The Grapple

IX

In the reinforced-concrete shelter under the ruins of the Gray House, Jake Featherston fumed. He had the feeling of being a bug pinned down on a collector’s board. Wiggle as he would, the pin held him helplessly in place.

He’d had that feeling in the last war, when U.S. artillery and barrels inexorably pushed the Army of Northern Virginia back from Pennsylvania through Maryland and into the state for which it was named. He’d sworn he would never feel that way again. He’d sworn the Confederate States would never let anybody on earth do that to them again. For two years, near enough, his barrels and dive bombers made good on the boast. Now…

Now the damnyankees had barrels and dive bombers, too. Their machines were just as good as the CSA’s. From the dismayed reports from the field, their latest barrels were better than anything the Confederates had. And the United States had swarms of barrels and cannon and airplanes and men, while the Confederates had…what was left from the adventures of the past two years.

Lulu stuck her head into the office. “Mr. President, General Forrest is here to see you.”

“Thanks,” Featherston said. “Please send him in.” He could order Negroes sent to camps by the tens of thousands, by the hundreds of thousands, without batting an eye, but he was always polite to his secretary.

Nathan Bedford Forrest III came in and gave him a perfunctory salute. “Mr. President,” he said, and then, plainly with an effort, “Freedom!”

“Freedom!” Jake echoed; the Party slogan never felt stale to him. He waved the head of the General Staff to a chair. Seeing how haggard Forrest looked, he took out the bottle of whiskey that lived in his desk drawer. “Need a snort?”

“Don’t mind if I do, sir.” Forrest poured himself a healthy shot. “Mud in your eye.” He knocked it back. Jake Featherston also drank. Forrest eyed him. “That was good, but I don’t reckon I can drink enough to make me forget how much trouble we’re in.”

“You’re the fellow who’s supposed to get us out of trouble like that,” Jake said.

“With what…sir?” Forrest asked. “Talk about making bricks without straw-I feel like I’m trying to make bricks without mud out there. How can I stop the damnyankees when they’re throwing everything but the kitchen sink at me and I don’t even have the goddamn sink?”

“It can’t be that bad,” Featherston said.

“No, sir. It’s worse,” Nathan Bedford Forrest III said. “We…lost a lot of men and we lost a lot of materiel in Pittsburgh and falling back afterwards.”

“The Yankees must have lost a lot, too.” Featherston eyed the whiskey bottle. He still drank, but he couldn’t remember the last time he really drank. Getting plowed, forgetting all this crap, was an enormous temptation. But the crap wouldn’t go away, and it would get worse while he wasn’t looking at it. And so, regretfully, he looked but he didn’t grab the bottle again.

“They did, sir. No doubt about it,” the chief of the General Staff said earnestly. He’s getting ready to call me a damn fool, Featherston thought. He’ll be polite about it, but he’ll do it just the same. And sure as hell, Forrest went on, “But they’ve got more men and more factories than we do. They can build up faster than we can, and they can go on building up to a level…we have trouble matching.”

A level we can’t match-that’s what he almost said. “They’ve got more men. We can’t do much about that,” Jake said. “But we’ve got better men, by God, and we’ve got better weapons. The automatic rifles, and now the rockets…”

“All that’s true, sir, and it’s why things aren’t worse,” Forrest said. “But our artillery’s no better than theirs, and they’ve got more. Our airplanes aren’t better, and they’ve got more. That’s really starting to hurt. And when it comes to barrels-sir, when it comes to barrels, they’ve got a step up on us. That’s starting to hurt bad, too.”

“Goddammit, why can’t we keep up?” Jake Featherston snarled. “We were ahead when the war started.”

“We don’t have enough engineers, sir. We don’t have enough factory hands,” Forrest said. “Damn near every healthy white man in the country from eighteen to fifty’s in uniform.”

“Women are taking up some of the slack in the factories-more every day, in fact.” Forrest was angry he’d taken too long to see how important that was. He didn’t like giving women such jobs. In the long run, it would twist the CSA out of the shape he wanted the country to have. But if you got smashed in the short run, the long run didn’t matter. So women went to work in war plants, and he’d worry about what it all meant later-if there was a later.

“We still need more bodies in there, sir.” Forrest took a deep breath. “If there was any way we could get more use out of our niggers-”

“No,” Featherston said in a low, deadly voice. “The niggers are Party business. They’re my business. Don’t you go sticking your nose in where it doesn’t belong. We are gonna come out of this war nigger-free. Nigger-free, you hear me?”

“Mr. President, how much do we have to pay to make that happen?” Forrest asked. “We needed most of a division to clean Richmond out-a division we couldn’t use against the damnyankees. If that happens too many more times, it’ll put us in a world of trouble. I’m sorry I have to tell you such things, sir, but somebody needs to.”

He had nerve. Not many people who came before Jake Featherston told him anything but what they thought he wanted to hear. Clarence Potter did, but Potter had almost official gadfly status. Even Ferd Koenig hesitated. Forrest might be hesitant, but he was saying what he thought.

“The worst is over,” Jake said. “Most towns are cleaned out.” That still left the black belt from rural South Carolina through Louisiana largely unaffected, but he wasn’t about to split hairs with Nathan Bedford Forrest III. Besides, he had Mexican soldiers dealing with the coons there. He didn’t need to pull so many of his own men away from more urgent-not more important, but more urgent-things.

“I hope you’re right, sir,” the chief of the General Staff said. “I hope so, but…”

I haven’t convinced that man, Jake thought. He changed the subject from his own shortcomings to those of the Army: “We’ve got to stop the Yankees. They’re carving their way through Kentucky like we did through Ohio.”

“That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Mr. President,” Forrest said. “We’re using every man and every piece of machinery we can get our hands on. We can’t get our hands on enough men or machines.”

“If you stop retreating, if you start hitting back-”

“Sir, that’s not fair to the men fighting and dying in Kentucky. You can hang me out to dry if you want-I’ll be your scapegoat. But they’re doing everything flesh and blood can do. They’re making stands every chance they get, and they’re counterattacking every chance they get, too. We’d be in worse shape if they weren’t, and you can take that to the bank.”

His passion startled Featherston. The President of the CSA would have thrown him to the wolves without a qualm-if he’d had someone in mind to replace him. But the only officer who came to mind for the job was George Patton, and Patton was too valuable in the field to bring him back to Richmond.

So instead of canning Nathan Bedford Forrest III, Featherston said, “Let’s take a look at the map.”

“Of course, sir.” Did Forrest sound relieved? If he didn’t, he damn well should have.

But the map mattered. Jake Featherston slashed a line across it with his forefinger-almost exactly the line Irving Morrell had slashed across a map of the CSA in Philadelphia some months earlier. Whatever Featherston’s flaws, he had a gift for seeing the big picture. “This is what the sons of bitches aim to do to us.”

Nathan Bedford Forrest III blinked. He worried about trees; he hadn’t looked at the forest as a whole for a while. “You don’t think small, sir,” he said after a moment’s pause for thought.

“Neither do the damnyankees,” Jake answered without the least hesitation. The truth burned hot and clear in his mind. (Lies burned just as hot and clear, which helped make him as effective as he was. But this was no lie; he wasn’t trying to fool either himself or the chief of the General Staff.) “The damnyankees hurt us bad the last go-round, but that was all they did-they hurt us. With barrels that really haul ass, with airplanes that really bomb, they’ll fucking kill us this time. And that’s how they’ll do it-Chattanooga, Atlanta, the ocean.”

