Breakthroughs (9 page)

He would have gone on—the idiocy of the War Department roused him to repeated furious tirades—but the sound of marching men heading north up the dirt road from Round Hill toward the front made him break off and look back over his shoulder. Michael Scott looked up toward the crest of the hill, too, relief on his face. “They
are
giving the line some reinforcements,” the loader said. “I thank you, Jesus; I’ll sing hallelujah come Sunday.”

Over the hill and down toward the guns of the battery came the head of the column. Jake started to look away; he’d seen any number of infantry columns moving up toward the battle line. Here, though, his head snapped back toward the oncoming soldiers. He stared and stared.

That the troops were new and raw, that their uniforms were a fresh butternut as yet clean, as yet unfaded and unwrinkled from too many washings in harsh soap and too many delousings that didn’t work—that didn’t matter. He’d seen raw troops before, and knew the edges would rub off in a hurry. But these men, all save their officers and noncoms, had skins darker than their uniforms: some coffee with cream, some coffee without, some almost the black of midnight or a black cat.

On they tramped, tin hats on their heads, Tredegars on their shoulders, packs on their backs, gas helmets bouncing against their hipbones. They were big, rugged men, and marched well. A couple of them turned their heads for a better look at Featherston’s field gun. Noncoms screamed abuse at them, the same sort of abuse they would have screamed at raw white troops foolish enough to turn their heads without permission.

Only when the whole regiment had marched past could Jake bring himself to speak. Even then, he mustered nothing more than a whisper hoarse with anger and disbelief: “Jesus God, we’re going to have nigger infantry in front of us? What in blazes are they gonna do the first time a barrel comes at ’em? Shit on a plate, barrels scare white troops. Niggers’ll run so fast, they’ll leave their shadows behind, and then there won’t be nothin’ between the barrels and
us
.”

“I don’t know, Sarge,” Scott said. “I don’t reckon they would’ve put ’em in the line if they didn’t reckon they’d get some fighting out of ’em.”

“
I
don’t reckon they would’ve put ’em in the line if they had any white men they could use instead,” Jake retorted, to which his loader gave a rueful nod. He went on, “Oh, some of ’em’ll fight—I expect you’re right about that. Some of ’em, not so long ago, they was fightin’ under red flags. So yeah, they’ll fight. Only question is, whose side will they fight on?”

“Do you reckon the Yankees want those black sons of bitches any more’n we do?” Scott asked.

That gave Featherston pause, but not for long. “Anything that’ll take us down a peg’ll be fine by the Yanks, I expect,” he answered. “If we’d known it’d come down to this, we never would’ve gotten into the war in the first place, I reckon. After it’s done, those niggers’ll have the right to vote, I tell you. Did you ever imagine, in all your born days, that niggers in the Confederate States of America would have the right to
vote
?”

“No, Sarge, never once,” Scott said. “War’s torn everything to hell.”

“The war,” Featherston agreed. “The war, and the boneheads down in Richmond running the war. Oh, and the niggers, too—talk about tearing things to hell, when they rose up, they almost tore the CSA to hell. And now the boneheads in Richmond are putting rifles in their hands and saying, ‘Yeah, you’re as good as white men. Why the hell not?’ Well, there’ll be a reckoning for that, too.” He sounded eerily certain. “You mark my words—there’ll be a reckoning for that, too.”

Shivering in a trench outside Jonesboro, Arkansas, a U.S. soldier grumbled, “Where in the goddamn hell did I leave my gloves?”

“Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain, Groome,” Sergeant Gordon McSweeney said sharply.

“Uh, right, Sergeant,” Groome answered. “Sorry, Sergeant.” He was eighteen, a big, tough, beef-fed kid from the plains of Nebraska. Rank, though, had very little to do with why he backed down from McSweeney.

“You need to make your peace with God, not with me,” McSweeney answered, his voice still stern. Groome nodded hastily, placatingly. Had he been a dog, he would have rolled over on his back to expose his throat and belly.

