"I is Cassius," the Negro answered. "You sho' you got to waste time wid de captain? I got 'portant things to do up here in Yankeeland."
"Think a good bit of yourself, don't you, Cassius?" Martin said dryly. "Yes, you have to go see Captain Wyatt. You satisfy him, he'll pass you on up the line. And if you don't—" He didn't go on. Cassius sounded like a man with a head on his shoulders. He could work that out for himself.
Cassius picked his way over and around sleeping men and avoided holes in the bottom of the trench with an ease a cat would have had trouble matching and Martin couldn't approach. The Negro couldn't have acquired that sense of grace and balance chopping cotton all day. Martin wondered what he had done.
Captain Wyatt, as it happened, was awake, studying a map under the tiny light from a candle shielded by a tin can. He looked up when Martin and Cassius drew near. "This the man we're looking for, Sergeant?" he asked.
"I think so, sir," Martin answered. "His name's Cassius, and he's a Red." He wondered how the Negro would react to that. He just nodded, matter-of-factly, as if he'd been called tall or skinny. He was a Red.
Wyatt frowned. Martin knew he was a Democrat, and a conservative Democrat at that. But after a moment his face cleared. "If the Rebs have themselves a nice Red revolt in their own backyards, that won't make it any easier for them to fight us at the same time." He swung his eyes toward the black man. "Isn't that right, Mr. Cassius?" Martin had never heard anybody call a Negro Mister before. Cassius nodded. "It's right, but we make dis revolution fo' our ownselves, not fo' you Yankees. Like I tol' you' sergeant here, one fine day you gits yo' own revolution."
"Yes, when pigs have wings," Wyatt said crisply. The two men glared at each other in the gloom, neither yielding in the least. Then the captain said, "But it's the CSA we're both worried about now, eh?" and Cassius nodded. Wyatt went on, "I still don't know if it was them or the Canucks who set Utah on its ear, but your people will do worse to them than Utah ever did to us." He pointed to Martin. 'Take him back to the support trenches and tell them to pass him on to divisional headquarters. They'll see he gets what he needs."
"Yes, sir," Martin said. He headed for the closest communications trench, Cassius following. As they made their way back through the zigzag trench connecting the first line to the second, Martin remarked, "I sure as hell hope you give those Rebs a hard time."
"Oh, we do dat," Cassius said. With a dark skin, wearing a muddy Confederate laborer's uniform, he might almost have been an invisible voice in the night. "We do dat. We been waitin' fo' dis day a long time, pay they back fo' what dey do to we all dese years."
Chester Martin tried to think of it as an officer would, weighing everything he knew about the situation. "Even with the Rebs' having to fight us, too, you, uh, Negroes are going to have the devil's own time making the revolution stick. A lot more whites with a lot more guns than you've got."
"You Yankees gwine help wid de guns—I here fo' dat," Cassius said. "An' dis ain't no uprisin' o' jus de niggers o' de CSA. Dis an uprisin' o' de proletariat, like I done say befo'. De po' buckra—"
'The what?" Martin asked.
"White folks," Cassius said impatiently. "Like I say, de po' buckra, he 'pressed, too, workin' in de factory an' de mill fo' de boss wid de motorcar an' de diamond on he pinky an' de fancy seegar in he mouf. Come de revolution, all de proletariat rise up togedder." He walked on a couple of steps. "What you do 'fo' you go in de Army?"
"Worked in a steel mill back in Toledo," Martin answered. "That's where I'm from."
"You in de proletariat, too, den," Cassius said. 'The boss you got, he throw you out in de street whenever he take a mind to do it. An' what kin you do about it? Cain't do nothin', on account of he kin hire ten men what kin do jus' de same job you was doin'. You call dat fair? You call dat right? Ought to point you' gun at dey fat-bellied parasites suckin' de blood from yo' labor."
'Telling a soldier to rise up against his own country is treason," Martin said. "Don't do that again."
Cassius laughed softly. "Tellin' de proletariat to rise up fo' dey class ain't no treason, Sergeant. De day come soon, you see dat fo' your own self."
A sergeant in the secondary trenches called a challenge that was more than half a yawn. Had Martin and Cassius been Confederate raiders, the fellow probably would have died before he finished. As things were, he woke up in a hurry when Martin identified his companion. "Oh, yes, Sergeant," he said. "We've been told to expect him."
