American Front (29 page)

“Yeah, I’m the same way with you birds, pretty much,” Mantarakis said. Oh, maybe a Confederate sailor or two had come into one of the Philadelphia greasy spoons where he’d worked, but taking an order for a sandwich or a steak was damn near as impersonal as talking from one side of a rifle to the other. He gave his name, then said, “Who are you? What do you do?”

“I’m Colby Gilbert, Paul,” the Rebel answered. He stuck out his hand. Mantarakis shook it. The Reb grinned. “Right glad to meet you, Paul, long as you don’t ask me to say your last name. What do I do? I got me a farm, forty, maybe fifty miles outside o’ Little Rock, Arkansas. How about your own self?”

“Cook in Philadelphia,” Paul answered.

“No wonder you got them nice spices, then. You got a family?” Gilbert asked. Before Mantarakis could answer, the Reb pulled a photograph out of his breast pocket: himself, a plain blond woman, a little boy, and a baby of indeterminate sex, all in what had to be Sunday best. “This here’s me and Betsy and Colby, Jr., and Lucy.” The baby was a girl, then.

“I’m not married yet,” Mantarakis said. “A couple of my brothers have children, so I’m an uncle.” He trotted out a family joke: “One of my sisters is expecting, so I’ll be an aunt pretty soon, too.”

Colby Gilbert scratched his head, then laughed. “Didn’t know you damnyankees could be funny. Never even thought you might. Ain’t that queer?”

“Yeah, pretty much.” Paul looked ahead to Morton’s Gap, or what was left of it. What struck him as funny was being here in a foreign country, talking like an old friend with a real, live enemy.

Somebody, from one trench or another, had thrown out a football. Soldiers from both the USA and the CSA wanted a game, but before they could play, they argued over the rules—the United States’ version let you advance the ball by throwing it forward, if you did it from five yards back of the scrim line, while by the Confederacy’s rules no forward passes could be thrown, only laterals. The disagreement stayed good-natured, though, and, when the Rebs whooped and cheered to see how far one of the U.S. soldiers could heave the ball and how nimbly another one ran under it and caught it, they agreed to try the damnyankee style of play themselves.

Men in green-gray and men in butternut stood shoulder to shoulder and cheered the two teams of gladiators wrestling in the mud. Several flasks went through the crowd; Paul had a nip of brandy and another of raw, searing corn liquor. Probably because they understood the passing game better, the U.S. team won, 26-12. Everybody cheered both sides, anyway.

“Shitfire,” a loud Southern voice declared, “if I’d knowed damnyankees was people just like us, damn me to hell if I’d’ve been so all-fired eager to grab me a gun an’ shoot ’em.”

“You Rebels, I think you may be Christians, too.” That was Gordon McSweeney, sounding surprised. For once, Paul didn’t blame him. If you lived in the USA, you figured everybody in the CSA grew horns and a pointy tail. From the way the Confederates talked, they seemed to think the same thing about Americans.

“What the hell we fightin’ for, then?” somebody asked. Mantarakis didn’t know whether the question had come from a soldier of the USA or the CSA. He decided it didn’t matter, anyhow. And nobody tried to answer it.

The crowd from the football match dispersed slowly, reluctantly. A few U.S. soldiers followed new-made friends into the Confederate lines for supper; a few Rebs, Colby Gilbert among them, came back with the U.S. troops. “I’ll show you what garlic is good for,” Mantarakis said, going to work on the lamb carcass he’d been about to cut up before the impromptu Christmas truce broke out.

Gilbert showed his family photo again, and admired those of the U.S. soldiers who were married. He traded cigars for this and that, and did admit the meat Paul was cooking smelled mighty good. Mantarakis had just put a big chunk of roast leg on Gilbert’s mess tin (shaped a little different from those the U.S. soldiers carried) when Lieutenant Norman Hinshaw, the platoon commander, came up to the fire, no doubt drawn by the rich cooking odors.

Hinshaw stared in dismay at Colby Gilbert. “They’re raising hell about this back at regimental headquarters,” he said. “If he doesn’t get his ass back to his own side, we’ve got to take him prisoner.”

“Aw, have a heart, Lieutenant,” Mantarakis said. “At least let him finish eating. It’s Christmas, right?” Even if it wasn’t Christmas for him, he used the argument without qualm of conscience.

