Nobody liked this kind of fighting, going back and forth over the same few miles of ground. “When do we break out, Sarge?” Frankie asked one day. He was scooping up pork and beans from a can. “We go somewhere new, maybe it won’t smell so bad.”
“Maybe.” Chester’s ration can was full of what was alleged to be beef stew. The grayish meat inside might have been boiled tire tread. Chester had never found a piece with GOODYEAR stamped on it, but that didn’t mean he wouldn’t. And the Confederates thought Yankee chow was better than what their own quartermasters dished out! That was a scary thought. He went on, “I asked Captain Rhodes the other day. He didn’t know, either.”
“Well, if he don’t, chances are nobody does. He’s a hell of a smart man, the captain is,” Frankie said.
“That’s a fact,” Chester said.
They were still eating when a Confederate junior officer came forward with a white flag. He asked for a two-hour truce for both sides to pick up their wounded. Martin greeted him with a glare. “Yeah? Suppose you get some of our guys? You gonna shoot ’em once you take ’em back behind the lines?”
“Good God, no!” the C.S. lieutenant said. “We don’t do things like that!”
“Except maybe to niggers,” Chester said.
He watched the enemy soldier turn red. But the man didn’t even waste his breath denying it. “We don’t do that to soldiers in a declared war,” was all he said.
“Sounds like bullshit to me, buddy,” Chester said. “What about that goddamn leaflet you’ve been spreading all over creation?”
The C.S. lieutenant blushed again. “That wasn’t soldiers who did that. It was Freedom Party guys from the Director of Communications’ office.”
“How the hell are we supposed to tell the difference? You’ve even got Freedom Party Guards coming into the line along with regular soldiers. What are we supposed to do? Kill all of you bastards and let God worry about it afterwards?”
“I don’t have anything to do with ordering that stuff,” the Confederate said. “If they come up here, they’re soldiers. They perform like soldiers, don’t they?” He waited. Martin couldn’t very well deny that. Seeing that he couldn’t, the officer went on, “Honest to God, Sergeant, if we find your people, we’ll take ’em prisoner. If we start doing things to ’em and you people find out, you’ve got our POWs to get even with.”
That made a certain brutal sense to Chester. He nodded. “All right, Lieutenant. Two hours. Your medics and ours-and probably a little bit of trading back and forth. Got any coffee?” Not much came up into the USA. The Army got most of what there was and stretched it as far as it would go, which made it pretty awful.
“Swap you some for a couple cans of deviled ham. That’s the best damn ration around,” the lieutenant said.
Before talking to him, Chester had made sure he had some. He would have bet the Confederate wanted it. The lieutenant gave him a cloth sack full of whole roasted beans. Just the smell, the wonderful smell, was enough to pry his eyelids farther apart. “Yeah, that’s the straight goods, sure as hell,” Chester said reverently.
“I got me some eggs,” the lieutenant said. “Got me some butter, too. Gonna scramble ’em up with this ham…” For a moment, they both forgot about the war.
Then the Confederate officer turned and waved to his men. Chester also turned. “Cease-fire!” he yelled. “Two hours! Medics, forward!” He nodded to the lieutenant. “You can head on back now.”
“Thanks.” The officer raised his hand in what wasn’t quite a wave and wasn’t quite a salute. Away he went.
From both sides of the line, men with Red Cross smocks and with the Red Cross painted on their helmets moved up to gather casualties-and to share cigarettes and food and coffee and maybe an unofficial nip or two from a canteen. Men on both sides stood up and stretched and walked around without fear of getting shot. If they were smart, they tried not to show exactly where their hiding places were. Snipers had a nasty habit of remembering stuff like that.
Corpsmen brought back a soldier with a wound dressing on his leg. “How you doing, Miller?” Chester asked.
“I’m out of the fucking war for a while, anyway.” Miller didn’t sound sorry he’d got hit. A lot of people who caught hometowners felt the same way.
Chester kept smelling that wonderful coffee. He wanted to smash up the beans with the hilt of his belt knife or find a hammer to do it and to make himself three or four cups’ worth of joe right then. The enemy lieutenant had probably brought it forward the same way he’d carried the cans of deviled ham. The fellow had to know what a damnyankee would want.
