Walk in Hell (26 page)

The cash box was nicely heavy. Nellie had thought it would be. If she could do any one thing, it was gauge how busy the place had been through the day. Most of the take was in silver, too; as her place had become a favorite stop for the occupiers, they became more likely to give her real money and fob off their nearly worthless scrip on merchants whose goodwill mattered less to them.

“A couple of dollars less than I thought there would be,” she murmured, and then shrugged. She was doing well enough that a couple of dollars one way or the other mattered much less to her than they would have before the war started. She had no use for the Rebs, she spied on them whenever their loose talk gave her the chance, but she was getting, if not rich, at least well-to-do off them.
Serves them right,
she thought, and went to help her daughter clean up.

Artillery rumbled, off to the north and northeast, the noise clearly audible through splashing and the clank of china on china. “Louder these days,” Edna remarked, glancing in the direction of that deep-throated roar.

“Were you listening to the Rebs tonight?” Nellie asked. Edna shook her head. That exasperated her mother; Edna saw the war only in terms of how it affected her—not least by supplying her with handsome young Confederate officers to meet. Nellie went on, “They say they think they can stop our attack out of Balti-more, but it didn’t sound to me like they were real sure about it. If we’re lucky, we may run the Rebs out of here this summer.”

Edna kept right on drying saucers. She didn’t say anything for a while. The way she stood, though, suggested she wasn’t altogether sure it would be good luck. She liked the way things were going. Business wouldn’t be the same with the USA holding Washington again.

That wasn’t all that wouldn’t be the same. Mother and daughter spoke together. Nellie said, “The Rebs won’t want to give this town back,” while Edna put it more gamely: “They’ll fight like bastards to hold on to Washington.”

They finished doing the dishes in gloomy silence. There wouldn’t be much left of Washington after a big fight for it. The city had been badly damaged when the Rebels overran it in 1914, and they’d taken it pretty quickly. What would it look like if they chose to defend it street by street, house by house?

Nellie lighted a candle at one of the downstairs gas lamps, then turned them out. She and Edna went up the stairs to their bedrooms by the light of the candle. She used it to light the lamps in those rooms, then blew it out. “Good night, Ma,” Edna said around a yawn.

“Good night,” Nellie answered, hiding a smile. Keep Edna busy enough and she wouldn’t have time for mischief, all right. Maybe she wouldn’t. Nellie undid the hooks and eyes that held her skirt closed, then unbuttoned the long row of mother-of-pearl buttons on her shirtwaist. She tossed it into the wicker clothes hamper. The hamper was almost full; she’d have to go to the laundry soon. The corset came off next. She sighed with pleasure at being released from its steel-boned grip. She put on a long cotton nightdress, turned off the gas lamp, and climbed under the blankets.

Falling asleep seldom took her long. She’d almost done it when the Confederates sent a column marching up the street in front of the coffeehouse. The tramp of boots on pavement, the rattle of steel-tired wagon wheels, and the clop of horses’ hooves made her sit up. It was a good-sized column; they hadn’t sent so many men north in a while.

She tried to figure out what that meant. Was it good news or bad? Good, if the Rebs were moving because they needed men against the U.S. attacks. Not so good, if these were troops freed up because the Negro uprisings in the CSA were collapsing. She’d have to see if she could find out tomorrow.

When the column had passed, she settled back down again. She was drifting toward sleep when someone knocked on the door. The knock was soft but insistent, as if whoever was there wanted to make sure she and Edna heard but also wanted to be equally sure no one else did.

She got out of bed in the dark. Her first suspicious glance, when she reached the hall, was to Edna’s bedroom. But Edna was in there snoring. She’d never been able to fool her mother about being asleep. Scratching her head, Nellie slowly and carefully went downstairs.

The knocking persisted. She wished she had a pistol down there by the cash box. She’d never thought she’d need one, though, not with so many Confederate soldiers always in the coffeehouse. And the Rebs had made it against their rules for locals to keep firearms, with penalties harsh enough to make her not want to take the chance of hiding one right under their noses.

They hadn’t made any rules against keeping knives. She picked up the biggest carving knife she had, one that would have made a decent sword with a different handle, and walked to the door. “Who’s there?” she asked, making no move to open it.

