Breakthroughs

III

“Do you see?” Lucien Galtier asked his horse as he drove the wagon into the town of Riviere-du-Loup on the southern bank of the St. Lawrence. The Quebecois farmer gestured to the macadamized road along which the wagon traveled. “Had this been an earlier year, you would have labored through ice and mud, and you would have complained even more than you do now.”

The horse snorted. A paved road, even a paved road largely free of snow, impressed it very little. One of the reasons the road was largely free of snow was that it was an important highway for the U.S. forces who occupied that part of Quebec south of the St. Lawrence. A big, square, ugly White truck came growling up behind the wagon. The driver squeezed the bulb on his horn. Just enough shoulder-frozen hard here-had been cleared to let Lucien pull off for a moment so the truck and three more in its wake could roll past, kicking up little spatters of ice.

“Hey, Frenchy!” called one of the soldiers huddled under the green-gray canvas top on the last truck. He waved. After a couple of seconds’ hesitation, Galtier touched the brim of the thick wool cap he wore.

He flicked the reins. “Do not think you can rest here all day, you lazy creature,” he told the horse, which flicked its ears to let him know it would think whatever it pleased, and needed no advice from the likes of him.

A green-gray ambulance with red crosses on the sides and roof sped south past Galtier. The military hospital to which it was going was built on land that had been his till the Yankees appropriated it because he’d politely declined to collaborate with them. How fury had burned in him at the injustice! And now…

“And now the eldest of my daughters assists at the hospital,” he said to the horse, “and one of the American doctors, by no means a bad fellow, is most attentive to her. Life can be most peculiar, n’est-ce pas?” He patted his own leg. Dr. O’Doull had sewn that up, too, when he’d tried to chop it instead of wood. It had healed well, too, better and faster than he’d thought a wound of twenty-one stitches would.

The breeze shifted so that it came out of the north. It brought to Lucien’s ears the rumble of artillery from the other side of the broad river. The Americans, having forced a crossing in better weather the year before, had bogged down in their drive south and west toward Quebec City.

“Tabernac,” Galtier muttered under his breath; Quebecois cursing ran more to holy things than to the obscenity English-speakers used. But he’d learned English-style swearing in his stint as a conscript more than twenty years before, while the Americans here sometimes seemed to go out of their way to curse. Experimentally, he let an English swear word roll off his tongue: “Fuck.” He shook his head. It lacked flavor, like rabbit cooked without applejack.

A handful of fresh, muddy craters just outside of Riviere-du-Loup marked a bombing raid the night before by Canadian and British aeroplanes. He didn’t see that they’d done any particular damage. They did keep trying, though. Pockmarks in the snow cover showed where other, earlier, bombs had fallen. So did a couple of graveled patches in the paving of the roadway.

In town, Galtier drove the wagon to the market square near the church. He quickly sold the potatoes and chickens he’d brought from the farm, and got better prices than he’d expected.

Angelique, the prettiest barmaid at the Loup-du-Nord, who for once did not have an American soldier on one arm, or on both arms, bought a chicken. His eyes traveled her up and down as they dickered. Marie, his wife, would not have approved, but she hadn’t come with him. Because Angelique was so pretty, he might have given her the chicken for a few cents less than someone else would have paid. Marie would not have approved of that, either.

In her breathy little voice, Angelique said, “Have you heard the wonderful news?”

“How can I know until you tell me?” Lucien asked reasonably.

“Father Pascal is to be consecrated Sunday after next!” Angelique exclaimed. “Riviere-du-Loup, after so long, is to be a bishopric, an episcopal see. Is it not marvelous?”

“Yes,” Galtier said, though what he meant was, Yes, it is not marvelous. Father Pascal was plump and pink and nearly as clever as he thought he was. He had welcomed the Yankee invaders with arms as open as Angelique’s. Had he been a woman, he would no doubt have welcomed them with legs as open as Angelique’s.

And here he came now, perhaps drawn by the sight of Angelique (even if a priest, even if a collaborator, he was a man-of sorts) or perhaps by that of poultry. The latter, it proved. He did not haggle so well as his housekeeper; Lucien roundly cheated him. Angelique, bless her, stood by and said never a word.

Feeling mellow with an extra thirty cents in his pocket, Galtier said, “Do I understand you are to be congratulated, Father?”

The priest looked too modest to be quite convincing. “They honor me above my humble deserts.”

“How did it happen that you were raised to this dignity?” Lucien asked.

Before Father Pascal answered, his eyes flicked for a moment to the sidewalk close by the market square. Then, still smooth, still modest, he said, “My son, in truth I have no idea. I felt, when I heard the news, as if a thunderbolt had struck me, I was so astonished.”

But that brief glance had given him away. Along the sidewalk, his green-gray uniform neat as if it had just been issued, strode Major Jedediah Quigley, who administered Riviere-du-Loup and the surrounding area for the U.S. Army. Somehow or other, Lucien was sure, Quigley had pulled the wires behind Father Pascal’s promotion. That might even have involved moving Riviere-du-Loup and the rest of eastern Quebec south of the St. Lawrence out of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the archbishop of Quebec City, who assuredly would never have raised a collaborator to the episcopal dignity.

Major Quigley saw Lucien look toward him. The American officer waved, as if he had not been the man who confiscated the land that had been in Lucien’s family for more than two hundred years to build the military hospital on it. “I hope all goes well with you, Monsieur Galtier,” he called in fluent, Parisian-accented French that seemed almost as out of place in Riviere-du-Loup as English did.

“Assez bien,” Galtier answered grudgingly. Quigley waved again and walked on.

“You will excuse me,” Father Pascal-soon to be Bishop Pascal-said. Off he went, carrying the chicken by its feet. Angelique went off with him. Their heads were close together as they chatted. Watching her walk away was more interesting than eyeing Father Pascal’s backside, even if she too was a collaborator of sorts-a horizontal collaborator, Galtier thought, and smiled at his own wit.

He looked longingly at the Loup-du-Nord. Beer or whiskey or applejack would have helped chase away the cold. But no. The Loup-du-Nord, these days, was an American soldiers’ saloon. He might get his drink and get out without trouble. On the other hand, a tableful of drunken Yanks might decide to stomp him into the floor. “When I get home,” he told the horse, “I can have a drink.”

On his way back to the farmhouse, down the fine paved road the Americans had built, he had to pull off a couple of times to let ambulances race past. Far more than that of the big, stolid trucks, their speed made him wonder what traveling in a motorcar was like. He’d taken train rides, but this seemed as if it would be different-as if he would be riding in a wagon somehow equipped with wings.

When he got to the farm, he drove the emphatically unwinged wagon into the barn. He unharnessed the horse, brushed it down, and fed it before going into the farmhouse. He did not begrudge the delay; it gave him the chance to think of more uncharitable things to say about Father Pascal’s elevation.

And then, when he went inside, he found he could not say most of them. Nicole had brought Dr. Leonard O’Doull home for supper. O’Doull, a skinny, sandy-haired man with eyes as green as a cat’s, was a good fellow, but he was also, to some degree, an outsider.

