American Front (32 page)

That got him a chuckle as tinny as the sigh had been. “Makes you feel any better, First Richmond, the Yanks are as bad off as we ’uns. You can shoot off shells faster’n you can make ’em, and that’s a fact.”

“Yeah, but if the Yanks are short in Kentucky and full-up here ’stead o’ the other way round, that doesn’t do us a hell of a lot of good.” Featherston said.

“Send you all I can, promise,” the fellow back at the dump said.

“You better, you expect us to keep fightin’ the war,” Featherston told him. He hung the earpiece back on its hook with a crash, muttering, “Son of a bitch acts like they’re
his
goddamn shells.” The corporal in charge of the telephone, who’d undoubtedly heard language a lot worse than that, snickered. Still fuming, Jake headed off toward the guns.

If the dump didn’t send enough shells forward, as seemed highly likely, Captain Stuart would have to do the calling next time. What was the point of carrying a famous name if you couldn’t exploit it every now and then?

When Featherston got back to his battery, he discovered his men gathered around a major he’d never seen before: a major of infantry, for the single stars showing his rank were mounted on blue-faced collar tabs. “What’s up?” Jake asked, which really meant,
What the devil is the infantry doing sniffing around an artillery unit?

The major turned to him. The fellow wasn’t very big and his face wasn’t very tough, but Featherston wouldn’t have wanted any damnyankee with those hard, gray eyes staring at him over the sights of a Springfield. Almost without realizing he’d done it, he stiffened to attention and saluted.

Crisply, the major returned the salute. “Clarence Potter, Army of Northern Virginia Intelligence,” he said. His voice was harsh and clipped and had a trace of a Yankee accent; Featherston wondered if he’d gone to college in the United States. Potter went on. “I am here to investigate a conspiracy threatening the security not only of this army but of the Confederate States of America.”

“Jesus Christ!” Jake exclaimed, and then said, “Excuse me, sir, but I don’t know anything about anything like that, and I’d be right surprised—I’d be more than right surprised—if anybody here does.”

“That’s what we were tellin’ him, Sarge,” Jethro Bixler said. The loader went on, “All we want to do—all any of us want to do—is tie a can to the damnyankees’ tails and then get back to what we was doin’ ’fore the damn war started.”

“Sergeant, if your men are as good with their gunnery as they are at flapping their gums, the Confederate States are in good hands,” Major Potter said, “If you’ll listen, I’ll tell you exactly why I’m here. What I want to know is, how far do you trust the niggers in this battery?”

“The niggers?” Featherston scratched his head. “Haven’t hardly thought about the niggers. They do what we tell ’em, and that’s that. You want to know the truth of it, most of the time I worry about the horses more. Something’s wrong with a nigger, he can tell you what it is and where it hurts. With horses, you got to guess.”

“That’s how it is, all right,” Bixler said, and the rest of the gun crew nodded agreement. Featherston relaxed. His best guess was that the intelligence unit had too much time on its hands and was running around making work for itself so it would look busy and important.

But Clarence Potter shook his head, as if reading Jake’s mind. “That’s what they want you to think,” he said in a low voice. If he’d had long mustaches and twirled them, he would have looked as well as sounded like a stage villain. He went on, “We’ve broken up four cells of Red rebellion in the niggers of this army in the past two weeks. One of them was in another artillery battery. I won’t name names, but we found out the niggers there were sabotaging shells so they wouldn’t go off when they came down on the Yankees’ heads.”

“I be go to hell,” Jake said softly. The rest of his men gaped at the major from Intelligence.

“It is a fact,” Potter declared. “We shot four buck niggers yesterday—gave them blindfolds and cigars and tied them to posts and shot them dead. One thing this war has brought out is how deeply the rot has spread through the Confederate States. Half the niggers in government service and half the niggers back home, it seems, have been plotting against the white race and the Confederate government, and likely plotting against them for years. We will crush those plots if it means giving half our niggers blindfolds and cigars—if that is what we require, gentlemen, that is what we shall do, for the sake of our race and for the sake of our country.”

