

Here came Major General Alonzo Kent, tramping along through the rubble like a common soldier. He waved to the veterans gathering in front of the wrecked Mormon temple. “Well, boys, it was a hell of a fight, but we licked ’em,” he said. He wasn’t impressive to look at, not even in a general’s fancy uniform, but he’d got the job done.

And here came the Mormon delegation, behind a standard-bearer carrying the beehive banner under which the Utah rebels had fought so long and hard and well. Most of the leaders of the defeated Mormons looked more like undertakers than politicians or soldiers: weary old men in black suits and wing-collared shirts.

One of them stepped past the standard-bearer. “General Kent? I am Heber Louis Jackson, now”-he looked extraordinarily bleak as he spoke that word-“president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I have treated with your representatives.”

“Yes,” Kent said: not agreement, only acknowledgment.

The Mormon leader went on, “With me here are my counselors, Joseph Shook and Orem Pendleton. We make up the first presidency of the church, and are the authority in ultimate charge of the forces that have been resisting those of the government of the United States. And here”-he pointed to the youngest and toughest-looking of the Mormons in his party-“is Wendell Schmitt, commander of the military forces of the Nation of Deseret.”

“The Nation of Deseret does not exist,” General Kent said in a flat voice. “President Roosevelt has, as you know, declared the entire state of Utah to fall under martial law and military district. He has also ordered the arrest of all officials of the rebel administration in the state of Utah on a charge of treason against the government of the United States of America. That specifically includes you gentlemen here.”

“Pity they’ll shoot them or hang them,” Gordon McSweeney whispered to Mantarakis as Heber Jackson bowed his head. “They should be burned.” He touched the nozzle to his flamethrower. Mantarakis hissed at him to be quiet; he wanted to hear what the Mormons said.

Wendell Schmitt took an angry step forward. “The terms you set us were already hard enough without that, General. The Constitution-”

“Does not apply here, because of the president’s declaration,” General Kent interrupted. “You people put yourselves beyond the pale when you hopped into bed with the Confederates and the Canadians. Now that you have made that bed for yourselves, you shall be made to lie in it. You tried to destroy our government here. You failed. We will destroy your government here. This surrender will let the common people of the state survive. If you reject it, we will destroy them, too, and turn Utah back into the desert it was before they came.”

“And call that peace,” Joseph Shook murmured. It sounded like a quotation, but Paul didn’t know what it was from.

General Kent evidently did: “If you like, Mr. Shook. But you Mormons will not joggle our elbows again while we are fighting this bigger war, and you will not disturb the peace in the USA once we have won the war.” He opened an attache case and took out a sheet of fancy paper. “Here is the formal instrument of surrender. Before we affix our signatures to it, I am going to summarize its provisions one last time, so that we have no unfortunate misunderstandings. Is that agreeable to you?”

“Hard terms,” Heber Jackson said softly.

“Having fought us tooth and nail for a year, you cannot expect a kiss on the cheek now,” Kent retorted. He fumbled in the case again, this time for a pair of reading glasses. “‘Item: all troops in resistance to the government of the United States’…Well, we’ve done that; they laid down their arms when you asked for the cease-fire.

“‘Item: all firearms in Utah to be surrendered within two weeks. Penalty for possession after that time is death.

“‘Item: any act of violence against soldiers of the United States shall be punished by the taking and execution of hostages, not to exceed ten for each soldier wounded or fifty for each soldier killed.

“‘Item: all public gatherings of more than three persons are banned. This includes churches, vaudeville houses, picnics’-you name it. ‘Violators will be fired upon without warning by soldiers of the United States.

“‘Item: all property of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints is forfeit to the government of the United States in reparation for the cost of suppressing this rebellion.

“‘Item: gatherings in private homes to worship in the fashion of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Days Saints shall be construed as public gatherings under the meaning of the previous item, and shall be dealt with like any other public gatherings under the terms of that item.

“‘Item…’” He droned on and on. After a while, Paul stopped paying close attention. The Mormons had tried to break away from the USA, and they were paying a heavy price for it. In effect, they had broken away, and were being treated not as a state returning to the Union but as a conquered province. As far as he was concerned, they’d earned it. He’d been in Utah most of a year, and nasty strangers had been trying to kill him the whole time.

One of General Kent’s aides unfolded a portable table and produced a pen and bottle of ink with which to sign the instrument of surrender. “May I say something before I set my name there?” Wendell Schmitt asked.

