Walk in Hell

VI

“There is, there is, there is a God in Israel!” George Armstrong Custer chortled, brandishing a newspaper at his adjutant.

“Sir?” Abner Dowling said. He’d already seen the Army newspaper. He hadn’t noticed anything in it to make him want to do a buck-and-wing. He wondered what the devil General Custer had spotted to bring him out of the bad-tempered depression in which he’d been sunk ever since his wife got to Kentucky.

Custer wasn’t just happy, he was gloating. “Look!” he said, pointing to a story on the second page of the paper. “Richard Harding Davis had the good grace to drop dead on a visit to the front. I wish he would have done it while he was on this front, but damn me to hell if I’ll complain.”

Davis had written about Custer in less than flattering terms: a capital crime if ever there was one, as far as the general commanding First Army was concerned. “Sir, his work is being judged by a more exacting Critic now than any editor he knew here,” Dowling said, which not only smacked of truth (if you were a believing man, as Dowling was) but was noncommittal, letting Custer pick for himself the way in which the late correspondent was likely to be judged.

He picked the way Dowling had been sure he would: “How right you are, Major, which means they’ve got him on a frying pan hotter than the one that does my morning bacon-and he’ll stay there a lot longer and get a lot more burnt, not that that’s easy these days.” He hadn’t stopped complaining about the ways the meals that were cooked for him had gone downhill since Olivia left. He hadn’t stopped complaining to Dowling, that is. He hadn’t said one word where his wife was liable to hear it. To Dowling’s regret, the old boy had a keenly developed sense of self-preservation.

Still snorting with glee, the illustrious general waddled into the kitchen. Dowling suspected the corporal doing duty at the stove for the time being would hear fewer fulminations than usual. When Custer was in a good mood, everything looked rosy to him. Trouble was, he wasn’t in a good mood very often.

Libbie Custer came downstairs a moment later. She was only a few years younger than her husband, and had the look of a schoolmarm who would sooner crack a ruler over her pupils’ knuckles than teach them the multiplication table. Her eyes were the gray of the sky just before it settles down to rain for a week. When she fixed her gaze on Dowling, he automatically assumed he’d done something wrong. He didn’t know what yet, but he figured Mrs. Custer would tell him.

She, however, chose an indirect approach: “Did I hear the general laughing just now?” She often spoke of her husband in that old-fashioned way.

“Uh, yes, ma’am,” Dowling answered. He had not taken long to decide that at least two thirds of the brains in the Custer family resided in the female of the species.

Libbie Custer did her best to prove herself more deadly than the male, too. “Where is she?” she hissed. “I’ll send her packing in a hurry, I promise you that, and afterwards I’ll deal with the general, too.” She sounded as if she looked forward to it. More-she sounded as if she’d had practice at it, too.

But Dowling said, truthfully if not completely, “There’s no woman here, ma’am. It was only-”

“Don’t give me that.” Mrs. Custer cut him off so abruptly, he was glad she didn’t have a knife in her hand. “He’s been doing this for forty years, the philandering skunk, ever since he found that pretty little Cheyenne girl, Mo-nah-see-tah-did you ever think you’d learn how to say ‘stinking whore’ in Cheyenne, Major Dowling? When he laughs that way, he’s done it again. I know him. I ought to, by now, don’t you think?”

“Ma’am, you’re wrong.” That was truthful, too, if only technically. Dowling had enough troubles serving as intermediary between Custer and the rest of First Army; serving as intermediary between Custer and Mrs. Custer struck him as conduct above and beyond the call of duty-far above. Rather desperately, he explained.

For a wonder, Libbie Custer heard him out. For another wonder, she didn’t call him a liar when he was done. Instead, she nodded and said, “Oh, that explains it. Mr. Richard Harding Davis.” George Armstrong Custer had sworn at Davis. He’d said he would use Davis’ reportage in the outhouse. Nothing he had said, though, packed the concentrated menace of those four words. Mrs. Custer went on, “Yes, that would explain it. Thank you, Major.”

She swept into the kitchen, her long, gray dress almost brushing the ground as she walked. She clung to the bustle, which had gone out of style for younger women a few years before. As far as Dowling was concerned, it made her look more like a cruising man-of-war than a stately lady, but no one had sought his opinion. No one was much in the habit of seeking his opinion.

From inside the kitchen came the sounds of mirth and gaiety-Dowling couldn’t hear the words, but the tone was unmistakable. The general and his wife were happy as a couple of larks. Dowling scratched his head. A moment before, Mrs. Custer had been ready to scalp her husband. Now the two of them seemed thick as thieves. It didn’t figure.

And then, after a bit, it did. Libbie Custer would come down on George like a dynamited building for any of his personal shortcomings. Given the scope of those, she had plenty of room for action. But Mrs. General Custer protected General Custer’s career like a tigress. Bad press jeopardized the general, not the man.

“I couldn’t live like that,” Dowling muttered. And yet the Custers had been wed since the War of Secession. Marital bliss? Dowling had his doubts. He shook his head. He didn’t have doubts, he damn well knew better. Whether they were what any outsider would call happy or not, though, they’d grown together. He doubted one of them would live more than a year or two if the other died. Libbie Custer looked ready to last another twenty years. Dowling wasn’t so sure about the general. But he’d have bet Custer would have keeled over from a heart attack or a stroke, not Richard Harding Davis. You never could tell.

The two Custers came out of the kitchen arm in arm. For the moment, they presented a united front against the world, and would probably go right on doing so till Libbie found out for sure about Olivia. To his wife, the general said, “I do have to fight the war now. I’ll see you in a while.” She nodded and went upstairs. Custer turned to Dowling. “Major, I’ll want to consult with you about the artillery preparation for the attack on Bowling Green. Give me ten minutes to study the maps, then come into my office.”

“Yes, sir,” Dowling said. Custer was acting more like a proper general these days. That was likely to be Libbie’s influence, too. The brains of the outfit, Dowling thought again.

While he was waiting for Custer to finish studying (an unlikely notion in and of itself), the kitchen door opened again. “Uh, sir?” It was the corporal who’d been frying everything in sight since Olivia made herself scarce.

“What is it, Renick?” Dowling asked.

The corporal, who looked more like a light-heavyweight prizefighter than a cook, opened his left hand to display a small gold coin. “Look, sir, the general gave me a quarter eagle. Said I was the best cook anybody could ask for. Said he’d write me a letter of commendation any time I wanted.”

“Good for you, Renick,” Dowling said. “I’ll make sure he does that today.” Davis’ death was doing the cook some good, anyhow-but if Custer didn’t sign that letter while still in the warm glow of euphoria, Renick didn’t stand a Chinaman’s chance of getting it added to his record, not on skill alone he didn’t.

Dowling hurried to the tiny downstairs room he used as his own office, ran a sheet of Army stationery into his typewriter, and banged out the letter. Eventually, Mrs. Custer would go back to Michigan and Olivia would replace Corporal Renick. If he had that letter in his file, he might end up cooking for some other officer, not in the trenches. He seemed a good kid-why not give him a better chance to come out of the war in one piece?

And, sure enough, General Custer did sign the letter. “Fine lad,” he said, “that young-whatever his name is.”

