Walk in Hell (10 page)

“Maybe,” Herodotus said. Cincinnatus just shrugged. The paymaster wasn’t a bad fellow, but he didn’t feel easy about trusting any white man, even one who criticized a comrade.

Herodotus spent a nickel of his bonus on trolley fare and headed for home in a hurry. Cincinnatus had always saved money, even before he had a child, so he walked through Covington on his way to the colored district that lay alongside the Licking River.

Walking through Covington was walking through a minefield of resentments. The Stars and Stripes floated over the city hall and all the police stations. Troops in green-gray uniforms were not just visible; they were conspicuous. The Yankees had the town, and they aimed to keep it.

Some local whites did business with them, too. With Cincinnati right across the Ohio, Covington had been doing business with the USA for as long as Kentucky had been in Confederate hands. But more than once, Cincinnatus saw whites cross the street when U.S. soldiers came by, for no better reason he could find than that they didn’t want to walk where the men they called damnyankees had set their feet.

Cincinnatus didn’t worry about that. He walked past Joe Conroy’s general store. The white storekeeper saw him, but pretended he didn’t. Nor was there any advertising notice taped to the lower left-hand corner of Conroy’s window. That meant neither Conroy nor Tom Kennedy, who had been Cincinnatus’ boss before the war and was now a fugitive from the Yankees, wanted to talk with him tonight.

“And that’s a damn good thing,” he muttered under his breath, “on account of I don’t want to talk with them, neither.” If he hadn’t hidden Tom Kennedy when a U.S. patrol was after him, he never would have been drawn into the Confederate underground that still functioned in Covington and, he supposed, in other Yankee-occupied parts of the CSA as well.

He shook his head. If the U.S. soldiers had just treated Negroes like ordinary human beings, they would have won them over in short order. It hadn’t happened; it didn’t seem to have occurred to anyone that it should happen. And so he found himself, though far from in love with the government that had been driven out of these parts, no less unhappy with the regime replacing it.
As if life wasn’t hard enough,
he thought.

After a while, the big white clapboard houses and wide lawns of the white part of town gave way to smaller, dingier homes packed tightly together, the mark of a Negro district in any town in the Confederate States of America. The paving on a lot of the streets here was bad. The paving on the rest of the streets did not exist at all.

Boys in battered kneepants kicked a football up and down one dirt street. One of them threw it ahead to another, who caught it and ran a long way before he was dragged down. “Yankee rules!” the two of them shouted gleefully. As football had been played in the Confederacy, forward passes were illegal. North of the Ohio, things had been different. This wasn’t the first such pass Cincinnatus had seen thrown. The U.S. game was catching on here.

He walked past a whitewashed picket fence. Like fresh blood, red paint had been daubed here and there on the whitewash. A couple of houses farther on, he came to another fence similarly defaced. On the side of a shack that nobody lived in, somebody had painted
REVOLUTION
in big, crimson letters, and a crude sketch of a broken chain beside the word.

“Ain’t nobody happy,” Cincinnatus muttered. Whites in Covington hated the U.S. occupiers who kept them apart from the Confederacy most of them held dear. Blacks in Covington hated the U.S. occupiers who kept them from joining the uprising against the Confederacy most of them despised.

He turned a corner. He was only a couple of blocks from home now. Being an up-and-coming man, he lived on a street that was paved and that boasted real concrete sidewalks. That meant horses and mules drawing wagons and buggies didn’t step on the wreaths there, and meant that the blood on the sidewalk, though it had gone brown rather than crimson and looked gray, almost black, in the deepening twilight, had not been washed away by rain.

He kicked at the sidewalk with his shabby shoes. Yankee soldiers didn’t hesitate to shoot down Negroes aflame with the beauty of the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Maybe the revolution would succeed down in the Confederacy, with so many armed whites having to stay in place and fight the USA. It would not work here, not now, not yet.

A kerosene lamp burned in the front window of his house. The savory smell of chicken stew wafted out toward him. All at once, he could feel how tired—and how cold—he was. As he hurried up the walk toward the front door, it opened. His mother came out.

His wife was right behind, Achilles in her arms. “You sure you won’t stay for supper, Mother Livia?” Elizabeth asked.