“Go ahead,” General Kent told him. “If you think anything you say will change matters, though-”

“Not likely,” the Mormon military commander broke in. “No, what I want to tell you is that terms like these will come back to haunt you, years from now. You’re sowing the seeds of hatred and bloodshed that will grow up in the days of our grandchildren, and of their grandchildren, too.”

“Do you know what?” General Kent said. “I don’t care. Teddy Roosevelt doesn’t care, either. And if they have to, Mr. Schmitt, my grandchildren will come in here to Utah and blow your grandchildren sky-high all over again. If more damn fools like you come to power here, that’s just what will happen. If you people are smart enough to realize you’re fighting out of your weight, it won’t.” He folded his arms across his chest.

Biting his lip, Wendell Schmitt signed the surrender document. So did the three men who made up the first presidency of the Mormon Church. Last of all, so did General Kent. His aides took the Mormon leaders into custody. The Mormon standard-bearer handed the beehive banner to one of those U.S. aides. With deliberate contempt, the American soldier let it fall in the dirt.

“It’s over,” Ben Carlton said.

“Yeah,” Paul agreed. “Now we either get to stay here for occupation duty, with everybody hating us like rat poison, or else they ship us back to fighting the Rebs or the Canucks.” He laughed ruefully. “Sounds like a bully time either way, doesn’t it?”

Anne Colleton cranked to life the engine of the battered Ford they’d given her. The motorcar shivered and shuddered like a man with the grippe. It sounded as if it would fall to pieces at any moment-it was about as far a cry from her Vauxhall roadster as an automobile could possibly be.

She didn’t complain, not any more. She’d had to move heaven and earth to pry the Ford out of Confederate officialdom. It would, with luck, get her back to Marshlands, which was all she wanted for the time being. God only knew where the Vauxhall Major Hotchkiss had confiscated was now. That might well have been literally true; Hotchkiss himself, she was given to understand, was dead, killed along with so many others in the death throes of the Congaree Socialist Republic.

“Anyone want to ride with me?” Anne asked, not for the first time. None of the women with whom she’d shared a refugee tent for so many months made a move toward her. The bayoneted Tredegar with a full clip she’d laid in the middle of the seat probably had something to do with that.

“The officers say you’re asking to get yourself killed-or else somethin’ even worse-if y’all go into that country now,” the fat woman named Melissa declared. By her tone, she looked forward to that prospect for Anne.

“I’ll risk it,” Anne answered. “I’ve always been able to take care of myself, unlike a lot of people I can think of.” Being on the point of leaving gave her the last word. She hopped into the Ford, released the hand brake, put the motorcar in gear, and put-putted away.

Going was slow, as she’d known it would be. The Robert E. Lee Highway had been one of the main lines of Confederate advance, which meant the Red Negro rebels had defended it as well as they could, which in turn meant the artillery had gone to work, which meant what was called a road was in many places anything but. Anne was glad she’d managed to get her hands on several spare inner tubes and a pump and patches.

Not many trees along the road were standing; most had been blasted to tinder. Those that did stand often held ghastly fruit: rebels captured and then summarily hanged. Ravens and buzzards flew up from them as the noisy Ford rattled past. The stench of death was everywhere, and far stronger than the hanged bodies could have accounted for by themselves. Anne wondered if the fronts between the CSA and USA were full of this same dreadful reek. If they were, how did the soldiers endure it?

In a field by the side of the road, Negroes were digging trenches that would probably serve as mass graves. From a distance, the scene looked almost as it would have before the Red uprising began. Almost, for the couple of whites who supervised the laborers carried rifles: the spring sun glinted off the sharp edge of a bayonet.

Anne bit her lip. Putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again in the CSA wouldn’t be easy. If whites had to get labor out of blacks at gunpoint, how were they supposed to fight the damnyankees at the same time? And if they offered concessions to make Negroes more willing to go along with them, wasn’t that as much as saying the Reds had been right to rise against the government?

Reaching St. Matthews took her more than twice as long as she’d thought it would, and she hadn’t been optimistic setting out from the refugee camp. By the time she got to the town nearest Marshlands, she found herself astonished she’d made it at all. She was also filthy from head to foot, having repaired three punctures along the way.

St. Matthews shocked her again. It wasn’t so badly smashed up as some of the territory through which she’d driven; the rebellion had been dying on its feet by the time Confederate forces reached the town, and the Reds hadn’t fought house to house here. But St. Matthews was the town she knew best: in the back of her mind, she expected to see it as it always had been, with whitewashed picket fences, neatly painted storefronts and even warehouses, and streets lined with live oaks shaggy with moss.

