“Damned if I know.” As if reminded of what he’d traded to the men in green-gray for Lieutenant Nicoll’s supply of whiskey, Hairston rolled himself a cigarette. He sucked in smoke before going on, “Hope nothin’ bad’s happened to Toohey. He ain’t a bad guy.” After another drag, he chuckled. “Crazy sayin’ that about one of those Yankee bastards, but it’s so.”
“I know what you mean, Sarge,” Reggie replied. “Fellow who captured me, there in the Roanoke valley, he could have shot me and my pals easy as not. I ever run into him once this damn war is over, he can do all the boozing he wants. I’ll buy till he can’t even see, let alone walk.”
The sporadic Yankee shelling had been falling short of Wilson Town, so much so that the Confederate soldiers had gone on about the business of digging in without pausing at the explosions a couple of furlongs to the north. Now, suddenly, the U.S. gunners began to find the range. Hearing the hideous whistle of a shell that might have his name on it, Reggie dove headlong into the stretch of trench he’d just dug. The round hit behind him. Fragments and shrapnel balls hissed through the air. One of the lead spheres with which the shell had been loaded drilled a neat hole in the dirt he’d heaped up in front of the trench. It would have drilled a neat hole in him, too.
He got back up and started digging again. A hoarse shout from the southern edge of town made him turn his head. The Jewish peddler didn’t care for artillery close by. He was getting his horses up to a gallop so he could escape Wilson Town in jig time. Others who had lingered, the last few, now delayed their departure no more.
Reggie laughed. “Look at ’em go,” he said, pointing. After a moment, though, it didn’t seem funny. “If two guys are in a dangerous place, and one leaves while the other stays, which one of ’em is stupid?”
Hairston laughed, too, but singularly without humor. “That’d be funny, Bartlett, if only it was funny, you know what I mean?”
“Yeah, Sarge, I do. Wish to Jesus I didn’t.” Bartlett looked out across the broad Sequoyah prairie. “Here come the damnyankees. I don’t think they think we’re ready for ’em yet.”
“Yeah, well, if they don’t, they’re gonna be real sorry real fast,” Hairston said.
The artillery fire supporting the men in green-gray who trotted forward got heavier, but it didn’t turn into anything that would have been reckoned worse than harassment back in Virginia. Here and there, a Confederate soldier shrieked or abruptly fell silent, forever blasted from man to butcher-shop display in the blink of an eye.
But most of the C.S. troopers crouched down in the field fortifications they’d been digging and waited for the Yankees to get closer, so they could sting the enemy hard. Reggie wouldn’t have wanted to be trudging through that yellowed autumn grass, waiting for the machine guns to open up on him. He wondered how much experience the damnyankees up there had. Were they brave men advancing into what they knew would be awful or raw fish too ignorant to tell they were heading for a fish fry? In the end, it didn’t much matter. They’d kill him or he’d kill them. War reduced everything to a brutal simplicity.
Closer, closer…A couple of Confederate riflemen opened up on the Yankees. Men in green-gray started dropping, most not because they were hit but to keep from getting hit. Others kept coming forward, running now, not trotting, as if they knew they didn’t have much time to do before they were done by. Raising his rifle to his shoulder, Bartlett picked one.
He pulled the trigger at the same time as the first machine gun began spraying precisely measured death at the U.S. soldiers. More and more of the men in green-gray were falling, and taking cover had little if anything to do with it. A couple of hundred yards off to the left, the second Confederate machine gun joined its satanic chattering to that of the first. More and more Yankees toppled.
None of the foe got within a hundred yards of the position the Confederates had chosen to defend. As the attack finally broke down, cold rain began falling on U.S. and C.S. troops alike. Looking west, Reggie saw more and more clouds rolling his way. He pointed in that direction and said, “Looks like we’ve got ourselves a new commanding officer.”
“What are you talkin’ about?” Pete Hairston asked.
“General Winter,” Bartlett answered. Hairston did a double take, but then he nodded. If the rain kept coming, the way it looked as if it would, nobody on either side would go anywhere fast, not for a good long while.
“Ma’am?” Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid loomed over Nellie Semphroch. “May I speak to you for just a minute, ma’am?”
