Blood and Iron (8 page)

Jeff took her in his arms. She pulled his face down to hers. Her lips were greedy against his. She’d always been greedy for loving. When Jeff hadn’t been there to give it to her…That was when he’d become a less than happy man.

“What did you do today?” he asked her after they broke apart.

“Usual kinds of things,” she answered. “Did my cleaning. Did my cooking. Went out and bought me some cloth to make a dress with.” She nodded toward the sewing machine in a corner of the front room. Then she stuck out a hip, tilted her head a little, and looked at him sidelong. “Thought about you. Thought about you a lot, Jeff.”

“Did you?” he said.

Emily nodded, batting her eyelashes. She played the role of seductress to the hilt. That didn’t mean Jeff failed to respond to it. The collarless neck of his shirt suddenly felt like a choker. Some evenings, supper turned out to be later than he expected when he walked through the door.

“Did—?” That was the question Jeff knew he shouldn’t ask.
Did you see Bedford Cunningham today?
If he wanted to let the poison seep out of their marriage instead of putting more in, he couldn’t keep harping on that. He changed course in midstream: “Did we have any more beer in the icebox?”

Alabama had gone dry not long before the war. What that meant, Pinkard had found, was that you had to know somebody before you could buy beer or whiskey, and that the quality of the stuff you could buy, especially the whiskey, had gone down. He’d evidently managed to ask the question without perceptible pause, for Emily nodded again. “Sure do,” she said. “Couple bottles. Shall we have ’em with the stew? It ought to be just about ready.”

“That sounds pretty good,” Jeff said. Supper, for the moment, was more on his mind than going back to the bedroom. He found another question that wasn’t dangerous, or wasn’t dangerous that way: “What did you pay for the cloth?”

Now Emily’s blue eyes flashed with fury, not any more tender emotion. “Dollar and a half a yard. Can you believe it?” she said. “I wasn’t buying fancy silk taffeta, Jeff. I know we ain’t rich. It wasn’t anything but printed cotton dress percale, like I used to get before the war for eleven cents a yard. Wasn’t as nice as what I could get then, neither.”

He sighed; he’d feared the answer would be something like that. “They haven’t bumped my pay in a bit,” he said. “Don’t know when they’ll do it again.” His laugh held fury, too. “Here I am, making more money than I ever reckoned I would in all my born days, and I can’t even keep my head above water. That ain’t right, Em. That purely ain’t right. And hellfire, the little bit we’d stashed away in the bank before the war—what’ll it buy us now? Not what we hoped it would, that’s certain sure.”

His wife didn’t argue. Instead, she went into the kitchen, pulled the cork from a bottle of beer, and brought it out to him. “Here,” she said. “Won’t make things better, but it’ll make ’em
look
better for a spell.” While Jeff took a long pull, she got the other bottle for herself.

Things did look a little better after some beer. Getting some pork stew under his belt made Pinkard more charitably inclined toward the world, too. It even made him more charitably inclined toward Emily. He hadn’t married her for any other reason than getting her drawers down, but she’d shown him some others in the years since they tied the knot.

While she washed the supper dishes, he read yesterday’s newspaper by the light of a kerosene lamp. Kerosene was heading through the roof, too, especially since the Yankees weren’t going to let go of Sequoyah, from which the Confederate States had drawn a great part of their oil.

A story caught his eye. “Look here,” he said to Emily when she came out of the kitchen, drying her hands on a towel. “They had themselves a riot in Richmond: folks saying we’re selling ourselves down the river to the USA. We’re sure as hell selling ourselves down the river to somebody. Dollar and a half a yard for cotton! That kind of thing means we need to get ourselves set to rights, but I’m hanged if I know how.”

“I don’t want you hanged, Jeff, sweetheart, but I like the way you’re hung,” Emily said. She cared nothing for politics. Sweeping the newspaper aside, she sat down on her husband’s lap.

His arms went around her. One hand closed on her breast. She sighed in his ear, her breath warm and moist. He knew she wanted him. He’d never stopped wanting her, even when…. That hand squeezed tight. Emily whimpered a little, but only a little.

Later, in the bedroom, she whimpered in a different way, and gasped and moaned and thrashed and clawed. Sated, sinking toward sleep, Jeff slowly nodded. She wanted him, all right—no doubt of that. But whom would she want when his back was turned? He drifted off, wondering, wondering.

