Sylvia Enos sat in a Charleston, South Carolina, jail cell, wondering what would happen to her next. Looking back on it, she decided she shouldn’t have shot Roger Kimball. Now she would have to pay for what she’d done. Try as she would, though, she couldn’t make herself sorry she’d done it.
She shared the small women’s wing of the Charleston city jail with a couple of drunks and a couple of streetwalkers. They all kept sending her awestruck looks because she was locked up on a murder charge. She hadn’t imagined anything like that. It was funny, if you looked at it the right way.
A matron with a face like a clenched fist came down the hall and stopped in front of Sylvia’s cell. “Your lawyer is here,” she said, and unlocked the door. Then she quickly stepped back, as if afraid Sylvia might overpower her and escape. Sylvia found that pretty funny, too.
Her lawyer was a chubby, white-mustached, very pink man named Bishop Polk Magrath. He insisted that she call him Bish. She’d never called anyone Bish in her life, but didn’t argue. He sat on one side of a table in a tiny visiting room, she on the other. The matron stood close by to make sure they didn’t pass anything back and forth.
“I still don’t understand why you’re helping me,” she said. She’d said that before, and hadn’t got any kind of answer that made sense to her.
Now she did, after a fashion. Magrath’s blue, blue eyes sparkled. “You don’t seem to have realized what a cause célèbre your case has become, ma’am,” he said. “I’ll draw more notice for defending you than I would in ten years of ordinary cases.”
“I don’t see how you’ll draw notice for defending me and losing,” Sylvia said. “I did it.” She hadn’t tried to run after shooting Kimball. She’d given her revolver to the first man who stuck his head out the door of another apartment and waited for the police to come arrest her.
“Let’s just put it like this, Mrs. Enos,” the lawyer said: “There are a good many people in this town who think Mr. Kimball deserved what you gave him, a good many people who aren’t the least bit sorry he’s dead. If we can get enough of them on a jury, you might just see Rhode Island again.”
“Massachusetts,” Sylvia said automatically. She scratched her head. “I don’t follow you at all. Isn’t—wasn’t—Roger Kimball a hero down here for sinking the Ericsson?”
“Oh, he is, ma’am. To some people, he is,” Magrath said. By the expression on the matron’s face, she might well have been one of those people. The lawyer went on, “But he’s not a hero to everybody in the Confederate States, not after what happened last June he’s not.”
“Oh,” Sylvia said softly. At last, a light went on in her head. “Because he was a Freedom Party bigshot, you mean.”
“What a clever lady you are, Mrs. Enos.” Magrath beamed at her. “That’s right. That’s just exactly right. There are people in this country—there are people in this town—who would be happy if the same thing that happened to Roger Kimball would happen to the whole Freedom Party.”
One of those people, whoever they might be, was without a doubt paying Bishop Polk Magrath’s fees. Sylvia certainly wasn’t. She’d spent more than she could afford getting a passport and a one-way ticket down to Charleston. She hadn’t expected she’d be going back to Boston. Maybe she’d been wrong.
“Time’s up for this visit,” the tough-looking matron said. Sylvia obediently got to her feet. The lawyer started to reach across the table to shake hands with her. A glance from the matron stopped him. He contented himself with tipping his derby instead. “Come along,” the matron told Sylvia, and Sylvia came.
Halfway back to her cell, she asked, “Will supper be more of that cornmeal mush?” It didn’t taste like much of anything, but it filled her stomach.
As if she hadn’t spoken, the matron said, “You damnyankees killed my husband and my son, and my brother’s got a hook where his hand used to be.”
“I’m sorry,” Sylvia said. “I haven’t got a brother, and my son’s too young to be a soldier. But the man I shot snuck up on my husband and more than a hundred other sailors after the war was over, and he didn’t just kill them—he murdered them like he’d shot them in the back.”
The matron said nothing more till they got back to Sylvia’s cell. As she locked Sylvia inside once more, she remarked, “Grits for supper again, yes,” and went on her way.
