Walk in Hell

Before Nellie could reply, a young Confederate lieutenant came in, picked up his boots, and bustled out again without looking at her once. That suited her fine. Once he was gone, she answered the question that had sounded casual but wasn’t: “They’ve been talking about strengthening the bridges over the Potomac. I don’t know why. It can’t be for anything really important: they keep going on about barrels and tanks, not guns or trucks or wagons. Maybe they’re bringing beer up for their men.”

“Maybe they are. It would be fine if they were.” Jacobs muttered something his bushy gray mustache swallowed. Aloud, he said, “Anything you hear about tanks and barrels would be-interesting.”

“All right.” Nellie knew he wasn’t going to tell her anything more than that. Ignorance was her best protection, though she already knew too many secrets, guilty and otherwise. But Jacobs had connections-about most of which she was also ignorant-back to the U.S. government, whereas she was no more than one of his sources of news. She assumed that meant he knew how to run his business.

Another Confederate officer came in: the owner of the boot on which the cobbler was working. The fellow glowered. “You said that was going to be ready today,” he growled.

“So I did, sir,” Jacobs answered. “And it will be. I didn’t say it would be ready first thing in the morning, though.”

“As soon as you can,” the Reb said. “My unit is heading north this afternoon, and I want these boots.”

“I’ll do all I can,” Jacobs said. “If you come back about half-past eleven, this one should be all fixed up.” Shaking his head unhappily, the Confederate left. Nellie would have bet Hal Jacobs knew to which unit he belonged, and that the information about its movements would soon be in U.S. hands. And Jacobs had his own way of harassing the enemy: “Won’t it be a shame when some of the nails I put in go through the sole and poke the bottom of his foot? What a pity-he’s made me hurry the job.”

The bell rang again. Nellie wondered if it was the Reb, too impatient to wait for eleven-thirty. It wasn’t. It was Edna. That meant something was wrong. Except for a couple of times to get shoes fixed, Edna didn’t come in here.

“Ma,” Edna said without preamble, “there’s a Rebel major over across the street, says he’s got to talk to you right now.”

“You go tell him I’ll be right there,” Nellie said. When Edna had gone, she gave Mr. Jacobs a stricken glance. “What do I do now?”

“It depends on what he wants,” replied the cobbler who wasn’t only a cobbler. “I know you will do your best, come what may. Whatever happens, remember that you have more friends than you know.”

Cold comfort. Nellie nodded, composed herself, and went back across the street. The major was waiting for her outside the coffeehouse, which she did not take as a good sign. When she first came up to him, he said, “Mrs. Semphroch, you are acquainted with William Gustavus Reach.” It was not a question. She wished it had been.

“Yes, I know him some,” she said through ice in her belly so cold, she thought it would leave her too frozen to speak at all. Part of it was fear for herself, part fear for Mr. Jacobs, and part, maybe the biggest part, fear of what Edna, standing not five feet away, would hear and learn. “He came by this place every so often.” She made her lip curl. “Last time he came by, he was trying to steal things when they dropped bombs on us that night.”

“The acquaintance goes back no farther than that?” The Confederate major was one of those smart men who think themselves even smarter than they are. How much did he know? How much had Reach spilled? How much could she say without spilling more to Edna?

She picked her words with care, doing her best to sound careless: “I knew him a long time ago, a little, you might say, but I hadn’t set eyes on him from before my daughter here was born till he showed up again.” That was all true, every word of it; it helped steady her.

“Uh-huh.” The Reb looked down at his notebook. “You are not, and never have been, his wife?”

Edna stared at Nellie. Nellie stared, too, in astonishment commingled with relief. Maybe she’d come out of this in one piece after all. “I hope to Jesus I’m not,” she exclaimed-more truth. “I hope to Jesus I never was, and I surely hope to Jesus I never will be! If I never see him again in all my born days, it’ll be too soon.”

“Uh-huh,” the Confederate major said again. “Well, if you had been his wife and weren’t any more, you might say the same thing, but I reckon-” He didn’t say exactly what he reckoned, but it didn’t seem like anything bad for Nellie. “Maybe you can tell me what sort of friends he has, then.”

“Next friend of his I know about will be the first,” Nellie said.

Edna giggled. The major started to smile, then stopped, as if remembering he was on duty. He said, “This here Reach tells more stories than Uncle Romulus, and that’s a fact. Some of them, ma’am, we have to check.” He chuckled. “We’re going to send him to a place where nobody listens to his stories for a long, long time.”

“If you think I’m going to miss him, Major, you can think again.” Nellie sounded as prim and righteous as she did when taking the high line with Edna. The Rebel tipped his hat to her and went on his way.

“That wasn’t so bad, Ma,” Edna said. “Way he was asking after you, though, heaven only knew what he wanted.”

“You’re right,” Nellie said. You don’t know how right you are.

She went back across the street to the shoe-repair shop. The bell jangled. Mr. Jacobs looked up-warily-from his work. Her enormous smile said everything that needed saying. He set down the little hammer, came around the counter, and took both her hands in his. To her astonishment, she leaned forward and kissed him full on the mouth. She hadn’t done that with a man since well before her husband died. His arms went around her, and he kissed her, too. She enjoyed it. That hadn’t happened since well before her husband died, either.

“Some good out of Bill Reach after all,” she murmured to herself.

Hal Jacobs stiffened. “Out of who?” he barked, his voice too loud, his mouth too near her ear. She explained, sure he’d misheard. He sagged away from her, his face pale as whitewash. “I wondered what was wrong,” he gasped. “Hadn’t heard from him in too long. Bill runs-ran, maybe-our whole organization here. And he’s caught? Good God!”

“Good God!” Nellie said, too, for very different reasons. All at once, she wondered if she was backing the wrong side.

X

“Not much further now,” Lucien Galtier told his horse as he rode up the fine American-paved road toward Riviere-du-Loup. In the back of the wagon, several hens clucked, but they were not a true part of the conversation. He and the horse had been discussing things for years. The hens’ role, though they did not realize it, was strictly temporary.

Off to the east, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, a steam whistle shouted as a train hurried up toward the town. “Tabernac,” Galtier muttered under his breath: a Quebecois curse. The soldiers on the train, no doubt, would cross the St. Lawrence and then try to push on toward Quebec City. The Americans, worse luck, were making progress, too, for the artillery from the north bank of the river sounded farther off than it had when the campaign was new. The newspapers extolled every skirmish as one Bonaparte would have admired (clumsy propaganda, in a province that had never reconciled itself to the French Revolution), but anyone who believed all the newspapers said deserved nothing better than he got.

The whistle screamed again. The horse twitched his ears in annoyance. The chickens squawked and fluttered in their cages. No, they were not suited for serious talk-too flighty.

Cannon by the riverbank started going off-wham, wham, wham! The horse snorted. The chickens went crazy. Lucien Galtier raised a dark eyebrow. “Those are quick-firing guns,” he told the horse, “the kind they use when trying to shoot down an aeroplane. And so-”

Through the cannons’ roar, he picked up a rapidly swelling buzz. Then he spotted the winged shapes. Before the war, he had never seen an aeroplane. Here, now, were two at once, flying hardly higher than the treetops. They both carried blue-white-red roundels on their wings and flanks. The red was in the shape of a maple leaf.

“There, what did I yell you?” Lucien said to the horse. “And not just any aeroplanes, but Canadian aeroplanes.” He reined in to watch.

In front of the pilots, machine guns hammered. He wondered how the men managed to fire through the