American Front (74 page)

“I guess not, sir,” Featherston said, which, by the sour look Stuart gave him, was not a good enough answer. But he didn’t know whether it had been
élan
or good field fortifications that had stopped the U.S. drive. For that matter, he didn’t know for a fact it was stopped. The Yankees were still shipping men and matériel down into the bulge around Baltimore. Sooner or later, it would burst again, like any carbuncle. “But if they break past Poplar Springs toward Frederick, we may have to skedaddle out of here yet.”

Now Stuart looked angry: he’d had his theory contradicted. He put a biting edge in his voice: “Sergeant, I’ve seen the trench lines we’ve constructed to make sure the Yankees don’t break out. I am confident they will hold against any pressure brought to bear against them, just as I am confident the lines ahead of us will hold against any conceivable pressure from the north.”

“Yes, sir,” Featherston said woodenly. He was kicking himself for disagreeing with the captain after he’d told himself not to be so foolish. But, damn it, wasn’t he a free white man, with the right to say anything he chose? The way the Army treated you, you had to act like a Negro to your superiors. He didn’t see the justice in that.

Pompey came up and said, “Captain Stuart, suh, your supper will be ready in a couple minutes. We found us a nice wine to go with your lamb chops, suh. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it.”

“I don’t doubt that,” Stuart said. Pompey went on his way. Watching him, Stuart returned to the argument with Jake: “Without our niggers, the Yankees would squash us flat, no way around it. But with them to build the works we use, every white Confederate man is a fighting man. We use our resources more efficiently than the USA can.”

“Yes, sir, that’s a fact,” Featherston agreed, now anxious for nothing so much as to get the battery commander out of his hair. He was watching Pompey, too, still wondering whether he’d been right to tell that major about Stuart’s servant. He’d never find out now, not with the influence a Stuart had in Richmond just because he was a Stuart.

Happier now that the sergeant was agreeing with him, Captain Stuart headed off, presumably to enjoy his lamb chops. Featherston wasn’t going to be eating lamb chops; he’d have whatever came out of the battery kettle, probably some horrible slumgullion whose sole virtue was filling his belly. He wouldn’t have a nice wine with his slop, either. He clicked tongue between teeth. The First Richmond Howitzers had been an aristocratic regiment since the days of the War of Secession. He’d managed to get in because he was good at what he did. Everybody above the rank of sergeant had got in by being good at who he was. Some times the differences were more glaring than others.

To Nero, Perseus said, “Bet you that Pompey, he gwine eat hisself lamb chops tonight, too.”

“I dunno,” Nero answered. “Maybe he gwine wait till Cap’n Stuart done used ’em up, then go to the latrine to git ’em.” Both black men laughed. So did Jake Featherston, down deep inside. Seeing the Army’s Negroes distrusting one another made white men sleep better at night.

Actually, nothing could have made Featherston sleep well that night. U.S. aeroplanes buzzed over Hampstead, dropping bombs at random. None of them landed within a couple of hundred yards of the battery; none of them, so far as Jake could judge from the absence of screams and cries of alarm from Confederate soldiers, landed within a couple of hundred yards of any worthwhile target.

Even landing out of the range where they could do any damage, though, they made a hell of a racket. Antiaircraft guns hammered away at the U.S. bombers, adding to the din. They didn’t hit anything—or, at least, the rhythm of the engines throbbing overhead didn’t falter.

Eventually, the U.S. aeroplanes gave up and flew back to the north. Jake rolled himself tighter in his blanket—which was stiflingly hot but which had the virtue of shielding large areas of his anatomy from mosquitoes—and went back to sleep.

Some time in the wee small hours, another flight of bombing aeroplanes visited Hampstead. Again, they dropped their bombs with nothing more than the vaguest idea of where those bombs might land. And again, the bombs did no damage Featherston could discern. They did, however, wake him up and keep him awake when he would sooner have grabbed as much sleep as he could get.

The next morning, shambling around like a drunk, barely remembering his own name, he realized the bombers had done some damage after all.

XIX

A few miles outside of Boston harbor, Patrick O’Donnell stuck his head out of the cabin of the
Spray
and called to George Enos, “The submersible has cast off the tow and the telephone line. Haul ’em aboard.”