“What do you want?” Nellie knew her voice was cold, and did nothing to warm it. Speaking with the Confederate officer who’d seduced her daughter (or so she’d thought of it, not that Edna would have needed much seducing) was the last thing she wanted. “Whatever it is, you’d better make it snappy. We’re goin’ to be busy very soon, I expect.”
“Yes, ma’am. I know that, ma’am. That’s why I came here so early, ma’am.” Kincaid stood there, holding his butternut slouch hat in both hands. He kept twisting it every which way, though he didn’t seem to notice. He took a deep breath, held it so long he began to turn red, and then blurted, “Ma’am, me and your daughter, we’d like to get married, ma’am.”
Nellie’s head whipped around. There stood Edna, stacking cups on the countertop by the coffeepots so she and Nellie could serve a lot of coffee in a hurry. Edna’s face wore what Nellie could think of only as an idiot grin. “That’s right, Ma,” she said, and the grin got wider.
“You’re too young,” Nellie said automatically.
“I’m older’n you were when you got married,” her daughter retorted. “And I sure do want to marry Nick there.” It was the first time she’d called Kincaid that-no, the first time Nellie had heard her call him that. When she did, he started grinning an idiot grin, too.
And she was right. Nellie had been younger than Edna was now when her name abruptly became Semphroch. Her name had had to change abruptly. “Edna, are you in a family way?” she demanded.
Lieutenant Kincaid turned red, the blush starting at his collar and rising all the way to his forehead. Edna indignantly tossed her head. “I am not-no such thing,” she answered. “And I ought to know, too.” When Kincaid heard that, he got even redder.
“All right.” Nellie knew when to beat a retreat. She’d been in a family way when she got married, though she didn’t think Edna knew that. The less Edna ever found out about her unsavory past, the better she’d like it.
“Ma’am, your daughter and I, we really do love each other,” Kincaid said earnestly. “We’ll be happy together for the rest of our lives, I know we will.”
If I laugh at him, he’ll get angry at me, and so will Edna. Nellie made herself hold her face still. It wasn’t easy. He’d managed to get Edna’s corset off her once (maybe more than once; Nellie admitted to herself she didn’t know for sure about that) and both of them had liked what followed, so they thought they’d be happy together forever. Nellie knew better. She’d learned better the hard way. She wanted to pass on what she’d learned, but they wouldn’t listen. She knew they wouldn’t listen. The only way anyone learned those lessons was the hard way.
Off in the middle distance, artillery rumbled. Lately, days didn’t go by-hours hardly went by-without that sound in the air. It reminded Nellie of her second biggest problem with Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid, after his being a man. “Edna,” she said, as gently as she could, “he’s a Confederate. Do you want to go down there to live?” By the way she said down there, she might have been talking about dropping into hell for a visit.
Now Edna turned bright red. Like every child in the USA since the War of Secession, she’d been taught to think of Confederates as the enemy, with a capital E. That hadn’t worried her when Kincaid started sniffing after her. But maybe she hadn’t faced, even in her own mind, all the implications of what marrying him would mean. “I love him,” she said defiantly.
“You think you can stay here in Washington the rest of y
our days?” Nellie asked. The artillery rumbled again, louder this time. “How much longer do you think the CSA can hold on here?”
“We’ll hold Washington,” Kincaid said. “President Wilson said it was our capital by rights, and we’ll keep it. President Semmes says the same thing, so that’s how it’ll be.” He thrust out his already prominent chin, as if to stay the Yankee hordes with the granite contained therein.
Nellie thought about mentioning the jawbone of an ass, but forbore. What she did say was, “You Confederates have said a lot of things that haven’t come true. What makes you think this’ll be any different?”
“Don’t you rag on him, Ma!” Edna said shrilly.
When Nellie heard that tone of voice from her daughter, she knew the game was lost. Edna would do whatever Edna intended doing, and nothing and nobody would stop her. My God, Nellie thought. How am I going to explain this to Mr. Jacobs? The daughter of a spy for the United States running off and marrying a Confederate officer? He’d never trust Nellie again.
