Walk in Hell (50 page)

Nellie’s hands balled into fists. Edna saw that, and laughed silently. Nellie wanted to throw a cup at her daughter. But what could she do? She couldn’t prove a thing. Edna had made sure of that. All in a rush, for the first time in her life, Nellie felt old.

Arthur McGregor came in from the fields. The sun was at last dipping toward the northwestern horizon. He’d been up since it rose, or a little before. Manitoba summer days were long. He thanked God for that. Otherwise, he wouldn’t even have come close to doing all the things he had to do if he wanted to bring in a crop. He couldn’t do them all, not now. With the long days, he could come close.

As he walked in, Julia came out of the barn. “I’ve taken care of the livestock, Pa,” she said. She was thirteen now, shooting up fast as a weed, tall as her mother or maybe even taller. He shook his head in bemusement. She wasn’t a little girl any more. Where had the time gone?

“That’s good,” he told her. “That’s very good. One more thing I don’t have to worry about, and I’ve got plenty.”

“I know,” she answered seriously—she’d always been serious, no matter how little. McGregor sometimes thought she’d used up all the seriousness in the family, so that her sister Mary ended up with none. Julia went on, “I know I can’t do as much as Alexander could, but I’m doing all I can.”

“I know you are,” her father told her. The whole family was doing all it could. In spite of themselves, his wide shoulders slumped. When the damned Americans had arrested Alexander, he’d known at once how big a hole it would leave in the family. What he’d realized only gradually was how big a hole not having his son left in the daily routine of the farm.

He made himself straighten. You did what you had to do, or as much of it as you could possibly do. His nostrils twitched. “Whatever Ma’s cooking in there, it sure smells good.”

“Chicken stew,” Julia said.

McGregor’s eyes went to the chopping block between the barn and the house. The stains on it were fresh, and the hatchet stood at an angle different from the way it had this morning. He smiled and nodded at his older daughter. “Good,” he said. “Sticks to the ribs.”

The inside of the farmhouse, as always, was spotless, immaculate. McGregor wondered how Maude managed to keep it that way. She’d taken on extra work, too, with Alexander gone. The weeding in the potato patch, for instance, was in her hands, because no one else had time for it.

And here came Mary, a rag in her hand, a look of fierce concentration on her face, the tip of her tongue peeking out of the corner of her mouth. Whenever she saw dust on anything, she pounced on it like a kitten pouncing on a cricket—and looked to be enjoying herself like a kitten, too.

“Pa!” she said indignantly. “You didn’t wipe your feet very well.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and meant it. Maude would have given him a hard time about that, too. He went back out and did it better. Seeing that he’d satisfied Mary—who would have let him know if he hadn’t—he walked past her into the kitchen.

His wife looked up from the stew she was stirring. “You look worn to a nub,” she said, worry in her voice.

“So do you,” Arthur McGregor answered. They smiled at each other, wanly. He poured water from a pitcher over his hands and splashed some onto his face. Maude handed him a towel with which to dry himself. That was all the washing he did. Finding time for a bath even once a week wasn’t easy.

“Supper soon,” Maude said.

“Good.” Walking in from the wheatfields, McGregor had thought he was too tired to be hungry. The first whiff of stew convinced him otherwise. He was ravenous as a wolf, and his stomach, empty since dinner long, long before, was growling like one, too.

He sat down in a chair in the front room to wait, and pulled out a copy of
Ivanhoe
with which to spend those few minutes: the first rest he’d had since dinner, too. The book was old, the binding starting to work loose from the pages. It had come out here with him from Ontario, and felt more like a companion than a novel. He sighed. He’d found himself in a world harsher and more merciless than the one Sir Walter Scott’s hero knew.

Over the stew, Maude said, “Biddy Knight came by in the buggy this afternoon, while you were out working.”

“Did she?” McGregor said. “I hope there weren’t any Americans on the road to see her.” Not least because he’d known Biddy’s son, Alexander was in the Rosenfeld gaol now. But Biddy had a harder burden than that to bear: her boy was dead, executed by Yankee bullets. “What did she want?”

“Social call,” his wife answered lightly—too lightly. “Her husband would take it kindly if you dropped in on him one of these days.”

