The Grapple (38 page)

C
assius skirted Milledgeville, Georgia, the way he skirted every town he approached. Milledgeville was a fair-sized place, with maybe 5,000 people in it. It was laid out with the idea that it would become the state capital—and it did, till brawling, bumptious Atlanta displaced it after the War of Secession. A sign on the outskirts bragged that Milledgeville was where Georgia legislators voted to leave the Union. Cassius didn’t think that was anything to be proud of.

What would life be like in the United States? It probably wouldn’t be good; he didn’t suppose life for Negroes was good anywhere. But it couldn’t be like
this.
He was skinny and dirty. He smelled bad—the only chances he got to wash were in streams he walked past. He was hungry most of the time.

And, at that, he didn’t have it so bad. He wasn’t in a camp. He didn’t know what his family was going through, not exactly. Nobody knew exactly except the people who got carted away. The only thing people on the outside knew was that the ones who got carted away didn’t come back.

Most Negroes in the cities had been rounded up and taken away. It was harder out in the countryside. They were more scattered, harder to get into one place with barbed wire all around it. Guerrillas scared some whites out in the country to death. Others, though, weren’t so bad. Quite a few let you do odd jobs in exchange for food and a place to sleep and maybe a dollar or two.

Some of the farms had women running them, all the menfolk gone to war. Cassius learned it was harder to get a handout or even a hearing at those places than at the ones with white men on them. Women on their own commonly carried shotguns or rifles, and didn’t want to listen to a hard-luck story. “Get lost before I call the sheriff,” they would say—either that or, “Get lost before I shoot.”

But they didn’t call the sheriff. In spite of an Augusta passbook, Cassius hadn’t had any trouble going where he pleased. If he stole, that might have been a different story. Except for trifles—a few eggs here, some matches there—he didn’t. His parents had raised him the right way.
He
wouldn’t have put it like that, not after the way he knocked heads with his father, but that was what it amounted to.

He stayed in the pine woods after getting run off a farm west of Milledgeville. With summer coming soon, nights were mild. Mosquitoes tormented him, but they would have done that anywhere except behind screens. He didn’t worry about animals; bears and cougars were hunted into rarity. People, on the other hand…

He’d already seen Mexican soldiers on the march. He made sure they didn’t see him, ducking into a stand of trees once and hiding behind a haystack another time. Those yellowish khaki uniforms made him angry—what were they doing in his country? He wouldn’t have got nearly so upset about butternut or gray.

That was his gut reaction, anyhow. When he thought about it, he laughed at himself. As if the Confederate States were his country, or any Negro’s country! The idea was ridiculous. And native whites would have been rougher on him or anyone else his color than these foreigners were.

He chopped wood for a farmer later that day. The blisters he’d got the first time he did it were starting to turn to calluses. The farmer gave him ham and grits and a big mug of homebrew. Making your own beer was against the law in Georgia, but plenty of people both white and black turned criminal on that score.

“You work good,” the farmer said, spitting a stream of tobacco juice.

“Thank you, suh,” Cassius answered.

As others had before him, the white man asked, “Want to stick around?” He gave Cassius a shrewd look. “Sooner or later, you’re gonna run into trouble wandering around the countryside—or else trouble’s gonna run into
you.
”

Cassius only shrugged. Whatever happened to him out here couldn’t be worse than what had happened to his father and mother and sister in Augusta. “Sorry, suh, but I got to be movin’ on,” he said.

“Whatever you want.” The farmer shrugged, too, but Cassius didn’t like the glint in his eye. He left a little earlier than he would have otherwise, and headed south where he had been going west. As soon as he got out of sight of the farmhouse, he took the first westward track he found. Luck was with him, because he came up to another farm just as the sun was going down. He scouted the place from the edge of the woods, and didn’t see or hear any dogs. When it got really dark, he sneaked into the haystack, which gave him a much better bed than bare ground would have.

He hadn’t fallen asleep yet when gunfire split the night: several bursts from submachine guns, with single shots from a pistol in between them. He wondered what that was all about. No, actually he didn’t wonder—he feared he knew. Had that farmer called the local sheriff or militia commander or whoever was in charge of the people with guns and said, “There’s an uppity nigger southbound from my place. Reckon you ought to take care of him”?

Deputies or Mexicans must have picked on the first Negro they saw heading south on that road. That black wasn’t Cassius, but they didn’t know or care—especially after he started shooting back at them. Cassius felt bad about snaring the other colored man in his troubles, and hoped the fellow got away.

