Chapter VIII
Nellie Jacobs opened her eyes. She was lying on a hard, unyielding bed, staring up into a bright electric light bulb. When she blinked, the bulb seemed to waver and float. It also seemed much farther away than a self-respecting ceiling lamp had any business being.
Hovering between her and the lamp were her daughter and her husband. Hal Jacobs asked, “Are you all right, darling?”
“I’m fine.” Even to herself, Nellie sounded anything but fine. What she sounded was drunk. She felt drunk, too, at least to the point of not caring what she said: “Don’t worry about me. I was born to hang.” She coughed. That hurt. So did talking. Her throat was raw and sore and dry. As she slowly took stock of herself, that was far from the only pain she discovered. Someone had been using her belly for a punching bag.
“Do you know where you’re at, Ma?” Edna Semphroch asked her.
“Of course I do,” she answered indignantly. That bought her a few seconds in which to cast about through the misty corridors of her memory and try to find the answer. Somewhat to her own surprise, she did: “I’m in the Emergency Hospital at the corner of Fifteenth and D, Miss Smarty-Britches.” Recalling where she was made her recall why she was there. “Holy suffering Jesus! Did I have a boy or a girl?”
“We have a daughter, Nellie,” Hal said. If he was disappointed at not having a son, he didn’t show it. “Clara Lucille Jacobs, six pounds fourteen ounces, nineteen and a half inches—and beautiful. Just like you.”
“How you do go on,” Nellie said. A little girl. That was nice. Little girls, thank God, didn’t grow up to be men.
Someone new floated into her field of view: a man clad all in white, even to a white cloth cap on his head. A doctor, she realized, and giggled at being able to realize anything at all. Businesslike as a stockbroker, he asked, “How are you feeling, Mrs. Jacobs?”
“Not too bad,” she said. “I had ether, didn’t I?” She remembered the cone coming down over her face, the funny, choking smell, and then…nothing. The doctor was nodding. Nellie nodded, too, though it made her dizzy, or rather, dizzier. “I had ether, and after that I had the baby.” The doctor nodded again. Nellie giggled again. “A lot easier doing it like that than the regular way,” she declared. “One hell of a lot easier, believe me.”
“Most women say the same thing, Mrs. Jacobs,” the doctor answered. Her cursing didn’t bother him. He’d surely heard a lot of patients coming out from under ether. He hadn’t even noticed. Edna had, and was smirking.
Nellie went on taking stock. She’d felt a lot of labor pains before Hal and Edna brought her to the hospital, and a lot more before the doctors put her under. But she’d missed the ones at the end of the affair, and those were far and away the worst. And she’d missed the process of, as one of her fallen sisters had put it many years before, trying to shit a watermelon. Sure as sure, this was better.
“Would you like to see your daughter, Mrs. Jacobs?” the doctor asked.
“Would I ever!” Nellie said. Smiling, the doctor turned and beckoned. A nurse brought the baby, wrapped in a pink blanket, up to Nellie. Clara was tiny and bald and pinkish red and wrinkled. Edna had looked the same way just after she was born.
“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Hal said.
“Of course she is,” Nellie answered. Edna looked as if she had a different opinion, but she was smart enough to keep it to herself.
“If you want to give her your breast now, you may,” the doctor said.
What, right here in front of you? Nellie almost blurted. That was foolish, and she figured it out before the words passed her lips. He’d had his hands on her private parts while delivering Clara. After that, how could she be modest about letting him see her bare breast?
But she was. He must have read it in her face—and, of course, he would have seen the same thing in other women, too. He said, “Mr. Jacobs, why don’t you step out into the hall with me? I think your wife might have an easier time of it with just the ladies in here with her.”
“Oh. Yes. Of course,” Hal said. He followed the doctor out of the room, looking back over his shoulder at Nellie as he went.
“Slide down your gown, dearie, and you can give your wee one something good,” the nurse said. She was a powerfully built middle-aged woman with the map of Ireland on her face. After Nellie exposed her breast, she set the baby on it. Clara knew how to root; babies were born knowing that. She didn’t need long to find the nipple and start to suck.
“Ow,” Nellie said, and made a hissing noise between her teeth. She’d forgotten how tender her breasts were and would be till nursing toughened them up.
“She’s getting something, sure enough,” the nurse said. Nellie heard the gulping noises the baby was making, too. The nurse went on, “You’ll be better off if you go right on nursing her, too. Breast-fed babies don’t get the bowel complaints that carry off so many little ones, not nearly as often as them that suck a bottle.”
“Cheaper and easier to nurse a baby, too,” Nellie said. “Nothing to buy, nothing to measure, nothing to boil. I’ll do it as much as I can.”
Edna watched in fascination. “They know just what to do, don’t they?”
“They do that,” the nurse said. “If they didn’t, not a one of ’em’d live to grow up, and then where would we be?”
“You were the same way,” Nellie told Edna. “I reckon I was the same way, too, and my ma, and her ma, and all the way back to the start of time.” She didn’t mention little Clara’s father, nor Edna’s father, nor her own father, nor any other man. That wasn’t because she assumed they were the same way, too. It was because, as far as she was concerned, men weren’t worth mentioning.
After about ten minutes, the baby stopped nursing. Nellie handed her to the nurse, who efficiently burped her. Clara cried for a little while, the high, thin wail of a newborn that always put Nellie in mind of a cat on a back fence. Then, abruptly, as if someone had turned a switch on her back, she fell asleep.
Nellie found herself yawning, too. Not only were the remnants of the ether coursing through her, but she’d also been through labor and delivery: hard work, even if she hadn’t felt most of it.
“Rest now, if you want to,” the nurse said. “We’ll want to keep you here for a week, maybe ten days, make sure you don’t come down with childbed fever or anything else.” She cast a speculative eye toward Nellie. That or anything else no doubt meant or anything else that’s liable to happen to an old coot like you.
Had Nellie had more energy, she might have resented that. As she was now, without enough get-up-and-go to lick a postage stamp, she simply shrugged. A week or ten days with nothing to do but nurse the baby and eat and sleep looked like heaven to her.
Edna took a different perspective. “A week? Ten days?” she exclaimed in mock anger. “You’re going to leave me running things by myself so long, Ma? That’s a lot to hand me.”
“I’ve already done a lot,” Nellie said. “Besides, the place has to bring in enough to pay for my little holiday here.”
It didn’t, not really. She and Hal had saved up enough to meet the hospital bill. Hal knew how to sock away money. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world. Nellie wished she were better at that. She’d learned some from paying attention to the way her husband handled things. Maybe she could learn more.
Edna stopped complaining, even in fun. Nellie thought she recognized the gleam in her daughter’s eye. Hal wouldn’t be able to watch Edna the way Nellie had ever since she’d become a woman. Edna wouldn’t have a lot of time to get into mischief, but a girl didn’t need a lot of time to get into mischief. Fifteen minutes would do the job nicely.
And maybe, nine months from now, Edna would have an ether cone clapped over her face and wake up with a baby hardly younger than its aunt. If she did, Nellie hoped the baby would have a last name.
