Walk in Hell gw-2

by Harry Turtledove

  “That would be good, I guess,” she said. “If they want to show they’re grateful, they can keep from shelling this part of town when their guns get into range.”

  “Yes, I also think this would be an excellent reward,” Jacobs said with a smile. But that smile did not last long. He coughed before continuing, “Widow Semphroch, I am glad you came by today, because there is something of importance I need to take up with you.”

  “What’s that?” she asked. It was something important, or he wouldn’t have returned to the formality with which they’d once addressed each other.

  He coughed again. It wasn’t something he wanted to bring up, plainly. At last, he said, “Widow Semphroch, what have you done to Bill Reach?”

  “I haven’t done anything to him, except tell him to stay away,” Nellie answered. “You know I don’t want anything to do with him.” She cocked her head to one side. “Why?”

  Even more reluctantly than before, he said, “Because he is acting-strangely-these days. I believe he is drinking far too much for a man in his position. He often speaks of you, but gives no details.”

  Thank God for that, Nellie thought. Aloud, she said, “The last time I saw him, I thought he’d been drinking,” which was politer than, He stank of rotgut.

  “If there is anything you can do for him-” Jacobs began.

  “No, Mr. Jacobs. I am sorry, but there is nothing.” Now Nellie threw up the chilling wall of formality. “Good day. I will call again another time.” She left the cobbler’s shop without a backwards glance, and without giving Jacobs the chance to say a word.

  She supposed she should have been warned. But all she wanted to do with Bill Reach was put him out of her mind, and so she did not pay as much heed to Jacobs as she might have done. Two evenings later, Reach threw open the door to the coffeehouse and lurched inside.

  Nellie was in back of the counter, pouring coffee, making sandwiches, and frying ham steaks and potatoes. Edna was out among the customers: the usual crowd of Confederate officers, the sleek Washingtonians who collaborated with them, and a sprinkling of fancy women who collaborated more intimately with both Rebels and local cat’s-paws.

  All of them stared at Bill Reach, who looked even more disreputable than usual. By the boneless way he stood, Nellie knew he’d had his head in a bottle all day, or maybe all week. His eyes held a wild gleam she didn’t like. She started out toward the front of the coffeehouse, certain he was going to do something dreadful.

  She hadn’t taken more than a step and a half before he did it. “Little Nell!” he said loudly-but he wasn’t looking at Nellie at all. He was looking at Edna, so drunk he couldn’t tell daughter from mother. “Makes me feel young just to see you, Little Nell, same as it always did.” Edna was less than half his age-no wonder seeing her made him feel young. A leer spread over his face.

  “Get out of here!” Nellie shouted, but he was too drunk, too intent on what was going on inside his own mind, to hear her.

  And Edna, after a glance back at her mother, a glance filled with both curiosity and malice, smiled at him and said, “What do you want tonight, Bill?”

  It wasn’t quite the right question, but it was close enough. Over Nellie’s cry of horror, Reach pulled a quarter-eagle out of his pocket, slapped the gold coin down on a tabletop as if it were a nightstand, and said, “Tonight? Well, we’ll go upstairs like always”-he pointed to the stairway leading up to Nellie and Edna’s rooms, which was just visible from where he stood swaying-“and then you can suck on me for a while before you get on top. I’m feelin’-hic! — lazy, if you know what I mean. I’ll give you an extra half a buck all your own if you’re good.”

  “Get him out of here!” Nellie screamed.

  A couple of Confederate officers were already rushing toward Bill Reach. They landed on him like a falling building, pummeling him and flinging him out into the street with shouts of, “Get your foul mouth out of here!” “Never show your face here again or you’re a dead man!” One of them noticed the quarter-eagle. He threw it out after Reach, then wiped his hand on a trouser leg, as if to clean it of contamination. That done, he bowed first to Edna and then to Nellie. “You tell us if that cur comes back, ladies. We’ll fix him for good if he dares show his ugly face in here again.”

