Walk in Hell

XIII

“What’s the matter, Ma?” Edna Semphroch asked. “Lord, you ought to be dancing out in the street at how bully things are, but you’ve done nothing but mope the past month.” She dried a last cup and set it in the cupboard. “We’ve got more money than I ever thought I’d see in all my born days, and we haven’t seen hide nor hair of that awful Bill Reach since the Rebs hauled him off. I don’t miss him, neither. He gave me the horrors.” She shuddered.

“I don’t miss him, either,” Nellie Semphroch answered. She was drying silverware, and threw a fork into the drawer with unnecessary violence. “I wish to God I’d never set eyes on him.”

She waited for Edna to start prying again about who Reach was, who he had been, and what he’d meant to her. She’d fended off those questions for months now. What Edna would learn if she got the true answer would not only make her wilder, it would also probably make her despise Nellie.

But, for once, Edna took a different tack tonight. She said, “Is Mr. Jacobs across the street all right? You ain’t been over there for a while now, and you were going every few days for a long time.”

If Edna had noticed that, had some alert Confederate intelligence officer noticed it, too? Nellie grimaced; she wondered if she even cared. She dried a teaspoon. “As far as I know, he’s fine,” she answered, doing her best to sound unconcerned, indifferent.

Edna looked at her out of the corner of her eye. “Were you sweet on him, Ma?” she asked in a tone that invited woman-to-woman confidences. “Is that what it is? Were you sweet on him and you had a quarrel?”

“We’ve never had a quarrel,” Nellie snapped, all pretense of indifference vanishing before she could try to keep it. The irony was that she had discovered she was sweet on Hal Jacobs-and he on her-bare moments before she discovered he was working for Bill Reach, whom she still loathed with the deep and abiding loathing that clung to every part of her life before she’d met Edna’s father.

Too clever for her own good, Edna noticed the hot denial at once, both for what it said and for what it didn’t. “It’s all right, Ma, it really is,” she said tolerantly. “You know I wouldn’t mind if you found somebody. Pa’s been dead so long, I don’t hardly remember him anyways. And Mr. Jacobs seems nice enough, even if-” She stopped. “He seems nice enough.”

Even if he’s old and not very handsome. Nellie could read between the lines, too. She sighed. Edna wanted license for herself, and was consistent enough, maybe even generous enough, to grant the same license to everyone else, even to her mother. That Nellie might not want it never occurred to her. But then, she didn’t know Nellie had had far too much license far too young. Nellie hoped she would never find out.

“You really ought to make up with him, Ma,” Edna said. “I mean-” She stopped again. This time, she didn’t amend anything. She didn’t need to amend anything. Nellie could figure out what she meant. You’re not getting any younger. You’re not going to catch anything better.

“Maybe I will,” Nellie said with another sigh. She hadn’t brought Hal Jacobs any information gleaned at the coffeehouse since she found out to whom he’d been giving it. One reason-one big reason-the place flourished as it did was that his connections helped it get food and drink hard to come by in hungry, Confederate-occupied Washington, D.C. If she didn’t do anything for him, why should he do anything for her?

I’ll do this for you, and you’ll pay me off, Nellie thought. How was that different from the sweaty bargains she’d made in little, narrow rooms back when she was too much younger than Edna? “Damned if I know,” she muttered.

“What did you say, Ma?” Edna asked.

“Nothing.” The coffeehouse had become so popular with the Rebels, they’d probably help keep her in supplies if the shoemaker across the street didn’t. But that felt like an illicit bargain, too. They hadn’t been the kindest nor the gentlest occupiers, and a good many of them frequented her place for no better reason than the hope of seducing Edna. Nellie was sure of that, too.

And, to make matters worse, who could guess how long the Confederates were going to hold on to Washington? If she aligned herself with them now, what would the reckoning be when the United States reclaimed their capital? She thought that was going to happen, and perhaps not in the indefinite future. Oh, the Confederates bragged about and made much of what a submersible of theirs had done in the Chesapeake Bay, but was that anything more than a pinprick when you measured it against the hammering U.S. forces were giving the Rebs in Maryland? She didn’t think so.

“You ought to go over there, Ma,” Edna said. “He’s a nice man.”

“Tomorrow.” Nellie didn’t often yield an argument to her daughter, but most of their arguments were about what Edna was doing, not about what she was doing herself. She turned off the gaslight in the kitchen. “It’s late. Let’s go on up to bed.”

The next morning, she did cross the street to Mr. Jacobs’shop. Dirt and gravel had been shoveled into the hole the U.S. bomb made in the street; the Rebs weren’t going to be bothered with proper pavement. She kicked at the gravel. Watching the little stones spin away from her shoe, she wished she could kick a lot more things.

It was early. She tried the doorknob anyway. She wasn’t surprised when it turned in her hand. Hal Jacobs didn’t sleep late. The bell above the door chimed. The shoemaker stood behind the counter, a hammer in his hand. His eyes widened a little beneath bushy eyebrows. His smile showed teeth not too bad, not too good. “Hello,” he said, and then, more warily, “Widow Semphroch.”

That he didn’t use her Christian name said he’d noticed how she’d not been in lately. “You can still call me Nellie, Hal,” she said.

He nodded. “Good morning, Nellie,” he said. He coughed a couple of times. “I was afraid I had offended you the last time you were here.”

Afraid he’d offended her by kissing her, she meant. “No, that’s all right,” she answered. As she had with Edna, she spoke before she’d fully figured out what she should have said. Claiming offense would have given her the perfect excuse for having avoided him. Now she couldn’t use it. She found a question of her own: “What have you heard about Bill Reach?”

He made a face. “In prison. In a Confederate prison as a burglar. This had to do with you, didn’t it?” She found she didn’t like him scowling at her. But after a moment, he went on, “But you knew him some time ago, is that not true?” He looked at her with mixed kindness and suspicion.

“I kind of knew him, yes, you might say so.” Nellie bit her lip. She wouldn’t have recognized Reach now, any more than she would have recognized any of the other men she’d kind of known. But he’d recognized her, and presumed on old…acquaintance. “I thought he was just a tramp. And I thought-” But she couldn’t say that.

“You thought, perhaps, he did not want to treat you as a lady should be treated,” Jacobs said. Nellie nodded, grateful for the graceful phrase. The cobbler sighed. “He did have an eye for pretty women. I sometimes worried it would get him in trouble. I did not think it would get him into this sort of trouble.”

“I wish to heaven he’d left me alone,” Nellie said, which was nothing but the truth. “Why he had to come around after all these years-”

“No one is perfect.” Hal Jacobs tugged at a stray curl of gray hair that had slid over the top of one ear. “You really must dislike him very much.”

“Why do you say that?” Nellie asked, in lieu of screaming, I hated him. I still hate him the same way I hate all the other men who used me, and all the men who want to use Edna, too.

“Because if you were not embarrassed to come here for what we did, the only other reason you would not come here-the only other reason I can think of, anyhow-is that you dislike Bill Reach.”

“Well, yes, that probably had something to do with it,” Nellie admitted. “If Bill Reach was an angel, I’d think hard about rooting for the devil.”

Hal Jacobs looked distressed. “But you must not say this! Without him, the United States would not know half of what we’ve learned of the doings of the enemy from the Atlantic to the mountains.”

