American Front (67 page)

“How much good does this do, do you think?” he asked the horse when they started traveling again, after the curses of the U.S. drivers finished washing over him. “This getting them angry and giving them a couple of minutes’ delay, is it worthwhile?”

Again, the horse did not answer. He got the distinct impression the horse did not care, although the animal had no great use for trucks whether delayed or rolling past.
Foolish beast
, he thought.

As he drew near Rivière-du-Loup, the wagon rolled through an enormous U.S. encampment: more tents than he had ever imagined, and he was familiar with tents. Soldiers bustled about, doing soldierly things. But for the color of their uniforms and the fact that their brand of soldiers’ slang had no French in it, they might have been the sons of the men with whom he had served a generation before.

Up near the river, artillery pieces squatted like long-necked, dangerous beasts. Some of them were big, six-or eight-inchers, not just the three-inch popguns that had been here the year before. The Americans could answer warships in kind now. He still remembered the weight of metal the cruiser had been able to hurl at those popguns; thinking about it brought a smile to his lips.

Out in the river, guns boomed. For a moment, he hoped naval vessels were shelling the camp: it would be a target of the sort about which gunners dreamed. But then he realized it was the battery the Americans had placed on the Isle aux Lièvres, the Isle of Hares, out in the St. Lawrence. He wondered if the guns were shooting at ships on the river or at the Canadian and British positions on the north bank. Either way, they would miss if God was kind.

Those guns out on the Isle aux Lièvres had shelled the south bank once, after a couple of companies of picked men rowed over from St.-Siméon or somewhere nearby under cover of darkness and wiped out the American garrison. The locals had laughed about that for weeks, even though the soldiers of the British Empire hadn’t been able to hold the island against a massive U.S. counterattack.

Into Rivière-du-Loup Lucien rode, enjoying such summer warmth as Quebec offered. Before he got to the market square, U.S. soldiers not once but twice inspected him, the horse, the wagon, and the chickens he hoped to sell. They didn’t turn him back and they didn’t demand payment in exchange for letting him go forward, so he supposed he had no real complaint. Maybe they thought he’d hidden a bomb in one of the capons. He thought about making a joke with them about that, but decided not to. They did not look as if they would be amused.

He found a place to hitch his wagon not far from the Loup-du-Nord. He thought about going in, too, but the place was bustling with soldiers. Neither the idea of good liquor nor that of leering at Angelique and the other barmaids was enough to counterbalance their presence.

As soon as he had his chickens on display, American soldiers came up and started buying them. The birds mostly went for a couple of dollars apiece; prices had shot up since the Americans came into Quebec, because there was little to buy here. Besides, most of the soldiers knew no more about haggling than they did about archery.

He soon found one exception to that rule, a small, swarthy man older than the latest class or two of conscripts. Where most of the U.S. soldiers looked like English-speaking Canadians, this one might have been a cousin of Lucien’s. He also understood something of bargaining, to Galtier’s disappointment. He had patience, which most of the Americans signally lacked. “Come on, Antonelli, you gonna stand there all day?” one of his comrades asked. “Buy the damn chicken, already.”

“I’ll buy it when this guy here quits trying to steal my money,” Antonelli said. He turned back to Galtier. “Awright, you damn thief, I’ll give you a dollar ten for the bird.”

“
I
steal?” Galtier assumed an injured expression. “I? No,
monsieur
, you are the thief. Even at a dollar forty, it is for me no bargain.”

He ended up selling Antonelli the hen for a dollar and a quarter. He could have done better by refusing to deal with the American at all and getting more from a less able haggler, but he enjoyed the bargaining enough to make the deal at that price simply for the sake of having met a worthy opponent. Marie, no doubt, would cluck at him when he got back to the farm, but money was not the only thing that brought satisfaction to life.

When the Americans had snapped up all the chickens he had for sale, he put the crates back in the wagon and then wandered over to the edge of the river. More boats were tied up at the quays below the town than he was used to seeing there. Not all of them were the usual sort of fishing boats and tramp steamers, either. He didn’t think he’d ever seen so many barges at Rivière-du-Loup. A lot of them looked new, as if they’d just been put together from green timber and had engines bolted to them. They wouldn’t go far or fast. For a moment, he had trouble figuring out why they were there.

