He stuck his head up over the top of the parapet. Sure enough, one of those tracked traveling fortresses was slowly rumbling and clanking straight toward the U.S. line—straight toward him, it looked like. The U.S. machine guns went from raking the soldiers in butternut advancing with the barrel to aiming their fire exclusively at it, trying to knock it out of action before it could get into the trenches.
It was a British-style machine, with cannon mounted in sponsons on either side. One of those cannon spat fire. A machine gun fell silent. The barrel clattered forward once more. Its own machine guns sprayed bullets at the U.S. soldiers.
The glass portholes in McSweeney’s gas helmet were fogged on the inside and streaked with dust on the outside. That did not keep him from noticing a couple of men running away from the barrel. “Halt!” he roared at them. It did no good. At last, the men had discovered something they feared worse than they feared him.
Boom! The barrel fired again. Another machine gun abruptly stopped shooting at it. Ricochets whined off the steel armor, striking sparks but failing to penetrate. McSweeney wondered how many more barrels that he could not see were moving forward.
He shrugged. If he couldn’t see them, he couldn’t do anything about them. He could see this one. He bent and, careful not to disturb his gas helmet, shrugged over his shoulders the straps to the metal tank that fueled his special weapon. Then he waited. Bullets seemed unable to hurt the barrel.
Here it came, grinding its way through and over the few strands of wire protecting the U.S. trenches. Having thicker belts out there wouldn’t have stopped it. More soldiers in green-gray fled the machine they could not stop.
It crushed the parapet and stood poised up there above the edge of the trench, triumphant, like a great bull elephant. As it began its plunge into the U.S. works, McSweeney sent a stream of flame in through one of the machine-gun ports. An instant later, he did the same with the other port on the right side of the barrel, thereby making sure neither of those guns would bear on him.
Through the shelling, through the firing going on all around, through the coughing roar of the barrel’s engine, he heard screams inside the metal hull. Hatches flew open on top of the barrel. Men started scrambling out. Smiling behind the canvas of the mask, McSweeney burned them down. They tumbled back into the machine, black and shrunken and flaming, like insects that had flown into the flame of a gaslight.
Smoke poured from the barrel. Ammunition started cooking off in it. McSweeney regretfully moved away, that hard, tight grin still on his face. A Confederate soldier sprang onto the parapet. He fired from the hip at McSweeney—and missed. He never got a second chance. A tongue of flame licked over him. He tumbled back, burning, burning.
A grenade flew down into the trench. The blast was deafening. A fragment bit McSweeney’s leg. But when a Rebel followed the grenade, he too became a torch. No more Confederate soldiers tried coming down into the U.S. trenches, not anywhere the flame could reach. The sight of the blazing barrel took the heart out of their attack.
“You’ll get a medal for this!” someone shouted: someone in captain’s bars. Schneider hadn’t run, then. That was something. The company commander went on, “A Medal of Honor, if I have anything to do with it.”
“Thank you, sir.” McSweeney was as unflinchingly honest about himself as about everything and everyone around him. “I earned it.”
The envelope with the familiar handwriting had caused a small stir when it got to Scipio’s apartment house. Any time mail arrived there was a small occasion, for only a few of the Negroes in the building were able to read and write. “Who it from?” asked the apartment manager, a plump black fellow named Demosthenes. “Sho’’nuf write pretty.”
Scipio had professed ignorance; the imperturbable mask a butler had to be able to don at will was proof against Demosthenes’ curiosity. Behind that mask, he’d been trembling. How did Miss Anne find out where I was living? he wondered. The war had made people forget about registering newly arrived blacks, and in any case he was but one Nero among many Negroes by that name in Columbia.
In his haste to find out what his former mistress wanted, he’d ignored yet another inviting glance from the widow Jezebel, ignored it so flagrantly that he knew he’d offended. He hadn’t cared.
The message, as was Anne Colleton’s way, was to the point. Come to Marshlands Sunday before noon, she’d written. If you do, no harm will come to you. If you do not, I shall not answer for the consequences.
