Walk in Hell (42 page)

And the Ford she was driving these days made as unsatisfactory a replacement for her vanished Vauxhall as the nigger cottage did for her vanished mansion. She hated the balky, farting motorcar. The only thing she would have hated worse was being without one altogether.

An automobile rattled past on the road, kicking up a trail of red dust as it went. It was, she saw, an armored car, with a couple of machine guns mounted in a central turret. Resistance still sputtered in the swamps by the Congaree. Otherwise, that armored car would have been of far more value shooting down damnyankees, its proper task.

Julia’s eyes followed the armored car till it disappeared behind a stand of trees. Despite her broad lips, her mouth made a thin, hard line. She swore up and down that she’d never been a rebel, that she hated everything the Reds stood for. Anne’s opinion was that she protested too much. Wherever the truth lay there, Julia did not take kindly to seeing such deadly machines out hunting black men. That was also true even of the Negroes who had, Anne thought, genuinely disapproved of the Socialist uprising. Anne sighed. Life kept getting harder.

A couple of minutes later, a party of horsemen turned off the road and onto the path leading up to…the ruins of Marshlands. Two of the three riders had the look of superannuated soldiers, and carried carbines across their knees. The third, the postman, wore a Tredegar slung on his back.

Anne walked toward him, nodding as she did so. “Good morning, Mr. Palmer,” she called. With the telephone and telegraph out of commission, the postman was her lifeline to the wider world.

He swung down off his horse and touched the brim of his hat with a forefinger. Producing a pencil and a printed form, he said, “Mornin’ to you, Miss Colleton. Got a special delivery you got to sign for—and quite a special delivery it is, too. Ah, thank you, ma’am.” He passed her the envelope, and then the rest of the day’s mail. That done, he gave her another half-salute, remounted, and urged his horse up from walk to canter. The two armed guards rode off with him, their eyes hard and alert.

“Richmond,” Anne said, noting the postmark on the envelope before she spotted the return address in the upper left-hand corner, in a typeface that might have come straight off a Roman monument:

RESIDENCE OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE CONFEDERATE STATES OF AMERICA

Her head went up and down in a quick, decisive nod. “About time Gabriel Semmes got off his backside and wrote to me.”

“Who it from, Miss Anne?” Julia asked.

“The president,” Anne answered, and the Negro woman’s eyes got big and round.

Anne tore the envelope open. The letter was in Semmes’ own hand, which partly mollified her for not having heard from him sooner.
My dear Miss Colleton,
the president of the CSA wrote,
Let me extend to you my deepest personal sympathies on the loss of your brother and the damage to your property during the unfortunate events of the recent past
.

“Unfortunate events,” Anne snorted, as if the two words added up to some horrible curse—and so, maybe, they did. Before he’d been elected, Gabriel Semmes had made a name for himself as a man who went out and did things, not a typical politician. Anne had thrown money into his campaign on that basis. But if he called an insurrection an unfortunate event, maybe she would have been better served spending it elsewhere.

She read on:
As you no doubt know, these unfortunate events have adversely affected our ability to resist the aggression of the United States of America, which seek to reduce us once more to the state of abject dependency existing before the War of Secession. To meet their challenge, we shall have to utilize every resource available to us
.

“I should hope so,” Anne said, as if the president were standing there before her. She was sure she knew what would be coming next: some sort of higher taxes, which she would be asked to support in the name of continued Confederate strength and independence.

She looked around Marshlands. She didn’t know how she could pay higher taxes. She didn’t know how she could pay the taxes already due. One way or another, she would have to manage. She understood that. If the choice was between paying more and having the damnyankees win, she would—somehow—pay more. With the Yankees’ having gassed Jacob, and with Tom still at the Roanoke front, how could she do anything less?

Her eyes returned to the letter:
For that reason, I have introduced into the Congress of the Confederate States of America…
She nodded and stopped reading for a moment. Yes, Gabriel Semmes was perfectly predictable….
a bill authorizing the recruitment, training, and employment against the United States of America of bodies of Negro troops, these to serve under white officers and noncommissioned officers, the reward for their satisfactory completion of service, or for their inability to do so because of wounds, to be the franchise and all other rights and privileges pertaining to full citizenship in the Confederate States of America, intermarriage being the sole exception thereto
.

