Walk in Hell (25 page)

More shells rained down. He wouldn’t have done an infantryman’s job for a million dollars. If there were any heroes in the war, the foot sloggers were the ones. They laughed when he said so.

“This is a letter from your father,” Sylvia Enos said to George, Jr., and Mary Jane. “See how it says
NAVAL POST
on the envelope by the stamp?” George, Jr., nodded impatiently. He knew his ABCs, and he could read a few words. To Mary Jane, the rubber-stamped phrase didn’t mean anything.

Sylvia opened the envelope and took out the letter. She read aloud in a portentous tone: “‘Dear Sylvia’—that’s me—‘I hope you and the children are well. I am fine here. We have done some fighting on the river. I came through it fine and so did the ship. We hit the enemy and he did not hit us.’”

“Boom!”
George, Jr., yelled, as if he were a shell going off. Then, as best he could on the floor of the front room, he imitated a stricken warship capsizing and sinking, finishing the performance with a loud, “Glub, glub, glub!”

Mary Jane thought that was very funny. So did Sylvia, till it crossed her mind that the
Punishment
could have been the vessel going to the bottom as easily as its foe. “Do you want to hear the rest of the letter?” she asked, more sharply than she’d intended.
She
wanted to finish it; George didn’t write so often as she wished he would. With a touch of guilt, she realized her own letters were also fewer and further between than they should have been.

“Yes, Mama,” George, Jr., said, Mary Jane chiming in with, “Rest of letter!”

“‘I miss all of you and I wish I could come back to Boston,’” she resumed. “‘Here in the middle of the country you cannot get any fish that is very good. The cooks do up catfish we catch in the river but no matter what you do to it it still tastes like mud.’”

“Yuck!” George, Jr., exclaimed. Mary Jane stuck out her tongue.

“‘I love all of you and hope I will get some leave one day before too long,’” Sylvia finished. “‘Tell the children to be good. I bet they are getting as big as can be. Your husband, George.’”

“George,” Mary Jane said in tones of wonder. She pointed to her brother. “George.”

“That’s right,” Sylvia said. “George, Jr., is named after his papa—your papa, too, you know.”

“Papa.” Mary Jane dutifully repeated the word and nodded, but she didn’t sound convinced. She hadn’t seen her father for months. Sylvia wondered if she remembered him. She said she did, but then she said all sorts of things that had only the vaguest connection with reality. Seeing her, remembering George, Jr., at the same age, Sylvia was convinced two-year-olds lived in a very strange world. She wondered if she’d been like that at the same age. She probably had.

George, Jr., asked, “Will Papa ever come home before the war ends and we’ve beaten the Rebs all up?”

Where does he hear such things?
Sylvia wondered. At home, she didn’t talk much about the war. That left Brigid Coneval and the other children she watched. Sylvia shrugged. She supposed war needed hate, but wished it didn’t. The question deserved an answer, though, no matter how it was framed. She said, “When Papa talked about getting leave in his letter, that meant he hoped he could come for a visit before he had to go back to his ship.”

“Oh,” her son said seriously. “Well, I hope he can, too.”

“I’ll get supper going now, and then we’ll wash you two and put you to bed,” Sylvia said. That drew mixed responses. Her children were hungry, but unenthusiastic about baths and even more unenthusiastic about bedtime. She told them, “If you eat all your supper up and you’re good in the bathtub, maybe you can play for a little while afterwards.”

They wolfed down fried halibut and potatoes, they didn’t do anything too outrageous when she took them out of the apartment and down the hall to the bathroom at the end (a good thing, too, with her carrying hot water to mix with the cold), and they didn’t splash up the place too badly. She brought them back swaddled in towels, and changed George, Jr., into pajamas (which made him look very grown-up) and Mary Jane into her nightgown.

George, Jr., played with toy soldiers, the U.S. troops storming trench after Confederate trench. Sylvia wished it were really so easy. Mary Jane gave her doll a bottle, then climbed up into Sylvia’s lap and fell asleep there. Not even the bloodcurdling explosions her brother kept producing did anything to stir her.

Maybe so much warmaking had worn out George, Jr., too, for he didn’t put up his usual complaints about going to bed. That left Sylvia the only one awake in the apartment, which seemed, as it often did at such times, too big and too quiet.

