Breakthroughs (44 page)

“You ought to be,” Anne Colleton said. She weighed the words, then nodded. “Yes, you ought to be, because if I’m angry at something, I’ll hunt it down and kill it.” She looked north, toward the Congaree. Silently, her lips shaped a name.
Cassius.

Like so many small, hunted creatures, Nellie Semphroch had learned to stay laired up in her burrow, and to come out at night to forage. The occupying Confederates hardly bothered to patrol Washington, D.C., any more. Hal Jacobs said they’d given up because every man they had, they needed at the front. Nellie didn’t know about that. She did know that getting water from the Potomac or firewood from a wrecked building, she worried more about a chance U.S. shell than she did about men in butternut. Even at night, the bombardment from the north did not halt. It only slowed a little.

She was far from the only one prowling the night. If she passed close enough to Jacobs and a few others to recognize them, she would nod. When she saw others, she shrank back into the shadows, and that though she never ventured forth without a long, sharp kitchen knife. Still others shrank from her. That made her feel oddly strong and fierce.

Sometimes Edna would come out with her, sometimes not. When they needed water, they generally went down to the river together. Stove wood was easier to come by close to home. One of them would usually go out for it, or else the other.

“I wish we could find some coal,” Nellie said, not for the first time. “The grate isn’t really right for wood, and the stove pipe will get all full of soot and creosote. It’s liable to catch on fire.”

“If you’re going to wish, Ma, don’t waste your time wishing for coal, for God’s sake,” Edna said. “Wish for a couple days without shells falling all the damn time. That’d be somethin’ really worth having.”

“I think we may get that wish before too long,” Nellie said. “How much longer do you suppose the Confederate lines north of town are going to be able to stand the pounding the Army is giving them? They’ll have to crack pretty soon, and then the United States will have Washington back again.”

“Oh, bully!” Edna loaded her voice with sarcasm. “Even if you’re right, Ma, it’ll only take ’em a hundred years to build it all back up the way it was. And the Rebs’ll fight hard to keep the place, too.”

“I know they will—it’s about the only part of the line where they’re still on our soil instead of the other way round,” Nellie said. “But when you look at the way the war is going everywhere else, it’s hard to see how they’re going to be able to do it.”

“Well, what if the United States do come in?” Edna said. “Then the Rebs will pound the city to pieces from the other side of the Potomac. The only difference will be which way the guns are pointed.”

Nellie sighed and nodded in the candlelit dimness of the cellar under the coffeehouse. Her daughter’s guess held an unpleasant feel of truth.

After it got dark outside as well as down in the cellar, Nellie went out to see what she could find and to discover what the bombardment had knocked flat since the last time she came up above ground. One of the things that wasn’t flat any more was the street down the block from the coffeehouse. A big shell had dug an enormous crater in it. Time was when such wounds had been rare and the Confederates patched them as soon as they were made. Now the Rebs kept a few roads to the front open and forgot the rest.

Half a block farther along the street, another couple of shells had landed, converting several houses and shops to rubble. In among the bricks would be lumber, much of it already broken into convenient lengths. Nellie tossed them into a large canvas duffel bag.

She had the bag nearly ready to drag back to the coffeehouse when Bill Reach’s voice spoke from out of the darkness close by: “Evenin’, Little Nell.”

Ice ran through Nellie, though the night was warm and humid. “You’re drunk again,” she said quietly. “If you were sober, you’d know better than to call me that.” Her head went back and forth, back and forth. Where was he?

He laughed. “Maybe I am. Maybe I would. And maybe I’m not, and maybe I wouldn’t. What do you think of that?”

There. Behind that pile of bricks, out of which stuck a couple of legs from an upended cast-iron stove. Her fingers closed around the handle of the kitchen knife. “Go away,” she said, still looking around as if she hadn’t found him. “Can’t you just leave me in peace?”

