Walk in Hell (9 page)

He sighed and shrugged. It wasn’t worth an argument. She’d come up with more radical ideas since she started working than in all the time they’d been married up till then. She hurried off toward the trolley. He stood in the doorway for half a minute or so, watching her walk. He would have forgiven a lot of radical ideas from a woman who moved her hips like that. It gave him something to look forward to when he came home from work.

Because the company housing was only a few hundred yards away from the Sloss foundry, he didn’t have to leave as soon as his wife did to get to work on time. He went back in, finished his coffee and ham and eggs, set the dishes to soak in soapy water in the sink, grabbed his dinner pail, and then headed out the door himself.

As he walked into the foundry, he waved to men he knew. There weren’t that many, not any more: most of the whites in the Sloss labor force had already been conscripted. Every time he opened his own mailbox, Pinkard expected to find the buff-colored envelope summoning him to the colors, too. He sometimes wondered if they’d lost his file.

Along with the white men in overalls and caps came a stream of black men dressed the same way. Many of them, nowadays, were doing jobs to which they wouldn’t have dared aspire when the war began, jobs that had been reserved for whites till the front drained off too many. They still weren’t getting white men’s pay, but they were making more than they had before.

Pinkard had been working alongside a Negro for a good long while now. Though he’d hated the notion at first, he’d since come to take it for granted—until the uprising had broken out the month before. Leonidas, the buck he was working with these days, had kept right on coming in, uprisings or no uprisings. That would have made Pinkard happier, though, had Leonidas shown the least trace of brains concealed anywhere about his person.

He went into the foundry and out onto the floor. The racket, as always, was appalling. You couldn’t shout over it; you had to learn to talk—and to hear—under it. When it was cold outside, it was hot in there, hot with the heat of molten metal. When it was hot outside, the foundry floor made a pretty good foretaste of hell. It smelled of iron and coal smoke and sweat.

Two Negroes waited for him: night shift had started hiring blacks well before they got onto the day crew. One was Agrippa, the other a fellow named Sallust, who didn’t have a permanent slot of his own but filled in when somebody else didn’t show up.

Seeing Sallust made Jeff scratch his head. “Where’s Vespasian at?” he asked Agrippa. “I don’t ever remember him missin’ a shift. He ain’t shiftless, like that damn Leonidas.” He laughed at his own wit. Then, after a moment, he stopped laughing. Leonidas
was
shiftless, and, at the moment, late, too.

Agrippa didn’t laugh. He was in his thirties, older than Pinkard, and right now he looked older than that—he looked fifty if a day. His voice was heavy and slow and sober as he answered, “Reason he ain’t here, Mistuh Pinkard, is on account of they done hanged Pericles yesterday. Pericles was his wife’s kin, you know, an’ he stayed home to help take care o’—things.”

“Hanged him?” Pinkard said. “Lord!” Pericles had been in jail as an insurrectionist for months. Before that, he’d worked alongside the white man in the place Leonidas had now. He’d been a damn sight better at it than Leonidas, too. Pinkard shook his head. “That’s too damn bad. Maybe he was a Red, but he was a damn fine steel man.”

“I tell Vespasian you say dat,” Agrippa said. “He be glad to hear it.” Sallust sent him a hooded glance. Pinkard had seen its like before. It meant something on the order of,
Go on, tell the white man what he wants to hear
. Very slightly, as if to say he meant his words, Agrippa shook his head.

The two black men from the night shift left. Jeff got to work. He had to work harder without Leonidas around, but he worked better, too, because he didn’t have to keep an eye on his inept partner. One of these days, Leonidas would be standing in the wrong place, and they’d pour a whole great crucible full of molten metal down on his empty head. The only things left would be a brief stink of burnt meat and a batch of steel that needed resmelting because it had picked up too much carbon.

Leonidas came strutting onto the floor twenty minutes late. “Lord, the girl I found me las’ night!” he said, and ran his tongue across his lips like a cat after a visit to a bowl of cream. He rocked his hips forward and back. He was always talking about women or illegal whiskey. A lot of men did that, but most of them did their jobs better than Leonidas, which meant their talk about what they did when they weren’t working was somehow less annoying.

Pinkard tossed him a rake. “Come on, let’s straighten up the edges of that mold in the sand pit,” he said. “We don’t want the metal leaking out when they do the next pouring.”

Leonidas rolled his eyes. He couldn’t have cared less what the metal did in the next pouring, and didn’t care who knew it. Without the war, he would have had trouble getting a janitor’s job at the Sloss works; as things were, he’d been out here with Pinkard for months.
One more reason to hate the war,
Jeff thought.

He kept Leonidas from getting killed, and so wondered, as he often did, whether that made the day a success or a failure. Pericles, now, Pericles had been a good worker, and smart as a white man. But he’d also been a Red, and now he was a dead Red. A lot of the smart Negroes were Reds. Pinkard supposed that meant they weren’t as smart as they thought they were.

