The Grapple

“Let’s see,” Armstrong said. His pal showed him the picture. It was of a guy noticeably darker and noticeably ski

“I haven’t done anything!” the corporal said. One thing he hadn’t done was swear, not even once. Most U.S. soldiers would have. Mormons watched their mouths better.

“Well, you’ll get the chance to prove it,” Armstrong said. “Yossel, grab his rifle.”

Carefully, Yossel Reisen unslung the other corporal’s Springfield. “Move,” he told the man.

Still squawking-but still not cursing-the soldier who might not be a soldier moved. They led him back over the ground for which the Mormons had fought so long and so hard, the ground that was cratered and crumpled and crushed, the ground over which the stench of death still hung. That would only get worse when the weather warmed up. Armstrong wondered if it would ever leave the land, or if the foul, clinging odor would linger forever, an unseen but unmistakable monument to what Salt Lake City had gone through.

Sentries outside of regimental headquarters popped up out of the foxholes where they spent most of their time-not every sniper had been hunted down and killed. “What the fuck’s going on here?” one of them demanded. He talked the way most U.S. soldiers did.

“We caught this guy up by the Temple,” Armstrong answered. “Yossel here spotted him.” It didn’t occur to him till later that he might have taken the credit himself. He didn’t want to screw his buddy. “We figure maybe he’s a Mormon. His papers don’t match his face, and he was carrying this little chickenshit pistol-show ’em, Yossel.” Reisen displayed the revolver.

The sentry eyed the corporal who didn’t seem to be a corporal. “Waddayou got to say for yourself, Mac?” he asked, his voice colder than the weather.

“They’re full of baloney,” the-maybe-two-striper said. Not shit-baloney. He added, “I don’t like a.45-kicks too hard.”

“Huh,” the sentry said, no doubt noticing, as Armstrong did, that that-maybe-Mormon didn’t say anything about his papers. The sentry nodded to Armstrong and Yossel. “Bring him on in. They’ll find out what’s going on with him. And if it is what you think it is…” He didn’t go on, or need to. If it was what they thought it was, the fellow they’d captured was a dead man. He wouldn’t die quickly or cleanly, either. Oh, what a shame, Armstrong thought, and led him on.

Cinci

But he’d been flat on his back in Covington, Kentucky, when the state passed from the USA back to the CSA. He supposed he was lucky: the car that hit him didn’t kill him. It didn’t seem like luck while he was recovering from a broken leg and a fractured skull and a smashed shoulder. Even now, almost two and a half years later, he walked with a limp and a cane and sometimes got headaches that laughed at aspirin.

He was finally exchanged for a Confederate the USA was holding-U.S. citizenship meant something, even for a Negro. It didn’t mean everything; Negroes in the United States couldn’t join the Army, couldn’t pick up rifles and go after the enemies who were tormenting their brethren south of the Mason-Dixon Line. With his age and his injuries, Cinci

This was the next best thing. He’d driven trucks for more than thirty years. He’d driven for the USA during the Great War. Here he was, doing it again, part of a long column of green-gray machines hauling ammunition and rations to the U.S. troops trying to drive the Confederates out of western Ohio.

The state of the art had improved over the past quarter-century. The Chevy truck he drove now had a much more powerful, much more reliable engine than the White he’d used then. It had a fully enclosed cabin, too, and a heater. It boasted a self-starter; he didn’t have to crank it to life. Its headlights were electric, not acetylene lamps. With all-wheel drive, it could get through terrain that would have shaken the White to pieces.

But the driving wasn’t much different. Neither was the fear when shells started bursting in the field to either side of the road. Cinci

A.45 lay on the seat beside him. He couldn’t afford to let the Confederates capture him. It wasn’t just that he was colored, though no black man in the USA wanted to think about falling into Confederate hands. But he was also on the CSA’s list of dangerous characters. When they removed him from Covington, they made it very plain they didn’t want to have anything to do with him ever again. They might regret it if they did, but he would never get over it.

Next to those bursting shells, the.45 seemed like small potatoes. Next to the dreadful immensity of the war, Cinci

“They better,” Cinci

One of the incoming shells hit a truck a couple of hundred yards ahead of him. The truck, loaded with the same sort of cargo as his, went up in a fireball. Luckily, it careened off the road instead of blocking it. All the same, Cinci

Could have been me, he thought, and shuddered. It would have been him if one of the Confederate artillery men had paused to scratch an itch or stick a fresh chaw in his mouth before pulling the lanyard. About fifteen seconds later, his truck would have been where that shell landed.

He sped up when he went past the shattered deuce-and-a-half. Not a chance in hell the driver got out. He hoped the man died fast, anyhow. Given the size of that explosion, the odds seemed good.

Another shell left a crater in the road, forcing Cinci

The truck column rolled into Findlay about five minutes later. Here and there around the town, tall columns of black, greasy smoke rose into the air: oil wells torched by the retreating Confederates. A team of U.S. engineers was trying to put one out as Cinci

He didn’t get long to worry about it. “Come on! Come on! Over here!” a sergeant bellowed, waving like a man possessed. Cinci

A swarm of soldiers descended on the truck, transferring the munitions and rations to several smaller trucks for the trip to the front. It wasn’t far away; Findlay itself had fallen only a few days before. Shells still came down on the town, as they’d landed on the road to the northwest. The faster the explosives left Cinci