Edna, of course, hadn’t the slightest idea Nellie was a spy for the USA. A good thing, too, Nellie thought. She’d never imagined life could get so complicated. Knowing it was weak, she tried a new card: “Suppose I say no?”
Kincaid didn’t answer, which told Nellie the card was even weaker than she’d thought. He’d seemed so polite, she’d hoped a refusal might make him go away. Edna did reply, firmly: “Ma, we’d run off. Nick knows this chaplain-he told me so.” Kincaid blushed again, but after a moment nodded. Edna went on, “You can’t stop us, and you know it. You got to sleep sometime.”
“You’d leave me to run the coffeehouse all by my lonesome?” Nellie asked, shifting with the changing breeze as adroitly as a politician. “It’s too much for one person. It’s too much for two people, sometimes.”
“Hire yourself a nigger,” Edna told her. “Ma, you know you’re making good money. You can hire a couple of niggers, easy.”
Again, that was probably true. Kincaid said, “Edna, honey, when we get back down into my country”-he spoke as if to assure her the CSA was far superior to this benighted northern land-“you won’t have to lift a finger. You’ll have niggers doing all your work for you.”
Nellie did laugh then. She couldn’t help it. “Niggers doing all your work for you, Edna, on a lieutenant’s pay?” she said. “Likely tell. Besides, aren’t the Confederate States buzzing like a hornets’nest about how niggers aren’t going to be like servants no more?”
“I don’t reckon that’ll come to anything,” Lieutenant Kincaid said. He sounded none too confident, though, and he said not a word about how easy keeping Negro servants on a junior officer’s pay would be. That relieved Nellie; she’d feared he would announce that his father owned a plantation stretching halfway across Alabama, and that what he got from the Confederate War Department was less than pocket change to him.
Before the argument-the losing argument, Nellie was convinced-could go on, the door to the coffeehouse opened. The bell above it chimed. A fierce smile of triumph lighted Edna’s face. “Ma,” she said sweetly, “why don’t you go take care of Mr. Reach there?”
Not five minutes earlier, Nellie had wondered how life got so complicated. Now she wondered if God had decided to show her she didn’t know what complicated meant. Sure as hell, there was Bill Reach folding himself into a chair at a table by the window. He looked the same as he always had since he’d returned, all unbidden, to Nellie’s life: dark, unkempt clothes, stubbled chin and cheeks, bleary eyes.
As she went up to him, she heard Lieutenant Kincaid say, “I never did fancy that fellow, not from the first time I set eyes on him.”
Edna giggled. “I think he’s one of Ma’s old beaus.” Nellie’s back stiffened.
“Hello, Little Nell,” Reach said when Nellie reached his table. Edna giggled. Nicholas Kincaid chuckled. Nellie steamed.
Speaking very softly, she said, “If you ever call me that again, I will tell the Confederate occupying authorities exactly-exactly, do you hear me? — what you are.”
Those bleary eyes widened. “Me? I’m not anything much,” he said, but the certainty that usually informed his gravelly voice was missing.
“You heard me,” Nellie whispered. “I don’t ever want to see you round here again, either.” In normal tones, she went on, “Now what’ll it be?”
“Cup of coffee, couple fried eggs, and buttered toast,” Reach said, his tone grudging. He smelled of whiskey.
“I’ll be right back,” Nellie told him.
As she started frying the eggs and toasting the bread, Lieutenant Kincaid said, “Ma’am? Can you give me your answer, ma’am?” He sounded plaintive as a calf calling for its mother.
“No,” Nellie snarled. The Rebel officer looked as if she’d kicked him.
Edna set a hand on his arm. “It’ll be all right, Nick. Don’t you worry about it none. She’s just my mother. She ain’t my jailer, and she can’t hold me back when I go with you.” Not if I go with you, Nellie noted. When.
“I don’t know what this world is coming to,” she said, “when children don’t pay any attention at all to the people who brought them into this world in the first place.” Edna didn’t answer. She kept staring at Lieutenant Kincaid as if she’d just invented him. Nellie sighed and slipped a metal spatula under the eggs to turn them in the pan. She repeated what she’d said a moment before: “I don’t know what this world is coming to.”