“Renick, sir.” Dowling put the letter back in the manila folder from which he’d produced it.

“Ah, yes, of course,” Custer said, which meant he hadn’t heard the answer but was too vain to ask his adjutant to say it over again louder. He picked up a pointer and aimed it at the situation map of Kentucky. “I am of the opinion, Major, that Bowling Green falls at the next onslaught.”

“Seeing as we’re approaching from the west and the north, the Confederates will have a hard time keeping us out, yes, sir,” Dowling agreed. “But fighting in built-up country can be expensive as the devil. As you said before, we need to use our superiority in artillery to the best advantage.”

Custer hadn’t actually said anything quite like that, but had talked about the artillery preparation, which, as far as his adjutant was concerned, came close enough. He scratched at his mustache. “We’ll give the Rebs enough artillery preparation to blow them right back to the War of Secession,” he growled. “And then we’ll follow it with infantry, and then with cavalry-”

“I think the ground troops may well be able to capture the city without the cavalry, sir,” Dowling said. Custer would probably remain sure to his dying day that cavalry could exploit any breakthrough the infantry made. Try as Dowling would, he hadn’t been able to convince the general otherwise. Breakthroughs of any sort looked to be illusory in this war, and, if they came, the cavalry wasn’t going to exploit them, not till somebody bred an armor-plated horse it wasn’t.

“Ground troops,” Custer grumbled. “Artillery.” He let out a long, wheezy sigh. “The spirit has gone out of warfare, Major. It’s not as it was when I was a young man.”

“No, sir.” Dowling wondered if he would be saying the same thing if he lived till 1950 or so. Maybe he would, but Dowling hoped he wouldn’t try to turn an entire army on its head because he didn’t care to adjust to a new reality.

Custer whacked the map with the stick. “And after Bowling Green falls, Major, we advance on Nashville! We took it in the War of Secession, and we held it, too, till the stinking limeys and frogs made us give it back. When we take it this time, we’ll keep it.”

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for? The words from Browning ran through Dowling’s head. They’d needed a year and a half to get to-not yet into, but to-Bowling Green. At that rate, another year might, with luck, see them on the Cumberland. By the way Custer talked, he expected to be there week after next. As grand strategy, what he said made a certain amount of sense. Turning it from grand strategy to tactical maneuvering, though…was liable to fall squarely on Abner Dowling’s broad shoulders.

“We’ll need help from the Navy,” he warned. “And up till now, their monitors haven’t been able to get anywhere near Nashville.”

“Well then, seems to me that they’ll need help from us, too,” Custer observed. The comment was so much to the point that Dowling frankly stared at the general commanding First Army. He’d been glad to have Libbie Custer come visit for no better reason than to see her husband dismayed. But if her presence meant Custer turned into something close to the general First Army needed, Dowling hoped she’d never leave.

And if that meant Custer didn’t get to jump on Olivia’s sleek brown body any more, everyone had to make sacrifices to win the war. Hell, Dowling thought, I’ll even put up with Renick’s godawful cremated bacon.

Cincinnatus pulled the wool sailor’s cap down over his ears to keep them warm as he walked to the Covington wharves. The sun wasn’t up yet, though the eastern sky glowed pink. Days were getting longer now, noticeably so, but it was still one snowstorm after another.

He walked past a gang of U.S. soldiers. They were busy tearing posters off walls and pasting up replacements. Some of the ones they were destroying had been smuggled up from the unoccupied CSA. Cincinnatus turned a chuckle into a cough so the soldiers wouldn’t notice him. He knew about those.

The other posters going down were printed in red and black-images of broken chains, stalwart Negroes with rifles, and revolutionary slogans. Cincinnatus knew about those, too.

He paused for a moment to have a look at the posters the U.S. soldiers were putting up to replace the Confederate and Red propaganda. The art showed three eagles-the U.S. bald eagle, the German black one, and the two-headed bird symbolizing Austria-Hungary-with their talons piercing four red-white-and-blue flags: those of the CSA, England, France, and Russia. The message was one word: VICTORY.

“Not bad,” he murmured, and disguised another chuckle behind a glove. He’d never expected to become a connoisseur of poster propaganda, not before the war started. A lot of things he’d never expected had happened since the war started.

He saw more of the three-eagle posters as he came closer to the riverfront, and nodded to himself: so the Yanks were going to be putting out a new type, were they? It had the look of the first in a series. He wouldn’t have thought of that kind of thing back in 1913, either.

When he got to the wharves, he waved to the other Negro laborers coming in to help keep the U.S. war effort moving. Some of them, no doubt, also belonged to Red revolutionary cells. He didn’t know which ones, though. He hadn’t had the need to know. What you didn’t know, you couldn’t tell.

Here came Lieutenant Kennan. Goddamn pipsqueak, Cincinnatus thought. If he ever got the chance, he knew he could snap Kennan in two like a stale cracker. But Kennan had the weight of the U.S. Army behind him. Now he fixed Cincinnatus with his customary glare. “You, boy!” he snapped.

“Yes, suh?” Cincinnatus said warily. Kennan sounded more filled with bile than usual, which was saying something.

“Don’t I remember you bragging once upon a time that you could drive a truck?”

“Don’t know about braggin’, suh, but I can drive a truck,” Cincinnatus said. “Been doin’it for a while before the war started.” Before the war started. Here it was barely sunup, and that phrase had already crossed his mind several times. It was going to be a dividing line for his life, for everybody’s life, for a long time to come.

Lieutenant Kennan looked as if every word he was about to say tasted bad. “You see that line of trucks over yonder? You get your ass over there, ask for Lieutenant Straubing, and tell him you’re the nigger I was talking about.”

“Yes, suh,” Cincinnatus said. Were the Yanks finally getting smart? If they were, they’d taken their own sweet time about it. Better late than never? Cincinnatus wouldn’t have bet on that, not till he saw for certain. “If I’m drivin’ a truck, suh, what do they pay me?”

“I don’t know anything about that,” Kennan said, as if washing his hands of Cincinnatus. “You take it up with Lieutenant Straubing. You’re his baby now.” No, he didn’t want to have anything to do with Cincinnatus. He rounded on the rest of the men in the labor gang. “What are you coons doing, standing around gaping like a bunch of gorillas? Get your nigger asses moving!”

Cincinnatus had all he could do not to spring over to the trucks to which Kennan had directed him. Nobody, he told himself, could be a worse boss than the one he was escaping. But then, after a moment, he shook his head. Since the war began, he’d learned you couldn’t tell about things like that.

A sentry near the trucks wore one of the helmets that made U.S. soldiers look as if they had kettles on their heads. He carried a Springfield with a long bayonet, which he pointed at Cincinnatus. “State your business,” he snapped, with a clear undertone of it had better be good.

“Lieutenant Kennan back there, suh”-he pointed toward the wharf where his old gang, under Kennan’s loud and profane direction, was beginning to unload a barge-“he tol’ me to come see Lieutenant, uh, Straubing here.”

For a moment, he wondered if there’d be no Lieutenant Straubing, and if Kennan, for reasons of his own (maybe connected with Cincinnatus’ dealings with one underground or another, maybe only with Kennan’s loathing for blacks) had sent him here to get in trouble, or perhaps to get shot.

