American Front (24 page)

Sure enough, in English rough as sandpaper, one of the men out there said, “Those hounds try and bite, you stick ’em or shoot ’em. The major, he ain’t gonna give you no Purple Heart for a dog bite, boys.”

Lucien realized he was the only one in the family who understood what the newcomers were saying. His sons would have learned their English in the Army when their time came; his wife and daughters would have had few occasions ever even to hear it.

“Shall we fight, Papa?” Charles demanded. He wanted to. At sixteen, you knew you could do the impossible.

At forty-three, you knew damn well you couldn’t. “We have one rifle,” Lucien said. “It is better for rabbits than for men. They have many guns out there, and can bring many soldiers here. No, we do not fight. We do as they tell us.” When Charles and even Georges looked mutinous, he added, “Then we see what we can do afterwards.” To his relief, that satisfied his sons. They were too young to be killed in a hopeless fight. It also had an element of truth that salved his own pride.

One of the Americans rapped on the door. The whole farmhouse shook. He had to be using his rifle butt, not a fist. Galtier opened the door. The American, a sergeant almost a head taller than he was, checked a piece of paper and said, “Galtier, Lucien.” It was not a question, though the fellow mangled the pronunciation so badly that Lucien needed a moment to understand his own name.

“Yes, I am Lucien Galtier,” he said when he did. He hated standing here with the door open; he could feel cold air sliding past him into the house. It wasn’t as cold as it was going to be, but it was a lot colder than it had been, cold enough so you were glad of stove and fireplace.

“Good. You speak English,” the U.S. sergeant said. Then his eyes, hard and pale, narrowed. “Round here, that means you been in the Army, ain’t that right, Frenchy?”

“I have been in the Army, yes,” Galtier said, shrugging. He paused to think of English words. “You find few men as old as I who are not in the Army, if they are not sick or—how do you say?” He mimed limping about.

“Crippled?” the American said. “Yeah, that’s so, I guess. All right.” He looked down at Lucien’s stocking feet. “Get your shoes on, Frenchy. We’re gonna have a look round your barn and your storehouses. You don’t wanna waste time.” He turned to a couple of his men and shouted, “Gosse, Hendrick, you go and start. Frenchy here’ll be along.”

“What is it you do here?” Galtier asked as he pulled on first one boot, then the other. He was glad they stood by the door, so he did not have to go away and let the sergeant—and maybe his followers—come in. To his family, he called in French, “Stay here. I am attending to this.”

The sergeant nodded. “That’s smart, pal. Don’t want trouble.” He understood French, then, even if he didn’t deign to speak it. He went on, in ugly English, “Requisition of supplies, by order of the brigadier general commanding.”

“Requisition?” Lucien got on his other boot and stepped out into the night, closing the door after him. “This means what?” He meant the question seriously; he was trying to remember what the word meant. Before the sergeant could answer, he did remember, and stopped in his tracks. “This means—you take?”

“You got it in one, buddy,” the U.S. soldier said.

“You do not pay,” Galtier went on.

“Well, yes and no,” the sergeant said. “You’ll see how it goes.”

A couple of soldiers—presumably Gosse and Hendrick—were pawing over what Lucien had spent a lifetime maintaining and adding to, the farm having been in his family for generations. One of them said, “Sarge, he’s got enough here to keep the battalion in food all winter long.”

“Yeah?” the sergeant said. He turned around and shouted toward one of the mounted men who’d come up to the farm. “Blocksage! Ride back and tell the QM to send a truck out here. No, better make it two trucks. Plenty of goodies, yes indeed.” The horse went trotting away.

Galtier did not like the sound of any of that. “How is it you have the right to—?” he began.

Before he could finish, the sergeant pointed his rifle at him. “
This
gives me the right, pal,” he said. “We’re the ones who won the war, remember? Now, we’re supposed to treat you Frenchies nice, so you’ll get some compensation, don’t you worry about that. But don’t you go telling us what we can do and what we can’t, either. You’ll be real sorry real fast, if you understand what I’m saying. You understand?”

“Oh, yes,
monsieur
,” Galtier said. “I understand.”

