Walk in Hell (7 page)

That got Flora out of the apartment in a hurry. She didn’t even wait to adjust her picture hat in front of the mirror, but put it on as she was walking downstairs. If it was crooked, too bad. Her mother didn’t see, wouldn’t see, that living a full life didn’t have to include a life full of men (or full of one man) and full of babies.

Socialist Party headquarters for the Fourteenth Ward were in a crowded second-floor office above a butcher shop on Centre Market Court, across the street from the stalls and little shops in the Centre Market. Buyers already went from stall to store, looking for early morning bargains. Soldiers’ Circle men prowled through the marketplace, some of them wearing armbands, others pins, all of them carrying truncheons or wearing pistols on their hips. They’d been suppressing dissent and resistance to the war in Socialist neighborhoods ever since the Remembrance Day riots.

As often happened, a couple of them were leaning up against the brick wall near the stairway up to Socialist Party headquarters. They’d eased off on that for a time, but had come back in greater force since the Socialist uprising in the Confederate States. If the oppressed Negroes could rise up in righteous revolutionary fury there, what about the oppressed proletariat of all colors in the USA?

Flora waved to Max Fleischmann, the butcher downstairs. He waved back, smiling; she helped keep the Soldiers’ Circle goons from bothering him. Nothing could keep them from leering at her. Not by accident did the flowers in her hat conceal a couple of long, sharp hatpins.

Perhaps grouchy from lack of sleep, she glared back at the Soldiers’ Circle men. “I don’t know why you waste your time hanging around here,” she said, exaggerating for effect. “Aren’t you grateful that people who see the need for class struggle are helping the United States win the war?”

“Reds are Reds, whether they’re black or white,” one of the men answered. “We’ve got the answer for any what gets out o’ line.” He set his fist by the side of his neck, then jerked his arm sharply upward and let his head fall to one side, as if he’d been hanged. “Anybody tries a revolution
here
, that’s what they get, and that’s what they deserve.”

“I’m sure you would have told George Washington the same thing,” Flora said, and went upstairs. She felt the eyes of the Soldiers’ Circle men like daggers in her back till she opened the door and walked inside.

Party headquarters, as usual, put her in mind of a three-ring circus crammed into about half a ring. Typewriters clattered. People shouted into telephones in Yiddish and English, often with scant regard for which language they were using at any given moment. Other people stood in the narrow spaces between desks or sat on the corners of the desks themselves and argued loudly and passionately about anything that happened to cross their minds. Flora looked on the chaos and smiled. It was, in an even larger, even more disorderly style, her family writ large.

“Good morning, Maria,” she said to her secretary as she hung her hat on a tree near the desk.

“Good morning,” Maria Tresca answered. She was one of the few gentiles at the Fourteenth Ward office, but was as enthusiastic for Socialism and its goals as anyone else; her sister, Angelina, had died in the Remembrance Day riots the year before. She studied Flora, then added, “You look pleased with yourself.”

“Do I? Well, maybe I do,” Flora said. “I gave the bully boys downstairs something to think about.” She explained her crack about Washington. Maria grinned from ear to ear and clapped her hands together.

Over at the next desk, Herman Bruck hung up the telephone on which he’d been speaking and sent Flora a stern look. A stern look from Bruck was not something to bear lightly. He might have stepped out of the pages of a fashion catalogue, from perfectly trimmed hair and neat mustache to suits always of fine wool and most modish cut. He often made a spokesman for the Socialists, simply because he looked so elegant. Money had not done it for him; coming from a family of fancy tailors had.

“Washington was no revolutionary, not in the Marxist sense of the word,” he said now. “He didn’t transfer wealth or power from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie, and certainly not to the peasants. All he did was replace British planters and landowners with their American counterparts.”

Flora tapped a fingernail against the top of her desk in annoyance. Herman Bruck would probably have made an even better Talmudic scholar than poor Yossel Reisen; he delighted in hairsplitting and precision. Only in chosen ideology did he differ from Yossel.

“For one thing, Soldiers’ Circle goons don’t care about the Marxist sense of the word,” Flora said, holding onto her patience with both hands. “For another, by their use of the term, Washington
was
a revolutionary, and I got them to think about the consequences of denying the right to revolution now. Either that or I got them angry at me, which will do as well.”

