Breakthroughs (2 page)

Pinkard and Rodriguez looked at each other. Sergeant Cross was a veteran, one of the trained cadre around whom the regiment had been formed. He wore the ribbon for the Purple Heart to show he’d been wounded in action. That was about all that kept the other two men from braining him with the coffeepot. Pinkard couldn’t begin to remember how many times over the past few weeks Cross had made the same weary joke.

Wearily, Pinkard pointed north and east. “Town of Dickens is over that way, Sarge,” he said. “Christ, I wish we’d run the damnyankees back toward Lubbock a ways, just to get us the hell out of Dickens County and make you come up with somethin’ new to say.”

“Godalmightydamn,” Cross said. “Put a stripe on somebody’s sleeve and listen to how big his mouth gets.” But he was chuckling as he sipped his coffee. He knew how often he said the same thing. He just couldn’t stop himself from doing it.

And then, with flat, harsh, unemphatic bangs, U.S. artillery began shelling the stretch of trench where Pinkard and his comrades sheltered. His coffee went flying as he dove for the nearest dugout. The shells screamed in. They burst all around. Blast tried to tear the air out of Pinkard’s lungs and hammered his ears. Shrapnel balls and fragments of shell casing scythed by.

Lying next to him in the hole scraped under the forward wall of the trench, Sergeant Cross shouted, “Leastways it ain’t gas.”

“Yeah,” Pinkard said. He hadn’t heard any of the characteristic duller explosions of gas shells, and no one was screaming out warnings or pounding on a shell casing with a rifle butt to get men to put on their masks. “Ain’t seen gas but once or twice here.”

Even as they were being shelled, Cross managed a chuckle with real amusement in it. “Sonny boy, this front ain’t important enough to waste a lot of gas on it. And you know what else? I ain’t a bit sorry, neither.”

Before Pinkard could answer, rifles and machine guns opened up all along the line. Captain Connolly, the company commander, shouted, “Up! Get up and fight, damn it! Everybody to the firing steps, or the damnyankees’ll roll right over us.”

Shells were still falling. Fear held Pinkard in what seemed a safer position for a moment. But he knew Connolly was right. If U.S. troops got into the Confederate trenches, they’d do worse than field guns could.

He grabbed his rifle and scrambled out of the dugout. Yankee bullets whined overhead. If he thought about exposing himself to them, his bowels would turn to water. Doing was better than thinking. Up to the firing step he went.

Sure enough, here came the U.S. soldiers across no-man’s-land, all of them in the world seemingly headed straight toward him. Their green-gray uniforms were splotched with mud, the same as his butternut tunic and trousers. They wore what looked like round pots on their heads, not the British-style iron derbies the Confederates called tin hats. Pinkard reached up to adjust his own helmet, not that the damned thing would stop a direct hit from a rifle bullet.

He rested his Tredegar on the dirt of the parapet and started firing. Enemy soldiers dropped, one after another. He couldn’t tell for certain whether he was scoring any of the hits. A lot of bullets were in the air. Not all the Yankees were falling because they’d been shot, either. A lot of them went down so they could advance at a crawl, taking advantage of the cover shell holes and bushes offered.

Sometimes a few U.S. soldiers would send a fusillade of rifle fire at the nearest stretch of trench line. That would make the Confederates put their heads down and let the Yankees’ pals move forward. Then the pals would bob up out of whatever hiding places they’d found and start blazing away in turn. Firing and moving, the U.S. troops worked their way forward.

Pinkard’s rifle clicked harmlessly when he pulled the trigger. He slammed in a new ten-round clip, worked the bolt to bring a cartridge up into the chamber, and aimed at a Yankee trotting his way. He pulled the trigger. The man in green-gray crumpled.

Pinkard felt the same surge of satisfaction he did when controlling a stream of molten steel back at the Sloss Works: he’d done something difficult and dangerous and done it well. He worked the bolt. The spent cartridge casing leaped out of the Tredegar and fell at his feet. He swung the rifle toward the next target.

In the fighting that made the headlines, in southern Kentucky or northern Tennessee, on the Roanoke front, or up in Pennsylvania and Maryland, attackers had to work their way through enormous belts of barbed wire to close with their foes. It wasn’t like that in west Texas, however much Jefferson Pinkard might have wished it were. Hereabouts, not enough men tried to cover too many miles of trenches with not enough wire. A few sad, rusty strands ran from pole to pole. They would have been fine for keeping cattle from straying into the trenches. Against a determined enemy, they did little good.

