Blood and Iron (64 page)

“I sure would,” he answered, “but I’ll have to run them off one day before too long.” He still wasn’t close to fat—he didn’t think he’d ever be fat the way, say, General Custer’s adjutant was fat—but now, for the first time in his life, he wondered if he’d stay scrawny forever. Agnes’ determination to put meat on his bones was starting to have some effect. He was also past thirty, which meant the meat he put on had an easier time sticking.

“You served under General Custer,” Agnes said a little later. With a mouth full of dumpling, Morrell could only nod. His wife continued, “What do you think about him taking a tour through Canada before he finally comes home for good?”

After swallowing, Morrell said, “I don’t begrudge it to him, if that’s what you mean. He did better up there than I thought he would, and he’s the one who really broke the stalemate in the Great War when he saw what barrels could do and rammed it down Philadelphia’s throat. He may be a vain old man, but he’s earned his vanity.”

“When you’re as old as he is, you’ll have earned the right to be just as vain,” Agnes declared.

Morrell tried to imagine himself in the early 1970s. He couldn’t do it. The reach was too far; he couldn’t guess what that distant future time would be like. He couldn’t guess what he’d be like, either. He could see forty ahead, and even fifty. But eighty and beyond? He wondered if anybody in his family had ever lived to be eighty. He couldn’t think of anyone except possibly one great-uncle.

He said, “I hope I don’t have the chance to get that vain, because I’d need another war, maybe another couple of wars, to come close to doing all the things Custer’s done.”

“In that case, I don’t want you to get old and vain, either,” Agnes said at once. “As long as you have the chance to get old, you can stay modest, for all of me.”

“I suppose that will do,” Morrell answered. Agnes smiled, thinking he’d agreed with her. And so he had…to a point. Old men, veterans of the War of Secession, talked about seeing the elephant. He’d seen the elephant, and all the horror it left in its wake. It
was
horror; he recognized as much. But he’d never felt more intensely alive than during those three years of war. The game was most worth playing when his life lay on the line. Nothing felt better than betting it—and winning.

He had a scarred hollow in the flesh of his thigh to remind him how close he’d come to betting it and losing. Agnes had a scarred hollow in her heart: Gregory Hill, her first husband, had laid his life on the life—and lost it. Morrell knew he ought to pray with all his heart that war never visited the borders of the United States again. He
did
pray that war never visited again. Well, most of him did, anyhow.

The next morning, he put on a pair of overalls and joined the rest of the crew of the test model in tearing down the barrel’s engine. They would have done that in the field, too, with less leisure and fewer tools. The better a crew kept a barrel going, the less time the machine spent behind the lines and useless.

Morrell liked tinkering with mechanical things. Unlike the fluid world of war, repairs had straight answers. If you found what was wrong and fixed it, the machine would work every time. It didn’t fight back and try to impose its own will—even if it did seem that way sometimes.

Michael Pound looked at the battered engine and sadly shook his head. “Ridden hard and put away wet,” was the gunner’s verdict.

“That’s about the size of it, Sergeant,” Morrell agreed. “It does a reasonably good job of making a White truck go. Trying to move this baby, though, it’s underpowered and overstrained.”

“We ought to build something bigger and stronger, then,” Pound said. “Have you got the three-sixteenths wrench, sir?”

“Matter of fact, I do.” Morrell passed it to him. He grinned while he did it. “You always make everything sound so easy, Sergeant—as if there weren’t any steps between
we ought to
and doing something.”

“Well, there shouldn’t be,” Pound said matter-of-factly. “If something needs doing, you go ahead and do it. What else?” He stared at Morrell with wide blue eyes. In his world, no steps lay between needing and doing. Morrell envied him.

Izzy Applebaum, the barrel’s driver, laughed at Pound. “Things aren’t that simple, Sarge,” he said in purest New York. His eyes were narrow and dark and constantly moving, now here, now there, now somewhere else.

“Why ever not?” Pound asked in honest surprise. “Don’t you think this barrel needs a stronger engine? If it does, we ought to build one. How complicated is that?” He attacked the crankcase with the wrench. It yielded to his straightforward assault.

Morrell wished all problems yielded to straightforward assault. “Some people don’t want us to put any money at all in barrels,” he pointed out, “let alone into better engines for them.”

“Those people are fools, sir,” Pound answered. “If they’re not fools, they’re knaves. Hang a few of them and the rest will quiet down soon enough.”