If they were after me, they would’ve snagged me,
he thought, shivering as he burrowed deeper into the sweet-smelling hay.
If I didn’t notice that damn ofay looking all sly…

He woke up before sunrise, and got out of there before the farmer could come outside and discover him. Once he was back in the woods, he took off his clothes and made sure he brushed all the hay off of them. He didn’t want to look like somebody who had to sleep in a haystack, even if that was what he was—especially if that was what he was.

He heard gunfire again that afternoon: not just a little, the way he had the night before, but lots. Both sides had plenty of firepower and weren’t shy about using it.
Now I know what war sounds like,
Cassius thought, which only proved he’d never come anywhere near a real battlefield.

But this would do. He walked toward it, thinking—foolishly thinking—he would watch what was going on from a safe distance, as he might have watched a football game back in Augusta. Even the first bullet that came close enough for him to hear the
crack!
as it zipped past wasn’t enough to deter him. He got behind a pine tree and imagined he was safe.

Negro guerrillas held what had been a sharecropper village. Mexican soldiers were trying to push them out of it or kill them if they stayed inside. Hardly even noticing that he was doing it, Cassius leaned forward. This was more exciting than any football game he’d ever watched.

It stayed an exciting game till a Mexican took a bullet to the temple. The other side of his head exploded into red mush. His rifle fell from his hands as he crumpled to the ground. Even with that surely mortal wound, he didn’t die right away. He jerked and flopped and twitched, like a chicken that had just met the chopper.

Cassius gulped. He almost wished someone would shoot the Mexican again to make him hold still. No, this wasn’t a game, no matter what it looked like. People were really dying out there. When another bullet snapped past Cassius, he didn’t just flinch. He felt as if somebody’d jabbed an icy dagger into each kidney.
This is what fear feels like,
he thought.

And fear had an odor, too. He could smell it coming off of himself. He could probably smell it drifting over from the Mexican soldiers and their Negro foes. And smelling it only made him more afraid, at some level far below conscious thought.

He heard footfalls coming through the woods toward him. They made him afraid, too. They were all too likely to come from Francisco José’s men. And if the greasers spotted him, what would they do? They’d shoot him, that was what. He was a young Negro man. Of course they would think him an enemy.

And he was, even if he didn’t carry a Tredegar. His heart was with the embattled blacks in the little hamlet. Not only his heart, either. Before he knew what he was doing, he ran for those shacks as fast as he could go.

Bullets chewed up the ground under his feet. They cracked and whirred past his head. He didn’t know if the Mexicans or the Negroes were shooting at him. Both, probably. If the two sides weren’t so busy blazing away at each other, they might have paid him even more attention than they did, not that it was attention he was likely to live through.

He dove behind a crate, hoping everybody would forget about him. “Who the hell’re you?” one of the Negroes shouted at him.

“Name’s Cassius,” he answered, not that that told them much. “There’s soldiers in them trees I run out of.”

“Oh, yeah?” said the voice from behind him. “We can shift them fuckers, I reckon.”

They did, too. They had a couple of machine guns, and they didn’t seem short of ammunition for them. Shrieks from the woods said they’d scored at least a couple of hits. Nobody used the trees to outflank the hamlet, which the Mexicans had probably wanted to do.

Cassius lay very still behind the crate. The Mexicans seemed to forget he was there, which suited him fine. He didn’t want to remind them. After another half hour or so, the firing on both sides tapered off. “They’s goin’!” someone behind him shouted.

“Reckon you can come out now, whatever the hell your name was,” someone else added.

Wearily, Cassius got to his feet. A couple of Negro men with rifles in their hands showed themselves. One of them gestured to him. “Looks like you jus’ joined us,” the man said. He was short and wiry, with a knife scar pulling the left side of his mouth up into a permanent sneer. “Coulda had some trouble if them Mexicans got where they was goin’.”

“Looked that way to me,” Cassius said.

“You know anything about guns?” the scarfaced man asked.

“No, suh, but I reckon I can learn,” Cassius replied.

The older Negro nodded. “That’s a good answer. Now I got another question fo’ you: you take orders? Folks call me Gracchus.” He jabbed a thumb at his own chest. “I runs this outfit. You don’t like that, you hit the road. No hard feelin’s, but we don’t want nobody who’s out for hisself and not for all of us. The outfit gotta come first.”

“I’ll take orders,” Cassius said. “If you gave dumb ones, I reckon you’d be dead by now, not runnin’ things here.”

“Expect you’re right,” Gracchus said. “Well, my first order is, tell me about yourself. What’s your name again? Where you from?”

“I’m Cassius. I got out of Augusta when the ofays nabbed my folks.”

“How come they didn’t catch you, too?” Gracchus sounded coldly suspicious. Cassius wondered why. Then he realized the rebel leader might fear he was bait, and would betray the whole band when he saw the chance.

