Shaking her head, she went downstairs and out into the street. It was still dark outside; the sun wouldn't be up for most of another hour. Breath making a foggy cloud around her, she walked down to the corner and waited for the trolley. Up it came a few minutes later. She climbed in and dropped her nickel in the fare box. A fellow in a rain slicker who looked like a fisherman stood up to give her his seat. She took it with a murmur of thanks.
She changed trolleys, then got off and walked over to the canning plant, a square brick building that looked ancient though it wasn't and that smelled of fish even more powerfully than T Wharf. The workers coming in with her were a mixed lot, some white men who hadn't yet been called into the Army, some colored men who weren't likely to be called into the Army unless things got even worse than they were already, and a lot of women like her who needed to keep body and soul together and families running while their men were gone.
A couple of women were wearing black; they'd lost their husbands in the fighting that sprawled across North America. Sylvia wondered if she should be doing the same. Stubbornly, she refused to give up hope. She wouldn't don widow's weeds till she knew for a fact she was a widow.
Before she'd had to look for work, she'd never operated anything more complicated than a sewing machine. The machine that put labels on cans of mackerel as they came sliding along a conveyor belt wasn't much more complicated. You pulled a lever to shunt the can off the belt, another one to route it through the machine, and a third to send it on its way, now adorned with a fish that looked more like a tuna than a mackerel-but, since the housewife in Ohio or the bachelor in Nebraska had probably never seen either in the flopping flesh, what harm was done?
You did have to watch out that the labelling machine didn't run out of paste, and every once in a while the endless strip of labels would jam. When that happened, you had to shut down the line till you could clear and fix the feed mechanism. Most days, though, it was just pull this one, pull that one, pull the other one, then pull this one again, from the start of the shift right through to the end.
Sometimes time crawled by. Sometimes it sped; Sylvia had found herself almost mesmerized by what she was doing, and had an hour or two slip by al most without conscious thought. You could talk through the clatter of thousands of cans and of the machinery that moved them on their way, but often there wasn't a whole lot to say.
Saturday half-shift often passed more slowly, at least in mental terms, than a full day's work. Sylvia had expected that, especially after being off for the New Year's holiday. But it didn't happen. She came out into the bright winter sun with the feeling that she had a lot of time to do the rest of the day's chores. She went to the grocer's and the butcher's and the yard-goods store for cloth and patterns for the clothes her children would be wearing come spring.
'Good to see you, Mrs. Enos,' the clerk there said as he took her money. 'Business has been slow. A lot of people are buying ready-to-wear goods these days.'
'Making them myself is cheaper-if I can find the time.' Sylvia shook her head. She didn't have much money since George had disappeared, but she didn't have much time, either. How could you win?
When she got back to her apartment building, she checked the rank of mailboxes in the front hall. She found a couple of advertising circulars, a Christmas card from her cousin in New York (she muttered rude things about the post office), and an envelope with a stamp she did not recognize and a rubber-stamped notice saying it had been forwarded through the International Society of Red Cross Organizations.
The rubber stamp nearly obscured the address. When she got a look at that, she shivered and felt so light- headed, she had to lean against the iron bank of mailboxes for a moment before she could open the envelope: it was in her husband's handwriting.
Dear Sylvia, the note inside read, I want you to know I am all right and not hurt. The Ripple was caught and sunk by the (here someone had rendered a word or two illegible with black ink). They took us to North Carolina, where I am now. They treat us well. The food is all right. You can write me in care of the Red Cross and it will get to me sooner or later. They may end up letting me go in a while because I wasn't in the Navy and they exchange civilians with the United States. I hope so. I love you. Give my love to the children to. I hope I see you before to long. Love again from your George.
Sylvia leaned against the mailboxes again. Tears ran down her cheeks. 'Oh, dear,' Henrietta Collingwood, a neighbor, said as she came downstairs. She pointed to the letter Sylvia was still holding. 'I hope it is not bad news.' By her voice, she sounded certain it was.
