American Front (47 page)

“Heard tell about that,” the lieutenant colonel said. “Damned—pardon me, ma’am,” he added with a glance toward Nellie, “I say, damned if I know whether they ought to pin medals on those niggers or take ’em out somewhere quiet, have ’em kneel down in front of a hole, and then shoot ’em, cover ’em up, and try to make out the whole thing never happened.” All the Rebs around the table nodded. The lieutenant colonel nodded to the artillery captain. “You’re closest to the matter, Jeb. What do you think about it?”

“Me?” The captain—Jeb—was boyishly handsome, with a little tuft of beard under his lower lip that should have looked absurd but somehow seemed dashing instead. “I think I’d like another cup of our hostess’ excellent coffee, too.” He held out his cup to Nellie. As she hurried off to refill it, he lowered his voice—but not quite enough to keep her from overhearing—and said, “I wouldn’t mind a go with our hostess’ excellent daughter, either.”

Hoarse male laughter rose. Nellie stiffened. If Edna judged by looks—if Edna judged by anything—she probably wouldn’t have minded a go with this Jeb, either. Nellie thought hard about dosing his coffee with a potent purgative. In the end, she didn’t. All men were like that. Some, at least, were honest about it.

When she got back to the table, the artillery captain was saying, “…niggers don’t seem to be putting on airs on account of it. They’re back to driving and fetching, same as they were before. You ask me, it’s worth knowing niggers can fight if their necks are on the block. Way we’re losing men, we may need black bodies one of these days.”

One of the other officers—a major—got out a silvered flask and poured a hefty shot of something into his coffee. “That’s not the most cheerful notion I’ve ever heard,” he said, taking a big swig of the augmented brew. “Ahh! Don’t like the idea of niggers’ getting their hands on guns. Don’t like ’em getting their hands on military discipline, either.”

“I don’t like it myself,” the lieutenant colonel said. “We’ve got ourselves a white man’s country. That’s how it ought to be, and that’s how it ought to stay.”

“Well, gentlemen, you won’t hear me disagreeing there,” Jeb said, “but if it turns into a matter of winning the war with niggers or losing it without ’em, what do we do then?”

An uncomfortable silence followed that question. The major with the flask poured another shot into his cup. What he had in there was probably more hooch than coffee. That didn’t keep him from gulping it down as if it were water. “Ahh!” he said again, and then, “What we do is, we pray to God to keep that cup from passing to us.”

“Amen,” Jeb said, and the rest of the officers nodded. But the artillery captain went on, “War’s already gone on longer than we thought it would. The middle of April now, and no end in sight. Christ! We ought to be ready in case it goes on longer yet.”

“Not up to you and me to decide that kind of thing, thank heaven,” the lieutenant colonel said, which brought another round of nods. “The president and the secretary of war, they’ll do whatever they choose to do, and we’ll make the best of it. That’s what the Army’s for.”

The major started telling a long, complicated story about a mule that had tried to kick an aeroplane to death. It would have been funnier if he hadn’t had to go back and repeat and correct himself over and over again.
That’s what the demon rum does to you
, Nellie thought; in her mind, all liquor got lumped together as rum.
It calcifies the brain, and serves you right
.

She had other tables on which to wait. The coffeehouse was jumping these days, business better than it had been since before the war, maybe better than it had ever been. Being able to get her hands on all the coffee she needed didn’t hurt there. A lot of places in Washington had gone belly-up, just as she had been at the point of doing not so long before.

She’d wondered if anyone would ask how she managed to keep getting coffee beans in the middle of a tightly rationed town. But that hadn’t happened. Even Edna hadn’t been unduly curious.
She probably thinks I’m sleeping with someone
, Nellie thought sadly. It was, she feared, what her daughter would have done in her place. Or maybe Edna only noticed the beans were there and truly did think no more about it.

The next morning, Nellie and Edna were sweeping up the floor by the light of a couple of kerosene lamps—neither gas nor electricity had yet come back to this part of Washington. Outside, black night brightened toward dawn; a coffeehouse’s customers started showing up early. As Nellie emptied the dustpan into a wastebasket, a light went on across the street.

A small pot of coffee was already on the coal stove, to give her and Edna an eye-opener before customers started coming in. Nellie poured a cup from the pot and set it in a saucer. “I see Mr. Jacobs is up and about, too,” she said. “I’ll take this over to him. It will be better than anything he’s likely to make for himself.”

