Walk in Hell

III

Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid raised a forefinger. “Another cup of coffee for me here, if you please,” the Confederate cavalry officer said.

“I’ll take care of it,” Nellie Semphroch said quickly, before her daughter Edna could. Edna glared at her. Half the reason Kincaid came into the coffeehouse the two women ran in occupied Washington, D.C., was to moon over Edna, his eyes as big and glassy as those of a calf with the bloat.

That was also all the reason Nellie tried to keep Edna as far away from Kincaid as she could. She’d caught them kissing once, and who could say where that would have led if she hadn’t put a stop to it in a hurry? She shook her head. She knew where it would have led. She’d been down that path herself, and didn’t intend to let Edna take it.

Edna filled a cup with the blend from the Dutch East Indies that Kincaid liked, set the cup on a saucer, and handed it to Nellie. “Here you are, Ma,” she said, her voice poisonously sweet. She knew better than to argue out loud with Nellie when the coffeehouse was full of customers, as it was this afternoon. That didn’t mean she wasn’t angry. Far from it.

Nellie Semphroch glared back at her, full of angry determination herself. Given a generation’s difference in their ages-a short generation’s difference-the two women looked very much alike. They shared light brown hair (though Nellie’s had some streaks of gray in it), oval faces, fine, fair skin, and eyes somewhere between blue and green. If Nellie’s expression was habitually worried, well, she’d earned that. In this day and age, if you were an adult and you didn’t have plenty to worry about, something was wrong with you.

She carried the steaming cup over to Lieutenant Kincaid. “Obliged, ma’am,” he said. He was polite, when he could easily have been anything but. And, when he dug in his pocket, he put a real silver quarter-dollar on the table, not the Confederate scrip that let Rebel officers live like lords in the conquered capital of the USA.

Outside in the middle distance, a sudden volley of rifle shots rang out. Nellie jumped. She’d been through worse when the Confederates shelled Washington and then fought their way into town, but she’d let herself relax since: that had been well over a year ago now.

“Nothin’ to worry about, ma’am,” Kincaid said after sipping at the coffee. “That’s just the firing squad getting rid of a nigger. Waste of bullets, you ask me. Ought to string the bastards up. That’d be the end of that.”

“Yes,” Nellie said. She didn’t really like talking with Kincaid. It encouraged him, and he didn’t need encouragement to come around. But Confederate soldiers and military police were the only law and order Washington had these days. The Negro rebellion that had tried to catch fire here hadn’t been against the CSA alone; a good part of the fury had been aimed at whites in general.

Kincaid said, “Those niggers were damn fools-beg your pardon, ma’am-to try givin’ us trouble here. Places where they’re still in arms against the CSA are places where there weren’t any soldiers to speak of. They take a deal of rooting out from places like that, on account of we can’t empty our lines against you Yankees to go back and get ’em. But here-we got plenty of soldiers here, coming and going and staying. Why, we got three regiments comin’ in tonight, back from whipping the Reds in Mississippi and heading up to the Maryland front. And it’s like that every day of the year. Sometimes I don’t think niggers is anything but a pack of fools.”

“Yes,” Nellie said again. Three regiments in from Mississippi, going up to Maryland. Hal Jacobs, who had a little bootmaking and shoe-repair business across the street, had ways of getting such tidbits to people in the USA who could do something useful with them.

“Bring me another sandwich here, ma’am?” a Confederate captain at a far table called. Nellie hurried over to serve him. Despite the rationing that made most of Washington a gray, joyless place, she never had trouble getting her hands on good food and good coffee. Of themselves, her eyes went across the street for a moment. She didn’t know exactly what connections Mr. Jacobs had, but they were good ones. And he liked having the coffeehouse full of Confederates talking at the top of their lungs-or even quietly, so long as they talked freely.

“You had a ham and cheese there?” she asked. The captain nodded. She hurried back of the counter to fix it for him.

Nicholas H. Kincaid was not without resource. He gulped down the coffee Nellie had given him and asked for another refill while she was still making the sandwich. That meant Edna had to take care of him. Not only did she bring him the coffee, she sat down at the table with him and started an animated conversation. The person to whom she was really telling something was Nellie, and the message was simple: I’ll do whatever I please.

Seething inside, Nellie sliced bread, ham, and cheese with mechanical competence. She wished she could haul off and give her daughter a good clout in the ear, but Edna was past twenty, so how much good could it do? Why don’t young folks listen to people who know better? she mourned silently, forgetting how little she’d listened to anyone at the same age.

She took the sandwich over to the captain, accepted his scrip with an inward sigh, and was about to head back behind the counter when the door opened and a new customer came in. Unlike most of her clientele, he was neither a Confederate soldier nor one of the plump, clever businessmen who hadn’t let a change of rulers in Washington keep them from turning a profit. He was about fifty, maybe a few years past, with a black overcoat that had seen better times, a derby about which the same could be said, and a couple of days’ stubble on his chin and cheeks. He picked a table near the doorway, and sat with his back against the wall.

When Nellie came over to him, he breathed whiskey fumes up into her face. She ignored them. “I thought I told you never to show your face in here again,” she said in a furious whisper.

“Oh, Little Nell, you don’t have to be that way,” he answered. His voice, unlike his appearance, was far from seedy: he sounded ready for anything. His eyes traveled the length of her, up and down. “You’re still one fine-looking woman, you know that?” he said, as if he’d seen right through the respectable gray wool dress she wore.

Her face heated. Bill Reach knew what she looked like under that dress, sure enough, or he knew what she had looked like under her clothes, back when she’d been younger than Edna was now. She hadn’t seen him since, or wanted to, till he’d shown up at the coffeehouse one day a few months before. Then she’d managed to frighten him off, and hoped he was gone for good. Now-

“If you don’t get out of here right now,” she said, “I’m going to let these officers here know you’re bothering a lady. Confederates are gentlemen. They don’t like that.” Except when they’re trying to get you into bed themselves.

Reach laughed, showing bad teeth. It looked like a good-natured laugh-unless you were on the receiving end of it. “I don’t think you’ll do that.”

“Oh? And why don’t you?” She might be betraying Rebel information to Hal Jacobs, but that didn’t mean she’d be shy about using Confederate officers to protect herself from Bill Reach and whatever he wanted.

But then he said, “Why? Oh, I don’t know. A little bird told me-a little homing pigeon, you might say.”

For a couple of seconds, that meant nothing to Nellie. Then it did, and froze her with apprehension. One of Mr. Jacobs’ friends was a fancier of homing pigeons. He used them to get information out of Washington and into the hands of U.S. authorities. If Bill Reach knew about that-“What do you want?” Nellie had to force the words out through stiff lips.

Now the smile was more like a leer. “For now, a cup of coffee and a chicken-salad sandwich,” he answered. “Anything else I have in mind, you couldn’t bring me to the table.”

