Breakthroughs (5 page)

Sergeant Chester Martin wrinkled his long, rather beaky nose as he made his way up the muddy zigzag of the communications trench toward the front line. He’d lived with mud and the stink of rotting meat and shit and garbage from the U.S. invasion of the Roanoke valley when the war was new till he got wounded the autumn before. Convalescing in Toledo, he’d almost managed to forget the nature of the stench, but it came back in a hurry.

He rubbed his chin, which was as pointed as his nose. Now the United States were getting ready to invade Virginia again, this time from the north rather than the west. In the early days of the fighting, the CSA had overrun Maryland and southern Pennsylvania before being halted on the line of the Susquehanna. The grinding war since then had driven the Rebels back toward their own border. Now—

Now the United States had bridgeheads south of the Potomac, on Confederate soil. Martin trudged past a wrecked barrel—a Confederate model, with treads all around the hull—from which Army engineers were scavenging whatever they could.

A shell burst a couple of hundred yards to Martin’s left. He didn’t bother ducking; going home to heal hadn’t made him lose the knack for knowing when an incoming round was dangerous and when it wasn’t. Rifle and machine-gun fire told him he was getting very close to the front. The shooting was sporadic, almost desultory. Neither side was pushing hard here, not right this second.

A grimy, tired-looking fellow with several days’ growth of beard was leaning against the wall of the trench while he smoked a cigarette. Martin paused. The soldier studied him. He could read the fellow’s thoughts. Nearly clean uniform—a point against. New Purple Heart ribbon—a point for, maybe even a point and a half, because it explained the clean uniform. Sergeant’s stripes—three points against, without a doubt.

But the stripes also meant the fellow couldn’t safely ignore him. Sure enough, after another drag on the hand-rolled cigarette, the soldier asked, “You lookin’ for somebody in particular, Sergeant?”

“B Company, 91st Regiment,” Martin answered. “They told me back at division HQ it was up this way.”

“They gave you the straight goods,” the soldier said with a nod. “Matter of fact, I’m in B Company myself. Name’s Tilden Russell.”

“Chester Martin,” Martin said.

Russell looked him over again, this time with more interest. “You don’t mind me askin’, Sarge, where’d you pick up your grape-jelly ribbon there?”

What kind of soldier are you?
the question meant.
What kind of action have you seen?
“Roanoke front,” Martin answered crisply. “Spent two years there, till I took one in the arm in the Rebs’ big counterattack last fall.”

“Two years on the Roanoke front?” Russell’s eyebrows rose toward the brim of his helmet. “Come on. I’ll take you up to the line myself. God damn, you can play on my team any day of the week.”

“Thanks.” Martin hid a smile. If he’d come from Arkansas or, say, Sequoyah, Tilden Russell wouldn’t have wanted to give him the time of day, let alone escort him up to the forward trenches. Compared to this front, the fighting out west wasn’t anything to speak of. The fighting in the Roanoke valley, though, didn’t take a back seat to anything.

“Captain Cremony!” Russell called as he came into the front-line trenches, and then, to a soldier in a green-gray uniform, “You seen the captain, Eddie? This here’s our new sergeant—spent two years on the Roanoke front.” He sounded as proud of that as if he’d done the fighting himself.

“Yeah?” Eddie looked impressed, too. He pointed to the nearest vertical jog in the horizontal trench. “He ducked into that traverse there, last I saw him.”

“Thanks. Come on, Sergeant.” Russell led Martin down the firebay toward the traverse. Some of the trench floor was corduroyed with wood. Some was just mud, into which Martin’s boots sank with wet, squelching noises. He rounded the corner on Tilden Russell’s heels. Russell let out a pleased grunt and said, “Hey, Captain, I found our new sergeant comin’ up to the line. His name’s Martin, sir—he was on the Roanoke front before he got wounded.”

In spite of a fearsomely waxed, upthrusting Kaiser Bill mustache, Captain Cremony couldn’t have seen his twenty-fifth birthday. He was skinny and swarthy and looked more like a clerk than a soldier, but clerks didn’t commonly have two oak-leaf clusters under their Purple Heart ribbons. “Roanoke, eh?” he said. “You’ll know what it’s all about, then.”

