American Front (37 page)

Nobody waited there to bayonet him or fire at him while he was leaping. A Rebel with the top of his head neatly clipped off sprawled dead; another writhed and moaned, clutching a bleeding arm. But the only healthy Confederates were trying to get away, not fighting back.

One of his men hurled a grenade at the fleeing Rebs: a half-pound block of Triton explosive with sixteen-penny nails taped all around it, and with five seconds’ worth of fuse hooked up to a blasting cap. Unlike guns, grenades could be used around corners and without showing yourself, which made them wonderfully handy for fighting in trenches. Talk was, the munitions factories would start making standardized models any day now. Till they did, improvised versions served well enough.

More grenades, more gunfire. A few Confederates kept fighting. More threw down their rifles and threw up their hands. And still more fled through the gulleys that ran east and south from their trench line.

“Shall we pursue, sir?” Lieutenant Craddock asked, panting. He had the look of a man who’d seen a rabbit pulled out of a hat he thought assuredly empty. Sounding happy but dazed, he went on, “We haven’t lost but a man or two wounded, I don’t think, and nobody killed.”

“Good,” Morrell said; it was, in fact, far better than he’d dared hope. After thinking for a moment, he shook his head. “No, Lieutenant, no pursuit, not in that terrain. The Rebs would rally and bushwhack us.” He pointed ahead. “Where I want to be is the top of that hill. We control that, we control the countryside around it, too, and we can start flushing the Rebels out at our leisure.”

Some of his men were already out of the Confederate trench lines and heading up the steep, rocky slopes. Around here, the elevation, which might have reached fifteen hundred feet, was reckoned a mountain; Morrell didn’t like dignifying it with a name he didn’t think it deserved. Whatever you called it, though, it was the high ground, and he intended to seize it. He scrambled out of the trench himself. He got to the top of the hill bare moments after the sun came out and let him see for miles. He pulled his watch out of his pocket and looked at it in some surprise: a few minutes past six. His part of the fight had taken only a bit more than twenty minutes. He put the watch back. He’d seen a couple of officers carrying pocket watches on leather straps round their wrists. That was more convenient than having to dig it out whenever you wanted to know the time. Maybe he’d do it himself one day soon.

“King of the mountain, sir,” one of his soldiers said with a big grin.

“King of the mountain—such as it is,” Morrell echoed, liking the sound of it. He would have liked it even better had the elevation been a more important conquest. But every little bit helped. Enough victories and you won the war. He rubbed his chin. “Now that we’re up here, let’s see what else we can do.”

When Jefferson Pinkard and Bedford Cunningham came back to their side-by-side cottages after another day at the foundry, their wives were standing out in front, talking. The grass was still brown, but would be going green soon; spring wasn’t that far away. That wasn’t so unusual; Fanny and Emily were good friends, if not so tight together as their husbands, and Emily Pinkard had helped Fanny get a job at the munitions plant where she was already working.

What was unusual was the buff-colored envelope Fanny held in her left hand. Only one outfit used paper that color: the Confederate Conscription Bureau. Jeff recognized the envelope for what it was before his friend did, but kept his mouth shut. You didn’t want to be the one who gave your buddy news like that.

Then Bed Cunningham spotted the CCB envelope. He stopped in his tracks. Pinkard walked on a couple of steps before he stopped, too. “Oh, hell,” Cunningham said. He shook his head in profound disgust. “They went and called me up, the sons of bitches.”

“It’ll be me next,” Pinkard said, offering what consolation he could.

“It’s not that I’m afraid to go or anything like that,” Cunningham said. “You know me, Jeff—I ain’t yellow.” Jefferson Pinkard nodded, for that was true. His friend went on, “Hell and damnation, though, ain’t I worth more to the country here in Birmingham than I am somewhere on the front line totin’ a rifle? Any damn fool can do that, but how many folks can make steel?”

“Not enough,” Pinkard said. Like a lot of men, he’d picked up almost an attorney’s knowledge of the way wartime conscription worked. “You could appeal it, Bed. If the local Bureau board won’t listen to you, I bet the governor would.”

But Cunningham gloomily shook his head. He’d kept his ear to the ground when it came to conscription, too. “Heard tell the other day how often the governor overrules the CCB when it comes to suckin’ people into the Army. Three and a half percent of the time, that’s it. Hell, three and a half percent don’t even make good beer.”

