that his hearing was the most important thing he risked, and that the war would ever end.
Pompey came up to Featherston and waited to be noticed. When the sergeant gave him a curt nod, he said, 'Cap'n Stuart's compliments, suh, and we gonna shift our fire to a new Yankee position, range 5,300 yards, bearing 043.'
'Range 5,300, bearing 043,' Featherston repeated; he had to work to keep from imitating Pompey's mincing accent. Captain Stuart's servant nodded and went off to give the word to the next howitzer in the battery.
Featherston sighed. He didn't know whether Major Potter had investigated Pompey or not. If the major had, nothing had come of it. Pompey remained Jeb Stuart Ill's trusted servant: too trusted, as far as Jake was concerned. He knew Captain Stuart had given the command. All the same, getting it from Pompey was too close to taking orders from a Negro to suit him.
He glanced over at Nero and Perseus, who were combing down the horses. They were all right. They knew white men gave the orders and they took them. Pompey, just because he worked for somebody important, thought his own station improved, too. Thinks his shit don't stink, is what he does, Jake thought.
And then he stopped worrying about things as trivial as the right status of the Negro in the Confederate States of America. At any other time, that would have been important. Not now, not when Yankee shells came whistling in straight toward where he was standing.
Big ones, he thought with a chill as the freight-train noises in the sky grew to a roar, a scream. The damnyankees' three-inchers fired more slowly than the Confederacy's guns, but their shells gave the same scant warning coming in. A little whizz before the bang, that was all you got.
Not these. Through the growing shriek of torn air, Jethro Bixler screamed something. If it wasn't 'Get down!' it should have been. A split second before the shells went off, Featherston threw himself flat.
Back home outside of Richmond, he'd gone to church a lot of times to hear a preacher work himself up into a good sweat over hellfire and damnation and brimstone. You listened to a preacher who was good enough, who threw off his jacket and waved his white-shirtsleeved arms at the congregation, you could get the feeling hell wasn't more than half a mile off.
That's what he'd thought then. Since the war started, he'd begun to get the notion he had a more intimate personal acquaintance with hellfire than any preacher ever spawned-unless the preacher served a gun, too.
But now, with the war that had started in summer and should have ended before winter still going strong at the start of spring and heading into its second summer of what looked like a great many yet to come, he discovered he didn't know so much after all. The battery had been under fire before, plenty of times. That was why he wasn't working with all the same gun-crew men who'd started out with him bombarding Washington, D.C. You shot at the damnyankees, they shot at you. That was fair.
They weren't just shooting at the battery this time, though. They wanted to wipe it off the face of the earth. He frantically hugged the dirt as the big shells burst all around him. Black puffs of smoke with red flame at their hearts sprang into being everywhere. Shrapnel balls and fragments of shell casing hissed through the air. The ground jerked and bucked. Featherston had never felt an earthquake, and after this bombardment was convinced he didn't need to. If you were in a house when an earthquake hit, the worst that would happen was things falling on you. Things weren't just falling here. They were accelerated, viciously accelerated, by high explosive.
Worst was knowing that whether he lived or died was altogether out of his hands. If a shell came down so near the blast ripped his lungs to bits from the inside out, if an explosion blew him to smithereens, if a tiny steel splinter awled through his skull and into his brain.. then that was what happened. He had no say, and whether he was a good soldier or a bad didn't matter. Luck, that was it.
Shells kept raining down on the battery. He heard someone screaming, and realized it was himself. He felt not the least bit ashamed. You had to let some of the terror loose, or it would eat you from the inside out. Besides, in the many times worse than thunderstorm all around, who could hear him?
He wondered what else the Yankees were bombarding. Front-line trenches? Ammunition dumps? It mattered in theory, but not in practice, not right now. He couldn't do anything about it any which way. All he could do was lie flat and scrabble at the ground with the knife he wore on his belt, trying to dig a shallow hole in which he could shelter from the storm of steel- the storm of hate, the infantry called it-raging all around.