“Without me, you wouldn’t know half of that stuff,” Nellie returned with no small pride.

“I admit it,” Jacobs said. “I have been very worried here. I-”

He had to break off then, because a Confederate corporal brought in a marching boot with a broken heel. “Kin I have it this afternoon?” he drawled. “We-uns is a-movin’ out of here tomorrow.”

“I’ll have it for you, sir, I promise. By two o’clock.” Jacobs was, no doubt, noting the regimental number and state abbreviation the corporal wore on his collar. Word that that regiment was on the move might well head for Philadelphia before this afternoon. Confirming that, the shoemaker waited till the soldier was gone and then said, “As you see, Wid-Nellie, I have my own sources of information.”

“Yes, I see that,” she said. “And I see you’re managing to use ’em without having anything to do with Bill Reach. As far as I’m concerned, you can go right on doing that. If he rots in jail, I won’t shed a tear.”

“What did he do to you, to make you hate him so?” Jacobs asked. Nellie set her jaw and said nothing. The shoemaker let out a long, sad sigh. “Whatever it was, he does not deserve these feelings you have about him. He kept track of everything, sorted it out, put pieces of the puzzle together…If any one man kept the Rebs from reaching the Delaware and bombarding Philadelphia, he is the one.”

“A few hundred thousand soldiers had something to do with it, too, I think,” Nellie answered tartly. She looked down at the dingy rug on the dingy floor of the shoemaker’s shop. “Most important thing I’ve heard in the past week is that the Rebs think they’re going to be getting barrels-or maybe plans for barrels, I’m not sure which-from England sometime soon. I think they’re talking about barrels, anyway. Sometimes they call ’em tanks instead.”

“That’s what the English call them,” Jacobs said. “Worth knowing. I suppose we should have expected as much.” He did not sound very surprised or very interested. Maybe he wasn’t. Maybe he just didn’t want her to know how important her information was. Then he inclined his head in what was almost a bow, part of the old-time courtliness she enjoyed with him. “I hope you will come in again on such matters. And if you wish to come in for other reasons, I want you to know I am always glad to see you.”

Nellie felt her cheeks grow hot. He meant he wanted to kiss her again. She’d liked it when he’d kissed her before. She wasn’t used to being kissed any more, or to enjoying it when she was. He might even have meant he wanted to do more than kiss her. The idea didn’t disgust her as much as she thought it should.

Flustered, she said, “We’ll have to see,” and hurried out of there as fast as she could go.

A Confederate major stood outside the door to the coffeehouse. “Ah, here you are,” he said, tipping his cap. “I looked inside, but I didn’t see anyone.”

“That’s odd.” Nellie opened the door for him. The bell jingled merrily. “Please, sir, come in. My daughter should be here.” She raised her voice: “Edna!”

“Coming, Ma!” Edna called from upstairs, and came down as fast as anyone could have wanted.

“Get the major here his coffee and whatever else he wants,” Nellie said severely. “If we’re open for business, I want you down here ready to work. We lose customers if you aren’t.”

“Yes, Ma. I’m sorry, Ma.” Edna hurried over to the Rebel. “What can I get for you today, sir?”

“Cup of coffee and a fried-egg sandwich,” the major answered. To Nellie, he added, “It’s all right, ma’am. Don’t you worry about it.”

“I do worry about it,” Nellie said, “and it’s not all right.” But she let it drop; Edna had the coffee on the table for the major in jig time, and was frying eggs and slicing bread with practiced efficiency.

The bell jingled again. A couple of lieutenants came in. One of them leered disgracefully at Edna. Nellie made a point of serving that pair herself. Breakfast business was slower than usual, though. After an hour or so had gone by, the place was for the moment empty.

Nellie took advantage of that for a trip to the bathroom. When she came out, Edna was setting a cup of coffee in front of Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid. The big lieutenant nodded to Nellie. “Morning, ma’am,” he said, polite as usual.

“Good morning,” she answered coolly. She wished he wouldn’t come around here. He wanted to do more than leer at Edna; he’d made that plain. And she, young and foolish as she was, wanted to let him. Nellie shook her head. That wouldn’t happen, not if she had anything to do with it.

Suddenly, she stiffened. She hadn’t heard the doorbell ring. She should have heard it; the bathroom door was thin. She usually heard customers come in when she was in there. If she hadn’t…if she hadn’t, Edna had been upstairs before, and probably Kincaid had, too. Did Edna look smug?

She did. Without a doubt, she did. She looked like a cat that had fallen into a pitcher of cream. And Lieutenant Kincaid…As always, his eyes followed Edna. Still, that gaze was different now. He didn’t look as if he wondered and dreamt of what she was like under her clothes. He looked as if he knew.

Nellie’s hands balled into fists. Edna saw that, and laughed silently. Nellie wanted to throw a cup at her daughter. But what could she do? She couldn’t prove a thing. Edna had made sure of that. All in a rush, for the first time in her life, Nellie felt old.

Arthur McGregor came in from the fields. The sun was at last dipping toward the northwestern horizon. He’d been up since it rose, or a little before. Manitoba summer days were long. He thanked God for that. Otherwise, he wouldn’t even have come close to doing all the things he had to do if he wanted to bring in a crop. He couldn’t do them all, not now. With the long days, he could come close.

As he walked in, Julia came out of the barn. “I’ve taken care of the livestock, Pa,” she said. She was thirteen now, shooting up fast as a weed, tall as her mother or maybe even taller. He shook his head in bemusement. She wasn’t a little girl any more. Where had the time gone?

“That’s good,” he told her. “That’s very good. One more thing I don’t have to worry about, and I’ve got plenty.”

“I know,” she answered seriously-she’d always been serious, no matter how little. McGregor sometimes thought she’d used up all the seriousness in the family, so that her sister Mary ended up with none. Julia went on, “I know I can’t do as much as Alexander could, but I’m doing all I can.”

“I know you are,” her father told her. The whole family was doing all it could. In spite of themselves, his wide shoulders slumped. When the damned Americans had arrested Alexander, he’d known at once how big a hole it would leave in the family. What he’d realized only gradually was how big a hole not having his son left in the daily routine of the farm.

He made himself straighten. You did what you had to do, or as much of it as you could possibly do. His nostrils twitched. “Whatever Ma’s cooking in there, it sure smells good.”

“Chicken stew,” Julia said.

McGregor’s eyes went to the chopping block between the barn and the house. The stains on it were fresh, and the hatchet stood at an angle different from the way it had this morning. He smiled and nodded at his older daughter. “Good,” he said. “Sticks to the ribs.”

The inside of the farmhouse, as always, was spotless, immaculate. McGregor wondered how Maude managed to keep it that way. She’d taken on extra work, too, with Alexander gone. The weeding in the potato patch, for instance, was in her hands, because no one else had time for it.

And here came Mary, a rag in her hand, a look of fierce concentration on her face, the tip of her tongue peeking out of the corner of her mouth. Whenever she saw dust on anything, she pounced on it like a kitten pouncing on a cricket-and looked to be enjoying herself like a kitten, too.

“Pa!” she said indignantly. “You didn’t wipe your feet very well.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and meant it. Maude would have given him a hard time about that, too. He went back out and did it better. Seeing that he’d satisfied Mary-who would have let him know if he hadn’t-he walked past her into the kitchen.