But the sentry, though he didn’t lower the rifle, did nod. “Stay right here,” he said, as if Cincinnatus were likely to be going anywhere with that bayonet aimed at his brisket. Then he raised his voice: “Hey, Lieutenant! Colored fellow here to see you!”

Colored fellow. It was just a description. Cincinnatus, not used to being just described, heard it with some incredulity. Out from around the row of trucks came an ordinary-looking white man with silver first-lieutenant’s bars on the shoulder straps of his U.S. uniform. “Hello,” he said to Cincinnatus. “You the man Eddie was telling me about last night?” Seeing Cincinnatus’ frown, he added, “Lieutenant Kennan, I mean?”

“Oh. Yes, suh.” Cincinnatus had labored for Kennan for well over a year without learning, or wanting to learn, his Christian name.

“He says you can drive a truck,” Straubing said. He waited for Cincinnatus to agree, then went on, “How long have you been doing that?”

“Couple-three years before the war started,” Cincinnatus answered. “Haven’t had the chance to do it since.”

Lieutenant Straubing cocked his head to one side. “You don’t hardly look old enough to have been driving that long.” For a moment, Cincinnatus thought he was calling him a liar. Then he realized Straubing meant he had a young-looking face. “Come on,” the lieutenant said, and walked him past the sentry. He halted in front of one of the big, green-gray White trucks. “Think you can drive this baby?”

“Reckon I can,” Cincinnatus said. The White was a monster, a good deal larger than the delivery truck he’d driven for Tom Kennedy. But it was still a truck. A crank was still a crank, a gearshift still a gearshift.

“All right. Show me. The key’s in it.” Lieutenant Straubing scrambled up into the truck, sliding over to the passenger’s half of the front seat.

Cincinnatus had no trouble starting the truck. It was a bare-bones military model, without even a windscreen, which surprised him when he climbed in behind the wheel, but he didn’t let it worry him. He didn’t ask Straubing about pay, either, not right then. That he wasn’t hauling heavy crates was plenty to keep him happy for the moment.

“Pull out of the line and take me on a spin through town. Be back here in, oh, twenty minutes or so,” Lieutenant Straubing told him over the growl of the motor.

“Yes, suh,” Cincinnatus said. He put the truck in gear and got moving. Every once in a while, he sneaked a glance over at the soldier beside him. He wanted to scratch his head, but didn’t. Something in the way Straubing dealt with him was peculiar, but he had trouble putting his finger on it.

They didn’t get back to the parked trucks in twenty minutes. They had a blowout not five minutes after getting on the road. Cincinnatus fixed it. Straubing helped, not the least bit fussy about getting mud and grease on his hands or on his uniform. “All right, where were we?” he said when the two of them got back onto the rather hard seat.

Cincinnatus didn’t answer. He didn’t feel he had to answer, even though a white man had just spoken to him. When he realized that, he realized what was funny about how the U.S. soldier was treating him: as one man would treat another, regardless of whether he was white and Cincinnatus black. No wonder Cincinnatus had taken so long to figure that out: as best he could remember, he’d never run into anything like it before.

Some white men hated Negroes, plain and simple. He’d met a good many of those before having the imperfect delight of busting his hump for Lieutenant Kennan for so long. But that kind of out-and-out hatred wasn’t the most common response he’d had from whites over the years. More treated him as they would have treated a mule: they gave him orders when they needed him and made as if he were invisible when they didn’t.

He’d even had white men grateful to him: Tom Kennedy’s image rose up in his mind. After he’d hidden his former boss and kept U.S. soldiers from finding him, Kennedy had been nice as you please. But it had been a condescending sort of niceness, even then: a lord being kind to a serf who by some accident of fate had been in position to do him a good turn.

He didn’t feel any of that from Lieutenant Straubing. The way Straubing was acting, they might both have been white-or, for that matter, they might both have been black. He’d never run into that from Confederate white men. He hadn’t run into it from Yankees, either, not till now. He didn’t know how to react to it.

Straubing suddenly spoke up: “You can go on back now, Cincinnatus. I’m sold-you can drive a truck. Better than I can, wouldn’t be surprised.” As Cincinnatus turned back toward the riverfront, the lieutenant went on, “Dollar and a half a day suit you?”

“It’s what I’m makin’ now, most days,” Cincinnatus answered, “but yes, suh, it suits. Work’ll be easier.”

“I thought longshoreman’s rate was a dollar a day,” Straubing said with a small frown. Then he laughed-at himself. “And I’m a dimwit. I think half the reason Kennan sent you over to me is that you were ruining his accounts, getting the extra half-dollar so often. The other half, unless I’m wrong, is that you were getting the extra half-dollar so often, you were ruining his notions of what colored people are like. He probably hasn’t figured that half out for himself yet. Tell you what-I won’t tell him if you don’t.”

Now Cincinnatus did stare at him. He almost ran down a horse and buggy before he started paying attention to the road again. Never in all his born days had he heard-or expected to hear-one white man discussing another’s attitude toward Negroes, and discussing it in tones that made it obvious he thought Lieutenant Kennan was a damn fool.

“You’re changing jobs-you ought to do better for yourself,” Straubing said. “Hmm. Can you read and write?”

Cincinnatus looked at Lieutenant Straubing. One rule of survival for blacks in the Confederacy had always been, Never let the white man find out how much you know. Without that rule, the Red underground would never have had the chance to pull off its rebellion-not that the rebellion looked as if it would succeed, worse luck. He clicked his tongue between his teeth. “Yes, suh.”

“Good,” the U.S. lieutenant said. “In that case, my accounts’ll stand paying you a buck six bits. How does that sound?”

Before the war-that phrase again-$1.75 a day had been white man’s wages, and not the worst white man’s wages. It was a good deal more than Tom Kennedy had been paying him. “You got yourself a driver, Lieutenant,” Cincinnatus said.

“Good,” Lieutenant Straubing answered. “Glad to hear it. I can use people who know what they’re doing.”

Cincinnatus expected him to go on, I don’t care if they’re white or black. He’d heard that before, every now and then. Most of the time, it was a thumping lie: that you needed to say it proved it was a lie. But Straubing didn’t say it. By everything Cincinnatus could see, he took it for granted.

After Cincinnatus had parked the truck, Straubing led him into a dockside building and spoke to a clerk there. The clerk took down Cincinnatus’ name and where he lived and who his family were. Then he swore him to loyalty to the United States. Cincinnatus was already sworn to loyalty to the Confederate underground and to the Negro Marxist underground. He took the oath without hesitation-after so many, what was one more?

The clerk slid papers across the desk at him. “Make your mark here to show all this information is correct and complete. Lieutenant, you’ll witness it for him.”

Cincinnatus took the pen. He looked at the clerk. He signed his name in a fine, round hand. The clerk stared at him. “Good thing you know your letters,” Lieutenant Straubing said. “It’ll make you a hell of a lot more useful.”

Tom Kennedy had known he could read and write, too. Kennedy had also used that to his advantage. But with him, there had always been something of the flavor of a man using a high-school horse. It wasn’t there with Straubing. Cincinnatus’ear for such things was keen. Had it been there, he would have heard it.

