American Front (66 page)

“Thank you, sir,” Ramsay said. “And this isn’t any ordinary town, either.” He told Lincoln the story of how Nuyaka had got its name.

“Is that a fact?” Lincoln said.

“Yes, sir,” Moty Tiger answered when Ramsay glanced his way. Colonel Lincoln shook his head in bemusement. Like Ramsay, he was careful to do or say nothing that might offend the Indians he commanded. But Nuyaka, any way you looked at it, was pretty damn funny.

Lincoln peered back toward Okmulgee. Smoke and dust were rising up above the hills rimming the valley in which the town sat. The rumble of artillery carried across the miles. “They’re pounding each other again,” he said.

“Sure sounds that way, sir,” Ramsay agreed. “I’m glad to be out of there, you want to know the truth. This here”—he waved at the Creeks preparing the position in front of Nuyaka—“it ain’t cavalry fighting, but it’s better than what it was back there. For now it’s better, anyways.”

“For now,” Colonel Lincoln echoed. “The fight around Okmulgee has got itself all bogged down, the way things are in Kentucky and Virginia and Pennsylvania: a whole lot of men battling it out for a little patch of ground. But Sequoyah’s got too much land and not enough men for most of it to be like that. And where men are thinner on the ground, you can get some movement.”

“Not cavalry sweeps,” Ramsay said mournfully. “Hell of a thing, training for years to be able to fight one kind of way, and then when the war comes, you find you can’t do it.”

“Machine guns,” Lincoln said. By the way he said it, he couldn’t have come up with a nastier curse if he’d tried for a week. He pointed to the ones the Creeks were setting up. “They’ll mow down the Yankees if they try to come in this direction, but they mow down horses even better than they do men.”

“Yes, sir, that’s a fact,” Ramsay said. He thought back to the days when the Confederates had been raiding up into Kansas rather than U.S. troops pressing down into Sequoyah. “If this war ever really gets moving again, it’ll have to be with armored motorcars, not horses.”

“Armored motorcars?” Moty Tiger said. “I read about those in the newspapers. Bad to run up against, are they?”

“You shoot a horse, it goes down,” Ramsay said dryly. “You shoot one of those motorcars, the bullets mostly bounce off. It’s got machine guns, too, and it keeps right on shooting at you. I’m just glad the damnyankees don’t have a whole lot of them.”

“More than we do.” Captain Lincoln sounded grim. “Back before the war started, they were building a lot more automobiles than we were.”

“They come this way, we’ll deal with ’em, sir,” the Creek sergeant said. Ramsay didn’t want to discourage pluck like that. The Creeks had turned out to make far better, far steadier soldiers than he’d ever figured they would. One of the reasons was, they thought they could do anything. When you thought like that, you were halfway—maybe more than halfway—to being right.

They got the rest of that day, that night, and the first hour or so of daylight the next morning to dig in before the first U.S. patrols started probing their positions. Pickets in rifle pits well in front of the main Creek position traded gunfire with the Yankees.

Things had changed over the past year. When the war was new, infantry running up against opposition would mass and then hurl itself forward, aiming to overwhelm the foe by sheer weight of numbers. Sometimes they did overwhelm the foe, too, but at a gruesome cost in killed and wounded.

No more. The damnyankees coming down toward Nuyaka from the north must have been veteran troops. When they started taking fire, they went to earth themselves and fired back. Instead of swarming forward, they advanced in rushes, one group dashing up from one piece of cover to another while more soldiers supported them with rifle fire that made the Creeks keep their heads down, then reversing the roles.

In danger of being cut off from their comrades, the pickets retreated to the main line. When the U.S. troops drew a little closer, the machine guns opened up on them, spraying death all along the front. Again, the U.S. soldiers halted their advance where a year before they would have charged. It was as if they were pausing to think things over.

Not far from Ramsay, Moty Tiger peered out over the forward wall of the trench. “Uh-oh,” he said. “I don’t like it when they stop that way. Next thing that happens is, they start shooting cannon at us.”

“You’re learning,” Ramsay told him. He looked back over his own shoulder. The Confederates had promised a battery of three-inch field pieces to help the Creek Nation Army hold Nuyaka. Ramsay hadn’t seen any sign of those guns. Getting shelled when you couldn’t shell back was one of the joys of the infantryman’s life with which he’d become more intimately acquainted than he’d ever wanted.

Instead of rolling out the artillery, though, the damnyankees, as if to give Moty Tiger what he’d said he wanted, rolled out a couple of armored motorcars. The vehicles didn’t come right up to the trench line. They cruised back and forth a couple of furlongs away, plastering the Creek position with machine-gun fire.