“Aye aye, Skipper,” Enos answered; the biggest difference between life aboard the
Spray
and the way things had gone aboard the
Ripple
was that commands got answered in Navy talk these days.

George wished he had a winch with which to haul in the thick line and the insulated telephone wire wrapped around it. But the
Spray
had no winches for its own trawls, and one would have looked decidedly out of place at the stern. The steam trawler wanted to look like an ordinary fishing boat, not arousing the suspicions of Entente warships till too late. And so he did the work by hand.

Harvey Kemmel said, “Talk about locking the barn door after the horse has been stolen.”

Although he had been in the Navy for years, Kemmel still flavored his speech with Midwestern farm talk George Enos sometimes found incomprehensible and often amusing. Today, though, he could do nothing but nod. “We were a little on the excited side when we sank that Rebel submarine,” he admitted. “Beginners’ luck, you might say.”

“One way to put it,” Kemmel said. “Christ, our pictures in the paper and everything. Felt good while it lasted, but we haven’t had a sniff from the Rebs or the Canucks since.”

A nibble
, Enos would have said. However you said it, though, the message was the same. Nobody could prove the enemy was wise to the trick the
Spray
and other boats like her were trying to play, but neither she nor any of those other boats had lured a cruiser or a submarine to destruction since, either. “Hey, we’ve got a good load of fish in the hold,” George said, pausing for a moment to look back over his shoulder.

Kemmel rolled his eyes. “I don’t think I’m ever going to look a fish in the face again, now that I know what a hell of a lot of work it is to try and catch the bastards. I thought I was tired on a destroyer, but I didn’t know what tired was. I feel like somebody rode me hard and put me away wet.”

That was another comparison Enos never would have come up with on his own; he had trouble remembering the last time he’d ridden a horse. Again, though, he understood what his comrade was driving at. He answered, “The smaller the boat, the more work it takes.”

“You did this stuff for
years
, didn’t you?” Kemmel said. “Each cat his own rat, but—” He shook his head in bemusement.

“I’d sooner fish than watch a horse’s rear end all day,” George answered, dirt farming being the only thing he could think of that might possibly have been harder work than fishing.

“Soon as I got old enough, though, I got off my pa’s farm and as far away as I could go,” Kemmel shot back. “War hadn’t come along, you would have kept on doing this your whole blessed life.”

George Enos shut up and went back to pulling in the heavy, wet rope and the telephone line, one tug after another, hand over hand. It was hard work, but easier than bringing in the trawl full of fish. There was, at the moment, nothing at the end of this rope.

He’d just brought in the dripping end and coiled the rope neatly in place when a tug steamed up alongside the
Spray
and demanded her papers: no ship got into the harbor these days without being stopped and inspected first. Since they were Navy, passing the inspection proved easy enough. A pilot came aboard to guide them through the mine fields protecting Boston from enemy raiders. Every time they came back from a trip out to one fishing bank or another, more mines had been sown. Every once in a while, the mines came loose from their moorings, too. Then, pilot or no pilot, a boat or even a ship was likely to go to the bottom in a hurry.

“Wonder where the submersible’s gone,” Enos said. As had become its custom, the submersible had remained under the sea after releasing the towline. Maybe it went into Boston, sneaking under the mines, or maybe to one of the other ports nearby.

Harvey Kemmel laughed. “I can tell you ain’t been in the Navy long—you still ask questions. What they want you to know, they’ll tell you. What they don’t want you to know ain’t your business anyhow.” George would have argued with him, but he looked to be right.

The pilot brought them in to T Wharf as if the
Spray
were an ordinary fishing boat. Patrick O’Donnell disposed of the catch as if she were an ordinary trawler, too. Then the illusion that she was still a part of the civilian world took a beating; an officer with a lieutenant commander’s two medium-width stripes surrounding a narrow one strolled up the wharf to the
Spray
and said, “Men, you’ll come with me. We have some matters to discuss.” By that, he meant he would tell them what to do and they would do it.