And so, early Sunday morning, Scipio, not doubting her word for a moment, had hopped aboard the beat-up Negro car of a train at Confederacy Station, traveled southeast and then southwest around two sides of a triangle to reach St. Matthews (no direct rail route on the third side existing), and then trudged out of town down a muddy road that got muddier as a chilly drizzle came down, heading west toward the plantation where he’d lived his whole life till the past year.
Marks of the Negro uprising still scarred the countryside: burnt-out houses and barns, cotton fields gone to weeds, trees shattered by the artillery that had done more than anything else to break the Congaree Socialist Republic. Despite the scars, Scipio had the feeling he was walking back into his own past. He wondered if Anne Colleton would have a brass-buttoned tailcoat waiting for him when he got back to the plantation.
All things considered, he preferred life as a laborer, which had more freedom to it than he’d ever imagined. Very few people, though, had ever cared about what he preferred. He hiked through the forest where he’d killed Major Hotchkiss. If anyone ever found out about that, none of Miss Anne’s promises would matter in the least.
Coming up the familiar path, turning onto it, and seeing the Marshlands mansion in ruins brought home to him how much things had changed. The Negro cottages still standing alongside those charred ruins brought home to him how much things hadn’t.
A battered, filthy, rusty Ford was parked next to one of those cottages: no sign anywhere of the fancy motorcar Miss Anne had driven. None of the field hands would have had an automobile, though, no matter how battered. That had to be where the mistress was staying. As Scipio approached the cottage, a chill ran down his back. Before the uprising—the revolution that had failed—that had been Cassius’cottage. Scipio wondered if Anne Colleton appreciated the irony.
A few children were playing outside in spite of the drizzle. In his city clothes, he was a stranger to them. Strangers, these days, were objects of fear, not curiosity. “What you wan’?” asked one of the boys, a chap who would have been just too young to fight in the revolutionary army, which had had more than one twelve-year-old carrying a rifle.
“I wish to speak with the mistress of Marshlands, Ajax,” Scipio answered. “Will you be so good as to tell her I have arrived?”
Ajax and the other children stared at him, not expecting that kind of language to come from the mouth of a black man wearing a frayed, collarless shirt and a pair of dungarees with patches at the knees, a cloth cap on his head against the rain. Then the youngster recognized him in spite of the unfamiliar habiliments. “It Scipio!” he yelped. “Do Jesus, Scipio done come back!”
That shout brought faces to windows and made several doors come open so the inhabitants of those cottages could gape—or could warily study—the returned prodigal. One of the opening doors was that of the cottage formerly Cassius’. Out came Anne Colleton, who ignored the nasty weather. “Good morning, Scipio,” she said, almost—but not quite—as she might have done before the revolt. “You were wise to come.”
“Ma’am, I thought so myself, which is why I did,” he answered.
She stood aside. “Well, come in,” she said. “I have coffee waiting, and cold chicken, and sweet-potato pie. You’ll be hungry, I expect.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said again. He went into the cottage, pausing only to wipe his feet on the jute mat in front of the door. The cottage hadn’t boasted a mat when Cassius had lived there. It hadn’t boasted an icebox, either, or a small stove to supplement the fireplace.
Nor had it held a bookcase, even if the titles on the shelves were worn secondhand copies like the ones he bought for himself. But there had been literature here: Marx and Engels and Lincoln and other Red and near-Red writers. Cassius, though, had had to keep all that hidden.
Anne Colleton closed the door behind them. “Help yourself to anything,” she said. “I don’t want anyone but the two of us hearing what we have to say to each other.” That explained why she had no servant present. And for her to serve him had undoubtedly never once crossed her mind. She was, after all, a sort of commingling of feudal landlord and capitalist oppressor. Scipio had read Cassius’ books, too.
Unless he planned on killing her and then fleeing, he had to do as she said for the moment. He’d thought about that, walking out from St. Matthews. But even if the field hands didn’t try stopping him as he ran, she would have put aside a letter or something somewhere to point the finger at him. She was not the sort to miss such a trick.