“It’s me, Little Nell.” Bill Reach didn’t name himself, confident she could identify his voice. She didn’t, but no one else these days—thank God!—used the name from her sordid past. When she neither said anything nor worked the latch, he hissed, “Let me in, darlin’. I got nowhere else to go, and it’s late—way past curfew.”

Nellie knew what time it was. “Go away,” she said through the door, quietly, so as not to wake Edna. That he had the nerve to call her
darling
filled her with fury. “Don’t you ever come here again. I mean it.” Her hand closed on the handle of the knife, hard enough to hurt.

“Listen, Nell,” Reach said, also quietly, “if you don’t let me in, I’m a dead man. I can’t stay on the dodge any more, and they—”

“If you don’t get out of here this instant,” Nellie told him in a deadly whisper, “I’ll scream loud enough to bring every Confederate patroller for a mile and a half around this place on the dead run.”

“But—” Reach muttered something under his breath. Then he grunted, an involuntary, frightened sound. “Jesus, Nell, here they come—it’s a whole goddamn Confederate column. They see me here, I’m dead and buried.”

For a moment, Nell thought he was trying to trick her. Then she too heard the rhythmic thump of marching men and the jingle of harness. Another column—probably another regiment—heading up toward the fighting. Nellie bit her lip till she tasted blood. She didn’t want the Rebs to lay their hands on…anyone.
Even Bill Reach?
she asked herself silently, and, with great reluctance, nodded.
Even Bill Reach
.

She opened the door. Reach scurried inside like a rat running into its hole. “God bless you, Nell,” he said while she closed it as quietly as she could. “If they’d have caught me, they’d have squeezed everything out of me, about you and this place and the shoemaker and—
guk!
”

Nellie held the tip of the knife against his poorly shaved throat. “Don’t you talk about such things, not to me, not to them, not to anybody,” she said in a voice all the more frightening for being so cold. “I’m not the foolish girl I was, and you can’t blackmail me. When that column marches past, you’re going out the door again. If you come around here after that, I’ll shove this in”—she did shove the knife in, perhaps a quarter of an inch; Reach moaned and tried to pull away, but she wouldn’t let him—“and I’ll laugh while I’m doing it. Do you hear me? You laughed when you shoved it into me, didn’t you? My turn now.”

He didn’t say anything. That was the smartest thing he could have done. A little moonlight came through the plate-glass window from outside. His eyes glittered. The fear smell, sharp and acrid, came off him in waves.

The Confederates tramped past the coffeehouse. Maybe the noise of their passing woke Edna. Nellie would have sworn she hadn’t been noisy enough to disturb her daughter. But, from the hall, Edna asked, “Ma, what’s going on? Who’s this bird? And—” Edna’s breath caught sharply. “What are you doing with that knife?”

“He’s trouble, nothing else but.” Nellie’s voice was grim. “But he’s in trouble, too, so he can stay here till the Rebs have gone by outside. After that, he’s gone forever.”

“I knew your mother, before you were born,” Bill Reach said to Edna, “back in the house at—” He drew a frightened breath of his own, for Nellie had stuck the knife in farther.
How deep do you have to stab to kill a man?
she wondered. A couple of more words out of Reach and she would have found out.

The sounds of marching feet, clattering wagons, and clopping hooves drowned out the drone of aeroplane engines high overhead. Maybe someone in the Confederate ranks was unwise enough to strike a match to light a cigar or pipe; maybe the moonlight let a U.S. pilot spot the column even without such help. However that was—Nellie had no way of knowing—a stick of bombs came falling out of the sky.

“Oh, Jesus!” Reach said when he heard the high-pitched shriek of air rushing past the bombs’ fins. Nellie needed a split second longer to identify the noise; U.S. bombers hadn’t come over Washington all that often.

A split second after that, sharp explosions left no possible doubt of what was going on. One bomb fell a little in front of the head of the Confederate column. Then two more in quick succession landed right in the middle of it. Either the U.S. bomb-aiming was extraordinarily good or the bombardier was trying for another target altogether and got lucky—again, Nellie never knew.

Glass sprayed inward. A sharp shard caught Nellie in the leg. She yelped. Edna screamed. Bill Reach let out a groan and clutched at his midsection. Nellie staggered back from him. He sank slowly to the floor.

