American Front (53 page)

“Fanatics,” Lieutenant Hinshaw said. “This is what they warned us about, these nests of maniacs. But most of the people are loyal to the USA. We’ll see that when we get into Price. Come on, men.” He led his soldiers outside. Once out there, he picked up the Mormons’ flag. “Spoil of war. Now—on with the advance.”

If the people of Price, Utah, were loyal to the United States, nobody had bothered telling them about it. They had a trench line just east of town, and defended it ferociously till machine-gun and artillery fire drove them back in amongst the buildings. But when the U.S. soldiers tried to advance into Price, rifle fire and a couple of Mormon machine guns hurled them back with heavy losses.

“Looks like we’re going to be in the next wave,” Mantarakis told his squad unhappily. He’d become numbed to the prospect of charging straight ahead at the enemy’s line: that was how First Army operated.

But the divisional commander showed a little more imagination than General Custer ever had. Instead of drowning Price in U.S. blood, he decided to shell it into ruins. Back of the U.S. line, more artillery unlimbered and started bellowing away. The Mormons had machine guns, but evidently no cannon of their own. A great cloud of smoke and dust rose above the Utah town.

In an abstract way, Mantarakis sympathized with the Mormons who’d been stupid enough to rise up against the might of the United States. He’d had artillery barrages come down on his position only too often; he knew what being under one of them was like. He hoped, though, that this one would be so stunning, so deadly, that the defenders would be either blown to bits or too battered to fight back. After the barrage let up, his neck would be on the line.

It went on for three hours. When it stopped, whistles blew, ordering the U.S. soldiers forward. Paul came up out of the foxhole in which he’d crouched and sprinted toward the outskirts of Price.

He hadn’t gone fifty yards before a Mormon machine gun started stuttering out death. After that, he didn’t run any more. He scrambled from one piece of cover to the next, firing as he went. So did the men with him. They’d learned in a hard school.

He didn’t know where the Mormons had learned. Wherever it was, they’d earned high marks. They defended every ruined store and pile of rubble as if losing it meant losing the war. They wouldn’t retreat. They wouldn’t surrender. Sometimes they would hold their fire till a party of U.S. soldiers had gone by, then shoot at them from behind, blazing away with no hope of escape until they were either dead or too badly wounded to hold a rifle.

Men, women, children down to about the age of eight—every Mormon in Price—fought, and fought to the death. Every smashed house had to be combed through room by room, every cellar checked for lurkers with guns. It was a grimmer, bloodier, more expensive nightmare than Paul had ever imagined.

He crouched down behind tumbled boards that had probably once been a false front and lighted a cigarette. A moment later, Gordon McSweeney took cover with him. “Tobacco is a filthy weed,” McSweeney said.

As far as Mantarakis could see, the big Scotsman disapproved of everything. “I’m not making you smoke it,” he pointed out. He blew a stream of smoke toward the little patch of Price to which the Mormons still clung. “Still think this is just a few fanatics fighting us? If the rest of Utah is anything like this, the next Mormon who likes us will be the first.”

“You may be right about that,” McSweeney said. “But what if you are? I keep telling you, the Mormons will burn in hell regardless of what they do here on earth.”

“Thanks a lot, Gordon,” Mantarakis muttered. McSweeney didn’t see it, but to him fighting a whole bunch of people who all hated you was different from fighting fanatics who hated you hidden among people who mostly didn’t. If all the Mormons hated the U.S. government, what did that make them when they rose up against it? Patriots?

Whatever it made them, it made them dangerous. A couple of bullets snapped by, too close for comfort. Paul stubbed out his cigarette on a rock, made sure he had a full clip in his Springfield, and went back to clearing the Mormons out of Price.

Sylvia Enos looked at her husband in dismay. “Are you sure this is what you should do?” she asked, in lieu of screaming,
Are you out of your mind?
“You haven’t been home long enough to be sure of anything.”

“I’m sure of this,” he answered, and she could hear he meant it.

But being sure wasn’t the same as being right. “Can’t you wait a little longer before you join the Navy?” Sylvia knew she was pleading. She didn’t care.