As if to underscore that, she pulled a pistol out of her handbag. “In case you were foolish,” she remarked. “I didn’t really expect you to be, but one never knows these days.”
“I have no intention of being foolish,” he answered gravely. She’d put out two coffee cups. He poured one for her, one for himself. Since she’d set out only one plate, he assumed she’d already eaten. The food was plain, nothing like the fancy banquets she’d served in the days before the war, but good enough. Since he’d had nothing but a slice of bread before leaving for the train station, he ate his fill now.
With more patience than she usually showed, his former mistress let him finish before saying anything. When he was done, she began without preamble: “I want you to tell me how my brother Jacob died.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He made his voice as flat as he could, a fitting complement to the features he schooled to stillness. Her face and voice were similarly chary of giving him clues. How much did she know? How much did he dare lie? After no more than a heartbeat, he decided that anyone who lied to her was a fool. The truth, then, as much of it as he could give. “Ma’am, he perished most courageously.”
“I wouldn’t have expected anything else,” she answered. “Courage Jacob always had. No brains to speak of, but courage. That wench Cherry would have played a part in it, wouldn’t she?”
“Ma’am, if you know the answers, what need have you to question me?” Scipio asked.
“I am in a position to question you,” Anne said. “You are not in a position to question me. She would have used her charms to soften him up, wouldn’t she?” That was not a question; she sounded wearily sure she knew whereof she spoke. “And Cassius. He’s still stealing things hereabouts, you know.”
“So I have heard, yes,” Scipio said. The more he talked about Cassius now, the less he would have to talk about what had happened a year before.
“He still has a price on his head, too,” Anne said. “If he comes round here”—the pistol twitched in her hand—“I shall kill him.” She studied Scipio, as if deciding whether to butcher a hog now or to wait. “And, of course, you still have a price on your head as well.”
“You said no harm would come to me if I visited you here,” Scipio said quickly. If she hadn’t had the pistol, he would have thought about trying to kill her. Living with her, serving her, had taught him how devious she was.
But when she said, “And I meant that,” he thought she was telling the truth. She went on, “You and Julia are the only members of the house staff I’ve been able to find. She and the field hands deny knowing anything. I’ve made my investigations, but you are the only eyewitness to what happened I’ve been able to…find.”
Catch was what she meant. Wherever she’d learned whatever she’d learned, she knew a good deal. Scipio had not defied Cassius when the Red leader made it plain his choices were cooperation and death. The stuff of defiance was not in him. Maybe it never had been; maybe his servile upbringing had trained out whatever he’d once owned.
He told the whole story, from Cherry’s claim of abuse to the gun battle in which Jacob Colleton had defended himself so well to the storming of the bedroom door behind which Anne’s gassed brother had barricaded himself. “Three or four men did that,” he said. “They rushed past me so fast, I do not know for certain who they were. I do not know which of them fired the fatal shot, either. Ma’am, you may do with me what you will, but I am being truthful in this regard.”
“I believe you,” Anne said, which caught Scipio by surprise. Sitting where she sat, he wouldn’t have believed himself. She went on, “The reason I believe you is that, if you were lying to me, you would have come up with a better story. The truth, I’ve found, is usually confused.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said.
“Now—” Her voice sharpened. “Who burned the Marshlands mansion?”
“That was Cassius, ma’am,” he answered, adding, “I wish he had not done it. Many beautiful things were lost.”
“In five words, you’ve just given the story of this war,” she said. “I know you had a role in the so-called Congaree Socialist Republic. From what I’ve heard, you usually did what you could to stop its excesses. I suspect your reasons had as much to do with what would happen after the uprising was put down as they did with any special milk of human kindness in your veins, but only God can look into a man’s heart, and I’ve found out that, whatever else I may be, I am not God.”
Not knowing what to say to that, Scipio kept quiet. If Anne Colleton hadn’t thought she was God before the Red revolt, she’d done a fine job of concealing the fact. He wondered what she’d gone through. He didn’t have the nerve to ask. He didn’t have the nerve for a lot of things. In a nutshell, that was the tale of his life.