“Your leg, it goes well?” he asked Galtier after they shook hands. He spoke Parisian French like Major Quigley; unlike the major, he tried to adapt his tongue to that of the folk among whom he found himself.

“It goes very well, thank you.” Lucien walked around to show how well he could move. “I have not even a limp, not unless I am on it for the whole day. When I went into Riviere-du-Loup today, I did not take the stick you gave me, and the leg held me as if it had never been hurt. I am in your debt.”

“Not for that,” O’Doull said. “It is I who am in your debt for your friendship to me when, after all, my country occupies yours.”

“You speak straight,” said Galtier’s elder son, Charles. “That is good.”

“Of course he does,” Nicole said indignantly. Lucien and Marie exchanged an amused look. Nicole defended Dr. O’Doull because of who he was, not because of what he said.

“Dr. O’Doull, you’re so wonderful.” Georges, Lucien’s younger son, spoke first in worshipful tones and then wickedly imitated his sister: “Of course he is.” He let out a sigh full of longing and molasses.

He’d been an imp since he was a toddler. That was the only reason Lucien could find for Nicole’s letting him live. Even in the ruddy light of the kerosene lamps, O’Doull’s flush was easy to see.

“I think supper is about ready,” Marie said, which distracted everyone better than anything else might have done. Like Galtier himself, his wife was small and dark and a good deal more clever than she often let on.

Supper was a chicken stew enlivened by dried apples. Over it, Lucien told the story of Father Pascal’s promotion. He told it dispassionately, out of good feeling for the American who shared the table with him. His family showed less restraint. “That man knows nothing of shame!” exclaimed Denise, who was only twelve and wore her feelings on her sleeve.

“He comes to the hospital sometimes, to visit the soldiers who are Catholic,” Leonard O’Doull said. “Don’t much care for him. If he were an American priest in Vermont, say, and the British occupied it, he’d suck up to them the same way he sucks up to Americans here. Have I reason, or not?”

“Oui, vous avez raison,” Galtier said emphatically. “Which side he is on, that matters nothing to Father Pascal. Whether he is on top, that matters a great deal.”

O’Doull hefted his glass of applejack. Applejack, especially this homemade stuff Galtier had got from a neighbor, was dangerously deceptive-sweet and mild and with a kick like a mule’s. “And you, Monsieur Galtier, what of you?” the young doctor asked, as he might not have were he more sober.

Galtier thought about that for a while; he was a few knocks into the applejack himself. “My country has been made not my country,” he said, one word at a time. “Should I be happy at that?”

Marie gave him a warning glance. Too late: the words were said. Dr. O’Doull considered them. At last, he replied, “If you think you were free as a chunk of the British Empire, no. If you do not think so, you may wish to see what you become after the war. What do you think, if it does not bother you that I ask?”

“Why should it bother me?” Galtier said lightly. “I need not answer.” And the reason he did not answer, not that he would ever have admitted it, was that he was no longer sure what to think.

Nellie Semphroch went outside the coffeehouse in the bitter cold of early morning and flipped the sign on the boards that covered the space where her plate-glass window had been from CLOSED to OPEN. She had connections among the Confederates who occupied Washington, D.C., who could have got her more glass, but saw no point in using them. The next U.S. bombing raid, or the one after that, would only shatter the new window, as three-or was it four? — windows had been shattered already.

“Mornin’, Ma,” Edna Semphroch said when Nellie went back inside. The two women-one in her early twenties, the other in her early forties-looked very much alike, with long, oval faces and high foreheads that seemed higher because they both wore their hair pulled back. Edna painted her face; Nellie didn’t. With a sneer on her red lips, Edna added, “Good morning, Little Nell.”

Although Nellie had been cold, her face heated and congealed like an egg left too long on a frying pan. “Don’t you ever call me that again,” she said in a low, furious voice. “Ever, do you hear me?”

Edna’s sneer got wider. “I hear you-” She visibly debated throwing kerosene on the fire, but decided against it. “I hear you.”

With grim determination, Nellie took what was left of the previous day’s bread off the icebox and started slicing it for the toast and sandwiches she’d be serving. Every stroke of the serrated bread knife made her wish she were drawing it across Bill Reach’s throat.

Reach had been an annoyance from her past for a couple of years. A former reporter, he had, in Nellie’s much younger days, been in the habit of putting a price down on a nightstand in a cheap hotel and partaking of her services. She’d escaped that life and attained modest respectability. Edna had never known she’d been in it-till Reach, hideously drunk, lost a quarter of a century in what passed for his mind and tried to buy her in the coffeehouse when it was packed with Confederate officers.

Edna started whistling, not too loud. Nellie ground her teeth and sliced even more viciously than before. The tune Edna was whistling had come up from the Confederate States the year before. It was called “I’ll Do as I Please.”

Edna had largely done as she pleased before that night, but Nellie had been able to enforce some respect for the proprieties on her. Now-now Edna lived as fast as she chose, and laughed when Nellie protested. Nellie couldn’t protest much. Edna, at least, had a fiance. What had Nellie had? Customers.

“Ain’t seen that Reach character since that one night,” Edna remarked. “Wonder what the devil happened to him?”

“I hope he’s dead,” Nellie said grimly. “If he’s not dead, he ought to be. If he ever shows his face in here again, he will be, too, fast as I can kill him.”

“He didn’t do anything but tell the truth,” Edna said. She was still very young, too young, perhaps, to realize how deadly dangerous incautious doses of truth could be.

The door opened. The bell above it jangled. Resplendent in butternut, in strode Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid. The big, handsome Confederate officer planted a kiss on Edna’s smiling mouth. His hands tightened greedily on her. “Mornin’, darling,” he said when they broke apart. Her lipstick branded him like a wound. He turned to Nellie. “Mornin’, ma’am.” He was polite. Very few Confederate officers were anything but. It did little to make her like him better.

“Good morning,” she said, her own tone grudging. Edna looked daggers at her. Kincaid was not a man to notice subtleties. His smile reminded Nellie of a happy, stupid dog’s. She sighed. Against such an amiable idiot, what hope had she? Sighing, she asked, “What can I get you today?”

“Couple of scrambled-egg sandwiches with Tabasco on ’em and a big cup of coffee,” he answered.

Nellie made the eggs and toasted the bread while Kincaid and Edna sat at a table and gazed into each other’s eyes. Nellie was convinced that, had Edna gazed into one of his ears, she could have gazed out the other, there being nothing but empty space between the two. But she did not want him for his brains. Nellie knew that. She wanted him for the bulge he’d had in his pants when they’d separated after their embrace.

Nicholas Kincaid’s eyes widened when he took his first bite-Nellie had plied the Tabasco bottle with vigor. He gulped scalding coffee. Nellie smiled. But then, enthusiastically, he wheezed, “Good!” The smile vanished.

Edna said, “Ma, he wants us to tie the knot on the twenty-fifth of March. It’s the first Sunday of spring. Ain’t that romantic?”

“Are the Confederates still going to be in Washington on the twenty-fifth of March?” Nellie asked. “Fighting sounds closer every day.”

“You’d best believe we’ll still be here, ma’am.” Kincaid sounded positive. “Yankees won’t have any luck, not even a little, knockin’ us out again. Just to help make sure they don’t, we’re gettin’ more troops, whites and niggers both. This here is our town, and we aim to keep it.”