“I sure as hell would like a piece,” he said, and laughed again. “I liked it when I had it before, and I know I’d like it again. Oh, you were a hot number in between the sheets, Little Nell, and I don’t figure God ever gave another woman in the whole wide world a nastier mouth. Things you used to do…”

If she’d writhed with grunting, sweating customers pounding away atop her, it was only to make them finish faster, get off her, and leave the cheap little room where she worked. She’d always hated sucking on men’s privates. It seemed filthy, even when they didn’t squirt vile-tasting jism into her mouth—usually after promising they wouldn’t.

“Go away,” she repeated. “Those days are long gone, thank God. I’m a respectable woman now—or I was till you walked into my coffeehouse, anyways. Go back into the gutter, go back to spying, go wherever you want, just as long as you leave me alone. I don’t want anything to do with you, do you hear?”

He stood up. In his black coat and black derby, he was still hard to see. He swayed a little, then brought a bottle to his lips. Oddly, the whiskey seemed to steady him instead of making him keel over. “But I want somethin’ to do with you, Little Nell,” he said. “You haven’t given it to me, so it looks like I’m just gonna have to go and take it.” He smashed the fat end of the bottle on the bricks. A little whiskey spilled out—not much. Jagged edges glittered under the stars. “Just gonna have to go ahead and take it,” he repeated.

“Go away,” Nellie whispered once more.

“You take what’s coming to you, and everything will be fine.” Bill Reach waved the bottle around. “You give me any trouble, and you’ll be real sorry. Yes, you will. Real sorry. Now get down on the ground and take it. Once it’s in there, you’ll love it. Hell, you always did.”

“No.” Nellie held the knife behind her back so Reach wouldn’t be able to see it.

The acrid fumes of the whiskey, some from his breath, some from the inside of the bottle, made her nostrils twitch as he came closer. “You ain’t runnin’,” he said. “You ain’t screamin’. See? You know you want it. I’m the man to give it to you, too. If you’re good, I’ll even pay you, same as old times.”

“No,” Nellie said again. Either he didn’t hear her or he didn’t listen. He took a couple more steps toward her, then extended his left hand to push her to the ground.

He still held the neck of the bottle, but he didn’t think he’d have to do anything with it. He’d surely made a lot of mistakes in his time, but that was the last and the worst. Nellie had no experience as a knife fighter, but Bill Reach couldn’t have stopped a two-year-old swinging a wooden spoon right then. The knife went deep into the left side of his chest. Its edge grated against a rib when Nellie yanked it out and rammed it home again.

He let out a brief, bubbling shriek, then toppled. Nellie wiped the knife clean on his coat while he was still feebly kicking. “Once it’s in there, you’ll love it,” she said. Then she grunted as she picked up the duffel full of chunks of wood, slung it over her shoulder, and headed for home.

When she got back, Edna was mixing salt pork into canned soup. “That looks like a good load, Ma,” her daughter said. “You were gone a while longer than I thought you would be, though. You have any trouble out there?”

“Trouble?” Nellie shook her head. “Not a bit. That soup smells good.”

“Make you thirsty as all get-out,” Edna said.

“I know. It still smells good.” Nellie had a big bowl. The soup did make her thirsty, so she drank a glass of boiled river water. She went down to the cellar to sleep, and had a better night than she’d enjoyed in years.

Artillery started thundering before dawn, but didn’t wake her right away. Neither she nor anyone else left in Washington would have got any sleep at all if they’d let shellfire unduly disturb them. When she did wake, she gauged the bombardment with a practiced ear. So did Edna, who said, “They’re pounding the front line right now.”

Half an hour or so later, though, the pattern of the shelling abruptly changed. Rounds began falling inside Washington, along the routes the Confederates used to move reinforcements through the city toward the front. “I wonder if the Army is trying to break through the Rebs’ trenches right now,” Nellie said.

“Do you really think they can?” Edna asked. “The Confederates have been digging and putting in concrete and wire ever since they got here, and that’s going on three years now.”