With a grunt, McSweeney went back to making his flamethrower’s trigger mechanism more sensitive. That he took a flamethrower into combat was not the reason he got instant, unthinking obedience from the soldiers in his section. That he was the sort of man who carried a flamethrower into battle with not a thought in his mind but the harm he could wreak on his enemies had more to do with it.

He scowled as he worked. His face was made for scowling, being almost entirely vertical lines: a narrow rectangle with a hard chin, a long nose, and a vertical crease between pale eyes that didn’t seem to blink as often as they should. His hands, large and knobby-knuckled, manipulated a small screwdriver with surprising delicacy.

A shadow fell on the disassembled trigger mechanism. He looked up with a deeper scowl—who presumed to stand in his light? When he saw Captain Schneider, he relaxed. The company commander could do as he pleased, at least when it came to Gordon McSweeney. “Sir?” McSweeney asked, and started to get to his feet.

“As you were,” Schneider said.

McSweeney obediently checked himself. As far as he was concerned, Captain Schneider was too lenient with all the men in his company, McSweeney himself included. But the captain had ordered him not to come to attention, and so he did not.

“Division headquarters wants some captured Rebs tonight for interrogation,” Schneider said.

“Yes, sir, I’ll go,” McSweeney said at once.

Captain Schneider frowned. “I didn’t mean you in particular, Sergeant,” he said. “I meant for you to tell off a party to go into no-man’s-land and come back with prisoners.”

“Sir, I’ll go,” McSweeney repeated. “The men Gideon took with him to fight the Midianites chose themselves. I shall do the same. The Lord will protect me—or, if it be His will that I fall here, I shall go on to my glory, for I know in my heart that I am numbered among the elect.” He was every bit as uncompromisingly Presbyterian as his features suggested.

Schneider’s frown did not go away. “I don’t want to lose you, Sergeant,” he said. “You’re too valuable a fighting man. And your courage is not in question. It hardly could be, with that on your chest.”

Even on his combat uniform, McSweeney wore the small, white-starred blue ribbon of the Congressional Medal of Honor. He’d earned it the year before, destroying a Confederate barrel with his flamethrower and then slaying Rebel foot soldiers who’d sought to follow the barrel into the U.S. lines. “Sir,” he said now, “snaking out prisoners is a job I’m better suited for than anyone else in the company. Why endanger somebody else when I can do it right?”

“How many times have you done it, though, Sergeant?” Schneider persisted. “How long can you go on being lucky?”

“As long as God wants me to be,” McSweeney answered. He did get to his feet then, so he could look down at the company commander, whom he overtopped by several inches. “Sir, you must understand: I
want
to do this. How better can I help the Lord punish the Confederate States for their iniquities?”

Had Schneider had a good response to that, he would have given it at once. When he didn’t, McSweeney smiled at him. McSweeney knew most men did not find his smile delightful. Schneider was no exception; he flinched away from it as from the screech of an incoming Confederate shell. “Have it your way, then, Sergeant,” he muttered, and went walking down the trench in a hurry.

McSweeney’s smile changed to the somewhat softer one any successfully stubborn soldier might have worn. He squatted down and got back to work on the trigger mechanism. By the time Ben Carlton shouted that he had supper ready, the trigger was nearly as smooth as McSweeney wanted it.

He made a horrible face at his first mouthful of stew. “What is it?” he demanded. “Is it donkey or cat?”

“Dammit, it’s beef,” Carlton said, offended.

“Don’t blaspheme,” McSweeney told him. “How is it that you’ve been a cook since the war started and still do no better than this?”

“Because Paul Mantarakis did it till he got killed last summer, and he was a better cook than I’ll be if I live to be ninety-five, which ain’t what you’d call likely,” Carlton retorted. “Stinkin’ shame he’s dead, too.”

“He was a good man, for a Papist,” McSweeney admitted: from him, no small concession.

“He weren’t no Cath-o-lic,” the company cook said. “He was Greek whatever the devil you call it.”

