Walk in Hell (75 page)

For a wonder, that made both colonels thoughtful. Before the war, the arrogant Rebs wouldn’t have worried about how the USA might respond to anything they did. Now—Now Nellie had a hard time holding on to her polite mask. Now they’d learned better.

Edna got up and filled Nicholas Kincaid’s coffee cup. She didn’t charge him, which annoyed Nellie but about which she could say nothing. She didn’t want Edna to marry the Confederate lieutenant—she didn’t want Edna marrying any man—but she knew she couldn’t do anything to stop it. She consoled herself by thinking that marrying Kincaid might get Edna out of Washington before the United States battered their way back into the city. Had Nellie had some way of escaping the bloodbath that likely lay ahead, she would have taken it.

She did have a way to escape the coffeehouse, if only for a little while. “I’m going across the street to see Mr. Jacobs,” she said to Edna. “Take care of everybody while I’m gone, would you, dear?”

“All right, Ma,” Edna said sulkily. She no doubt suspected that her mother wanted to keep her from spending so much time with Nicholas Kincaid. She was right, too, but she couldn’t do anything about it.

The bell above Jacobs’ door jangled when Nellie came in. The cobbler looked up from the boot he was resoling. “Why, hello, Nellie,” he said, as if his fondest wish had just been realized. “How good to see you this morning.”

“Good to see you, too, Hal,” Nellie said, a little stiffly. She was still nervous about having let him kiss her once, and even more nervous about having liked it. But that didn’t matter, or didn’t matter much. Business was business, and wouldn’t keep. “You remember how I told you not so long ago that the Rebs would do anything to try and hang onto Washington, on account of they reckoned it was their capital by rights, and not ours?”

“Yes, of course I remember that,” Jacobs said, peering at her through his spectacles. Then he took them off, blinked a couple of times as he set them on the counter, and looked up at her again. He smiled. “That’s better.”

Nellie said, “I think they’re starting to get the idea they can’t keep Washington no matter what they do. The USA won’t get it back in one piece, sounds like.” She told the shoemaker what the Confederate officers had been discussing in the coffeehouse.

Jacobs clucked reproachfully. “This is foolish wickedness,” he said. “No other word for it, Widow Sem—Nellie. I promise you, I will make certain it is known, if you happen to be the first to have heard of it. Your country owes you a great debt if we can use this knowledge to keep the CSA from carrying out such a vile scheme.”

“That would be good, I guess,” she said. “If they want to show they’re grateful, they can keep from shelling this part of town when their guns get into range.”

“Yes, I also think this would be an excellent reward,” Jacobs said with a smile. But that smile did not last long. He coughed before continuing, “Widow Semphroch, I am glad you came by today, because there is something of importance I need to take up with you.”

“What’s that?” she asked. It was something important, or he wouldn’t have returned to the formality with which they’d once addressed each other.

He coughed again. It wasn’t something he wanted to bring up, plainly. At last, he said, “Widow Semphroch, what have you done to Bill Reach?”

“I haven’t done anything to him, except tell him to stay away,” Nellie answered. “You know I don’t want anything to do with him.” She cocked her head to one side. “Why?”

Even more reluctantly than before, he said, “Because he is acting—strangely—these days. I believe he is drinking far too much for a man in his position. He often speaks of you, but gives no details.”

Thank God for that,
Nellie thought. Aloud, she said, “The last time I saw him, I thought he’d been drinking,” which was politer than,
He stank of rotgut
.

“If there is anything you can do for him—” Jacobs began.

“No, Mr. Jacobs. I am sorry, but there is nothing.” Now Nellie threw up the chilling wall of formality. “Good day. I will call again another time.” She left the cobbler’s shop without a backwards glance, and without giving Jacobs the chance to say a word.

She supposed she should have been warned. But all she wanted to do with Bill Reach was put him out of her mind, and so she did not pay as much heed to Jacobs as she might have done. Two evenings later, Reach threw open the door to the coffeehouse and lurched inside.

Nellie was in back of the counter, pouring coffee, making sandwiches, and frying ham steaks and potatoes. Edna was out among the customers: the usual crowd of Confederate officers, the sleek Washingtonians who collaborated with them, and a sprinkling of fancy women who collaborated more intimately with both Rebels and local cat’s-paws.

