No, more readily than credit, for credit had come grudgingly even after his success was obvious. No one blamed him only grudgingly. Here he was, an outsider, a newcomer, who’d dared to presume himself more astute, more clever, than General Staff veterans. When he turned out not to have thought of everything, it was as if he hadn’t thought of anything.
The door to the map room opened. The newcomer was a lieutenant so junior, he hardly seemed to have started shaving. He too made a beeline for the map of Utah. That didn’t surprise Morrell, not any more; misery loved company.
But the lieutenant wasn’t interested, or wasn’t chiefly interested, in the strategic situation there. He was interested in Irving Morrell. Saluting, he said, “General Wood’s compliments, sir, and he would like to see you at your earliest convenience.”
“I’m coming,” Morrell said; when the chief of the General Staff wanted you at your earliest convenience, he wanted you right now. The lieutenant nodded; he might have been even greener than his uniform, but he understood that bit of military formality.
Behind Morrell, Colonel Gilbert spoke to Captain Abell: “Maybe the general is trying to figure out how we can get blown up on the Ontario front, too.” Maybe he hadn’t intended Morrell to hear that. Maybe. But when Abell snickered, Morrell knew he was supposed to have heard that. The young captain was too smooth to offer insult by accident.
Escape, then, became something of a relief. The lieutenant led him through the maze of General Staff headquarters without offering a word of conversation, and responded only in monosyllables when Morrell spoke. That made Morrell fear he did not stand in General Wood’s good graces.
He clicked his tongue between his teeth. He thought he should still have had credit in his account with the head of the General Staff. Utah wasn’t the only matter concerning which he’d come to Wood’s notice. Along with a doctor back in Tucson, New Mexico, he’d suggested the steel helmets that by now had been issued to just about every U.S. front-line soldier. That should have counted for something against the troubles in Utah.
Wood’s adjutant sat at a desk in an outer office, pounding away at a typewriter hard and fast enough to make the rattle of the keys sound almost like machine-gun fire. Idly, Morrell wondered if the adjutant had ever heard real machine-gun fire. They led sheltered lives here.
“Major Morrell,” the adjutant said, rising politely enough. “I’ll tell the general you’re here.” He went into Wood’s private office. When he returned a moment later, he nodded. “Go on, sir. He’s expecting you.” The staccato typing resumed as Morrell walked past him.
Morrell came to stiff attention before General Leonard Wood. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” he said, saluting.
“At ease, Major,” Wood answered easily. “Smoke if you care to. It’s not the firing squad for you, or the guillotine, either.” One of his hands went to the back of his neck. “That’s what a Frenchman comes up with when he thinks about efficiency. Let it be a lesson to you.”
“Yes, sir.” Morrell wouldn’t have minded a cigar, but didn’t light up in spite of Wood’s invitation.
The general sighed and studied Morrell with that same sickroom expression he’d come to loathe. From the chief of the General Staff, the look came naturally: he’d earned an M.D. before joining the military. He sighed again. “It didn’t quite work out, did it, Major?”
“I beg your pardon, sir?” Morrell replied, though he’d long since reached the same conclusion.
“It’s too bad,” Wood said. “I honestly don’t know if this place is good for you, but you’ve certainly been good for it. We get insulated against the soldier in the field and what he needs. You’re a breath of fresh air here.”
“Too fresh, I’d say by what’s happened lately.” Morrell spoke without rancor.
“Major, it’s not your fault we did not anticipate the Mormons’ mining us,” Wood said. “No blame for that will go into your record, I assure you. But Utah had turned into your baby, and when the baby turned out to have warts-”
“More than warts, I’d say, sir,” Morrell answered. “They wrecked most of a division there, and we only had two in the front line.”
“That is very much in people’s minds right now,” Wood agreed. “I think it’s unfortunate, but it’s true. As a result, your usefulness here has been compromised through what is, I repeat, no fault of your own.”