“It’s not proper,” Bruck answered stiffly. “We should be accurate about these matters. Educating the nation must be undertaken in an exact and thoroughgoing fashion.”

“Yes, Herman.” Flora suppressed a sigh. The one thing Bruck lacked that would have made him a truly effective political operative was any trace of imagination. Before he could go on with what would, no doubt, have been a disputation to consume the entire morning, his telephone rang. He gave whoever was on the other end of the line the same sharply focused attention he had turned on Flora.

Her own phone jangled a moment later. “Socialist Party, Flora Hamburger,” she said, and then, “Oh—Mr. Levitzsky. Yes, by all means we
will
support the garment workers’ union there. That contract will be honored or the rank and file will strike, war or no war. Teddy Roosevelt makes a lot of noise about a square deal for the workers. We’ll find out if he means it, and we’ll let the people know if he doesn’t.”

“I’ll take that word to the factory manager,” Levitzsky said. “If he knows the union and the Party are in solidarity here, he won’t have the nerve to go on calling the contract just a scrap of paper. Thank you, Miss Hamburger.”

That was the sort of phone call that made Flora feel she’d earned her salary for the day. Workers were so vulnerable to pressure from employers, especially with the war making everything all the more urgent: or at least seem all the more urgent. The Party had the collective strength to help redress the balance.

Herman Bruck got off the phone himself a minute or so later. In a new tone of voice—as if he hadn’t been criticizing her ideological purity a moment before—he asked, “Would you like to go to the moving pictures with me tonight after work? Geraldine Farrar is supposed to be very fine in the new version of
Carmen
.”

“I really don’t think so, not tonight—” Flora began.

Bruck went on as if she hadn’t spoken: “The bullfight scene, they say, is especially bully.” He smiled at his pun. Flora didn’t. “So many people wanted to sit in the amphitheater while it was being photographed, I’ve heard, that they didn’t have to hire any extras.”

“I’m sorry, Herman. Maybe when Yossel sleeps a little better, so I can be sure I’ll sleep a little better. He kept everyone awake through a lot of last night.”

Herman Bruck looked like a kicked puppy. He’d been trying to court Flora almost as long as they’d known each other. The next luck he had would be the first. That didn’t stop him from going right on trying. Abstractly, Flora admired his persistence: the same persistence he showed in his Party work. She admired it even more there than when it was aimed at her.

Turning away from Bruck and toward Maria Tresca, she asked, “What’s next?”

Jake Featherston stuck out his mess tin. The Negro cook for the First Richmond Howitzers gave him a tinful of stew. He carried it back among the ruins of Hampstead, Maryland, and sat down with his gun crew to eat.

Michael Scott, the three-inch howitzer’s loader, said, “Stew tastes pretty good, Sarge. Now all we have to do is hope it ain’t poisoned.”

“Funny,” Jake said. “Funny like a truss.” He dug in with his spoon. Scott had been right; the stew was good. Trying to look on the bright side of things, he went on, “This Metellus, he seems like a good nigger. He knows his place, and he don’t give anybody any trouble.”

“Not that we know about, anyways.” That was Will Cooper, one of the shell haulers for the three-inch gun. Like Scott, he was a kid; both of them had joined the regiment after heavy casualties along the Susquehanna thinned out most of the veterans who had started the war with Jake. But the kids had been around for a while now; their butternut uniforms were stained and weather-beaten, and the red facings on their collar tabs that showed them to be artillerymen had faded to a washed-out pink.

Featherston kept on eating, but scowled as he did so. The trouble was, Cooper was right, no two ways about it. “Be a long time before we can trust the niggers again,” Jake said glumly.

Heads bobbed up and down in response to that. “At this here gun, we were lucky—this whole battery, we were lucky,” Scott said. “Our laborers just ran off. They didn’t try and turn our guns on us or on the infantrymen in front of us.”

Now Jake spoke with fond reminiscence: “Yeah, and we gave the damnyankees a good warm welcome when they came up out of their trenches, too. They figured we couldn’t do nothin’ about ’em with all our niggers givin’ us a hard time, but I reckon we showed ’em different.”

When the wind blew out of the north, it wafted the stench of unburied Yankee bodies into the Confederate lines. It was a horrible stench, sweet and ripe and thick enough to slice. But it was also the stench of victory, or at least the stench of defeat avoided. U.S. forces had driven the Confederacy out of Pennsylvania, but the Stars and Bars still flew over most of Maryland and over Washington, D.C.