“I have trouble imagining anything like that in this battery, sir,” Featherston said. By the look in his eye, Major Clarence Potter had no trouble imagining almost any sort of trouble anywhere. Featherston continued. “Haven’t had reports from the aeroplane pilots or the ground spotters that we’re shootin’ too many duds, anything like that. And besides”—he laughed ruefully—“it ain’t like we got that many shells any which way, live or dud.” He explained where he’d been, and why.

“We’re investigating that particular scandal, too,” Potter said in a tone of voice that did not bode well for whoever he and his cohorts decided was to blame. Featherston didn’t know whether it was a scandal or not. The fellow back at the ammunition dump had a point, though Jake wouldn’t have admitted it to him, not in a million years; you could shoot off shells a hell of a lot easier than you could make them.

“Red revolutionaries—in the Army?” Jethro Bixler sounded incredulous. “Those are the crazy people who throw bombs at senators, things like that.”

“Not all of them are crazy, not even close,” Potter said. “Life would be simpler if they were. A lot of them are as hard to spot as a rattler in dry leaves, and every bit as deadly. So, gentlemen—have you seen any Negroes acting in any way suspicious, any way at all?”

Jake glanced over toward the laborers and teamsters who were standing around watching the artillerymen chew the fat with this stranger. You couldn’t tell anything from their faces, but then you never could. Jake’s father had taught him that almost before he was out of short pants: overseers’ lore, even though there weren’t any overseers left, not in the old sense of the word, since manumission went through. He wouldn’t have given long odds against the Negroes’ knowing who Potter was: jungle telegraph, white men called it. He wondered what the blacks thought.

“Well?” the major snapped.

For close to half a minute, nobody said anything. Featherston understood that: even if the laborers and teamsters were imperfectly loyal, how was the battery supposed to function without them? If Major Potter arrested them, who, if anybody, would replace them? The saying about the devil you knew and the devil you didn’t held true here.

Or it mostly held true. Jake said, “Captain Stuart’s nigger, Pompey, he’s…not uppity, but he thinks a good deal of himself, if you know what I mean.”

“I do indeed know exactly what you mean, Sergeant,” Potter said, his voice grim and predatory. Jake would not have liked to get in his way. But then even the iron-eyed intelligence officer hesitated. “Captain Stuart, you say? That would be Captain Jeb Stuart III, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes, sir, sure would,” Featherston agreed.

“Damnation,” Major Potter muttered under his breath. “Well, we’ll see what we can do about finding out what this buck Pompey knows, if he knows anything.” He walked off, looking unhappy.

Jethro Bixler laughed softly. “Every time there’s an election, everybody starts brayin’ about how one white man, he’s just as good as the next. Sounds mighty fine, don’t it? Look what it’s worth when you bump up against one of the big ones, though.”

The crew of Featherston’s gun nodded, all together. But then an ammunition wagon came doggedly forward over the muddy road. “This here First Richmond Howitzers?” called the driver, a white man. When the gun crew nodded again, the fellow said, “Why the devil didn’t you say this here was Jeb Stuart’s battery? Jeb Stuart III needs ammunition, by Jesus he gets it.”

Featherston started to laugh. The rest of the gun crew joined in, uproariously. The driver first gaped and then started to get mad. For some reason, that only made Jake laugh harder. Every coin had two sides. If Pompey was plotting revolution, he’d be hard to get rid of, because Captain Stuart liked him and trusted him. But if the battery needed shells, shells the battery would have, because Captain Stuart commanded it.

“With a little luck,” Jake said, “the good outweighs the bad.”

Winter blew through Manitoba so that, when spring finally came, you wondered to find anything standing. Arthur McGregor thanked God that the Americans didn’t come out to any of the farms very often. They were, from everything he’d seen and heard, holed up in towns and along railroad tracks. Not many of them had been ready for a winter like this one. He hoped they were a lot colder and more uncomfortable than he was.

“Serves ’em right,” he said over supper one long early February night: salt pork from pigs he’d raised himself and bread baked from his own wheat. “They wanted to come up here and take away what’s ours, did they? I wish they’d take our winter and ship it back to the USA with ’em, to some place that could use a hard one: Maryland, maybe, or—what was the name of that state of theirs?” Geography had never been his favorite subject in school, and he hadn’t cracked a school book in more than half a lifetime.

His son Alexander was no great scholar, either, but his memory was fresher than Arthur’s. “California?” he suggested.