The bell above the door rang again. Kincaid was usually the first customer, but then, he had an ulterior motive. He rarely stayed alone with Edna and Nellie for long. In came a couple of field-grade Confederate officers. As they ordered breakfast, they chatted about the fighting off to the west, in northern Virginia. Edna had taken everything Kincaid said as gospel (which was a devil of a thing for a woman bent on marriage to do), but Nellie added together what she had heard from many different people. Her picture of the way the war was going didn’t match his optimistic words.

After the morning rush of soldiers and collaborators and their sleek, expensive women ebbed, Nellie said, “I’m going across the street to say hello to Mr. Jacobs.”

“Have fun, Ma,” Edna answered.

In another tone of voice, the remark would have been harmless. Nellie felt her face heat. “He’s a gentleman, Edna. I know it’s a word you may not understand, but it’s so. We don’t do what you and that overgrown side of beef most assuredly do.”

“That makes you the fools, not Nick and me,” Edna shot back.

Nellie went outside without answering. It was still chilly, but not savagely cold. As it had at dawn, as it did around the clock, artillery rumbled to the north. Every so often now, Nellie could hear individual shells screaming in on Confederate fortifications defending the Rebels’ grip on the capital of the United States.

The bell above Hal Jacobs’ door jingled instead of jangling. The cobbler looked up from the Confederate officer’s riding boot he was resoling. “Widow Semphroch-Nellie,” he said, and smiled a smile that made him look young in spite of gray mustache and thinning gray hair. “How good to see you.”

“And you, Hal,” she answered, closing the door behind her to keep the heat inside. She looked around. Almost all the shoes in Jacobs’ shop these days belonged to Confederate soldiers. Some awaited his attention, some their owners’ return. Nellie sighed and said, “The Rebs have been here a long time.”

“That they have,” Jacobs agreed. “That they have.” He sighed, too.

Casually, she went on, “They’re going to try to hold on here, too. They’re bringing in reinforcements-whites and niggers both, matter of fact.”

“Is that so?” the shoemaker said. “How interesting.” Nellie always passed him the gossip she picked up in the coffeehouse in that easygoing, conversational way. He always responded in kind, and then sent the information on so the United States could get some use from it.

“I thought so,” she answered now. After a moment, she went on, “My daughter and that Rebel lieutenant are planning to get married here, a few days after the start of spring.”

For one of the rare times since she’d begun letting Hal Jacobs know what she heard, she was looking for information from him. He understood that, and did not look very happy about it. At last, grudgingly, he said, “I do hope their plans won’t have to be changed, as could happen.”

He wasn’t going to say anything more. She could see it in his eyes. He’d told her something, anyhow. She nodded brusque thanks. Then, even more brusquely, she asked, “What do you hear from Bill Reach?”

Jacobs knew Bill Reach. Along with being a humiliating piece of Nellie’s past, along with drinking like a fish, he had also been the cobbler’s superior among the U.S. spies in Washington. Jacobs said, “Since that unfortunate evening, Widow Semphroch, I have not heard from him at all. Perhaps the Confederates have again jailed him as a thief.”

“Perhaps he’s frozen to death in a gutter.” Nellie’s voice was full of fierce hope.

“I never knew what he did to offend you so greatly,” Jacobs said.

“Never mind, but he did.” Nellie thought Jacobs was lying about his ignorance. If he wasn’t, she didn’t intend to enlighten him.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m sorry because, since you have been angry at him, you have not brought so many pieces of useful information to me-and you must hear a great deal, because your coffeehouse is so popular with the Confederates and those who deal with them.”

Jacobs and his friends-about whose identities Nellie had carefully not inquired-had helped keep her coffeehouse in coffee and food, when both were in short supply in occupied Washington. She probably would have gone out of business without their help. “I am sorry, too,” she said. “I do pay my debts, or try to. But that man…I want to pay him back-oh, yes, very much.”

The cobbler held up a hand. “I had not finished. I am also sorry because, with you angry at Bill Reach, I don’t get to see you as often as I would like. I’ve missed you, you know.”

Nellie’s mouth fell open. She wasn’t used to having men say such things to her. Edna’s father had been decent enough to marry her when she found herself in a family way. It was one of the few decent things he’d ever done. After he died, she’d been content-more than content-to live as a widow. Now-

“How you do go on, Hal,” she said, trying to make light of it.

He didn’t want to make light of it. “I meant what I said,” he told her, and she could hear the truth in his voice. “You are a fine woman-a finer woman, I think, than even you know. Maybe you have been a widow too long to remember these things, but you must believe me here, for I know what I am talking about.”

“Well, good day, Mr. Jacobs,” Nellie said. “I really have to get back to the coffeehouse now.” She fled from the shoemaker’s shop as if a hundred Confederate spycatchers were on her trail. Her heart thudded. A man who said he missed her, a man who thought her a fine woman, was to her a more frightening apparition than all the Confederate spycatchers in the world.

Commander Roger Kimball let out a long, lugubrious sigh as the CSS Bonefish sailed away from Habana. Standing atop the submarine’s conning tower, he peered back toward the red tile roofs and brightly painted plaster walls of the capital of the Confederate state of Cuba.

“Damn,” he said with all due respect. “That sure as hell is one fine town for a shore leave, isn’t it?”

“Yes, sir,” agreed Senior Lieutenant Tom Brearley, his executive officer. Both men were recently promoted, after their successful raid on New York harbor. The fresh gold stripes on the sleeves of their dark gray uniform coats were easy to tell apart from the duller ones they’d worn for a while. Brearley went on, “I thought I was a whiskey-drinking man, but I expect I could get used to rum.” He grinned. “I expect I did get used to rum.”

“Hot and cold running whores, too,” Kimball said with a reminiscent leer. “Black ones, brown ones, white ones-whatever you happen to feel like. Cheap, too. Cuba’s a damn sight cheaper than Charleston, and you can have a better time, too-although I had me some pretty fair times in Charleston, now that I think about it.”

Anne Colleton naked on a bed had been worth a dozen Habana whores. His blood heated at the memory. She’d been a tigress between the sheets-and she’d wanted him for himself, not for the money he laid down. And she was a rich lady, an influential lady. To a man who’d gone from a backwoods Arkansas farm to the Confederate Naval Academy at Mobile, a connection like that was worth its weight in rubies. Kimball didn’t intend to go back to that miserable farm when his Navy days were over. The only direction he intended to head was up.

“Weather’s a lot better here than up in the North Atlantic,” Brearley said. “Sea’s a lot calmer, too. I’m just as glad they sent us down here.”

“Far as the Bonefish goes, so am I,” Kimball agreed. “Hell of a lot easier, hell of a lot more fun where the sea doesn’t try to throw your boat away or tear it in half whenever you’re on the surface. But I don’t care for what the move south says about the way the war is going.”

Brearley shrugged. “If England doesn’t get the bread and meat she needs from Argentina, she’s out of the war. If she’s out of the war, the Kaiser runs roughshod in Europe and the damnyankees do the same thing in America. If the United States are starting to try and take a bite out of the route from Pernambuco to Dakar, we’ve got to stop ’em.”