Before long, blacks from the wharves were loading crates into the back of Cincinnatus’ truck. They weren’t from his labor gang, but he knew several of them even so. They looked at him from the corners of their eyes. Nobody said anything, not with white men all around: most of the other truck drivers were white, for instance. Cincinnatus waited to see how that would go.

The trucks rumbled out of Covington before nine o’clock. The front was between Lexington and Richmond, Kentucky: about a four-hour trip. A little more than halfway there, they rolled past the Corinth Monument, which commemorated Braxton Bragg’s victory in late 1862 that had brought Kentucky into the Confederacy. Bragg’s statue was gone from its pedestal these days, and the pedestal itself plastered over with fresh, crisp three-eagles posters. The USA aimed to keep as much of Kentucky as it had seized.

Laborers, mostly black but some white, unloaded the trucks. Some of what those had brought would go to the front in small wagons, some on muleback or on man’s back. Cincinnatus ate his dinner out of the dinner pail, then drove the truck back to Covington. Everyone took him for granted. He still had trouble knowing what to make of that.

He got back into Covington with his headlamps on. Straubing paid off the drivers himself. Some got $1.50, some $1.75, some two dollars even. One of the two-dollar men was black. Nobody raised a fuss.

Money jingling in his pocket, Cincinnatus headed for home with more news for Elizabeth than he could shake a stick at. He went past Conroy’s general store, as he always did when coming home from the riverfront. Conroy had a paper stuck in the bottom left-hand corner of his window. That meant he and Tom Kennedy wanted to see Cincinnatus.

“Well, I’ll be damned if I want to see them,” Cincinnatus muttered. “Paper? What paper? I didn’t see no paper.” He walked right past the general store.

Three eagles glared out at Flora Hamburger from every other wall as she walked to the Socialist Party offices. She glared right back at them. She was sick to death of wartime propaganda. What worried her most was that the Democrats were getting better at what she’d thought of as a Socialist specialty.

Other posters (some with text in Yiddish as well as English; the government didn’t miss a trick) exhorted people to buy the latest series of Victory Bonds, to use less coal than their legal ration (which was, most of the time, not big enough as it was), to take the train as little as they could (which also saved coal), to turn back glass bottles and tin cans, to give waste grease to the War Department through their local butcher shop, to…she lost track of everything. Anyone who tried to do all the things the posters urged him to do would go mad in short order.

But then, the world already seemed to have gone mad.

Here and there, among the eagles and the handsome men in green-gray and the women who had to be their wives or mothers, Socialist Party posters managed to find space. Keeping them up there wasn’t easy. As fast as boys went round with pastepots and brushes, Soldiers’ Circle men followed, tearing down anything that might contradict what TR wanted people to think today.

PEACE AND JUSTICE, one of the Socialist posters said. A SQUARE DEAL FOR THE WORKER, shouted another. A good many copies of that one stayed up; some of the Soldiers’ Circle goons took it for a government-issued poster. Stealing the opposition’s slogan was always a good idea.

Fewer Soldiers’ Circle men prowled the Centre Market than was usually so. And, most uncommonly, none loitered in front of Max Fleischmann’s butcher shop. Fleischmann was sweeping the sidewalk in front of the shop when Flora came up. “Good morning, my dear,” he said with Old World courtliness. He was a Democrat himself, which didn’t keep the government goons from giving him a hard time. With his shop right under Fourteenth Ward Socialist Party headquarters, it was guilt by association in the most literal sense of the words.

“Good morning, Mr. Fleischmann,” Flora answered. “How are you today?”

“Today, not so bad,” the butcher answered. “Last night-” He rolled his eyes. “You’ve seen the ‘turn in old grease’ posters?” After pausing to see if Flora would nod, he went on, “Last night, just as I was closing up shop, one of those Soldiers’ Circle mamzrim brought in a gallon tin-of lard.”

“Oy!” Flora exclaimed. That was more nastily clever than the Soldiers’ Circle usually managed to be. A gallon of pig’s fat in a kosher butcher shop…

“Oy is right,” Fleischmann agreed mournfully. “Thank God I had no customers just then. I shut the shop and brought my rabbi over. The place is ritually clean again, but even so-”

“I can complain to the City Council about that kind of harassment, if you’d like me to,” Flora said.

But the butcher shook his head. “Better not. If one of them does it one time, a kholeriyeh on him and life goes on. If you give the idea to a whole great lot of them, it will happen over and over for the next six months. No, better not.”

“It shouldn’t be like that,” Flora said. But she’d spent enough time as an activist to know the difference between what should have been and what was. Shaking her head in sad sympathy with Max Fleischmann, she went upstairs.

People were still coming into the Socialist Party offices, which meant the chaos wasn’t so bad as it would be later in the day. She had time to get a glass of tea, pour sugar into it, and catch up on a little paperwork before the telephones started going mad.

“How are you this morning?” Maria Tresca asked.

“I’ve been worse-little Yossel slept through the whole night,” Flora answered. “But I’ve been better, too.” She explained what the Soldiers’ Circle man had done to Max Fleischmann.

Maria was Catholic, but she’d spent enough time among Jews to understand what lard in the butcher shop meant. “It’s an outrage,” she snapped. “And he probably went out to a saloon and got drunk afterwards, laughing about it.”

“Probably just what he did,” Flora agreed. “Anyone who could think of anything so vile, he should walk in front of a train.”

Herman Bruck walked in just then. Flora wished fleetingly that he would walk in front of a train, too. But no, that wasn’t fair. Yes, Herman was a nuisance and wouldn’t leave her in peace. But he’d never yet made her snatch a hatpin out from among the artificial flowers where it lurked, and she didn’t think he ever would. There were nuisances, but then there were nuisances.

“Good morning, Flora,” he said, setting his homburg on the hat tree. “You look pretty today-you must have had a good night’s sleep.”

“Yes, thanks,” she answered shortly. She wasn’t going to tell him about little Yossel. She didn’t encourage him-but then, he needed no encouragement.

He’d got himself some tea and sat down at his desk when a Western Union messenger opened the door to the office. Flora thought about the messenger who’d brought word of little Yossel’s father’s death back to Sophie at the apartment the family shared. She shook her head, annoyed at herself. That wouldn’t happen here. People didn’t live here, however much it sometimes seemed they did.

She accepted the yellow envelope, gave the delivery boy a nickel, and watched him head back down to the street. “Who is it from?” Herman Bruck asked.

“It’s from Philadelphia,” she answered, and tore the envelope open. Her eyes slid rapidly over the words there. She had to read them twice before she believed them. No one would bring bad news here. The thought jeered in her mind. “It’s Congressman Zuckerman,” she said in a voice so empty, she hardly recognized it as her own. “He was walking downstairs with Congressman Potts from Brooklyn, and, and, he tripped and he fell and, he, he broke his neck. He died not quite three hours ago.”

She had never heard the Socialist Party office go so quiet, not even in the aftermath of the Remembrance Day riots. Myron Zuckerman had been a Socialist stalwart in Congress since before the turn of the century. Come November, his reelection would have been as automatic as the movement of a three-day clock. The Democrats wouldn’t have put up more than a token candidate against him, and the Republicans probably wouldn’t have run anyone at all. All of a sudden, though, everything was different.

“There’s no doubt?” Maria Tresca asked.