“I should write to George,” she said. She found paper and a pen soon enough, but the bottle of ink had escaped. She finally came upon it lurking in her sewing box. “
I
didn’t put it there,” she declared, and wondered which of her offspring had. Mary Jane would say no to everything on general principles, and George, Jr., knew better than to admit to anything that would get him spanked.

Dear George,
Sylvia wrote,
I got your letter. It was good to hear from you. I am glad you are well and safe. I saw Charlie White’s wife on T Wharf and she says he is out to sea on a cruiser. They will have good food on that ship
. Despite his name, Charlie was black, not white, and had been the cook on the
Ripple
. Reinking her pen, she went on,
I am well. The children are well. We all hope you do get leave so we can see you. We miss you. I love you. Sylvia
.

When she was done, she read the letter over. It seemed so flat and empty. She wished she were a better writer, to be able to say all the things she wanted to say, all the things that really mattered. Maybe she could have done that if she’d had more schooling. As things were…it would have to do. More searching scared an envelope out of cover.
Seaman George Enos,
she wrote on it.
U.S. Navy. Central River Command. St. Louis, Mo
. She went on one more scouting expedition, this time through her handbag in search of a stamp. She found one, stuck it on the envelope, and put the letter in the handbag so she could mail it in the morning.

In the chaos of getting the children ready and over to Mrs. Coneval’s and then of getting herself off to work, she forgot about the letter. She remembered only when her machine stuck the first label on a can of mackerel. Can after can followed that first one. She had to pull three levers for each can, keep the machine full of labels and paste, and clear the feeding mechanism when it jammed, as it did every so often.

After a while, she noticed Isabella Antonelli wasn’t at the machine next to hers. The foreman, Mr. Winter, was running it instead. Mr. Winter was fat and fifty-five and walked with a limp from a wound he’d got in the Second Mexican War. The Army didn’t want him, which made him a godsend for the canning plant.

When she asked him where her friend was, she thought for a moment he hadn’t heard her over the rattle of the lines that sent the cans moving from one station to the next. Then he said, “She called on the telephone this morning. Western Union visited her last night.”

“Oh, God,” Sylvia said. Isabella Antonelli’s husband had been a fisherman on a little boat that operated out of T Wharf. Then the Army had taken him and sent him off to Quebec. The newspapers did their best to be optimistic about the fighting north of the St. Lawrence, but their best wasn’t all that good. The going was hard up there, and bad weather liable to last till May.

Mr. Winter nodded. He was bald, with a fringe of gray hair above his ears; the lights shone off his smooth pate. “She’ll be out a few days, I’m afraid,” he said. “They’ll put a temporary on the machine here tomorrow, I expect, till she can come back.”

Sylvia nodded, too, hiding a flash of fury frightening in its fierceness. Yes, Mr. Winter was a godsend for the canning plant, all right. He thought of getting the mackerel out before he worried about the people who got it out.
Keep the machines running, no matter what,
she thought. Antonelli was one more line in the casualty lists? So what?

She filled the paste reservoir to her machine from one of the cans under it. The foreman at the paste plant probably had the exact same attitude. For that matter, the generals probably had the exact same attitude, too. What was Antonelli to them but one more line in the casualty lists?

All the canning machines, including Sylvia’s, ran smoothly, unlike the war machine. She pulled her three levers, one after the other, then went back and did it again and again and again. If you didn’t notice how your feet got sore from standing by the machine for hours at a time, you could get into a rhythm where you did your job almost without conscious thought, so that half the morning could go by before you noticed. Sylvia didn’t know whether to like those days or be frightened of them.

Mr. Winter’s voice startled her out of that half-mesmerized state: “
Your
husband well, Mrs. Enos?”

“What?” she said, and then, really hearing the words, “Oh. Yes. Thank you. I got a letter from him yesterday, as a matter of fact. I wrote an answer, too,” she added virtuously, “but I forgot to mail it this morning. I’ll do it on the way home.”

“Good. That’s good.” The foreman’s smile displayed large yellow teeth, a couple of them in the lower jaw missing. “Good-looking woman like you, though, I bet you get lonely anyhow, no man around. Being lonely’s no fun. I know about that, since Priscilla died a few years ago.”