She yawned again. She was too tired even to worry about that very much. Whatever Edna did in the next week or so—if she did anything—she would damn well do, and she and Nellie and Hal would deal with the consequences—if there were consequences—later. The only thing Nellie wanted to deal with now was sleep. The light overhead and the hard hospital mattress fazed her not at all.
Before she could sleep, though, her husband came back into the room. He bent over her and kissed her on the cheek. “Everything will be fine,” he said. “The doctor tells me you could not have done better. You will be well, and little Clara will be well, and every one of us will be well.”
“Bully,” Nellie said, and then a new word she’d started hearing in the coffeehouse: “Swell. Hal, you’re sweet as anything, but will you please get the hell out of here and let me rest?”
“Of course. Of course.” He almost stumbled over his own feet, he went out the door so fast. He paused in the doorway to blow her a kiss, and then he was gone. A moment later, Nellie was gone, too.
They woke her in the middle of the night to nurse the baby again. By then, all the anesthetic had worn off. Not to put too fine a point on it, she felt like hell. The night nurse brought her some aspirin. That was sending a boy to do a man’s job. She wondered if she’d be able to go back to sleep once they took Clara away again. She did, which testified less to the tablets’ effectiveness than to her own overwhelming exhaustion.
When she woke in the morning, she was ravenous. She would have yelled at Edna for serving a customer such greasy scrambled eggs, overcooked bacon, and cold toast. The coffee they gave her with it might have been brewed from mud. She didn’t notice till the whole breakfast was gone. While she was eating, she noticed only that it filled the vast, echoing void in her midsection.
After Clara had had breakfast, too, a nurse escorted Nellie down the hall so she could take a bath. It was the first time she’d had a good look at her body since the baby was born. She didn’t care for what she saw, not even a little bit. The skin of her belly hung loose and flabby, having been stretched to accommodate the baby who wasn’t in there any more. It would tighten up again; she remembered that from the days following Edna’s birth. She’d been a lot younger in those days, though. How much would it tighten now?
If Hal wanted her less after she came home…that wouldn’t break her heart. It would, if anything, be a relief. She resolved to lay in a supply of safes. Now that she knew she could catch, she didn’t intend to do it again. If Hal didn’t care to wear them—She grimaced. There were other things they could do, things that carried no risk. She hated those things, having had to do them for men who laid coins on the nightstands of cheap hotel rooms, but she hated the notion of getting pregnant again even more.
As it had been on the way to the bathtub, her walk on the way back was not only slow but distinctly bowlegged. She remembered that, too. She’d had a baby come through there, all right. Clara was waiting for her when she returned to her bed. Nellie startled herself with a smile. Another baby, no. This one? “Not so bad,” she said, and took her daughter in her arms.
On the night of November 4, Roger Kimball headed over to Freedom Party headquarters on King Street to get the Congressional election returns as fast as the telegraph brought them into Charleston. He’d tried to get Clarence Potter and Jake Delamotte to come along with him. They’d both begged off.
“If your madman friends do win some seats, I’ll want to go out and get drunk, and I don’t mean by way of celebration,” Potter had said. “That being so, I may as well go straight to a saloon now. The company’s apt to be better, anyhow.”
“I aim to get drunk no matter what happens,” Jack Delamotte had echoed. He’d gone along with Potter.
Summer soldiers, Kimball thought. They’d been willing enough to think about using Jake Featherston, but hadn’t settled down for the long haul of using Featherston’s party. A submersible skipper learned patience. Those who didn’t learn ended up on the bottom of the ocean.
Smoke filled the Freedom Party offices when Kimball walked in. As soon as the door closed behind him, he held up a gallon jug of whiskey. A raucous cheer went up, and everybody in the place welcomed him like a long-lost brother. His was far from the only restorative there; several men already seemed distinctly elevated. He laughed. Potter and Delamotte could have got drunk here and saved themselves thousands of dollars—not that thousands of dollars meant much any more.
“We’re leading in the fourth district up in Virginia!” somebody at one of the bank of telegraph clickers announced, and more cheers rang out. People had yelled louder for Kimball and his whiskey, though.
He poured himself a glass and raised it high. “Going to Congress!” he shouted, and another burst of happy noise filled the rooms.
It must have spilled out into the street, too, for a gray-uniformed cop poked his head inside to see what the commotion was about. Somebody stuck a cigar in his mouth, as if the Freedom Party had had a baby. Somebody else asked, “Want a snort, Ed?” Before the policeman could nod or shake his head, he found a glass in his hand. He emptied it in short order.
“First votes in from Alabama—we’re winning in the Ninth. That’s Birmingham,” a red-faced Freedom Party man said.
Applause rang out, and a couple of Rebel yells with it. People raised glasses and bottles on high and poured down the whiskey as if they’d never see it again. “Congress is going to be ours!” somebody howled. That set off more applause.
It made Kimball want to laugh or cry or bang his head against the wall. A couple of seats made people think they’d win a majority, which wouldn’t, couldn’t, come within nine miles of happening. Maybe Clarence Potter was right: maybe the Freedom Party did attract idiots.
From everything Kimball had heard, even Jake Featherston wasn’t predicting more than about ten seats’ ending up with Freedom Party Representatives in them. That didn’t make up a tenth part of the membership of the House. And if the leader of a party wasn’t a professional optimist before an election, who was? Kimball had figured the night would be a success if the Freedom Party elected anybody. By that undemanding standard, things already looked to be going well.
“Here we go—First District, South Carolina. That’s us. Quiet down, y’all,” somebody at the bank of telegraph tickers called. People did quiet down—a little. The fellow waited for the numbers to come in, then said, “Damn, that Whig bastard is still a couple thousand votes up on Pinky. We’re way out in front of the Radical Liberals, though.”
Kimball looked around to see if Pinky Hollister, the Freedom Party candidate, was in the office. He didn’t spot him. That didn’t surprise him too much: Hollister actually lived not in Charleston but in Mount Holly, fifteen miles outside of town. He was probably getting the results there.
“Well, we scared the sons of bitches, anyways,” a bald man said loudly. That signaled yet another round of cheers and clapping.
“To hell with scaring the sons of bitches,” Kimball said, even more loudly. “We scared the sons of bitches up in the USA, but in the end they licked us. What I want us to do, God damn it to hell, is I want us to win.”
Another near silence followed that. After a moment, people started to clap and yell and stomp on the floor. “Freedom!” somebody shouted. The cry filled the room: “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!”
Dizziness that had nothing to do with the whiskey he’d drunk or with the tobacco smoke clogging and thickening the air filled Kimball. He’d known something of the same feeling when a torpedo he’d launched slammed into the side of a U.S. warship. Then, though, the pride had been in something he was doing himself. Now he rejoiced in being part of an entity larger than himself, but one whose success he’d had a hand in shaping.
“Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” The shout went on and on. It was intoxicating, mesmerizing. Kimball howled out the word along with everybody else. While he was yelling, he didn’t have to think. All he had to do was feel. The rhythmic cry filled him full.
