The other woman staggered back and sat down hard. She’d almost stumbled into one of the stoves, which would have given her even worse hurt than Anne had intended. Blood dribbled from the corner of her mouth. She stared up at Anne like a dog that rolls over onto its back to present its belly and throat to a stronger rival.
“Before they sent me to this camp,” Anne said, “I asked them to give me a rifle and let me fight alongside our soldiers and militiamen. They wouldn’t let me-
Nobody argued with her, not now. She’d not only flayed Melissa with words but also thrashed her. The plump woman slowly stood up and went back to her own cot, one hand clutched to her jaw. She sat down on the canvas and blankets and didn’t say a thing.
Anne spoke into vast silence: “Happy New Year.” Before the war, people had celebrated the hour by shooting guns in the air. These past two New Years, they’d shot with intent to kill, not only on the hour but all day long, all week long, all month…
Convinced the trouble in the tent was over for the time being, Anne sat down again. As she did so, the irony of one of the arguments she’d used to discomfit Melissa suddenly occurred to her. She hadn’t been wrong when she’d said that poor whites in the Confederacy were more concerned about keeping blacks down than were the rich, who would stay on top no matter what the relationship between the races happened to be.
A few miles to the north, though, the agitators of the Congaree Socialist Republic were using similar arguments to spur their followers to fresh effort against their white foes. Did that mean the Negroes had been right to rebel?
She shook her head. That wasn’t what she’d had in mind at all. They weren’t building anything up there, just tearing down. She wondered if anything would be left of Marshlands by the time she was finally able to return to it. One way or another, though, she figured she would get along. She wasn’t Melissa, to fall into obscurity. No. Melissa hadn’t fallen into obscurity. She’d never been anything but obscure. Many fates might yet befall Anne Colleton, but not, she vowed, that one.
“Look at that bastard burn,” Ben Carlton said, his voice as full of joy as if he’d never seen anything more beautiful than the flaming factory in Clearfield, Utah.
Watching the Utah Canning Plant go up in smoke felt pretty good to Paul Mantarakis, too. As they had a habit of doing, the Mormons had used the big, strongly built building to anchor their line. Now that it was a blazing wreck, they’d have to abandon it, which meant the United States Army could take one more grinding step on the road toward the last rebel stronghold in Ogden.
“Three quarters of the way there,” Mantarakis muttered under his breath. They were only nine miles from Ogden now. He could see the town from here-or he could have seen it, had the smoke from the great burning here in Clearfield not obscured the northern horizon.
“Soon all the misbelievers shall be cast into the fiery furnace and receive the punishment they deserve,” Gordon McSweeney said. He had the drum and hose of the flamethrower strapped onto his back. He hadn’t been the one who’d set the canning plant on fire, though; artillery had managed that. Had the big guns failed, Paul could easily imagine the other sergeant going out there and starting the blaze.
Paul shook his head. “Doesn’t sound quite right for that.”
“Yeah, I know, Sarge.” But Dan Stonebreaker was still laughing. He went on, “I damn near got killed by a can of string beans.”
“Huh?” Mantarakis looked at the missile that had landed close to him. Sure as hell, it was a tin can that must have exploded in the fire inside the plant. He examined the goop inside the can. “This one wasn’t beans. Looks more like apricots, something like that.”
In short order, the soldiers also identified beets and peas. Whenever some more cans exploded inside the factory, the men would sing out, “Vegetable attack!” and take cover more melodramatically than they did against artillery or machine-gun fire.
They took casualties from the superheated produce, too. One fellow who wasn’t wearing his helmet got a fractured skull when a one-pound can of peas landed right on his luckless, foolish head. Hot bits of metal, almost as dangerous as shrapnel or shell fragments, burned several more.
Then the U.S. guns opened up with another barrage. When it eased, the soldiers went up and over the top and drove the Mormons out of Clearfield. The men-and women-who fought under the beehive banner and the motto DESERET fought as hard as ever, but there were fewer of them in these trenches than there had been farther south.
“I think we’ve finally got them on the run,” Captain Schneider said. He looked like a Negro with a bad paint job-his face was black with soot, but smeared here and there just enough to suggest he might be a white man after all. Paul Mantarakis looked down at himself. He couldn’t see his own face, but his hands and uniform were as filthy as those of the company commander.
“Come on!” Gordon McSweeney shouted, his voice ringing over the field like a trumpet. “We have the heretics on the run. The more we push them, the greater the punishment we give. Forward!”
Mantarakis’ opinion was that McSweeney was a hell of a lot crazier than the Mormons. He didn’t say so; McSweeney was, after all, on his side. And the shouts were doing some good, pulling U.S. soldiers after the Scotsman as he singlehandedly advanced against the enemy. He would have advanced, though, had not a single man followed.
For the next mile, maybe two, the going was easy. The Mormons had no real line of solid fortifications here. Men retreating before the American advance traded shots with their pursuers, but it was hardly counted as a rear- guard action. “Maybe we do have ’em on the run,” Paul said to nobody in particular. Even the fanaticism of the Mormons had to have limits…didn’t it?
Before long, he was doubting that again. U.S. troops ran up against yet another defensive line prepared in advance and manned by still more determined warriors. Such a line called for spadework in return, and the Americans began turning shell holes into a trench line of their own.
Captain Schneider pointed west, toward some ruins not far from the horizon. “We want to be careful the enemy doesn’t pull a fast one on us. Those buildings, or what’s left of them, are the Ogden Ordnance Depot. It’d be just like the Mormons to pack ’em full of powder and touch ’em off as our forces were moving up to ’em.”
The buildings were not part of the Mormon defensive line, which only increased Mantarakis’ suspicions: the rebels fought from built-up positions till forced out of them by artillery or, more often, by the bayonet. But, before long, U.S. troops had not only occupied the Ordnance Depot buildings, they were firing from them on the Mormon defenses farther north. When an American aeroplane dropped a couple of bombs nearby-whether because it thought the enemy still held the depot or because it simply couldn’t aim worth a damn, Paul never knew-the soldiers shooting from it began waving a big Stars and Stripes to show under whose ownership it had passed.
Maybe the sight of the American flag in the ruins of the Ordnance Depot was some kind of signal. Paul never knew that, either. But, whether by plan or by coincidence, the ground rocked under his feet a couple of minutes later.
He staggered, stumbled, fell. “What the hell…?” he shouted while clods of earth rained down on him from the wall of the trench in which he’d been standing-and from on high, too, or so it seemed. He was afraid the whole trench would collapse.
Through the shaking, through the hideous din, Captain Schneider shouted, “Earthquake! I was in the Presidio in San Francisco ten years ago, and it was almost like this.” He managed to stay on his feet.
“Make it stop! Jesus, make it stop!” Ben Carlton howled. It would have taken Jesus to make it stop; that was surely beyond the power of an infantry captain, or even of Teddy Roosevelt himself.
Mantarakis succeeded in standing. The rumble had faded, leaving behind an awful silence. The sound that
