Nellie Semphroch pasted a sign to the boards that still did duty for her shattered front window: yes, we have iced coffee. She'd lettered it herself, along with the slogan just below: come in & try it. it's good. With summer's heat and humidity as they were, she would have lost half her business without iced coffee.
"Have to go to the bank," she muttered, and then laughed at herself. Banks in Washington, D.C., weren't safe these days. Anyone with any sense kept his money at home or in his store or buried in a tin can in a vacant lot. A robber might take it away from you, but the Army of Northern Virginia might take it away from the bank. The Confederates, from everything she'd seen of them, made the local robbers seem pikers by comparison.
Off in the distance, artillery rumbled. Nellie hadn't heard that sound since the early days of the war, for the Confederates' opening drive had pushed the front too far north for the gunfire to carry. It had returned with the U.S. Army's spring offensive, the breakout from Baltimore. But the breakout, like so many breakouts in the war, had not turned into a breakthrough. The Rebs, though they'd drawn back from Pennsylvania, still held most of Maryland, and U.S. forces were nowhere near ready to regain poor Washington. As if to underscore that, a couple of Confederate soldiers came out of Mr. Jacobs' shoemaker's shop across the street, one of them holding a pair of marching boots, the other shiny black cavalry boots. The fellow with the cavalry boots must have told a joke, for the other Reb laughed and made as if to throw half his own footgear at him.
Nellie ducked back inside the coffeehouse and said, "I'm going over to Mr. Jacobs' for a few minutes, Edna."
"All right, Ma," her daughter answered from behind the counter. The place was busy—too busy, Nellie hoped, for Edna to get into any mischief while she was gone. Nicholas Kincaid wasn't in there soaking up coffee and mooning over Edna, which Nellie took for a good sign.
She had to hurry across the street to keep a big truck from running her down. The colored man at the wheel of the truck laughed because he'd made her scramble. She glared at him till the truck turned a corner and went out of sight. She was a white woman. She deserved better treatment from a Negro. But, she reminded herself sadly, she was also a damnyankee, and so deserving of no respect from Confederates, even black ones.
The bell above the shoemaker's door jingled as Nellie went inside. She'd thought Jacobs was alone, but he was in there talking with another gray-haired, nondescript man. They both fell silent, quite abruptly. Then Mr. Jacobs smiled. "Hello, Widow Sem-phroch," he said smoothly. "Don't be shy—this is my friend, Mr. Pfeiffer. Lou, Widow Semphroch runs the coffeehouse across the street. She is one of the nicest ladies I know."
"Pleased to meet you, ma'am," Lou Pfeiffer said.
"And you, Mr. Pfeiffer, I'm sure." Nellie glanced over at the shoemaker. "Since you have your friend here, Mr. Jacobs, I'll come back another time."
"Don't hurry off," Jacobs said. "Mr. Pfeiffer—Lou—was telling me something very interesting. You might even want to hear it yourself. If you're not too busy, why don't you stay?"
"Well, all right," Nellie said, a little surprised. She'd intended giving Mr. Jacobs some of the dirt she'd gleaned from the coffeehouse, and he had to know that. He wouldn't have wanted her to do it while anyone else was around. So why keep her here when she couldn't speak of what really mattered? She shrugged. "Go ahead, Mr. Pfeiffer."
"I was just telling Hal here what a nuisance it is to try and keep pigeons in Washington these days," Pfeiffer said. Hal—Nellie raised an eyebrow. Years across the street from Mr. Jacobs, and she'd never known his first name. His friend went on, "The Rebs don't want anybody having birds these days. Pigeons aren't just pigeons, not to them. A pigeon can carry a message, too, so they've confiscated all the birds they could find."
"But they haven't found all of them, eh, Lou?" Jacobs said.
Pfeiffer shook his head. He had a sly look to him that had nothing to do with his rather doughy features—more the glint in his eye, the angle at which he cocked his head. "Not all of 'em, no. Not mine, for instance. Not some other people's, too. We've got an underground, you might say. We keep birds, but the Rebs don't know it. Makes life exciting, so to speak." He set a finger by the side of his nose and winked.
A few months before, Nellie would have taken his jaunty talk at face value and not even thought to look below the surface. Now— Now she was convinced everything had unplumbed depths. "That is interesting, Mr. Pfeiffer," she said. She looked at him, then at Mr. Jacobs: a silent question.
