American Front (18 page)

“All right.” George Enos sat down and lighted a cigar. He wondered how long he’d be able to keep doing that. Most tobacco came from the Confederate States, and they weren’t going to be shipping any up north, not while they and the United States were shooting at each other.

George, Jr., came over and hugged one of his legs. Seeing that, Mary Jane toddled up and hugged the other one. She tried to imitate everything her older brother did, which often made her the most absurd creature George had ever seen. “Dadadada!” she said enthusiastically. She was a year and a half old now, and sometimes said “Daddy,” but when she got excited—as she always did when her father first came home from the sea—she went back to baby talk.

Fresh sizzling noises from the kitchen said the fish had gone into the frying pan. The Enoses, like any other fisherfolk, ate a lot of fish: nobody begrudged George’s bringing home enough to feed his family. He didn’t have to fill out any forms to get it, either. Through the sizzle, Sylvia called, “When do you think you’ll be going out again?”

“Don’t know exactly,” he answered. “Soon as Captain O’Donnell or somebody from the company can lay hold of more coal, I expect. Business is good, prices are up, and so they’re sending us out as often as they can. Might be the day after tomorrow, might be—”

Somebody knocked on the front door, hard.

“Might be tomorrow morning,” Enos said, heaving himself up out of his chair. In the kitchen, Sylvia groaned, but softly. He understood what she was feeling, because he was feeling all the same things himself. Getting to see his family once in a while mattered a lot. But he’d brought home a lot of money in the weeks since the war started. Prices were up, too, but as long as he stayed busy, he stayed ahead of them.

He opened the door. Sure enough, there stood Fred Butcher. “Hate to do this to you, George,” the mate said, “but we’ve swung a deal for some fuel. We sail at half past five tomorrow morning.”

“I’ll be there,” Enos said—what else could he say?

Butcher nodded. “I know you will. You and Cookie, we can always count on the two of you. Some of the others, I’m going to have to pry ’em out of the saloons and sober ’em up—if I can find ’em.” He touched a finger to the bill of his cap. “See you on the wharf. Tell your missus I’m sorry.” He hurried off, a busy man with more work ahead of him.

George Enos shut the door. “Supper’s on the table,” Sylvia called at the same moment. As he walked into the kitchen, she went on, “I can guess what that was all about. Nice I get to give you one meal before Charlie White gets his hands on you again. You eat more of his cooking than you do of mine, seems like.”

“Maybe I do,” Enos said, “but I like yours better.” That made Sylvia smile; for a moment, she didn’t look so tired. George wasn’t sure he’d told her the truth, but he’d made her happy, which counted, too.

Sylvia cut up bits of fish and potato for the children. George, Jr., handled his fork pretty well; one day soon, he’d start using a knife. With Mary Jane, Sylvia had to make sure she ate more than she threw from the high chair onto the floor. It was about an even-money bet.

“Have to get them to bed early tonight,” George remarked. “If we can.”

“I don’t want to go to bed early,” his son declared indignantly. Mary Jane wasn’t old enough yet to know what he was talking about.

“You’ll do as you’re told, though,” Enos said.

George, Jr., knew that tone brooked little argument. He changed his tack, asking, “Why do I have to go to bed early? Mama? Daddy? Why?”

“Just because you do,” Sylvia answered, glancing at her husband with an expression half amused, half harassed. When you had only occasional nights together, you needed to make the most of them.

And there were reasons sailors coming home from the sea had a salty reputation. “
Again
, George?” Sylvia whispered in the darkness of their bedroom, feeling him rise against her flank for the fourth time. “You might as well be a bridegroom. Shouldn’t you sleep instead?”

“I can sleep on the
Ripple
,” he said as he climbed back on top of her. “I can’t do this.” She laughed and clasped her arms around his sweaty back.

When the alarm clock jangled at four in the morning, he wished he’d slept more and done other things less. He made the clock shut up, then found a match, scratched it, and used the flame to find and light the gas lamp. Staggering around like a half-dead thing, he fumbled his way into his clothes.

By the time he was dressed, Sylvia, who’d thrown a quilted robe over her white cotton nightdress, pressed a cup of coffee into his hands. He gulped it down, hot and sweet and strong. “You should go back to bed,” he told her. She shook her head, as she did whenever he said that in the small hours of the morning. She puckered her lips. He set down the cup and kissed her good-bye.

