For a moment, Nell thought he was trying to trick her. Then she too heard the rhythmic thump of marching men and the jingle of harness. Another column-probably another regiment-heading up toward the fighting. Nellie bit her lip till she tasted blood. She didn’t want the Rebs to lay their hands on…anyone. Even Bill Reach? she asked herself silently, and, with great reluctance, nodded. Even Bill Reach.
She opened the door. Reach scurried inside like a rat running into its hole. “God bless you, Nell,” he said while she closed it as quietly as she could. “If they’d have caught me, they’d have squeezed everything out of me, about you and this place and the shoemaker and-guk!”
Nellie held the tip of the knife against his poorly shaved throat. “Don’t you talk about such things, not to me, not to them, not to anybody,” she said in a voice all the more frightening for being so cold. “I’m not the foolish girl I was, and you can’t blackmail me. When that column marches past, you’re going out the door again. If you come around here after that, I’ll shove this in”-she did shove the knife in, perhaps a quarter of an inch; Reach moaned and tried to pull away, but she wouldn’t let him-“and I’ll laugh while I’m doing it. Do you hear me? You laughed when you shoved it into me, didn’t you? My turn now.”
He didn’t say anything. That was the smartest thing he could have done. A little moonlight came through the plate-glass window from outside. His eyes glittered. The fear smell, sharp and acrid, came off him in waves.
The Confederates tramped past the coffeehouse. Maybe the noise of their passing woke Edna. Nellie would have sworn she hadn’t been noisy enough to disturb her daughter. But, from the hall, Edna asked, “Ma, what’s going on? Who’s this bird? And-” Edna’s breath caught sharply. “What are you doing with that knife?”
“He’s trouble, nothing else but.” Nellie’s voice was grim. “But he’s in trouble, too, so he can stay here till the Rebs have gone by outside. After that, he’s gone forever.”
“I knew your mother, before you were born,” Bill Reach said to Edna, “back in the house at-” He drew a frightened breath of his own, for Nellie had stuck the knife in farther. How deep do you have to stab to kill a man? she wondered. A couple of more words out of Reach and she would have found out.
The sounds of marching feet, clattering wagons, and clopping hooves drowned out the drone of aeroplane engines high overhead. Maybe someone in the Confederate ranks was unwise enough to strike a match to light a cigar or pipe; maybe the moonlight let a U.S. pilot spot the column even without such help. However that was-Nellie had no way of knowing-a stick of bombs came falling out of the sky.
“Oh, Jesus!” Reach said when he heard the high-pitched shriek of air rushing past the bombs’ fins. Nellie needed a split second longer to identify the noise; U.S. bombers hadn’t come over Washington all that often.
A split second after that, sharp explosions left no possible doubt of what was going on. One bomb fell a little in front of the head of the Confederate column. Then two more in quick succession landed right in the middle of it. Either the U.S. bomb-aiming was extraordinarily good or the bombardier was trying for another target altogether and got lucky-again, Nellie never knew.
Glass sprayed inward. A sharp shard caught Nellie in the leg. She yelped. Edna screamed. Bill Reach let out a groan and clutched at his midsection. Nellie staggered back from him. He sank slowly to the floor.
A moment later, the front door opened, hitting him and knocking him sideways. It wasn’t another bomb; it was Confederate soldiers, seeking shelter from the rain of destruction from the sky. Outside in the street, injured soldiers screamed and groaned. A horse screamed, too, on a higher note. Officers shouted for medical orderlies and Negro stretcher-bearers.
Seeing Nellie, one of the Rebs pointed to Reach and said, “This here your husband the damnyankees done hurt, ma’am?” Even at such a time, he worked to separate the people of Washington from the government of the USA.
“I should say not,” she answered, and raised her voice, hoping Reach wasn’t too far gone to pay attention: “He’s a burglar. I caught him breaking in here. I was going to give him to you.” If they thought him an ordinary criminal, they wouldn’t ask him questions about anything but burglary. She didn’t know how he knew what else he knew, or exactly how much that was. She did know it was too much.
