“Wouldn’t miss it,” he said, and gave her an extra squeeze to show what he had in mind. “What smells good?” he added; an alluring odor followed her.
“I’ve got a nice beef tongue cooking-with cloves and everything, the way you like it.” She paused to eye her sons. “Why don’t you boys go out and play? I’ve got something to tell Papa Jeff.”
“Why can’t we hear?” asked Frank, the older.
“Because I want to tell Papa Jeff, not you-that’s why,” his mother answered. “Now beat it, before I send you to your room instead.” He disappeared even faster than Major Wyatt had. So did his brother Willie.
“What’s up?” Pinkard asked.
“I’m going to have a baby.”
Jeff had gone so long without getting a woman pregnant, he wondered if he was shooting blanks. “Well, I’ll be,” he said. Then he realized Edith had to be looking for something better than that. “Wonderful!” He hugged her and kissed her and, with the boys out of the house, set a possessive hand on her backside.
She smiled. “That’s how this started.”
“I didn’t reckon it was any other way,” Jeff answered. “Jesus, yeah. Not us.”
“Don’t you start.” Edith was a churchgoing woman. She took her faith much more seriously than Jeff took his. He believed in Jake Featherston the way she believed in Jesus. From everything he could see, Jesus didn’t deliver.
Lately, though, Jake Featherston wasn’t delivering, either. The Confederate States were gone from just about all the U.S. territory they took when the war was new. Not even the professional optimists on the wireless were predicting when the CSA would reinvade the USA. All the talk these days was of defense and of outlasting the enemy.
The Freedom Party Guards Ferdinand Koenig threw into the fight had stopped the damnyankees not far beyond Lubbock. They couldn’t retake the town, though, and they couldn’t push U.S. forces back very far. A good-sized chunk of west Texas remained under the Yankee boot heel.
“All right,” Jeff said to Edith, and then, in what had to seem like a change of subject to her but didn’t to him, “I hear the United States are going to start up that, uh, darn state of Houston again-give the collaborators something to do.”
“That’s dreadful!” she exclaimed. “They’re so wicked. They’ve got no business doing anything like that.” She paused, then asked, “How are things at the camp?”
“Going well enough.” He rarely gave her a detailed answer when she asked something like that. She wasn’t really looking for one, either. She both knew and didn’t know what went on inside the barbed wire. She didn’t like to think about it. For that matter, neither did Pinkard. He said, “What shall we name the baby?”
“If it’s a girl, I’d like to call her Lucy, after my mother,” Edith said.
Jeff nodded. “All right. It’s a good name. And if it’s a boy?”
“What do you think of Raymond?” she asked.
He hesitated. Her first husband was called Chick. What the devil was his real name? Jeff didn’t want his son named after the camp guard who’d killed himself. Chick Blades’ real name was…Leroy. Jeff almost snapped his fingers, he was so glad to remember. “Raymond’ll do fine,” he said. That was easy.
He ate more than his share at supper. So did his stepsons-they liked tongue. He smiled to see them stuff themselves. Maybe it would make them sleepy sooner than usual. And it did. He smiled again. Things were going his way.
Edith even let him leave the light on. She usually liked darkness better. “You’re beautiful,” he said. While he stroked her and kissed her, while she touched him, he believed it. And he made her believe he believed it, too.
“Oh, Jeff,” she said, and then, a little later, “Oh, Jeff.” Her nails dug into his back. He spent himself at the same time as she quivered beneath him. The damnyankees, even the camp, seemed a million miles away. They wouldn’t in the morning, though, and that was a crying shame.
“Boston,” Lieutenant Sam Carsten said as a pilot guided the Josephus Daniels through the minefields that kept submersibles and surface raiders away from the harbor. “Boston’s a good town.”
“Oh, yes, sir,” Pat Cooley agreed. The exec went on, “Good restaurants, theaters, all kinds of things you can do here.”
“Yeah.” Sam’s voice was dry. When he was a rating, his liberties here revolved around saloons and whorehouses. Restaurants? Theaters? Those were for other people, people with time on their hands and without money burning a hole in their pocket.
The pilot swung the helm a little to port. “How did you know to do that then?” Cooley asked.
“Simple, sir. Last time I didn’t, I blew up,” the man answered, deadpan.
“That’ll teach you, Pat,” Carsten said.
“Teach me what?” Cooley said in tones more plaintive than they had to be. The pilot chuckled and turned the ship again when he thought he needed to. The Josephus Daniels didn’t explode. Sam was in favor of not exploding.
An hour later, the destroyer escort was tied up at a pier in the U.S. Navy Yard, across the river from Boston proper-and Boston improper-in Charlestown. The first liberty party went off to roister, just as Sam would have without gold stripes on his cuffs.
Since he had them, he went through the Navy Yard to report to his superiors. He gave a lot of salutes and returned just about as many. To his own amusement, he caused a lot of confusion. Here he was, a middle-aged man with several rows of fruit salad on his chest. Young lieutenant commanders and commanders-the up-and-comers in the Navy-would assume he had to be at least a captain, if not of flag rank. Their right arms would start to go up. Then they would see he was only a lieutenant and stop in the middle of their salute till Sam bailed them out with one of his own.
Sometimes they wouldn’t notice they outranked him. When that happened, he gravely returned a salute with one of his own. He left a trail of bemused officers in his wake. He messed up their mental Y-ranging gear.
The men to whom he reported had no doubt about his grade. They were his age, and had the rank he could have aspired to if he weren’t a mustang. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” he said to the four-striper who headed things. He saluted first.
Returning the courtesy, Captain William McClintock said, “Take a seat, Carsten.”
“Thank you, sir,” Sam said, though he wasn’t sure he was grateful. He’d got used to being skipper of the Josephus Daniels, a potentate who gave orders and had to worry about receiving them only from a distance. Now, under the eyes of five senior officers, he felt more like a bug on a plate than a potentate.
“You’ve had a busy time in the North Atlantic,” McClintock observed. His craggy features and sun-baked skin said he’d spent a lot of time at sea.
“Yes, sir,” Sam answered. What McClintock said was true-and any which way, it was hard to go wrong saying Yes, sir to your superiors.
One of the other captains across the table looked down at some papers through bifocals, tilting his head back to read. Sam wore reading glasses, but still saw well enough at a distance. “You’ve done pretty well for yourself, seems like,” said the captain-his name was Schuyler Moultrie.
“Thank you, sir,” Sam said-one more phrase where it was hard to go wrong.
“Have you had any…special disciplinary problems aboard the Josephus Daniels, Carsten?” Captain McClintock asked.
Sam knew what that meant. Any mustang would have. “No, sir,” he answered. “I try to keep a tight rein on my CPOs-not tight enough to choke ’em, you understand, because they have to do their jobs, but tight enough so they can’t get away with murder.”
McClintock’s mouth twitched in what looked like a swallowed smile. Sam knew what that meant, too-he’d said the right thing. A mustang who still behaved like a CPO himself was liable to let his chiefs run wild, and that wasn’t good for the ship. One of the best pieces of advice he got after his promotion was to remember he was an officer. He always did his best to follow it.