Most of the fences had been knocked flat. Two of the four big cotton warehouses were only burnt-out wreckage. Some of the live oaks still stood, but the artillery bombardment before the assault on the town had put paid to most of them. It would be a hundred years before saplings grew into trees that could match the ones now ruined.

Anne’s eyes filled with tears. She’d kept trying to think of the rebellion as something that, once defeated, could in large measure be brushed aside. Negroes working under white men’s guns had gone a fair way toward telling her how foolish that was. The blasted oaks, though, warned even more loudly that the uprising would echo for generations.

A gray-haired white man in an old-fashioned gray uniform shifted a plug of tobacco from one ill-shaven cheek to the other and held up a hand, ordering her to stop. “What the-blazes you doin’here, lady?” he demanded. “Don’t you know there’s still all kinds o’ bandits and crazy niggers running around loose?”

“What am I doing here?” Anne replied crisply. “I am going home. Here is my authorization.” She handed the militiaman a letter she had browbeaten out of the colonel in charge of the refugee camp.

By the way this fellow stared at the sheet of paper, he couldn’t read. That she had it, though, impressed him into standing aside. “If’n they say it’s all right, reckon it is,” he said, touching the brim of his forage cap. “But you want to be careful out there.”

“I intend to be careful,” Anne said, a thumping lie if ever there was one. She put some snap in her voice: “Now kindly give that letter back, so I can use it again at need.”

“Oh. Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.” Where her grimy appearance and this beat-up motorcar hadn’t convinced the militiaman she was a person of quality, her manner did. He handed the letter back to her.

The road from St. Matthews to Marshlands was not so heavily cratered as the highway up to town had been. By the time the rebels abandoned St. Matthews, they’d pretty much abandoned organized resistance against Confederate forces, too. But that thought had hardly crossed her mind before she heard a couple of brisk spatters of gunfire from the north, the direction of the Congaree swamps. Not all the Reds, it seemed, had given up.

Woods blocked any view of Marshlands from the road till not long before a traveler needed to turn onto the lane leading up to the mansion. I am ready for anything, Anne told herself, again and again. Whatever I see, I will bear up under it.

Coughing and wheezing, the Ford passed the last trees. There, familiar as the mole she carried on one wrist, was the opening into that winding lane. Just before you turned, you looked along the lane and you saw…

“Hell,” she said quietly. She’d been hoping the place had survived, but it looked like a skeleton with most of the flesh rotted away. Altogether against her will, tears blurred her eyes. “Jacob,” she whispered. If Marshlands had burned, her brother must have burned with it.

By contrast, the Negro cottages off to one side of the great house looked exactly as they had before the Red uprising began. A couple of men were out hoeing in their gardens; a couple of women were feeding chickens; a whole raft of pickaninnies were running around raising hell.

After a little while, her eyes left the vicinity of the mansion and traveled out to the cotton fields. Her teeth closed hard on the soft flesh inside her lower lip. If anyone had done anything with the cotton since she’d left for Charleston all those months before, she would have been astonished. Was that what the Red revolution had been about-the freedom not to work? Her face twisted into an expression half sneer, half snarl.

If the rest of the plantations in what had been the Congaree Socialist Republic looked the same way, a lot of planters were bankrupt, busted, flat. She wasn’t; she’d invested wisely ever since Marshlands came into her hands. Most people, though, couldn’t see past their noses. And, speaking of seeing…

One of the men in the garden plots had spotted her. He dropped his hoe and pointed, calling out to the rest. One after another, heads swung in her direction. Other than that, none of the Negroes moved. That in itself chilled her. Before the uprising, they would have come running up to her motorcar, calling greetings and hoping she had trinkets for them. Telling lies, she realized. Hiding what they really thought.

For a moment, she was especially glad of the Tredegar on the seat beside her. Then, all at once, she wasn’t. How much good would it do her? What kind of arsenal did the Negroes have hidden in those cabins? She’d prided herself on knowing her laborers well. She hadn’t known them at all. Maybe the Army men had been right when they thought her crazy to come here by herself.

A woman walked slowly toward her. It was, she realized after too long, Julia, who had been her body servant. The young woman, instead of a maid’s shirtwaist and black dress, wore homespun made gaudy with bits of probably stolen finery. She was also several months pregnant.

