Breakthroughs (33 page)

“And why would she not?” Galtier replied. “You are a personable man, you are a reasonable figure of a man, and you are skilled in your profession, as I have reason to know.” He patted the leg O’Doull had sewn up. “But even so, before I say yes or no, there are some things I must learn. For example, suppose that you marry her. Where would you live when the war ends? Would you take her back to the United States?”

“As a matter of fact, I was thinking of setting up shop in Rivière-du-Loup,” O’Doull answered. “I’ve been asking around when I go up into town, and you folks here can use a good surgeon. I
am
a good surgeon, M. Galtier; any doctor who works in a military hospital turns into a good surgeon because he has so many chances to practice his trade.” He gulped down his own applejack, then muttered in English: “Damn the war.”

“You would speak French, then, and mostly forget your own language, except”—Galtier’s eyes twinkled—“when you need to swear, perhaps?”

“I would,” O’Doull said. “I speak French better than many people who come to the United States speak English. They do well enough in my country. I should be able to do well enough in yours.”

“I think you have reason there,” Galtier said. “That you can do this, I do not doubt. The question I was asking was whether you were willing to do it, and I see you are. And you are a Catholic man. That I have known for long and long.”

“Yes, I am a Catholic man,” O’Doull said. “I am not a perfectly pious man, but I am a Catholic.”

“The only man I know who believes himself to be perfectly pious is Bishop Pascal,” Galtier said. “Bishop Pascal is surely very pious, as he is very clever, but he is neither so pious nor so clever as he believes himself to be.”

“There I think
you
have reason, M. Galtier,” Leonard O’Doull said, chuckling. He blinked a couple of times; if a man drank apple brandy when he was tired, it hit even harder than usual. After a moment’s thought, he went on, “May I now tell you something to help you decide?”

“Speak,” Galtier urged. “Say what is in your mind.”

“No—what is in my heart,” O’Doull replied. “What I want to tell you is that I love your daughter, and I will do everything I can to take care of her and make her as happy as I can.”

“Well,” Lucien Galtier said, and then again: “Well.” He picked up the bottle of applejack and poured a hefty dollop for Dr. O’Doull and another for himself. He raised his glass in salute. “I look forward to my grandchildren.”

O’Doull’s long face was normally serious almost to somberness. Galtier had not imagined such a wide smile could spread over it as happened when the doctor understood his words. Still smiling that broad smile, Dr. O’Doull reached out and shook his hand. The doctor’s skin was soft, uncallused from manual labor, but not smooth—poisons to kill germs had left it rough and red.

“Thank you, my father-in-law to be,” O’Doull said. “Thank you.”

“Now you make me feel old,” Galtier said in mock severity. He raised his glass. “Let us drink, and then let us tell the rest of the family—if Nicole has not already done as much in the kitchen.”

Only as the brandy slid warmly down his throat did he reflect on how, after the United States had overrun his country, he had been certain—he had been more than certain; he had been resolved—he would hate the invaders forever. And now his daughter was going to marry an American. He had just given permission for his daughter to marry an American. He shook his head. Life proved stranger than anyone could imagine.

When he called, his wife and daughters flew out of the kitchen and his sons came leaping down the stairs like mountain goats. They might not know what he would say, but they knew what he was going to talk about. He got up, walked over to Leonard O’Doull, and set a hand on his shoulder. “We are going to have in our family a new member,” he said simply. “Our friend,
monsieur le docteur
O’Doull, has asked of me permission to marry Nicole, and I have given to him that permission and my blessing.”

He remembered then that O’Doull had not asked for permission, only his blessing. He wondered what would have happened had he refused it. Would O’Doull have done something foolish? Would Nicole? He had no way of finding out now. Perhaps—no, probably—that was just as well.

And then he forgot about might-have-beens, because Nicole squealed with joy and threw herself into his arms, her three little sisters squealed with excitement and started jumping up and down, Charles and Georges went over to O’Doull and pounded him on the back (that Charles did so rather surprising Lucien), and Marie squeezed between them to kiss the American doctor on the cheek.

“Thank you, Papa. Thank you,” Nicole said over and over.

He patted her on the back. “Do not thank me now, my little one,” he said. “If you thank me ten years from now, if you thank me twenty years from now, if
le bon Dieu
permits me to remain in this world so that you may thank me thirty years from now, that will be very good.”