“What’s going on, sir?” George asked him. Off to one side, Harvey Kemmel snickered. Enos’ ears got hot. He
did
still ask questions. The United States were a free country, and most places you could do things like that. But when you were in the Navy, your freedom disappeared.

“I’m going to pretend I didn’t hear that,” the lieutenant commander said. The hell of it was, George understood the fellow was doing him a favor.

They all walked down T Wharf after the officer. Real fishermen and other people with business on the wharf gave them curious looks, those who didn’t know they were Navy themselves. What the dickens did a spruce lieutenant commander want with a bunch of ragamuffins in dungarees and overalls and slickers and hats that had seen better days?

Most of the couple of blocks just back of T Wharf were full of tackle shops and saloons and boatbuilders’ offices and whorehouses: businesses serving the fishing trade and the men who worked it. In one of the whorehouses, a girl stood naked behind a filmy curtain: a living advertisement. A cop across the street looked the other way. Actually, he looked right in at her, but he didn’t do anything about her. George looked at her, too. He was happy being married to Sylvia, but he was a long way from blind.

He flicked a glance up toward the lieutenant commander. The man’s head never moved. Maybe his eyes slid to the right, but George wouldn’t have bet on it. He seemed as straight an arrow as Enos had come across in some time.

He led the crew from the
Spray
into a Navy recruiting station sandwiched between a saloon and a cheap diner. Charlie White said, “’Scuse me, sir, but we already joined up.” The ex-fishermen all laughed. The sailors who filled out the crew didn’t.

A couple of young men sat in there, talking earnestly with a gray-haired petty officer. Enos had a pretty fair idea what they were doing: trying to convince him they ought to be allowed to put on whites before conscription made them don green-gray. From things he’d read about what life in the trenches was like, and from the black-bordered casualty lists the papers printed day in and day out, he had a hard time blaming them.

The lieutenant commander led the men from the
Spray
into a back room. “Be seated, men,” he said, waving to the chairs around the big wooden table. There were just enough chairs for the ersatz fishermen and, at the head of the table, for the officer. As George Enos sat down, he wondered if that was a coincidence. He had his doubts. The Navy didn’t run on coincidences.

He also wondered if Patrick O’Donnell would start asking questions. O’Donnell, after all, had commanded a naval vessel that had helped sink a Confederate submarine, while the lieutenant commander had the look of a man who didn’t go to sea much. But the former skipper of the
Ripple
sat silent. He had too much Navy in his blood to pressure an officer.

The lieutenant commander coughed. Maybe he was having trouble coming to the point. George didn’t like that. If somebody didn’t want to tell you something, odds were you didn’t want to hear it, either. At last, the officer did speak: “Men, we are ending the program in which you have been engaged. Results have not shown themselves to be commensurate to the effort involved.”

Kemmel and Schoonhoven and a couple of other regular Navy men aboard the
Spray
nodded. It didn’t matter to them. One job, another job—so what? They were little rivets on a big machine. They’d fit wherever someone put them.

Now Patrick O’Donnell found his voice: “But, sir, we did sink a submarine.”

“I know you did,” the lieutenant commander said. “Another towing couple sank one off the western coast of the Empire of Mexico, too. Both, though, came in the very earliest days of the program, and both, unfortunately, received wide publicity. Now our enemies are suspicious of targets that look too tempting to be true, and towed submersibles are operating with a far smaller range than would be the case if they were cruising on their own. And so—” He spread his hands.

“What do we do now, sir, in that case?” O’Donnell asked.

“You’ll be reassigned, of course,” the lieutenant commander answered crisply. “Orders have already been cut for all of you, and transportation arranged for those being moved out of the area.” He pushed back his chair; the legs scraped against the floor. “I have them in my office. I’ll distribute them to you. Wait here.”

He left the room, returning a moment later with a manila folder from which he drew envelopes with names typed on them. He handed O’Donnell his without hesitation, but had to ask who the other men were.