Kimball clicked his tongue between his teeth. His exec was a good kid, but you needed to give him the C and the A if he was going to spell CAT. “Yeah, Tom, we’ve got to stop ’em. But if things were going better farther north, they wouldn’t be able to turn ships loose to go after this shipping route.”

“Oh, I see what you’re saying, sir,” Brearley answered. No doubt he did, too; he wasn’t stupid, only a little slow. “We’ve got them beat hollow when it comes to logistics.”

“Good thing, too,” Kimball said. “Otherwise, this war would be within shouting distance of over. But they’ll need coal and fuel oil if they’re going to operate for long in those waters from out of Boston or New York or Philadelphia. We want the supply ships as much as we want the warships.”

He took his binoculars out of their leather case and scanned the horizon for plumes of smoke. He knew that was foolish. If he spotted enemy ships less than an hour out of Habana, the war wouldn’t just be within shouting distance of the end. It would be history.

“Anything, sir?” Brearley asked. He had to be jumpy, too, if he thought there might be something so close to the Cuban coast.

“Damn all,” Kimball told him. He put the binoculars back in the case. “I’m going below.”

Tropical sun, calm water, and a mild breeze smelling of the salt sea made the top of the conning tower a pleasant, even a delightful, place to stand and pass the time. Going down into the long steel tube of the Bonefish was like descending into another world, perhaps one found in the infernal regions.

Instead of the illimitable confines of the ocean, Roger Kimball found himself in confines as severely limitable as any in the world, confines where space for machinery was a sine qua non and space for men a distinct afterthought. He banged his head on a pipe fitting he hit about every other day, and he was not an especially tall man.

Dim orange-tinted electric lamps replaced bright sun. Slowly, slowly, Kimball’s eyes adjusted. He knew he would squint like a blind thing when he went topside again.

Hardest of all, though, was the transition from fresh sea air to the horrible stuff inside the Bonefish. Even with the hatches open, even with a refit in Habana, she stank: an unforgettable mixture of bilgewater and diesel fuel and food and sweat and the reek of the heads. Kimball knew what she would be like when she came back from her cruise: like this, only magnified a hundredfold. A landlubber boarding a submersible just into port was like as not to add vomit to the reek. Kimball didn’t like the stink, but held it in wry affection. It was the smell of home.

Ben Coulter had the helm. “Steady on 075, sir,” the veteran petty officer said in response to Kimball’s unspoken question. “Listen to her. Doesn’t she sound good? Those greaser mechanics did a hell of a job.”

Kimball cocked his head to one side. The engine did sound unusually smooth. “Greasers are loyal,” he said. “It’s the goddamn niggers you got to watch out for.”

“Not in Cuba,” Coulter said. “Niggers didn’t hardly rise up at all in Cuba, what I hear tell. Never was so many Reds in Cuba like there is back home.” The unlit cigar he clenched between his teeth twitched as he talked.

“Sad state of affairs when the greasers keep their niggers quiet and white men can’t do it,” Kimball said. “Sad state of affairs when they think they’ve got to give niggers guns or the whole country goes under, too. Anybody wants to know, President Semmes is out of his goddamn mind.”

Ben Coulter nodded. So did most of the other crewmen within earshot. And then Kimball remembered that Anne Colleton had favored creating Negro military units, and also favored making Negroes Confederate citizens after their service. He thought as much of her brains as he did of her body, which said a great deal. If, after what she’d gone through at the hands of the Reds, she still thought the CSA needed Negro troops…She’s still wrong, dammit, Kimball thought.

The Bonefish moved steadily east toward the rectangle on the chart through which the submersible was supposed to sweep till her patrol was done. Kimball drilled the crew hard, regaining whatever edge they’d lost in the fleshpots of Habana. When the boat slid below the surface of the Atlantic in less than thirty seconds, he pronounced himself satisfied-privately, to Tom Brearley. As far as the crew was concerned, he was never satisfied.

Navigating aboard a submersible wasn’t easy, but repeated sights and hard work with the tables-much of it by Brearley, who had a fine head for mathematics-brought the Bonefish into the box between fifteen and seventeen degrees north latitude, thirty and thirty-three degrees west longitude, her assigned area for this patrol. Kimball chafed at working a set zone instead of hunting freely. Back and forth, back and forth the Bonefish prowled, like a shark in a tank.

“This isn’t what war is supposed to be about,” Kimball grumbled to his executive officer. “This is hide-and-seek, nothing else but.”

“Orders,” Brearley said placidly. As far as he was concerned, that made everything right. He had more imagination than a fence post, but not a whole lot. If he ever got his own boat, Kimball was sure he would command it competently. He was also sure his exec would never do anything spectacular.

Kimball was frustrated not least because he doubted whether any Yankee ships would come into his search zone. A patrol with a log book essentially empty of action was not what he had in mind.

He was in his bunk-which, however tiny and cramped, was the only one the Bonefish boasted, everyone else sleeping in hammocks or in odd places amongst the gear and machinery in the pressure hull-when the lookout on the conning tower spotted a plume of smoke to westward. Roused by the shouts, he put on his shoes and cap (the only items he’d taken off) and hurried up for a look of his own.

His first order was to bring the Bonefish up to fifteen knots so he could approach and get a better idea of what he was hunting. He could do that with little or no risk, because the submersible’s diesels produced less exhaust than the coal-burner up ahead. He shouted a course change down to the helmsman, one that would put the Bonefish in front of whatever ship had presumed to steam south through the territory he patrolled. Submerged, the boat was slow. He needed to be in front to close for an attack.

He peered through the binoculars, willing himself to get a clear look at the vessel making that smoke. If it was a warship, it was dawdling through the water; it couldn’t be making more than eight or nine knots. As he drew near, he made out the dumpy superstructure of a freighter.

Tom Brearley came up alongside him. When he told the exec what he’d found, Brearley asked, “Shall we sink her with the gun, sir?”

Kimball was tempted. The Bonefish carried far more three-inch shells than torpedoes. Gunfire was the cheap, easy way to sink enemy shipping. After a moment, though, he shook his head. “No, we’ll feed her a couple of fish. She’s liable to be one of those gunboat freighters the Yankees fit out to slug it out with submarines on the surface. Why take a chance?”

He shouted the order to dive to periscope depth. Brearley scrambled down the hatch. Kimball was right behind him. The captain of the Bonefish dogged it shut. If he’d waited more than a few seconds longer, he would have let the sea in with him.

He raised the periscope and peered through it. One of the prisms had condensation on it; the image was foggy. “Give me five knots,” he said, and crawled closer on the electric engines that powered the submarine underwater. The freighter had no idea he was there, or that any submersibles might be nearby. It didn’t change speed. It didn’t zigzag. It went on its way, so resolutely normal it made Kimball suspicious as hell.

As he got inside a mile, he and Brearley and Coulter were all working out the torpedo solution: the Bonefish’s course, the freighter’s course, the sub’s speed, the freighter’s, the torpedo’s, and the distance at which he’d shoot all went into calculating the angle at which to shoot. “A couple of degrees to port,” he murmured at about 1,200 yards, and then, murmuring no more, “Fire one! Fire two!”