“Sir, if my usefulness here is compromised, could you please return me to the field?” Morrell could hear the eagerness in his own voice. A chance to get out of Philadelphia, to get back to real action-
And General Wood was nodding. “I’m going to do exactly that, Major. As you know, I would have liked you to stay around longer, to learn some more tricks of the trade, so to speak. But situations have a way of changing, like it or not. My eye is still on you, Major. Now, though, I think it best to have it on you at a distance for a while. I assure you once more, no imputation of blame will appear in your personnel file.”
Morrell barely heard that. It mattered little to him. What did matter was that he would be able to fight his way now, out in the open, face to face with the foe. He had learned a few things here, and was eager to try them out along with everything he’d known before he came.
“Where do you plan on sending me, sir?” he asked. “Someplace where things are busy, I hope.”
“You’ve given the Rebels a hard time through the first year of the war,” Wood said, which was true only if you neglected the months during which Morrell had been flat on his back. Being the chief of the General Staff, Wood was allowed to neglect details like that. He said, “You’ve shown a knack for mountain warfare. What would you say if they sent you up to the Canadian Rockies and helped us cut the Pacific Coast off from the rest of the Canucks?”
“What would I say? Sir, I’d say, ‘Yes, sir!’” Morrell knew he was all but quivering as he stood there. The mountains in eastern Kentucky had been little gentle knobby things. The Canadian Rockies were mountains with a capital M, full of ice and snow and jagged rocks. Nobody would figure you could accomplish much on that kind of terrain at this time of year. All the more reason to go out and prove people wrong.
“I’ll make the arrangements, then,” Wood said. “Good luck, Major.”
“Thank you very much, sir,” Morrell said, much more for the promised arrangements than the polite wishes. The Canadian Rockies…The prospect sang in him. John Abell would think him a fool. He didn’t care what John Abell thought.
After not too hard a day doing not too much-although anyone who heard him talking about it might conclude he’d been at slave labor since he tumbled out of his bunk-Sam Carsten lined up for evening chow call.
“We been out here a long time, wherever the devil ‘here’ is,” he said. “I want to get back to Honolulu, spend some of the money I’ve earned. I can feel it burnin’ a hole in my pocket while I’m standing here.”
“Yeah, well, if it gets loose, it can come to me,” Vic Crosetti said. “I got one pocket in every set of dungarees lined with asbestos, just for money like that.”
Carsten snorted. So did everybody else who heard Crosetti. The sailor in front of him, a big, rangy fellow named Tilden Winters, said, “Wish my stomach had a pocket like that. The slop they’ve been giving us the past few days, I wouldn’t feed it to a rat crawling up the hawser.”
“You tried feedin’ it to a rat crawling up the hawser, he’d crawl back down-rats aren’t stupid,” Carsten said. That got a laugh, too, but it was kidding on the square. The Dakota had indeed been out on patrol a long time, and gone through just about all the fresh food with which she’d left port. Sam went on, “Some of the things the cooks come up with-”
“And some of the things the purchasing officers bought, figuring we’d be stupid enough to eat ’em,” Winters added. “That salt beef yesterday tasted like it had been in the cask since the Second Mexican War, or maybe since the War of Secession.”
Again, loud, profane agreement came from everybody in
earshot. There were several conversations farther back in the chow line that Carsten couldn’t make out, but their tone suggested other people were also imperfectly delighted with the bill of fare they’d been enjoying-or rather, not enjoying-lately.
Vic Crosetti’s long, fleshy nose twitched; his nostrils dilated. “Whatever that is they’re gonna do to us, it ain’t salt beef.” He made the pronouncement in a way that brooked no disagreement.
A moment later, Carsten caught the whiff, too. “You’re right, Vic.” He made a sour face. “That’s fish, and it’s been dead a long, long time.”
Tilden Winters delivered his own verdict: “You ask me, one of the cooks got diarrhea again.”
“If that joke ain’t as old as the Navy, it’s only on account of it’s older,” Sam said. The closer he got to the pots from which the horrible smell was coming, though, the more he wondered if it was a joke this time.
He took a tray with more reluctance than he’d ever known. As he came up to one of the cooks, the fellow ladled a dollop of stinking yellowish stuff onto the tray, then added some sauerkraut, a hard roll, and a cup of coffee. Sam pointed at the noxious puddle. “You got a sick cat, Johansen?”
