“He’d be a hell of a lot luckier if the damn Rebs didn’t keep throwin’ nails in the road,” Burrhead added. “’Course, we’d all be a hell of a lot luckier if the damn Rebs didn’t keep throwin’ nails in the road.”
“I’ll tell you who’s lucky.” Herk pointed at Cincinnatus. “Here’s the lucky one.” Cincinnatus had rarely heard a white man call him that. But Herk went on, “You and me, Burrhead, we’ll sleep in the barracks tonight. He’s going home to his wife.”
“That ain’t bad,” Burrhead agreed.
Cincinnatus collected five dollars-two days’ pay. Herk got the same. Burrhead, who hadn’t been in the unit so long, got four and a half. Some of the white drivers had grumbled because experienced blacks got more than they did. Some had tried to do more than grumble. They were spending time at hard labor; Lieutenant Straubing tolerated nothing that got in the way of his unit’s doing its job.
A trolley line ran from the wharves to the edge of Covington’s Negro district, over by the Licking River on the east side of town. Cincinnatus set a nickel in the fare box without hesitation. When he’d been working on the wharves, making a dollar or a dollar and a half a day, he’d almost always walked to and from his house. By his standards of comparison, being able to sit down in the colored section at the back of the trolley was affluence.
The trolley ran past the charred ruins of a general store. Cincinnatus wondered if Conroy had been able to rebuild somewhere else. The white storekeeper was one of the stubborn Confederates still working against the U.S. occupiers. If he did get back in business, Cincinnatus expected he’d hear from him. He looked forward to that as much as he did to smallpox.
He might hear from Conroy even if the storekeeper didn’t get back into business. He looked forward to that even less than he did to smallpox. The fire that had gutted the store hadn’t been an accident.
When he got off the trolley car, he did not immediately hurry home as he’d thought he would. Instead, he paused and sniffed. A delicious, spicy odor hung in the air. Sure enough, around the corner came the horse-drawn delivery wagon from the Kentucky Smoke House, Apicius’ barbecue palace. Apicius’ son, Lucullus, was driving the wagon. He waved to Cincinnatus. “Sell you some ribs tonight?” he called, white teeth gleaming in his black face.
“No thanks,” Cincinnatus answered. “Elizabeth’s got some chicken stew waitin’ for me when I get home.”
Lucullus waved again and drove on. Cincinnatus let out a small sigh of relief. Had Lucullus asked him if he wanted red-hot ribs, that would have been an instruction to show up at Apicius’ place. All sorts of red-hot things went on there, Apicius and his sons being Reds themselves.
But not tonight. Tonight Cincinnatus was free to be simply a man, not a political man. As neighborhoods in the colored part of town went, his was one of the better ones. The clapboard house in which he lived was neat and well kept. As best he could, given his color, he’d been a man on the rise before the war. As best he could, given a great many complications, he remained a man on the rise now.
When he opened the door, he grinned. The chicken stew smelled as good-well, almost as good-as the barbecue Lucullus hadn’t called red-hot tonight. In the kitchen, Elizabeth exclaimed, “That’s your pa!”
“Dadadadada!” Achilles came toddling out toward him on stiff legs spread wide. An enormous grin spread over his face, wide enough to show he had four teeth on top and two on the bottom.
Cincinnatus picked him up and swung him around. Achilles squealed with glee, then squawked indignantly when Cincinnatus set him on the floor again. His father swatted him on the bottom, so softly that he laughed instead of crying.
Elizabeth came out, too, and tilted her face up for a kiss. “You look tired,” she said. She was still in the shirtwaist and skirt in which she cleaned house for white Covingtonians.
“So do you,” he answered. They both laughed-tiredly. “Ain’t life bully?” he added. They laughed again. He had a pretty good notion of how the rest of the night would go. They’d eat supper. She’d wash dishes while he played with the baby. They would sit and talk and read for a little while-they both had their letters, unusual for black couples even on what had been the northern edge of the Confederate States. Then they’d get Achilles to bed, and then they’d go to bed themselves. Maybe they would make love. Odds were better they’d fall asleep as soon as their heads hit the pillows, though.
Through the first half of the evening, things went very much as he’d expected. The stew was delicious, and Cincinnatus said so. “Your mother gits half the credit-she kept an eye on it and the baby while I was workin’,” Elizabeth said. After dinner, Cincinnatus chased Achilles around the house hoping to tire him out so he’d fall asleep in a hurry. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.
Elizabeth was just drying the last dish when somebody knocked on the door. “Who’s that?” she asked, frowning. “Curfew’s comin’.”
“I’d better find out.” Cincinnatus strode to the door and opened it.
Tom Kennedy stood there, as he had on the horrible night when his mere presence dragged Cincinnatus, all unwilling, into the Confederate resistance against U.S. forces in Kentucky. As his former boss had then, he gasped, “You got to hide me, Cincinnatus! They’re right on my heels, the sons of bitches.”
“Who?” Cincinnatus demanded. Christ, if Kennedy had led the Yankees to him-
Before the white man could answer, a rifle shot rang out. “My God! I am hit!” Kennedy cried. He clutched at his chest. Before he could fall-as he surely would have fallen-the rifle cracked again. The left side of his head exploded, spraying Cincinnatus with blood and brains and bits of bone. Behind him, Elizabeth screamed. Tom Kennedy went down now, like a sack of peas. Blood poured from him in a wet, sticky flood over Cincinnatus’ front porch.
In the barrel yard behind the U.S. First Army’s front in northern Tennessee, mechanics swore sulfurously as they worked in the twin White engines that sent their enormous toys rumbling forward. Other mechanics were on their knees in the mud, tightening the tracks that let the barrels go down into shell holes and trenches and climb out the other side.
Armorers carried belts of machine-gun ammunition and crates of two-inch shells for the guns of the traveling fortresses. Each one mounted not only a cannon but also half a dozen machine guns on a chassis twenty-five feet long and more than ten feet high. They needed a lot of ammunition to fill them up.
Lieutenant Colonel Irving Morrell walked slowly along a path through the mud corduroyed with fence posts and house timbers and whatever other scraps of wood the folks who had made the path had been able to come up with. He was a lean, fit man in his mid-twenties, with a long face, pale eyes, and sandy hair he wore short. When he wasn’t paying attention to the way he walked, he limped a little, a reminder of the leg wound he’d taken not long after the start of the war. Whenever he caught himself doing it, he stopped and made himself walk straight.
The farther he went into the barrel yard, the slower he walked and the more noticeable the limp became. Finally, he stopped altogether, and stood and stared in complete fascination. He might have stood there for quite a while, had a soldier coming up the path with a roll of tent cloth on his shoulder not found him in the way and, in lieu of cursing him, inquired, “May I help you, sir?”
Thus recalled to himself, Morrell said, “Yes, if you please. I’m looking for Colonel Ned Sherrard.”
“That tent right over there, sir,” the soldier answered, pointing to one erection of green-gray among many. “Now if you’ll excuse me-”
More slowly than he should have, Morrell realized he’d been given a hint. “Sorry,” he said, and stepped aside. The soldier trudged on. He was shaking his head and muttering under his breath. Morrell had no doubt what sorts of things he was muttering, either.
No corduroyed track ran toward the tent to which the soldier had directed Morrell. Without hesitation, he stepped off the path and tromped through the mud. A couple of mechanics looked up as he squelched past them. He caught a snatch of what one of them said to the other: “-ficer not too proud to get his boots dirty.” He had been walking straight before he heard that. He walked straighter afterwards.