Walk in Hell (19 page)

And it wasn’t stopping. The reverse, in fact: it was speeding up, to escape the harassing fire from the brush by the tracks. In a speculative voice, Ploughman said, “How sneaky are them damn niggers, anyways? They tryin’ to spook us into runnin’ right over some explosives they planted?”

“Jesus!” Jefferson Pinkard said. He was glad he wasn’t the only one who said it. He’d thought working at the Sloss foundry was such a dangerous job, war would hardly faze him afterwards. But in the Sloss works even Leonidas, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, wasn’t actively trying to kill him and devoting all his ingenuity toward that end. The idea that the Red Negroes might be using a small incident to give rise to a big one, as if they were throwing stones to flush game out of deep cover to where it could more readily be shot—that made the hair stand up at the back of his neck.

Acceleration pressed him against his seat. Things in his pack dug into his spine and his kidneys. He tried to brace himself against an explosion that would fling the car off the tracks like a toy kicked by a brat with a nasty temper. He didn’t think anything he did would help much, but sitting there like a lump of coal wouldn’t help at all.

Without warning, he wasn’t being pressed back any more. He had everything he could do to keep from going facefirst into the back of the seat in front of him. Soldiers in the corridor, who could not steady themselves, tumbled over one another in a shouting, cursing heap.

Iron screamed on iron, rails and wheels locking in an embrace so hot, it sent orange-red sparks leaping up higher than the window through which Jefferson Pinkard stared. Absurdly, he wondered if he’d helped bring any of that iron into being.

Groaning and shuddering, the train staggered to a halt. Pinkard saw a couple of men with kerosene lanterns outside. Their voices came through the shattered windows of the car: “Out! Out! Everybody out!”

That wasn’t easy or quick. It wouldn’t have been easy or quick with veteran troops. With raw recruits, all the shouting of their officers and noncoms helped only so much. They got in one another’s way, went in this direction when they should have gone in that, and generally blundered their way out of the coaches into the night.

Cold nipped at Pinkard as he stood in the darkness. A coal stove and a lot of bodies had kept the car warm. Now he got out the overcoat stowed in his pack. He wished he were home in bed with Emily, who would warm him better than any Army overcoat could. Most of the time, he’d been too busy to notice how much he missed her. Not now, standing here all confused, breathing in coal smoke from the engine, breathing out fog from the chill.

“Just in time—” The phrase started going through the raw soldiers, some of them plainly repeating it without any clear idea of why they were. Then somebody who sounded as if he did know what he was talking about spoke up: “We hadn’t been able to flag the engineer down in time, reckon this here train would have blown sky high.”

“What did I say?” Corporal Peter Ploughman sounded both vindicated and smug. Pinkard shrugged. If Ploughman didn’t know more about the soldiering business than the men he led, he had no business wearing stripes on his sleeves. But Jeff supposed the noncom did need to impress them every now and again with how much he knew.

“Where are we?” someone asked.

“About twenty miles outside of Albany,” the authoritative-sounding voice answered. Albany, or its outskirts, had been their destination. Jeff had a ghastly suspicion he knew how they were going to get there now.

A moment later, that suspicion was confirmed. Captain Connolly, the company commander, shouted, “Form column of fours!” Grumbling and cursing in low voices, the soldiers obeyed, again less efficiently than veterans might have done. And off they tramped, eastward along the line of the railroad toward Albany.

Pinkard promptly tripped over a rock, almost falling on his face. “They’re going to pay for this,” he muttered. He’d had to make only one night march during his abbreviated training. He hadn’t liked it for beans. Now he discovered practice was a lot easier than the real thing.

After some endless time, dawn began to break. What had been dark punctuated by deeper black turned into trenches and shell crates and burned-out Negro shacks and also the occasional burned-out mansion. Fresh-turned red earth in the middle of winter meant new graves. There were a lot of them. A faint odor of corruption hung in the air.

“Niggers are playing for keeps,” Stinky Salley remarked, in tones full of the same surprise and disbelief Pinkard felt. “Never would have reckoned they could do nothin’ like this.”