Ever so slightly, the shoemaker nodded. He turned to Pfeiffer and started to laugh. "You see, Lou? Not just a nice lady, but a clever one, too."
"I see," Pfeiffer said agreeably. "I've thought so, from what you've said about her every now and then."
That cleared up the last small doubt Nellie had had. "Can I tell you some interesting things I've heard in the coffeehouse, Mr. Pfeiffer, or would you rather have me wait and tell Mr. Jacobs so he can tell you?"
"She is a clever lady," Pfeiffer said, and then, to Nellie, "You can tell me—eliminate the middleman." He and Jacobs both wheezed laughter.
So Nellie, as if casually gossiping, told of the troop movements and other interesting bits of news she'd heard in the coffeehouse over the past couple of days. She got interrupted once, when a colored servant brought in a Confederate officer's boots for resoling. The Negro paid no attention to anything but his business, and was soon gone. Nellie finished her—report was the right word for it, she thought.
"Well, well," Lou Pfeiffer said. "Yes, I am glad I still keep pigeons, that I am. Thank you, Widow Semphroch."
"Nellie, isn't it?" Mr. Jacobs said suddenly.
"That's right—Hal," she answered, smiling at him. He smiled back. They'd knocked down a barrier, one they'd taken for granted but one that had been there for a long time. She smiled at Mr. Pfeiffer, too, partly for being what he was, partly for his help in making that barrier fall. "Gentlemen, if you'll excuse me, I have to go back across the street and keep the Rebs in order at the coffeehouse. A pleasure to have met you, Mr. Pfeiffer."
"And you, Widow Semphroch," Pfeiffer said as she went out the door.
When she got back into the coffeehouse, Edna discreetly beckoned her over. She went, curious to see what could make her daughter circumspect. In a low voice, Edna said, "There was a man came in here askin' after you, Ma, and I didn't fancy his looks even a little, if you know what I mean."
Fear leaped up and bit Nellie. The Rebs would have people hunting U.S. spies. "What did he look like?" she asked, forcing herself to speak quietly, too.
"Old and ugly," Edna answered with the callousness of youth. "Either he ought to shave or else he ought to let his whiskers grow, one way or the other. Said his name was Bill or Phil or Pill or something like that." She shrugged. It hadn't been important to her.
A chill ran through Nellie. That sounded altogether too much like Bill Reach to suit her. "If he ever comes back, tell him I don't want his business here. If he doesn't like that, throw him out. I'm sure some of our customers would be delighted to help you do anything you ask."
"Yeah, probably," Edna said; she enjoyed being attractive to the Rebs. Her gaze sharpened. "He's known you for a long time, this fellow, whoever he is, hasn't he?"
"Why do you say that?" Nellie asked, at the same time as she was thinking, Longer than you 've been alive.
Edna gave back some of that thought: "He said I looked just like you did when you were my age, maybe even younger. Did he know you way back then, Ma? That's a long time ago now."
Don't I know it. Nellie made her shrug quiet, casual, easygoing. "I knew a lot of men when I was a young lady." And even more when I wasn't being a lady. "I don't remember anybody named Phil or Pill, though." She hoped her smile was disarming.
It wasn't disarming enough. "How about somebody named Bill?" Edna said.
"A lot of Bills back then." Nellie tried a small joke: "Always a lot of bills, never enough money to pay 'em."
"You're givi
ng me the runaround, Ma." Edna didn't raise her voice, but sounded very certain. She had a right to sound that way; a lifetime with her mother had made Nellie transparent to her. "How well did you know this fellow, anyways? Did you ... ?" She wouldn't say it, but she was thinking it.
"None of your business," Nellie hissed, and then, louder, "Go serve that man there, would you? He wants himself filled up again."
Edna glared at her, but went over to give the Confederate lieutenant another cup of coffee. "There you go, Toby," she said, smiling a smile very close to the ones Nellie had once had to paste onto her own face.
"Thank you, Miss Edna," Toby said. She put a little extra wiggle into her walk, too; the Reb's eyes followed her every inch of the way back behind the counter. Nellie wanted to grab her daughter and shake her or, better yet, pour a pitcher of iced coffee over her head.