“Tempting, ain’t it?” Izzy Applebaum said with another laugh. “Only trouble is, they make lists of people who ought to get hanged, too, and we’re on ’em. The company’s better on their list than on ours, but none of them lists is any goddamn good. My folks were on the Czar’s list before they got the hell out of Poland.”

“Down south of us, the Freedom Party is making lists of people to hang,” Morrell added. “I don’t care for it, either.”

Michael Pound was unperturbed. “Well, but they’re a pack of wild-eyed fanatics, sir,” he said. “Go ahead and tell me you don’t think there are some people who’d be better off dead.”

“It
is
tempting,” Morrell admitted. He had his mental list, starting with several leading Socialist politicians. But, as Applebaum had said, he was on their list, too. “If you ask me, it’s just as well nobody hangs anybody till a court says it’s the right and proper thing to do.”

“Have it your way, sir,” Pound said with a broad-shouldered shrug, and then, a moment later, another one. “It’s the law of the land, I suppose. But if I were king—”

“If you was king, I’d get the hell out of here faster than my old man got out of Poland,” Izzy Abblebaum broke in.

The gunner looked aggrieved. He no doubt thought he’d make a good king. He’d done a fine job of commanding one barrel after Morrell got “killed.” That didn’t mean he could run roughshod over the world leading a brigade of them, even if he thought it did. Checking a gasket, Morrell reflected that nobody could do too much roughshod running in the USA; the Constitution kept such things from happening. If it sometimes left him frustrated…he’d just have to live with it. “This lifter is shot,” he said. “We have a spare part?”

“With this budget?” Applebaum said. “Are you kidding? We’re lucky we’ve got the one that doesn’t work.” Morrell spent a long time pondering that, and never did straighten it out.

Nellie Jacobs felt harassed. Once Edna got Merle Grimes to pop the question, she hadn’t wasted a minute. She’d said, “I do,” and moved out. That meant Nellie had to try to run the coffeehouse and keep track of Clara—who at two was into everything—all by herself. Either one of those would have been a full-time job. Trying to do both at once left her shellshocked.

Every once in a while, when things got more impossible than usual, she’d take Clara across the street to Hal’s shop to let her husband keep track of the kid in between half-soling shoes and occasionally making fancy boots. On those days, she ended up tired and Hal exhausted instead of the other way round.

“Now I know why God fixed it up so that young people have most of the babies,” she groaned after one particularly wearing day. “Folks our age don’t have the gumption to keep up with ’em.”

“I wish I could tell you you were wrong,” Hal answered. He looked more like a tired grandfather than a father. He wasn’t Nellie’s age; he was better than ten years older. Having Clara around seemed to be making both her parents older still at a faster rate than usual.

“Shall I make us some more coffee?” Nellie asked. “It’s either that or prop my eyelids up with toothpicks, I reckon.”

“Go ahead and make it,” Hal said. “You always make good coffee. But I do not think it will keep me awake. I do not think anything will keep me awake, not any more.” He sighed. “And she sleeps through the night so well now, too.”

“I know.” Nellie would have groaned again, but lacked the energy. “If she didn’t, I wouldn’t just be tired—I’d be dead.”

“I do love her—with all my heart I love her,” Hal said. “But you are right—she can be a handful. Two handfuls, even. I will be very glad when she stops saying no to everything we tell her.”

“You mean they stop saying no?” Nellie exclaimed in surprise more or less mock. “Hard to tell, if you go by Edna.”

“Edna is fine,” Hal said. “There is nothing wrong with Edna. You worry about her too much.”

“I don’t think so,” Nellie said in a flat voice. “If you knew what I’ve been through—if you knew what I’ve put myself through for her…”

“They are not the same thing,” Hal said.

“Huh!” was the only answer Nellie gave to that. After a while, she went on, “Merle’s going to find out about Nicholas Kincaid. You wait and see. That kind of thing won’t stay under the rug.”

Her husband shrugged. “You are probably right. I cannot blame Edna for not wanting to talk about it, though.”

“Not fair to tell lies,” Nellie said. Then she remembered Bill Reach, almost five years dead now. She remembered how the knife had felt going into him. And she remembered Hal could not, must not, find out how he’d died. The only difference between her case and her daughter’s was that she had a better chance of keeping her secret.

“It is not a lie that intends to hurt,” Hal said, and Nellie had to nod, for that was true. She let him win the argument, which she didn’t always do by any means.