Another wounded man came in, this one with a blood-soaked bandage on his head. The medics looked grim. “Bad?” Chester said.
“About as bad as it gets,” one of the medics answered. “Head wound, in one side and out the other. God knows how he’s still breathing, with half his brains blown out. Take a miracle for him to get better.”
“Take a miracle for him to still be breathing this time tomorrow,” another medic said. The man who’d spoken first didn’t tell him he was wrong. Shaking their heads, the stretcher team carried the wounded soldier back towards an aid station.
“Fuck,” Chester Martin said softly. Krikor Hartunian-hell of a name-didn’t belong to his platoon. But he came from Captain Rhodes’ company. He was a baby when his folks were lucky enough to escape from the Ottoman Empire. An awful lot of Armenians hadn’t been so lucky. Some people said the massacres the Turks pulled off helped give Jake Featherston the idea for getting rid of the CSA’s Negroes.
Chester had no idea if that was true. All he knew was that a Confederate bullet had slaughtered Krikor-usually called Greg. The kid’s folks had a farm somewhere in central California nowadays. Pretty soon, a Western Union messenger would deliver a Deeply Regrets telegram from the War Department. People didn’t want to see Western Union messengers these days. Chester remembered his folks talking about that during the last war. These days, they called the poor kids-who were only doing their job-angels of death. Wasn’t that a hell of a thing?
Here in southern Tennessee, death came without angels. When the truce ran out, both sides fired a few warning shots. Anybody still up and around and out in the open ran for cover. Then they got back to the business of murder.
XIV
Gracchus’ band of black guerrillas kept growing. At first, Cassius thought that was wonderful. Then he noticed how worried the rebel leader looked. “What’s the matter?” he asked.
Gracchus eyed him with something less than joy. “How’m I gonna keep all you sons of bitches fed?” he burst out.
“Oh.” Cassius had no answer for that. He’d eaten well his whole life in Augusta. He’d gone on eating well, or as well as any Negro could, after the Freedom Party enclosed the Terry in barbed wire. Only after he escaped did he discover what living with his belly bumping his backbone was like. A full stomach was better. How his father, his old, fussy, precise father, would have laughed at him for that brilliant discovery! He hoped Scipio, wherever he was, still could laugh. What he hoped and what he feared were very different things.
“Oh,” Gracchus echoed sardonically. “Yeah. You kin say, ‘Oh.’ But you only gots to say it. I gots to do somethin’ about it.”
Cassius paused to fiddle with the sling to his Tredegar. When he first got the rifle, he messed with it all the time, trying to make the nine-pound weight comfortable. Now, as often as not, he forgot he was carrying it. If the sling hadn’t found some way to twist, he wouldn’t have noticed it.
“When I was in the city, I reckoned country niggers lived in these little villages,” he said. “Y’all’d grow your own corn and raise chickens and pigs and like that. An’ I reckoned there’d be plenty o’ vittles.”
“Used to be like dat,” Gracchus said bitterly. “I was a sharecropper. Had me a pot belly-best believe I did.” He was skinny as a snake now, and at least as mean. “Freedom Party git in, they start makin’ all kinds o’ harvesters an’
combines an’ shit. Put all us niggers outa work, fucked them villages like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Got the factories set up so they could make barrels, too,” Cassius said.
“That’s a fact.” Gracchus eyed him. “You ain’t dumb, is you?”
“Me?” Cassius said in surprise. He always thought of himself as pretty dumb. He measured himself against his father-what young man doesn’t? His father, as far as he could tell, knew everything there was to know. He could even talk white, and do it better than most whites could. He’d tried to teach Cassius some of what he knew. Cassius could read and write and cipher. Past that, he hadn’t cared to learn. For the first time, he wondered if he’d made a mistake. It was too late, of course. Life didn’t hand you many second chances. If you were black in the CSA, life didn’t hand you many first chances.