“I hope so, sir,” Martin answered.

“You ought to fit in well,” the company commander said. “You mark my words, Sergeant—when the weather clears up, this front will see movement like nothing since the early days.”

“I hope so, sir,” Martin said again. In the early days, the Confederates had been doing all the moving on this front. He was willing to assume that wasn’t what Captain Cremony meant.

“About time, too,” Cremony said. “We’ve owed these bastards for two wars and fifty years. Now we’re going to get our own back.”

“Yes, sir!” Martin’s voice took on real warmth. “My grandfather lost a leg in the War of Secession. He died before we got to pay the Rebs back for that and for everything else. Next to what he got, this”—he waggled his arm—“isn’t anything worth talking about.”

He listened to himself in something close to amazement. After two and a half years of what surely came closer to hell than anything else man had managed to build on earth, he could still sound like a patriot. If that didn’t mean he was crazy, it did mean the United States had owed a hell of a big debt for a hell of a long time: a debt of pain, a debt of humiliation. And if they won this time, they would pay it back in the same coin. Martin didn’t look forward to the fighting that lay ahead. But the repayment…oh, yes, he looked forward to the repayment.

Captain Cremony said, “Russell, take him down the line to the section he’ll be leading. The sooner he fits himself into the scheme of things, the better for everybody.”

“Yes, sir,” Tilden Russell said. “You come with me, Sergeant. It’s not far.” As soon as he and Martin were out of earshot of Captain Cremony, he added, “The one you’re going to have to watch out for, Sarge, is Corporal Reinholdt. He’s been running the section since Sergeant Kelly stopped a Tredegar round with his ear, and he was steamed when they didn’t give him his third stripe.”

“I’ll take care of that,” Martin said. He didn’t blame Reinholdt for being steamed. If you were doing a three-striper’s job, you deserved a third stripe. A file card with Martin’s name on it must have popped up in the War Department at just the wrong moment for Reinholdt.

Either that,
Martin thought,
or the guy doesn’t deserve two stripes, let alone three.
He’d have to see about that, too.

Quietly, Russell said, “Here we are, Sarge.” Then he raised his voice: “Heads up, you lugs. This here is Sergeant Martin. He’s off convalescent leave—spent the whole damn war till now on the Roanoke front.”

One of the men Martin would be leading was stirring a kettle of stew. A couple were on the firing step, though they weren’t shooting at the Rebels. One was dealing from a battered deck of cards for himself and three friends. A couple were cleaning their rifles. One was repairing a tunic, using a needle and thread with what Martin could see at a glance was extraordinary skill. A few were asleep, rolled in blankets.

Everybody who was awake gave Martin a once-over. He was a stranger here, and so an object of suspicion, and in a clean uniform, and so doubly an object of suspicion. He looked the men over, too. The tailor, or whatever he was in civilian life, was a kid. So were one of the fellows on the firing step, a cardplayer, and one of the men working with gun oil and cleaning rod. The rest, Martin guessed, had been in the fight longer.

He looked around for Corporal Reinholdt, and found him glowering at the cards he was holding. Reinholdt looked like somebody who spent a lot of time glowering. Martin decided to try it the smooth way first: “Corporal, I hope you’ll give me a hand getting to know people.”

By way of answer, Reinholdt only grunted. His eyes went back to his hand, but kept flicking toward Martin’s face. Martin sighed. The smooth way wasn’t going to work. Sooner or later, he’d have trouble with the disgruntled corporal. He resolved to make it sooner, and to pick the time himself.

Holding in his temper, Martin spoke to the men of the section: “Tell me who you are. I’ll get it wrong for a while, but not for long.”

Names washed over him: Willie and Parker and Zeb and Cal and two guys named Joe and one, the fellow with needle and thread, who seemed to be called Hamburger. “That a first name or a last name?” Martin asked, and got a laugh from everybody except Corporal Reinholdt.

“Hey, don’t get him mad at you,” one of the Joes said. “His sister’s a congressman—congresslady—whatever the hell they call her.”

“Yeah, and I’m Queen of the May,” Martin said.

That got more laughter, but the soldiers said things like, “We’re not shitting you, Sarge.” “She really is.” “We ain’t lyin’.”