Cincinnatus’ mother shook her graying head. “That’s all right, child,” she said. “I got my own man to take care of now—he be gettin’ home about this time. Got some good pork sausages I can do up quick, and fry some potatoes in the grease. I see you in the mornin’.” She paused to kiss her son on the cheek, then headed back to her own house a few blocks away.

Achilles smiled a large, one-tooth smile at his father. Cincinnatus smiled back, which made the baby’s smile get larger. Elizabeth turned and went back into the house. Cincinnatus came with her. He shut the door, then gave her a quick kiss.

Standing in the short front hallway, they looked at each other. Elizabeth looked worn; she’d put in a full day as a domestic while her mother-in-law watched the baby. No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than she said, “You look beat, honey.”

“Could be,” he admitted. “That Kennan, he’d be happier if they gave him a bullwhip for us, but what can you do?” He pulled money out of his overalls. “Got me the bonus again, anyways.”

“Good news,” she said, and then, “Come on into the kitchen. Supper’s just about ready.”

Cincinnatus dug in with a will. The way he worked, he needed to eat hearty. “That’s right good,” he said, and without missing a beat added, “but it ain’t a patch on yours.” That made Elizabeth look happy. Cincinnatus had learned better than to praise his mother’s cooking at the expense of his wife’s.

He played with Achilles in the front room while Elizabeth washed supper dishes. The baby could roll over but couldn’t crawl yet. He thought peekaboo was the funniest game in the world. Cincinnatus wondered what went on inside that little head. When he covered his face with his hands, did Achilles think he’d disappeared? By the way the baby laughed and laughed, maybe he did.

Elizabeth came out, sniffed, gave Cincinnatus a reproachful stare, and went off to change Achilles. When she came back she sat down in the rocking chair to nurse the baby. She didn’t have a lot of milk left, but enough to feed him in the evening before he went to sleep and sometimes in the morning when they first got up, too.

He fell asleep now. The tip of her breast slid out of his mouth. Cincinnatus eyed it till she pulled her dress back up over her shoulder. He’d thought he was too beat to try to get her in the mood for making love tonight, but maybe he’d been wrong. When she carried Achilles off to his cradle, Cincinnatus’ gaze followed her. She noticed, and smiled back over her shoulder. Maybe she wouldn’t need too much persuading after all.

She’d just sat down again when somebody knocked on the door. Cincinnatus wondered who it was. Curfew would be coming soon, and U.S. soldiers were especially happy about proving their shoot-to-kill orders were no joke in the black part of town.

Sighing, Cincinnatus opened it, and there stood Lucullus. The young black man, the son of Apicius, the best barbecue chef in a goodly stretch of the Confederacy, had yet to develop his father’s formidable bulk. “Here’s the ribs you ordered this afternoon,” he said, and handed Cincinnatus a package. Before Cincinnatus could say anything, Lucullus had hurried down the walk, climbed into the Kentucky Smoke House delivery wagon, and clucked the mule into motion.

The package was not ribs. Considering what Apicius did with ribs, that sent a pang of regret through Cincinnatus. “What you got?” Elizabeth called. “Who was that, here and gone so quick?”

“Lucullus,” Cincinnatus answered. Elizabeth caught her breath. Cincinnatus hefted the package. Though wrapped in old newspaper and twine like Apicius’ barbecue, it made a precise rectangle in his hands, and was much heavier than he would have guessed from the size.

A note was attached.
Put in third trash can, Pier 5, before 7 tomorrow,
it said, very much to the point. After reading it, he tore it into small pieces and threw them away. Elizabeth asked no more questions. She took one look at the package, then refused to turn her eyes that way.

Cincinnatus wondered what was under the newspaper. Set type, by the size and startling heft: that was his best guess. Whoever picked it out of the trash can would print it, and the Reds would have themselves another poster or flyer or news sheet or whatever it was.

He shook his head. Being part of the Confederate underground was hard and dangerous. Being part of the Red underground was harder and more dangerous. Being part of both of them at once…at the time, all his other choices had looked worse. He wondered how long he could keep juggling, and how bad the smashup would be when he started dropping plates.