Men, Nellie thought, a one-word condemnation of half the human race. All they want is that. Well, he’s not going to get it. “I’ll bring you your food and the coffee,” she said, and then, to show him-to try to show him-she wasn’t intimidated, she added, “That will be a dollar fifteen.”

Silver jingled in his pocket. He set a dollar and a quarter on the table-real money, no scrip. He’d looked seedy the last time she’d seen him, too, but he hadn’t had any trouble paying her high prices then, either. She scooped up the coins and started back toward the counter.

She almost ran into Edna. “I’m sorry, Ma,” her daughter said, continuing in a low voice, “I wondered if you were having trouble with that guy.”

“It’s all right,” Nellie said. It wasn’t all right, or even close to all right, but she didn’t want Edna getting a look at the skeletons in her closet. Edna was hard enough to manage as things were. One of the things that helped keep her in line was the tone of moral superiority Nellie took. If she couldn’t take that tone any more, she didn’t know what she’d do.

And then, from behind her, Bill Reach said, “Sure is a pretty daughter you have there, Nell.”

“Thank you,” Nellie said tonelessly. Edna looked bemused, but Nellie hoped that was because Reach’s appearance failed to match the other customers’. At least he hadn’t called her Little Nell in front of Edna. The most unwanted pet name brought the days when he’d known her back to all too vivid life.

“I’d be proud if she was my daughter,” Reach said.

That was too much to be borne. “Well, she isn’t,” Nellie answered, almost certain she was right.

The cold north wind whipped down across the Ohio River and through the Covington, Kentucky, wharves. Cincinnatus felt it in his ears and on his cheeks and in his hands. He wasn’t wearing heavy clothes-overalls and a collarless cotton shirt under them-but he was sweating rather than shivering in spite of the nasty weather. Longshoreman’s work was never easy. Longshoreman’s work when Lieutenant Kennan was bossing your crew was ten times worse.

Kennan swaggered up and down the wharf as if the green-gray uniform he wore turned him into the Lord Jehovah. “Come on, you goddamn lazy niggers!” he shouted. “Got to move, by God you do. Get your black asses humping. You there!” The shout wasn’t directed at Cincinnatus. “You don’t do like you’re told, you don’t work here. Jesus Christ, them Rebs were fools for ever setting you dumb coons free. You don’t deserve it.”

Another laborer, an older Negro named Herodotus, said to Cincinnatus, “I’d like to pinch that little bastard’s head right off, I would.”

“You got a long line in front of you,” Cincinnatus answered, both of them speaking too quietly for the U.S. lieutenant to hear. Herodotus chuckled under his breath. Cincinnatus went on, “Hell of it is, he’d get more work if he didn’t treat us like we was out in the cotton fields in slavery days.” Those days had ended a few years before he was born, but he had plenty of stories to give him a notion of what they’d been like.

“Probably the only way he knows to deal wid us,” Herodotus said.

Cincinnatus sighed, picked up his end of a crate, and nodded. “Ain’t that many black folks up in the USA,” he said. “They mostly didn’t want us before the War of Secession, an’ they kep’ us out afterwards, on account of we was from a different country then. Me, I keep wonderin’ if Kennan ever set eyes on anybody who wasn’t white ’fore he got this job.”

Herodotus just shrugged. He did the work Kennan set him, he groused about it when it was too hard or when he was feeling ornery, and that was that. He didn’t think any harder than he had to, he couldn’t read or write, and he’d never shown any great desire to learn. Saying he was content as a beast of burden overstated the case, but not by too much.

Cincinnatus, now, Cincinnatus had ambition. An ambitious Negro in the CSA was asking for a broken heart, but he’d done everything he could to make life better for himself and his wife, Elizabeth. When the USA seized Covington, he’d hoped things would get better; U.S. law didn’t come down on Negroes nearly so hard as Confederate law did. But he’d discovered Lieutenant Kennan was far from the only white man from the USA who had no more use for blacks than did the harshest Confederate.

Along with Herodotus, he hauled the crate from the barge to a waiting truck. He could have driven that truck, freeing a U.S. soldier to fight; he’d been a driver before the war started. But the Yankees wouldn’t let him get behind the wheel of a truck, for no better reason he could see than that he had a black skin. That struck him as stupid and wasteful, but how was he supposed to convince the occupying authorities? The plain answer was, he couldn’t.

And so he did what he had to do to get along. He and Elizabeth had a son now. Better yet, Achilles was sleeping through the night most of the time, so Cincinnatus didn’t stagger into work feeling three-quarters dead most mornings. He thanked Jesus for that, because what he did was plenty to wear him out all by itself, without any help from a squalling infant.

He and Herodotus finally loaded the day’s last crate of ammunition into the last truck and lined up for the paymaster. Along with the usual dollar, they both got the fifty-cent hard-work bonus. The gray-haired sergeant who paid them said, “You boys is taming that Kennan half a dollar at a time, ain’t you?”

“Maybe,” Herodotus said. Cincinnatus just shrugged. The paymaster wasn’t a bad fellow, but he didn’t feel easy about trusting any white man, even one who criticized a comrade.

Herodotus spent a nickel of his bonus on trolley fare and headed for home in a hurry. Cincinnatus had always saved money, even before he had a child, so he walked through Covington on his way to the colored district that lay alongside the Licking River.

Walking through Covington was walking through a minefield of resentments. The Stars and Stripes floated over the city hall and all the police stations. Troops in green-gray uniforms were not just visible; they were conspicuous. The Yankees had the town, and they aimed to keep it.

Some local whites did business with them, too. With Cincinnati right across the Ohio, Covington had been doing business with the USA for as long as Kentucky had been in Confederate hands. But more than once, Cincinnatus saw whites cross the street when U.S. soldiers came by, for no better reason he could find than that they didn’t want to walk where the men they called damnyankees had set their feet.

Cincinnatus didn’t worry about that. He walked past Joe Conroy’s general store. The white storekeeper saw him, but pretended he didn’t. Nor was there any advertising notice taped to the lower left-hand corner of Conroy’s window. That meant neither Conroy nor Tom Kennedy, who had been Cincinnatus’ boss before the war and was now a fugitive from the Yankees, wanted to talk with him tonight.

“And that’s a damn good thing,” he muttered under his breath, “on account of I don’t want to talk with them, neither.” If he hadn’t hidden Tom Kennedy when a U.S. patrol was after him, he never would have been drawn into the Confederate underground that still functioned in Covington and, he supposed, in other Yankee-occupied parts of the CSA as well.

He shook his head. If the U.S. soldiers had just treated Negroes like ordinary human beings, they would have won them over in short order. It hadn’t happened; it didn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that it should happen. And so he found himself, though far from in love with the government that had been driven out of these parts, no less unhappy with the regime replacing it. As if life wasn’t hard enough, he thought.

After a while, the big white clapboard houses and wide lawns of the white part of town gave way to smaller, dingier homes packed tightly together, the mark of a Negro district in any town in the Confederate States of America. The paving on a lot of the streets here was bad. The paving on the rest of the streets did not exist at all.