“Not unless the telegram is wrong,” Flora answered. Her voice was gentle; she knew Maria hadn’t been doubting so much as hoping. She looked down at the telegram. It blurred, not from changing words but from the tears that filled her eyes.

“That’s-terrible.” Herman Bruck’s voice was shaken, as if he was holding back tears himself. “He was like a father to all of us.”

“What are we going to do?” Three people spoke at the same time. Everyone in the office had to be thinking the same thing.

Maybe because Yossel Reisen’s death had got her used to thinking clearly through shocks, Flora answered before anyone else: “The governor will appoint somebody to fill out the rest of his term.” That brought dismayed exclamations from everyone; Governor MacFarlane was as thoroughgoing a Democrat as anyone this side of TR.

“Almost a year of being represented by someone who does not represent us,” Maria Tresca said bitterly. The syntax might have been imperfect, but the meaning was clear.

“It’s liable to be longer than that,” Flora said. “Whoever he is, he’ll have most of that time to establish himself, too. He may not be so easy to throw out when November comes, either.”

“We’ll have to pick the finest candidate we can to oppose him, whoever he turns out to be,” Herman Bruck said. He stood up and struck a pose, as if to leave no doubt where he thought the finest candidate could be found.

Flora studied him. He was bright. He was earnest. He would campaign hard. If he was elected, he would serve well enough. He was also bloody dull. If Governor MacFarlane named someone with spirit, the Socialists were liable to lose this district. That would be…humiliating was the word that came to Flora’s mind.

I’d make a better candidate than Herman Bruck, she thought. At first, that was nothing but scorn. But the words seemed to echo in her mind. She looked at Bruck. She looked down at her own hands. Women could vote and hold office in New York State. She was over twenty-five. She could run for Congress-if the Socialists would nominate her.

She looked at Herman Bruck again. No one had shouted his name to the rafters, but there he stood, confident as if he were already the candidate. Of one thing she was certain: anyone so confident with so little reason could be overhauled. She didn’t know how it would happen, or even if she would be the one to do it, but it could be done. She was sure of that.

Arthur McGregor rode the farm wagon toward Rosenfeld, Manitoba. Days were almost as long as nights now, but snow still lingered. They could have more snow for another month, maybe six weeks-and for six weeks after the thaw finally began, the road to Rosenfeld would be hub-deep in mud.

Most years, McGregor cursed the spring thaw, which not only cut him off from the world but also made working the fields impossible or the next thing to it. Now he turned to Maude, who sat on the seat beside him, and said, “The road’ll make it hard for the Yanks to move.”

“That it will,” she agreed. “Weather’s never been easy here for anyone. I expect they’ve found that out for themselves by now.”

Alexander McGregor sat up in the back of the wagon. “You know what they say about our seasons, Pa,” he said, grinning. “We’ve only got two of ’em-August and winter.”

“When I first came to this part of the country, the way I heard it was July and winter,” McGregor said. “But it’s not far wrong, however you say it. And when the weather’s bad, they have the devil of a time getting from one place to another.”

“Except for the trains,” Alexander said, making no effort to conceal his anger at the railroads. “If it’s not a really dreadful blizzard, the trains get through.”

“I can’t say you’re wrong, son, because you’re right,” McGregor answered. The way he thought about trains was another measure of how the past year and a half had turned the world on its ear. Up till the day the war started, he’d blessed the railroads. They brought supplies into Rosenfeld in all but the worst of weather, as Alexander had said. They also carried his grain off to the east. Without them, he would have had no market for most of what he raised. Without them, the Canadian prairie could not have been settled, nor defended against the United States if somehow it was.

But now the USA held the tracks leading up toward Winnipeg, and used them to ship hordes of men and enormous amounts of materiel to the fighting front. In peace, he’d blessed the railroad and cursed the mud. In war, he did the exact opposite. He nodded to himself. Things were on their ear, all right.

Mary stuck her head up and looked around. With her eyes sparkling and her round cheeks all red with cold, she looked like a plump little chipmunk. “We ought to do something about the railroads,” she said in a voice that did not sound at all childlike. What she sounded like was a hard-headed saboteur thinking out loud about ways and means.

“You hush, Mary,” her mother said. “You’re not a soldier.”

“I wish I was,” Mary said fiercely.

“Hush is right,” Arthur McGregor said. He looked back over his shoulder at Alexander. So far as he knew, his son was keeping the promise he’d made and not trying to act the part of a franc-tireur. So far as he knew. Till the war, he hadn’t savored the full import of that phrase, either. It was what he didn’t know that worried him.

Half a mile outside of Rosenfeld, a squad of U.S. soldiers inspected the wagon. McGregor hated to admit it, but they did a good, professional job, one of them even getting down on his back on the dirt road to examine the axles and the underside of the frame. They were businesslike with him, reasonably polite to Maude, and smiled at his daughters, who were too young to be leered at. If they gave Alexander a sour look or two, those weren’t a patch on the glares he sent them. After a couple of minutes, they nodded and waved the wagon forward. Fortunately, Alexander didn’t curse them till it had gone far enough so they couldn’t hear him.

Julia gasped. Mary giggled. Arthur McGregor said, “Don’t use that sort of talk where your mother and sisters can hear you.” He glanced over to Maude. She was keeping her face stiff-so stiff, he suspected a smile under there.

Rosenfeld, as it had since it was occupied, seemed a town of American soldiers, with the Canadians to whom it rightfully belonged thrown in as an afterthought. Soldiers crowded round the cobbler’s shop, the tailor’s, the little cafe that had been struggling before the war started (what ruined most folks made a few rich), and the saloon that had never struggled a bit. There were three or four rooms up above the saloon that must have had U.S. soldiers going in and out of them every ten or fifteen minutes. McGregor had never walked up to one of those rooms-he was happy with the lady he’d married-but he knew about them. He glanced over to Maude again. She probably knew about those rooms, too. Husband and wife had never mentioned them to each other. He didn’t expect they ever would.

Henry Gibbon’s general store was full of U.S. soldiers, too, buying everything from five-for-a-penny jawbreakers to housewives with which to repair tattered uniforms in the field to a horn with a big red rubber squeeze-bulb. “You don’t mind my askin’,” Henry Gibbon said to the sergeant in green-gray who laid down a quarter for that item, “what the devil you going to do with that?”

“Next fellow in my squad I catch dozing when he ain’t supposed to,” the sergeant answered with an evil grin, “his hair’s gonna stand on end for the next three days.” A couple of privates who might have been in his squad sidled away from him.

A tiny smile made the corners of McGregor’s mouth quirk upward. Back in his Army days, he’d had a sergeant much like that. When they were just being themselves, the Yanks were ordinary people. When they were being occupiers, though…The smile disappeared. If they had their way, they’d do whatever they could to turn all the Canadians in the land they’d occupied into Americans. That was why Julia and Mary didn’t go to the school they’d reopened.

McGregor held onto Mary’s hand; Maude had charge of Julia. They picked their way toward the counter. Some of the U.S. soldiers politely stepped aside. Others pretended they weren’t there. That rude arrogance angered McGregor, but he couldn’t do anything about it. He held his face still. So did Maude. Their children weren’t so good at concealing what they felt. Once he had to give Mary’s hand a warning squeeze to get rid of the ferocious grimace she gave an American who’d walked through the space where she had been standing as if she didn’t exist.

