Walk in Hell (27 page)

Cherry’s appeal to the faltering followers of the Republic was more fundamental: “Kill de white folks! Got to kill de white folks! Dey catches you, dey kills you sure!”

She was probably right. No—she was almost certainly right. But the men who had done so much had concluded they could do no more. Neither her fiery words nor her even more fiery beauty were enough to turn them back toward the trenches they could not hold.

She rushed over to Scipio and, to his startlement and no small alarm, threw herself into his arms. Her breasts were firm and soft against his chest. “Make dey stop, Kip,” she said in a bedroom voice. “Make dey stop, make dey fight. You de best talkin’ man we gots. Make dey go back an’ fight and I is yours. I do whatever you wants, you make dey stop.” She ran her tongue over her full lips, making them even moister and more delicious-looking than they had been. Every sort of promise smoldered in her eyes.

Scipio sighed and shook his head. “Cain’t,” he said regretfully—not so much regret that he would not have her, for she frightened him more than he wanted her, but regret that this collapse would get so many people killed, with him all too likely to be among them. “Cain’t, Cherry. It over. Don’t you see? It over.”

“Bastard!” she screamed, and twisted away from him. “Liar! Quitter!” She slapped him, a roundhouse blow that snapped his head sideways on his neck and left the taste of blood in his mouth.
Blood on my hands, too
, he thought.
Blood on all our hands
. Cherry cared nothing about the blood on her hands. He counted himself lucky she hadn’t pulled out a knife and gutted him with it.

In spite of haranguing the Negroes who didn’t want to be soldiers any more, Cassius heard the exchange between Cherry and Scipio. Cassius, as best Scipio could tell, never missed anything. He came trotting over to the two of them. Scipio’s guts knotted with fear all over again. Cherry was Cassius’ woman. No—Cherry was her own woman, and had been giving herself to Cassius. That wasn’t quite the same thing, even if, from Cassius’ point of view, it probably looked as if it were.

But Cassius didn’t want to quarrel. The ex-hunter, now chairman of what was left of the Congaree Socialist Republic, sadly studied Scipio. “It over now, Kip?” he asked. “You t’ink it over now fo’ true?”

“Don’t you?” Scipio waved his arms. As he did so, a shell landed only a couple of hundred yards away, black smoke with angry red fire at the core. Dirt leaped upward in graceful arcs, beauty in destruction. “We done everything we kin do. Dey gots too many buckra, too many rifles, too many cannons. Dey whip we, Cass.”

“Too many buckra,” Cassius said bitterly. “Dey don’ rise fo’ dey class int’rest, de fools. De ’ristocrats got dey all mystified up.” He lifted a weary hand. “We been over this before. I know. We make de struggle go on.” He pointed north, toward the swamps of the Congaree. “Gwine make de stand up there. De niggers in de ’pressed zones, dey always gwine know de struggle go on. De white folks, dey never takes we fo’ granted again.”

That, no doubt, was true. Scipio wished he thought it likelier to help than to hurt. It was liable to be another fifty years before the Negro cause revived in the CSA. He didn’t say that. What point, now? What he did say was, “I cain’t go to de swamp with you, Cass.”

To his surprise, the ex-hunter burst out laughing. “I knows that—you was just a house nigger, and you don’t know nothin’ ’bout that kin’ o’ life. What you gots to do is, you gots to blend in. Don’ let nobody know you got dat white folks’ talk hidin’ in your mouth. Git work in de field, in de factory, be a good nigger till de heat die down, then hurt they white folks however you kin.” He slapped Scipio on the back. Then he and Cherry, hand in hand, headed north along with some of the other Negroes who still had fight in them.

Scipio stood in the St. Matthews square till shells started landing a good deal closer than a couple of hundred yards away. Then he turned on his heel and ran, along with so many other blacks, men and women both. From behind came shouts of, “De buckra! De buckra comin’!” He ran harder. The leaders of the Congaree Socialist Republic, unlike their Confederate counterparts, hadn’t gone in for fancy uniforms. In his undyed cotton homespun, he could have been anybody at all.

And anybody at all was just who he aimed to pretend to be. Once white control washed over this part of what was again South Carolina, he’d lie low, find work, eventually find better work, and spend the rest of his life trying to pretend this whole unfortunate business had never happened.