  Nellie nodded. Her customers worked hard to show good breeding by pretending nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Edna didn’t say a thing. Edna didn’t need to say a thing. Whatever else she was, Edna was no fool. She could figure out why Bill Reach thought he had any business saying those filthy things to Nellie-or to someone he thought was Nellie. The only possible answer was the right one.

  Edna glanced back at Nellie again. Her mother could not meet her eye. That told her everything that still needed telling. Nellie hung her head. She’d tried to stay respectable for her daughter’s sake. That was over. Everything was over now.

  Over the past couple of winters, Lucien Galtier had discovered, somewhat to his surprise, that he liked chopping wood. The work took him back to his youth, to the days before he was conscripted. He’d swung an axe then, swung it and swung it and swung it.

  After he came back from the Army, the farm had burned far more coal than wood. The Americans, though, were niggardly with their coal rations, as they were niggardly with everything else. He was glad old Blaise Chretien, only a couple of miles away, had a woodlot. It made the difference between shivering through the winter and getting by comfortably enough.

  Chopping wood also kept him warm while he was doing it. Down came the axe-whump! Two chunks of wood leaped apart. “Ah, if only those were Father Pascal’s head and his fat neck,” Lucien said wistfully.

  His son Georges was walking by then. Georges had a way of walking by whenever he had the chance to create mischief. “You want to be careful, Papa,” he called. “Otherwise you’ll end up like Great-uncle Leon after Grandfather took off his little finger with the axe when they were boys.”

  “You scamp, tais-toi,” Lucien retorted. “Otherwise your backside will end up like your grandfather’s after he took off Leon’s finger with the axe.”

  Georges laughed at him. Georges had a right to laugh, too. He was sixteen now, and almost half a head taller than his father. If Lucien tried to give him a licking, who would end up drubbing whom was very much in doubt. Lucien thought he would win even yet-you learned tricks in the Army that simple roughhousing never taught you. But he didn’t want to have to find out.

  Up went the axe. Down it came. More wood split. Marie would be happy with him. “No, she cannot call me lazy today,” he said. Some people, he had seen, worked simply for the sake of working. A lot of English-speaking Canadians were like that, and Americans, too. Fewer Quebecois had the disease. Lucien worked when something needed doing. When it didn’t (which, on a farm, was all too seldom), he was content to leave it alone.

  He wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve. He’d worked up a good sweat, though it was chilly out here. The day was clear, though, the sunshine streaming down as if it were spring. Only the slightly deeper blue of the sky argued otherwise.

  Up in the sky, something buzzed like a mosquito out of season. He stopped chopping for a little while and peered upward, trying to spot the aeroplane-no, aeroplanes: a flight of them, droning north. His mouth twisted. “I hope all of you are shot down,” he said, shaking his fist at the heavens. “This is our patrimony, not yours. You have no business taking it from us.”

  Afterwards, he blamed the American aeroplanes for what happened when he went back to chopping. They had, after all, broken the smooth rhythm he’d established before they disturbed him. And if he hadn’t blamed them, he would have blamed Georges instead. Better to put it on his enemy’s head than on his own flesh and blood.

  He knew the stroke was wrong the second the axehead started on its downward arc. He tried to twist it aside; in the end, he didn’t know whether that made things better or worse. The axe hit the piece of wood on the chopping block a glancing blow and th
en bit into his left leg.

  “Tabernac!” he hissed. The blade had a red edge when he pulled it free. Blood started running down his calf into his shoe. It was warm on what had been cold skin. “Ah, mauvais tabernac.”

  The axe had sliced into meat, not bone. That was the only good thing he could say about the wound. He started to throw the axe aside so he could hobble to the farmhouse, but held onto the tool instead. That leg didn’t want to bear much weight, and the axe handle made a stick to take it instead.

  Marie let out a small shriek when he made it inside. “It is not so bad,” he said, hoping it was not so bad. “Put a bandage on it, and then I will go out and finish what I have to do.”

  “You will go nowhere today,” she said, grabbing for a rag. “You should be ashamed, bleeding on my clean floor.”

  “Believe me, I regret the necessity more than you do,” he said.