Lieutenant Hinshaw looked at the rest of his men. When he saw all of them, even Sergeant Peterquist, nodding, he threw up his hands. “All right, he can stay,” he said. “But tomorrow, if we see him, we kill him.”

“Same to you, Lieutenant,” Colby Gilbert said. “Nothin’ personal, of course.”

He ate slowly, enjoying every bit, garlic or no. Mantarakis gave him another chunk of meat to take back to his own lines. A chorus of good-byes followed him when he left the U.S. trenches. As the sun set a couple of hours later, a new chorus rang out: Christmas carols, sung first by the U.S. soldiers, then by the Confederates, and at last by both armies together.

Not a shot disturbed the night. Paul rolled himself in his blanket, confident for once he’d wake up to see the dawn.

And when dawn came, a savage U.S. artillery bombardment tore at the Confederates’ front-line positions. Mantarakis huddled in a little ball in the mud, for the Rebs were shelling the U.S. trenches, too. Maybe the brass on both sides was making sure the truce wouldn’t last more than a day. If so, they got their wish. Rifles began to bark, and machine guns to hammer. The war had come back, and come back strong.

Later that day, it started to snow.

Church bells chimed in 1915 as if the new year were something worth celebrating. Sylvia Enos lay alone in her bed, listening to the bells, to the firecrackers, to the occasional gunshots, to the sound of happy—or at least drunk—people in the streets. Tomorrow was Saturday, a half day of work, and she knew she had to be up before six, but she could not relax her mind enough to sleep.

In the next room, George, Jr., whimpered. Most nights when he did that, Sylvia prayed he’d go right back to sleep. Now she wouldn’t have minded his waking…too much.

She whimpered a little herself, and bit her lip to make herself stop. Not knowing was the hardest part. The
Ripple
hadn’t come back from Georges Bank, and hadn’t come back, and hadn’t come back—and now, two months and more after it put out, no one, not even Sylvia, thought it would come back.

But what had happened to it? The weather had been good—not perfect, but good, so a storm couldn’t have sunk the trawler. Had it collided with another vessel? Had a Confederate commerce raider sunk it? And if a raider had sunk it, had the crew had a chance to get off first?

“Please, God, do whatever You want with me, but let George be safe,” Sylvia said quietly in the darkness. She hadn’t been much given to prayer before the
Ripple
disappeared, but she’d found it made her feel she was doing something, however small a something, for her husband. Past prayer, she had nothing to do.

At last, she fell asleep, only to be wakened a few minutes later by a drunken brawl out in the hallway in front of her flat. The racket woke Mary Jane, too. She was wet, so Sylvia groggily changed her diaper and put her back to bed. The toddler sighed and went to sleep right away. Sylvia wished she’d be so lucky, but wasn’t.

When the alarm clock went off beside her head, she thought at first it was the bells from the midnight just past. The clattering went on and on, though. Under her breath, she muttered something George had brought home from T Wharf. His hair would have curled to hear her say it, but there was no one to hear her say it, and so she did.

She struck a match and lighted the gas lamp by the bed, then quickly put on her corset, shirtwaist, and long, dark blue wool skirt over her winter underwear. She let out a silent thank-you to whatever gods of fashion had decreed bustles no longer mandatory. That saved time.

She stoked up the fire in the stove and set water to boil for oatmeal and for coffee. Breathing a sigh of relief that she’d managed to get through the month with a little coal left in the scuttle, she went into the other bedroom to get the children up and moving.

“I don’t want to get up,” George, Jr., moaned.

“I don’t want to get up, either, but I have to, and so do you,” Sylvia said. He grumbled some more, but got out of bed. If he’d dawdled, the flat of her hand on his backside would have got him moving in a hurry, and he knew it. Mary Jane, on the other hand, woke up sweetly, as she did most mornings.

She made the oatmeal, put on butter and salt, and fed alternate mouthfuls to herself and Mary Jane while George, Jr., ate. The children drank water; there had been a tainted milk scare the week before, and she’d been leery of buying it. She wished she had some for her coffee, too, but if her large wishes weren’t being granted, she didn’t expect to get her small ones.

“Come on—time to go to Mrs. Coneval’s,” she said. “It’s Saturday today, so I’ll be back in the afternoon, not at nighttime.” George, Jr., nodded at that; Mary Jane was still too little to have it mean anything to her.