“Good God,” Anne said. Taxes, she’d expected. This, no. She felt as if she’d been kicked in the belly. The Negroes rose up in bloody revolt, and Semmes proposed to reward them for it? He did indeed go forth and do things, and she wished to high heaven he’d been content to hold still.

He continued,
I am soliciting your support for this measure because I know that you judge the continued independence of the country we both love to be of primary importance, with all else subordinated to it. Now we are come to a crisis the likes of which we have never known, one that calls for a supreme effort from every man, woman, and child in the Confederate States, white and black alike. Anything less would be a dereliction of duty from all of us. I hope and trust you will use your not inconsiderable influence both within your circle of acquaintances and with your Congressional delegation to let us turn back the ravening hordes of American Huns. Your ob’t servant
—and a florid signature.

“Good God,” Anne said again. “I should have backed Doroteo Arango.”

“Miss Anne?” Julia knew nothing of politics, unless perhaps Red politics, and cared less.

“Never mind.” Anne carried the rest of the mail into the cottage. Julia followed her. She sorted through it, separating out bills; requests for money and time for charitable organizations that, these days, would have to go unanswered; advertising circulars that would make good kindling for the fireplace but were otherwise worthless; and, at the bottom of the stack, a letter from Tom.

She opened that one eagerly. She wondered what Tom would think of having nigger troops put on Confederate butternut. No, she didn’t wonder. She was perfectly sure. She’d never credited her brother with a whole lot of sense, but how much sense did you need to see folly?

Dear Sis,
Tom wrote,
Just a note to let you know I’m alive and well. Not a scratch on me—they do say that if you’re born to hang, nothing else can hurt you
. Anne snorted again. Her brother was about the least likely man to go to the gallows she could imagine. She read on:
It has been lively, I will say. The damnyankees have come as far as
—a censor had cut out the name of the place—
which we never expected them to do.

The trouble is, they’re using these armor-plated traveling forts prisoners call
—another censor’s slice denied her the knowledge of what they were called, though she could not for the life of her see why—
and they’ve gained a lot of ground because of it. Artillery will take them out. So will brave soldiers, but it’s hard being brave with one of those things bearing down on you
. This time, the censor, damn him, had cut out a whole sentence. When she was allowed to resume reading what her brother wrote, he said,
If they keep throwing more and more machines at us, I don’t know where we’ll come up with the men to hold them back.

I hope to get leave before too long, and will come home to have a look at Marshlands. I am sure you are whipping the old place back into shape
. Tom was always sure of that. Till now, his confidence had always been justified. Now—Anne didn’t want to think about now. Her eyes went to the last couple of sentences:
Who would have dreamt the damned niggers could raise so much Cain? If I’d thought they could do half so much, I’d have sooner had them shooting at the damnyankees so we could get some use out of them. But even though everything else is turned upside down from before the war, I still love you, and I’ll see you soon—Tom
.

“Miss Anne?” Julia said when Anne stood there motionless, reading the letter over several times.

“Hush,” Anne Colleton replied absently. After a bit, she put the letter down and picked up the one from the president of the Confederacy. She read through that letter twice, too. Her breath whistled out in a long sigh.

“You all right, Miss Anne?” Julia asked, sounding for once very much like the concerned body servant she’d been till not long before.

“No,” Anne said. “Not even close.” She’d misjudged her brother—and if she couldn’t tell what Tom was thinking these days, how could she trust her judgment on anything else? The short answer was, she couldn’t. She sighed again, even louder this time. “Maybe Gabriel Semmes isn’t a complete utter damn fool after all. Maybe.” She tried to make herself sound as if she believed it. It wasn’t easy.

George Armstrong Custer stood at the edge of the road, by a sign that had an arrow saying
KENTUCKY
pointing north and another saying
TENNESSEE
pointing south. A photographer snapped several pictures. “These’ll make bully halftones, General,” he said.