“Chow call!” the prison guard in the green-gray uniform shouted. Along with several thousand other captive Confederates, Reginald Bartlett lined up, tin mess kit and spoon in his hand. The guard, like all the guards, wore an overcoat. Reggie wore an ill-fitting butternut tunic and trousers, not really enough to keep him warm in a West Virginia autumn that had not a drop of Indian summer left to it.

Actually, the tunic fit better than it had when he’d got to the prison camp: he was skinnier than he had been. But he had to belt his pants with a piece of rope to keep them from sliding down over what was left of his backside. The boots they’d given him were too big, too; he’d stuffed them with crumpled paper to help keep his feet warm.

“This here prisoner business, it ain’t no fun
a
-tall,” Jasper Jenkins said. He and Reggie had been captured in the same raid on Confederate trenches east of Big Lick, Virginia. A lot of men from both sides had died in the struggle for the Roanoke valley between the Blue Ridge Mountains and the Alleghenies. A lot more from both sides had been captured. But—

“You never think it’s going to happen to you,” Reggie agreed. “Maybe if I think real hard, I’ll find out it didn’t.” He gave a whimsical shrug to show he didn’t intend that to be taken seriously. He’d always been cheerful, he’d always been good-natured, he’d always been able to make people like him…and what had it got him? A third-tier bunk in a damnyankee prison camp.
Maybe I should have been more of a bastard,
he thought.
Couldn’t have turned out much worse, could it?

Jasper Jenkins, on the other hand,
was
more of a bastard, a dark, lanky farmer who looked out for himself first and everybody else later. And here he was, too. So what did that prove?

Jenkins looked around at the prisoners, almost all of them as much alike as so many sheep. “This here war’s too big for people, you ask me,” he remarked.

“Now why the devil do you say that?” Bartlett asked, deadpan. He and Jenkins both laughed, neither of them happily. The line in which they stood made Reggie think of nothing so much as a trail of ants heading for a sandwich that had been dropped on the ground. Compared to the size of the war in which they’d been engaged, that was about what they were.

“And to think I went and volunteered for this.” Jenkins shook his head. “I was a damn fool.”

“Yeah, me, too,” Reggie agreed. “I was there in Capitol Square in Richmond when President Wilson declared war on the damnyankees. I went and quit my job right on the spot and joined the Army—didn’t wait for the regiment I’d been conscripted into to get called up. Figured we’d win the war in a couple of months and go on home. Shows how much I knew, doesn’t it?”

“Nobody who didn’t live by it knew about the Roanoke then,” Jasper Jenkins said. “Wish I didn’t know about it now. That damn valley is going to be sucking lives till the end of the war.”

“I only wish you were wrong,” Bartlett answered.

They snaked toward the front of the line, moving not quite fast enough to stay warm in the chilly breeze. As they drew near the kettles that would feed them, Reggie held his mess tin in front of him with both hands. That was how the rules said you did it. If you didn’t follow the rules in every particular, you didn’t get fed. The cooks enjoyed finding an excuse not to give a prisoner his rations.

“Miserable bastards,” Jenkins muttered under his breath, glaring at the men who wore white aprons over their baggy butternut clothes. But he made sure he kept his voice low, so low that only Bartlett could hear. If the cooks found out he was complaining about them, they’d find ways to make him sorry.

They were prisoners, too; the USA wasn’t about to waste its own men to feed the Confederates it captured. But whoever had thought up the prison-camp system the United States used had been a devilishly sneaky fellow. What better way to remind soldiers in enemy hands what their status was than to make them dependent on the goodwill of the Negroes who had formerly been their laborers and servants?

White teeth shining in their dark faces as they grinned unpleasantly at the men they fed, the cooks ladled stew—heavy on potatoes and cabbage and bits of turnip, thin on meat that was probably horse, or maybe cat, anyhow—into the mess kits. If they liked you, you got yours from the bottom of the pot, where all the good stuff rested. If they didn’t, you ate nothing but broth. Complaining did no good, either. The damnyankees backed up the Negroes all the time.

A few men in front of Reggie, a Confederate cursed when he saw what he’d been given. “You stinkin’ niggers’re tryin’ to starve me to death,” he snarled. “I’ll git you for that if it’s the last thing I ever do, so help me God I will.”

“Shut up, Kirby,” one of his friends told him. “You’re just gonna make things worse, you keep going on like that.”