“What’s your lawyer got to say?” one of the streetwalkers called to Sylvia. “A lawyer—God almighty.” She sounded as if she never expected to enjoy a lawyer’s professional services, though a lawyer might enjoy hers.
Two days later, the hard-faced matron marched up to Sylvia’s cell and announced, “You’ve got another visitor.” Disapproval congealed on her like fat in a pan cooling on the stove.
“Is it—Bish?” Sylvia still had to work to say that. The matron shook her head. Sylvia frowned in confusion. Now that Kimball was dead, her lawyer was the only person she knew or even knew of in Charleston. “Who is it, then?”
Through tight lips, the matron said, “Just come on.” Sylvia came. Sitting in an iron cage staled very quickly.
Waiting for her in the visitors’room was a blond woman about her own age whose sleek good looks, coiffure, and clothes all shouted Money! “Mrs. Enos, my name is Anne Colleton.”
That meant nothing to Sylvia—and then, to her dismay, it did. She’d seen the name in a couple of the newspaper stories that talked about Kimball. “You’re one of the people who helped the Freedom Party,” she said. Maybe Bishop Polk Magrath had been talking through that derby of his.
Anne nodded. “I was one of those people, yes, Mrs. Enos. And I was a friend of Roger Kimball’s, too—I was, up till his last day on earth.”
Sylvia heard, or thought—hoped—she heard, a slight stress on the past tense. “Were you?” she asked, with her own slight stress.
Maybe that was approval in Anne Colleton’s eyes. “You listen, don’t you?” the woman from the Confederate States said. “In fact, I’m not telling you any great secret when I say that Roger Kimball and I were more than friends, up till his last day on earth.”
Whatever hope Sylvia had went up in smoke. It hadn’t been approval after all. It must have been well-bred, well-contained fury. “Have you come here to gloat at me in jail, then?” she asked with gloomy near-certainty.
“What?” Anne Colleton stared, then started to laugh. “You don’t understand, then, do you, my dear?” Sylvia shook her head. She only understood that she didn’t understand. Anne’s voice went cold and harsh. “I’ll spell it out for you, in that case. Not too long before you shot him, Roger Kimball tried to take me by force when I told him I didn’t care to be more than his friend any more. He did not succeed, I might add.” She spoke proudly. “I might also add that I came very close to shooting him myself before you got the chance.”
“Oh,” Sylvia whispered. Something more seemed to be called for. She went on, “I’m glad you didn’t. It would have meant I’d spent all that money on my passport and train fare for nothing.”
“We wouldn’t want that, would we?” Anne Colleton said, and sounded as if she meant it. “With any luck at all, Mrs. Enos, the Confederate government or the government of South Carolina will pay your train fare north. Bish Magrath and I will do everything we can to see that that’s what happens.”
“Oh,” Sylvia repeated in a different tone of voice. She’d put her children on the train, too, to distant cousins in Connecticut—distant, but closer than any other relatives she had close by. George, Jr., and Mary Jane had thought it would be a short get-acquainted visit. So had her cousins. Maybe, just maybe, if God and Anne Colleton turned out kind, they’d be right.
“Time’s up,” the matron announced, and even Anne Colleton, who seemed able to outstare the lightning, did not argue with her. Sylvia got to her feet and headed back toward her cell. When she was about halfway there, the matron said, “Some rich folks reckon they can buy their way out of anything.”
I hope this one’s right, Sylvia th
ought. Saying that out loud didn’t seem to be the best idea she’d ever had.
Anne Colleton did not visit her again. Bishop Polk Magrath did, a couple of times. He didn’t ask many questions; he seemed to come more to cheer her up than for any other reason. She didn’t know how cheerful she should be. She’d gathered Anne Colleton was a power in the land, but how big a power? Sylvia couldn’t find out till she went to court.
She came before a judge two weeks after Anne Colleton visited her. Bish Magrath kept beaming like a grandfather with plenty of candy canes in his pockets for his grandchildren to find. The lawyer at the other table in front of the judge—the district attorney, Sylvia supposed he was—seemed anything but happy. But was that because of the case or because he’d had a fight with his wife before coming here? Sylvia couldn’t tell.