And serving the Confederate hadn't distracted Edna or made her forget what she'd asked her mother. "C'mon, Ma," she said. "Don't tell me you actually had a life back then?"
"Whatever I had back then, it wasn't very good," Nellie said. "All I'm trying to do is keep you from going through the same things I did."
Edna shrugged. "You got through 'em, looks like, even if you're too goody-goody to talk about it now. You don't want me to have a good time, that's all. It ain't fair."
Nellie sighed. They'd had this fight before. Likely they were going to go right on having it, too. "You don't know what you're talking about," Nellie said. That was true. It was also the problem. Edna didn't know, and was wild to find out. / won't let her, Nellie told herself fiercely. / won't.
Bremen, Kentucky, had been a coal-mining town before the U.S. First Army drove the Confederates out of it. Abner Dowling had no doubt the place had been grimy and ugly and smelly back in peacetime. Now it was grimy, ugly, doubly smelly thanks to so many dead horses nearby, and wrecked to boot. Given a choice, it was not where Dowling would have made First Army headquarters. He had not been given a choice.
"Dowling!" George Armstrong Custer shouted. His rasping, old man's voice put his adjutant in mind of the braying of the donkey in the fairy tale about the musicians of Bremen. Dowling had done plenty of braying himself, reading his nieces the fairy tale. They'd giggled wildly, back ten years before. "Dowling!" Custer yelled again. "Coming, sir," Dowling said. Listening to a real donkey bray wasn't nearly so much fun as impersonating one. The major squeezed his bulk through the narrow doorway of the house Custer had taken over. He came to attention; Custer was a stickler for courtesy—from subordinates. "What can I do for you, sir?"
"Bring me some coffee from the mess," Custer said. "Put some fuel in it before it gets here, too."
"Yes, sir," Dowling said resignedly. He turned to go. Custer didn't drink so much as some officers he'd known—but then, they hadn't been in command of whole Armies, either.
"Do you know," Custer said, "I hardly drank at all—no more than for medicinal purposes—till after we lost the Second Mexican War. No matter the renown I won in that last campaign, the thought of my beloved country having gone down to defeat at the hands of rebels and traitors and stabbed in the back by foreign foes twice in a generation's time was too much for me to bear. Since then, I have been known to indulge myself, as an anodyne if nothing else."
"Yes, sir," Dowling repeated. He didn't know whether the lieutenant general was telling the truth or not. He didn't much care, either. However Custer had first made the acquaintance of the brandy bottle, he'd since become quite intimate with it.
Getting the coffee and adulterating it was a matter of a few minutes. Dowling was carrying the steaming cup back to Custer when the general let out a great bellow, as if he'd been gored by a bull. Oh, Lord, what now? Dowling thought. It wasn't, he was sure, that the First Army drive on Morehead's Horse Mill had stalled: it had been obvious for days that U.S. forces weren't going to reach the road junction that had been their goal since they forced the Rebs out of Madisonville any time soon. It also wasn't the casualty figures coming from their efforts to reach the town. Custer viewed casualty figures with considerable equanimity, especially seeing how many of them his own headlong ferocity caused. What was rattling his cage, then?
"Is something wrong, sir?" the major said, advancing with the coffee cup. "Here, drink this and you'll feel better for it." At least you won't be able to scream while you're drinking it.
Custer seized the cup and poured its contents down his throat. His face, already red, got redder. He coughed a couple of times before coherent if highly irate speech emerged. "That son of a bitch! That no-good, lying, stinking scoundrel. That fiend in human shape. When I'm through with the bastard, he'll wish he was never born. I already wish he was never born."
"Uh—who, sir?" Dowling asked. If Custer was swearing at General Pershing or one of the other younger officers in the service, Dowling's job was to listen and calm him down and make sure he wouldn't do anything that would damage not only himself (something Dowling didn't mind at all) but also First Army (which would be regrettable).
"Who?" Custer thundered. "That blackguard Davis, that's who!" For a moment, Dowling remained confused, Davis being anything but an uncommon name. Then Custer pointed to the Scribner's magazine on his desk. It hadn't been there when Dowling went to get the general's coffee. A messenger must have delivered it to Custer and then disappeared in a hurry.
