Walk in Hell gw-2 Page 9
Standing in the short front hallway, they looked at each other. Elizabeth looked worn; she’d put in a full day as a domestic while her mother-in-law watched the baby. No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than she said, “You look beat, honey.”
“Could be,” he admitted. “That Kennan, he’d be happier if they gave him a bullwhip for us, but what can you do?” He pulled money out of his overalls. “Got me the bonus again, anyways.”
“Good news,” she said, and then, “Come on into the kitchen. Supper’s just about ready.”
Cincinnatus dug in with a will. The way he worked, he needed to eat hearty. “That’s right good,” he said, and without missing a beat added, “but it ain’t a patch on yours.” That made Elizabeth look happy. Cincinnatus had learned better than to praise his mother’s cooking at the expense of his wife’s.
He played with Achilles in the front room while Elizabeth washed supper dishes. The baby could roll over but couldn’t crawl yet. He thought peekaboo was the funniest game in the world. Cincinnatus wondered what went on inside that little head. When he covered his face with his hands, did Achilles think he’d disappeared? By the way the baby laughed and laughed, maybe he did.
Elizabeth came out, sniffed, gave Cincinnatus a reproachful stare, and went off to change Achilles. When she came back she sat down in the rocking chair to nurse the baby. She didn’t have a lot of milk left, but enough to feed him in the evening before he went to sleep and sometimes in the morning when they first got up, too.
He fell asleep now. The tip of her breast slid out of his mouth. Cincinnatus eyed it till she pulled her dress back up over her shoulder. He’d thought he was too beat to try to get her in the mood for making love tonight, but maybe he’d been wrong. When she carried Achilles off to his cradle, Cincinnatus’ gaze followed her. She noticed, and smiled back over her shoulder. Maybe she wouldn’t need too much persuading after all.
She’d just sat down again when somebody knocked on the door. Cincinnatus wondered who it was. Curfew would be coming soon, and U.S. soldiers were especially happy about proving their shoot-to-kill orders were no joke in the black part of town.
Sighing, Cincinnatus opened it, and there stood Lucullus. The young black man, the son of Apicius, the best barbecue chef in a goodly stretch of the Confederacy, had yet to develop his father’s formidable bulk. “Here’s the ribs you ordered this afternoon,” he said, and handed Cincinnatus a package. Before Cincinnatus could say anything, Lucullus had hurried down the walk, climbed into the Kentucky Smoke House delivery wagon, and clucked the mule into motion.
The package was not ribs. Considering what Apicius did with ribs, that sent a pang of regret through Cincinnatus. “What you got?” Elizabeth called. “Who was that, here and gone so quick?”
“Lucullus,” Cincinnatus answered. Elizabeth caught her breath. Cincinnatus hefted the package. Though wrapped in old newspaper and twine like Apicius’ barbecue, it made a precise rectangle in his hands, and was much heavier than he would have guessed from the size.
A note was attached. Put in third trash can, Pier 5, before 7 tomorrow, it said, very much to the point. After reading it, he tore it into small pieces and threw them away. Elizabeth asked no more questions. She took one look at the package, then refused to turn her eyes that way.
Cincinnatus wondered what was under the newspaper. Set type, by the size and startling heft: that was his best guess. Whoever picked it out of the trash can would print it, and the Reds would have themselves another poster or flyer or news sheet or whatever it was.
He shook his head. Being part of the Confederate underground was hard and dangerous. Being part of the Red underground was harder and more dangerous. Being part of both of them at once…at the time, all his other choices had looked worse. He wondered how long he could keep juggling, and how bad the smashup would be when he started dropping plates.
“Chow call!” the prison guard in the green-gray uniform shouted. Along with several thousand other captive Confederates, Reginald Bartlett lined up, tin mess kit and spoon in his hand. The guard, like all the guards, wore an overcoat. Reggie wore an ill-fitting butternut tunic and trousers, not really enough to keep him warm in a West Virginia autumn that had not a drop of Indian summer left to it.