The door out onto the street opened. Kimball wondered if another cop was going to come in and try to make people quiet down. (He hadn’t seen the first policeman leave. There he was, as a matter of fact, drinking like a fish.) A good many people must have had the same thought, for the chant of “Freedom!” came to a ragged halt.
But it wasn’t a cop standing there. It was Anne Colleton. Not everybody in the office recognized her. Not everybody who recognized her knew she’d helped the Freedom Party. Most of the people who followed Jake Featherston were poor, or at best middle-class. One of the reasons they followed him was the vitriol he poured down on the heads of the Confederacy’s elite. And here was an obvious member of that elite—Anne could never be anything else—coolly inspecting them, as if they were in the monkey house at the Charleston zoo.
Kimball started to explain who she was and what she’d done for the Party. Before he could get out more than a couple of words, she took matters into her own hands, as was her habit. “Freedom!” she said crisply.
At that, the chant resumed, louder than ever. Men surged toward Anne, as men had a way of doing whenever she went out in public. If she’d accepted all the drinks they tried to press on her, she would have gone facedown on the floor in short order. After she took one, though, she was vaccinated against taking any more.
Instead of acting like a chunk of iron in the grip of a magnet, Kimball hung back. Anne took her own attractiveness so much for granted, a man who showed he wasn’t completely in her grasp often succeeded in piquing her interest by sheer contrariness.
“Hello, Roger,” she said when she did finally notice him in the crowd. “I wondered if I’d find you here.”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” he answered. “Best show in the world—this side of the circus, anyhow.” She laughed at that. He said, “I didn’t expect to see you here, though. If you got out of St. Matthews, I reckoned you’d go on up to Columbia.”
“I didn’t come down just for the election,” Anne said. “I’ve taken a room at the Charleston Hotel on Meeting Street. The shops in Columbia don’t compare to the ones they have here.”
“If you say so,” Kimball replied.
“I do say so,” she answered seriously. “I know what I want, and I aim to get just that, nothing less.” She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. “Some ways, we’re very much alike, you and I.”
“That’s a fact,” he said. With a scowl, he went on, “If you’re going to tease me, pick another time. I’ve got a little too much whiskey in me to take kindly to it tonight.”
“That’s frank enough.” She appraised him as frankly. “But I’d already made up my mind that I wasn’t gong to tease you if I found you tonight: I was going to invite you up to my room. I just told you, I know what I want, and I aim to get it.”
He thought about turning her down to prove she couldn’t take him for granted. It might make her respect him more. It might also make her furious. And he didn’t want to turn her down. He wanted to throw her down on a big soft bed and take her while she clawed his back to ribbons. If she had something like that in mind, he was ready, willing, and able—he hadn’t drunk so much as to leave him in any doubts on that score.
“We’re ahead in the Seventh in Tennessee,” a man at the telegraph tickers announced, which produced a new roar of applause. Through it, the fellow went on, “That’s around Nashville. They had the damnyankees occupying them—they got themselves some debts to pay.”
Another Freedom Party man was keeping an eye on a different telegraphic instrument. “The Redemption League looks like they’re gonna win themselves a seat in Texas,” he said. “Ain’t as good as if we did it, but it’s the next best thing.”
“How long do you want to stay here?” Anne asked.
“Up to you,” Kimball answered. “We’ve already done about as much as I reckoned we could, and there’s a lot of votes out there waiting to be counted. Maybe we really will get ten seats, the way Featherston said we would.”
“That would be remarkable,” Anne said. She echoed his own thought: “Most brags before an election turn to wind the second the voting’s done.” She slipped her arm into his. “Shall we go celebrate, then? My motorcar’s a couple of doors down.”
She was still driving the spavined Ford she’d got after the C.S. Army commandeered her Vauxhall. That told Kimball she hadn’t come all the way back from the financial reverses she’d taken during the war. But then, who in the Confederate States had? He wondered what would have become of him had he not had more than usual skill with a deck of cards.
The Charleston Hotel was a large building of white stucco with a colonnaded entranceway. An attendant took charge of the Ford as if it had been a Vauxhall. The house detective didn’t blink an eye as Kimball got into the elevator with Anne.
Their joining was fierce as usual, as much a struggle for dominance as what a lot of people thought of as lovemaking. When it was good, as it was tonight, they both won. Afterwards, they lay side by side, lazily caressing each other and talking…politics.
“You were right, Roger,” Anne said, the sort of admission she seldom made. “The Freedom Party is on the way up, and Jake Featherston is someone to reckon with.”
“I want to meet him myself,” Kimball said. He tweaked her nipple, gently enough to be another caress, sharply enough to be a demand and a warning. “You owe me that, seeing as I was right.”
She knocked his hand away and answered with more than a hint of malice: “What makes you think he’d want to meet you? You were an officer, after all, and he’s not what you’d call keen on officers.”
“He’s not keen on rich officers,” Kimball retorted. “You ever saw the farm I grew up on, you’d know I’m not one of those. He’ll know it, too.”
He saw he’d surprised her by answering seriously. He also saw his answer wasn’t something she’d thought of herself. “All right,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do.” She rolled toward him on the broad bed. “And now—”
He took her in his arms. “Now I’ll see what I can do.”
Cincinnatus Driver wished he didn’t keep getting shipments for Joe Conroy’s general store. He wished he could stay away from Conroy for the rest of his life. Like so many wishes, that one wasn’t granted. He couldn’t turn down deliveries to Conroy’s. If he started turning down deliveries to one storekeeper, he’d stop getting deliveries to any storekeepers.
He also wished his rattletrap truck had windshield wipers. Since it didn’t—he counted himself lucky it had a motor, let alone any fripperies—he drove from the Ohio to the corner of Emma and Blackwell as slowly and carefully as he could, doing his best to peer between the raindrops spattering his windshield. His best was good enough to keep him from hitting anybody, but he clucked to himself at how long he was taking to drive across Covington.
“And when I finally get there, I get to deal with Joe Conroy,” he said. He talked to himself a lot while driving, for lack of anyone else with whom to talk. “Won’t that just make my day? Sour old—”
But, when he hauled the first keg of molasses into the general store, he found Conroy in a mood not merely good but jubilant. He stared suspiciously at the fat storekeeper; Conroy wasn’t supposed to act like that. Conroy didn’t usually sign the shipping receipt till Cincinnatus had fetched in everything, but he did today. “Ain’t it a beautiful mornin’?” he said.
Cincinnatus looked outside, in case the sun had come out and a rainbow appeared in the sky while his back was turned. No: everything remained as gray and dark as it had been a moment before. Nasty cold drizzle was building toward nasty cold rain; he didn’t relish the upcoming drive back to the wharves.
“Tell you straight out, Mistuh Conroy, I’ve seen me a whole hell of a lot of days I liked the looks of better,” he answered, and went back out into the wet to fetch some more of what Conroy had ordered. The sooner he got it all into the store, the sooner he could get away.
When he came inside again, Joe Conroy said, “Didn’t say it was pretty out. I said it was a beautiful mornin’, and it damn well is.”
“I ain’t got the time to play silly games.” Cincinnatus spoke more rudely to Conroy than to any other white man he knew, and enjoyed every minute of it. “Tell me what you’re talkin’ about or let it go.”
