In at the Death (25 page)

This penicillin stuff knocked those down in nothing flat, though. It was better than sulfa for the clap, and ever so much better than the poisons that had been medicine’s only weapons against syphilis.

“Move up, Doc!” a noncom shouted at O’Doull one morning. “Front’s going forward, and you gotta keep up with it.”

“Send me a truck, and I’ll do it,” the doctor answered. Sergeant Goodson Lord played a racetrack fanfare on his liberated trombone. The soldier who brought the news thumbed his nose at the medic. Grinning, Lord paused and returned the compliment, if that was what it was.

By now, O’Doull had moving down to a science. Packing, knocking down the tent, loading stuff, actually traveling, and setting up again went as smoothly as if he’d been doing them for years—which he had. He was proud of how fast he got the aid station running once the deuce-and-a-half stopped. And every forward move meant another bite taken out of the Confederate States.

He hadn’t been set up again for very long before he got a hard look at what those bites meant. “Doc! Hey, Doc!” Eddie the corpsman yelled as he helped carry a litter back to the aid station. “Got a bad one here, Doc!”

O’Doull had already figured that out for himself. Whoever was on the litter was screaming: a high, shrill sound of despair. “Christ!” Sergeant Lord said. “They go and find a wounded woman?”

“Wouldn’t be surprised, not by the noise,” O’Doull answered. “It’s happened before.” He remembered an emergency hysterectomy after a luckless woman stopped a shell fragment with her belly. What had happened to her afterwards? He hadn’t the faintest idea.

When he first saw the wounded person, he thought it was a woman. The skin was fine and pale and beardless, the cries more contralto than tenor. Then Eddie said, “Look what they’re throwing at us these days. Poor kid can’t be a day over fourteen.”

This time, O’Doull was the one who blurted, “Christ!” That
was
a boy. He wore dungarees and a plaid shirt. An armband said,
NATIONAL ASSAULT FORCE
.

“You damnyankees here’re gonna shoot me now, ain’t you?” the kid asked.

“Nooo,” O’Doull said slowly. He’d seen National Assault Force troops before, but they were old geezers, guys with too many miles on them to go into the regular Army. Orders were to treat them as POWs, not
francs-tireurs
. Now the Confederates were throwing their seed corn into the NAF, too.

“They said you’d kill everybody you got your hands on,” the wounded boy said, and then he started shrieking again.

“Well, they’re full of shit,” O’Doull said roughly. He nodded to the stretcher-bearers. “Get him up on the table. Goodson, put him out.”

“Yes, sir,” Lord said. When the mask went over the kid’s face, the ether made him think he was choking. He tried to yank off the mask. O’Doull had seen that before, plenty of times. Eddie and Goodson Lord grabbed the boy soldier’s hands till he went under.

He’d taken a bullet in the belly—no wonder he was howling. O’Doull cut away the bloody shirt and got to work. It could have been worse. It hadn’t pierced his liver or spleen or gall bladder. He’d lose his left kidney, but you could get along on one. His guts weren’t
too
torn up. With the new fancy medicines to fight peritonitis, he wasn’t doomed the way he would have been a few years earlier.

“I think he may make it.” O’Doull sounded surprised, even to himself.

“I bet you’re right, sir,” Goodson Lord said. “I wouldn’t have given a dime for his chances when you got to work on him—I’ll tell you that.”

“Neither would I,” O’Doull admitted as he started closing up. His hands sutured with automatic skill and precision. “If he doesn’t come down with a wound infection, though, what’s to keep him from getting better?”

“
Then
we can kill him,” Lord said. O’Doull could see only the medic’s eyes over his surgical mask, but they looked amused. The kid had been so sure falling into U.S. hands was as bad as letting the demons of hell get hold of him.

“Yeah, well, if we don’t kill him now, will we have to do it in twenty years?” O’Doull asked.

“He’ll be about old enough to fight then,” Sergeant Lord said.