“I understand you have a request before we proceed, Mr. Chesterfield?” the judge asked the district attorney.
“Yes, your Honor, I do,” the lawyer—Chesterfield—said. When he glanced over to Sylvia, he looked as if he’d bitten down hard on a lemon. “May it please the court, your Honor, the state must recognize the extraordinary circumstances that prompted the defendant to act as she has admitted acting. In light of the fact that the decedent did cause the death of the defendant’s husband not during wartime but after he knew combat had ended, the state is willing”—he looked none too willing himself—“to further the cause of international understanding and amity by not pressing charges in this case, provided that the defendant leave the Confederate States on the first available transportation north and solemnly swear never to return to our nation again, on pain of rearrest and the charges’ being reinstituted.”
“How say you, Mr. Magrath?” the judge inquired.
“I am in complete accord with my learned colleague, your Honor,” Magrath said placidly. “I should also like to note for the record that the government of the United States has formally requested clemency for my client from both the government of the Confederate States and the government of the sovereign state of South Carolina. It now rests in your hands, your Honor.”
Things were happening too fast for Sylvia. They weren’t just arranged—they were nailed down tight. “How say you, Mrs. Enos?” the judge asked her. “If set at liberty, will you quit the Confederate States of America, never to return?”
Bish Magrath had to nod before she could stammer, “Y-Yes, sir.”
Bang! Down came the gavel. “So ordered,” the judge declared. “Mrs. Enos, you will be on a northbound train before the sun sets this evening.” Numbly, Sylvia nodded. She had her life back. Now she would have to figure out what to do with it.
Lieutenant Lije Jenkins sorted through the mail that had come into the barrel unit at Fort Leavenworth. He held out an envelope to Irving Morrell. “Letter from Philadelphia for you, Colonel.”
“War Department?” Morrell asked, not that he had much doubt. Jenkins nodded. Morrell took the envelope. “Well, let’s see what kind of birthday present they have for me today.” His birthday still lay a month away, but he thought about it more than he had before he got married, because Agnes’ came only a week afterwards. Have to get into Leavenworth and do some shopping for her, he thought, and laughed under his breath. Amazing, the small domestic things in which he took pleasure these days because he was doing them for the woman he loved.
He opened the envelope and unfolded the letter it held. As his eyes went back and forth across the typewritten page, he stiffened. Colonel Morrell, the letter read, Having completed work on the test vehicle for a new-model barrel and having also completed evaluation of optimum strategic utilization of barrels irregardless of model, you are ordered to terminate the program you now head at Fort Leavenworth and to report to the War Department Personnel Office here in Philadelphia no later than 1 March 1923 for reassignment. Each day earlier than the aforesaid date for the closure of the project will be greatly appreciated due to reduced expenditures as a result thereof.
Only after he’d gone through the letter twice did he notice who had signed it: Lieutenant Colonel John Abell, the adjutant to General Hunter Liggett, who’d replaced Leonard Wood as U.S. Army Chief of Staff a few months into President Sinclair’s administration.
“Well, well,” Morrell said softly. A pigeon had come home to roost. He’d spent some time as a General Staff officer during the Great War, and had not got on well with John Abell. Abell was a brilliant man, everything a military administrator should be and then some. Morrell had always made it plain he would sooner have been out in the field fighting. When he’d got out in the field, he’d smashed the enemy. And now he was going to pay for it.
“Something wrong, sir?” Lieutenant Jenkins asked.
“No good deed goes unpunished,” Morrell answered.
“Sir?” Jenkins said. Morrell handed him the letter. He read it, then stared at his superior. “Close down the Barrel Works? They can’t do that!”
“They can. They are. Whether they ought to or not is a different question, but not one that’s mine to answer,” Morrell said. “You see why they’re doing it—they need to save money.” He saw no point to saying anything about John Abell. If personal animosity had dictated where the savings would come from…If that had happened, it wouldn’t be the first time.
“But you haven’t finished your work with the test model, sir,” Jenkins protested.