“Good day to you, Arthur,” Henry Gibbon said. Had a moving picture wanted to cast somebody as a storekeeper, he would have been the man, if only his apron had been cleaner: he was tubby and bald, with a gray soup-strainer of a mustache that whuffed out when he talked. “Brought the whole kit and kaboodle with you, I see. Well, what can I do for you this mornin’?”

“Need a couple of hacksaw blades, and a sack of beans if you’ve got some. We’ll get our kerosene ration, too, I expect, and the missus is going to make a run at your yard goods. And tobacco-”

“Ain’t got any.” Gibbon moved his hand just enough to suggest that the Yanks had bought him out. McGregor looked glum. So did Alexander. Life was hard. Life without a pipe was harder.

“And we’ll see what kind of candy you’ve got here, too,” McGregor said. His eye went to the Minnesota and Dakota papers piled on the counter. He reached out and shoved one of them at the storekeeper, too. It would be full of Yankee lies, but new lies might be interesting.

He went over and stood by the pickle barrel, waiting while Maude told Gibbon what she needed and he compared that to what he happened to have, which was a good deal less. He wasn’t quite emptied out, though, as McGregor had feared he would be. That was something, anyhow.

When McGregor took a look at the hacksaw blades while walking back to the wagon, he understood why. “These were made in the United States,” he exclaimed, and then, a few steps later, “No wonder Henry’s still got stuff on his shelves.”

“Traitor,” Alexander said, low enough so that none of the U.S. soldiers passing by could hear him.

But, after a moment, McGregor shook his head. “Everybody’s got to eat,” he said. “Storekeeper can’t live selling dust and spiderwebs. I’m surprised he’s able to get things from the USA, that’s all.” He rubbed his chin. “Maybe I’m not, not with all the soldiers he has in there. No, maybe I’m not. They’re getting things from him they likely can’t get straight from their own quartermasters.”

“I don’t like it,” Alexander said as they got into the wagon.

“Everybody’s got to eat,” Arthur McGregor repeated. “Rokeby the postmaster sells those occupation stamps with ugly Americans on them, because those are the only stamps the Yankees let him sell. That doesn’t make him bad; he’s just doing his job. Weren’t for the Yankees buying our crop last fall, I don’t know what we’d be doing for cash money right now.”

That produced an uncomfortable silence, which lasted for some time. None of the McGregors cared for the notion of the United States as an entity with which they and their countrymen did business, and upon which they depended. But whether you cared for the notion or not, it was true.

When they got back to the farmhouse, the front door was open. Maude spotted it first. “Arthur,” she said reproachfully, “all the heat will have gone out of the house.” McGregor started to deny having failed to shut it, but he’d ducked back inside for his mittens after everyone else was in the wagon, so it had to have been his fault.

So he thought, glumly, till a man in green-gray walked out onto the front porch and pointed at the wagon. Several more U.S. soldiers, all of them armed, came running out of the house. “What are they doing here?” Alexander demanded, his voice quivering with indignation.

“I don’t know,” McGregor answered. Some of the Yankees were aiming rifles at him. He made very sure they could see both his hands on the reins.

The man who’d first spotted the wagon walked toward it. He wore a captain’s bars on each shoulder strap. “You are Arthur McGregor,” he said in a tone brooking no denial. He pointed. “That is your son, Alexander.”

“And who the devil are you?” McGregor asked. “What are you doing in my house?”

“I don’t have to tell you that,” the captain said, “but I will. I am Captain Hannebrink, of Occupation Investigations. We have uncovered a bomb on the railroad tracks, and arrested some of the young hotheads responsible for it. Under thorough interrogation”-which probably meant torture-“more than one of them named Alexander McGregor as an accomplice in their vicious attempt.”

“It’s a lie!” Alexander said. “I never did anything like that!”

Captain Hannebrink pulled a scrap of paper from his breast pocket. “Are you acquainted with Terence McKiernan, Ihor Klimenko, and Jimmy Knight?”

“Yes, I know them, but so what?” Alexander said. Arthur McGregor knew them, too: boys his son’s age, more or less, from nearby farms. He knew Jimmy and Ihor were hotheads; he hadn’t been so sure about the McKiernan lad.

“Do you deny having joined with them in discussing subversion and sabotage?” Hannebrink went on, all the more frightening for being so matter-of-fact.

“No, I don’t even deny that,” Alexander said. “I’m a patriot, the same as any good Canadian. But I never knew anything about a bomb on the tracks, and that’s the truth.”

The American captain shrugged. “We’ll find out what the truth is. For now, you’re coming with us.” A couple of his soldiers gestured with their rifles. Alexander had no choice. He scrambled out of the wagon and walked with them to a big motor truck they had waiting behind the barn. Its engine roared to life. It rolled away, back toward Rosenfeld.

Arthur McGregor stared after it till it was no more than a black speck. Alexander had been talking about the railroad that very morning, but his father still thought he had kept the promise he’d made. That Alexander’s keeping the promise might not matter hadn’t occurred to him, not till now, not till too late.

Jonathan Moss looked down from several thousand feet on a yellow-green cloud of gas rolling from the American line toward the defensive positions the British and Canadians were holding. Chlorine was heavier than air. None of it, surely, had any way of reaching him here, more than a mile up in the sky. In any case, the goggles he was wearing against the wind would have given his eyes some protection against the poison gas. They stung in spite of that, and he felt like coughing.

He shook his head, annoyed at himself. “If the cook takes the head off a chicken, you don’t get a pain in the neck,” he said. The roar of the engine drowned the words, while the slipstream blew them away.

Artillery thundered down onto the Canucks and limeys in the wake of the gas. Some of the shells ripped through the air alarmingly close to his Martin single-decker. Those near misses made the aeroplane buck like a poorly broken horse. Accidental hit…You didn’t want to think about an accidental hit. Odds are against it, Moss told himself very firmly.

Sure as sure, the Canucks and the English soldiers who helped fill their trenches were catching hell. Whenever their long, slow retreat moved them back into another town, they fought harder than ever. Now they were trying to hold on to Acton, a no-account little place a few miles east of Guelph. Acton had been no-account, anyhow. Now its name was going into the history books in letters of blood.

When the artillery let up, Americans swarmed out of their trenches and rushed across fields, some snow-covered, others brown-black with mud, toward the enemy line. Watched from high in the sky, it looked as if God’s hand were moving pieces on an enormous board: more like chess than war.

One thing neither God nor gas nor shelling had managed was to sweep all the Canucks and limeys from that board. Machine guns began winking from redoubts of timber and sandbags. Between them came flashes of rifle fire. From his lofty perch, Moss saw the American advance falter.

He also saw Dud Dudley wagging his wings up ahead of him. The flight was supposed to support the infantry attack on Acton. Dudley put the nose of his fighting scout down and dove on the enemy trenches. Tom Innis followed. So did Moss, the wind howling past the wires supporting his wings. So did Phil Eaker, who had replaced Zach Whitby, who had replaced Luther Carlsen, who had probably replaced…

Moss didn’t want to think about that, either. He was a replacement here, too, even if he’d been in the war from the beginning. Instead, he thought about the rapidly swelling scene below. Yes, the attack had bogged down, sure as the devil. The artillery hadn’t cut enough wire in front of the enemy trenches to give the Americans decent avenues to close with their foes. The United States had come as far as they had in Canada on the strength of overwhelming numbers. If they kept throwing men away at this rate, their numbers wouldn’t stay overwhelming forever.

