American Front (56 page)

As Featherston supervised the emplacement of his own howitzer, Captain Stuart rode up himself. Featherston saluted. Stuart watched the black men in butternut tunics of simpler, baggier cut than soldiers wore. With a sly grin, he said, “Got yourself a whole ready-made gun crew this time, in case the one the government issued you goes down.”

“Uh, yes, sir,” Jake said, a little nervously. He still wasn’t happy about having used Nero and Perseus as fighting men. Nobody else was happy about it, either, except possibly the two Negroes—and their opinion didn’t count. What the reaction of the brass amounted to was that Featherston had done what he’d had to do, and it was too damn bad he’d had to do it. That was pretty much how he felt about it himself.

Stuart swung down off the horse and tied the reins to a sapling. “What really makes life difficult is that you put the niggers on the guns right after that Major Potter came sniffing around with all his crazy talk about every other nigger in the army being a damned Red. Would you believe it, he wanted to take Pompey away for questioning.”

“Is that a fact, sir?” Featherston said, in tones he devoutly hoped were unrevealing. He, after all, had been the one who’d suggested Pompey could do with some investigating.

“It is indeed.” Jeb Stuart III kicked at the ground to show his indignation. It wasn’t aimed at Jake, from which he concluded Smart didn’t know who mistrusted his supercilious servant. “I had to get hold of my father back in the War Department, and he had to do some pretty plain talking to the Army of Northern Virginia Intelligence before they turned Pompey loose. When those people question somebody, he’s lucky if he comes out of it in one piece, especially if he’s a nigger.”

Ever since the days of Robert E. Lee, Confederates had used
those people
, spoken in a particular tone of voice, as a euphemism for
the enemy
. Featherston had never heard it used that way to mean part of the Confederate Army, not till now. He hoped he didn’t hear it used that way again for another fifty or sixty years.

So Jeb Stuart, Jr., had saved Pompey from the tender mercies of Army Intelligence, had he? If Pompey wasn’t any more than an ordinary black servant stuck up beyond his station because of whom he served, that was fine. If Pompey was a snake in the grass, it was anything but fine. But how were you supposed to know which if you didn’t try to find out?

“Pompey’s family has been with my family since my great-grandfather’s day,” the captain said. “He’d be loyal to the Stuarts before he’d join up with a pack of Red revolutionaries just because they have black skins.”

Featherston didn’t answer. Arguing with your superior had no future in it. Arguing with your superior when he was also in the third generation of a leading Confederate military family had less than no future.

And, in any case, he had enough other things to do. Making sure the gun was sited as well as it could be, making sure the wheel brakes were set and the spade on the end of the trail dug into the ground, making sure there was a good, thick earthen rampart between the ammunition and the crew so a lucky shell hit wouldn’t—or might not—blow them all to Jesus…all that took time and work.

As he readied the position, he kept peering over the creek, looking for the caterpillar ripples on the distant ground that marked advancing Yankee infantry. Sure enough, here they came. Larger dots punctuating the ripples were horses.
Cavalry
, Featherston thought, with a mixture of respect of their courage and scorn for their uselessness.

Then the dots peeled off.
They know better than to get their precious horses—and their precious selves—too close to the machine guns
, Jake thought.
Poor dears might get hurt
. Cavalry would charge, though, when ordered. After staring a moment, he recognized the pattern the horses were forming.

“That’s not cavalry!” he shouted. “That’s field artillery.”

Jeb Stuart III came trotting up beside him. He nodded as he stuck a brass telescope up to his eye. “Field artillery, sure as hell,” he agreed. “I make the range about two and a half miles—say, four thousand yards for starters. Let’s give them a hello, shall we?”

He started bawling for the whole battery. Featherston handled his gun. It was the second one of the battery to open up. The shell fell a couple of hundred yards short of the U.S. field gun. The next shell, a few seconds later, was long. After that, they started landing in the right general area. You put enough shells in the right general area, you did damage. The Yanks had probably figured they could get their battery into position and into action before the retreating Confederates were ready to reply. They’d made a mistake there, and they were going to pay for it.

