Walk in Hell

declared, and wondered which of her offspring had. Mary Jane would say no to everything on general principles, and George, Jr., knew better than to admit to anything that would get him spanked.

Dear George, Sylvia wrote, I got your letter. It was good to hear from you. I am glad you are well and safe. I saw Charlie White’s wife on T Wharf and she says he is out to sea on a cruiser. They will have good food on that ship. Despite his name, Charlie was black, not white, and had been the cook on the Ripple. Reinking her pen, she went on, I am well. The children are well. We all hope you do get leave so we can see you. We miss you. I love you. Sylvia.

When she was done, she read the letter over. It seemed so flat and empty. She wished she were a better writer, to be able to say all the things she wanted to say, all the things that really mattered. Maybe she could have done that if she’d had more schooling. As things were…it would have to do. More searching scared an envelope out of cover. Seaman George Enos, she wrote on it. U.S. Navy. Central River Command. St. Louis, Mo. She went on one more scouting expedition, this time through her handbag in search of a stamp. She found one, stuck it on the envelope, and put the letter in the handbag so she could mail it in the morning.

In the chaos of getting the children ready and over to Mrs. Coneval’s and then of getting herself off to work, she forgot about the letter. She remembered only when her machine stuck the first label on a can of mackerel. Can after can followed that first one. She had to pull three levers for each can, keep the machine full of labels and paste, and clear the feeding mechanism when it jammed, as it did every so often.

After a while, she noticed Isabella Antonelli wasn’t at the machine next to hers. The foreman, Mr. Winter, was running it instead. Mr. Winter was fat and fifty-five and walked with a limp from a wound he’d got in the Second Mexican War. The Army didn’t want him, which made him a godsend for the canning plant.

When she asked him where her friend was, she thought for a moment he hadn’t heard her over the rattle of the lines that sent the cans moving from one station to the next. Then he said, “She called on the telephone this morning. Western Union visited her last night.”

“Oh, God,” Sylvia said. Isabella Antonelli’s husband had been a fisherman on a little boat that operated out of T Wharf. Then the Army had taken him and sent him off to Quebec. The newspapers did their best to be optimistic about the fighting north of the St. Lawrence, but their best wasn’t all that good. The going was hard up there, and bad weather liable to last till May.

Mr. Winter nodded. He was bald, with a fringe of gray hair above his ears; the lights shone off his smooth pate. “She’ll be out a few days, I’m afraid,” he said. “They’ll put a temporary on the machine here tomorrow, I expect, till she can come back.”

Sylvia nodded, too, hiding a flash of fury frightening in its fierceness. Yes, Mr. Winter was a godsend for the canning plant, all right. He thought of getting the mackerel out before he worried about the people who got it out. Keep the machines running, no matter what, she thought. Antonelli was one more line in the casualty lists? So what?

She filled the paste reservoir to her machine from one of the cans under it. The foreman at the paste plant probably had the exact same attitude. For that matter, the generals probably had the exact same attitude, too. What was Antonelli to them but one more line in the casualty lists?

All the canning machines, including Sylvia’s, ran smoothly, unlike the war machine. She pulled her three levers, one after the other, then went back and did it again and again and again. If you didn’t notice how your feet got sore from standing by the machine for hours at a time, you could get into a rhythm where you did your job almost without conscious thought, so that half the morning could go by before you noticed. Sylvia didn’t know whether to like those days or be frightened of them.

Mr. Winter’s voice startled her out of that half-mesmerized state: “Your husband well, Mrs. Enos?”

“What?” she said, and then, really hearing the words, “Oh. Yes. Thank you. I got a letter from him yesterday, as a matter of fact. I wrote an answer, too,” she added virtuously, “but I forgot to mail it this morning. I’ll do it on the way home.”

“Good. That’s good.” The foreman’s smile displayed large yellow teeth, a couple of them in the lower jaw missing. “Good-looking woman like you, though, I bet you get lonely anyhow, no man around. Being lonely’s no fun. I know about that, since Priscilla died a few years ago.”

Numbly, Sylvia nodded. The machine ran low on labels, which let her tend to it without having to say anything. Mr. Winter hadn’t been crude, as men sometimes were. But she felt his eyes on her as she loaded in the labels. He was the foreman. If he pushed it and she said no, he could fire her. The line kept running smoothly, but she never got the easy rhythm back.

VII

Among the butternut uniforms in the West Virginia prisoner-of-war camp were a few dark gray ones: Navy men captured by the damnyankees. Reggie Bartlett found himself gravitating toward them. For a while, he wondered why; he’d never had any special interest in the Confederate States Navy before the war began. After a bit, he found an answer that, if it wasn’t the whole picture, was at least a good part of it.

The trouble was, soldiers were boring. He’d done as much hard fighting as any of them, and more than most-war in the Roanoke valley was as nasty a business as war anywhere in the world. He’d seen almost all the horrors there were, and heard about the ones he hadn’t seen. Soldiers told the same kinds of stories, over and over again. They got stale.

Navy men, now, Navy men were different, and so were their stories. They’d been in strange places and done strange things-or at least things Reggie Bartlett had never done. Those tales made the time between stretches of chopping wood and filling in slit trenches and the other exciting chores of camp life pass more quickly.

Even when things went wrong in the stories, they went wrong in ways that couldn’t happen on dry land. A senior lieutenant who somehow managed to look clean and spruce and well-shaved in spite of the general camp squalor was saying, “Damnyankees suckered me in, neat as you please. There sat this fishing boat, out in the middle of the Atlantic, no ships around her, naked as a whore in her working clothes. So up came my boat to sink her with the deck gun-cheaper and surer than using one of my fish-”

“One of your what, Lieutenant Briggs?” Reggie asked, a beat ahead of a couple of other prisoners who had gathered around the Navy lieutenant for reasons probably similar to his own.

“Torpedoes,” Briggs explained. Under his breath, he muttered, “Landlubbers.” But he resumed after a moment, as glad to tell the story as the others were to hear it: “You can’t always trust a whore, though, even when she’s naked. And sure enough, this was the badger game. The fishing boat was towing a Yankee sub on a cable with a telephone line attached. I let the fishermen go over the side before I sank their boat, and what thanks did I get? Their damned submersible blew me out of the water.” His face clouded. “Only a couple-three of us lived. The rest went right to the bottom, never had a chance.”

“It’s almost like what the Mormons done to the damnyankees, blowin’ up all that powder right under ’em,” somebody said.

“More like sniper’s work,” Reggie contradicted. “A lot of times, a sniper’ll be hiding, and he’ll try and make somebody on the other side look up to see what’s going on further down the trench. And if you’re dumb enough to do it, the bastard with the scope on his rifle, he’ll put one right in your earhole for you.”

“Good analogy,” Briggs said, nodding. He wasn’t a whole lot older than Bartlett, but better educated and also stiffer in manner; had he been a civilian, he would have been something like a junior loan officer at a bank. He was steady, he was sound, he was reliable-and Reggie would have loved to play poker against him, because if the Yankees could play him for a sucker that way, Reggie figured he could, too.

He’d just noticed that his analogy, whether Briggs approved of it or not, took things back to the trenches when the U.S. guards started shouting, “Prisoners form by barracks in parade ranks!”

Senior Lieutenant Briggs frowned. “This isn’t right. It’s not time to form parade ranks.” The break in routine irked him.

“Probably got some kind of special announcement for us,” Bartlett said. The guards had done that before, a