'That's not cavalry!' he shouted. 'That's field artillery.'
Jeb Stuart III came trotting up beside him. He nodded as he stuck a brass telescope up to his eye. 'Field artillery, sure as hell,' he agreed. 'I make the range about two and a half miles-say, four thousand yards for starters. Let's give them a hello, shall we?'
He started bawling for the whole battery. Featherston handled his gun. It was the second one of the battery to open up. The shell fell a couple of hundred yards short of the U.S. field gun. The next shell, a few seconds later, was long. After that, they started landing in the right general area. You put enough shells in the right general area, you did damage. The Yanks had probably figured they could get their battery into position and into action before the retreating Confederates were ready to reply. They'd made a mistake there, and they were going to pay for it.
The U.S. battery did get a few shots off, shells crashing down on the trench line behind Codorus Creek. But that kind of nuisance firing went on every day of the war. It was hardly worth noticing, even by the Negro labourers, who were more flighty than soldiers when it came to being on the receiving end of bullets. Since they couldn't shoot back, Jake found it hard to blame them for that.
He glanced over to Nero and Perseus. They stood by the horses, and were plainly ready to dive into the foxhole if the damnyankees started hurling shells at the battery. They'd shot back. Featherston hoped to high heaven they'd never have to do it again.
After a few minutes, the U.S. field guns couldn't stand the heat from deploying out in the open. They started moving again, this time against the tide of the advancing U.S. infantry. 'So long!' Featherston shouted at them. 'Tell your mama what it's like when you really have to work for a living.' His gun crew yelled and waved their hats. At Captain Stuart's orders, they started pouring shells into the foot soldiers approaching the creek.
They worked a formidable slaughter among them, too, but a couple of hours later they had to abandon their position and pull back another mile or two: somewhere farther west, the Yankees had forced a crossing of the creek.
'Doesn't seem right,' Michael Scott grumbled as Nero and Perseus hitched the horses up to the guns. 'We were massacring the bastards.'
'Wasn't so much what they did in front of us that made us start this retreat,' Featherston answered. 'It was what happened off to the flank and the rear. You can win your own part of the battle and still have the whole army lose.'
'I wish you hadn't said that,' the loader told him. After Jake thought about it for a while, he wished he hadn't said that, too.
When Flora Hamburger went downstairs from the Socialist Party offices to walk across Centre Market Place and buy a sandwich in the market, Max Fleischmann was arguing with two goons outside his butcher's shop.
'No, I don't got no ham,' he said to them. 'Don't got no pig's knuckles. Don't got no head cheese. Don't got no bacon. Don't got no time for no silliness, neither. I'm a Jew. You maybe may have noticed.'
'Yeah, pop, we noticed,' one of the goons said. His nasty grin showed a couple of broken teeth. 'Maybe you noticed this.' He raised the billy club he carried in his right hand. The armband wrapped around his left sleeve read, peace and order. He and his equally unpleasant friend looked like a couple of Soldiers' Circle men, and were helping to hold down the staunchly Socialist neighborhood by main force.
'Leave that man alone,' Flora said crisply. Her English was precise and almost unaccented. The two volunteer policemen gaped at her as she went on, 'Not only has he done nothing to you, but if you beat him, you will be beating one of the few Democrats in this part of New York.'
'Ain't no Democrats here,' said the goon with the club ready to use. 'Just Jews and Socialists.' He leered at her. 'Which are you, lady?'
'Both,' Flora answered. The thugs undoubtedly knew that; they hung around the Socialist Party office to harass the Party regulars, and, Maria Tresca aside, few gentiles came here. Angelina Tresca wouldn't, ever again. Flora's party affiliation, though, was a sword that cut both ways. 'And if you beat me today-or if you beat Mr. Fleischmann-every Socialist paper in the country will carry the story tomorrow.'
That was true. By the unhappy look on the goons' faces, they knew it, too. The one with the club raised lowered it. 'Come on, Paddy,' he said in disgust. 'We'll find games to play somewheres else.' They mooched off, looking for people more willing to be intimidated.