A moment later, the front door opened, hitting him and knocking him sideways. It wasn’t another bomb; it was Confederate soldiers, seeking shelter from the rain of destruction from the sky. Outside in the street, injured soldiers screamed and groaned. A horse screamed, too, on a higher note. Officers shouted for medical orderlies and Negro stretcher-bearers.

Seeing Nellie, one of the Rebs pointed to Reach and said, “This here your husband the damnyankees done hurt, ma’am?” Even at such a time, he worked to separate the people of Washington from the government of the USA.

“I should say not,” she answered, and raised her voice, hoping Reach wasn’t too far gone to pay attention: “He’s a burglar. I caught him breaking in here. I was going to give him to you.” If they thought him an ordinary criminal, they wouldn’t ask him questions about anything but burglary. She didn’t know how he knew what else he knew, or exactly how much that was. She did know it was too much.

One of the Confederate soldiers said, “All right, ma’am, we’ll take charge of him—throw him in a wagon till we find somebody we can give him to. Don’t want to leave him bleedin’ all over your floor here. Come on, you.” He and a buddy got Bill Reach to his feet and out the door.

The bombs had stopped falling. The rest of the Rebels who’d tumbled into the coffeehouse took their leave. Some of them even apologized for bothering Nellie.

“—And your pretty daughter,” one of them added, which did him less good in her eyes than he would have guessed.

Nellie shut the door after the last departing Reb, a futile gesture with the window smashed. She looked around at glinting, drifted glass. “Go on upstairs and get me some slippers, Edna,” she said. “I’ll cut my feet to ribbons if I try to walk through this stuff.” She sighed, but went on, “It’s not near so bad as it was after the Rebs shelled us.”

“No, I reckon not,” Edna agreed. She started toward the stairway, then stopped and looked back at Nellie. “What was that crazy fellow talking about houses for? I ain’t never lived in a house, and I didn’t think you had, neither.”

Not all houses are homes,
ran through Nellie’s mind. “I never did live in a house,” she answered. “He’s crazy like you said, that’s all. Get me those slippers—and get me a blanket, too, will you? With the windows gone, I think I better stay down here till sunup.”

“All right, Ma,” Edna said. “But I still think that feller knows you a whole lot better than you let on. If he didn’t, you wouldn’t let him get you all upset like you do.”

“Just get me my things,” Nellie snapped. Shaking her head, Edna went upstairs. Nellie shook her head, too. Sooner or later, the tawdry tale
would
come out. She could feel it in her bones. And what would she do then? How would she keep Edna in line at all?

Out in the street, wounded Confederates kept on groaning. They did give her a sense of proportion. You didn’t die of mortification, however much you wished you could. Bombs falling out of the sky were something else again.

Thunder filled the air. Artillery was pounding ever closer to St. Matthews, South Carolina, from the south and from the east. Negroes streamed back through the town. Some of them wore red armbands and carried the rifles with which they had fought their white, capitalist oppressors so long and so hard. One or two even wore helmets taken from Confederate corpses. They still had the look of soldiers to them. More, though, had thrown away armbands and weapons and were looking for escape, not more battle.

Scipio wished he could have fled, too. But he was too prominent, too recognizable to escape the square so easily. He’d been one of the leaders of the Congaree Socialist Republic from the beginning—
from the beginning till the end,
he thought. The end could not be delayed much longer.

I tried to tell them
. He hadn’t sought the revolution. He’d been drawn into it, that seeming a safer course than letting himself be eliminated for knowing too much. And it had been a safer course—for a little more than a year. Now, with everything ending in fire, he saw—as he’d seen from the beginning—that going along with the Reds had bought him only a little time.

The rest of the leaders of what had been the Congaree Socialist Republic and was falling to pieces still refused to admit the game was up. Cassius stood in the town square, shouting, “Rally! Rally, God damn de lot of you! Rally ’gainst de ’pressors! Don’ let dey take yo’ freedom!”

He had picked men with him, men who could have formed a line and stopped—or tried to stop—the collapse, but who stood with their rifle butts trailing in the dust and watched men who had been fighters but were now only fugitives running past.