He stopped running about half a mile outside St. Matthews. That was partly because his wind wasn’t all it should have been; before the uprising, he
had
lived soft. It was also partly because he calculated that a Negro overrun while fleeing was more likely to be killed on sight than one who looked to have some business where he was. If he seemed a field hand or a farmer, maybe the white soldiers wouldn’t figure he’d been in arms against them. And, as a matter of fact, he hadn’t. He’d never once fired a weapon at the duly constituted forces of the Confederated States of America.

Not that that mattered. His laugh came bitter as Cassius’. If the white folks ever figured out who he was, he’d hang. He wouldn’t simply hang, either. What they’d do to him first…

He moaned a little, down deep in his throat. He’d never been a physically brave man. The idea of being tortured made him want to piss himself with fright. He forced himself to something dimly resembling calm.
Your wits are all you’ve got now,
he thought.
If you don’t use them,
that
will kill you
.

Gunfire and faint shouts rose behind him. That would be the white folks, entering St. Matthews. He nodded to himself. The Congaree Socialist Republic was dead, all right, even if Cassius could keep a nasty ghost of it going in the swamps.

When Scipio came to a patch of woods, he chose a winding path through them over going around. In the woods, he thought, he would be perceived as doing something in particular rather than simply trying to escape from the victorious whites. That again might help keep them from shooting him for the fun of it.

Maybe there was a farm on the far side of the woods. Maybe the world had just gone topsy-turvy. Whatever the reason, a fat hen walked out from among the pine trees and stood in the path, staring at him from beady black eyes. For a moment, that didn’t mean much to him. Then it did.
Food,
he thought. No more communal kitchens, no more suppers arguing the workings of the dialectic. If he was going to eat, he’d have to feed himself.

Slowly, he bent and picked up a fist-sized stone. The chicken kept watching him from about ten feet away. He drew back his arm—and let fly, hard as he could. The bird had time for one startled squawk before the stone hit. Feathers exploded out from it. It tried to run away, but had trouble making its legs work. He sprang on it, snatched up the stone, and smashed in its little stupid head.

He wore a knife on his belt. He cut off the broken head and held the chicken by the feet, letting it bleed out. Then he gutted it. He worked slowly and carefully there; he’d seen the job done in the kitchens at Marshlands more times than he could count, but couldn’t remember the last time he’d done it himself. He saved the liver and gizzard and heart, putting them back inside the body cavity.

He’d just tossed the rest of the offal into the bushes by the side of the path—a fox or a coon or a possum would find a treat—when a white man called, “You there, nigger! What are you doin’?”

“Got me a chicken, suh,” Scipio said. He turned toward the white man—a Confederate major—and put on a wide, servile smile. “Be right glad to share, you leave me jus’ a little bit.” That was how sharing between blacks and whites worked (when it worked at all) in the CSA.

“Give it here,” the major said: a lot of the time, sharing didn’t work at all in the CSA. Scipio handed the bird over without a word. The officer took its feet in his right hand. His left hand wasn’t a hand, but a hook.

Scipio stiffened in dismay. He’d dealt with this white man, arranging to exchange wounded prisoners. Maybe, though, the fellow wouldn’t recognize him. One raggedy Negro looked a lot like another, especially when you hardly saw them as human beings at all.

But Major Hotchkiss, even if he was mutilated, wasn’t stupid. His eyes narrowed. “I know your voice,” he said, half to himself. “You’re the nigger who—” From narrow, his eyes went wide. He didn’t bother saying,
talks like a white man,
but dropped the chicken and grabbed for his pistol.

He was a split second too slow. Scipio hit him in the face with the rock he’d used to kill the hen. The Negro leaped on him as he had on the bird, pounding and pounding with the stone till Hotchkiss was as dead as a man ever would be.

Scipio reached for the major’s pistol, then jerked his hand away. He didn’t want to be caught with a firearm, not in these times. He didn’t want to be caught with a blood-spattered shirt, either. He stripped it off and hid it in a hole in the ground. A shirtless Negro would draw no comment.

The chicken was another matter. It was
his
. “You damn thief,” he muttered to the late Major Hotchkiss. He picked up the bird and got out of there as fast as he could, before any more white soldiers came along to connect him to the major’s untimely demise.