Conroy was in the habit of making noises about what an uppity nigger Cincinnatus was. He didn’t even bother with those today. “I’ll tell you, by Jesus,” he answered. “I sure as hell will tell you. It’s a beautiful mornin’ on account of the Freedom Party won eleven seats in the Congress down in Richmond, and the Redemption League took four more.”
That didn’t make it a beautiful morning for Cincinnatus—but then, Cincinnatus, though he’d had to work with the Confederate diehards in Kentucky, wasn’t one himself. His considered opinion was that a black man would have to be crazy to want the Stars and Bars flying here again. The Stars and Stripes weren’t an enormous improvement, but any improvement, no matter how modest, seemed the next thing to a miracle to him.
Then he thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. He might not be crazy, but maybe he was stupid. “That’s how come I’ve seen ‘Freedom!’ painted on about every other wall this past couple weeks,” he said.
“Sure as hell is,” Conroy said. “Those folks is gonna do great things for the country—for my country.” His narrow little eyes probed at Cincinnatus. Cincinnatus stared back impassively. He didn’t want Conroy to know what he was thinking. The storekeeper grunted and went on, “Reckon there’ll be a Freedom Party startin’ up in Kentucky any day now.”
“How do you figure the USA’s gonna let you get away with that?” Cincinnatus asked in surprise. “They ain’t gonna let there be no party that don’t really belong to the United States at all.”
Joe Conroy looked sly. He might not have been all that smart, but he was one crafty devil: that much Cincinnatus could not help but recognize. “They let Reds operate in the USA, don’t they?” he said. “It’s a free country, ain’t it? Says it is, anyways—says it out loud, bangin’ on a big drum. If the Freedom Party, say, wants to try and get the votes to take Kentucky back into the CSA, how can they stop us from doin’ that?”
He looked smug, as if certain Cincinnatus could have no answer. But Cincinnatus did have an answer, and gave it in two words: “Luther Bliss.”
“Huh,” Conroy said. “We’ll handle him, too, when the time comes.”
Cincinnatus didn’t argue, not any more. Arguing with a fool had always struck him as a waste of time. And Conroy sure as hell wasn’t all that smart if he thought he could handle Luther Bliss. Cincinnatus had his doubts about whether Apicius Wood could handle Bliss if he had to. Apicius, he judged, had the sense not to try, but then Apicius really was pretty smart.
“Let me get the rest of your stuff,” Cincinnatus said. If he wasn’t face-to-face with Conroy, he couldn’t possibly argue with him.
The storekeeper wanted to keep on jawing, but Cincinnatus didn’t have to play, not today he didn’t. With Conroy’s receipt in his pocket, all he had to do was finish the delivery and get out. He did exactly that.
As he drove back up toward the river, he really noticed how many walls and fences had FREEDOM! painted on them. The word had replaced the blue crosses and red-white-red horizontal stripes as the diehards’ chosen scribble.
He didn’t like what he’d heard about the Freedom Party. That put it mildly. The local papers said little about the outfit; these days, they did their best to ignore what went on in the Confederate States. But word drifted up out of the CSA even so, word spread on the black grapevine that ran alongside and occasionally overlapped the one the diehards used. None of that word was good. And now the Freedom Party had done better in the elections than anyone expected. That was not good news, either.
When he got home that evening, he told Elizabeth what he’d heard from Conroy. She nodded. “White lady I clean house for, she was talkin’’bout the same thing on the telephone. She sound happy as a pig in a strawberry patch.”
“I believe it,” Cincinnatus said. Kentucky had been taken out of the USA by main force at the end of the War of Secession. It had been dragged back into the United States the same way during the course of the Great War. A lot of Kentuckians—a lot of white Kentuckians—wished the return had never happened. Cincinnatus went on, “The government ever lets people here vote for the Freedom Party, they ain’t gonna like the votes they see.”
Elizabeth sighed. Part of the sigh was weariness after a long day. Part of it was weariness after living among and having to work for people who despised her the second they set eyes on her. She said, “Reckon you’re right. Wish it wasn’t so, but it is.”
“Pa’s right,” Achilles said cheerfully. “Pa’s right.” He didn’t know what Cincinnatus was right about. He didn’t care, either. He had confidence that his father was and always would be right.
Cincinnatus wished he had that same confidence. He knew all too well how many mistakes he’d made over the years, how lucky he was to have come through some of them, and how one more could ruin not only his life but those of his wife and little son. Slowly, he said, “Maybe we ought to talk some more about pullin’ up stakes, Elizabeth. We can do it. Don’t need no passbook, not any more.”
“We got us a lifetime of roots in this place,” Elizabeth said. She’d said the same thing when Cincinnatus brought up the idea of leaving Covington earlier in the year.
He hadn’t pressed her very hard then. Now he said, “Sometimes the only thing roots is good for is gettin’ pulled out of the ground. Sometimes, if you don’t pull ’em out, they hold you there till somethin’ cuts you down.”
Instead of answering directly, Elizabeth retreated to the kitchen. Over her shoulder, she said, “Go set yourself down. Smells like the ham is just about ready.”
Sit himself down Cincinnatus did, but he didn’t abandon the subject, as his wife plainly hoped he would. “I been thinkin’ about this,” he said. “Been thinkin’ about it a lot, even if I ain’t said much. If we leave, I know where I’d like us to go. I been lookin’ things up, best I can.”
“And where’s that?” Elizabeth asked, resignation and fear mingling in her voice.
“Des Moines, Iowa,” he answered. “It’s on a river—the Des Moines runs into the Mississippi—so there’ll be haulin’ business off the docks. Iowa lets black folks vote. They let women vote for president, too.”
“I reckon they got women there,” Elizabeth allowed. “They got any black folks there at all?”
“A few, I reckon,” he answered. “There’s a few black folks in just about every good-sized town in the USA. Ain’t any more than a few very many places, though.” He held up a hand before his wife could say anything. “Maybe that’s even for the best. When there ain’t very many of us, can’t be enough for the white folks to hate us.”
“Who says there can’t?” Elizabeth spoke with the accumulated bitter wisdom of her race. “And Jesus, how far away is this Des Moines place? It’d be like fallin’ off the edge of the world.”
“About six hundred miles,” Cincinnatus said, as casually as he could. Elizabeth’s eyes filled with horror. He went on, “Reckon the truck’ll make it. They got a lot o’ paved roads in the USA.” He pursed his lips. “Have to pick the time to leave, make sure everything’s all good and dry.”
“You aim on bringin’ your ma an’ pa along?” Elizabeth asked. Her own parents were both dead.
“They want to come, we’ll fit ’em in some kind of way,” Cincinnatus answered. “They don’t—” He shrugged. “They’re all grown up. Can’t make ’em do nothin’they don’t take a shine to.”
“I don’t take no shine to this myself.” Elizabeth stuck out her chin and looked stubborn.
“You take a shine to livin’ here in Kentucky if that Freedom Party starts winnin’ elections?” Cincinnatus asked. “Somethin’ like that happen, you’ll be glad we got somewheres else to go.”