Boys in battered kneepants kicked a football up and down one dirt street. One of them threw it ahead to another, who caught it and ran a long way before he was dragged down. “Yankee rules!” the two of them shouted gleefully. As football had been played in the Confederacy, forward passes were illegal. North of the Ohio, things had been different. This wasn’t the first such pass Cincinnatus had seen thrown. The U.S. game was catching on here.

He walked past a whitewashed picket fence. Like fresh blood, red paint had been daubed here and there on the whitewash. A couple of houses farther on, he came to another fence similarly defaced. On the side of a shack that nobody lived in, somebody had painted REVOLUTION in big, crimson letters, and a crude sketch of a broken chain beside the word.

“Ain’t nobody happy,” Cincinnatus muttered. Whites in Covington hated the U.S. occupiers who kept them apart from the Confederacy most of them held dear. Blacks in Covington hated the U.S. occupiers who kept them from joining the uprising against the Confederacy most of them despised.

He turned a corner. He was only a couple of blocks from home now. Being an up-and-coming man, he lived on a street that was paved and that boasted real concrete sidewalks. That meant horses and mules drawing wagons and buggies didn’t step on the wreaths there, and meant that the blood on the sidewalk, though it had gone brown rather than crimson and looked gray, almost black, in the deepening twilight, had not been washed away by rain.

He kicked at the sidewalk with his shabby shoes. Yankee soldiers didn’t hesitate to shoot down Negroes aflame with the beauty of the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Maybe the revolution would succeed down in the Confederacy, with so many armed whites having to stay in place and fight the USA. It would not work here, not now, not yet.

A kerosene lamp burned in the front window of his house. The savory smell of chicken stew wafted out toward him. All at once, he could feel how tired-and how cold-he was. As he hurried up the walk toward the front door, it opened. His mother came out.

His wife was right behind, Achilles in her arms. “You sure you won’t stay for supper, Mother Livia?” Elizabeth asked.

Cincinnatus’ mother shook her graying head. “That’s all right, child,” she said. “I got my own man to take care of now-he be gettin’ home about this time. Got some good pork sausages I can do up quick, and fry some potatoes in the grease. I see you in the mornin’.” She paused to kiss her son on the cheek, then headed back to her own house a few blocks away.

Achilles smiled a large, one-tooth smile at his father. Cincinnatus smiled back, which made the baby’s smile get larger. Elizabeth turned and went back into the house. Cincinnatus came with her. He shut the door, then gave her a quick kiss.

Standing in the short front hallway, they looked at each other. Elizabeth looked worn; she’d put in a full day as a domestic while her mother-in-law watched the baby. No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than she said, “You look beat, honey.”

“Could be,” he admitted. “That Kennan, he’d be happier if they gave him a bullwhip for us, but what can you do?” He pulled money out of his overalls. “Got me the bonus again, anyways.”

“Good news,” she said, and then, “Come on into the kitchen. Supper’s just about ready.”

Cincinnatus dug in with a will. The way he worked, he needed to eat hearty. “That’s right good,” he said, and without missing a beat added, “but it ain’t a patch on yours.” That made Elizabeth look happy. Cincinnatus had learned better than to praise his mother’s cooking at the expense of his wife’s.

He played with Achilles in the front room while Elizabeth washed supper dishes. The baby could roll over but couldn’t crawl yet. He thought peekaboo was the funniest game in the world. Cincinnatus wondered what went on inside that little head. When he covered his face with his hands, did Achilles think he’d disappeared? By the way the baby laughed and laughed, maybe he did.

Elizabeth came out, sniffed, gave Cincinnatus a reproachful stare, and went off to change Achilles. When she came back she sat down in the rocking chair to nurse the baby. She didn’t have a lot of milk left, but enough to feed him in the evening before he went to sleep and sometimes in the morning when they first got up, too.

He fell asleep now. The tip of her breast slid out of his mouth. Cincinnatus eyed it till she pulled her dress back up over her shoulder. He’d thought he was too beat to try to get her in the mood for making love tonight, but maybe he’d been wrong. When she carried Achilles off to his cradle, Cincinnatus’ gaze followed her. She noticed, and smiled back over her shoulder. Maybe she wouldn’t need too much persuading after all.

She’d just sat down again when somebody knocked on the door. Cincinnatus wondered who it was. Curfew would be coming soon, and U.S. soldiers were especially happy about proving their shoot-to-kill orders were no joke in the black part of town.

Sighing, Cincinnatus opened it, and there stood Lucullus. The young black man, the son of Apicius, the best barbecue chef in a goodly stretch of the Confederacy, had yet to develop his father’s formidable bulk. “Here’s the ribs you ordered this afternoon,” he said, and handed Cincinnatus a package. Before Cincinnatus could say anything, Lucullus had hurried down the walk, climbed into the Kentucky Smoke House delivery wagon, and clucked the mule into motion.

The package was not ribs. Considering what Apicius did with ribs, that sent a pang of regret through Cincinnatus. “What you got?” Elizabeth called. “Who was that, here and gone so quick?”

“Lucullus,” Cincinnatus answered. Elizabeth caught her breath. Cincinnatus hefted the package. Though wrapped in old newspaper and twine like Apicius’ barbecue, it made a precise rectangle in his hands, and was much heavier than he would have guessed from the size.

A note was attached. Put in third trash can, Pier 5, before 7 tomorrow, it said, very much to the point. After reading it, he tore it into small pieces and threw them away. Elizabeth asked no more questions. She took one look at the package, then refused to turn her eyes that way.

Cincinnatus wondered what was under the newspaper. Set type, by the size and startling heft: that was his best guess. Whoever picked it out of the trash can would print it, and the Reds would have themselves another poster or flyer or news sheet or whatever it was.

He shook his head. Being part of the Confederate underground was hard and dangerous. Being part of the Red underground was harder and more dangerous. Being part of both of them at once…at the time, all his other choices had looked worse. He wondered how long he could keep juggling, and how bad the smashup would be when he started dropping plates.

“Chow call!” the prison guard in the green-gray uniform shouted. Along with several thousand other captive Confederates, Reginald Bartlett lined up, tin mess kit and spoon in his hand. The guard, like all the guards, wore an overcoat. Reggie wore an ill-fitting butternut tunic and trousers, not really enough to keep him warm in a West Virginia autumn that had not a drop of Indian summer left to it.

Actually, the tunic fit better than it had when he’d got to the prison camp: he was skinnier than he had been. But he had to belt his pants with a piece of rope to keep them from sliding down over what was left of his backside. The boots they’d given him were too big, too; he’d stuffed them with crumpled paper to help keep his feet warm.