When the quitting whistle blew, he headed out of the foundry with barely a good-bye to Leonidas. That was partly because he didn’t have any use for Leonidas and partly because he was heading off to vote and Leonidas wasn’t. Given what Leonidas used for brains, that didn’t break Jeff’s heart, but rubbing the black man’s nose in it at a time like this seemed less than clever.

Sometimes a couple of weeks would go by between times when Jefferson Pinkard left company grounds. He spent a lot of time in the foundry, his friends—those who weren’t in the Army—lived in company housing as he did, and the company store was conveniently close and gave credit, even if it did charge more than the shops closer to the center of town.

The polling place, though, was at a Veterans of the War of Secession hall a couple of blocks in from the edge of company land. He saw two or three burnt-out buildings as he went along. Emily had seen more damage from the uprising than he had, because she took the trolley every day. He shook his head. Steelworkers armed with clubs and a few guns had kept the rampaging Negroes off Sloss land; the black workers, or almost all of them, had stayed quiet. They knew which side their bread was buttered on.

A line of white men, a lot of them in dirty overalls like Pinkard’s, snaked out of the veterans’ hall, above which flapped the Stars and Bars. He took his place, dug a stogie out of his pocket, lighted it, and blew out a happy cloud of smoke. If he had to move slowly for a bit, he’d enjoy it.

By their white hair and beards, the officials at the polling place were War of Secession veterans themselves. “Pinkard, Jefferson Davis,” Jeff said when he got to the head of the line. He took his ballot and went into a booth. Without hesitation, he voted for Gabriel Semmes over Doroteo Arango for president; as Woodrow Wilson’s vice president, Semmes would keep the Confederacy on a steady course, while Arango was nothing but a wild-eyed, hot-blooded southerner. Jeff methodically went through the rest of the national, state, and local offices, then came out and pushed his ballot through the slot of the big wood ballot box.

“Mr. Pinkard has voted,” one of the elderly precinct workers said, and Pinkard felt proud at having done his democratic duty.

He walked home still suffused with that warm sense of virtue. If you didn’t vote, you had no one to blame but yourself for what happened to the country—unless, of course, you were black, or a woman. And one of these years, the way things looked, they’d probably let women have a go at the ballot box, no matter what he thought about it. He supposed the world wouldn’t end.

Emily came out onto the porch as he hurried up the walk toward the house. “Hi, darlin’!” he called. Then he saw the buff-colored envelope she was holding.

Lieutenant Nicholas H. Kincaid raised a forefinger. “Another cup of coffee for me here, if you please,” the Confederate cavalry officer said.

“I’ll take care of it,” Nellie Semphroch said quickly, before her daughter Edna could. Edna glared at her. Half the reason Kincaid came into the coffeehouse the two women ran in occupied Washington, D.C., was to moon over Edna, his eyes as big and glassy as those of a calf with the bloat.

That was also all the reason Nellie tried to keep Edna as far away from Kincaid as she could. She’d caught them kissing once, and who could say where that would have led if she hadn’t put a stop to it in a hurry? She shook her head. She knew where it would have led. She’d been down that path herself, and didn’t intend to let Edna take it.

Edna filled a cup with the blend from the Dutch East Indies that Kincaid liked, set the cup on a saucer, and handed it to Nellie. “Here you are, Ma,” she said, her voice poisonously sweet. She knew better than to argue out loud with Nellie when the coffeehouse was full of customers, as it was this afternoon. That didn’t mean she wasn’t angry. Far from it.

Nellie Semphroch glared back at her, full of angry determination herself. Given a generation’s difference in their ages—a short generation’s difference—the two women looked very much alike. They shared light brown hair (though Nellie’s had some streaks of gray in it), oval faces, fine, fair skin, and eyes somewhere between blue and green. If Nellie’s expression was habitually worried, well, she’d earned that. In this day and age, if you were an adult and you didn’t have plenty to worry about, something was wrong with you.

She carried the steaming cup over to Lieutenant Kincaid. “Obliged, ma’am,” he said. He was polite, when he could easily have been anything but. And, when he dug in his pocket, he put a real silver quarter-dollar on the table, not the Confederate scrip that let Rebel officers live like lords in the conquered capital of the USA.

Outside in the middle distance, a sudden volley of rifle shots rang out. Nellie jumped. She’d been through worse when the Confederates shelled Washington and then fought their way into town, but she’d let herself relax since: that had been well over a year ago now.

“Nothin’ to worry about, ma’am,” Kincaid said after sipping at the coffee. “That’s just the firing squad getting rid of a nigger. Waste of bullets, you ask me. Ought to string the bastards up. That’d be the end of that.”