“Would they try if they didn’t think they could do it, anyway?” Nellie asked in return. Her daughter only shrugged in return, which was, when you got down to it, a reasonable enough answer. From the perspective of a coffeehouse, who could know what the U.S. General Staff had in mind?

But then, a couple of hours later, Nellie heard a rattle of small-arms fire, rifles and machine guns, off to the north. Edna recognized it for what it was, too. She let out a soft whistle. “Haven’t hardly heard that since the Confederates drove the USA out of here.”

“Sure haven’t,” Nellie agreed. “As long as we have water and fuel, I think we’d better stay right where we’re at. If it was bad outside before, it’s going to be worse now, with both sides shelling the city and with bullets flying around along with the shells.”

They did sneak out for water one night. Other than that, they stayed inside the coffeehouse all the time for the next several days, and down in the cellar whenever they weren’t at the stove. The battle for Washington raged around them. They saw almost none of it, which suited Nellie. If she’d seen the battle, the soldiers fighting it would have seen her, with consequences ranging from unpleasant to lethal.

A couple of times, barrels rumbled up the street. Nellie thought they belonged to the CSA, but she didn’t go outside to look. Two days later, somebody—she didn’t know who, and again didn’t care to find out—set up a machine-gun post just down the street and fired off belt after belt of ammunition, the gun roaring like a demented jackhammer. Then came rifle fire and running, shouting men. After that, the racket of small arms sounded from the south, not the north.

Several hours of relative calm were shattered when somebody pounded on the cellar door with a rifle butt. “You the Semphrochs down there?” a deep voice shouted. “Nellie and, uh, Edna?” He sounded as if he might be reading the names from a list.

“Yes,” Nellie said, and went up the stairs and pushed the door open.

She found herself staring down a rifle barrel. The soldier holding the rifle wore a green-gray uniform that was familiar and a pot-shaped helmet that wasn’t. “Nellie Semphroch,” he said—sure enough, he had a list. “You and your daughter are the ones who had the coffeehouse where the damn Rebs came all the damn time.”

“But—” Nellie began.

He talked right through her: “Come out, both of you. You’re under arrest. Charges are collaboration and treason.”

“Come on, men,” Gordon McSweeney called as his company trudged wearily down an Arkansas dirt road. “Come on. I will not have you go any place I will not go myself in front of you. What I can do, you can also do. What I can do, you
will
also do—or you will answer to me.”

Nobody argued with him. Nobody had argued with him since the day Captain Schneider fell in the Craighead Forest. Schneider, McSweeney feared, had been translated to a clime warmer than this one. That was a warm climate indeed; as both summer and the edge of the Mississippi delta grew closer with every passing moment, the muggy heat made McSweeney feel as if his uniform tunic and trousers had been pasted to his hide.

He’d remained in command of the company since the fight in the Craighead Forest. He’d also remained a second lieutenant. A sergeant was commanding one of the other companies in the regiment, and nobody seemed to be making any noise about replacing him, either. Officers didn’t grow on trees, especially not west of the Mississippi they didn’t.

“Pick ’em up,” McSweeney called to the troopers shambling along under the weight of helmet and Springfield and heavy pack and entrenching tool and clodhopper boots and however much mud clung to the boots. “If God grant that we pierce their forces but once more, we can bring Memphis and the Mississippi River under our guns. That would be a great blow to strike, and a sore hurt to the wicked cause of the Confederate States.”

“You talk like something right out of the Bible, sir,” said a private named Rogers who had not been in the section or platoon McSweeney led before getting the whole company.

“It is the word of God,” McSweeney answered. “Is a man not wise to shape his words in the pattern of those of his Father?”

Rogers didn’t answer. He just kept marching. That suited Gordon McSweeney fine. Even if he had the words of the Good Book on which to model his own, he was more comfortable doing than talking. Men could easily argue what he said. No one could argue about what he did.