American Front

But the monster was in front. Here and there along the Yankee line, muzzle flashes showed men who, despite the artillery barrage, knew they had to kill the attackers now or die themselves in moments. Then a couple of machine guns, one right in front of Ramsay, came to hammering life.

Men of the Creek Nation Army fell before that hateful patter like wheat before a reaper. There went Moty Tiger, clutching at his belly. There went Colonel Lincoln, down with boneless finality.

My regiment now, Ramsay thought. He waved the survivors forward. "Come on!" he shouted. "We can still -"

One moment, he was advancing. The next, without warning, he found himself lying in a shell hole, staring in confusion at dirt and a couple of bits of rusty barbed wire. He had trouble breathing. He couldn't figure out why till he tasted blood in his mouth. How did that happen? he wondered vaguely. He looked up at the sky. It was going black. That's not right, he thought. It's morning, not

XX

S ylvia Enos collected the mail from the box in the front hall of her apartment building. She crumpled up a patent-medicine circular. The allotment check from the Navy she kept.

Her lips twisted in a bitter smile. She had the money, drawn from George's pay, as he'd said she would before he enlisted. The only trouble was, she didn't care about the money. She would sooner have had her husband back. When he'd stayed in Boston after joining the Navy, when he'd, in essence, gone back to being a fisherman, she'd been overjoyed. Her life had returned to one not far different from what she'd known before the war started, even if she had kept her job at the ca

"So much for luck," she said as she started upstairs. Now George was gone, and gone farther and more irrevocably than when he'd languished in Confederate imprisonment. All she had by which to remember him were the monthly allotment checks and an occasional letter. There could have been more letters, she supposed, but George had never been much of a writer.

The hallway and the stairwell were not so warm as they had been a few weeks before: Boston 's summer, hot while it lasted, couldn't be counted on to last far into September. For the moment, cutting the heat only made days and nights more pleasant. Pretty soon, though, she wouldn't be wrangling with the Coal Board over fuel enough to cook her food. She'd be wrangling with its inflexible clerks and stubborn supervisors over fuel enough to keep her from freezing during the winter.

She left the stairwell and trudged wearily down the hall to Mrs. Coneval's apartment. She stood there in front of the doorway for a moment before she knocked. It sounded as if the children were fighting a battle of their own inside, a battle about the size of some of the big ones on the Kentucky front. She wondered how Brigid Coneval put up with the noise.

When she did knock, she needed to hammer on the door to get anyone within to notice she was there. After a while, Brigid Coneval opened the door. The racket, without wood between it and Sylvia, grew from alarming to ap palling. "A bit rowdy they are today," Mrs. Coneval said with a smile that could only be described as wan.

"So it would seem," Sylvia agreed. She knew she would have gone crazy, cooped up in there the day around with a horde of screaming children. Given the choice between that and the factory job she had, she would have chosen factory work a hundred times out of a hundred. Her own two children were plenty to try to keep under control.

"I'll get your wee ones," Brigid Coneval said, and disappeared back into chaos. A toddler smaller than Mary Jane started to howl. Sylvia thanked heaven she hadn't got pregnant again after George came back from the CSA. Trying to take care of a new baby by herself, along with two small children, was nothing to anticipate with glee.

Mrs. Coneval came back holding Mary Jane by one hand and George, Jr., by the other. George, Jr., twisted in her grasp and fired an imaginary rifle at one of the other children. "I got you, Joey, you dirty Reb!"

"No, you didn't -you missed me," Joey shouted back-the next small boy who admitted himself slain in imaginary conflict would be the first. "And I'm not the Reb-you are!"

"Liar, liar, pants on fire," George, Jr., yelled at him, which made Mary Jane giggle. George, Jr., said, "Hello, Mama. Joey cheats."

"I don't either!" Joey exclaimed.

"It doesn't matter now, one way or the other," Sylvia said. By the look on his face, her son was prepared to disagree with that as eloquently as he could. She didn't give him the chance. "See you tomorrow morning," she said to Mrs. Coneval, and took her children back to their apartment.

It seemed empty without her husband there. She was used to having him gone for days at a time; she'd even had to grow used to having him gone for much longer than that while he was a Confederate detainee. Now, though, with him in St. Louis, she had the strong sense she wouldn't see him again till the war ended, and it didn't look as if it was going to end any time soon.

She had some good scrod in the icebox. She hadn't lost the co

George, Jr., ate everything up and demanded more. He ate almost as much as a man, or so it seemed. She was probably wrong about that, she admitted to herself as she gave him more potatoes, but she wasn't wrong about his outgrowing all his clothes. She patted her purse. The allotment check would come in handy the next time she went shopping at Filene's.

Mary Jane, by contrast, had to be cajoled into eating much of anything. Sylvia produced a gumdrop from a bowl on a shelf too high for the children to reach. She set it on the table. "Do you want it?" she asked her daughter.

Eyes wide with longing, Mary Jane nodded. Having once made the dread ful error of saying no to candy, she wasn't about to repeat it.

"All right," Sylvia said. "Eat up your supper and you can have it." Sometimes that got results, sometimes a tantrum. Today it worked. Mary Jane cleaned her plate and stretched out a hand that needed washing. "Good girl," Sylvia told her, handing her the sweet.

After she'd scrubbed the dishes, she settled the children down on the couch, one on either side of her, and read to them from Queen Zixi of Ix. Mary Jane's attention sometimes wandered. When she got off the couch, went over to get a doll, and then came back to play with it, Sylvia didn't mind. The story held George, Jr., rapt for most of an hour. By then, it was time for Sylvia to get the children into bed. Morning came all too early.

Then she had the apartment to herself, before she also had to go to bed. When George was home, they'd sit and talk while he smoked a pipe or cigar. When he was out fishing, she'd look forward to his return. Now… now he was gone, and the place seemed large and empty and quiet as the tomb.

She walked around for a while with a feather duster, flicking specks from tables and gewgaws. What with the dirt and soot always in the air, things got dusty faster than they had any proper business doing. That would worsen in winter, when everyone burned more coal -always assuming the Coal Board didn't decide to let people turn to blocks of ice instead.

She realized she was dusting a china dog for the third time. Shaking her head, she put the feather duster away. Time hung heavy when she was alone, but not that heavy. She went into the bedroom, changed into a nainsook cotton nightgown with lace at the neck and sleeves, and set out the drawers and skirt and shirtwaist she'd wear the next morning. Then she went into the bathroom, where she cleaned her teeth and gave her hair a hundred strokes with the brush in front of the mirror over the sink. Evening ritual done, she went back into the bedroom, turned off the gas lamp, and lay down.