American Front (71 page)

Figuring ways to do that kept Bruck happily occupied till quitting time. Indeed, Flora was able to slip out the door and down the stairs while he was still shouting into a telephone. When she could, she preferred to deal with annoying men peacefully and indirectly, rather than whipping out a hat pin. When peaceful, indirect means didn’t work—

“Speak softly and carry a sharp pin,” she murmured, laughing at the way she’d twisted TR’s slogan. But the laughter did not last long. Roosevelt’s stick had not been big enough to knock over either the Confederacy or Canada at the first onslaught, which meant casualties by the tens, by the hundreds of thousands over chunks of land hardly large enough to serve as burying grounds for the dead.

Soldiers’ Circle men still prowled through the Lower East Side, but fewer of them than in the days just after the Remembrance Day riots. They weren’t so likely to break heads as they had been then, either. She’d even heard a story that one of them had put aside his truncheon after falling in love with a pretty Jewish girl. She didn’t know whether it was a true story; no one seemed to have details. That people were telling it was interesting, though. True or not, they wanted to believe it.

When she got back to her family’s apartment, her sister Esther was helping their mother get supper ready. Her brother Isaac had his nose in a book. Her other brother, David, walked in a few minutes after she did, looking tired. He’d got a sewing job, and was putting in long hours at it.

Her father came in next. He’d worked the same hours as his son, more or less, but bore them better, or at least more easily: he’d been putting in a back-breaking day for many years, and was used—or resigned—to it. His pipe smoke, though harsher than it had been in the days before the war started, still blended nicely with the odor of the stewing chicken in the pot on the stove.

Sophie dragged herself in last of all. She was very close to her time of confinement, but that didn’t keep her from putting in a full day’s work. If you couldn’t do the job, the boss would find someone who could. Once she’d recovered from having the baby, she’d have to find a new position, too; no one would hold the old one for her. It wasn’t right, it wasn’t just, but, as Herman Bruck had said, it was real.

“Did I get a letter from Yossel today?” she asked as soon as she walked into the apartment. A framed photograph of Yossel Reisen, looking stern in his U.S. Army uniform, stood on the table next to the divan-sofa where he’d slept so many nights.

“Not today, Sophie,” Esther answered.

Sophie looked disappointed. “That’s three days now with nothing,” she said, setting both hands on her swollen belly as if to say the baby expected to hear from its father, too. Her fingers had got too swollen to let her wear the wedding band Yossel had bought for her, but she had worn it and, more to the point, had the right to wear it.

“He hasn’t been writing every day,” Flora said, and then quickly added, “but he has been very good about sending you letters.” For one thing, that was true. For another, now that Yossel had made Sophie his wife, she defended him like a tigress defending its young. Flora didn’t want her thinking she had to do that now.

“Supper’s ready,” their mother said, another way of defusing a situation that could get sticky.

Over chicken stew, Benjamin Hamburger said, “I saw in the papers today that we are making good progress in the Roanoke valley, that we are pushing the Confederates back there. Soon,
alevai
, we will clear them out of the land between the Blue Ridge and the Alleghenies.”

“You sound like a general, Papa,” David Hamburger said with a smile. “Did you know where these places were before we went to war?”

“I didn’t know where these places were before I had a son-in-law fighting there,” his father answered. He snapped his fingers. “And I didn’t care that much, either. You care about what touches you. Everything else is not so important.”

“That’s shortsighted, Papa,” Flora said, respectfully but firmly. “That’s how the bosses keep the workers under their control: by mystifying them about what really is important to their well-being.”

“Politics at the supper table we can do without,” Benjamin Hamburger said. “I wasn’t talking about politics. I was talking about this family.”

“You can’t separate them like that,” Flora said. Her father started to raise a hand. She got in one last shot before he could: “If it weren’t for politics, would Yossel be in Virginia now?”

“That’s different,” he said. A moment later, he looked sheepish. “If you ask me to explain exactly how it’s different, I may have a little trouble.” Flora smiled at him, liking him very much right then. Not many people had the intellectual honesty to admit something like that. Because he had admitted it, she didn’t push him any further. The rest of the meal passed in peace.