His wife looked up from the stew she was stirring. “You look worn to a nub,” she said, worry in her voice.

“So do you,” Arthur McGregor answered. They smiled at each other, wanly. He poured water from a pitcher over his hands and splashed some onto his face. Maude handed him a towel with which to dry himself. That was all the washing he did. Finding time for a bath even once a week wasn’t easy.

“Supper soon,” Maude said.

“Good.” Walking in from the wheatfields, McGregor had thought he was too tired to be hungry. The first whiff of stew convinced him otherwise. He was ravenous as a wolf, and his stomach, empty since dinner long, long before, was growling like one, too.

He sat down in a chair in the front room to wait, and pulled out a copy of Ivanhoe with which to spend those few minutes: the first rest he’d had since dinner, too. The book was old, the binding starting to work loose from the pages. It had come out here with him from Ontario, and felt more like a companion than a novel. He sighed. He’d found himself in a world harsher and more merciless than the one Sir Walter Scott’s hero knew.

Over the stew, Maude said, “Biddy Knight came by in the buggy this afternoon, while you were out working.”

“Did she?” McGregor said. “I hope there weren’t any Americans on the road to see her.” Not least because he’d known Biddy’s son, Alexander was in the Rosenfeld gaol now. But Biddy had a harder burden than that to bear: her boy was dead, executed by Yankee bullets. “What did she want?”

“Social call,” his wife answered lightly-too lightly. “Her husband would take it kindly if you dropped in on him one of these days.”

“Don’t know that I want to.” McGregor, as usual, was blunt. “If the Americans know we visit those people, it won’t do Alexander any good.” Maude nodded. Julia looked angry-she’d been angry at the Americans since the day they invaded. For once, something got past Mary, who was playing with the wishbone.

But McGregor hadn’t been so blunt as he might have been. He feared Jimmy Knight’s father was cooking up some kind of scheme to hurt the Americans, and wanted him to be a part of it. He didn’t aim to join any plots. However much he despised the United States and everything they stood for, U.S. soldiers could kill his son any time they chose. That was a powerful argument in favor of prudence.

When Maude said, “Maybe you’re right,” he just nodded. Whenever his wife and he saw things the same way, they weren’t likely to be on the wrong track.

While the womenfolk washed dishes, he indulged himself in the luxury of a pipe. It wasn’t much of a luxury, not with the vile U.S. tobacco Henry Gibbon had to stock these days, but it was better than nothing. McGregor sighed for lost Virginia and North Carolina leaf as he paged through Ivanhoe. Scott made war feel glorious, nothing like the squalid reality that had roared past the farm.

The kitchen went dark. Kerosene was in short supply these days, too; no lamp ever burned in an unoccupied room. “Let’s go outside, then upstairs to bed,” Maude said. Mary’s yawn was big as the world.

McGregor was the last to use the outhouse. By the time he got back in, his younger daughter was already snoring. “Saxons,” he muttered as he pulled off his boots. “Saxons in a country the Normans stole from them.”

“What are you talking about?” his wife said. But she was puzzled for only a moment. “Oh. That’s right. You’ve been reading Ivanhoe again.”

He nodded and undid his overalls. They were old, and hardly blue at all any more; the fabric, softened by many washings, conformed perfectly to the shape of his body. “Living in a land that had been theirs, and then somebody took it away. How did they stand it? How could they?”

Maude sighed. “You’re going to break your heart, Arthur, if you dwell on things you can’t do anything about. Getting Alexander home, we can do something about that. Maybe we can. I pray to God every night we can. But getting Canada back, that’s too big for the likes of us.”

“It shouldn’t be,” he declared. But half of that-more than half-was Sir Walter Scott speaking through him, and he was wise enough to understand as much.

If he hadn’t been, Maude would have nailed it down tight: “If you don’t think so, why didn’t you want to go see poor Jimmy Knight’s father? Sounds like he’s going to try to do something-”

“Stupid,” he finished for her. She nodded; he hadn’t meant it for a joke, and she hadn’t taken it for one. She blew out the lamp, plunging the bedroom into blackness. No moon, not tonight, and no town close by, either. Sometimes, when all the guns up at the front were going at once, that glow would flicker on the horizon: the Northern Lights of death. But the guns were quiet tonight, too, or as quiet as they ever got.

Still in his union suit, McGregor slid under the covers. Afterwards, he didn’t know whether he first reached for Maude or she for him. After being married so long, after working so hard every day, desire was a flame that guttered, and sometimes guttered low. But it had never quite gone out, and, like any guttering flame, sometimes flared high, too.

Neither one of them undressed. They were almost as formal with each other as they would have been with strangers. He kissed her carefully, knowing he hadn’t had time to shave in the past couple of days, knowing also he would rasp her face raw if he wasn’t careful.

His hand closed on her breast through the cotton nightshirt she wore. She sighed. He squeezed her nipple. It stiffened against the soft fabric. He did the same with her other breast. They were still firm after nursing three children-and, in any case, in the darkness she was always a bride and he a bridegroom ever so glad to be out of his uncomfortable fancy suit and the top hat he’d never had on a day of his life before or since.

He reached under the hem of the long nightshirt. Her legs slid apart for him. His hands were hard with endless labor, and she-she was softer there than anywhere else. Of themselves, her legs drifted wider. When her breath began to come short and quick, he stopped what he was doing and unbuttoned the union suit with fingers clumsy not only from work but from desire. He poised himself above her. The mattress rocked, ever so slightly. She was nodding, urging him to hurry, something she would never have done with words.

She gasped when he entered her, and soon shuddered beneath him. He went on, intent on what he was doing-and also too tired to be able to do it quickly. She began to gasp again, her arms tightened around his back, her hips moving no matter how unladylike motion at such times was. She let out a small, involuntary moan at about the same time joyous fire poured through him.

He rolled off her almost at once, and set his underwear to rights. “Good night,” she said, turning onto her side to get ready to sleep.

“Good night,” he answered. They always said that. He kept wondering if there shouldn’t be something more. But if there was more, their bodies had said it. For a little while, he hadn’t thought about anything, not even Alexander. But making love didn’t make trouble go away; it just shoved the trouble to one side. He brooded, but not for long. Sleep shoved trouble to one side, too.

In the morning, though, the sun would rise. The trouble would still be there.

George Enos slapped at a mosquito. He killed it-he squashed it flat, smearing red guts across his forearm. “That means it’s bitten somebody,” Wayne Pitchess said. “That’s blood in there.”

“Of course it’s bitten somebody, for God’s sake.” Enos rolled his eyes. “You think I squashed it because it was throwing pillows at me?”

The Punishment lay at anchor a few miles beyond Clarksville, Tennessee. George didn’t like lying at anchor. He looked to the south, to the hills below which the Cumberland flowed. Somewhere out there, the Rebs were liable to have a gun waiting to start throwing shells at the river monitor, and a moving target was harder to hit than a stationary one.