Nellie Semphroch woke with a start to find a man in her bed: a gray-haired fellow with a bushy mustache. The reason she woke, and woke with a start, was not hard to find, for he was snoring like a sawmill.

As her racing heart slowed toward its normal rhythm, she relaxed and let out a small sigh. Here she’d been married since before the turn of the year, and she still wasn’t used to sleeping with her husband. She wasn’t used to thinking of herself by her new name, either. She’d worn the one Edna’s father had given her for a good many years—most of them without him, as he’d died when his daughter was little, and Edna wasn’t little any more.

“One of the few decent things he ever did,” Nellie muttered. Then, softly, she repeated her new name to herself, over and over: “Nellie Jacobs. Nellie Jacobs. Nellie
Jacobs
.” She hadn’t had so much trouble the first time she was married. That lay a quarter of a century in the past, though. She was more set in her ways now. “Nellie Jacobs.”

Hal Jacobs grunted and rolled over toward her. His eyes opened. Did he look a little confused, too, as if wondering where he was? He’d been a widower for a long time, as she’d been a widow, and had grown used to fending for himself. The room in which he’d lived, above the cobbler’s shop across the street from her coffeehouse in Washington, D.C., was aridly neat.

Then, seeing her, he smiled. “Good morning, my dear Nellie,” he said, leaning over to kiss her on the cheek. He did that every morning they woke up together.

“Good morning, Hal,” Nellie said. Her husband, though far from young, remained very much the enchanted new bridegroom. Nellie wasn’t so young as she wished she were, either. For her part, she remained bemused she’d ever agreed to marry him.

His hand slid along under the covers and came to rest on the curve of her hip. “You have made me the happiest man in the world,” he declared.

He
was
sweet. Because he was sweet, Nellie had never told him how much she disliked having a man reach out and touch her like that. He wasn’t young. He didn’t seek his marital rights all that often. When he did, she had no trouble getting through it. She’d got through far worse back in her own younger days.

He wanted to please her. She let him think he did. Once or twice, he really had come close, which surprised her. She’d thought that part of her dead forever, not that it had ever had much life.

She threw off the wool blankets. She wore a thick flannel nightgown and long underwear beneath it, but she was still cold. She’d been cold for months. “When will this winter end?” she asked, though that was not a question her husband could answer.

Hal Jacobs got out of bed, too. He also had on long johns under a nightshirt, and he also looked cold. “It has been a hard one,” he agreed. “March and no sign of letup. And it has to be making the influenza epidemic worse.”

They both dressed rapidly. Nellie said, “I hate the influenza. It makes people afraid to go out in crowds, and that’s bad for business.”

“With so much snow on the street, they have trouble getting about anyhow,” Hal said. “This will not keep me from enjoying a cup of your wonderful coffee, though, or I hope not, Mrs. Jacobs.”

“I think we can probably take care of something like that, Mr. Jacobs,” Nellie said. She’d always liked his old-fashioned, almost Old World, sense of courtesy. Now that they were married, she found herself imitating it.

They went downstairs together. Edna, whose room was across the hall, joined them a few minutes later. They all stuck close to the stove, which heated the kitchen area as well as water for coffee.

Sipping at his steaming cup, Hal Jacobs let out a grateful sigh. He looked from Nellie to Edna and back again. “My beautiful wife and her beautiful daughter,” he said, beaming. “Yes, I am a lucky man.”

Edna glanced over to her mother. “You better keep him happy, Ma. He sure does talk pretty.”

“Foosh,” Nellie said. She and Edna did look alike, with long faces, brown hair, and very fair skin. She didn’t think she was particularly beautiful. Edna made a pretty young woman. She smiled more than Nellie did, which made her look more pleasant—but then, she was looking for a man. Nellie’s opinion was that the joys of having even a good one were overrated, but Edna paid as little attention to Nellie’s opinions as she could get away with.

A customer came in and ordered a fried-egg sandwich to go with his coffee. He was young and moderately handsome, with a brown Kaiser Bill mustache whose upthrust points were waxed to formidable perfection. Edna took care of him before Nellie could. That might have been funny, were it happening for the first time. Having seen it throughout the war, Nellie was sick and tired of it.