That hit home. “Maybe,” Elizabeth said in a small voice.
Something else occurred to Cincinnatus: if the Freedom Party started winning elections in the Confederate States, what would the Negroes there do? They couldn’t run away to Iowa. They’d already tried rising up, tried and failed. What did that leave? For the life of him, Cincinnatus couldn’t see anything.
Stephen Douglas Martin’s eyes went from his daughter to his son and back again in something that looked like pleased bemusement. “You don’t have to do this on account of me, you know,” he said. “If you want to go out and paint the town red, go right on out and do it.”
Chester Martin grinned at his father. “You already say I’m too much of a Red. I don’t even want to go out and paint the town green.”
“We just want to spend New Year’s Eve with you and Mother, that’s all,” Sue Martin said, nodding vigorously. Chester’s kid sister looked a lot like him, with sharp nose, green eyes, and sandy hair. She thought a lot like him, too, on labor matters and on a lot of other things as well.
“Besides, Pa,” he added, “where the devil could I go in Toledo to paint the town red even if I wanted to? This isn’t exactly Philadelphia or New York City.” Toledo also didn’t boast the multitude of saloons and brothels that sprang up behind an army’s lines to cater to the needs—or at least the desires—of soldiers briefly free from the trenches.
“Well, you’ve got me there,” his father answered. “Yes, sir, you’ve got me there. Once upon a time, I used to know where all the hot joints were, but that was a while ago now. Don’t look so much to go out and get rowdy, like I used to before I hooked up with your mother and settled down.”
From the kitchen, Louisa Martin called, “What are you blaming me for now, Stephen?” Dishes rattled as she put them back into the cabinet. “I’m almost finished in here. Whatever you’re trying to pin on me, in a minute I’ll be out there and you won’t be able to do it.”
She was as good as her word. Her husband said, “What I was trying to pin on you, dear, was settling me down. If you don’t think you’ve done it, I’ll go out and get drunk and leave you home with the kids.” His eyes twinkled. “I’ll probably beat you when I get back, too, the way I always do.”
“I don’t know why you haven’t quit yet,” Louisa Martin said with a pretty good martyred sigh. “I’m all over bruises, and the police keep dragging you down to the station every other day.”
They both started laughing. Sue looked from one of them to the other, as if astonished her parents could act so absurd, and about something that would have been very serious had they been serious themselves. Chester said, “Well, Ma, that’s better work for the cops than most of what they do, believe me.”
“Hold on there.” His father held out his hand like a cop halting traffic. “If we’re going to have a happy New Year’s Eve, let’s see if we can manage not to talk politics. Otherwise, we’ll just start arguing.”
“I’ll try,” Chester said, knowing his father was likely to be right. He let out a wry chuckle before going on, “Doesn’t leave me much to talk about but my football team, though.”
“I wish you wouldn’t talk about that, either,” his mother said. “It’s just as dangerous as going out there on the picket line.”
“Not even close.” Chester shook his head. “The fellows on the teams we play hardly ever carry guns, the way the cops and the company goons do.”
“What did I say a minute ago?” Stephen Douglas Martin asked rhetorically. “If you want to turn out editorials, son, go work for a newspaper.”
“All right,” Chester said.
His father looked at him in some surprise, evidently not having expected such an easy victory. The older male Martin arose with a grunt from the chair in which he’d been ensconced since suppertime. He went into the kitchen and came out with a bottle of whiskey and two glasses.
“Well, I like that,” Sue said with annoyance only partly affected. “Are you going to leave Mother and me thirsty?”
“I only have two hands.” Her father set the whiskey and the glasses on the side table by his chair, then held up the members in question. “Count ’em—two.” He returned to the kitchen and brought out two more tumblers.
Chester wondered if his father had intended to include Sue and his mother in the drinking. If he hadn’t, nobody could prove it now. Whiskey gurgled into four glasses. Chester raised his. “To 1920!” he said.
“To 1920!” his sister and his parents echoed. They all drank. Chester sighed as the whiskey ran down his throat. It wasn’t the smoothest he’d ever drunk, but it wasn’t bad, either. Some of the rotgut he’d had in back of the lines—and, every once in a while, in a canteen or jug smuggled up to the forward trenches—had been like drinking liquid barbed wire.
His father stood to propose a toast. “To the 1920s—may they be a better ten years than the ten we’ve just gone through.” Everyone drank to that, too. Stephen Douglas Martin said, “Now we ought to all pitch our glasses into the fireplace. Only trouble with that is, you go through a lot of glasses.”
Sue looked at the clock on the mantel over the fireplace. “Three hours till midnight, less a couple of minutes. Will starting a new calendar really make a difference? It’d be nice to think it would.”
“We always hope it will,” her mother said wistfully. She sighed. “And we usually end up looking back and saying, ‘Well, that’s another year down.’”
“This wasn’t too bad a year,” Chester said. “I’ve had work through most of it, anyway, and that’s more than I can say for the rest of the time since I got out of the Army.”
He left it at that. Had he said more, he and his father would have got to arguing politics. He was convinced the factory owners had settled with the steelworkers because of the 1918 election returns. Whatever else you might say about them, big capitalists weren’t stupid. When handwriting went up on the wall, they could read it. If they didn’t come to terms with the people who worked for them, Congress would start passing laws they didn’t fancy.
His mother sat down at the tired old upright piano and began to play. Her choice of tunes made him smile. After a little while, he said, “I’m not in the Army any more. You don’t have to give me one Sousa march after another.” He stomped up and down the room as if on parade.
“I like playing them, Chester,” Louisa Martin said. “They make me want to go marching—except I can’t, not while I’m playing.” She swung into a spirited if not technically perfect rendition of “Remembrance and Defiance.”
“She’ll do as she pleases, son,” Stephen Douglas Martin said. “If you haven’t learned that about her by now, how long is it going to take you?”
“If she’s playing them for herself, that’s fine,” Chester said. “If she’s doing them for me, though, she’s wasting her time. I never was so glad as the last time I took that uniform off.”
“You went through a lot,” Sue said. “I remember the hard time you gave that military policeman in the park when you were home on convalescent leave. It was like you’d seen a lot of things he never had, so you didn’t think he had any business bothering you.”
“That’s just what I was thinking, Sis,” he answered. “He behaved like he thought God had sent him down in a puff of smoke. The people who really went through the mill don’t act that way.”
“I’ve seen that with the younger fellows I work with,” his father said. “One of ’em won the Medal of Honor, but you’d never hear it from him.”
“That’s the way it ought to be,” Martin said. “We didn’t go out there to blow our own horns or to have a good time—not that there were any good times to have in the trenches. We went out there to win the war, and we did that.” He tossed down the rest of his whiskey. “And you know what? I wonder if what we bought is worth what we paid for it.”
“We licked the Rebs,” his father said. “Along with Kaiser Bill, we licked everybody. We’ve paid people back for everything they ever did to us.”