What worried him more than anything else was that monitors regularly tied up here: so regularly that the locals-the colored locals, anyhow-had run up a couple of shanties by the riverside to cater to Yankee sailors’ needs-or their desires, anyhow. If you were off duty, and if your commanding officer was in a good mood, you could row over to the shanties, eat fried chicken or roast pork, drink some horrible homemade rotgut that tasted as if it should have gone into a kerosene lamp instead of a human being, or get your ashes hauled in the crib next door.

George had eaten the food, which was pretty good. He’d drunk the whiskey, and awakened the next morning with a head that felt like the Punishment’s boiler at forced draft. He hadn’t laid his money down for any of the colored women, not yet. The sailors who had gone into the shabby little makeshift whorehouse came out with stories of how ugly the girls were. That hadn’t stopped a lot of them from going back.

That was another reason he wished the Punishment would go upstream or down. He didn’t want to be unfaithful to Sylvia, or the top part of his mind didn’t. But he’d been away from her and without a woman for a long time now. If he went over to one of those shacks for some pork ribs and had himself a glass or two of that godawful bad whiskey, maybe he wouldn’t care how ugly the whores were supposed to be or how much he missed Sylvia. Sometimes you just wanted to do it so badly, you…

He found himself fondling the curve of the water jacket on his machine gun as if it were Sylvia’s breast-or, for that matter, the breast of one of the colored women in that shack. He jerked his hand away from the green-gray painted iron as if it had become red-hot, or as if everyone on the monitor could see what was on his mind.

He went back to work, stripping and cleaning the machine gun with the same dogged persistence he might have shown trawling for haddock in the North Atlantic. He wished he were trawling for haddock in the North Atlantic, or would have wished it had the ocean not been full of warships and commerce raiders and submarines, all of which looked on a fishing boat as a tasty snack.

And keeping the machine gun in perfect order didn’t only distract him from thoughts of Sylvia (though, when he thought on how he’d rubbed the cooling jacket, it hadn’t distracted him much, had it?); it also made his coming through a fight alive more likely. He approved of that.

But, as the sun began to slide down the sky in the afternoon, three men made for one of the Punishment’s boats to improve their outlook on life. One of them called to George: “Come on, have a few with us.”

The deck officer was standing close by. Moltke Donovan was a fresh-faced lieutenant who took his duties very seriously. One of those duties was keeping his men in top fighting trim, and that meant, every now and then, letting them go off on a toot. Lieutenant Kelly would probably have said no. His replacement smiled and said, “Go ahead, Enos. That machine gun’s in better shape than when they tore it out of its crate.”

“Yes, sir,” George said, if not happily, then without sackcloth and ashes, too. He set down the rag, stuck the little screwdriver into a loop on his belt, and hurried for the boat.

As he clambered in, one of the other sailors said, “I know you got money in your pocket, on account of you were lucky last night.”

“Lucky, hell,” Enos said indignantly. “That was skill, Grover, nothing else but.”

“Skill, my foot,” Grover retorted. “Anybody who draws three cards and comes out holding a flush shouldn’t play poker with honest people. You ought to go looking for wallets instead.”

Said in a different tone of voice, that would have been an invitation to brawl. As things were, it was only rueful mourning over lost cash. George said, “Well, all right, maybe I was lucky.” Laughing, they rowed across the Cumberland to the waiting shacks.

They tied up the boat at a bush by the edge of the river, there being no other wharf: till the war, this hadn’t been a place where anyone stopped. But it was a place where people stopped now. George smelled ribs cooking in some kind of spicy sauce. He hadn’t known he was hungry, but he knew it now. He scrambled out onto the mud of the riverbank and hurried toward the shack.

“Good day to you, gentlemens,” said the colored fellow who ran the place. His name was Othello. He grinned, showing white teeth all the whiter for being set in a black, black face. “Got me some barbecue cookin’, best you gwine find this side o’ the Kentucky Smoke House.”

He spoke as if that were some kind of touchstone. Maybe it was, but it didn’t touch George. Still, he said, “All I know about Kentucky is that we’re on this side of it. And all I know about that meat is that it smells better than anything that ever came out of the galley.”

To that, Grover and the other two sailors-Albert and Stanley-added loud, profane agreement. Othello grinned again, and served up great slabs of sizzling-hot meat. Barbecue wasn’t something Enos had known back in Boston, but, he thought, it was something he could get used to.

Othello had rags for napkins and sometimes eked out his mismatched, battered china with box lids. None of that mattered. “This pig died happy,” George declared, and again no one argued with him.

“You boys want somethin’ to wash that there down?” Othello asked, looking sly. Cumberland water wasn’t so bad. Next to the water of the Mississippi, Cumberland water was pretty damn fine. But the jars the cook displayed, though they’d come out of the Cumberland and were dripping to prove it, hadn’t been in there to fill with water, only to keep cool.

Grover shook his head. “God only knows why we drink that panther sweat,” he said. “I could get the same feeling hittin’ myself in the head with a hammer six or eight times, and it’d be cheaper.”

“Taste better, too,” Stanley said. But when Othello set a jar on the rickety table around which the sailors sat, nobody asked him to take it away. Nobody threw the cups and mugs he gave them at him, either. They paid him, poured the deadly-pale whiskey, and drank it down.

“Jesus,” George wheezed when he could speak again. Another mug of that, he thought, and he was liable to know Jesus face to face-and, in the mood he’d be in, he’d probably want to wrestle. He drank the second mug. Jesus didn’t appear, and he didn’t die. Tomorrow morning, he might want to, but not now.

A colored woman walked into the shack. All she wore was a thin cotton shift. When she was standing between anybody looking at her and a source of light, the shape of her body was easy to make out.

“Boys,” she said, “if you done spent all your money here, my friends and me, we is gonna be powerful disappointed in y’all.”

Othello laughed. George didn’t know whether he got a rakeoff from the whores who’d set up shop next door, but that laugh made him think so. “Mehitabel, I left ’em with somethin’,” he said. “You kin git yo’ share.” He made no bones about being there for any other reason than skinning the men from the Punishment or any other U.S. river monitors that came by. And if the Confederate Navy made it back to this stretch of the Cumberland, he’d skin them, too.

Mehitabel placed herself so she was displayed to best advantage. George wished he hadn’t let that second mug of whiskey char its way to his stomach. He wasn’t thinking about Sylvia now, any more than a stallion thought of anything when you put him in with a mare in season.

He got up from the table. The other sailors shouted bawdy advice. Rolling her big hips, the whore led him out of one shack toward the other. In broad daylight, she might as well not have been wearing that shift. She sure as hell wasn’t wearing anything underneath it.

George’s heart drummed in his chest. His breath whistled in his throat. That was what he thought at first, with rotgut half stunning his senses. But he knew the sound of incoming shells in his gut, not just in his head, which wasn’t working very well right then.

He threw himself flat-not on top of the whore, but to the ground. The roar of the explosions stunned him. Mehitabel screamed like a cat with its tail in a door. Dirt flew as shells smashed into the soft ground south of the Cumberland. Great columns of water leaped from shells landing in the Cumberland. And, to George’s horror, two enormous columns of smoke and flame sprang from the Punishment as one shell struck her near the stern, the other square amidships.

More shells walked across the Cumberland toward him. Some of the water they kicked up splashed down onto him and onto Mehitabel, plastering the thin shift to her rounded contours. Enos didn’t care about that. He didn’t care about anything except approaching death and the fate of his crewmates.