“Yes,” Nellie said. She didn’t really like talking with Kincaid. It encouraged him, and he didn’t need encouragement to come around. But Confederate soldiers and military police were the only law and order Washington had these days. The Negro rebellion that had tried to catch fire here hadn’t been against the CSA alone; a good part of the fury had been aimed at whites in general.

Kincaid said, “Those niggers were damn fools—beg your pardon, ma’am—to try givin’ us trouble here. Places where they’re still in arms against the CSA are places where there weren’t any soldiers to speak of. They take a deal of rooting out from places like that, on account of we can’t empty our lines against you Yankees to go back and get ’em. But here—we got plenty of soldiers here, coming and going and staying. Why, we got three regiments comin’ in tonight, back from whipping the Reds in Mississippi and heading up to the Maryland front. And it’s like that every day of the year. Sometimes I don’t think niggers is anything but a pack of fools.”

“Yes,” Nellie said again.
Three regiments in from Mississippi, going up to Maryland
. Hal Jacobs, who had a little bootmaking and shoe-repair business across the street, had ways of getting such tidbits to people in the USA who could do something useful with them.

“Bring me another sandwich here, ma’am?” a Confederate captain at a far table called. Nellie hurried over to serve him. Despite the rationing that made most of Washington a gray, joyless place, she never had trouble getting her hands on good food and good coffee. Of themselves, her eyes went across the street for a moment. She didn’t know exactly what connections Mr. Jacobs had, but they were good ones. And he liked having the coffeehouse full of Confederates talking at the top of their lungs—or even quietly, so long as they talked freely.

“You had a ham and cheese there?” she asked. The captain nodded. She hurried back of the counter to fix it for him.

Nicholas H. Kincaid was not without resource. He gulped down the coffee Nellie had given him and asked for another refill while she was still making the sandwich. That meant Edna had to take care of him. Not only did she bring him the coffee, she sat down at the table with him and started an animated conversation. The person to whom she was really telling something was Nellie, and the message was simple:
I’ll do whatever I please
.

Seething inside, Nellie sliced bread, ham, and cheese with mechanical competence. She wished she could haul off and give her daughter a good clout in the ear, but Edna was past twenty, so how much good could it do?
Why don’t young folks listen to people who know better?
she mourned silently, forgetting how little she’d listened to anyone at the same age.

She took the sandwich over to the captain, accepted his scrip with an inward sigh, and was about to head back behind the counter when the door opened and a new customer came in. Unlike most of her clientele, he was neither a Confederate soldier nor one of the plump, clever businessmen who hadn’t let a change of rulers in Washington keep them from turning a profit. He was about fifty, maybe a few years past, with a black overcoat that had seen better times, a derby about which the same could be said, and a couple of days’ stubble on his chin and cheeks. He picked a table near the doorway, and sat with his back against the wall.

When Nellie came over to him, he breathed whiskey fumes up into her face. She ignored them. “I thought I told you never to show your face in here again,” she said in a furious whisper.

“Oh, Little Nell, you don’t have to be that way,” he answered. His voice, unlike his appearance, was far from seedy: he sounded ready for anything. His eyes traveled the length of her, up and down. “You’re still one fine-looking woman, you know that?” he said, as if he’d seen right through the respectable gray wool dress she wore.

Her face heated. Bill Reach knew what she looked like under that dress, sure enough, or he knew what she had looked like under her clothes, back when she’d been younger than Edna was now. She hadn’t seen him since, or wanted to, till he’d shown up at the coffeehouse one day a few months before. Then she’d managed to frighten him off, and hoped he was gone for good. Now—

“If you don’t get out of here right now,” she said, “I’m going to let these officers here know you’re bothering a lady. Confederates are gentlemen. They don’t like that.”
Except when they’re trying to get you into bed themselves
.

Reach laughed, showing bad teeth. It looked like a good-natured laugh—unless you were on the receiving end of it. “I don’t think you’ll do that.”

“Oh? And why don’t you?” She might be betraying Rebel information to Hal Jacobs, but that didn’t mean she’d be shy about using Confederate officers to protect herself from Bill Reach and whatever he wanted.

But then he said, “Why? Oh, I don’t know. A little bird told me—a little homing pigeon, you might say.”

For a couple of seconds, that meant nothing to Nellie. Then it did, and froze her with apprehension. One of Mr. Jacobs’ friends was a fancier of homing pigeons. He used them to get information out of Washington and into the hands of U.S. authorities. If Bill Reach knew about that—“What do you want?” Nellie had to force the words out through stiff lips.

Now the smile was more like a leer. “For now, a cup of coffee and a chicken-salad sandwich,” he answered. “Anything else I have in mind, you couldn’t bring me to the table.”

Men,
Nellie thought, a one-word condemnation of half the human race.
All they want is that. Well, he’s not going to get it
. “I’ll bring you your food and the coffee,” she said, and then, to show him—to try to show him—she wasn’t intimidated, she added, “That will be a dollar fifteen.”