Martin still didn’t believe it. Pointing at the kid named Hamburger—David, his first name turned out to be—he asked, “Listen, if your sister’s in Congress, what the hell are you doin’
here
? She don’t like you or somethin’?”

“She likes me fine,” Hamburger said through more laughter. His swarthy face flushed. “She just doesn’t think it’s right to use her job to make things soft for her family. That’s not why the working people elected her.”

Socialist,
Martin thought from the way the kid said
working people
. It didn’t faze him; about one soldier in three voted that way. “New York City?” he asked.

“Yeah.” Hamburger nodded. “You can tell from the way I talk, I bet.”

“Right the first time,” Martin said. He would have tagged the kid for a dago from his looks, but with that last name he was likelier to be a Jew. “Your old man a peddler?”

“No—he sews for a living, same as me, same as my other two sisters.” That explained the deft hand with a needle. “How about you, Sarge?”

“I was a steelworker in Toledo before the war, like my pa still is,” Martin answered. “He makes the stuff, and we throw it at the Rebs. That works out pretty good, hey?” David Hamburger nodded again. Martin thought he’d get on here well enough—except he didn’t like Corporal Reinholdt’s eyes.

Anne Colleton paced back and forth like a caged lioness in the little room she’d rented in St. Matthews, South Carolina. “I will not go any farther from Marshlands,” she snapped, as if someone had insisted that she should.

A wisp of dark blond hair escaped from its pin and tickled her cheek. She forced it back into place without breaking her furious stride. The Red uprising of 1915 had sent the Marshlands mansion up in flames; her brother Jacob, an invalid after the damnyankees gassed him, died then, too. She’d been in Charleston when the Negroes rebelled, and, unlike so many white landowners, returned to her plantation after the revolt was quelled. She’d even managed to bring in a cotton crop of sorts. And then—

“God damn you, Cassius,” she said softly. In the days before the war, he’d been the chief hunter at Marshlands—and a secret Red, when she’d thought the Negroes there had no secrets from her. In the rebellion, he’d headed the murderous outfit that styled itself the Congaree Socialist Republic. He still led a ragtag band of black brigands who skulked through the swamps, eluding the authorities and calling murder and thievery acts of revolution.

They had friends among the Negroes who’d gone back to work at Marshlands. They had more friends among them than Anne had imagined. A month or so earlier, on Christmas night, 1916, they’d come horrifyingly close to killing her.

“I will have my revenge,” she said, as she’d said a hundred times since managing to escape. “I will have—” A knock on the door interrupted her. She stormed over to it and threw it open. “What is it?” she demanded.

Even though the delivery boy for the Confederate Wire Service wore a uniform close in color and cut to that of the Army, he couldn’t have been a day above fifteen years old. The sight of a tall, fierce, beautiful blond woman twice his age glaring at him unstrung him altogether. He tried to stammer out why he had come, but words failed him. After a couple of clucks a hen would have been ashamed to claim, he dropped the envelope he carried and incontinently fled.

Feeling triumph over so lowly a male would have demeaned Anne. She bent, scooped up the envelope, tore it open, and unfolded the telegram inside.
REGRET NO CONFEDERATE TROOPS AVAILABLE TO AID SOUTH CAROLINA FORCES IN HUNTING DOWN BANDITS. HOPE ALL OTHERWISE WELL. GABRIEL SEMMES, PRESIDENT OF THE CONFEDERATE STATES.

She crumpled up the telegram and flung it into the wickerwork wastebasket that had come with the room. “You stingy son of a bitch!” she snarled. “I poured money into your campaign. The niggers burned down Marshlands, and I still twisted arms to help get your bill for Negro troops through Congress. And now you won’t—”

She broke off. Some of her rage evaporated. The only reason Semmes had wanted to arm Negroes was that the war, as it was presently being fought, was going so badly. It hadn’t gone any better lately. Maybe the president of the CSA really couldn’t spare any decent soldiers to help the lame, the halt, and the elderly of South Carolina’s militia go after Cassius and his guerrillas.