“All right, Ma.” Edna’s laugh was not altogether kindly. “Beyond me what you see in a little wrinkled old shoemaker, though.”

“Mr. Jacobs is a very nice man,” Nellie said primly. Her daughter laughed again. Nellie took a haughty tone: “Your mind may be in the gutter, but that doesn’t mean mine is.”

“Now tell me another one, Ma,” Edna said; her mind
was
in the gutter, sure enough. To keep from heating up one of their all too frequent fights. Nellie let the door she closed behind her serve in place of an angry response.

No sooner had she crossed the street than a long line of trucks rolled past, their acetylene lamps turning morning twilight to noon. She looked back at the growling monsters. Almost all of the drivers were Negroes. She had to tap twice to get Mr. Jacobs to hear her.

He peered through his magnifying glasses. His wizened face wrinkled in a new way when he smiled. “Widow Semphroch! Come in,” he said. “And you have brought me coffee, too. Oh, this is wonderful. I was afraid you would be a Confederate soldier with boots that had to be repaired at once because he was going back to the front. I am glad to be wrong.” He stood aside and bowed like an Old World gentleman as he welcomed her.

She set the coffee on his work counter, by the last. Closing the door after her, he came over, picked up the cup, and sipped. At his appreciative hum, Nellie said, “Thank you so much for helping to arrange to get the beans delivered to my shop in the first place.”

“It is my pleasure,” he said, and then, sipping again, “It
is
my pleasure. And it is so very kind of you to bring a cup to me every morning.” He cocked his head to one side. “You hear all sorts of interesting news in a coffeehouse. What have you heard lately?”

Nellie told him what she’d heard lately, chief among the stories being the one about the Negroes who had served as artillerymen after the men for whom they labored went down, wounded or killed. She recounted the tale in as much detail as she could. “The commander of the battery was a captain named Jeb, though I don’t know his last name,” she finished.

“I do not know this, either, but I think I may have friends who will.” Mr. Jacobs nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, thank you for bringing this to my notice, Widow Semphroch. I think my friends may be most interested to hear it. I am very glad we were able to help you in your difficulty.” He finished the coffee and set cup back in saucer. “Here you are. Your business grows busy before mine, and I would not keep you from it.”

“Edna will take care of things till I get back,” Nellie said. But she picked up the cup and saucer and hurried back to the coffeehouse even so. Leaving Edna alone in there with all those lecherous Confederates was asking for trouble.

And sure enough, when she walked inside, there sat the handsome artillery captain from the night before, with Edna pouring him a cup of coffee and looking, to Nellie’s jaundiced eye, as if she was about to plop herself down in his lap. But the scene was outwardly decorous, so Nellie, in spite of what she was thinking, kept her mouth shut.

Edna didn’t. Subscribing to the notion that the best defense was a good offense, she said, “Hello, Ma. Took you long enough to get back from the shoemaker’s shop. What were you doing over there, anyhow?” Her tone was light; Jeb the Confederate gunner would have noticed nothing amiss. But Nellie knew she meant something like,
You went over there and tore one off with Mr. Jacobs, didn’t you? And since you did, what are you doing meddling in
my
life?

But Nellie had gone across the street for patriotic reasons, not vile ones. She said, “We were just talking—he’s a good friend. Why don’t you go back and scrub out the sinks?”
Why don’t you wash out your mouth with soap while you’re doing it, too?

Edna went, with a walk that, Nellie thought, would have got her arrested for soliciting had she done it on the street—and had the Confederates bothered arresting streetwalkers. They mostly didn’t; their basic attitude seemed to be that all U.S. women were whores, so what point to worrying about a few in particular?

Jeb followed Edna with his eyes till she disappeared. Then he seemed to remember the coffee growing cold in front of him. He gulped it down, set a coin on the table, and rose, setting his red-corded artilleryman’s hat on his head. Touching the brim, he nodded to Nellie and said, “Obliged, ma’am.”

Nellie nodded back.
Why not?
she thought. She was obliged to him, too, for running off at the mouth so freely the night before. And he hadn’t got his hands on Edna: the moonstruck way he looked at her proved that. She knew all about the ways men looked at women. If he’d had her, his stare would have been more possessive, more knowing. He was still wondering what she was like, and all the more twitchingly lustful for that.

Keep right on wondering, you stinking Reb
, Nellie thought.

