Coughing and wheezing, the Ford passed the last trees. There, familiar as the mole she carried on one wrist, was the opening into that winding lane. Just before you turned, you looked along the lane and you saw…
“Hell,” she said quietly. She’d been hoping the place had survived, but it looked like a skeleton with most of the flesh rotted away. Altogether against her will, tears blurred her eyes. “Jacob,” she whispered. If Marshlands had burned, her brother must have burned with it.
By contrast, the Negro cottages off to one side of the great house looked exactly as they had before the Red uprising began. A couple of men were out hoeing in their gardens; a couple of women were feeding chickens; a whole raft of pickaninnies were running around raising hell.
After a little while, her eyes left the vicinity of the mansion and traveled out to the cotton fields. Her teeth closed hard on the soft flesh inside her lower lip. If anyone had done anything with the cotton since she’d left for Charleston all those months before, she would have been astonished. Was that what the Red revolution had been about—the freedom not to work? Her face twisted into an expression half sneer, half snarl.
If the rest of the plantations in what had been the Congaree Socialist Republic looked the same way, a lot of planters were bankrupt, busted, flat. She wasn’t; she’d invested wisely ever since Marshlands came into her hands. Most people, though, couldn’t see past their noses. And, speaking of seeing…
One of the men in the garden plots had spotted her. He dropped his hoe and pointed, calling out to the rest. One after another, heads swung in her direction. Other than that, none of the Negroes moved. That in itself chilled her. Before the uprising, they would have come running up to her motorcar, calling greetings and hoping she had trinkets for them. Telling lies, she realized. Hiding what they really thought.
For a moment, she was especially glad of the Tredegar on the seat beside her. Then, all at once, she wasn’t. How much good would it do her? What kind of arsenal did the Negroes have hidden in those cabins? She’d prided herself on knowing her laborers well. She hadn’t known them at all. Maybe the Army men had been right when they thought her crazy to come here by herself.
A woman walked slowly toward her. It was, she realized after too long, Julia, who had been her body servant. The young woman, instead of a maid’s shirtwaist and black dress, wore homespun made gaudy with bits of probably stolen finery. She was also several months pregnant.
The only reason Anne hadn’t taken her to Charleston was that she’d gone there for an assignation, not legitimate business. Had it been otherwise, would Julia have turned on her? The thought was chilling, but could hardly be avoided.
“So you’s come back, Miss Anne,” Julia said. Her voice had something of the old servile tone left in it, but not much.
“Yes, I’m back.” Anne looked over the neglected acres of what had been the finest plantation in South Carolina. “I don’t know why the hell I bothered.”
“Things, they ain’t the same no mo’,” Julia said. Had truer words ever been spoken, Anne hadn’t heard them.
Almost as one equal to another, she asked, “And what did you do in the uprising, Julia? What did the niggers here do?”
“Nothin’,” Julia said. “We stay here, we mind we bidness.” But now she didn’t meet Anne’s eyes.
Anne nodded. This was a lie she recognized. “What happens when the soldiers start asking the same thing?” she said. Julia flinched. Anne smiled to herself. Yes, no matter what, she could manage. “Mind my business”—she pointed to the forgotten fields—“along with your own, and I’ll keep the soldiers off your back. You know I can do things like that. Have we got a bargain?”
Julia thought for most of a minute, then nodded. “Miss Anne, I think we has.”
George Enos had felt constricted on the Mississippi. He was used to the broad reaches of the Atlantic, to looking around from his perch on deck and seeing nothing but the endless ocean in all directions. Next to the Atlantic, any river, even the Father of Waters, seemed hardly more than an irrigation ditch.
And the Cumberland was considerably narrower than the Mississippi. These days, he and his fellow deck hands aboard the Punishment wore Army helmets painted Navy blue. This stretch of the river was supposed to be pretty clear of snipers, but nobody with the brains God gave a haddock felt like betting his life on it.
Before the Punishment headed up the Cumberland, Navy ironworkers had installed protection around the deck machine guns, too. Little by little, the war heading toward two years old, they were figuring out that this riverine fighting had rules of its own. George was glad of that, but wondered what the devil had taken them so long.