“That’s so,” Chester said, “but there are—what? a million? something like that—say a million men who won’t ever see it. And Lord only knows how many there are on crutches and in wheelchairs and wearing a hook instead of a hand.” He touched his own left arm. “I’m one of the lucky ones. All I got was a Purple Heart and some leave time—a hometowner, we called a wound like that. But it was just luck. It wasn’t anything else. A few inches to one side and I wouldn’t be here now. I wouldn’t be anyplace. I was a good soldier, but that’s not why I came out in one piece. Nothing but luck.”
The Sousa march Louisa Martin was playing came to a ragged halt. “You’ve upset your mother,” Stephen Douglas Martin said, and then, to his wife, “It’s all right, dear. He is here. He’s fine. If he weren’t here and fine, he wouldn’t be spouting such nonsense, would he?”
“No,” Chester’s mother said in a small voice. “But I don’t like to think about…about things that might have been.”
Chester poured his glass full of whiskey again. He didn’t like to think about things that might have been, either. Most of them were worse than the way things had really turned out. Some of them still made him wake up sweating in the night, even though the war had been over for two and a half years. He drank. If he got numb, he wouldn’t have to think about them.
His mother got herself another drink, too. He raised an eyebrow at that; she didn’t usually take a second glass. Maybe she had things she didn’t want to think about, too. Maybe he’d given her some of those things. All at once, he felt ashamed.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled.
His father got up and clapped him on the shoulder. “You’ll make a man yet,” he said. “I think that’s the first time I ever heard you say you were sorry and sound like you meant it. Kids say it, too, but they don’t say it the same way. ‘I’m sorry.’” Stephen Douglas Martin did a good imitation of a nine-year-old apologizing lest something worse happen to him.
Sue said, “Here’s hoping we don’t need to say we’re sorry at all—well, not much—next year.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Chester said, and he did.
Every time he looked at the clock on the mantel, it got a bit later. He found that pretty funny, which was a sign he’d taken a little too much whiskey on board. He’d have a headache in the morning. He was glad he wouldn’t have to go in to the steel mill. That would have made his head want to fall off.
A few minutes before midnight, firecrackers started going off. They alarmed Chester; they made him think of gunfire. They alarmed all the dogs in the neighborhood, too. Along with bangs and pops, Toledo ushered in 1920 with a chorus of canine howls and frantic barks and yips.
“Happy New Year!” Chester said when both hands on the clock stood straight up. “Happy New Year!” He wondered if it would be. Then he wondered something else, something perhaps not altogether unrelated: who would be running for president?
Arthur McGregor stood in front of the stove in the kitchen, soaking in warmth as a flower soaked in sunlight. He had no idea why he thought of flowers: they weren’t likely to appear in a Manitoba January. He turned so he’d cook on all sides.
Maude said, “When you came inside, you had frost on your eyebrows.”
“I believe it,” he answered. “If I wore a mustache, I’d have icicles hanging down from it, too. It’s that kind of day. But if I don’t get out there and take care of the stock, who’s going to do it, eh?”
His wife’s mouth tightened. Alexander should have been there to help. But Alexander was gone, except in the picture on the wall. McGregor moved away from the stove for a moment to go over and slip an arm around Maude. Her mouth fell open in surprise. Neither of them was greatly given to open displays of affection.
“I’m not doing as much as I should,” he said discontentedly.
“You hush,” Maude told him. “You’ve done plenty. You don’t need to worry about not doing more. If you want it to be enough, it can be enough.”
“But I don’t,” he said. “I have to do this, don’t you see? I have to—and I can’t.” Of themselves, his hands folded into fists of frustration.
Maude set a consoling hand on his shoulder. “You went up to Winnipeg, Arthur. You looked around. And then you came home and said the thing couldn’t be done.” That was as close as she would come to talking out loud about his bombs. “If it can’t be done, it can’t, that’s all.”
“Damn the Yanks!” he said fiercely. “They keep too many soldiers around Custer’s headquarters, and around the house he’s stolen, too.”
Looking back on it, blowing up Major Hannebrink had been fairly easy. The Yanks’ euphoria at winning the war had helped; everyone in Rosenfeld that night had been celebrating as if joy would turn illegal the second the sun came up again. And Hannebrink was only a major, and not nearly so valuable to the Americans as their commander for all of Canada.
They knew General Custer would make a target for Canadians, as Archduke Franz Ferdinand had made a target for the Serbs. A Serb bomber had killed Franz Ferdinand and touched off the Great War. The Americans didn’t intend to let Custer go the same way. They kept swarms of soldiers around him. McGregor had had no chance whatever to plant a bomb anyplace where it might do any good.
He might have flung one into Custer’s motorcar, as the Serbs had flung one into Franz Ferdinand’s carriage. The Serbian nationalist who flung his bomb had been shot dead a moment later. McGregor wanted to live. Even killing Custer was not revenge enough to satisfy him. He wanted more later, if he ever got the chance.
“Maybe he’ll come down here to Rosenfeld again,” Maude said.
She sounded consoling, the way she did when one of the girls was sad after breaking a toy. McGregor was sad—and furious, too—because he couldn’t break his toy. If you looked at that the right way, it was grimly funny.
“Not likely,” he said. “It isn’t much of a town, when you get right down to it.” He scowled. “There’s just no chance for a man working by himself.”
Maude asked the question that had stymied him over and over again: “Who can you trust?”
“Nobody.” That was the answer he always reached. “Too many people up here have their hands in the Yanks’ pockets. Too many people spy on their neighbors. Too many people would just as soon turn into Yanks—and you can’t always tell who they are, not till you find out the hard way you can’t.”
His wife nodded. “I don’t know what you can do, then, except get on with things here.”
“I don’t, either.” McGregor felt like a lone wolf looking to pull down the biggest bull moose in an enormous herd. That was, when you thought about it, a crazy thing to want to do. Part of him knew as much. No: all of him knew as much. It was just that most of him didn’t care. Slowly, he said, “The trouble is, there are too many hours in the day in the middle of winter—too much time to sit around and think.”
Farm work was harder and made a man keep longer hours than any town job. There were times, especially around the harvest, when he wished he could stay awake for a couple of weeks at a stretch so as not to waste any precious time. When snow lay deep on the ground, though, what a man could do diminished. After he tended the stock and made repairs around the house and barn, what was left but coming inside and sitting around and brooding?
Maude had an answer: “You might help me with some of my chores. They don’t go away when the weather gets cold. Just the opposite, as a matter of fact.”
He stared at her. Did she think he was going to put on an apron and do women’s work? If she did, she had another think coming. He intended to let her know as much, too, in great detail.
Then he saw her eyes sparkle. He’d drawn in his breath for an angry shout. He let it out in a gust of laughter instead. “You’re a devil,” he said. “You really are. You had me going there.”
“I hope so,” his wife answered. “It’s good to see you smile, Arthur. I haven’t seen it often enough, not since—” She stopped. No one in the family had smiled much since Alexander got shot. Gamely, she went on, “We can’t stay gloomy all the time. Life is too short for that. In spite of everything, life is too short for that.”
“I suppose not,” he said, nowhere near sure he supposed anything of the sort. To keep from having to decide whether he did or not, he pointed toward the ceiling. “What are the girls doing?”