A roar in the air, a long hammering noise, screams running up and down the Confederate line. The U.S. aeroplane zoomed away after strafing the trenches from what would have been treetop height had any trees grown within miles. Pinkard sent a bullet after it, sure the round would be wasted—and it was.

“That ain’t fair!” he shouted to Sergeant Cross, who had also fired at the aeroplane. “Not many flying machines out here, any more’n there’s a lot of gas. Why the hell did this one have to shoot up our stretch of trench?”

“Damned if I know,” Cross answered. “Must be our lucky day.”

Stretcher bearers carried groaning wounded men back toward aid stations behind the line. Another soldier was walking back under his own power. “What the devil are you doing, Stinky?” Pinkard demanded.

“Christ, I hate that nickname,” Christopher Salley said with dignity. He was a skinny, precise little pissweed who’d been a clerk before the Conscription Bureau sent him his induction letter. He was, at the moment, a skinny, precise, wounded little pissweed: he held up his left hand to display a neat bullet hole in the flesh between thumb and forefinger. Blood dripped from the wound. “I really ought to get this seen to, don’t you think?”

“Go ahead, go ahead.” Pinkard turned most of his attention back to the Yankees. A minute or so later, though, he spoke to Sergeant Cross in tones of barely disguised envy: “Lucky bastard.”

“Ain’t it the truth?” Cross said. “He’s hurt bad enough to get out of the fight, but that’ll heal clean as a whistle. Shit, they might even ship him home on convalescent leave.”

That appalling prospect hadn’t occurred to Jeff. He swore. The idea of Stinky Salley getting to go home while he was stuck out here God only knew how far from Emily…

Then he forgot about Salley, for the U.S. soldiers were making their big push toward the trench line. The last hundred yards of savage fire proved more than flesh and blood could bear. Instead of storming forward and leaping down in among the Confederates, the soldiers in green-gray broke and ran back toward their own line, dragging along as many of their wounded as they could.

The firefight couldn’t have lasted longer than half an hour. Pinkard felt a year or two older, or maybe like a cat that had just used up one of its lives. He looked around for his tin cup. There it was, where he’d dropped it when the shelling started. Somebody had stomped on it. For good measure, it had a bullet hole in it, too, probably from the aeroplane. He let out a long sigh.

“Amen,” Sergeant Cross said.

“Wonder when they’re going to start bringin’ nigger troops into line,” Pinkard said. “Wouldn’t mind seein’ it, I tell you. Save some white men from getting killed, that’s for damn sure.”

“You really think so?” Cross shook his head to show he didn’t. “Half o’ those black bucks ain’t nothin’ but the Red rebels who were trying to shoot our asses off when they rose up. I think I’d sooner trust a damnyankee than a nigger with a rifle in his hands. Damnyankees, you
know
they’re the enemy.”

Pinkard shrugged. “I was one of the last white men conscripted out of the Sloss Works, so I spent a deal of time alongside niggers who were doin’ the work of whites who’d already gone into the Army. Treat ’em decent and they were all right. Besides, we got any hope of winning this war without ’em?”

Albert Cross didn’t answer that at all.

Iron wheels screaming against steel rails, the train slowed to a halt. The conductor worked his way through the cars, calling out the destination: “Philadelphia! All out for Philadelphia!”

Flora Hamburger’s heart thudded in her chest. Until this train ride, she had never been out of New York State—never, come to that, been out of New York City. But here she was, arriving in the de facto national capital as the newly elected Socialist member of the House of Representatives for her Lower East Side district.

She wished the train had not come into the Broad Street station at night. Blackout curtains on the windows kept light from leaking out of the cars—and kept her from seeing her new home. The Confederates’ night bombers were not hitting Philadelphia so hard as the aeroplanes of the United States were punishing Richmond—they had to fly a long way from Virginia—but no one wanted to give them any targets at which they might aim.

Her lip curled. She had opposed the war from the beginning, and wished her party had been more steadfast in opposing it. After once supporting war loans, the Socialists had been unable to avoid doing it again and again.

