“Tomorrow morning, uh, sir,” Ben Carlton said to McSweeney, “a lot of us are going to end up dead.”
McSweeney gave the cook a cold look. “Take it up with the Lord, not with me. I am going forward. So are you. God will choose who lives and dies.” Carlton went off muttering to himself. McSweeney checked his rifle, read his Bible, rolled himself in his blanket, and slept the sleep of an innocent man.
The U.S. bombardment blasted him awake a little before dawn. He nodded his approval. Short and sharp—that was the way to do it. A week-long bombardment only gave the Rebs a week to get ready, and didn’t kill nearly enough of them to be worth that.
Whistles blew, up and down the line. “Come on, you lugs!” McSweeney shouted. “Follow me. I’ll be the one they shoot at first, I promise you.”
With that encouragement, he led his platoon over the parapet and through the grass toward the edge of the now more battered wood, from which little winking lights—the muzzle flashes of machine guns and Tredegars—began to appear. Bullets clipped leaves from bushes and stirred the tall blades of grass almost as a stick might have done.
“By sections!” McSweeney yelled. “Fire and move!”
Half the men he led went down, though only a few had been shot. The ones on their knees and bellies blazed away to cover the advance of the rest. After a rush, the men ahead hit the dirt and fired while the former laggards rose and dashed past them.
They took casualties. Had it not been for their tactics—and for the artillery still falling in the woods, knocking over trees fast enough to make Paul Bunyan jealous—they would have taken more. But the survivors kept going forward in ragged waves. Several bullets cracked past Gordon McSweeney close enough for him to feel the wind of their passage. One brushed at his sleeve, so that he looked over to see if a comrade close by was tugging his arm. Seeing no one close by, he realized what must have happened. “Thank you, Lord, for sparing me,” he murmured, and ran on.
Then he was in among the trees. The covering barrage moved deeper into Craighead Forest, leaving it up to the men in green-gray to finish dealing with the men in butternut it had not killed or maimed. The Confederates were there in distressing numbers; they knew, as U.S. soldiers knew, how to lessen the damage artillery did.
That left hard, hot work to do. Many—not all—of the C.S. machine-gun crews stayed at their guns even after U.S. soldiers had got by them on either flank, lingering to do their foes as much harm as they could before they were slain. They were brave men, brave as any in green-gray.
McSweeney knew as much. He’d known as much since the day he crossed the Ohio into Kentucky. “The Egyptians who followed Pharaoh into the opening in the Red Sea after the children of Israel surely were brave men,” he muttered. “The Lord let the Red Sea close on them even so, because they were wicked.”
Confederates fired from behind and from under trees. Snipers fired from in the trees. The Rebels fought from their trenches. They popped up out of foxholes. Sometimes they hid till several U.S. soldiers had passed them, then turned around and fired at their backs.
McSweeney had blood on his bayonet before he was a hundred yards into the woods. He’d been changing clips when a Confederate soldier lunged at him. How the Reb had screamed when the point went into his belly! He would scream like that forever in hell.
“Schneider’s down!” somebody shouted. McSweeney waited for one of the other lieutenants, all of them senior to him, to start directing the company. None of them did. Maybe they were down, too. He shouted orders, driving the men on. He was loud and sounded sure of what he was doing, the next best thing to being sure of what he was doing.
Forming any firm line in the forest was impossible. The Confederates kept filtering past the U.S. forward positions and raising Cain. They knew the woods better than their foes—some of them had probably hunted squirrels and coons through these trees—and did not mean to lose them.
“Here!” McSweeney threw aside the bodies of two Rebs from the machine gun at which they’d fallen. He grabbed a couple of his own men and turned the machine gun around. “If you see any of those miscreants, shoot them down.”
“Miscre-whats, sir?” one of them shouted at him.
“Confederates,” he answered, which satisfied the soldier. He and his pal wouldn’t be so good as a properly trained crew, but they would be better than nothing for as long as their ammunition held out. McSweeney did that several more times, getting firepower any way he could.
U.S. machine guns started coming forward into Craighead Forest, too. By nightfall, most of it was in U.S. hands, though Confederate cannon kept shelling the woods their side had held when day began. Maybe the men in green-gray would be able to mount a flank attack on Jonesboro afterwards, maybe not. McSweeney couldn’t tell. He didn’t care, not too much. He’d done his job, and done it well.