“Don’t know that I want to.” McGregor, as usual, was blunt. “If the Americans know we visit those people, it won’t do Alexander any good.” Maude nodded. Julia looked angry—she’d been angry at the Americans since the day they invaded. For once, something got past Mary, who was playing with the wishbone.

But McGregor hadn’t been so blunt as he might have been. He feared Jimmy Knight’s father was cooking up some kind of scheme to hurt the Americans, and wanted him to be a part of it. He didn’t aim to join any plots. However much he despised the United States and everything they stood for, U.S. soldiers could kill his son any time they chose. That was a powerful argument in favor of prudence.

When Maude said, “Maybe you’re right,” he just nodded. Whenever his wife and he saw things the same way, they weren’t likely to be on the wrong track.

While the womenfolk washed dishes, he indulged himself in the luxury of a pipe. It wasn’t much of a luxury, not with the vile U.S. tobacco Henry Gibbon had to stock these days, but it was better than nothing. McGregor sighed for lost Virginia and North Carolina leaf as he paged through
Ivanhoe
. Scott made war feel glorious, nothing like the squalid reality that had roared past the farm.

The kitchen went dark. Kerosene was in short supply these days, too; no lamp ever burned in an unoccupied room. “Let’s go outside, then upstairs to bed,” Maude said. Mary’s yawn was big as the world.

McGregor was the last to use the outhouse. By the time he got back in, his younger daughter was already snoring. “Saxons,” he muttered as he pulled off his boots. “Saxons in a country the Normans stole from them.”

“What are you talking about?” his wife said. But she was puzzled for only a moment. “Oh. That’s right. You’ve been reading
Ivanhoe
again.”

He nodded and undid his overalls. They were old, and hardly blue at all any more; the fabric, softened by many washings, conformed perfectly to the shape of his body. “Living in a land that had been theirs, and then somebody took it away. How did they stand it? How could they?”

Maude sighed. “You’re going to break your heart, Arthur, if you dwell on things you can’t do anything about. Getting Alexander home, we can do something about that. Maybe we can. I pray to God every night we can. But getting Canada back, that’s too big for the likes of us.”

“It shouldn’t be,” he declared. But half of that—more than half—was Sir Walter Scott speaking through him, and he was wise enough to understand as much.

If he hadn’t been, Maude would have nailed it down tight: “If you don’t think so, why didn’t you want to go see poor Jimmy Knight’s father? Sounds like he’s going to try to do something—”

“Stupid,” he finished for her. She nodded; he hadn’t meant it for a joke, and she hadn’t taken it for one. She blew out the lamp, plunging the bedroom into blackness. No moon, not tonight, and no town close by, either. Sometimes, when all the guns up at the front were going at once, that glow would flicker on the horizon: the Northern Lights of death. But the guns were quiet tonight, too, or as quiet as they ever got.

Still in his union suit, McGregor slid under the covers. Afterwards, he didn’t know whether he first reached for Maude or she for him. After being married so long, after working so hard every day, desire was a flame that guttered, and sometimes guttered low. But it had never quite gone out, and, like any guttering flame, sometimes flared high, too.

Neither one of them undressed. They were almost as formal with each other as they would have been with strangers. He kissed her carefully, knowing he hadn’t had time to shave in the past couple of days, knowing also he would rasp her face raw if he wasn’t careful.

His hand closed on her breast through the cotton nightshirt she wore. She sighed. He squeezed her nipple. It stiffened against the soft fabric. He did the same with her other breast. They were still firm after nursing three children—and, in any case, in the darkness she was always a bride and he a bridegroom ever so glad to be out of his uncomfortable fancy suit and the top hat he’d never had on a day of his life before or since.

He reached under the hem of the long nightshirt. Her legs slid apart for him. His hands were hard with endless labor, and she—she was softer there than anywhere else. Of themselves, her legs drifted wider. When her breath began to come short and quick, he stopped what he was doing and unbuttoned the union suit with fingers clumsy not only from work but from desire. He poised himself above her. The mattress rocked, ever so slightly. She was nodding, urging him to hurry, something she would never have done with words.

