American Front (42 page)

When she got to the front of the line again, the clerk who’d given her the form looked as delighted to see her as she was to see the landlord on the first of every month. “What seems to be your trouble?” he asked in a voice that said he knew she was bothering him on purpose.

She pointed to the check-off boxes. “What do I do about my husband here?” she asked. “He’s a Confederate prisoner at—”

“Prisoners of war go under the Military heading,” the clerk said, more exasperated than ever.

“But he’s not a prisoner of war; he’s a detainee,” Sylvia said. “A commerce raider captured him when he was out on Georges Bank.”

“Then he’s a Civilian Gainfully—” The Coal Board clerk stopped. You couldn’t say George Enos was gainfully employed, not when he was at a camp or wherever the Rebs kept their detainees down in North Carolina. But he wasn’t unemployed, either. The clerk looked as if he hated Sylvia. He probably did, for breaking up the smooth monotony of his day. He turned and called, “Mr. Colfax, can you please come here for a moment?” Being his superior, Mr. Colfax rated politeness. Sylvia barely rated the time of day.

She turned to look back at her children. George, Jr., was teasing Mary Jane with the lollipop. She could have told him that was a mistake. Mary Jane grabbed the lollipop and stuffed it into her own mouth. George, Jr., started to scream.

“Excuse me,” Sylvia said hastily. She took the lollipop away from Mary Jane, returned it to its rightful owner, swatted every available backside, and warned of measures yet more dire if the two of them didn’t behave themselves. That done, she went back to the clerk. The next woman in line had come up to the window in the meanwhile, giving him an excuse to pretend she didn’t exist. He seized on the excuse with alacrity.

But then Mr. Colfax, who wore not only pince-nez but a red vest to show he was someone above the common run of clerk, came out of whatever office he’d been given to prove he was above the common run of clerk. The window clerk proved willing to ignore the other woman at the window instead of Sylvia: as long as he was ignoring someone, he was happy.

Upon hearing of the ambiguity, Mr. Colfax chewed on his lower lip, which was red and meaty and made for such mastications. At last, he said, “Properly speaking, this man should not be included in the calculations, for no coal need be expended on cooking and heating water for him.”

“It’s not his fault he’s not here,” Sylvia protested. “He’s a prisoner—”

“No, he is a detainee, as you yourself specified,” the window clerk said, relishing his moment of petty triumph. “Fill out the form accordingly and take it to Window C. Thank you, Mr. Colfax.” Mr. Colfax nodded and disappeared. Sylvia wished he were gone for good.

When she looked to her children again, Mary Jane was toddling over to take a good look at the brass cuspidor in one corner of the room. Its polished, gleaming surface was stained here and there—as was the floor around it—by the tobacco-brown spittle of men whose intentions were better than their aim. Sylvia let out a small shriek and, skirts flapping around her, managed to intercept Mary Jane just before her daughter got feet and hands in the disgusting stuff.

Gripping Mary Jane in one hand and the precious if annoying form in the other, she returned to the seat where George, Jr., waited placidly. “Why didn’t you keep your sister from wandering off and getting into mischief?” she said. “You have to be my big boy till Papa gets home, you know.”

“I’m sorry, Mama,” he said, his face serious, his eyes big, looking so much like his father, Sylvia thought her heart would break. “I didn’t see her go, I really didn’t. I was looking at this bug I caught.” He opened his hand. He was holding a cockroach. It jumped down and started to scurry across the floor toward any shelter it could find.

Sylvia lashed out with a foot. The cockroach crunched under the sole of her shoe. George, Jr., started to cry, but then discovered the remains of the cockroach were about as interesting as it had been alive. “Look at its guts sticking out!” he exclaimed, loudly and enthusiastically.

Heads turned, all through the Coal Board office. Sylvia felt herself flushing, and wished she could sink through the floor. “Don’t play with them any more, do you hear me?” she told George, Jr. “They’re dirty and nasty.”

At last, she got the chance to finish filling out the form. It asked for things she didn’t know, like the quality of the insulation in her flat, and for things she had a devil of a time figuring out, like the number of cubic feet the flat contained. Her education had stopped in the middle of the seventh grade, when it became obvious she needed a job more than schooling. She hadn’t had to figure out the volume of anything since then, and hadn’t expected to need to do it now.

At last, the dreadful task was done. By the time it was, Mary Jane was getting cranky. Sylvia carried her over to the line in front of Window C. “You stay here,” she told George, Jr., “and no more bugs, not if you want to be able to sit down when we ride the trolley home.”
If we ever get a chance to go home
, she thought wearily. But she’d got through to her son, who sat on both hands, as if to protect the area she’d threatened.

The line moved about as slowly as U.S. troops advancing on Big Lick, Virginia—Big Licking, the papers had taken to calling it. Some of the people must have made mistakes on their forms, because, faces set and angry, they had to go back to the previous window and get new copies to fill out. They had to stand in line again there, too.