'Thank you,' the butcher said to Flora in English before dropping back into Yiddish. 'When you go home, you stop in here. I'll have something for you to take back to the flat. Not something big, maybe, but something.'
'You don't need to do that,' she said, also in Yiddish.
'Hush,' Fleischmann told her, his voice stern. 'You have a sister who can use good food right now. Take it for her, if not for you.' His stiff-backed pose declared he would allow no disagreement.
Flora gave up. 'I'll stop,' she promised, wondering how Fleischmann knew about Sophie. Gossip on the crowded Lower East Side was an amazing thing. No doubt Fleischmann also knew the baby would be illegitimate. Flora sighed. Even if you disapproved of bourgeois conventions, you couldn't escape them.
More goons patrolled the Centre Market. The Remembrance Day riots had given the authorities the excuse they needed to clamp down on Socialist strongholds throughout New York City, though no one had proved or could prove a Socialist had started the disturbances.
Flora bought a smoked-tongue sandwich from a little stall in the market, a couple of pickled tomatoes from a man who carried his great vat of spiced brine on a pushcart, and coffee from another fellow with a pushcart, this one mounting a samovar. She ate quickly, then went back upstairs, where she spent the afternoon writing one letter after another, all of them aimed at getting Roosevelt's repressive restrictions lifted from New York City.
'If the president keeps up with them,' said Herman Bruck, who was also writing, 'he'll provoke a working- class uprising a hundred times worse than anything we saw in the Nineties. That will play hob with carrying on his foolish war.'
His bruises had faded. Roentgen-ray photographs had shown his left hand wasn't broken after all. He wore as a badge of honor the gap in his smile that he'd got when somebody wearing a heavy Soldiers' Circle ring had punched him in the face during the riots, and loudly proclaimed to whoever would listen that he preferred it to going to the dentist for bridgework. Flora found that absurd, but didn't say so; whenever she argued with Bruck about anything, he thought it meant she was interested in him. Maria Tresca, in mourning black, was very quiet.
Flora finished her letter-writing, said her good-byes, and went downstairs. Max Fleischmann stood waiting for her, as if in ambush. He thrust a paper-wrapped package into her hands. Her eyebrows flew up at the weight of it. 'This is too much!' she exclaimed.
'I'm sorry, I'm not hearing very well today,' the butcher said, and went back into his shop. That left her the choice of pursuing him when he plainly did not want to be pursued and going home. Shaking her head, she went home.
'What do you have there?' her mother asked when she walked into the crowded apartment.
'I kept Mr. Fleischmann the butcher from having some trouble with TR's hooligans, so he gave me this,' she answered, and opened it on the kitchen counter. 'Marrow bones and stewing beef: there must be three or four pounds of it.'
'That's very nice,' her mother said. 'We can use that-barley soup with onions and carrots, maybe, the way your father likes.'
'Yes, Mama,' Flora said; to her mother, utility made anything, even Socialism, worthwhile. 'I'll put it in the icebox.'
Her brothers came in then, bantering with her and their younger sister Esther as they hung up their jackets and caps. David lighted a cigarette, a habit he was just acquiring and one Flora wished he'd lose. The harsh smoke made the flat stink; it wasn't flavourful like the pipe tobacco their father used- even the cheaper grades he was using nowadays smelled better than this nasty weed.
When Benjamin Hamburger came in, he got the pipe going right away, perhaps in self-defense. Sophie dragged in last of all. The war had created relentless demands on seamstresses in New York City, all over the USA, and, no doubt, all over the world. The bosses didn't care if you were going to have a baby. You had to show up and you had to work no matter how tired, no matter how sick you were. If you didn't, somebody else was waiting to do your job.
Over small helpings of pot roast and big ones of potato kugel, Benjamin Hamburger remarked on that: 'With so many jobs needing doing now, wages may be going up. Alevai,' he added, dragging superstition into a discussion