Afterwards, Sophie sat and rested while her mother and Esther and Flora washed the dishes. The kitchen was crowded with the three of them in it, but they made short work of plates and glasses and pots and silverware.

Someone knocked on the door. Someone was always knocking on the door: neighbors wanting to borrow something, neighbors giving something back, young men coming to talk or play chess or cards with David and Isaac, young men coming to call on Esther, older men coming to talk and smoke with Benjamin, women coming to gossip, delivery boys…

Flora was closest to the door, so she opened it. The young man who stood in the hall was a few years too young for a military uniform, but the Western Union uniform he had on was of similar color and cut, even if its brass buttons were shinier and more aggressively visible than a soldier would have liked.

“Telegram for Mrs. Sophie, uh”—he looked down at the yellow envelope he was carrying—“Sophie Reisen.”

“Sophie!” Flora called, and started to give him a nickel for delivering the wire. She was, for a moment, puzzled: who would send Sophie a telegram?

Then the Western Union boy said, “No, ma’am, I never take money for delivering these.” He took off his hat when Sophie came to the door, handed her the envelope, and hurried away.

“Who is sending me a telegram?” Sophie asked: the same question Flora had put to herself. Suddenly, Flora knew a dreadful certainty.
God forbid
, she thought, and bit her tongue to keep from saying anything while Sophie opened the thin, flimsy envelope. “It’s from Philadelphia,” Sophie said, “from the Secretary of War.” Her voice got weaker and more full of fear with every word she spoke. “‘It is my sorrowful duty to inform you that—’”

She didn’t go on, not with words. Instead, she let out a great, full-throated wail of grief that had doors flying open up and down the hallway. Flora took the telegram from her limp fingers and read through it. Yossel had died in Virginia, “heroically defending the United States and the restoration of their proper place among the nations of the continent and of the world and the cause of liberty.” Flora wanted to crumple up the telegram and throw it away, but didn’t because she thought her sister might want to keep it. The only truth in it, she thought, was that Yossel was dead. Everything else was patriotic claptrap.

Sophie hugged her belly and moaned, “What am I going to do? What are we going to do? I’m a widow, and I never even had a husband!” That wasn’t quite true, but it wasn’t far wrong, either.

People came flooding into the apartment. The building had heard that kind of anguished cry more than once before. Everyone knew what it meant. Women began bringing food. Everyone who’d ever met Yossel Reisen had a good word for him, as did a good many people who hadn’t.

In the midst of the gathering, Esther asked Flora, “Are we going to sit
shiva
for Yossel?”

“Sophie will,” Flora answered, but that went almost without saying. Would the rest of the family sit in mourning with torn clothes and pray for a solid week? Everything American in Flora—and, evidently, in Esther, too—cried out against it, especially for a man who wouldn’t yet have been part of the family if he hadn’t impregnated their sister. But when death struck, new customs had a way of sloughing off and old ones reasserting themselves. Resignedly, Flora said, “If Mother tells us to do it, how can we say no?” Esther’s mouth twisted, but in the end she nodded.

And Flora knew that, while she was rocking back and forth sitting
shiva
for Yossel, she would not be mourning him alone, but the country and the whole world thrown onto the fire of war.

“Salt Lake City!” Paul Mantarakis said with considerable satisfaction. “One more fight to go and then we’ve licked these Mormon bastards once and for all.”

“Matter of fact, I hear tell there’s one big town after Salt Lake City,” Ben Carlton said. “Place called Ogden, north of here.”

“Yeah, all right, I heard about Ogden, too,” Mantarakis admitted. “But it stands to reason, once they lose their capital, they ain’t gonna have a whole lot of fight left in ’em.”

“Just like the USA and Washington, right?” the cook said with weary cynicism.

Mantarakis gave him a resentful look. “It’s not the same,” he said. “Salt Lake’s the only real city—city-type city—the Mormons have. Provo and Ogden, they’re just towns. I’m from Philly, remember. I know the difference. Next to what I’m used to, even Salt Lake City isn’t a big thing.”

“Be a hell of a big fight, though,” Carlton predicted gloomily. He stirred the cookpot. The smell that rose up from it was none too appetizing: he’d made some kind of horrible stew from bully beef and hardtack and whatever else he happened to have handy. Paul sighed. Since he’d started wearing stripes on his sleeves, he hadn’t been able to see to the cooking nearly so often as he had before. That meant the whole company ate worse than they would have otherwise.

