Breakthroughs

XIV

When Luther Bliss unhappily released him from the Covington, Kentucky, city hall, Cincinnatus had devoutly hoped he would not see the inside of the building again. That hope failed. Here he stood outside the city hall, soon to be inside once more, and, very much to his surprise, he was not filled with panic.

One thing he had seen since the USA drove the CSA from Kentucky: bureaucrats were far more numerous and far more thorough than their C.S. counterparts. That had a great deal to do with why he was standing in front of the Covington city hall in the middle of a long line of Negroes. He and they laughed and gossiped as the line moved forward. Why not? They were friends and neighbors; the new government of Kentucky had been summoning Covington’s Negroes to the city hall a few square blocks at a time.

“I tell you,” somebody behind him said, “this here gonna make the passbooks we had to put up with look downright puny alongside it. You step out of line now and they kin step on your whole blame family, wherever they be in the USA.”

“Ain’t doin’ nothin’ with us the white folks ain’t done to themselves,” somebody else answered.

“And they reckon they’s free,” the first speaker said, and shook his head.

“They ain’t free,” Cincinnatus said. “All the taxes they got to pay, they’re powerful expensive. And now we get to be just like them. Ain’t that bully?”

Nobody answered, not straight out. A couple of people let their eyes flick toward a white policeman who was standing not far away. Cincinnatus looked his way, too, then nodded ever so slightly. He’d pitched his words about right. The people he wanted to hear had heard, while the cop with his billy club and permanent tough expression hadn’t noticed a thing.

As the line snaked forward, the man right behind Cincinnatus murmured, “Don’t want to let the white folks know you’s a Red.”

“Ain’t against the law, not like it used to be,” Cincinnatus answered, but the fellow had a point. Cincinnatus glanced at the white cop again. He wondered if the bruiser had been a policeman when the CSA ruled Covington, or if he was one of Luther Bliss’ men. If he belonged to Bliss’ Kentucky State Police, he was liable to be more dangerous than he looked.

Once Cincinnatus got inside the city hall, he found himself face-to-face with white petty officials whose faces said they were disgusted at having to show up for work of a Sunday. That he and his fellow Negroes might also be unhappy at having to come to the city hall on Sunday never seemed to enter their minds. That surprised Cincinnatus not a bit.

“What’s your name, boy?” a clerk snapped when he got to the head of the line.

“Cincinnatus, suh,” Cincinnatus answered. Kentucky might be part of the USA again, but the clerk, by his accent, had likely served the Confederate States far longer than his new country. Long and sometimes bitter experience warned Cincinnatus to walk soft.

Not soft enough. “Cinci-what?” the clerk demanded, even though Cincinnati was just across the Ohio River. He gnawed at the top of his fountain pen. Toothmarks showed that was a habit of his. “I don’t reckon you can spell that for me, can you?”

“Yes, suh, I can,” Cincinnatus said, as quietly and submissively as he could. He spoke the letters one by one, slowly enough so that the clerk had no trouble writing them down. Then he gave his address. Reading upside down, he saw that the clerk had misspelled the name of his street. He did not correct the man; being literate gave him a leg up on being thought uppity, and he was already in enough hot water with enough different people.

“Family?” the clerk asked.

“My wife Elizabeth, my son Achilles,” Cincinnatus answered. He had to spell Achilles, too.

As if taking some small revenge for that, the clerk shook his head. “Not enough, boy. You got any other kin in town, any other kin at all, who haven’t been registered yet? Names and addresses both, mind you-you reckon I’m gonna let you waste my time, you can think again.”

“My pa’s called Seneca. My mother’s name is Livia.” Cincinnatus gave their address, too.

“Now we’re gettin’ somewhere,” the clerk said in sour satisfaction. He gnawed the pen some more, scribbled on the form in front of him, and went on, “All right, boy, what surname are you choosing for this lot of people here?”

Having hashed that out with his family ahead of time, Cincinnatus answered without hesitation: “Driver, suh.”

“Driver,” the clerk repeated. He seemed to weigh it on some mental scales, which finally came down on the side of approval. “Well, that’s not too bad. Anybody would’ve asked me, I’d’ve told him letting niggers own surnames was a pack of damnfoolishness, but nobody asked me. Even niggers have surnames in the USA, and we’re in the USA, so…” He shrugged, as if to show he wasn’t responsible for the policy he had to carry out.

“Makes it easier to keep tabs on us,” Cincinnatus said, not altogether without bitterness.

“Did fine with passbooks for a hell of a long time,” the clerk said, but he brightened, if only fractionally. “Maybe you’re right.” He wrote some more, reading as he wrote. “Cincinnatus Driver. Elizabeth Driver. Achilles Driver. Seneca Driver. Livia Driver. Wherever any of you go in the United States, that there last name goes with you.”

When you got right down to it, that was a pretty large thought. “You don’t mind me sayin’ so, I’d sooner carry around a name than a passbook.”

The clerk looked at Cincinnatus as if he emphatically did mind his saying any such thing. “Cards for all you people will be coming in the mail in the next few days. From now on, if it has to do with you, it has to do with Cincinnatus Driver, whatever it is. You got that, boy?”

“Yes, suh,” Cincinnatus answered.

“Then get the hell out of here,” the clerk said, and Cincinnatus-Cincinnatus Driver-took his leave. Behind him, the clerk called “Next!” and the black man in back of Cincinnatus stepped forward to take his place.

He got out of the Covington city hall as fast as he could; he kept expecting Luther Bliss to pop out of nowhere and start grilling him. Had the Kentucky State Police chief known what all Cincinnatus had done instead of merely suspecting him because of the company he kept, he would have been in a different line, a line where his ankles were shackled to those of the prisoners in front of and behind him.

When he got outside, he let out a sigh of relief. He also felt a surge of pride that surprised him. Somebody might actually call him Mr. Driver now, a form of address impossible before. In the form of his name-if in very little else-he had become a white man’s equal.

He spotted Apicius in the line snaking its way toward the building. The barbecue cook saw him, too, and waved. As he waved back, he wondered what the local Red leader would think of this small measure of equality. Nothing much, he suspected; mystification was one of Apicius’ favorite words.

Apicius waved again, more urgently this time. With a certain amount of reluctance, Cincinnatus approached. “What are you callin’ yourself?” the fat black man asked him.

“Driver,” Cincinnatus answered. “How ’bout you? You gonna be Cook?”

“Hell, no.” Apicius’ jowls wobbled as he scornfully shook his head. “I’m gonna call me an’ my boys Wood. You ain’t got the right wood in the fire, you ain’t got no barbecue.”

“Apicius Wood.” As the clerk had before, Cincinnatus tested the flavor of the new surname. As the clerk had, he decided he approved. “Sounds pretty good, you want to know what I think.”

“Don’t care much,” the Red answered, “on account of it don’t matter a hill of beans any which way. Just one more tool of the oppressors to do a better job of exploitin’ us. Hell of a lot easier to keep track of Apicius Wood than it is to keep track of Apicius the barbecue king.”