One of the Confederate soldiers said, “All right, ma’am, we’ll take charge of him-throw him in a wagon till we find somebody we can give him to. Don’t want to leave him bleedin’ all over your floor here. Come on, you.” He and a buddy got Bill Reach to his feet and out the door.
The bombs had stopped falling. The rest of the Rebels who’d tumbled into the coffeehouse took their leave. Some of them even apologized for bothering Nellie.
“-And your pretty daughter,” one of them added, which did him less good in her eyes than he would have guessed.
Nellie shut the door after the last departing Reb, a futile gesture with the window smashed. She looked around at glinting, drifted glass. “Go on upstairs and get me some slippers, Edna,” she said. “I’ll cut my feet to ribbons if I try to walk through this stuff.” She sighed, but went on, “It’s not near so bad as it was after the Rebs shelled us.”
“No, I reckon not,” Edna agreed. She started toward the stairway, then stopped and looked back at Nellie. “What was that crazy fellow talking about houses for? I ain’t never lived in a house, and I didn’t think you had, neither.”
Not all houses are homes, ran through Nellie’s mind. “I never did live in a house,” she answered. “He’s crazy like you said, that’s all. Get me those slippers-and get me a blanket, too, will you? With the windows gone, I think I better stay down here till sunup.”
“All right, Ma,” Edna said. “But I still think that feller knows you a whole lot better than you let on. If he didn’t, you wouldn’t let him get you all upset like you do.”
“Just get me my things,” Nellie snapped. Shaking her head, Edna went upstairs. Nellie shook her head, too. Sooner or later, the tawdry tale would come out. She could feel it in her bones. And what would she do then? How would she keep Edna in line at all?
Out in the street, wounded Confederates kept on groaning. They did give her a sense of proportion. You didn’t die of mortification, however much you wished you could. Bombs falling out of the sky were something else again.
Thunder filled the air. Artillery was pounding ever closer to St. Matthews, South Carolina, from the south and from the east. Negroes streamed back through the town. Some of them wore red armbands and carried the rifles with which they had fought their white, capitalist oppressors so long and so hard. One or two even wore helmets taken from Confederate corpses. They still had the look of soldiers to them. More, though, had thrown away armbands and weapons and were looking for escape, not more battle.
Scipio wished he could have fled, too. But he was too prominent, too recognizable to escape the square so easily. He’d been one of the leaders of the Congaree Socialist Republic from the beginning-from the beginning till the end, he thought. The end could not be delayed much longer.
I tried to tell them. He hadn’t sought the revolution. He’d been drawn into it, that seeming a safer course than letting himself be eliminated for knowing too much. And it had been a safer course-for a little more than a year. Now, with everything ending in fire, he saw-as he’d seen from the beginning-that going along with the Reds had bought him only a little time.
The rest of the leaders of what had been the Congaree Socialist Republic and was falling to pieces still refused to admit the game was up. Cassius stood in the town square, shouting, “Rally! Rally, God damn de lot of you! Rally ’gainst de ’pressors! Don’ let dey take yo’ freedom!”
He had picked men with him, men who could have formed a line and stopped-or tried to stop-the collapse, but who stood with their rifle butts trailing in the dust and watched men who had been fighters but were now only fugitives running past.
Cherry’s appea
l to the faltering followers of the Republic was more fundamental: “Kill de white folks! Got to kill de white folks! Dey catches you, dey kills you sure!”
She was probably right. No-she was almost certainly right. But the men who had done so much had concluded they could do no more. Neither her fiery words nor her even more fiery beauty were enough to turn them back toward the trenches they could not hold.
She rushed over to Scipio and, to his startlement and no small alarm, threw herself into his arms. Her breasts were firm and soft against his chest. “Make dey stop, Kip,” she said in a bedroom voice. “Make dey stop, make dey fight. You de best talkin’ man we gots. Make dey go back an’ fight and I is yours. I do whatever you wants, you make dey stop.” She ran her tongue over her full lips, making them even moister and more delicious-looking than they had been. Every sort of promise smoldered in her eyes.
