she found out why Flora needed to make the trip. Then she shut up and arranged the tickets with her usual competence.
Landing in St. Louis, Flora saw to her surprise that it had been hit almost as hard as Philadelphia. The war in the West never got the press things farther east did. But Confederate bombers still came up to strike St. Louis, and long-range C.S. rockets fired from Arkansas had hit the town hard.
The train ride southwest from St. Louis to Thayer was…a train ride. Every few miles, a machine-gun nest- sometimes sandbagged, more often a concrete blockhouse-guarded the track. Here west of the Mississippi, spaces were wide and soldiers thin on the ground. Confederate raiders slipped north every now and again. The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War would have had something sharp to say about that…if it hadn't had so many other bigger things closer to home to worry about.
Thayer had gone up as a railroad town. It had flourished, in a modest way, as a cross-border trading center- and then suffered when the war strangled the trade that kept it going. The military hospital on the edge of town put a little life back into the economy-but at what a cost!
Joshua wasn't in his bed when Flora got there to see him. She feared something had gone wrong and he was back in the doctors' clutches, but the wounded man in the bed next to his said, 'He's playing cards in the common room down at the end of the corridor, ma'am.'
'Oh,' Flora said. 'Thank you.'
When Flora walked in, Joshua held five cards in his right hand. Bandages swathed the left. He put down the cards to toss money into the pot. 'See your five and raise you another five.' Then he looked up from the poker game. 'Oh, hi, Mom,' he said, as if they were bumping into each other back home. 'Be with you in a minute. I have to finish cleaning Spamhead's clock.'
'In your dreams, kid. I'll raise you five more.' Another greenback fluttered down in the center of the table. The sergeant called Spamhead did have a square, very pink face. He seemed to take the nickname for granted. Flora wouldn't have wanted to be called anything like that.
He won the pot, too-his straight beat Joshua's three tens. Joshua said, 'Oh, darn!' All the other poker players laughed at him. What would he have said if his mother weren't there to hear it? Something spicier, no doubt. He stood up from the table and walked over to Flora. 'I didn't think you'd get here so fast.'
'How are you?' Flora asked.
Joshua raised his wounded hand. 'It hurts,' he said, as he might have said, It's sunny outside. 'But not too bad. Plenty of guys here are worse off. Poor Spamhead lost a foot-he stepped on a mine. He's lucky it wasn't one of those bouncing ones-it would've blown his balls off… Sorry.'
'It's all right,' Flora told him. 'How else can you say that?' Spamhead got mutilated, and Joshua think's he's lucky. I can see why, but… 'What does your doctor say?'
'That it was a clean wound. That it's nothing much to flabble about. That-'
'Easy for him to say,' Flora broke in indignantly. 'He didn't get hurt.'
'Yeah, I know. I thought of that, too,' Joshua said. 'But he's seen plenty worse, so it's not like he's wrong, either. I'll heal from this, and I'll heal pretty fast. The only thing I won't be able to do that I could before is give somebody the finger with my left hand.'
'Joshua!' Flora wasn't exactly shocked, but she was surprised.
Her son grinned sheepishly, but not sheepishly enough-he'd done that on purpose. 'I didn't even think of it,' he said. 'The medic who took me back to the aid station was the one who said it first.'
'Terrific. Now I know who to blame.' Flora sounded as if she were about to haul that medic up before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. She was tempted to do it, too. She recognized abuse of power when she saw it, which didn't mean it failed to tempt her.
Maybe Joshua saw the temptation gleaming in her eyes, for he said, 'Somebody else would've come up with it if he hadn't. I would have myself, I bet-it's the way soldiers think.'
'Terrific. I don't want you thinking like that,' Flora said. Joshua didn't answer. He just looked at her-looked down at her, to remind her he was taller, to remind her he was grown if not grown up, to remind her that he didn't care how she wanted him to think. He would think the way he chose, not the way she did. She squeezed him, careful of the gauze-shrouded hand. 'I'm glad you're going to be all right. I'm gladder than I know how to tell you.'
