have to do what he tells them.”
“Like the Coal Board officials,” Sue said. “And the Ration Board, and the Train Transportation Board, and the War Loan subscription committees, and-” She could have gone on. Instead, she said, “All those people were bad enough before the war. They’re worse now, and there are more of them. And if you’re not a big cheese yourself, they act like little tin gods and give you a nasty time just to show they can do it.”
“Makes you wonder what the country’s coming to sometimes, doesn’t it?” Martin said. “Old people say there used to be more room to act the way you pleased, back before the Second Mexican War taught us how surrounded we are. Gramps would always go on about that, remember?”
She shook her head. “Not really. I was only six or seven when he died. What I remember about him was his peg leg, and how he always pretended he was a pirate on account of it.”
“Yeah. He got hurt worse than I did, and the doctors in the War of Secession weren’t as good as they are nowadays, either, I don’t suppose. He used to talk about stacks of cut-off arms and legs outside the surgeons’ tents after a battle.”
Sue looked revolted. “Not with me, he didn’t.”
“You’re a girl,” Chester reminded her. “He used to tell me and Hank all the horrible stuff. We ate it up like gumdrops.”
She sighed. “I was only seven when Henry died, too. What a horrible year that was, everybody wailing all the time. I miss him sometimes, same as Gramps.”
“I was-eleven? Twelve? Something like that,” Martin said. “He was two years older than me, I know that much. I remember the way the doctor kept shaking his head. For all the good he did us, he might as well have been a Sioux medicine man. Scarlet fever, any of those things-I wish they could cure them, not just tell you what they are.”
“He’d be in the Army, too-Henry, I mean.” Sue’s laugh was startled. “I don’t think I ever thought of Henry all grown up till now.”
“He’d be in the Army, all right,” Chester agreed. “He’d be an officer, I bet. Hank was always sharp as a razor. People listened to him, too. I didn’t-but I was his brother, after all.” A chilly breeze from off the lake seemed to slice right through his uniform. “Brr! Enough sightseeing. Let’s go home and sit in front of the fire.”
They caught the trolley and went southwest down Summit, alongside the Maumee. After three or four miles, the trolley car turned inland and clattered past the county courthouse and, across the street from it, the big bronze statue of Remembrance, sword bared in her right hand.
Pointing to it, Sue said, “We just got some new stereoscope views of New York City. Now I know how good a copy of the statue on Bedloe’s Island that one is, even if ours is only half as tall.”
“We’ve still got a lot to pay people back for-the United States do, I mean,” Martin said. Now he laughed. “I’ve got a Rebel to pay back, and I don’t even know who he is.”
The trolley took them over the Ottawa River, a smaller stream than the Maumee, and up into Ottawa Heights. The closest stop was three blocks from their apartment house. Chester remembered how cramped he’d felt in the flat before the war started. He had no more room now-less, in fact, because they’d had to make room for him when he came back to convalesce-but he didn’t mind. After crowded barracks and insanely crowded bombproof shelters, a room of his own, even a small one, seemed luxury itself.
His mother-an older, graying version of Sue-all but pounced on him when he came in the door. “You have a letter here from the White House!” Louisa Martin exclaimed, thrusting the fancy envelope at him. The Martin family had a strong tradition of never opening one another’s mail; that tradition, obviously, had never been so sorely tested as now.
“Don’t be silly, Mother,” Chester said. “The Rebs are still holding onto the White House.” His mother glared at him, and with reason. Even if business got done in Philadelphia, Washington remained the capital of the USA.
Sue squeaked. “Open it!” she said, and then grabbed his arm so he couldn’t.
He shook her off and did open the envelope. “‘Dear Sergeant Martin,’” he read from the typed letter, “‘I have learned you were wounded in action. Since you have defended not only the United States of America but also me personally on my visit to the Roanoke front, I dare hope my wishes for your quick and full recovery will be welcome. Sincerely yours, Theodore Roosevelt.’” The signature was in vivid blue ink.