When she finally reached him, the clerk who reigned supreme over Window C proved to be a fresh-faced young fellow who, for a miracle, seemed friendly and anxious to help. He smiled at Mary Jane, who stared back at him over the thumb she had in her mouth.

Then he glanced down at the coal ration form. “I don’t see your husband listed here, ma’am,” he said to Sylvia. “You’re a widow?” He actually sounded sympathetic, which, from Sylvia’s previous experience with Coal Board clerks, should have been more than enough to get him fired.

“No,” she said, and explained what had happened to George.

“That doesn’t matter,” the clerk said. “If he’s captive of the Confederate States, you’re entitled to the coal for him.”

“Back there—” Sylvia pointed to the window from which she’d come. “Mister, uh, Colfax said I wasn’t, because George is a detainee, not a prisoner of war.”

“Doesn’t matter,” the clerk repeated, his voice firm. “Mr. Colfax doesn’t know everything there is to know.”

Sylvia shot a venomous look back at that window. But when she started to cross lines out and make changes on the form, the clerk said, “I’m sorry, ma’am, but these forms must be perfect the first time, to eliminate any suspicion that the changes originated in this office. I’m afraid you do have to go back and get a fresh copy to fill out.”

She stared at him, at Mary Jane, at George, Jr. (would he catch a mouse instead of forbidden bugs?), and at the line to the window from which she’d thought she’d escaped. She needed the coal. Coal Board rations were stingy. Even with what she’d get for George, she’d have none too much. But standing in line again—in two lines again—and then having to fill out the requisition form once more, even if this time she could copy from what she’d done before…Another half hour? Another hour? Was it worth the time? When could she shop?

“Come on, lady,” a gruff voice said behind her. “I ain’t got all day.”

Sylvia didn’t have all day, either. But she did need the coal. Sighing, ignoring George, Jr.’s, stricken look, she walked across the room and got back into the line in which she’d stood before.

XI

Sometimes you dished it out, sometimes you had to take it. Jake Featherston knew that was true, even if he didn’t like it for beans. He was taking it now, and his whole battery with him.

“Fire!” he yelled, and the field gun blasted a shell back at the damnyankees on the far side of the Susquehanna. The whole battery was pounding the U.S. positions, as far back as it could reach.

Trouble was, the battery couldn’t reach far enough. The Confederacy’s three-inch field guns had been the most wonderful thing in the world when the war was new and positions changed not just from day to day but from hour to hour. They moved with the advancing columns of men in butternut and slaughtered the U.S. soldiers who opposed them: slaughtered by tens, by hundreds, by thousands.

Because they did that job so well, the CSA had a lot of them. What the Confederates didn’t have, and what they were needing more and more now that the front wasn’t going anywhere fast, was a lot of big guns, guns that could reach well behind the enemy line and do some damage when they did reach. Nobody had thought the Confederacy would need so many guns like that.

“Only goes to show,” Featherston muttered. “People ain’t as smart as they wish they was.”

The USA had the big guns, or more of them than the CSA did. Now that the front had stabilized along the Susquehanna, the United States had brought up their heavy artillery, and their gunners were using the big, long-range shells to raise hell deep among the Confederates’ secondary positions. If the Yankees decided to try to force the Susquehanna line, they could beat down the opposition with their artillery till the Confederate forces would have a tough time fighting back.

“Wish we could do more to those damned six- and eight-inch guns,” Jethro Bixler said as he set another shell in the breech of the field piece.

“Yeah.” Featherston adjusted the elevation screw for maximum range, then pulled the lanyard. The field gun bucked and roared, but the muzzle brake kept the recoil short. If they hadn’t worn the rifling out of the barrel of the gun, it wasn’t because they hadn’t tried. As Bixler slammed yet another shell into the breech, Jake went on, “What I wish is, we weren’t so damned far forward. We got to be, I know, but if they do start dropping stuff on us, they’ll be awful damn accurate on account of it won’t be way out at the end of their range, like we are when we try to reach where they’re at.”

Another shell screamed off. Featherston wondered if he’d have any hearing left by the time the war was done. No sooner had the thought crossed his mind than he realized it contained two possibly false assumptions: that his hearing was the most important thing he risked, and that the war would ever end.

Pompey came up to Featherston and waited to be noticed. When the sergeant gave him a curt nod, he said, “Cap’n Stuart’s compliments, suh, and we gonna shift our fire to a new Yankee position, range 5,300 yards, bearing 043.”

“Range 5,300, bearing 043,” Featherston repeated; he had to work to keep from imitating Pompey’s mincing accent. Captain Stuart’s servant nodded and went off to give the word to the next howitzer in the battery.