Forrest eyed the map as if a rattlesnake had crawled out from behind it. He licked his lips. “They can’t do that!” he blurted.

“They can unless we stop ’em,” Jake answered. “How do you aim to? Losing Atlanta’d be bad enough. All the oil from Louisiana and Texas comes east through there. Atlanta goes down the toilet, everything north and east of it stops running. We are screwed, blued, and tattooed.”

“They can’t possibly do all that this year,” Forrest said.

Jake would have liked the assessment much better without the qualifier-and if it didn’t so closely match his own. He asked, “How much more can we pull out of Virginia to send west?”

“If we pull more out, the United States will just waltz into Richmond, you know,” Forrest said. “I’m not sure we can stop them if they push hard now.”

“If we have to, we can keep fighting without this town, right?” Jake knew losing the capital of the CSA would hurt. It would be a psychological blow that would start people plotting against him-if they weren’t already plotting against him, which they probably were. And Richmond wasn’t just the capital. It was one of the most important industrial towns in the CSA, right up there with Birmingham and Atlanta and Dallas. But…“If it comes down to choosing between Richmond and Atlanta, we have to hold on to Atlanta, because so many other things depend on it. If the damnyankees take this place away from us, they can’t go much farther. Is that right, or do you see it different?” He meant the question. Forrest was welcome to make him change his mind-if he could.

But the chief of the General Staff kept eyeing the map, and the slash Jake had cut across it. “I’m afraid it is right.” Forrest sounded unhappy about it, which convinced Jake he was telling the truth.

And if he was, and if Jake had things straight, the answer seemed plain: “We have to stop the USA as far this side of Atlanta as we can. Stop the damnyankees, then drive ’em back. They did it to us. Let’s see how they like getting hoist with their own waddayacallit.”

“Petard,” Forrest said automatically. “I hope we can do it, sir. The one big difference between us and the United States is that they have more margin for error than we do. They fell all over themselves in the Ohio campaign, but we did everything we could do to get as far as we did. If things don’t go just right for us…”

“Yes, yes.” Jake Featherston had heard that too many times. One reason he’d heard it so often was that it was true. He didn’t want to think about that, and no one in the CSA could tell him he had to. He said, “We’ll just have to make things go worse for the damnyankees, that’s all. Stir up the Canucks wherever we can, try and talk Quebec into pulling its soldiers out of the rest of Canada so the United States have to send more men in, see if we can fire up the Mormons one more time…”

“Will it be enough?” Forrest asked.

“Of course it will,” Jake said. “It’s got to be.” He also didn’t want to think about what would happen if it wasn’t, and no one in the CSA could tell him he had to do that, either.

For a long time, Camp Determination had bustled. Load after load of Negroes came into the place. Load after load of corpses went out. It was, in a way, a factory, with death as its chief product. And it ran very efficiently.

Troop Leader Hipolito Rodriguez longed for the old days. So did all the other guards, up to Jeff Pinkard himself. The only people who liked the way things were now were the Negroes still inside the camp, and their opinions didn’t count.

Fewer and fewer Negroes were left. Thanks to the damnyankees’ air raids, trains had a hard time getting to Snyder, Texas, and the camp just beyond it. The bathhouses that weren’t bathhouses and the asphyxiating trucks went right on working, emptying barracks one by one. Blacks went to their deaths without too much fuss; the story now was that they were being moved for their own protection. They knew how many bombs fell on Snyder. They didn’t know bombs wouldn’t fall on them. And so they walked into the bathhouses and climbed onto the trucks-and they never worried about anything else after that.

All of a sudden, Camp Determination had more guards than it needed. Rodriguez and the other men from the Confederate Veterans’ Brigades didn’t worry about going anywhere else; they were useless at the front. The tough females who did most of the guarding on the women’s side didn’t need to fear trading their gray uniforms for butternut, either. But the young men, the Freedom Party Guards…

“Shows what kind of people the damnyankees are,” one of them said at supper after another day when no trains came in. “They’d sooner help niggers and blow decent white folks to hell and gone.”

Rodriguez gnawed on a barbecued pork rib. As far as he was concerned, Texans only thought they knew how to barbecue. Down in Sonora, now, they did things right. He found himself nodding to the young guard, though he was neither black nor white himself.

Another youngster said, “How long till there aren’t any niggers left here at all?”

“They aren’t shipping so many spooks out this way, I hear,” said the guard who’d spoken first. “More and more are going to camps farther east, where the U.S. bombers can’t hit the train tracks so hard.”

“That’s not good,” the second guard said. “Camp Determination was made to be the biggest and the best. Country can’t do a proper job of reducing population if this here camp isn’t doing its bit.”

“They didn’t think about no Yankees when they made it,” Rodriguez put in.

“You’re right, Troop Leader,” the first young guard said. Without three stripes on his sleeve, Rodriguez would have been just another damn greaser to him. With them, the Sonoran was a superior. Party discipline ran deep.

“We’ve got to do something,” the second guard added. “We’ve got to push the United States back into New Mexico.”

Go ahead-volunteer, Rodriguez thought. Guards outfits were fighting alongside C.S. Army troops northwest of the camp. Even if he were hale, he wouldn’t have volunteered himself. He’d seen too much infantry combat in west Texas in the last war. He didn’t want or need any more.

“Maybe if we sneak in the spooks at night…” another guard said.

“Got to have lights to move ’em from the railhead into the camp,” Troop Leader Tom Porter said. The veteran was an outstanding noncom; Rodriguez tried to model himself after him. Porter went on, “Can you imagine what would happen if we lit this place up like a Christmas tree? Damnyankees’d be on it like ants on potato salad at a picnic.”

“They’ll blow up the niggers if they do that,” one of the young guards said. “They could hit this place any time they please. They don’t do it, on account of they love coons so goddamn much.”

Porter frowned. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe. But if they figure out they can take out a whole bunch of guards all at once, they might reckon it’s worthwhile. I mean, it’s not like we won’t reduce the niggers’ population anyway.”

The young guard grunted. So did Rodriguez. That sounded as if it made good military sense. “Why don’t they just bomb the camp anyhow, then, though?” the youngster said. “They’d just be blowing up the smokes a little bit before we take care of them.”

“Well, you’re right,” Porter said bleakly, which wasn’t what the young guard expected to hear. “That’s why we’ve got shelters in this place now. If they want to blast the living shit out of us, they can-no two ways about it.”

“What about the antiaircraft guns around the camp?” Two or three guards asked the question in almost identical words.

“What about ’em?” Porter said. “Antiaircraft guns don’t mean you can’t bomb a place if you want to bad enough. They just mean it costs more. If you’re willing to pay, you can do it. You bet your ass you can. You reckon they don’t have antiaircraft guns all over Richmond and Philadelphia? You reckon those places don’t get bombed? Ha!”

Nobody said anything for a while after that. Hipolito Rodriguez found himself looking at the ceiling, as if to see bombers overhead. He would have been embarrassed if he were the only one doing it. But he wasn’t-nowhere close.

He almost panicked when droning airplane engines woke him later that night. He was ready to run for the shelter, not that his middle-aged, almost-electrocuted body could run very fast. But the enemy airplanes went on to the east. Whatever they were after, it wasn’t Camp Determination or Snyder.

Two days later, Jefferson Pinkard sent another contingent of female guards packing. The men who had to go over to the women’s side to take their shift didn’t know exactly why the guards left. All their guesses were lewd, though. It wasn’t as if Pinkard minded brutality, as long as it stopped short of the point where prisoners rebelled.