Some of the streets on the way down to T Wharf had gaslights, some new, brighter electric lamps. The lamps weren’t bright enough to keep him from seeing stars in the sky. The air was crisp and cool. Fall wasn’t just coming—fall was here. They might get a couple of weeks of Indian summer, and then again they might not.

T Wharf didn’t care about day or night; it was busy all the time. And sure enough, there ahead of him strode Charlie White, a knitted wool cap on his head. “Hey, Cookie!” George called. The Negro turned and waved.

For a wonder, the whole crew got to the
Ripple
on time. “Wouldn’t even expect that in the Navy,” Patrick O’Donnell said: his highest praise. A few minutes later, coal smoke spurted from the steam trawler’s stack. Along with Lucas Phelps, George cast off the mooring lines. The
Ripple
chugged out toward Georges Bank.

The Cookie served out more coffee, and then more still; a lot of the fishermen were short on sleep. And if any of them were hung over, well, coffee was good for that, too.

The day dawned bright and clear. Gulls screeched overhead. They knew fishing boats were a good place to cadge a meal, but they weren’t smart enough to tell outbound boats from inbound. Off in the distance floated a plume of smoke from a warship outbound ahead of the
Ripple
. Enos liked seeing that; it made trouble from Confederate cruisers and submarines less likely. The warship, intent on its own concerns, soon left the
Ripple
behind; the smoke vanished over the eastern horizon.

Though the
Ripple
was a trawler, everyone fished with long lines on the way out to Georges Bank: no point wasting travel time. The cod and mackerel they caught went into the hold. So did a couple of tilefish. “Shallower water’n you’ll usually see ’em in,” Lucas Phelps remarked, pulling in a flopping three-foot fish. “More of ’em now than there have been, too, since they almost disappeared thirty years back.”

“My pa used to talk about that,” George Enos said. “Cold currents shifting almost killed ’em off, or something like that.” He headed up to the galley for yet another mug of coffee.

When they reached the Georges Bank that night, the trawl splashed into the sea. The
Ripple
crawled along, dragging it over the ocean bottom. To keep from drawing raiders, Captain O’Donnell left the running lights off; he posted a double watch to listen for approaching vessels and avoid collisions.

But they might have been alone on the ocean. Another clear dawn followed, with water around them stretching, as far as the eye could tell, all the way to the end of the world. No smoke told of other fishing boats or warships anywhere nearby.

Enos was gutting fish when the captain spotted a smoke plume approaching from the east. “Freighter heading in toward Boston,” he judged after a spyglass examination. He looked some more. “Carrying something under tarps on the bow, something else at the stern.”

The freighter must have spotted the
Ripple
, too, for she swung toward the trawler. O’Donnell kept watching her every couple of minutes. Enos thought he was worrying too much, but, on the other hand, he got paid to worry.

And then the captain shouted, “Cut the trawl free! We’ve got to run for it. Those are guns under there!”

Too late. One of the guns roared, a sound harsh even across a couple of miles of water. A shell splashed into the sea a hundred yards in front of the
Ripple
’s bow. Then the other gun, the one at the armed freighter’s stern, belched smoke and fire. That shell landed about as far behind the steam trawler.

Signal flags fluttered up the freighter’s lines. Captain O’Donnell read them through the telescope. “‘Surrender or be sunk,’ they tell us,” he said. Like the rest of the fishermen, George Enos stood numb, unbelieving. You never thought it could happen to you, not so close to home. But that freighter, while no match for the cruiser that hadn’t seen it, could do with the
Ripple
as it would. One of those shells would have smashed the steam trawler to kindling.

“What do we do, Captain?” Enos asked. O’Donnell was an old Navy man. Surely he’d have a trick to discomfit the approaching ship, which, George could see, now flew the Stars and Bars above the signal flags.

But O’Donnell, after kicking once at the deck, folded the telescope and put it in his pocket. “What can we do?” he said, and then answered his own question by turning to Fred Butcher and saying, “Run up a white flag, Mate. They’ve got us.”

