His mother, Louisa, who looked like an older version of Sue, exclaimed in surprise when he came through the door. "I thought you'd be out there all day," she said. She didn't approve of his striking, but he was her son, and she stayed polite about it.
At the moment, he knew a certain amount of relief he'd made it here ahead of the news of trouble. "It got a little lively when the scabs came in," he said, which was technically true but would do for an understatement till a better one came along.
"Were the cops busting heads?" his mother asked. He nodded. She shook her own head, in maternal concern. "That's why I don't want you out there picketing, Chester. You could get hurt."
He started to laugh. He couldn't help it. It wasn't that she was wrong. It was much more that she had no idea how right she was. "If I came through the war, I'm not going to let Toledo goons worry me," he answered.
"You need to worry. You could step in front of a streetcar tomorrow," his mother said. He nodded. She said that a lot. If he was going to worry, trolley cars wouldn't go high on the list. Two other questions topped it. One was, had anyone recognized him while he nerved the strikers to resist the police? The second followed hard upon the first: would any of those people let the police know who he was?
Jefferson Pinkard kept a wary eye on the crucible as it swung into position to pour its molten contents onto the Sloss Works foundry floor. The kid handling the crucible had some notion of what he was doing, but only some. Herb Wallace, the best crucible man Jeff had ever known, had gone off to fight the damnyankees- conscription nabbed him early-but he hadn't come home to Birmingham. His bones lay somewhere up in Kentucky.
This time, the pouring went smoothly. Only a tiny, fingerlike rivulet of molten steel broke through the earth and sand walling the mold, and Pinkard and his partner had no trouble stemming it with more earth. Leaning on his rake afterwards, Jeff said, "Wish they were all that easy."
His partner nodded. "Yes, suh, Mistuh Pinkard," Vespasian agreed. The big, bulky Negro-as big and bulky as Pinkard himself-took off his cloth cap and wiped sweat from his forehead. Winter might rule outside, but it was always summertime in hell on the foundry floor. Vespasian pointed toward the crucible operator. "Hope to Jesus Billy up there figure out his job before he kill somebody. Ain't happened yet, but he come too damn close a couple times."
"Yeah-one of 'em was me last month." Pinkard jumped sideways to show how he'd escaped the misplaced stream of metal.
"You was right lively, that's a fact," Vespasian said.
"Damn well had to be." Pinkard shored up the edge of the mold at another place where it looked as if it might give way. "The floor did run smoother before the war, and that's a fact, too."
Vespasian didn't answer. He hadn't been on the foundry floor before the war. Back then, Negroes had fed the furnaces and done other jobs that took strong backs and no brains, but the better positions had been in white hands. Jeff's partner then had been his next-door neighbor and best friend, Bedford Cunningham.
But the war had sucked white men into the Confederate Army. The CSA had still needed steel-more steel than ever-to fight the damnyankees. Negroes started filling night-shift jobs once solely the property of white men, then evening-shift, and then, at last, day-shift, too.
Back then, before he got conscripted himself, Jeff hadn't wanted to work alongside a black man. He'd done it, though, for the sake of his country. Bedford Cunningham had come back to Birmingham without an arm. A lot of other steel men had come back as invalids. A lot more, like Herb Wallace, hadn't come back at all.
And so even now, with the war over for half a year, Negroes remained in some of the places they had taken during the war: they'd gained experience. Pinkard couldn't argue against experience, not when he'd just been griping about Billy. And Vespasian, who was in his forties, didn't get uppity the way a lot of younger blacks did. As far as the work went, he made a good enough partner. Jeff still felt uncomfortable working beside him.
He didn't quit. He'd have felt a lot more uncomfortable unemployed. Steel was all he knew. If he got a job at another foundry, he had no guarantee he wouldn't be working with another Negro, and one harder to get along with than Vespasian. He didn't care to move out of S loss company housing, either (though he wished he didn't live next door to Bedford any more). He endured.
He never once wondered what Vespasian thought of working next to him.
At shift-changing time, the steam whistle blew a blast that cut through the rest of the din on the floor like a hot knife through pork fat. "See you in the mornin', Mistuh Pinkard," Vespasian said.
"Yeah," Jeff answered. "See you."
They clocked out separately, and left the enormous foundry building separately, too. It wasn't the way it had been, when Pinkard and Bedford had sometimes gone home to their side-by-side yellow cottages with their arms draped over each other's shoulders. Vespasian didn't have a yellow cottage. His cabin was painted primer red, which was cheaper.
Some of the white men going home waved to Pinkard, as did a couple coming onto the evening shift. He waved back. He was always glad to see familiar faces. He didn't see that many. Shift changes reminded him how little remained the same as it had been in 1914. Being reminded hurt.
His breath smoked as he hurried home. They'd had snow the week before, which wasn't common in Birmingham. On top of everything else, it had been a hard winter. The grass was yellow-brown and dead. Somebody sneezed not far from Jeff. He hoped it was from a cold, or from a tickling mustache hair. The Spanish influenza was killing men who'd lived through all the bullets the damnyankees aimed at them-and killing their wives and mothers and children, too.
In spite of the cold, Fanny Cunningham was standing in front of her house, gossiping with the woman who lived on the other side of her from the Pinkards. She waved to Jeff as he walked by. He waved back, calling, "How's Bedford doing?"
"Right good," she answered. "He's been cheerful the whole day through."
"Glad to hear it," Pinkard said. He was especially glad to hear Fanny had had her husband under her eye the whole day through.
She said, "You don't come over like you used to, Jeff. Bedford'd be powerful pleased to see more of you."
Jefferson Pinkard didn't answer that. He waved again, almost- but not quite-as if to say he'd think about it, then headed up the walk to his own cottage. He hesitated before opening the door. He had to do it, though, if he intended to go inside. When at last he did, the savory smell of stewing pork made his mouth water.
"That you, darlin'?" Emily called from the kitchen.
"It's me, all right," Jeff said.
Emily came out, a smile on her face. She had a barmaid's good looks and a barmaid's good buxom figure and hair of a bright shade somewhere between red and gold. Now that she wasn't working in a munitions plant any longer, she was letting it grow out. Now that she was out of the plant, too, the jaundice working with cordite had given her was gone, leaving her rosy and altogether desirable.
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.