Actually, the tunic fit better than it had when he’d got to the prison camp: he was skinnier than he had been. But he had to belt his pants with a piece of rope to keep them from sliding down over what was left of his backside. The boots they’d given him were too big, too; he’d stuffed them with crumpled paper to help keep his feet warm.
“This here prisoner business, it ain’t no fun a-tall,” Jasper Jenkins said. He and Reggie had been captured in the same raid on Confederate trenches east of Big Lick, Virginia. A lot of men from both sides had died in the struggle for the Roanoke valley between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Alleghenies. A lot more from both sides had been captured. But-
“You never think it’s going to happen to you,” Reggie agreed. “Maybe if I think real hard, I’ll find out it didn’t.” He gave a whimsical shrug to show he didn’t intend that to be taken seriously. He’d always been cheerful, he’d always been good-natured, he’d always been able to make people like him…and what had it got him? A third-tier bunk in a damnyankee prison camp. Maybe I should have been more of a bastard, he thought. Couldn’t have turned out much worse, could it?
Jasper Jenkins, on the other hand, was more of a bastard, a dark, lanky farmer who looked out for himself first and everybody else later. And here he was, too. So what did that prove?
Jenkins looked around at the prisoners, almost all of them as much alike as so many sheep. “This here war’s too big for people, you ask me,” he remarked.
“Now why the devil do you say that?” Bartlett asked, deadpan. He and Jenkins both laughed, neither of them happily. The line in which they stood made Reggie think of nothing so much as a trail of ants heading for a sandwich that had been dropped on the ground. Compared to the size of the war in which they’d been engaged, that was about what they were.
“And to think I went and volunteered for this.” Jenkins shook his head. “I was a damn fool.”
“Yeah, me, too,” Reggie agreed. “I was there in Capitol Square in Richmond when President Wilson declared war on the damnyankees. I went and quit my job right on the spot and joined the Army-didn’t wait for the regiment I’d been conscripted into to get called up. Figured we’d win the war in a couple of months and go on home. Shows how much I knew, doesn’t it?”
“Nobody who didn’t live by it knew about the Roanoke then,” Jasper Jenkins said. “Wish I didn’t know about it now. That damn valley is going to be sucking lives till the end of the war.”
“I only wish you were wrong,” Bartlett answered.
They snaked toward the front of the line, moving not quite fast enough to stay warm in the chilly breeze. As they drew near the kettles that would feed them, Reggie held his mess tin in front of him with both hands. That was how the rules said you did it. If you didn’t follow the rules in every particular, you didn’t get fed. The cooks enjoyed finding an excuse not to give a prisoner his rations.
“Miserable bastards,” Jenkins muttered under his breath, glaring at the men who wore white aprons over their baggy butternut clothes. But he made sure he kept his voice low, so low that only Bartlett could hear. If the cooks found out he was complaining about them, they’d find ways to make him sorry.
They were prisoners, too; the USA wasn’t about to waste its own men to feed the Confederates it captured. But whoever had thought up the prison-camp system the United States used had been a devilishly sneaky fellow. What better way to remind soldiers in enemy hands what their status was than to make them dependent on the goodwill of the Negroes who had formerly been their laborers and servants?
White teeth shining in their dark faces as they grinned unpleasantly at the men they fed, the cooks ladled stew-heavy on potatoes and cabbage and bits of turnip, thin on meat that
was probably horse, or maybe cat, anyhow-into the mess kits. If they liked you, you got yours from the bottom of the pot, where all the good stuff rested. If they didn’t, you ate nothing but broth. Complaining did no good, either. The damnyankees backed up the Negroes all the time.
A few men in front of Reggie, a Confederate cursed when he saw what he’d been given. “You stinkin’ niggers’re tryin’ to starve me to death,” he snarled. “I’ll git you for that if it’s the last thing I ever do, so help me God I will.”
“Shut up, Kirby,” one of his friends told him. “You’re just gonna make things worse, you keep going on like that.”
