"Yes!" The answer roared from Reginald Bartlett's throat, as from those of the other tens of thousands of people jamming Capitol Square. Someone flung a straw hat in the air. In an instant, hundreds of them, Bartlett 's included, were flying. A great chorus of "Dixie" rang out, loud enough, Bartlett thought, for the damnyankees to hear it in Washington.
Someone tapped him on the shoulder. He whirled around-and stared into the angry face of Milo Axelrod, his boss. "I told you to stay and mind the shop, dammit!" the druggist roared. "You're fired!"
Bartlett snapped his fingers under the older man's nose. "And this here is how much I care," he said. "You can't fire me, on account of I damn well quit. They haven't called up my regiment yet, but I'm joining the Army now, is what I'm doing. Go peddle your pills-us real men will save the country for you. A couple of months from now, after we've licked the Yankees, you can tell me you're sorry."
II
Nellie Semphroch huddled behind the counter in the ruins of her coffeehouse, wondering if she would die in the next instant. She'd been wondering that for hours, ever since the first Confederate shells began falling on Washington, D.C.
Beside her, her daughter Edna wailed, "When will it stop, Mother? Will it ever stop?"
"Lord help me, I don't know," the widow Semphroch answered. She had twice her daughter's twenty years; on her, bitter experience seamed the long, oval face they otherwise shared. "I just don't know. It wasn't like this when-"
A shell crashed down nearby. The ground quivered and jerked, as if in pain. Fragments sprayed through the blank square that had been the front window before it shattered early in the bombardment. Edna brushed dark blond curls-a brighter shade than Nellie's, which were streaked with gray- out of her eyes and repeated, despairingly, "Will it ever stop?"
"It wasn't like this when the Southerners shelled us before," Nellie said, at last able to get in another complete sentence. "When I was a girl, they bombarded Washington, yes, but after an hour or so they were done. I was scared then, but only for a little while. That's why we didn't leave when-"
Now, instead of a shell, Edna interrupted her: "We should have, Mama. We should have gotten out while we could, along with everybody else."
"Not everybody left," Nellie said, her daughter's bitterness making her defensive. A great host of people had, though, as crisis in some distant part of Europe became by the magic of far-flung alliances crisis in America, too. While Washington remained the nation's capital, Congress hadn't met there since the Second Mexican War: going about their business under Confederate guns had seemed intolerable. Before war was declared, an endless procession of wagons and buggies and motorcars jammed the roads leading north out of the capital, and every train bringing in soldiers had been full of civilians on its outbound journey.
But Nellie and Edna had sat tight, selling coffee to panicky bureaucrats and swaggering soldiers alike. They'd made a lot of money, and Nellie had been certain that, even if war broke out, the Rebels would not seek to destroy what had once been their capital, too. They hadn't back in 1881.
She'd been wrong. Sweet Jesus Christ, how wrong she'd been! She knew that now, to her everlasting sorrow. The Confederacy's bombardment of Washington a generation before had been more a demonstration that the South could be frightful if it so chose than actual frightfulness in and of itself. Having hit a few targets, the Confederates had gone on to fight the war elsewhere.
This time, they seemed intent on leaving no stone in the capital of the United States standing upon another. Once, just before sunrise, Nellie had gone to a well to draw a bucket of water-shelling had burst the pipes that carried water through the city. The Capitol's dome was smashed, the building itself burning. Not far away, the White House had also become a pile of rubble, and the needle of the Washington Monument no longer reached up to the sky-that despite the Rebels' claims to revere Washington as the father of their country, too.
More guns boomed, these not the Confederate cannon across the Potomac but American guns replying from the high ground north of Washington. Shells made freight-train noises overhead, then thudded to earth with roars like distant thunder.
"Kill all those Rebel bastards!" Edna shouted. "Blow Arlington to hell and gone so we don't have the God-damned Lees looking down on us like lords. Blow their balls off, every fucking one of them!"
Nellie stared at her daughter. "Where ever did you learn such language?" she gasped. Absurdly, at that moment, her first impulse was to wash Edna's mouth out with soap. After a moment's reflection, though, she wished she let the words out more readily herself. She knew them-oh, she knew them. And when hell came up here on earth, what did a few bad words matter?
"I'm sorry, Mama," Edna said, but then her chin came up. "No, I'm not sorry, not a bit of it. I wish I knew worse to call the Confederates. If I did, I would, and that's the truth."
"What you just said is pretty bad." Nellie had not led a sheltered life-far from it-but she'd seldom heard a lady curse as her daughter just had. Then again, she'd never been in a situation where tons of death fell randomly from the sky. As the judge said of the man who knifed a poker partner because he spotted an ace coming out of his sleeve, there were mitigating circumstances.
More freight-train noises filled the air, these from the east and south: Rebel artillery, striking back at U.S. guns. Because the Confederates were trying to hit the cannons, shells stopped falling on Washington itself and began smashing the hills that ringed the city.
Edna stood up. "Maybe we can get out of town now, Mama," she said hopefully.
"Maybe." Nellie rose, too. The air was thick with smoke and dust and a harsh odor she supposed came from explosives. Half the chairs and tables in the coffeehouse lay on their sides or upside down. The fine linen tablecloths that gave the establishment a touch of class-and that Nellie was still paying for-were rags now, torn rags.
A shell fragment had ripped into the fancy brass coffee grinder that gleamed out in front of the counter. Nellie wouldn't be grinding coffee with it again, not any time soon. She shivered and had to grasp the counter for a moment. If a fragment had done that to sturdy, machined brass, what would it have done to flesh? A few feet to one side and she would have found out. No, 1881 hadn't been like this.
She walked toward what had been her front window and was now a square opening with a few jagged shards round the edges. Out in the street- which had suddenly acquired deep pocks, like the face of a man who'd never been vaccinated-a shattered delivery wagon sat on its side, the horses that had drawn it gruesomely dead in the traces. Nellie gulped. She'd killed and plucked and gutted plenty of chickens, and even a few pigs, but artillery was a horrifyingly sloppy butcher. She hadn't imagined horses had that much blood in them, either. A scrawny stray dog came up and sniffed the pool. She shouted at it. It ran away. Behind the wagon, she could just see an outflung arm. No, the driver hadn't been luckier than his animals.
"Can we get out of town, do you think, Ma?" Edna repeated.
Nellie raised her eyes from the street to the high ground. For a moment, she did not understand what she was seeing, and thought a Midwestern dust storm had suddenly been transplanted to those low, rolling hills. Dust there was aplenty, but no wind to raise it. Instead, it came from the carpet of shells the Confederates were laying down. When she looked more closely, she spied the ugly red core of fire in each explosion. She wondered how anything could live under such bombardment, and if anything did.