Rodriguez wondered if he would find Bathsheba and Antoinette alive. To his surprise, he did. They’d lasted longer than most camp inmates. Both of them were dreadfully thin now; the older woman coughed all the time. But they greeted him with smiles. “It’s the nice sergeant,” Bathsheba said. “How is that Xerxes? How is our man?”

Dead. Rotting in a trench a bulldozer scraped in the ground, piled in with God knows how many other bodies. He couldn’t tell them that. He didn’t have the heart. He’d led so many men to their death-what was telling the truth about one of them next to that? Nothing, logically, but logical didn’t seem to have much to do with it.

And so he lied: “He is good. He is about like you. He says hello. He says he loves you both. He says he misses your son.” He remembered Bathsheba had one, and that the boy or young man didn’t come to the camp.

“I misses Cassius, too,” the older woman said, and Antoinette nodded. Bathsheba went on, “I hope he’s all right.”

Wherever he was, if he wasn’t in a camp he was better off than the rest of the family. Rodriguez didn’t say that-why belabor the obvious? He did say, “You got messages for-for your man?” He couldn’t pronounce Xerxes to save his own life, and nothing would save Xerxes’ now.

They poured out their hearts to him. That only made him feel worse about lying to them. But they would hate him all the more for deceiving them if they found out the truth now. And so he listened to words of love for a dead man and promised to bring back answers from beyond the grave.

None of the other guards knew what he was doing. Had they known, they would have laughed at him or said he was doing it to get Antoinette to lie down with him. If he wanted her, he thought he could have her. But what was the point? She and her mother couldn’t last much longer, not the way things were. And when she was dead, he’d be sad she was gone. He’d be sad when she was gone even if she didn’t sleep with him; he liked her.

He didn’t miss the black women he did lay. They were just…bodies. Now they were dead bodies, and so what?

“If they was to drop bombs all over this place,” Bathsheba said, “you reckon a couple o’ skinny colored ladies could run off without nobody noticing?”

“You don’t ask me that!” Rodriguez exclaimed. “I got to keep people inside here, not tell nobody how to get away.”

“You keepin’ people in here?” Bathsheba shook her head. “Don’t reckon so. Ain’t nobody in the whole wide world could keep people in a place like this. What you’re doin’ is, you’re keepin’ niggers here. Niggers ain’t people, not to the folks who go ’round yellin’, ‘Freedom!’ all the damn time.”

“Mama…” Antoinette said.

Bathsheba laughed. “It’s the truth, ain’t it? ’Course it is. You afraid I git in trouble on account of tellin’ the truth? Girl, how kin I git in trouble that’s any worse’n what I’m in already? You answer me that.” She turned to Rodriguez. “You answer me that, too, Mistuh Sergeant, suh.”

Rodriguez had no answers, and he knew it. He was a twenty-year Freedom Party man. He’d shouted, “Freedom!” and “?Libertad!” plenty of times, more times than he could count. He had no use for blacks; if anything, mallate was even more insulting, even more demeaning, than nigger. He still believed Negroes caused most of the Confederacy’s troubles. And without blacks, whites would come down on Mexicans instead.

But this skinny old woman did something no one else had ever been able to do: she made him ashamed of the uniform he wore, of the stripes on his sleeve, of the Party badge on his chest. Bathsheba did indeed tell the truth, and Hipolito Rodriguez wasn’t too far gone to know it.

“Where you goin’?” she called after him. He didn’t answer. He just went away, anywhere away from the terrible truth, as fast as his legs would take him.

“Now look what you went and done, Mama,” Antoinette said reproachfully, as if, despite everything that had happened to them, this could still be her mother’s fault.

“Me? I didn’t do nothin’,” Bathsheba answered, and then, more quietly but not too quietly for Rodriguez to hear, “He done it to hisself.”

And there was another piercingly painful truth. Rodriguez had done it to himself. He looked beneath the face of population reduction and saw murder. He looked at niggers, at mallates, and saw people. He looked at what he’d been doing and saw…

“Madre de Dios,” he whispered, and crossed himself. “?Ai, madre de Dios!” But could even the Virgin forgive him for such a mountain of sins? He had trouble believing it. No-he couldn’t believe it. That made a difference. That made all the difference in the world.

He crossed himself again. The gesture seemed extraordinarily pointless, extraordinarily futile. He was damned. He felt the certainty of his damnation like that mountain of sin falling on him.

He’d known for a long time that Edith Pinkard’s first husband was a camp guard who killed himself. He’d heard of other men who did the same thing. Up till now, he’d thought they were crazy. All at once, he didn’t. How could you live with yourself when you understood what you were doing, what you were helping your country do?

He looked down at his hands. How much blood was on them? A river? A lake? An ocean? He looked at the submachine gun in those bloodstained hands. It was made for one thing: killing people. It was perfectly designed for the job, too. He clicked off the safety, flicked the change lever to full automatic fire. Then, like a man in a trance, he put the muzzle of the conveniently short weapon in his mouth. It smelled and tasted of metal and gun oil.

“Look out!” a woman cried. “He gonna-”

And he did. He pulled the trigger, hard. And that was most definitely that.

Chester Martin had never gone south of the Ohio River. He’d spend the Great War in Virginia, on the Roanoke front in the west and then, after recovering from his first wound, in the northern part of the state, pushing down toward Richmond. He’d been not far from Fredericksburg when the fighting ended in 1917-and not far from the same town when he got wounded twenty-five years later.

He liked Kentucky better. He especially liked how far the U.S. Army had driven into Kentucky, and how fast it was moving. They’d passed Madisonville and were heading south toward Earlington. Madisonville was a tobacco town. The crop was nowhere near ripe, which didn’t stop several U.S. soldiers from plucking their own, drying or half cooking the leaves, and trying to smoke them afterwards. They proved one thing in a hurry: making cigarettes wasn’t as easy as it looked.

Earlington, by contrast, made its living from coal. U.S. Army engineers dynamited the entrances to one mine after another. “Is that smart, sir?” Martin asked his platoon commander. “Shouldn’t we be using those mines ourselves?” He knew how much coal the steel industry needed, and it wasn’t the only one.

Lieutenant Wheat only shrugged. “I guess the first thing is to deny this coal to the enemy,” he answered. “We can worry about everything else later. It’s not like we don’t mine plenty of our own.”

“I suppose so, sir.” If Chester didn’t sound convinced, it was because he wasn’t. But he didn’t decide such things, even if the news would have come as a surprise to the men in the platoon.

Somewhere not far away, a rifle went off. He and Lieutenant Wheat both reached for their weapons-that wasn’t a Springfield. It also wasn’t one of the Confederates’ automatic rifles, or an older bolt-action Tredegar. Martin didn’t know exactly what it was-some kind of squirrel gun, he supposed. He would have bet whoever squeezed the trigger wasn’t aiming at a squirrel.

The same thought must have gone through Delbert Wheat’s mind, for he said, “They don’t love us around here, do they?”

“Not hardly,” Chester said. The.22 or whatever it was barked again. “I bet we’re going to have to take more hostages.” Soldiers in butternut were trying to hold a line on the southern fringes of Earlington, and they would have to fall back from there in the next day or two. But Confederate civilians had rediscovered the thrills of guerrilla warfare. Kids and old men and even women turned into bushwhackers whenever they saw the chance.

The laws of war said people who weren’t in uniform but took up arms anyway were fair game. Those laws didn’t say taking hostages was all right, but every army on enemy territory did it. Sometimes it helped. Sometimes it just made more civilians want to pick up squirrel guns.