Numbly, Sylvia nodded. The machine ran low on labels, which let her tend to it without having to say anything. Mr. Winter hadn’t been crude, as men sometimes were. But she felt his eyes on her as she loaded in the labels. He was the foreman. If he pushed it and she said no, he could fire her. The line kept running smoothly, but she never got the easy rhythm back.

Among the butternut uniforms in the West Virginia prisoner-of-war camp were a few dark gray ones: Navy men captured by the damnyankees. Reggie Bartlett found himself gravitating toward them. For a while, he wondered why; he’d never had any special interest in the Confederate States Navy before the war began. After a bit, he found an answer that, if it wasn’t the whole picture, was at least a good part of it.

The trouble was, soldiers were boring. He’d done as much hard fighting as any of them, and more than most—war in the Roanoke valley was as nasty a business as war anywhere in the world. He’d seen almost all the horrors there were, and heard about the ones he hadn’t seen. Soldiers told the same kinds of stories, over and over again. They got stale.

Navy men, now, Navy men were different, and so were their stories. They’d been in strange places and done strange things—or at least things Reggie Bartlett had never done. Those tales made the time between stretches of chopping wood and filling in slit trenches and the other exciting chores of camp life pass more quickly.

Even when things went wrong in the stories, they went wrong in ways that couldn’t happen on dry land. A senior lieutenant who somehow managed to look clean and spruce and well-shaved in spite of the general camp squalor was saying, “Damnyankees suckered me in, neat as you please. There sat this fishing boat, out in the middle of the Atlantic, no ships around her, naked as a whore in her working clothes. So up came my boat to sink her with the deck gun—cheaper and surer than using one of my fish—”

“One of your what, Lieutenant Briggs?” Reggie asked, a beat ahead of a couple of other prisoners who had gathered around the Navy lieutenant for reasons probably similar to his own.

“Torpedoes,” Briggs explained. Under his breath, he muttered, “Landlubbers.” But he resumed after a moment, as glad to tell the story as the others were to hear it: “You can’t always trust a whore, though, even when she’s naked. And sure enough, this was the badger game. The fishing boat was towing a Yankee sub on a cable with a telephone line attached. I let the fishermen go over the side before I sank their boat, and what thanks did I get? Their damned submersible blew me out of the water.” His face clouded. “Only a couple-three of us lived. The rest went right to the bottom, never had a chance.”

“It’s almost like what the Mormons done to the damnyankees, blowin’ up all that powder right under ’em,” somebody said.

“More like sniper’s work,” Reggie contradicted. “A lot of times, a sniper’ll be hiding, and he’ll try and make somebody on the other side look up to see what’s going on further down the trench. And if you’re dumb enough to do it, the bastard with the scope on his rifle, he’ll put one right in your earhole for you.”

“Good analogy,” Briggs said, nodding. He wasn’t a whole lot older than Bartlett, but better educated and also stiffer in manner; had he been a civilian, he would have been something like a junior loan officer at a bank. He was steady, he was sound, he was reliable—and Reggie would have loved to play poker against him, because if the Yankees could play him for a sucker that way, Reggie figured he could, too.

He’d just noticed that his analogy, whether Briggs approved of it or not, took things back to the trenches when the U.S. guards started shouting, “Prisoners form by barracks in parade ranks!”

Senior Lieutenant Briggs frowned. “This isn’t right. It’s not time to form parade ranks.” The break in routine irked him.

“Probably got some kind of special announcement for us,” Bartlett said. The guards had done that before, a time or two. The special announcements they handed out weren’t good news, not if you backed the Entente.

He didn’t get the chance to learn Briggs’ opinion of his guess; he had to hurry off to form up outside his own harsh, chilly building, a good ways away from where the Navy man was holding forth. The uniforms he and his comrades in misery wore would have given a Confederate drill sergeant a fit, but the ranks the men formed were as neat and orderly as anything that sergeant could have wanted.

“What do you reckon this is?” Jasper Jenkins asked, taking his place beside Bartlett.

