Walk in Hell

more clouds rolling his way. He pointed in that direction and said, “Looks like we’ve got ourselves a new commanding officer.”

“What are you talkin’ about?” Pete Hairston asked.

“General Winter,” Bartlett answered. Hairston did a double take, but then he nodded. If the rain kept coming, the way it looked as if it would, nobody on either side would go anywhere fast, not for a good long while.

“Ma’am?” Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid loomed over Nellie Semphroch. “May I speak to you for just a minute, ma’am?”

“What do you want?” Nellie knew her voice was cold, and did nothing to warm it. Speaking with the Confederate officer who’d seduced her daughter (or so she’d thought of it, not that Edna would have needed much seducing) was the last thing she wanted. “Whatever it is, you’d better make it snappy. We’re goin’ to be busy very soon, I expect.”

“Yes, ma’am. I know that, ma’am. That’s why I came here so early, ma’am.” Kincaid stood there, holding his butternut slouch hat in both hands. He kept twisting it every which way, though he didn’t seem to notice. He took a deep breath, held it so long he began to turn red, and then blurted, “Ma’am, me and your daughter, we’d like to get married, ma’am.”

Nellie’s head whipped around. There stood Edna, stacking cups on the countertop by the coffeepots so she and Nellie could serve a lot of coffee in a hurry. Edna’s face wore what Nellie could think of only as an idiot grin. “That’s right, Ma,” she said, and the grin got wider.

“You’re too young,” Nellie said automatically.

“I’m older’n you were when you got married,” her daughter retorted. “And I sure do want to marry Nick there.” It was the first time she’d called Kincaid that-no, the first time Nellie had heard her call him that. When she did, he started grinning an idiot grin, too.

And she was right. Nellie had been younger than Edna was now when her name abruptly became Semphroch. Her name had had to change abruptly. “Edna, are you in a family way?” she demanded.

Lieutenant Kincaid turned red, the blush starting at his collar and rising all the way to his forehead. Edna indignantly tossed her head. “I am not-no such thing,” she answered. “And I ought to know, too.” When Kincaid heard that, he got even redder.

“All right.” Nellie knew when to beat a retreat. She’d been in a family way when she got married, though she didn’t think Edna knew that. The less Edna ever found out about her unsavory past, the better she’d like it.

“Ma’am, your daughter and I, we really do love each other,” Kincaid said earnestly. “We’ll be happy together for the rest of our lives, I know we will.”

If I laugh at him, he’ll get angry at me, and so will Edna. Nellie made herself hold her face still. It wasn’t easy. He’d managed to get Edna’s corset off her once (maybe more than once; Nellie admitted to herself she didn’t know for sure about that) and both of them had liked what followed, so they thought they’d be happy together forever. Nellie knew better. She’d learned better the hard way. She wanted to pass on what she’d learned, but they wouldn’t listen. She knew they wouldn’t listen. The only way anyone learned those lessons was the hard way.

Off in the middle distance, artillery rumbled. Lately, days didn’t go by-hours hardly went by-without that sound in the air. It reminded Nellie of her second biggest problem with Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid, after his being a man. “Edna,” she said, as gently as she could, “he’s a Confederate. Do you want to go down there to live?” By the way she said down there, she might have been talking about dropping into hell for a visit.

Now Edna turned bright red. Like every child in the USA since the War of Secession, she’d been taught to think of Confederates as the enemy, with a capital E. That hadn’t worried her when Kincaid started sniffing after her. But maybe she hadn’t faced, even in her own mind, all the implications of what marrying him would mean. “I love him,” she said defiantly.

“You think you can stay here in Washington the rest of your days?” Nellie asked. The artillery rumbled again, louder this time. “How much longer do you think the CSA can hold on here?”

“We’ll hold Washington,” Kincaid said. “President Wilson said it was our capital by rights, and we’ll keep it. President Semmes says the same thing, so that’s how it’ll be.” He thrust out his already prominent chin, as if to stay the Yankee hordes with the granite contained therein.