Wearily, Anne said, “Go back to Columbia. Go back to your work. Once we win the war, that will have been enough. Don’t ever come here again, unless I summon you.”
“Ma’am, on that you may rest assured.” Scipio wondered if he was talking like an educated white man for the last time in his life. In a way, he would miss it if that proved so. In another way, giving up what had been imposed on him was a sort of freedom in itself.
He rose, half bowed to Anne, and left the cottage. Field hands and children stared after him. He didn’t look back. As he got to the forest where he’d killed Major Hotchkiss, he decided he needed a new apartment, a new job, a new name. The widow had wanted to go to bed with him. He sighed. It wouldn’t happen now. “Odder chances,” he said aloud. “Dey is odder chances.” He kept walking toward the train station.
Brakes squealing, the train pulled into the station. “Cincinnati!” the conductor shouted. “All out for Cincinnati!”
Men, most of them in uniform, and a scattering of women rose from their seats so they could depart. Irving Morrell stayed where he was. So did Heinz Guderian beside him. “How far now from Cincinnati to Philadelphia?” Guderian asked in German.
Morrell visualized a map. “Six hundred miles, maybe a little less,” he answered in the same language. Seeing Guderian look puzzled, he amplified that: “About 950 kilometers.” He moved back and forth between one system of measurement and the other readily enough, but had learned the German found it harder.
Sure enough, Guderian twitted him about it: “How many feet in a mile? It is 5,280, nicht wahr? What a foolish number to have to keep straight every time you need to make a calculation.”
Before Morrell could defend the American system, the conductor leaned over and said with a smile, “Wir willen winnen der Krieg.”
Guderian stared at him, not because he spoke German so badly (he’d said “We want to win the war,” not “We will win the war,” which was what he’d probably meant, and he’d botched his article and his word order, too), but because he spoke it at all: he was a black man with a mouth full of gold-crowned teeth. “Ja!” Guderian managed at last, and the conductor, smiling still, headed down the central aisle. To Morrell, the German General Staff officer said, “I had not realized just how popular m
y country was in the United States.”
“Oh, yes,” Morrell said with a nod. “Good thing we weren’t speaking French, or he’d have probably thought we were spies. A classmate of mine at the Academy, Jack Lefebvre, changed his name to Schmidt after the war started. It was either that, he told me, or kiss promotion good-bye. And I happen to know his people have been in the USA since before the War of Secession.”
“This business of everyone coming from elsewhere or having parents or grandparents who came from elsewhere is very strange to me,” Guderian said. “In Europe, we have been where we are since the Völkerwanderungen of a thousand years ago and more.”
Passengers were boarding the train as well as leaving it. Some of them came from elsewhere, too, speaking with accents plainly sprung from the CSA. A couple of those fellows, looking prosperous with big bellies, expensive black suits, and homburgs, sat down across from Morrell and Guderian. “It’ll be right strange,” one of them said to the other with a ripe drawl, “but I reckon we can do it.”
Shifting to English, Morrell leaned over and asked, “Who are you people, anyway?” Talk about spies—!
The man sitting closer to him stuck out a plump hand. “Major, I’m Davis Lee Vidals, lieutenant governor of Kentucky—of the United State of Kentucky, I make haste to assure you.”
Morrell reached out and shook the proffered hand, being careful not to squash it. He gave his own name. “That’s wonderful news!” he said. “Welcome back to the country where you belong.”
“Thank you very kindly, Major Morrell,” Vidals said. “That fellow sitting beside you—is he a German?” His voice was half dread, half awe: he might have been one of the people helping to bring Kentucky back into the USA, but he didn’t seem to know how to feel about U.S. allies who had been enemies of the Confederate States.
“Ja, I am a German.” Guderian spoke English with a heavy accent, but was fluent enough. He grinned at the Kentucky politician. “You would not expect to find an American officer traveling with a Frenchman, would you?” He’d paid attention to the story of Jack Lefebvre, now Schmidt, all right.
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