“Dunno,” Reggie told his friend. “I hope it’s that we’ve had a couple more escapes, and they’re gonna make the rest of us work harder on account of that. I don’t mind paying the price they put on it. Worth it, you ask me.”

“Yeah, that’d be good,” Jenkins agreed. “They haven’t figured out that we’re gonna keep on tryin’ to break out o’ here no matter what they do. Only a fool’d want to stay, and that’s a fact.”

A U.S. captain strode importantly to the front of the prisoners’ formation. He unfolded a sheet of paper and read from it in a loud, harsh voice: “The Imperial German government, the loyal ally of the United States, has announced the capture of the city of Verdun, the French having evacuated the said city after being unable in six weeks of battle to withstand the might of German arms. Victory shall be ours! Dismissed!”

The neat ranks of prisoners broke up into pockets of chattering men. Jasper Jenkins tugged at Bartlett’s sleeve. “Hey, Reggie, where’s this Vair-done place at?” he asked. Before the war, he probably would have asked the same thing about Houston or Nashville or Charleston; his horizon had been limited to his farm and the small town where he sold his crops and bought what little he couldn’t raise for himself.

Reggie could have done better at the geography of the Confederate States. When it came to foreign countries, even foreign countries to which the CSA was allied…“I dunno, not exactly,” he admitted. “Somewhere in France, it has to be, and I reckon somewhere near Germany, or the Huns wouldn’t have been fighting for it. Past that, though, I can’t tell you.”

“Damnyankees sound like losin’ it’s about two steps from the end o’ the world for the Frenchies,” Jenkins said.

“I know they do,” Reggie answered, “but you’ve got to remember two things. First one is, for all you know, they’re lying just to get us downhearted. Second one is, even if they’re not, I expect they’re making it out to be more important than it really is. What are we going to do, call ’em liars?”

“They’re damnyankees—of course they’re liars,” Jenkins said, as if stating a law of nature. “You got a good way of lookin’ at things, pal. Thanks.” He went off, whistling a dirty song.

Having made his friend happy, Reggie discovered he was unhappy himself: Jenkins had made his bump of curiosity itch. He went off looking for Senior Lieutenant Briggs. The naval officer being an educated man, he would be the one to know where Verdun was and what its fall meant.

He found Briggs without much trouble, then wished he hadn’t. The Navy man sat on the ground in front of his barracks, head in hands, the picture of misery. Bartlett didn’t think the news the Yankees had announced could do that to a man, and wondered if Briggs had just got word his brother had been killed or his sweetheart had married somebody else.

But when he asked what the matter was, Briggs, like Poe’s raven, spoke one word and nothing more: “Verdun.”

“Sir?” Reggie said. Losing one town didn’t sound like that big a catastrophe to him. The Confederacy had lost a good many towns, all along the border, but was still very much in the fight.

“Verdun,” Briggs repeated, and climbed heavily to his feet. “From everything I heard, the French were swearing they’d defend the place to the last man. Now they’ve pulled back instead. The Germans have hit ’em such a lick, they couldn’t afford to keep on fighting where they were, not if they wanted to hang on. Best they think they can do now, looks like, is make the Huns pay such a price for the land they get that they decide it’s not worth the cost.”

“That’s not so bad,” Reggie began, but then corrected himself: “It’s not so good, either. The Germans, they’re inside France, and the French, they don’t have any soldiers inside Germany.”

“Now you’re getting the picture,” Briggs agreed. “Same sort of picture we’ve got over here, too—a goddamn ugly one.”

“Yes, sir.” Reggie tried to look on the bright side: “We’ve still got us Washington.”

“For now,” the Navy man said—the report from France seemed to have taken all the wind from his sails. “I tell you this, though, Bartlett: our country is going to need every man it can lay its hands on if we’re going to give the American Huns what they deserve.” He paused to let that sink in, then added in a low voice, “It is the positive duty of every prisoner of war to try to escape.”

Reggie felt a sudden hollow in the pit of his stomach having nothing to do with the hunger that never left. “The Yankees can shoot you if they catch you trying to escape,” he remarked. “They catch you after you’ve got out, they can pretty much do what they want to you.” Under the laws of war, Confederate guards had the same rights with U.S. prisoners, but he didn’t dwell on that.

