She thought, and then did bring out a Yiddish sentence: “What’s going to happen to this language in a couple of generations?”
“I don’t know,” David answered, also in Yiddish. He dropped back into English to go on, “And I won’t lose much sleep over it, either. We brought Yiddish from the old country. Now we’re Americans. They speak English here. So, fine-I’ll speak English.”
“I suppose so,” Flora said. “Joshua doesn’t seem much interested in learning it, anyhow. But I can’t help wondering whether my grandchildren or great-grandchildren won’t think they missed out on something special because they didn’t get the chance to learn it.”
“Well, if they do, there’s always night school,” David said, and Flora nodded. How many immigrants had learned all sorts of different things in night school? Hundreds of thousands, surely. Some were accountants, some were lawyers, because of the courses they’d taken in hours snatched from sleep and rest. Still…
“It won’t be the same,” she said. “What you learn in school isn’t like what you pick up around the house.”
“I can’t do anything about it.” David pulled another pickle spear out of the jar and aimed it at her like a bayonet. “I can’t-but you can. You can pass the Preservation of Yiddish Act and make it a crime for all the alter kackers”-he tacked the English plural onto the Yiddish word-“who can still yatter away in the old language to use English instead. And you can make it another crime for anybody Jewish not to listen to them and talk back in Yiddish.”
Flora laughed so hard, she almost choked on her sandwich. “You,” she said severely, “are ridiculous.”
“Thank you,” her brother answered, which only made her laugh harder. “And while you’re at it, you can have them make the Lower East Side a national park. Buffalo have Yellowstone. Why shouldn’t people who speak Yiddish have their own game preserve, too? And if we get too crowded, you could issue hunting licenses to anti-Semites, and they’d come in here and thin us out. Only difference between us and the buffalo is, we might shoot back.”
“You-” Flora stopped. She had to reach into her purse for a handkerchief to wipe her streaming eyes. She tried again: “You ought to sell that routine to the Engels Brothers. If they wouldn’t pay you for it, I’m a Chinaman.”
“You could do the same thing for Chinamen, here and in San Francisco,” David said, warming to his theme. “And think of the chances Jake Featherston’s missing. If he charged fees to get into the hunting preserves for shvartzers, he could probably cut taxes in half.”
That killed Flora’s laughter. “It isn’t hunting down there,” she said. “It’s slaughter, nothing else but.”
“They might as well be Mormons, eh?” David insisted on being difficult.
“It’s worse,” Flora insisted. “We’re fighting the Mormons, but we aren’t murdering the ones in the land we’ve taken. The Confederates are emptying out one town after another, taking the Negroes off to camps and killing them once they get there. It’s… about as bad as it can be down there.”
“And it’s just pretty bad up here,” David said. “Well, nice to know we’ve still got room for improvement.”
That wasn’t funny, either-or, if it was, only in the blackest way. When Flora laughed this time, it was only to keep from sobbing.
XVI
Some lovely rubble lay between Sergeant Michael Pound’s barrel and the advancing Confederate armor. Once upon a time, the rubble had been homes and shops and people’s hopes. All things considered, Pound liked it better as rubble. If you knocked a wall down in a neighborhood that hadn’t been trampled, the enemy would notice right away. If you rearranged what was already wreckage, though, so what?
Not many Pittsburgh neighborhoods had gone untrampled. The United States were making a stand here, defying the Confederates to drive them out. Jake Featherston seemed willing, even eager, to try. He keep feeding men and barrels and artillery and airplanes into the fight. No matter who held Pittsburgh by the time the battle here was done, one thing was clear: it wouldn’t be worth holding.
Pound tapped Lieutenant Don Griffiths on the leg. “Sir, do you think we could crawl inside that ruined-garage, I guess it used to be-over there? We’ve got a nice field of fire where the window was, and the shadows inside’ll keep the bastards in butternut from spotting us.”
The barrel commander stuck his head out of the cupola for a good look. He had nerve; nobody could say he didn’t. And he seemed to own more in the way of sense than the late Lieutenant Poffenberger, anyway. When he ducked back down again, he said, “Good idea, Sergeant,” and spoke to the driver by intercom. Jouncing over shattered brickwork, the barrel took its new position.
Another reason Pound liked the ruined garage was that he’d seen U.S. infantrymen huddled in the ruins not far away. Your own foot soldiers were the best insurance policy you had in a barrel. They kept the other side’s foot soldiers away. No sneaky bastard could plant a magnetic mine on your side, chuck a grenade through an open hatch, or throw a Featherston Fizz at your engine compartment so the flaming gasoline dripped down through the louvers and set you on fire, not if you had pals around.
He spotted motion up ahead through the gunsight. Not the dinosaurian shape of a Confederate barrel rumbling into position, but… “Sir, they’re moving infantry up.”
“Yes, I saw them, too,” Griffiths answered. “Hold fire for now. Let our own infantry deal with them if they can. We’ve got this good position. I don’t want to give it away for something as small as a few soldiers on foot.”
“Yes, sir.” Pound surprised himself by smiling at the lieutenant. What Griffiths said made perfectly good sense. Pound wouldn’t have thought the junior officer had it in him.
Confederate Asskickers screamed down out of the sky to bomb and machine-gun U.S. positions. What seemed like every antiaircraft gun in the world opened up on them. So many guns blazed away, Pound wondered if some of them hadn’t kept quiet before to lure the Confederate dive bombers into a trap. Three or four Mules didn’t pull up from their dives, but went straight into the ground. The explosions made the ground shake under his barrel. He saw one funeral pyre through the hole that had held the garage window.
“Good riddance,” he muttered.
“Amen,” Cecil Bergman said. The loader added, “See anything out there that needs killing, Sarge?”
“Quiet right now,” Pound answered.
“Good,” Bergman said-not a bloodthirsty attitude, but a sensible one. Nobody in his right mind was eager for combat. You had a job to do, you did it, and you tried not to think about it. When you had to think about it, you thought about targets and barrels. You didn’t think about men. Because those sons of bitches on the other side had a job to do, too, and theirs was turning you into a target. If that also meant turning you into raw hamburger or burnt hamburger, they would try not to think about it.
“Somebody coming over to us,” Griffiths said, and then, “He’s in our uniform.”
“Right,” Pound said, and pulled the.45 on his belt out of its holster. Confederates in U.S. uniform, Confederates who talked like U.S. soldiers, had caused a lot of grief in Pennsylvania. “Make sure he’s got the right countersign before you let him get close.”
“I intend to, Sergeant.” Griffiths sounded like a small boy reproving his mother. The barrel commander popped out of the cupola. “Foxx!” he said.
“Greenberg,” the soldier answered. Michael Pound relaxed-mostly. That was the right countersign. The Confederates had their own football heroes. They were unlikely to know the names of a couple of U.S. running backs. Of course, they might have captured a prisoner and torn the countersign out of him. Pound didn’t relax all the way.
He was glad to see Lieutenant Griffiths didn’t, either. “That’s close enough, soldier. I don’t know you,” Griffiths said. Pound grinned, down there where nobody but Cecil Bergman could see him. Maybe the lieutenant wasn’t such a little boy after all.