Compressed air hurled the fish out of the forward torpedo tubes. They took about half a minute to reach the freighter. It tried to turn away from them, but far too late. One struck near the bow, the other near the stern. The rumble of the explosions filled the Bonefish.

The crew cheered. Kimball watched the freighter capsize and sink like a stone. The sailors aboard it had no time to launch boats. A couple of heads bobbed in water unnaturally calm. “She’s leaking a hell of a lot of oil there,” Kimball said. “Likely she was carrying it for the U.S. goddamn Navy. Well, they’ll go hungrier now, and have to go home sooner.”

“Easiest one we’ve had in a while,” Brearley said. “Just like practice.”

“Tom, they won’t make us throw it back on account of it was easy,” Kimball answered. After a moment, he went on with a grim certainty: “Besides, odds are the next one won’t be. Nothing in this goddamn war stays simple long.”

Captain Jonathan Moss’ unit of fighting scouts was doing what it had done through most of the late fall and winter outside the hamlet of Arthur, Ontario: not much. The weather was too bad for flying about six days out of seven, and marginal the seventh. He’d run up an astonishing bar tab at the officers’ club.

Beside him at the table there, First Lieutenant Percy Stone looked down into his whiskey-and-soda. “Nothing in this goddamn war stays simple long. The aeroplanes I trained on are as obsolete as last year’s newspaper, and it wasn’t that long ago.”

Moss had a whiskey-and-soda, too, only the soda being omitted from the recipe. “Next time you want to keep a sense that things do go on steadily instead of by jerks, try not to get shot so you have to spend the better part of a year on the sidelines.”

“That’s good advice. I’ll make a note of it.” Stone really did make as if to write it down.

“You’re a good fellow, Percy,” Moss said, laughing. Stone, a photographer in civilian life, had been his observer when he was piloting a reconnaissance aeroplane in 1915. They’d been put together as much because of the way their names matched as for any other reason, but they’d always got on famously-till Stone stopped a machine-gun bullet. For a long time after that, Moss had thought he was dead, but he’d proved to be very much alive, and wearing a pilot’s two-winged badge instead of the one wing that marked the observer.

He raised his glass on high. “To hell with the Sopwith Pup!” he declared now.

Everyone who heard him drank with him. Only a handful of the new British machines had got to this side of the Atlantic, but they made every American who met them wish that handful were none at all.

Having lost friends who flew outmoded Martin one-deckers against Pups that could outclimb, outdive, outrun, and outmaneuver them, Moss poured down his own drink. He’d flown a Martin one-decker himself, from the day he’d gone from observation aeroplanes to fighting scouts until he came here to train on the new machines that were supposed to be able to contend on even terms with the best the limeys and Canucks had to offer. He got up, walked rather unsteadily to the bar, and bought himself another drink. With the glass of whiskey in his hand, he lifted it and said, “Here’s to the new biplanes that’ll tie tin cans to the Pups’ tails.”

That toast drew both cheers and laughs. He went back to the table. When he sat down, Percy Stone’s long-jawed, handsome face was thoughtful, even worried. In a low voice, Stone asked, “Do you think they’ll really be able to do the job? They’re a hell of a lot peppier than anything I ever flew before, but I’ve been out of circulation for quite a while.”

He patted his side. What with the entry and exit wounds of the bullet that had got him and the incisions the surgeons made to patch him up, he owned as spectacular a collection of scars as anyone could want-a more spectacular collection of scars than anyone in his right mind would want.

“We ought to have a good fighting chance,” Moss answered with a ponderous deliberation fueled by both thought and alcohol. “This new two-decker can climb with anything ever made, and it’s maneuverable as all get-out. I don’t think it’s quite as fast a bus on the straightaway as the Pups are, but damn close. How fast you can turn counts for more in a dogfight a lot of times, anyhow.”

“That’s what everybody’s saying, sure enough.” Stone nodded. “Now the next interesting question is, will we get a chance to fly our birds before they’re obsolete, too, and the War Department decides to train us up on the next new model, whatever that turns out to be?”

“Take that one up with the chaplain, or maybe take it straight to God. Weather’s not my department,” Moss said. Then he slowly started thinking again. “Wouldn’t be surprised if these two-deckers are damn near obsolete in Europe. That’s where the real air action is. Our new buses are just copies of the ones Albatros makes for the Germans.”

That had been true through most of the war. Maybe because they were in a tougher fight in the air, German manufacturers kept cranking out new and improved models, of which the Albatros biplane was but one. Some of the plans made the journey by submersible to the USA (some got sunk trying to make the journey, too, which was why the new fighting scout was slower getting out of the blocks than it should have been), just as the British did their best to keep the Canadians in aeroplanes and fresh plans.

A lot of fliers wore their pocket watches on wrist straps when in the air; bulky flying clothes made a watch impossible to check otherwise. Like some others Moss knew, Percy Stone had taken to wearing his on his wrist all the time. Looking at it now, he yawned and said, “I think I’m going to hit the hay. I’ll pretend tomorrow will be a bully day for flying, even though I know damn well it’ll snow and it’ll be colder than a witch’s tit.”

“Duty,” Moss said approvingly. “Responsibility. Remembrance.” He looked down into his own glass. “And whiskey. Don’t forget whiskey.” He made sure the glass had no whiskey left in it to forget, then rose and accompanied Stone to the tent they shared with the other two men in the flight, Pete Bradley and Hans Oppenheim.

An iron stove glowed red-hot in the middle of the tent. That meant the four cots, all piled high with thick, green-gray wool blankets, were cold to sleep in, but didn’t quite feel as if the North Pole had moved down to a couple of miles north of the aerodrome. This was Moss’ third winter in Ontario. So far as he knew, nobody in the world could strip down to his drawers and slide under the covers faster than he could.

Reveille came at half-past five, which was, in his opinion, a couple of hours too early. His head pounded. He dry-swallowed a couple of aspirins-American imitations of aspirins, actually. They worked well enough. And, when he poked his head out of the tent, he blinked and whistled in surprise.

It was cold. The breath he exhaled whistling made a little frosty cloud in front of his face. But it was clear. In the east, the sky glowed salmon. Before too long, the sun would rise. In December, it hardly showed its face. Now that February was here, it began to remember it did have some business up in Canada after all.

He stuck his head back inside. “I think we may be able to get some flying in after all.”

“That would be good,” Oppenheim said seriously. He seldom was anything but serious. “When they sent us up from London after they trained us on these new two-deckers, the idea was that we should fly them. We are, after all, an operational squadron.” His parents had come from Germany. He didn’t have an accent, but the language he’d spoken around the house as a kid influenced the way he put his sentences together.

The fliers went to the mess tent and shoveled down bacon and eggs and pancakes and bad coffee. The squadron commander, Major Julius Cherney, nodded to them. “Can we go up along the line, sir, and see if the limeys send anyone out against us?” Moss asked.

“Well, why the hell not?” Cherney said. “Meteorology says everything looks good for the next few hours.” He grunted. “Yeah-I know-that and five cents buys you a beer.” He clapped Moss on the back. “Good hunting.”