“As much schoolwork as they can, I hope,” Maude said. “If it doesn’t snow again, they ought to be able to start going again tomorrow or the day after. They want to go back.” A smile twisted only one corner of her mouth. “I hope they can. I won’t be sorry to have them out of the house for a while. They’ve been snapping at each other a lot the past few days.”
“I’ve noticed.” McGregor ruefully shook his head. “I can still heat up Mary’s backside, but that doesn’t work with Julia any more.” His older daughter was a woman, which still bemused him. “Have to talk sense to her, and sometimes she doesn’t want to listen to sense.”
“And where do you figure she gets that?” his wife murmured. He pretended not to hear. Knowing when not to hear struck him as not the least important part of a happy marriage.
What he did say was, “Fix me up a cup of tea, will you? I think I’ve warmed up enough so that it won’t turn into a lump of ice in my belly now.”
He was sipping it when Julia came downstairs dramatically rolling her eyes and demanded, “Who will do something about my nuisance of a little sister?”
McGregor laughed again—twice in one morning. “You remind me of Henry II saying ‘Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?’—and that was the end of Thomas à Becket,” he said.
Julia looked so angry, he thought for a moment she wanted someone to rid her of Mary. But she was angry about something else: “They don’t teach the history of England in school any more, except how the mother country was so wicked, the Americans had to have a revolution to get away.”
“I’m not surprised,” McGregor said. “I’m not happy, mind you, but I’m not surprised. The Yanks are doing everything they can to make us the same as they are, and they try to pretend they invented everything they borrowed from the mother country. The less youngsters know about England, the easier it is for the Americans to get away with their lies.”
“That’s right.” Julia seemed about to burst into tears. “And there’s nothing we can do about it, either, is there?”
Hearing that, McGregor knew he would have to try again to bomb General Custer. Maybe Custer’s death would spark an uprising throughout Canada. Even if it didn’t, it would remind his countrymen that they had a country of their own, that they weren’t Yanks who happened to live in a cold climate and speak with a slightly strange accent.
And, with her fury against the United States, Julia had forgotten to be furious at her little sister. Or so McGregor thought, till Julia said, “And Mary keeps humming in my ear until it drives me to distraction. She’s being annoying on purpose.”
“If you’d been born a boy, you’d know how to take care of that,” McGregor said. “You’d tell her to stop. If she didn’t, you’d wallop her. If you want to go back upstairs and pretend you’re a boy for a bit, that’s all right with me.”
Julia went, the light of battle in her eyes. A few minutes later, McGregor heard a thump. He waited for Mary to come down and complain about what a beast Julia was being. Nothing of the sort happened. There were several more thumps, interspersed with shouts and a couple of thuds, as of one body, or perhaps two, suddenly landing on the floor.
He chuckled. “That sounds cheery, doesn’t it?”
“I hope they don’t hurt each other,” Maude said worriedly. “Julia’s bigger, but I don’t think Mary knows how to quit.”
“If she goes up against somebody who’s bigger and who means business, she’ll learn how to quit after a little while,” McGregor said.
His wife looked at him—caught and held his eye—without saying anything. For a moment, he wondered why. Then he realized that what he’d said about his younger daughter could apply to Canada’s struggle against the United States. His own face showed that realization, but Maude kept staring at him. Again, he wondered why, and started to get angry.
But then he saw that what he’d said about his younger daughter could also apply to his own struggle against the United States. The United States were enormously bigger than he was, and they meant business about holding on to his country. He didn’t care whether they meant business or not. He intended to go on fighting them.
“They haven’t licked me yet, Maude,” he said. “I’ve hit them a few licks, but they haven’t licked me.”
“All right,” was the only thing his wife said. She wanted him to be careful in what he was doing, but she didn’t want him to stop. Or, if she did want him to stop, she didn’t let him know it, which amounted to the same thing.
Somebody was coming downstairs: Mary, by the sound of the footsteps. McGregor waited to console her. But, when his younger daughter came into the kitchen, triumph glowed on her face. “Julia got mean,” Mary said. “I guess she won’t try that again in a hurry.”
Maude gaped in astonishment. So did McGregor. This time, he caught and held his wife’s eye. If Mary could triumph against long odds, why couldn’t he? That bomb still lay in the barn, hidden below the old wagon wheel. In spite of everything, he might find the chance to place it. He didn’t need to do that right this minute. He had time.
Colonel Irving Morrell stood in the Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, train station, waiting for the special from Pontiac, Michigan, to come in. His green-gray overcoat held the worst of the cold at bay, though he wished he’d put on a fur hat instead of an ordinary service cap. Soot-streaked snow covered the ground. By the look of the mass of dirty-gray clouds building in the northwest, more would be coming before too long.
Beside him, Lieutenant Lije Jenkins stirred restlessly. “Everything’s gone slower than it should have, sir, I know,” he said, “but we’re finally going to get the prototype for the new model.”
“No, not the prototype.” Morrell shook his head. “Just a test model, to see how some of the ideas we sent the War Department work out. Most of the parts come from the barrels we used in the Great War, so the test model will run maybe half as fast as it ought to.” He sighed, blowing out a small cloud of vapor. “Getting the real McCoy built will run half as fast as it ought to, too.”
“When I think what we could have had—” Jenkins angrily shook his head. “When I think what we should have had by now—the war will have been over three years this summer, and the new model still isn’t anywhere near ready to go into production.”
“We’re living on borrowed time,” Morrell said. “Ask any soldier, and he’ll tell you the same thing. You can live on borrowed time for a while, but then you have to pay it back—with interest.”
Jenkins stared north and east, across the Missouri. He pointed. “Don’t I see exhaust there, sir? Time’s right for that to be the special.”
“So it is,” Morrell agreed. “We’ll know pretty soon, I expect.” He glanced around, then nodded in satisfaction. “Ah, good. The station boys are on the ball. They’ve got the heavy ramp ready to unload the barrel from its flatcar. They’ve helped take barrels off trains before, so they’ll know the drill.”
Coal smoke billowing from the stack, the special crossed the Missouri, rolled through Leavenworth, and came north again to the Fort Leavenworth station. It was about the shortest train Morrell had ever seen, consisting of a locomotive, a tender, and one flatcar, on which perched a large shape covered by green-gray tarpaulins to shield it from the weather and from prying eyes.
When the train stopped, an officer jumped out of the locomotive and came up to Morrell. “Colonel Irving Morrell?” he asked. Morrell admitted he was himself. The officer nodded briskly, then saluted. “Very pleased to meet you, sir. I’m Major Wilkinson; I’ve ridden down with this beast from Pontiac. As soon as I get your John Hancock on about sixty-eleven different forms here, I can put it into your hands and let you start finding out what it can do.”
Morrell signed and signed and signed. By the time he was through, the signatures on the forms hardly looked like his any more. After he gave the last sheet of paper back to Major Wilkinson, he said, “Why don’t you take the wrapping off so I can see what’s in the package?”