“The Devil has him now, I fear,” McSweeney said. Mantarakis had fiddled with beads, so what else could he have been but a Papist? With grim resolution, McSweeney finished his bowl of stew. With luck, the Confederates he captured would have rations worth taking.

He didn’t crawl out over the parapet of the trench till a little before midnight. Before he went, he blacked his face and hands with mud, so that he looked like a performer in some disastrous minstrel show. He had an officer’s pistol on his belt, but hoped he wouldn’t have to use it; he put more faith in his knife and entrenching tool.

Getting under and through the few strands of barbed wire in front of the U.S. trenches was easier than it should have been. The United States didn’t take the war west of the Mississippi so seriously as he thought they should have. The U.S. advance south from the Missouri line had proceeded at a snail’s pace because too many resources went into the fighting closer to Philadelphia.

A parachute flare went off overhead, bathing the hellish chaos of no-man’s-land with a pure white light that might have come straight from heaven. McSweeney froze. As the light slowly sank and dimmed and reddened, Confederate and U.S. gunners blazed away at what they thought were targets. Bullets whined and occasionally screamed as they ricocheted from rocks. None came close to him.

McSweeney waited till darkness was complete before moving again. When he did move, he moved fast, or as fast as he could, taking advantage of the little while before men’s eyes forgot the light. By the time he flopped down in a shell hole not far from the Confederate wire—which was hardly thicker than that protecting his line—he was filthy and wet. He was also satisfied. He settled down to listen and to wait.

The Rebs were far noisier than he let the men in his charge get. They would have pickets up near the line; he knew about where the foxholes were. If all else failed, he would go in there and bring a couple of those men back through. He didn’t want to do that, being cold-bloodedly aware of the risk it entailed. But he’d been ordered out to return with prisoners, and he would.

He waited a while longer. Maybe the Confederates would send out a wiring party—although they had as much trouble getting supplies as did their U.S. opponents, so they might not have any fresh wire to string up. Wiring parties made easy meat; they were so intent on what they were doing, they paid less attention than they should have to whoever might be sneaking close to them.

Above McSweeney, stars slowly spun, now in plain sight, now hidden by scudding clouds. At about half past two, several Rebs crawled northwest toward the U.S. lines. They passed within twenty feet of him, never knowing he was there.

In a thin thread of whisper, one of them told the others, “Remember, we catch ourselves a damnyankee or three, then we get the hell back home. This ain’t the mission for foolin’ around.”

McSweeney’s smile was enormous, predatory.
The Lord hath delivered them into my hands,
he thought. They were very quiet as they slid toward the position he’d left. He was silent as he followed them.

Or so he thought, till their rearmost man hissed, “Hush! What’s that?” McSweeney froze, as he had for the parachute flare. After a couple of minutes in which no one seemed to breathe, the Rebel said, “Must have been a rat. Christ, I hate them fat-bellied sons of bitches. I know what they eat.” With a faint rustle of cloth, he crawled on. Again, McSweeney followed, trying to be even more quiet than before.

The Confederate raiders took up a position almost identical to the one he’d used in front of their trenches. Before they could scatter along the line, McSweeney spoke in quiet but conversational tones: “Hold it right there, boys. We’ve got you dead to rights. If you want to keep breathing, throw down your toys, throw up your hands, and go on through the wire.”

That
we’ve
had the desired effect: it made the Rebels think they were outnumbered by their captors instead of outnumbering their captor. One of them started to whirl. Another one grabbed him and said, “No, you goddamn fool!” Weapons clunked and thudded to the ground.

“Coming in with prisoners!” McSweeney called.

Captain Schneider was awake and waiting for him. He stared when he saw the half-dozen men coming in ahead of McSweeney. “God damn me to hell, Sergeant, but you’ve done it again,” he said. McSweeney nodded, though he disapproved of the blasphemous sentiment. When the Confederates found out one man had taken them, their curses were far fouler than Schneider’s. Gordon McSweeney smiled.