Featherston sighed. He didn’t know whether Major Potter had investigated Pompey or not. If the major had, nothing had come of it. Pompey remained Jeb Stuart III’s trusted servant: too trusted, as far as Jake was concerned. He knew Captain Stuart had given the command. All the same, getting it from Pompey was too close to taking orders from a Negro to suit him.

He glanced over at Nero and Perseus, who were combing down the horses. They were all right. They knew white men gave the orders and they took them. Pompey, just because he worked for somebody important, thought his own station improved, too.
Thinks his shit don’t stink, is what he does
, Jake thought.

And then he stopped worrying about things as trivial as the right status of the Negro in the Confederate States of America. At any other time, that would have been important. Not now, not when Yankee shells came whistling in straight toward where he was standing.

Big ones
, he thought with a chill as the freight-train noises in the sky grew to a roar, a scream. The damnyankees’ three-inchers fired more slowly than the Confederacy’s guns, but their shells gave the same scant warning coming in. A little
whizz
before the bang, that was all you got.

Not these. Through the growing shriek of torn air, Jethro Bixler screamed something. If it wasn’t “Get down!” it should have been. A split second before the shells went off, Featherston threw himself flat.

Back home outside of Richmond, he’d gone to church a lot of times to hear a preacher work himself up into a good sweat over hellfire and damnation and brimstone. You listened to a preacher who was good enough, who threw off his jacket and waved his white-shirtsleeved arms at the congregation, you could get the feeling hell wasn’t more than half a mile off.

That’s what he’d thought then. Since the war started, he’d begun to get the notion he had a more intimate personal acquaintance with hellfire than any preacher ever spawned—unless the preacher served a gun, too.

But now, with the war that had started in summer and should have ended before winter still going strong at the start of spring and heading into its second summer of what looked like a great many yet to come, he discovered he didn’t know so much after all. The battery had been under fire before, plenty of times. That was why he wasn’t working with all the same gun-crew men who’d started out with him bombarding Washington, D.C. You shot at the damnyankees, they shot at you. That was fair.

They weren’t just shooting at the battery this time, though. They wanted to wipe it off the face of the earth. He frantically hugged the dirt as the big shells burst all around him. Black puffs of smoke with red flame at their hearts sprang into being everywhere. Shrapnel balls and fragments of shell casing hissed through the air. The ground jerked and bucked. Featherston had never felt an earthquake, and after this bombardment was convinced he didn’t need to. If you were in a house when an earthquake hit, the worst that would happen was things falling on you. Things weren’t just falling here. They were accelerated, viciously accelerated, by high explosive.

Worst was knowing that whether he lived or died was altogether out of his hands. If a shell came down so near the blast ripped his lungs to bits from the inside out, if an explosion blew him to smithereens, if a tiny steel splinter awled through his skull and into his brain…then that was what happened. He had no say, and whether he was a good soldier or a bad didn’t matter. Luck, that was it.

Shells kept raining down on the battery. He heard someone screaming, and realized it was himself. He felt not the least bit ashamed. You had to let some of the terror loose, or it would eat you from the inside out. Besides, in the many times worse than thunderstorm all around, who could hear him?

He wondered what else the Yankees were bombarding. Front-line trenches? Ammunition dumps? It mattered in theory, but not in practice, not right now. He couldn’t do anything about it any which way. All he could do was lie flat and scrabble at the ground with the knife he wore on his belt, trying to dig a shallow hole in which he could shelter from the storm of steel—the storm of hate, the infantry called it—raging all around.

Blast from a near miss picked him up and slammed him back down to the ground, the way you might throw a kitten you didn’t want against a brick wall to get rid of it. “Oof!” he said, and then, as he got more air back into his lungs, several less printable remarks.

How long the bombardment went on, he never knew exactly. When at last it lifted, it went down into the trenches even nearer the river than the battery was. Dazedly, Jake Featherston sat up. His hands shook. He tried to make them steady, and discovered he couldn’t.

His gun, for a miracle, was still upright. Nobody else from the crew was sitting up, though. A couple of people were down and moaning, a couple of others down and not moving. The rest of the battery’s howitzers had been tossed every which way, as if they were jackstraws.

He looked toward the smoke and dirt rising from the front-line trenches. Through that haze, he saw Yankees coming out of their own trenches and rushing toward the Susquehanna. They were going to try to force a crossing right now.

He ran to the howitzer. His head swiveled wildly. He had a target artillerymen dreamed of—but if he had to handle the three-incher by himself, he couldn’t possibly fire often enough to do the CSA any good. He spied motion. Somehow, Nero and Perseus had come through the bombardment with as little damage as he had.

“You niggers!” he shouted. “Get your black asses up here on the double!” The laborers obeyed. If they hadn’t, he would have drawn his pistol and shot them both. As things were, he barked, “You’ve seen the crew serve this gun often enough. Reckon you know how to do it your own selves?”