'Sure, Mom.' Joshua took it for granted. Flora didn't, couldn't, and knew she never would. She started to cry. 'I'm fine, Mom,' Joshua said, not understanding at all. He probably was. Flora knew too well that she wasn't.
E ver feel like a piece on a chessboard, sir?' Lon Menefee asked.
Sam Carsten nodded. 'Now that you mention it, yes.' The comparison wasn't one he would have made himself. Poker, pinochle, and checkers were more his speed. He knew how the different chessmen moved, but that was about it.
But the Josephus Daniels sure was making a long diagonal glide across the board of the Atlantic right now. Something big was in the wind. The Navy Department had found a more urgent assignment for her than protecting the carriers that protected the battlewagons that bombarded the coast of Haiti while Marines and soldiers went ashore.
'I'm sure not sorry to get out of range of land-based air,' he said. 'Even with our own flyboys overhead, I don't like that for hell.'
'Worked out all right,' Menefee said.
Sam had to nod. 'Well, yeah. When the butternut bastards on the island saw they wouldn't be able to hold us, they couldn't give up fast enough.'
The exec laughed. 'D'you blame 'em?'
'Christ, no!' Sam said. 'If they didn't surrender to us, the Haitians would've got 'em. They weren't up for that.' Haiti had won its freedom from France in a bloody slave revolt that shocked the South a century and a half before. What the Negroes there now would have done to the Confederate soldiers they caught…Carsten's mouth tightened. 'The blacks probably wouldn't have treated Featherston's fuckers any worse than they got treated themselves.'
'Yes, sir,' Menefee said, 'but that covers one hell of a lot of ground.'
'Mm.' Sam let it go at that. Again, the exec wasn't wrong. The Confederates had set up one of their murder factories outside of Port-au-Prince. At first, they'd just killed Haitian soldiers and government officials. Then they'd started in on the educated people in the towns: folks who might give them trouble one of these days. Before long, all you needed was a black skin-and how many Haitians didn't have one of those?
'They'll pay,' Menefee predicted. 'If we can arrest the guys who ran that camp in Texas, we can do the same with the sons of bitches in the Caribbean.'
'I expect you're right,' Sam said. A wave rolling down from the north slapped the Josephus Daniels' port side and made the destroyer escort roll a little. She was heading east across the ocean as fast as she could go, east and north. Musingly, Sam went on, 'I wonder how long we'll stay out of range of land-based air.'
'You think U.S. troops will land on Ireland the way we did on Haiti, sir?' Menefee asked. 'That'd be a rougher job. Logistics are worse, and the limeys aren't knocked flat the way the Confederates were.'
'It's one of the things I'm wondering about,' Sam answered. 'The other one is, what's the Kaiser going to do now? Yeah, England dropped a superbomb on Hamburg, but how many more does Churchill have? You don't want to piss the Germans off, because whatever you go and do to them, they'll do to you doubled and redoubled.' He wasn't a great bridge player, either, but he could talk the lingo.
'Beats me,' Menefee said. 'I expect we'll find out before too long.'
The Josephus Daniels remained part of the flotilla that had landed troops on Haiti. Sam felt a certain amount of satisfaction because the destroyer escort wasn't the slowest ship in it-the baby flattops were. He wouldn't have done without them for the world; if he really was sailing against the British Isles, he wanted all the air cover he could get. In fact, he wanted even more air cover than that.
Summer in the North Atlantic was much more pleasant than winter. Days were longer, seas were calmer, and the sun was brighter. Lon Menefee tanned. Sam reddened and burned and wore his hat whenever he went out on deck. He exchanged resigned looks with the handful of sailors who came close to being as fair as he was.
Nobody on the destroyer escort was eager to run into the Royal Navy. Britain's fleet didn't have the worldwide reach it had enjoyed before the Great War. Where it still went, though, it remained a highly capable outfit.