“Funny man. Everybody thinks he’s a cotton-picking funny man,” the cook said. “It’s herrings in mustard sauce, and I’ll say ‘I told you so’ when you come back for seconds.”
“Don’t hold your breath,” Sam told him, which, considering the stench, was a curse of no mean proportion. He took the tray over to a table, sat down, and looked dubious. “Hey, Vic, maybe the padre ought to give it the last rites.”
Crosetti shook his head. “Way it smells up the galley, it’s been dead a hell of a lot too long for that to do any good.”
Ever so cautiously, Carsten scooped up a forkful and brought it to his mouth. “Jesus!” he exclaimed. “It tastes as lousy as it smells.” He looked down at the tray with loathing that was almost admiration. “I didn’t figure it could.”
Tilden Winters made the taste test, too, then gulped down his coffee as if it were the only thing standing between him and an early grave. Seeing their reaction, Crosetti said, “I don’t think I want any. Never was much for sauerkraut, but tonight-”
Most of the time, such grumbling would have got them in Dutch with the cooks. This evening, their complaints went unnoticed in the wider tide of revolted complaint echoing through the galley. “Do the officers eat this shit, too?” somebody shouted.
Carsten’s eyes lit up. He knew he could trust Crosetti for what he had in mind, and Winters was a pretty square guy, too. “Listen,” he said, “if they try and feed us this kind of slop, they oughta know what we think of it, right?”
“Sounds good to me,” Winters said. “Sounds damn good to me.” Crosetti nodded, too. Carsten gestured to both of them. They all put their heads together. After they were done laughing, they solemnly clasped hands to seal the bargain.
Tilden Winters got up first. He slammed his tray down on the stack, then started saying to the cooks what everybody else had been saying to one another. He had a talent for abuse, and certainly a fitting subject for it, too. A good many other sailors joined in his vehement griping. That brought several cooks over, both to defend their honor, such as it was, and to keep the men from getting any creative ideas like flinging the herrings around the galley.
Carsten, however, had already had a more creative idea than that. He and Crosetti took advantage of the confusion to slip behind the galley counter, grab one of the kettles full of the herring-and-mustard mixture-fortunately, one with a lid-and slip off before anyone noticed what they were doing. As soon as they were away, they looked like a couple of sailors on some assignment or other; the kettle wasn’t that different from any of a number of containers aboard the Dakota.
No one paid them the least attention as they headed up into officer country. Again, looking as if you belonged was more important than actually belonging. In a prison-yard whisper, Crosetti said, “Only slippery part is gonna be if he’s in there.”
“Hey, come on,” Carsten said. “If he is, we go, ‘Sorry, sir, wrong cabin,’ and we ditch the stuff instead of dumping it. Either way, we’re jake.”
The cabin door bore a neatly stenciled inscription: LIEUT.-CMDR. JONATHAN Y. HENRICKSON, CHIEF SHIP’S PURCHASING OFFICER. Sam knocked, his knuckles ringing off steel. Nobody answered. He turned the latch. The cabin door opened easily. He grinned again. He’d been wondering if Henrickson was the sort who locked his door. But no.
Inside, the cabin was as neat as a CPO’s dreams of heaven, with everything in its place-exactly in its place-and a place for everything. Somehow, that only made what they were about to do the sweeter.
“Come on, let’s get going,” Crosetti said. “Our luck ain’t gonna hold forever.” That might have been cold feet, but it didn’t sound as if it was-just a steady professional warning his comrade (no, his accomplice, Sam thought) of things that could go wrong.
They took the lid off the kettle. Instantly, the stink of the herrings filled the cabin. They proceeded to make sure the stink wasn’t all that filled it: they methodically poured herrings and mustard sauce over everything they could, desk, bedding, clothes, deck, everything. As soon as they’d finished, they got the hell out of there.
An officer in the passage would have spelled disaster. Sam’s shoulders sagged in relief when the long, gray-painted metal corridor proved bare. “Now all we got to do is look ordinary.”