“We kill enough of these fuckers, sooner or later the rest will get the idea,” Wheat said. “Or if they don’t, we’ll kill all of them.” He didn’t sound worried-more as if he looked forward to it.

After a third shot rang out, Martin got to his feet. “Somebody ought to do something about that damn sniper,” he said.

He hadn’t gone more than a step or two before a U.S. machine gun stuttered out a short burst, and then another one. A triumphant shout went up: “Got the son of a bitch!”

“Talk about service,” Lieutenant Wheat said. Chester grinned and nodded and hunkered down again. He pulled out a pack of Raleighs-properly grown, properly cured tobacco-and lit up. After a deep drag, he nodded again. Yeah, this was what smokes were supposed to taste like.

A soldier trotted back to him and the lieutenant. “There’s a Confederate captain with a flag of truce, wants to talk to us about civilians,” he said.

“Bring him back here,” Wheat said. “We can talk.”

“Blindfold him first,” Chester added. “No point letting him see what we’ve got. That may be part of what he’s after.” The platoon commander nodded. The soldier saluted Wheat and hurried away.

“Would you like to sit in on this?” the lieutenant asked politely.

“If you don’t mind, sir,” Chester answered, as politely. The platoon leader didn’t want to let the Confederates hornswoggle him. Chester was his ace in the hole, and appreciated being invited without having to invite himself.

When the C.S. captain took off his blindfold, he proved to be about thirty, with the ribbon for the Purple Heart-a decoration that went back to George Washington, and that both sides used-on his chest. He said his name was Wilbur Pease. He didn’t seem surprised to find a first sergeant sitting in with a second lieutenant, which showed he knew how the world worked.

Wheat did the talking: “Well, Captain, what’s on your mind?”

“I’ve had reports of atrocities against civilian citizens, Lieutenant, and I’ve come to investigate and to protest,” Pease answered.

“Considering what the Confederate States are doing to their Negroes, aren’t you in a poor position to talk about atrocities?” Wheat asked.

Wilbur Pease didn’t even blink. “Civilian citizens, I said. Negroes are only residents, not citizens. They don’t have the rights of citizens.” We can do whatever we want to them, Martin translated. Captain Pease went on, “I’m talking about white people, people who matter.” His racism was so complete, so perfect, he didn’t know he had it.

“We have a problem with-what’s the fancy French for it, Sergeant?”

“Francs-tireurs, sir.” Chester pronounced it franks-teeroors; he knew no more French than Chinese.

It satisfied both Lieutenant Wheat and Captain Pease. The U.S. officer went on, “If we catch people out of uniform shooting at us, we’re going to kill them. It’s as simple as that, Captain. We nailed one a few minutes ago. If we have to take hostages to make them think twice, we’ll do that, too. And we’ll shoot the hostages if it comes to that. I’m sorry, but these jerks with guns need to understand that we’re serious.”

“The laws of war-” Pease began.

“You did the same damn thing on our soil,” Chester Martin said. “Don’t get all high and mighty about it.”

“And don’t encourage the, uh, francs-tireurs, either,” Wheat added. “That way, everybody will be better off.”

Captain Pease scowled. His troops wouldn’t be better off. The more U.S. soldiers flabbled about civilians with rifles, the more distracted from fighting the regular Confederate army they were. “I deny that we encourage civilians to take up arms against invaders,” he said.

“Of course you do, Captain,” Wheat said.

“And the stork brings babies and sticks ’em under cabbage leaves,” Chester added.

“All right,” Pease said angrily. “I can see you don’t take this seriously.”

“Oh, we do,” Wheat said. “We take it so seriously, we’ll do whatever we have to to stamp it out. And if that means you run short on civilians, we won’t lose any sleep about it. Whatever people in these parts try to do to us, we’ll do worse to them. I promise you that, Captain. It worked in Utah. It should work here.”

“If you want that kind of fight, I’m sure you can have it,” Wilbur Pease said. “You’d better put my hoodwink back on-I’d like to return to my side of the line.”

“I’ll do it, sir,” Chester said to Lieutenant Wheat. As he blindfolded Pease, he went on, “We don’t have anything in particular against the Confederate Army. You play fair when you fight us. Civilians playing soldier-that’s a different story.”

“Yes, it is. You’ll see.” Pease held out his hand. “Someone take me back, please.”

A soldier led him through the U.S. positions. Chester’s face was troubled as he watched the Confederate officer go. A different story…He wondered if his own words would come back to haunt him. Auto bombs, people bombs…The Kentuckians hadn’t started making life as miserable for the U.S. Army as they could.

“How much trouble do you think civilians can make?” By the troubled note in Lieutenant Wheat’s voice, he was worrying about the same thing.

“It can’t be worse than Utah. That’s all I know for sure.” Martin paused for a moment. “Of course, Utah was pretty bad.”

A brief burst of gunfire came from the Confederates, formally marking the end of the truce. A U.S. machine gun fired back, and after that it was time for everyone to keep his head down again.

The Confederates launched a salvo of their rockets. Most of them came down on Earlington. Civilians hadn’t evacuated the town, and bore the brunt of the hellish weapons’ bursts. “So much for taking care of their own,” Martin said into Delbert Wheat’s ear; they both crouched in the same shell hole. If something came down on them, the platoon would need new leaders.

“They don’t give a damn. They never have,” the young officer answered. “All they care about is scoring points off us.”

Chester nodded. It looked like that to him, too. Chaos reigned in the town. Wounded U.S. soldiers screamed for medics. So did wounded civilians. The corpsmen dealt with soldiers first. That was likely to hurt their popularity with the locals. They didn’t seem to care. Chester didn’t, either.

U.S. warplanes streaked low overhead. They were fighters, but each one carried a bomb slung under its belly. They were bound to be slower and less maneuverable till they dropped those bombs. Explosions on the Confederate side of the line said they weren’t wasting any time.

Barrels rumbled down toward the front, too. One platoon particularly caught Chester’s eye. All five machines were the newest U.S. model, sleek and deadly as so many tigers. All five were unbuttoned, too, their commanders and drivers looking out to see where they were. When they got closer to the firing, the drivers would close their hatches. Some barrel commanders liked to stand up in the cupola as long as they could. They took chances doing that, but their machines fared better.

One of those commanders drew Chester’s notice as he rolled down Highland Park and into the northern outskirts of Earlington. He spotted Chester, too, and no surprise, for they were about the same age: middle-aged survivors in a world of young men. Over the din of his engine, he called, “You went through it before and you came back for another round?” His accent said he came from somewhere close to the Canadian border.

“Yeah, I’m a glutton for punishment-just like you,” Chester shouted back. They grinned and waved at each other. “Stay safe,” Chester added.

“You, too.” The barrel commander laughed. So did Martin. If they wanted to stay safe, what were they doing here?

Lieutenant Wheat gave Chester a quizzical look. “You know that guy?”

“No, sir,” Chester answered. “But us old farts, we’ve got to stick together.”

His platoon went into the line not long after the barrels clattered past. With help from the armored behemoths, they shoved the Confederates all the way out of Earlington. More rockets came in from the south. Featherston’s soldiers had lots of nasty weapons. Whether they had enough men to use them was a different question. For all their firepower, Confederate troops seemed thin on the ground.

That barrel commander fought his machine aggressively. His gunner hit a Confederate barrel at what had to be over a mile, and set it afire. Two other Confederate barrels decided they’d be better off somewhere else. They trundled away in a hurry. Chester approved-the less he had to worry about enemy armor, the happier he was. Before too long, he trudged past the burning enemy machine. The push south rolled on.