Blast from a near miss picked him up and slammed him back down to the ground, the way you might throw a kitten you didn't want against a brick wall to get rid of it. 'Oof!' he said, and then, as he got more air back into his lungs, several less printable remarks.
How long the bombardment went on, he never knew exactly. When at last it lifted, it went down into the trenches even nearer the river than the battery was. Dazedly, Jake Featherston sat up. His hands shook. He tried to make them steady, and discovered he couldn't.
His gun, for a miracle, was still upright. Nobody else from the crew was sitting up, though. A couple of people were down and moaning, a couple of others down and not moving. The rest of the battery's howitzers had been tossed every which way, as if they were jackstraws.
He looked toward the smoke and dirt rising from the front-line trenches. Through that haze, he saw Yankees coming out of their own trenches and rushing toward the Susquehanna. They were going to try to force a crossing right now.
He ran to the howitzer. His head swivelled wildly. He had a target artillerymen dreamed of-but if he had to handle the three-incher by himself, he couldn't possibly fire often enough to do the CSA any good. He spied motion. Somehow, Nero and Perseus had come through the bombardment with as little damage as he had.
'You niggers!' he shouted. 'Get your black asses up here on the double!' The labourers obeyed. If they hadn't, he would have drawn his pistol and shot them both. As things were, he barked, 'You've seen the crew serve this gun often enough. Reckon you know how to do it your own selves?'
The two Negroes looked at each other. 'Mebbe we do, Marse Jake,' Perseus said at last, 'but-'
'No time for buts.' Featherston pointed toward the Susquehanna. 'Every damnyankee in the world is headin' straight this way. They get this far, they're gonna kill you the same as me. Only way to keep 'em from gettin' this far I can think of is to blow 'em up first. Now-you gonna serve the gun?'
He didn't know whether his logic or his hand on the butt of his pistol was the more convincing. But the Negroes, after glancing at each other again, both nodded. 'I kin load, I reckon,' Nero said, 'an' Perseus, he kin tote the shells. You got to do the rest, Marse Jake. We don't know nothin' 'bout how to aim.'
'I'll handle that,' Featherston promised. He looked around for Jethro Bixler, then wished he hadn't. The loader was spread out over the ground like an anatomy lesson. He hoped Nero wasn't lying to him, the way blacks did sometimes when they wanted to impress a white man.
Nero wasn't. He waited while Jake frantically worked the elevation screw to lower the muzzle of the gun and shorten range, then opened the breech, slammed in a shell, and dogged it shut almost as fast as poor dead Jethro could have done.
With a whoop, Featherston yanked the firing lanyard. The howitzer bellowed. A couple of seconds later, the shell burst among the swarming Yankees. They were close enough for Jake to watch the ones near the burst going down like ninepins. He whooped again and traversed the piece a little to the left.
Nero worked the breech. Out came the old shell casing. In went the new round. Jake jerked the lanyard. More U.S. soldiers fell. Methodically, he kept pumping shells into them. Despite the Yankee bombardment, not all the Confederate machine gunners were blasted out of their positions. They too began scything the U.S. attackers with bullets. Some of the Yankees did manage to ford the river and get into the Confederate trenches. The only ones who went any farther than that came to the rear as prisoners.
Seeing the glum, bloodied men in green-gray, Nero howled like a wolf. 'We done it!' he shouted. 'Jesus God almighty, we done it!'
They hadn't done it all by themselves-some guns from other batteries had spread death through the Yankee ranks, too-but they had done it. The eastern bank of the Susquehanna was littered with corpses tossed at every possible angle, and at too many impossible ones. A few last U.S. soldiers were scuttling back to their own trenches, like dogs fleeing with tails between their legs.
'We really did do it.' Featherston knew he sounded stunned and shaky. He didn't feel bad about it; he was stunned and shaky. He slapped Nero on the back, and then Perseus. 'You boys can serve my gun any time you please, and that's a fact. For a while there, I figured we'd be fightin' off the damn-yankees with pistols.'
'Ain't got no pistol, Marse Jake,' Nero pointed out. He looked in the direction of a dead artilleryman. 'Them
