"He does?" Cincinnatus said, amazed.
"Believe it or else, buddy," the paymaster said with an eyebrow raised in amusement-maybe he knew about Lieutenant Kennan. Instead of waving Cincinnatus on, he said, "Ask you somethin'?"
"Yes, sir, go ahead," Cincinnatus said. The fellow seemed friendly enough-and having a white man ask him permission for anything before going ahead and doing it was a novelty in and of itself.
"All right." The sergeant leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head, fingers interlaced. "What I want to know is, how come all you niggers down here carry such highfalutin names?"
"Never hardly studied it," Cincinnatus said. He did, for a couple of seconds, then answered, "Reckon it's on account of the law don't allow us no last names-maybe they figure we'd be good as white folks if we had 'em, I don't know. So we only have the one, and we got to make the most of it."
"Makes as much sense as any other guess I've heard," the paymaster allowed. Now he did wave Cincinnatus on, asking the next man in line, "Name?"
"Rehoboam," the stevedore answered. The paymaster chuckled and gave him his money.
With an extra four bits in his pocket, Cincinnatus spent a nickel of it for a ride home on the trolley, which had been running for only a couple of days. He went to the back of the car and stood there, hanging onto a leather strap, as it clattered along. Some seats in the forward, white, section were vacant, but the U.S. officials hadn't changed the rules, and the U.S. soldiers in the forward section were liable to beat up a black man who tried to sit among them. He'd heard that had already happened more than once.
The trolley rolled past the city hall. The Stars and Stripes flew in front of it and on top of its dome. To Cincinnatus, the U.S. flag looked crowded and busy, with too many stars and too many stripes. The Bleeding Zebra, Southerners called it, and he could see why.
Plump, prosperous-looking white gentlemen wearing homburgs and somber suits, carrying fancy leather briefcases, and smoking cigars strode in and out of the city hall, as they had before the United States occupied Coving-ton. Some were U.S. administrators, some Covington politicians licking the Yankees' boots.
And some, maybe, really did want to work with the USA. Kentucky was the only Confederate state that hadn't left the Union at the start of the War of Secession; Braxton Bragg had conquered it for Richmond when Lincoln pulled soldiers eastward to try to repair the disaster at Camp Hill. Up till the time of the Second Mexican War, when U.S. forces wrecked Louisville, a lot of Kentuckians had had sympathy for the United States, and, sympathy or not, Kentucky had always done a hell of a lot of business with the USA.
Along with the prosperous gentlemen, a good many U.S. soldiers held positions around the Covington city hall. Machine guns protected by sandbags stood at either side of the entrance. Not everybody in Covington sympathized with the damnyankees, not by a long shot.
Cincinnatus got out of the trolley not far from Tom Kennedy's warehouse. The lines did not run through the colored section of town. Standing still for the journey let him know how tired he was; he walked south to his house with the stoop-shouldered, stiff-jointed gait of an old man.
Motion by the Licking River caught his eye. A bunch of Yankee sailors in dark blue were swarming over the grounded, burned-out hulk of the river monitor he'd seen on the water that day just before the war broke out. The monitor had taken a licking, all right; Yankee shells had set it ablaze before it could do much damage. Now whatever bits of it that could be salvaged would be used against the Confederacy.
The smell of fried chicken floating out through the windows made Cincinnatus' mouth water and straightened his back. Just thinking about biting into a hot, juicy leg sent spit spurting into his mouth. "That better be done," he called as he walked inside, "'cause I'm gonna eat it whether it is or whether it ain't. Smells as good as my mama makes."
"Be five, ten minutes," his wife Elizabeth answered. She waved to him from the kitchen. Then, to his surprise, his mother did, too. A heavyset woman of about fifty, she beamed at him and Elizabeth both. "My boy Cincinnatus, he has a good nose," she declared.
"That he does, Mother Livia," Elizabeth said. "You were right-he could tell. Must be the spices."
"What are you doin' here, Mama?" Cincinnatus asked. "Not that I ain't glad to see you, but-"
"I came to help my daughter-in-law," his mother said.
Cincinnatus scratched his head. His wife was as capable as she needed to be and then some, and his mother had said as much ever since they were married. Elizabeth had got out of her black-and-white housekeeper's clothes and put on a shirtwaist too old and spotted to wear in public any more and a bright red cotton skirt that set off her light brown skin-she was two, maybe three shades paler than Cincinnatus. "You're home sooner than I reckoned on," she said.
"Took the trolley," he answered. She frowned at the extravagance till he showed her not only the day's usual greenback but the forty-five cents he had left from his bonus. "That damnyankee strawboss lieutenant, he sure hates niggers, but he knows work when he sees it."
"All right," Elizabeth said, more grudgingly than he'd expect. "I wish you'd saved every penny, but-all right."
"What's the matter?" he asked. "We ain't broke." One reason he loved Elizabeth was that she was as dedicated to getting ahead-or as far ahead as Negroes in the Confederate States could get-as he was. Even so, worrying about a nickel's worth of bonus seemed excessive.
Then she set both hands on her belly, about where the shirtwaist tucked into the skirt. "Reckon we gonna have us a little one some time next spring."