“They went to church,” he answered truthfully. “Me, I stayed home.”

Gracchus nodded again. “God didn’t help ’em much, did He?”

“You reckon there’s a God?” Cassius said. “I got a hard time believin’ any more. Either God likes ofays, or there ain’t none. I got to choose between a God that loves Jake Featherston an’ one that ain’t there, I know which way I go.”

For the first time since he shouted out his warning, Gracchus eyed him with something approaching approval. “Maybe you’s all right after all,” he said.

“Give me a rifle. Teach me what to do with it,” Cassius said. “Reckon I show you how all right I am.”

X

I
rving Morrell rolled into Bowling Green with a smile on his face. The burnt-out Confederate barrels he rolled past were what made him happy. The Confederates had fought hard outside—they’d fought hard, and they’d got smashed. The one thing they managed to do was empty out most of their big supply dump and wreck what they couldn’t take away. The U.S. Army wouldn’t be able to salvage much. Given what the CSA had in Kentucky, logistics was one of the enemy’s strengths. Some capable officer or another probably needed killing.

Almost without thinking about it, Morrell brought his left hand up to his right shoulder. It still twinged every now and again. Now both sides used snipers and bombs and any other way they could find to try to murder their foes’ better leaders. It hardly seemed like war. Neither USA nor CSA seemed to care. Any weapon that came to hand, either side would use. When this war ended, one country or the other would lie flat on its back. The winner would have a booted foot on the loser’s neck, and would try to keep it there as long as he could.

Somebody’d painted
FREEDOM
!
on a wall. Somebody else—or maybe the same Confederate patriot—had added several blue X’s: quick and easy shorthand for the C.S. battle flag. The Stars and Stripes might fly over Bowling Green, but the people still longed for the Stars and Bars.

Only a long lifetime ago, this town—this whole state—belonged to the USA. They spent a generation back in the USA after the Great War. The Negroes in Kentucky had liked that fine. Most of the whites had hated it. They thought of themselves as Confederates, and didn’t want to be U.S. citizens. The ones who did fled north when the CSA won the plebiscite in early 1941.

All of a sudden, Morrell stopped muttering and swore with savage fluency. “What’s wrong, sir?” Frenchy Bergeron asked.

“Nothing,” Morrell said. That was so patently untrue, he had to amend it: “Nothing I can do anything about, anyway.” How many whites—and maybe even blacks—who fled Kentucky after the plebiscite were really Confederate spies? That hadn’t occurred to him till now. He hoped it hadn’t because he was innocent and naive. He intended to send a message to the War Department anyway, on the off chance that everybody else was just as naive.

“Thinking about the next big push, sir?” the gunner asked.

“I’m always thinking about that,” Morrell said, and Sergeant Bergeron chuckled. He was a good gunner, even a very good gunner. He wasn’t quite in Michael Pound’s league, but who was? Now that Pound was an officer at last, he was finding new ways to annoy the Confederates. Seizing the crossing over the Green River between Calhoun and Rumsey probably put the western prong of Morrell’s offensive a couple of days ahead of where it would have been absent that.

A couple of artillery shells burst off to the south. The Confederates
were
fighting hard—if anything, harder than Irving Morrell had expected. No matter how hard they were fighting, they were still losing ground. They were losing it almost fast enough to suit Morrell’s driving perfectionism—almost, but not quite. When he conceived his plan, he wanted the CSA wrecked in a single campaigning season. Unless the bastards in butternut flat-out collapsed, he didn’t think he could bring that off. He would have to slice the Confederacy in half in two installments. John Abell was right about that.

“Ask you something, sir?” Frenchy Bergeron said.

“Sure,” Morrell answered. “What’s on your mind?”

“When do we go for Nashville?” Bergeron asked. Morrell started to laugh. The gunner coughed reproachfully. “What’s so damn funny, sir? Isn’t that’s what’s coming next?”

“You bet it is,” Morrell said. “And that’s what’s so damn funny. The War Department probably hasn’t figured out where I go from here, but you damn well have. I want to get moving as fast as I can, too, before the Confederates think I’m ready.”

He never denied the military talent facing him. After what happened in Ohio, after what came much too close to happening in Pennsylvania, he would have been a fool to do that (which didn’t always stop some of the more feverishly optimistic U.S. officers). What he wanted to do was make sure the Confederates’ talent didn’t matter much. If they lacked the men and barrels and airplanes to stop his thrusts, what was talent worth?

“Nashville…Nashville could be a real bitch,” Bergeron said. “Uh, sir.”

