After a while, the big white clapboard houses and wide lawns of the white part of town gave way to smaller, dingier homes packed tightly together, the mark of a Negro district in any town in the Confederate States of America. The paving on a lot of the streets here was bad. The paving on the rest of the streets did not exist at all.
Boys in battered kneepants kicked a football up and down one dirt street. One of them threw it ahead to another, who caught it and ran a long way before he was dragged down. "Yankee rules!" the two of them shouted gleefully. As football had been played in the Confederacy, forward passes were illegal. North of the Ohio, things had been different. This wasn't the first such pass Cincinnatus had seen thrown. The U.S. game was catching on here.
He walked past a whitewashed picket fence. Like fresh blood, red paint had been daubed here and there on the whitewash. A couple of houses farther on, he came to another fence similarly defaced. On the side of a shack that nobody lived in, somebody had painted REVOLUTION in big, crimson letters, and a crude sketch of a broken chain beside the word.
"Ain't nobody happy," Cincinnatus muttered. Whites in Covington hated the U.S. occupiers who kept them apart from the Confederacy most of them held dear. Blacks in Covington hated the U.S. occupiers who kept them from joining the uprising against the Confederacy most of them despised.
He turned a corner. He was only a couple of blocks from home now. Being an up-and-coming man, he lived on a street that was paved and that boasted real concrete sidewalks. That meant horses and mules drawing wagons and buggies didn't step on the wreaths there, and meant that the blood on the sidewalk, though it had gone brown rather than crimson and looked gray, almost black, in the deepening twilight, had not been washed away by rain.
He kicked at the sidewalk with his shabby shoes. Yankee soldiers didn't hesitate to shoot down Negroes aflame with the beauty of the notion of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Maybe the revolution would succeed down in the Confederacy, with so many armed whites having to stay in place and fight the USA. It would not work here, not now, not yet.
A kerosene lamp burned in the front window of his house. The savory smell of chicken stew wafted out toward him. All at once, he could feel how tired-and how cold-he was. As he hurried up the walk toward the front door, it opened. His mother came out.
His wife was right behind, Achilles in her arms. "You sure you won't stay for supper, Mother Livia?" Elizabeth asked.
Cincinnatus' mother shook her graying head. "That's all right, child," she said. "I got my own man to take care of now-he be gettin' home about this time. Got some good pork sausages I can do up quick, and fry some potatoes in the grease. I see you in the mornin'." She paused to kiss her son on the cheek, then headed back to her own house a few blocks away.
Achilles smiled a large, one-tooth smile at his father. Cincinnatus smiled back, which made the baby's smile get larger. Elizabeth turned and went back into the house. Cincinnatus came with her. He shut the door, then gave her a quick kiss.
Standing in the short front hallway, they looked at each other. Elizabeth looked worn; she'd put in a full day as a domestic while her mother-in-law watched the baby. No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than she said, "You look beat, honey."
"Could be," he admitted. "That Kennan, he'd be happier if they gave him a bullwhip for us, but what can you do?" He pulled money out of his overalls. "Got me the bonus again, anyways."
"Good news," she said, and then, "Come on into the kitchen. Supper's just about ready."
Cincinnatus dug in with a will. The way he worked, he needed to eat hearty. "That's right good," he said, and without missing a beat added, "but it ain't a patch on yours." That made Elizabeth look happy. Cincinnatus had learned better than to praise his mother's cooking at the expense of his wife's.
He played with Achilles in the front room while Elizabeth washed supper dishes. The baby could roll over but couldn't crawl yet. He thought peekaboo was the funniest game in the world. Cincinnatus wondered what went on inside that little head. When he covered his face with his hands, did Achilles think he'd disappeared? By the way the baby laughed and laughed, maybe he did.
Elizabeth came out, sniffed, gave Cincinnatus a reproachful stare, and went off to change Achilles. When she came back she sat down in the rocking chair to nurse the baby. She didn't have a lot of milk left, but enough to feed him in the evening before he went to sleep and sometimes in the morning when they first got up, too.
He fell asleep now. The tip of her breast slid out of his mouth. Cincinnatus eyed it till she pulled her dress back up over her shoulder. He'd thought he was too beat to try to get her in the mood for making love tonight, but maybe he'd been wrong. When she carried Achilles off to his cradle, Cincinnatus' gaze followed her. She noticed, and smiled back over her shoulder. Maybe she wouldn't need too much persuading after all.
She'd just sat down again when somebody knocked on the door. Cincinnatus wondered who it was. Curfew would be coming soon, and U.S. soldiers were especially happy about proving their shoot-to-kill orders were no joke in the black part of town.
Sighing, Cincinnatus opened it, and there stood Lucullus. The young black man, the son of Apicius, the best barbecue chef in a goodly stretch of the Confederacy, had yet to develop his father's formidable bulk. "Here's the ribs you ordered this afternoon," he said, and handed Cincinnatus a package. Before Cincinnatus could say anything, Lucullus had hurried down the walk, climbed into the Kentucky Smoke House delivery wagon, and clucked the mule into motion.
The package was not ribs. Considering what Apicius did with ribs, that sent a pang of regret through Cincinnatus. "What you got?" Elizabeth called. "Who was that, here and gone so quick?"
"Lucullus," Cincinnatus answered. Elizabeth caught her breath. Cincinnatus hefted the package. Though wrapped in old newspaper and twine like Apicius' barbecue, it made a precise rectangle in his hands, and was much heavier than he would have guessed from the size.
A note was attached. Put in third trash can, Pier 5, before 7 tomorrow, it said, very much to the point. After reading it, he tore it into small pieces and threw them away. Elizabeth asked no more questions. She took one look at the package, then refused to turn her eyes that way.
Cincinnatus wondered what was under the newspaper. Set type, by the size and startling heft: that was his best guess. Whoever picked it out of the trash can would print it, and the Reds would have themselves another poster or flyer or news sheet or whatever it was.
He shook his head. Being part of the Confederate underground was hard and dangerous. Being part of the Red underground was harder and more dangerous. Being part of both of them at once…at the time, all his other choices had looked worse. He wondered how long he could keep juggling, and how bad the smashup would be when he started dropping plates.
"Chow call!" the prison guard in the green-gray uniform shouted. Along with several thousand other captive Confederates, Reginald Bartlett lined up, tin mess kit and spoon in his hand. The guard, like all the guards, wore an overcoat. Reggie wore an ill-fitting butternut tunic and trousers, not really enough to keep him warm in a West Virginia autumn that had not a drop of Indian summer left to it.
Actually, the tunic fit better than it had when he'd got to the prison camp: he was skinnier than he had been. But he had to belt his pants with a piece of rope to keep them from sliding down over what was left of his backside. The boots they'd given him were too big, too; he'd stuffed them with crumpled paper to help keep his feet warm.