He made no particular effort to keep his voice down. Most Kentucky Negroes, like most down in what was still the CSA, had at least some sympathy for the Marxist line. Cincinnatus felt that way himself. Grinning at Apicius, though, he said, “They ain’t gonna have much trouble keepin’ track o’ you.”

Apicius set his hands on his hips, which only made him look wider than ever. “I ain’t sayin’ you’re wrong, mind you, but I ain’t sayin’ you’ re right, neither,” he said. “Other thing is, ain’t a whole lot o’ niggers stand out in a crowd like I do.” He snapped his fingers. “In a crowd-that reminds me, goddamn if it don’t.”

“Reminds you of what?” Cincinnatus asked.

“Reminds me of why Tom Kennedy got his head blown off,” Apicius replied.

Cincinnatus stiffened. “I think maybe you better tell me whatever it is you reckon you know.”

“Wonder if I ought to,” Apicius said thoughtfully. “I still don’t know whose game you’re playin’.”

“I’m playing my own game, goddammit,” Cincinnatus replied in a low, furious voice. “And I’ll tell you somethin’ else, too-I know how to play rough. You don’t reckon I’m tellin’ you the truth, you remember what happened to Conroy’s store and you reckon it up again.”

“You come prowlin’ round my place, you ain’t goin’ home again,” Apicius told him. “Catfish on the river bottom git hungry this time o’ year.” Cincinnatus looked back at him and said not a word. The barbecue cook was the first to shift from foot to foot. “Dammit, I do recollect about Conroy’s.”

“Tell me what you know, then.”

“Think about it like this,” Apicius said. “Think about how come Kennedy came round your place. Think about how come he didn’t go to Conroy or any o’ them Confederate diehards.”

Cincinnatus duly thought about it. His first thought was the one Apicius no doubt wanted him to have: that Kennedy had fallen foul of the diehards and was trying to escape them. But Cincinnatus’ ex-boss could as easily have been fleeing Luther Bliss or the U.S. Army. Or, for that matter, the Reds might have been after him while trying to make him-and Cincinnatus-think someone else was.

Letting Apicius see any of those thoughts but the first one was dangerous. “Uh-huh,” Cincinnatus said, as if to tell the Red leader he was with him and had not gone one step beyond him.

A broad, friendly grin spread over Apicius’ face. Cincinnatus trusted it no further than he would have trusted a smile from Luther Bliss. Apicius said, “That’s the way the money goes.”

Pop goes the weasel, Cincinnatus thought. Popped right between the eyes, most likely. And I’m the weasel. He took up his new surname and carried it off toward his home.

“We’ve grabbed ’em by the nose!” Lieutenant General George Custer said in the map room of what had been the Tennessee state capitol. “Now we have to kick ’em in the pants.”

“Yes, sir,” Major Abner Dowling said resignedly. Custer was a great one for mouthing slogans. He was a great one for inspiring his men, too. He’d had a lot of practice at that, having fed so many of them into the meat grinder. But, now that he’d come up with what was admittedly the great military idea of his career, he seemed disinclined to think about any other military ideas.

He had reasons, too, or thought he did. “The War Department is run by morons,” he growled, “and expects everyone else to be a moron, too.”

“Sir, as I’ve said before, in my opinion it’s just as well that First Army doesn’t advance on Memphis,” Dowling answered. “We’re too distant for the thrust to do much good. Murfreesboro is a better choice all the way around.”

Custer muttered something into his gilded mustache. It sounded like, If the War Department orders it, it must be wrong. But, since he hadn’t said it quite loud enough to compel Dowling to notice it, his adjutant didn’t. He made such a point of not noticing, in fact, that Custer had to say something intelligible: “So long as we kick ’em in the pants hard enough, maybe it won’t matter which direction we go in.”

“Yes, sir,” Dowling said, more enthusiastically than before. “We truly may have them on the ropes. All we need to do is finish them off.”

Was he really talking like that? He was. Did he really believe what he was saying? He did. That he believed it still astonished him. The Rebs were fighting hard-nobody had ever accused Confederate soldiers of having any quit in them-but there weren’t enough of them, white or black, and they didn’t have enough guns or barrels to hold back the United States, not any more.

Custer said, “The Barrel Brigade will put a crimp in the CSA-you wait and see if it doesn’t.”

“Yes, sir.” Abner Dowling didn’t know whether to be pleased he was thinking along with the general commanding First Army or appalled Custer was thinking along with him. After momentary hesitation, the latter emotion prevailed.

With a chuckle that struck Dowling’s ear as evil, Custer went on, “I’m going to make sure the Barrel Brigade doesn’t smash the Rebel line anywhere near General MacArthur’s division, too. And do you know what else, Major? I’ll have MacArthur thank me for doing things that way, too, because I’ll extend his men the great privilege of feinting against the Rebels to draw their attention away from the main axis of my attack.”

“That’s very-clever, sir,” Dowling said. No wonder Custer had sounded evil. He might not be a great soldier (on the other hand, despite everything, he might be, a realization that never failed to unsettle Dowling), but more than half a century in the Army had made him a nasty schemer. Daniel MacArthur could no more help putting his heart into any attack he made than a trout could help rising to a fly. But an attack meant as a feint would be foredoomed to failure, and not all his brilliance could change that. Poor bastard, Dowling thought-not that he was fond of the arrogant MacArthur, either.

“Colonel Morrell, now, Colonel Morrell is a proper officer,” Custer said. “That young fellow will go far.”

Since Morrell had made himself so prominent in Custer’s eyes, Dowling had done some checking on the officer who led the barrels. Morrell’s record was impressive; the only thing that could possibly be construed as a blemish was trouble getting along with the General Staff back in Philadelphia. Dowling didn’t hold that against a man, and Custer, no doubt, would look on it as virtue rather than vice.

Off in the distance, antiaircraft guns began to pound. First Army had driven the CSA out of artillery range of Nashville, but the Confederates never stopped trying to hit back as best they could. Their aeroplanes were finishing the job of pounding the town to bits that U.S. artillery north of the Cumberland had begun so well.

Larger explosions started mingling with the barking thunder of the guns. Dowling frowned. “Archie can’t hit the broad side of a barn,” he complained. “It’s a good thing the Rebs aren’t any better at it than we are, that’s all I have to say.”

The explosions came closer to the state capitol as the Confederates’ bombing aeroplanes penetrated one ring of U.S. antiaircraft guns after another. Dowling wondered how much damage the bombers were liable to do. In the early days of the war, bombing raids had been pinpricks, annoyances. Now more and bigger aeroplanes carried more and bigger bombs. They could hurt.

“Sounds like they’re heading right toward us,” Custer remarked. He didn’t sound afraid, or even particularly concerned, only interested. No one had ever challenged his courage. His good sense, perhaps, but never his courage.

As the antiaircraft fire grew more frantic, the drone of the bombers’ motors provided a swelling background to it. The ground quivered under Dowling’s feet from bombs slamming into Nashville one after another, marching ever closer to the already-battered building in which he stood.

His urge was to dive under a table. The only thing he personally could do about the bombers was try to keep them from killing him. Being under fire, so to speak, without being able to do anything about it galled him.

