“Was there, sir? I didn’t notice,” Dowling lied. He twisted the knife a little: “I’m sure you must be glad to hear from her.”
“Of course I am.” Custer sounded like a liar himself. His letter opener was shaped like a cavalry saber. He used it to slit the envelope. Elizabeth Custer was in the habit of writing long, even voluminous, letters. So was the general, come to that, when he bothered to write her at all. Dowling would have bet he hadn’t said anything about Olivia in any of them, though.
Custer fumbled for his reading glasses, perched them on his nose, and began to wade through the missive. Suddenly, he turned red, then white. His hand shook. He dropped one of the pages he hadn’t yet read.
“Is something wrong, sir?” Dowling asked, wondering if God had chosen this moment to give First Army a new commander.
But Custer shook his head, sending his curls flying once more. “No,” he said. “It’s good news, as a matter of fact.” If it was, no one had reacted so badly to good news since Pyrrhus of Epirus cried, One more such victory and we are ruined! Custer went on, “Libbie, it seems, has secured permission from the powers that be to enter into the war zone, and will soon be brightening my life here in Bremen for what she describes as an extended visit.”
“How lucky you are, sir, that you’ll have your own dear wife here to help you bear the heavy burden of command.” Dowling brought that out with an absolutely straight face. He was proud of himself. None of the delight he felt showed in his voice, either. Having Elizabeth Custer come to Bremen for a visit was better, more delightful news than any for which he’d dared hope.
He wondered what sort of convenient illness Olivia would contract the day before Mrs. Custer arrived, and whether she’d recover the day after Mrs. Custer left or perhaps that very afternoon. By the thoughtful look in his eye, the distinguished general might have been wondering the same thing.
Whatever Custer came up with, that, by God, was not something he could pile onto the shoulders of his long-suffering adjutant. He’d have to take care of it all by his lonesome.
“I’ll draft the orders for the push against Morehead’s Horse Mill,” Dowling said.
“Yes, go ahead,” Custer agreed abstractedly. Dowling had been sure he would be abstracted at the moment. Custer had made it plain he had no use for German terminology. Dowling reminded himself not to call the concentration against Morehead’s Horse Mill the Schwerpunkt of First Army action. But German was a useful language. English, for instance, had nothing close to Schadenfreude to describe the glee Dowling felt at his vain, pompous, foolish commander’s discomfiture.
Despite the many things Lieutenant Commander Roger Kim-ball had thought he might do in a submarine—and his fantasies had considerable scope, ranging from laying a pretty girl in the captain’s cramped cabin to sinking two Yankee battleships with the same spread of torpedoes—sailing up a South Carolina river on gunboat duty hadn’t made the list. But here he was, heading up the Pee Dee to bombard the revolting Negroes—in both senses of the word—who called themselves the Congaree Socialist Republic.
Diesel smoke poured from the exhaust of the Bonefish at the back of the conning tower on which he stood. The submersible drew only eleven feet of water, which meant it could go farther up the river before grounding itself than most of the surface warships that had been in Charleston harbor when the rebellion broke out.
All the same, Kimball was proceeding at a quarter speed and had a man with a sounding line at the bow. The sailor turned and called, “Three fathoms twain, sir!” He cast the line again. The lead weight splashed down into the muddy water of the Pee Dee.
“Three fathoms twain,” Kimball echoed to show he’d heard. Twenty feet—plenty of water under the Bonefish’s keel. He turned to the only other officer on the submersible, a junior lieutenant named Tom Brearley, who couldn’t possibly have been as young as he looked. “What I wish we had here is a river gunboat,” he said. “Then we could haul bigger guns further upstream than we’ll manage with our boat.”
“That’s a fact, sir,” Brearley agreed. He wasn’t long out of the Confederate naval academy at Mobile, and agreed with just about everything his commander said. After a moment, though, he added, “We have to do the best we can with what we’ve got.”