“You’re too ugly to look ordinary,” Crosetti retorted. But Carsten took not the slightest offense-they’d pulled it off. When they got back down to their proper part of the ship, Tilden Winters looked a question at them. They both nodded. So did he. That was all he did, too, before returning to the friendly argument about Honolulu whores in which he’d been involved before his partners in crime returned.
The hue and cry started about an hour later. Grim-faced petty officers started escorting cooks and galley helpers up to officer country near the bridge. When the first batch of them returned, rumor of what had happened started spreading through the sailors. The general reaction was delight.
“If I knew who done that,” Hiram Kidde declared, although no one yet was quite sure of what that was, “the first thing I’d do is kick his ass.” He was, after all, a CPO himself. But he’d suffered through the herrings in mustard sauce, too. “And after that, by Jesus, I’d pick him up and buy him a beer. Hell, I’d buy him all the beer he could drink.” The gunner’s mate roared laughter. “What I wouldn’t give to see Henrickson’s face.”
None of the cooks knew anything. Carsten carefully didn’t look at Crosetti. Somebody might have noticed them lifting the kettle. But it didn’t seem as if anyone had. That didn’t stop the officers from trying to get to the bottom of who had perpetrated the atrocity. They kept right on trying, all the way up until the Dakota docked in Honolulu.
Carsten went up before Lieutenant Commander Henrickson himself. “No, sir,” he said. “I’m sorry, sir. All I know is ship’s scuttlebutt.”
“What did you think of the fish?” the purchasing officer demanded, his thin mouth set in a tight, bloodless line.
“Sir, beg your pardon, but I didn’t like it worth a damn,” Carsten told him.
He sighed. “I’m afraid everyone says that. I hoped the bastards who did this would sing songs about how good it was, to try to turn looks away from them. No such luck, though. Damn sailors are too damn sly.” That last was an angry mutter. Carsten carefully did not smile.
V
Back when Scipio had been butler at Marshlands, he’d wondered how a man could ever get used to the racket of battle. Even single gunshots had been plenty to set his heart pounding. He was inclined to laugh at his former self nowadays. He hadn’t known much back then.
He hadn’t known much about a lot of things back then. As far as a lot of them went, he would gladly have remained ignorant, too. Much of what Cassius fondly thought of as revolutionary practice looked to Scipio an awful lot like wh
at the whites of the Confederate States had been doing, only stood on its head.
Sometimes the strain of keeping his mouth shut was almost more than he could bear. But he’d turned his own experience in the days before the Congaree Socialist Republic to his advantage, too. Anne Colleton hadn’t been able to see past the smooth butler’s mask he wore, and neither could Cassius now.
Fortunately, Cassius hadn’t noticed that he hadn’t noticed Scipio’s mask. The chairman of the Republic had plenty of other things on his mind. He somehow managed to make the undyed, unbleached cotton homespun of Negro field laborers into a good approximation of a uniform, and even to look smart in it, which was far beyond Scipio’s ability. What he could not do, though, was lose the worried expression on his face.
“Ain’t got enough white folks wid we, Kip,” he said now. “De po’ buckra, de gov’ment ’press them same as it done to we. Dey gots to see where dey class int’rest is at. Dey gots to see de revolution fo’ dey, too, not jus’ fo’ we.” He shook his head. “But dey don’. Dey is still de dogs o’ de massers dat ’sploits dey. Cipher dat out fo’ me, Kip. Don’ make no sense.”
Scipio still found revolutionary rhetoric and the Congaree dialect an odd blend. No one cared about his opinion in such matters, though, and he was canny enough to keep it to himself. Cassius had asked his opinion about the other matter, though, and might even have been ready to hear it. Scipio decided to take a chance there.
He pointed to what had been the country courthouse of Kingstree, South Carolina. The two-story, buff-colored building with a fancy, fanlighted pediment, built in the style of the early years of the last century, no longer flew the Stars and Bars. Instead, the red revolutionary banner of the Congaree Socialist Republic fluttered above it. Red paint had been daubed over the name KINGSTREE, which was carved into the frieze above the pediment. In letters equally blood-colored, someone had given the town a substitute name: PEOPLE’S TREE.
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