stepped aside. “Do come in. What might I do for you today?”
Her apartment looked more battered than Sylvia’s, and smelled of cooking grease and cabbage. Her children, three boys ranging from George, Jr.’s, size on down, ran around raising hell. Through their racket, Sylvia said, “I was wondering if I could pay you enough to watch my children, just long enough to let them get over the chicken pox.”
Brigid Coneval shook her head. “That I cannot, and that I will not,” she answered. “For one thing, I’m taking in other people’s wee ones no more, as you know. And for another, Patrick has not had the chicken pox himself, nor has Michael, nor Billy, neither. I’ll be just as well pleased without them having ’em, too, sure and I will.”
“But what am I going to do?” Sylvia exclaimed. She’d been saying the same thing to anyone who would listen ever since she’d first seen George, Jr., covered with spots. “How am I going to go to work?”
“Well, if you do, you do-and if you don’t, you don’t,” Mrs. Coneval said airily. “Tell ’em you’ll not be in while the babes are after being sick, that’s all. What else can you do?”
“They’ll fire me.” Sylvia stated the obvious.
“Will you starve while you miss a couple weeks’ pay?” Brigid Coneval asked. Reluctantly, Sylvia shook her head. The new widow went on, “Then be damned to the job. You’ll get another soon enough-plenty to be had, with so many men off getting killed. You’ll have no trouble at all, at all.”
“I’ve worked there a long time.” Sylvia sighed. “But you’re right. In the end, you’re right. If they fire me for staying home, then they do, that’s all. I don’t want to leave that job, but I can if I have to. Thank you, Mrs. Coneval. You’ve made me see things clear.”
“Any time at all, dearie,” Brigid Coneval said.
Behind Private First Class Reginald Bartlett, artillery thundered: not a lot of artillery, not by the standards of the Roanoke front, but more than he’d heard on the Confederate side of the line here in Sequoyah. “Let the damnyankees keep their heads down for a change,” he said.
Pete Hairston nodded. “Only trouble is, once the guns stop, we get to go forward and push ’em out,” the veteran sergeant said. He paused and shrugged. “Us and the niggers do. Goddamned if I like that.”
Joe Mopope said, “You people are crazy, giving niggers guns. Wouldn’t never catch us Kiowas giving niggers guns.”
“If those colored regiments hadn’t come over the river, we never would have got enough men to attack the Yanks,” Reggie said.
Hairston nodded again. “That’s a fact. We’d be holding on tooth and toenail, same as we have been. Now we got a chance to take back some of this here state. We better see that we don’t waste it, on account of I don’t reckon we’ll ever see another one.”
Whistles blew, up and down the reinforced Confederate line. Lieutenant Nicoll shouted, “Come on, boys, now it’s our turn!” Out of the trenches came his company. Howling the Rebel yell, they trotted forward. “Go!” Nicoll roared to them. “Go on! They aren’t doing so well back East-we’ve got to show them how to play the game.”
“We’ll get ’em!” Napoleon Dibble said. “They can’t mess with the Belgians, and they can’t mess with us.”
Reggie said nothing. He didn’t waste his breath yelling. Every time he came up above ground, he felt like a turtle coming out of its shell. He was vulnerable up here. His time in the close-quarters fighting of the Roanoke front had taught him how hideously vulnerable a man was when he came up out of his trench.
He wasn’t afraid, though, not in the ordinary sense of the word. Whatever was going to happen would happen. It was largely out of his hands. If he let it worry him, he’d be letting his pals down, and he couldn’t stand that, not after they’d been through and suffered so much together.
On they came. Some dropped into cover to shoot while others advanced, then leapfrogged past when the other group hit the dirt. The bombardment hadn’t taken out all the Yankees; bombardments never did. Rifles and machine guns stuttered to life. Men in butternut began falling not of their own volition.