“Whole damn world’s gone crazy since the war started,” Jeff said. “Women workin’ men’s jobs, niggers workin’ white men’s jobs, and now, hell, niggers fightin’ damn near like white men. Shitfire, I wish they were fightin’ the damnyankees, not me.”

That argument had raged on the train and in the training camp, as it had all over the Confederacy since the Negro uprising began. Stinky Salley was on the other side. He stared at Pinkard with withering scorn. “Yeah, and I bet you wish they was marrying your womenfolks, too,” he said.

“Don’t wish anything of the kind, goddammit,” Pinkard said. “Just use your eyes instead of your mouth for a change, why don’t you? If niggers was the happy-go-lucky stay-at-homes everybody been sayin’ they are, you and me wouldn’t be
here
. We’d be fighting the USA instead.” Salley’s glare didn’t get any friendlier, but he shut up. Not even he could argue that they were where they’d figured on being, or that Negroes in arms weren’t opposing the Confederate government.

“Let’s get moving,” Captain Connolly shouted. “You don’t want to fall out of line hereabouts—niggers’d sooner cut your throat than look at you. Sooner we put these stinking Reds down, sooner we can get back to whipping the damnyankees. Train can’t do the work, so your legs got to. Keep movin’!”

Keep moving Pinkard did, though his feet began to ache. He wondered if the CSA really could recover from this rebellion as if nothing had happened. The captain certainly seemed to think so. Looking at the devastation through which they were marching, Pinkard wasn’t so sure. Who would repair everything that had been damaged?

A couple of Negroes, a man and a woman, were working in a garden plot near the tracks. They looked up at the column of white men in butternut. Had they been rebels a few days before? Had they hidden their weapons when government forces washed over them? Would they cut his throat if they saw half a chance? Or were they as genuinely horrified by the uprising as a lot of blacks in Birmingham were?

How could you know? How were you supposed to tell? Pinkard pondered that as he tramped past them. Try as he would, he found no good answers.

Lucien Galtier spoke to his horse as the two of them rolled down the road from Rivière-du-Loup toward his home: “This paving, it is not such a bad thing, eh? Oh, I may have to put shoes on you more often now, but we can go out and about in weather that would have kept us home before,
n’est-ce pas?
”

The horse didn’t answer. The horse never answered. That was one of the reasons Lucien enjoyed conversing with it. Back at the house, he had trouble getting a word in edgewise. He looked around. Snow lay everywhere. Even with overcoat, wool muffler, and wool cap pulled down over his ears, he was cold. The road, however, remained a black ribbon of asphalt through the white. The Americans kept it open even in the worst of blizzards.

They did not do it for him, of course. The racket of an engine behind him and the raucous squawk of a horn told him why they did do it. Moving as slowly as he could get away with, he pulled over to the edge of the road and let the U.S. ambulance roar past. It picked up speed, racing with its burden of wounded men toward the hospital the Americans had built on Galtier’s land.

“On my patrimony,” he told the horse. It snorted and flicked its ears, as if here, for once, it sympathized with him. His land had been in his family for more than two hundred years, since the days of Louis XIV. That anyone should simply appropriate a piece of it struck him as outrageous. Had the Americans no decency?

He knew the answer to that, only too well. Major Quigley, the occupier in charge of dealing with the Quebecois, had blandly assured him the benefits of the road would make up for having lost some of his land. Quigley hadn’t believed it himself; he’d taken the land for no other reason than to punish Lucien. But it might even turn out to be so.

“And what if it is?” Lucien asked. Now, sensibly, the horse did not respond. How could anyone, even a horse, make a response? Thievery was thievery, and you could not compensate for it in such a way. Did they reckon him devoid of honor, devoid of pride? If they did, they would be sorry—and sooner than they thought. So he hoped, at any rate.

Another ambulance came up the road toward him. He took his time getting out of the way for this one, too. That was a tiny way to resist the American invaders, but even tiny ways were not to be despised. Perhaps a man who might have lived would die on account of the brief delay.

He glanced toward the west. Ugly clouds were massing there: another storm coming. Even on a paved road, Galtier did not care to be caught in it. He flicked the reins and told the horse to get moving. The horse, which had been listening to him for many years, snorted and increased its pace from a walk…to a walk.