The next morning, the past rose up and bit her. She should have expected such a thing, but somehow she hadn’t. A ruddy, handsome fellow in an expensive suit came in, looked around, and said, “Well, you’ve done the place up right nice, Widow Semphroch. Likely looked like a tornado went through it at the end of the war, but you’ve done it up right nice.” His Confederate accent was thick enough to slice—she guessed he hailed from Alabama, or maybe Mississippi.

“Should I know you, sir?” she asked, her voice cool but resolutely polite: business wasn’t so good that she could afford to anger any customer, even a Rebel.

“Name’s Alderford, ma’am—Camp Hill Alderford, major, CSA, retired,” he answered. “You might not recognize me out of uniform, and I used to wear a little chin beard I’ve shaved off on account of I’ve gotten a lot grayer since the war. But I had some of my best times in Washington right here in this coffeehouse, and that’s a fact. Now that I’m in town again, I figured I’d stop by and see if you and the place made it through in one piece. Right glad you did.”

“Thank you.” Nellie didn’t remember him at all. A lot of Confederate officers had spent a lot of time in the coffeehouse. She wondered if more of them would start paying visits.
If they do, they’d better have U.S. money,
she thought. Since she didn’t want this one to go without spending some cash, she said, “Now that you’re back in town, Mr. Alderford, what can I get you?”

“Cup of coffee and a ham sandwich,” he answered. He must have been thinking along with her, for he added, “I won’t pay in scrip, and I won’t pay with Confederate banknotes, either.”

“All right.” She got him what he’d ordered. While she was serving him, she asked, “What are you doing in Washington now?”

“Selling cottonseed oil, ma’am, cottonseed oil and cottonseed cake,” Alderford said. “Cottonseed oil brings a dollar a gallon, near enough—a U.S. dollar, I mean, and a U.S. dollar brings enough Confederate dollars to choke a mule. Two mules, even.” He bit into his sandwich. “That’s good. That’s mighty good. You always had good grub here, even when things were lean.”

That was to keep you Rebs coming in so I could spy on you.
Nellie almost said it aloud, to see the look on his face. Reluctantly, she kept quiet. Word would get around, down in the CSA. If more ex-officers stopped by, she wanted them in a mood to spend money, not to burn down the coffeehouse.

Clara had been amusing herself in what had been a storeroom before Nellie filled it with toys and a cot to keep the toddler either busy or resting. Camp Hill Alderford smiled to see her. “That your granddaughter, ma’am?” he asked. “Reckon your pretty daughter found somebody else after what happened to poor Nick. That was a hard day, a powerful hard day.”

“Mama,” Clara said, and ran to Nellie. She was shy of strangers, especially men with their deep voices.

Alderford’s eyebrows rose. Nellie nodded. “She’s my daughter, too,” she said. “I got married again after the war.”
And I got a surprise not so long after I did.
“And yes, Edna finally did get married, just a few months ago.” She started to add that Merle Grimes was a veteran, too, but didn’t bother. Men of the proper age who weren’t veterans were few and far between.

“Well, I’m happy for you,” Alderford said. He beckoned to Clara with a crooked index finger. “Come here, sweetheart. I’ve got a present for you.”

“You can go to him, Clara,” Nellie said. But Clara didn’t want to go anywhere. She clung to Nellie’s skirt with one hand. The thumb of the other was in her mouth.

“Here, I’ll give it to your mama,” Camp Hill Alderford told her. She watched with round eyes as he reached into his hip pocket, pulled out his wallet, and extracted a brown Confederate banknote. “Here y’are, ma’am.”

It was beautifully printed: more handsome than U.S. paper money. That wasn’t what made Nellie gape. She’d never seen, never imagined, a $50,000,000 bill. Gasping a little, she asked, “What’s this worth in real money?”

“About a dime.” Alderford shrugged. “Five cents next week, a penny the week after that.” He paused. “Maybe we’ll be able to start setting our house in order again if we get to stop sending you-all reparations. If we don’t, Lord knows what we’ll do.”

“I haven’t got anything to do with that,” Nellie said. She hoped Congress wouldn’t let President Sinclair cut off Confederate reparations. As far as she was concerned, the weaker the Rebs stayed, the better. What was the first thing they were likely to do if they ever got strong again? As far as she could see,
head straight for Washington
was the best bet.