Some of those men were black, the new units going forward along with the white troops who had been in the field for years. The Negro soldiers charged straight at the U.S. trenches; they weren’t skilled in the fire-and-move tactics the veterans had learned by painful experience. And they went down in gruesome numbers. When they screamed, Bartlett couldn’t tell their voices from those of white men.
He lay in a shell hole, fired a couple of rounds toward the Yankee line ahead, and then got to his feet and ran by the men he’d been supporting. He dove behind a stump and started shooting again. Once his buddies had dashed past him and found cover, he scrambled up and ran on.
He was about thirty yards from the Yankee trench when a traversing machine gun turned its balefully winking eye upon him.
His first feeling was nothing but surprise. One moment, he’d been sprinting forward, his eyes fixed on the Yankees in their ugly cooking-pot helmets who were shooting at him and his countrymen. The next, he slammed to the ground on his face.
Then he tried to move. What had been impact turned to pain, stunning pain, in his left shoulder and right leg. Someone very close by was screaming at the top of his lungs. Only when Reggie needed to inhale did he realize those cries belonged to him.
Machine-gun and rifle fire kept right on stitching past him. In what was more a roll and a wriggle than a crawl, he made it into a hole in the torn-up ground, pulled out his wound dressing, and wondered what the hell he should bandage first.
Blood was turning the outside of his right trouser leg blackish red. His left arm didn’t want to do what he told it to do. Awkwardly, one-handedly, he got a sort of a bandage around his thigh and stuffed a pad of gauze into the hole in his shoulder. The world kept going gray as he worked, but he persevered.
“Stretcher-bearer!” he shouted. “Stretcher-bearer!” His voice was hoarse and raw-edged. No one came. The Yanks didn’t usually shoot stretcher-bearers on purpose, any more than the CSA did, but bullets weren’t fussy, either.
Reggie got out his canteen and drank it dry. The day was hot and muggy. Before very long, the anguish of thirst joined the agony from his wounds. The sun beat down on him out of a brassy sky. His bandages went from white to red and soggy.
Every so often, when the pain backed off a little, he wondered how the attack was going. He occasionally saw men in butternut going forward. Nobody flopped down in his shell hole. He didn’t think that was fair.
More screams rose. This time, they didn’t come from Reggie. After a while, those screams stopped. They never started up again. Bartlett got the idea that the fellow who’d been making them wasn’t breathing any more.
Up ahead, the firing hesitated, then broke out anew, louder and fiercer than ever. Shells from the damnyankees’ field artillery whistled overhead. Some, no doubt aimed to impede the Confederates’ advance, dropped down near Reggie. He halfway-more than halfway-hoped one would land square on him. He’d never know what hit him then. He knew exactly what had hit him now. He moaned through dry lips.
Slowly, ever so slowly, the scorching sun slid across the sky. As it sank toward the western horizon, men in butternut started coming back past the shell hole where Reggie Bartlett lay. He called out to them, but his voice was a dry husk of what it had been. No one heard him. No one saw him reach out imploringly with his good hand. His comrades retreated.
In their wake, the soldiers of the U.S. Army advanced. They fired and moved, as their Confederate counterparts had done during the morning. The sun was going more orange than gold when one of them jumped down into Reggie’s hole.
The Yankee had fired twice before he realized the body in there with him was not dead. He had it in his power to change that on the instant. Reggie got a good, long, close look at him: he was in his late twenties or early thirties, dark, in need of a shave, and wearing what the Yanks called a Kaiser Bill mustache. It had a couple of white hairs in it. Reggie thought it looked stupid. Two stripes on the fellow’s sleeve: a corporal.
He said, “I ought to blow your fuckin’ head off, Reb.” Reggie shrugged a one-shouldered shrug. The U.S. corporal suddenly looked thoughtful. “If I bring you in, though,” he went on, thinking out loud, “your pals miss a chance to blow my fuckin’ head off, and that don’t make me even a little bit sorry, I got news for you.”
Reggie forced a word out through parched throat: “Water?”