That was good advice. The prisoner named Kirby didn’t take it. “To hell with all of ’em,” he shouted, and shook his fist at the Negro cooks. They didn’t say anything. They just looked at him. Memorizing his face, Reggie thought. Mr. Kirby was going to be on short commons for a long, long time. He must have known that, too, but he didn’t care. Maybe he was already too hungry to care. He went on, “You black sons of bitches think you’re so great on account of the damnyankees let you lord it over us’ns. But it don’t matter. You’re still niggers to them, too.”
His friend shoved him along to keep the line moving. If the line didn’t move, the prisoners caught hell from the guards. Kirby started cussing all over again when the piece of hardtack he got was both small and full of weevils. What do you expect, you damn fool? Bartlett thought, hoping Kirby’s outburst wouldn’t make the cooks take out their anger on everybody anywhere near the loudmouthed prisoner.
His bowl of stew, when he got it, had a decent amount of real food in with the watery broth. He nodded to the Negro who’d dished it out. “Thanks, Tacitus,” he said. The cook nodded back, soberly. Some of the prisoners tried sucking up to the cooks-acting like niggers themselves, Reggie thought with distaste-in the hopes of getting better rations. He couldn’t make himself do that, and he hadn’t seen that it helped, either. Treating them a little better than he would have before he got captured seemed like a good idea, though.
He took the square of hardtack another cook handed him. It wasn’t too big, but it wasn’t too small, either. He shrugged. It would do. He and Jenkins found a place where the wind wasn’t blowing too hard, sat down there, and began to eat.
“Lettin’ niggers lord it over white men just ain’t right,” Jenkins said. “That Kirby fellow knew what he was talkin’ about. This here war’s over and done with, it’s time to pay back what we owe ’em.”
“Wonder what it’s going to be like when we get home again,” Reggie said around a mouthful of potatoes. “Wonder what’s going on with the Negro uprising down there.”
He and Jasper Jenkins had argued about that for a while. Jenkins had refused to believe blacks could rise up against the whites who had dominated the Confederacy since its founding, and the South before that. But fresh-caught prisoners confirmed at least some of the stories the Yankee guards so gleefully told to the men who had been captured earlier.
Now Jenkins said, “We’ll smash the bastards flat, and then we’ll go on and smash the damnyankees, too, no matter how long it takes.”
Reggie nodded. Inside, though, he wondered. He still wanted to believe everything would turn out all right, but it got harder every day. It had been getting harder since the first time he saw what machine guns did to charging men, no matter whose uniform those men wore. If the war went on long enough, he figured nobody on either side would be left alive.
When he’d finished eating, he took his mess tray over to a barrel of water, waited for his turn, and sluiced the tray around before drying it on his shirttail. He made sure he’d got all the gunk out of the corners. If you came down with food poisoning here…well, the prison camp was a bad place, but the hospital next door was worse.
“Work detail!” a Confederate officer bawled. Some men went off to chop firewood, others to clean the latrines, still others to police up the grounds of the camp.
Jasper Jenkins shook his head in bemusement. “Never thought I’d be glad of a chance to work,” he said, “but it sure as hell beats standing around doing nothing like we been doin’.”
“Yeah,” Reggie agreed; like Jenkins, he had no duties today. And when there wasn’t anything to do, you just waited for the minutes and the hours to crawl by, and every one of them moved on hands and knees. He’d never imagined the worst part of being a prisoner of war was boredom, but the damnyankees didn’t care what their captives did in here, so long as they didn’t try to escape and so long as they didn’t try to get U.S. soldiers to do anything for them.
“Feel like some cards?” Jenkins asked.
“Not right now, no,” Bartlett answered. “I think I’m going to stand here till the dust covers me up. Maybe the Yanks won’t notice me any more after that.” Jasper Jenkins laughed. He thought Reggie had made a joke. Reggie knew too well he hadn’t.
Sergeant Chester Martin cowered in a bombproof shelter in a trench dug through the ruins of what had been Big Lick, Virginia, waiting for the Confederate artillery bombardment to end. The bombproof was thirty feet below ground level; even a shell from an eight-inch gun landing right on top probably wouldn’t collapse it. And the Rebels didn’t have many heavy artillery pieces, though their light field guns were better than anything the U.S. Army owned.