V

Rain with sleet in it blew into Arthur McGregor’s face as he rode his wagon into Rosenfeld, the hamlet on the Manitoba prairie nearest his farm. At the edge of town, a sentry in a green-gray U.S. Army rain slicker stepped out into the roadway, his boots making wet sucking noises as they went into and came out of the mud. “Let’s see your pass, Canuck,” he said in a harsh big-city accent.

Wordlessly, McGregor took it out of an inside pocket and handed it to him. The farmer had wrapped the pass in waxed paper before setting out for Rosenfeld, knowing he’d need it: the Americans were sticklers for every bit of punctilio they’d set up in the territory they occupied, and people who didn’t go along disappeared into jail or sometimes just disappeared, period.

After carefully inspecting the document, the sentry handed it back. “Awright, go ahead,” he said grudgingly, as if disappointed he didn’t have an excuse for giving McGregor more trouble. He gestured with his Springfield. Water beaded on the bayonet; he’d done a good job of greasing it to keep it from rusting.

Rosenfeld’s only reason for being was that it lay where an east-west railway line and one that ran north-south merged into a single line heading northeast: in the direction of Winnipeg. Along with the train station, it boasted a general store, a bank, a couple of churches, a livery stable run by the blacksmith (who also did his best to fix motorcars, not that he saw many), a doctor who doubled as a dentist, a weekly newspaper, and a post office. McGregor hitched the horses in front of that last.

“Shut the door behind you,” called Wilfred Rokeby, the postmaster, when McGregor came in. The farmer obeyed, not blaming him a bit: the coal stove made the interior of the post office deliciously warm. McGregor stood dripping on the mat just inside the door for a couple of minutes before going on up to the counter.

Rokeby nodded in approval. He was a small, fussy man with a thin mustache and with mouse-brown hair parted precisely in the center and held immovably in place by some cinnamon-scented hair oil that always made McGregor think of baked apples. “And what can I do for you today, Arthur?” he asked, as if certain the farmer had something new and exotic in mind.

McGregor took out another sheet of waxed paper. This one was folded around half a dozen ordinary envelopes. “Want to mail these,” he said.

Rokeby looked pained. He always did, but today more than usual. “They’re going to destinations in the occupied zone, I hope?”

“Can’t send ’em anyplace else from here, now can I?” McGregor answered sourly. “Any mail wagon goes from one side of the line to the other, first the Yanks shoot it up and then we do.”

“That is unfortunately correct.” The postmaster made it sound as if it were McGregor’s fault. He pointed to the envelopes lying on the counter between them. “Those’ll have to go through the American military censor before I can send ’em out, you know.”

“Yeah, I’d heard about that.” McGregor’s expression said what he thought of it, too. “It’s all right.” He spread the envelopes out fan-fashion so Rokeby could read the addresses on them. “Two to my brothers, two to my sisters and brothers-in-law, two to my cousins, just to let ’em know I’m alive and well, and so is the rest of the family. Censors can read ’em till their eyes cross, far as I’m concerned.”

“All right, Arthur. Wanted to make sure you remembered, is all.” Wilfred Rokeby lowered his voice. “The Yanks have arrested more’n a couple of people on account of they were careless about what they put in the mail. Wouldn’t want anything like that to happen to you.”

“Thanks,” McGregor said gruffly. He dug in his pocket and came out with a handful of change. Setting a dime and two pennies on the counter beside the envelopes, he went on, “Why don’t you let me have the stamps for them, then?”

“I’ll do that.” The postmaster scooped up the coins and dropped them into the cash box. Then he pulled out a sheet of fifty carmine stamps, tore off a strip of six, and handed them to McGregor. “Here you go.”

“Thanks. I’ll—” McGregor took a closer look at the stamps Rokeby had given him. The color wasn’t quite right—that was what had first drawn his eye. When he took that closer look, he saw they didn’t bear the familiar portrait of King George V, either. They were U.S. stamps, with a picture of Benjamin Franklin on them. On Franklin’s plump face, the phrase
MANITOBA MIL. DIST
. was overprinted in black ink. “What the devil are these?”

“The stamps we have to use from now on,” Rokeby answered. “Ugly, aren’t they? But I don’t have a choice about what I sell you: military governor says no mail with the old stamps goes out any more. Penalty for disobeying is…more than you want to think about.”