No one sharing the car with her knew who she was. Several young officers—and a couple of older men in business suits—had tried to strike up a conversation on the way down from New York City. As was her way in such situations, she’d been polite but resolutely distant. Most of them were likely to be Democrats, and few if any were likely to be Jews. She wondered what living outside the crowded and solidly Jewish neighborhood in which she’d grown up would be like. So many changes…

She got up, put on the overcoat she’d removed as soon as she boarded the car, and filed off with everyone else. “Be watching your step, ma’am,” a porter with a face like a freckled map of Ireland said as she descended to the platform.

Broad Street Station was an impressive pile of brick, terra cotta, and granite. It would have been more impressive without the cloth awnings that helped shield the electric lights inside from the air. It would also have been more impressive had more of those lights been shining. As things were, walls and doors and windows barely emerged from twilight. Shadows leaped and swooped wildly as people hurried by.

“How crowded it is!” someone behind her exclaimed. She had to smile. Whoever said that had never seen the Lower East Side.

A man walked slowly along the platform holding a square of cardboard with a couple of words printed on it in large letters. Peering through the gloom, she finally made them out:
CONGRESSWOMAN HAMBURGER
. She waved to catch the man’s attention, then called, “Here I am!”

“You’re Miss Hamburger?” he asked. At her nod, his eyes widened a little. With a shrug, he tossed the sign into the nearest rubbish barrel. His laugh was on the rueful side. “I knew you were young. I didn’t expect you to be quite so young.”

He was probably twice her age: an erect but portly fellow in his early fifties, with a gray mustache and gray hair peeping out from under a somber black homburg. “I don’t know what you expected,” she said, a little more sharply than she’d intended. “I
am
Flora Hamburger.” She held out her hand, man-fashion.

That surprised him again. He hesitated a moment before shaking hands. If he’d paused any longer, she would have grown angry. His grip, though, proved pleasantly firm. “I am pleased to meet you,” he said, and tipped his hat. “I’m Hosea Blackford.”

“Oh!” she said, now surprised in her turn. “The congressman from Dakota!” She felt foolish. She’d expected the Socialists to have someone waiting to meet her at the station, but she’d thought the fellow would be a local ward captain or organizer. That a U.S. Representative—
another U.S. Representative,
she thought with more than a little pride—would come here had never crossed her mind.

“I do have that honor, yes,” he said. “Shall we collect your baggage? I have a motorcar outside. I’ll take you to the flat we’ve found for you. It happens to be in the building where I have my own flat, so there is some method to the madness. You’ve got your claim tickets, I trust?”

“Yes.” Flora knew she sounded dazed. It wasn’t just because Congressman Blackford was meeting her here. The idea of having a flat to herself was every bit as astonishing. Back in New York, she’d shared one with her father and mother, two sisters, a brother (her other brother having gone into the Army not long before), and a nephew. What would she do, with so much space to herself? What would she do with so much quiet?

A porter with a dolly wheeled Flora’s trunks out to Blackford’s automobile, a small, sedate Ford, and heaved them into it. The congressman tipped the fellow, who thanked him in Italian-accented English. Despite the chilly breeze, Flora’s face went hot. She should have tipped the man herself, but she hadn’t thought of it till too late. Till now, she hadn’t been in a lot of situations where she was supposed to tip.

Blackford cranked the engine into life. It started readily, which meant it hadn’t been sitting long. The headlamps had masking tape over most of their surface, so they cast only the faintest glow out ahead of the motorcar. Congressman Blackford drove slowly and carefully, so as not to run into anything before he knew it was there.

“Thank you for taking all this trouble over me,” Flora said above the Ford’s grunts and rattles and squeaks.

“Don’t make it out to be something bigger than it is,” Blackford answered. “I’m not just taking you home: I’m taking myself home, too. And believe me, the Socialist Party needs every representative and senator it can lay its hands on. If you have a strong voice, you will be able to make yourself heard, I promise you.”

“Yes, but how much good will it do?” Flora could not hide her bitterness. “The Democrats have such a majority, they can do as they please.”

Blackford shrugged. “We do what we can. Lincoln didn’t quote the Scripture that says, ‘As your Father in heaven is perfect, be ye also perfect,’ because he wanted people to truly be perfect. He wanted them to do their best.”