“No!” Anne’s voice was sharp. “I want her alive. You men!” She waved to the rest of the squad, then pointed in the direction of the Reds who had been digging. “See to them. If any of them are still breathing, finish them off.”
She loped toward Cherry. Behind her, a couple of short, flat cracks rang out. Nodding in satisfaction, she trotted on. She had a round in the chamber of her Tredegar, and was ready and more than ready to fire if the colored woman had a pistol tucked in the pocket or waistband of her tattered dungarees.
Cherry snarled hatred at her, but made no move to reach for a weapon. “White debbil bitch,” she said. “They was right all along, damn them. You never was nothin’but a goddamn liar.”
“You know all about lies, don’t you?” Anne said evenly. “You told enough of them, back before the rebellion.”
“I ain’t never told lies like you ’pressors tell de niggers and de poor stupid buckra and your ownselves,” Cherry retorted. She gathered herself, though blood was puddling around her right calf.
“Don’t try it,” Anne advised her. “I’m too far away for you to reach me, and I won’t shoot you in the head. I’ll try for somewhere that hurts more and takes longer. Kidney, maybe, or one in each shoulder.”
To her surprise, Cherry nodded. “Ain’t a patch on what I do to you, I had you down shot on de ground.”
The longing in the black woman’s voice made Anne shiver, though she was the one with the rifle. She said, “After what you did to Marshlands, after what you did to my brother, you’ve had your turn already.”
“Ain’t.” Cherry shook her head. “Ain’t come close. Cain’t pay back three hundred years o’ ’pression in a day. Done whipped we and ’sploited we and sold we like we was horses and fucked we till we gots so many yaller niggers it’s a cryin’ shame. No, we ain’t come close.”
Anne heard the words. She heard the accusations. They didn’t register, not in any way that mattered. She shook her head. “You rose up against us,” she said. “You stabbed us in the back while we were fighting the damnyankees. And you-you-” When she tried to say what Cherry in particular had done, words failed her for one of the rare times in her life.
Despite the pain from her ruined lower leg, Cherry smiled. “I knows what I done, Miss Anne. I was fuckin’ and suckin’ your brother, and I was puttin’ on airs on account of it. And you knows what else?” The smile got wider. “All the time that goddamn skinny little white dick was in me, Miss Anne, I never feel one thing. Never oncet.”
Without conscious thought, ahead of conscious thought, Anne’s finger squeezed the trigger. The Tredegar roared. The back of Cherry’s head exploded, splashing blood and brains and pulverized bone over her and the ground around her. She twitched and shuddered and lay still. But, below the neat hole in her forehead, her face still held that mocking smile.
“To hell with you,” Anne whispered, and two tears ran down her face, half sorry for Jacob, half fury at the black woman and the way she’d duped him and used him. And Cherry had got the last word, too, and goaded Anne into giving her a quick end at the same time. Anne kicked at the dirt. Automatically, she worked the bolt and chambered a fresh round.
Linus Ashforth came up to her. The elderly militiaman spat a stream of tobacco juice into Cherry’s puddled blood. “This here was right good, ma’am,” he said. “Them murderin’ devils done took the bait you left ’em, and there ain’t a one of ’em going back to the swamps. Yes, ma’am, this here was pretty blame fine.”
“It wasn’t good enough,” Anne said, as much to herself as to the old man. “It wasn’t enough.”
“What more could you want?” Ashforth asked reasonably. “Every single nigger stuck his nose out of the swamp is dead now. Can’t do much better’n a clean sweep, now can you?”
“But there are still Reds in the swamps,” Anne answered. “When they’re all hunted down and killed, that will be-” She started to say enough, but shook her head before the word passed her lips. That wouldn’t be enough. Nothing could be enough to repair the damage the Negroes had done to the Confederate cause, the damage they had done to the Confederate States. She ended the sentence in a different way: “That will be a start, anyhow.”
Linus Ashforth’s whistle was soft and low and wondering. “Ma’am, don’t sound to me like you’ll ever be satisfied.”
“I would have been,” Anne said. “I could have been. God, I was. But it will be a long time before I’m satisfied again; you’re right about that. It will be a long time before this is a country anyone can be satisfied with.”
“Jesus God, Miss Anne, I’m sure as the dickens glad you ain’t mad with me.” The militiaman spat again, then wiped his mouth on his sleeve.
“You ought to be,” Anne Colleton said. She weighed the words, then nodded. “Yes, you ought to be, because if I’m angry at something, I’ll hunt it down and kill it.” She looked north, toward the Congaree. Silently, her lips shaped a name. Cassius.
Like so many small, hunted creatures, Nellie Semphroch had learned to stay laired up in her burrow, and to come out at night to forage. The occupying Confederates hardly bothered to patrol Washington, D.C., any more. Hal Jacobs said they’d given up because every man they had, they needed at the front. Nellie didn’t know about that. She did know that getting water from the Potomac or firewood from a wrecked building, she worried more about a chance U.S. shell than she did about men in butternut. Even at night, the bombardment from the north did not halt. It only slowed a little.
She was far from the only one prowling the night. If she passed close enough to Jacobs and a few others to recognize them, she would nod. When she saw others, she shrank back into the shadows, and that though she never ventured forth without a long, sharp kitchen knife. Still others shrank from her. That made her feel oddly strong and fierce.
Sometimes Edna would come out with her, sometimes not. When they needed water, they generally went down to the river together. Stove wood was easier to come by close to home. One of them would usually go out for it, or else the other.
“I wish we could find some coal,” Nellie said, not for the first time. “The grate isn’t really right for wood, and the stove pipe will get all full of soot and creosote. It’s liable to catch on fire.”
“If you’re going to wish, Ma, don’t waste your time wishing for coal, for God’s sake,” Edna said. “Wish for a couple days without shells falling all the damn time. That’d be somethin’ really worth having.”
“I think we may get that wish before too long,” Nellie said. “How much longer do you suppose the Confederate lines north of town are going to be able to stand the pounding the Army is giving them? They’ll have to crack pretty soon, and then the United States will have Washington back again.”
“Oh, bully!” Edna loaded her voice with sarcasm. “Even if you’re right, Ma, it’ll only take ’em a hundred years to build it all back up the way it was. And the Rebs’ll fight hard to keep the place, too.”
“I know they will-it’s about the only part of the line where they’re still on our soil instead of the other way round,” Nellie said. “But when you look at the way the war is going everywhere else, it’s hard to see how they’re going to be able to do it.”
“Well, what if the United States do come in?” Edna said. “Then the Rebs will pound the city to pieces from the other side of the Potomac. The only difference will be which way the guns are pointed.”
Nellie sighed and nodded in the candlelit dimness of the cellar under the coffeehouse. Her daughter’s guess held an unpleasant feel of truth.
After it got dark outside as well as down in the cellar, Nellie went out to see what she could find and to discover what the bombardment had knocked flat since the last time she came up above ground. One of the things that wasn’t flat any more was the street down the block from the coffeehouse. A big shell had dug an enormous crater in it. Time was when such wounds had been rare and the Confederates patched them as soon as they were made. Now the Rebs kept a few roads to the front open and forgot the rest.