Briggs just nodded, as if he’d remarked on the weather. “If we once get out, we can get away. We wouldn’t be like Frenchmen stuck in the middle of Germany. We speak the same language as the Yankees.”

“Not just the same language,” Reggie objected. “They talk ugly.”

“I think so, too,” Briggs said. “But I know how they talk and how it’s different from the way we talk. I can teach you. Come with me.” The last three words had the snap of an order. Bartlett followed him into the barracks. The senior lieutenant picked up an object made of galvanized sheet iron and walked across the room with it, asking, “What am I doing?” as he walked.

“Why, you’re toting that pail, sir.” Reggie stated the obvious.

But Briggs shook his head. “That’s what I’d be doing in the CSA,” he said. “If I’m doing it in the USA, I’m carrying this bucket. You see?”

“Yes, sir,” Bartlett said, and he did see. For that last part of the sentence, Briggs hadn’t sounded like a Confederate at all. He’d not only chosen different words, he’d sort of pinched his mouth up, so all the vowel sounds were somehow sharper. “How’d you do that?”

“Got started in theatricals at the Naval Academy down in Mobile,” Briggs answered. “If we can get outside the wire, it’ll come in handy. Like I say, I can teach you. Do you want to learn? Do you want to do the other things you’ll have to do to get outside the wire?”

It was a good question. If he stayed here, Reggie could sit out the war, if not in comfort, at least in security. If he tried to escape, he guaranteed himself all the risks involved with Yankee guards and patrols. If he managed to evade them and got back to the CSA, what would happen next? He knew exactly what would happen: they’d pat him on the back, grant him a little leave, and then hand him a new uniform and a Tredegar and put him back in the line. Hadn’t he had enough of that for a lifetime?

“I’m carrying the bucket,” he said, trying to pronounce the words as Briggs had. He wasn’t getting them right. He could hear that.

“Listen.” Briggs repeated the phrase. Bartlett tried it again. “Better,” the Navy man said. Reggie didn’t know exactly how he’d agreed to try to escape from the prisoner-of-war camp, but, by the time he left Briggs’ barracks, he had no doubt he’d done just that.

“Closing time, gentlemen,” Nellie Semphroch said as the clock in the coffeehouse finished striking nine. When none of the Confederate officers—or the Washingtonians who’d grown rich dealing with them—showed any sign of being ready to leave, she added, “I’m following the regulations you people set down. You wouldn’t want me to break your own rules, would you?”

A plump, gray-haired colonel who did not look to be the sort for late night adventures rose from his chair, saying, “We must set an example for the lovely ladies here.” He tossed a half-dollar down on the table and walked out into the night.

With him taking the lead, the rest of the men and the handful of women—
loose women,
Nellie thought, for what other kind would consort with the occupiers?—drifted out of the coffeehouse. Last of all went Nicholas H. Kincaid, who paused outside the doorway to send a mooncalf look back at Edna till Nellie almost broke his nose by slamming the door in his face.

“Ma, you keep doin’ things like that, he won’t come back no more,” Edna said, gathering up cups and saucers and plates and tips, some in scrip, some in good silver money.

“God, I hope he doesn’t,” Nellie said. “He’s not here for the coffee and victuals. He’s here because he’s all soppy over you.” The reverse, as she knew, also held; she’d caught them kissing and well on their way to worse a year before, and had watched Edna like a hawk ever since.

Her daughter just tossed her head. “He’s all right,” she said carelessly. “There are plenty of others, though.” That was calculated to make Nellie steam, and achieved the desired effect. Nellie was bound and determined that her daughter should go to the altar a maiden—she knew too well how grim the alternative could be. But Edna, and Edna’s hot young blood, weren’t making things easy.

Work helped. Running the coffeehouse kept the two of them hopping from sunup till long past sundown. If you were busy, you didn’t have time to get into trouble. Nellie said, “Start doing up the dishes. I’ll help in a minute—I want to count up what’s in the till first.”

“All right, Ma,” Edna said. She
would
work, Nellie admitted to herself, more than a little grudgingly. She wasn’t a
bad
girl, not really, just a
wild
girl, wild for life, wild for anything she could get her hands on, wild to let life—and the men crawling through life—get their hands on her.