Dowling felt a certain amount of sympathy for that messenger. Unfortunately, he didn't have the option of disappearing in a hurry. Very cautiously, he asked, "You're disappointed in the coverage you got from Richard Harding Davis?"
"Disappointed? Great heavens, the man proves himself a pathological liar." Custer picked up the offending periodical and thrust it at his adjutant. "See for yourself, Major."
The title of Davis' article was innocuous enough: "The First Army Attacks: Part Two." Part One had run a couple of weeks before, and had been a paean of praise for First Army's courage. Custer had not complained about it at all. Dowling rapidly skimmed through Part Two. The more he read, the more he had to work to keep his face not merely straight but sympathetic. Richard Harding Davis, a manly man himself, had been imperfectly impressed with the person of George Armstrong Custer: "neck wattled like a turkey's," "squinting little pouchy eyes," and "hair that bought its color from a bottle in a vain attempt to hold back Father Time" were some of the choicer epithets.
Davis hadn't had much good to say about the generalship involved in the first gas attack, either. "Opportunity squandered" was a phrase he used several times. "Failure to achieve a breakthrough despite the advantages given by the preceding chlorine barrage" was also sure to raise Custer's hackles. To Dowling's way of thinking, though, the most telling bit of evidence that the war reporter did know what he was talking about was the comment that "up and down the front, troops were committed to battle in a deployment more aggressive than strategically sound." That was Custer's style, set out in black and white for all to see.
"I'm sorry, sir," Dowling said, handing the Scribner's back to the commanding general. 'Those reporters, they're not to be trusted." Inside, he was chortling. Custer was drawn to publicity like iron filings to a magnet. He'd used it astutely, enabling himself to stay in the Army past what should have been retirement age. Now it had turned on him and bit him. There was a saying about he who lived by the sword, and another one about the pen's being mightier than that sword. Put those together and examine their implications...
Custer was not in a mood for logical examinations. "If I ever set eyes on that lying son of a whore again, I'll horsewhip him within an inch of his worthless life. I trusted him to tell the truth about me—"
/ trusted him to paint me in glowing colors, the way too many reporters have done for too many years: Dowling had no trouble making his own translation of Custer's remarks.
The general was in full spate now: "—and my boys in the trenches, hearing about this—this tripe, will wonder whether I have the right stuff to lead them against the hereditary f
oe."
Reluctantly, Dowling admitted to himself that Custer had a point there. The men who did the actual fighting needed to think their general had their best interests at heart and was using them wisely. The loss of that feeling was what had made McClellan's Army of the Potomac fall to pieces after Camp Hill during the War of Secession: figuring they'd get licked no matter what they did, the rank and file gave up.
Back then, the feeling had been justified; studying McClellan's campaigns, Dowling had been struck by the way he was always a step and a half behind Lee. The trouble was, he didn't think Custer's men were justified in having confidence in their commander. Custer was brave and liked to go right at the enemy. Having said that, you exhausted his military virtues.
No—in military politics, at least, he had a solid Machiavellian streak in him. "Davis is TR's fair-haired boy, too," he muttered gloomily. "When the president sees this, I can kiss Canada goodbye forever—he's going to want my scalp."
That last was true only metaphorically, Custer being bereft of hair on the portion of his scalp Indians had customarily removed. "It will be all right, sir," Dowling said, sympathetically if not sincerely. "You and TR fought side by side against the limeys in the Second Mexican War. I'm sure he'll remember that."
Half to himself, Custer muttered, 'Teddy always did say his troops outperformed my regulars."
Roosevelt's volunteer cavalry, a regiment of miners and farmers, had indeed done yeoman work in Montana, fighting their British opposite numbers to a standstill, and had led the pursuit after the British blundered straight into Custer's Gatling guns. In Dowling's view, TR had a point; only the armistice U.S. President Blaine had had to accept had kept the triumph from being bigger than it was.
"I'd have licked them anyway," Custer said, sounding as if he was trying to convince himself. Maybe he would have: nobody examined Chinese Gordon's campaigns alongside Napoleon's. Dowling's opinion remained that Custer had probably needed all the help Teddy Roosevelt gave him.
All of which was irrelevant. He pointed to the Scribner's. "What do we do about that, sir?"
American Front Page 59