“That’s what I’m here for,” Moss said. “To get rid of some numbers on the other side.”

He squeezed the firing button for his machine gun. Tracers let him guide the stream of bullets down the trench ahead of him as he roared over it at treetop height. The way the khaki-clad soldiers scattered before him made him feel treetop tall himself, as firing at men on the ground always did. He felt like a boy in short pants, amusing himself by stepping on bugs.

If you fooled with the wrong bug, though, you were liable to get stung. And the soldiers in the traverses, which ran perpendicular to his line of fire, blazed away at him instead of scattering. He laughed, as he would have laughed stepping on a bee while wearing shoes. They’d have a hell of a time hurting him: how could they draw a bead on a target streaking past at almost a hundred miles an hour?

Thwump! A bullet passing through canvas made a noise like a drumstick tapping on a rather loose drumhead. A lot of bullets were in the air. Some, dammit, would touch the aeroplane. He’d found that out in scraps with the limeys and Canucks, right at the start of the war. It was unnerving (thwump!), but you could put a lot of holes in an aeroplane’s canvas and it would keep on flying. Thwump!

Clang! He swore. That wasn’t canvas, that was the engine. His oil pressure began to drop. Maybe, he thought hopefully, the bullet had only damaged the pump mechanism. He had a hand squeeze-bulb to augment that; the pump was often balky. He couldn’t shoot and work the squeeze-bulb at the same time. When he stopped shooting to work the bulb, the pressure kept dropping. It wasn’t the pump mechanism. A fine mist of oil started coating his goggles. He could leave them on and not see well from oil…or take them off and not see well from the breeze.

Clang! “That’s not fair!” he shouted angrily. Fair or not, the damage the second bullet had done was immediately obvious. A plume of hot water from the radiator rained back on him.

He turned back toward the U.S. lines and put the Martin into a steep climb, figuring he’d need all the altitude he could get before-No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than the engine started dying. He throttled back for a moment, to see whether it would run better at low revs.

When it didn’t, he gave it all the power it had. “A short life but a merry one,” he said, and wondered whether he was talking about the engine or himself. He’d find out, one way or the other.

Abruptly, the engine went from dying to dead. That left him in charge of a nose-heavy glider a couple of hundred feet above no-man’s-land. He kept the nose up as best he could. The ground got closer with every beat of his heart.

He was over the American trench line-not very far over it, either. An idiot took a shot at him. Thwump! The bullet drilled through the fuselage, not far behind him. Nice to know our boys on the ground are such good shots, he thought, and then, If I ever find out who that son of a bitch is, I’ll kick his teeth in.

Between trenches and shell holes, he couldn’t have found a worse landscape in which to try to set down an aeroplane. If he’d had a choice, he wouldn’t have tried it. He had no choice. There was a road of sorts, one on which fresh ammunition and supplies came to the front. And there was a little train of wagons on it, bringing forward whatever they were bringing.

Would he-could he-get over them and set the Martin down? “I’ll do it or die trying,” he said, and giggled. Never had a hackneyed phrase been more literally true.

With his engine fallen silent, he could hear the horses whinny in fright. He could hear their drivers cuss, too. He thought that, if he’d wanted to, he could have reached down and snatched the caps off those drivers’ heads. He cleared their wagons that closely.

A moment later, his landing gear thudded down on rutted earth. The ruts, God be praised, ran in the direction he was going. The surface, he thought thankfully, wasn’t that much worse than the usual landing strip.

Then one of the wheels went into a hole. His teeth slammed together on his tongue. Blood filled his mouth. The aeroplane tried to stand on its nose. If it had succeeded, it would have shoved the engine and machine gun back into his chest and squashed him into jelly. It didn’t have quite enough momentum. The tail slammed back to earth. Moss bit his tongue again.

He unfastened his harness and scrambled out of the Martin. It hadn’t caught fire, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t. He stood there on the muddy, half-frozen ground, looking for any sign of the rest of his flight. He saw no aeroplanes at all.

The driver of the rearmost wagon hopped down and ran toward him. “You all right, buddy?” he asked.

Moss spat a mouthful of red into the muck, but then he nodded. “Think so,” he answered. Talking hurt, but other than that and what would probably be bruises where the harness had kept him from going facefirst into the instrument panel, he didn’t seem damaged.

“Thought you was going to clip me there,” the driver said. “Had time for one Hail Mary”-he crossed himself-“and then you was over me.”

“Yeah.” Moss’ legs suddenly felt as if they were made of some cheap grade of modeling clay, not flesh and bone. Now that he was down, he could realize what a narrow escape he’d had. Before, up in the air, he’d been too busy trying to stretch every last inch from his bus.

Soldiers came out of the trenches to shake his hands and congratulate him on being in one piece. Among them was a captain who asked, “Where’s your aerodrome, pal?”

“Back near Cambridge,” he answered.

“We’ll get you home,” the captain told him. “Probably tomorrow, not today. You can enjoy the hospitality of the trenches tonight.” He stuck out a hand. “I’m Clyde Landis.”

“Jonathan Moss, sir.” Just then, the Canucks started lobbing artillery at where they thought his aeroplane had gone down. Diving into the trenches seemed the most hospitable thing in the world.

All the rest of that day, the soldiers made much of him. They gave him cigars and big bowls of horrible slumgullion and enough shots of the rotgut they weren’t supposed to have to make his head swim. They all sounded convinced he was a hero, and made him tell story after story of what fighting in the air was like.

More shells rained down. He wouldn’t have done an infantryman’s job for a million dollars. If there were any heroes in the war, the foot sloggers were the ones. They laughed when he said so.

“This is a letter from your father,” Sylvia Enos said to George, Jr., and Mary Jane. “See how it says NAVAL POST on the envelope by the stamp?” George, Jr., nodded impatiently. He knew his ABCs, and he could read a few words. To Mary Jane, the rubber-stamped phrase didn’t mean anything.

Sylvia opened the envelope and took out the letter. She read aloud in a portentous tone: “‘Dear Sylvia’-that’s me-‘I hope you and the children are well. I am fine here. We have done some fighting on the river. I came through it fine and so did the ship. We hit the enemy and he did not hit us.’”

“Boom!” George, Jr., yelled, as if he were a shell going off. Then, as best he could on the floor of the front room, he imitated a stricken warship capsizing and sinking, finishing the performance with a loud, “Glub, glub, glub!”

Mary Jane thought that was very funny. So did Sylvia, till it crossed her mind that the Punishment could have been the vessel going to the bottom as easily as its foe. “Do you want to hear the rest of the letter?” she asked, more sharply than she’d intended. She wanted to finish it; George didn’t write so often as she wished he would. With a touch of guilt, she realized her own letters were also fewer and further between than they should have been.

“Yes, Mama,” George, Jr., said, Mary Jane chiming in with, “Rest of letter!”

