Walk in Hell

by Harry Turtledove

  The Jew muttered something under his breath. Reggie didn’t think it was a compliment. He didn’t think it was English, either, which was likely to be just as well: if he didn’t understand it, he didn’t have to notice it. That made something else occur to him: “Hey, Hymie, you sell a lot to the Indians around here?”

  “A lot, yes,” the peddler answered. “Is most of folk.”

  “How do you talk to ’em?” Bartlett asked. The Jew stared at him, not following the question. He tried again: “What language do you use when you sell to them?”

  “Oh.” The Jew’s face lit with intelligence. “They speak Henglish, same like me.” Reggie burst out laughing; from what little he’d seen of them, most of the local Chickasaws and Kiowas spoke English better than the peddler.

  “Go on, get the hell out of here,” Hairston said, and the peddler, not without a sigh or two of regret for business lost, scrambled up into the wagon and rattled south out of Wilson Town, almost the last one to leave it.

  Methodically, the troops of Lieutenant Nicoll’s company began to dig in. Nap Dibble said, “Wish them niggers what was in this town would’ve stayed a bit. They could have done this here entrenching for us.”

  “Back on the Roanoke front, we had us lots of nigger labor battalions,” Reggie said as he made the dirt fly. “Haven’t seen so much of that here out west.”

  “Ain’t that much of it,” Sergeant Hairston said. “Like I been tellin’ you since you got here, Bartlett, ain’t that much of anything.”

  “Except Yankees,” Reggie said.

  “Yeah, except them,” Hairston agreed. “But they ain’t got any more’n—well, ain’t got a whole lot more’n—what we do, ’cept maybe soldiers.”

  “Except,” Reggie said again. He dug and dug, steady as a steam shovel. The ground was the perfect consistency: not so hard that he had to labor to force his entrenching tool into it, not so soft or muddy that the edges of the trench he was digging started falling down into what he’d already dug. He flipped the dirt up in front of his excavations to form a parapet. “Wish we had some more barbed wire.” He scooped out another couple of shovelfuls. “Wish we had any barbed wire.”

  “Wish for sugarplums for Christmas while you’re at it,” Sergeant Hairston said. “Oh, we may get some wire—we had a good bit in front o’ Duncan, once we’d stayed there a while. But this here ain’t the Roanoke front—that kind of good stuff don’t grow on trees here. I just told you that a couple seconds ago, dammit. Ain’t you listenin’ to me?”

  “Yeah, Sarge. I always listen,” Bartlett answered, so mildly that Hairston went back to digging for another stroke or two before giving him a dirty look. Reggie grinned back, a grin that had occasionally softened even the Yankee prison guards in West Virginia. He looked around, not to see if the Yankees were coming or the Chickasaws getting the hell out but to spot his company commander. “Now that the fighting’s picked up again, what’s the lieutenant going to do for his hooch?”

  “Damned if I know.” As if reminded of what he’d traded to the men in green-gray for Lieutenant Nicoll’s supply of whiskey, Hairston rolled himself a cigarette. He sucked in smoke before going on, “Hope nothin’ bad’s happened to Toohey. He ain’t a bad guy.” After another drag, he chuckled. “Crazy sayin’ that about one of those Yankee bastards, but it’s so.”

  “I know what you mean, Sarge,” Reggie replied. “Fellow who captured me, there in the Roanoke valley, he could have shot me and my pals easy as not. I ever run into him once this damn war is over, he can do all the boozing he wants. I’ll buy till he can’t even see, let alone walk.”

  The sporadic Yankee shelling had been falling short of Wilson Town, so much so that the Confederate soldiers had gone on about the business of digging in without pausing at the explosions a couple of furlongs to the north. Now, suddenly, the U.S. gunners began to find the range. Hearing the hideous whistle of a shell that might have his name on it, Reggie dove headlong into the stretch of trench he’d just dug. The round hit behind him. Fragments and shrapnel balls hissed through the air. One of the lead spheres with which the shell had been loaded drilled a neat hole in the dirt he’d heaped up in front of the trench. It would have drilled a neat hole in him, too.

  He got back up and started digging again. A hoarse shout from the southern edge of town made him turn his head. The Jewish peddler didn’t care for artillery close by. He was getting his horses up to a gallop so he could escape Wilson Town in jig time. Others who had lingered, the last few, now delayed their departure no more.