The only reason Anne hadn’t taken her to Charleston was that she’d gone there for an assignation, not legitimate business. Had it been otherwise, would Julia have turned on her? The thought was chilling, but could hardly be avoided.

“So you’s come back, Miss Anne,” Julia said. Her voice had something of the old servile tone left in it, but not much.

“Yes, I’m back.” Anne looked over the neglected acres of what had been the finest plantation in South Carolina. “I don’t know why the hell I bothered.”

“Things, they ain’t the same no mo’,” Julia said. Had truer words ever been spoken, Anne hadn’t heard them.

Almost as one equal to another, she asked, “And what did you do in the uprising, Julia? What did the niggers here do?”

“Nothin’,” Julia said. “We stay here, we mind we bidness.” But now she didn’t meet Anne’s eyes.

Anne nodded. This was a lie she recognized. “What happens when the soldiers start asking the same thing?” she said. Julia flinched. Anne smiled to herself. Yes, no matter what, she could manage. “Mind my business”-she pointed to the forgotten fields-“along with your own, and I’ll keep the soldiers off your back. You know I can do things like that. Have we got a bargain?”

Julia thought for most of a minute, then nodded. “Miss Anne, I think we has.”

George Enos had felt constricted on the Mississippi. He was used to the broad reaches of the Atlantic, to looking around from his perch on deck and seeing nothing but the endless ocean in all directions. Next to the Atlantic, any river, even the Father of Waters, seemed hardly more than an irrigation ditch.

And the Cumberland was considerably narrower than the Mississippi. These days, he and his fellow deck hands aboard the Punishment wore Army helmets painted Navy blue. This stretch of the river was supposed to be pretty clear of snipers, but nobody with the brains God gave a haddock felt like betting his life on it.

Before the Punishment headed up the Cumberland, Navy ironworkers had installed protection around the deck machine guns, too. Little by little, the war heading toward two years old, they were figuring out that this riverine fighting had rules of its own. George was glad of that, but wondered what the devil had taken them so long.

As far as he could tell, the Rebs had got the idea from the beginning. He pointed to the mine-sweeping boat moving slowly down the Cumberland ahead of the Punishment and said, “Anybody would think the damn Rebs did nothing but build mines in all the time between the Second Mexican War and now.”

“Near as I can tell, that’s right,” Wayne Pitchess answered, his Connecticut accent not far removed from the flat vowels and swallowed r’s of Enos’ Boston intonation. Then he shook his head and pointed out to the battered farms out beyond the river. “I take it back. They raise tobacco, too.”

“That’s so,” George agreed. Some of it got into Navy supply channels, too, probably by most unofficial means. He had a pouch of pipe tobacco in a trouser pocket. It wasn’t as good as it might have been-which meant it had been cured, or half cured, after the war started-but it was a lot better than nothing.

Flags fluttered up the minesweeper’s signal lines. The Punishment’s engine changed its rhythm. The monitor began crawling away from the sweeper as the screw reversed to give power astern rather than ahead. “I’d say they found one,” Pitchess remarked.

George nodded. “I’d say you’re right. Other thing I’d say is, I hope they haven’t missed one.”

“There is that,” Pitchess agreed. You had to hope they hadn’t missed one, as you had to hope a storm wouldn’t sink you out on the Atlantic. You couldn’t do much about it, either way.

The mine-sweeping boat cut the cable mooring the deadly device to the bottom of the Cumberland. When it bobbed to the surface, the sweeper cut loose with its machine guns. The explosion showered muddy water down onto Enos a quarter of a mile away; the Punishment rocked as waves spread from the blast.

“Lord!” George had known what mines could do, but he’d never been so close to one when it went off. “If it’s all the same to everybody else, I’d just as soon not run over one of those.”

“Now that you mention it, I think I’d rather be on top of my wife, too,” Wayne Pitchess said with a veteran’s studied dryness.

George laughed at the comparison, then walked over to his machine gun and got busy checking the mechanism he’d finished cleaning not five minutes before. Most of the time, he managed not to think about how much he missed Sylvia. He hadn’t yet visited one of the whorehouses that sprouted alongside rivers like toadstools after rain. He had stained his underwear once or twice, waking up from dreams he didn’t much remember, dreams of the sort he hadn’t had since not long after he started going to the barbershop for a shave.

Engineers were busy at Clarksville, Tennessee. As U.S. monitors pushed up the Cumberland toward the town, the Confederates had dropped two railway bridges right into the water. Before the U.S. monitors advanced any farther, the steel and timber and the freight cars the Rebs had run out onto the bridge to complicate their enemies’ lives all had to be cleared away.