That was one of too many truths spoken in jest. But what would stop another war between the USA and the CSA a generation down the road? After the United States walloped the snot out of the Confederates this time around, would the USA stay determined long enough to make sure the Confederacy didn’t rise again? If the country did, wouldn’t it be a miracle? And wouldn’t the Confederates try to hit back as soon as the USA offered them even the smallest chance?

“Once you get on a treadmill, how do you get off?” O’Doull said.

“What do you mean, sir?” Lord asked.

“How do we keep from fighting a war with these sons of bitches every twenty years?”

“Beats me,” the medic said. “If you know, run for President. I guaran-damn-tee you it’d put you one up on all the chuckleheads in politics now. Most of ’em can’t count to twenty-one without undoing their fly.”

O’Doull snorted. Then, wistfully, he said, “Only trouble is, I don’t have any answers. I just have questions. Questions are easy. Answers?” He shook his head. “One reason old Socrates looks so smart is that he tried to get answers from other people. He didn’t give many of his own.”

“If you say so. He’s Greek to me,” Goodson Lord replied.

They sent the wounded Confederate kid off to a hospital farther back of the line—all the way back into Georgia, in fact. O’Doull, who had a proper professional pride in his own work, hoped the little bastard would live even if that meant he might pick up a rifle and start shooting at U.S. soldiers again twenty years from now…or, for that matter, twenty minutes after he got out of a POW camp.

The front ground forward. Before long, Birmingham would start catching it from artillery as well as from the bombers that visited it almost every night. O’Doull wondered how much good that would do. The Confederates might be running short of men, but they still had plenty of guns and ammunition. The bombing that was supposed to knock out their factories didn’t live up to the fancy promises airmen made for it.

Featherston’s followers still had plenty of rockets, too. Stovepipe rockets blew up U.S. barrels. O’Doull hated treating burns; it gave him the shivers. He did it anyway, because he had to. Screaming meemies could turn an acre of ground into a slaughterhouse. And the big long-range rockets threw destruction a couple of hundred miles.

“Hell with Birmingham,” Sergeant Lord said, picking screaming-meemie fragments out of the thigh and buttocks of an anesthetized corporal. “We’ve got to take Huntsville away from those fuckers. That’s where this shit is coming from.”

“No arguments from me.” O’Doull held out a metal basin to the senior medic. Lord dropped another small chunk of twisted, bloody steel or aluminum into it.
Clink!
The sound of metal striking metal seemed absurdly cheerful.

“Well, if you can see it and I can see it, how come the brass can’t?” Lord demanded. He peered at the wounded man’s backside, then dug in with the forceps again. Sure as hell, he found another fragment.

“Maybe they will,” O’Doull said. “They swung a lot of force south of Atlanta to make the Confederates clear out. Now we’re better positioned to go after Birmingham than we are for Huntsville, that’s all.”

“Maybe.” Lord sounded anything but convinced. “Me, I think the brass are a bunch of jerks—that’s what the trouble is.”

Of course you do
—
you’re a noncom
, O’Doull thought. He too was given to heretical thoughts about the competence, if any, of the high command. Yes, he was an officer, but as a doctor he wasn’t in the chain of command. He didn’t want to be, either. There often seemed to be missing links at the top of the chain.

Missing links…His memory went back to biology classes in college, in the dead, distant days before the Great War. He remembered pictures of low-browed, chinless, hairy brutes: Neanderthal Man and Java Man and a couple of others thought to lie halfway between apes and
Homo
laughably called
sapiens
. He imagined ape-men in green-gray uniforms with stars on their shoulder straps and black-and-gold General Staff arm-of-service colors.

The picture formed with frightening ease. “Ook!” he muttered. Sergeant Lord sent him a curious look. O’Doull’s cheeks heated.