Ramsay threw himself flat as bullets stitched near. Dirt spattered close by, kicked up by the gunfire. Cautiously, he got to his feet again. “Shoot out their tires, if you can,” he shouted to the Creek machine-gun crews. The tires weren’t armored, although these motorcars, unlike the first ones Ramsay had encountered, carried metal shields covering part of the circumference of the wheels.

One of the armored motorcars slowed to a stop. The Creeks cheered. It was less of a victory than they thought, though, as they soon discovered. The motorcar, though stopped, kept right on shooting. “Where are those damn guns?” Ramsay growled. “A target you’d dream about—”

Sometimes dreams did come true. He’d just sent a runner back toward Okmulgee to demand artillery support when earth started fountaining up around the automobile. Its hatches flew open. The two-man crew fled for the nearest Yankee foxhole moments before the machine was hit and burst into flames. The other armored motorcar skedaddled, shells bursting around it. It hid itself behind bushes and trees before it got knocked out. The Creeks yelled themselves hoarse.

“The damnyankees already have one New York,” Ramsay said to Moty Tiger, trying to pronounce the name as the Indian did. “What the hell do they need with two?” His sergeant grinned at him by way of reply.

XVII

Sylvia Enos finished tying George, Jr.’s, shoe. Her son had just turned five; pretty soon she or, better, George would teach him to tie shoes for himself, and that would be one less thing she’d have to worry about every morning. Quite enough would be left as things were.

She looked up. In the half minute during which she’d been dealing with those shoes, Mary Jane had disappeared. “Come here this instant,” she called. “We’re going to be late.”

“No!” Mary Jane said from the bedroom she shared with her brother. No was her standard answer to everything these days; not long before, she’d answered
no
when asked if she wanted a piece of licorice. She’d realized that tragic error a moment too late, and burst into tears.

Sylvia didn’t have much time or patience left. “Do you want me to whack you on the fanny?” she demanded, clapping her hands together.

“No!” Mary Jane answered, this time with alarm instead of defiance.

“Then come out here and behave yourself,” Sylvia said. “I have to go to work, and you have to go to Mrs. Coneval’s. Come out right now, or—”

Mary Jane appeared, both hands pressed over her bottom to protect it from the slings and arrows of an outraged mother. Sylvia knew she shouldn’t laugh; that just encouraged her daughter’s mischief, and a two-year-old needed no such encouragement. She couldn’t help herself, though.

Virtuously, George, Jr., said, “
I’m
all ready, Mama.”

“Good,” Sylvia said. “And now Mary Jane is ready, too, so we’ll go to Mrs. Coneval’s.” She held out her hands. George, Jr., took one and Mary Jane the other. They paraded down the hall to Brigid Coneval’s flat.

At Sylvia’s knock, Mrs. Coneval opened the door. “Ah, ’tis the hero’s children,” she said. “Come in, the two of ye,” George, Jr., puffed out his little chest and looked impressive and important. It all went over Mary Jane’s head.

“I’ll see the two of you tonight,” Sylvia said, bending down to kiss her children.

“Good-bye, Mama,” George, Jr., said. “I’ll be good.”

“I’m sure you will, lamb.” Sylvia turned to Mary Jane. “You’ll be good, too, won’t you?”

“No,” Mary Jane said, which might have been prediction or warning or—Sylvia hoped—nothing more than the answer she gave to most questions these days.

“She’s no trouble at all,” Brigid Coneval assured Sylvia. “Good as gold, she is…most o’ the time. But if I’ve coped with my own hellions so long, she’ll have to go some to put me out of kilter.” She cocked her head to one side. “And how does it feel to be after having your husband’s picture in the papers and all?”

“It feels wonderful. We have a copy of the
Globe
framed in the kitchen,” Sylvia answered, and then, “I wish they’d never done it.”

Confusion spread across Mrs. Coneval’s long, pale face. “Begging your pardon, but I don’t follow that.”

“Now that the papers have blabbed what that fishing boat did and how it did it, it’ll be harder and more dangerous for them to do it again,” Sylvia explained. “I wish the Rebs didn’t have any idea what sort of trick they used.”

“Ah, now I see,” Mrs. Coneval breathed. “God bless you, Mrs. Enos, and may He keep your man safe.” She crossed herself.

“Thank you,” Sylvia said from the bottom of her heart. She did a lot of praying, too. It had brought George safe from the sea to North Carolina, and from North Carolina back to Boston.

Whatever God chose to do about that, He wouldn’t let her stand around flapping her gums with Brigid Coneval. She hurried downstairs. The air was cooler and fresher outdoors than in the apartment building, but that wasn’t saying much. It was going to be hot and sticky. It was usually hot and sticky in Boston in July, but she hadn’t known what that meant, not really, till she’d put in a few shifts under a corrugated tin roof at the fish-canning plant.