Scipio sighed and shook his head. “Cain’t,” he said regretfully-not so much regret that he would not have her, for she frightened him more than he wanted her, but regret that this collapse would get so many people killed, with him all too likely to be among them. “Cain’t, Cherry. It over. Don’t you see? It over.”
“Bastard!” she screamed, and twisted away from him. “Liar! Quitter!” She slapped him, a roundhouse blow that snapped his head sideways on his neck and left the taste of blood in his mouth. Blood on my hands, too, he thought. Blood on all our hands. Cherry cared nothing about the blood on her hands. He counted himself lucky she hadn’t pulled out a knife and gutted him with it.
In spite of haranguing the Negroes who didn’t want to be soldiers any more, Cassius heard the exchange between Cherry and Scipio. Cassius, as best Scipio could tell, never missed anything. He came trotting over to the two of them. Scipio’s guts knotted with fear all over again. Cherry was Cassius’ woman. No-Cherry was her own woman, and had been giving herself to Cassius. That wasn’t quite the same thing, even if, from Cassius’ point of view, it probably looked as if it were.
But Cassius didn’t want to quarrel. The ex-hunter, now chairman of what was left of the Congaree Socialist Republic, sadly studied Scipio. “It over now, Kip?” he asked. “You t’ink it over now fo’ true?”
“Don’t you?” Scipio waved his arms. As he did so, a shell landed only a couple of hundred yards away, black smoke with angry red fire at the core. Dirt leaped upward in graceful arcs, beauty in destruction. “We done everything we kin do. Dey gots too many buckra, too many rifles, too many cannons. Dey whip we, Cass.”
“Too many buckra,” Cassius said bitterly. “Dey don’ rise fo’ dey class int’rest, de fools. De ’ristocrats got dey all mystified up.” He lifted a weary hand. “We been over this before. I know. We make de struggle go on.” He pointed north, toward the swamps of the Congaree. “Gwine make de stand up there. De niggers in de ’pressed zones, dey always gwine know de struggle go on. De white folks, dey never takes we fo’ granted again.”
That, no doubt, was true. Scipio wished he thought it likelier to help than to hurt. It was liable to be another fifty years before the Negro cause revived in the CSA. He didn’t say that. What point, now? What he did say was, “I cain’t go to de swamp with you, Cass.”
To his surprise, the ex-hunter burst out laughing. “I knows that-you was just a house nigger, and you don’t know nothin’ ’bout that kin’ o’ life. What you gots to do is, you gots to blend in. Don’ let nobody know you got dat white folks’ talk hidin’ in your mouth. Git work in de field, in de factory, be a good nigger till de heat die down, then hurt they white folks however you kin.” He slapped Scipio on the back. Then he and Cherry, hand in hand, headed north along with some of the other Negroes who still had fight in them.
Scipio stood in the St. Matthews square till shells started landing a good deal closer than a couple of hundred yards away. Then he turned on his heel and ran, along with so many other blacks, men and women both. From behind came shouts of, “De buckra! De buckra comin’!” He ran harder. The leaders of the Congaree Socialist Republic, unlike their Confederate counterparts, hadn’t gone in for fancy uniforms. In his undyed cotton homespun, he could have been anybody at all.
And anybody at all was just who he aimed to pretend to be. Once white control washed over this part of what was again South Carolina, he’d lie low, find work, eventually find better work, and spend the rest of his life trying to pretend this whole unfortunate business had never happened.
He stopped running about half a mile outside St. Matthews. That was partly because his wind wasn’t all it should have been; before the uprising, he had lived soft. It was also partly because he calculated that a Negro overrun while fleeing was more likely to be killed on sight than one who looked to have some business where he was. If he seemed a field hand or a farmer, maybe the white soldiers wouldn’t figure he’d been in arms against them. And, as a matter of fact, he hadn’t. He’d never once fired a weapon at the duly constituted forces of the Confederated States of America.
Not that that mattered. His laugh came bitter as Cassius’. If the white folks ever figured out who he was, he’d hang. He wouldn’t simply hang, either. What they’d do to him first…
He moaned a little, down deep in his throat. He’d never been a physically brave man. The idea of being tortured made him want to piss himself with fright. He forced himself to something dimly resembling calm. Your wits are all you’ve got now, he thought. If you don’t use them, that will kill you.