  Reggie laughed. “Look at ’em go,” he said, pointing. After a moment, though, it didn’t seem funny. “If two guys are in a dangerous place, and one leaves while the other stays, which one of ’em is stupid?”

  Hairston laughed, too, but singularly without humor. “That’d be funny, Bartlett, if only it was funny, you know what I mean?”

  “Yeah, Sarge, I do. Wish to Jesus I didn’t.” Bartlett looked out across the broad Sequoyah prairie. “Here come the damnyankees. I don’t think they think we’re ready for ’em yet.”

  “Yeah, well, if they don’t, they’re gonna be real sorry real fast,” Hairston said.

  The artillery fire supporting the men in green-gray who trotted forward got heavier, but it didn’t turn into anything that would have been reckoned worse than harassment back in Virginia. Here and there, a Confederate soldier shrieked or abruptly fell silent, forever blasted from man to butcher-shop display in the blink of an eye.

  But most of the C.S. troopers crouched down in the field fortifications they’d been digging and waited for the Yankees to get closer, so they could sting the enemy hard. Reggie wouldn’t have wanted to be trudging through that yellowed autumn grass, waiting for the machine guns to open up on him. He wondered how much experience the damnyankees up there had. Were they brave men advancing into what they knew would be awful or raw fish too ignorant to tell they were heading for a fish fry? In the end, it didn’t much matter. They’d kill him or he’d kill them. War reduced everything to a brutal simplicity.

  Closer, closer…A couple of Confederate riflemen opened up on the Yankees. Men in green-gray started dropping, most not because they were hit but to keep from getting hit. Others kept coming forward, running now, not trotting, as if they knew they didn’t have much time to do before they were done by. Raising his rifle to his shoulder, Bartlett picked one.

  He pulled the trigger at the same time as the first machine gun began spraying precisely measured death at the U.S. soldiers. More and more of the men in green-gray were falling, and taking cover had little if anything to do with it. A couple of hundred yards off to the left, the second Confederate machine gun joined its satanic chattering to that of the first. More and more Yankees toppled.

  None of the foe got within a hundred yards of the position the Confederates had chosen to defend. As the attack finally broke down, cold rain began falling on U.S. and C.S. troops alike. Looking west, Reggie saw more and more clouds rolling his way. He pointed in that direction and said, “Looks like we’ve got ourselves a new commanding officer.”

  “What are you talkin’ about?” Pete Hairston asked.

  “General Winter,” Bartlett answered. Hairston did a double take, but then he nodded. If the rain kept coming, the way it looked as if it would, nobody on either side would go anywhere fast, not for a good long while.

  “Ma’am?” Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid loomed over Nellie Semphroch. “May I speak to you for just a minute, ma’am?”

  “What do you want?” Nellie knew her voice was cold, and did nothing to warm it. Speaking with the Confederate officer who’d seduced her daughter (or so she’d thought of it, not that Edna would have needed much seducing) was the last thing she wanted. “Whatever it is, you’d better make it snappy. We’re goin’ to be busy very soon, I expect.”

  “Yes, ma’am. I know that, ma’am. That’s why I came here so early, ma’am.” Kincaid stood there, holding his butternut slouch hat in both hands. He
kept twisting it every which way, though he didn’t seem to notice. He took a deep breath, held it so long he began to turn red, and then blurted, “Ma’am, me and your daughter, we’d like to get married, ma’am.”

  Nellie’s head whipped around. There stood Edna, stacking cups on the countertop by the coffeepots so she and Nellie could serve a lot of coffee in a hurry. Edna’s face wore what Nellie could think of only as an idiot grin. “That’s right, Ma,” she said, and the grin got wider.

  “You’re too young,” Nellie said automatically.

  “I’m older’n you were when you got married,” her daughter retorted. “And I sure do want to marry Nick there.” It was the first time she’d called Kincaid that—no, the first time Nellie had heard her call him that. When she did, he started grinning an idiot grin, too.

  And she was right. Nellie had been younger than Edna was now when her name abruptly became Semphroch. Her name had had to change abruptly. “Edna, are you in a family way?” she demanded.

