Nobody gives a damn, Featherston thought. Nobody. He went away himself, to the base of the great statue of Albert Sidney Johnston, the Confederacy’s chief martyr during the War of Secession. The war now ended had martyrs in plenty, but he didn’t think he would see statues to them any time soon. He wrapped himself in his blanket and went to sleep.
When morning came, he found a cheap cafe, the saloons not yet being open. Ham and eggs and biscuits and coffee cost him two dollars he could not afford. He fumed at the price, as he fumed at everything these days. And then he spotted a couple of neatly turned-out sentries in front of a building at the southwestern corner of Capitol Square. Those sentries drew him as a lodestone draws nails. Sure enough, that was the War Department building, the source, as he saw it, of all his miseries and all his country’s miseries as well.
One of the sentries wrinkled his nose as Featherston approached. He turned his head and spoke to his comrade: “Dogs find more rubbish to drag out these days.”
Jake didn’t think he was meant to hear that, but hear it he did, artilleryman’s battered ears or not. “You can kiss my ass, too, pal,” he said, and started past the spit-and-polish boys into the War Department.
The one who’d spoken swung his rifle down horizontally to block his way. “Where do you think you’re going, buddy?” he demanded. “State your business.”
“Kiss my ass,” Jake repeated. “I’m a citizen of this country, and I’m a real soldier, too, goddammit. I’d rather smell the way I do than be a perfumed pansy in a uniform that never once saw dirt. Now get the hell out of my way. I aim to have me a word or two to say to the bonehead generals who cost us this war.”
“I don’t think so, sonny boy,” the sentry said. “They’ve got better things to do with their time than listen to-and smell-the likes of you.”
“Like hell they do,” Featherston said. “I want to tell you-” Without a single telltale motion or glance, he kicked the sentry in the crotch, then whirled and coldcocked his chum while the other man was just beginning to raise his rifle. The only difference between them was that the first went down with a groan, the second silently.
Whistling, Jake started to walk by them and into the War Department. Then, reluctantly, he checked himself. He’d get caught in there. He was liable to get caught out here; a couple of men were coming across the street toward him.
He did what they must have expected least-he charged straight at them. Neither of them cared to try tackling him. They were middle-aged and prosperous and no doubt thought anyone who did anything out of line would politely wait around for the police afterwards. He taught them otherwise in a hurry. Then he was back in Capitol Square, one discharged soldier among hundreds. How were they supposed to find him after that?
They couldn’t. They didn’t. They didn’t even try, and the sentries, who’d got a better look at him, were in no condition to help. He stopped running and started sauntering, looking like any of the rest of the men in the square who had more time on their hands than they knew what to do with.
At least one of those soldiers had seen what he’d done. As he strolled past, the fellow said, “Damn shame you couldn’t give that bastard Semmes a good shot in the nuts, too.”
“You’d best believe it’s a damn shame,” Jake said. “One of these days, though, if this poor, miserable country ever gets back on its feet again, we’ll pay back everybody who ever did us wrong-and I mean everybody.”
“Hope that day comes soon,” the other veteran said. “Can’t come soon enough, if anybody wants to know what I think.”
“I don’t know when,” Featherston said. “We’ll have to go some to put our own house in order, I reckon. But we’ll walk tall again one of these days, and then-and then everybody better look out, that’s all.” The other soldier clapped his hands.
Not even a funeral. Sylvia Enos thought that was worst of all. When scarlet fever took her mother, when her brother died in a trainwreck, there had been an end to things, dirt thudding down on the lid of a coffin, and then a wake afterwards. Once that was done, people had been able to pick up the threads of their lives and go on.
But fish and crabs and whatever lived at the bottom of the sea in the middle of the Atlantic were giving George the only burial he would ever get. Fishermen shuddered when they talked of things like that. Along with all his friends, George had hated the idea of going down at sea. Sylvia knew men who wouldn’t eat crab or lobster because of what the shellfish might have been eating.
She stirred the dress she’d thrown in the kettle full of black dye. It would be ready pretty soon. She’d used a good deal of coal heating water to dye clothes for mourning; that was cheaper than buying new black dresses and shirtwaists. She hoped the Coal Board wouldn’t cut the ration yet again, though.
Mary Jane came into the kitchen and said, “I want to go out and play.”
“Go on, then,” Sylvia said with a sigh. Mary Jane wasn’t really mourning; how could she mourn a man she scarcely remembered? She knew Sylvia was upset, but had trouble understanding why. George, Jr., had known his father well enough to miss him, but he was also far less wounded than he would have been had George come home every night. School seemed far more real and far more urgent to him than a father long at sea.
Sylvia wished she felt the same way. Now that George was gone, she found herself far more forgiving of his flaws than she had been while he was alive. She even-almost-wished he’d gone to bed with that colored strumpet, to give him one more happy memory to hold on to when the torpedo slammed into the Ericsson.
“Not fair,” she muttered, stirring again. The Confederacy had already dropped out of the war, and England had been on the point of giving up. Why, how, had a British submersible chosen her husband’s ship in those waning moments of the war? Where was the sense in that?
George hadn’t even mentioned British submersibles to her. All he’d ever written about were Confederate boats. Why had the Royal Navy decided to move one of theirs into that part of the ocean?
She didn’t suppose questions like that had any answers. A minister would have called it God’s will. As far as she was concerned, that wasn’t any answer, either. Why had God decided to take everybody on board the Ericsson? Because her husband had wanted to screw a whore? If God started taking every man who’d ever wanted to do that, men would get thin on the ground mighty quick.
Men had got thin on the ground. So many women wore mourning these days, or had worn it and were now returning to less somber wear. Sylvia looked at the alarm clock, which she’d brought out of the bedroom. The dress had been in the kettle long enough. Sylvia carried the kettle over to the sink and poured out the water in which she’d dyed the dress. Then she wrung the dress as dry as she could and set it on a hanger to finish drying. That done, she scrubbed at her hands with floor soap to clean the dye from her knuckles and around and under her nails.
She was just drying her hands-and noting that she hadn’t got rid of all the dye-when someone knocked on the door. Her mouth twisted bitterly as she went to open it. She’d already had the worst news she could get. Opening the door held no terror for her now.
Brigid Coneval stood in the hallway. The Irishwoman still wore black for her own dead husband. “And how is it today, Sylvia?” she asked. Where nothing else had, their common loss left them on a first-name basis. They understood each other in a way no one who had not shared that loss ever could.
“It’s…about the same as always,” Sylvia said. She stepped aside. “Come in, why don’t you?”