That was also a fact, as Kimball was glumly aware. His own features, blunter and harsher than Brearley’s, assumed a bulldog cast as he surveyed the weaponry aboard the Bonefish. The three-inch deck gun had been designed to sink freighters, not to bombard land targets, but it would serve that purpose. For the mission, a machine gun had been hastily bolted to the top of the conning tower and another one to the deck behind it. Take all together, the three guns and the vital sounding line used up everyone in the eighteen-man crew who wasn’t required to stay below and keep the diesel running.
The hatch behind Kimball was open. From it wafted the reek with which he had become intimately familiar in three years aboard submersibles, a reek made up of oil and sweat and heads that never quite worked in the manner in which they’d been designed. Here, at least, as opposed to out on the open sea, he didn’t have to keep the hatch dogged if he didn’t want to flood the narrow steel tube inside which he and his men did their job.
“Three fathoms twain!” the sailor with the lead sang out again.
“Three fathoms twain,” Kimball repeated. His eyes flicked back and forth, back and forth, from one side of the Pee Dee to the other. Most places, forest—or maybe jungle was a better word—came right down to the riverbank. He didn’t like that. Anything could be hiding in there. He felt eyes on him, though he couldn’t see anyone. He didn’t like that, either.
Here and there, plantations had been carved out of the forest. He didn’t know what they grew in these parts—maybe rice, maybe indigo, maybe cotton. He was from the hills of northeastern Arkansas himself. The farm where he’d grown up turned out a little wheat, a little tobacco, a few hogs, and a lot of strapping sons. Some Confederate officers looked down their noses at him because of his back-country accent. If you were good enough at what you did, though, how you talked mattered less.
But that wasn’t why he growled whenever they passed a plantation. The mansions in which the Low Country bluebloods had made their homes were one and all burnt-out shells of their former selves. “I wonder if that happened to Marshlands, too,” he muttered.
“Sir?” Tom Brearley said.
“Never mind.” Kimball knew how to keep his mouth shut. It was none of Brearley’s business that he’d been in the sack with the mistress of Marshlands at a cheap hotel when the Negro uprising broke out. He hoped Anne Colleton was all right. Like him, she had a way of running straight toward trouble. That was probably a good part of what had attracted the two of them to each other. It made for a good submarine commander. In a civilian, though, in what might as well have been the middle of a war…
A rifle cracked in the thick undergrowth. A bullet ricocheted off the side of the conning tower, a yard from Kimball’s feet. He felt the vibration through the soles of his shoes. The rifle cracked again—or maybe it was another one. The round slapped past his ear.
“Hose ’em down!” he shouted to the men at the machine guns. Both guns started hammering away in the general direction from which the shots had come. The greenery by the riverbank whipped back and forth, as if in a hailstorm rather than a hail of bullets. Whether that hail of bullets was doing anything about getting rid of the uprisen Negroes who’d fired on the Bonefish was another matter. Kimball didn’t know enough about fighting on land to guess one way or the other. He suspected he would acquire more of an education in that regard than he really wanted.
“Wouldn’t it be fine, Tom, if we could land a company of Marines and let them do the dirty work for us?” he said.
“It surely would, sir,” Brearley answered. He looked up and down the length of the Bonefish. “It would be nice if this boat could hold a company of Marines. For that matter, it would be nice if this boat would hold all of us.”
“Hey, don’t talk like that. You’re an officer, so you’ve got a bunk to call your own, and a good foot of room between the edge of it and the main corridor,” Kimball said. “You sleep in a hammock or triple-decked in five and a half feet of space and you’ll find out all about crowded.”
“Yes, sir,” Brearley said. “I know about that from training.”
“You’d better remember it,” Kimball told him. Another reason he’d joined the submersible service was that you couldn’t be an aristocrat here—the boats weren’t big enough to permit it.
He was about to say something more when the man at the bow cried out and tumbled into the Pee Dee. The fellow came up a moment later, splashing feebly. Around him, the muddy water took on a reddish cast.
Then one of the sailors working the conning-tower machine gun crumpled. He pounded at the roof of the conning tower in agony, but his legs didn’t move—he’d been hit in the spine. Crimson spread from around a neat hole in the back of his tunic.
