Breakthroughs (36 page)

“Evenin’, Apicius, you damn Red,” Bliss answered amiably. Cincinnatus stared from one of them to the other. They both laughed at him. Pointing to Apicius, Luther Bliss said, “I know who this son of a bitch is. I know what he stands for. Because I know that, he doesn’t worry me too much. I can handle him—reckon he thinks the same about me. You, though, Cincinnatus—who the hell are you? Who are you really working for?”

Apicius laughed again, louder this time. He pointed to Cincinnatus. “I come over here to find out the same damn thing, Luther—and I don’t care if you’s here or not. He still could be one o’yours.”

“Only man I work for is Lieutenant Straubing, who bosses my truck unit,” Cincinnatus said. “I ain’t nobody’s man but my own.” He looked from Apicius to Luther Bliss and back again. One thing was obvious: neither of them believed him.

In the mid-Atlantic,
Sylvia Enos read in the
Boston Globe
as she rode the trolley to work,
the USS
Ericsson
engaged and sank the
CSS Bonefish,
a submersible that had for some time tormented shipping in the region. The
Bonefish
had previously torpedoed the
SS Teton
, a civilian steamship in U.S. service. Our bold Navy has valiantly swept away yet another vicious scourge of the sea.

That was George’s ship. If they’d fought a Confederate submarine, he’d surely been in danger. She folded the paper and leaned back in the uncomfortable seat. He was all right now. And with this
Bonefish
sunk, he’d keep on being all right a while longer. Now that she hadn’t seen him for a few months, her anger was cooling. He might have wanted to be unfaithful, but he hadn’t actually gone and done it.

And he was all right.
Thank you, God,
Sylvia thought. Next to that simple fact, the war news on the front page, the mutinies in the French Army and all the rest of it, faded to insignificance. The
Ericsson
had fought again, and nothing had happened to George. The world looked good.

When the trolley came to her stop, Sylvia left the
Globe
on the seat for whoever might want it. She hoped the next person who picked it up would find as much good news as she had, and not a name he recognized in the black-bordered casualty lists.

She had a spring in her step as she went into the canning plant. It was usually missing in the morning—especially these days, when she had to get George, Jr., off to kindergarten and Mary Jane to Mrs. Dooley’s before she could come to work.

She was humming a song about coal conservation when she punched in. The words were as stupid as those of most wartime patriotic songs, but she couldn’t get the tune out of her mind.
Save your coal for me—Always!/ Says the sailor on the sea—Always!
She shook her head in annoyance—not just a stupid song but irritating, too, because it would not leave her alone.

Mr. Winter, the foreman, followed the war news closely, as befit a veteran wounded in the service of his country. “That’s your husband’s destroyer that sank that Rebel submersible, isn’t it, Mrs. Enos?” he called as she walked to the machine that put labels on cans of mackerel.

“Yes, Mr. Winter, George is on the
Ericsson
, that’s right,” she answered.

“Thought so,” the foreman said, puffing on his cigar. “Well, good for him, by God. I’m glad he came through that safe. Those submersibles are things we didn’t have to worry about in my day. I’ll tell you something else, too: I’m not sorry to have missed them.” He patted his gimpy leg. “I just wish the Rebs had missed me.”

“I’m sure of that, Mr. Winter,” Sylvia said. When she got to her machine, she checked the paste reservoir, which was full, and the label hopper, which turned out to be almost empty. She quickly filled it. That would have been just what she needed: to get caught by surprise fifteen minutes into her shift, and have to hold up the line while she fed the hopper. Mr. Winter would have made some not so polite conversation with her about that.

Isabella Antonelli came hurrying up to the machine next door. “I saw in the paper—your husband’s ship, it sank a submarine,” she said. “This is good news. Better news would be for the
dannata
war to end, but this is good news for you.”

Before Sylvia could do anything more than nod, the line, which had shut down for shift changeover, started again with the usual assortment of groans and creaks from the belts and gearing. Into the machine went the first brightly tinned can. Sylvia pulled a lever. Three lines of paste flowed onto the can. She took a step and pulled a second lever. On went the label, with the colorful picture of the improbably tunalike mackerel on it. Another step, a third level, and the can went on its way. She went back and did it again…and again…and again.