One after another, mechanically, McGregor separated the stamps from the strip the postmaster had given him, licked them, and stuck them on envelopes. Even the glue tasted wrong, or he thought it did—more bitter than that to which he was accustomed.
The taste of occupation
, he thought. The U.S. stamps, specially made up for the occupied area hereabouts, brought home to him that the Americans expected to be here a long time in a way nothing else, not even the soldier outside of town, had done.

He shoved the letters at Rokeby, then turned on his heels and stomped out of the post office without another word. Suddenly the warmth in there felt treacherous, deceptive, as if by being comfortable Rokeby was somehow collaborating with the United States. He knew the idea was absurd, but it wouldn’t go away once it occurred to him. The cold, nasty rain that beat in his face when he went outside was a part of his native land, and so seemed oddly cleansing.

The general store was a couple of doors down. His feet thumped on the boards of the sidewalk. A bell jingled when he went in. Henry Gibbon looked up from a copy of the Rosenfeld
Register
. He took a pipe out of his mouth, knocked it against an ashtray, and said, “Morning to you, Arthur. Haven’t seen you in a while. Everything all right out at your place?”

“Right enough, anyhow,” McGregor answered: a measure of life in wartime. “We didn’t get hurt, thank God, and we didn’t lose our buildings or too much of the livestock. I’ve heard of plenty of people who came through worse.”

“That’s a fact,” the storekeeper said. Henry Gibbon looked like a storekeeper: bald and plump and genial, with a big gray mustache hiding most of his upper lip. He wore a white apron, none too clean, over a collarless shirt, a considerable expanse of belly, and black wool trousers. “You got your family, you got your house, you can go on.”

McGregor nodded. He didn’t tell Gibbon about how his wife had tried endlessly to get rid of the bloodstains on the floors and walls, or about the chunks of board he’d nailed over dozens of bullet holes to keep out the cold. The farmhouse looked as if it had broken out in pimples.

“So what can I sell you today?” Gibbon asked. Unlike some storekeepers McGregor had known, he made no bones about being in a business where he gave customers goods in exchange for money.

“Thing I need most is ten gallons of kerosene,” the farmer answered. “Nights are starting to get longer, and they’ll be really long pretty soon. I’ve got plenty of coal laid in for the winter, but lamp oil, now—” He spread his hands.

Henry Gibbon clicked his tongue between his teeth. “I can give you two gallons, no problem. Anything more than that at one time, or you buyin’ more than two gallons a month, and you got to get permission from the Americans in writing.” He reached down under the counter and pulled out a set of forms, which he waved in McGregor’s face. “I got to account for every drop I sell: when and to who and how much at a time. They’re fussy about checkin’ on it, too. You don’t want to run foul of ’em.”

It was warm inside the store, as it had been in the post office. Again, McGregor had the sense of warmth betraying him. “Two gallons a month, that’s not much.”

“It’s what I can sell you,” Gibbon said. “Arthur, I’d do more if I could, but I got a family. You get in trouble with the Americans, you get in bad trouble.” He waved the copy of the
Register
, much as he had the U.S. forms. Then he pointed to an item and read aloud: “‘The U.S. military governor in the town of Morden announces that ten hostages have been taken because of the shooting death of an American soldier. If the perpetrator of this vile and dastardly act of cowardice does not surrender himself to the duly constituted authorities within seventy-two hours of this announcement, the hostages will be executed by firing squad.’”

“Let me see that!” McGregor said. He’d paid little attention to the town weekly since the American tide rolled over this part of Manitoba. Now he got a good look at how things had changed since the occupation.

Oh, not everything was different from what it had been. Local stores still advertised on the front page of the
Register
, as they had for as long as Malachi Stubing had been publishing it—and through the tenures of two other publishers before him. He still announced local births and marriages. Farmers still plunked down money to tout the service of their stallions and jackasses, with the invariable ten-dollar fee and the phrase “Colt to stand and walk.” If the foal was stillborn, the fee was waived. McGregor had put a good many such notices in the paper over the years.