Paul Mantarakis strode warily through the ruins of Ogden, Utah. “Boy, this place looks like hell,” he said. “I can’t tell whether what I’m walking on used to be houses or street.”

“Hell was let loose on earth here,” said Gordon McSweeney, who still wore on his back the flamethrower which had loosed a lot of that hell. But then he went on, “Hell let loose on earth, giving the misbelievers a foretaste of eternity.”

Beside them, Ben Carlton said, “Feels damn strange, walking along where there’s Mormons around and not diving for cover.”

“They surrendered,” Mantarakis said. But he was warily looking around, too. He carried his Springfield at the ready, and had a round in the chamber.

“For all we know, they ain’t gonna go through with it,” Carlton said. “Maybe they got more TNT under this here Tabernacle Park, and they’ll blow us and them to kingdom come instead of giving up.”

“Samson in the temple,” McSweeney murmured. But the big Scotsman shook his head. “No, I cannot believe it. Samson worked with the Lord, not against Him. I do not think Satan could steel their souls to such vain sacrifice.”

“The whole damn state of Utah is a sacrifice,” Paul said. “I don’t know what the hell made the Mormons fight like that, but they did more with less than the damn Rebs ever dreamt of doing. Only way we licked ’em is, we had more men and more guns.”

Here and there, people who were not U.S. soldiers picked through the remains of Ogden. Women in bonnets and long skirts shoved aside wreckage, looking for precious possessions or food or perhaps the remains of loved ones. Children and a few old men helped them. The spoiled-meat smell of death hung everywhere.

A few men not old also went through the ruins. Most of them wore overalls, with poplin or flannel shirts underneath. Their clothes were as filthy and tattered as the soldiers’ uniforms, and for the same reason: they’d spent too long in trenches.

“If looks could kill…” Paul said quietly. His companions nodded. The Mormon fighting men no longer carried weapons; that was one of the terms of the cease-fire to which their leaders had agreed. They stared at the American soldiers, and stared, and kept on staring. Their eyes were hot and empty at the same time. They’d fought, and they’d lost, and it was eating them inside.

“My granddads fought in the War of Secession,” Carlton said. “I seen a photograph of one of ’em after we gave up. He looks just like the Mormons look now.”

They tramped past a five-year-old boy, a little towhead cute enough to show up on a poster advertising shoes or candy. His eyes blazed with the same terrible despair that informed the faces of the beaten Mormon fighters.

The women were no different. They glowered at the victorious U.S. troopers. The prettier they were, the harder they glared. Some of them had carried rifles and fought in the trenches, too. Soldiers who won a war were supposed to have an easy time among the women of the people they’d defeated. That hadn’t happened anywhere in Utah that Paul had seen. He didn’t think it would start happening any time soon, either.

But the Mormon women didn’t aim that look full of hatred and contempt at the Americans alone. They also sent it toward their own menfolk, as if to say,
How dare you have lost?
Even the Mormon fighters quailed under the gaze of their women.

Carlton pointed ahead. “Must be the park.”

Most of Ogden was shell holes and rubble. Tabernacle Park was, for the most part, just shell holes. The only major exception was the burned-out building at the southeast corner. It had been the local Mormon temple, and then the last strongpoint in Ogden, holding out until surrounded and battered flat by U.S. artillery.

Captain Schneider was already in the park. He waved the men of his company over to him. Pulling out a pocket watch, he said, “Ceremony starts in fifteen minutes. General Kent could have got himself a fancy honor guard, but he chose us instead. He said he thought it would be better if soldiers who’d been through it from the start saw the end.”

“That is a just deed,” Gordon McSweeney rumbled—high approval from him.

“Congratulations again on your medal, sir,” Mantarakis said.

Schneider looked down at the Remembrance Cross in gold on his left breast pocket, won for rallying the line south of Ogden after the Mormons exploded their mines. “Thank you, Sergeant,” he said. “I shouldn’t be the only one wearing it, though. We all earned them that day.”

Under his breath, Ben Carlton muttered, “Damn fine officer.” Paul Mantarakis nodded.

Here came Major General Alonzo Kent, tramping along through the rubble like a common soldier. He waved to the veterans gathering in front of the wrecked Mormon temple. “Well, boys, it was a hell of a fight, but we licked ’em,” he said. He wasn’t impressive to look at, not even in a general’s fancy uniform, but he’d got the job done.