The kitchen went dark. Kerosene was in short supply these days, too; no lamp ever burned in an unoccupied room. “Let’s go outside, then upstairs to bed,” Maude said. Mary’s yawn was big as the world.
McGregor was the last to use the outhouse. By the time he got back in, his younger daughter was already snoring. “Saxons,” he muttered as he pulled off his boots. “Saxons in a country the Normans stole from them.”
“What are you talking about?” his wife said. But she was puzzled for only a moment. “Oh. That’s right. You’ve been reading Ivanhoe again.”
He nodded and undid his overalls. They were old, and hardly blue at all any more; the fabric, softened by many washings, conformed perfectly to the shape of his body. “Living in a land that had been theirs, and then somebody took it away. How did they stand it? How could they?”
Maude sighed. “You’re going to break your heart, Arthur, if you dwell on things you can’t do anything about. Getting Alexander home, we can do something about that. Maybe we can. I pray to God every night we can. But getting Canada back, that’s too big for the likes of us.”
“It shouldn’t be,” he declared. But half of that-more than half-was Sir Walter Scott speaking through him, and he was wise enough to understand as much.
If he hadn’t been, Maude would have nailed it down tight: “If you don’t think so, why didn’t you want to go see poor Jimmy Knight’s father? Sounds like he’s going to try to do something-”
“Stupid,” he finished for her. She nodded; he hadn’t meant it for a joke, and she hadn’t taken it for one. She blew out the lamp, plunging the bedroom into blackness. No moon, not tonight, and no town close by, either. Sometimes, when all the guns up at the front were going at once, that glow would flicker on the horizon: the Northern Lights of death. But the guns were quiet tonight, too, or as quiet as they ever got.
Still in his union suit, McGregor slid under the covers. Afterwards, he didn’t know whether he first reached for Maude or she for him. After being married so long, after working so hard every day, desire was a flame that guttered, and sometimes guttered low. But it had never quite gone out, and, like any guttering flame, sometimes flared high, too.
Neither one of them undressed. They were almost as formal with each other as they would have been with strangers. He kissed her carefully, knowing he hadn’t had time to shave in the past couple of days, knowing also he would rasp her face raw if he wasn’t careful.
His hand closed on her breast through the cotton nightshirt she wore. She sighed. He squeezed her nipple. It stiffened against the soft fabric. He did the same with her other breast. They were still firm after nursing three children-and, in any case, in the darkness she was always a bride and he a bridegroom ever so glad to be out of his uncomfortable fancy suit and the top hat he’d never had on a day of his life before or since.
He reached under the hem of the long nightshirt. Her legs slid apart for him. His hands were hard with endless labor, and she-she was softer there than anywhere else. Of themselves, her legs drifted wider. When her breath began to come short and quick, he stopped what he was doing and unbuttoned the union suit with fingers clumsy not only from work but from desire. He poised himself above her. The mattress rocked, ever so slightly. She was nodding, urging him to hurry, something she would never have done with words.
She gasped when he entered her, and soon shuddered beneath him. He went on, intent on what he was doing-and also too tired to be able to do it quickly. She began to gasp again, her arms tightened around his back, her hips moving no matter how unladylike motion at such times was. She let out a small, involuntary moan at about the same time joyous fire poured through him.
He rolled off her almost at once, and set his underwear to rights. “Good night,” she said, turning onto her side to get ready to sleep.
“Good night,” he answered. They always said that. He kept wondering if there shouldn’t be something more. But if there was more, their bodies had said it. For a little while, he hadn’t thought about anything, not even Alexander. But making love didn’t make trouble go away; it just shoved the trouble to one side. He brooded, but not for long. Sleep shoved trouble to one side, too.
In the morning, though, the sun would rise. The trouble would still be there.
George Enos slapped at a mosquito. He killed it-he squashed it flat, smearing red guts across his forearm. “That means it’s bitten somebody,” Wayne Pitchess said. “That’s blood in there.”
“Of course it’s bitten somebody, for God’s sake.” Enos rolled his eyes. “You think I squashed it because it was throwing pillows at me?”
The Punishment lay at anchor a few miles beyond Clarksville, Tennessee. George didn’t like lying at anchor. He looked to the south, to the hills below which the Cumberland flowed. Somewhere out there, the Rebs were liable to have a gun waiting to start throwing shells at the river monitor, and a moving target was harder to hit than a stationary one.
What worried him more than anything else was that monitors regularly tied up here: so regularly that the locals-the colored locals, anyhow-had run up a couple of shanties by the riverside to cater to Yankee sailors’ needs-or their desires, anyhow. If you were off duty, and if your commanding officer was in a good mood, you could row over to the shanties, eat fried chicken or roast pork, drink some horrible homemade rotgut that tasted as if it should have gone into a kerosene lamp instead of a human being, or get your ashes hauled in the crib next door.
George had eaten the food, which was pretty good. He’d drunk the whiskey, and awakened the next morning with a head that felt like the Punishment’s boiler at forced draft. He hadn’t laid his money down for any of the colored women, not yet. The sailors who had gone into the shabby little makeshift whorehouse came out with stories of how ugly the girls were. That hadn’t stopped a lot of them from going back.
That was another reason he wished the Punishment would go upstream or down. He didn’t want to be unfaithful to Sylvia, or the top part of his mind didn’t. But he’d been away from her and without a woman for a long time now. If he went over to one of those shacks for some pork ribs and had himself a glass or two of that godawful bad whiskey, maybe he wouldn’t care how ugly the whores were supposed to be or how much he missed Sylvia. Sometimes you just wanted to do it so badly, you…
He found himself fondling the curve of the water jacket on his machine gun as if it were Sylvia’s breast-or, for that matter, the breast of one of the colored women in that shack. He jerked his hand away from the green-gray painted iron as if it had become red-hot, or as if everyone on the monitor could see what was on his mind.
He went back to work, stripping and cleaning the machine gun with the same dogged persistence he might have shown trawling for haddock in the North Atlantic. He wished he were trawling for haddock in the North Atlantic, or would have wished it had the ocean not been full of warships and commerce raiders and submarines, all of which looked on a fishing boat as a tasty snack.
And keeping the machine gun in perfect order didn’t only distract him from thoughts of Sylvia (though, when he thought on how he’d rubbed the cooling jacket, it hadn’t distracted him much, had it?); it also made his coming through a fight alive more likely. He approved of that.
But, as the sun began to slide down the sky in the afternoon, three men made for one of the Punishment’s boats to improve their outlook on life. One of them called to George: “Come on, have a few with us.”
The deck officer was standing close by. Moltke Donovan was a fresh-faced lieutenant who took his duties very seriously. One of those duties was keeping his men in top fighting trim, and that meant, every now and then, letting them go off on a toot. Lieutenant Kelly would probably have said no. His replacement smiled and said, “Go ahead, Enos. That machine gun’s in better shape than when they tore it out of its crate.”