"A little one?" Cincinnatus stared. All at once, he understood why his mother had come. He hurried forward to embrace Elizabeth. "That's wonderful!" And it was wonderful, even if the timing could have been better. But now he wished he hadn't spent that nickel.
The troop train rattled through Lynchburg and west toward the Blue Ridge Mountains. "If I'd known they were going to pack us into these cars like canned sardines," Reginald Bartlett said, feeling not just canned but cooked in his uniform and heavy kit, "I never would have volunteered."
"Ahh, quit whinin'," said Robert E. McCorkle. Since McCorkle was a corporal, his opinion carried considerable weight. So did he; his uniform could have held a couple of men of ordinary girth. He went on, "You don't like it, write your congressman."
"I can't," Bartlett said. "Can't raise my arms to write."
That put a smile on McCorkle's face; even noncommissioned officers responded to Bartlett 's charm, a sure proof of its effectiveness. The corporal said, "Well, you ain't as bad as some here, and that's the Gospel truth. Some o' these birds, they even grouse in their sleep."
"Birds? Grouse?" Reggie Bartlett laughed, but McCorkle failed to join him: he didn't notice he'd made a joke. What were you supposed to do with such people? Burying them struck Bartlett as a good idea, but only for a moment. A lot of young men were getting buried, off in the direction they were going.
McCorkle said, "Ahh, what the hell, anyway? You turn out a bunch of soldiers who can't even complain when they feel like it, they might as well come from the United States."
"Or Germany," somebody said from behind the corporal.
"Yeah, or Germany," McCorkle allowed. "But it's different with the Huns. If it's got buttons on its coat, they salute it. The soldiers in the United States, once upon a time they was Americans, same as you an' me. Not any more. It's all the damn foreign riffraff they let in, you ask me."
Ahead, the bulk of the Blue Ridge notched the skyline. The sun was going down in fire above the mountains. The troop train rolled over an iron bridge spanning the Otter River. Less than half an hour later, it went through Bedford Court House; in the twilight, Bartlett saw street lamps going up into the hills at whose feet the town lay.
Night fell. The troop train kept on traveling. Its pace slowed as it climbed. Some of the peaks of the Blue Ridge rose well over four thousand feet: not so much out West in the United States or the CSA, but more than respe
ctable hereabouts. The tracks went through the passes, not over the peaks, of course, but still rose considerably in a short stretch of time.
Reginald Bartlett made himself as comfortable as he could. Considering all the gear with which he was festooned, that wasn't very comfortable, but at least he had a seat on a hard second-class bench. The aisles were full of men who'd been standing since they left Richmond and who were trying to squat or lie down so they could try to get a little sleep.
That didn't come easy, for them or for him. His pack dug into his spine. If he let his head flop backwards, it went over the back of the seat, and made him feel his neck was breaking. If he leaned forward, he hit himself in the forehead with the rifle he held between his knees. The men on either side of him kept poking him with their elbows, and neither of them, by all the evidence, had ever heard of soap and water-or maybe Bartlett was just smelling himself.
"This whole business of war is a lot more entertaining to read about than to be a part of," he complained. "All the writers who go on about the Revolution and the Secession and the Second Mexican War leave out the parts that have no glory in them."
"And when they do talk about glory, they're talking about the fellows who lived," Corporal McCorkle added. "The poor bastards who died, yeah, they wave good-bye to them, you might say, but that's all."
Bartlett didn't want to think about that, and wished he'd kept his mouth shut. The Confederacy was mowing down damnyankees the way a steam-powered threshing machine mowed down wheat at harvest time. All the papers said so, and so did every military briefing Bartlett had heard since he'd showed up at the recruiting office. But the papers also printed hideously long casualty lists every day, and the maps showed that most of the fighting was on Confederate soil. Things weren't so easy as he'd thought they would be when he joined up.
Just when he finally managed to doze off, the troop transport started down the grade on the western slope of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Couplings bumped and jolted-the weight of the train had shifted from the back end to the front. Bartlett jerked bolt upright. His start woke the soldier next to him, who cursed foully. He'd heard more blasphemy and obscenity in a few weeks of soldiering than he had in all his civilian life-but he remembered that from a few years before, when his birth class had been conscripted.
Iron wheels screamed on iron rails as the train slowed to a stop. "This here must be Vinton," McCorkle said. "This is where we get out."
Bartlett peered through the window. He couldn't see anything. If they were at a station, it was news to him. The doors at either end of the railroad car opened, though, and his companions stumbled out into the night. When his turn came, he went, too.
"This way! This way! This way!" Captain Dudley Wilcox shouted, waving around an electric torch so his men could see which way this way was. Bartlett was glad to be reminded the company commander existed; he'd neither seen nor heard him since the troop train pulled out of Richmond.
Captain Wilcox led them down a path full of pungent horse manure to a field where campfires were already burning. "We'll bivouac here tonight," he declared. "Bedrolls only-no tents. Get what rest you can-tomorrow we go into action."