“This here prisoner business, it ain’t no fun a-tall,” Jasper Jenkins said. He and Reggie had been captured in the same raid on Confederate trenches east of Big Lick, Virginia. A lot of men from both sides had died in the struggle for the Roanoke valley between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Alleghenies. A lot more from both sides had been captured. But-

“You never think it’s going to happen to you,” Reggie agreed. “Maybe if I think real hard, I’ll find out it didn’t.” He gave a whimsical shrug to show he didn’t intend that to be taken seriously. He’d always been cheerful, he’d always been good-natured, he’d always been able to make people like him…and what had it got him? A third-tier bunk in a damnyankee prison camp. Maybe I should have been more of a bastard, he thought. Couldn’t have turned out much worse, could it?

Jasper Jenkins, on the other hand, was more of a bastard, a dark, lanky farmer who looked out for himself first and everybody else later. And here he was, too. So what did that prove?

Jenkins looked around at the prisoners, almost all of them as much alike as so many sheep. “This here war’s too big for people, you ask me,” he remarked.

“Now why the devil do you say that?” Bartlett asked, deadpan. He and Jenkins both laughed, neither of them happily. The line in which they stood made Reggie think of nothing so much as a trail of ants heading for a sandwich that had been dropped on the ground. Compared to the size of the war in which they’d been engaged, that was about what they were.

“And to think I went and volunteered for this.” Jenkins shook his head. “I was a damn fool.”

“Yeah, me, too,” Reggie agreed. “I was there in Capitol Square in Richmond when President Wilson declared war on the damnyankees. I went and quit my job right on the spot and joined the Army-didn’t wait for the regiment I’d been conscripted into to get called up. Figured we’d win the war in a couple of months and go on home. Shows how much I knew, doesn’t it?”

“Nobody who didn’t live by it knew about the Roanoke then,” Jasper Jenkins said. “Wish I didn’t know about it now. That damn valley is going to be sucking lives till the end of the war.”

“I only wish you were wrong,” Bartlett answered.

They snaked toward the front of the line, moving not quite fast enough to stay warm in the chilly breeze. As they drew near the kettles that would feed them, Reggie held his mess tin in front of him with both hands. That was how the rules said you did it. If you didn’t follow the rules in every particular, you didn’t get fed. The cooks enjoyed finding an excuse not to give a prisoner his rations.

“Miserable bastards,” Jenkins muttered under his breath, glaring at the men who wore white aprons over their baggy butternut clothes. But he made sure he kept his voice low, so low that only Bartlett could hear. If the cooks found out he was complaining about them, they’d find ways to make him sorry.

They were prisoners, too; the USA wasn’t about to waste its own men to feed the Confederates it captured. But whoever had thought up the prison-camp system the United States used had been a devilishly sneaky fellow. What better way to remind soldiers in enemy hands what their status was than to make them dependent on the goodwill of the Negroes who had formerly been their laborers and servants?

White teeth shining in their dark faces as they grinned unpleasantly at the men they fed, the cooks ladled stew-heavy on potatoes and cabbage and bits of turnip, thin on meat that was probably horse, or maybe cat, anyhow-into the mess kits. If they liked you, you got yours from the bottom of the pot, where all the good stuff rested. If they didn’t, you ate nothing but broth. Complaining did no good, either. The damnyankees backed up the Negroes all the time.

A few men in front of Reggie, a Confederate cursed when he saw what he’d been given. “You stinkin’ niggers’re tryin’ to starve me to death,” he snarled. “I’ll git you for that if it’s the last thing I ever do, so help me God I will.”

“Shut up, Kirby,” one of his friends told him. “You’re just gonna make things worse, you keep going on like that.”

That was good advice. The prisoner named Kirby didn’t take it. “To hell with all of ’em,” he shouted, and shook his fist at the Negro cooks. They didn’t say anything. They just looked at him. Memorizing his face, Reggie thought. Mr. Kirby was going to be on short commons for a long, long time. He must have known that, too, but he didn’t care. Maybe he was already too hungry to care. He went on, “You black sons of bitches think you’re so great on account of the damnyankees let you lord it over us’ns. But it don’t matter. You’re still niggers to them, too.”

His friend shoved him along to keep the line moving. If the line didn’t move, the prisoners caught hell from the guards. Kirby started cussing all over again when the piece of hardtack he got was both small and full of weevils. What do you expect, you damn fool? Bartlett thought, hoping Kirby’s outburst wouldn’t make the cooks take out their anger on everybody anywhere near the loudmouthed prisoner.

His bowl of stew, when he got it, had a decent amount of real food in with the watery broth. He nodded to the Negro who’d dished it out. “Thanks, Tacitus,” he said. The cook nodded back, soberly. Some of the prisoners tried sucking up to the cooks-acting like niggers themselves, Reggie thought with distaste-in the hopes of getting better rations. He couldn’t make himself do that, and he hadn’t seen that it helped, either. Treating them a little better than he would have before he got captured seemed like a good idea, though.

He took the square of hardtack another cook handed him. It wasn’t too big, but it wasn’t too small, either. He shrugged. It would do. He and Jenkins found a place where the wind wasn’t blowing too hard, sat down there, and began to eat.

“Lettin’ niggers lord it over white men just ain’t right,” Jenkins said. “That Kirby fellow knew what he was talkin’ about. This here war’s over and done with, it’s time to pay back what we owe ’em.”

“Wonder what it’s going to be like when we get home again,” Reggie said around a mouthful of potatoes. “Wonder what’s going on with the Negro uprising down there.”

He and Jasper Jenkins had argued about that for a while. Jenkins had refused to believe blacks could rise up against the whites who had dominated the Confederacy since its founding, and the South before that. But fresh-caught prisoners confirmed at least some of the stories the Yankee guards so gleefully told to the men who had been captured earlier.

Now Jenkins said, “We’ll smash the bastards flat, and then we’ll go on and smash the damnyankees, too, no matter how long it takes.”

Reggie nodded. Inside, though, he wondered. He still wanted to believe everything would turn out all right, but it got harder every day. It had been getting harder since the first time he saw what machine guns did to charging men, no matter whose uniform those men wore. If the war went on long enough, he figured nobody on either side would be left alive.

When he’d finished eating, he took his mess tray over to a barrel of water, waited for his turn, and sluiced the tray around before drying it on his shirttail. He made sure he’d got all the gunk out of the corners. If you came down with food poisoning here…well, the prison camp was a bad place, but the hospital next door was worse.

“Work detail!” a Confederate officer bawled. Some men went off to chop firewood, others to clean the latrines, still others to police up the grounds of the camp.

Jasper Jenkins shook his head in bemusement. “Never thought I’d be glad of a chance to work,” he said, “but it sure as hell beats standing around doing nothing like we been doin’.”

“Yeah,” Reggie agreed; like Jenkins, he had no duties today. And when there wasn’t anything to do, you just waited for the minutes and the hours to crawl by, and every one of them moved on hands and knees. He’d never imagined the worst part of being a prisoner of war was boredom, but the damnyankees didn’t care what their captives did in here, so long as they didn’t try to escape and so long as they didn’t try to get U.S. soldiers to do anything for them.