Scipio squatted on his heels in the mud by the Congaree River, reading a newspaper one of the black fighters of what still called itself the Congaree Socialist Republic had brought back from a Fort Motte park bench. Going into a town was dangerous; actually buying a newspaper from a white man would have been suicidally dangerous.
“Do Jesus!” Scipio said, looking up from the small print that gave him more trouble than it had a few years before. “Sound like the Yankees is kickin’ we where it hurt the most.”
Cassius was gutting catfish he’d pulled out of the muddy river. When they were fried, they would taste of mud, too. Cassius threw offal into the river before cocking his head to one side and giving Scipio a glance from the corner of his eye. “Them Yankees ain’t kickin’ we, Kip,” he said at last.
Scipio snorted. “Don’ tell me you believes we gwine lick they any day now, an’ we jus’ fallin’ back to fool they. De papers prints de lies like that to keep de stupid buckra happy.”
“I knows it,” Cassius answered calmly. “De lies makes de buckra mo’ and mo’ stupid, too. But, Kip, you gots to recollect—de Congaree Socialist Republic ain’t at war wid de United States. The Confederate States, they is at war, but you ain’t no Confederate citizen, now is you? Never was, ain’t, never gwine be. This here the onliest country you gots, Kip.”
Instead of answering, Scipio buried his nose in the newspaper again. He did not trust himself to keep from saying what he really thought if he spoke at all. Since he would surely be shot the moment he did, shot and tossed in the river like catfish guts, he thought silence the wiser course.
A country! A country of mud and weeds and muddy water and stinks and furtive skulking and shells falling out of the sky whenever the militia managed to lay their hands on some ammunition. A country surrounded by a real country intent on wiping it from the face of the earth. A country that existed more in Cassius’ imagination than in the real world.
“We is the free mens,” Cassius said. “The ’pressors o’ de world got no power here.” Methodically, he gutted another fish.
Cherry came striding up in her tattered trousers. She moved like a free woman, or perhaps more like a catamount, graceful and dangerous at the same time. Scipio could readily understand how she’d enthralled Jacob Colleton. She didn’t just smolder. She blazed.
Now she squatted down beside Cassius and said, “What you think o’ dis story Vipsy bring back from Marshlands?”
“Woman, you knows what I thinks,” Cassius answered impatiently. “I thinks Miss Anne bait a trap fo’ we. I thinks I ain’t gwine be foolish enough to put this here head”—he tapped it, almost as if to suggest he had another one stored somewhere not far away—“in de noose.”
Cherry’s lips skinned back from her white teeth in a hungry smile. “But if it so, Cass, if it so an’ we can git our hands on de treasure—”
“But it ain’t, an’ you knows it ain’t, same as I knows it ain’t,” Cassius said, his voice still good-natured, but with iron underneath.
“How you know that for a fac’?” Cherry demanded. “You was a hunter. You wasn’t into the mansion all de time, no more’n me.”
Cassius pointed at Scipio, as Scipio had known he would. “Dis nigger here, he know if anybody do. Kip, you tell Cherry what you done tol’ her before. See if maybe she listen dis time, damn stubborn gal.”
Scipio found himself longing for the polite, precise formality of the English he’d spoken as Anne Colleton’s butler. He could have disagreed without offending much more readily in that dialect than in the speech of the Congaree. “Cassius, he right,” he said, as placatingly as he could—he might have been more afraid of Cherry than of Cassius. “Ain’t no treasure.”
“How you know dat?” Cherry snapped. “How kin you know dat? Miss Anne, she one white debbil bit of a ’pressor, but she one sly white debbil bitch, too. Couldn’t never git away from we las’ Christmas, she weren’t one sly white debbil bitch.”
In the other English, the English he spoke no more, Scipio would have talked about probabilities, and about the impossibility of proving a negative. He could not do that in the dialect of the Congaree. Instead, at last losing his temper, he answered, “I knows Miss Anne’s business better’n any other Marshlands nigger, and I says there ain’t no treasure. You wants to go lookin’ fo’ what ain’t dere, go on ahead. An’ if de buckra wid de guns blows yo’ stupid head off ’cause they layin’ fo’ you like you was a deer, don’ you come back here cryin’ afterwards.”