“Do you see?” Lucien Galtier asked his horse as he drove the wagon into the town of Rivière-du-Loup on the southern bank of the St. Lawrence. The Quebecois farmer gestured to the macadamized road along which the wagon traveled. “Had this been an earlier year, you would have labored through ice and mud, and you would have complained even more than you do now.”

The horse snorted. A paved road, even a paved road largely free of snow, impressed it very little. One of the reasons the road was largely free of snow was that it was an important highway for the U.S. forces who occupied that part of Quebec south of the St. Lawrence. A big, square, ugly White truck came growling up behind the wagon. The driver squeezed the bulb on his horn. Just enough shoulder—frozen hard here—had been cleared to let Lucien pull off for a moment so the truck and three more in its wake could roll past, kicking up little spatters of ice.

“Hey, Frenchy!” called one of the soldiers huddled under the green-gray canvas top on the last truck. He waved. After a couple of seconds’ hesitation, Galtier touched the brim of the thick wool cap he wore.

He flicked the reins. “Do not think you can rest here all day, you lazy creature,” he told the horse, which flicked its ears to let him know it would think whatever it pleased, and needed no advice from the likes of him.

A green-gray ambulance with red crosses on the sides and roof sped south past Galtier. The military hospital to which it was going was built on land that had been his till the Yankees appropriated it because he’d politely declined to collaborate with them. How fury had burned in him at the injustice! And now…

“And now the eldest of my daughters assists at the hospital,” he said to the horse, “and one of the American doctors, by no means a bad fellow, is most attentive to her. Life can be most peculiar,
n’est-ce pas?
” He patted his own leg. Dr. O’Doull had sewn that up, too, when he’d tried to chop it instead of wood. It had healed well, too, better and faster than he’d thought a wound of twenty-one stitches would.

The breeze shifted so that it came out of the north. It brought to Lucien’s ears the rumble of artillery from the other side of the broad river. The Americans, having forced a crossing in better weather the year before, had bogged down in their drive south and west toward Quebec City.

“Tabernac,”
Galtier muttered under his breath; Quebecois cursing ran more to holy things than to the obscenity English-speakers used. But he’d learned English-style swearing in his stint as a conscript more than twenty years before, while the Americans here sometimes seemed to go out of their way to curse. Experimentally, he let an English swear word roll off his tongue: “Fuck.” He shook his head. It lacked flavor, like rabbit cooked without applejack.

A handful of fresh, muddy craters just outside of Rivière-du-Loup marked a bombing raid the night before by Canadian and British aeroplanes. He didn’t see that they’d done any particular damage. They did keep trying, though. Pockmarks in the snow cover showed where other, earlier, bombs had fallen. So did a couple of graveled patches in the paving of the roadway.

In town, Galtier drove the wagon to the market square near the church. He quickly sold the potatoes and chickens he’d brought from the farm, and got better prices than he’d expected.

Angelique, the prettiest barmaid at the Loup-du-Nord, who for once did not have an American soldier on one arm, or on both arms, bought a chicken. His eyes traveled her up and down as they dickered. Marie, his wife, would not have approved, but she hadn’t come with him. Because Angelique was so pretty, he might have given her the chicken for a few cents less than someone else would have paid. Marie would not have approved of that, either.

In her breathy little voice, Angelique said, “Have you heard the wonderful news?”

“How can I know until you tell me?” Lucien asked reasonably.

“Father Pascal is to be consecrated Sunday after next!” Angelique exclaimed. “Rivière-du-Loup, after so long, is to be a bishopric, an episcopal see. Is it not marvelous?”

“Yes,” Galtier said, though what he meant was,
Yes, it is not marvelous.
Father Pascal was plump and pink and nearly as clever as he thought he was. He had welcomed the Yankee invaders with arms as open as Angelique’s. Had he been a woman, he would no doubt have welcomed them with legs as open as Angelique’s.