Brigid Coneval lived down at the end of the hall, near the bathroom. Her husband was off at the front: in New Mexico, if Sylvia’s memory was straight. Instead of going off to work in a factory herself, Mrs. Coneval kept body and soul together by using the money he sent home and by caring for the children of other women who had to go out to work and who had no family to mind their own.

Sylvia knocked on her door. She had to knock loudly; the racket inside the flat was already frightful, and, when Brigid Coneval opened the door, Sylvia saw that only about half her usual mob had arrived. “Good mornin’ to you, Mrs. Enos,” Mrs. Coneval said in a musical brogue. “Have you had any word of that man o’ yours, now?”

“No,” Sylvia said bleakly. “Just—nothing.” She urged her children into the flat, saying, as she did every day, “Do as Mrs. Coneval tells you, and play nicely with the other children.” George, Jr., kissed her good-bye; Mary Jane nibbled the end of her nose, which amounted to the same thing.

Inside the flat, somebody sneezed. Sylvia sighed. Cooping her children up with so many others was asking for them to come down with colds or worse; diphtheria and measles, whooping cough and chicken pox (though George, Jr., had already had most of those) ran not in wintertime, when people stayed tightly packed together so much of the time. But what else could she do? Unlike Brigid Coneval, she had no husband sending home even a little money. For all she knew, she had no husband at all.

Shaking her head, she went downstairs and out into the street. It was still dark outside; the sun wouldn’t be up for most of another hour. Breath making a foggy cloud around her, she walked down to the corner and waited for the trolley. Up it came a few minutes later. She climbed in and dropped her nickel in the fare box. A fellow in a rain slicker who looked like a fisherman stood up to give her his seat. She took it with a murmur of thanks.

She changed trolleys, then got off and walked over to the canning plant, a square brick building that looked ancient though it wasn’t and that smelled of fish even more powerfully than T Wharf. The workers coming in with her were a mixed lot, some white men who hadn’t yet been called into the Army, some colored men who weren’t likely to be called into the Army unless things got even worse than they were already, and a lot of women like her who needed to keep body and soul together and families running while their men were gone.

A couple of women were wearing black; they’d lost their husbands in the fighting that sprawled across North America. Sylvia wondered if she should be doing the same. Stubbornly, she refused to give up hope. She wouldn’t don widow’s weeds till she knew for a fact she was a widow.

Before she’d had to look for work, she’d never operated anything more complicated than a sewing machine. The machine that put labels on cans of mackerel as they came sliding along a conveyor belt wasn’t much more complicated. You pulled a lever to shunt the can off the belt, another one to route it through the machine, and a third to send it on its way, now adorned with a fish that looked more like a tuna than a mackerel—but, since the housewife in Ohio or the bachelor in Nebraska had probably never seen either in the flopping flesh, what harm was done?

You did have to watch out that the labeling machine didn’t run out of paste, and every once in a while the endless strip of labels would jam. When that happened, you had to shut down the line till you could clear and fix the feed mechanism. Most days, though, it was just pull this one, pull that one, pull the other one, then pull this one again, from the start of the shift right through to the end.

Sometimes time crawled by. Sometimes it sped; Sylvia had found herself almost mesmerized by what she was doing, and had an hour or two slip by almost without conscious thought. You could talk through the clatter of thousands of cans and of the machinery that moved them on their way, but often there wasn’t a whole lot to say.

Saturday half-shift often passed more slowly, at least in mental terms, than a full day’s work. Sylvia had expected that, especially after being off for the New Year’s holiday. But it didn’t happen She came out into the bright winter sun with the feeling that she had a lot of time to do the rest of the day’s chores. She went to the grocer’s and the butcher’s and the yard-goods store for cloth and patterns for the clothes her children would be wearing come spring.

“Good to see you, Mrs. Enos,” the clerk there said as he took her money. “Business has been slow. A lot of people are buying ready-to-wear goods these days.”

“Making them myself is cheaper—if I can find the time.” Sylvia shook her head. She didn’t have much money since George had disappeared, but she didn’t have much time, either. How could you win?

When she got back to her apartment building, she checked the rank of mailboxes in the front hall. She found a couple of advertising circulars, a Christmas card from her cousin in New York (she muttered rude things about the post office), and an envelope with a stamp she did not recognize and a rubber-stamped notice saying it had been forwarded through the International Society of Red Cross Organizations.