“Got him good, Vic,” Carsten said. Crosetti grinned and nodded. They went back to swabbing the deck-still not working too hard.
Jefferson Pinkard kissed his wife, Emily, as she headed out the door of their yellow-painted company house to go to the munitions plant where she’d been working the past year. “Be careful, honey,” he said. He meant that a couple of ways. For one, her usually fair skin was still sallow from the jaundice working with some of the explosives caused. For another, riding the trolley in Birmingham, as in a lot of cities in the Confederacy these days, was something less than safe.
“I will,” she promised, as she did whenever he warned her. She tossed her head. These days, she’d cut her strawberry-blond hair short, to keep it from getting caught in the machinery with which she worked. Jeff missed the braid she’d worn halfway down her back. She kissed him again, a quick peck on the lips. “I got to go.”
“I know,” he said. “You may get home a little before me tonight-I got to vote, remember.”
“I know it’s today,” she agreed. She gave him a sidelong look. “One of these days, I reckon I’ll be voting, too, so you won’t have to remind me about it.”
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.