Breakthroughs

sitting here and letting them hurt us.”

“Yes, except for one thing.” Reggie set down his entrenching tool and unslung his rifle. “If we’re opening up on the damnyankees, that means they’re close enough for the gunners to spot ’em. And if they’re close enough for the gunners to spot ’em, we’re going to have company before long.”

He looked north. Sure enough, here came the men in green-gray. They advanced much more openly than they would have in the Roanoke valley, where any man outside a trench risked immediate annihilation. That aside, the Yankee commander hereabouts seemed to assess danger by how many men the Confederates in front of him knocked over on the approach. Some generals in butternut were like that, too. Bartlett was glad he didn’t serve under any of them.

Rifle and machine-gun fire forced the Yankees to go to earth. Dirt flew as the U.S. soldiers dug themselves in. Any man who hoped to live through the war was handy with the spade. Stretcher-bearers carried a few wounded Confederates back into Ryan. On the other side of the line, stretcher-bearers in U.S. uniforms were no doubt doing the same thing with injured damnyankees.

“We stopped ’em!” Napoleon Dibble said happily.

Even Joe Mopope rolled his black eyes at that. As gently as he could, Reggie said, “We stopped ’em for now, Nap. We stopped ’em for a while at Duncan, and for a while at Waurika, too. Question is, can we stop ’em when they bring up everything they’ve got?”

“We have to,” Dibble answered. “Lieutenant Nicoll said we have to. If we don’t, the Yankees get Sequoyah, and they’ll fill it up with Germans.” He’d made that mistake before; nobody bothered correcting him about it any more.

Dusk fell. Reggie gnawed stale cornbread and opened a tin of beans and pork. That was enough to quiet the growling in his belly, though it didn’t make much of a meal. Cold drizzle started falling. Rifle fire spattered up and down the lines, muzzle flashes looking like lightning bugs.

When Bartlett wanted somebody to dig a trench forward toward a good post for a picket that he’d spotted, he looked around for Joe Mopope, but didn’t spot him. He wondered where the hell the Indian had got to. The Kiowas and Comanches were good enough in a fight, but they didn’t like the drudgery that went with soldiering for hell.

He set Nap Dibble digging instead. Nap did the job without complaint. He never complained. He probably wasn’t smart enough to complain. Because he didn’t, he got more than his fair share of jobs nobody else wanted.

Sergeant Pete Hairston launched a fearsome barrage of curses. Reggie hurried over to see what was going on. There stood Joe Mopope, knife in one hand, a couple of objects Bartlett couldn’t see well in the other. In tones somewhere between disgust and awe, Hairston said, “This red-skinned son of a bitch just brought us back two Yankee scalps.”

Reggie stared. Then he blurted, “No wonder he wasn’t around when I needed him to dig.”

Very quietly, Joe Mopope laughed.

As she rode the streetcar to her job at a mackerel-canning plant, Sylvia Enos went through the inner pages of the Boston Globe with minute care. As far as she was concerned, the paper never talked enough about naval affairs. A battle on land that didn’t move the front a quarter of a mile in one direction or the other got page-one coverage. Sometimes she thought ships got mentioned only when they were torpedoed or blown to bits.

She saw nothing about the USS Ericsson. Not seeing anything about the destroyer made her let out a silent sigh of relief. It meant-she devoutly hoped it meant-her husband George was all right.

Most of the people on the trolley were women on the way to work, many of them on the way to jobs men had been doing before the war pulled them into the Army or the Navy. Many of them were scanning the newspaper as attentively as Sylvia was doing. Some of the ones who weren’t wore mourning black. They no longer had any need to fear the worst. They’d already met it.

Sylvia left her copy of the Globe on the seat when the trolley came to her stop. She wished George were home. She wished he’d never gone to war. And she hoped the Ericsson was far out to sea, nowhere near a port. She loved her husband, and she thought he loved her, but she wasn’t sure, as she had been once, she could trust him out of her sight.

She walked the short distance to the canning plant, which was no more lovely than it had to be. It wasn’t far from the harbor, and stank of fish. A skinny cat looked at her and gave an optimistic meow. She shook her head. “Sorry, pussycat. No handouts from me today.” The cat meowed again, piteously this time. Sylvia shook her head again, too, and walked on.

She grabbed her time card and stuck it in the clock. The money wasn’t good-it wasn’t as if she were a man, after all-but, with it and her monthly allotment from George’s pay, she managed well enough.

“Good morning, Mrs. Enos,” the foreman said as she hurried toward the machine that stuck bright labels on cans of mackerel.

“Good morning, Mr. Winter,” she answered. He nodded and limped on past her: as a young man, he’d taken a bullet in the leg during the Second Mexican War.

A couple of minutes later, Isabella Antonelli took her place on the machine next to Sylvia’s. She wore black; her husband had been killed fighting in Quebec. She nodded shyly to Sylvia, set down her dinner pail, and made sure her machine was in good working order.

With a rumble of motors and several discordant squeals of fan belts, the line started moving. Sylvia had to pull three levers, taking steps between them, to bring bare, bright cans into her machine, squirt paste on them, and affix the labels-which made the mackerel whose flesh went into the cans look remarkably like tuna. Being a fisherman’s wife, she knew what a lie that was. People who bought the cans in Ohio or Nebraska wouldn’t, though.

Some days, stepping and pulling levers could be mesmerizing, so that half the morning would slip by while Sylvia hardly noticed any time passing. This was one of those mornings. The only time she got jolted out of her routine was when her paste reservoir ran dry and she had to refill it from the big bucket of paste under the machine before she could put on more labels.

As it did sometimes, the lunch whistle startled her, jerking her out of the world in which she was almost as mechanical as the machine she tended. The line groaned to a stop. Sylvia shook herself, as she might have done coming out of the bathtub at the end of the hall in her apartment building. She looked around. There was her dinner pail, of black-painted sheet metal like the one a riveter might have carried to the Boston Navy Yard.

Isabella Antonelli’s dinner pail might have been identical to her own. The two women sat on a bench near a wheezing steam radiator. Sylvia had a ham sandwich in her dinner pail, leftovers from the night before. Isabella Antonelli had a tightly covered bowl that also looked to hold leftovers: long noodles that looked like worms, smothered in tomato sauce. She brought them to the factory about three days out of five. Sylvia thought they were disgusting, though she’d never said so for fear of hurting her friend’s feelings.

Mr. Winter limped by, a cigar clamped between his teeth. He was carrying his own dinner pail, looking for a place to sit down. His eyes lingered on Isabella as he walked past. “You can go with him, if you’d like,” Sylvia said.

“I will sit with you today,” the Italian woman said. She smiled, which made her look younger and not so tired. “He should not take me too much for granted, don’t you think?”

She and the foreman-a widower for years-had been lovers for a couple of months. They were discreet about it, both at the factory and with their own families. Winter had aimed a few speculative remarks at Sylvia since she’d started working at the canning plant; she was just as well pleased to see him attached to someone else. To his credit, he hadn’t aimed any of those remarks at her since taking up with Isabella.

Sylvia said, “Anybody who takes anybody else for granted is a fool.”

She didn’t realize with how much bitterness she’d freighted the remark till Isabella Antonelli, a worried look on her face, asked, “But all is well with your Giorgio, yes?”

“He’s well, yes,” Sylvia replied, which was by no means a complete answer. Isabella obviously realized it wasn’t a complete answer. She also obviously realized it was all the answer she would get. The rest of the half- hour lunch passed in uneasy silence.

For once, Sylvia was glad to go back to her machine, to lose herself in the routine of pulling and stepping,