Walk in Hell (70 page)

As had been true up in Wilson Town, not all the civilians had fled from Waurika. Most of the men and women who came out of the houses to look over the retreating Confederates had dark skins: Waurika, Lieutenant Nicoll had said, was about half Kiowa, half Comanche. Reggie couldn’t have told one bunch from the other to save himself from the firing squad.

Some of the civilians had skins darker than copper: the Indians’ Negro servants. Most of those, or at least most of the ones Bartlett saw, were women. The men had probably been impressed into labor service already: either that or they’d run off toward the Yankees or toward the forests and swamps of the Red River bottom country, where a man who knew how to live off the land could fend for himself for a long time.

More than a few Indians, men wearing homespun and carrying hunting rifles, tried to fall in with the column of Confederate soldiers. “You braves don’t know what you’re getting into,” Lieutenant Nicoll told them. “This isn’t any kind of fighting you’ve ever seen before, and if the damnyankees catch you shooting at them without wearing a uniform, they’ll kill you for it.”

“What will the Yankees do to us if they take this land?” one of the Indians answered. “We do not want to be in the USA.”

“Our grandfathers have told us how bad the living was under the Stars and Stripes,” another Indian agreed. “We want to stay under the Stars and Bars.” He pointed toward the business section of Waurika, where several Confederate flags flew in spite of the threatening weather.

At that moment, the weather stopped threatening and started delivering chilly rain mixed with sleet. Shivering, Bartlett consoled himself with the thought that the rain would be harder on the Yankees, who would have to fight their way through it, than on his own unit, which had already reached the place it needed to defend.

Sergeant Hairston spoke in a low, urgent voice: “Sir, you can’t give them redskins any stretch of line to hold. They ain’t soldiers.”

“We are warriors,” one of the Indians said proudly. “The tribes in the east of Sequoyah have their own armies allied to the Stars and Bars.”

“I’ve heard about that,” Nicoll said. “Isn’t anything like it hereabouts, though.” He scowled, visibly of two minds. At last, he went on, “You want to fight?” The Indians gathered round him made it loudly clear they did indeed want to fight. He held up a hand. “All right. This is what we’ll do. You go out in front of the line we’ll hold. You snipe at the damnyankees and bring us back word of what they’re doing and how they’re moving. Don’t let yourselves get captured. You get in trouble, run back to the front. Is it a bargain?”

“We know this country,” one of the Indians answered. “The soldiers in the uniforms the color of horse shit will not find us.” The rest of the men from Waurika nodded, then trotted quietly north, in the direction from which the U.S. soldiers would come.

Reggie turned to Nap Dibble. “The damnyankees may not find ’em, but what about machine-gun bullets? I don’t care how brave or how smart you are, and a machine gun doesn’t care, either.” He spoke with the grim certainty of a man who had been through the machine-gun hell of the Roanoke River valley.

All Nap Dibble knew was the more open fighting that characterized the Sequoyah front. No: he knew one thing more. “Better them’n us,” he said, and, taking out his entrenching tool, began to dig in.

Along with using the Indians of Waurika as scouts and snipers, Lieutenant Nicoll used the few Negro men left in town as laborers. None of the Indian women and old men left behind objected. No one asked the Negroes’ opinions. With shovels and hoes and mattocks, they began helping the Confederate soldiers make entrenchments in the muddy ground.

Once there were holes in which the men of Nicoll’s company could huddle, the lieutenant set the blacks to digging zigzag communications trenches back toward a second line. “Lawd have mercy, suh,” one of them said, “you gwine work us to death.”

“You don’t know what death is, not till the Yankees start shelling you,” Nicoll answered. Then his voice went even colder than the weather: “Weren’t for the way you niggers rose up last winter, the Confederate States wouldn’t be in the shape they’re in.”

“Weren’t us, suh,” said the Negro who had spoken before. “Onliest Reds in Sequoyah, they’s Indians, and they was born that way.” The other black men impressed into labor nodded emphatic agreement.

“Likely tell,” Nicoll said, dismissing their contention with a toss of the head. “You want to show me you’re good, loyal Confederates, you dig now and help your country’s soldiers beat the Yanks.”

Sullenly, the Negroes dug alongside the soldiers. Bartlett began to hope the Confederates around Waurika would have the rest of the day and the whole night in which to prepare their position for the expected U.S. onslaught. Having slogged through a lot of mud himself, he knew what kind of time the Yankee troops would be having.