And here he came now, perhaps drawn by the sight of Angelique (even if a priest, even if a collaborator, he was a man—of sorts) or perhaps by that of poultry. The latter, it proved. He did not haggle so well as his housekeeper; Lucien roundly cheated him. Angelique, bless her, stood by and said never a word.

Feeling mellow with an extra thirty cents in his pocket, Galtier said, “Do I understand you are to be congratulated, Father?”

The priest looked too modest to be quite convincing. “They honor me above my humble deserts.”

“How did it happen that you were raised to this dignity?” Lucien asked.

Before Father Pascal answered, his eyes flicked for a moment to the sidewalk close by the market square. Then, still smooth, still modest, he said, “My son, in truth I have no idea. I felt, when I heard the news, as if a thunderbolt had struck me, I was so astonished.”

But that brief glance had given him away. Along the sidewalk, his green-gray uniform neat as if it had just been issued, strode Major Jedediah Quigley, who administered Rivière-du-Loup and the surrounding area for the U.S. Army. Somehow or other, Lucien was sure, Quigley had pulled the wires behind Father Pascal’s promotion. That might even have involved moving Rivière-du-Loup and the rest of eastern Quebec south of the St. Lawrence out of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the archbishop of Quebec City, who assuredly would never have raised a collaborator to the episcopal dignity.

Major Quigley saw Lucien look toward him. The American officer waved, as if he had not been the man who confiscated the land that had been in Lucien’s family for more than two hundred years to build the military hospital on it. “I hope all goes well with you,
Monsieur
Galtier,” he called in fluent, Parisian-accented French that seemed almost as out of place in Rivière-du-Loup as English did.

“Assez bien,”
Galtier answered grudgingly. Quigley waved again and walked on.

“You will excuse me,” Father Pascal—soon to be Bishop Pascal—said. Off he went, carrying the chicken by its feet. Angelique went off with him. Their heads were close together as they chatted. Watching her walk away was more interesting than eyeing Father Pascal’s backside, even if she too was a collaborator of sorts—
a horizontal collaborator,
Galtier thought, and smiled at his own wit.

He looked longingly at the Loup-du-Nord. Beer or whiskey or applejack would have helped chase away the cold. But no. The Loup-du-Nord, these days, was an American soldiers’ saloon. He might get his drink and get out without trouble. On the other hand, a tableful of drunken Yanks might decide to stomp him into the floor. “When I get home,” he told the horse, “I can have a drink.”

On his way back to the farmhouse, down the fine paved road the Americans had built, he had to pull off a couple of times to let ambulances race past. Far more than that of the big, stolid trucks, their speed made him wonder what traveling in a motorcar was like. He’d taken train rides, but this seemed as if it would be different—as if he would be riding in a wagon somehow equipped with wings.

When he got to the farm, he drove the emphatically unwinged wagon into the barn. He unharnessed the horse, brushed it down, and fed it before going into the farmhouse. He did not begrudge the delay; it gave him the chance to think of more uncharitable things to say about Father Pascal’s elevation.

And then, when he went inside, he found he could not say most of them. Nicole had brought Dr. Leonard O’Doull home for supper. O’Doull, a skinny, sandy-haired man with eyes as green as a cat’s, was a good fellow, but he was also, to some degree, an outsider.

“Your leg, it goes well?” he asked Galtier after they shook hands. He spoke Parisian French like Major Quigley; unlike the major, he tried to adapt his tongue to that of the folk among whom he found himself.

“It goes very well, thank you.” Lucien walked around to show how well he could move. “I have not even a limp, not unless I am on it for the whole day. When I went into Rivière-du-Loup today, I did not take the stick you gave me, and the leg held me as if it had never been hurt. I am in your debt.”

“Not for that,” O’Doull said. “It is I who am in your debt for your friendship to me when, after all, my country occupies yours.”

“You speak straight,” said Galtier’s elder son, Charles. “That is good.”