Why do I always get gunners who think they belong on the General Staff?
Morrell wondered wryly. It wasn’t that Frenchy was wrong. The problem, in fact, was that he was right. Along with George Custer, Morrell had planned and executed the attack that crossed the Cumberland and took Nashville in 1917. That wasn’t quite the blow that won the Great War, but it did knock the Confederates back on their heels, and they never got over it afterwards.

Meanwhile, Sergeant Bergeron was waiting for an answer. “I expect we’ll come up with something,” Morrell said.

“Oh, yes, sir,” Frenchy said. “Don’t want to try crossing the river where you did the last time, though. What do you want to bet Featherston’s little chums’ll be laying for us there?”

“Jesus!” Morrell exploded. “You really do belong on the General Staff!”

“Not me, sir. I don’t want to go back to Philly. The people back there, they just talk about what’s supposed to happen. Me, I want to make that shit happen myself. They’re smarter’n I am, but I have more fun.”

“I feel the same way,” Morrell said, which was only partly true. No way in hell did he think the high foreheads back in Philadelphia were smarter than he was. A lot of the time, he thought they thought they were smarter than they really were. Of course, Frenchy might have been sandbagging, too.

“You know what you’re gonna do?” Bergeron persisted. “Anything happens to you, I may be the guy who has to talk through the fancy wireless set for a little while.”

He was about as far removed from the chain of command as a soldier could be. That didn’t necessarily mean he was wrong. If, say, Morrell got hit standing up in the cupola, which could happen easily enough, somebody who knew what things were like at the front might have to do some talking to keep an attack moving smoothly till Brigadier General Parsons could take over. It would be highly unofficial. Chances were it wouldn’t show up in the after-action reports. It could be important, though.

“You’re going to be an officer before this war is done,” Morrell said.

How many times had he tried to promote Michael Pound? How many times had Pound said no? Now Pound was a lieutenant himself, and proving he deserved his rank. Morrell hadn’t expected anything different. As for Frenchy Bergeron, he said, “I hope so, sir.”

“I’ll promote you right now if you want,” Morrell said. “Only thing I don’t like about the deal is that I’ll have to break in a new gunner.”

“Thank you, sir!” Bergeron said. “You want to wait till we get past Nashville, then? I figure there’ll be a lot of fighting up to there, and you’ll need me.”

“Deal,” Morrell said at once. “And I think you’re right. Getting over the Cumberland won’t be fun. But if we made it across the Ohio, we can do that, too.”

The U.S. spearhead broke out of Bowling Green heading south three days later. Air strikes took out a battery of Confederate rockets before they could salvo. Hearing that cheered Morrell no end. Those damn things could hamstring an advance before it really got going.

As usual, Morrell’s place was at the front. He wanted to see what happened, not hear about it later from somebody else. Officers who served on the General Staff didn’t understand that. To them, war was arrows on a map. To Morrell, it was shells going off and machine guns hammering and barrels brewing up and sending pillars of noxious black smoke into the sky and prisoners staggering out of the fight with shell shock on their faces and with their hands in the air. It was exhaust fumes and cordite and the sharp stink of fear. To the men of the General Staff, it was chess. They didn’t understand both sides were moving at once—and trying to steal pieces and knock over the board.

Morrell’s barrels raced by—raced through—a column of refugees U.S. fighter-bombers had hit from above. In 1941, the Confederates gleefully strafed Ohioans who didn’t care to live under the Stars and Bars. Refugees clogged roads. Refugees who’d just been hammered from the air clogged them even better. So the Confederates taught.

And now they were learning the same lesson for themselves. Kentuckians—or maybe they were Tennesseans by now—who didn’t want to live under the Stars and Stripes fled south as people from Ohio had fled north and east two years earlier. When they got hit by machine guns and cannon fire and bombs from above, it was as horrible as it had been in the USA.

Dead and wounded children and women—and a few men, mostly old—lay in the roadway. Children with dead parents clutched corpses and screamed grief to the uncaring sky. People’s most precious possessions were scattered everywhere. Automobiles burned.

A woman standing by the body of a little girl stared at Morrell with terrible eyes as his barrel rattled past. The shoulder was wide here—the oncoming barrels didn’t need to plow straight through what was left of the refugee column. The woman picked up a rock and threw it at Morrell. It clanged off the barrel’s side. “What the hell?” Frenchy Bergeron said.

“It’s all right.” Morrell ducked down into the turret. “Just a dissatisfied customer. If that was me out there and all I had was a rock, I expect I’d throw it, too.”