As far as he could tell, the Rebs had got the idea from the beginning. He pointed to the mine-sweeping boat moving slowly down the Cumberland ahead of the Punishment and said, “Anybody would think the damn Rebs did nothing but build mines in all the time between the Second Mexican War and now.”
“Near as I can tell, that’s right,” Wayne Pitchess answered, his Connecticut accent not far removed from the flat vowels and swallowed r’s of Enos’ Boston intonation. Then he shook his head and pointed out to the battered farms out beyond the river. “I take it back. They raise tobacco, too.”
“That’s so,” George agreed. Some of it got into Navy supply channels, too, probably by most unofficial means. He had a pouch of pipe tobacco in a trouser pocket. It wasn’t as good as it might have been—which meant it had been cured, or half cured, after the war started—but it was a lot better than nothing.
Flags fluttered up the minesweeper’s signal lines. The Punishment’s engine changed its rhythm. The monitor began crawling away from the sweeper as the screw reversed to give power astern rather than ahead. “I’d say they found one,” Pitchess remarked.
George nodded. “I’d say you’re right. Other thing I’d say is, I hope they haven’t missed one.”
“There is that,” Pitchess agreed. You had to hope they hadn’t missed one, as you had to hope a storm wouldn’t sink you out on the Atlantic. You couldn’t do much about it, either way.
The mine-sweeping boat cut the cable mooring the deadly device to the bottom of the Cumberland. When it bobbed to the surface, the sweeper cut loose with its machine guns. The explosion showered muddy water down onto Enos a quarter of a mile away; the Punishment rocked as waves spread from the blast.
“Lord!” George had known what mines could do, but he’d never been so close to one when it went off. “If it’s all the same to everybody else, I’d just as soon not run over one of those.”
“Now that you mention it, I think I’d rather be on top of my wife, too,” Wayne Pitchess said with a veteran’s studied dryness.
George laughed at the comparison, then walked over to his machine gun and got busy checking the mechanism he’d finished cleaning not five minutes before. Most of the time, he managed not to think about how much he missed Sylvia. He hadn’t yet visited one of the whorehouses that sprouted alongside rivers like toadstools after rain. He had stained his underwear once or twice, waking up from dreams he didn’t much remember, dreams of the sort he hadn’t had since not long after he started going to the barbershop for a shave.
Engineers were busy at Clarksville, Tennessee. As U.S. monitors pushed up the Cumberland toward the town, the Confederates had dropped two railway bridges right into the water. Before the U.S. monitors advanced any farther, the steel and timber and the freight cars the Rebs had run out onto the bridge to complicate their enemies’ lives all had to be cleared away.
It was slow work. It was dangerous work, too; every so often, Confederate batteries off to the south would lob some three-inch shells in the direction of the fallen bridges. The engineers didn’t have a lot of heavy equipment with which to work. Once they’d cleared the river, the U.S. presence in this part of Tennessee would firm up. Then they could bring in the tools they really needed now. Of course, they wouldn’t need them so much then.
“Yeah, th
at’s a hell of a thing,” Pitchess said when George remarked on the paradox. “But hell, if you wanted things simple, you never would have joined the Navy.”
“I suppose you’re right,” Enos said. “I joined the Navy so I could give the Rebs a kick in the slats to pay them back for the one they gave me. I was already a sailor, so what the hell?—and I didn’t want to get conscripted into the Army. But I never thought they’d stick me here in the middle of the country. You join the Navy, you think you’ll be on the ocean, right?”
“Didn’t matter to me one way or t’other,” his friend answered. “I wasn’t making enough to keep a roof on my head and food in my belly when I was fishing. I figured I wouldn’t starve in the Navy, and I was right about that.” A wry grin stretched across his lean, weathered face. “Maybe I didn’t think about getting blown to smithereens as much as I should’ve.”
Men and mules, straining mightily, hauled a freight car out onto the north bank of the river. Pointing, George said, “I expect that’ll be the last train to Clarksville for a good long time.”