Cherry’s eyes blazed. Her high cheekbones and narrow, delicate chin told of Indian blood; now she looked as if she wanted to take Scipio’s scalp. Her voice was deadly: “An’ when I comes back wid de money, drag you down an’ cut your balls off—or I would, if I reckoned you gots any.”
“Easy, gal, easy,” Cassius said. Sometimes Scipio thought Cherry alarmed the hunter who led the Reds, too. Cherry had not an ounce, not a speck, of give anywhere about her splendidly shaped person. Cassius went on, “You make a man ’fraid to tell you de truth, or what he reckon de truth, sooner o’ later you gwine be sorry you done it.”
Cherry tossed her head in a gesture of magnificent contempt Scipio had seen from her many times before. Pointing to him, she said, “He don’ need me to make he afraid. He wish he was still Miss Anne’s house nigger, still Miss Anne’s lapdog.” She spat on the ground between Scipio’s feet.
Scipio violently shook his head, the more violently because she told nothing but the truth. He’d never wanted anything to do with the revolutionary movement, partly because of a suspicion—an accurate suspicion, as things turned out—the Red revolt would fail, partly because he had indeed been comfortable in the life he was living at Marshlands. He’d always assumed that, if anyone in power among the revolutionaries learned as much, he was a dead man.
But then Cassius said, “I knows dat. We all knows dat. De lap dog like de sof’ pillow an’ de fancy meat in de rubber dish. He cain’t he’p it.”
Right then, Scipio was glad of his dark, dark skin. No one could see the flush that made him feel he was burning up inside. He schooled his features to the impassivity required of a butler. Let no one know what you are thinking. He’d had that beaten into him in his training. It served him in good stead now.
Cassius went on, “But Kip, he keep he mouf shut. He don’ never say boo to Miss Anne ’bout we. De proletariat, dey gots nuffing to lose in de revolution. Kip, he gots plenty to lose, an’ he wid us anyways. If dat don’ make he a hero o’ de revolution, you tell me what do.”
Cherry tossed her head again. “Shit, he jus’ too ’fraid to betray we. He know how he pay fo’ dat.”
She was right again. Fortunately for Scipio, Cassius didn’t think so. The hunter said, “He have plenty chances to give we away an’ git away clean, an’ he never done it. He wid us, Cherry.”
“He ain’t,” Cherry said positively. “Miss Anne spread she legs, he come runnin’ to lick dat pussy wid de yellow hair, same as he always done.”
“Liar!” Scipio shouted now, a mixture of horror, embarrassment, and fury in his voice. Only after that anguished cry passed his lips did he realize she might have been using a metaphor, if a crude one. Part of the embarrassment, he realized with a different kind of horror, was that Anne Colleton was beautiful and desirable. But a black man who was found out looking on a white woman with desire in the CSA was as surely dead as one who betrayed the revolutionary movement.
Even Cassius looked distressed. “Enough, Cherry!” he said sharply. “You gots no cause to rip he to pieces dat way.”
“Got plenty cause,” Cherry retorted. “An’ when I comes back with the treasure, Cass, we see who am de gen’l sec’tary o’ de Congaree Socialist Republic after dat.” She stalked off.
Cassius sighed. “Dat one hard woman. Ain’t nobody gwine stop she—she gwine try an’ fin’ dat treasure, an’ it don’t matter if it ain’t there. She try anyways.”
“She gwine get herself killed,” Scipio said. “She gwine get whoever go wid she killed, too.”
“I knows it,” Cassius said unhappily. “I ain’t no fool, an’ I weren’t borned yesterday. But how is I s’posed to stop she? If I shoot she wid my own gun, she dead, too—an’ dat bitch liable to shoot first. I done told her, don’ go. But she don’ listen to what I say.” He sighed again, a leader hard aground on the shoals of leadership. “I brings her up befo’ de revolutionary tribunal, they liable to do like she say, not like I say. Dere some stubborn revolutionary niggers on de tribunal. I oughts to know. I put ’em dere my ownself.”