She got onto the trolley. A man who looked like a factory worker stood up and gave her his seat. She sat down with a murmur of thanks. Men were more inclined to be gentlemanly in the morning, she’d found, than in the evening after a full day’s work, when they were tired and wanted to get a load off their feet. Then it was everyone for himself. She’d heard women complain and shame men to their feet, but she never did that herself. She knew all about being tired.

Riding the streetcar gave her a few minutes to herself, even in a crowd of strangers. She spent half the time thinking of the pork chops she’d fry up for supper when she got home that night, the other half, inevitably, worrying about George. The
Spray
was out on patrol again. What she hoped most of all was that the boat would come back from the Banks with a hold full of hake and halibut, having seen no Confederate, Canadian, or British warships of any description. That had happened on one cruise already, and was probably the only thing the Navy was doing during the war to turn a profit.

Next best would be to sink an enemy submersible. George would have disagreed with those priorities, but what did he know? Going face to face with the Rebs and Canucks put him in even more danger than simply going out to sea, and so many men never came home in time of peace.

And, of course, the tables could turn. That was even more likely now, thanks to the enterprising reporters who’d published their stories about fishing boats that were so much more than they seemed. Making the foe wary might tempt him to shoot at long range or make him more watchful for the towed submarine or any number of other unpleasant possibilities.

On that cheerful note, she got off the trolley and walked to the factory. A couple of cats stared at her with green, green eyes. The smell of the fish-canning plant—and the scraps outside—drew them like a magnet. She wondered if they were jealous, watching her go into the dingy building. If they were, it was only because they didn’t know what she did in there.

Her children’s best efforts to the contrary notwithstanding, she got to work on time. “Has the machine been behaving itself?” she asked Elena Gomes, who worked the night shift.

“It did not jam much—not too much,” the other woman answered. “Some nights, I think it has the Devil in it, but tonight it was not bad.” She patted her lustrous black hair. Instead of cutting it short, as most of the women at the factory did, she wore it under a hairnet to keep it from getting caught in the machinery.

“That’s something, anyway,” Sylvia said, though what the label-gluing machine did on one shift was no guarantee of what it would do on the next. For the moment, as shifts changed all through the canning plant, the production line was quiet.

“Your husband, he is well?” Elena asked.

“As far as I know, yes,” Sylvia said. “But his boat put to sea again three nights ago, so I won’t know for certain till they come back from the trip.” And if something did go wrong, she wouldn’t know till days, maybe weeks, passed. Dead? Captured? She’d been through the agony of wondering once; she didn’t know if she could stand to go through it again.

The Portuguese woman made the sign of the cross. “I pray for him, as I do for my own husband.”

“Thank you,” Sylvia said, as she had to Brigid Coneval. “How’s your Pedro?” Elena Gomes’ husband was in the Army, somewhere out in the Southwest. “Have you heard from him lately?”

“I got a letter yesterday, thank God,” Elena said. “They are moving farther into Texas, to a town called—” She frowned. “Lummox? Is that right?”

“Lubbock, I think.” Sylvia remembered seeing the name in the newspaper. “I’m glad he’s all right.”

“Oh, so am I,” the other woman replied. “He says they are thinking of making him a corporal. He talks it down: he says it is only because—again, thank God—he has stayed alive. But I can tell he is proud of it. Still, it is nothing like what your George has done. To be one of the crew that sank a submarine—” Her eyes glowed.

What George had had to say about that was that the
Spray
had gone to sea with a big
SINK ME
! sign painted on the cabin, and that the Confederate submarine had thought it was part of the free-lunch spread at a saloon. He didn’t think being a decoy was worth getting as excited over as the papers had gone and done.

Before Sylvia found a way to put any of that into words, the conveyor belt gave a couple of jerks. She knew what that meant—it would start up in earnest in a minute or two. Elena Gomes understood that, too. “I am going to go home and try to get some sleep,” she said with a wan smile, “so I can come back tonight and do the same thing all over again. Such is life.” She hurried away.

Such is life
, Sylvia thought: drudgery, exhaustion, never enough money, never the time to lift up your head and look around. Wasn’t it last week she’d had George, Jr., the day before yesterday she’d given birth to Mary Jane? If it wasn’t where had the time gone? How had it slipped past her? She hadn’t even been working then—if, that is, you didn’t call raising children work. People who didn’t have to do it didn’t think it was, which, as far as she was concerned, only showed how little they knew. Or maybe they thought it wasn’t work because women didn’t get paid for it. That was nothing but more foolishness.