  She got off his shoe and sock and pulled up his trouser leg. “This is not good,” she said, examining the wound. He did not want to look at it himself while she worked. He had not a qualm about slaughtering livestock, but his own blood made him queasy. “It is bleeding right through the bandage,” she told him. “A cloth will not be enough for this, Lucien. It wants stitching, or heaven knows when it will close.”

  “That is nonsense,” he said. Even as he spoke, though, the two raw edges of the wound slipped against each other. His stomach lurched. He felt dizzy, a little lightheaded.

  Firmly, Marie said, “J’ai raison, Lucien. I have sewn up a cut hand once or twice, but I do not think I should sew this. It is too long and too deep. I think you should go to the American hospital, and let them do a proper job of putting you back together.”

  The mere idea of going to the hospital was enough to restore her husband to himself. “No,” he said. “No and no and no. It was bad enough that the Americans took my land, took land in this family since before the battle on the Plains of Abraham, took my patrimony for their own purposes. To use this hospital, to acknowledge it is there: this is a humiliation that cannot be borne. Sew it yourself.”

  “If you do not acknowledge the hospital, why does Nicole work there?” Marie asked. “If you do not acknowledge the hospital, why have you drunk applejack with Dr. O’Doull three times in the past month? Why have you probably got one of his cigars in your pocket even now?”

  Galtier opened his mouth to give her the simple, logical explanation to the paradoxes she propounded. Nothing came out. His wits, he thought, were discommoded because of the wound. He told her that instead.

  She set her hands on her hips. “Then, foolish man, it is time to get the wound seen to, n’est-ce pas? You will come with me.”

  Go with her he did, still using the axe as a stick and with his other arm around her shoulder. Even with such help, he had to stop and rest three or four times before they got to the hospital. When they did, one of the workmen there tried to turn them away: “This place is for Americans, not you damn Canucks.”

  “Hold on, Bill,” a nurse said. “That’s Nicole’s father. We’ll take care of him. What happened to you?” The last was to Galtier.

  “Axe-cutting wood.” Remembering English was hard.

  “Come on in,” the nurse said. “I’ll get Dr. O’Doull. He’ll do a proper job of patching you up.” She pointed to the door, maybe seeing that Marie had no English.

  At the door, Lucien ordered his wife home. “They will help me the rest of the way,” he told her, pointing to the nurse and the workman. When she protested, he said, “Some of what is here, you should not see.” He knew what war looked like. She didn’t, not really. He wanted to keep it that way.

  In English and in horrible French, the people from the hospital told her the same thing. She was still protesting when an ambulance skidded to a stop in front of the hospital. The driver and an attendant carried in a man on a stretcher. A bloody blanket lay over the lower part of his body; it was obvious he’d lost a leg. Marie abruptly turned and walked back toward the farmhouse.

  The first thing Lucien noticed inside the hospital was how warm it was. The Americans did not have to stint on coal. The second thing he noticed was the smell. Part of it was sharp and medicinal: the top layer, so to speak. Under it lay faint odors he knew from the barnyard-blood and dung and, almost but not quite undetectable, a miasma of bad meat.

  “You wait here,” the nurse told him, pointing to a bench. “I’ll get the doctor to see you.”

  “Merci,” he said, his injured leg stretched out straight in front of him. A couple of soldiers, young men hardly older than Charles, his older son, sat there, too. The wounded man who’d been brought in on the stretcher wasn’t in sight. They were probably working on him already.

  One of the soldiers asked, “You speak English, pal?” At Lucien’s nod, the youngster asked, “You get that from a shell?” He pointed to the wound.

  “No, from to chop the wood.” Lucien gestured to eke out his words. The American nodded in turn. Seeing him polite, Lucien asked, “And you-what have you?”

  “Flunked my shortarm inspection,” the young soldier answered, flushing. That didn’t mean anything to Lucien. The Yank noticed. “This hoor up in Riviere-du-Loup, she gave me the clap,” he explained. Lucien had heard that phrase in his own Army days. Inside, he laughed. He had a more honorable wound than the American.