The shells stopped falling before they reached the north bank of the Cumberland. He looked out toward the Punishment. The river monitor was burning and sinking fast. A moment later, as flame reached the magazines, it stopped burning and exploded. Mehitabel’s mouth was open as wide as it would go, which meant she had to be screaming, but George couldn’t hear a thing.

The heat of the fireball scorched his face. When at last it faded, twenty feet or so of the bow of the Punishment stuck up out of the river like a tombstone. The rest of the monitor was gone. A couple of bodies and a few pieces of bodies floated in the water, food for the snappers.

Stanley and Albert and Grover came out of the shack where they’d been drinking. They looked as bad as Enos felt. He suddenly realized he wasn’t drunk any more. Horror and terror had scorched the whiskey out of him.

He also realized, looking at his crewmates, that they were the only four Yankee sailors in hostile country, and that none of them carried anything more lethal than a belt knife. Absurdly, he wished he hadn’t wasted so much time on that machine gun when all it turned out to be good for was getting blown up.

“Get into bed this minute, do you hear me?” Sylvia Enos snapped at George, Jr., punctuating her words with a whack on his fanny.

As nothing else would have, that convinced him she meant what she said. “Good night, Mama!” he exclaimed, and planted a large, wet kiss on her cheek. He hurried off into the bedroom, humming an artillery march.

Sylvia looked down at the palm of her hand. It still stung, which meant his behind had to sting, too. He hadn’t even noticed, except that the swat had reminded him of what he needed to do. She stared after him. Was she raising a little boy or training a horse?

Mary Jane had peacefully gone to bed an hour before. By the haggard look on Brigid Coneval’s face when Sylvia had picked up her children, the reason Mary Jane was peaceful in the evening was that she’d raised hell all afternoon, and worn herself out doing it.

It wasn’t even nine o’clock yet. An hour to myself, Sylvia thought. I can read a book. I can write a letter. I can just sit here and think about how tired I am. That last sounded particularly good to her.

She’d sat for about five minutes when someone knocked on the door. That should have been the signal for George, Jr., to come bounding out of the bedroom, demanding to know what was going on. But he didn’t: only soft, steady breathing came from there, not a little boy. Well, he’d been raising hell all afternoon, too; he must have run down as soon as his head hit the pillow.

Sylvia laughed to herself as she walked to the door. Try as she would, she had the devil of a time getting any peace and quiet. Here was somebody wanting to borrow some molasses or salt, or to tell her the latest scandal of the apartment house, or to give her some cookies or…a little community in its own right, the building was a busy place.

She opened the door. Standing there was no one she knew, but a youngster a year too young to do a proper job of raising the downy, fuzzy excuse for a mustache he had on his upper lip. He wore a green uniform, darker than the Army green-gray, with brass buttons stamped “WU.” “Mrs. Enos?” he said, and, at her automatic nod, went on, “Telegram for you, ma’am.”

Numbly, she accepted the envelope. Numbly, she signed for it. Numbly, she closed the door as the delivery boy hurried away. And, numbly, she opened the envelope with shaking fingers. It was, as she’d feared, from the Navy Department. REGRET TO INFORM YOU, she read, and a low moan came from her throat, THAT YOUR HUSBAND, ABLE SEAMAN GEORGE ENOS, IS LISTED AS MISSING IN EXPLOSION OF USS PUNISHMENT. NO FURTHER INFORMATION AVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. YOU WILL BE INFORMED DIRECTLY SHOULD HE BE FOUND OR CONFIRMED LOST. The printed signature was that of the Secretary of the Navy.

She stared at the telegram till the words were only shapes on paper, shapes without meaning, without sense. But it did not help. The meaning had already been imparted, and lay inside her mind like an icy spear, piercing and freezing everything it touched. She crumpled the flimsy yellow sheet of paper. She felt crumpled, used and used up and thrown away by something bigger than herself, something bigger than the whole country, something eating the world. It was blind and sloppy, and it would not stop until it had its fill.

Her body knew what to do. Her mind did not fight it when it set the alarm on the clock by the bed, undressed itself, and lay down. It tried to make itself go to sleep, too. It knew how tired it was. But her mind had something to say about that, and said it, loud and emphatically.

She lay and lay and lay, mind spinning useless like a trolley wheel on an icy track. Convinced she would not sleep at all, she closed her eyes to look at the darkness inside her eyelids instead of the different darkness of the ceiling. She tried to guess when it was four, when five, when six and time to rise.

She jerked in horror when the alarm went off. She had fallen asleep after all. She wished she’d had a moment’s forgetfulness on first getting up, but no. She knew. As she had after the telegram arrived, she let her body do what needed doing, and roused her children, fed them breakfast, and took them over to Brigid Coneval’s apartment almost without conscious thought.

“Are you all right, dearie?” Mrs. Coneval asked. Her husband was in the Army. “You look a bit peaked, you do.”

“It’s-nothing,” Sylvia said. She kissed her children and left for work. Brigid Coneval stared after her, shaking her head.

Mechanically, Sylvia boarded the trolley. Mechanically, she rode to the right stop. Mechanically, she got off. Mechanically, she punched in. And, mechanically, she headed for her machine.

The mechanism broke when she saw Isabella Antonelli, or rather when her friend saw her. “Sylvia!” Isabella exclaimed, recognizing the dazed, haggard face staring at her for what it was. “Your husband, your Giorgio. Is he-?”

“Missing.” Sylvia forced the word out through numb lips. “I got-the telegram-last night…” She started to cry. She should have been working already. “I’m sorry, but-” She dissolved again.

Isabella Antonelli came over and wrapped her arms around Sylvia, as Sylvia might have done for Mary Jane had her little daughter broken a favorite doll. “Oh, my friend,” Isabella said. “I am so sorry he is gone.”

“Missing,” Sylvia said. “The telegram said missing.”

“I will pray for you,” Isabella answered. She said nothing more than that. Missing was a forlorn hope, and one all too likely to sink on the sea of truth. She knew that. Sylvia knew it, too. She would not have admitted knowing it, not if her own life depended on that admission.

Mr. Winter came limping along to see that the day shift’s run was beginning as it should. When he saw the two women huddled together between their machines, he hurried over to them. “Here, what’s this?” he asked, his voice not angry but not calm, either. For him, the line came first, everything else afterwards. “What’s going on?”

Sylvia tried to answer and could not. Calmly-with the sort of calm that comes from having experienced too much rather than not enough-Isabella Antonelli spoke for her: “Her husband, he is missing, she hears last night from the Department of Wars.” Sylvia didn’t bother correcting her.

“Oh. I am sorry to hear that,” the foreman said, and sounded as if he was telling, if not the whole truth, then at least most of it. He studied Sylvia. “Do you want to go home, Mrs. Enos?”

“No,” Sylvia answered quickly. If she went home, they would find a substitute for her, and they might keep the substitute, too. But that was not the only reason she spoke as she did: “I’d rather be here, as a matter of fact. It will help me take my mind off, off-” She didn’t go on. Going on would have meant thinking about what she most wanted not to think about.

