“Good thing it doesn’t happen very often, too,” added Sherwood McKenna, who was the third man in the tier of bunks with George and Pitchess. “Monitors can sink each other in a godawful hurry.”
George Enos took a swig of coffee. It was vile stuff, but that wasn’t the cook’s fault. The Empire of Brazil, which produced more coffee than the rest of the world put together, had remained neutral. That meant both the Entente and the Quadruple Alliance went after its shipping with great enthusiasm. Most of the other coffee-growing countries were in the Entente camp. Not even the finest cook in the world could have done much with the beans that had gone into this pot.
“Well, if we don’t fight other monitors much,” George said, setting down his mug, “what do we do?”
“Bombard enemy land positions, mostly,” Pitchess answered. “Moving six-inch guns down a river is easy. Hauling them cross-country is anything but. And we’re a harder target to hit back at than guns on land, too, because we can move around easier.”
“And because we’re armored,” Enos added.
“That doesn’t hurt,” Sherwood McKenna agreed. “Another monitor can smash us up, but we just laugh at those little fast-firing three-inch field guns the Rebs use. Lots of difference between a three-inch shrapnel shell and a six- or eight-incher with an armor-piercing tip.”
Lifting the coffee mug again, this time as if to make a toast with it, George said, “Here’s hoping we never find out what the difference is.” Both his bunkmates drank to that.
Sleeping belowdecks was stifling, especially in the top bunk, which Enos, as a newcomer aboard the Punishment, had inherited. Sometime in the middle of the night, though, a couple of the deck machine guns began to hammer, waking up everyone who was asleep. George didn’t stay awake long. As soon as he figured out the shooting wasn’t aimed directly at him, he rolled over-carefully, so as not to fall out of the narrow bunk-and started sawing wood again.
Next morning, he found out somebody on the Kentucky shore had fired a machine gun at the Punishment, hoping to pick off someone on deck or in the cabin. Wayne Pitchess took that in stride. “He didn’t hurt us, and we probably didn’t hurt him,” he said around a mouthful of sausage. “That’s the kind of war I like to fight.”
Cautiously, the Punishment pushed farther down the river. Now Tennessee lay to port. They steamed past the ruins of a Confederate fort that had mounted guns able to sink a battleship, let alone a river monitor. More such forts, still untaken, lay farther south. On the stretches of the Mississippi it owned, the USA had its share of them, too. They were another reason combats between monitors were scarce.
Enos eyed the woods running down to the river. U.S. forces were supposed to have cleared away all the Rebs, but the exchange of fire the night before showed that wasn’t so. He wondered how he would get any sign of the enemy, or, for that matter, of the Negroes who had rebelled against the Confederacy. All he saw were trees. He saw a hell of a lot of trees. He was used to the cramped confines of Massachusetts, where everything was jammed up against everything else. It wasn’t like that here. The land was wide, and people thin on the ground.
With a low rumble, the turret of the Punishment began to revolve. The guns rose slightly. George had never heard them fired before. He braced himself.
Bracing himself wasn’t enough. The roar seemed like the end of the world. Sheets of golden flame spat from the guns’ muzzles. One of them blew a perfect smoke ring, as he might have done with a cigar, only a hundred times bigger.
His ears still ringing, he watched the gun barrels rise again, an even smaller movement than they had made before. They salvoed once more. He couldn’t tell where the shells were coming down. Someone evidently could, though, and was letting the Punishment know, perhaps by wireless. That repositioning must have been what was wanted, for the twin six-inchers fired again and again. Somewhere, miles inside Tennessee, the shells were creating a good approximation of hell. Here, they were just creating an ungodly racket.
After a while, the bombardment stopped. The gunners came out on deck. It had probably been hell inside the turret, too. They stripped off their sweat-soaked uniforms and jumped naked into the river, where they proceeded to try to drown one another. It was, George Enos thought, a strange way to fight a war.
Anne Colleton gunned the Vauxhall Prince Henry up the Robert E. Lee Highway from Charleston, South Carolina, toward her plantation, Marshlands, outside the little town of St. Matthews. The motorcar hit a pothole. Her teeth came together in a sharp click. The so-called highway, like all roads outside the cities, was nothing but dirt. Even with a lap robe and a broad-brimmed hat with a veil, Anne was caked with red-brown dust. She supposed she should count herself lucky she hadn’t had a puncture. She’d already repaired two since leaving Charleston.
“Punctures?” She shook her head. “Punctures are nothing.” She counted herself lucky to be alive. With a dashing submersible commander, she’d been at a rather seedy hotel near the edge of one of Charleston’s Negro districts when the riot or uprising or whatever it was broke out. They’d piled into the Vaux-hall and escaped just ahead of the baying mob. She’d delivered Roger Kimball back to the harbor and then, not bothering to get the bulk of her belongings out of the much finer hotel where she was registered, she’d headed for home.
Down the road toward her, filling up most of it, came a wagon pulled by a horse and a mule and filled to overflowing with white men, women, and children-several families packed together, unless she missed her guess. She stepped on the brake, hard as she could. The Vauxhall came to a shuddering stop. Its sixty-horsepower engine could hurl it forward at a mile a minute-though not on the Robert E. Lee Highway-but slowing down was another matter.
Some of the whites wore bandages, some of those rusty with old blood. Over the growl of the motorcar’s engine, Anne called, “What’s it like up ahead?”
“It’s bad, ma’am,” the graybeard at the reins answered, tipping his battered straw hat to her-he could see she was a person of consequence, even if he didn’t know just who she was. “We’re lucky we got out alive, and that’s a fact.”
The woman beside him nodded vehemently. “You ought to turn around your ownself,” she added. “Niggers up further north, they gone crazy. They got guns some kind of crazy way and they got red flags flyin’ and sure as Jesus they’re gonna kill any whites they can catch.”
“Red flags,” Anne said, and heads bobbed up and down again in the wagon. Her lips moved in a silent curse. Her brother Tom, a Confederate major, had said earlier in the year there were Red revolutionaries among the Negro laborers in the Army. She’d scoffed at the idea that such radicals might also have gained a foothold at Marshlands. Now fear clawed her. Her other brother, Jacob, was back at the mansion, an invalid since the Yankees had gassed him within an inch of his life. She’d thought it surely safe to leave him for a few days.
The fellow in the straw hat tipped it again, then guided his mismatched team off the road so the wagon could get around the automobile. As soon as she had the room, she put the Vauxhall in gear and zoomed forward again. Along with other innovations, she’d had a rearview mirror installed on the motorcar. Looking into it, she saw faces staring after her from the wagon as she drove toward trouble rather than away from it.
Every so often, trees shaded the road. Something dangled from an overhanging branch of one of them. She slowed down again. It was the body of a lynched Negro. A placard tied round his neck said, THIS IS IF WE KETCH YOU. He wore only a pair of ragged drawers. What had been done to him before he was hanged wasn’t pretty.