It galled Custer, too, far more. He went to a south-facing window, yanked his pistol from its holster, and blazed away at the Confederate aeroplanes overhead. Abner Dowling knew how utterly futile that was, but sympathized with it nonetheless. And then Custer shouted, “One of them’s coming down, by God!”

Dowling stared. Custer couldn’t possibly have-

Custer, no doubt, hadn’t. The Confederate bomber had to have been in trouble long before the general commanding First Army opened fire on it. Otherwise, it would have crashed beyond the state capitol instead of coming down not far in front of the building Custer was using as his headquarters.

It must have had most of its bomb load still on board, too. The blast sounded like the end of the world. Custer reeled away from the window, both hands clapped to his ears. One of his elbows caught Dowling in the belly. “Uff!” his adjutant said. They both sat down, hard.

Custer yelled something. Dowling had no idea what it was. He hoped his ears would start working again one of these days. They weren’t working for the time being.

Bombs kept falling, too. Dowling heard them, and felt them as well. One of them blew the glass out of the window Custer had thrown open. Dowling yipped as a little fragment bit the back of his neck. He clapped a hand to the wound. His palm came away red, but not too much worse than if he’d cut himself shaving.

“Get up!” Custer screamed in his ear. “We’ve got to make sure this headquarters is still a going concern.”

Grunting, Dowling struggled to his feet. Custer was up ahead of him, even though the general commanding First Army carried twice his years. That shamed Dowling, although every part of his corpulent body-his right ham in particular-seemed one great bruise.

Custer’s right trouser leg was out at the knee. He had a cut on his face and another on the back of his hand, each about the same as the small wound Dowling had taken. He seemed to notice none of that. Spry as a new recruit, he ran back to the window and fired some more at the Confederate aeroplanes. Only when his pistol clicked instead of roaring did he bellow what had to be a curse and shove the weapon back into the tooled leather sheath in which it had sat idle for so many years.

Dowling wondered if he would reload. Instead, he ran for the door. Limping, his adjutant followed. Dowling had never actually seen Custer under attack till now. Lieutenant generals seldom approached the front: the last time Custer had been there was during the first chlorine gas attack against the CSA, two years before.

Now, all at once, Dowling understood how Custer’s shortcomings had failed to keep him from advancing to his present eminence. In combat, the general commanding First Army was a man transformed. Nothing fazed him. He threw open the door and charged down the hall, Dowling in his wake.

“General Custer! General Custer!” Officers and enlisted men yelled Custer’s name loud enough to penetrate the cotton wool some unknown malefactor seemed to have stuffed into Dowling’s ears. “What do we do, General Custer?”

“Come with me!” Custer shouted, and they came. They obeyed without question. Dowling was very impressed. He was even more impressed at the stream of orders Custer threw out. Wherever the general saw a fire or a pile of rubble, he set men to attacking it. They went in with a will, too, just as they’d gone in with a will against the Confederates in so many expensive attacks.

Steam pumps played water on the fires closer to the Cumberland, from which they could easily draw a good supply. Other fire engines struggled against those here close by and in the state capitol, but pressure in the mains wasn’t all it should have been; Dowling wondered if some of the bombs had damaged the water works. He sighed. The USA had finally got them running again, and now…

But Custer, far more than in an office or conferring with his subordinates around a map, took charge. “Don’t worry, pal,” he called to a soldier whom other men in green-gray were digging out from under bricks and stones. “If you think this is bad, just wait till you see what we do to those Rebel sons of bitches.”

“That’s bully, sir,” the wounded man answered. By the blood soaking his leg and by the way he held it, he wouldn’t be doing any more fighting any time soon, but he was smiling as his comrades carried him away. Dowling shook his head in amazement. He wouldn’t have been smiling with a broken leg. He would have been screaming his head off. Would listening to Custer have made him shut up? He didn’t think so, but it had sure as hell done the job for the wounded soldier.

Custer turned and said, “Major, get on the telegraph to Philadelphia. Let the War Department know I am well and tell them First Army has just begun to fight.”

Dowling, whose ears were still stunned, had to get him to repeat that several times before he had it straight. Custer gladly repeated himself: the only thing he liked better than hearing his own voice was seeing his name in the newspapers. But the men he’d been directing listened avidly, no matter how pompous he sounded.

“Sorry, sir,” said the telegrapher to whom Dowling brought the message, “but the lines north are all down right now.”

“They had better be fixed soon, for the future of the nation may ride on them,” Dowling boomed. He was appalled at how much he sounded like Custer. A moment later, he was appalled again, this time by the telegraph operator’s fervent apology. It made him blink and scratch his head. Damned if the old boy didn’t have something after all.

Barrels crawled north up the road past Arthur McGregor’s farm. They chewed the dirt to hell and gone, kicking great clouds of dust into the air. McGregor wouldn’t have wanted to be one of the Yankee soldiers marching behind the noisy, smelly barrels. But then, he wouldn’t have wanted to be a Yankee soldier under any circumstances.

He looked out across his fields. They were beginning to go from green to gold. He would have a fine crop this year if the weather held-and the only way he would be able to dispose of it was to the U.S. authorities. He grimaced. Almost better to touch a match to the wheat than sell it to the USA.

The barrels passed-like a kidney stone, he thought, remembering a torment of his father’s. More men in green-gray slogged north on foot. Watching them, McGregor thought of ants swarming round spilled molasses. You could smash some, but more kept coming. How many columns of U.S. soldiers had he watched trudging up that road? How many men did the United States hold, anyway? One answer fit both questions: too many.

Southbound traffic was sparser. The farm near Rosenfeld was a long way from the front these days; few Americans needed to withdraw this far. Gloomily, McGregor headed for the barn to muck out and to get in a little work on his latest bomb. He thought he had a way to get it into town, but he wasn’t sure yet.

Here came a U.S. Ford, painted green-gray as Army motorcars often were. McGregor paused, wondering if it was Major Hannebrink trying to catch him in the act. If so, the Yank would be disappointed. McGregor had nothing out now, and would have nothing out ninety seconds after he stopped work. He did not believe in taking foolish chances with his revenge.

When the Ford stopped just outside the lane that led to his farmhouse and barn, he laughed quietly, sure he’d pegged things aright. “Not today, Major,” he murmured. “Not today.”

But then the automobile sped up again, rolling south toward the border. McGregor scratched his head, wondering why it had stopped in the first place. He got his answer a moment later, when a great exultant shout ripped from the throats of the marching American soldiers: “Winnipeg!”

McGregor took two quick steps to the barn and leaned against the timbers by the door. He didn’t think he could have stood up without that support; he felt as punctured, as deflated, as the inner tubes on the motorcars that had come with Hannebrink after Mary got through with them.

“Winnipeg!” the U.S. soldiers cried, again and again. “Winnipeg!” Every repetition felt like a fresh kick in the belly to Arthur McGregor. Since the war began, the city through which passed the railroads linking Canada’s east and west had held out against everything the United States threw at it. McGregor knew fresh train lines had been built north of Winnipeg, but if the Yanks had broken into it, could they, would they, not move past it as well?

Slowly, grimly, he walked back toward the farmhouse. The bomb would wait. The bomb would wait a long time. The United States looked to be in Canada to stay.