  “Well, well, what have we here?” That was good French, from the mouth of Dr. Leonard O’Doull. He wore a white coat with a few reddish stains on it. Looking severely at Lucien, he said, “Monsieur Galtier, if you want to visit me here, it is not necessary to do yourself an injury first.”

  “I shall bear that in mind, thank you,” Lucien said dryly. “It was, you must believe me, not the reason for which I hurt myself.”

  “Of that I have no doubt,” O’Doull replied. He undid just enough of the bandage to see how big the wound was, and whistled softly when he did. “Yes, you were wise to come.”

  “It was my wife’s idea,” Galtier said.

  “Then you were wise to listen to her. As long as one in the family is wise, things go well. I shall have to show you how neatly I can sew.” He turned and spoke to a nurse in English too rapid for Lucien to follow. She nodded and hurried off.

  “I am glad you are the one to help me,” the farmer said.

  “I speak French,” O’Doull answered, “and you are the father of my friend.” Did he hesitate a little before that last word? Lucien couldn’t tell. O’Doull went on, “This is a duty and an honor both, then.” The nurse came back with a tray full of medical paraphernalia. The doctor went on, “It is an honor that will be painful for you, though, monsieur. I am going to give you an injection to keep you from getting lockjaw. This will not hurt much now, but may make you sore and sick later. We must roll up your sleeve-”

  Next to the fire in Galtier’s leg, the injection was a fleabite. Then O’Doull said, “And now we must disinfect the wound. You understand? We must keep it from rotting, if we can.” Lucien nodded. He’d seen hurts go bad.

  O’Doull poured something that smelled almost like applejack into the wound. Galtier gasped and bit his lip and crossed himself. If the wound was a fire, O’Doull had just poured gasoline on it. “’Osti,” the farmer said weakly. Tears blurred his vision.

  “I do regret it very much, but it is a necessity,” O’Doull said. Lucien managed to nod. “Now to sew it up,” the doctor told him.

  Before O’Doull could get to work with needle and thread, another nurse came in. That was how Galtier thought of her till she exclaimed, “Papa!”

  “Oh, bonjour, Nicole,” he said. He’d seen her in the white-and-gray nurse’s uniform with the Red Cross on the right breast before, of course, but here he’d looked at the uniform instead of the person inside it. Embarrassed, he muttered, “The foolish axe slipped.”

  “Nothing that can’t be fixed,” O’Doull said, fitting fat thread to a large needle. “Do hold still, if you’d be so kind. Oh, very good. I have seen soldiers, M. Galti
er, who gave far more trouble with smaller wounds.”

  “I have been a soldier,” Lucien said quietly. He counted the sutures: twenty-one. O’Doull bandaged the wound thicker and more tightly than Marie had done. Lucien dipped his head. “Merci beaucoup.”

  “Pas de quoi,” O’Doull answered. “I will give you a week’s supply of sterile wound dressings. If it’s still oozing after that much time, come in and see me and we will disinfect it again. Let your sons do the work for a while. They think they’re men now. Work will show whether or not they are right. We’ll take you home in an ambulance, if you like.”

  “No,” Lucien said. “Marie will think I have died.”

  “Ah. Well, let me get you a proper walking stick, then.” O’Doull did that himself. The stick with which he returned was so severely plain, it was obviously government issue. That the U.S. government manufactured large numbers of walking sticks for the anticipated use of wounded men said more plainly than words what sort of war this was.

  But, as Lucien made his slow, hobbling way home, he despised the Americans less than he had before. Almost everyone at the hospital had been good to him, even though he was a civilian, and an enemy civilian at that. No one had asked him for a penny. He was not used to feeling anything but scorn for the occupiers, but he prided himself on being a just man. “It could be,” he said, slowly, wonderingly, “that they are-that some of them are-human beings after all.”

  “I wish Pa would come home again,” George Enos, Jr., said.

  “Me, too!” Mary Jane said loudly. She didn’t say no as much as she had when she’d first turned two, for which Sylvia Enos heartily thanked God. Now her daughter tried to imitate George, Jr., in everything she did. Most of the time, that wasn’t bad at all. Every so often-as when she piddled standing up-it proved unfortunate.