“Of course he does,” Nicole said indignantly. Lucien and Marie exchanged an amused look. Nicole defended Dr. O’Doull because of who he was, not because of what he said.

“Dr. O’Doull, you’re so wonderful.” Georges, Lucien’s younger son, spoke first in worshipful tones and then wickedly imitated his sister: “Of course he is.” He let out a sigh full of longing and molasses.

He’d been an imp since he was a toddler. That was the only reason Lucien could find for Nicole’s letting him live. Even in the ruddy light of the kerosene lamps, O’Doull’s flush was easy to see.

“I think supper is about ready,” Marie said, which distracted everyone better than anything else might have done. Like Galtier himself, his wife was small and dark and a good deal more clever than she often let on.

Supper was a chicken stew enlivened by dried apples. Over it, Lucien told the story of Father Pascal’s promotion. He told it dispassionately, out of good feeling for the American who shared the table with him. His family showed less restraint. “That man knows nothing of shame!” exclaimed Denise, who was only twelve and wore her feelings on her sleeve.

“He comes to the hospital sometimes, to visit the soldiers who are Catholic,” Leonard O’Doull said. “Don’t much care for him. If he were an American priest in Vermont, say, and the British occupied it, he’d suck up to them the same way he sucks up to Americans here. Have I reason, or not?”

“Oui, vous avez raison,”
Galtier said emphatically. “Which side he is on, that matters nothing to Father Pascal. Whether he is on top, that matters a great deal.”

O’Doull hefted his glass of applejack. Applejack, especially this homemade stuff Galtier had got from a neighbor, was dangerously deceptive—sweet and mild and with a kick like a mule’s. “And you,
Monsieur
Galtier, what of you?” the young doctor asked, as he might not have were he more sober.

Galtier thought about that for a while; he was a few knocks into the applejack himself. “My country has been made not my country,” he said, one word at a time. “Should I be happy at that?”

Marie gave him a warning glance. Too late: the words were said. Dr. O’Doull considered them. At last, he replied, “If you think you were free as a chunk of the British Empire, no. If you do not think so, you may wish to see what you become after the war. What do you think, if it does not bother you that I ask?”

“Why should it bother me?” Galtier said lightly. “I need not answer.” And the reason he did not answer, not that he would ever have admitted it, was that he was no longer sure what to think.

Nellie Semphroch went outside the coffeehouse in the bitter cold of early morning and flipped the sign on the boards that covered the space where her plate-glass window had been from
CLOSED
to
OPEN.
She had connections among the Confederates who occupied Washington, D.C., who could have got her more glass, but saw no point in using them. The next U.S. bombing raid, or the one after that, would only shatter the new window, as three—or was it four?—windows had been shattered already.

“Mornin’, Ma,” Edna Semphroch said when Nellie went back inside. The two women—one in her early twenties, the other in her early forties—looked very much alike, with long, oval faces and high foreheads that seemed higher because they both wore their hair pulled back. Edna painted her face; Nellie didn’t. With a sneer on her red lips, Edna added, “Good morning, Little Nell.”

Although Nellie had been cold, her face heated and congealed like an egg left too long on a frying pan. “Don’t you ever call me that again,” she said in a low, furious voice. “Ever, do you hear me?”

Edna’s sneer got wider. “I hear you—” She visibly debated throwing kerosene on the fire, but decided against it. “I hear you.”

With grim determination, Nellie took what was left of the previous day’s bread off the icebox and started slicing it for the toast and sandwiches she’d be serving. Every stroke of the serrated bread knife made her wish she were drawing it across Bill Reach’s throat.

Reach had been an annoyance from her past for a couple of years. A former reporter, he had, in Nellie’s much younger days, been in the habit of putting a price down on a nightstand in a cheap hotel and partaking of her services. She’d escaped that life and attained modest respectability. Edna had never known she’d been in it—till Reach, hideously drunk, lost a quarter of a century in what passed for his mind and tried to buy her in the coffeehouse when it was packed with Confederate officers.