“Maybe you jus’ let she go, then,” Scipio said. “Maybe you jus’ let she go an’ get herself killed.” His voice turned savage. “Maybe dat jus’ what she deserve.” If he could find a way to get a message to Anne Colleton, letting her know when Cherry was going to try to plunder Marshlands, he would do it, and it would be a true message, too. Letting—helping—one of the women who’d made the past year and a half of his life a nightmare dispose of the other had a sweet ring of poetic justice to it.
But Cassius was watching him with those hunter’s eyes. Somebody was watching him all the time. The surviving revolutionaries did not altogether trust him. They had good reason not to trust him. Casually, as if he weren’t thinking at all, he took from his belt a tin cup that had once belonged to a Confederate soldier now surely dead. He dipped up water from the river and drank. The water tasted of mud, too. Only because he’d grown up in a slave cabin not far away could he drink it without having his guts turn inside out.
Cherry and half a dozen men went treasure hunting the next day. Cassius watched them go with a scowl on his face. If by some accident Vipsy had been telling the truth, if by some accident Miss Anne had done something of which Scipio was ignorant, Cassius’ place at the head of the Congaree Socialist Republic was indeed in danger. Could the Red rebels survive a leadership struggle? Scipio had his doubts.
But Cherry came back after sundown, empty-handed. Scipio had hoped she wouldn’t come back at all. The glower she aimed at him almost made her return worthwhile, though. He concentrated on his bowl of stew—turtle and roots and other things he ate and tried not to think about.
“I knows dat treasure there,” Cherry said. “I’s gwine find it. I ain’t done. Don’t nobody think I’s done.” She glared at Scipio, at Cassius, at everyone but the men who’d followed her. Scipio wore his butler’s mask. Behind it, he kept on trying to figure out how to get a message to Anne Colleton.
Marie Galtier held out a tray loaded with stewed chicken to Dr. Leonard O’Doull. O’Doull held up both hands, palms out, as if warding off attack. “Merci, Mme. Galtier, but mercy, too, I beg you,” he said. “One more drumstick and I think I’ll grow feathers.”
Marie sniffed. “I do not see how you could grow feathers when you do not eat enough to keep a bird alive.”
“Mother!” Nicole said reprovingly, and Marie relented.
Dr. O’Doull looked over to Lucien Galtier. “Seeing how she feeds you, it is to me a matter of amazement that you do not weigh three hundred pounds.”
“Our father is very light for his weight,” Georges said before Lucien co
uld answer.
“In the same way that you, my son, are very foolish for your brains,” Galtier said, and managed to feel he had got a draw with his son, if not a win over him.
Serious as usual, Charles Galtier asked, “Is it true, monsieur le docteur, that U.S. forces continue their advance against Quebec City?”
“Yes, from what I hear at the hospital, that is true,” Dr. O’Doull told Galtier’s elder son.
“Is it also true that fighting alongside the forces of the United States is a corps from the soi-disant Republic of Quebec?” Charles asked.
“Charles…” Lucien murmured warningly. Speaking of it as the so-called Republic of Quebec before an American, one of the people who called it that, was something less than the wisest thing his son might have done.
But Leonard O’Doull, fortunately, took no offense. “Not a corps, certainly, for there are not nearly enough volunteers for a Quebecois corps,” he replied. “But a regiment, perhaps two regiments of Quebecois from the Republic—yes, I know they are in the line, for I have treated some of their wounded, being called upon to do so because I am lucky enough to speak French.”
It was a straightforward, reasonable, matter-of-fact answer. Lucien waited with some anxiety to hear how his son replied to it. If Charles denounced the Republic, life could grow difficult. But Charles said only, “I do not see how Quebecois could volunteer to fight Quebecois.”
“In the War of Secession, brother fought brother in the United States—what was the United States,” O’Doull said. “It is not an easy time when such things happen.”
“But no one outside created the Confederate States, n’est-ce pas?” Charles said, doggedly refusing to let go. “They came into being of themselves.”
To Lucien’s relief, his son once more failed to get a rise out of Dr. O’Doull. “Perhaps at the beginning, yes,” the American said, “but England and France have helped prop them up ever since. Now, though, the props begin to totter.”
Breakthroughs Page 28