Wherever the quartermaster had set up his headquarters, it wasn’t far away. Within a few minutes, a couple of trucks came wheezing and rattling up the dirt road before turning and approaching the farmhouse. The looting began immediately thereafter.

They left Lucien his horse. They left him a cow and a few sheep and a pig. They left him a handful of hens and his rooster. They left him enough fodder to feed the animals he had left through the winter—if it wasn’t too long or too hard and he didn’t feed them too much. By the time they were done hauling away glass jars, they left his family in the same shape as the livestock: most of the food Marie had laboriously preserved was gone, along with lovingly smoked hams and flitches of bacon.

As food and fodder moved into the trucks, the sergeant kept meticulous notes on everything that was taken. When the sacking of the farm was complete, he handed Lucien a carbon copy of the list. “You want to take this in to Rivière-du-Loup”—from his mouth, it came out
rivy-air-doo-loop
—“to the commandant’s office. They’ll pay you off there.”

“They will pay me off,” Galtier echoed dully. He wished he had grabbed the little .22 Charles had wanted to get. That way, he could have died defending what was his instead of having to watch as he went from a prosperous farmer to a poor one in a couple of hours’ time. He nodded to the sergeant. “You are sure this generosity will not cause them difficulties?”

He’d intended that for irony. The sergeant took it literally, which would have been funny in an absurd kind of way if he hadn’t answered, “Don’t worry about that, Frenchy. You ain’t gonna get more than twenty cents on the dollar, and you’ll have to yell and scream and cuss to get that much.”

Galtier didn’t yell or scream or swear, no matter how much he wanted to. He stood silent, holding the copy of the list of supplies requisitioned from him, as the big American soldiers finished their job, started the trucks’ engines, and left. The infantry and horsemen went on to the next farm down the road. They were noisily arguing about whether it would yield more or less than they’d got from him.

When they were all gone, he went back into the house. His family crowded round him. “Thank God you are well,” Marie said, taking his hand in a public display of affection unlike any she’d given him since they were newlyweds. “What have the
Boches américains
done?”

He told her and the children what they’d done. “Hard times are here, as I told you before,” he said. Even in dismay, he recognized that he hadn’t intended to be taken seriously before, but now he did.

“Hard times,” Marie echoed somberly. He might have been wrong before, he might have been joking before, but no longer.

A string of the curses he hadn’t aimed at the U.S. soldiers burst from him: “
C’est chrisse, maudit, calisse de tabernac
.” Like any Quebecois, he cursed by reviling the symbols of his church; English-speakers’ ways of blowing off steam by talking about excrement and sex struck him as peculiar.

His family stared at him; he hardly ever said such things where even his sons, let alone his wife and daughters, could hear him. “It’s all right,” Marie said. “God will surely forgive you, so we must as well.”

Lucien nodded gratefully to her. She always found a way to make things right. He said one thing more: “
Je me souviens
—I will remember.”

Without hesitation, everyone nodded.

The train rolled westward toward New Orleans. As far as Anne Colleton could tell, she was the only unattached white female under the age of sixty on the whole train—certainly in her car. Not many women were traveling at all—soldiers in butternut and sailors in white took up most of the seats.

Not all her money, not all her influence, had been able to get her a Pullman berth for herself and her colored maidservant, Julia. When she boarded the train, she found out why: the Pullmans were full of military men, too, some of them with cots adding to their carrying capacity. When set against the needs of war, luxury was no longer practical.

Luxury no longer seemed fashionable, either. That distressed Anne: what point to living if you couldn’t live graciously? With a cynicism older than her years but not older than her sex, she suspected the powers that be would soon grow bored with their egalitarian pose. These weren’t the United States, after all: class mattered in the Confederacy, especially looking down from the top. Pretending that wasn’t so struck at the heart of the nation’s
raison d’être
.

Not that she wasn’t the center of attention all the same. She coolly took that for granted, as much as she did Julia’s presence beside her. Had the train been almost all women and only a handful of men instead of the other way round, she would have been as confident of drawing those men to her. Looks told. Even President Wilson responded to her smile. So did breeding. And, she thought, smoothing a pleat on the skirt of the cranberry-red silk dress she was wearing, so did money. She toyed with the lace at her throat, affecting not to notice that she was being watched.