When he went inside, Julia gave him a severe look and said, “Don’t you dare slam the door, Father. Don’t you dare stomp around the way you usually do, either. I’ve got bread in the oven, and I don’t want it to fall.”

“All right,” McGregor said meekly, and shut the door with care. The last time he could remember sounding meek, he’d been about eight years old. He shook his head like a bear bedeviled by dogs and wondered what the devil to do next. He had no idea. With Winnipeg lost, what did anything matter?

His older daughter noticed that he sounded strange. “What’s wrong, Father?” she asked.

He cocked his head to one side. With the door closed, with the windows closed, he had trouble hearing the Yankees yelling. If Julia had been busy with the bread, she probably hadn’t even noticed them. “Winnipeg’s fallen,” he said baldly. “I think the Americans mean it this time.”

Julia stared at him as if he’d started spouting gibberish. “But it can’t have,” she said, though she had to know perfectly well it could. Then she burst into tears and threw herself into his arms. He held her and stroked her hair as if she were a little girl and not turning ever more into a woman day by day.

Hearing Julia start to cry was enough to bring Maude and Mary at a run. McGregor knew what was in his wife’s mind, at least-Maude had surely feared the Yanks were seizing him. Seeing him there, she stopped dead. “Dear God in heaven, what is it?” she demanded.

“Winnipeg,” he said. The one word was plenty. It made Julia cry harder than ever. Maude turned away, as if she could not bear to hear such news-and if she could not, who could blame her?

Mary’s mouth fell open. “God doesn’t love us,” she whispered, no doubt the worst thing she could think of. Then, as a grown man might have done, she gathered herself. Over Julia’s shoulder and bent head, McGregor watched the process with nothing but admiration. A word at a time, Mary went on, “I don’t care if God loves us or not. I won’t be a Yankee, and there’s nothing they can do that will make me be one.”

“I won’t be a Yankee, either,” Julia said, and stood straighter. McGregor affected not to notice the dark tear stains on the front of his denim overalls. “I won’t be a Yankee,” Julia repeated. But she, more than anyone else in the family, had a way of looking at things over the long haul. “I won’t be a Yankee,” she said for the third time, and then added, “but what will my children be, if I ever have children? What will their children be?”

McGregor, thus prodded, thought of those distant, hypothetical great-grandchildren he probably wouldn’t live to see, since they’d be born around 1950, a year that seemed impossibly distant from mundane 1917. What would they be like?

Try as he would, he couldn’t see them as much different from himself and his own family. He supposed that was foolish. His great-grandfather, whom he’d never known, would have been astonished at the modern conveniences to be found in Rosenfeld, just a few hours away by wagon. Maybe, when the century had halfway run its course, such conveniences would reach farms, too.

That wasn’t really what he wanted to think about. If the United States won this war, as they looked like doing, how would those great-grandchildren think of themselves? Would they be contented Americans, as the Yanks would try to make them?

“They have to remember,” he said, more to himself than to anyone else. “They have to remember they’re Canadians, and the USA stole their country from them. They have to try to take it back one day.”

“Can they do that?” Maude asked the ruthlessly pragmatic question. A farm wife who was anything but ruthlessly pragmatic had a long, hard, rocky road ahead of her.

But McGregor, to his own surprise, had an answer ready: “Look at Quebec. The Frenchies there are still mad that we licked them on the Plains of Abraham a hundred and fifty years ago. As soon as the Yankees gave them their chance, they jumped on the idea of this Republic of theirs, and to the devil with whatever went before it. If somebody gives us the chance, we can do the same.”

“Who would give us a chance, with the United States smothering us the way a bad sow smothers her piglets?” Maude said.

“I don’t know,” McGregor admitted. “But the Quebecers didn’t know before the war, either. Sooner or later, something will turn up.”

“My bread!” Julia exclaimed. “I forgot the bread!” She fled back into the kitchen. The oven door clanked open. Julia let out a sigh of relief.

“It smelled fine,” Maude called after her. “I didn’t think you had anything to worry about.”

Mary looked at her mother in astonishment. “Don’t you think turning into a Yankee is something to worry about?”

“Well, yes,” Maude said, “but it isn’t something Julia can fix by taking it out of the oven on time.” Her younger daughter thought that over. At last, reluctantly, Mary nodded.

McGregor said, “Maybe they can make us stand up in front of the Stars and Stripes. Whatever they do, though, they can’t keep us from spitting on it in our hearts, and from staying loyal to the King.”

“God save the King!” Mary said, and McGregor and Maude each put a hand on her shoulder. She caught fire, as she had a way of doing. “We’ll make it our secret,” she breathed. “We’ll all make it our secret. I don’t mean all of us-I mean all of us Canadians. We’ll do what the Yanks tell us, but inside we’ll be laughing and laughing, because we’ll know what we really think.”

Arthur and Maude McGregor looked at each other over their daughter’s head. “Some of us will,” McGregor said. “Some of us will keep the secret. Some of us will want to. Some of us won’t care, though-remember how things were in your school? Some people will believe the Americans’ lies.”

“We’ll make them pay,” Mary said fiercely. Her parents looked at each other again. McGregor didn’t know how much she knew about his bombs. She did know Major Hannebrink kept coming around-and she knew her father hated him. McGregor might have taken her out of school because the teacher mouthed the Yanks’ lies, but Mary knew how to add even so.

“What happens next?” Maude asked.

McGregor blew air out through his lips, making a whuffling noise a horse might have produced. “I don’t know. I don’t know enough to know. If we can stop them in Winnipeg and keep them from getting at the new railroads farther north, the fight goes on a while longer.”

He was trying to find the bright side, and that was the most hopeful thing he could say. If the Americans kept driving, if the Canadians and the British were able to stop them no more…in that case, the fight wouldn’t go on a while longer. It would be over in a matter of weeks.

“Whatever happens, we have to go on,” he said.

“Whatever happens, we have to pay the Americans back,” Mary said. “We have to pay them back for Alexander.”

“We will,” Maude said. “I don’t know how, but we will.”

“You can count on that, Mary,” McGregor added. His daughter nodded. She had confidence in him even if he had none in himself, even if the war was as good as lost. He looked up at the ceiling. He seemed to look right through the ceiling, to look on the naked face of God. The war might be as good as lost, but all his confidence came flooding back.

As she’d done every day she could since the war began, Nellie Semphroch opened the coffeehouse for business. The morning was fine and bright. Before long, it would get impossibly hot and impossibly muggy, the way it did every summer in Washington. Nellie stood on the sidewalk, enjoying the freshness while it lasted.

She had little else to enjoy. The view was one to inspire horror, not delight, even if a robin did trill from a tree that had been broken only into table legs, not into matchsticks. Most of her own block had come through pretty well, which is to say it hadn’t been smashed flat and then burned. Even so, bullet holes pocked storefronts, shells had bitten chunks out of them, and the only glass in sight was not in the windows but drifted in the street to puncture motorcars’ inner tubes.

