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?"
"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.