Then he did, and crossed himself. As soon as he’d done that, he looked around to see whether anyone—especially Father Pascal—had noticed. But the priest was nowhere in sight, for which he thanked God. So many men around Rivière-du-Loup, so many barges and boats of all kinds assembled here, could mean only one thing: the Americans were making ready to cross the St. Lawrence and inflict on the rest of Quebec all the delights their rule had brought here.

“
Mauvais chance
—bad luck,” he murmured under his breath. Too much of France already lay under the boots of the Americans’ German allies—would all the French speakers in the world now be occupied and tyrannized? “Prevent it, God,” he said quietly.

He wanted to run to the church, so his prayers would have more effect. But who presided over the church in Rivière-du-Loup? No one other than the odious Father Pascal. To the priest, his own advancement counted for more than the fate of his countrymen. When the day of reckoning came (if God was kind enough to grant such), Father Pascal would have much for which to answer.

Glumly, Lucien walked to the general store and bought his monthly ration of kerosene with some of the money he’d got from selling the hens. He was pleased by how little he paid for it; compared to other things, it hadn’t risen so sharply. It would, he expected, but it hadn’t yet. He understood military bureaucracies and how slowly they worked, having been part of one himself, but hadn’t expected to be able to turn that to his advantage. With another half-dollar of hen money, he bought hair ribbons in several bright colors for his womenfolk.

He put the kerosene and the ribbons into the back of the wagon. He was just coming up onto the seat when Angelique came out of the Loup-du-Nord hand in hand with an American soldier. “Look at that little whore,” one housewife said to another near Lucien.

The second woman’s claws also came out: “Why doesn’t she simply tie a mattress on her back? It would save so much time.”

And then, as if to prove their own virtue and piety, the two of them turned their backs on the barmaid and, noses in the air, strode into the church: Father Pascal’s church. Galtier sat scratching his head for a minute or two, then flicked the reins and got the wagon moving. Getting out of Rivière-du-Loup felt more like escape than it ever had before.

“It is a very strange thing,” he told the horse when he was out in open country and could safely have such conversations, “how those women despise Angelique, who at most gives the Americans her body, and think nothing of going in to confess themselves to Father Pascal, who has assuredly sold the Americans his soul. Do you understand this,
mon cheval
?”

If the horse did understand, it kept its knowledge to itself.

“Well, I do not understand, either,” Lucien said. “It is, to me, a complete and absolute mystery. Soon, though, I shall be home, and then, thank God, I shall have other things to worry about.”

The horse kept walking.

Nellie Semphroch pasted a sign to the boards that still did duty for her shattered front window:
YES, WE HAVE ICED COFFEE
. She’d lettered it herself, along with the slogan just below:
COME IN
&
TRY IT. IT’S GOOD
. With summer’s heat and humidity as they were, she would have lost half her business without iced coffee.

“Have to go to the bank,” she muttered, and then laughed at herself. Banks in Washington, D.C., weren’t safe these days. Anyone with any sense kept his money at home or in his store or buried in a tin can in a vacant lot. A robber might take it away from you, but the Army of Northern Virginia might take it away from the bank. The Confederates, from everything she’d seen of them, made the local robbers seem pikers by comparison.

Off in the distance, artillery rumbled. Nellie hadn’t heard that sound since the early days of the war, for the Confederates’ opening drive had pushed the front too far north for the gunfire to carry. It had returned with the U.S. Army’s spring offensive, the breakout from Baltimore. But the breakout, like so many breakouts in the war, had not turned into a breakthrough. The Rebs, though they’d drawn back from Pennsylvania, still held most of Maryland, and U.S. forces were nowhere near ready to regain poor Washington.

As if to underscore that, a couple of Confederate soldiers came out of Mr. Jacobs’ shoemaker’s shop across the street, one of them holding a pair of marching boots, the other shiny black cavalry boots. The fellow with the cavalry boots must have told a joke, for the other Reb laughed and made as if to throw half his own footgear at him.

Nellie ducked back inside the coffeehouse and said, “I’m going over to Mr. Jacobs’ for a few minutes, Edna.”

“All right, Ma,” her daughter answered from behind the counter. The place was busy—too busy, Nellie hoped, for Edna to get into any mischief while she was gone. Nicholas Kincaid wasn’t in there soaking up coffee and mooning over Edna, which Nellie took for a good sign.