Men with shovels and horses and mules with scoops made the airstrips usable. Bigger aerodromes had tractors with blades mounted in front of them to clear snow. Arthur boasted no such amenities.

Moss reveled in the way his aeroplane leaped from the ground. The streamlined fighting scout from the Wright works in Ohio-a copy of the Albatros D.II-climbed at close to a thousand feet a minute, a hell of a lot faster than his old Martin could have managed.

And all the sky in front of him was empty. He led the flight now, with Percy Stone behind him on the right and Oppenheim and Bradley on the left. They flew east till they came to the trench line that scarred Ontario between Lake Ontario and Lake Huron. West of the trenches, the snow could not hide the devastation of the land the Canadians and their British allies had fought so bitterly to hold. East of them-or, at least, east of artillery range from them-it was simply snowy country in winter. The dazzle of sun off endless miles of white made Moss blink back tears behind his goggles.

Here and there, down in the Canucks’ trenches, muzzle flashes showed that soldiers were taking potshots at him and his flightmates. He laughed, and the chilly slipstream blew his mirth away. Rifle and machine-gun fire reached up to about two thousand feet. He was high above that danger.

Then Canadian antiaircraft guns opened up. Black puffs of smoke appeared in the sky, as if by magic. When one burst a couple of hundred yards below Moss’ fighting scout, the aeroplane bucked like a restive horse. He began changing his speed and course and altitude more or less at random, so the gunners could not calculate just where to place their shells. The sky, thank heaven, was a big, wide place. He respected antiaircraft fire without fearing it.

He led his flight south and east along the line, in the direction of Toronto, daring enemy aeroplanes to come up and fight. Every so often, he would glance at his fuel gauge and his watch. Like most other fighting scouts, the new Wright machines could stay in the air for about an hour and a half. If he and his comrades found no challengers, they would have to go home.

When more antiaircraft shells burst in the sky south of Moss, they drew his eye toward the aeroplane at which they were aimed: one of the Avro two-seat biplanes the Canadians had been using for reconnaissance work since the beginning of the war.

Moss sped toward the Avro, followed close by his flightmates. The Canuck pilot hadn’t changed course despite the Archie bursting around him; he was letting his observer take the photos he needed. Moss knew about that from his work with Stone. Having four U.S. fighting scouts on this tail was a different business for the Avro driver. He corkscrewed away from the Wrights in a spinning dive.

Sometimes speed did matter. Moss and his comrades had better than twenty miles an hour on the Avro. They closed quickly. The observer started shooting at them. They shot back from four directions at once. Four streams of tracers converged on the desperately dodging Avro.

Then it dodged no more, but plunged toward the ground. One of those streams of machine-gun bullets must have found the pilot and left him dead or unconscious. The observer kept firing till the American fighting scouts pulled away from their stricken foe. A moment later, the Avro slammed into the frozen ground and burst into flame.

We only get to claim a quarter of an aeroplane apiece, Moss thought: no way to tell whose bullet nailed the Canuck. He didn’t care. He needed a moment to get his bearings after the dizzying action. When he knew which way was which, he waggled his wings and pointed northwest, back toward the aerodrome. The flight headed for him. Moss looked back at the burning wreck of the Avro. We’ve earned our pay today, he thought.

Confederate soldiers tramped glumly south through the mud that clogged the roads of the state of Sequoyah. The Red River, which marked the boundary between the former Indian Territory and Texas, was only a couple of miles away.

Private First Class Reginald Bartlett pointed. “What’s the name of that little town there?” he asked. He was a big, fair fellow with a comic turn of phrase that let him get away with saying outrageous things that would have got other men into trouble or into fights.

“That there’s Ryan,” Sergeant Pete Hairston answered. The veteran’s harsh Georgia drawl was far removed from Bartlett’s soft, almost English Richmond accent.

Reggie grinned. “Well, I want to tell you something, Sarge,” he said, making his voice as deep and authoritative as he could. “We’ve got to hold this town. The whole Confederacy is depending on us to hold this town.”

Hairston let out a strangled snort of laughter. “You go to hell, Bartlett, you goddamn smartmouth son of a bitch.”

“Sarge, why you cussin’ out Reggie?” Private Napoleon Dibble asked. “What did he say that was so bad?”

A moment later, First Lieutenant Jerome Nicoll, the company commander, spoke up in deep, authoritative tones of his own: “I want to tell you something, boys-we’ve got to hold Ryan. The whole Confederacy is depending on us to hold Ryan.”

“You son of a bitch,” Hairston said admiringly, and made as if to throw a punch at Bartlett.

“What did he say, Sarge?” Nap Dibble repeated, his eyes wide and puzzled. “He said the same thing the lieutenant said, so why are you getting steamed at him?”

Hairston and Bartlett shared a moment of silent amusement. Dibble was a pretty good fellow, brave and good-natured, but not a fireball when it came to brains. “Don’t worry about it, Nap-everything’s fine,” Bartlett said. He turned back to Hairston. “We’ve got to hang on to any chunk of Sequoyah we can, you know. The Germans still don’t have all of Belgium.”

A moment later, Lieutenant Nicoll delivered the same sentiment in almost identical words. “See?” Dibble exclaimed. “Reggie said just what the lieutenant said, so how come you’re givin’ him a hard time about it?”

“The lieutenant said the same damn thing in front of Duncan, too, an’ we got run out of Duncan,” Hairston said. “He said the same damn thing in front of Waurika, and we got run out of there. Just on account of we got to do somethin’ don’t have to mean we can do it.”

As if to underscore that point, a shell screamed down and burst a few hundred yards off to one side of the road. It threw up a fountain of dirt. A few of the Kiowas and Comanches who’d attached themselves to the C.S. army in its grinding retreat through southern Sequoyah jumped and exclaimed. Most of them took no more notice of the explosion than did the white soldiers.

“I hear some of these Indian tribes have their own little armies in the field, fighting alongside ours,” Reggie said.

Pete Hairston nodded. “That’s a fact. But those are the Five Civilized Tribes, and they pretty much run their own affairs any which way. They did, anyhow, till the damnyankees landed on ’em. God knows what’s happening to the poor miserable red-skinned bastards now.”

“These Indians here seem civilized enough,” Bartlett said.

Lieutenant Nicoll overheard that (fortunately, he’d missed Reggie’s impersonation of him). “It’s a matter of law, Bartlett. The Creeks, the Choctaws, the Cherokees, and whatnot have legal control over their own internal affairs. The redskins hereabouts don’t.”

Ryan, when they trudged into it, might have once boasted a thousand people. Then again, it might not have. It certainly didn’t have a thousand civilians in it now: most of them had fled across the Red River into Texas. Ryan lay on the edge of the Red River bottomland, with forests of mesquite and tamaracks and swamps with endless little streams winding through them taking the place of the prairie over which Bartlett had been marching for so long.

At Lieutenant Nicoll’s shouted order, his company joined the rest of the Confederate soldiers retreating from Waurika in entrenching in front of Ryan. Flinging dirt out behind him, Reggie said, “Wasn’t like this on the Roanoke front. There, if you went forward or back a quarter of a mile, that was something to write home about. When we pulled out of Waurika, we had to pull back maybe ten miles.”