Martin surrendered the Negro with more than a little relief and hurried back up toward the front line. Some of the things Cassius had said worried him more than a little, too. So did the Red's calm assumption that revolution would break out, come what may, not only in the Confederate States but in the United States as well.
Could it? Would it? Maybe it had tried to start in New York City on Remembrance Day, but it had been beaten down then. Would it stay beaten down? Capital and labor hadn't gotten on well in the years before the war. Plenty of strikes had turned bloody. If a wave of them came, all across the country ...
After the war, something new would go into the mix, too. A lot of men who'd seen fighting far worse than strikers against goons would be coming back to the factories. If the bosses tried to ignore their demands—what then? The night was fine and mild, but Martin shivered.
Captain Stephen Ramsay remained convinced that his Creek Army rank badges were stupid and, with their gaudiness, were more likely to make him a sniper's target. He also remained convinced that entrenching in—or, more accurately, in front of—a town was a hell of a thing for a cavalryman to be doing.
Not that Nuyaka, Sequoyah, was much of a town—a sleepy hamlet a few miles west of Okmulgee. But, with the damnyankees shifting forces in this direction, it had to be defended to keep them from getting around behind Okmulgee and forcing the Confederates out of the Creek capital.
Where the blacks had run off, everybody had to do nigger work. Ramsay used an entrenching tool just as if he still was the sergeant he'd been not so long before. Alongside him, Moty Tiger also made the dirt fly. Pausing for a moment, the Creek noncom grinned at Ramsay and said, "Welcome to New York."
"Huh?" Ramsay answered. He paused, too; he was glad for a blow. The heat and humidity made it feel like Mobile. "What are you talking about?"
"New York," Moty Tiger repeated, pronouncing the name with exaggerated care, almost as if he came from the USA. Then he said it again, pronouncing it as a Creek normally would have. Sure as hell, it sounded a lot like Nuyaka.
'This... little town"—Ramsay picked his words with care, not wanting to offend the Creek sergeant—"is named after New York City?" Moty Tiger nodded. Ramsay asked, "How come?"
"Back in Washington's time, when the Creeks still lived in Alabama and Georgia, he invited our chiefs to New York to make a treaty with him," the sergeant told him. "They were impressed at how big and fine it was, and took the name home with them. We took it here, too, when the government of the USA made us leave our rightful homes and travel the Trail of Tears." His face clouded. "Richmond has been honest with us. The USA never was. Being at war with the USA feels right."
"Sure does," Ramsay said. But the Creeks had been fighting the USA back when his ancestors were U.S. citizens. That made him feel strange whenever he thought about it. The Confederate States had been part of the United States longer than they'd been free. If they'd lost the War of Secession the damnyankees had forced on them, they'd still be part of the USA. He scowled, thinking, Christ, what an awful idea.
Perhaps luckily, he didn't have time to do much in the way of pondering. When you were digging like a gopher trying to get underground before a hawk swooped down and carried you away, worries about what might have been didn't clog your mind.
Colonel Lincoln, whose two-jewel insigne was twice as absurd as Ramsay's, came up to look over the progress the Creek regiment had made. He nodded his approval. "Good job," he told Ramsay. "You've got foxholes back toward town dug, so you can fal
l back if you need to, you've got the machine guns well sited, you've done everything I can think of that you should have."
"Thank you, sir," Ramsay said. "And this isn't any ordinary town, either." He told Lincoln the story of how Nuyaka had got its name.
"Is that a fact?" Lincoln said.
"Yes, sir," Moty Tiger answered when Ramsay glanced his way. Colonel Lincoln shook his head in bemusement. Like Ramsay, he was careful to do or say nothing that might offend the Indians he commanded. But Nuyaka, any way you looked at it, was pretty damn funny.
Lincoln peered back toward Okmulgee. Smoke and dust were rising up above the hills rimming the valley in which the town sat. The rumble of artillery carried across the miles. "They're pounding each other again," he said.
"Sure sounds that way, sir," Ramsay agreed. "I'm glad to be out of there, you want to know the truth. This here"—he waved at the Creeks preparing the position in front of Nuyaka—"it ain't cavalry fighting, but it's better than what it was back there. For now it's better, anyways."