“If I want to thank you now, I am going to thank you now,” Nicole said. “So there!” To prove it, she kissed him.

He glanced over to O’Doull, one eyebrow upraised. “See how disobedient she is,” he said. “You should know what you are getting into.”

“I’ll take my chances,” O’Doull said with a laugh.

“And we will at last get our older sister out of the house!” Georges said. If the dance he and Charles danced wasn’t one of delight, it made an excellent counterfeit.

Galtier waited for Nicole to explode into fury. It didn’t happen. She said, “This is the happiest day of my life, and I am not going to let my two foolish brothers ruin it for me.”

The happiest day of my life.
When the USA first invaded Quebec, Galtier had never imagined those words in connection with an American. Now Nicole spoke them altogether without self-consciousness. And now he did not explode into fury on hearing them. He poured himself more applejack, to serve as a shield against strangeness.

“Well, Edna,” Nellie Semphroch said with a groan, “I wish you’d married that Rebel officer and moved away from here, the way you were talking about.”

“So do I, Ma,” her daughter moaned. “Oh, Jesus Christ, so do I.” They were not angry at each other, not for the moment. What sounded like a thunderstorm raged outside.

It was not a thunderstorm. It was worse, much worse. “If you’d gone somewhere far away, you’d be safe now,” Nellie said. “You ain’t safe here. Nobody’s safe in Washington, not any more.”

Two candles lit the cellar under the coffeehouse from which Nellie had made so much during the war. Every few seconds, another U.S. shell would crash down, and the candlesticks would shake and the flames jerk. Every so often—far more often than Nellie’s frazzled nerves could readily bear—a shell would land close by or a round from a big gun would hit a little farther off. Then the candlesticks would jump, and the flames leap and swoop wildly. A couple of times, Nellie had to move like lightning to keep the candlesticks from falling over and the candles from starting a fire.

If a big shell came down on the coffeehouse…If a big shell came down on the coffeehouse, it would pierce the roof and then the ceiling of the first story and then the floor, every one of them as if it weren’t there at all. Those shells, she’d heard, had special hard noses to smash their way even into concrete installations. If one of them exploded in the cellar—well, she and Edna would never know what hit them, and that, she had seen, was in its own way a mercy.

A heavy shell thudded home. The ground shook, as if in an earthquake (or so Nellie imagined; she’d never felt a real earthquake). Edna started to cry. “God, God, Ma,” she wailed. “This here is the capital of the United States. What the hell is the U.S. Army doing, blowing the capital of their own goddamn country to pieces?”

“If the Rebs would have left, if they would have said Washington was an open city and pulled back over the Potomac into Virginia, this never would have happened,” her mother answered. “But they keep going on about how Washington is theirs, and they built all those forts on the high ground north of town—built ’em or took over the ones we made—and so this is what happens on account of it.”

Edna was not inclined to argue politics. She’d wanted to marry Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid for his personal charms, not out of sympathy for the Confederate States of America. Falling in love with him (that was what Edna called it, though to Nellie it had never looked like anything but an itch in the privates) had made her more sympathetic to the CSA, but not all that much more.

One of the candles burned out, making the cellar even gloomier and filling it with the greasy stink of hot tallow. Edna lighted a fresh candle from the one still burning and stuck it in its candlestick. The flickering flames filled her face with shadows, making her look far older than her years. “Ma…?” she began, and then hesitated.

“What is it?” Nellie asked warily. These days, that kind of stuttering led only to trouble.

Sure enough, when Edna resumed, it was to ask, “Ma, why do you suppose that Bill Reach yelled for everybody to get out of the church just when the Yanks—uh, the Army—were gettin’ ready to start shooting at Washington?”

“I don’t know.” Nellie’s voice was tight. “I don’t care. I wish I’d never set eyes on Bill Reach, not a long time ago and not now, either.”

She waited for her daughter to bait her about the strumpet’s life she’d led. But Edna’s mind, for once, turned in a different direction. “How do you suppose he knew, Ma? How could he have known the Army was going to open up on us right then?”

“I couldn’t begin to tell you,” Nellie answered. That didn’t mean she didn’t know, as she hoped Edna would think it would. It meant only what it said: that she couldn’t tell.