She made eggs for herself and her husband, too—after so many years as a widow, she found the idea of having a husband very strange. When Hal had eaten, he said, “I’m going to go across the street and get some things done.” He chuckled. “Can’t have folks say my wife does all the work in the family, now can I?”

“Not when it isn’t true,” Nellie said. “Go upstairs and get your overcoat, though, before you set foot outdoors.” Jacobs nodded and headed for the stairs.

Edna laughed. “There you go, Ma! You’re telling him what to do like you’ve been married twenty years.” Nellie made a face at her, and not a happy one. Jacobs laughed again going upstairs. That was luck, nothing else. He could as easily have grown angry at the idea of being ordered about.

Well bundled, he walked across the snowy street and opened the cobbler’s shop. He wouldn’t get much business today. He had to know it, too. The shop was part of his routine, though, as running the coffeehouse was part of Nellie’s. She was glad he kept his independence and let her keep hers.

A barrel with a bulldozer blade welded to the prow rumbled down the street, pushing snow aside—and up onto the sidewalk, making the drifts higher and making it even harder for people to come into the coffeehouse or the cobbler’s shop. The barrel driver cared nothing about that. Having been occupied by the Confederates for more than two and a half years and then devastated in the U.S. reconquest, Washington remained under martial law with the war months over.

Trucks roared by in the barrel’s wake: it was for them that the bigger, heavier machine had cleared a path. Rubble filled their beds. Had rubble been gold, Washington would have spawned a rush to make the stampede to California seem as nothing beside it. But it wasn’t gold. It was only rubble. It had to be disposed of, not sought out.

When Nellie opened the front door to take a cup of coffee to Hal, she found she couldn’t, not without shoveling her way to the street. By the time she and Edna did the shoveling, the coffee was cold. She poured it out, got a fresh one, and took it across the street. Then she discovered she had to shovel her way into her husband’s shop. That meant another trip back for coffee that was hot. Some of the things she said about the U.S. government were less than complimentary.

Her husband was fixing a soldier’s boot when she finally came in. The only difference between 1918 and 1916 was that it was a U.S., not a Confederate, boot. “Coffee? How nice. How thoughtful,” he said. His eyes twinkled. “And what do you hear in the coffeehouse that might interest an old shoemaker, eh?”

Nellie laughed. He hadn’t just been a shoemaker during the war. He’d been part of a spy ring keeping tabs on what the Confederates did in and around Washington. He’d helped Nellie get coffee and food when they were scarce and hard to come by. Since she had them, her place had been popular among Confederate officers and homegrown collaborators. In turn, she’d passed on what she overheard to him.

She had an Order of Remembrance, First Class, straight from the hands of Theodore Roosevelt because of that. Edna had an Order of Remembrance, Second Class, which was richly undeserved: she’d been on the point of marrying a Confederate officer when he died in a U.S. artillery barrage. So far as Nellie knew, Hal had no decorations of his own. That struck her as dreadfully unfair, but he’d never once said a word about it where she could hear.

Nor did he now. He drank the coffee quickly, savoring the warmth she’d had to work so hard to get him. Then he remarked, “If you look over there, you’ll see they are building the Washington Monument a little higher now.”

She looked out the window. Before the war, she would have been able to see only the tip of the monument over the buildings between it and the shop. Rebel bombardment and U.S. counterattacks had truncated the white stone obelisk. She could still see more of it now than she’d seen before the war, because the fighting had also leveled most of the buildings formerly in the way.

Hal said, “I hear they’re starting to rebuild the White House and the Capitol, too.”

“They’ll be pretty,” Nellie said. “Past that, I don’t know why anybody would bother. They’ll just get blown up again when the next war comes, and I can’t see the president and Congress coming down from Philadelphia, can you?”

“To spend all their time here, the way they used to do?” Hal Jacobs shook his head. “No. Not when we are still so close to Virginia, even though the USA will hold the land down to the Rappahannock. But maybe to come down for ceremonial sessions: that, yes. That I could see.”

“I suppose you may be right,” Nellie said after a little thought. “Teddy Roosevelt
is
the sort to enjoy ruffles and flourishes, no doubt about that. He’d love to make the Rebs grind their teeth, too. They were going on about how Washington would be theirs forever. Reckon they didn’t know everything there is to know.”