He also imagined hulking subhumans in butternut, with wreathed stars on their collars. Confederate Neanderthals also proved easy to conjure up.
A good thing, too
, O’Doull thought.
We’d lose if they weren’t as dumb as we are
.

And wasn’t Jake Featherston the top
Pithecanthropus
of them all? “Ook,” Leonard O’Doull said again, louder this time. Then he shook his head, angry at himself for swallowing his own side’s propaganda. Sure, Featherston had made his share of mistakes, but who in this war hadn’t? The President of the CSA had come much too close to leading his side to victory over a much bigger, much richer foe. If that didn’t argue for a certain basic competence, what would?

“You all right, sir?” Goodson Lord asked, real concern in his voice.

“As well as I can be, anyhow,” O’Doull answered. What worried him was that Jake Featherston could still win. The Confederates had come up with more new and nasty weapons this time around than his own side had. The fragments Lord was cleaning up—another one clanked into the bowl—showed that. If the enemy pulled something else out of his hat, something big…

“Hey, Doc!” That insistent shout from outside drove such thoughts from his mind. No matter what the Confederates who weren’t Neanderthals came up with, all he could do was try to patch up the men they hurt.

“You all right by yourself?” he asked Lord.

“I’ll cope,” the senior medic said, which was the right answer.

The new wounded man had had a shell fragment slice the right side of his chest open. The corpsmen who brought him in were irate. “It was a short round, Doc,” Eddie said. O’Doull could all but see the steam coming out of his ears. “One of ours. It killed another guy—they’ll have to scrape him up before they can bury him.”

“That kind of shit happens all the time,” another stretcher-bearer said.

“Happens too goddamn often.” Yeah, Eddie was hot, all right.

“I think so, too.” O’Doull had also seen too many wounds on U.S. soldiers inflicted by other U.S. soldiers. He hated them at least as much as Eddie did. All the same…“Let’s get to work on him. The less time we waste, the better.”

Collapsed lung, lots of bleeders to tie off, broken ribs. O’Doull knew what to expect, and he got it. The wound was serious, but straightforward and clean. O’Doull knew he had a good chance of saving the soldier. By the time he finished, he was pretty sure he had. If the war lasted long enough, the man might return to duty.

“Won’t he be proud of his Purple Heart?” Eddie was a little rabbity guy. Somehow, that only made his sarcasm more devastating.

“He’s here to get one, anyway,” O’Doull said. “You told me he had a buddy who bought the whole plot, right?”

“Yeah.” Eddie nodded.

“Well, this is better. This guy’ll probably end up all right,” O’Doull said. Eddie didn’t answer, which might have been the most devastating comeback of all.

VII

W
hen Cassius walked down the street, white people scurried out of his way. That still thrilled him. It had never happened before he started this occupation duty. His whole life long, he’d been taught to move aside for whites. Dreadful things happened to colored people who didn’t.

Now he had a Tredegar in his hands and the U.S. Army at his back. Anybody who didn’t like that—and there were bound to be people who didn’t—and was rash enough to let him know it could end up suddenly dead, and no one would say a word. Other members of Gracchus’ band had shot whites in Madison for any reason or none, and then gone about their business. Oh, the ofays in town flabbled, but who paid attention to them? Not a soul.

White women were particularly quick not just to get out of the way but to get out of sight. Cassius had seen that ever since he got here. Shooting wasn’t the only revenge Negroes could take on their former social superiors. Oh, no—not at all.

Cassius scowled when he saw blue X’s painted on walls. Those would come down or get painted over in a hurry—they were shorthand for C.S. battle flags. If a property owner didn’t cover them up, U.S. soldiers would assume he was a Confederate sympathizer. They’d probably be right, too. Right or wrong, they’d make him sorry.

More than a few whites had already disappeared from Madison. The U.S. Army said they’d gone into prisons farther from the front. Negroes loudly insisted the U.S. soldiers had shipped them to camps. Cassius had done it himself. He
wanted
the ofays quivering in their boots. They’d made him quiver too damn long.