Some of the death notices were as they’d always been: Mary Lancaster, age 71, beloved mother, grandmother; Georgi Pasternak, age 9 months, at home with the angels. But a good many bore familiar names gone at unexpected ages: Burton Wheeler, 19 years old; Paul Fletcher, age 20; Joe Teague, 18. None of those gave the least hint how the young men had died.

Another story listed men known to be prisoners of war, and gave their kin instructions on how to send them packages. “All parcels are subject to search,” it warned. “Any found containing contraband of any description will result in the addressee’s forfeiting all rights to receive future parcels.”

That blunt warning took McGregor to the columns of small print that covered the broader world. And there, most of all, that world might have turned upside down with the arrival of the Americans. Suddenly Germany became the trusted ally, England and France the hated foes. The German failure in front of Paris was glossed over as a small setback, and much made of the victory the Kaiser’s forces had won over Russians poking their noses into eastern Prussia.

As far as the
Register
was concerned, the United States could do no wrong, though each story did bear the disclaimer,
furnished by the American Military Information Bureau
. If you believed what you read, the Yanks were in Winnipeg, in Toronto, and bombarding Montreal and Quebec City, to say nothing of the triumphs they’d won against the Confederacy and the victories their Atlantic Fleet and the German High Seas Fleet had gained over the Royal Navy and its French and Confederate allies.

McGregor set the
Register
back on the counter. “What do you think of all this?” he asked Henry Gibbon.

The storekeeper paused before he spoke. “Well, the paper it’s on is pretty thin now,” he said at last. “That makes it better for wipin’ your ass than it used to be.”

McGregor stared at him, then chuckled, down deep in his throat. “I don’t expect the American Military Information Board’d like that answer, Henry.”

“Give me a penny and I’ll care a cent’s worth,” Gibbon answered. This time, both men laughed.

“Come on, you damn nigger, shake a leg!” the lieutenant shouted, a silver bar gleaming on each shoulder strap. “You think we’ve got all day to unload this stuff? Get your lazy, stinking black ass in gear, or you’ll be sorry you were ever born, and you can take that to the bank.”

“I’m comin’, sir, fast as I can,” Cincinnatus answered. He walked onto the barge, threw a hundred-pound sack of corn onto his shoulder, and carried it to the waiting motor truck. The truck rocked on its springs as he tossed the sack on top of the others already in the cargo bed.

“Faster, dammit!” the lieutenant screamed, setting a hand on the grip of his pistol. He clapped the other hand to his forehead, and almost knocked the green-gray cap off his head. “Jesus Christ, no wonder the stinking Rebs go on about niggers the way they do.”

Cincinnatus would have liked to see the lieutenant haul as much as he was hauling, or even half as much. The noisy little peckerwood ofay’d fall over dead. But he had the gun, and he had the rest of the U.S. Army behind him, and so Cincinnatus didn’t see that he had much choice about doing what he was told.

He had no great love for the whites for whom he’d labored here in Covington. They’d told the truth about one thing, though: he didn’t get better treatment now that the United States was running the town than he had when the Stars and Bars flew here. Some ways, things were worse. The whites who lived in Covington—Tom Kennedy came to mind—dealt with Negroes every day and were used to them. A lot of the soldiers from the United States—this buckra lieutenant surely among them—had never set eyes on a black man before they invaded the Confederacy. They treated Negroes like mules, or maybe like steam engines.

Another grunt, another sack of grain on his shoulder, another walk to the truck. The lieutenant shouted at him every inch of the way. No, you didn’t cuss a steam engine the way that fellow cussed Cincinnatus. The Negro couldn’t figure out whether the U.S. soldier blamed him for being black or for being the reason the South had broken away from the United States. He didn’t think the lieutenant knew, or cared. The man could abuse him with impunity, and he did.

“Once we win here, we’ll ship all you nigger bastards back to Africa,” he said, sounding ready, willing, and able to pilot the boat himself.

Sensibly, Cincinnatus kept his mouth shut. Even if he hadn’t had a lot of schooling, though, he could do arithmetic better than that damnfool lieutenant. There were something like ten million Negroes in the Confederate States. That made for a lot of boat trips back and forth across the ocean. For that matter, the USA hadn’t shipped its own Negroes back to Africa. If they weren’t there any more, whom would the white folks have left to despise?