The pale, pudgy woman with the two-tone hair certainly seemed to be trying to promote her own untimely demise. Glaring at Anne, she remarked, "Some people don't seem to care about anyone but themselves."
"Some people," Anne said, relishing the chance to release the bile that had been gathering inside her ever since the Negro uprising began, "some people don't care about anything except stuffing their faces full of sowbelly till they turn the same color as the meat and the same size as the hog it came from."
She heard the sharp intakes of breath from all around the tent. "Here we go," one woman said in a low voice to another. So they'd been expecting a fight, had they? They'd been looking forward to one? Anne had thought only of entertaining herself. But if she entertained other people, too…She showed her teeth in what was more nearly snarl than smile. If she entertained other people, too…that was all right.
Melissa's mouth opened and closed several times, as if she were a fish out of water. "Weren't for you damn rich folks, the niggers never would have riz up," she said at last.
Two or three women nodded at that. Anne Colleton laughed out loud. Melissa couldn't have looked more astonished had Anne flung a pail of water in her face. For about two cents, Anne would have, and enjoyed it, too.
"It's the truth," Melissa insisted.
"In a pig's eye," Anne replied sweetly. "It's you who-"
"Liar!" Melissa squealed, her voice shrill. "If you'd have been born on a little farm like me, nobody would've ever heard of you."
"Maybe," Anne replied. "And if you'd been born at Marshlands, nobody would ever have heard of you, either." A classical education came in handy in all sorts of unexpected ways. The jibe was so subtle, the eager listeners needed a moment to take it in. When they did, though, their hum of appreciation made the wait worthwhile.
Melissa needed longer than most of the women around her to understand she'd been punctured. When she did, she sent Anne a look full of hate. That look also had fear in it, as if she'd only now realized she might have picked a dangerous target. Proves you're a fool, for not seeing it sooner, Anne thought, not that she'd been in any great doubt of that.
But Melissa did not back away from the argument. "Go ahead, make all the smart cracks you want," she said, "but you rich folks, you-"
"Stop that," Anne said coldly. "You talk like the Negroes with their red flags, pitting rich against poor. Are you a Red yourself?" Melissa didn't have the brains to be a Red, and Anne knew it full well. But she also calculated the other woman would need some little while to find a comeback.
That calculation proved accurate. Melissa looked around the tent for support. When she saw she wasn't getting any-no one there, for good and sufficient reasons, wanted anything to do with either Reds or even ideas possibly Red-she resumed her attack, though she had only one string on her fiddle: "Weren't for you rich folks, niggers'd just stay in their place and-"
"What a pile of horseshit," Anne said, drawing gasps on account of the language as she'd known she would. She'd also shocked Melissa into shutting up, as she'd hoped would happen. Into that sudden and welcome silence, she went on, "Yes, I'm rich. So what? If you ask me, it's the way the po' buckra"-she dropped into the Negro dialect of the Congaree for those two scornful words-"like you treat the Negroes that-"
Melissa surged to her feet. "Po' buckra? Who are you calling white trash?"
"You," Anne told her. "And I don't need to give you the name, because you give it to yourself by the way you act. You're the sort of person who treats a Negro like an animal, because if you treated him any different, he might think-and you might think-he was as good as you."
She rose, too, as she spoke, and just as well, for Melissa rushed over to her, aiming a roundhouse slap at her face. As her brothers had taught her in long-ago rough-and-tumble, Anne blocked the blow with her left hand while delivering one of her own with her right. She didn't slap, but landed a solid uppercut with a closed fist square on the point of Melissa's chin.
The other woman staggered back and sat down hard. She'd almost stumbled into one of the stoves, which would have given her even worse hurt than Anne had intended. Blood dribbled from the corner of her mouth. She stared up at Anne like a dog that rolls over onto its back to present its belly and throat to a stronger rival.
"Before they sent me to this camp," Anne said, "I asked them to give me a rifle and let me fight alongside our soldiers and militiamen. They wouldn't let me-men-but I could have done it. And anyone who thinks I can't take care of myself without a gun is making a mistake, too."
Nobody argued with her, not now. She'd not only flayed Melissa with words but also thrashed her. The plump woman slowly stood up and went back to her own cot, one hand clutched to her jaw. She sat down on the canvas and blankets and didn't say a thing.
Anne spoke into vast silence: "Happy New Year." Before the war, people had celebrated the hour by shooting guns in the air. These past two New Years, they'd shot with intent to kill, not only on the hour but all day long, all week long, all month…
Convinced the trouble in the tent was over for the time being, Anne sat down again. As she did so, the irony of one of the arguments she'd used to discomfit Melissa suddenly occurred to her. She hadn't been wrong when she'd said that poor whites in the Confederacy were more concerned about keeping blacks down than were the rich, who would stay on top no matter what the relationship between the races happened to be.
A few miles to the north, though, the agitators of the Congaree Socialist Republic were using similar arguments to spur their followers to fresh effort against their white foes. Did that mean the Negroes had been right to rebel?
She shook her head. That wasn't what she'd had in mind at all. They weren't building anything up there, just tearing down. She wondered if anything would be left of Marshlands by the time she was finally able to return to it. One way or another, though, she figured she would get along. She wasn't Melissa, to fall into obscurity. No. Melissa hadn't fallen into obscurity. She'd never been anything but obscure. Many fates might yet befall Anne Colleton, but not, she vowed, that one.
"Look at that bastard burn," Ben Carlton said, his voice as full of joy as if he'd never seen anything more beautiful than the flaming factory in Clearfield, Utah.
Watching the Utah Canning Plant go up in smoke felt pretty good to Paul Mantarakis, too. As they had a habit of doing, the Mormons had used the big, strongly built building to anchor their line. Now that it was a blazing wreck, they'd have to abandon it, which meant the United States Army could take one more grinding step on the road toward the last rebel stronghold in Ogden.
"Three quarters of the way there," Mantarakis muttered under his breath. They were only nine miles from Ogden now. He could see the town from here-or he could have seen it, had the smoke from the great burning here in Clearfield not obscured the northern horizon.
"Soon all the misbelievers shall be cast into the fiery furnace and receive the punishment they deserve," Gordon McSweeney said. He had the drum and hose of the flamethrower strapped onto his back. He hadn't been the one who'd set the canning plant on fire, though; artillery had managed that. Had the big guns failed, Paul could easily imagine the other sergeant going out there and starting the blaze.
Pop! Pop-pop! Short, sharp explosions began sounding, deep within the bowels of the Utah Canning Plant. "Some poor dead son of a bitch's ammo cooking off," Ben Carlton said.