“If they can’t handle the job, I’ll damn well have to take care of it myself,” she said. Somehow, that didn’t surprise her. Cassius had made the fight personal when he burned the mansion where her family had lived for most of a century. He’d made it even more personal when he tried to give her a bullet for Christmas. “If that’s how he wants it, that’s how he’ll have it.”

She walked over to the closet, slid the door on its squeaking track, and scowled at the few sorry dresses and skirts and shirtwaists that hung there. She was used to ordering gowns from Paris and London and (in peacetime) New York. What she’d been able to buy in St. Matthews was to her eye one short step up from the burlap feed sacks poor Negroes and shiftless whites used to cover their nakedness.

But, after she’d pushed aside the clothes, she smiled. Against the back wall of the closet leaned a Tredegar her surviving brother, Tom, had sent on learning of her escape. It was a sniper’s rifle, with a telescopic sight. She’d been a tomboy as a girl—good training for competing against men as an adult. She knew how to handle guns.

During the Red rebellion, the authorities hadn’t let her fight against the Negroes of the Congaree Socialist Republic. Now—

Now she picked up her handbag (which held, among other things, a revolver to replace the one she’d lost when Cassius burned her cabin) and went downstairs. It was cool, not cold; whatever winter might do up in the USA, it rested lightly on Low Country South Carolina. She headed for the haberdasher’s.

St. Matthews had been a cotton town before the war. It was still a cotton town—of sorts. Most of the nearby plantations were either corpses or crippled remnants of their former selves. Most of the white men in town were gone for soldiers or gone to the grave. Most of the black men were gone, too: drafted into labor battalions, fled into revolt, or now wearing butternut themselves. Only a little of the damage done when Confederate forces recaptured the town from the Congaree Socialist Republic had been repaired. No labor for that, and no money, either.

By what sort of luck Anne could scarcely imagine, Rosenblum’s Clothes had escaped everything. One of the bricks near the plate-glass window bore a bright bullet scar; other than that, the place was untouched. Inside, Aaron Rosenblum clacked away on a treadle-powered sewing machine, as he’d been doing for as long as Anne could remember.

When the bell above the door jangled, he looked up over the tops of his gold-framed half-glasses. Seeing Anne, he jumped to his feet and gave her a nod that was almost a bow. “Good day to you, Miss Colleton,” he said.

“Good day, Mr. Rosenblum.” As always, Anne hid the smile that wanted to leap out onto her face whenever she heard him talk. His accent, half Low Country drawl, half guttural Yiddish, was among the strangest she’d ever encountered.

“And what can I do for you today?” Rosenblum asked, running a hand over his bald head. He would never go into the Army; he had to be nearer seventy than fifty.

“I want half a dozen pairs of stout trousers of the sort men use to go hunting in the swamps of the Congaree,” she answered.

He nodded. “These would be for your brother, after—God willing—he comes home safe from the war? Shall I alter them thinking he will be the same size he was when he went into the Army?”

“I’m sorry,” Anne said. “You misunderstand, Mr. Rosenblum. These trousers are for me.”

“For—you?” His eyes went wide. The lenses of his spectacles magnified his stare even more. “You are joking with me.” Instead of staring, he really looked at her. “No, you are not joking. But—what would a woman want with trousers?”

“To go hunting in the swamps of the Congaree,” she repeated patiently. “I can’t very well do that in gingham or lace, can I?”

“What would you hunt?” he asked, still not believing.

“Reds.” Anne Colleton’s voice was flat and determined. “I will want these trousers as soon as you can have them ready. They shouldn’t be hard to alter to fit me; I’m as tall as a good many men.”

“Well, yes, but—” He blushed to the crown of his head, then blurted, “My wife is visiting our daughter in Columbia. Who will measure you?”

Again, Anne didn’t laugh out loud. “Go ahead, Mr. Rosenblum. Being so careful, you won’t take any undue liberties. I’m sure of it.”
And if you try, I’ll give you such a licking, you won’t know yesterday from next week.

He coughed and muttered, then blushed once more. “If you do this thing, Miss Colleton, will you wear a corset while you are doing it?”

Anne felt like giving herself a licking. She’d defied a lot of conventions, but some she didn’t even notice till someone reminded her they were there. She dashed into the dressing room, yanked the curtain shut, and divested herself of boning and elastic. When she came out, she was so comfortable, she wondered why she wore the damn thing. Fashion made a harsh mistress.