The day went smoothly. She didn’t have to think about what she was doing. The labels didn’t jam in the hopper once during the whole shift. That was the machine’s Achilles’ heel, the most common problem that could shut down the line and bring down the wrath of Mr. Winter.

Not today. Sylvia still felt almost alarmingly fresh as she clocked out and hurried to the trolley stop to catch the next car to George, Jr.’s, school. The streetcar was right on time. A man with a white Kaiser Bill mustache stood up so she could sit down.

Everything was going so well, she wondered what would happen to break the lucky streak. She found out when she got to the school. He wasn’t in the kindergarten classroom. “You’ll have to get him at the front office,” his teacher, Miss Hammaker, told Sylvia.

“What did he do?” she gasped. “Is he all right?”

“You’ll have to get him at the office,” the dyspeptic-looking spinster repeated. Sylvia snarled at her and hurried away.

When she saw George, Jr., she knew right away what the trouble was. A clerk clacking away at a typewriter spelled it out in two well-chosen words: “Chicken pox.” Then she went on, “I’m afraid you’re going to have to keep him home until the scabs come off the pox.”

“But that will be two weeks from now,” Sylvia exclaimed in horror.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Enos, but we can’t very well let him go spreading a contagious disease, now can we?” the clerk said primly.

“But my job!” Sylvia said. “What am I supposed to do about my job?”

“I really don’t know what to tell you about that, ma’am,” the clerk answered. “We do have the other children to look out for, too, you know.”

Sylvia put a hand on her son’s shoulder. “Come on, George,” she said wearily. “Let’s go get your sister and take the two of you home and then try to figure out what to do next.” She had no idea what to do next. Once she got home, she could start worrying about it. The clerk started typing again. Now that George, Jr., was leaving, she didn’t have to worry about him any more. Sylvia did.

When she got to Mrs. Dooley’s, the woman looked at her with the same disapproval Miss Hammaker had shown. “Mrs. Enos,” she said pointedly, “your daughter will not be welcome here—”

“Until she gets over the chicken pox,” Sylvia finished for her. Mrs. Dooley’s eyebrows rose. Sylvia said, “Just a wild guess, of course.” She kept her arm around George, Jr. The longer he had to stay on his feet, the more pale and sick he looked—and the redder his spots got by comparison.

“I can’t have her here till she’s better,” Mrs. Dooley said. “The other women whose children I mind would have a fit if I let her stay, and I wouldn’t blame them one bit.” She turned. “Go on, Mary Jane. Go home with your mother. When you’re well, you can come back again.”

“All right,” Mary Jane said meekly. That she offered no mischief or snippy talk was a telling indication she didn’t feel right. She too was starting to break out in the red spots that would soon turn into blisters.

Cautiously, Mrs. Dooley asked, “She
is
vaccinated, isn’t she?”

“What?” Sylvia needed a moment to understand what the question meant. “Oh. Yes. She and her brother both. It’s only chicken pox—it can’t be smallpox.”

“All right.” The older woman nodded. “Most children
are
vaccinated these days, but you never know. Well, that’s a relief. You take them home now, Mrs. Enos, and bring your daughter back when she’s well.”

Nodding, Sylvia turned away and led the children back to the trolley stop. They didn’t frisk ahead of her, the way they usually did. She urged them to hurry, but they lacked the energy to do it. She counted herself lucky they didn’t make her miss a streetcar.

They had no appetite at supper, which also didn’t surprise her. After they were done picking at their food, she gave them aspirins and put them to bed early. “This itches, Mama,” George, Jr., said. “It itches a lot.”

“Try not to scratch,” Sylvia answered. “If you do, it’ll leave scars.”

“It
itches
!” he said.

Remembering her own bout of chicken pox—she’d been nine or ten—she knew how fiercely they itched. “Do your best,” she said. She had a pockmark on the side of her jaw, one between her breasts, several on her arms and legs, and one or two in other places she hadn’t known about till her husband found them. That had amused George no end, though she’d been embarrassed.

By the time she finished the supper dishes, the children were asleep. She went down the hall and knocked on Brigid Coneval’s door. When the Irishwoman opened it, she was in mourning black. “Mrs. Enos,” she said, and stepped aside. “Do come in. What might I do for you today?”