They’d made him fight back, too. Tales of horror like that were liable to make the local whites fight back. Cassius didn’t care. If the ofays wanted to try, they could. He figured the U.S. Army
would
start massacring them then.

And he would get to help.

He came to a street corner at the same time as another Negro marching from a different direction. “Mornin’, Sertorius,” he said. “How you doin’?”

“I’s tolerable,” his fellow guerrilla replied. “How ’bout yourself?”

“Could be worse,” Cassius admitted. “We got us plenty o’ grub, we got warm places to sleep, an’ we got all the Yankees on our side. Yeah, sure enough could be worse.”

“Amen,” Sertorius said, as if Cassius were a preacher. “Couple months ago, things
was
worse.” He wore a U.S. helmet, and made as if to tip it. Cassius returned the gesture with the cap he had on. “See you,” Sertorius added, and went on marching his assigned route.

“See you.” Cassius also walked on. Odds were they would see each other at the end of the day. They weren’t living in fear, the way they had when they skulked and hid in the countryside. The ofays feared them now. Cassius liked that better. Who wouldn’t?

And sometimes the ofays were starting to treat them with respect. A kid maybe eight or nine years old came up to Cassius. “Got any rations you can spare?” he asked, his voice most polite.

Cassius would have told a grown man to go to hell. A skinny kid, though, was a skinny kid. Cassius started to reach for one of the ration cans in his belt pouch. Then he took another look at the boy. His hand stopped. “You called me a goddamn nigger before,” he said. “You said I sucked the damnyankees’ dicks. Far as I’m concerned, you kin starve.”

The white boy looked almost comically astonished. “I didn’t mean it,” he said, and smiled a winning smile.

How dumb was he? How dumb did he think Cassius was? That was the real question, and Cassius knew the answer—dumb as a nigger, that was what he thought. “Now tell me one I’ll believe,” Cassius said scornfully.

If looks could have killed, he would have fallen over dead on the spot. The white kid started to say something—probably something as sweet and charming as the insults he’d dealt out the last time he ran into Cassius. Then he glanced at the Tredegar and went away instead. That was the smartest thing he could have done. Cassius likely would have shot him if he’d run his mouth twice.

An old man came up behind him. “You won’t even feed a little boy?” the geezer asked. “What’s the world coming to?”

“I ain’t gonna feed that little bastard no matter what the world’s comin’ to,” Cassius answered. “Some other kid, maybe, but not him.”

“Why not?”

“On account of he done called me a nigger and a cocksucker.”

Well, you are a nigger
. Cassius could see it in the old white man’s shrewd gray eyes. The fellow had sense enough not to say it, though. And cocksucker was an insult to anybody. “Oh,” was all that came out of the ofay’s mouth. He walked on past Cassius, careful not to come close enough to seem threatening.

At noon, another black man took over Cassius’ beat. Cassius went back to the tents outside of town to see if the U.S. Army cooks had any hot food. Sure enough, big kettles of chicken stew simmered over crackling fires. Cassius dug out his mess kit and got in line.

“How’d it go?” asked the white soldier in front of him. “Any trouble with the local yokels?”

“Nah.” Cassius shook his head. But then he corrected himself: “Well, a little. This kid who don’t like niggers—an’ I
know
he don’t like niggers—tried to bum food offa me.”

“Hope you told him to fuck himself,” the soldier said. “Little asshole can starve for all I care. Just save somebody on our side the trouble of shooting him once he grows up.”

“You reckon another war’s comin’?” Cassius asked as the line snaked forward.

“Shit, don’t you?” the white man replied. “Sooner or later, we’ll let these Confederate bastards back on their feet. A half hour after we do, they’ll clean the grease off the guns they got stashed away and start greasin’ us.”