Cincinnatus Driver made sure the.45 on the seat of his truck was loaded and sat where he could grab it in a hurry-he never let it slide out of reach. The road between Paris and Winchester wasn’t safe for U.S. convoys. The drive south had pushed the Confederate Army out of this part of Kentucky. But C.S. stragglers and bushwhackers who didn’t wear uniforms still took potshots at U.S. vehicles from the trees that grew too damn close to the side of the road.

A bloated body hung from a telegraph pole. The placard tied around the man’s neck said, FRANC-TIREUR. That was officer talk for bushwhacker. No doubt U.S. authorities hanged him there to warn his buddies. His wasn’t the first corpse Cincinnatus had seen. They didn’t seem to do much to intimidate the Confederates.

He sighed. Things hadn’t been that much different in the Great War. You did what they told you to do, and you hoped you came out the other side in one piece. You volunteered for this, Cincinnatus reminded himself. Were you born stupid, or did you have to study? He concluded he was born stupid; he’d never been much for studying. But he’d had too recent a close-up look at the Confederacy. Any black man who did, naturally wanted to kill the country with an axe.

Since he didn’t have an axe, truckload after truckload of supplies would have to do. In the Great War, the USA was content to make the CSA say uncle. This time, the United States seemed to want to kill the Confederate States with an axe. Cincinnatus understood why, too. The United States almost had the axe fall on them.

The lead truck in the convoy didn’t run into an axe. It ran over a land mine, and started to burn. The lead truck never carried munitions, just because it was most likely to go boom. The driver probably didn’t have a chance. A different truck, chosen by lot, led every convoy. That could have been me, Cincinnatus thought, gulping.

No matter what happened to the lead truck, the convoy had to get through. The second truck drove off the road onto the soft shoulder on the right-and ran over another mine and blew up. “Do Jesus!” Cincinnatus yelped. He hit the brakes. There was going to be a holdup here-he could see that. If the third truck went off the road to the left, would it go sky-high, too? The driver didn’t want to find out. Cincinnatus wouldn’t have, either. The Confederates who planned this one had outthought their U.S. opposite numbers.

Just how badly they’d outthought them became obvious a moment later. When the U.S. trucks in the convoy were all stopped and all bunched up behind the two that were in flames, a machine gun and assorted automatic rifles and submachine guns opened up on them from the woods to the left. As soon as Cincinnatus heard the gunfire and saw muzzle flashes winking over there, he bailed out. He paused only to grab the.45 as he slid across the seat. He was damned if he’d get out of the truck on the driver’s side and make himself a perfect target for the C.S. holdouts or guerrillas or whoever the hell they were.

His bad leg and bad shoulder both howled protests at what he was making them do. He paid them no attention. Getting hit by an auto had been bad, very bad. Getting chewed up by machine-gun fire was one of the few things he could think of likely to be worse. He didn’t want to find out the hard way.

No more than a second or two after he threw himself to the ground and crawled behind a tire, a burst of bullets chewed up the cab of the truck. Glass from the windshield and the driver’s-side window blew out and then fell like rain.

Had the engine caught fire, he would have had to abandon the truck and make for the woods to the right. He would also have had to pray Confederates didn’t infest them, too. For the moment, though, the truck wasn’t burning.

A couple of wounded drivers cried out in pain. Other men, like Cincinnatus, crouched and sprawled in whatever cover they could find. One of them called, “Be ready! Those fuckers are liable to rush us.”

Can they be that smart and that dumb at the same time? Cincinnatus wondered. If he were in the woods, he would have kept shooting at the trucks till they all caught fire or started exploding. The Confederates had put themselves in a position where they could do that. Why wouldn’t they, then?

Confederate soldiers probably would have reasoned the same way he did. The men in the woods turned out not to be soldiers. They were amateurs, bushwhackers, guerrillas. They cared about the trucks, yes, but they wanted to kill people, too. Once they’d peppered the trucks with bullets, set some on fire, and flattened a lot of tires, they loped forward to deal with the drivers.

They must have thought they’d killed and wounded more men than they had. That was the only thing Cincinnatus could think of. With just a pistol, he had to let them come near before he opened up. He eyed the bushwhackers. They wore dirty dungarees and dirtier flannel shirts. They were poorly shaved. When they got a little closer, they would probably stink.

They never got that close. One of the drivers had a Springfield, not a.45. He fired from behind a tire, worked the bolt, and fired again. Two guerrillas fell. The others started spraying lead as if it were going out of style.

The drivers fired back. They didn’t want the bushwhackers to concentrate on the man with the best weapon. Cincinnatus used the two-handed grip to steady the.45, but it still bucked like an unbroken stallion when he pulled the trigger. The man he aimed at ducked, the way almost everyone did when a bullet came too close.

Several bullets came too close to Cincinnatus. He was already down on his belly. He tried to flatten out like a squirrel after a deuce-and-a-half ran over it. Another guerrilla fell. The drivers’ cheers were punctuated by a shriek as one of them got hit.

In the films about fighting Indians on the Great Plains, the cavalry always charged over the hill in the last reel. It wasn’t the cavalry this time. It was an armored car and two command cars that carried.50-caliber machine guns. As soon as the U.S. soldiers in them got a look at what was going on, they hosed the irregulars down with gunfire. The men who fought for the Confederacy broke and flew toward the woods. Not many of them got there.

Even then, the bushwhackers didn’t give up. The machine gun hidden among the trees started shooting at the oncoming vehicles. The armored car didn’t need to worry about that, but the thin-skinned command cars did. The armored car had a small cannon, not just machine guns of its own. After it sent half a dozen rounds crashing into the woods, the enemy machine gun shut up in the middle of a burst.

Somebody in one of the command cars or the armored car must have used the wireless, because four or five fighter-bombers roared in and dropped their presents on the stand of trees. Cincinnatus hoped they blew the bushwhackers to hell and gone. No matter what he hoped, he knew some of them would get away. Maybe they would think twice about messing with the U.S. Army from now on. More likely, he feared, they wouldn’t.

He didn’t want to get out from behind his tire even after the armored car took up a position between the woods and the shattered convoy. Nobody could call him a cowardly coon, either, not when the white drivers also stayed right where they were.

A soldier got out of one of the command cars for a closer look at a dead irregular. A bullet from the woods made him throw himself flat. The armored car and the command car lashed the trees with machine-gun rounds. Another defiant bullet clanged off the armored car’s turret.

Nobody went anywhere till more trucks brought soldiers forward, some to clear the woods and others, engineers, to get rid of the rest of the mines the bushwhackers had planted. After that, still more trucks had to come up to salvage what the Kentuckians hadn’t destroyed-and to pick up the drivers.

“I’m getting too old for this shit,” one of them said wearily as he climbed into the back of a deuce-and-a-half.

“I was too old for this shit a long time ago,” Cincinnatus said. “Remind me how come I signed up to do it again.”

“On account of you’re a damn fool,” the other driver said. Before Cincinnatus could even start to get mad, the white man added, “Just like me.” That took care of that.

The front lay just north of Winchester. Cincinnatus wished it were farther south still. He knew that was unfair. The U.S. Army had done in a couple of weeks what took months of slogging in the last war. And this wasn’t even the main U.S. thrust. That was farther west, and was moving faster.

He got a new truck that afternoon, and a new assignment. The kid lieutenant in the motor pool gave him a dubious look. “You sure you’re up for this, Gramps?” he said.