“Yeah,” Pitchess said. “Till we get our own rolling stock running through, anyways.”
Confederate field guns opened up with another barrage just then. Shells screamed down on the engineers, who dove for cover. Mules weren’t smart enough to do that (or, George thought, stupid enough to start a war in the first place). Thin across the water, the screams of wounded animals floated over to the Punishment.
The guns had the bridge zeroed to a fare-thee-well, and could strike at the wreckage or at either bank, as they chose. They didn’t have the range for the Punishment down so precisely. That didn’t keep them from trying to hit her, though. Shells splashed into the river and chewed up the bushes on the northern bank.
George dove into the shelter the ironwrights had built around his machine gun. A splinter hit the steel and clattered away. He hadn’t thought enough about getting blown to smithereens, either.
Growling and grumbling on its bearings, the Punishment’s turret swung round so the six-inch guns it carried bore on the field pieces harassing them. On land, six-inch cannon were heavy guns, hard to move at any sort of speed except by rail. On the water, though, they were nothing out of the ordinary, and the Punishment gave them a fine, steady platform from which to work.
They roared. The monitor heeled ever so slightly in the water from the recoil, then recovered. Sprawled out as he was, George felt the motion more acutely than he might have on his feet. Up in the armored crow’s nest atop the mast, an officer with field glasses would be watching the fall of the shells and comparing it to the location of the Rebel guns.
More grumbling noises—these smaller, to correct the error in the turret’s previous position. The big guns boomed again. Wafting powder fumes made George cough and sent tears streaming from his eyes.
Confederate shells kept falling, too. One of them exploded against the turret. A whole shower of splinters rattled off Enos’ protective cage. He’d wondered whether the ironworkers had made it thick enough. Nothing tore through it to pierce him. Evidently they had.
The turret carried more armor than any other part of the Punishment. It was made to withstand a shell from a gun of the same caliber as those it carried. It didn’t laugh at a hit from a three-inch howitzer, but it turned the blow without trouble.
And it replied with shells far heavier than those the field pieces threw. “Hit!” shouted the spotter from the crow’s nest. “That’s a hit, by God!” He whooped with glee. The guns fired several more salvos. The spotter kept yelling encouragement. What encouraged George more than anything else was that, after a while, no new fire came toward either the Punishment or the Clarksville bridges.
He got to his feet, ready to hose down the riverbank with machine-gun fire in case the Rebs, having lost their guns, chose to bring riflemen forward to make the engineers’ jobs harder—and perhaps to snipe at the men on the monitor’s deck, too. They often tried that after big, waterborne guns smashed their artillery.
Not this time, though. All was calm as the Punishment floated on the Cumberland. The engineers got back to work. The mine-sweeping boat ran right up to the wreckage to pick up a couple of wounded men. On the shore, pistol shots rang out. Soldiers were shooting wounded mules.
Just another day’s work, George thought. Noticing that thought brought him up sharply. It was the sort of thought a veteran might have. “Me?” he muttered. No one answered, naturally, but no one needed to, either.
Roger Kimball stood up on the conning tower of the Bonefish. He looked around. All he saw were the cool, gray waters of the North Atlantic. All he smelled was clean salt air—none of the rotting stinks of the South Carolina swamps. He sucked in a long, deep breath and let it out like a connoisseur savoring a fine wine.
His executive officer smiled. “Feels good to be back at sea, doesn’t it, sir?” Junior Lieutenant Brearley said.
“Feels better than good, Tom,” Kimball answered. “We’re doing our proper job again, and about time, too. If I’d wanted to be a policeman and wear a funny hat, I’d have joined the police in the first place.”
A wave crashed against the Bonefish’s bow. The conning tower and the hatch leading down into the submersible were protected by canvas shields—or so claimed the men who’d designed the shields. Kimball supposed they were better than nothing. They didn’t keep him and Brearley from getting seawater in the face. They didn’t keep more seawater from puddling under their feet or from dripping down the hatch.
Brearley used a sleeve to wipe himself more or less dry. His smile now was rueful. “Harder to keep the boat dry than it was on the river.”
