'I'll tell you what's gone wrong. Charlie Fixico's up and decided he's a goddamn general, that's what.'
'LIh-oh,' Ramsay said, without any great eloquence but most sincerely. 'What sort of stupid, impossible thing does he have in mind for us to do?' He still thought like a sergeant, not an officer: what were generals for but ordering troops to try to do stupid, impossible things?
Lincoln was a longtime officer, but he looked to feel the same way. Point ing northeast, he answered, 'He wants us to break through that Yankee line and retake Beggs.'
'Jesus,' Ramsay said. He'd talked Moty Tiger out of that. Talking the chief of the Creek Nation out of it wasn't going to be easy. 'Why does he want to do that? Isn't he grateful we saved Okmulgee for him?'
'Not any more, he's not. That was a while ago, and politicians aren't what you'd call good at remembering,' Lincoln answered. 'Why? Two reasons, far as I can make out. First one is, he wants to get back the oil fields around Beggs. Second one is, it's Creek territory, it's got damnyankees on it, and he wants 'em gone. That's about what it boils down to.'
'Jesus,' Ramsay said again. 'Doesn't he know that if we try to take those Yankee positions, we're gonna get ourselves slaughtered, nothing else but?'
'If he doesn't, it's not because I didn't tell him till I was blue in the face,' Lincoln answered. 'He ordered the attack to go in anyhow.'
'I hope you got the Confederate corps commander to overrule him, sir,' Ramsay said. 'It'd be suicide, like I said.'
'I went to corps headquarters, yes,' Lincoln said. 'They told me that if Chief Fixico wants an attack, Chief Fixico gets an attack. Two reasons, again. One is, his own men — us-are in it, so he's not asking the CSA to do all his work for him. Two is, near as I can tell, they don't want to make the Indians angry, so they go along with any requests they get. Bombardment begins tomorrow morning at 0300-supposed to chew up the barbed wire between us and them and make reaching their trenches easier. We go over the top at 0600.'
'Yes, sir,' Ramsay said. He couldn't think of anything else to say. He knew what was liable to happen shortly after 0600. He wasn't afraid — or not very much afraid, at any rate. What he felt was more like numbness, as if he'd been told out of the blue he'd need a surgical operation.
He went up and down the trench line, letting the men know what they'd be doing at dawn tomorrow. Some of the Creeks, especially the younger ones and the replacements who hadn't seen much action, looked excited. A couple of them let out happy yowls: war cries. Moty Tiger just glanced up at Ramsay and nodded. What was going on behind those black eyes, that impassive face? Ramsay couldn't tell.
He made sure his rifle was clean and that he had plenty of ammunition, then wrapped himself in his blanket and tried to sleep. He didn't think he would, but he did. The beginning of the barrage at 0300 woke him. He got up and made sure the men would be ready to move forward when the shelling stopped. 'With luck,' he said, 'the damnyankees'll be too battered to do any shooting back till we're in amongst 'em. Good luck, boys.'
At 0600 on the dot, the bombardment ended. Colonel Lincoln blew a whistle. 'Let's go!' he shouted.
Out of the trenches swarmed the Creek Nation Army, along with Confed erate troops proper to either side of them. They went forward as fast as they could, knowing their best hope for safety was getting to the enemy front line before U.S. troopers could recover from the barrage they'd taken and reach the firing steps — and the machine guns they surely had all along the line.
The shelling had knocked aside or wrecked some of the barbed wire, but not all, or even most. First one Creek, then another, then another, got hung up in it. 'Don't try and cut 'em loose,' Ramsay called. 'Keep moving. That's the best thing we can do.' It wasn't easy. The stuff grabbed and clung and bit, so you felt as if you were moving underwater with sharks nipping you, or through a nightmare, trying without much luck to run from a monster you dared not turn around and see.
But the monster was in front. Here and there along the Yankee line, muzzle flashes showed men who, despite the artillery barrage, knew they had to kill the attackers now or die themselves in moments. Then a couple of machine guns, one right in front of Ramsay, came to hammering life.
Men of the Creek Nation Army fell before that hateful patter like wheat before a reaper. There went Moty Tiger, clutching at his belly. There went Colonel Lincoln, down with boneless finality.
My regiment now, Ramsay thought. He waved the survivors forward. 'Come on!' he shouted. 'We can still — '
One moment, he was advancing. The next, without warning, he found himself lying in a shell hole, staring in confusion at dirt and a couple of bits of rusty barbed wire. He had trouble breathing. He couldn't figure out why till he tasted blood in his mouth. How did that happen? he wondered vaguely. He looked up at the sky. It was going black. That's not right, he thought. It's morning, not
XX
Sylvia Enos collected the mail from the box in the front hall of her apartment building. She crumpled up a patent-medicine circular. The allotment check from the Navy she kept.
Her lips twisted in a bitter smile. She had the money, drawn from George's pay, as he'd said she would before he enlisted. The only trouble was, she didn't care about the money. She would sooner have had her husband back. When he'd stayed in Boston after joining the Navy, when he'd, in essence, gone back to being a fisherman, she'd been overjoyed. Her life had returned to one not far different from what she'd known before the war started, even if she had kept her job at the canning plant. Considering all the dislocations that had come since 1914, she'd counted herself lucky.
'So much for luck,' she said as she started upstairs. Now George was gone, and gone farther and more irrevocably than when he'd languished in Confederate imprisonment. All she had by which to remember him were the monthly allotment checks and an occasional letter. There could have been more letters, she supposed, but George had never been much of a writer.
The hallway and the stairwell were not so warm as they had been a few weeks before: Boston 's summer, hot while it lasted, couldn't be counted on to last far into September. For the moment, cutting the heat only made days and nights more pleasant. Pretty soon, though, she wouldn't be wrangling with the Coal Board over fuel enough to cook her food. She'd be wrangling with its inflexible clerks and stubborn supervisors over fuel enough to keep her from freezing during the winter.
She left the stairwell and trudged wearily down the hall to Mrs. Coneval's apartment. She stood there in front of the doorway for a moment before she knocked. It sounded as if the children were fighting a battle of their own inside, a battle about the size of some of the big ones on the Kentucky front. She wondered how Brigid Coneval put up with the noise.
When she did knock, she needed to hammer on the door to get anyone within to notice she was there. After a while, Brigid Coneval opened the door. The racket, without wood between it and Sylvia, grew from alarming to ap palling. 'A bit rowdy they are today,' Mrs. Coneval said with a smile that could only be described as wan.
'So it would seem,' Sylvia agreed. She knew she would have gone crazy, cooped up in there the day around with a horde of screaming children. Given the choice between that and the factory job she had, she would have chosen factory work a hundred times out of a hundred. Her own two children were plenty to try to keep under control.
'I'll get your wee ones,' Brigid Coneval said, and disappeared back into chaos. A toddler smaller than Mary Jane started to howl. Sylvia thanked heaven she hadn't got pregnant again after George came back from the CSA. Trying to take care of a new baby by herself, along with two small children, was nothing to anticipate with glee.
Mrs. Coneval came back holding Mary Jane by one hand and George, Jr., by the other. George, Jr., twisted in her grasp and fired an imaginary rifle at one of the other children. 'I got you, Joey, you dirty Reb!'
'No, you didn't — you missed me,' Joey shouted back-the next small boy who admitted himself slain in imaginary conflict would be the first. 'And I'm not the Reb-you are!'
'Liar, liar, pants on fire,' George, Jr., yelled at him, which made Mary Jane giggle. George, Jr., said, 'Hello, Mama. Joey cheats.'
'I don't either!' Joey exclaimed.