But, a little past three in the afternoon, a brisk crackle of small-arms fire broke out ahead of the line. He found himself in a trench and peering out over the parapet almost before he realized he’d heard the rifles. Some of the reports were strange; not all rifles sounded exactly like the Tredegars and Springfields with which he’d been so familiar for so long.

Machine guns were heavy. Units not of the first quality—which, on the Sequoyah front, meant a lot of units—didn’t make sure they kept up with the head of an advancing column. But that malignant hammering started only moments after the rifle fire broke out.

“Now we see what kind of balls the redskins have,” Sergeant Hairston said with a sort of malicious anticipation. “Warriors!” He hawked and spat in the mud.

Here came the Kiowas and Comanches, running back toward the hastily dug entrenchments. Behind them, trudging across the fields, firing as they advanced, were U.S. soldiers. An Indian fell, then another one. An Indian leaped into the trench near Bartlett. “Why do you not shoot at them?” he demanded. “Do you want them to kill us all?”

“No,” Reggie answered. “What we want is for them to get close enough for us to hurt ’em bad when we do open up. Fire discipline, it’s called.”

The Indian stared at him without comprehension. But when the Confederate company did open up with rifles and machine guns and a couple of trench mortars, the U.S. soldiers went down as if scythed. Not all of them, Reggie knew, would be hit; more were taking whatever cover they could find. But the advance stopped.

More Indians jumped into the trenches with the Confederates. They kept on shooting at the Yankees, and showed as much spirit as the men alongside whom they fought. “Maybe they are warriors,” Bartlett said.

Sergeant Hairston nodded. “Yeah, maybe they are. I tell you one thing, though, Bartlett. They give the niggers guns the way it looks like they’re gonna, them coons ain’t never gonna fight this good.”

Reggie thought about that. The Kiowas and Comanches—most of the Indians in Sequoyah—had done pretty well for themselves under the rule of the Great White Father in Richmond. As these young men had said, they wanted to stay under the Stars and Bars.

How many Negroes wanted the same thing? “Maybe they’ll fight for the chance to turn into real citizens,” he said at last.

“Shitfire, who wants niggers voting?” Hairston exclaimed. Since Reggie himself was a long way from thrilled at the idea of their voting, he kept quiet. It all seemed abstract anyhow. Wondering about if and how soon the Yankees would be able to haul their artillery forward through the thickening muck was a much more immediate concern.

Riding a swaybacked horse he’d no doubt rented at the St. Matthews livery stable, Tom Colleton came slowly up the path toward the ruins of Marshlands. Anne Colleton stood waiting for her brother, her hands on her hips. When he got close enough for her to call out to him, she said, “You might have let me known you were coming before you telephoned the train station. I would have come to get you in the motorcar.”

“Sis, I tried to wire you, but they told me the lines out from St. Matthews weren’t up or had gone down again or some such,” Tom answered. “When I got into town, I telephoned just on the off chance—I didn’t really expect to get you. I was all set to show up and surprise you.”

“I believe it,” Anne answered. Tom had always been one to do things first and sort out the consequences later. She pointed to the wire than ran to the cabin where she lived these days. “They finally put that in last week. If you knew what I had to go through to get it—”

“Can’t be worse than Army red tape,” Tom said as he swung down from the horse. He looked fit and dashing and alert; his right hand never strayed far from the pistol on his hip. The scar on his cheek wasn’t pink and fresh any more.

He also wore two stars on either side of his stand collar. “You’ve been promoted!” Anne exclaimed.

He gave a little bow, as a French officer might have done. “Lieutenant-Colonel Colleton at your service, ma’am,” he said. “My regiment happened to find a hole in the Yankee lines up on the Roanoke, and they pushed forward half a mile at what turned out to be exactly the right time.” He touched one of the stars signifying his new rank, then the other. “Each of these cost me about a hundred and fifty men, killed and wounded.”

Slowly, Anne nodded. Tom had gone into the war as a lark, an adventure. A lot had changed in the past two years.

A lot had changed here, too. He strode up to her and gave her a brotherly embrace, but his eyes remained on what had been the family mansion. “Those sons of bitches,” he said in a flat, hard voice, and then, “Well, from what I hear, they paid for it ten times over.”