Off to the south, on the far side of the Potomac, artillery boomed. It was U.S. artillery, pounding the Confederates still farther south. Confederate forces had retreated out of artillery range of Washington, driven not so much by the U.S. troops who had retaken the capital as by U.S. successes off to the west, which had left the Rebels afraid of being cut off. Not having to worry about shellfire for the first time in weeks felt good, though C.S. bombers did still make nocturnal appearances overhead.

Hal Jacobs threw wide the boarded-up door across the street to show his cobbler’s shop was open, too. He waved and called, “Good morning, Nellie.”

“Good morning, Hal,” Nellie answered. She didn’t like giving Jacobs the encouragement of using his Christian name, but didn’t see she had much choice, either. As she did every morning she saw the shoemaker these days, she said, “Thank you for getting me and Edna out of that military jail.”

Jacobs waved his hands. “I have told you before, do not thank me for this. It was my duty. It was my pleasure. People saw Confederate officers in your coffeehouse-naturally they thought you were collaborating. They didn’t know you were passing what you heard on to me.”

“You could have let me rot,” Nellie said. I didn’t come across for you, so you didn’t have any reason to come across for me. That was how things worked in the world from which she’d escaped, and, for the most part, in the more decorous world she’d managed to enter, too. They didn’t seem to work that way for Hal Jacobs, which made Nellie intensely suspicious.

He waved again, this time in rejection of the idea. “You bravely served your country. How could I do such a wicked thing? If Bill Reach turns up again-no, I will say when Bill Reach turns up again-I know he would-will-feel the same.”

“That’s nice,” Nellie answered. She had to make herself not look in the direction of the wreckage where, she presumed, Bill Reach still lay. Jacobs might talk about his turning up, but she knew he wouldn’t turn up again till the Last Trump blew.

With a final wave, Jacobs went back inside and got to work. Nellie went inside, too. While she was opening up, Edna had come downstairs. Her daughter’s face bore a look of sullen discontent, as it often did lately. “Jesus, this town is dead nowadays,” Edna complained. “We did a hell of a lot better when the Rebs were running things.”

“We wouldn’t have, if it hadn’t been for the help we got from Mr. Jacobs and the rest of the people who worked for the United States,” Nellie said.

Edna’s discontented look went from sullen to angry. “And you never told me about it, not a word,” she said shrilly. “I even said that crazy Bill Reach was a spy, and you went, ‘Pooh-pooh! The very idea!’ You would have let me marry Nick and then taken my pillow talk straight across the street.”

Since that, while unkind, was not altogether untrue, Nellie did not rise to it. She did say, “You know I never wanted you to marry him at all.”

“But that wasn’t because he was a Reb,” Edna said. “That was just because he was a man. He could have been on the U.S. General Staff, and you would’ve felt the same way.” That also had a good deal of truth in it. Edna went on, “You just don’t want a girl to have any fun, and look at what all you done when you was my age and even younger.”

“That’s wasn’t fun,” Nellie replied. “That was hell, is what that was.” But Edna didn’t believe her. She could see as much in her daughter’s eyes. Edna was convinced she was acting like a dog in the manger. What Edna wanted was to screw herself silly, not having a clue how silly she was already. With a sigh, Nellie said, “Get a pot of coffee going, why don’t you? I could use a cup, and I bet you could, too.”

“Might as well make it for us,” Edna said. “Ain’t nobody else likely to come in and drink it. Most of the folks left here in town don’t have the money, and most of the ones who do still think we was a pack of traitors.”

“I know.” Nellie sighed again, this time over lost business unlikely to return. “Good thing I put aside as much as I did, or we’d be in worse shape than we are.” One more sigh. “Only thing that Rebel scrip we got is good for now is blowing our noses on it, I’m afraid.”

“We haven’t got that much of it, though,” Edna said, lighting the fire in the stove. “The Rebs liked us. Why not? We always had good coffee and good food, so no wonder they liked us and mostly paid us real cash.” As she started measuring grounds for the pot, she gave her mother another sour stare. “Now I know how we got all that good stuff. I never did before, on account of you never told me.”

Before Nellie could answer, a motorcar stopped outside. She was amazed anyone had even tried to negotiate the shell-pocked, glass-strewn roadway. “Got a puncture, I’ll bet,” she said.

A moment later, the door opened. Nellie started to say, See? Told you so, but the words clogged in her throat. Into the coffeehouse walked Theodore Roosevelt. He pointed a finger at her. “You are Mrs. Nellie Semphroch,” he said, as if daring her to disagree.

“Y-Yes, sir,” she said, and dropped a curtsy. “And this here is my daughter Edna.” She didn’t know whether she ought to be introducing Edna to the president of the United States. She didn’t know whether she should have admitted her own name, either. If Roosevelt was inclined to believe most of her neighbors and not Hal Jacobs, he was by all accounts capable of ordering her dragged out and shot on the spot.

“Now that our capital is in our own hands once more,” he said, “I decided to come down from Philadelphia and see what was left of this city that was once so wonderful. The Rebs haven’t left us much, have they?”

“No, sir,” Nellie answered. On the stove, the pot began to perk. “Would you care for some coffee, sir?”

“Bully!” Roosevelt said. A couple of hard-faced men in green-gray-bodyguards, by the look of them-came into the coffeehouse after him. “Cups for Roland and Stan, too, if you please. I have something for you here, Mrs. Semphroch, and also for your lovely daughter.”

Edna simpered as she poured the coffee. Nellie wished the cups that had survived the recapture of Washington were all from the same set. She supposed she should have been grateful any cups had survived. One direct hit and they wouldn’t have. One direct hit and she might not have, either.

After taking a sip, Roosevelt set down his cup and reached into his pocket. His hand came out not with a derringer but with a dark blue velvet box, the sort of box in which a ring might have come. He opened the box. Nellie gaped at the big golden Maltese cross on a red, white, and blue ribbon. Roosevelt lifted the medal out of the box. The ribbon was long enough to go around Nellie’s neck.

“The Order of Remembrance, First Class,” Roosevelt boomed. “Highest civilian honor I can give. I argued for a Distinguished Service Cross myself, but the stick-in-the-muds at the War Department started having kittens. This is the best I could do. Congratulations, Mrs. Semphroch: a grateful country thanks you for your brave service.”

He slipped the medal over Nellie’s head. Dazedly, she watched him put a hand in his pocket again and produce another velvet box. When he opened it, the Maltese cross inside was of silver, with inlaid gold stripes. The ribbon attached to it was also of the colors of the national flag, but not quite so wide as the one on Nellie’s medal.

“Order of Remembrance, Second Class,” he said, putting the decoration over Edna’s head. “For you, Miss Semphroch, for helping your mother gather information from the foe and pass it on to the United States.”

Edna gaped. So did Nellie. Maybe Roosevelt didn’t know Edna had been on the point of marrying Confederate Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid-would have married him if the U.S. bombardment hadn’t turned the ceremony into a bloody shambles. Maybe he did know and didn’t care.

No sooner had that thought crossed Nellie’s mind than, as if on cue, a photographer strode into the coffeehouse. President Roosevelt put one arm around Nellie, the other around Edna, and Nellie realized the photographer’s appearance wasn’t as if on cue at all. It was on cue. The fellow touched off his tray of flash powder. Foomp! As a glowing purple smear made hash of Nellie’s eyesight, the shutter clicked.