George Enos’ fingers fumbled with the flap of the envelope, as if they didn’t want to find out what lay inside. No, not
as if
: he had no desire whatever to learn that the faceless red-tape twisters in Philadelphia had sent him to New York or San Diego or San Francisco or—

Want to or not, he pulled out the papers folded into the fat envelope. The name leaped out at him at once: “St. Louis,” he said, his voice a raw hiss of pain.
Report at once to the river monitor USS
Punishment,
St. Louis, Missouri
. A train ticket fell out of the mass of other papers. He stared at it in horrified dismay. “Sir, this says I’m supposed to leave this afternoon!”

“That’s correct,” the lieutenant commander agreed. “We expected the
Spray
in three or four days ago, and made arrangements accordingly. Your family will be notified, I assure you.”

Your family will be notified
. A bloodless way to say it, a gutless way to do it. Sylvia would be at the canning plant now; he couldn’t reach her there. The children were at Mrs. Coneval’s, but she had no telephone, any more than his own apartment did. Send a wire? He shook his head. That would make Sylvia think he’d been killed.

Charlie White said, “San Diego,” in that same wounded, disbelieving voice. They looked at each other. Despite the difference in the color of their skins, they were, in that moment, very much alike.

Marshlands had two wheelchairs now, the old one for upstairs and a new one with bigger wheels, one also easier to maneuver outside, for downstairs. Anne Colleton had bought the second chair without a murmur after watching Scipio bump her brother down the stairway and escape losing control of the chair only by luck.

Getting Jacob Colleton downstairs without having to bring his chair along certainly made matters easier for Scipio. He wheeled the mistress’ brother to the top of the staircase, helped him rise, draped one of Jacob’s arms over his own shoulder, let the gassed man hang onto the banister with the other hand, and walked down more or less normally. Then he eased Jacob Colleton down into the other wheelchair. “My gun,” Colleton rasped.

“Are you certain that is what you require, sir?” Scipio asked tonelessly. As usual, Jacob reeked of whiskey. He’d also given himself an injection of morphia not long before. The butler did not think well of a drunk, drugged man’s prospects for straight shooting.

Jacob Colleton glared at him. His body was wrecked, his eyes red-tracked and blurry, but the hate and rage that poured out from them made Scipio back up half a step in alarm. They weren’t aimed at him in particular, but at the world as a whole, the world that had done what it had done to Jacob. That made them more frightening, not less. “Bring me my gun,” Colleton hissed. He paused to draw a painful breath, then added, “If you’re lucky, I’ll give you a running start.”

Scipio’s laugh was dutiful. He might have found that funnier if he hadn’t been sure Miss Anne’s brother at least half meant it. “I’ll be back directly, sir,” he said, and went upstairs again. Hung on brackets above the bed in which he could sleep only propped up by pillows, Jacob Colleton had a Tredegar military rifle. Scipio took it and a couple of ten-round clips of ammunition and carried them down to Colleton. Jacob laid the rifle across the arms of his wheelchair and stuck the ammunition in one of the deep pockets of his robe.

“Push me over by that stand of trees,” he told Scipio. “You know, the one by the nigger cottages.”

“Yes, sir,” Scipio said.

“See what kind of varmints I can get,” Colleton went on. What a .303 caliber bullet meant for knocking over men at five hundred yards did to a squirrel at fifty wasn’t pretty, but Jacob Colleton didn’t seem to care much about that. He was a good shot—a far better shot than he had been before he went off to war. He looked up at Scipio, those pale eyes blazing. “I keep wishing it was damnyankees in my sights. Do you have any idea what I’m telling you? No, you wouldn’t. How could you?”

But Scipio did. As he opened the front door so he could push Jacob Colleton out of Marshlands, he thought of the Negro revolutionary cell to which he’d so unwillingly become attached, and of their endless, hungry murmurs of
Come de revolution
. Come the revolution, they’d take aim at Jacob Colleton with exactly the same loving hate he lavished on the men of the USA.

A couple of Negro children broke off their games to stare at Jacob and Scipio as they went by. Colleton made as if to lift his rifle. “You better run fast, you damn little pickaninnies,” he croaked. Run the children did, squealing in delicious fear. Colleton laughed his ghastly, shattered laugh. He looked up at Scipio again. “If I don’t have any luck in the woods, I’ll bag ’em on the way back to Marshlands.”