Walk in Hell

“So you’s come back, Miss Anne,” Julia said. Her voice had something of the old servile tone left in it, but not much.

“Yes, I’m back.” Anne looked over the neglected acres of what had been the finest plantation in South Carolina. “I don’t know why the hell I bothered.”

“Things, they ain’t the same no mo’,” Julia said. Had truer words ever been spoken, Anne hadn’t heard them.

Almost as one equal to another, she asked, “And what did you do in the uprising, Julia? What did the niggers here do?”

“Nothin’,” Julia said. “We stay here, we mind we bidness.” But now she didn’t meet Anne’s eyes.

Anne nodded. This was a lie she recognized. “What happens when the soldiers start asking the same thing?” she said. Julia flinched. Anne smiled to herself. Yes, no matter what, she could manage. “Mind my business”-she pointed to the forgotten fields-“along with your own, and I’ll keep the soldiers off your back. You know I can do things like that. Have we got a bargain?”

Julia thought for most of a minute, then nodded. “Miss Anne, I think we has.”

George Enos had felt constricted on the Mississippi. He was used to the broad reaches of the Atlantic, to looking around from his perch on deck and seeing nothing but the endless ocean in all directions. Next to the Atlantic, any river, even the Father of Waters, seemed hardly more than an irrigation ditch.

And the Cumberland was considerably narrower than the Mississippi. These days, he and his fellow deck hands aboard the Punishment wore Army helmets painted Navy blue. This stretch of the river was supposed to be pretty clear of snipers, but nobody with the brains God gave a haddock felt like betting his life on it.

Before the Punishment headed up the Cumberland, Navy ironworkers had installed protection around the deck machine guns, too. Little by little, the war heading toward two years old, they were figuring out that this riverine fighting had rules of its own. George was glad of that, but wondered what the devil had taken them so long.

As far as he could tell, the Rebs had got the idea from the beginning. He pointed to the mine-sweeping boat moving slowly down the Cumberland ahead of the Punishment and said, “Anybody would think the damn Rebs did nothing but build mines in all the time between the Second Mexican War and now.”

“Near as I can tell, that’s right,” Wayne Pitchess answered, his Connecticut accent not far removed from the flat vowels and swallowed r’s of Enos’ Boston intonation. Then he shook his head and pointed out to the battered farms out beyond the river. “I take it back. They raise tobacco, too.”

“That’s so,” George agreed. Some of it got into Navy supply channels, too, probably by most unofficial means. He had a pouch of pipe tobacco in a trouser pocket. It wasn’t as good as it might have been-which meant it had been cured, or half cured, after the war started-but it was a lot better than nothing.

Flags fluttered up the minesweeper’s signal lines. The Punishment’s engine changed its rhythm. The monitor began crawling away from the sweeper as the screw reversed to give power astern rather than ahead. “I’d say they found one,” Pitchess remarked.

George nodded. “I’d say you’re right. Other thing I’d say is, I hope they haven’t missed one.”

“There is that,” Pitchess agreed. You had to hope they hadn’t missed one, as you had to hope a storm wouldn’t sink you out on the Atlantic. You couldn’t do much about it, either way.

The mine-sweeping boat cut the cable mooring the deadly device to the bottom of the Cumberland. When it bobbed to the surface, the sweeper cut loose with its machine guns. The explosion showered muddy water down onto Enos a quarter of a mile away; the Punishment rocked as waves spread from the blast.

“Lord!” George had known what mines could do, but he’d never been so close to one when it went off. “If it’s all the same to everybody else, I’d just as soon not run over one of those.”

“Now that you mention it, I think I’d rather be on top of my wife, too,” Wayne Pitchess said with a veteran’s studied dryness.

George laughed at the comparison, then walked over to his machine gun and got busy checking the mechanism he’d finished cleaning not five minutes before. Most of the time, he managed not to think about how much he missed Sylvia. He hadn’t yet visited one of the whorehouses that sprouted alongside rivers like toadstools after rain. He had stained his underwear once or twice, waking up from dreams he didn’t much remember, dreams of the sort he hadn’t had since not long after he started going to the barbershop for a shave.

Engineers were busy at Clarksville, Tennessee. As U.S. monitors pushed up the Cumberland toward the town, the Confederates had dropped two railway bridges right into the water. Before the U.S. monitors advanced any farther, the steel and timber and the freight cars the Rebs had run out onto the bridge to complicate their enemies’ lives all had to be cleared away.

It was slow work. It was dangerous work, too; every so often, Confederate batteries off to the south would lob some three-inch shells in the direction of the fallen bridges. The engineers didn’t have a lot of heavy equipment with which to work. Once they’d cleared the river, the U.S. presence in this part of Tennessee would firm up. Then they could bring in the tools they really needed now. Of course, they wouldn’t need them so much then.

“Yeah, that’s a hell of a thing,” Pitchess said when George remarked on the paradox. “But hell, if you wanted things simple, you never would have joined the Navy.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Enos said. “I joined the Navy so I could give the Rebs a kick in the slats to pay them back for the one they gave me. I was already a sailor, so what the hell? — and I didn’t want to get conscripted into the Army. But I never thought they’d stick me here in the middle of the country. You join the Navy, you think you’ll be on the ocean, right?”

“Didn’t matter to me one way or t’other,” his friend answered. “I wasn’t making enough to keep a roof on my head and food in my belly when I was fishing. I figured I wouldn’t starve in the Navy, and I was right about that.” A wry grin stretched across his lean, weathered face. “Maybe I didn’t think about getting blown to smithereens as much as I should’ve.”

Men and mules, straining mightily, hauled a freight car out onto the north bank of the river. Pointing, George said, “I expect that’ll be the last train to Clarksville for a good long time.”

“Yeah,” Pitchess said. “Till we get our own rolling stock running through, anyways.”

Confederate field guns opened up with another barrage just then. Shells screamed down on the engineers, who dove for cover. Mules weren’t smart enough to do that (or, George thought, stupid enough to start a war in the first place). Thin across the water, the screams of wounded animals floated over to the Punishment.

The guns had the bridge zeroed to a fare-thee-well, and could strike at the wreckage or at either bank, as they chose. They didn’t have the range for the Punishment down so precisely. That didn’t keep them from trying to hit her, though. Shells splashed into the river and chewed up the bushes on the northern bank.

George dove into the shelter the ironwrights had built around his machine gun. A splinter hit the steel and clattered away. He hadn’t thought enough about getting blown to smithereens, either.

Growling and grumbling on its bearings, the Punishment’s turret swung round so the six-inch guns it carried bore on the field pieces harassing them. On land, six-inch cannon were heavy guns, hard to move at any sort of speed except by rail. On the water, though, they were nothing out of the ordinary, and the Punishment gave them a fine, steady platform from which to work.

They roared. The monitor heeled ever so slightly in the water from the recoil, then recovered. Sprawled out as he was, George felt the motion more acutely than he might have on his feet. Up in the armored crow’s nest atop the mast, an officer with field glasses would be watching the fall of the shells and comparing it to the location of the Rebel guns.

More grumbling noises-these smaller, to correct the error in the turret’s previous position. The big guns boomed again. Wafting powder fumes made George cough and sent tears streaming from his eyes.

Confederate shells kept falling, too. One of them exploded against the turret. A whole shower of splinters rattled off Enos’ protective cage. He’d wondered whether the ironworkers had made it thick enough. Nothing tore through it to pierce him. Evidently they had.

The turret carried more armor than any other part of the Punishment. It was made to withstand a shell from a gun of the same caliber as those it carried. It didn’t laugh at a hit from a three-inch