“Yeah, well, this here’s the next town south of Waurika, too. Ain’t nothing to speak of between there and here,” Hairston said. “The Yankees run us out of the one place, what the hell’s the point in stoppin’ till you got somewheres else worth holding on to?”

“Mm, maybe you’ve got something there,” Bartlett admitted. “Lot of built-up land in the Roanoke valley, and what isn’t built up is good farm country. Here, there’s a lot of land just lying empty, not doing anything in particular. Seems kind of funny, when you’re used to the way things are on the other side of the Mississippi.”

“Yeah,” Hairston agreed. A couple of three-inch field guns came by, pulled through the mud by laboring horses. “And that’s our artillery. That’s all the artillery we got, for miles and miles. Ain’t like that on the Roanoke front, is it?”

“Lord, no,” Reggie answered. “There, the Yankees and us’d line ’em up hub to hub and whale away at each other till it didn’t seem like there was a live man anywhere the guns could reach.”

He wished there were barbed wire to string in front of the entrenchments he and his comrades were digging. Confederate forces had been able to use some farther north in Sequoyah, but had had to abandon it when the Yankees forced them out of their positions. Nothing new had come up from Texas. From what Reggie’d heard, the defenders of Texas had their problems, too.

He was still digging when the U.S. field guns opened up on his position. He had to throw himself down in the mud a couple of times because of near misses. After each one, he got up, brushed himself off, and went back to work.

Joe Mopope, one of the Kiowas who’d been fighting alongside the Confederates since Waurika, asked, “How can you do that? I can fight with a rifle”-he carried a Tredegar now, not the squirrel gun he’d started with-“but it’s different when the big guns start shooting. They are too far away for me to shoot back at them, so they make me afraid.”

Admitting fear took a kind of nerve of its own. Bartlett studied Mopope’s long, straight-nosed, high-cheekboned face. “All what you’re used to, Joe,” he said at last, more careful of the Indian’s pride than he’d thought he might be. “I’ve been under worse shellfire than this since 1914. I know what it can do and what it can’t. First few times, it damn near scared the piss out of me.”

“Ah.” Mopope was usually a pretty serious fellow. Now he tried out a smile, as if to see whether it would fit his face. “This is good to know. A warrior can learn this kind of fighting, then, the same as any other kind.”

“Yeah,” Reggie said. Joe Mopope’s father might have been a warrior of the traditional Indian sort, sneaking across the U.S. border on raids up into Kansas. That sort of thing had gone on for years after the Second Mexican War, finally petering out not long before the turn of the century.

Bartlett shrugged. He came from a family of warriors, too. Both his grandfathers had served in the War of Secession. His father hadn’t fought in the Second Mexican War, but Uncle Jasper sure as hell had-and wouldn’t shut up about it, either, not to this day.

From in back of the trenches, the Confederates’ field guns opened up. They fired faster than their Yankee counterparts. Joe Mopope’s smile got wider. “Ah, we give it back to them. That is good. Hurting them is better than sitting here and letting them hurt us.”

“Yes, except for one thing.” Reggie set down his entrenching tool and unslung his rifle. “If we’re opening up on the damnyankees, that means they’re close enough for the gunners to spot ’em. And if they’re close enough for the gunners to spot ’em, we’re going to have company before long.”

He looked north. Sure enough, here came the men in green-gray. They advanced much more openly than they would have in the Roanoke valley, where any man outside a trench risked immediate annihilation. That aside, the Yankee commander hereabouts seemed to assess danger by how many men the Confederates in front of him knocked over on the approach. Some generals in butternut were like that, too. Bartlett was glad he didn’t serve under any of them.

Rifle and machine-gun fire forced the Yankees to go to earth. Dirt flew as the U.S. soldiers dug themselves in. Any man who hoped to live through the war was handy with the spade. Stretcher-bearers carried a few wounded Confederates back into Ryan. On the other side of the line, stretcher-bearers in U.S. uniforms were no doubt doing the same thing with injured damnyankees.

“We stopped ’em!” Napoleon Dibble said happily.

Even Joe Mopope rolled his black eyes at that. As gently as he could, Reggie said, “We stopped ’em for now, Nap. We stopped ’em for a while at Duncan, and for a while at Waurika, too. Question is, can we stop ’em when they bring up everything they’ve got?”

“We have to,” Dibble answered. “Lieutenant Nicoll said we have to. If we don’t, the Yankees get Sequoyah, and they’ll fill it up with Germans.” He’d made that mistake before; nobody bothered correcting him about it any more.

Dusk fell. Reggie gnawed stale cornbread and opened a tin of beans and pork. That was enough to quiet the growling in his belly, though it didn’t make much of a meal. Cold drizzle started falling. Rifle fire spattered up and down the lines, muzzle flashes looking like lightning bugs.

When Bartlett wanted somebody to dig a trench forward toward a good post for a picket that he’d spotted, he looked around for Joe Mopope, but didn’t spot him. He wondered where the hell the Indian had got to. The Kiowas and Comanches were good enough in a fight, but they didn’t like the drudgery that went with soldiering for hell.

He set Nap Dibble digging instead. Nap did the job without complaint. He never complained. He probably wasn’t smart enough to complain. Because he didn’t, he got more than his fair share of jobs nobody else wanted.

Sergeant Pete Hairston launched a fearsome barrage of curses. Reggie hurried over to see what was going on. There stood Joe Mopope, knife in one hand, a couple of objects Bartlett couldn’t see well in the other. In tones somewhere between disgust and awe, Hairston said, “This red-skinned son of a bitch just brought us back two Yankee scalps.”

Reggie stared. Then he blurted, “No wonder he wasn’t around when I needed him to dig.”

Very quietly, Joe Mopope laughed.

As she rode the streetcar to her job at a mackerel-canning plant, Sylvia Enos went through the inner pages of the Boston Globe with minute care. As far as she was concerned, the paper never talked enough about naval affairs. A battle on land that didn’t move the front a quarter of a mile in one direction or the other got page-one coverage. Sometimes she thought ships got mentioned only when they were torpedoed or blown to bits.

She saw nothing about the USS Ericsson. Not seeing anything about the destroyer made her let out a silent sigh of relief. It meant-she devoutly hoped it meant-her husband George was all right.

Most of the people on the trolley were women on the way to work, many of them on the way to jobs men had been doing before the war pulled them into the Army or the Navy. Many of them were scanning the newspaper as attentively as Sylvia was doing. Some of the ones who weren’t wore mourning black. They no longer had any need to fear the worst. They’d already met it.

Sylvia left her copy of the Globe on the seat when the trolley came to her stop. She wished George were home. She wished he’d never gone to war. And she hoped the Ericsson was far out to sea, nowhere near a port. She loved her husband, and she thought he loved her, but she wasn’t sure, as she had been once, she could trust him out of her sight.

She walked the short distance to the canning plant, which was no more lovely than it had to be. It wasn’t far from the harbor, and stank of fish. A skinny cat looked at her and gave an optimistic meow. She shook her head. “Sorry, pussycat. No handouts from me today.” The cat meowed again, piteously this time. Sylvia shook her head again, too, and walked on.