  Lieutenant Kincaid turned red, the blush starting at his collar and rising all the way to his forehead. Edna indignantly tossed her head. “I am not—no such thing,” she answered. “And I ought to know, too.” When Kincaid heard that, he got even redder.

  “All right.” Nellie knew when to beat a retreat. She’d been in a family way when she got married, though she didn’t think Edna knew that. The less Edna ever found out about her unsavory past, the better she’d like it.

  “Ma’am, your daughter and I, we really do love each other,” Kincaid said earnestly. “We’ll be happy together for the rest of our lives, I know we will.”

  If I laugh at him, he’ll get angry at me, and so will Edna. Nellie made herself hold her face still. It wasn’t easy. He’d managed to get Edna’s corset off her once (maybe more than once; Nellie admitted to herself she didn’t know for sure about that) and both of them had liked what followed, so they thought they’d be happy together forever. Nellie knew better. She’d learned better the hard way. She wanted to pass on what she’d learned, but they wouldn’t listen. She knew they wouldn’t listen. The only way anyone learned those lessons was the hard way.

  Off in the middle distance, artillery rumbled. Lately, days didn’t go by—hours hardly went by—without that sound in the air. It reminded Nellie of her second biggest problem with Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid, after his being a man. “Edna,” she said, as gently as she could, “he’s a Confederate. Do you want to go down there to live?” By the way she said down there, she might have been talking about dropping into hell for a visit.

  Now Edna turned bright red. Like every child in the USA since the War of Secession, she’d been taught to think of Confederates as the enemy, with a capital E. That hadn’t worried her when Kincaid started sniffing after her. But maybe she hadn’t faced, even in her own mind, all the implications of what marrying him would mean. “I love him,” she said defiantly.

  “You think you can stay here in Washington the rest of your days?” Nellie asked. The artillery rumbled again, louder this time. “How much longer do you think the CSA can hold on here?”

  “We’ll hold Washington,” Kincaid said. “President Wilson said it was our capital by rights, and we’ll keep it. President Semmes says the same thing, so that’s how it’ll be.” He thrust out his already prominent chin, as if to stay the Yankee hordes with the granite contained therein.

  Nellie thought about mentioning the jawbone of an ass, but forbore. What she did say was, “You Confederates have said a lot of things that haven’t come true. What makes you think this’ll be any different?”

  “Don’t you rag on him, Ma!” Edna said shrilly.

  When Nellie heard that tone of voice from her daughter, she knew the game was lost. Edna would do whatever Edna intended doing, and nothing and nobody would stop her. My God, Nellie thought. How am I going to explain this to Mr. Jacobs? The daughter of a spy for the United States running off and marrying a Confederate officer? He’d never trust Nellie again.

  Edna, of course, hadn’t the slightest idea Nellie was a spy for the USA. A good thing, too, Nellie thought. She’d never imagined life could get so complicated. Knowing it was weak, she tried a new card: “Suppose I say no?”

  Kincaid didn’t answer, which told Nellie the card was even weaker than she’d thought. He’d seemed so polite, she’d hoped a refusal might make him go away. Edna did reply, firmly: “Ma, we’d run off. Nick knows this chaplain—he told me so.” Kincaid blushed again, but after a moment nodded. Edna went on, “You can’t stop us, and you know it. You got to sleep sometime.”

  “You’d leave me to run the coffeehouse all by my lonesome?” Nellie asked, shifting with the changing breeze as adroitly as a politician. “It’s too much for one person. It’s too much for two people, sometimes.”

  “Hire yourself a nigger,” Edna told her. “Ma, you know you’re making good money. You can hire a couple of niggers, easy.”

  Again, that was probably true. Kincaid said, “Edna, honey, when we get back down into my country”—he spoke as if to assure her the CSA was far superior to this benighted northern land—“you won’t have to lift a finger. You’ll have niggers doing all your work for you.”

  Nellie did laugh then. She couldn’t help it. “Niggers doing all your work for you, Edna, on a lieutenant’s pay?” she said. “Likely tell. Besides, aren’t the Confederate States buzzing like a hornets’nest about how niggers aren’t going to be like servants no more?”