“Feel like some cards?” Jenkins asked.

“Not right now, no,” Bartlett answered. “I think I’m going to stand here till the dust covers me up. Maybe the Yanks won’t notice me any more after that.” Jasper Jenkins laughed. He thought Reggie had made a joke. Reggie knew too well he hadn’t.

Sergeant Chester Martin cowered in a bombproof shelter in a trench dug through the ruins of what had been Big Lick, Virginia, waiting for the Confederate artillery bombardment to end. The bombproof was thirty feet below ground level; even a shell from an eight-inch gun landing right on top probably wouldn’t collapse it. And the Rebels didn’t have many heavy artillery pieces, though their light field guns were better than anything the U.S. Army owned.

But a collapsed roof wasn’t Martin’s worst worry, although his lips skinned back from his teeth whenever a shellburst nearby made the candles jump. Nobody could see the expression on his face, though, not behind the soaked pad of cotton wadding he wore over his mouth and nose. The chemicals in the pad would-with luck-keep poison gas out of his lungs. Without luck…

He feared gas more than a direct hit. The dugout that sheltered him from explosives and splinters could be a death trap now, for gas, heavier than air, crept down and concentrated in such places. The USA had started using the deadly stuff several months before the Confederacy could answer in kind, but the Rebs had the knack now.

Sitting there beside him in the flickering near-dark, squeezed up tight against him as a lover, Corporal Paul Andersen muttered something over and over again. The mask he wore muffled the words, but Martin knew what he was saying: “Fucking bastards.” He said it a lot. It was a sentiment with which few of the men in the company would have disagreed.

All at once, sudden as a kick in the teeth, the barrage stopped. Martin’s stomach knotted in pain. He was senior man in the bombproof. He had to order the men to rush out to their posts-or to stay there. The Rebs were sneaky sons of bitches. Sometimes they’d stop shelling you long enough to draw you out from your cover, then pick up again with redoubled fury once you were more nearly out in the open.

But sometimes they’d send their men at your lines the minute after a barrage ended. If they reached the trenches before your troops got up to the firing steps and the machine guns, you were gone: captured if you got lucky, more likely dead. No wonder his guts knotted. He had to figure out which way to jump, his own life depending on the answer along with everyone else’s.

He weighed his choices. Better to guess wrong about more shelling than about a raid, he decided. “Out! Out! Out!” The words were muffled and blurry, but nobody had any doubt about what he meant.

Men streamed out of the dugout and ran shouting up the steps cut into the earth. Those steps were full of dirt that had cascaded down from hits up above; enough hits like that and it wouldn’t matter whether the bombproof caved in or not, because nobody could escape it anyway.

Clutching his rifle, Martin ran for a firing step, waving for his men to follow him. Sure as hell, here came the Rebels. They didn’t move forward yowling like catamounts, not any more. They’d learned better than that. But come on they did.

Martin started shooting at the butternut-clad figures stumbling toward him through no-man’s-land. The Rebs went down, not in death or injury so much as to take shelter in shell holes and what had been trenches and were now ruins. In their mud-caked boots, he would have done the same.

Not all of them took refuge. Some kept moving, no doubt thinking their best chance for survival lay in seizing a length of U.S. trench. They might have been right. But then a couple of machine guns added their din to the mix. At that, some of the Confederate soldiers did yell, in horrified dismay. Advancing against rifle fire was expensive, but might be possible. Advancing against machine-gun fire was suicide without the fancy label.

None of the Rebs made it into the trenches. The ones who hadn’t fallen broke and made for their own lines. Some of the ones who had fallen lay still. Others twisted and writhed and moaned, out there in no-man’s-land. Some U.S. soldiers took pleasure in shooting the Rebs who came out to try to recover their wounded. Some Confederates did the same thing to U.S. soldiers seeking to pick up their comrades.

Martin took off his gas mask. He breathed warily. The air still had a chlorine tang to it, but it didn’t make him choke and turn blue. “We threw ’em back,” he said. “Not too bad.”

Maybe twenty feet down along the firing step, Joe Hammerschmitt suddenly cried out. He dropped his rifle and clutched a hand to his right shoulder. The Springfield fell in the mud. Red started oozing out between his fingers.

He opened his hand for a moment to examine the wound. Once he’d done that, pain warred with exultation on his long, thin face. Exultation won. “Got me a hometowner, looks like,” he said happily.

Half the men up there with him made sympathetic noises; the other half looked frankly jealous. Hammerschmitt was going to be out of the firing line for weeks, maybe months, to come, and they still risked not just death but horrible mutilation every day.

“Get him back to the doctors,” Martin called. A couple of Hammerschmitt’s buddies roughly bandaged the wound and helped him out of the front line of trenches. They got envious looks, too. They weren’t going on a long vacation like Joe’s, but they were able to escape the worst of the firing till they’d turned him over to the quacks in the rear.

“You take care of yourself, Joe,” Specs Peterson told his friend. “Don’t let the bugs bite you back at the hospital.” Everyone laughed at that. The bugs bit harder in the trenches than anyplace else. Peterson went on, “I’ll see if I can’t shoot the damn Reb who got you there.” For that moment, he looked and sounded altogether serious. Birds who wore glasses were supposed to be peaceable types. Somehow Specs hadn’t got the word.

Paul Andersen let out a long sigh. He sat down on the firing step, took off his iron helmet, and ran a dirty hand through his dirty-yellow hair. “Another one of the old boys down,” he remarked.

Chester Martin sat down beside him and began to roll a cigarette. “Yeah,” he said. “Time this war’s finally done, ain’t gonna be a lot of people left who went in at the start.”

“Don’t I wish you were wrong.” Andersen touched the two stripes on his sleeve, then the three on Martin’s. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to say anything. They’d both been promoted because men senior to them had gone down. One of these days, you had to figure they would go down, too, and fresh-faced kids would inherit their jobs.

Martin lighted the cigarette and sucked in smoke. It rasped his lungs raw. Maybe that was because the U.S. tobacco wasn’t so good as the stuff from the CSA that you could get only from Rebel corpses nowadays. Or maybe the chlorine still mixed with the air had something to do with it. Martin didn’t know. He didn’t care, either. The cigarette eased his nerves.

Back of the line, U.S. artillery opened up on the Confederate forward positions. “Go ahead,” Martin exclaimed with the bitterness any veteran comes to feel about the shortcomings of his own side. “Hit the sons of bitches now. That’s bully, that’s what that is. Doesn’t do us a damn bit of good. Why didn’t you shell them when they were coming up over the top at us?”

Andersen also got out makings for a cigarette. “Damn right,” he said while rolling it. “’Course, that would have done us some good, so we can’t have it, now can we?” He leaned forward to get a light from Martin’s smoke.