Here came a buggy toward his wagon. He stiffened on the seat. The man in the seat did not wear American green-gray. American soldiers at least had the courage to fight their foes face to face, however reprehensible their other habits might be. The small, plump man in black there, far from fighting his foes, embraced them with a fervor Galtier found incomprehensible and infuriating.

The priest waved to him. “
Bonjour,
Lucien,” he called.

“
Bonjour,
Father Pascal,” Galtier called back, adding under his breath,
“Mauvais tabernac.”
Even English-speaking Canadians thought the Quebecois way of cursing peculiar, but Lucien did not care. It satisfied him more than their talk of manure and fornication.

Father Pascal’s cheeks were always pink, and doubly so with the chilly wind rising as it was now. “I have given those poor injured men a bit of spiritual solace,” he said, smiling at Lucien. “Do you know, my son, a surprising number of them are communicants of our holy Catholic church?”

“No, Father, I did not know that.” Galtier did not care, either. They might be Catholics, but they were unquestionably Americans. That more than made up for a common religion, as far as the farmer was concerned.

Father Pascal saw the world differently. “
C’est vrai
—it’s true,” he said. Father Pascal, Lucien thought, saw the world in terms of what was most advantageous for Father Pascal. The Americans were here, the Americans were strong, therefore he collaborated with the Americans. Nodding again to Lucien, he went on, “I had the honor also to see your lovely daughter Nicole at the hospital. In her whites, I did not recognize her for a moment. The doctors tell me she is doing work of an excellent sort. You must be very proud of her.”

“I am always very proud of her,” Lucien said. That had the virtue of being true and polite at the same time, something which could not be said about a good many other possible responses. Galtier glanced over toward the building clouds. “And now, Father, if you will pardon me—” The horse broke into a trot this time, as if it truly did understand how much he wanted to get away.

“Go with God, my son,” Father Pascal called after him. He waved back toward the priest, hoping the snowstorm would catch him before he got back to Rivière-du-Loup.

If Lucien was to reach the farmhouse, he had to drive past the hospital. It was almost as if Major Quigley had set a small town on his property: the hospital certainly had more ambulances coming to it and leaving it than Rivière-du-Loup had had motorcars at the start of the war. It also had a large gasoline-powered generator that gave it electricity, while trucks and big wagons brought in coal to keep it warm against the worst a Quebec winter could do.

People bustled in and out the front door, those going in pausing to show their bona fides to armed guards at the doorway. A doctor stood outside the entrance, smoking a cigarette; red spattered his white jacket. Out came a U.S. officer in green-gray, a formidable row of ribbons and medals on his chest and an even more formidable scowl on his face. Lucien would have bet he hadn’t got what he wanted, whatever that was. And here came a couple of women pulling overcoats on over their long white dresses to fight the chill outside.

Galtier steered the wagon toward them and reined to a halt.
“Bonsoir, mademoiselle,”
he said, formal as a butler. “May I offer you a ride to your home?”

Nicole Galtier smiled at him. “Oh,
bonsoir,
Papa,” she said. “I didn’t expect you here at just this time.” She started to climb into the wagon, then turned back toward the other nurse. “See you tomorrow, Henrietta.”

“See you tomorrow,” Henrietta said. She went over to the doctor. He gave her a cigarette and lighted it with his own, leaning his face close to hers.

The horse had taken several strides before Lucien fully noticed what he’d heard. “You spoke to her in English,” he said to Nicole.

“I am learning it, yes,” she answered, and tossed her head so that the starched white cap she wore almost flew off. “If I am to do anything that is important and not just wash and carry, I have to learn it.” She glanced at him to see how he was taking that. When he didn’t say anything, she went on, “You have learned it, and use what you have learned, is that not so?”

“Yes, it is so,” he told her, and wondered where to go from there. Discovering he had no idea, he kept quiet till he had driven the wagon into the barn. “Go on to the house,” he said then. “I’ll see to the horse and be in with you in a few minutes.”

Brushing down the animal and making sure it had food and water—but not too much of either—was a routine he took for granted. He had heard that rich farmers had motorcars of their own, and tractors and threshers with motors, too. He wondered what they thought of doing without horses. He shrugged. He was not a rich farmer, nor likely to become one.