“In a way, I have,” Morrell told him. “I’ve done about everything I can do with one machine. If they’d coughed up the money for more than one, I could have done a lot more than I did. I just wish they were passing the Barrel Works on to someone else instead of closing it down.”
“Yes, sir!” Jenkins’ face was red with anger. “They might as well be telling us we’ve wasted all the time and work we put in here.” He didn’t think about what he would do next himself. In Morrell’s book, that made him a good soldier.
“That’s probably what they think,” Morrell told him. He remembered how Abell had looked at him during the war when he’d agreed with Custer that the barrel doctrine the General Staff had developed needed changing. He might have been an atheist ripping into Holy Writ.
That he’d been right hadn’t made things better. It might have made things worse.
“What are you going to do?” Jenkins asked.
“Obey the order,” Morrell said with a sigh. “What else can I do? They have the test model. They have my reports. They can go on from there. Things won’t disappear. They’ll just stop for a while.” That might prove as bad, but he didn’t care to dwell on such gloomy possibilities.
He left the office to break the news to the men who had worked so hard for so long with the test model. The first one he ran into was Sergeant Michael Pound. “What’s the matter, sir?” the barrel gunner asked. “You look ready to chew bolts and spit rivets.”
“We’re out of business, that’s what,” Morrell said, and went on to explain how and why—or what he understood of why—they were out of business.
Pound frowned. With his thick body, wide shoulders, and broad face, he could easily have looked like a lout. He didn’t; his features were clever and expressive. “That’s—very shortsighted, isn’t it, sir?” he said when Morrell had finished. “The point is to stay ahead of everybody else, after all. How are we going to do that if we drop out of the race?”
“I don’t know the answer to that question, Sergeant,” Morrell replied. “I do know I’ve received a legal order to shut down the Barrel Works and report to Philadelphia once I’ve done it. I have to obey that order.”
“Yes, sir, I understand,” Pound said. “I hope you raise some hell when you get to Philadelphia, though.”
“I intend to try, anyhow,” Morrell said. “How much good that will do, God only knows. Now—what about you, Sergeant? Do you have any new assignment in mind? I’ll do what I can to help you get it.”
“That’s very kind of you, sir.” Pound scratched his brown mustache as he thought. “I suppose I’d better go back to
the regular artillery, sir. Whether we have barrels or not, we’ll always need guns.”
“That’s true. It’s a sensible choice,” Morrell said. He got the idea that most of Pound’s choices were sensible. “I’ll see what I can arrange. I hate to say it, but it’s liable to be a better choice than staying in barrels, the way things are.”
“If we do get in trouble again, we’ll wish we’d done more now,” Pound said with a massive shrug. “We’ll all be running around trying to do what we should have done in years in a few weeks.”
That was also likely to be true. Trying not to dwell on how likely it was, Morrell slapped Sergeant Pound on the shoulder and went on to find the rest of the test model’s crew. They took the news hard, too. Then he had to break it to the crews of the other barrels, the Great War machines that also tested tactics, and to the mechanics who kept all the big, complex machines running. Little by little, he realized what a mountain of paperwork he’d have to climb by the first of March.
After he’d spread the word to the soldiers it affected, he went to tell the other person who needed to know: his wife. He found Agnes ironing clothes. “What are you doing here at this hour of the morning?” she said in surprise. Something in her smile as he kissed her told him what she hoped he was there for.
But he hadn’t come home for that, however much he would have enjoyed it. He told her why he had come home. The explanation came out smooth as if he’d rehearsed it. As a matter of fact, he had rehearsed it, going over it again and again with his men.
Agnes pursed her lips. She was an Army wife, and had taken on many of the attitudes of her officer husband (she’d probably had some of those attitudes already, her first husband also being a soldier). She said, “They should be giving you all the tools you need to do the job right, not taking away the ones they did let you have.”
“You know I feel the same way about it, honey, but I can’t do anything about it except close down the Barrel Works, pack my bags, and hop on the train for Philadelphia. That means you get to hop on the train for Philadelphia, too.”
Blood and Iron Page 67