Gunfire and faint shouts rose behind him. That would be the white folks, entering St. Matthews. He nodded to himself. The Congaree Socialist Republic was dead, all right, even if Cassius could keep a nasty ghost of it going in the swamps.
When Scipio came to a patch of woods, he chose a winding path through them over going around. In the woods, he thought, he would be perceived as doing something in particular rather than simply trying to escape from the victorious whites. That again might help keep them from shooting him for the fun of it.
Maybe there was a farm on the far side of the woods. Maybe the world had just gone topsy-turvy. Whatever the reason, a fat hen walked out from among the pine trees and stood in the path, staring at him from beady black eyes. For a moment, that didn’t mean much to him. Then it did. Food, he thought. No more communal kitchens, no more suppers arguing the workings of the dialectic. If he was going to eat, he’d have to feed himself.
Slowly, he bent and picked up a fist-sized stone. The chicken kept watching him from about ten feet away. He drew back his arm-and let fly, hard as he could. The bird had time for one startled squawk before the stone hit. Feathers exploded out from it. It tried to run away, but had trouble making its legs work. He sprang on it, snatched up the stone, and smashed in its little stupid head.
He wore a knife on his belt. He cut off the broken head and held the chicken by the feet, letting it bleed out. Then he gutted it. He worked slowly and carefully there; he’d seen the job done in the kitchens at Marshlands more times than he could count, but couldn’t remember the last time he’d done it himself. He saved the liver and gizzard and heart, putting them back inside the body cavity.
He’d just tossed the rest of the offal into the bushes by the side of the path-a fox or a coon or a possum would find a treat-when a white man called, “You there, nigger! What are you doin’?”
“Got me a chicken, suh,” Scipio said. He turned toward the white man-a Confederate major-and put on a wide, servile smile. “Be right glad to share, you leave me jus’ a little bit.” That was how sharing between blacks and whites worked (when it worked at all) in the CSA.
“Give it here,” the major said: a lot of the time, sharing didn’t work at all in the CSA. Scipio handed the bird over without a word. The officer took its feet in his right hand. His left hand wasn’t a hand, but a hook.
Scipio stiffened in dismay. He’d dealt with this white man, arranging to exchange wounded prisoners. Maybe, though, the fellow wouldn’t recognize him. One raggedy Negro looked a lot like another, especially when y
ou hardly saw them as human beings at all.
But Major Hotchkiss, even if he was mutilated, wasn’t stupid. His eyes narrowed. “I know your voice,” he said, half to himself. “You’re the nigger who-” From narrow, his eyes went wide. He didn’t bother saying, talks like a white man, but dropped the chicken and grabbed for his pistol.
He was a split second too slow. Scipio hit him in the face with the rock he’d used to kill the hen. The Negro leaped on him as he had on the bird, pounding and pounding with the stone till Hotchkiss was as dead as a man ever would be.
Scipio reached for the major’s pistol, then jerked his hand away. He didn’t want to be caught with a firearm, not in these times. He didn’t want to be caught with a blood-spattered shirt, either. He stripped it off and hid it in a hole in the ground. A shirtless Negro would draw no comment.
The chicken was another matter. It was his. “You damn thief,” he muttered to the late Major Hotchkiss. He picked up the bird and got out of there as fast as he could, before any more white soldiers came along to connect him to the major’s untimely demise.
Paul Mantarakis strode warily through the ruins of Ogden, Utah. “Boy, this place looks like hell,” he said. “I can’t tell whether what I’m walking on used to be houses or street.”
“Hell was let loose on earth here,” said Gordon McSweeney, who still wore on his back the flamethrower which had loosed a lot of that hell. But then he went on, “Hell let loose on earth, giving the misbelievers a foretaste of eternity.”
Beside them, Ben Carlton said, “Feels damn strange, walking along where there’s Mormons around and not diving for cover.”
“They surrendered,” Mantarakis said. But he was warily looking around, too. He carried his Springfield at the ready, and had a round in the chamber.
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