Occasional crackles of gunfire came from the front: scouts thinking they’d spotted Yankee raiders, snipers shooting at enemies in the trenches rash enough to expose any part of themselves even for a moment, and, on the other side of the line, Yankee riflemen ready to do unto the Confederates what was being done unto them.

Another rifle shot rang out, then two more. Featherston’s head came up and his gaze sharpened, as if he were a coon dog taking a scent. Those shots hadn’t come from the front, but from well behind the line. He scowled again. “That’s likely to be some damn nigger trying to bushwhack our boys.”

“Bastards,” Cooper muttered. “We finish dealin’ with them, they’re gonna spend the next hundred years wishin’ they didn’t try raisin’ their hands to us, and you can take that to church.”

“I know,” Featherston said. “Back in the old days, my old man was an overseer. Till they laid him in the ground, he said we never ought to have manumitted the niggers. I always thought, you got to change with the times. But with the kind of thanks we got, damned if I think that way any more.”

The whole gun crew nodded in response to that. Jake finished his stew. Maybe Metellus really knew which side his bread was buttered on and did all the things he was supposed to do. But for all Jake knew, maybe he unbuttoned his fly and pissed in the stewpot when nobody was looking. How could you tell for sure? You couldn’t, till maybe too late.

From what he’d heard, it had been like that up and down the CSA—worst in the cotton belt, where whites were thin on the ground in big stretches of the country, but bad everywhere. He didn’t know how many of the ten million or so Negroes in the Confederacy had joined the rebellion, but enough had so that some troops had had to leave the fighting line against the USA to help put them down.

No wonder, then, that the damnyankees were pushing forward in western Virginia, in Kentucky, and in Sonora. The wonder was that the Confederate positions hadn’t fallen apart altogether. He glanced over to his gun. The quick-firing three-incher, copied from the French 75, was one big reason they hadn’t. The USA lacked a field piece that came close to matching it.

He heard footsteps coming up from the south. He wore a pistol on his hip, in case Yankee infantry somehow God forbid got close enough to his gun for him to need a personal weapon. He hadn’t drawn it till trouble broke out among the Negroes. Now—Now he was a long way from the only artilleryman to have a weapon ready. “Who goes there?” he demanded.

“This Battery C, First Richmond Howitzers?” Whoever owned the voice, he sounded crisp and decisive. He also sounded white. Featherston knew that didn’t necessarily mean anything, though. He’d known plenty of Negroes who could put on white accents. But this voice…He scratched his head. He thought he’d heard it before.

“You’re in the right place,” he answered. “Advance and be recognized.” He didn’t take his hand off the pistol.

Into the firelight came a small, spruce major and a bedraggled Negro. Jake and the rest of the men in the gun crew scrambled to their feet and stood at attention. The major’s pale eyes flashed; a hawk might have wished for such a piercing gaze. Those pale eyes fixed on Jake. “I know you. You’re Sergeant Featherston.” The fellow spoke with assurance.

“Yes, sir,” Featherston said. He
had
met this officer before. “Major Potter, isn’t it, sir?”

“That’s right. Clarence Potter, Intelligence, Army of Northern Virginia.” None too gently, he shoved the Negro up close to the fire. “And since you were here when I last visited the battery, perhaps you will be good enough to confirm for me that this ragged scoundrel”—he shoved the Negro again—“is in fact Pompey, former body servant to your commander, Captain Stuart. Captain Jeb Stuart III, that is.” He spoke the battery commander’s full name with a certain savage relish.

Everybody in the gun crew stared at the Negro. Jake could make a pretty good guess as to what the men were thinking. He was thinking a lot of the same things himself. But Potter hadn’t asked the question of anyone save him. He had to look closely to be certain, then said, “Yes, sir, that’s Pompey. He’s usually a lot neater and cleaner than he is now, that’s all.”

“He’s been living a little harder lately than he’s used to, poor darling.” Potter spoke with flaying sarcasm. He pointed to Will Cooper. “You. Private. Go find Captain Stuart and bring him here, wherever he is and whatever he’s doing. I don’t care if he’s got some woman in bed with him—tell him to take it out, get dressed, and get his ass down here.”