For a moment, Nell thought he was trying to trick her. Then she too heard the rhythmic thump of marching men and the jingle of harness. Another column-probably another regiment-heading up toward the fighting. Nellie bit her lip till she tasted blood. She didn’t want the Rebs to lay their hands on…anyone. Even Bill Reach? she asked herself silently, and, with great reluctance, nodded. Even Bill Reach.
She opened the door. Reach scurried inside like a rat running into its hole. “God bless you, Nell,” he said while she closed it as quietly as she could. “If they’d have caught me, they’d have squeezed everything out of me, about you and this place and the shoemaker and-guk!”
Nellie held the tip of the knife against his poorly shaved throat. “Don’t you talk about such things, not to me, not to them, not to anybody,” she said in a voice all the more frightening for being so cold. “I’m not the foolish girl I was, and you can’t blackmail me. When that column marches past, you’re going out the door again. If you come around here after that, I’ll shove this in”-she did shove the knife in, perhaps a quarter of an inch; Reach moaned and tried to pull away, but she wouldn’t let him-“and I’ll laugh while I’m doing it. Do you hear me? You laughed when you shoved it into me, didn’t you? My turn now.”
He didn’t say anything. That was the smartest thing he could have done. A little moonlight came through the plate-glass window from outside. His eyes glittered. The fear smell, sharp and acrid, came off him in waves.
The Confederates tramped past the coffeehouse. Maybe the noise of their passing woke Edna. Nellie would have sworn she hadn’t been noisy enough to disturb her daughter. But, from the hall, Edna asked, “Ma, what’s going on? Who’s this bird? And-” Edna’s breath caught sharply. “What are you doing with that knife?”
“He’s trouble, nothing else but.” Nellie’s voice was grim. “But he’s in trouble, too, so he can stay here till the Rebs have gone by outside. After that, he’s gone forever.”
“I knew your mother, before you were born,” Bill Reach said to Edna, “back in the house at-” He drew a frightened breath of his own, for Nellie had stuck the knife in farther. How deep do you have to stab to kill a man? she wondered. A couple of more words out of Reach and she would have found out.
The sounds of marching feet, clattering wagons, and clopping hooves drowned out the drone of aeroplane engines high overhead. Maybe someone in the Confederate ranks was unwise enough to strike a match to light a cigar or pipe; maybe the moonlight let a U.S. pilot spot the column even without such help. However that was-Nellie had no way of knowing-a stick of bombs came falling out of the sky.
“Oh, Jesus!” Reach said when he heard the high-pitched shriek of air rushing past the bombs’ fins. Nellie needed a split second longer to identify the noise; U.S. bombers hadn’t come over Washington all that often.
A split second after that, sharp explosions left no possible doubt of what was going on. One bomb fell a little in front of the head of the Confederate column. Then two more in quick succession landed right in the middle of it. Either the U.S. bomb-aiming was extraordinarily good or the bombardier was trying for another target altogether and got lucky-again, Nellie never knew.
Glass sprayed inward. A sharp shard caught Nellie in the leg. She yelped. Edna screamed. Bill Reach let out a groan and clutched at his midsection. Nellie staggered back from him. He sank slowly to the floor.
A moment later, the front door opened, hitting him and knocking him sideways. It wasn’t another bomb; it was Confederate soldiers, seeking shelter from the rain of destruction from the sky. Outside in the street, injured soldiers screamed and groaned. A horse screamed, too, on a higher note. Officers shouted for medical orderlies and Negro stretcher-bearers.
Seeing Nellie, one of the Rebs pointed to Reach and said, “This here your husband the damnyankees done hurt, ma’am?” Even at such a time, he worked to separate the people of Washington from the government of the USA.
“I should say not,” she answered, and raised her voice, hoping Reach wasn’t too far gone to pay attention: “He’s a burglar. I caught him breaking in here. I was going to give him to you.” If they thought him an ordinary criminal, they wouldn’t ask him questions about anything but burglary. She didn’t know how he knew what else he knew, or exactly how much that was. She did know it was too much.
One of the Confederate soldiers said, “All right, ma’am, we’ll take charge of him-throw him in a wagon till we find somebody we can give him to. Don’t want to leave him bleedin’ all over your floor here. Come on, you.” He and a buddy got Bill Reach to his feet and out the door.
The bombs had stopped falling. The rest of the Rebels who’d tumbled into the coffeehouse took their leave. Some of them even apologized for bothering Nellie.
“-And your pretty daughter,” one of them added, which did him less good in her eyes than he would have guessed.
Nellie shut the door after the last departing Reb, a futile gesture with the window smashed. She looked around at glinting, drifted glass. “Go on upstairs and get me some slippers, Edna,” she said. “I’ll cut my feet to ribbons if I try to walk through this stuff.” She sighed, but went on, “It’s not near so bad as it was after the Rebs shelled us.”
“No, I reckon not,” Edna agreed. She started toward the stairway, then stopped and looked back at Nellie. “What was that crazy fellow talking about houses for? I ain’t never lived in a house, and I didn’t think you had, neither.”
Not all houses are homes, ran through Nellie’s mind. “I never did live in a house,” she answered. “He’s crazy like you said, that’s all. Get me those slippers-and get me a blanket, too, will you? With the windows gone, I think I better stay down here till sunup.”
“All right, Ma,” Edna said. “But I still think that feller knows you a whole lot better than you let on. If he didn’t, you wouldn’t let him get you all upset like you do.”
“Just get me my things,” Nellie snapped. Shaking her head, Edna went upstairs. Nellie shook her head, too. Sooner or later, the tawdry tale would come out. She could feel it in her bones. And what would she do then? How would she keep Edna in line at all?
Out in the street, wounded Confederates kept on groaning. They did give her a sense of proportion. You didn’t die of mortification, however much you wished you could. Bombs falling out of the sky were something else again.
Thunder filled the air. Artillery was pounding ever closer to St. Matthews, South Carolina, from the south and from the east. Negroes streamed back through the town. Some of them wore red armbands and carried the rifles with which they had fought their white, capitalist oppressors so long and so hard. One or two even wore helmets taken from Confederate corpses. They still had the look of soldiers to them. More, though, had thrown away armbands and weapons and were looking for escape, not more battle.
Scipio wished he could have fled, too. But he was too prominent, too recognizable to escape the square so easily. He’d been one of the leaders of the Congaree Socialist Republic from the beginning-from the beginning till the end, he thought. The end could not be delayed much longer.
I tried to tell them. He hadn’t sought the revolution. He’d been drawn into it, that seeming a safer course than letting himself be eliminated for knowing too much. And it had been a safer course-for a little more than a year. Now, with everything ending in fire, he saw-as he’d seen from the beginning-that going along with the Reds had bought him only a little time.
The rest of the leaders of what had been the Congaree Socialist Republic and was falling to pieces still refused to admit the game was up. Cassius stood in the town square, shouting, “Rally! Rally, God damn de lot of you! Rally ’gainst de ’pressors! Don’ let dey take yo’ freedom!”