Her apartment looked more battered than Sylvia’s, and smelled of cooking grease and cabbage. Her children, three boys ranging from George, Jr.’s, size on down, ran around raising hell. Through their racket, Sylvia said, “I was wondering if I could pay you enough to watch my children, just long enough to let them get over the chicken pox.”

Brigid Coneval shook her head. “That I cannot, and that I will not,” she answered. “For one thing, I’m taking in other people’s wee ones no more, as you know. And for another, Patrick has not had the chicken pox himself, nor has Michael, nor Billy, neither. I’ll be just as well pleased without them having ’em, too, sure and I will.”

“But what am I going to do?” Sylvia exclaimed. She’d been saying the same thing to anyone who would listen ever since she’d first seen George, Jr., covered with spots. “How am I going to go to work?”

“Well, if you do, you do—and if you don’t, you don’t,” Mrs. Coneval said airily. “Tell ’em you’ll not be in while the babes are after being sick, that’s all. What else can you do?”

“They’ll fire me.” Sylvia stated the obvious.

“Will you starve while you miss a couple weeks’ pay?” Brigid Coneval asked. Reluctantly, Sylvia shook her head. The new widow went on, “Then be damned to the job. You’ll get another soon enough—plenty to be had, with so many men off getting killed. You’ll have no trouble at all, at all.”

“I’ve worked there a long time.” Sylvia sighed. “But you’re right. In the end, you’re right. If they fire me for staying home, then they do, that’s all. I don’t want to leave that job, but I can if I have to. Thank you, Mrs. Coneval. You’ve made me see things clear.”

“Any time at all, dearie,” Brigid Coneval said.

Behind Private First Class Reginald Bartlett, artillery thundered: not a lot of artillery, not by the standards of the Roanoke front, but more than he’d heard on the Confederate side of the line here in Sequoyah. “Let the damnyankees keep their heads down for a change,” he said.

Pete Hairston nodded. “Only trouble is, once the guns stop, we get to go forward and push ’em out,” the veteran sergeant said. He paused and shrugged. “Us and the niggers do. Goddamned if I like that.”

Joe Mopope said, “You people are crazy, giving niggers guns. Wouldn’t never catch us Kiowas giving niggers guns.”

“If those colored regiments hadn’t come over the river, we never would have got enough men to attack the Yanks,” Reggie said.

Hairston nodded again. “That’s a fact. We’d be holding on tooth and toenail, same as we have been. Now we got a chance to take back some of this here state. We better see that we don’t waste it, on account of I don’t reckon we’ll ever see another one.”

Whistles blew, up and down the reinforced Confederate line. Lieutenant Nicoll shouted, “Come on, boys, now it’s our turn!” Out of the trenches came his company. Howling the Rebel yell, they trotted forward. “Go!” Nicoll roared to them. “Go on! They aren’t doing so well back East—we’ve got to show them how to play the game.”

“We’ll get ’em!” Napoleon Dibble said. “They can’t mess with the Belgians, and they can’t mess with us.”

Reggie said nothing. He didn’t waste his breath yelling. Every time he came up above ground, he felt like a turtle coming out of its shell. He was vulnerable up here. His time in the close-quarters fighting of the Roanoke front had taught him how hideously vulnerable a man was when he came up out of his trench.

He wasn’t afraid, though, not in the ordinary sense of the word. Whatever was going to happen would happen. It was largely out of his hands. If he let it worry him, he’d be letting his pals down, and he couldn’t stand that, not after they’d been through and suffered so much together.

On they came. Some dropped into cover to shoot while others advanced, then leapfrogged past when the other group hit the dirt. The bombardment hadn’t taken out all the Yankees; bombardments never did. Rifles and machine guns stuttered to life. Men in butternut began falling not of their own volition.

Some of those men were black, the new units going forward along with the white troops who had been in the field for years. The Negro soldiers charged straight at the U.S. trenches; they weren’t skilled in the fire-and-move tactics the veterans had learned by painful experience. And they went down in gruesome numbers. When they screamed, Bartlett couldn’t tell their voices from those of white men.

He lay in a shell hole, fired a couple of rounds toward the Yankee line ahead, and then got to his feet and ran by the men he’d been supporting. He dove behind a stump and started shooting again. Once his buddies had dashed past him and found cover, he scrambled up and ran on.

He was about thirty yards from the Yankee trench when a traversing machine gun turned its balefully winking eye upon him.