“It’s gonna help whip Jake Featherston, ain’t it?” Cincinnatus said.

“That’s the idea, yeah,” the lieutenant answered.

“Then I’m up for it,” Cincinnatus declared.

After another pause, the lieutenant-he was younger than Cincinnatus’ son Achilles, which made him seem very young indeed-nodded. “Well, when you put it that way-”

“I do,” Cincinnatus said.

“Fair enough. I can see why,” the lieutenant said. “Good luck.”

Cincinnatus drove within artillery range of the front. Nothing came down too close, for which he thanked God. “What the hell took youse guys so long?” said the quartermaster sergeant who took charge of the supplies the truck convoy delivered. “We been waitin’ for youse.” He was a hairy little Italian guy from New York City. His accent and Cincinnatus’ were a long way from each other.

He was also a long way from any place where bullets flew. His uniform was clean. It was even pressed. “Sorry to disoblige you, Sergeant,” Cincinnatus said, “but before I got down here, bushwhackers hit the convoy I was in. We had trucks blown up an’ men killed, so maybe you better do your grousin’ somewheres else.”

“You gotta lotta noive, talkin’ t’me that way,” the sergeant growled. “Who do you think you are?”

“I’m an uppity nigger tryin’ to kick Jake Featherston’s raggedy ass,” Cincinnatus answered. “We on the same side or not?”

The noncom’s eyes almost bugged out of his head. “You can’t talk to me like that. You can’t, you hear? Tell me your name. I’m gonna put you on report.”

“I’m Cincinnatus Driver. Do whatever you damn well please,” Cincinnatus said calmly. “Whatever you do, it ain’t gonna be worse’n what happened this morning.”

“You want to put him on report, put us all on report,” a white driver said. “He just told you what everybody was thinking. I’m Hal Williamson. Write it down.”

“Bruce Donovan,” another driver said. Everybody in the convoy gave the quartermaster sergeant his name. Somebody in the back of the crowd added, “You sad, sorry chickenshit asshole.”

“That does it! That fuckin’ does it!” the sergeant shouted. “Youse guys have had it.” He stormed off and returned a few minutes later with a captain in tow. “Listen to these wiseguys, sir!”

Cincinnatus and the other truckers were happy to let the captain listen. “We almost got killed today,” Cincinnatus said. “I don’t see him with no Purple Heart or Silver Star or nothin’.” Again, the rest of the drivers chimed in on his side.

After listening to them, the captain turned to his sergeant and said, “Take an even strain, Cannizzaro. It’s not like they were holding you up on purpose.”

“But, sir-” Sergeant Cannizzaro began.

“Take an even strain, I said,” the captain told him, more sharply this time. “The stuff is here now. Let’s get it out to the troops who need it.” He walked away, leaving the quartermaster sergeant staring after him. An officer with sense, Cincinnatus thought. He’d run into some before, but it didn’t happen every day.

Jerry Dover had a promotion. He wanted a second star on either side of his collar about as much as he wanted a third leg, but he was now officially a lieutenant-colonel. He was doing everything Colonel Travis W.W. Oliphant did before he went missing and more besides, so the powers that be seemed to have decided he deserved at least some of the vanished Colonel Oliphant’s rank.

Lieutenant-colonel wasn’t enough. To get the boneheads down in Tennessee to pay attention to him, he would have needed to be at least a lieutenant general-not a rank the Confederate States dished out every day.

“Listen, dammit,” Dover snarled over a bad telephone connection, “if you don’t get more ammo and gasoline up here pretty damn quick, you won’t need to worry about me pissing and moaning any more, that’s for sure.”

“You don’t know how bad things are down here,” said the colonel on the other end of the line. “The Yankees are bombing the shit out of the dams President Featherston built. We’ve got floods like you wouldn’t believe. Half the time we don’t have power, on account of they made so much of it. Roads are out, railroads are out-”

“If you don’t send us what we need to fight with, we’re out,” Dover interrupted. “You’ll be arguing with some damnyankee quartermaster, not me.” Some damnyankee quartermaster was enjoying the depot he’d put together outside of Covington. Nobody but nobody had dreamt the USA could move so fast.

“We’re trying,” the colonel said.

“You sure are,” Jerry Dover told him, but it went over his head. Dover would have bet on that. He went on, “This is a war, in case you didn’t notice…sir. If we don’t do it, we’re going to fucking lose.” He didn’t care what he said when he talked to a supplier. That was just as true when he talked to C.S. Army quartermasters as it had been when he talked to rascally butchers in Augusta.

“I am certain you are doing everything you can, Colonel,” said the officer down in Tennessee. “Why don’t you give me and my men credit for doing the same?”

Because from up here it looks like you’ve got your head up your ass. But Dover didn’t say that, though it was a damned near-run thing. What he did say was, “Get as much forward as you can. They’ve promised me they’ll hold on to Bowling Green no matter what.”

They’d also promised they would hold on to Covington no matter what. He’d believed them, which only proved anybody could be a fool now and then. He was more ready to evacuate and wreck this depot than he had been when the line lay farther north. Some Yankee writer once said, Trust everybody-but cut the cards. That struck Jerry Dover as good advice.

Even the colonel down in Tennessee, who had to worry about nothing worse than bombers and floods-mere details in Dover’s harried existence-could see they might have promised more than they could deliver. “Keep your options open,” he said, and hung up.

“Options. Right,” Dover said tightly. At the moment, he didn’t know whether to shit or go blind, and that about summed up his options. The western U.S. column was already down about even with Bowling Green. The eastern one was still northeast of his current center. In a way, that was good news. It meant that, for the time being, he could resupply both crumbling Confederate fronts. But it also meant both fronts were liable to converge on him here, or even behind him. If that happened…

If that happens, I have to move like a son of a bitch to save anything, Dover thought glumly. Take what I can, blow up what I can’t. He already knew what was what, what would go and what would go up in smoke.

If this turned into the front, he was liable to have to turn into a combat soldier to get free of it. He muttered to himself; like every other white man his age in the CSA, he’d done a spell in the trenches in the last war. He wasn’t eager to repeat it. But if the damnyankees got in his way, he would try his best to run them over.

The telephone jangled. If it was that officious idiot in Tennessee, telling him something wouldn’t show up because somebody’d lost the paperwork…“Dover here,” he growled, a note of warning in his voice.

“This here is Major Kirby Bramlette over by Elkton,” the caller said. Dover had to look at a map to find Elkton southeast of Hopkinsville, which had fallen to the USA only the day before. It was also definitely south of Bowling Green, which wasn’t good news. Bramlette sounded right on the edge of being frantic as he went on, “You got any more o’ them antibarrel rockets, the ones infantrymen can shoot off? Looks like every Yankee barrel in the world is heading right at me.”

“You’ll have some in a couple of hours, if U.S. fighters don’t shoot up my trucks on the way,” Dover answered.

“Sooner’d be better,” Bramlette said. “Two hours from now, I’m liable to be dead.” He didn’t say anything about pulling back. The Confederates did that only when they couldn’t help it.

“Fast as we can get there.” Dover hung up and ran outside, yelling for drivers. When he’d assembled half a dozen, he said, “Load up on antibarrel rockets and get ’em to Elkton on the double.”

“Where the fuck is Elkton?” one of them asked.

“Follow me. I’ll get you there.” By his accent, the man who spoke was from around these parts. You’d have to be, to know where Elkton was.

“Take your trucks to gate number nine,” Dover said. “Go in through there and make the first left you can.” He’d laid out the depot himself. He knew where everything was. If Major Bramlette needed cold-weather socks or prophylactics, he would have known where they were off the top of his head, too.