Aaron Rosenblum still hawed instead of hemming. In the end, though, he did as she wanted. In the end, almost everyone did as she wanted. He looked a little happier when she set two butternut-colored twenty-dollar bills on his sewing machine, but only a little. “I still do not know if this is decent,” he muttered.

“I’ll worry about that,” she answered, by which she meant she would not worry in the slightest.

The telephone rang a few minutes after she got back to her room. “Hello?” she said into the mouthpiece. “What?…Really?…Yes, bring him here. We’ll see. Greenville, you say?…You should have him here by evening…. Of course I’ll pay for train fare. I want to get to the bottom of this, too.” She hung the mouthpiece on its hook, then let out a long sigh that was also a name: “Scipio.”

After he’d fled Columbia, he’d gone up into the northwestern part of the state, had he? Now he was found out there, too. He knew how to get things done, did Scipio. A butler who didn’t know how to get things done wasn’t worth having. From things she’d heard, Scipio had been Cassius’ right-hand man in the Congaree Socialist Republic, and a big reason it held together as long as it did.

What did she owe him for that? After what the Reds’ revolutionary tribunals had done to so many white landowners, how many times did any official of the Congaree Socialist Republic deserve to die?

Waiting was hard, even though she knew Scipio was coming from more than a hundred miles away. She’d lighted the gas lamps before a knock sounded on her door. She opened it. The two whites who stood in the hall had the look of city policemen: middle-aged, rugged, wary, wearing suits that would have been fashionable about 1910 but were dowdy now. “Miss Colleton?” one of them asked in an Up Country accent. When she nodded, the policeman pointed to the Negro who stood, hands manacled behind his back, between him and his partner. “This boy the Scipio you know, ma’am?”

She carefully studied the black man, then slowly and regretfully shook her head. “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid not. There must be some mistake. I’ve never set eyes on this man before in my life.”

Both white policemen stared at her in astonished dismay. Scipio stared, too, in equal astonishment—though not dismay—but only for an instant. Then, very smoothly, he went back to playing the innocent wronged. “You see?” he shouted to the policemen. “I ain’t dat bad nigger. I tol’ you I ain’t dat bad nigger!”

“Shut up, God damn you,” one of them growled. Perfunctorily, he added, “Sorry, ma’am.” Then he and his partner put their heads together.

Anne looked at Scipio. He was looking at her. She’d known he would be.
You are mine,
she mouthed silently.
Do you understand me?
His head moved up and down—only a little, but enough.
You are mine,
she repeated, and watched him nod again.

Major Abner Dowling slogged through freezing Tennessee mud from his tent toward the farmhouse where the general commanding the U.S. First Army made his headquarters. Dowling supposed the mud couldn’t have been quite freezing. In that case, it would have been hard. It wasn’t.

When the general’s adjutant lifted one booted foot out of the muck, pounds of it came up, stuck to the sole and sides. For one of the few times in his life, Dowling wished he were seventy-five pounds lighter. Far more often than not, he’d found, being fat mattered little, and he dearly loved to eat. But his bulk made him sink deeper into the ooze than he would have had he been thin.

Puffing his way up onto the porch, he paused to knock as much mud off his boots as he could. Cornelia, the colored housekeeper the general had hired after First Army’s attack on Nashville stalled the winter before, would not be happy if he left filthy tracks in the hall and parlor. Even if she was a mulatto, she was such a good-looking young woman, he didn’t want her glaring at him.

Delicious frying odors filled the air when he went inside. He sighed. Not only was Cornelia a fine-looking wench, she could cook with the best of them, too.

Neat in a white shirtwaist and long black skirt, she came sweeping out of the kitchen. “Mornin’, Major,” she said. “The general and his missus, they still finishin’ breakfast. You want to sit yourself down in the parlor, I bring you some coffee while you wait.”

He knew he could have gone straight into the kitchen, had he had anything more urgent than the usual morning briefing. But he also knew the general would not appreciate being disturbed at his ham and eggs and hotcakes, or whatever other delicacies Cornelia had devised. “Coffee will be fine,” he said. She made good coffee, too.