“Can we do one more?” the photographer asked, beginning to set up again.

“I’m standing here with my arms around two lovely ladies, and you ask me a question like that?” Roosevelt said. “By all means, sir, by all means. Take all day if you need to-but make sure you do the job right.”

Edna laughed at the president’s joke. Had Roosevelt shown any interest in more than her laugh, she probably would have given him that, too. Nellie did not like being touched without having invited it, but she endured it. She’d endured worse in her time, and Roosevelt took no undue liberties.

Of one thing Nellie was very, very sure: he had no more idea than did Hal Jacobs of how Bill Reach had died. Nor did she intend to let either of them ever learn.

Thinking that, she was smiling when the flash powder went Foomp! again. So was Theodore Roosevelt. So was Edna. “Great!” the photographer said. “The newspapers’ll eat this one up.”

“Bully!” Roosevelt said again. He let the women go and then turned to them. “Now I must depart, I fear. I have to look over this poor tormented town and try to decide how we can set it to rights once more. But now that I have had a cup of your excellent coffee and given you some small portion of the reward you so richly deserve, I do hope any and all slanders against you on the part of your neighbors shall cease forthwith. A very good day to you both.”

And he was gone, a human hurricane in a black suit and straw boater. His bodyguards followed him out. So did the photographer, who had the grace to tip his hat. Nellie felt as if she’d survived yet another bombardment.

As soon as that feeling faded even a little, though, she went to a counter and pulled out a can of red paint and a brush. Roosevelt’s limousine was still making its slow way around the corner when she painted a message on the boards covering her shattered window: OUR COFFEE IS FINE ENOUGH FOR THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES. HOW ABOUT YOU?

“Oh, that’s good, Ma,” Edna said, the medal still around her neck.

“It’s better than good,” Nellie said. “It’s bully!” Mother and daughter smiled, at ease with each other for one of the rare times since the shooting started.

A horse-drawn cab driven by a white man whose right arm ended in a hook carried Anne Colleton across the bridge from the Georgia mainland to Jekyll Island. “I hope the weather at the hotel will be a little nicer than this,” she said; down near the Florida border, Georgia could give South Carolina lessons in heat and humidity.

“Which hotel were you at again, ma’am?” the driver asked.

“The Laughing January, it’s called,” she answered.

“Oh, yes, ma’am, that’s on the ocean side. It’s always cooler there. Place got the name on account of, before the war, rich Yankees’d come down here to get away from winter. I had to live up in Yankee country and I had the money, reckon I’d do the same thing.”

The road did not go directly to the Laughing January, but meandered around the rim of the island. Most of the interior was swamp and salt marsh and, on the rare ground that rose slightly higher, woods of pine and moss-draped oak. Egrets and herons, their wings as broad as a man was tall, rose from the marshes and flew off with ungainly haste. A cardinal perched on a branch outthrust from an oak added a splash of brightness.

It caught the driver’s eyes, too. “My blood was about that color when the damnyankees blew up my arm,” he remarked, and then, “You got any kin in the war, ma’am?”

“They gassed one of my brothers,” Anne answered. “He’s dead now. The other one’s an officer on the Roanoke front. He was well, last I heard.” If the driver had been on the point of making any cracks along the lines of a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight, that forestalled him. He kept quiet the rest of the way to the hotel.

Not all the rich-Yankee and Confederate-had stayed at hotels. Their villas had crushed-shell driveways leading off from the road. Some of the fancy houses were in fine shape, with servants bustling about. Some looked abandoned, forlorn, weather-beaten: men from the United States had probably wintered in them. And some, these days, were charred ruins like Marshlands. She wondered how bad the Red risings had been here. She didn’t ask. She didn’t really want to know.

“Here we are,” the cab driver said at last. “The Laughing January.” The place seemed more like a village than a hotel, with individual cottages surrounding a larger building to the north, the south, and the east, toward the ocean. The driver had been right about the weather. Even inside the cab, Anne could feel as much. It wasn’t cool. It wasn’t dry. It was better than it had been.

After hitching the horse, the driver carried her bags into the lobby. He was handy with his hook but used his right arm only for the lighter pieces. Inside, a colored bellhop took charge of them all. And what were you doing, there toward the end of 1915? Anne thought, looking at him. He was all deference now. Under that deference, who could guess what went through his mind? Anne had once thought she could. She didn’t any more.

At the desk, the clerk-a woman-confirmed that her reservation was in order and handed her a shiny brass key with a large 8 stamped onto it. “You’ll have a grand sea view from that cabin, ma’am,” she said, “and the netting on the porch is fine enough to keep out the mosquitoes and the nasty little no-see-’ems, too.”

“That’s good,” Anne said. She got directions on how to find cabin 8, then headed off down the walk with the colored attendant pushing her bags on a little wheeled cart behind her.

“You jus’ here by your lonesome, ma’am?” he asked. “You didn’t bring no servants or nothin’?”

“No,” she said tightly. After folk who had been her servants tried to kill her, she neither wanted anything to do with them nor wanted to acquire new ones, lest they prove to have similarly unfortunate habits.

She gave the attendant half a dollar once he set the bags down on the floor of the front room of her cottage. It would have been an extravagant tip before the war, and was still a good one; he went back toward the main building whistling and with a spring in his step Anne didn’t think was assumed. Would that save her if the Negroes planned another uprising? Her laugh had broken glass in it. She knew better.

She was hanging up a white tennis dress when someone knocked on the frame to the screen door. Maybe it was the bellhop again. Had she dropped or forgotten something? Or maybe-

A Navy officer in tropical whites stood there, his cap under one arm, a cigar dangling from his mouth at a deliberately rakish angle. “Why, Commander Kimball,” Anne drawled, exaggerating her accent to the point of burlesque. “What a pleasant surprise.”

To her genuine rather than assumed surprise, Roger Kimball glared at her instead of grinning. “I didn’t get interested in you because you were cute and sweet and helpless,” he growled. “If I want that, I can buy it on a streetcorner any time I please. I got interested in you because I think you’re the only woman I ever met who’s every bit as ornery and uppity as I am. You don’t like that, I’ll head back to Habana.”

He meant it. She could see as much. She almost did send him packing; if there was one thing she couldn’t stand, it was being upstaged. But he was one of the few men she’d ever met who came close to being as ornery and uppity as she was. She didn’t think he matched her, but he did come close.

And so, when she spoke again, it was in tones she might have used with her brother: “All right, Roger. It takes one to know one, I expect. Come in. How long do you have in Georgia?”

“Four days,” he answered. “Then back on the train and the boat to Cuba, and then back to sea. No rest for the weary.” He stepped past her into the cottage and closed the door. “You have any whiskey in this place? Plenty in mine if you don’t.”

“I don’t know,” Anne said. “I haven’t had a chance to look.”

Kimball nodded. “Saw you on the way over here, with the coon hauling your bags. I usually like a little water in my whiskey, but not here. Jekyll Island water tastes like swamp. They say it’s safe to drink, but it’s nasty.”