Mr. Winter gnawed at his mustache. “I dunno,” he said. But Isabella Antonelli gave him such a reproachful look that he softened. “All right, Mrs. Enos; we’ll see how it goes.” Had he not been interested in Sylvia’s friend as something more than an employee, he might have decided differently. Sylvia noted that enough to be amused by it, and then got angry at herself for letting anything amuse her.

She went to her machine and began pulling levers. She hoped desperately to fall into the routine that sometimes overtook her, so that half the day would go by without her consciously noticing it. To her disappointment, it didn’t happen. Her body did what it had to do, pulling her three levers, loading labels, filling the paste reservoir, and her mind ran round and round and round like a pet squirrel in a wheel.

When she went home, she said nothing to Brigid Coneval. The Irishwoman’s green eyes glowed with curiosity, though; surely the whole floor and probably the whole apartment building knew by now that she’d got a telegram in the night. But explaining to Mrs. Coneval would have meant explaining to George, Jr., who, like any little pitcher, had enormous ears. She sometimes marveled that he could hear anything, what with all the noise he made, but here he did. George is only missing, Sylvia told herself fiercely. I don’t have to say anything till I know for certain. Time enough then.

She did her best not to let her demeanor show either of her children anything was wrong. That she was even more tired than usual from having slept so badly the night before probably helped rather than hurt her cause. The evening passed quietly, not too far from normal.

Four days went by like that. Sympathy replaced curiosity in Brigid Coneval’s face. “It’s a brave front you put up, Mrs. Enos,” she said, having drawn her own conclusions. When Sylvia only shrugged, Mrs. Coneval nodded, as if she’d received all the answer she needed.

Sylvia’s mood veered from despair to fury, with many stops in between. She’d expected a second telegram hard on the heels of the first, either letting her know George was well or-more likely, she feared-very much the reverse. Either way, she would have known how to respond. She couldn’t respond to nothing, though. It left her adrift on a chartless sea.

Her work was not all it might have been. Mr. Winter proved more forbearing than she’d expected. “You’re doing the best you can, Mrs. Enos; I can see that,” he told her. Was he saying that because he was a veteran himself, and a widower, too, and so knew what suffering was like, or because he had an ulterior motive if George really was lost? With no way to be sure, she cautiously gave him the benefit of the doubt.

Another four days went by. Sometimes life seemed almost normal. Sometimes Sylvia thought she was losing her mind. Sometimes she hoped she would.

Press, step, press, step, press, go back to the beginning and begin the cycle anew…She had succeeded in immersing herself in the rhythm of her machine when another Western Union delivery boy interrupted her. “Mrs. Enos?” he said, holding out a yellow envelope. “They told me at your apartment house where you was at, ma’am.”

She signed the sheet he had on his clipboard. He got out of there in a hurry-telegraph delivery boys were not welcome visitors, not in wartime. Cans began to stack up as Sylvia pulled none of her three levers.

She opened the envelope. Yes, from the Navy Department-who else? Isabella Antonelli came hurrying over to her. She didn’t notice. Again, she was reading: MY PLEASANT DUTY TO INFORM YOU YOUR HUSBAND, ABLE SEAMAN GEORGE ENOS, CONFIRMED AS UNINJURED SURVIVOR OF LOSS OF MONITOR USS PUNISHMENT. TO BE REASSIGNED, LEAVE POSSIBLE. She read but did not notice the Secretary of the Navy’s name.

“God hears my prayers,” said Isabella, who had been looking over her shoulder.

“Good heavens!” Sylvia exclaimed. “The line!” All at once, life stretched out ahead of her again. Small things mattered. Waving the telegram like a banner, she hurried back to deal with all the cans that had stacked up. Mr. Winter never said a thing.

“This west Texas country would be wonderful terrain for tanks,” Stinky Salley said.

Several of the Confederate soldiers gathered around the campfire looked at him. “You mean barrels, don’t you?” Jefferson Pinkard said at last.

“I prefer to use the name our allies have given them,” Salley said loftily, with his usual fussy precision. “Let the damnyankees call them what they will.”

“Oh, give it up, Stinky,” Pinkard said. “Everybody’s calling the damn things barrels, us and the Yanks both.”

“That does not make it proper,” Salley returned, “any more than it is proper to call me Stinky rather than my given name.”

“Proves my point, doesn’t it?” Jeff said, and got a laugh from his squadmates. Stinky Salley glared, but he spent a lot of time glaring.

“It would be good country for barrels, except only for one thing,” Hip Rodriguez said, holding one finger up in the air.

“What the devil do you know about it, you damn greaser?” Salley said with a snort. “It’s perfect country for tanks.” He kept on using his word, regardless of what anyone else did. Waving a hand, he continued, “It’s flat, it’s wide open-it’s ideal.”

Rodriguez looked at him expressionlessly. “I gonna tell you two things,” he said in his uncertain English. As he had before, he held up one finger. “It ain’t no perfect country for barrels on account of ain’t no train stations close to here nowhere. Barrel got to run by itself, barrel breaks down.”

“Everything I’ve heard about them damn things, he’s right,” Sergeant Albert Cross said. “Bastards break down if you look at ’em sideways.”

“Gracias.” With considerable dignity, the Sonoran soldier inclined his head to the noncom. Then he undid his bayonet from his sheath and made as if to clean his nails with it. Looking straight into Salley’s face, he went on, “I tell you the second thing now. You call me a damn greaser again, I cut your fucking throat.” His voice was flat and emotionless-not so much a threat as a simple statement of how the world would be.

Salley’s pale eyes went wide. His mouth formed a startled O. He turned to Cross. “Sergeant, did you hear that?”

“I heard it,” the noncom answered. “I heard you, too. If I was you, I’d watch the way I ran my big mouth.” He noisily sipped coffee from his tin cup.

Salley stared at Hip Rodriguez as if he’d never seen him before. Maybe he hadn’t, not really. Sonorans and Chihuahuans and Cubans-Cubans without black blood in them, anyhow-had a curious place in the CSA: better off than Negroes, but not really part of the larger society, either, cut off from it by swarthiness, language, and religion. But a Sonoran with a weapon in his hand was not something to take lightly. Stinky Salley kept quiet after that-he made a point of keeping quiet after that.

Instead of making cornmeal into little loaves, Rodriguez wet his share and shaped it into patties he fried in lard and wrapped around his tinned rations. Pinkard and a couple of other soldiers in the squad were doing that, too; beans and beef went down easier and tastier. Pinkard took a bite out of his-tortilla, Hip called a cornmeal patty-then said in a low voice, “You shut him up sharp.”

Rodriguez shrugged. “If you step on a scorpion when he is small, he don’t get no bigger.”

“Yeah.” Jeff’s eyes slid to Stinky Salley. The ex-clerk still didn’t look as if he knew what had hit him. That, Pinkard thought, wasn’t so good. Stinky’d done well enough against U.S. soldiers, out at a distance. But when Rodriguez delivered his warning, he’d folded up. In a way, it was just Stinky’s problem. But in another way, it warned of a weakness in the squad, and that was everybody’s problem.

Off in the distance, a rifle barked. Pinkard’s head came up, as a watchdog’s would do at the sound of someone walking past his house. Another shot followed, also a long way off. Then silence. He relaxed.

Rodriguez swigged from his canteen and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. He’d already put the bayonet away, having made his point with it. “You know what?” he said to Pinkard. “I miss my esposa. How you say esposa, Jeff? My woman, my-”

“Your wife?” Pinkard said.