"For now," Colonel Lincoln echoed. "The fight around Okmulgee has got itself all bogged down, the way things are in Kentucky and Virginia and Pennsylvania: a whole lot of men battling it out for a little patch of ground. But Sequoyah's got too much land and not enough men for most of it to be like that. And where men are thinner on the ground, you can get some movement."
"Not cavalry sweeps," Ramsay said mournfully. "Hell of a thing, training for years to be able to fight one kind of way, and then when the war comes, you find you can't do it."
"Machine guns," Lincoln said. By the way he said it, he couldn't have come up with a nastier curse if he'd tried for a week. He pointed to the ones the Creeks were setting up. "They'll mow down the Yankees if they try to come in this direction, but they mow down horses even better than they do men."
"Yes, sir, that's a fact," Ramsay said. He thought back to the days when the Confederates had been raiding up into Kansas rather than U.S. troops pressing down into Sequoyah. "If this war ever really gets moving again, it'll have to be with armored motorcars, not horses."
"Armored motorcars?" Moty Tiger said. "I read about those in the newspapers. Bad to run up against, are they?"
"You shoot a horse, it goes down," Ramsay said dryly. "You shoot one of those motorcars, the bullets mostly bounce off. It's got machine guns, too, and it keeps right on shooting at you. I'm just glad the damnyankees don't have a whole lot of them."
"More than we do." Captain Lincoln sounded grim. "Back before the war started, they were building a lot more automobiles than we were."
"They come this way, we'll deal with 'em, sir," the Creek sergeant said. Ramsay didn't want to discourage pluck like that. The Creeks had turned out to make far better, far steadier soldiers than he'd ever figured they would. One of the reasons was, they thought they could do anything. When you thought like that, you were halfway—maybe more than halfway—to being right.
They got the rest of that day, that night, and the first hour or so of daylight the next morning to dig in before the first U.S. patrols started probing their positions. Pickets in rifle pits well in front of the main Creek position traded gunfire with the Yankees.
Things had changed over the past year. When the war was new, infantry running up against opposition would mass and then hurl itself forward, aiming to overwhelm the foe by sheer weight of numbers. Sometimes they did overwhelm the foe, too, but at a gruesome cost in killed and wounded.
No more. The damnyankees coming down toward Nuyaka from the north must have been veteran troops. When they started taking fire, they went to earth themselves and fired back. Instead of swarming forward, they advanced in rushes, one group dashing up from one piece of cover to another while more soldiers supported them with rifle fire that made the Creeks keep their heads down, then reversing the roles.
In danger of being cut off from their comrades, the pickets retreated to the main line. When the U.S. troops drew a little closer, the machine guns opened up on them, spraying death all along the front. Again, the U.S. soldiers halted their advance where a year before they would have charged. It was as if they were pausing to think things over.
Not far from Ramsay, Moty Tiger peered out over the forward wall of the trench. "Uh-oh," he said. "I don't like it when they stop that way. Next thing that happens is, they start shooting cannon at us."
"You're learning," Ramsay told him. He looked back over his own shoulder. The Confederates had promised a battery of three-inch field pieces to help the Creek Nation Army hold Nuyaka. Ramsay hadn't seen any sign of those guns. Getting shelled when you couldn't shell back was one of the joys of the infantryman's life with which he'd become more intimately acquainted than he'd ever wanted.
Instead of rolling out the artillery, though, the damnyankees, as if to give Moty Tiger what he'd said he wanted, rolled out a couple of armored motorcars. The vehicles didn't come right up to the trench line. They cruised back and forth a couple of furlongs away, plastering the Creek position with machine-gun fire.
Ramsay threw himself flat as bullets stitched near. Dirt spattered close by, kicked up by the gunfire. Cautiously, he got to his feet again. "Shoot out their tires, if you can," he shouted to the Creek machine-gun crews. The tires weren't armored, although these motorcars, unlike the first ones Ramsay had encountered, carried metal shields covering part of the circumference of the wheels.