All of them stared at Bill Reach, who looked even more disreputable than usual. By the boneless way he stood, Nellie knew he’d had his head in a bottle all day, or maybe all week. His eyes held a wild gleam she didn’t like. She started out toward the front of the coffeehouse, certain he was going to do something dreadful.

She hadn’t taken more than a step and a half before he did it. “Little Nell!” he said loudly—but he wasn’t looking at Nellie at all. He was looking at Edna, so drunk he couldn’t tell daughter from mother. “Makes me feel young just to see you, Little Nell, same as it always did.” Edna was less than half his age—no wonder seeing her made him feel young. A leer spread over his face.

“Get out of here!” Nellie shouted, but he was too drunk, too intent on what was going on inside his own mind, to hear her.

And Edna, after a glance back at her mother, a glance filled with both curiosity and malice, smiled at him and said, “What do you want tonight, Bill?”

It wasn’t quite the right question, but it was close enough. Over Nellie’s cry of horror, Reach pulled a quarter-eagle out of his pocket, slapped the gold coin down on a tabletop as if it were a nightstand, and said, “Tonight? Well, we’ll go upstairs like always”—he pointed to the stairway leading up to Nellie and Edna’s rooms, which was just visible from where he stood swaying—“and then you can suck on me for a while before you get on top. I’m feelin’—
hic!
—lazy, if you know what I mean. I’ll give you an extra half a buck all your own if you’re good.”

“Get him out of here!” Nellie screamed.

A couple of Confederate officers were already rushing toward Bill Reach. They landed on him like a falling building, pummeling him and flinging him out into the street with shouts of, “Get your foul mouth out of here!” “Never show your face here again or you’re a dead man!” One of them noticed the quarter-eagle. He threw it out after Reach, then wiped his hand on a trouser leg, as if to clean it of contamination. That done, he bowed first to Edna and then to Nellie. “You tell us if that cur comes back, ladies. We’ll fix him for good if he dares show his ugly face in here again.”

Nellie nodded. Her customers worked hard to show good breeding by pretending nothing out of the ordinary had happened. Edna didn’t say a thing. Edna didn’t need to say a thing. Whatever else she was, Edna was no fool. She could figure out why Bill Reach thought he had any business saying those filthy things to Nellie—or to someone he thought was Nellie. The only possible answer was the right one.

Edna glanced back at Nellie again. Her mother could not meet her eye. That told her everything that still needed telling. Nellie hung her head. She’d tried to stay respectable for her daughter’s sake. That was over. Everything was over now.

Over the past couple of winters, Lucien Galtier had discovered, somewhat to his surprise, that he liked chopping wood. The work took him back to his youth, to the days before he was conscripted. He’d swung an axe then, swung it and swung it and swung it.

After he came back from the Army, the farm had burned far more coal than wood. The Americans, though, were niggardly with their coal rations, as they were niggardly with everything else. He was glad old Blaise Chrétien, only a couple of miles away, had a woodlot. It made the difference between shivering through the winter and getting by comfortably enough.

Chopping wood also kept him warm while he was doing it. Down came the axe—
whump!
Two chunks of wood leaped apart. “Ah, if only those were Father Pascal’s head and his fat neck,” Lucien said wistfully.

His son Georges was walking by then. Georges had a way of walking by whenever he had the chance to create mischief. “You want to be careful, Papa,” he called. “Otherwise you’ll end up like Great-uncle Léon after Grandfather took off his little finger with the axe when they were boys.”

“You scamp,
tais-toi,
” Lucien retorted. “Otherwise your backside will end up like your grandfather’s after he took off Léon’s finger with the axe.”

Georges laughed at him. Georges had a right to laugh, too. He was sixteen now, and almost half a head taller than his father. If Lucien tried to give him a licking, who would end up drubbing whom was very much in doubt. Lucien thought he would win even yet—you learned tricks in the Army that simple roughhousing never taught you. But he didn’t want to have to find out.

Up went the axe. Down it came. More wood split. Marie would be happy with him. “No, she cannot call me lazy today,” he said. Some people, he had seen, worked simply for the sake of working. A lot of English-speaking Canadians were like that, and Americans, too. Fewer Quebecois had the disease. Lucien worked when something needed doing. When it didn’t (which, on a farm, was all too seldom), he was content to leave it alone.