Confederate soldiers loaded the rockets and their stovepipe launchers onto the trucks. In the last war, Negroes would have done it. Not here, not now. The soldiers didn’t even grumble about nigger work. They just fetched and carried without a second thought. If blacks were working now, most of the soldiers working the depot could have been at the front with automatic rifles in their hands. That seemed obvious to Jerry Dover. The trouble he would land in if he said so out loud seemed even more obvious, so he kept his mouth shut.

Inside of half an hour, the trucks were on the way. Dover went back to his office and telephoned Major Bramlette. “Barring air strikes, they should get there in an hour or so. It’s what, about forty miles from here to where you’re at?” he said.

“Something like that, anyways,” Bramlette answered. “Thank you kindly, Colonel. You’ve done what you could. Now we just have to see if we can hold on that long.” As if to punctuate the comment, explosions came over the telephone line. All of a sudden, he didn’t have a connection. He swore, hoping the trouble was in the line and not because of a direct hit on Bramlette’s headquarters.

He didn’t find out till the trucks got back a little before sunset. “We delivered the rockets, sir,” said the head driver, a master sergeant named Stonewall Sloane. (Dover had seen his papers-that was his real name. Why his parents couldn’t have picked a different Confederate hero to name him after…Jerry Dover shrugged. How many babies born between 1934 and now were called Featherston? Too many-he was sure of that.)

“All right-you delivered them,” Dover said. Sloane nodded. He neither looked nor sounded happy. Dover asked the question he had to ask: “What went wrong?”

“Damnyankees had already shoved our guys out of Elkton by the time we got there, sir.” Stonewall Sloane paused to light a cigar. Dover had a cigarette going-but then, he usually did. The sergeant went on, “I hope the rockets can help us blow some of the Yankees to hell and gone. If they can’t…” He sent up gloomy smoke signals.

“Shit,” Dover said. “Whereabouts exactly did you make your delivery? Was it south of Elkton or east of it?”

“East, sir,” Sloane answered: a world of bad news in two words.

“Shit,” Dover said again. “They’re heading this way, then.”

“Don’t know if they want to take Bowling Green or get in behind it and cut it off,” Sergeant Sloane said. “They’ve been doing a lot of that crap lately. We did it in Ohio, so I reckon the United States learned their lessons from us.”

“Did they have to learn them so goddamn well?” Dover stubbed out his cigarette and lit another one. Stonewall Sloane managed a thin smile. After a deep, savage drag, Dover asked, “You think we’ll have to get out of town? The more time we have, the more stuff we’ll be able to save.”

“Sir, I honest to God don’t know,” Sloane replied. “If you told me a month ago the Yankees could come this far this fast, I would’ve told you you were out of your goddamn tree. Uh-meaning no disrespect.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Dover said dryly.

Stonewall Sloane sent him an appraising glance. The cigar twitched. “You’re all right, aren’t you?”

“Well, I try.”

“Yeah.” Sloane scratched his head. “Where was I? Oh, yeah. They’ve already done more than I reckoned they could, so who knows what the fuck they’re liable to do next? Do you want to take chances?”

Before Dover could answer, air-raid sirens wailed. “We’re going to take chances whether we want to or not,” he said, and grabbed his helmet and ran for the closest trench. Sergeant Sloane was right behind him.

Antiaircraft guns around the depot thundered. Dover was glad he had steel between his skull and the chunks of shrapnel that would start falling out of the sky any second now. You were just as dead if your own side killed you as you were any other way.

Fighter-bombers streaked by low overhead, the U.S. eagle in front of crossed swords plainly visible. One trailed fire and smoke. It slammed into the ground and blew up. “That’ll learn ’em!” Sloane yelled.

But other explosions came from the depot not far away. Some were single, others multiple: bombs touching off more explosions on the ground. What Jerry Dover had to say scuttled several commandments. He’d arranged ordnance in small lots with thick earthen dikes between them. That minimized the damage, but didn’t, couldn’t, stop it.

The surviving U.S. airplanes came back for another pass at the depot and the trucks, this time with their cannons and machine guns. Dover said something even worse. He yanked his.45 out of its holster and fired several shots at the U.S. warplanes. That did no good, of course. He’d known it wouldn’t. “Goddamn useless thing,” he growled in disgust.

“Antiaircraft guns aren’t doing a hell of a lot better,” Stonewall Sloane said.

“Fuck them, too,” Dover said. The veteran noncom blinked, then laughed. Dover wasn’t laughing. He was furious. “We ought to have something that really will shoot airplanes down, dammit. All these things do is make noise.” The guns, at the moment, were making a godawful racket.

“Rockets, maybe?” Sergeant Sloane didn’t sound as if he took that seriously, even if he was the one proposing it.

But Dover said, “Why the hell not? They’ve got ’em for barrels. Why not airplanes? They’re a lot easier to wreck.”

“Harder to hit, though,” Sloane said.

“That’s for the guys with the high foreheads and the thick glasses,” Dover said. “I bet we’ve got people working on it. I bet the damnyankees do, too. If they figure it out first, that’s bad news.” He scrambled out of the trench and trotted toward the depot to do what he could to control the damage-and to see how much damage there was to control. Right now, he couldn’t find much good news for the CSA.

Cassius skirted Milledgeville, Georgia, the way he skirted every town he approached. Milledgeville was a fair-sized place, with maybe 5,000 people in it. It was laid out with the idea that it would become the state capital-and it did, till brawling, bumptious Atlanta displaced it after the War of Secession. A sign on the outskirts bragged that Milledgeville was where Georgia legislators voted to leave the Union. Cassius didn’t think that was anything to be proud of.

What would life be like in the United States? It probably wouldn’t be good; he didn’t suppose life for Negroes was good anywhere. But it couldn’t be like this. He was skinny and dirty. He smelled bad-the only chances he got to wash were in streams he walked past. He was hungry most of the time.

And, at that, he didn’t have it so bad. He wasn’t in a camp. He didn’t know what his family was going through, not exactly. Nobody knew exactly except the people who got carted away. The only thing people on the outside knew was that the ones who got carted away didn’t come back.

Most Negroes in the cities had been rounded up and taken away. It was harder out in the countryside. They were more scattered, harder to get into one place with barbed wire all around it. Guerrillas scared some whites out in the country to death. Others, though, weren’t so bad. Quite a few let you do odd jobs in exchange for food and a place to sleep and maybe a dollar or two.

Some of the farms had women running them, all the menfolk gone to war. Cassius learned it was harder to get a handout or even a hearing at those places than at the ones with white men on them. Women on their own commonly carried shotguns or rifles, and didn’t want to listen to a hard-luck story. “Get lost before I call the sheriff,” they would say-either that or, “Get lost before I shoot.”

But they didn’t call the sheriff. In spite of an Augusta passbook, Cassius hadn’t had any trouble going where he pleased. If he stole, that might have been a different story. Except for trifles-a few eggs here, some matches there-he didn’t. His parents had raised him the right way. He wouldn’t have put it like that, not after the way he knocked heads with his father, but that was what it amounted to.

He stayed in the pine woods after getting run off a farm west of Milledgeville. With summer coming soon, nights were mild. Mosquitoes tormented him, but they would have done that anywhere except behind screens. He didn’t worry about animals; bears and cougars were hunted into rarity. People, on the other hand…

He’d already seen Mexican soldiers on the march. He made sure they didn’t see him, ducking into a stand of trees once and hiding behind a haystack another time. Those yellowish khaki uniforms made him angry-what were they doing in his country? He wouldn’t have got nearly so upset about butternut or gray.