“I missed that one,” Jeff Pinkard admitted.

“Three and a half percent,” Cunningham repeated with morose satisfaction. “States’ rights ain’t like what it was in the War of Secession, when a governor could stand up and spit in Jeff Davis’ eye and he’d have to take it. Don’t dare do that no more, not with everybody so beholden to Richmond. Sorry damn world we live in, when a governor ain’t any better’n the president’s nigger, but that’s how it goes.”

Slowly, they went on to Cunningham’s walk and headed up it together. The expressions on their wives’ faces took away any doubt about what might have been in the CCB envelope. Bedford Cunningham took it out of Fanny’s hand, removed the paper inside, and read the typewritten note before crumpling it up and throwing it on the ground.

“When do you have to report?” Pinkard asked, that seeming the only question still open.

“Day after tomorrow,” Cunningham answered. “They give a man a lot of time to get ready, now don’t they?”

“It’s not right,” Fanny Cunningham said. “It’s not fair, not even a little bit.”

“Fair is for when you’re rich,” her husband answered. “All I could do is the best I could. We’ll get by all right now that you’re workin’, honey. I didn’t like the notion, I tell you that much, but it’s turned out pretty good.” He set a hand on Jefferson Pinkard’s shoulder. “You’re the one I feel sorry for, Jeff.”

“Me?” Pinkard scratched his head. “I’m just goin’ on doin’ what I always did. They ain’t messed with me, way they have with you.”

“Not yet they ain’t, but they’re gonna, an’ quicker’n you think.” Cunningham sounded very certain, and proceeded to explain why: “All right, I take off my overalls an’ they deck me out in butternut. Foundry work’s got to go on, though—we all know that.
Who they gonna get to take my place?
”

Emily Pinkard saw what that meant before her husband did. “Oh, lordy,” she said softly.

The light went on in Jeff’s head a moment later. “They ain’t gonna put no nigger on day shift,” he exclaimed, but he didn’t sound certain, even to himself.

“Hope you’re right,” Cunningham said. “I won’t be around here to see it, one way or the other. You drop me a line, though, once I find out where my mail should head to, and you tell me whether I’m right or whether I’m wrong. Bet you a Stonewall I’m right.” The Confederate five-dollar goldpiece bore Jackson’s fierce, bearded image.

They shook hands on the bet, solemnly. Pinkard thought he was likelier to lose it than win, but made it anyhow. Five dollars wouldn’t break him, and they’d come in handy to a private bringing in less than a dollar a day.

Muttering under his breath, Cunningham led Fanny into their house. The evening breeze picked up the conscription notice and skirled it away. Emily and Jeff walked across the lawn to their own cottage, up the steps, and inside. They were both very quiet over the chicken stew Emily served up for supper. Afterwards, when Jefferson got a pipe going, Emily said hesitantly, “Jeff, they wouldn’t really put a nigger alongside you—would they?”

Pinkard savored a mouthful of honeyed tobacco before he answered, “You ask me that last year, before the war started, I’d’ve laughed till I ripped a seam in my britches—either that or I’d’ve grabbed me a shotgun and loaded it with double-aught buck. Nowadays, though, the war goin’ like it is, suckin’ up white men like a sponge sucks up water, who the devil knows what they’ll do?”

“If they do…what’ll you do?”

“Gotta make the steel. Gotta win the war,” he said after some thought. “Don’t win the damn war, nothin’ else matters. Nigger don’t get uppity, reckon I have to work with him—for now. Come the day the war’s over, though, comes the day of payin’ back debts. I got me a vote, an’ I know what to do with it. Gets bad enough, I got me a gun, too, an’ I know what to do with that.”

Slowly, Emily nodded. “I like the way you got o’ lookin’ at things, honey.”

“Wish there were some things I didn’t have to look at,” Pinkard said. “Maybe we’re all wrong. Maybe I’ll win that Stonewall from Bed after all. Never can tell.”

Word of Cunningham’s call to the colors spread fast. All the next day, people came by the foundry floor with flasks and bottles and jars of home-cooked whiskey. The foremen looked the other way, except when they swung by to grab a nip themselves. If any of them knew who was going to replace Cunningham, they kept their mouths shut.

The day after that, Pinkard walked to Sloss Foundry by himself, which seemed strange. His head pounded as if someone were pouring molten metal in there, then rolling and trip-hammering it into shape. He’d done more drinking after he and Bed got home. Hangovers made some men mean. He didn’t feel mean, just drained, empty, as if part of his world had been taken away.

