Walk in Hell

Rebs have gone by outside. After that, he’s gone forever.”

“I knew your mother, before you were born,” Bill Reach said to Edna, “back in the house at-” He drew a frightened breath of his own, for Nellie had stuck the knife in farther. How deep do you have to stab to kill a man? she wondered. A couple of more words out of Reach and she would have found out.

The sounds of marching feet, clattering wagons, and clopping hooves drowned out the drone of aeroplane engines high overhead. Maybe someone in the Confederate ranks was unwise enough to strike a match to light a cigar or pipe; maybe the moonlight let a U.S. pilot spot the column even without such help. However that was-Nellie had no way of knowing-a stick of bombs came falling out of the sky.

“Oh, Jesus!” Reach said when he heard the high-pitched shriek of air rushing past the bombs’ fins. Nellie needed a split second longer to identify the noise; U.S. bombers hadn’t come over Washington all that often.

A split second after that, sharp explosions left no possible doubt of what was going on. One bomb fell a little in front of the head of the Confederate column. Then two more in quick succession landed right in the middle of it. Either the U.S. bomb-aiming was extraordinarily good or the bombardier was trying for another target altogether and got lucky-again, Nellie never knew.

Glass sprayed inward. A sharp shard caught Nellie in the leg. She yelped. Edna screamed. Bill Reach let out a groan and clutched at his midsection. Nellie staggered back from him. He sank slowly to the floor.

A moment later, the front door opened, hitting him and knocking him sideways. It wasn’t another bomb; it was Confederate soldiers, seeking shelter from the rain of destruction from the sky. Outside in the street, injured soldiers screamed and groaned. A horse screamed, too, on a higher note. Officers shouted for medical orderlies and Negro stretcher-bearers.

Seeing Nellie, one of the Rebs pointed to Reach and said, “This here your husband the damnyankees done hurt, ma’am?” Even at such a time, he worked to separate the people of Washington from the government of the USA.

“I should say not,” she answered, and raised her voice, hoping Reach wasn’t too far gone to pay attention: “He’s a burglar. I caught him breaking in here. I was going to give him to you.” If they thought him an ordinary criminal, they wouldn’t ask him questions about anything but burglary. She didn’t know how he knew what else he knew, or exactly how much that was. She did know it was too much.

One of the Confederate soldiers said, “All right, ma’am, we’ll take charge of him-throw him in a wagon till we find somebody we can give him to. Don’t want to leave him bleedin’ all over your floor here. Come on, you.” He and a buddy got Bill Reach to his feet and out the door.

The bombs had stopped falling. The rest of the Rebels who’d tumbled into the coffeehouse took their leave. Some of them even apologized for bothering Nellie.

“-And your pretty daughter,” one of them added, which did him less good in her eyes than he would have guessed.

Nellie shut the door after the last departing Reb, a futile gesture with the window smashed. She looked around at glinting, drifted glass. “Go on upstairs and get me some slippers, Edna,” she said. “I’ll cut my feet to ribbons if I try to walk through this stuff.” She sighed, but went on, “It’s not near so bad as it was after the Rebs shelled us.”

“No, I reckon not,” Edna agreed. She started toward the stairway, then stopped and looked back at Nellie. “What was that crazy fellow talking about houses for? I ain’t never lived in a house, and I didn’t think you had, neither.”

Not all houses are homes, ran through Nellie’s mind. “I never did live in a house,” she answered. “He’s crazy like you said, that’s all. Get me those slippers-and get me a blanket, too, will you? With the windows gone, I think I better stay down here till sunup.”

“All right, Ma,” Edna said. “But I still think that feller knows you a whole lot better than you let on. If he didn’t, you wouldn’t let him get you all upset like you do.”

“Just get me my things,” Nellie snapped. Shaking her head, Edna went upstairs. Nellie shook her head, too. Sooner or later, the tawdry tale would come out. She could feel it in her bones. And what would she do then? How would she keep Edna in line at all?

Out in the street, wounded Confederates kept on groaning. They did give her a sense of proportion. You didn’t die of mortification, however much you wished you could. Bombs falling out of the sky were something else again.