Was that savage cynicism or sage common sense? When it came to gauging the chances of peace and war, how much difference was there? Cassius didn’t know. He did know Confederate whites despised both blacks and U.S. whites. He’d always known C.S. Negroes didn’t love whites—and how little reason they had to love them. Now he’d discovered that white soldiers from the USA couldn’t stand Confederate whites, either. That was reassuring.

Plainly, quite a few soldiers in green-gray didn’t like Negroes, either. But they hated Confederate whites more—at least while they were down here. Confederate whites wanted them dead, and were willing—no, eager—to pick up weapons and make sure they died. Negroes in the CSA, by contrast, made natural allies. The enemy of my enemy…
is at least worth dishing out rations to
, Cassius thought.

The cook loaded his mess kit with as much chicken stew as anybody else got. “Here y’are, buddy,” he said, his lips barely moving because of the cigarette that dangled from the corner of his mouth.

“Thanks.” Cassius moved on.

When he got a cup of coffee to go with the stew, he found it heavily laced with chicory. But it came from the same big pot—almost a vat—that served the U.S. soldiers. No one was giving him particularly lousy coffee. The good stuff was hard to come by—that was all. As long as he got his fair share of what there was, he had no kick coming.

He made sure he washed his mess kit after he finished eating. The U.S. Army came down hard on you if you didn’t. One dose of a jowly sergeant screaming in his face about food poisoning and the galloping shits was enough to last him a lifetime. He did notice that the sergeants screamed just as loud at white men they caught screwing up. Again, as long as they tore into everybody equally, Cassius could deal with it.

Once he’d policed up—a term that had sounded funny when he first heard it, but one he was used to now—he went over to the POW camp outside of Madison. Watching Confederate soldiers behind barbed wire was even more fun than looking at animals in cages had been when his father took him to the zoo.

The Confederates were like lions—they’d bite if they got half a chance. But he had claws of his own. The Tredegar’s weight, which often annoyed him, seemed more like a safety net close to the prisoners. “I had a gun myself, I’d shoot you for totin’ that thing,” a POW said, shaking his fist.

“You could try,” Cassius answered. “Some other ofays done tried before, but I’m still here.”

“You know what happens to uppity niggers?” the POW said.

“Sure do. They git shot.” Cassius started to unsling the rifle. “Same thing happens to uppity prisoners.” The Confederate shut up. Cassius let his hand drop.

Some of the other POWs weren’t uppity. They were just hungry. They begged from U.S. soldiers, and they begged from Negroes, too. “Got any rations you don’t need?” one of them asked, stretching out his hands imploringly to Cassius.

“You feed me if I was in there?” Cassius asked.

“Well, I hope so,” the man answered after a perceptible pause for thought. “I’m a Christian, or I try to be.”

“Reckon Jake Featherston’s a Christian, too?”

“Sure he is,” the POW said, this time without hesitation. “He loves Jesus, same as you’n me. Jesus loves him, too.”

“Fuck you, you ofay asshole.” Cassius turned away. “You can starve.”

“You ain’t no Christian,” the Confederate called after him.

“If Jake Featherston is, I don’t want to be.” Cassius walked off. He wondered if the POW would cuss him out as he went. But the man kept quiet. A few untimely demises had convinced the C.S. prisoners that they needed to watch their mouths around the surviving Negroes.

Cassius’ mother would have landed on him like a thousand-pound bomb if she heard him say he didn’t want to be a Christian. She prayed even when things looked worst—no, especially when they did. And she got caught in church, and went straight from church to one of Jake Featherston’s murder factories. What did that say about how much being a Christian was worth? Not much, not so far as Cassius could see.

Maybe she was in heaven, the way she always thought she would be. Cassius hoped so. He had trouble believing it, though. He had trouble believing anything these days.

He found Gracchus that evening. Gracchus thought about things, too. “You reckon we’ll ever fit in again?” Cassius asked.

The former guerrilla leader didn’t even pretend not to understand what he was talking about. “In Georgia? Naw.” Gracchus shook his head.