“Thanks for letting me know,” Anne answered as they made their way back toward the little cottage’s kitchen-if you came to the Laughing January with a cook and a housekeeper, you could do some very handsome entertaining. “I haven’t tried that yet, either.”

Kimball stopped, so suddenly that she almost ran into him. Voice lazy and amused, he asked, “What else haven’t you tried here?”

Afterwards, she couldn’t sort out which of them grabbed the other first. What followed was as much a brawl as lovemaking. He tore a couple of hooks and eyes from her gauzy summer frock as he got her out of it; she sent one of the gold buttons from his uniform jacket spinning across the room when she yanked it open instead of bothering to undo all the fastenings.

They didn’t even look for the bedroom. For the rough coupling they both wanted, the floor seemed better. Kimball’s weight pinned Anne half against rug, half against polished hardwood. He slammed himself into her as if he wanted to hurt her and please her at the same time.

And he did, both. Her nails clawed stripes down his back as she bucked under him. “Come on, damn you, come on,” she said, her own excitement mounting. She bit his shoulder and tasted blood.

He grunted, drove even deeper into her-she would not have thought it possible-and spent himself. Only a couple of quick heartbeats later, she cried out, too, a noise any cat prowling along a fence would have recognized.

Suddenly, he was heavy upon her. Before she could push him away, he rolled off and to one side. She felt a small pang of regret as he pulled out of her. “Hell of a woman,” he muttered to himself, and then spoke directly to her: “You don’t believe in taking prisoners, do you?” He set a hand where she’d bitten, stared at the red smear on his palm, and shook his head. “I was wondering if I’d come out of that one alive.”

Anne rubbed her backside in a fashion no properly refined lady would have used-but then, no properly refined lady would have got rugburn on the area in question by screwing her brains out on the floor. “I thought you were trying to ram me down into the basement,” she replied, not without admiration.

“These places don’t have basements,” Roger Kimball said.

“I knew that,” Anne told him. “The way you were going there, I didn’t think you cared.” Her stretch was an odd blend of satisfied lassitude and abraded posterior.

One appetite for the moment slaked, Kimball remembered another. “We were coming in here for some whiskey, weren’t we?” He got to his feet and searched the cabinets. Curtains covered the windows, but they weren’t thick. A dedicated snoop would have had no trouble spotting his nudity. He didn’t care. Anne admired him again, this time for brazenness-not that she didn’t already know about that. She also admired the red lines on his back…and the back itself.

He grunted again, on a different note from when he’d shot his seed into her, and held up a bottle three-quarters full of amber liquid. “If this cottage is like mine, the bedroom should be…over here,” he said, and sure enough, it was.

He bothered with glasses no more than he’d bothered with clothes. Anne followed his lead, something she was unused to doing. He yanked the cork from the bottle with his teeth when it would not yield to his fingers. “What shall we drink to?” Anne asked.

She wondered if he would say victory. She thought he started to, but the word did not pass his lips. Instead, he answered, “To doing our jobs the best way we know how while the world goes to hell around us,” and took a long pull at the bottle.

“Leave some for me,” Anne said. She had to pull it out of his hand. It wasn’t the best whiskey she’d ever had, nor anywhere close, but, if she drank enough of it, it would get her drunk. After she’d swallowed and her eyes stopped watering, she said, “We’re going to lose, aren’t we?”

“Don’t see how we can do anything else,” Kimball said. “Scuttlebutt is, we’ve already started sniffing around for terms.”

“I hadn’t heard that,” Anne said. “I’d have thought President Semmes owed me enough to let me know such things, but maybe not.” Maybe, with her plantation in ruins and her investments in hardly better shape, she wasn’t rich enough to be worth cultivating any more.

“Well, he hasn’t told me about it, either. I don’t know if the stories are true or not,” Kimball said. “Ones I’ve heard say that damned Roosevelt turned us down flat, so it doesn’t matter any which way.” He drank again, then stared at the bottle. “What are we supposed to do after we lose the war? How are we supposed to get over that?”

“The damnyankees did. They did it twice,” Anne said. “Anything those people can do, we can do, too. We have to figure out where we went wrong in this fight and make sure we don’t go wrong that way again.”

“Because there will be another round,” Kimball said, and Anne nodded. She reached for the whiskey bottle. He handed it to her. She drank till her eyes crossed. Anything, even oblivion, was better than thinking about spending so many lives and so much treasure-and losing anyhow.

She discovered Roger Kimball’s hand high up on her bare thigh. As she stared at it, it moved higher still. She set the bottle on the floor by the side of the bed and clasped Kimball to her. Love, or even fornication, was better than thinking about what might have been, too.

An aeroplane buzzed high over the line east of Lubbock. Jefferson Pinkard stared up at it. He thought about firing a few rounds-by the way it had come, it was plainly a U.S. machine-but decided not to waste the ammunition. It was so high up there, he had no chance of hitting it.

“Why we don’t got no aeroplanes to shoot down that puto?” Hipolito Rodriguez asked. “The Yankees, they got aeroplanes all the time. They look at us like a man peeking at a woman taking a bath in a river.”

Jeff thought of Emily. He couldn’t help imagining her naked. That was all right, when he didn’t imagine Bedford Cunningham naked beside her or on top of her. He answered, “Guess they don’t reckon this here front’s important enough to send us much in the way of flying machines. Yankees always have had more’n us.”

Something fell from the U.S. aeroplane. Pinkard’s first reaction was to hit the dirt, but he checked himself-that wasn’t a bomb. No: those weren’t bombs. They drifted and fluttered in the air like the snowflakes he occasionally saw in Birmingham. Rodriguez stared at them in blank wonderment. Jeff guessed he never saw snow down in Sonora, even if he’d made its acquaintance here this past winter.

“Papers!” Sergeant Albert Cross said. “The bastards are dropping leaflets on us.”

“Rather have ’em drop leaflets than bombs any old day, and twice on Sunday,” Pinkard said.

“Si.” Hip Rodriguez nodded enthusiastic agreement. “With papers, too, I can wipe my ass. This is muy bueno.”

“Probably be scratchy as hell,” Cross said after a judicious pause for thought. “But hey, Hip, you’re right-damn sight better’n nothin’. It’s a fucking wonder all the flies in Texas don’t live in this here trench.”

“You mean they don’t?” Jeff said, kidding on the square. “Could have fooled me.” As if to make him pay for his words, something bit him on the back of the neck. He swatted, but didn’t think he got it.

By then, the fluttering papers had nearly reached the ground. A few drifted back toward the Yankees’ trenches. Others fell in no-man’s-land. Still others came down in and behind the Confederates’ forward line.

Had Pinkard stabbed up with his bayoneted Tredegar, he could have spitted one of the descending leaflets. He didn’t bother. He just grabbed one out of the air. Cross and Rodriguez crowded close to see what the devil the United States thought it worthwhile to tell their foes.

At the top of the leaflet was a U.S. flag that looked to have too many stars in the canton crossed with another one Pinkard hadn’t seen before, a dark banner with the light silhouette of a tough-looking man’s profile on it. The headline below explained: THE UNITED STATES WELCOME THE STATE OF HOUSTON INTO THE UNION.