Plowing the land had an ancient, timeless rhythm to it. Walking behind horses, guiding the plow, watching the rich, dark earth of Manitoba furrow up on either side of the blade made Arthur McGregor think of his grandfather, who had done the same thing back in Ontario; of his several-times-great-grandfather, who had done his best to scratch a living from the stony soil of Scotland; and, sometimes, of an ancestor far more distant than that, an ancestor who didn’t speak English or Scots Gaelic, either, an ancestor who wore barely tanned skins and walked behind an ox scratching a furrow in the ground with a stick sharpened in the fire.

Like his ancestors, going back to that ancient, half-imaginary one, McGregor eyed the sky, worrying about the weather. If he hadn’t, his son would have taken care of that for him. Here came Alexander, with a pitcher of cold water from the well. “Think it’s safe, getting the seed in the ground so soon, Pa?” Alexander asked, as he already had more than once. “A late frost and we’re in a lot of trouble.”

Alexander was a good boy, Arthur McGregor thought, but he was getting to the age where he thought everything his father did was wrong, for no better reason than that it was the old man doing it. “This year, son, we’re in a lot of trouble no matter what we do, I think,” McGregor answered. “But I want to plow and plant as early as I can, before the Americans find a reason to come round and tell me I can’t.”

“They can’t do that!” Alexander exclaimed. “We’d starve.”

“And if the lot of us did, do you think they’d shed a single tear?” Arthur McGregor shook his head. “Not likely.”

There, for once, his son had a hard time disagreeing with him. But Alexander found a different question to ask: “Even if we do get our crop in, will they let us keep enough of it to live on?”

His father sighed. “I don’t know. But if we have no crop, I’m certain sure we’ll not be able to live on that.”

Arthur McGregor looked north. Like all his ancestors save a couple of lucky ones, he worried about war hardly less than weather. The front lay a good way off now—but who could guess where it would be when harvest time rolled around? Would the Yanks have overrun Winnipeg by then? Or would the Canadians and British have rallied and pushed the thieves in green-gray back south over the border where they belonged? If you read the newspapers, you figured Canada was in a state of collapse. But if you believed all the lies the Americans made the papers tell, Winnipeg had already fallen twice, Montreal three times, and Toronto once—maybe for luck.

Alexander persisted: “How do you feel about raising a crop when the Americans will end up eating most of it while they’re fighting Canada?”

McGregor sighed. “How do I feel about that? Like the mother bird after the cuckoo laid the egg in her nest, son. But what am I supposed to do, I ask you that? What the Americans don’t take, we’ll eat ourselves.”

His son kicked at the dirt. When you were young, you were sure everything had answers either black or white. Alexander was getting his nose rubbed in the reality of gray, and didn’t much care for it. Trying to avoid it, he said, “Why not just plant enough for us, and leave the rest of the fields”—he waved at the broad, flat acreage—“to lie fallow for the year?”

“I could do that, I suppose, if I didn’t need to make some cash to buy the things we can’t raise on the farm,” Arthur McGregor said. He eyed his son with genuine respect; the boy—no, the young man—could have come up with many worse notions. But—“If I try that, too, the other thing likely to happen to me is farming at the point of an American bayonet.”

“If every farmer in Manitoba did the same thing, they couldn’t put bayonets to all of our backs.” Alexander’s face flamed with excitement. In the course of a couple of sentences, he’d given himself a bold and patriotic movement to join. “A farmers’ strike, that’s what it would be!”

The only drawback to the movement was that it didn’t exist. Arthur McGregor shook his head: no, it had more. “For one thing, son, with all the Yanks in Manitoba these days, they likely do have enough men to put a bayonet at every farm. And for another, the way they shoot hostages, they wouldn’t wait more than a minute or two before they started shooting farmers. And once they shot a few, the rest would—”

“Rise up and throw the Yanks off our soil!” Alexander broke in.

“Not that easy,” McGregor said with a sigh. “I wish it was, but it’s not. They shoot a few, most of the rest will do just what they say and nothing else but. Other thing is, there’s too many Americans up here for us to throw ’em out even if we did rise up. Oh, we could make nuisances of ourselves, that I don’t deny, but no more. The Yanks are bastards, sure enough, but we’ve seen too much to have the notion that they are cowards and they are fools. They’d beat us down, and we’d spend our blood for nothing.”