“Si, my wife.” Rodriguez pronounced the word with care. “I go to sleep in the night, I see my wife in a sueno.” Not knowing or not caring that wasn’t English, he went on, “When I wake up, all I see is soldados feos-ugly soldiers.” Sueno was something like dream, Jeff realized. Hip Rodriguez sighed. “I do better, I stay to sleep.” He glanced over toward Pinkard. “You got a wife, yes, Jeff?”

“Yeah. I wish I was home with her, too.” Pinkard was amazed at how little he’d thought of Emily since he got his notice from the Conscription Bureau and reported for duty. Now that she flooded into his mind, he understood why he’d done his best to block the memories-they hurt too much, when set alongside the squalid reality of the life he was living.

Fleas and lice and fear and mutilation and stinks and-He turned away from the campfire, a scowl on his face. If he weren’t here, if he hadn’t got that damned buff-colored envelope, he could have been in Emily’s arms right now, making the bedsprings creak, her breath warm and moist on the skin of his neck, her voice urging him on to things he hadn’t imagined he could do or else rising to a cry of joy that must have made Bedford Cunningham and all his other neighbors jealous. Dear God, she loved to do it!

Courteous as a cat, more courteous than most curious Confederates would have been, Hip Rodriguez left him alone with his thoughts. For a few seconds, Jeff was glad of that. And then, all at once, he wasn’t.

Back before the government put him in butternut and stuck a rifle in his hands, he’d matched Emily stroke for stroke, given her everything she’d wanted in the way of loving. Now he wasn’t there any more. She’d grown used to making love all the time. Would she be looking for a substitute?

He shivered, regardless of how hot and muggy the evening was. In his imagination, he could see her thrashing on the bed with-whom? The face on the male form riding her didn’t matter. It wasn’t his own. That was enough, and bad enough.

His fists bunched. This is all moonshine, he told himself fiercely. He’d never had any reason to believe Emily would want to be unfaithful to him. If ever two people loved each other, Emily and he were those two. But he’d never been away from her before. And she didn’t just love him. She loved love, and he knew it. Moonshine, dammit, moonshine.

When he hadn’t said anything for some little while, Rodriguez quietly asked, “You are lonely, amigo?”

“You bet I am,” Pinkard said. “Ain’t you?”

“I am lonely for my esposa, my wife. I am lonely for my farm. I am lonely for my village, where I go to drink in the cantina. I am lonely for my proper food. I am lonely for my lengua, where I can talk and I don’t got to think before I say every word. I am lonely for not being nowhere near these yanquis who try of killing me. Si, I am lonely.”

Jeff hadn’t thought of it like that. Even though the filthy picture in his imagination wouldn’t go away, he said, “Sounds like I got it easy next to you, maybe.”

“Life is hard.” Rodriguez shrugged. “And after life is done, then you die.” He shrugged again. “What can anyone do?”

It was a good question. It was, when Pinkard thought about it, a very good question. If there were any better questions out there, he had no idea what they might be. “You do the best you can, is all,” he answered slowly, and then looked around at the hole in the ground in the middle of nowhere he was currently inhabiting. “If this here is the best I can do, I been doin’ somethin’ wrong up till now.”

“I also think this very thing,” Rodriguez said with a smile. “Then I think what they do to my compadres who do not come into the Army when it is their time. Beside that, this is muy bueno.”

“Yeah, you try and dodge conscription, they land on you with both feet.” Pinkard yawned. Exhaustion was landing on him with both feet. He spread his blanket under him-too hot to roll himself in it-and smeared his face and hands with camphor-smelling goo that was supposed to hold the mosquitoes and other bugs at bay. As far as he could see, it didn’t do much good, but he was happier with it in his nostrils than with what he smelled like after God only knew how long since his last bath.

The next morning, Captain Connolly got the company moving before sunup. The promised drive on Lubbock hadn’t happened. Nobody was saying much about that, but nobody was very happy with it, either. Trying to build a front to keep the damnyankees from moving deeper into Texas wasn’t the same as throwing them out of the state when they had no business there.

What can anyone do? Hip Rodriguez’s question echoed in Jeff’s mind. So did his own answer. You do the best you can, is all. If the best the CSA could do was keep the USA from pushing deeper into Texas, the war wasn’t going the way everybody’d figured it would when it started.

The Yankees were extending their line northward, too. Texas, Jeff thought wearily as he tramped through it, had nothing but room. The invaders kept hoping they could get around the Confederates’ flank, and the job for the boys in butternut was convincing them they couldn’t.

A brisk little fire fight developed, both sides banging away at each other from little foxholes they scraped into the hard earth as soon as the bullets started flying. Neither U.S. nor C.S. forces were there in any great numbers; it was almost like a game, though nobody wanted to be removed from the board.

“Hold ’em, boys,” Captain Connolly yelled. “Help’s on the way.” Firing at a muzzle flash, Jeff figured the Yankees’ commander was probably shouting the same thing. One of them would prove a liar. After a moment, Jeff realized they both might prove liars.

But Captain Connolly had the right of it. A battery of three-inch howitzers came galloping up behind the thin Confederate line and started hurling shrapnel shells at the equally thin Yankee line. The U.S. soldiers, without artillery of their own and not dug in to withstand a bombardment, sullenly drew back across the prairie. The Confederates advanced-not too far, not too fast, lest they run into more than they could handle.

“We licked ’em,” Jeff said, and Hip Rodriguez nodded. Pinkard took off his helmet to scratch his head. Victory was supposed to be glorious. He didn’t feel anything like glory. He was alive, and nobody’d shot him. He fumbled for tobacco and a scrap of paper in which to wrap it. Right now, alive and unshot would do.

Barracks swelled Tucson, New Mexico, far beyond its natural size. In one of those barracks, Sergeant Gordon McSweeney sat on a cot wishing he were someplace, anyplace, else. “I want to get back to the field,” he murmured, more than half to himself.

Ben Carlton heard him. McSweeney outranked Carlton, but, as cook, the latter enjoyed a certain amount of license an ordinary private soldier, even a veteran, would not have had. “Rather be here than that damn Baja, California desert,” he declared, “and you can take that to church.”

McSweeney shook his head. He was big and tall and fair, with muscles like rocks, a chin and cheekbones that might have been hewn from granite, and pale eyes that looked through a man, not at him. He said, “A soldier’s purpose is fighting. If I am not fighting, I am not fulfilling my appointed purpose in life.” If he did not do that, his infinitely stern, infinitely just God would surely punish him for it in the days to come.

Carlton would not be silenced. “To hell with my appointed purpose, if the damn fool who appointed me to it gets his brains out o’ the latrine bucket. Sendin’ us down there with no support or nothin’, that was murder, and that’s all it was.” He stuck out his own chin, which was nowhere near so granitic as McSweeney’s. “Go ahead and tell me I’m wrong. I dare you.”

From most men, to most men, that would have been an invitation to fight. Gordon McSweeney reserved his wrath for the men on the other side, a fact for which his mates had had a good many occasions to be thankful. “God predestined our failure, for reasons of His own,” he said now.