“I’ll be glad to, sir. If you and Lieutenant—Jenkins, was it?—will come along with me, you can see just what’s in there.” Nimble as a monkey, he swung himself up onto the flatcar and untied the ropes that held the tarps in place. Morrell and Jenkins ascended more sedately. They helped him pull away the heavy cloth covering the new barrel.
“Bully,” Lije Jenkins said softly when he got his first look. “If that’s not a machine for the 1920s, I’ll be darned if I know what is. Compared to what we had in the Great War, that’s a machine from out of the 1930s, by God.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty on the outside,” Morrell said, “but what it reminds me of is a homely girl with a lot of paint and powder on.” He started to rap the barrel’s hull with his knuckles, but checked himself; it was cold enough that he’d lose skin on the metal. He contented himself with pointing. “That’s just mild steel, not armor plate, and it’s thin mild steel to boot. That makes the barrel lighter, so the one White engine they threw in there can give it even a halfway decent turn of speed. But you couldn’t take it into combat; it’s not even proof against rifle fire, let alone anything else.”
But even as he spoke, his eyes caressed the test barrel’s lines as they did Agnes Hill’s whenever he saw her. Here, in metal, was the shape he’d sketched not long after coming to the Barrel Works. The turret cannon and machine gun stared at him. So did the machine gun mounted in the front of the hull.
“It doesn’t look as…as busy as one of our regular barrels,” Lieutenant Jenkins said.
“No, I suppose not,” Morrell said, “but I hope it’ll keep the enemy busier than one of the regular sort. And we won’t need to put a whole regiment of soldiers inside here when we go into action, either.” He strode to the rear of the flatcar. “Hurry up with that ramp, if you please, gentlemen.”
“We’re just about ready, Colonel,” one of the soldiers replied. A couple of minutes later, he said, “All right, sir, everything’s in place.”
“Do you want to back it off the car, Major?” Morrell asked.
“I will if you want me to, sir,” Wilkinson answered, “but go right ahead if you’d rather do the honors.”
Morrell needed no more urging. He opened the hatch in the top of the hull that led down into the driver’s compartment, then wriggled inside. The controls were identical to those of the older barrels. He’d learned the driver’s art since coming to the Barrel Works, but had applied himself to it as he applied himself to everything that caught his interest. His finger stabbed the electric-starter button.
Behind him, the White engine grunted, coughed, and came to life. It was loud. It was not, however, deafening, as the engines in old-style barrels were. That wasn’t because the test model had only one, where normal machines needed two. It was because, instead of sitting right there in the middle of the barrel’s interior, the engine had a compartment of its own, separated from the crew by a steel bulkhead.
He wished he didn’t have to back the barrel down the ramp to get it off the flatcar. Even with his head out of the hatch, even with the rearview mirror the manufacturer had thoughtfully provided (a little bonus that might possibly last thirty seconds in combat), he couldn’t see behind himself for beans. That was something he hadn’t thought about when he decided on a turret-mounted cannon.
Well, that was what the test model was for: to discover all the things he hadn’t thought of, and nobody else had, either. With luck, he’d be able to get rid of them before the new model went into production. He knew perfectly well that he wouldn’t find them all; he was human, and therefore fallible. But he’d do the best job he could.
He’d do the best job he could of getting this beast off the flatcar, too. All he had to do was back straight. If he looked ahead, he ought to be able to judge how well he was doing that. And he couldn’t keep sitting up here forever. His left foot came down on the clutch. He threw the shift lever into reverse and gave the barrel a little gas.
It was peppier than the ones in which he’d fought the Great War: not peppy like a fancy motorcar, not peppy enough to suit him, but peppier. It went down the ramp faster than he’d expected. Almost before he knew it, he was on the ground. From the flatcar, Major Wilkinson waved and Lieutenant Jenkins gave him a thumbs-up.
“Come on!” he shouted to Jenkins over the rumble of the engine—which seemed a lot louder with his head out the hatch. The lieutenant jumped down from the train, clambered up the side of the barrel, and scrambled into the turret through a hatch on the roof.
“There’s no ammunition in here,” he said indignantly. Morrell snorted—as if anyone would be crazy enough to put ammunition in a barrel that would be traveling by train. Accidents didn’t happen very often, but who would take the chance on sending an expensive test model up in smoke? Then Jenkins went on, “I wanted to shoot up the landscape as we drove along,” and Morrell snorted again, this time on a different note. His subordinate was just acting like a kid again.
Morrell put the barrel into the lowest of its four forward speeds. It rattled over the railroad tracks and off toward the muddy prairie northwest of Fort Leavenworth. He built up to full speed as fast as he could. If the speedometer wasn’t lying, he was doing better than ten miles an hour, more than twice as fast as a Great War barrel could manage on similar ground. The power-to-weight ratio of the test model was supposed to be the same as that of the eventual production machine. If so, these barrels would do tricks their ancestors had never imagined. They still weren’t fast enough to suit him.
“Hell of a ride!” Jenkins shouted, sounding as exhilarated as a skilled horseman on a half-broken stallion. “Hell of a ride! Now we’ve got the cavalry back again, by Jesus!”
“That’s part of the idea,” Morrell said. Men on horseback had been poised throughout the Great War, ready to exploit whatever breakthroughs the infantry could force. But infantry alone hadn’t been able to force breakthroughs, and cavalry melted under machine-gun fire like snow in Death Valley summer. The old barrels had broken through Confederate lines, but hadn’t always been swift enough to exploit to the fullest the breaches they made.
Maybe these machines would, even in their present state. In his mind’s eye, Morrell saw barrels clawing at the flank of a foe in retreat, shooting up his soldiers, wrecking his supply lines, keeping reinforcements from reaching the field, pushing the front forward by leaps and bounds, not plodding steps.
It was a heady vision, so heady it almost made Morrell see with his mind’s eye to the exclusion of the pair at the front of his head. Had he not paid attention to the gauges in front of him, he would have missed noting how little fuel the test model carried in its tank. Stranding himself out on the prairie was not what he had in mind when it came to getting acquainted with the new machine. Reluctantly, he steered for the muddy field where half a dozen survivors of the Great War sat.
He turned off the engine, climbed out of the hatch, and got down off the test model. Lije Jenkins came down beside him. The youngster looked from the new barrel to the old ones. “It’s like stacking the first Duryea up against an Oldsmobile, isn’t it, sir?” he said.
“Something like that, anyway,” Morrell said. “Of course, there is one other difference: there really are Oldsmobiles, but this baby”—again, he remembered in the nick of time not to rap his knuckles on the hull—“is just pretend, for now.”
“I hope we don’t take twenty years to get the real ones, sir,” Jenkins said.
“So do I, Lieutenant, with all my heart. We may need them sooner than that,” Morrell said. He started off toward the barracks. Jenkins tagged along after him.
As Morrell walked, he wondered what he could tell Agnes Hill about his new toy. She knew, in a general way, what his duties were. Being a soldier’s widow, she also knew not to ask too many questions about what exactly he did. But the next time he saw her, he was going to be excited. He wanted to share that excitement. He also needed not to talk too much. He was awfully glad he’d gone to that dance with Jenkins. He wanted to go right on being glad. The only place where taking chances was a good idea was on the battlefield.