“Wait a minute,” Cross said, “Houston’s in Texas, God damn it. I been through there on the train.”

“Here, let me read it,” Jeff said, and did: “ ‘When Texas was admitted to the United States in 1845, it retained for itself the right of forming up to four new states within its boundaries. The people of the state of Houston have availed themselves of the opportunity to break free of the evil and corrupt Richmond regime and found a new political body: in the words of the immortal John Adams, ‘a government of laws and not of men.’ The new state takes its name from Governor Sam Houston, who so valiantly tried to keep the whole of Texas from joining the Confederate States of America. The United States are delighted at this return to the fold of so many upstanding citizens who repent of their grandfathers’ errors.’ ”

Pinkard crumpled up the paper and stuck it in his pocket. “It’s an ass-wipe, sure as hell.” He went down the trench, gathering more leaflets.

Rodriguez and Sergeant Cross also picked up several copies of the announcement, no doubt for the same purpose. Rodriguez peered west, toward the enemy lines and what was presumably the territory of the new state of Houston. “How do they do this?” he asked. “Make a new state where there was no state before, I mean.”

“Same way they did when they stole part of Virginia from us during the War of Secession and called it West Virginia, I reckon,” Pinkard answered with a snort of contempt.

Sergeant Albert Cross added, “Then they went and found themselves enough traitors and collaborators to make themselves a legislature out of, like they done in Kentucky when they went and stole that from us. Wonder how many soldiers they got to use to keep the people from hanging all those bastards from the closest lamp poles.”

“Probably enough so that, if we start ourselves a counterattack, the Yankees won’t have enough reinforcements left to be able to hold us back,” Jeff said.

Sergeant Cross laughed louder than the joke deserved. “That’s good, Pinkard, that’s right good,” he said, but then gave the game away by adding, “Ain’t heard you say nothin’ that funny in a while now.”

“World hasn’t been a funny place lately, and that’s a fact,” Jeff said. “The Yankees have been pushin’ us back every place there is to push, and livin’ in the trenches wouldn’t be my notion of a high old time even if we was winnin’. Other thing is, way it sounds is that everybody else on our side is about to fall over dead, too. Don’t know about you, Sarge, but none of that makes me want to do a buck and wing.”

Hip Rodriguez looked at Pinkard with his large, dark eyes and didn’t say anything. He was still convinced Jeff had more urgent reasons for not making jokes these days. He was right, of course, but also too polite to push it.

Sergeant Cross lacked Sonoran manners. Not only that, he outranked Pinkard, which Hip didn’t. He said, “I don’t reckon it’s fretting over whether we’re goin’ to lose the damn war that’s made you try to get yourself killed every time we sent raiders out the past couple months.”

“Haven’t been trying to get myself killed,” Pinkard protested, which, at least as far as the top part of his mind went, was true. “Want to kill me as many damnyankees as I can, is all.”

“You used to have better sense than to volunteer to do it all the damn time,” Cross said. “You go across no-man’s-land often enough, sooner or later you don’t come back.”

If he could have shot Emily and Bedford first, Pinkard might have been content to turn his Tredegar on himself. One of the reasons he shook his head now was that he hadn’t shot the damned bitch. Give her the satisfaction of outliving him? He shook his head again.

Then, from the other side of no-man’s-land, the Yankees started firing trench mortars. The bombs whistled cheerily as they fell. As he’d almost done for the leaflet, Pinkard threw himself flat. “Hijos del diablo!” Hip Rodriguez shouted as he dove down to the bottom of the trench, too.

Sons of the devil, that meant, and Pinkard couldn’t have agreed more. Mortar bombs flew right down into a trench, as conventional artillery, with its flatter trajectory, often could not. Along the line, somebody shrieked as fragments pierced him.

Machine guns started to rattle, both from the Yankees’ entrenchments and from the Confederate line under attack. “They’re coming!” someone yelled.

Cursing, Jeff scrambled up. That made him more vulnerable to the mortar bombs, which kept on falling. Lying down and waiting for damnyankees to jump into the trench and shoot him or bayonet him was the worse side of that bargain, though.

Just as he gained his feet, a soldier in green-gray did leap down into the trench. Jeff thought he shot him before the Yankee’s feet hit the dirt. As the fellow crumpled, Jeff shot him again. He groaned. His Springfield slipped from fingers that could hold it no longer. Blood poured from the wounds in his chest and from his mouth and nostrils. He was a dead man, even if he didn’t quite know it yet.

His pals were intent on making Jefferson Pinkard a dead man, too. Jeff shot another Yankee just before the man could shoot him. The U.S. soldiers shouted to one another in their sharp accents. They seemed dismayed that the Confederates should be so alert and ready to fight. “How the hell we supposed to bring back prisoners like the lieutenant wants?” one of them called to another.

“Shit, I don’t know,” his friend answered. “I only hope to Jesus I bring myself back in one piece.”

Here and there, parties of damnyankees were getting into the Confederate trenches. Then it became a stalking game, rushing out of traverses and into firebays, flinging grenades, and fighting vicious little battles with bayonet and entrenching tool.

Jefferson Pinkard didn’t think he was trying to get himself killed. But he was at the fore of the party that swarmed out of a traverse to beat down the last U.S. squad still holding a length of firebay. He swung an entrenching tool with savage abandon, reveling in the resistance the flesh and bones of a Yankee’s head gave to the edge of the tool, reveling also in the way the soldier in green-gray moaned and dropped his rifle and clutched at himself and toppled, all in the space of a couple of seconds.

Then the Yankees, those few who hadn’t been shot or stabbed or otherwise put out of action, were fleeing over the parapet and back toward their own lines. “Have fun in the state of Houston, boys!” Pinkard shouted, taking a couple of potshots at the retreating U.S. soldiers. He thought he hit one of them; the others kept on running.

A couple of U.S. soldiers still lay groaning and wounded in the trench. Sergeant Albert Cross examined their injuries with experience gained in a lot of war. “They ain’t gonna make it back to field hospitals still breathing,” he said. “Christ, Pinkard, looks like you took off half this poor bastard’s face with that damn shovel of yours.”

“He wasn’t there to give me a kiss, Sarge,” Jeff answered.

“Didn’t say he was,” Cross replied equably. He pointed down the length of the firebay. “Might as well put these sons of bitches out of their misery.”

Nobody moved for a few seconds. There wasn’t a Confederate soldier in the trench who didn’t hope somebody, regardless of whether friend or foe, would do him that favor if he ever lay in agony, horribly wounded. That didn’t mean many men were eager to do the job. Killing in cold blood, even for the sake of mercy, was different from killing in battle.

“I’ll take care of it,” Pinkard said at last. He loaded a new clip into his Tredegar and walked slowly down the trench line. Whenever he came across a U.S. soldier who was still breathing, he shot him in the head. One of the Yankees, whose guts spilled out onto the ground from a dreadful bayonet wound, thanked him as he pulled the trigger.

“They didn’t buy anything cheap today,” Sergeant Cross said.

“No,” Jeff answered, “but they’re in Texas and we ain’t in New Mexico. What the hell have we bought?” Cross didn’t say another word.