“‘I miss all of you and I wish I could come back to Boston,’” she resumed. “‘Here in the middle of the country you cannot get any fish that is very good. The cooks do up catfish we catch in the river but no matter what you do to it it still tastes like mud.’”

“Yuck!” George, Jr., exclaimed. Mary Jane stuck out her tongue.

“‘I love all of you and hope I will get some leave one day before too long,’” Sylvia finished. “‘Tell the children to be good. I bet they are getting as big as can be. Your husband, George.’”

“George,” Mary Jane said in tones of wonder. She pointed to her brother. “George.”

“That’s right,” Sylvia said. “George, Jr., is named after his papa-your papa, too, you know.”

“Papa.” Mary Jane dutifully repeated the word and nodded, but she didn’t sound convinced. She hadn’t seen her father for months. Sylvia wondered if she remembered him. She said she did, but then she said all sorts of things that had only the vaguest connection with reality. Seeing her, remembering George, Jr., at the same age, Sylvia was convinced two-year-olds lived in a very strange world. She wondered if she’d been like that at the same age. She probably had.

George, Jr., asked, “Will Papa ever come home before the war ends and we’ve beaten the Rebs all up?”

Where does he hear such things? Sylvia wondered. At home, she didn’t talk much about the war. That left Brigid Coneval and the other children she watched. Sylvia shrugged. She supposed war needed hate, but wished it didn’t. The question deserved an answer, though, no matter how it was framed. She said, “When Papa talked about getting leave in his letter, that meant he hoped he could come for a visit before he had to go back to his ship.”

“Oh,” her son said seriously. “Well, I hope he can, too.”

“I’ll get supper going now, and then we’ll wash you two and put you to bed,” Sylvia said. That drew mixed responses. Her children were hungry, but unenthusiastic about baths and even more unenthusiastic about bedtime. She told them, “If you eat all your supper up and you’re good in the bathtub, maybe you can play for a little while afterwards.”

They wolfed down fried halibut and potatoes, they didn’t do anything too outrageous when she took them out of the apartment and down the hall to the bathroom at the end (a good thing, too, with her carrying hot water to mix with the cold), and they didn’t splash up the place too badly. She brought them back swaddled in towels, and changed George, Jr., into pajamas (which made him look very grown-up) and Mary Jane into her nightgown.

George, Jr., played with toy soldiers, the U.S. troops storming trench after Confederate trench. Sylvia wished it were really so easy. Mary Jane gave her doll a bottle, then climbed up into Sylvia’s lap and fell asleep there. Not even the bloodcurdling explosions her brother kept producing did anything to stir her.

Maybe so much warmaking had worn out George, Jr., too, for he didn’t put up his usual complaints about going to bed. That left Sylvia the only one awake in the apartment, which seemed, as it often did at such times, too big and too quiet.

“I should write to George,” she said. She found paper and a pen soon enough, but the bottle of ink had escaped. She finally came upon it lurking in her sewing box. “I didn’t put it there,” she declared, and wondered which of her offspring had. Mary Jane would say no to everything on general principles, and George, Jr., knew better than to admit to anything that would get him spanked.

Dear George, Sylvia wrote, I got your letter. It was good to hear from you. I am glad you are well and safe. I saw Charlie White’s wife on T Wharf and she says he is out to sea on a cruiser. They will have good food on that ship. Despite his name, Charlie was black, not white, and had been the cook on the Ripple. Reinking her pen, she went on, I am well. The children are well. We all hope you do get leave so we can see you. We miss you. I love you. Sylvia.

When she was done, she read the letter over. It seemed so flat and empty. She wished she were a better writer, to be able to say all the things she wanted to say, all the things that really mattered. Maybe she could have done that if she’d had more schooling. As things were…it would have to do. More searching scared an envelope out of cover. Seaman George Enos, she wrote on it. U.S. Navy. Central River Command. St. Louis, Mo. She went on one more scouting expedition, this time through her handbag in search of a stamp. She found one, stuck it on the envelope, and put the letter in the handbag so she could mail it in the morning.

In the chaos of getting the children ready and over to Mrs. Coneval’s and then of getting herself off to work, she forgot about the letter. She remembered only when her machine stuck the first label on a can of mackerel. Can after can followed that first one. She had to pull three levers for each can, keep the machine full of labels and paste, and clear the feeding mechanism when it jammed, as it did every so often.

After a while, she noticed Isabella Antonelli wasn’t at the machine next to hers. The foreman, Mr. Winter, was running it instead. Mr. Winter was fat and fifty-five and walked with a limp from a wound he’d got in the Second Mexican War. The Army didn’t want him, which made him a godsend for the canning plant.

When she asked him where her friend was, she thought for a moment he hadn’t heard her over the rattle of the lines that sent the cans moving from one station to the next. Then he said, “She called on the telephone this morning. Western Union visited her last night.”

“Oh, God,” Sylvia said. Isabella Antonelli’s husband had been a fisherman on a little boat that operated out of T Wharf. Then the Army had taken him and sent him off to Quebec. The newspapers did their best to be optimistic about the fighting north of the St. Lawrence, but their best wasn’t all that good. The going was hard up there, and bad weather liable to last till May.

Mr. Winter nodded. He was bald, with a fringe of gray hair above his ears; the lights shone off his smooth pate. “She’ll be out a few days, I’m afraid,” he said. “They’ll put a temporary on the machine here tomorrow, I expect, till she can come back.”

Sylvia nodded, too, hiding a flash of fury frightening in its fierceness. Yes, Mr. Winter was a godsend for the canning plant, all right. He thought of getting the mackerel out before he worried about the people who got it out. Keep the machines running, no matter what, she thought. Antonelli was one more line in the casualty lists? So what?

She filled the paste reservoir to her machine from one of the cans under it. The foreman at the paste plant probably had the exact same attitude. For that matter, the generals probably had the exact same attitude, too. What was Antonelli to them but one more line in the casualty lists?

All the canning machines, including Sylvia’s, ran smoothly, unlike the war machine. She pulled her three levers, one after the other, then went back and did it again and again and again. If you didn’t notice how your feet got sore from standing by the machine for hours at a time, you could get into a rhythm where you did your job almost without conscious thought, so that half the morning could go by before you noticed. Sylvia didn’t know whether to like those days or be frightened of them.

Mr. Winter’s voice startled her out of that half-mesmerized state: “Your husband well, Mrs. Enos?”

“What?” she said, and then, really hearing the words, “Oh. Yes. Thank you. I got a letter from him yesterday, as a matter of fact. I wrote an answer, too,” she added virtuously, “but I forgot to mail it this morning. I’ll do it on the way home.”

“Good. That’s good.” The foreman’s smile displayed large yellow teeth, a couple of them in the lower jaw missing. “Good-looking woman like you, though, I bet you get lonely anyhow, no man around. Being lonely’s no fun. I know about that, since Priscilla died a few years ago.”

Numbly, Sylvia nodded. The machine ran low on labels, which let her tend to it without having to say anything. Mr. Winter hadn’t been crude, as men sometimes were. But she felt his eyes on her as she loaded in the labels. He was the foreman. If he pushed it and she said no, he could fire her. The line kept running smoothly, but she never got the easy rhythm back.