He straightened up and looked out again. The Confederates didn’t try to hold back the advancing U.S. troops till they got to a hamlet called Westmoreland. Morrell looked for it on his Kentucky maps, didn’t find it, and checked the sheets for northern Tennessee. That was how he was sure he’d crossed the state line. A sign said,
WESTMORELAND—STRAWBERRY CAPITAL OF THE WORLD
. Here as May passed into June, the crop was no doubt coming to full, sweet ripeness…or it would have been, anyhow. The treads of Morrell’s barrel and all the others speeding south with it churned the strawberries into jam.

Was that motion, there behind a farmhouse by Hawkins, the street leading into Westmoreland from the northwest? Morrell brought up his binoculars. “Front!” he sang out. “In back of that yellow clapboard house.”

“Identified!” Bergeron said, and then, “Clapboard? That house go to a whorehouse?”

Morrell snorted and wheezed. He had to try twice before he could ask, “What’s the range?”

“Just over a mile, sir.”

“Can you hit it?”

“Bet your ass. I’ll
kill
the fucker, and he won’t dare open up on us till we get closer.”

“Do it, then.” Morrell ordered the barrel to a halt. The gunner traversed the turret till the long 3½-inch cannon bore on the C.S. barrel. The roar almost took Morrell’s head off. He used the field glasses again. “Hit!” he yelled. “Way to go, Frenchy! Son of a bitch is burning!”

“Damn straight,” Bergeron said. “They got any others hanging around, they’ll know they better clear out.” Other U.S. barrels started finding targets and setting them afire at a range the Confederates couldn’t hope to match. Sullenly, the surviving C.S. machines did pull back. They had to hope for wooded terrain where they had a better chance to strike from ambush. U.S. foot soldiers and barrels pushed into Westmoreland. The streets proved to be mined. That slowed them up, but not for long.

U
.S. bombers left two major dams in northern Tennessee untouched—the one by Carthage and the one farther east near Celina. They didn’t do it out of the goodness of their hearts: they didn’t want the floods downstream to disrupt their own advance. The Confederates, desperate to slow U.S. ground forces however they could, blew both dams as they fell back over the Cumberland.

Michael Pound was not pleased. The floodwaters washed over the banks of the river and flowed across what had been fertile farmland. They turned it into something that more closely resembled oatmeal.

The new U.S. barrels had wide tracks. That meant each part of the track carried less weight than was true in older machines. It also meant they could keep going where older barrels would bog down. It didn’t mean they had an easy time.

Here and there, Confederate antibarrel guns and holdouts with rocket launchers lingered north of the Cumberland. “I hate those damn stovepipes,” Sergeant Mel Scullard said, using the name the men in green-gray had hung on the launchers. “Doesn’t seem fair, one miserable infantry son of a bitch able to take out a whole barrel all by his lonesome.”

“Especially when it’s your barrel—and your neck,” Pound observed dryly.

“You bet,” the gunner said.

“They always could, with a Featherston Fizz,” Pound said.

“That’s different,” Scullard insisted. “You could see those assholes coming, and you had a chance to kill ’em before they got to you. These guys, they stay hidden, they fire the lousy thing, and then they run like hell.”

“I know,” Pound said. “We’ve got to get something just like that so our guys can give the Confederates what-for.” Had he been as mouthy to his superiors when he was a noncom? He smiled reminiscently. He was sure he had.

That evening, he got summoned to an officers’ conclave. This was the sort of thing he’d always had to find out about from his own superiors till he finally couldn’t evade promotion. It proved less impressive than he’d imagined it would. A dozen or so officers, ranging up from his lowly second lieutenanthood to a light colonel, gathered in a barn that smelled maddeningly delicious: the former owners had used it for curing tobacco.

The lieutenant colonel lit a U.S. cigarette, whose nasty smoke seemed all the viler by comparison with the aroma of choice burley. “Intelligence says the Confederates have some Freedom Party Guards units in the neighborhood,” he announced. “You want to watch out for those guys.”

“What’s so special about ’em, sir?” a captain asked. “If you shoot ’em, they go down, right? If you shoot ’em enough times, they stay down, right?” Michael Pound smiled. Meeting someone who thought the way you did was always nice.

After another drag on his cigarette, the senior officer (who was younger than Pound) looked at it in distaste. “I think they made this thing out of camel shit,” he said. How he knew what camel shit tasted like when he smoked it was probably a question for another day. No matter how little he liked the Niagara, he kept on smoking it. “What’s so special?” he echoed. “They’re supposed to be Featherston’s elite force. They’ve got the best men, and they’ve got the best equipment. Just about all of them carry those goddamn automatic rifles, they’ve got plenty of stovepipes”—he used the new handle, too—“and their armor is the best the Confederates have.”