The U.S. battery did get a few shots off, shells crashing down on the trench line behind Codorus Creek. But that kind of nuisance firing went on every day of the war. It was hardly worth noticing, even by the Negro laborers, who were more flighty than soldiers when it came to being on the receiving end of bullets. Since they couldn’t shoot back, Jake found it hard to blame them for that.

He glanced over to Nero and Perseus. They stood by the horses, and were plainly ready to dive into the foxhole if the damnyankees started hurling shells at the battery. They’d shot back. Featherston hoped to high heaven they’d never have to do it again.

After a few minutes, the U.S. field guns couldn’t stand the heat from deploying out in the open. They started moving again, this time against the tide of the advancing U.S. infantry. “So long!” Featherston shouted at them. “Tell your mama what it’s like when you really have to work for a living.” His gun crew yelled and waved their hats. At Captain Stuart’s orders, they started pouring shells into the foot soldiers approaching the creek.

They worked a formidable slaughter among them, too, but a couple of hours later they had to abandon their position and pull back another mile or two: somewhere farther west, the Yankees had forced a crossing of the creek.

“Doesn’t seem right,” Michael Scott grumbled as Nero and Perseus hitched the horses up to the guns. “We were massacring the bastards.”

“Wasn’t so much what they did in front of us that made us start this retreat,” Featherston answered. “It was what happened off to the flank and the rear. You can win your own part of the battle and still have the whole army lose.”

“I wish you hadn’t said that,” the loader told him. After Jake thought about it for a while, he wished he hadn’t said that, too.

When Flora Hamburger went downstairs from the Socialist Party offices to walk across Centre Market Place and buy a sandwich in the market, Max Fleischmann was arguing with two goons outside his butcher’s shop.

“No, I don’t got no ham,” he said to them. “Don’t got no pig’s knuckles. Don’t got no head cheese. Don’t got no bacon. Don’t got no time for no silliness, neither. I’m a Jew. You maybe may have noticed.”

“Yeah, pop, we noticed,” one of the goons said. His nasty grin showed a couple of broken teeth. “Maybe you noticed this.” He raised the billy club he carried in his right hand. The armband wrapped around his left sleeve read,
PEACE AND ORDER
. He and his equally unpleasant friend looked like a couple of Soldiers’ Circle men, and were helping to hold down the staunchly Socialist neighborhood by main force.

“Leave that man alone,” Flora said crisply. Her English was precise and almost unaccented. The two volunteer policemen gaped at her as she went on, “Not only has he done nothing to you, but if you beat him, you will be beating one of the few Democrats in this part of New York.”

“Ain’t no Democrats here,” said the goon with the club ready to use. “Just Jews and Socialists.” He leered at her. “Which are you, lady?”

“Both,” Flora answered. The thugs undoubtedly knew that; they hung around the Socialist Party office to harass the Party regulars, and, Maria Tresca aside, few gentiles came here. Angelina Tresca wouldn’t, ever again. Flora’s party affiliation, though, was a sword that cut both ways. “And if you beat me today—or if you beat Mr. Fleischmann—every Socialist paper in the country will carry the story tomorrow.”

That was true. By the unhappy look on the goons’ faces, they knew it, too. The one with the club raised lowered it. “Come on, Paddy,” he said in disgust. “We’ll find games to play somewheres else.” They mooched off, looking for people more willing to be intimidated.

“Thank you,” the butcher said to Flora in English before dropping back into Yiddish. “When you go home, you stop in here. I’ll have something for you to take back to the flat. Not something big, maybe, but something.”

“You don’t need to do that,” she said, also in Yiddish.

“Hush,” Fleischmann told her, his voice stern. “You have a sister who can use good food right now. Take it for her, if not for you.” His stiff-backed pose declared he would allow no disagreement.

Flora gave up. “I’ll stop,” she promised, wondering how Fleischmann knew about Sophie. Gossip on the crowded Lower East Side was an amazing thing. No doubt Fleischmann also knew the baby would be illegitimate. Flora sighed. Even if you disapproved of bourgeois conventions, you couldn’t escape them.

More goons patrolled the Centre Market. The Remembrance Day riots had given the authorities the excuse they needed to clamp down on Socialist strongholds throughout New York City, though no one had proved or could prove a Socialist had started the disturbances.