With a clatter, the conveyor belt got rolling in earnest. Sylvia thought,
The trouble with this job is that I don’t get paid…enough
. If she’d been a man, she would have made more money. Then again, if she’d been a man, she probably would have been in the armed forces by now. Soldiers and sailors didn’t get paid much, either, and the things they did…

She remembered George talking about the torpedo that had slammed into the Confederate submersible. “It was there,” he’d said, “and then it was in two pieces, sinking. Nobody had a chance to get out.” He’d known some pride in being part of the ambush that sank it, but also a sailor’s horror of watching any vessel go to the bottom.

She pulled the levers on her machine. As Elena had said, it was behaving pretty well. When the paste reservoir ran low, she poured more into it from a big bucket that sat by her feet. She had to keep an eye on the labels, too, to make sure the machine didn’t run out of them. She’d let the feeder go empty once, and had the foreman screaming at her because unlabeled cans were going down the line. She never wanted that to happen again.

She ate dinner with Isabella Antonelli, whose husband had been a fisherman and these days was fighting somewhere up in Quebec. “He say they going to do something big,” she told Sylvia. “What it is, I don’t know. The—how you say?—the censor, he scratch out so much, I cannot tell what his big thing is gonna be.”

“I hope he’ll be all right,” Sylvia answered, not knowing what else to say. Isabella nodded and then started complaining about her machine, which fastened strips of tinned steel into cylinders that would be soldered to make the bodies of cans. If half of what she said was true, it made the labeling machine a delight by comparison. But she liked to complain, so who could guess whether half was true?

When she finally slowed down about the machine, she said, “Your husband, he’s a hero. You don’t get no extra money for that, so you no have-a to work here?”

“I wish I did,” Sylvia said. “But what I really wish is that we weren’t at war at all, so he could just catch fish and make a living and we wouldn’t have to worry about anything else. I wish we never had the war.”

“So do I,” Isabella Antonelli said. “But we have it. What can you do?”

“Nothing,” Sylvia answered bleakly. “Nothing at all.” She gulped her cold coffee and went back to work.

Behind Lucien Galtier, a motorized rumble and rattle and racket grew rapidly. He paid it no mind, clucking to his horse and saying, “In a little while, we shall be at Rivière-du-Loup. No point in hurrying on such a fine day—I am certain you agree.” If the horse disagreed, it didn’t tell him so.

Brakes squealed. Lucien did not look back over his shoulder, Then he heard the raucous squawk of a horn’s rubber bulb as it was vigorously squeezed again and again. Through those squawks, an American bellowed at him: “Get out of the road, you goddamn stinking Canuck, or we’ll run you down!”

Now Galtier did look back. Sure enough, he was holding up a convoy of big, snorting White trucks, all of them painted the green-gray of the U.S. uniform. “I am desolate,” he said, dropping the reins so he could spread his hands in apology. “I did not know you were there.”

The driver of the lead truck shook a fist at him through the dust-streaked windscreen. “Get the hell out of the road,” he shouted again, “or we won’t know you’re there.”

Lucien fumbled as he picked up the reins, which made the driver start squeezing that rubber bulb again. Lucien tipped his hat to show he did at last hear, then guided the wagon onto the verge to let the truck convoy pass. Delaying things any longer, he calculated, would be more dangerous than enjoyable.

Truck after truck roared past, gears clashing as drivers upshifted for better speed. The noise of the growling engines was appalling. So was the dust the trucks kicked up from the road. The horse snorted indignantly and twitched its ears, as if blaming Lucien for the gray, choking cloud that enveloped them. “I am sorry,” Lucien told the animal. “We would have had the same trouble had we pulled off right away.” The horse looked unconvinced. So did the chickens in the slotted crates in the back of the wagon; they squawked almost as loud as the truck horn and flapped their wings in a vain effort to escape. Galtier wasted little sympathy on them, not when they were bound for the stew pot or the roasting pan.

He counted the trucks that passed him, noting how many carried men and how many supplies. Having done that, he laughed at himself. The army stint he’d put in had trained him well: when in contact with the enemy, gather intelligence. The only problem with that was, he had nowhere to convey the intelligence he’d gathered. And even if he had known to whom to convey it, how much good would that have done him? Anyone on this side of the St. Lawrence would have needed a wireless set to pass the information on to where it might do some good. He knew no one with such exotic equipment.

Dust from the trucks hung in the air when he got back onto the road and headed up toward Rivière-du-Loup once more. Before he got to town, he had to pull off again to let another convoy pass him. As he had with the first one, he waited to the last possible moment and then a couple of moments more, forcing the whole convoy to slow down to a horse’s walking speed before finally noticing the trucks were there and getting out of their way.