“Price you pay for doing the proper job,” Kimball said airily. He could afford to be airy now, up here. When he went below, the diesel-oil and other stenches inside the Bonefish—all produced despite everything the crew could do—would easily surpass those of the swamps flanking the Pee Dee.
Since that couldn’t be helped, he put it out of his mind. Wiping the lenses of his field glasses with a pocket handkerchief, he raised the glasses to his eyes and scanned the horizon for a telltale plume of smoke that would mark a ship. The wind quickly whipped away the exhaust from the Bonefish’s diesel. Bigger vessels, though, burned coal or fuel oil, and left more prominent signatures in the air.
He spied nothing. The Bonefish might have been alone in the Atlantic. He didn’t like that. Letting the binoculars thump down against his chest on their leather strap, he pounded on the conning tower rail with his fist. “Damn it, Tom, they’re supposed to be out here.”
“Yes, sir,” the exec said. That was all he could say. Intelligence had reported the U.S. Navy was gathering for a push against the British and French warships protecting their home countries’ merchant vessels. Sending one or two of those Yankee ships to the bottom would make life easier for the Entente powers against the twin colossi of the USA and Germany.
As if picking the thought from his mind, Brearley said, “We have managed to keep the damnyankees and the Huns from joining hands.”
“We’d better go right on keeping ’em from doing that, too, sonny, or you can kiss this war good-bye,” Kimball answered dryly. “We’ve got to keep the trade route from Argentina to French West Africa open, too, or England starts starving even worse than she is already. And we’ve got to keep the route from England to Canada at least partway open, or else the USA sits on Canada like an elephant squashing a mouse. If we manage to do all of that, the soldiers can go on doing what they’re supposed to do.”
“Have we got enough ships?” Brearley asked. “Have all of us together—us and the British and the French and the Russians and whatever the Canadians have left—have we got enough ships to do everything we have to do?”
Kimball clapped him on the back. “We’ve done it so far—just barely. Reckon we can keep on doing it—just barely. And don’t forget the Japanese. They’re giving England and Canada quite a hand in the Pacific, by everything I hear.”
“Don’t know as how I really care for them fooling around in a white man’s war,” Brearley said, “but I suppose we have to grab the help now and be thankful for it, and then worry later about sorting out what it means.”
“That’s how it works,” Kimball agreed. As soon as he’d spoken, though, he wished he’d kept his mouth shut. Brearley was all for cutting a deal with the Negroes, too, and then sorting out what that all meant later.
Had his exec set him up, so he would notice he was arguing one way on one of the questions and the other way on the other? He let his eyes slide toward Tom Brearley. Sure as hell, the young pup looked ever so slightly smug. But Brearley had too much sense to say anything, so Kimball couldn’t gig him for it. This round went to the junior lieutenant.
So Kimball wouldn’t have to admit as much, he raised the field glasses once more to scan the horizon. He did not do it expecting to spot anything: more to give him an excuse not to answer, and to change the subject when he did speak again. But there, off to the northeast, rose an unmistakable plume of smoke.
He stiffened and thrust out an index finger, as if he were a bird dog coming to the point. Tom Brearley didn’t have field glasses of his own. Before the war, most of them had been made in Germany, and they remained in short supply throughout the Entente powers. But, after a minute or so, Brearley nodded. “Yes, sir. I see it, too.”
Kimball called down to the petty officer at the wheel: “Change course to 045.”
“Oh-four-five, aye aye, sir,” Ben Coulter answered. His voice caught with excitement as he sent a question up the hatchway: “You spotted something, sir?”
“Something, yes,” Kimball answered: submersible officers and crew paid less attention to the minutiae of military formality than any other part of the C.S. Navy. “Don’t know what yet.”
He peered through the field glasses again. A swell lifted the Bonefish, extending the horizon for him. He got a glimpse of the hull producing the smoke. “That’s a Yankee destroyer, sure as hell it is. Now the fun begins.” His lips curled back from his teeth in what was more nearly snarl than smile.
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