“They were probably getting shelled, too,” Martin allowed, trying to be fair.

Paul Andersen wasted no time on such useless efforts. “Poor babies,” he said. “Yeah, they get shelled every once in a while. So what? You bring those bastards up to the front line and they’d turn up their toes double quick. Tell me I’m lying-I dare you.”

“Can’t do it,” Martin said. Infantrymen took as an article of faith the notion that nobody else in the Army had a nastier job than theirs. It was, as far as Martin was concerned, a faith justified by works. He laughed. “At least the artillery fights. You ever seen a dead cavalryman?”

“Not likely,” Andersen exclaimed. “Hey, they’re all sitting back there, living soft and sharpening up their sabers for the breakthrough.”

“The breakthrough we’re going to give them,” Martin said. He and his friend laughed. That they would see a breakthrough in their lifetimes struck both of them as unlikely. That the cavalry would be able to exploit it if it ever came was even more absurd. Meditatively, Martin observed, “A horse makes a hell of a target for a machine gun, you know that?”

“It’s a fact, sure enough,” Andersen said. They both smoked on till their cigarette butts were too tiny to hold. Then they tossed them into the mud at the bottom of the trench.

Rain began pattering down a few minutes later. “Always comes right after a bombardment,” Martin said. That wasn’t strictly true, but shelling and rain did seem to go together. At first, he welcomed the rain, which washed the last remnants of poison gas from the air. But it did not let up. It kept raining and raining and raining, till the trenches went from mud to muck.

Martin ordered men to start laying down boards, so they could keep moving up and down the trench in spite of the rain. That would work-for a while. Eventually, if the rain kept up, the muck would start swallowing the boards. Martin had seen that the winter before. He’d never expected to spend two winters in the trenches. But then, when the war started, he hadn’t figured on spending one winter in the trenches.

“Only goes to show,” he muttered, and began to fix himself another cigarette. He hadn’t known how to keep one going in miserable weather till the war started. He did now. The sort of talent I could live without, he thought as he struck a match and lighted the cigarette, shielding it from the wet with his cupped hands as he did so. He sucked in more smoke. As long as he had the talent, he saw no reason not to use it.

“Come on,” Sylvia Enos said to George, Jr., and Mary Jane. “We’re going to be late to the Coal Board if you two don’t stop fooling around.”

Her son was five, her daughter two. They didn’t understand why being late for a Coal Board appointment-as with any government appointment in the USA-was a catastrophe, but they did understand that it was a catastrophe. They also understood Sylvia would warm their backsides hotter than any coal fire if they made her late. She’d made that very plain.

Taking one of them in each hand, she started to head away from Brigid Coneval’s flat, which lay down the hall with the one she and her children had shared with George, Sr., till the Navy sent him off to the Mississippi.

George, Jr., said, “Why can’t we stay with Mrs. Coneval? We like staying with Mrs. Coneval.” Mary Jane nodded emphatically. She couldn’t have said anything so complex, but she agreed with it.

“You can’t stay with Mrs. Coneval because she has an appointment with the Coal Board this afternoon, too,” Sylvia answered. Had George meant, We like staying with her better than staying with you? Sylvia tried not to think about that. She worked all day five days a week and a half-day Saturday like everyone else. That meant her children spent more time awake with Brigid Coneval, who hadn’t taken a factory job when her husband was conscripted but made ends meet by caring for the children of women who had, than with their own mother. No wonder they thought the world of her these days.

“Don’t wanna go Coal Board,” Mary Jane said.

Sylvia Enos sighed. She didn’t want to go to the Coal Board, either. “We have to,” she said, and let it go at that. The Coal Board, the Meat Board (not that she couldn’t evade that one, with her connections to the fishing boats that came into T Wharf), the Flour Board…all the bureaucracies that kept life in the United States efficient and organized-if you listened to the people who ran them. If you listened to anyone else, you got another story, but no one in power seemed interested in that tale.

Mary Jane stuck out her plump lower lip, which had a smear of jam beneath it. “No,” she said. Being two, she used the word in every possible intonation, with every possible variation on volume.

“Do you want to go to the Coal Board, or would you rather have a spanking?” Sylvia asked. As she’d known it would, that got Mary Jane’s attention. Her daughter held still long enough so she could button the girl’s coat all the way up to the neck. It was early December, still fall by the calendar, but it felt like winter outside, and a hard winter at that.

George, Jr., had buttoned his own buttons. He was proud of everything he could do on his own, in which he took after his father. He had, unfortunately, buttoned the buttons wrong. Sylvia fixed them quickly, and with as little fuss as she could, nodded to Mrs. Coneval, and took the children downstairs and down to the corner where the trolley stopped.

Had she imagined it, or did Brigid Coneval seem to be looking forward to a trip to the Coal Board offices? Putting up with a dozen or more little ones from before sunup to after sundown had to wear at her nerves; George, Jr., and Mary Jane were often plenty to make Sylvia wish she’d never met her husband, and they were her own flesh and blood. If you didn’t sneak into the whiskey bottle while caring for your neighbors’ brats, you were a woman of stern stuff.

Out on the street, newsboys wearing caps and wool mufflers against the chill hawked copies of the Boston Globe and other local papers. They were shouting about battles in west Texas and Sequoyah, and up in Manitoba, too. Sylvia thought about spending a couple of cents to get one, but decided not to. The black-bordered casualty lists that ran on every front page would only make her sad. So long as the newsboys weren’t yelling about gunboat disasters on the Mississippi River, she knew everything about the war that mattered to her.

She clambered onto the trolley and put a nickel in the fare box. The driver cast a dubious eye at George, Jr. “He’s only five,” Sylvia said. The driver shrugged and waved her on. She was having to say that more and more. Next year, she’d have to pay her son’s fare, too. When every five cents counted, that hurt.

“Coal Board!” the trolley man shouted, pulling up to the stop half a block away from the frowning gray-brown sandstone building. As if by magic, his car nearly emptied itself. It filled again a moment later, when people who had already arranged for their coming month’s ration climbed aboard to go home.

“It didn’t used to be this way,” an old man complained to his wife as Sylvia shepherded the children past them. “Back before the Second Mexican War, we-”

Distance and the crowd kept Sylvia from hearing the rest of that. It mattered little. She knew how the old man would have gone on. Her own mother had always said the same sort of thing. Back in the 1870s, the USA hadn’t been full of Boards watching every piece of everybody’s life and making sure all the pieces fit together in a way that worked best for the government. Back then, the CSA, England, and France had humiliated the United States only once, in the War of Secession, and people figured it was a fluke. After the second time, though, it seemed pretty obvious that the only way to fight back was to organize to the hilt. Thus conscription, thus the Boards, thus endless lines and endless forms…

Coal Board forms were stacked in neat piles, a whole array of them, on a long table just inside the entrance. Sylvia started to reach for the one that said, ENTIRE FAMILY DWELLING IN SAME LIVING QUARTERS. She jerked her hand away. That hadn’t been the right form for some months now. Instead, she grabbed the one reading, FAMILY MEMBER ON MILITARY SERVICE.