She had to hurry across the street to keep a big truck from running her down. The colored man at the wheel of the truck laughed because he’d made her scramble. She glared at him till the truck turned a corner and went out of sight. She was a white woman. She deserved better treatment from a Negro. But, she reminded herself sadly, she was also a damnyankee, and so deserving of no respect from Confederates, even black ones.

The bell above the shoemaker’s door jingled as Nellie went inside. She’d thought Jacobs was alone, but he was in there talking with another gray-haired, nondescript man. They both fell silent, quite abruptly. Then Mr. Jacobs smiled. “Hello, Widow Semphroch,” he said smoothly. “Don’t be shy—this is my friend, Mr. Pfeiffer. Lou, Widow Semphroch runs the coffeehouse across the street. She is one of the nicest ladies I know.”

“Pleased to meet you, ma’am,” Lou Pfeiffer said.

“And you, Mr. Pfeiffer, I’m sure.” Nellie glanced over at the shoemaker. “Since you have your friend here, Mr. Jacobs, I’ll come back another time.”

“Don’t hurry off,” Jacobs said. “Mr. Pfeiffer—Lou—was telling me something very interesting. You might even want to hear it yourself. If you’re not too busy, why don’t you stay?”

“Well, all right,” Nellie said, a little surprised. She’d intended giving Mr. Jacobs some of the dirt she’d gleaned from the coffeehouse, and he had to know that. He wouldn’t have wanted her to do it while anyone else was around. So why keep her here when she couldn’t speak of what really mattered? She shrugged. “Go ahead, Mr. Pfeiffer.”

“I was just telling Hal here what a nuisance it is to try and keep pigeons in Washington these days,” Pfeiffer said.
Hal
—Nellie raised an eyebrow. Years across the street from Mr. Jacobs, and she’d never known his first name. His friend went on, “The Rebs don’t want anybody having birds these days. Pigeons aren’t just pigeons, not to them. A pigeon can carry a message, too, so they’ve confiscated all the birds they could find.”

“But they haven’t found all of them, eh, Lou?” Jacobs said.

Pfeiffer shook his head. He had a sly look to him that had nothing to do with his rather doughy features—more the glint in his eye, the angle at which he cocked his head. “Not all of ’em, no. Not mine, for instance. Not some other people’s, too. We’ve got an underground, you might say. We keep birds, but the Rebs don’t know it. Makes life exciting, so to speak.” He set a finger by the side of his nose and winked.

A few months before, Nellie would have taken his jaunty talk at face value and not even thought to look below the surface. Now—Now she was convinced everything had unplumbed depths. “That
is
interesting, Mr. Pfeiffer,” she said. She looked at him, then at Mr. Jacobs: a silent question.

Ever so slightly, the shoemaker nodded. He turned to Pfeiffer and started to laugh. “You see, Lou? Not just a nice lady, but a clever one, too.”

“I see,” Pfeiffer said agreeably. “I’ve thought so, from what you’ve said about her every now and then.”

That cleared up the last small doubt Nellie had had. “Can I tell you some interesting things I’ve heard in the coffeehouse, Mr. Pfeiffer, or would you rather have me wait and tell Mr. Jacobs so he can tell you?”

“She
is
a clever lady,” Pfeiffer said, and then, to Nellie, “You can tell me—eliminate the middleman.” He and Jacobs both wheezed laughter.

So Nellie, as if casually gossiping, told of the troop movements and other interesting bits of news she’d heard in the coffeehouse over the past couple of days. She got interrupted once, when a colored servant brought in a Confederate officer’s boots for resoling. The Negro paid no attention to anything but his business, and was soon gone. Nellie finished her—
report
was the right word for it, she thought.

“Well, well,” Lou Pfeiffer said. “Yes, I am glad I still keep pigeons, that I am. Thank you, Widow Semphroch.”

“Nellie, isn’t it?” Mr. Jacobs said suddenly.

“That’s right—Hal,” she answered, smiling at him. He smiled back. They’d knocked down a barrier, one they’d taken for granted but one that had been there for a long time. She smiled at Mr. Pfeiffer, too, partly for being what he was, partly for his help in making that barrier fall. “Gentlemen, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go back across the street and keep the Rebs in order at the coffeehouse. A pleasure to have met you, Mr. Pfeiffer.”