Ben Carlton looked as if he had bitten into something that tasted bad-something he cooked himself, then, McSweeney thought. “Damn me to hell if I can see how God’s will had anything to do with poor Paul bleedin’ to death like a stuck pig way the devil out in the middle of the desert,” Carlton said.

McSweeney’s gaze fixed on him as if over the sights of a Springfield. “God will surely damn you to hell if you take His name in vain.” His expression softened, ever so slightly. “Paul Mantarakis, as I saw, was a brave man, for all that he was a papist.”

“He weren’t no Cath-o-lic,” Carlton said. “He was whatever Greeks are-orthosomething, he called it.”

“He carried with him a rosary of beads, which condemns him of itself. A pity, I admit, for he was a man of spirit.” McSweeney spoke with the assurance of one who knew himself to be a member of the elect and thus assured salvation.

Carlton gave it up. “There’s worse men than Paul as are still breathing in and out,” he said.

“Such is God’s will,” McSweeney answered. “Only a fool, and a blasphemous fool at that, would question it. Be assured: the unjust shall have their requital.”

He got left alone after that, which suited him well enough. Even in the crowded trenches of western Kentucky, he had been left alone a good deal. He knew why: a man of fixed purpose naturally confounded the greater number who had none, but drifted through life like floating leaves, going wherever the current chanced to take them. God anchored him, and anchored him firm.

That he used the time to make sure his flamethrower was in good working order also helped ensure his privacy. Few in the company seemed eager to associate, either in the field or away from the fighting, with anyone who carried such horror on his back. In the field, the enemy made flamethrower operators special targets, so McSweeney could see the sense in staying away from him, even if it filled him with scorn. Back here? He shrugged. If the men gave in to superstition, how could he stop them?

After evening mess call, the soldiers gossiped and smoked and gambled till lights out. McSweeney read the Book of Kings, an island of rectitude in the sea of sin all around. Then one of the men in his squad shouted “Goddammit!” after losing a poker hand he thought he should have won.

“Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain, Hansen,” McSweeney said, glancing up from the small type of the Bible.

“Yes, Sergeant. Sorry, Sergeant,” Private Ulysses Hansen said hastily. He was not the smallest nor the weakest nor the least spirited man in the regiment, but his sergeant not only outranked him but also intimidated him. He kept his language circumspect thereafter.

In the morning, McSweeney inspected the persons and kits of his squad with his usual meticulous care. When he’d reported to Captain Schneider the infractions he’d found, the company commander raised an eyebrow and said, “Sergeant, can’t you learn to let some of that go? You gig men for things that aren’t worth noticing.”

“Sir, they are against regulations,” McSweeney answered stiffly.

“I understand that, Sergeant, but-” Schneider looked exasperated. For the life of him, Gordon McSweeney could not understand why. He stood at stolid attention, not showing his perplexity. Schneider was a brave soldier, and not altogether ungodly; he might perhaps have been numbered among the elect. After a pause to marshal his thoughts, he went on, “A smudged button or a speck of dust on a collar won’t cost us the war. These are real soldiers, remember, not West Point cadets.”

“Sir, I did not invent the infractions,” McSweeney said. “All I did was note them and report them to you.”

“You’d need a magnifying glass to note some of them,” Schneider said.

McSweeney shook his head. “No, sir, only my eyes.”

Schneider looked unhappier still. “Could you stand the kind of inspection you’re giving your men?”

“Sir, I hope so,” McSweeney answered. “If I fail, I deserve whatever punishment you care to inflict on me.”

Now the captain shook his head. “You don’t get it, Sergeant. I don’t want to punish you for small things. I don’t want you making your men hate you so much they won’t follow you, either.”

“Sir, they will follow me.” McSweeney spoke with a calm, absolute confidence. “Whatever else they may feel about me, they’re afraid of me.”

“I don’t doubt that,” Captain Schneider muttered, perhaps more to himself than to McSweeney. But he shook his head again. “That won’t do, I’m afraid. A U.S. noncom or officer whose men hate him or fear him ends up with a wound from a Springfield, not a Tredegar.”

Gordon McSweeney considered that. “Whoever would do such a thing would surely spend eternity in hell.”

“As may be,” Schneider said. “That’s not the point. The point is to keep your men from wanting to shoot you in the first place.”

“If they would only do that which is required of them, we would not have this problem,” McSweeney said.

Captain Schneider sighed. “Sergeant, have you ever, even once in your life, considered the wisdom of tempering justice with mercy?”

“No, sir,” McSweeney answered, honestly shocked.

“I believe you,” Schneider said. “The one thing-the only thing-I’ll give you is that you hold yourself to the same standards as everyone else. That time a couple of days ago when you reported yourself for not polishing the inside of your canteen cup-that was a first for me, I tell you. But what did I do about it?”

“Nothing, sir.” McSweeney’s voice reeked disapproval.

Captain Schneider either didn’t notice or pretended not to. “That’s right. That’s what I’m going to keep on doing when you bother me with tiny things, too. Sergeant, I order you not to report trivial infractions to me until and unless they constitute a clear and obvious danger to the discipline or safety of your squad. Do you understand me?”

“No, sir,” McSweeney said crisply.

“All right, then, Sergeant. I am going to leave you with two quotations from the Good Book, then. I want you to concentrate on the lessons in John 8:7 and Matthew 7:1.” With an abrupt about-face, Schneider stalked off.

Gordon McSweeney knew the Scriptures well. But those were not verses he was in the habit of studying, so he had to go and look them up. He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her, he read in John. The verse in Matthew was even shorter and more to the point, saying, Judge not, that ye be not judged.

He stared out the door through which Captain Schneider had departed. The captain, as far as he was concerned, had the letter without the spirit. If God chose to urge mercy, that was His affair. Could a man not so urged by the Lord afford such a luxury? McSweeney didn’t think so.

He was, in any case, by temperament more drawn to the Old Testament than to the New. The children of Israel, now, had been proper warriors. God had not urged them to mercy, but to glorify His name by smiting their foes. And their prophets and kings had obeyed, and had grown great by obeying. Against such a background, what did a couple of verses matter?

Jesus Christ hadn’t always been meek and mild, either. Hadn’t He driven the money-changers from the Temple? They hadn’t been doing anything so very wrong. Trivial infractions, Captain Schneider would have called their business, and thought Jesus should have left it alone.

McSweeney flipped back a few pages in the Book of Matthew and grunted in satisfaction. “Chapter 5, verse 29,” he murmured: And if thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out, and cast it from thee: for it is profitable for thee that one of thy members should perish, and not that thy whole body should be cast into hell.

He looked at the men in his squad. None of them dared meet his eye. Would any have the nerve to shoot him under cover of battle? He shook his head. He didn’t believe it, not for a moment. Would they leave him in the lurch when he attacked? Maybe they would. His glance flicked to the flamethrower. Anyone who carried one of those infernal devices was on his own anyhow.

“Justice,” McSweeney said, and gave a sharp nod. Only the wicked feared justice, and with reason, for they deserved chastisement. Thus the United States would chastise their seceded brethren, and chastise as well the wicked foreigners who had made secession possible.

God wills it, McSweeney thought, for all the world like a Crusader before the walls of Jerusalem. And Jerusalem would fall. He would make it fall, and break anyone and anything standing in the way.