The two Negroes looked at each other. “Mebbe we do, Marse Jake,” Perseus said at last, “but—”

“No time for buts.” Featherston pointed toward the Susquehanna. “Every damnyankee in the world is headin’ straight this way. They get this far, they’re gonna kill you the same as me. Only way to keep ’em from gettin’ this far I can think of is to blow ’em up first. Now—you gonna serve the gun?”

He didn’t know whether his logic or his hand on the butt of his pistol was the more convincing. But the Negroes, after glancing at each other again, both nodded. “I kin load, I reckon,” Nero said, “an’ Perseus, he kin tote the shells. You got to do the rest, Marse Jake. We don’t know nothin’ ’bout how to aim.”

“I’ll handle that,” Featherston promised. He looked around for Jethro Bixler, then wished he hadn’t. The loader was spread out over the ground like an anatomy lesson. He hoped Nero wasn’t lying to him, the way blacks did sometimes when they wanted to impress a white man.

Nero wasn’t. He waited while Jake frantically worked the elevation screw to lower the muzzle of the gun and shorten range, then opened the breech, slammed in a shell, and dogged it shut almost as fast as poor dead Jethro could have done.

With a whoop, Featherston yanked the firing lanyard. The howitzer bellowed. A couple of seconds later, the shell burst among the swarming Yankees. They were close enough for Jake to watch the ones near the burst going down like ninepins. He whooped again and traversed the piece a little to the left.

Nero worked the breech. Out came the old shell casing. In went the new round. Jake jerked the lanyard. More U.S. soldiers fell. Methodically, he kept pumping shells into them. Despite the Yankee bombardment, not all the Confederate machine gunners were blasted out of their positions. They too began scything the U.S. attackers with bullets. Some of the Yankees did manage to ford the river and get into the Confederate trenches. The only ones who went any father than that came to the rear as prisoners.

Seeing the glum, bloodied men in green-gray, Nero howled like a wolf. “We done it!” he shouted. “Jesus God almighty, we done it!”

They hadn’t done it all by themselves—some guns from other batteries had spread death through the Yankee ranks, too—but they had done it. The eastern bank of the Susquehanna was littered with corpses tossed at every possible angle, and at too many impossible ones. A few last U.S. soldiers were scuttling back to their own trenches, like dogs fleeing with tails between their legs.

“We really did do it.” Featherston knew he sounded stunned and shaky. He didn’t feel bad about it; he
was
stunned and shaky. He slapped Nero on the back, and then Perseus. “You boys can serve my gun any time you please, and that’s a fact. For a while there, I figured we’d be fightin’ off the damnyankees with pistols.”

“Ain’t got no pistol, Marse Jake,” Nero pointed out. He looked in the direction of a dead artilleryman. “Them Yankees break through an’ come this way, though, reckon I woulda had me one.”

“Yeah,” Jake said abstractedly. Except when Negroes were doing things like hunting for the pot, they weren’t supposed to have firearms. You let black men get their hands on guns and you were sitting on a keg of powder with the fuse lighted and heading your way.

And Nero and Perseus hadn’t just got their hands on a pistol, or even a Tredegar. They’d served an artillery piece, and they’d done a hell of a job at it, too. You couldn’t make them forget how to do it, or that they’d done it. If there ever was a black rebellion, they could do it again, provided they got themselves a field piece.

But if Featherston hadn’t put them on the gun, he almost certainly wouldn’t have been alive to worry about things like that. If Major Potter ever found out he’d turned them into impromptu artillerymen, he was liable to order them dragged off somewhere and shot. Part of Jake said that was a good idea. Hell, part of him wanted to yank out his pistol and use it now, so nobody would know what he’d done.

He couldn’t. They’d saved his neck along with their own. He would never have yelled for their help if he could have yelled for white men instead, but there hadn’t been any white men to yell for. He’d done what he’d had to do, and he’d got away with it.

Now he said what he said to say: “It’s over, boys. You got to go back to bein’ niggers again. You know what I’m tellin’ you?”

He wondered if they could obey, even if they wanted to. They’d just been soldiers, after all. One of the reasons you didn’t let a Negro get a gun in his hands was that, if he did some fighting with it, he’d start feeling like a man, not like a servant. A Negro who felt like a man was liable to be a dangerous Negro.

But Nero and Perseus understood what Jake meant. Perseus said, “Yes, suh, Marse Jake, we be your niggers again, till the next time y’all need us to be somethin’ different.” He sounded almost as if he was inviting Featherston to share a joke.

“All right,” Jake answered, not knowing what else he could say. Eventually, the battery would get replacements: young white men, eager—or at least willing—to serve the guns. And, eventually, they’d get slaughtered, too. So would Jake, like as not. He carried on about his business with a grim fatalism; the Yanks could throw more metal at him than he could easily throw back.