"Yeah, that's about right." Cincinnatus sighed. "I be go to hell, though, if I see us black folks gettin' any kind o' square deal after the war, an' it don't matter if the USA or the CSA win."
"Dat's the exact truth," Apicius said emphatically. "The exact truth, an' nothin' but the truth, so help me God." He held up a meaty hand, as if taking oath in court—not that blacks could testify against whites in court, not in the CSA. After stirring the barbecue sauce again, he went on, "On de odder hand, there's undergrounds and then there's undergrounds."
"Is that a fact?" Cincinnatus said. If Apicius was going to come to a point, he hoped the fat cook would do it soon.
And, in his own way, Apicius did. Offhandedly, he asked, "You ever hear tell about the Manifesto?"
He didn't say what kind of manifesto. If Cincinnatus hadn't heard of it, he probably would have slid the talk around to something innocuous, then sent him on his way none the wiser. But Cincinnatus did know what he was talking about. He stared, wide-eyed. "Be you one of the people who—" He didn't go on. He'd heard about Reds a good many times, always in the whispers that were the only safe way to mention such people. He hadn't really imagined he would meet such an exotic specimen.
"We git justice for ourselves," Apicius said in a voice that had nothing in it of the jolly-fat-man persona he affected, only steely determination. "Come the revolution, nobody treat a workin' man like dirt only on account of he be black."
That was a heady vision. Cincinnatus, however, had already met the heady visions of the Confederacy and the United States, and seen how neither reality lived up to those visions. He had no reason save hope blinder than he could justify to believe the Red vision would be different. And besides— "Even if the revolution come in the CSA, right now we be under the USA, and it don't look like they gonna give us up."
"Revolution comin' in the USA, too," Apicius replied with calm certainty. "Now we kin help the Red brothers in the CSA—we git stuff they kin use, ship it south, an'— What so funny?"
Between giggles, Cincinnatus got out, "We take stuff the white men in the Confederate States ship north, an' use it to drive the damnyankees crazy. Then we take stuff the damnyankees ship south, an' use it to drive the white men in the CSA crazy. If that ain't funny, what is?"
Apicius' smile was thin (the only thin thing about him), but it was a smile. "You wif us, then?"
When Elizabeth found out, she'd want to kill him. He had a baby now. He was supposed to be careful. That consideration made him hesitate a good half a second before he answered, "Yes."
Up in Pennsylvania, Jake Featherston had been acutely conscious that he'd come to a foreign country. Houses looked different; the winter weather had been harsher than he was used to; the local civilians, those who hadn't fled before the advancing Army of Northern Virginia, had looked and sounded different from their counterparts in the CSA; and they hadn't made any bones about despising the men in butternut who'd overrun their farms and towns.
Now the Army of Northern Virginia wasn't advancing any more. It wasn't in Pennsylvania any more, either. Hampstead, Maryland, where Jake's battery in the First Richmond Howitzers was stationed, looked a lot more like a corresponding small town in Virginia than had anything he'd seen in Pennsylvania. The Old Hampstead Store, for instance, wouldn't have been out of place in some rural county seat outside of Richmond: a two-story clapboard building, a hundred years old if it was a day, in the shape of an L, with a massive water pump shielded from the street by the longer side of the L.
Nero was working the pump. When he'd filled a bucket, Perseus lugged it over to the horse trough. The draft animals that had pulled the battery's cannons and ammunition limbers drank greedily. "Don't give 'em too much too fast," Jake said warningly. 'They're liable to get the colic and peg out, and we can't afford that, not now."
"Yes, suh, Marse Jake, I knows," Perseus answered. "But they got to drink some. They been workin' hard."
"I know," Featherston said. "I don't think we'll do much more moving back, though." He paused to wipe his sweaty forehead. "We better not, or we'll be fighting this damn war back in Virginia."
Jeb Stuart III came round the corner in time to hear that. "It will not happen, Sergeant," he said crisply. 'They will not get past us. They will not come any farther. All right: we couldn't take Philadelphia. That's too bad; it might have made the damnyankees roll over and show us their bellies like the cowardly curs they are. But Maryland we hold, Washington we hold, and we're going to keep them."