He wiped his forehead with the back of his sleeve. He’d worked up a good sweat, though it was chilly out here. The day was clear, though, the sunshine streaming down as if it were spring. Only the slightly deeper blue of the sky argued otherwise.

Up in the sky, something buzzed like a mosquito out of season. He stopped chopping for a little while and peered upward, trying to spot the aeroplane—no, aeroplanes: a flight of them, droning north. His mouth twisted. “I hope all of you are shot down,” he said, shaking his fist at the heavens. “This is our patrimony, not yours. You have no business taking it from us.”

Afterwards, he blamed the American aeroplanes for what happened when he went back to chopping. They had, after all, broken the smooth rhythm he’d established before they disturbed him. And if he hadn’t blamed them, he would have blamed Georges instead. Better to put it on his enemy’s head than on his own flesh and blood.

He knew the stroke was wrong the second the axehead started on its downward arc. He tried to twist it aside; in the end, he didn’t know whether that made things better or worse. The axe hit the piece of wood on the chopping block a glancing blow and then bit into his left leg.

“Tabernac!”
he hissed. The blade had a red edge when he pulled it free. Blood started running down his calf into his shoe. It was warm on what had been cold skin. “Ah,
mauvais tabernac
.”

The axe had sliced into meat, not bone. That was the only good thing he could say about the wound. He started to throw the axe aside so he could hobble to the farmhouse, but held onto the tool instead. That leg didn’t want to bear much weight, and the axe handle made a stick to take it instead.

Marie let out a small shriek when he made it inside. “It is not so bad,” he said, hoping it was not so bad. “Put a bandage on it, and then I will go out and finish what I have to do.”

“You will go nowhere today,” she said, grabbing for a rag. “You should be ashamed, bleeding on my clean floor.”

“Believe me, I regret the necessity more than you do,” he said.

She got off his shoe and sock and pulled up his trouser leg. “This is not good,” she said, examining the wound. He did not want to look at it himself while she worked. He had not a qualm about slaughtering livestock, but his own blood made him queasy. “It is bleeding right through the bandage,” she told him. “A cloth will not be enough for this, Lucien. It wants stitching, or heaven knows when it will close.”

“That is nonsense,” he said. Even as he spoke, though, the two raw edges of the wound slipped against each other. His stomach lurched. He felt dizzy, a little lightheaded.

Firmly, Marie said, “
J’ai raison
, Lucien. I have sewn up a cut hand once or twice, but I do not think I should sew this. It is too long and too deep. I think you should go to the American hospital, and let them do a proper job of putting you back together.”

The mere idea of going to the hospital was enough to restore her husband to himself. “No,” he said. “No and no and no. It was bad enough that the Americans took my land, took land in this family since before the battle on the Plains of Abraham, took my patrimony for their own purposes. To use this hospital, to acknowledge it is there: this is a humiliation that cannot be borne. Sew it yourself.”

“If you do not acknowledge the hospital, why does Nicole work there?” Marie asked. “If you do not acknowledge the hospital, why have you drunk applejack with Dr. O’Doull three times in the past month? Why have you probably got one of his cigars in your pocket even now?”

Galtier opened his mouth to give her the simple, logical explanation to the paradoxes she propounded. Nothing came out. His wits, he thought, were discommoded because of the wound. He told her that instead.

She set her hands on her hips. “Then, foolish man, it is time to get the wound seen to,
n’est-ce pas
? You will come with me.”

Go with her he did, still using the axe as a stick and with his other arm around her shoulder. Even with such help, he had to stop and rest three or four times before they got to the hospital. When they did, one of the workmen there tried to turn them away: “This place is for Americans, not you damn Canucks.”

“Hold on, Bill,” a nurse said. “That’s Nicole’s father. We’ll take care of him. What happened to you?” The last was to Galtier.

“Axe—cutting wood.” Remembering English was hard.

“Come on in,” the nurse said. “I’ll get Dr. O’Doull. He’ll do a proper job of patching you up.” She pointed to the door, maybe seeing that Marie had no English.

At the door, Lucien ordered his wife home. “They will help me the rest of the way,” he told her, pointing to the nurse and the workman. When she protested, he said, “Some of what is here, you should not see.” He knew what war looked like. She didn’t, not really. He wanted to keep it that way.