Gordon McSweeney, a man with a cast-iron stomach (or at least no sense of taste to speak of) came up, smelled the pot, looked into it, and scowled at Carlton. “If I were a Papist, I’d give that last rites,” he said.

He was a sergeant these days, too, so the cook could only assume an expression of injured innocence. “It’ll be ready pretty soon,” he said, which, considering McSweeney’s editorial comment, was apt to be something less than a consummation devoutly to be wished.

But McSweeney, luckily for him, was looking north, toward Salt Lake City. “‘Now also the axe is laid unto the root of the trees: there every tree which bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire,’” he said. “‘Because they had no root, they withered away.’ So it says in the Holy Scriptures, whose words shall be fulfilled.”

Mantarakis looked north, too. Here and there, flames burned in the Mormons’ capital. Artillery fire had blown the gilded angel off the east-center tower of the Temple and had knocked down two of the other towers, but the big building, the heart of Salt Lake City, still stood. Enormous beehive flags flapped defiantly from the towers that survived. “They read a different book there,” Paul said.

“And they will burn in hell because of it,” McSweeney answered, sounding as certain as he generally did when speaking of matters of religion. “The
Book of Mormon
is no more the word of God than is an advertising circular for stomach powders.”

It wasn’t so much that Mantarakis thought McSweeney wrong—he didn’t figure the
Book of Mormon
was divinely inspired, either. But the way McSweeney said it, like the way McSweeney said anything, put his back up. “Lot of people up there think you’re wrong, Gordon,” he remarked.

“The more fools they,” McSweeney said. “They suffer in this world for their arrogance and overweening pride, and in the next for their false and blasphemous faith.” He wasn’t simply armored in his faith, but also used it as a sword against the foe. Mantarakis supposed that helped make him a good soldier; it also made him a scary man.

An aeroplane flew in lazy circles above Salt Lake City, spotting targets for the U.S. artillery. All of a sudden, black puffs of smoke started dotting the otherwise clear summer sky around the aeroplane. What artillery the Mormons had was mostly here; they’d got their hands on it by overrunning Camp Douglas, east and north of town. They knew the aeroplane was the U.S. artillery’s eye in the sky. If they brought it down, they could fight on more nearly even terms. And bring it down they did. The aeroplane seemed to stagger in the sky, then plunged earthward, trailing smoke and flame. It crashed just inside the Mormon lines. The cheer the religious rebels raised rang in Mantarakis’ ears. “
Kyrie eleison
,” he muttered.

For once, Gordon McSweeney did not upbraid him for praying in Greek. “Damn them,” McSweeney said, over and over again. “Damn them, damn them.” It wasn’t cursing; it was nothing like the casual way in which most soldiers would have brought out the words. It sounded more as if McSweeney was instructing God about what needed doing and how to go about it. Paul wanted to take a couple of steps away from the other sergeant, in case God got angry at him for using that tone of voice.

With their great factories, the United States had guns especially devoted to antiaircraft fire and others given nothing but ground targets. The Mormon insurgents did not enjoy the luxury of specialization. Having shot down the aeroplane, they began working over the front-line trenches in which Mantarakis and his companions sheltered. He crouched down in the dirt, hands clutching his head, his body folded up into a ball to make himself the smallest possible target.

He’d been through worse in Kentucky; the Confederates had far more guns to fire at U.S. forces than the Mormons did. But any barrage was a bowel-loosener. The ground shook and jumped. Shrapnel balls and fragments of shell casing filled the air. Whether he lived or died wasn’t really in his hands, not for the time being. Either God’s providence or random luck, depending on how the world worked, would decide his fate.

After about half an hour, the Mormon guns eased up. Men helped their wounded comrades back toward the rear. Mormon snipers took potshots at them. The Mormons were short of men, short of guns, short of munitions, but they not only held the high ground (they had their artillery on the mountain spur above Temple Square, not far from the wreckage of what had been the state capitol before the revolt), but they also knew the terrain well and squeezed from it all the advantages they could.