Walk in Hell

he said, half to himself. “Nothing is the way it was any more.”

“No,” Anne said. “It’s not. But-I talked with President Semmes not so long ago. He’s worried, yes, but not that worried.” She checked herself; if the president hadn’t been that worried, would he have introduced the bill calling for Negro troops? Trying to look on the bright side, she pointed to Tom’s tunic. “That was a victory, there in the valley.”

“And it makes one,” her brother answered bitterly. “I pray to God we can hold the ground we gained, too. We need every man in the CSA at the front, and we need every man in the CSA working behind the lines so the men at the front have something to shoot at the damnyankees. If everybody could be two places at once twenty-four hours a day, we’d be fine.”

“That’s why the president wants to give the blacks guns,” she said.

“I understand.” He sounded impatient with her, something he’d rarely done…before the war, that endlessly echoed phrase. “We’ve put them in the factories to make up for the white men who’ve gone. Maybe we can put enough women in to make up for the niggers. Maybe.”

She didn’t want to argue with him any more. “Supper soon,” she said. “Come over to my cottage and we’ll talk more then. Get yourself settled in for now.”

“For now,” he repeated. “I’ve got to catch the train day after tomorrow.” He sighed. “No rest for the weary.”

Supper was fried chicken, greens, and pumpkin pie, with apple brandy that had no tax stamp on it to wash down the food. “It’s not what I would have given you if things were different,” Anne said, watching with something like awe as the mountain of chicken bones on her brother’s plate grew and grew. “No fancy banquets these days, though.”

“It’s nigger food,” Tom said, and then held up a hand against the temper that sparked in her eyes. “Wait, Sis. Wait. It’s good. It’s a hundred times better than what I eat at the front. Don’t you worry about it for a minute.” He patted his belly, which should have bulged visibly from what he’d put away but somehow didn’t.

“What are we going to do?” she said. “If this is the best we can hope for once the war is over, is it worth going on?”

“Kentucky is a state in the United States again,” Tom said quietly. “The Yankees say it is, anyhow, and they have some traitors there who go along with them. The best may not be as good as we hoped when we set out to fight, but the worst is worse than we ever reckoned it could be.” He yawned, then got up, walked over to her, and kissed her on the cheek. “I’m going to bed, Sis-can’t hold ’em open any more. You don’t have to worry about anything tonight-I’m here.” He walked out of the cottage into the darkness.

Julia took away the dishes. Anne got into a long cotton nightgown, blew out the lamps, and lay down. Off in the distance, an owl hooted. Off farther in the distance, a rifle cracked, then another, than a short volley. Silence returned. She shrugged. Ordinary noises of the night. As always, her pistol lay where she could reach it. She even carried the revolver when she needed to go to the outhouse instead of using the pot, though it was no good against moths and spiders.

Did she feel safer because her brother was here? Yes, she decided: now there were two guns on which she could rely absolutely. Did she feel he was taking on the job of protecting her, so she wouldn’t even have to think of such things as long as he was nearby? Laughing at the absurdity of the notion, she rolled over and went to sleep.

George Enos was swabbing the deck on the starboard side of the USS Ericsson when shouts of alarm rang out to port: “Torpedo!” He jumped as if someone had stabbed him with a pin. As klaxons began to hoot, he sprinted toward his battle station, a one-pounder antiaircraft gun not far from the depth-charge launcher at the stern of the destroyer. Someone, by some accident, had actually read his file and given him a job he knew how to do. The one-pounder wasn’t that different from an outsized machine gun.

“Torpedo!” The shouts grew louder. The Ericsson’s deck throbbed under Enos’ feet as the engines came up to full power from cruising speed. Thick, black smoke poured from the stacks. The smoke poured back toward him. He coughed and tried to breathe as little as he could.

The deck heeled sharply as the destroyer swung into a tight turn. The turn was to the right, not to the left as he’d expected. “We’re heading into the track,” he shouted.