For a moment, that didn’t mean anything to Kimball. Then another bullet cracked past his head, and he realized the fire was coming not from the northern bank of the Pee Dee, the one the machines guns were working over, but from the southern bank.
“Christ, we’re caught in a crossfire!” he exclaimed. The Pee Dee was no more than a couple of hundred yards wide. The Negroes hiding in the bushes had only rifles (he devoutly hoped they had only rifles), but they didn’t need to be the greatest shots in the world to start picking off his men. He thought about turning the deck gun on the southern riverbank, but that would have been like flailing around with a sledgehammer, trying to smash a cockroach you couldn’t even see.
“What do we do, sir?” Brearley asked.
Without waiting for orders, one of the men from the deck gun crew had leaped into the river after the wounded leadsman. He hauled the fellow back up onto the deck. It might have been in the nick of time. Kimball thought he saw something sinuous moving through the water toward the submersible, then going away. Did alligators live in the Pee Dee? Nobody had briefed him, one way or the other.
He didn’t have a doctor on board the Bonefish, or even a pharmacist’s mate. He knew a little about first aid, and so did one of the petty officers who kept the diesels going. He wished again for a river gunboat, one with its guns housed in protective turrets against just this sort of nuisance fire. It would have been nuisance fire against such a gunboat, anyway. Against the vessel he commanded, it was a great deal worse.
“All hands below!” he shouted. The sailors on deck scrambled up the ladder to the top of the conning tower, then swarmed down into the Bonefish. The leadsman had a bullet through his upper left arm, a wound from which he’d recover if it didn’t fester. He got up and down as fast as an uninjured sailor. The man who’d been hit in the spine presented a harder problem. Moving him at all would do his wound no good, but leaving him where he sprawled was asking for him to be hit again and killed.
Kimball waited until he and the wounded machine gunner were the only men left on top of the conning tower. Bullets kept whipping past them. At the top of the ladder, Tom Brearley waited. “Nichols, I’m going to get you below now,” Kimball said.
“Don’t worry about me, sir,” the sailor answered. “What the hell good am I like this?”
“Lots of people in your shoes now,” Kimball told him. “That’s a fact—goddamn war. They’ll figure out plenty of things for you to do. And the wheelchairs they have nowadays let you get around pretty well.”
Nichols groaned, maybe in derision, maybe just in pain. Kim-ball ignored that. As carefully as he could, he slid the wounded sailor toward the hatch. When Brearley had secure hold of Nichols’ feet, he guided the man’s torso through the hatchway, then hung on to him as they descended.
The petty officer—his name was Ben Coulter—was already bandaging the leadsman’s arm. His jowly, acne-scarred face twisted into a grimace when he saw how Nichols was dead from the waist down. “Nothing I can do about that, sir,” he told Kim-ball. “Wish there was, but—” He spread his hands. He’d washed them before he got to work, but he still had dirt ground into the folds of his knuckles and grease under his nails.
“I know,” Kimball said unhappily. Then he burst out, “God damn it to hell, we’re not built to fight close-in actions. We have any sheet metal or anything we can use to shield our gunners’ backs?” The deck gun had a shield for the front, good against shell splinters but maybe not against bullets. As things stood, the machine guns were altogether unprotected.
“Maybe we could do something like that, sir,” Coulter said. He hesitated. “You mean to go on after this?”
“Hadn’t thought of doing anything else,” Kimball answered. He looked from the petty officer to Tom Brearley to the rest of the crew packed together in the cramped chamber under the conning tower. “Haven’t had any orders to do anything else, either. Anybody who doesn’t want to go on, I’ll put him off the boat right now and he can take his chances!”
“You mean here, among the niggers?” somebody asked. Lucky for him, he was behind Kimball, who couldn’t tell who he was.
“Hell, yes, I mean here among the niggers,” the submersible commander said. “Anybody who thinks I’m going to back off and let those black bastards—those Red bastards—take my country away from me or help the damnyankees whip us had better think twice. Maybe three times.” He looked around again. If anybody disagreed with him, it didn’t show. That was the way things were supposed to work. He nodded once, brusquely. “All right. Let’s get to work and figure out how to do what needs doing.”