“Would you rather I signed up on a fishing boat?” George asked. Sylvia flinched by way of answering. The Confederates, the Canadians, and the British had sown Georges Bank and the other fishing waters around Boston full of mines. Not a week went by when a boat didn’t blow up. If another boat was nearby, it sometimes brought back survivors. More often than not, though, the only way you knew—or thought you knew—a fishing boat had hit a mine was when it didn’t come back to T Wharf.

“I’d rather you didn’t put to sea at all,” Sylvia said. It was about the worst thing a fisherman’s wife could tell her man. Sylvia knew that, and said it anyhow. She was listening to George, Jr., and Mary Jane snoring in their bedroom. They were both getting over colds, with their heads full of snot. They counted for something, too. She went on, “I’d rather you stayed ashore, is what I’d rather.”

He didn’t get angry, as she’d expected he would. He just shook his head in absolute rejection. “I had a lot of time to think about this, down in the camp in Rebel country. Nobody on land would hire me. Fishing is all I know.”

“They’ll take any bodies they can get,” Sylvia shot back. “I didn’t know anything to speak of, and they hired me.”

“Yeah, but conscription won’t drag you into the Army, like it will me,” George answered. “I wouldn’t last a month before the letter came. If I’m going to go fight, I’d rather do it on the water. I thought about that, too. I thought real hard.”

Sylvia didn’t have a good comeback. She’d already had a cousin wounded. The Army seized men and mangled them—that was the sense you got when you scanned the casualty lists every day, anyhow. She let out a sad, defeated sigh. “You were gone so long. You had to make friends with your children all over again after you got off the train. How long will you be away if you join the Navy? Years at a time, maybe. Stay here a while.”

He shook his head again. “And live off the money you’re making? That’s not anything for a man to do. I know you had to get work while I was gone. You had to keep bread on the table. But I feel useless sitting around here. If I’m in the Navy, they’ll send part of my pay home every month to help you and the kids out. That’s a better bargain.”

“Pride,” she said bitterly, as if it were a dirty word. As far as she was concerned, it was. “Men’s pride.” Along with the children’s snores, she heard the relentless ticking of the alarm clock from the bedroom she now shared once more with her husband. Shared now…but for how long? Every tick meant a second less. She did not have that many ticks to spare. “What good is it? If it weren’t for men’s pride, we wouldn’t have this war.”

“I don’t know anything about that,” George told her. “All I know is, I didn’t like what the Rebs did to me—I sure as the devil didn’t like them murdering poor Lucas Phelps—and I’m going to give some of it back to them when I get the chance.”

That was men’s pride, too, but what point to saying so?
He got me, so I’m going to get him back
. You heard it in the schoolyards, on the streets. You saw it in feuds between fishing captains, feuds that sometimes ended up fought out with broken bottles or with pistols. And here was a war, throwing half the world into the fire.
He got me, so I’m going to get him back
.

“I wish I were a heathen Chinese,” Sylvia said. “They have better sense than to mix themselves up in such foolishness.”

“No, they don’t,” her husband answered. “They’re on the Rebs’ side, same as the Japs are. I remember one of the guards gloating about it and about all the people China has. And Captain O’Donnell, he looked at that Confederate and he said, ‘Yeah, and all of ’em put together ain’t worth a regiment of United States Marines in a scrap.’ That Reb, he was angry, but he didn’t know what to say.”

“Captain O’Donnell!” The light that went on in Sylvia’s head was brighter than the gas lamps that lit their apartment; it blazed like an electric light. “You spent all that time down there in North Carolina listening to him. He’s the reason you want to join the Navy so bad.”

When George didn’t answer right away, she knew she’d hit that one on the nose. At last, slowly, he said, “We talked about it, sure, but I wouldn’t say I made up my mind just on account of him.”

“You wouldn’t say that? Does that mean it’s not true?”

When she had him, he folded up. To his credit, he didn’t usually bluff and bluster, the way so many men did. He took her by surprise by not folding up now. “It wasn’t just the captain,” he insisted. “Like I said, a lot of it was the way the Rebs treated us down there, like we were dirt because we came from the USA. They shot poor Lucas. And what they did to Charlie White…He’s joining the Navy, too. For all I know, he may have signed up already—I haven’t seen him, past couple of days.”

That surprised Sylvia, too, in a different way. She said, “I didn’t know they let colored people into the Navy.”

