American Front (64 page)

As if to remind him what kind of fight that was, the Mormons in the front-line foxholes and shelters in the rubble opened up again on the U.S. positions south of Center Street. Rifle fire picked up all along the line as government soldiers started shooting back. Machine guns began to bark and chatter. Here and there, wounded men shrieked.

“Be alert out there!” Paul shouted to his men as he got to his feet. “They’re liable to rush us.” The Mormons had done that to another regiment in the brigade, down near the town of Spanish Fork. Farmers and merchants in overalls and sack suits, a couple even wearing neckties, had thrown the U.S. soldiers back several hundred yards, and captured four machine guns to boot. That regiment had had its colors retired in disgrace; it was off doing prisoner-guard duty somewhere these days, being reckoned unfit for anything better. Mantarakis didn’t want the same ignominy to fall on his unit.

But the religious fanatics—
religious maniacs
was what Mantarakis thought of them, even if that did make him seem unpleasantly like Gordon McSweeney to himself—didn’t charge. They weren’t eager about battling their way through barbed wire, not any more. A few gruesome maulings at the hands of troops more alert than that one luckless regiment had pounded that lesson into them. Even if they didn’t have uniforms, they were beginning to behave more like regular troops than they had: the effect, no doubt, of fighting the U.S. regulars for some weeks.

They still had more originality left in them than most regulars, though. Something flew through the air and crashed into the foxholes and trenches behind Mantarakis. He shook his head in bemusement. It had looked like a bottle. He wondered what was in it. Not whiskey, that was for sure—the poor stupid damn Mormons were even drier than the desert in which they lived.

Another bottle hurtled toward the U.S. lines. The Mormons had used some sort of outsized slingshot arrangement to fling makeshift grenades at the soldiers battling to crush their rebellion; Paul would have bet they were throwing their bottles the same way. But why?

A trail of smoke followed that second one. It smashed maybe twenty yards from Mantarakis, and splashed flame into the bottom of the trench. “Jesus!” he yelled, and crossed himself. “They’ve got kerosene in there, or something like it.”

“That’s a filthy way to fight,” Captain Hinshaw said. Half walking, half waddling, he started down the trench line. “Let me get to a field telephone. We’ll teach them to play with fire, God damn me to hell if we don’t.”

“Look out, Captain!” Paul shouted. The Mormons must have been saving up bottles, because they had a lot of them. Here came another one. Hinshaw ducked. That didn’t help him. It hit him in the back and shattered, pouring burning kerosene up and down his body.

He screamed. He thrashed. He rolled on the ground, trying to put out that fire. It didn’t want to go out. It wasn’t just the kerosene burning any more, but also his uniform and his flesh. The harsh, acrid stink of scorched wool warred with a sweet odor a lot like that of roasting pork. Had Mantarakis smelled that odor under other circumstances, he might have been hungry. Now he just wanted to heave up his guts into the bottom of the trench.

He lacked the luxury of time in which to be sick. He jumped on top of Captain Hinshaw, smothering the flames with his body, beating at them with his hands, and then shoveling dirt onto them.

Hinshaw kept on screaming like a damned soul. Mantarakis remembered he’d asked God to damn him. Even as the Greek battled the fire burning his captain, he shivered. When you said something like that, you were asking for trouble.

A couple of other soldiers came running up and helped Mantarakis extinguish Hinshaw. More kerosene-filled bottles kept dropping all around. More men screamed those horrid screams, too.

Captain Hinshaw was still smoking, but he didn’t seem to be burning anywhere, not any more. He sat up. That gave Mantarakis and the other two men the first look at his face they’d had since the bottle hit him. Mantarakis wanted to look away. “Jesus,” one of the other soldiers said softly. It wasn’t a live man’s face any more, but a skull covered here and there with bits of charred meat.

In a voice eerily calm, Hinshaw said, “Will one of you please take your weapon and kill me? Believe me, you’d be doing me a favor.”

“We can’t do that, sir,” Mantarakis answered through numb lips. He raised his voice to shout for stretcher-bearers. Trying to sound soothing, he went on. “They’ll have morphia for you, sir.”