Silver jingled in his pocket. He set a dollar and a quarter on the table—real money, no scrip. He’d looked seedy the last time she’d seen him, too, but he hadn’t had any trouble paying her high prices then, either. She scooped up the coins and started back toward the counter.

She almost ran into Edna. “I’m sorry, Ma,” her daughter said, continuing in a low voice, “I wondered if you were having trouble with that guy.”

“It’s all right,” Nellie said. It wasn’t all right, or even close to all right, but she didn’t want Edna getting a look at the skeletons in her closet. Edna was hard enough to manage as things were. One of the things that helped keep her in line was the tone of moral superiority Nellie took. If she couldn’t take that tone any more, she didn’t know what she’d do.

And then, from behind her, Bill Reach said, “Sure is a pretty daughter you have there, Nell.”

“Thank you,” Nellie said tonelessly. Edna looked bemused, but Nellie hoped that was because Reach’s appearance failed to match the other customers’. At least he hadn’t called her
Little Nell
in front of Edna. The most unwanted pet name brought the days when he’d known her back to all too vivid life.

“I’d be proud if she was my daughter,” Reach said.

That was too much to be borne. “Well, she isn’t,” Nellie answered, almost certain she was right.

The cold north wind whipped down across the Ohio River and through the Covington, Kentucky, wharves. Cincinnatus felt it in his ears and on his cheeks and in his hands. He wasn’t wearing heavy clothes—overalls and a collarless cotton shirt under them—but he was sweating rather than shivering in spite of the nasty weather. Longshoreman’s work was never easy. Longshoreman’s work when Lieutenant Kennan was bossing your crew was ten times worse.

Kennan swaggered up and down the wharf as if the green-gray uniform he wore turned him into the Lord Jehovah. “Come on, you goddamn lazy niggers!” he shouted. “Got to move, by God you do.
Get
your black asses humping. You there!” The shout wasn’t directed at Cincinnatus. “You don’t do like you’re told, you don’t work here. Jesus Christ, them Rebs were fools for ever setting you dumb coons free. You don’t deserve it.”

Another laborer, an older Negro named Herodotus, said to Cincinnatus, “I’d like to pinch that little bastard’s head right off, I would.”

“You got a long line in front of you,” Cincinnatus answered, both of them speaking too quietly for the U.S. lieutenant to hear. Herodotus chuckled under his breath. Cincinnatus went on, “Hell of it is, he’d get more work if he didn’t treat us like we was out in the cotton fields in slavery days.” Those days had ended a few years before he was born, but he had plenty of stories to give him a notion of what they’d been like.

“Probably the only way he knows to deal wid us,” Herodotus said.

Cincinnatus sighed, picked up his end of a crate, and nodded. “Ain’t that many black folks up in the USA,” he said. “They mostly didn’t want us before the War of Secession, an’ they kep’ us out afterwards, on account of we was from a different country then. Me, I keep wonderin’ if Kennan ever set eyes on anybody who wasn’t white ’fore he got this job.”

Herodotus just shrugged. He did the work Kennan set him, he groused about it when it was too hard or when he was feeling ornery, and that was that. He didn’t think any harder than he had to, he couldn’t read or write, and he’d never shown any great desire to learn. Saying he was content as a beast of burden overstated the case, but not by too much.

Cincinnatus, now, Cincinnatus had ambition. An ambitious Negro in the CSA was asking for a broken heart, but he’d done everything he could to make life better for himself and his wife, Elizabeth. When the USA seized Covington, he’d hoped things would get better; U.S. law didn’t come down on Negroes nearly so hard as Confederate law did. But he’d discovered Lieutenant Kennan was far from the only white man from the USA who had no more use for blacks than did the harshest Confederate.

Along with Herodotus, he hauled the crate from the barge to a waiting truck. He could have driven that truck, freeing a U.S. soldier to fight; he’d been a driver before the war started. But the Yankees wouldn’t let him get behind the wheel of a truck, for no better reason he could see than that he had a black skin. That struck him as stupid and wasteful, but how was he supposed to convince the occupying authorities? The plain answer was, he couldn’t.

And so he did what he had to do to get along. He and Elizabeth had a son now. Better yet, Achilles was sleeping through the night most of the time, so Cincinnatus didn’t stagger into work feeling three-quarters dead most mornings. He thanked Jesus for that, because what he did was plenty to wear him out all by itself, without any help from a squalling infant.

He and Herodotus finally loaded the day’s last crate of ammunition into the last truck and lined up for the paymaster. Along with the usual dollar, they both got the fifty-cent hard-work bonus. The gray-haired sergeant who paid them said, “You boys is taming that Kennan half a dollar at a time, ain’t you?”