“Maybe not so much as that,” Anne said, “but they paid.” She cocked her head to one side and sent him a curious glance. “And you’re one of the people who want to put guns in niggers’ hands?”

He nodded. “For one thing, we’re running out of white men to be soldiers,” he said, and Anne nodded in turn, remembering President Semmes’ words. Tom went on, “For another, if niggers have a stake in the Confederate States, maybe they won’t try and pull them down around our ears. We smashed this rebellion, sure, but that doesn’t mean we won’t have another one ten years from now if things don’t change.”

“This one’s smashed, but it’s not dead,” she said. “Cassius is still out in the swamps by the river, and the militiamen they’ve sent after him and his friends haven’t been able to smoke them out.”

“He’s the kind of nigger I wish we had in the Army,” Tom said. “He’d make one fine scout and sniper.”

“Unless he decided to shoot at you instead of the damnyankees,” Anne answered, which made her brother grimace. Then, suddenly, she noticed a new ribbon in the fruit salad above Tom’s left breast pocket. Her eyes widened. Pointing to it, she said, “That’s an Order of Lee, and you weren’t going to say a thing about it.”

She’d succeeded in embarrassing him. “I didn’t want to worry you,” he replied, which went a long way toward explaining the circumstances under which he’d won it. The Order of Lee was the Army equivalent of Roger Kimball’s Order of the
Virginia
: only one step down from the Confederate Cross.

“I’ve been worried from the beg—” Anne started to say, but that wasn’t quite true: in the beginning, she, like most in the CSA, had thought they’d lick the Yankees as quickly and easily as they had in their first two wars. She made the needed change: “I’ve been worried for a long time.”

Julia came up to them then, her baby on her hip. “Mistuh Tom, we got yo’ cabin ready fo’ you.”

“That’s good,” he answered. “Thank you.” He spoke to her in a tone slightly different from the one he would have used before the war started, even if the words might have been the same then. In 1914, he would have taken the service completely for granted; now, he spoke of it as if she was doing him a favor. Anne found herself using that tone with blacks these days, too, and noticed it in others.

Tom went back to his horse, detached the saddlebags and bedroll from the saddle, and carried them while he walked after Julia. In 1914, a Negro would have dashed up to relieve him of them. If he missed that level of deference, he didn’t show it.

And, before he went into the cabin, he asked, “You’re not putting anyone out so I can stay in here, are you?”

“No, suh,” the serving woman answered. “Ain’t so many folks here as used to be.”

“I see that.” Tom glanced over at Anne. “It’s a wonder you’ve done as much as you have out here by yourself.”

“You do what you have to do,” she said, at which he nodded again. Before the war, that hard logic had meant nothing to him. The Roanoke front had given him more than rank and decorations; he understood and accepted the ways of the world these days. As soon as Julia went out of earshot, she continued, in a lower voice, “We made a bargain of sorts—they do the work that needs to be done, and I make sure nobody from St. Matthews or Columbia comes around prying into what they did during the rebellion.”

“You said something about that in one of your letters,” Tom answered, remembering. “Best you could do, I suppose, but there are some niggers I wouldn’t have made that bargain with. Cassius, for one.”

“Even if you’d want him for a soldier?” Anne asked, gently mocking.

“Especially because I’d want him for a soldier,” her brother said. “I know a dangerous man when I see one.”

“I have no bargain with Cassius,” Anne said quietly. “Every so often, livestock here—disappears. I don’t
know
where it goes, but I can guess. Not that much to eat in the swamps of the Congaree, even for niggers used to living off the land.”

“That’s so,” Tom agreed. “And he’ll have friends among the hands here. Sis, I really wish you weren’t out here by your lonesome.”

“If I’m not, this place goes to the devil,” Anne said. “I didn’t get a great crop from it, but I got a crop. That gave me some of the money I needed to pay the war taxes, and it meant I didn’t have to cut so far into my investments as I would have otherwise. I don’t intend to be a beggar when the war ends, and I don’t intend for you to be a beggar, either.”

“If the choice is between being being rich and being a beggar, that’s one thing, Sis,” he said. “If the choice is between being a beggar and being dead, that’s a different game.” His face, its expression already far more stern than it had been before the war, turned bleak as the oncoming winter. “That’s what the Confederate States are looking at right now, seems to me: a choice between being beggars and being dead.”