Lieutenant Kincaid leaned over and pecked Edna on the lips. He set his hat back on his head, tipped it to Nellie, and went out of the coffeehouse whistling “Dixie” loudly and off-key. “Isn’t he wonderful?”
“No,” Nellie snapped. A couple of other Confederate officers came in. Nellie pointed their way. “You take care of them.” She slid the eggs out of the frying pan, took the toast from the rack above the fire in the stove, spread butter on it, poured coffee, and carried Bill Reach his breakfast. “Here you are. That’ll be a dollar ten.”
He winced slightly, but laid down a dollar and a quarter. “Don’t worry any about the change,” he said. He spread salt and pepper liberally over the eggs before he began to eat. Then he looked up at her. “Back in those days, I didn’t know you could cook, too.”
She glared. “Do you think I won’t turn you in?” she said in a low, savage voice. “You better think again. My daughter is going to marry a Confederate officer.” And then, to her helpless horror, she began to cry.
“Are you all right, Ma?” Edna came rushing over. She looked daggers at Bill Reach. “What’d he do?” Hearing that, the two Confederate officers jumped to their feet. They were nothing if not gentlemen.
Nellie waved everyone away. “It’s all right,” she insisted. “I’m just-happy for you, that’s all.” She’d told Edna a lot of lies for the foolish girl’s own sake. After so many, what was one more?
Doubtfully, Edna retreated. The Rebs settled back into their seats. In a half-apologetic mumble, Bill Reach said, “Hal told me not to come around here any more.”
“Then why didn’t you listen to him?” Nellie said. She sat down at the table with Reach, which made Edna stare in surprise but succeeded in convincing the Confederates nothing was wrong.
“Now that I found you, I can’t stay away from you,” Reach answered. He started to reach out to set his hand on hers, but stopped when she made as if to pull away. He sighed, then coughed. “All these years, all that water over the dam, and I never forgot even a little of what we did, and I knew it had to be the same for you.”
She wanted to cry some more, or maybe scream. If he’d been mooning after her since before Edna was born…that made him crazy, was what it did. Try as she would, she had trouble remembering him at all from those long-ago days. Just another face, just another cock-But nowadays, he was the USA’s number-one spy in Washington. She wondered if the people to whom he fed his information knew he was on, or over, the ragged edge.
He got to his feet, tipped his battered black homburg, and said
, “I’ll see you again, Nellie, one day before too long.” His walk to the door was slow and deliberate, as if he was daring her to tell the Rebs who he was.
He hadn’t called her Little Nell. She kept quiet. But he hadn’t taken any notice when she’d told him to go away and stay away, either. What am I going to do? she thought. She had no more answer for that than for, What is the world coming to?
“Sir,” the truck driver in green-gray said to Lieutenant Straubing, packing what should have been a title of respect with all the scorn he could, “it ain’t right, us white men working alongside niggers.” He set hands on hips and glared at Cincinnatus, who happened to be the black man closest to him.
“See here, Murray,” Straubing said, “you will do as you are ordered or you will face military punishment.”
“Then we will, won’t we, boys?” Murray turned for support to the new truck drivers-well over half the unit-who had joined the transport company to replace the men killed, wounded, or captured in the Confederate raid south of Berea, Kentucky. He was a little, skinny, bandy-legged fellow, with a narrow face, a receding chin, a beaky nose, and a shock of red hair: all in all, he reminded Cincinnatus of an angry chicken.
But he had backers. The new men in the unit were fresh out of the USA. A lot of them, probably, had never seen a Negro before coming down to Covington, let alone thought of working alongside one-or rather, a good many more than one.
“Don’t want to maybe trust my life to a coon,” one of them said.
“Hear tell some of them get paid more’n white men,” another added. “Ain’t nobody can tell me that’s proper.”
Cincinnatus looked over to Herk. The two of them had escaped the Rebel raiders together, and had shared what food they could steal and what miserable shelter they could find till they came upon a U.S. outpost. Herk hadn’t treated Cincinnatus like a nigger then. Of course, Herk had needed him then. Now the white man stood silent as a stone, when Cincinnatus needed him.
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