"Yes, sir," Jake said—you didn't get anywhere arguing with your captain. But he couldn't help adding, "If the damnyankees are such terrible cowards, how come they're moving forward and we're going back?"
"We aren't," Stuart said. "Not one more step back—I have that straight from the War Department in Richmond."
When Jeb Stuart HI had something straight from the War Department in Richmond, he had it straight from his father, who'd worn the wreathed stars of a Confederate general for a good many years. That sort of information came straight from the horse's mouth, then. Featherston said, "It's good to hear, sir—if the Yankees cooperate."
For a moment, Stuart seemed more a tired modern soldier than the cavalier he tried to be. His shoulders sagged a little. "The trouble with the Yankees, Sergeant, is that God was having an off day when he made them, because he turned out altogether too many. They die by thousands, but more thousands keep coming— as you may perhaps have noticed."
"Who, me, sir?" All too well, Featherston remembered the U.S. barrage that had cost him his first gun crew, and remembered pouring shells into oncoming green-gray waves till they broke barely beyond rifle range of his piece. 'There's a lot of weight behind them," he agreed.
"There certainly is—weight of metal and weight of men," Stuart said. "And they use that advantage of size in place of true courage, battering us down by stunning us with their big guns and then drowning us in those assaults that leave hillsides and meadows paved with broken bodies from one end to the other. You ask me, Sergeant, that has very little to do with real courage, real elan, as our gallant French allies call it. Elan consists of throwing yourself at the foe regardless of his size, and in going forward for the simple reason that you refuse to admit to yourself you might be beaten. Look what it did for us in the opening days of the war."
"Yes, sir," Jake said. "Took us all the way to the Susquehanna— but not quite to the Delaware."
"If we'd made it to the Delaware, we surely would have crossed it and broken into Philadelphia," Stuart agreed, "and Baltimore would have withered on the vine. But without elan, could we have stopped the Yankee breakout from Baltimore before it trapped all our forces up in Pennsylvania?"
"I guess not, sir," Featherston said, which, by the sour look Stuart gave him, was not a good enough answer. But he didn't know whether it had been elan or good field fortifications that had stopped the U.S. drive. For that matter, he didn't know for a fact it was stopped. The Yankees were still shipping men and materiel down into the bulge around Baltimore. Sooner or later, it would burst again, like any carbuncle. "But if they break past Poplar Springs toward Frederick, we may have to skedaddle out of here yet."
Now Stuart looked angry: he'd had his theory contradicted. He put a biting edge in his voice: "Sergeant, I've seen the trench lines we've constructed to make sure the Yankees don't break out. I am confident they will hold against any pressure brought to bear against them, just as I am confident the lines ahead of us will hold against any conceivable pressure from the north."
"Yes, sir," Featherston said woodenly. He was kicking himself for disagreeing with the captain after he'd told himself not to be so foolish. But, damn it, wasn't he a free white man, with the right to say anything he chose? The way the Army treated you, you had to act like a Negro to your superiors. He didn't see the justice in that.
Pompey came up and said, "Captain Stuart, suh, your supper will be ready in a couple minutes. We found us a nice wine to go with your lamb chops, suh. I'm
sure you'll enjoy it."
"I don't doubt that," Stuart said. Pompey went on his way. Watching him, Stuart returned to the argument with Jake: "Without our niggers, the Yankees would squash us flat, no way around it. But with them to build the works we use, every white Confederate man is a fighting man. We use our resources more efficiently than the USA can."
"Yes, sir, that's a fact," Featherston agreed, now anxious for nothing so much as to get the battery commander out of his hair. He was watching Pompey, too, still wondering whether he'd been right to tell that major about Stuart's servant. He'd never find out now, not with the influence a Stuart had in Richmond just because he was a Stuart.