Flora bought a smoked-tongue sandwich from a little stall in the market, a couple of pickled tomatoes from a man who carried his great vat of spiced brine on a pushcart, and coffee from another fellow with a pushcart, this one mounting a samovar. She ate quickly, then went back upstairs, where she spent the afternoon writing one letter after another, all of them aimed at getting Roosevelt’s repressive restrictions lifted from New York City.

“If the president keeps up with them,” said Herman Bruck, who was also writing, “he’ll provoke a working-class uprising a hundred times worse than anything we saw in the Nineties. That will play hob with carrying on his foolish war.”

His bruises had faded. Roentgen-ray photographs had shown his left hand wasn’t broken after all. He wore as a badge of honor the gap in his smile that he’d got when somebody wearing a heavy Soldiers’ Circle ring had punched him in the face during the riots, and loudly proclaimed to whoever would listen that he preferred it to going to the dentist for bridgework. Flora found that absurd, but didn’t say so; whenever she argued with Bruck about anything, he thought it meant she was interested in him. Maria Tresca, in mourning black, was very quiet.

Flora finished her letter-writing, said her good-byes, and went downstairs. Max Fleischmann stood waiting for her, as if in ambush. He thrust a paper-wrapped package into her hands. Her eyebrows flew up at the weight of it. “This is too much!” she exclaimed.

“I’m sorry, I’m not hearing very well today,” the butcher said, and went back into his shop. That left her the choice of pursuing him when he plainly did not want to be pursued and going home. Shaking her head, she went home.

“What do you have there?” her mother asked when she walked into the crowded apartment.

“I kept Mr. Fleischmann the butcher from having some trouble with TR’s hooligans, so he gave me this,” she answered, and opened it on the kitchen counter. “Marrow bones and stewing beef: there must be three or four pounds of it.”

“That’s very nice,” her mother said. “We can use that—barley soup with onions and carrots, maybe, the way your father likes.”

“Yes, Mama,” Flora said; to her mother, utility made anything, even Socialism, worthwhile. “I’ll put it in the icebox.”

Her brothers came in then, bantering with her and their younger sister Esther as they hung up their jackets and caps. David lighted a cigarette, a habit he was just acquiring and one Flora wished he’d lose. The harsh smoke made the flat stink; it wasn’t flavorful like the pipe tobacco their father used—even the cheaper grades he was using nowadays smelled better than this nasty weed.

When Benjamin Hamburger came in, he got the pipe going right away, perhaps in self-defense. Sophie dragged in last of all. The war had created relentless demands on seamstresses in New York City, all over the USA, and, no doubt, all over the world. The bosses didn’t care if you were going to have a baby. You had to show up and you had to work no matter how tired, no matter how sick you were. If you didn’t, somebody else was waiting to do your job.

Over small helpings of pot roast and big ones of potato kugel, Benjamin Hamburger remarked on that: “With so many jobs needing doing now, wages may be going up.
Alevai
,” he added, dragging superstition into a discussion of what should have been the most unsuperstitious study of economics.

Before Flora could turn the discussion into a more rational pattern, someone knocked on the door. Flora’s mother bounced to her feet and strode to the door with a determined stride, saying, “A peddler who comes round at suppertime deserves a
choleryeh
he’ll remember for a year, and I’ll give him one, you see if I don’t.”

But when she threw open the door, it was not a peddler hawking knives or pens or stereoscope slides through the block of flats. Instead, it was an unfamiliar-looking man in a green-gray uniform “Yossel!” Sophie exclaimed, recognizing him without his beard where Flora had not.

“May I come in?” Yossel Reisen asked when Sarah Hamburger showed no signs of getting out of his way.

“You may come in,” Benjamin called over his wife’s shoulder. When she whirled around to protest, he waved for her to calm down, continuing, “How long you stay depends on what you have to say for yourself once you are in here.”

Thus appeased, Sarah grudgingly stepped out of the way. Yossel came past her and into the flat. Esther quickly got up. “Here, find a chair and eat something,” she said, hurrying into the kitchen and returning with a plate piled high with potato kugel.

“Thank you.” Reisen did sit down, and looked around nervously. The grimace with which he greeted Sophie was no doubt intended for a smile, but failed of its purpose. “Hello,” he said, cautiously, as if she were an armed Rebel behind a wall. “How are you?”