“Not in the Army, no,” George said, “but in the Navy they do. Even back in the War of Secession, they did. Coal-heavers, cooks, that kind of thing. The way Charlie is with a frying pan, he’d get himself whatever rank they give number one cooks in nothin’ flat.”

Sylvia had no great use for Negroes in general, but Charlie wasn’t a Negro in general. He was a Negro in particular, and somebody who fed her husband at least as often as she did. She saw him more as a man and less as a colored man than anyone else of his race she’d ever known—not that that took in any great sample of Boston’s Negro community.

“I can see why Charlie would want revenge, but—” she said, and then stopped in dismay at her own words.
He got me, so I’m going to get him back
. God in heaven, where did it end?

“Like I said, we all owe the Rebs,” George said, sensing her hesitation. “And me joining the Navy is the best I can do. Safer than being a fisherman these days, safer than being in the Army by a long shot. If I sit idle or if I get a land job, the Army hooks me sure.”

If you looked at things logically, what he said made good sense. Sylvia didn’t want to look at things logically. What she wanted, now that George was home at last, was for him to stay home. He didn’t want to stay home. Even if he had reasons for not wanting to stay home, it still hurt. She put her face in her hands and started to cry. She’d kept up a strong front for the children for so long that when the dam finally broke, it broke wide open.

“Honey, cut that out.” George sounded nervous, almost alarmed. Sylvia didn’t cry very often, and he didn’t know how to cope when she did. Helplessly, he went on, “It doesn’t do any good.”

He was right, but Sylvia couldn’t stop. “You just came back, and now you’re—going away again,” she sobbed. That was it, in a nub.

George slid closer on the sofa. He reached out awkwardly to stroke her wet cheek. His hand wasn’t so hard and rough as it had been before the Rebs captured him. Whatever they’d had him doing down there in the prison camp, it was easier than fishing. “It’ll be all right,” he said, and put his arm around her.

They ended up in the bedroom not much later. Since he’d come home, they’d made love more than they had even when they were first married; Sylvia had joked about pausing to take an occasional look at the floor, because all she ever saw was the ceiling. This had more a feel of desperation to it. Even when she gasped and quivered as powerfully as she ever had in her life, fear as much as healthy excitement drove her to that height.

And afterwards, lying there spent in the darkness beside her husband, she realized making love didn’t do any more good than crying did. When you were done, the world hadn’t changed a bit.

“God damn the war,” she whispered as she got up to put on her nightgown. George didn’t hear her. He was already breathing the deep, regular breaths of sleep. She lay down beside him. She knew she had to go to the canning plant in the morning, but lay a long time awake even so.

Ugly as a drunk white man with a chunk of firewood in his hand looking for a Negro to beat on, the barge made its slow way up to the Covington wharf. Unlike a drunk white man, though, it was in full and complete control. The fellow piloting it was a master, in fact; Cincinnatus had never seen anybody do a better job of easing such an ungainly craft into place.

The Army men on board threw lines up to a couple of roustabouts on the wharf. Even before the barge was fully fast, they ran a gangplank up to the wharf, too. That was what Lieutenant Kennan had been waiting for. “All right, you lazy niggers,” he shouted to the work gang of which Cincinnatus was a part, “you been lollygagging long enough. Now get your black asses down there and get to work. Two men to a crate. That’s what my order says, and that’s how we’re gonna do it. Move, God damn you!”

“Lord have mercy,” said a gray-haired Negro named Herodotus. “I been workin’, doin’
hard
work, since slavery days, an’ I didn’t never have no overseer with as mean a mouth as that Yankee.”

“Watch out he don’t hear you,” Cincinnatus warned, though the other Negro, being no one’s fool, had kept his voice down. “Ain’t just his mouth that’s mean. He’d just as soon kick a black man as look at him.”

Along with the rest of the work crew, he and Herodotus went down into the barge. The crates they were to unload were a funny shape, as long as a man, but only a foot or so high and wide. They were of more solid wood than the usual run of box, and bound with iron straps, too. Whatever was in there, the people back in the USA who’d packed it didn’t want it coming out.

Each crate had, neatly stenciled on it,
BATTERY F
, and, below that,
DISINFECTION
. Cincinnatus scratched his head. You put those two together, they didn’t make a whole lot of sense. But then, you could say that about a whole lot of things he’d seen since the war started.