Happier now that the sergeant was agreeing with him, Captain Stuart headed off, presumably to enjoy his lamb chops. Featherston wasn't going to be eating lamb chops; he'd have whatever came out of the battery kettle, probably some horrible slumgullion whose sole virtue was filling his belly. He wouldn't have a nice wine with his slop, either. He clicked tongue between teeth. The First Richmond Howitzers had been an aristocratic regiment since the days of the War of Secession. He'd managed to get in because he was good at what he did. Everybody above the rank of sergeant had got in by being good at who he was. Some times the differences were more glaring than others.
To Nero, Perseus said, "Bet you that Pompey, he gwine eat his-self lamb chops tonight, too."
"I dunno," Nero answered. "Maybe he gwine wait till Cap'n Stuart done used 'em up, then go to the latrine to git 'em." Both black men laughed. So did Jake Featherston, down deep inside. Seeing the Army's Negroes distrusting one another made white men sleep better at night.
Actually, nothing could have made Featherston sleep well that night. U.S. aeroplanes buzzed over Hampstead, dropping bombs at random. None of them landed within a couple of hundred yards of the battery; none of them, so far as Jake could judge from the absence of screams and cries of alarm from Confederate soldiers, landed within a couple of hundred yards of any worthwhile target.
Even landing out of the range where they could do any damage, though, they made a hell of a racket. Antiaircraft guns hammered away at the U.S. bombers, adding to the din. They didn't hit anything—or, at least, the rhythm of the engines throbbing overhead didn't falter.
Eventually, the U.S. aeroplanes gave up and flew back to the north. Jake rolled himself tighter in his blanket—which was sti-flingly hot but which had the virtue of shielding large areas of his anatomy from mosquitoes—and went back to sleep.
Some time in the wee small hours, another flight of bombing aeroplanes visited Hampstead. Again, they dropped their bombs with nothing more than the vaguest idea of where those bombs might land. And again, the bombs did no damage Featherston could discern. They did, however, wake him up and keep him awake when he would sooner have grabbed as much sleep as he could get.
The next morning, shambling around like a drunk, barely remembering his own name, he realized the bombers had done some damage after all.
XIX
A few miles outside of Boston harbor, Patrick O'Donnell stuck his head out of the cabin of the Spray and called to George Enos, "The submersible has cast off the tow and the telephone line. Haul 'em aboard."
"Aye aye, Skipper," Enos answered; the biggest difference between life aboard the Spray and the way things had gone aboard the Ripple was that commands got answered in Navy talk these days.
George wished he had a winch with which to haul in the thick line and the insulated telephone wire wrapped around it. But the Spray had no winches for its own trawls, and one would have looked decidedly out of place at the stern. The steam trawler wanted to look like an ordinary fishing boat, not arousing the suspicions of Entente warships till too late. And so he did the work by hand.
Harvey Kemmel said, 'Talk about locking the barn door after the horse has been stolen."
Although he had been in the Navy for years, Kemmel still flavored his speech with Midwestern farm talk George Enos sometimes found incomprehensible and often amusing. Today, though, he could do nothing but nod. "We were a little on the excited side when we sank that Rebel submarine," he admitted. "Beginners' luck, you might say."
"One way to put it," Kemmel said. "Christ, our pictures in the paper and everything. Felt good while it lasted, but we haven't had a sniff from the Rebs or the Canucks since."
A nibble, Enos would have said. However you said it, though, the message was the same. Nobody could prove the enemy was wise to the trick the Spray and other boats like her were trying to play, but neither she nor any of those other boats had lured a cruiser or a submarine to destruction since, either. "Hey, we've got a good load offish in the hold," George said, pausing for a moment to look back over his shoulder.
Kemmel rolled his eyes. "I don't think I'm ever going to look a fish in the face again, now that I know what a hell of a lot of work it is to try and catch the bastards. I thought I was tired on a destroyer, but I didn't know what tired was. I feel like somebody rode me hard and put me away wet."
That was another comparison Enos never would have come up with on his own; he had trouble remembering the last time he'd ridden a horse. Again, though, he understood what his comrade was driving at. He answered, "The smaller the boat, the more work it takes."
"You did this stuff for years, didn't you?" Kemmel said. "Each cat his own rat, but—" He shook his head in bemusement.
