But Edna, despite being wild for life, was not a fool in matters unrelated to large, handsome, empty-headed men. “He couldn’t have known, Ma,” she insisted, “not if he’s just a drunken bum. Only thing a drunken bum cares about is his next bottle. Only way he could have known…” She drew in a sharp, excited breath. “Ma, the only way he could have known is if he’s a spy.”
Edna had hit the nail on the head. She didn’t realize that hitting the nail on the head endangered not only Bill Reach-who, in Nellie’s view, deserved all the danger he could find and then some-but also Hal Jacobs and Nellie herself. With a sniff, Nellie said, “Anyone who’d hire that louse to spy for him would have to be pretty hard up, if you want to know what I think.”
That was true. Hal Jacobs, now, was sober and sensible-sensible enough to stay sober, too. Nellie could see him as a spy. Why Reach never started babbling about what he knew to everyone around him when he got drunk was beyond her.
Edna said, “But he couldn’t be anything else, Ma. He knew. Somebody must have told him.”
“ I wouldn’t want to tell Bill Reach anything, except where to head in,” Nellie said grimly. “And anybody else who would want to is a fool, like I said before. I don’t know what he might have heard while he was laying in the gutter, and I don’t want to know, either.”
For a wonder, Edna subsided. The bombardment didn’t. The U.S. Army seemed intent on killing every Confederate in Washington, D.C. If that meant killing all the U.S. citizens left in the tortured city, too, well, fair enough. For variety’s sake, perhaps, bombing aeroplanes roared overhead and dropped long strings of explosives that made the candlesticks quiver as if they were in torment along with everything else in town.
At last, hours later, a lull came. “Let’s go up and cook something to eat,” Nellie said. “Then, if they haven’t started up again by the time we’re through, I think I’ll scurry across the street and see how Mr. Jacobs is getting along.”
“All right, Ma, you go ahead and do that,” Edna said, but without the viciousness that would have informed the words before the disaster of her wedding. Losing her fiance on what would have been their wedding day had taken a lot of the starch out of her.
It was dark in the coffeehouse, too: night outside, with a few strips and circles of moonlight sliding through holes shell fragments had punched in the boards that covered the window opening. The gas had gone out as soon as U.S. shelling started, which was sensible of the Confederate authorities but made life no easier. Edna scooped coal into the firebox of the stove and got a fire going.
“I hope this beefsteak is still good,” Nellie muttered, sniffing at it as she took it out of the icebox. She sighed. “You may as well cook it up, because it won’t be any better tomorrow. God only knows when we’ll have the chance to get ice again.”
Edna fried it in an iron spider. It tasted a little gamy, but not too bad. But when Edna turned the tap to get water to make coffee, nothing came out. “The Rebs wouldn’t have shut off the water,” she said. “They couldn’t put out any fires if they did.”
“A shell must have broken a pipe somewhere not far away,” Nellie said. “If the water doesn’t come back on soon, we’ll have to carry it back from the river in a bucket and boil it. That will be dangerous, if the shelling keeps up like this.”
“Oh, well.” Edna tried to make the best of things: “If there ain’t no water, I can’t very well do dishes, now can I?”
“I’m going across the street,” Nellie said, and her daughter nodded. When Nellie opened the door and inhaled, she coughed. The air was thick with smoke. A lot of the things that could burn in Washington were burning. Here and there in the near and middle distance, orange flames flickered and leaped.
Nellie was not supposed to be on the street after dusk. A Confederate patrol that spied her was as likely as not to shoot first and ask questions later. But she didn’t think she would be spotted, and she wasn’t.
When she opened the door to Hal Jacobs’ cobbler’s shop, the bell over it jangled, as if cheerily announcing a customer. Jacobs looked up, candlelight exaggerating the surprise on his face. The two men huddled with him also looked startled. One was Lou Pfeiffer, a pigeon fancier who used his birds to carry messages out of Washington. The other, to Nellie’s horrified dismay, was Bill Reach.
“I came to check and make sure you were all right, Mr. Jacobs,” Nellie said in a voice that might have been carved from ice. “I see you are. Good evening.” She turned and started back across the street.
“Widow Semphroch-Nellie-please wait,” Jacobs said. “Mr. Reach has something he would like to say to you-don’t you, Bill?” He bore down heavily on the last three words.
Reach, for once, wasn’t obviously drunk. That did not make his tone any less raspy and rough when he said, “I’m sorry as he-as anything for all the trouble I caused you, Lit-uh, Nellie, and I sure as-as can be won’t do anything like that ever again, honest to God I won’t.” He took off his battered black derby, revealing a mat of unkempt gray hair beneath.
It wasn’t enough. It wasn’t nearly enough. But it sufficed to bring Nellie back into the shop. Lou Pfeiffer’s round head went up and down on his fat neck. “That’s good,” he wheezed. “That’s very good.”
And then the thunder from the north that had died away started up again, not only started up again but was, impossibly, louder and fiercer than ever. Shells began crashing down, some very close by. Fragments whined off brick and stone and bit into and through rough wood. “To the cellar!” Jacobs shouted.
Nellie hesitated. Crossing the street to get back to her own cellar in the middle of the bombardment was nothing but madness. Going down into the cellar here, with a man who, she thought, loved her; a man who had used her; and a man about whom she knew next to nothing…
She hesitated, and was lost. “Come on! To the cellar!” Jacobs bawled again. He grabbed her by the arm and half dragged her down the stairs.
Meant for one, his cellar was obscenely crowded for four. Nellie sat in one corner of the tiny, stifling chamber, her skirts pulled in tight around her, willing no one to come near. And no one did. But they all kept looking at her in the flickering light of the candle flame. And they were all men, so she knew-she was sure she knew-what went through their filthy minds.
And then, to her horror, Bill Reach pulled from his pocket a flask and began to drink. She sprang to her feet and was up the stairs and shoving the cellar door open before Hal Jacobs could do anything more than let out a startled bleat. She slammed the door down on top of the three U.S. spies and fled.
When she got back to the cellar under the coffeehouse, she discovered flying fragments had sliced her skirt to shreds. Not one of them had touched her flesh. “You all right, Ma?” Edna asked. “I heard you at the cellar door right in the middle of all the guns-before that, I was afraid you were a goner, and then I thought you were nuts, coming out in that.”
“With where I was, I’d go out among the shells again in a minute.” Nellie spoke with great conviction. “In a second, believe me.” Edna shot her a quizzical glance. She shuddered but did not explain.
Far in the distance, off somewhere on the west Texas plains, a coyote howled, a wail full of hunger and loneliness and unrequited lust. Hipolito Rodriguez let out a soft chuckle. “He is not very happy, I don’t think. The way he sound, he might as well be a soldier, si?”
Before Jefferson Pinkard could answer, Sergeant Albert Cross said, “Need some men for a raidin’ party on the Yankee trenches tonight.”
Pinkard stuck up his hand. “I’ll go, Sarge.”
Cross looked at him without saying anything for a while. Then he remarked, “You don’t got to kill all the damnyankees in Texas by your lonesome, Jeff. Leave some for the rest of us.”