“That’s wonderful,” Louisa Martin said softly. “TR keeps track of everything, doesn’t he?”
“Seems to,” Martin agreed. He kept staring at that signature. “Well, I was going to vote for him anyhow. Guess I’ll have to vote twice now.” If you knew the right people, in Toledo as in a good many other U.S. towns, you could do that, though he’d meant if for a joke.
His mother sighed. “One of these days, Ohio may get around to granting women’s suffrage. Then you wouldn’t need to vote twice.”
Stephen Douglas Martin, Chester’s father, came home from the mill about an hour later. “Well, well,” he said, holding the letter from TR out at arm’s length so he could read it. He was too old to worry about conscription, and had been promoted three times at work since the start of the war, when younger men with better jobs had to put on green-gray. “Ain’t that somethin’, Chester? Ain’t that somethin’? We ought to frame this here letter and keep it safe so you can show it to your grandchildren.”
“That would be something, Pop,” Martin said. He thought of himself with gray hair and wrinkled skin, sitting in a rocking chair telling war stories to little boys in short pants. Gramps’stories had always been exciting, even the ones about how he’d lost his leg. Could Chester make life in the trenches exciting? Was it anything he’d want to tell his grandchildren? Maybe, if he could show them the president’s letter.
“I’m proud of you, son,” his father said. “The Second Mexican War was over before they called me up. My father fought for our country, and now you have, too. That’s pretty fine.”
“All right, Pop,” Martin answered. For a moment, he wondered what his father would have said if he’d stopped that bullet with his head instead of his arm. Whatever it was, he wouldn’t have been around to hear it.
“Supper!” his mother called. The ham steaks that went with the fried potatoes weren’t very big-meat had got expensive as the dickens this past year, he’d heard a hundred times-but they were tasty. And there were plenty of potatoes in the big, black iron pan. She served Chester seconds of those, and then thirds.
“You’re going to have to let out the pants on my uniform,” he said, but all she did was nod-she was ready to do it. His father lighted a cigar, and passed one to him. The tobacco was sharp and rather nasty, but a cigar was a cigar. He leaned back in his chair as his mother and sister cleared away the dishes. For now, the front seemed far, far away. He tried to stretch each moment as long as he could.
“Come on!” Jake Featherston called to the gun crews of his battery. “We’ve got to keep moving.” Rain poured down out of the sky. The southern Maryland road, already muddy, began turning to something more like glue, or maybe thick soup. “Come on!”
A whistle in the air swelled rapidly to a scream. A long-range shell from a Yankee gun burst about a hundred yards to Featherston’s left. A great fountain of muck rose into the air. None splattered down on him, but that hardly mattered. He’d long since got as muddy as a human being could.
More U.S. shells descended, feeling for the road down which the First Richmond Howitzers were retreating. The damnyankee gunners couldn’t quite find it. The barrage, instead of swinging west from where the first one hit, went east. That meant they’d probably find another road and hurt a different part of the Army of Northern Virginia. Jake didn’t care. If he got out in one piece, he’d settle for that.
“Hey, Sarge!” Michael Scott said. With the shelling and the rain, the loader had to call two or three times to get Featherston’s attention. When he finally had it, he asked, “What do we do when we get to the Potomac?”
“You think I’m the War Department, God damn them to hell?” Featherston answered. The War Department, and especially its upper echelons, did not contain his favorite people. “If the damnyankees’ aeroplanes haven’t bombed all the bridges to hell and gone, I reckon we cross over ’em and go back into Virginia.”
“But what are we gonna do there?” Scott persisted.
“I told you, I’m not the goddamn War Department,” Jake said. He shook his head, which made cold rainwater drip down the back of his neck. They wouldn’t make him an officer, they didn’t have the brains to notice when the niggers were going to rise up, and they were still in charge of running the war? Where was the justice in that? And his own men expected him to think like a fancy-pants Richmond general? Where was the justice in
“But, Sarge-” the loader said, like a little boy complaining when his mother wouldn’t let him do what he