At the launcher, Carl Sturtevant nodded. “If it misses us, we charge down the wake and pay the submarine a visit,” the petty officer said.

“Yeah,” George said. If it missed them, that was what would happen. But it was likelier to hit them when they were running toward it than if they’d chosen to run away. Enos did his best not to think about that. He was sure the whole crew of the Ericsson-including Captain Fleming, who’d ordered the turn- were doing their best not to think about that.

He peered ahead, though the destroyer’s superstructure blocked his view of the most critical area. His fate rested on decisions over which he had no control and which he could not judge till afterwards. He hated that. So did every other Navy man with whom he’d ever spoken, both on the Mississippi and out here in the Atlantic.

Something moving almost impossibly fast shot by the onrushing Ericsson, perhaps fifty feet to starboard of her. Staring at the creamy wake, George sucked in a long breath, not caring any more how smoky it was. “Missed,” he said with fervent delight. “Is that the only fish they launched at us?”

“Don’t hear ’em yelling about any others,” Sturtevant said.

Lieutenant Crowder came running toward the stern. “Load it up!” he shouted to Sturtevant and his comrades. “We’ll make ’em pay for taking a shot at us.”

“Yes, sir.” Sturtevant sounded less optimistic than his superior. The depth-charge launcher was a new gadget, the Ericsson one of the first ships in the Navy to use it instead of simply rolling the ashcans off the stern. Like a lot of new gadgets, it worked pretty well most of the time. Like a lot of sailors, George Enos among them, Sturtevant was conservative enough to find that something less than adequate.

Like a lot of young lieutenants, Crowder was enamored of anything and everything new, for no better reason than that it was new. He said, “By throwing the charges off to the side, we don’t have to sail right over the sub and lose hydrophone contact with it.”

“Yes, sir,” Sturtevant said again. His mouth twisted. George understood that, too. A hydrophone could give you a rough bearing on a submersible. What it couldn’t tell you was where along that bearing the damn thing lurked.

An officer on the bridge waved his hat to Lieutenant Crowder. “Launch!” Crowder shouted, as if the depth- charge crew couldn’t figure out what that meant for themselves.

The launcher roared. The depth charge spun through the air, then splashed into the sea. Carl Sturtevant’s lips moved. In the racket, George couldn’t hear what he said, but he saw the shape of the words. Here goes nothing-and it was just as well that Lieutenant Crowder couldn’t read lips. Another depth charge flew. The chances of hitting a submarine weren’t quite zero, but they weren’t good. The charge had to go off within fifteen feet of a sub to be sure of wrecking it, though it might badly damage a boat at twice that range. Since the destroyer and the submersible were both moving, hits were as much luck as in a blindfold rock fight.

As the third depth charge arced away from the Ericsson, water boiled up from the explosion of the first one. “Damnation!” Lieutenant Crowder shouted: only white water, nothing more. By the disappointed look on his face, he’d expected a kill on his very first try.

Another charge flew. The second one went off, down below the surface of the sea. Another seething mass of white water appeared, and then a great burst of bubbles and an oil slick that helped calm both the normal chop of the Atlantic and the turbulence the bubbles had kicked up.

“Hit!” Crowder and Sturtevant and the rest of the depth-charge crew and George all screamed the word at the same time. Skepticism forgotten, Sturtevant planted a reverent kiss on the oily metal side of the depth-charge launcher.

More bubbles rose from the stricken submersible, and more oil, too. Peering out into the ocean, George was the first to spy the dark shape rising through the murky water. “Here he comes, the son of a bitch,” he said, and turned the one-pounder in the direction of the submersible. The gun was intended for aeroplanes, but Moses hadn’t come down from the mountain saying you couldn’t shoot it at anything else.

Vaster than a broaching whale, the crippled sub surfaced. English? French? Confederate? George didn’t know or care. It was the enemy. The men inside had done their best to kill him. Their best hadn’t been good enough. Now