"I'd sooner fish than watch a horse's rear end all day," George answered, dirt farming being the only thing he could think of that might possibly have been harder work than fishing.
"Soon as I got old enough, though, I got off my pa's farm and as far away as I could go," Kemmel shot back. "War hadn't come along, you would have kept on doing this your whole blessed life."
George Enos shut up and went back to pulling in the heavy, wet rope and the telephone line, one tug after another, hand over hand. It was hard work, but easier than bringing in the trawl full of fish. There was, at the moment, nothing at the end of this rope.
He'd just brought in the dripping end and coiled the rope neatly in place when a tug steamed up alongside the Spray and demanded her papers: no ship got into the harbor these days without being stopped and inspected first. Since they were Navy, passing the inspection proved easy enough. A pilot came aboard to guide them through the mine fields protecting Boston from enemy raiders. Every time they came back from a trip out to one fishing bank or another, more mines had been sown. Every once in a while, the mines came loose from their moorings, too. Then, pilot or no pilot, a boat or even a ship was likely to go to the bottom in a hurry.
"Wonder where the submersible's gone," Enos said. As had become its custom, the submersible had remained under the sea after releasing the towline. Maybe it went into Boston, sneaking under the mines, or maybe to one of the other ports nearby.
Harvey Kemmel laughed. "I can tell you ain't been in the Navy long—you still ask questions. What they want you to know, they'll tell you. What they don't want you to know ain't your business anyhow." George would have argued with him, but he looked to be right.
The pilot brought them in to T Wharf as if the Spray were an ordinary fishing boat. Patrick O'Donnell disposed of the catch as if she were an ordinary trawler, too. Then the illusion that she was still a part of the civilian world took a beating: an officer with a lieutenant commander's two medium-width stripes surrounding a narrow one strolled up the wharf to the Spray and said, "Men, you'll come with me. We have some matters to discuss." By that, he meant he would tell them what to do and they would do it.
"What's going on, sir?" George asked him. Off to one side, Harvey Kemmel snickered. Enos' ears got hot. He did still ask questions. The United States were a free country, and most places you could do things like that. But when you were in the Navy, your freedom disappeared.
"I'm going to pretend I didn't hear that," the lieutenant commander said. The hell of it was, George understood the fellow was doing him a favor.
They all walked down T Wharf afte
r the officer. Real fishermen and other people with business on the wharf gave them curious looks, those who didn't know they were Navy themselves. What the dickens did a spruce lieutenant commander want with a bunch of ragamuffins in dungarees and overalls and slickers and hats that had seen better days?
Most of the couple of blocks just back of T Wharf were full of tackle shops and saloons and boatbuilders' offices and whorehouses: businesses serving the fishing trade and the men who worked it. In one of the whorehouses, a girl stood naked behind a filmy curtain: a living advertisement. A cop across the street looked the other way. Actually, he looked right in at her, but he didn't do anything about her. George looked at her, too. He was happy being married to Sylvia, but he was a long way from blind.
He flicked a glance up toward the lieutenant commander. The man's head never moved. Maybe his eyes slid to the right, but George wouldn't have bet on it. He seemed as straight an arrow as Enos had come across in some time.
He led the crew from the Spray into a Navy recruiting station sandwiched between a saloon and a cheap diner. Charlie White said," 'Scuse me, sir, but we already joined up." The ex-fishermen all laughed. The sailors who filled out the crew didn't.
A couple of young men sat in there, talking earnestly with a gray-haired petty officer. Enos had a pretty fair idea what they were doing: trying to convince him they ought to be allowed to put on whites before conscription made them don green-gray. From things he'd read about what life in the trenches was like, and from the black-bordered casualty lists the papers printed day in and day out, he had a hard time blaming them.
The lieutenant commander led the men from the Spray into a back room. "Be seated, men," he said, waving to the chairs around the big wooden table. There were just enough chairs for the ersatz fishermen and, at the head of the table, for the officer. As George Enos sat down, he wondered if that was a coincidence. He had his doubts. The Navy didn't run on coincidences.
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