But Edna, despite being wild for life, was not a fool in matters unrelated to large, handsome, empty-headed men. “He
couldn’t
have known, Ma,” she insisted, “not if he’s just a drunken bum. Only thing a drunken bum cares about is his next bottle. Only way he could have known…” She drew in a sharp, excited breath. “Ma, the only way he could have known is if he’s a spy.”

Edna had hit the nail on the head. She didn’t realize that hitting the nail on the head endangered not only Bill Reach—who, in Nellie’s view, deserved all the danger he could find and then some—but also Hal Jacobs and Nellie herself. With a sniff, Nellie said, “Anyone who’d hire that louse to spy for him would have to be pretty hard up, if you want to know what I think.”

That was true. Hal Jacobs, now, was sober and sensible—sensible enough to stay sober, too. Nellie could see him as a spy. Why Reach never started babbling about what he knew to everyone around him when he got drunk was beyond her.

Edna said, “But he couldn’t be anything else, Ma. He
knew
. Somebody must have told him.”

“
I
wouldn’t want to tell Bill Reach anything, except where to head in,” Nellie said grimly. “And anybody else who would want to is a fool, like I said before. I don’t know what he might have heard while he was laying in the gutter, and I don’t want to know, either.”

For a wonder, Edna subsided. The bombardment didn’t. The U.S. Army seemed intent on killing every Confederate in Washington, D.C. If that meant killing all the U.S. citizens left in the tortured city, too, well, fair enough. For variety’s sake, perhaps, bombing aeroplanes roared overhead and dropped long strings of explosives that made the candlesticks quiver as if they were in torment along with everything else in town.

At last, hours later, a lull came. “Let’s go up and cook something to eat,” Nellie said. “Then, if they haven’t started up again by the time we’re through, I think I’ll scurry across the street and see how Mr. Jacobs is getting along.”

“All right, Ma, you go ahead and do that,” Edna said, but without the viciousness that would have informed the words before the disaster of her wedding. Losing her fiancé on what would have been their wedding day had taken a lot of the starch out of her.

It was dark in the coffeehouse, too: night outside, with a few strips and circles of moonlight sliding through holes shell fragments had punched in the boards that covered the window opening. The gas had gone out as soon as U.S. shelling started, which was sensible of the Confederate authorities but made life no easier. Edna scooped coal into the firebox of the stove and got a fire going.

“I hope this beefsteak is still good,” Nellie muttered, sniffing at it as she took it out of the icebox. She sighed. “You may as well cook it up, because it won’t be any better tomorrow. God only knows when we’ll have the chance to get ice again.”

Edna fried it in an iron spider. It tasted a little gamy, but not too bad. But when Edna turned the tap to get water to make coffee, nothing came out. “The Rebs wouldn’t have shut off the water,” she said. “They couldn’t put out any fires if they did.”

“A shell must have broken a pipe somewhere not far away,” Nellie said. “If the water doesn’t come back on soon, we’ll have to carry it back from the river in a bucket and boil it. That will be dangerous, if the shelling keeps up like this.”

“Oh, well.” Edna tried to make the best of things: “If there ain’t no water, I can’t very well do dishes, now can I?”

“I’m going across the street,” Nellie said, and her daughter nodded. When Nellie opened the door and inhaled, she coughed. The air was thick with smoke. A lot of the things that could burn in Washington were burning. Here and there in the near and middle distance, orange flames flickered and leaped.

Nellie was not supposed to be on the street after dusk. A Confederate patrol that spied her was as likely as not to shoot first and ask questions later. But she didn’t think she would be spotted, and she wasn’t.

When she opened the door to Hal Jacobs’ cobbler’s shop, the bell over it jangled, as if cheerily announcing a customer. Jacobs looked up, candlelight exaggerating the surprise on his face. The two men huddled with him also looked startled. One was Lou Pfeiffer, a pigeon fancier who used his birds to carry messages out of Washington. The other, to Nellie’s horrified dismay, was Bill Reach.

“I came to check and make sure you were all right, Mr. Jacobs,” Nellie said in a voice that might have been carved from ice. “I see you are. Good evening.” She turned and started back across the street.

“Widow Semphroch—Nellie—please wait,” Jacobs said. “Mr. Reach has something he would like to say to you—don’t you, Bill?” He bore down heavily on the last three words.