He got to the foundry on time, hangover or no hangover. There waiting for him stood Agrippa and Vespasian, the two Negroes who were his and Bedford Cunningham’s night-shift counterparts. However wrong having them around had seemed at first, he’d grown used to it. Most days, he’d nod when he came on and even stand around shooting the breeze with them before they went home to get some sleep, almost as if they’d been white men.

He didn’t nod this morning. His face went hard and tight, as if he were in a saloon and getting ready for a fight. Three black men stood waiting for him today, not just two. “Mornin’, Mistuh Pinkard,” Vespasian said. Agrippa echoed him a moment later. They knew what he had to be thinking.

“Mornin’,” Pinkard said curtly. The moment had really come. He hadn’t believed it. No, he hadn’t wanted to believe it. It was here anyhow. What was he supposed to do about it? Before it turned true, telling your wife you’d stay was easy. Now—Should he stand up on his hind legs and go home? If he didn’t do that, he’d have to stay here, and if he stayed here, he’d have to work side by side with this Negro.

“Mistuh Pinkard, this here’s Pericles,” Vespasian said, nodding at the black man Jeff hadn’t seen before.

“Mornin’, Mistuh Pinkard,” Pericles offered. Like all the Negroes Sloss Foundry had hired since the war began, he was a big, strapping buck, with muscles hard and thick from years in the cotton fields. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-one or twenty-two; he had open, friendly features and a thin little mustache you could hardly see against his dark skin.

Years in the cotton fields…Pinkard almost demanded to see his passbook. Odds were, Pericles had no legal right to be anywhere but on a plantation. But the same probably held true for Agrippa and Vespasian, and for most of the other newly hired Negroes at the foundry. If the inspectors ever started checking hard, they’d shut the Sloss works down—and the steel had to be made.

“He kin do the work, Mr. Pinkard,” Vespasian said. “We been learnin’ him on nights, so he be ready if the time come.” He hesitated, then added, “He be my wife’s cousin. I vouch for him, I surely do.”

Fish or cut bait
, Jeff thought. Damn it to hell, how could you walk out on your job when your country was in the middle of a war? You had to win first; then you figured out what was supposed to happen next—he’d had that much right, talking with Emily the night before. “Let’s get to work,” he said.

“Thank you, Mr. Pinkard,” Vespasian breathed. Pinkard didn’t answer. Vespasian and Agrippa didn’t push him. Even if things were changing, they knew better than that. They nodded to Pericles and headed off the floor.

For the first couple of hours after his shift started, Pinkard didn’t say word one to Pericles. When he wanted the Negro to go somewhere or do something, he pointed. Pericles did as he was directed, not with any great skill—a few nights’ watching and pitching in couldn’t give you that—but with willing enthusiasm.

When Pinkard finally did speak, it wasn’t aimed at Pericles, but at the world at large, the same useless complaint Fanny Cunningham had made the night before: “It ain’t fair.”

“Mistuh Pinkard?” Pericles didn’t know how to talk under the foundry floor racket; he bellowed to get permission to speak himself. When Jeff nodded, the Negro said, still loudly, “Fair is for when you’re white folks. I can only do the best job I know how.”

Pinkard chewed on that for a while. It sounded a hell of a lot like what his friend had said a couple of nights before. When you were down, everybody above you looked to have it easy. When you were a Negro, you were always down, and everybody was above you. He’d never really thought of it in those terms before. After a bit, he shoved the idea aside. It made him uncomfortable.

But he did start talking with Pericles after that. Some things you couldn’t explain with just your hands, and some things Bedford Cunningham would have done without thinking were just the sort of things Pericles didn’t know, any more than any other new hire would have. The Negro caught on fast enough to keep Pinkard from snarling at him.

A couple of times, Pericles tried to talk about things that weren’t directly tied to the job. Pinkard stonily ignored those overtures. Answering back, he thought, would have been like a woman cooperating with her ravisher. After a while, Pericles gave up. But then, when the closing whistle blew, he said, “G’night, Mr. Pinkard. See you in the mornin’.”

“Yeah,” Pinkard said, his mouth out in front of his brain.
What the hell?
he thought as he walked home alone.
Didn’t do any real harm. Maybe I’ll even say “Mornin’” tomorrow—but nothin’ after that, mind
.