Thunder filled the air. Artillery was pounding ever closer to St. Matthews, South Carolina, from the south and from the east. Negroes streamed back through the town. Some of them wore red armbands and carried the rifles with which they had fought their white, capitalist oppressors so long and so hard. One or two even wore helmets taken from Confederate corpses. They still had the look of soldiers to them. More, though, had thrown away armbands and weapons and were looking for escape, not more battle.

Scipio wished he could have fled, too. But he was too prominent, too recognizable to escape the square so easily. He’d been one of the leaders of the Congaree Socialist Republic from the beginning-from the beginning till the end, he thought. The end could not be delayed much longer.

I tried to tell them. He hadn’t sought the revolution. He’d been drawn into it, that seeming a safer course than letting himself be eliminated for knowing too much. And it had been a safer course-for a little more than a year. Now, with everything ending in fire, he saw-as he’d seen from the beginning-that going along with the Reds had bought him only a little time.

The rest of the leaders of what had been the Congaree Socialist Republic and was falling to pieces still refused to admit the game was up. Cassius stood in the town square, shouting, “Rally! Rally, God damn de lot of you! Rally ’gainst de ’pressors! Don’ let dey take yo’ freedom!”

He had picked men with him, men who could have formed a line and stopped-or tried to stop-the collapse, but who stood with their rifle butts trailing in the dust and watched men who had been fighters but were now only fugitives running past.

Cherry’s appeal to the faltering followers of the Republic was more fundamental: “Kill de white folks! Got to kill de white folks! Dey catches you, dey kills you sure!”

She was probably right. No-she was almost certainly right. But the men who had done so much had concluded they could do no more. Neither her fiery words nor her even more fiery beauty were enough to turn them back toward the trenches they could not hold.

She rushed over to Scipio and, to his startlement and no small alarm, threw herself into his arms. Her breasts were firm and soft against his chest. “Make dey stop, Kip,” she said in a bedroom voice. “Make dey stop, make dey fight. You de best talkin’ man we gots. Make dey go back an’ fight and I is yours. I do whatever you wants, you make dey stop.” She ran her tongue over her full lips, making them even moister and more delicious-looking than they had been. Every sort of promise smoldered in her eyes.

Scipio sighed and shook his head. “Cain’t,” he said regretfully-not so much regret that he would not have her, for she frightened him more than he wanted her, but regret that this collapse would get so many people killed, with him all too likely to be among them. “Cain’t, Cherry. It over. Don’t you see? It over.”

“Bastard!” she screamed, and twisted away from him. “Liar! Quitter!” She slapped him, a roundhouse blow that snapped his head sideways on his neck and left the taste of blood in his mouth. Blood on my hands, too, he thought. Blood on all our hands. Cherry cared nothing about the blood on her hands. He counted himself lucky she hadn’t pulled out a knife and gutted him with it.

In spite of haranguing the Negroes who didn’t want to be soldiers any more, Cassius heard the exchange between Cherry and Scipio. Cassius, as best Scipio could tell, never missed anything. He came trotting over to the two of them. Scipio’s guts knotted with fear all over again. Cherry was Cassius’ woman. No-Cherry was her own woman, and had been giving herself to Cassius. That wasn’t quite the same thing, even if, from Cassius’ point of view, it probably looked as if it were.

But Cassius didn’t want to quarrel. The ex-hunter, now chairman of what was left of the Congaree Socialist Republic, sadly studied Scipio. “It over now, Kip?” he asked. “You t’ink it over now fo’ true?”

“Don’t you?” Scipio waved his arms. As he did so, a shell landed only a couple of hundred yards away, black smoke with angry red fire at the core. Dirt leaped upward in graceful arcs, beauty in destruction. “We done everything we kin do. Dey gots too many buckra, too many rifles, too many cannons. Dey whip we, Cass.”

“Too many buckra,” Cassius said bitterly. “Dey don’ rise fo’ dey class int’rest, de fools. De ’ristocrats got dey all mystified up.” He lifted a weary hand. “We been over this before. I know. We make de struggle go on.” He