“Morphia?” Hinshaw’s laugh made Paul’s hair stand on end. The officer groped for his own pistol, and got it out of the holster. Mantarakis knew he ought to stop him, but crouched, frozen. Neither of the other two soldiers moved. Hinshaw’s hand was burned, too, but not too burned to pull the trigger. He fell over, mercifully dead.

A few minutes later, artillery stopped pounding Brigham Young College and started hammering the Mormons in the front-line positions. A couple of shells fell short, too, plowing up the ground too close to Paul for comfort.

Whistles shrilled. For once, Mantarakis was glad to go over the top, glad to struggle through paths in the wire that weren’t paths enough—anything to get away from the roast-meat horror Captain Hinshaw had become. Beside that, the bullets cracking past him were nuisances, distractions, nothing more. By the way his men were shouting as they rushed the Mormon lines, they felt the same as he did.

He sprang down into a length of trench. The Mormons fought hard. They always fought hard. Hardly any of them threw down their rifles, even in the face of death. That didn’t matter, not today it didn’t. He hadn’t planned on taking prisoners, anyhow.

From an upstairs bedroom came the insistent clanging of a bell. “I’ll speak further to you later, Griselda,” Scipio said. The servant, who’d given Anne Colleton rancid butter, looked suitably downcast, but he hadn’t quite turned away before she stuck out her tongue at him.

She would have to go, he realized as he hurried up the staircase. Whether that meant another situation indoors somewhere else or work out in the fields, he didn’t know, but such insubordination could not be tolerated. And then, around three steps higher, he remembered he was part of a revolutionary movement that, if it succeeded, would sweep away Negro servitude forever. Until it succeeded, though, the most he could do to help it was to make everything seem as normal as he could. Yes, Griselda would have to go.

“Coming, Captain Colleton,” he called, for the bell went on and on and on. He had been too well-trained ever to look like someone in a hurry, but he was walking very fast by the time he got to Jacob Colleton’s bedroom.

“Took you long enough,” Colleton said in a slurring rasp. That didn’t spring from the effects of the gas alone; he was drunk, as he was most of the time: a cut-glass whiskey decanter, nearly all the whiskey it had once held now decanted, sat on a table by the chair in which he perched.

“I am sorry to have inconvenienced you, sir,” Scipio said. He had to fight to keep his air of servile detachment around Jacob Colleton. You knew people came back from war wounded, even maimed. You didn’t think they could come back ruined this particular way, though, condemned to maybe a full life’s worth of hell.

Chlorine gas…that was stuff more appalling than anyone had imagined back before the war. If the Confederates had thought of it, they wouldn’t have used it against the USA, not at first they wouldn’t. They’d have used it to keep their own blacks in line. He had a sudden, horrid vision of black men and women lined up and made to breathe the stuff. A lot more efficient than just shooting them…

In that choking wreck of a whisper, Jacob Colleton said, “I want to see Cherry. Bring her here to me. She can tell me a story, one of those Congaree yarns you niggers spin, take my mind off how wonderful the world is for me these days.” He coughed. His face, already the color of parchment, went paler yet, to the shade milk had once you’d skimmed off the cream.

“You understand, sir, that she is in the fields at present,” Scipio said. Colleton nodded impatiently. Face not showing any of what he was thinking, Scipio said, “I shall fetch her here directly.”

Muggy heat smote him when he went outside. He felt himself starting to sweat. It was, for once, honest sweat, sweat having nothing—well, only a little—to do with fear. The kinds of stories Cherry told Jacob Colleton had nothing to do with words. Colleton, of course, had no notion Cherry was anything but one more Negro wench to distract him and keep his mind off his pain.

What she thought about him was harder for Scipio to unravel. She gave Colleton what he wanted from her; the butler was sure of that much. He wouldn’t have kept asking for her if she didn’t. Understanding why she did was harder. Come the revolution, Jacob Colleton, like every other white aristocrat in the CSA, was fair game.

Maybe he told her things, when they were in there together with the doors closed. Cassius might know about that; Scipio didn’t. He didn’t have the nerve to ask the hunter, either. Maybe Cherry reveled in making herself feel worse now so revenge would be all the sweeter when it came. And maybe, too, revolutionary sentiments or not, she also felt something akin to pity for Jacob Colleton. People weren’t all of a piece, not whites, not blacks, not anybody. Scipio was sure of that.