One of the armored motorcars slowed to a stop. The Creeks cheered. It was less of a victory than they thought, though, as they soon discovered. The motorcar, though stopped, kept right on shooting. "Where are those damn guns?" Ramsay growled. "A target you'd dream about—"
Sometimes dreams did come true. He'd just sent a runner back toward Okmulgee to demand artillery support when earth started fountaining up around the automobile. Its hatches flew open. The two-man crew fled for the nearest Yankee foxhole moments before the machine was hit and burst into flames. The other armored motorcar skedaddled, shells bursting around it. It hid itself behind bushes and trees before it got knocked out. The Creeks yelled themselves hoarse.
"The damnyankees already have one New York," Ramsay said to Moty Tiger, trying to pronounce the name as the Indian did. "What the hell do they need with two?" His sergeant grinned at him by way of reply.]
XVII
Sylvia Enos finished tying George, Jr.'s, shoe. Her son had just turned five; pretty soon she or, better, George would teach him to tie shoes for himself, and that would be one less thing she'd have to worry about every morning. Quite enough would be left as things were.
She looked up. In the half minute during which she'd been dealing with those shoes, Mary Jane had disappeared. "Come here this instant," she called. "We're going to be late."
"No!" Mary Jane said from the bedroom she shared with her brother. No was her standard answer to everything these days; not long before, she'd answered no when asked if she wanted a piece of licorice. She'd realized that tragic error a moment too late, and burst into tears.
Sylvia didn't have much time or patience left. "Do you want me to whack you on the fanny?" she demanded, clapping her hands together.
"No!" Mary Jane answered, this time with alarm instead of defiance.
"Then come out here and behave yourself," Sylvia said. "I have to go to work, and you have to go to Mrs. Coneval's. Come out right now, or—"
Mary Jane appeared, both hands pressed over her bottom to protect it from the slings and arrows of an outraged mother. Sylvia knew she shouldn't laugh; that just encouraged her daughter's mischief, and a two-year-old needed no such encouragement. She couldn't help herself, though.
Virtuously, George, Jr., said, "I'm all ready, Mama."
"Good," Sylvia said. "And now Mary Jane is ready, too, so we'll go to Mrs. Coneval's." She held out her hands. George, Jr., took one and Mary Jane the other. They paraded down the hall to Brigid Coneval's flat. At Sylvia's knock, Mrs. Coneval opened the door. "Ah, 'tis the hero's children," she said. "Come in, the two of ye.
" George, Jr., puffed out his little chest and looked impressive and important. It all went over Mary Jane's head.
"I'll see the two of you tonight," Sylvia said, bending down to kiss her children.
"Good-bye, Mama," George, Jr., said. "I'll be good."
"I'm sure you will, lamb." Sylvia turned to Mary Jane. "You'll be good, too, won't you?"
"No," Mary Jane said, which might have been prediction or warning or—Sylvia hoped—nothing more than the answer she gave to most questions these days.
"She's no trouble at all," Brigid Coneval assured Sylvia. "Good as gold, she is ... most o' the time. But if I've coped with my own hellions so long, she'll have to go some to put me out of kilter." She cocked her head to one side. "And how does it feel to be after having your husband's picture in the papers and all?"
"It feels wonderful. We have a copy of the Globe framed in the kitchen," Sylvia answered, and then, "I wish they'd never done it."
Confusion spread across Mrs. Coneval's long, pale face. "Begging your pardon, but I don't follow that."
"Now that the papers have blabbed what that fishing boat did and how it did it, it'll be harder and more dangerous for them to do it again," Sylvia explained. "I wish the Rebs didn't have any idea what sort of trick they used."
"Ah, now I see," Mrs. Coneval breathed. "God bless you, Mrs. Enos, and may He keep your man safe." She crossed herself.
"Thank you," Sylvia said from the bottom of her heart. She did a lot of praying, too. It had brought George safe from the sea to North Carolina, and from North Carolina back to Boston.
Whatever God chose to do about that, He wouldn't let her stand around flapping her gums with Brigid Coneval. She hurried downstairs. The air was cooler and fresher outdoors than in the apartment building, but that wasn't saying much. It was going to be hot and sticky. It was usually hot and sticky in Boston in July, but she hadn't known what that meant, not really, till she'd put in a few shifts under a corrugated tin roof at the fish-canning plant.
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