But they didn't treat him as they would have treated a white man, either, always jeering at him-and, to a lesser degree, at the crewmen of the Ripple for insisting he was their friend, not a servant or a pet. They had Negro servants here at Fort Johnston, men who acted like dogs around Southern whites. Enos wondered what they used for self-respect.
He didn't have much left himself. The medical orderly-the Rebs didn't waste a doctor on damnyankees, not unless they were dying-snapped, "Bend over, nigger-lover." When Enos obeyed, the fellow ran fingers through his hair, examining the nape of his neck and the short hairs behind his ears. Reluctantly, the orderly said, "All right, you're clean-go on."
Enos went. He suspected the Rebs of claiming the men from the Ripple were lousy even when they weren't, just so they could put them through the process of getting rid of the vermin. Afterwards, your head smelled for days as if you'd been soaking it in the well of a kerosene lantern.
To give him his due, the medical officer did try to keep from spreading lice from one man to another. Between inspections, he dipped his hands into a bowl from which rose the antiseptic smell of dilute carbolic acid, then dried them on a towel. He looked over Patrick O'Donnell, and let the captain of the Ripple pass inspection in the same grudging manner he had Enos.
O'Donnell went over to the barbed wire and stood around looking bored. Enos walked up and stood beside him. "Another exciting day, isn't it, Skipper?" he said.
"You might say that," O'Donnell allowed. Both men laughed. About the only excitement in these parts was finding out whether your day's ration of cornbread had mold or not, and whether the chunk of boiled sowbelly the Rebs gave you with it was all fat or whether it had a tiny bit of real meat attached.
Thinking of that made George Enos laugh again. "Remember that time when Fred got a whole strip of meat in his sowbelly? I bet they fired the cook who gave it to him the day after, because it sure hasn't happened again."
"Bet you're right," the skipper said. "Sure sounded like they were giving somebody holy hell that night, too. Might've been the cook."
Ever so casually, he turned and glanced toward the disappearing turrets that held Fort Johnston 's three twelve-inch guns. Any ships that tried to ascend the Cape Fear River and bombard or mine Wilmington, North Carolina, would have to pass the guns here and in other forts farther up the river. Enos wouldn't have liked to try it. In their endless practices, the Rebs seemed very alert.
He'd never asked O'Donnell why he spent so much time by the wire. It wasn't really his concern, and confirming his suspicions wouldn't have done him or the captain of the Ripple any good. But he was pretty sure that, when they finally did get exchanged, O'Donnell would give the U.S. Navy a set of drawings for the interior grounds of Fort Johnston better than anything they had now.
Enos had other things on his mind. "You think they'll give us our jobs back when we get out of here?" he asked. "God only knows what Sylvia's doing to make ends meet."
"I hope you get your job back, George," O'Donnell answered. "With me, it doesn't matter so much." A skipper who lost his ship, even if it wasn't his fault, had trouble getting another one. But that wasn't what O'Donnell meant. If and when the Confederates shipped him back to the United States, he was going straight into the Navy. They'd be glad to have him again, what with his experience.
They'd probably be glad to have George Enos, too. He'd never served on a warship, but he was a sailor. He'd have an easier time figuring out what was going on than some landlubber from Dakota.
He didn't want to go into the Navy, the way O'Donnell did. Being kept away from Sylvia and his children had forcibly reminded him how much he missed them. You went aboard a cruiser, you were there for months at a time, and even when you got back to port, who could say where that port would be? If you were in San Diego, say, and got forty-eight hours' liberty, so what? You couldn't get back to Boston, let alone make the round trip, in that length of time.
He laughed. "What's funny?" O'Donnell asked.
"Thinking about getting liberty and what I'd do with it if I'm too far from home to go back and if I join the Navy and if I ever get out of here. Too damn many ifs." Enos laughed again. "Hell, liberty from the Navy is one thing. Liberty from here is a whole different one." To that, Patrick O'Donnell could only nod.
And liberty from Fort Johnston was a different thing for the two white men from what it was for Charlie White. A Confederate soldier walked up and stood watching the Ripple's cook chop wood. "Hey, nigger," he said in an assumed tone of casual interest, "you think maybe back 'fore we manumitted you coons, my pa or granddad fucked your mother?"
Charlie stopped chopping. For a horrible second, George was afraid he'd try to use his hatchet against a rifle. But he just paused, then shook his head. "Nah. If that had happened, I'd be a whole lot uglier."
Every detainee who heard the answer howled and jeered at Charlie's comeback. The Reb who'd walked into it turned red as brick. He started to bring his rifle to bear on the cook. Now the detainees yelled even louder for a Confederate officer. Before anybody with bars or stars on his collar got to the barbed-wire enclosure, the soldier lowered the rifle, snarling, "Nigger gets uppity, he gets his sooner or later, wait an' see if he don't."
"You haven't got the balls to do that to anybody who could shoot back," Lucas Phelps told him.
"Fuck you, too, pal-fuck you special," the guard said. Phelps slowly and deliberately turned his back and walked away. The guard raised his voice: "Where you think you're goin', nigger-lover?"
"To the shithouse," the fisherman answered over his shoulder. "I'm gonna pretend the hole is your face."
"Watch it, Lucas," George Enos said softly. Then he and all the other fishermen cried out in alarm and horror, for the guard brought the rifle up to his shoulder, took aim-he could hardly have missed, not from a range of twenty feet at the most-and fired at the back of Lucas Phelps' head. Phelps took another half step and then crumpled, surely dead before he knew what hit him: George got a good look at the blasted ruin the bullet had made of his face as it exited. All the detainees screamed "Murder!" at the top of their lungs.
At the sound of the shot, an officer did come. He led the soldier away. Two days later, the fellow was back at his post, looking meaner than ever. Nobody said a word to him, not if he could help it.
Enos had another reason to hope exchange came soon. It was already too late for his comrade.
VIII
Dashing in spats and a double-breasted herringbone overcoat with a breast pocket slanted at the latest angle-or so he said-Herman Bruck came into the Socialist Party headquarters with a copy of the New York Times in one hand. He quickly hung his homburg on a tree and got out of the overcoat. It was icy outside, but very much the reverse with a couple of coal stoves and a steam radiator heating the office.
He went over to Flora Hamburger and set the newspaper on the desk in front of her. "Bully speech by Senator Debs," he said, pointing. The newsprint had smudged on the gray calfskin of his gloves.
Flora bent over it. "Let me see," she said. Debs had been the first Socialist elected to the Senate, coming out of Indiana when the Republicans broke up in disarray in the aftermath of the Second Mexican War. He'd been there ever since, and twice run unsuccessfully for president.
"'Our losses in a few brief months have exceeded all those in the War of Secession, till now our bloodiest conflict,'" Flora read aloud. " 'Soon they will exceed those in all our previous wars combined. And for what? For what, I ask, Mr. President? When we fought to keep the Confederate States from abandoning our Union, we fought for a principle: that the covenant of the United States, once made, was indissoluble. Here, on what great principle do we stand? That the European alliances with which we have entangled ourselves be honoured when even to be in them is to hold no honour? How splendid! How noble! What a fine principle for which to crucify mankind on a cross of blood and iron!'" She looked up in admiration. Several people who'd been listening to her broke into applause. "That is strong stuff," she said.