But Sylvia shook her head. 'No, Henrietta,' she said. 'The best news of all: he is alive.'
'Come on, nigger-lovers, get movin',' the Confederate guard said. He gestured with the bayonet of his rifle as if he would have liked to use it on the crew of the Ripple.
George Enos and the rest of the captured fishermen obediently got up and headed across the barbed-wire enclosure of Fort Johnston for their daily louse inspection. Anybody discovered with the little pests got his hair washed with kerosene and his clothes and bedding baked in an oven. That killed the lice for a while, but in a week or two they'd be back again.
Enos shivered. The wind off the Atlantic here at the outlet of the Cape Fear River was bitingly cold, though he still had on the gear he'd been wearing when the commerce raider Swamp Fox captured the Ripple. 'I thought North Carolina was supposed to be hot and sticky all the time,' he said.
'Shut up, nigger-lover,' the guard said, his voice flat and harsh. Enos would have been surprised if he was eighteen; his face was full of angry red blotches. But he had a gun and he had the rest of the Confederate Army behind him, so Enos shut up. The crew of the Ripple had that unlovely handle hung on them because they'd insisted on treating Charlie White like a human being even after the Swamp Fox plucked them off the steam trawler and then sank it.
Technically, they were detainees, not prisoners of war. U.S. commerce raiders had scooped up Confederate merchant seamen, too. They were being exchanged, one for one, in the order of capture, using the good offices of the Kingdom of Spain, one of the few nations neutral in the fight that roiled across the world. Enos figured he'd probably get back to Boston about a week before the war ended, if it ever did. He hadn't said that in his letter to Sylvia, but it remained at the back of his mind.
No matter what anybody called him, though, George felt like a prisoner of war. The worst of it was, he hadn't even been at war when the Confederates nabbed him. All he'd been doing was trying to make a living. The Rebels didn't give a damn about that. To them, capturing a fishing boat counted as a blow against the United States. It struck him as dreadfully unfair. War was about soldiers and sailors. It wasn't about fishermen, not as far as he was concerned. But nobody cared what he thought. Nobody cared how much he missed his wife, either. That was something else war was about: not caring.
Off to one side, chips flew as Charlie White chopped firewood. The cook worked with grim intensity, slamming the axe down again and again. It was his turn for the job; Enos had done it a couple of days before, and yesterday a sailor off a freighter the Swamp Fox had sent to the bottom. The Rebs didn't work Charlie any differently from the way they worked their other detainees. That would have been against international law, and they would have caught hell for it when word got back to the United States.
But they didn't treat him as they would have treated a white man, either, always jeering at him-and, to a lesser degree, at the crewmen of the Ripple for insisting he was their friend, not a servant or a pet. They had Negro servants here at Fort Johnston, men who acted like dogs around Southern whites. Enos wondered what they used for self-respect.
He didn't have much left himself. The medical orderly-the Rebs didn't waste a doctor on damnyankees, not unless they were dying-snapped, 'Bend over, nigger-lover.' When Enos obeyed, the fellow ran fingers through his hair, examining the nape of his neck and the short hairs behind his ears. Reluctantly, the orderly said, 'All right, you're clean-go on.'
Enos went. He suspected the Rebs of claiming the men from the Ripple were lousy even when they weren't, just so they could put them through the process of getting rid of the vermin. Afterwards, your head smelled for days as if you'd been soaking it in the well of a kerosene lantern.
To give him his due, the medical officer did try to keep from spreading lice from one man to another. Between inspections, he dipped his hands into a bowl from which rose the antiseptic smell of dilute carbolic acid, then dried them on a towel. He looked over Patrick O'Donnell, and let the captain of the Ripple pass inspection in the same grudging manner he had Enos.
O'Donnell went over to the barbed wire and stood around looking bored. Enos walked up and stood beside