“I ain’t talkin’ about Demosthenes over there,” Gracchus said. Demosthenes was larger than Cassius, stronger than Cassius, braver than Cassius. As far as Cassius could tell, Demosthenes feared nothing and nobody. He was hung like a horse, too. On the other hand, he was so dumb he had to remind himself out loud how to tie his shoes. Gracchus went on, “We need folks who’ll do whatever somebody tells ’em to do, an’ do it right now. Gots to have folks like dat, no two ways about it. But we gots to have people who kin think some, too.”
“Me?” Cassius said again.
“Reckon so,” Gracchus answered. “Next thing we gots to see is if folks jump when you tells ’em to. We fight the damn Mexicans again, you try it. See what happens. Things go good, got us a new officer.”
“Me?” Cassius knew he was starting to sound like a broken record. What he didn’t know was whether he wanted to be an officer. He didn’t like other people ordering him around. His father could speak volumes on that…if he was in a position to speak volumes on anything. Cassius didn’t see why other people would want him ordering them around, either.
But Gracchus had no doubts. From everything Cassius had seen, Gracchus hardly ever had doubts. That was one of the things that made him a leader. “You,” he said now, with a decisive nod. “If you kin do the job, you better step up an’ do it.”
That cut close to the bone. Francisco Jose’s Mexicans had made most unwilling soldiers when they first came to the CSA. Now they seemed to realize they weren’t going home any time soon, and that it was the black guerrillas’ fault. Just as blacks wanted revenge on whites, so the Mexican soldiers wanted revenge on blacks.
And if they didn’t, unconscripted Confederate whites did. The lame, the halt, the old, the very young…Some of them could take rifles out into the field and go after the rebels haunting Georgia. And even the ones who couldn’t served as sentries and guards and did all they could to make life difficult for raiding bands of Negroes-and to fire up the Mexicans so they fought harder, too.
All of which made this march through the central part of the state grim and hungry. Gracchus had scouts out before and behind, to the left and to the right. He knew the guerrillas were hunted, all right. So far, though, they kept slipping through the net.
And how much good does it do? Cassius wondered. He wished he hadn’t thought of the raiders as haunting the Georgia countryside. That made them too much like ghosts of what had been there before, what would never come back to life again. Whites in the towns were real. Everything out here…Well, so what? A lot of town dwellers had to see things that way, anyhow.
But without the countryside, where would the Confederates States get their cotton and peanuts and tobacco, their corn and rice and hogs? Thanks to the Freedom Party and the machinery, the countryside needed far fewer workers to produce its crops than it had ten years earlier. But it still needed some, and it still needed the machines. If farmers and farmworkers got shot, if combines got torched, how was the Confederacy supposed to bring in any kind of harvest at all?
Nobody challenged the guerrilla band as it tramped along a narrow blacktop road. Gracchus probably knew where the fighters were going, but Cassius had no idea. The countryside was a whole different world, and not one where he belonged. He knew every alleyway and corner of the Terry-and much good that ended up doing him. Now he had something new to learn. And he would…if he lived long enough.
Something buzzed overhead. For a second, Cassius thought it was a stupid country bug that didn’t come into cities. Then he saw other guerrillas pointing and heard them swearing. His eyes followed their upraised fingers. The biplane circling up there had been obsolete as a fighting machine since the mid-1920s, if not longer. But it did just fine spotting people who couldn’t shoot it down.
“Goddamn thing,” Gracchus snarled. “Bet your ass some fucker with a wireless set bringin’ sojers down on us.”
That struck Cassius as much too likely. But the biplane pilot had other things in mind, too. He dove on the guerrillas. “Scatter!” three blacks yelled at the same time.
The airplane mounted two machine guns set above the engine and firing through the prop. Cassius could see them winking on and off, on and off, as the pilot fired one short burst after another. Afterwards, he couldn’t have said why he didn’t run like most of the other men. It wasn’t lack of fear. With bullets from the guns cracking past and with others pinging and shrieking as they ricocheted off the paving, he would have been an idiot not to be afraid. Hadn’t Gracchus just called him a smart fellow?
Wounded men screamed to either side of the road. Cassius raised his rifle to his shoulder and fired two shots at the swooping biplane. He knew he wasn’t the only guerrilla shooting at it. But he was sure one of his shots caught the pilot in the chest. He had a good bead on the man, and saw him throw up his arms when he was hit. The biplane never pulled out of the dive, but slammed into the ground less than a hundred yards away.