“Don’t just mean Georgia,” Cassius said. “I mean anywhere. The Confederate ofays all hate us.” He didn’t love whites in the CSA, either, but he left that out of the mix, continuing, “Ofays from the USA don’t all hate us, I reckon, but they’s so different, ain’t no way we belong in Yankeeland, neither. So what does that leave?”

“Nothin’.” Gracchus managed a crooked grin. “When you ever know a nigger who had more’n dat?”

“You got somethin’ there,” Cassius admitted. His father had had more: a kingdom of the mind, a kingdom whose size and scope Cassius was only beginning to realize he’d never fully grasped. But what did all of Xerxes’ quiet wisdom win him in the end? Only another place on the train bound for hell on earth. Cassius said, “I could kill ofays for the rest o’ my life an’ not even start payin’ them fuckers back.”

“It’s a bastard, ain’t it?” Gracchus said. “Maybe Jake Featherston wins, an’ maybe he loses. But we-uns, we-uns already done lost.” Cassius started to answer, but what could he say that Gracchus hadn’t?

Y
es, the front was Richmond. There had always been a danger in putting the Confederate capital so close to the U.S. border. Richmond made a magnet for U.S. ambitions. McClellan had threatened it in the War of Secession; a better general likely would have taken it then. Even in the Second Mexican War, the USA dreamt of marching in. During the Great War, the flood tide of green-gray had reached Fredericksburg on its way south before the Confederate government decided it had had enough.

And now…Now Jake Featherston was red-hot, almost white-hot, with fury, but not even his unending, unyielding rage could stiffen the Confederate armies north of the capital. “God damn it to hell!” he screamed at Nathan Bedford Forrest III. “We need to bring more men into the line up there!”

“Sir, we haven’t got any more men to move,” Forrest replied.

“Get ’em from somewhere!” Jake said.

“Where do you recommend, sir?” the chief of the General Staff asked. “Shall we pull them out of Georgia? Or maybe out of Alabama?”

“No! Jesus Christ, no!” Featherston exclaimed. “The fucking country’ll fall apart if we do.” The country was falling apart anyway, but he knew it would fall apart faster if he pulled soldiers away from the sectors where they were fighting hardest. “What have we got left in the Carolinas?”

“What was there is either up here or down in Georgia,” Forrest replied. “It has been for weeks.” He paused, then licked his lips and asked, “Are you sure you aren’t overworked, Mr. President?”

“I’m tired of nobody doin’ what needs doin’—I sure am tired o’ that,” Jake growled.

“That’s…not quite what I meant, sir.” Nathan Bedford Forrest III licked his lips again. “Don’t you think the strain of command has been a little too much for you? Shouldn’t you take a rest, sir, and come back to duty when you’re refreshed and ready to face it again?”

“Well, I don’t rightly know,” Featherston said slowly. “Do you really reckon I’m off?”

“The war hasn’t gone the way we wish it would have, and that’s a fact.” Forrest sounded relieved—and surprised—that Jake wasn’t hitting the armored ceiling in fourteen different places. “Maybe somebody with a fresh slant on things can stop the damnyankees, or at least get a peace we can live with out of them.”

“I suppose it’s possible, but I wouldn’t bet on it.” Under the desk, out of the general’s sight, Jake’s left hand hesitated between two buttons. The first one, the closer one, would send the nearest guards rushing into the office. But the chief of the General Staff plainly had a coup in mind. If he hadn’t suborned those guards, he wasn’t worth the paper he was printed on. “Who do you have in mind to take over afterwards? You?” Keep the son of a bitch talking. Jake’s finger came down on the other button.

“I’ll take military command,” Nathan Bedford Forrest III replied. “But I think Vice President Partridge is the better man to talk peace with the United States. Everything stays nice and constitutional that way.” He was keeping Jake talking, too, waiting till his men got here to back his play.