Ordinary soldiers and sailors eyed her without approaching; they knew she was beyond them. Yes, breeding and money told. A couple of soldiers who stank of cheap whiskey tried to approach Julia, looking for nothing more than female flesh with which to slake their lusts. Anne Colleton sent them on their way with a few low-voiced words that left their ears red and tingling.

Officers, though, officers were drawn to Anne as moths were drawn to fires. And, like moths, they drew back with their wings singed. Attracting men was great sport. But most of the officers, especially those from the Navy and the cavalry and artillery, were aristocrats with all the virtues of their class—they were brave and loyal and randy—and also its vices—they were crashing bores, or so Anne found them.

When the porter announced that supper was being served, she and Julia went back to the dining car together. A couple of tables at the rear were reserved for Negroes, commonly servants. Just as Anne had not been able to get a Pullman berth, so she was not able to get a table for herself, either: the train was too full for that. Something like a football scrim developed among the officers in white and butternut to see who would get the other two seats at the corner table where she was sitting.

When the elbowing died away, a couple of Navy officers not far from her own age smiled down at her. “Mind if we join you, ma’am?” one of them asked. He might have been an officer, but he was no aristocrat, not with that rough accent. Anne shrugged and nodded permission.

They sat down. The crowd behind them thinned regretfully. The one who’d asked her leave was a lieutenant, senior grade, with wreathed stars on his shoulder straps and a stripe and a half of gold on each sleeve. He was growing a sandy beard; at the moment, he looked as if he’d forgotten to shave.

His companion, a lieutenant, junior grade, with plain stars and single sleeve stripes, was so blond and perfect, he might have stepped off a recruiting poster. Anne dismissed him at once. The other one, though, backwoods accent or not, was…interesting.

The colored waiter, resplendent in tailcoat livery like that which Scipio usually wore, poised pencil above notepad. “What can I bring you tonight, ma’am, gentlemen?”

“How are the ham and yams?” Anne asked.

“Very fine, ma’am,” the waiter assured her.

“I’ll have that, then, and a glass of rosé to go with it.”

Pencil poised again, the waiter looked a question to the two officers. “Steak and potatoes here, and a bottle of bourbon for the two of us,” the senior lieutenant said.

“Steak and potatoes for me, too,” the junior lieutenant agreed.

“Of course,” the waiter said. “How would you care to have those done?”

“Medium,” the lieutenant, junior grade, said.

The other officer laughed. “How many times have I got to tell you, Ralph, you want to be able to taste the meat?” He looked up at the waiter. “I want that slab of meat just barely—and I mean
just
barely—dead. You tell the cook that if it doesn’t go ‘Ouch!’ when I stick a fork in it, I’m going to tell his grandpappy’s ghost to haunt him till the end of time.” He made a curious gesture with one hand. Had the waiter been white, he would have turned pale. His eyes got big. He nodded and beat a hasty retreat.

“What was that?” the handsome junior lieutenant—Ralph—asked.

Anne surprised herself by speaking: “That was a hex sign. It means—it’s supposed to mean, anyhow—your friend really can do things with, or to, the cook’s grandfather’s ghost.”

The lieutenant, senior grade, raised a gingery eyebrow. “You’re right, ma’am. Not many white folks—especially not many white women—know that one.”

“I make it a point to know what goes on with my Negroes,” Anne said. Smugly, she used a different sign. She was surprised again, because both naval officers recognized it, and she’d never yet run across a white man who did. “How did you know what that meant?” she asked quietly.

“We use that one for luck, ma’am, when we fire a torpedo,” the senior lieutenant answered. “I didn’t know anybody—anybody white, anyhow—outside of submarines knew about it.”

“Submarines!” Now Anne looked at both of them with respect. They might not be gentlemen, but they had courage and to spare. You had to have courage—or be a little touched in the head—to go down under the ocean in what was basically a metal cigar.

“Submarines,” the senior lieutenant repeated. “I’m Roger Kimball, off the
Whelk
, and this lug here is Ralph Briggs, off the
Scallop
. Heading for New Orleans, both of us, for reassignment.”

“I’m on my way to New Orleans, too,” Anne said, and gave her name.