Nellie thought about mentioning the jawbone of an ass, but forbore. What she did say was, “You Confederates have said a lot of things that haven’t come true. What makes you think this’ll be any different?”

“Don’t you rag on him, Ma!” Edna said shrilly.

When Nellie heard that tone of voice from her daughter, she knew the game was lost. Edna would do whatever Edna intended doing, and nothing and nobody would stop her. My God, Nellie thought. How am I going to explain this to Mr. Jacobs? The daughter of a spy for the United States running off and marrying a Confederate officer? He’d never trust Nellie again.

Edna, of course, hadn’t the slightest idea Nellie was a spy for the USA. A good thing, too, Nellie thought. She’d never imagined life could get so complicated. Knowing it was weak, she tried a new card: “Suppose I say no?”

Kincaid didn’t answer, which told Nellie the card was even weaker than she’d thought. He’d seemed so polite, she’d hoped a refusal might make him go away. Edna did reply, firmly: “Ma, we’d run off. Nick knows this chaplain- he told me so.” Kincaid blushed again, but after a moment nodded. Edna went on, “You can’t stop us, and you know it. You got to sleep sometime.”

“You’d leave me to run the coffeehouse all by my lonesome?” Nellie asked, shifting with the changing breeze as adroitly as a politician. “It’s too much for one person. It’s too much for two people, sometimes.”

“Hire yourself a nigger,” Edna told her. “Ma, you know you’re making good money. You can hire a couple of niggers, easy.”

Again, that was probably true. Kincaid said, “Edna, honey, when we get back down into my country”-he spoke as if to assure her the CSA was far superior to this benighted northern land-“you won’t have to lift a finger. You’ll have niggers doing all your work for you.”

Nellie did laugh then. She couldn’t help it. “Niggers doing all your work for you, Edna, on a lieutenant’s pay?” she said. “Likely tell. Besides, aren’t the Confederate States buzzing like a hornets’nest about how niggers aren’t going to be like servants no more?”

“I don’t reckon that’ll come to anything,” Lieutenant Kincaid said. He sounded none too confident, though, and he said not a word about how easy keeping Negro servants on a junior officer’s pay would be. That relieved Nellie; she’d feared he would announce that his father owned a plantation stretching halfway across Alabama, and that what he got from the Confederate War Department was less than pocket change to him.

Before the argument-the losing argument, Nellie was convinced-could go on, the door to the coffeehouse opened. The bell above it chimed. A fierce smile of triumph lighted Edna’s face. “Ma,” she said sweetly, “why don’t you go take care of Mr. Reach there?”

Not five minutes earlier, Nellie had wondered how life got so complicated. Now she wondered if God had decided to show her she didn’t know what complicated meant. Sure as hell, there was Bill Reach folding himself into a chair at a table by the window. He looked the same as he always had since he’d returned, all unbidden, to Nellie’s life: dark, unkempt clothes, stubbled chin and cheeks, bleary eyes.

As she went up to him, she heard Lieutenant Kincaid say, “I never did fancy that fellow, not from the first time I set eyes on him.”

Edna giggled. “I think he’s one of Ma’s old beaus.” Nellie’s back stiffened.

“Hello, Little Nell,” Reach said when Nellie reached his table. Edna giggled. Nicholas Kincaid chuckled. Nellie steamed.

Speaking very softly, she said, “If you ever call me that again, I will tell the Confederate occupying authorities exactly-exactly, do you hear me? — what you are.”

Those bleary eyes widened. “Me? I’m not anything much,” he said, but the certainty that usually informed his gravelly voice was missing.

“You heard me,” Nellie whispered. “I don’t ever want to see you round here again, either.” In normal tones, she went on, “Now what’ll it be?”

“Cup of coffee, couple fried eggs, and buttered toast,” Reach said, his tone grudging. He smelled of