She sat down on one of the hard, uncomfortable chairs in the vast office. After fishing a cloth doll out of her handbag for Mary Jane and a couple of wooden soldiers painted green-gray for George, Jr., she guddled around in there till she found a pen and a bottle of ink. Normally, she would have contented herself with a pencil, if anything, but since the start of the war all the Boards had grown insistent on ink.

The form was long enough to have been folded over on itself four different times. As she did each month, she filled out the intimate details of her family’s life: ages, address, square footage, location of absent member(s), and on and on and on. She wished the bureaucrats could remember from one month to the next what she’d put down the month before. That didn’t seem to be in the cards, although, if you invented a palace for yourself so you could get a bigger coal ration, they generally did find out about that, whereupon you wished you hadn’t.

“Come on,” she said to the children. They got into the line appropriate to the form. It was, naturally, the longest line in the entire office: conscription had made sure of that. Up at the distant front, a clerk standing behind a tall marble counter like that of a bank examined each form in turn. When satisfied, he plied a rubber stamp with might and main: thock! thock! thock!

“Wonder what’s keeping him out of the Army,” the middle-aged woman in front of Sylvia muttered under her breath.

“When they start conscripting clerks, you’ll know the war is as good as lost,” Sylvia said with great conviction. The woman in front of her nodded, the ragged silk flowers on her battered old picture hat waving up and down.

The line inched forward. Sylvia supposed she should have been grateful the Coal Board offices stayed open all day Saturday. Without that, she would have had to leave work at the fish-canning plant in the middle of some weekday, which would not have made her bosses happy about her. Of course, she would have been far from the only one with such a need, so what could they have done? Without coal, how were you supposed to cook and to heat your house or flat?

When she was three people away from pushing her form over the high counter to the clerk behind it, paying her money, and collecting the ration tickets she’d need for the month ahead, the woman whose turn it was got into a disagreement with the clerk. “That’s not right!” she shouted in an Italian accent. “You think you can cheat me on account of I don’t know much English? I tell you this-” Whatever this was, it was in Italian, and Italian so electrifying that a couple of women who not only heard but also understood it crossed themselves.

It rolled off the clerk like seawater down an oilcloth. “I’m sorry, Mrs., uh, Vegetti, but I have applied the policy pertaining to unrelated boarders correctly, as warranted by the facts stated on your form there,” he said.

“Lousy thief! Stinking liar!” The rest was more Italian, even more incandescent than what had gone before. People from all over the Coal Board offices were staring at anyone bold enough to vent her feelings in that way before the representative of such a powerful organ of government.

The clerk listened to the stream of abuse for perhaps a minute. So, wide-eyed, did George, Jr. “What’s she saying, Mama?” he asked. “She sure sounds mad, whatever it is.”

“I don’t understand the words myself,” Sylvia answered, relieved at being able to tell the literal truth.

Clang! Clang! The clerk had heard enough. When he rang the bell, a couple of policemen came up to the irate Italian woman. One of them put a hand on her shoulder. Wham! She hauled off and hit him with her handbag. The two cops grabbed her and hustled her out of the office. She screeched every inch of the way. “Shut up, you noisy hag!” one of the policemen shouted at her. “No coal for you this month!”

A sigh ran through the big room. The woman in front of Sylvia said, “It would almost be worth it to have the chance to tell the no-good rubber stampers what you really think of them.”

“Almost,” Sylvia agreed wistfully. But that was the operative word. The Italian woman was going to lose a month’s fuel for the sake of a few minutes’ pleasure. Like a foolish woman who fell into immorality, she wasn’t thinking far enough ahead.

Sylvia smiled. There were temptations, and then there were temptations….

At last, she reached the head of the line. The clerk took her form, studied it with methodical care, and spoke in a rapid drone: “Do you swear that the information contained herein is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, knowing false statements are liable to the penalty for perjury?”

“I do,” Sylvia said, just as she had when the preacher asked her if she took George as her lawful wedded husband.

Thock! Thock! Thock! The rubber stamp did its work, a consummation less enjoyable than the one that had followed the earlier I do. But then George had heated her only through the wedding night. The Coal Board clerk would let her keep herself and her children warm all month long.

She passed money over the counter, receiving in return a strip of ration tickets, each good for twenty pounds of coal. The clerk said, “Be ready for a ration decrease or a price increase, or maybe both, next month.”

Nodding, she took George, Jr., and Mary Jane by the hand and headed out of the office. Be ready, the clerk had said. He made it sound easy. But where was the extra money supposed to come from? What was she supposed to do if they didn’t-couldn’t-give her enough coal for both cooking and heating?

The clerk didn’t care. It wasn’t his problem. “Come on,” she told her children. Like all the others the war caused, the problem was hers. One way or another, she would have to deal with it.

Outside the farmhouse, the wind howled like a wild thing. Here on the Manitoban prairie, it had a long running start. Arthur McGregor was glad he wouldn’t have to go out in it any time soon. He had plenty of food; the locusts in green-gray hadn’t been so thorough in their plundering as they had the winter before.

He even had plenty of kerosene for his lamps. Henry Gibbon, the storekeeper over in Rosenfeld, had discovered a surefire way to cheat the Yankees’ rationing system. McGregor didn’t know what it was, but he was willing to take advantage of it. Cheating the Americans was almost like soldiers making a successful raid on their lines, up farther north.

As if picking that thought right out of his head, his son Alexander said, “The Yanks still don’t have Winnipeg, Pa.” At fifteen, Alexander looked old enough to be conscripted. He was leaner than his father, and fairer, too, with brown hair that partly recalled his mother Maude’s auburn curls. Arthur McGregor might have been taken for a black Irishman had his craggy features not been so emphatically Scots.

“Not after a year and a half of trying,” he agreed now. “The troops from the mother country helped us hold ’em back. And as long as we have Winnipeg-”

“We have Canada,” Alexander finished for him. Arthur McGregor’s big head went up and down. His son was right. As long as grain could go east and manufactured goods west, the dominion was still a working concern. The USA had almost cut the prairie off from the more heavily settled eastern provinces, but hadn’t quite managed it.

“The real question is,” Arthur rumbled, “can we go through another year like this one and the last half of the one before?”

“Of course we can!” Alexander sounded indignant that his father should presume to doubt Canada could hold on.

Arthur McGregor studied his son with a mixture of fondness and exasperation. The lad was at an age where he was inclined to believe things would turn out as he wanted for no better reason than that he wanted them to turn out so. “The United States are a big country,” he said, that being another oblique way to say he wasn’t so optimistic as he had been.

“We’re a big country, too-bigger than the USA,” Alexander said, “and the Confederacy is on our side, and England, and France, and Russia, and Japan. We’ll lick the Yanks yet, you wait and see.”