“That’s the one I meant,” Arthur McGregor agreed.

“They say there are parts of that state where it doesn’t snow for years and years at a time,” Alexander said. “I can’t hardly believe that.”

“Well, Alexander, when did they tell you that you knew everything there was to know?” his mother asked, with just enough chuckle in her voice to take away the sting, the way medicine was sweetened to fight its bitter taste.

“Now, Maude,” Arthur McGregor said, “I have trouble believing that, too.” He’d lived in Manitoba since he was about ten years old, and in Ontario before that. Neither province went without snow for years at a time. From October through April, you counted yourself lucky if you went without snow for a week.

But, from the way the U.S. soldiers had trouble with the cold here, he thought it likely they were used to a much milder climate. If you started thinking the whole world was like the part of it where you lived, you were going to be wrong a lot of the time.

Maude got up and carried dishes to the kitchen. She was coming back for a second load when somebody knocked on the door. Maude froze; Arthur admired her for not dropping any of the dishes. Ice that had nothing to do with the weather ran up his back. The best he could hope for was that it was a neighbor in some kind of trouble. The worst…Sometimes, when the Americans ran short of supplies, they made up the lack by plundering the people whose land they’d invaded.

Alexander McGregor pointed to the cabinet where they’d hidden the rifle. Arthur McGregor shook his head. One gun against however many U.S. soldiers might have been out there wasn’t betting odds.

The knock came again, louder, more insistent. Now Arthur thought about getting the gun. None of his neighbors would have knocked like that, which left American troops as the next best bet. But one against however many still looked grim. Slowly, he walked to the door. “Who’s there?” he called without putting his hand on the latch.

Two words came through the timbers: “A friend.”

McGregor scratched his head. Any neighbor would have said who he was, and probably would have been angry at him for not opening up right away, too. And the Americans would also have said who they were, loudly and rudely. Whom did that leave? Nobody likely to come to his door he could think of. “What kind of friend?” he demanded.

The answer came back at once: “A cold one, dammit.”

He scowled, but threw the door wide. When he saw the uniformed rifleman outside in the snow, he thought the fellow was an American. Then he realized the greatcoat wasn’t green-gray, but the khaki he’d once worn himself. Along with the greatcoat, the Canadian soldier wore a fur cap on his head and long, narrow boards on his feet. McGregor had snowshoes in his own closet, of course, but he wasn’t good on skis. “Come in,” he said now. “You’re a friend indeed, and among friends.”

The soldier bent down and undid the straps holding the skis to his feet. He set down the poles that had helped him travel over the snow and hurried into the house so McGregor could close the door behind him. “Thanks,” he said with a theatrical shiver. “Have you got any tea or coffee? I’ve been going for a long time.”

“Maude!” McGregor called. His wife hurried into the kitchen again. Her face bore an expression half proud, half worried. The American authorities had issued regulations against harboring Canadian or British (all of whom they described as “enemy”) soldiers, with draconian punishments for disobedience spelled out in minute, loving detail. The Americans seemed very good at spelling things out in minute detail, without much caring what they were defining.

Alexander McGregor, on the other hand, looked as if he was going to bow down before the scruffy Canadian soldier the way the Israelites bowed down to the Golden Calf. Arthur’s son was at the age where he was prone to hero worship, and anyone who could hit back at the United Sates was a hero in his eyes now.

A couple of minutes after the kettle started whistling, Maude came out with a steaming cup of tea. “Obliged, ma’am,” the soldier said, and sipped. His eyebrows went up. “You even sugared it for me. I’m in your debt.”

Maude glanced toward Arthur. Almost imperceptibly, he nodded back. He would have expected nothing less from her than giving a guest the best they had. Yes, sugar was in short supply in these days of occupation, but they wouldn’t waste away and die for want of a couple of teaspoonsful.

The soldier drank the cup down while it was still steaming, the better to get all the warmth he could inside him. When it was empty, he sighed deeply. “God bless you,” he said. “I may live. I may even want to. Long, cold trip down here, I tell you that.” He blinked; his eyes were a startling blue. “Haven’t given you my name, have I? I’m Sergeant Malcolm Lockerby, 90th Rifles.”