McGregor neither moved back nor blinked. Evenly, he said, “You’re the people who know all about murdering.”
Before the soldier could reply, Major Hannebrink broke in: “Enough, Neugebauer.” The private in green-gray stiffened to obedient attention. Hannebrink went on, “We don’t know that McGregor here is a murderer. We’re trying to find out.” He turned to the farmer. “So far, we have no evidence, only a man who thinks he has a reason to be angry at us.”
“You had no evidence against my son, either,” McGregor said. Not lunging at the U.S. officer was one of the hardest things he’d ever done. “You didn’t need any. You shot him without it.”
“I had evidence I thought good,” Hannebrink said. “I did my duty to my country. I would do it again.”
“I believe that,” McGregor said. “I don’t know why you’re bothering with this rigmarole. If you need evidence against me, you can always plant it whenever you please. Then you’ll haul me off to jail and shoot me, same as you did with Alexander.”
Hannebrink exhaled through his nose. “If I have no evidence against you, I have no quarrel with you. If you aren’t the man who’s been planting bombs hither and yon through the countryside, I don’t want to waste my time on you. I want to catch the son of a bitch who is doing that and make him pay.”
He sounded sincere. But then, to be good at his job he needed to sound sincere. McGregor answered, “If I was crazy enough to make bombs, I wouldn’t plant ’em hither and yon through the countryside.” He pointed to Hannebrink. “I’d go after you.”
“One of those bombs almost did kill me,” the U.S. major said.
“Really?” McGregor was calm, casual, cool. “Too bad it missed. I’d buy a beer for the fellow who got you, and then I’d hit him over the head with my mug, for doing it before I could.”
“You ought to bring him in for sedition, sir,” said the private-Neugebauer-who’d stepped over and around McGregor’s bomb-making supplies.
Hannebrink shook his head. Raising his voice a little, he asked, “Anything here even a little out of the ordinary?”
“No, sir,” the soldiers answered, almost in chorus.
Hannebrink shook his head again. “Then I’ve got no reason to bring him in. He does have some reason not to be in love with me. That doesn’t worry me. I did what I thought was right, and I’ll live with it. Let’s go back to town, boys.”
When they walked out to their Fords, they discovered that each of them had a punctured inner tube. Cursing, the soldiers set about patching the punctures. McGregor wanted to smile. He didn’t. He was too worried. All the soldiers had been back at the barn, and…
Major Hannebrink folded his arms across his chest. “If these punctures turn out to be knife cuts, Mr. McGregor, I am not going to be pleased with your family, I warn you.”
Oh, Mary, McGregor thought, what have you done? But then a soldier at the nearer motorcar said, “Sir, we got a nail in this one.”
“Don’t know what did this one, sir,” said Neugebauer, who was holding the inner tube from the other Ford, “but it looks like a hole, not a cut.”
“Anybody see anything?” Hannebrink asked. None of the U.S. soldiers answered. McGregor realized he hadn’t been breathing, and sucked in a long, ragged inhalation. The soldiers wouldn’t be thinking about a little girl. Even Hannebrink, who was professionally suspicious, wouldn’t be thinking about a little girl. Maude, maybe, but not Mary.
Hannebrink pursed his lips. “No evidence,” he said. “Maybe we picked up those punctures on the way over here. Maybe. It could have happened. Since I can’t prove it didn’t happen that way, I’m going to leave it alone. But if it ever happens here again, Mr. McGregor, someone is going to be very unhappy, and it won’t be me.”
“Why are you barking at me?” McGregor asked. “I was in the barn with you and your hooligans.” For once, he was telling the whole truth. It sounded no different from his lies.
Hannebrink didn’t answer. He waited while his men fixed the punctures, which they handled with practiced efficiency. Then all the Yank soldiers piled into the motorcars and drove off.
McGregor waited till they’d left his land. Then he walked into the house. His wife was furious. “They turned everything upside down and inside out, those dirty-” She hissed like a cat with its fur puffed out, then went on, “I wish I was a man, so I could say what I think.”
“Never mind,” McGregor said, which made Maude hiss again. Ignoring her, he went over to Mary. He knelt down and kissed her on the forehead. “This is for what you did, and for being clever enough to use a nail and not a knife.” Then he spanked her, hard enough to make her yelp in both surprise and pain. “And this is to remind you not to do it again, no matter how much you want to.”
His younger daughter stared. “How did you know it was me, Pa? You were inside the barn with the Yankees. You couldn’t see it.”
“How did I know? Because I’m your father, that’s how. This time, I’m proud of you, you little sneak. Some things you can only get away with once, though. This is one of them. Remember it.”
“Yes, Pa,” Mary said demurely, so demurely that McGregor could only hope she’d paid some attention-a little attention-to what he’d told her.
The big guns rumbled and roared. The bombardment of Nashville itself hadn’t stopped since the U.S. guns got close enough to reach the city. Lieutenant Colonel Irving Morrell had long since got used to that rumble from the western horizon.
Closer, but still west of his position on the northern bank of the Cumberland, another bombardment lay its thunder over the more distant rumble. For the past six days, U.S. artillery had been hammering the Confederate positions south of the river with high explosives and gas. Bombing aeroplanes had added the weight of their munitions to the unending gunfire. Fighting scouts swooped low, strafing the Rebel’s trenches with their machine guns.
General Custer could hardly have made it more obvious where he intended to throw First Army across the Cumberland. He had even been rash enough to let them get glimpses of the barrels he was gathering for his frontal blow.
And the Confederates, having such generosity bestowed upon them, were not slow to take advantage of it. Though the U.S. artillery hampered their movements, they brought reinforcements forward. Their own guns pounded away at the force Custer had assembled. Their aeroplanes were outnumbered, but still stung the U.S. soldiers waiting on Custer’s order to cross the river.
Irving Morrell looked west with benign approval.
Beside him, Colonel Ned Sherrard pulled out his watch. Morrell imitated the gesture. Together, they said, “Five minutes to go.”
Sherrard put his watch back into its pocket. He said, “How does it feel to have the whole First Army moving to a scheme you thought up?”
“Ask me in a few days,” Morrell answered. “If it goes the way I hope, it’ll feel great. If it doesn’t, I’ll be so low a deep dugout will look like up to me.”
As he watched the second hand of his own watch sweep into its final minutes before the curtain went up, he realized how much he had riding on the next few days. He would soon know the answer to a question so many men ask themselves: are you really as smart as you think you are? If he was, he’d be wearing a colonel’s eagles himself soon, or maybe even a brigadier general’s single stars. If he wasn’t, he’d be a lieutenant colonel if he stayed in the Army for the next fifty years, and no one would pay any attention to him during all that time.
Compared to failure, dying on the battlefield had its attractions.
“Fifteen sec-” he started to say, and then the guns behind him, the guns that had stayed hidden under canvas and branches, the guns that had remained silent for so long while their brethren pounded the Confederates to the west, opened up with everything they had against the thinned Rebel line just east of Lakewood, Tennessee. On the far side of the Cumberland, earth leapt and danced and quivered in agony.