But a collapsed roof wasn’t Martin’s worst worry, although his lips skinned back from his teeth whenever a shellburst nearby made the candles jump. Nobody could see the expression on his face, though, not behind the soaked pad of cotton wadding he wore over his mouth and nose. The chemicals in the pad would-with luck-keep poison gas out of his lungs. Without luck…
He feared gas more than a direct hit. The dugout that sheltered him from explosives and splinters could be a death trap now, for gas, heavier than air, crept down and concentrated in such places. The USA had started using the deadly stuff several months before the Confederacy could answer in kind, but the Rebs had the knack now.
Sitting there beside him in the flickering near-dark, squeezed up tight against him as a lover, Corporal Paul Andersen muttered something over and over again. The mask he wore muffled the words, but Martin knew what he was saying: “Fucking bastards.” He said it a lot. It was a sentiment with which few of the men in the company would have disagreed.
All at once, sudden as a kick in the teeth, the barrage stopped. Martin’s stomach knotted in pain. He was senior man in the bombproof. He had to order the men to rush out to their posts-or to stay there. The Rebs were sneaky sons of bitches. Sometimes they’d stop shelling you long enough to draw you out from your cover, then pick up again with redoubled fury once you were more nearly out in the open.
But sometimes they’d send their men at your lines the minute after a barrage ended. If they reached the trenches before your troops got up to the firing steps and the machine guns, you were gone: captured if you got lucky, more likely dead. No wonder his guts knotted. He had to figure out which way to jump, his own life depending on the answer along with everyone else’s.
He weighed his choices. Better to guess wrong about more shelling than about a raid, he decided. “Out! Out! Out!” The words were muffled and blurry, but nobody had any doubt about what he meant.
Men streamed out of the dugout and ran shouting up the steps cut into the earth. Those steps were full of dirt that had cascaded down from hits up above; enough hits like that and it wouldn’t matter whether the bombproof caved in or not, because nobody could escape it anyway.
Clutching his rifle, Martin ran for a firing step, waving for his men to follow him. Sure as hell, here came the Rebels. They didn’t move forward yowling like catamounts, not any more. They’d learned better than that. But come on they did.
Martin started shooting at the butternut-clad figures stumbling toward him through no-man’s-land. The Rebs went down, not in death or injury so much as to take shelter in shell holes and what had been trenches and were now ruins. In their mud-caked boots, he would have done the same.
None of the Rebs made it into the trenches. The ones who hadn’t fallen broke and made for their own lines. Some of the ones who had fallen lay still. Others twisted and writhed and moaned, out there in no-man’s-land. Some U.S. soldiers took pleasure in shooting the Rebs who came out to try to recover their wounded. Some Confederates did the same thing to U.S. soldiers seeking to pick up their comrades.
Martin took off his gas mask. He breathed warily. The air still had a chlorine tang to it, but it didn’t make him choke and turn blue. “We threw ’em back,” he said. “Not too bad.”
Maybe twenty feet down along the firing step, Joe Hammerschmitt suddenly cried out. He dropped his rifle and clutched a hand to his right shoulder. The Springfield fell in the mud. Red started oozing out between his fingers.
He opened his hand for a moment to examine the wound. Once he’d done that, pain warred with exultation on his long, thin face. Exultation won. “Got me a hometowner, looks like,” he said happily.
Half the men up there with him made sympathetic noises; the other half looked frankly jealous. Hammerschmitt was going to be out of the firing line for weeks, maybe months, to come, and they still risked not just death but horrible mutilation every day.
“Get him back to the doctors,” Martin called. A couple of Hammerschmitt’s buddies roughly bandaged the wound and helped him out of the front line of trenches. They got envious looks, too. They weren’t going on a long vacation like Joe’s, but they were able to escape the worst of the firing till they’d turned him over to the quacks in the rear.