  “I don’t reckon that’ll come to anything,” Lieutenant Kincaid said. He sounded none too confident, though, and he said not a word about how easy keeping Negro servants on a junior officer’s pay would be. That relieved Nellie; she’d feared he would announce that his father owned a plantation stretching halfway across Alabama, and that what he got from the Confederate War Department was less than pocket change to him.

  Before the argument—the losing argument, Nellie was convinced—could go on, the door to the coffeehouse opened. The bell above it chimed. A fierce smile of triumph lighted Edna’s face. “Ma,” she said sweetly, “why don’t you go take care of Mr. Reach there?”

  Not five minutes earlier, Nellie had wondered how life got so complicated. Now she wondered if God had decided to show her she didn’t know what complicated meant. Sure as hell, there was Bill Reach folding himself into a chair at a table by the window. He looked the same as he always had since he’d returned, all unbidden, to Nellie’s life: dark, unkempt clothes, stubbled chin and cheeks, bleary eyes.

  As she went up to him, she heard Lieutenant Kincaid say, “I never did fancy that fellow, not from the first time I set eyes on him.”

  Edna giggled. “I think he’s one of Ma’s old beaus.” Nellie’s back stiffened.

  “Hello, Little Nell,” Reach said when Nellie reached his table. Edna giggled. Nicholas Kincaid chuckled. Nellie steamed.

  Speaking very softly, she said, “If you ever call me that again, I will tell the Confederate occupying authorities exactly—exactly, do you hear me?—what you are.”

  Those bleary eyes widened. “Me? I’m not anything much,” he said, but the certainty that usually informed his gravelly voice was missing.

  “You heard me,” Nellie whispered. “I don’t ever want to see you round here again, either.” In normal tones, she went on, “Now what’ll it be?”

  “Cup of coffee, couple fried eggs, and buttered toast,” Reach said, his tone grudging. He smelled of whiskey.

  “I’ll be right back,” Nellie told him.

  As she started frying the eggs and toasting the bread, Lieutenant Kincaid said, “Ma’am? Can you give me your answer, ma’am?” He sounded plaintive as a calf calling for its mother.

  “No,” Nellie snarled. The Rebel officer looked as if she’d kicked him.

  Edna set a hand on his arm. “It’ll be all right, Nick. Don’t you worry about it none. She’s just my mother. She ain’t my jailer, and she can’t hold me back when I go with you.” Not if I go with you, Nellie
noted. When.

  “I don’t know what this world is coming to,” she said, “when children don’t pay any attention at all to the people who brought them into this world in the first place.” Edna didn’t answer. She kept staring at Lieutenant Kincaid as if she’d just invented him. Nellie sighed and slipped a metal spatula under the eggs to turn them in the pan. She repeated what she’d said a moment before: “I don’t know what this world is coming to.”

  Lieutenant Kincaid leaned over and pecked Edna on the lips. He set his hat back on his head, tipped it to Nellie, and went out of the coffeehouse whistling “Dixie” loudly and off-key. “Isn’t he wonderful?”

  “No,” Nellie snapped. A couple of other Confederate officers came in. Nellie pointed their way. “You take care of them.” She slid the eggs out of the frying pan, took the toast from the rack above the fire in the stove, spread butter on it, poured coffee, and carried Bill Reach his breakfast. “Here you are. That’ll be a dollar ten.”

  He winced slightly, but laid down a dollar and a quarter. “Don’t worry any about the change,” he said. He spread salt and pepper liberally over the eggs before he began to eat. Then he looked up at her. “Back in those days, I didn’t know you could cook, too.”

  She glared. “Do you think I won’t turn you in?” she said in a low, savage voice. “You better think again. My daughter is going to marry a Confederate officer.” And then, to her helpless horror, she began to cry.

  “Are you all right, Ma?” Edna came rushing over. She looked daggers at Bill Reach. “What’d he do?” Hearing that, the two Confederate officers jumped to their feet. They were nothing if not gentlemen.

  Nellie waved everyone away. “It’s all right,” she insisted. “I’m just—happy for you, that’s all.” She’d told Edna a lot of lies for the foolish girl’s own sake. After so many, what was one more?

  Doubtfully, Edna retreated. The Rebs settled back into their seats. In a half-apologetic mumble, Bill Reach said, “Hal told me not to come around here any more.”