It was slow work. It was dangerous work, too; every so often, Confederate batteries off to the south would lob some three-inch shells in the direction of the fallen bridges. The engineers didn’t have a lot of heavy equipment with which to work. Once they’d cleared the river, the U.S. presence in this part of Tennessee would firm up. Then they could bring in the tools they really needed now. Of course, they wouldn’t need them so much then.

“Yeah, that’s a hell of a thing,” Pitchess said when George remarked on the paradox. “But hell, if you wanted things simple, you never would have joined the Navy.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Enos said. “I joined the Navy so I could give the Rebs a kick in the slats to pay them back for the one they gave me. I was already a sailor, so what the hell? — and I didn’t want to get conscripted into the Army. But I never thought they’d stick me here in the middle of the country. You join the Navy, you think you’ll be on the ocean, right?”

“Didn’t matter to me one way or t’other,” his friend answered. “I wasn’t making enough to keep a roof on my head and food in my belly when I was fishing. I figured I wouldn’t starve in the Navy, and I was right about that.” A wry grin stretched across his lean, weathered face. “Maybe I didn’t think about getting blown to smithereens as much as I should’ve.”

Men and mules, straining mightily, hauled a freight car out onto the north bank of the river. Pointing, George said, “I expect that’ll be the last train to Clarksville for a good long time.”

“Yeah,” Pitchess said. “Till we get our own rolling stock running through, anyways.”

Confederate field guns opened up with another barrage just then. Shells screamed down on the engineers, who dove for cover. Mules weren’t smart enough to do that (or, George thought, stupid enough to start a war in the first place). Thin across the water, the screams of wounded animals floated over to the Punishment.

The guns had the bridge zeroed to a fare-thee-well, and could strike at the wreckage or at either bank, as they chose. They didn’t have the range for the Punishment down so precisely. That didn’t keep them from trying to hit her, though. Shells splashed into the river and chewed up the bushes on the northern bank.

George dove into the shelter the ironwrights had built around his machine gun. A splinter hit the steel and clattered away. He hadn’t thought enough about getting blown to smithereens, either.

Growling and grumbling on its bearings, the Punishment’s turret swung round so the six-inch guns it carried bore on the field pieces harassing them. On land, six-inch cannon were heavy guns, hard to move at any sort of speed except by rail. On the water, though, they were nothing out of the ordinary, and the Punishment gave them a fine, steady platform from which to work.

They roared. The monitor heeled ever so slightly in the water from the recoil, then recovered. Sprawled out as he was, George felt the motion more acutely than he might have on his feet. Up in the armored crow’s nest atop the mast, an officer with field glasses would be watching the fall of the shells and comparing it to the location of the Rebel guns.

More grumbling noises-these smaller, to correct the error in the turret’s previous position. The big guns boomed again. Wafting powder fumes made George cough and sent tears streaming from his eyes.

Confederate shells kept falling, too. One of them exploded against the turret. A whole shower of splinters rattled off Enos’ protective cage. He’d wondered whether the ironworkers had made it thick enough. Nothing tore through it to pierce him. Evidently they had.

The turret carried more armor than any other part of the Punishment. It was made to withstand a shell from a gun of the same caliber as those it carried. It didn’t laugh at a hit from a three-inch howitzer, but it turned the blow without trouble.

And it replied with shells far heavier than those the field pieces threw. “Hit!” shouted the spotter from the crow’s nest. “That’s a hit, by God!” He whooped with glee. The guns fired several more salvos. The spotter kept yelling encouragement. What encouraged George more than anything else was that, after a while, no new fire came toward either the Punishment or the Clarksville bridges.

He got to his feet, ready to hose down the riverbank with machine-gun fire in case the Rebs, having lost their guns, chose to bring riflemen forward to make the engineers’ jobs harder-and perhaps to snipe at the men on the monitor’s deck, too. They often tried that after big, waterborne guns smashed their artillery.

Not this time, though. All was calm as the Punishment floated on the Cumberland. The engineers got back to work. The mine-sweeping boat ran right up to the wreckage to pick up a couple of wounded men. On the shore, pistol shots rang out. Soldiers were shooting wounded mules.

Just another day’s work, George thought. Noticing that thought brought him up sharply. It was the sort of thought a veteran might have. “Me?” he muttered. No one answered, naturally, but no one needed to, either.