“Splendid, my good man, splendid,” Custer replied grandly. Major Abner Dowling felt ready to retch. That road sign was as resurrected as Lazarus—everything hereabouts, like everything everywhere the rake of war passed, had been stomped flat. When it came to getting his name—and, better yet, his photograph—in the papers, Custer was not a man to let mere rude facts stand in his way. Dowling would have thought he’d had the sign made up special for the occasion, but that order would have gone through him, so Custer must have come up with a real one instead.

The photographer put down the camera and pulled out a notebook and pencil; he doubled as a reporter. “To what do you attribute your success in this spring’s campaign, General?” he asked.

Before Custer could reply, a barrel came rumbling down the road, heading south into Tennessee. Another followed, then another. Everybody except the drivers rode on top of the machines, not inside them. Men had died from heat prostration inside barrels, trying to fight in this hideous summer weather. Kentucky had been bad. Tennessee promised to be worse.

Custer pointed to the machines. “There is your answer, sir. The barrels have filled Rebel hearts not only with fear but also with a good, healthy respect for the prowess of the American soldier and for the genius lying behind what I call with pardonable pride old-fashioned Yankee ingenuity. I have always insisted that machines as well as men will make the difference—are you all right, Major Dowling?”

“Yes, sir. Sorry, sir,” Dowling said. “Must have been the dust the barrels kicked up, or maybe those stinking exhaust fumes. I couldn’t breathe for a second or two there.”

“I hope you’re better now,” Custer said doubtfully. “You sounded like a man choking to death. Where was I? Oh yes, barrels. I—”

Custer barreled on. Dowling took out a pocket handkerchief and daubed at his sweaty forehead and streaming eyes. Custer disapproved of the aeroplane. He disapproved of the machine gun, though he’d risen to prominence in the Second Mexican War because he’d had a few attached to his command. He disapproved of the telephone and the telegraph. He undoubtedly would have disapproved of the telescope had it not been invented before he was born.

But barrels—he approved of barrels. Barrels, to him, remained cavalry reborn, cavalry proof against everything machine guns could do. Since he’d grown up in the cavalry, he’d transferred his affection to these gasoline-burning successors. And Custer, being Custer, never did anything by halves. When he fell in love, he fell hard.

To prosaic Dowling, barrels were bully infantry support weapons. Past that…he failed to share Custer’s enthusiasm. Custer had any number of enthusiasms he did not share, that for Custer being perhaps the largest.

But even Dowling was prepared to admit the barrels had done some good. The first few times the Rebs saw them, they’d panicked. They were good soldiers; as one of their sincerest foes, Dowling admitted as much. Even the best soldiers, though, would run if the alternative was dying without having the chance to hit back at their enemies.

They weren’t panicking quite so much now. They were starting to figure out ways to blow up barrels, too. The armored machines had proved vulnerable to artillery fire, though artillery had trouble hitting moving targets even if the movement was no swifter than the barrels’ mechanized waddle. Still, Dowling had thought he’d grow old and die in Kentucky, and here he was in Tennessee, or at least on the border.

“Next stop—Nashville!” Custer declared, waving his staff as if he were a train conductor. Dowling wished he thought it would be so easy.

“General, what will your men do if they come up against black troops in Confederate uniform?” the reporter asked.

“I’ll believe that when I see it,” Custer answered. Here, for once, Dowling agreed with him completely. He went on, “If it does happen, it will be only one more sign that the Rebels are scraping the bottom of the barrel—heh, heh. The frogs are padding their lines with African savages these days, so I suppose the Rebs
might
give their home-grown niggers guns—not that they haven’t grabbed guns of their own already, to use on the whites who now talk about using them against us.”

“Er—yes.” The fellow with the camera and notebook hadn’t bargained for a speech. He came back to the question he’d really asked: “But how will your soldiers respond to them, if they are enlisted?”

Custer’s drooping mustache and even more drooping jowls made his frown impressively ugly. “How will they respond to them?” he repeated, not caring for the fact that his earlier answer hadn’t satisfied the man. “I expect they’ll shoot them in great carload lots, that’s how.”