That was his gut reaction, anyhow. When he thought about it, he laughed at himself. As if the Confederate States were his country, or any Negro’s country! The idea was ridiculous. And native whites would have been rougher on him or anyone else his color than these foreigners were.

He chopped wood for a farmer later that day. The blisters he’d got the first time he did it were starting to turn to calluses. The farmer gave him ham and grits and a big mug of homebrew. Making your own beer was against the law in Georgia, but plenty of people both white and black turned criminal on that score.

“You work good,” the farmer said, spitting a stream of tobacco juice.

“Thank you, suh,” Cassius answered.

As others had before him, the white man asked, “Want to stick around?” He gave Cassius a shrewd look. “Sooner or later, you’re gonna run into trouble wandering around the countryside-or else trouble’s gonna run into you.”

Cassius only shrugged. Whatever happened to him out here couldn’t be worse than what had happened to his father and mother and sister in Augusta. “Sorry, suh, but I got to be movin’ on,” he said.

“Whatever you want.” The farmer shrugged, too, but Cassius didn’t like the glint in his eye. He left a little earlier than he would have otherwise, and headed south where he had been going west. As soon as he got out of sight of the farmhouse, he took the first westward track he found. Luck was with him, because he came up to another farm just as the sun was going down. He scouted the place from the edge of the woods, and didn’t see or hear any dogs. When it got really dark, he sneaked into the haystack, which gave him a much better bed than bare ground would have.

He hadn’t fallen asleep yet when gunfire split the night: several bursts from submachine guns, with single shots from a pistol in between them. He wondered what that was all about. No, actually he didn’t wonder-he feared he knew. Had that farmer called the local sheriff or militia commander or whoever was in charge of the people with guns and said, “There’s an uppity nigger southbound from my place. Reckon you ought to take care of him”?

Deputies or Mexicans must have picked on the first Negro they saw heading south on that road. That black wasn’t Cassius, but they didn’t know or care-especially after he started shooting back at them. Cassius felt bad about snaring the other colored man in his troubles, and hoped the fellow got away.

If they were after me, they would’ve snagged me, he thought, shivering as he burrowed deeper into the sweet-smelling hay. If I didn’t notice that damn ofay looking all sly…

He woke up before sunrise, and got out of there before the farmer could come outside and discover him. Once he was back in the woods, he took off his clothes and made sure he brushed all the hay off of them. He didn’t want to look like somebody who had to sleep in a haystack, even if that was what he was-especially if that was what he was.

He heard gunfire again that afternoon: not just a little, the way he had the night before, but lots. Both sides had plenty of firepower and weren’t shy about using it. Now I know what war sounds like, Cassius thought, which only proved he’d never come anywhere near a real battlefield.

But this would do. He walked toward it, thinking-foolishly thinking-he would watch what was going on from a safe distance, as he might have watched a football game back in Augusta. Even the first bullet that came close enough for him to hear the crack! as it zipped past wasn’t enough to deter him. He got behind a pine tree and imagined he was safe.

Negro guerrillas held what had been a sharecropper village. Mexican soldiers were trying to push them out of it or kill them if they stayed inside. Hardly even noticing that he was doing it, Cassius leaned forward. This was more exciting than any football game he’d ever watched.

It stayed an exciting game till a Mexican took a bullet to the temple. The other side of his head exploded into red mush. His rifle fell from his hands as he crumpled to the ground. Even with that surely mortal wound, he didn’t die right away. He jerked and flopped and twitched, like a chicken that had just met the chopper.

Cassius gulped. He almost wished someone would shoot the Mexican again to make him hold still. No, this wasn’t a game, no matter what it looked like. People were really dying out there. When another bullet snapped past Cassius, he didn’t just flinch. He felt as if somebody’d jabbed an icy dagger into each kidney. This is what fear feels like, he thought.

And fear had an odor, too. He could smell it coming off of himself. He could probably smell it drifting over from the Mexican soldiers and their Negro foes. And smelling it only made him more afraid, at some level far below conscious thought.

He heard footfalls coming through the woods toward him. They made him afraid, too. They were all too likely to come from Francisco Jose’s men. And if the greasers spotted him, what would they do? They’d shoot him, that was what. He was a young Negro man. Of course they would think him an enemy.

And he was, even if he didn’t carry a Tredegar. His heart was with the embattled blacks in the little hamlet. Not only his heart, either. Before he knew what he was doing, he ran for those shacks as fast as he could go.

Bullets chewed up the ground under his feet. They cracked and whirred past his head. He didn’t know if the Mexicans or the Negroes were shooting at him. Both, probably. If the two sides weren’t so busy blazing away at each other, they might have paid him even more attention than they did, not that it was attention he was likely to live through.

He dove behind a crate, hoping everybody would forget about him. “Who the hell’re you?” one of the Negroes shouted at him.

“Name’s Cassius,” he answered, not that that told them much. “There’s soldiers in them trees I run out of.”

“Oh, yeah?” said the voice from behind him. “We can shift them fuckers, I reckon.”

They did, too. They had a couple of machine guns, and they didn’t seem short of ammunition for them. Shrieks from the woods said they’d scored at least a couple of hits. Nobody used the trees to outflank the hamlet, which the Mexicans had probably wanted to do.

Cassius lay very still behind the crate. The Mexicans seemed to forget he was there, which suited him fine. He didn’t want to remind them. After another half hour or so, the firing on both sides tapered off. “They’s goin’!” someone behind him shouted.

“Reckon you can come out now, whatever the hell your name was,” someone else added.

Wearily, Cassius got to his feet. A couple of Negro men with rifles in their hands showed themselves. One of them gestured to him. “Looks like you jus’ joined us,” the man said. He was short and wiry, with a knife scar pulling the left side of his mouth up into a permanent sneer. “Coulda had some trouble if them Mexicans got where they was goin’.”

“Looked that way to me,” Cassius said.

“You know anything about guns?” the scarfaced man asked.

“No, suh, but I reckon I can learn,” Cassius replied.

The older Negro nodded. “That’s a good answer. Now I got another question fo’ you: you take orders? Folks call me Gracchus.” He jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “I runs this outfit. You don’t like that, you hit the road. No hard feelin’s, but we don’t want nobody who’s out for hisself and not for all of us. The outfit gotta come first.”

“I’ll take orders,” Cassius said. “If you gave dumb ones, I reckon you’d be dead by now, not runnin’ things here.”

“Expect you’re right,” Gracchus said. “Well, my first order is, tell me about yourself. What’s your name again? Where you from?”

“I’m Cassius. I got out of Augusta when the ofays nabbed my folks.”

“How come they didn’t catch you, too?” Gracchus sounded coldly suspicious. Cassius wondered why. Then he realized the rebel leader might fear he was bait, and would betray the whole band when he saw the chance.

“They went to church,” he answered truthfully. “Me, I stayed home.”

Gracchus nodded again. “God didn’t help ’em much, did He?”

“You reckon there’s a God?” Cassius said. “I got a hard time believin’ any more. Either God likes ofays, or there ain’t none. I got to choose between a God that loves Jake Featherston an’ one that ain’t there, I know which way I go.”

For the first time since he shouted out his warning, Gracchus eyed him with something approaching approval. “Maybe you’s all right after all,” he said.

“Give me a rifle. Teach me what to do with it,” Cassius said. “Reckon I show you how all right I am.”