Reach, for once, wasn’t obviously drunk. That did not make his tone any less raspy and rough when he said, “I’m sorry as he—as anything for all the trouble I caused you, Lit—uh, Nellie, and I sure as—as can be won’t do anything like that ever again, honest to God I won’t.” He took off his battered black derby, revealing a mat of unkempt gray hair beneath.

It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly enough. But it sufficed to bring Nellie back into the shop. Lou Pfeiffer’s round head went up and down on his fat neck. “That’s good,” he wheezed. “That’s very good.”

And then the thunder from the north that had died away started up again, not only started up again but was, impossibly, louder and fiercer than ever. Shells began crashing down, some very close by. Fragments whined off brick and stone and bit into and through rough wood. “To the cellar!” Jacobs shouted.

Nellie hesitated. Crossing the street to get back to her own cellar in the middle of the bombardment was nothing but madness. Going down into the cellar here, with a man who, she thought, loved her; a man who had used her; and a man about whom she knew next to nothing…

She hesitated, and was lost. “Come on! To the cellar!” Jacobs bawled again. He grabbed her by the arm and half dragged her down the stairs.

Meant for one, his cellar was obscenely crowded for four. Nellie sat in one corner of the tiny, stifling chamber, her skirts pulled in tight around her, willing no one to come near. And no one did. But they all kept looking at her in the flickering light of the candle flame. And they were all men, so she knew—she was sure she knew—what went through their filthy minds.

And then, to her horror, Bill Reach pulled from his pocket a flask and began to drink. She sprang to her feet and was up the stairs and shoving the cellar door open before Hal Jacobs could do anything more than let out a startled bleat. She slammed the door down on top of the three U.S. spies and fled.

When she got back to the cellar under the coffeehouse, she discovered flying fragments had sliced her skirt to shreds. Not one of them had touched her flesh. “You all right, Ma?” Edna asked. “I heard you at the cellar door right in the middle of all the guns—before that, I was afraid you were a goner, and then I thought you were nuts, coming out in that.”

“With where I was, I’d go out among the shells again in a minute.” Nellie spoke with great conviction. “In a second, believe me.” Edna shot her a quizzical glance. She shuddered but did not explain.

Far in the distance, off somewhere on the west Texas plains, a coyote howled, a wail full of hunger and loneliness and unrequited lust. Hipolito Rodriguez let out a soft chuckle. “He is not very happy, I don’t think. The way he sound, he might as well be a soldier,
sí
?”

Before Jefferson Pinkard could answer, Sergeant Albert Cross said, “Need some men for a raidin’ party on the Yankee trenches tonight.”

Pinkard stuck up his hand. “I’ll go, Sarge.”

Cross looked at him without saying anything for a while. Then he remarked, “You don’t got to kill all the damnyankees in Texas by your lonesome, Jeff. Leave some for the rest of us.”

“I want to go, Sarge,” Pinkard answered. He had never been a particularly eloquent man. Instead of saying more with words, he folded his big hands into fists. “What they done—” He shook his head in frustration. The words clogged in his throat.

In the end, Sergeant Cross shrugged. “Well, hell, you want ’em that bad, reckon you can have ’em. Who else?”

“I go,” Hip Rodriguez said quietly.

One by one, Cross got the rest of the volunteers. “That’s good,” he said. “That’s mighty fine. We go out half past midnight. Y’all grab yourselves some shuteye before then. Don’t want any sleepy bastard yawnin’ out in the middle of no-man’s-land an’ lettin’ the damnyankees know we’re comin’. See y’all tomorrow mornin’—
early
tomorrow mornin’.”

After the sergeant went on his way, Rodriguez said, “Ever since you get back from leave,
amigo,
you want to go on all the raids, on all the attacks. You never used to do nothing like that before.”

“What about it?” Pinkard said. “Yankees ain’t gonna get out of Texas unless we grab ’em by the scruff of the neck and heave ’em on out. Somebody’s got to do it. Might as well be me.”

Rodriguez studied him. The little Sonoran farmer’s eyes might have been black glass in his swarthy face. “You don’t have such a good time like you think when you get back home?” he asked. He didn’t push. He didn’t raise his voice. He let Pinkard answer without making him feel he had to tell any deep, dark secrets.

But no matter how discreet he was, no matter how little pressure he applied, Jefferson Pinkard kept on saying what he’d been saying ever since he returned to the front from Birmingham: “Had a hell of a time back home.”