She grabbed her time card and stuck it in the clock. The money wasn’t good-it wasn’t as if she were a man, after all-but, with it and her monthly allotment from George’s pay, she managed well enough.

“Good morning, Mrs. Enos,” the foreman said as she hurried toward the machine that stuck bright labels on cans of mackerel.

“Good morning, Mr. Winter,” she answered. He nodded and limped on past her: as a young man, he’d taken a bullet in the leg during the Second Mexican War.

A couple of minutes later, Isabella Antonelli took her place on the machine next to Sylvia’s. She wore black; her husband had been killed fighting in Quebec. She nodded shyly to Sylvia, set down her dinner pail, and made sure her machine was in good working order.

With a rumble of motors and several discordant squeals of fan belts, the line started moving. Sylvia had to pull three levers, taking steps between them, to bring bare, bright cans into her machine, squirt paste on them, and affix the labels-which made the mackerel whose flesh went into the cans look remarkably like tuna. Being a fisherman’s wife, she knew what a lie that was. People who bought the cans in Ohio or Nebraska wouldn’t, though.

Some days, stepping and pulling levers could be mesmerizing, so that half the morning would slip by while Sylvia hardly noticed any time passing. This was one of those mornings. The only time she got jolted out of her routine was when her paste reservoir ran dry and she had to refill it from the big bucket of paste under the machine before she could put on more labels.

As it did sometimes, the lunch whistle startled her, jerking her out of the world in which she was almost as mechanical as the machine she tended. The line groaned to a stop. Sylvia shook herself, as she might have done coming out of the bathtub at the end of the hall in her apartment building. She looked around. There was her dinner pail, of black-painted sheet metal like the one a riveter might have carried to the Boston Navy Yard.

Isabella Antonelli’s dinner pail might have been identical to her own. The two women sat on a bench near a wheezing steam radiator. Sylvia had a ham sandwich in her dinner pail, leftovers from the night before. Isabella Antonelli had a tightly covered bowl that also looked to hold leftovers: long noodles that looked like worms, smothered in tomato sauce. She brought them to the factory about three days out of five. Sylvia thought they were disgusting, though she’d never said so for fear of hurting her friend’s feelings.

Mr. Winter limped by, a cigar clamped between his teeth. He was carrying his own dinner pail, looking for a place to sit down. His eyes lingered on Isabella as he walked past. “You can go with him, if you’d like,” Sylvia said.

“I will sit with you today,” the Italian woman said. She smiled, which made her look younger and not so tired. “He should not take me too much for granted, don’t you think?”

She and the foreman-a widower for years-had been lovers for a couple of months. They were discreet about it, both at the factory and with their own families. Winter had aimed a few speculative remarks at Sylvia since she’d started working at the canning plant; she was just as well pleased to see him attached to someone else. To his credit, he hadn’t aimed any of those remarks at her since taking up with Isabella.

Sylvia said, “Anybody who takes anybody else for granted is a fool.”

She didn’t realize with how much bitterness she’d freighted the remark till Isabella Antonelli, a worried look on her face, asked, “But all is well with your Giorgio, yes?”

“He’s well, yes,” Sylvia replied, which was by no means a complete answer. Isabella obviously realized it wasn’t a complete answer. She also obviously realized it was all the answer she would get. The rest of the half-hour lunch passed in uneasy silence.

For once, Sylvia was glad to go back to her machine, to lose herself in the routine of pulling and stepping, pulling and stepping, of watching cans bright with their tinning go into the machine and cans gaudy with their labels stream out. The machine asked no questions she would sooner not have answered. The machine asked no questions at all.

As she had at the lunch whistle, Sylvia started when the quitting whistle screamed. It was dark when she clocked out and walked to the trolley stop, but not quite so dark as it had been earlier in the year. Twilight lingered in the west, a harbinger of spring ahead. It was the only harbinger of spring she could find; the wind cut like a knife.

She had to stand almost all the way back to the stop by her apartment building. Except for lunch, she’d been standing since she got to the plant. Now that she’d returned from that mechanistic world, she felt how tired she was. Her legs didn’t want to hold her up any more. When she finally did get to sit down, she nearly fell asleep before the streetcar got to her stop. She’d done that once, and walked back more than a mile. This time, she didn’t, but getting up and getting off the trolley were more mind over matter than anything else.

She checked her mailbox in the entrance hall to the apartment building. No letter from George, which meant he hadn’t come to port as of a few days before, which meant he hadn’t had the chance to get into trouble in a port. He might have got into trouble on the sea, but that was a different sort of trouble, and one over which she worried in a different sort of way.

Circulars from the Coal Board, the Scrap Metal Collection Agency, the Ration Board, the Victory Over Waste Committee, and the War Savings and Tax Board helped fill the mailbox. So did one from an agency new to her, the Paper Conservation Authority, which informed her in the portentous bureaucratic tones of any government outfit that paper was an important war resource and should not be wasted.

“Then why do I get so much worthless paper every day?” she muttered, tossing the multicolored sheets into the battered wastebasket there. The answer to that was only too clear: “Because one board writes this and none of the others read it, that’s why.”

She went upstairs to reclaim her children from Brigid Coneval, who, after her husband was conscripted, had decided to take in the children of other women who got jobs in factories instead of getting a factory job herself. Each flight of stairs seemed to have twice as many as the one before, and each step twice as high.

When she came out into the hallway, she walked down the hall to Mrs. Coneval’s flat to get George, Jr., and Mary Jane and take them back to her own apartment, where she would make supper and let them play till they were ready for bed-or, more likely, till she was ready for bed and managed to persuade them that they should lie down, too.

They were getting harder to persuade. George, Jr., was six now, heading toward seven, and Mary Jane nearly four. Sylvia needed more sleep these days, while they needed less. It hardly seemed fair.

With so many children in Brigid Coneval’s flat, shrieks and cries as Sylvia came up were the order of the day. But the shrieks and cries that Sylvia heard now did not come from the throats of children. Fear shot through her, sharp as if she’d seized a live electric wire. She had to will herself to knock, and then had to knock twice to make anyone inside notice her.

The woman who opened the door was not Brigid Coneval, though she looked very much like her. Seeing Sylvia, George, Jr., and Mary Jane came running up and embraced her. Above them, Sylvia asked the question she dreaded, the question that had to be asked: “Is she-? Is it-?”

“It is that.” The woman, doubtless Brigid’s sister, had a brogue like hers, too. “Less than an hour ago, the telegram came. Down in Virginia he was, poor man, and never coming back from there again.”

“That’s dreadful. I’m so sorry,” Sylvia said, feeling the inadequacy of words. She knew what Brigid Coneval was feeling. She’d twice thought George lost, once when his fishing boat was captured by a Confederate commerce raider and once when his river monitor was blown out of the water. The only thing that had saved him then was that he hadn’t been aboard, but on the riverbank, drunk and about to lie down with a colored strumpet.

She couldn’t even say she understood, for Brigid’s sister would not believe her. Then she found a new worry, different but in its own way no less urgent: while Brigid Coneval mourned, who would take care of the children when she had to go to work?