She gasped when he entered her, and soon shuddered beneath him. He went on, intent on what he was doing—and also too tired to be able to do it quickly. She began to gasp again, her arms tightened around his back, her hips moving no matter how unladylike motion at such times was. She let out a small, involuntary moan at about the same time joyous fire poured through him.

He rolled off her almost at once, and set his underwear to rights. “Good night,” she said, turning onto her side to get ready to sleep.

“Good night,” he answered. They always said that. He kept wondering if there shouldn’t be something more. But if there was more, their bodies had said it. For a little while, he hadn’t thought about anything, not even Alexander. But making love didn’t make trouble go away; it just shoved the trouble to one side. He brooded, but not for long. Sleep shoved trouble to one side, too.

In the morning, though, the sun would rise. The trouble would still be there.

George Enos slapped at a mosquito. He killed it—he squashed it flat, smearing red guts across his forearm. “That means it’s bitten somebody,” Wayne Pitchess said. “That’s blood in there.”

“Of course it’s bitten somebody, for God’s sake.” Enos rolled his eyes. “You think I squashed it because it was throwing pillows at me?”

The
Punishment
lay at anchor a few miles beyond Clarksville, Tennessee. George didn’t like lying at anchor. He looked to the south, to the hills below which the Cumberland flowed. Somewhere out there, the Rebs were liable to have a gun waiting to start throwing shells at the river monitor, and a moving target was harder to hit than a stationary one.

What worried him more than anything else was that monitors regularly tied up here: so regularly that the locals—the colored locals, anyhow—had run up a couple of shanties by the riverside to cater to Yankee sailors’ needs—or their desires, anyhow. If you were off duty, and if your commanding officer was in a good mood, you could row over to the shanties, eat fried chicken or roast pork, drink some horrible homemade rotgut that tasted as if it should have gone into a kerosene lamp instead of a human being, or get your ashes hauled in the crib next door.

George had eaten the food, which was pretty good. He’d drunk the whiskey, and awakened the next morning with a head that felt like the
Punishment
’s boiler at forced draft. He hadn’t laid his money down for any of the colored women, not yet. The sailors who had gone into the shabby little makeshift whorehouse came out with stories of how ugly the girls were. That hadn’t stopped a lot of them from going back.

That was another reason he wished the
Punishment
would go upstream or down. He didn’t want to be unfaithful to Sylvia, or the top part of his mind didn’t. But he’d been away from her and without a woman for a long time now. If he went over to one of those shacks for some pork ribs and had himself a glass or two of that godawful bad whiskey, maybe he wouldn’t care how ugly the whores were supposed to be or how much he missed Sylvia. Sometimes you just wanted to do it so badly, you…

He found himself fondling the curve of the water jacket on his machine gun as if it were Sylvia’s breast—or, for that matter, the breast of one of the colored women in that shack. He jerked his hand away from the green-gray painted iron as if it had become red-hot, or as if everyone on the monitor could see what was on his mind.

He went back to work, stripping and cleaning the machine gun with the same dogged persistence he might have shown trawling for haddock in the North Atlantic. He wished he were trawling for haddock in the North Atlantic, or would have wished it had the ocean not been full of warships and commerce raiders and submarines, all of which looked on a fishing boat as a tasty snack.

And keeping the machine gun in perfect order didn’t only distract him from thoughts of Sylvia (though, when he thought on how he’d rubbed the cooling jacket, it hadn’t distracted him much, had it?); it also made his coming through a fight alive more likely. He approved of that.

But, as the sun began to slide down the sky in the afternoon, three men made for one of the
Punishment
’s boats to improve their outlook on life. One of them called to George: “Come on, have a few with us.”

The deck officer was standing close by. Moltke Donovan was a fresh-faced lieutenant who took his duties very seriously. One of those duties was keeping his men in top fighting trim, and that meant, every now and then, letting them go off on a toot. Lieutenant Kelly would probably have said no. His replacement smiled and said, “Go ahead, Enos. That machine gun’s in better shape than when they tore it out of its crate.”

“Yes, sir,” George said, if not happily, then without sackcloth and ashes, too. He set down the rag, stuck the little screwdriver into a loop on his belt, and hurried for the boat.

As he clambered in, one of the other sailors said, “I know you got money in your pocket, on account of you were lucky last night.”