Tiny Yossel Reisen woke up and started to wail. When he woke up, everyone in the crowded apartment woke up with him. Flora Hamburger opened her eyes. It was dark. She groaned—softly, so as not to disturb anyone who, by some miracle, might still have been asleep. This was the third time her baby nephew had awakened in the night. Her parents and siblings had to get up too early to go to work as things were. When a howling baby cut into what little sleep they got, life was hard.
“Sha, sha—hush, hush,” Sophie Reisen murmured wearily as she stumbled toward the baby’s cradle. Flora’s older sister scooped Yossel out, sat down in a chair, and began to nurse him. Little urgent sucking noises replaced his desperate cries.
Flora rolled over on the bed she shared with her younger sister Esther and tried to go back to sleep. She’d just succeeded when the alarm clock beside her head went off, clattering as if all the fire alarms in New York City were boiled down into its malevolent little case.
Blindly, almost drunk with weariness, she fumbled at the clock till it shut up. Then she staggered out of bed and splashed cold water on her face to bring back a semblance of life. She stared at herself in the mirror above the sink. Her dark eyes, usually so lively, were dull, with purplish circles under them. Her skin had a pallor that had nothing to do with fashion, but threw her cheekbones and prominent nose and chin into sharp relief. And he’s not even my baby, she thought with tired resentment.
Esther pushed her away from the mirror. She dressed quickly. By the time she got out to the kitchen, her mother had sweet rolls and coffee pale with milk already on the table. Her younger brothers, David and Isaac, were there eating and drinking. They’d risen no earlier than she had, but they hadn’t had to struggle with a recalcitrant corset.
Her father came in a moment after she did. The biggest mug of coffee was reserved for him. He already had his pipe going. The tobacco was harsher than what he’d used before the war cut off imports from the Confederacy, but the odor of smoke was still part of breakfast as far as Flora was concerned. Benjamin Hamburger bit into a roll, sipped his coffee, and nodded approvingly. “That’s good, Sarah,” he called to Flora’s mother, as he did every morning.
Sophie sat down, too. “He’s asleep again,” she said, sounding half asleep herself. “How long it will last—Gott vayss.” Her shrug was barely visible, as if she lacked the energy to raise her shoulders any higher. She probabl
y did.
Flora Hamburger’s eyes went to the framed photograph of Yossel Reisen—baby Yossel’s father—near the divan in the living room. There he stood in his Army uniform, looking nothing like the yeshiva-bucher he’d been till he enlisted. Because he was going into the Army and might very well never come back, Sophie, who’d been his fiancée then, had given him a going-away present as old as history. He’d given her one as old as history, too, though it had taken nine months to find out whether that one was a boy or a girl.
He had married her when he came back to the Lower East Side on leave: the baby did bear his name. That was all of him it had, though; shortly before Sophie’s time of confinement, he’d been killed in one of the meaningless battles down in Virginia.
Flora had hated the war long before it came home to her family. As a Socialist Party activist, she’d done everything she could to keep the Socialist delegation in Congress—the second-largest bloc, behind the dominant Democrats but far ahead of the Republicans—from voting for war credits. She’d failed. Now it was the Socialists’ war, too. She and her party were to blame for that picture of a man who wasn’t coming home, and for so many like it from the black-bordered casualty lists the papers printed every day.
Her father, her sisters, her brother hurried off to work in the sweatshops that, these days, turned endless bolts of green-gray cloth into tunics and trousers and caps and puttees for men to wear as they went out to get slaughtered. David had just turned eighteen. She wondered how long it would be before he got his conscription call. Not long, she thought worriedly, not at the rate the war was going through the young men of two continents.
Before long, it was time for Flora to go, too. She kissed her mother on the cheek, saying, “I’ll see you tonight. I hope the baby isn’t too much trouble.”
Sarah Hamburger smiled. “I’ve had a lot of practice with babies by now, don’t you think?” She turned a speculative eye on Flora. “One of these days, alevai, it would be nice to take care of one of yours.”
Walk in Hell Page 5