“Do Jesus!” Cassius exclaimed through the crunching thud of the impact and the roar of the fireball that went up an instant later. “Do Jesus!” Machine-gun rounds in the burning wreck started cooking off, pop! pop! pop!, like firecrackers on the Fourth of July. A bullet snapped past Cassius’ head, as if the pilot were still fighting back from beyond the grave.
“You the one who nailed that ofay asshole?” Gracchus asked, coming out from between the rows of corn that grew to either side of the road.
“Reckon I am,” Cassius answered. Then he coughed. The breeze was blowing back from the downed airplane toward him. It was thick with the smells of burning fabric, burning fuel, hot metal-and charred flesh. He thought that odor would stay with him the rest of his life.
“How come you didn’t run and hide?” the guerrilla leader asked.
“Beats me,” Cassius said honestly. “Just didn’t think to, I guess.”
“Didn’t think to? Didn’t fuckin’ think to?” Gracchus came up and gave him an affectionate clout in the side of the head. “Hope you do some more not thinkin’ real soon now, you hear? You know what the ofays gonna do when they find out you shoot down their fancy airplane? They gonna shit, that’s what.” He clouted Cassius again, which the younger man could have done without. Cassius knew better than to say so.
He looked down at the asphalt around his feet. Bullet scars pockmarked it. The white man in that airplane had done his level best to kill him. One of the bullet marks lay right between his feet. He started to realize just how lucky he was. It didn’t make him feel proud or brave. No, it made him want to shiver instead.
Not everybody was so lucky. The guerrillas were doing what they could for their wounded. What they could do was pitifully little. They could bandage. They could suture-crudely. They could put alcohol or iodine on injuries. If they were desperate enough, they could put ether on a rag and go after a bullet with stolen forceps. Past that…no. Was there a black doctor, a black surgeon, anywhere in the CSA? Cassius didn’t think so. Oh, maybe in New Orleans. People went on and on about what Negroes in New Orleans were supposed to be able to do.
Were there any Negroes, surgeons or otherwise, in New Orleans these days? Or had they all gone to the
camps like the rest of Cassius’ family? If they had, would any of them ever come out again?
Cassius feared he knew the answer. He knew it, but he didn’t want to think about it. Thinking about it would have meant thinking about his mother and father and sister.
“We gots to get outa here,” Gracchus said. “Even if that fucker wasn’t on the wireless-an’ he was bound to be, damn him-they gonna come see how come their airplane done crashed.”
“Ambush ’em?” Cassius asked.
Gracchus blinked. He thought. At last, reluctantly, he shook his head. “Don’t reckon we could pull free an’ disappear fast enough afterwards,” he said. “They be on our trail like bloodhounds.” Had he ever read Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Cassius had, though the novel remained banned in the CSA sixty years after the slaves were-allegedly-manumitted. But he didn’t think Gracchus could read at all.
He couldn’t very well argue with the guerrilla leader about the risks. Since he couldn’t, he made himself nod instead. “Whatever you say.”
To a commander, that was always the right answer. Because it was, Gracchus condescended to explain: “This ain’t the Army. I lose my men, I can’t pick up no telephone an’ git mo’. I gots to find ’em, same way I found you. Sometimes I gots to learn ’em to fight, way I learned you. Don’t want to lose ’em. Happens, but I don’t want it to. Want the ofays an’ the Mexicans to lose their bastards instead.”
He’d learned war in a sternly practical school. Cassius knew he himself remained a beginner, even if he was a beginner who’d just luckily aced an important test. He nodded and gave back the magic words once more: “Whatever you say.”
“I say we gets outa here,” Gracchus declared. And they did. If Cassius wished for what might have been…this wasn’t the first time, nor the most urgent. He hurried away with the rest.
Every time Jonathan Moss read in captured papers about U.S. advances deeper into Tennessee, he wanted to head north. When he and Nick Cantarella escaped from Andersonville, he never imagined men in green-gray could penetrate the Confederacy the way the USA’s soldiers were. Jake Featherston’s butternut-clad troops were pushing into western Pennsylvania then, and it hadn’t been clear whether anything or anybody could stop them.
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