“We’re a big country without enough people in it, and our friends are a long way away,” McGregor answered. Always dark and cold, December was a good time of year in which to be gloomy. “If the Yankees had chosen to stand on the defensive against the CSA and throw everything they had at us, they would have smashed us in a hurry and then gone on to other things.”

“Nahh!” Alexander rejected the idea out of hand.

But Arthur McGregor nodded. “They would have, son. They could have. They’re just too big for us. But one thing about Americans is, they always think they can do more than they really can. They tried to smash us and the Confederates and England on the high seas, all at the same time. And I don’t care how big they are, I don’t care how much they love the Kaiser and the Huns, no country on the face of the earth is big enough and strong enough to do all that at once.”

At last, he’d succeeded in troubling his son. “Do you think they’re going to win the war, Pa?”

McGregor had lain awake at night from that very fear. “I hope not,” he said at last. “It’s just that there are so blasted many of them.”

That put a sour twist on Alexander’s mouth; it was inarguably true. In Arthur McGregor’s mind’s eye, he saw endless columns of men in green-gray tramping north, endless queues of snarling canvas-topped trucks painted the same shade, endless teams of horses hauling wagons and artillery pieces, endless trains also bringing men and supplies up toward the front. True, there were also endless ambulances and trains marked with the Red Cross, taking wounded Yankees away for treatment, and, no doubt, endless corpses at the front. But somehow the U.S. military machine kept grinding on despite the wastage.

Alexander said, “What can we do?”

“Hope,” McGregor answered. “Pray, though God will do as He likes, not as we like.” He was as stern a Presbyterian as he looked. “Cooperate with the Americans as little as we can-though if they hadn’t bought our grain, however little they paid for it, I can’t imagine what we’d do for money.”

He scowled. A farm didn’t need much in the way of cash, especially when a war knocked deeds and land taxes all topsy-turvy. You could live off your crops and your livestock and you might even make your own cloth from wool and from flax if you’d planted any, but you couldn’t make your own coal or your own kerosene or your own glass or books or…a lot of things that made life come close to being worth living.

“It’s not enough,” Alexander said. “Not going along with the Yanks, I mean-it’s not enough. We shouldn’t be talking about not doing things with them-that’s why you don’t send my sister to the school they set up. Like I say, it’s good, but it’s not enough. We’ve got to figure out ways to do things to the Americans.”

“Like that bomb in Rosenfeld?” Arthur McGregor asked. His son nodded, gray eyes fierce. But McGregor sighed. “It’s possible, I suppose, but it’s not easy. They almost made me one of the hostages they took after that bomb went off, remember. They would have given me a blindfold, lined me up against a wall, and shot me. This is a war, son, and you can’t back out and say you didn’t mean it if something goes wrong.”

“I know that!” Alexander exclaimed. But the jaunty tone with which he’d replied gave him away. He didn’t believe for a moment that anything could go wrong in a scheme to tweak the Yankees’ tails. When you were fifteen, you knew everything always turned out fine in the end. Arthur McGregor was a good deal past twice fifteen. He knew how foolish you were at that age.

He addressed his son with great seriousness: “I want you to promise me you won’t go off on your own to try to do anything to the Americans. And once you make that promise, I expect you to keep it.”

Now Alexander McGregor looked most unhappy. “Aw, Pa, I don’t want to have to lie to you.”

“I don’t want you to have to lie to me, either,” his father said. McGregor was at the same time proud of his son for not taking a lie for granted and alarmed at how serious he was in wanting to do something to strike at the American soldiers holding-and holding down-Manitoba.

“Believe me, Pa,” Alexander went on, “I’m not the only fellow who wants to-” He stopped. Kerosene light was on the ruddy side, anyhow, but McGregor thought he turned red. “I don’t think I should have said that.”

“I wish you hadn’t, I’ll tell you that.” McGregor studied Alexander, who did his inadequate best to show nothing on his face. How many boys were there on the scattered farms of Manitoba-and boys they would have to be, for everyone of conscription age before the land was overrun had already been called to the colors-plotting heaven only knew what against the USA?

“Whatever these fellows have in their minds, you will not be a part of it. Do you understand me?” Arthur McGregor knew he sounded like a prophet laying down the Law. He hadn’t taken that tone with Alexander for years; he’d had no need. Now he wondered whether his son, who was nearly a man and who thought himself more nearly a man than he was, would still respond to it as he had when he was smaller. And, sure enough, defiance kindled in Alexander’s eyes. “I understand you, Pa,” he said, but that was a long way from pledging his obedience.

McGregor exhaled heavily. “I’m not just saying this for myself, you know. What do you suppose your mother would do if the Yanks caught you at whatever mischief you have in mind?” He knew that was a low blow, and used it without compunction or hesitation.

It went home, too. Alexander winced. “It wouldn’t be like that, Pa,” he protested.

“No? Why wouldn’t it?” McGregor pressed the advantage: “And how would you keep Julia out of it, once you got in? Or even Mary?”

“Julia’s just a girl, and she’s only twelve,” Alexander said, as if that settled that.

“And she hates the Americans worse than you do, and she’s stubborner than you ever dreamt of being,” McGregor said. Before Alexander could respond, he went on, “And one of these days you and your pals would decide that the Yanks couldn’t think she was dangerous because she’s a girl and she’s only twelve. And you’d send her out to do something, and she’d be proud to go. And what if she got caught, son? The Yanks are nasty devils, but Lord help you if you think they’re stupid.”

“We’d never-” Alexander began, but he didn’t finish the sentence. When you were in a war, who could say what you might be driven to do?

Neither of them spoke of Mary. That was not because she had but seven years. It had more to do with a certainty father and son shared that the littlest girl in the house would take any chance offered her to hurt the U.S. cause, and an equally shared determination not to offer her any such chance. Mary was very bright for her age, but unacquainted with anything at all related to restraint.

“I asked you once for your promise, and you would not give it,” McGregor said. “I’m going to ask you again.” He folded his arms across his chest and waited to hear what his son would say. If Alexander said no…He didn’t know what he would do if Alexander said no.

His son let out a long, deep sigh, the sigh not of a boy but of a man facing up to the fact that the world doesn’t work the way he wished it would. It was the most grown-up noise McGregor had ever heard from him. At last, voice full of regret, he said, “All right, Pa. I promise.”

“Promise what, Alexander?” That was Mary, coming out of the kitchen, where she’d been putting away the plates her mother had washed and her big sister dried.

“Promise to tickle you till you scream like there’s American soldiers coming down the chimney instead of Santa Claus,” Alexander said, and made as if to grab her. That could be dangerous; she fought as ferociously as a half-tame farm cat.

But now she hopped back, laughing. She turned to Arthur McGregor. “What did he promise, Pa?”

“To be a good boy,” McGregor said. Mary snorted. That sort of promise meant nothing to her. McGregor had to hope it meant something to her brother.