He sent a little boy who wore nothing but a grin and a shirt that came halfway down to his knees out to find Cherry. That meant he’d have to give the little rascal a couple of pennies when he came back, but going out into the fields after a particular woman was beneath a butler’s dignity.

While he waited for the boy to return with Cherry, he looked back at the Marshlands mansion. Halftone photographs in the newspapers showed what towns looked like after the rake of war dragged through them. He tried to imagine Marshlands as a burnt-out shell. Horror ran through him when he did. He loved and hated the place at the same time himself.

Here came Cherry, a plain cotton blouse over an equally plain cotton skirt, but a fiery red bandanna tied over her hair. Scipio gave the boy three pennies, which was plenty to send him capering off with glee. “Why fo’ you wants me?” Cherry asked.

“Ain’t me.” Scipio shook his head in denial. “Marse Jacob, he want you. Say he want you to tell a story to he.”

“He say dat?” Cherry asked. Scipio nodded. Now he was sweating from nerves. If Cherry told Jacob Colleton the wrong story, he himself was a dead man. He hoped she didn’t truly care for Miss Anne’s brother. If she did, she was liable to talk more than she should. That was the last thing Scipio wanted. She said, “Well, he gwine like de story he get.”

Scipio wouldn’t have doubted that. She was a fine-looking woman, with high cheekbones that said she had some Indian in her. You’d have never a dull moment between the sheets with her; of that much Scipio was sure. All the same, knowing what he knew, he would sooner have taken a cougar to bed.

Cherry walked on toward Marshlands. Scipio followed her with his eyes. Any man would have, the roll she put to her hips. She opened the door, closing it after her as she went inside. Something else occurred to Scipio, something he hadn’t thought through before. Cherry was going up to that bedroom to do what Jacob Colleton wanted. Colleton probably didn’t care much about whether it was what she wanted. If the uprising of which she dreamt ever came off, Scipio wouldn’t have cared to be in the shoes Miss Anne’s brother was—or, at the moment, most likely wasn’t—wearing.

Well, that was Jacob Colleton’s lookout, not Scipio’s. The butler had enough to worry about, keeping Marshlands going with servants constantly leaving for better-paying jobs, and with the threat of revolt from the field hands growing worse every day.

And, he remembered, with insolence from the servants he did have. Dealing with Griselda came within the normal purview of his duties. That it was normal made it all the more attractive to him now. Straightening up until he looked as stiff and stern as the Confederate sergeant on the recruiting poster pasted to every other telegraph pole, he marched back to the mansion.

Griselda, predictably, screamed abuse at him when he told her she had to go. “That will be enough of that,” he said, using his educated voice: he was speaking as Anne Colleton’s agent now, not as himself. “If you comport yourself with dignity, I will prevail upon the mistress to write you a letter that will enable you to find a good situation elsewhere. Otherwise—”

But that was not so effective as it would have been a year earlier. “Fuck yo’ letter, an’ fuck you, too,” Griselda shouted. “Don’ need no letter, not these days I don’t. Take myself to Columbia, git me work at one o’ the factories they got there. Don’ have to lissen to no nigger talkin’ like white folks what needs to go take a shit, neither.” She stormed out of Marshlands, slamming the door behind her.

Scipio stared out the window as she flounced down the path that led to the road. She hadn’t even bothered going to her room and getting her belongings. Maybe she’d be back for them later, or maybe she’d have somebody send them on to her when she found a place in town. Wherever the truth lay there, she never would have behaved that way before the war made it possible for her to find a job without worrying about her passbook or a letter of recommendation or anything past a strong back and a pair of hands.

“The war,” he muttered. It had dislocated everything, including, God only knew, his own life.

Anne Colleton came out of her office and looked down at him from the second floor. “What was that all about?” she asked, “Or don’t I want to know?”

“One of the house staff has seen fit to resign her position, ma’am,” Scipio answered tonelessly.

Miss Anne raised an eyebrow. “I didn’t know an artillery accompaniment was required with resignations these days,” she remarked, but didn’t seem inclined to take it any further, for which Scipio was duly grateful.

The mistress of Marshlands was turning away from the railing when another door opened upstairs. Cherry walked by Anne Colleton, nodding to her almost, although not quite, as an equal. Miss Anne looked at her, looked back to the door from which she had emerged, and went back into her office, shaking her head as she went.