As Bartlett spread his blanket on the ground and wrapped himself in it, a mutter of distant thunder came from the west. He looked up into the sky. The stars of early autumn twinkled down on him. The trees would be changing color, though he couldn't see that in the darkness. The thunder came again- only it wasn't thunder, it was artillery. Somewhere over there, gunners were launching shells into the dark-and when those shells came down, they probably killed people. That didn't strike Bartlett as glorious. He was too tired to care. He fell asleep almost at once.
Corporal McCorkle woke him with a boot in the seat of the pants. It was still dark. He sat up, stiff from lying on the ground and feeling he needed another two or three or six hours of sleep to turn himself into a properly functioning human being. He rolled up the blanket and put it away. No more sleep today.
"Listen here, you birds!" Captain Wilcox sounded indecently alert and indecently cheerful for whatever the hour was. "The damnyankees want to take Big Lick away from us, take away the mines, take away the railroad junction. There's so damn many of 'em, they've made it over the Alleghenies and they're coming down toward the city. That's why we're here-to keep 'em from taking it. The company-the regiment-the division-we all go across the Roanoke at ten this morning and we drive the Yankees back into the mountains. Sooner or later, we drive 'em out of Virginia. Any questions? I know you'll fight hard. We'll get us some breakfast and then we'll get us some damnyankees."
Negro cooks passed out cornmeal muffins and bacon. Bartlett wolfed his down. He filled the screw-on cup that doubled as a canteen lid with chicory-laced coffee. It made him feel more nearly alive.
He was gulping a second cup when the artillery barrage opened up. The noise was brutal, appalling, overwhelming. He loved every second of it. "More of that racket there is," he shouted to anyone who would listen, "more damnyankees the Devil's dragging down to hell, the fewer of 'em there are left up here to shoot at me."
"Amen to that," said one of his squad mates, a skinny, bespectacled fellow named Clarence Randolph. He'd been a preacher before the war started, and could have joined the Army as a chaplain, but he hadn't wanted to be a non-combatant. If he wasn't the best shot in the company, Bartlett didn't know who was.
Captain Wilcox blew a whistle. Its shrill screech cut through the roar of the barrage and the occasional blasts from shells the U.S. gunners threw back in reply. "Let's go," Wilcox said, waving his arm. Along with the rest of the regiment, along with the rest of the division, the company moved forward.
Under cover of darkness, Confederate engineers and colored laborers had run pontoon bridges across the Roanoke. The planks they'd laid over the pontoons rumbled under Bartlett 's feet. He wanted to get across before day broke enough to give the fellows who manned the Yankees' cannon a good shot at the improvised bridges.
Horses snorted in a field as he marched past. The shadows in that field were centaur like. "We punch the hole in the Yankee lines," Corporal McCorkle said gladly, "then the cavalry rides through, gets into their rear, and chases 'em to hell and gone."
"Good place for 'em," Clarence Randolph said. "I am a man brimming over with Christian charity, but I don't believe in wasting it on damnyankees."
As light gained on darkness, Bartlett saw how barrages by both sides had chewed the land to ruins. The Confederacy still held about half the valley between the Alleghenies and the river; the Stars and Bars floated over Big Lick, a couple of miles to the south, but nobody was working the mines these days.
A shell fell short and landed among a knot of soldiers off to Bartlett 's left. Some of the screams that rose from them were those of injured men, others of sheer fury at wounds inflicted by friend rather than foe.
"Come on up." A corporal in a grimy uniform waved Captain Wilcox's company into the firing pits and connecting trenches that made up the Confederate line. "Come on up, new fish, come on up."
The soldiers already in line greeted the newcomers with nasty grins and even nastier questions: "Does your mother know you're here?" "Ever see guts all over everywhere?" "How loud can you scream, new fish? No, don't bother answerin'-you'll find out."
Their looks shocked Bartlett. It wasn't just that their uniforms and persons were filthy, though that was what he noticed first. The look in their eyes said more. They'd seen things he hadn't. Some of them-the ones who took obvious delight in those questions-knew a malicious glee that he and his comrades were about to see those things, too.
Some gave good advice: "You go forward, stay low. Zigzag a lot-don't let 'em draw a bead on you. Get down on your belly and crawl like a snake."
Bartlett wanted to see what the bombardment was doing to the Yankee lines, but when somebody stuck his head over the front edge of a firing pit, he slumped down dead a moment later, a bullet in his forehead just above the right eye, the back of his head blown o
ut. One of the men who'd been in the line for a while shoved the body out of the path the newcomers were taking, as if it were an inconvenient log. Gulping, Bartlett stepped past the corpse. He decided he wasn't curious any more.
Here and there among the firing pits, steps made of dirt and sandbags led up to the ground ahead. The company halted by some of those steps. "When the barrage stops, we go," Captain Wilcox said.
Maybe the barrage would go on forever. Maybe the artillery would kill all the damnyankees and leave nothing for the infantry to do. Maybe staying behind a pharmacy counter back in Richmond hadn't been such a bad thing. Maybe Bartlett should have waited for his old regiment to be called up instead of volunteering in a new one. Maybe As suddenly as it had begun, the barrage stopped. Captain Wilcox blew that damned whistle again. Bartlett wished he'd lose it or, better yet, swallow it.
Soldiers started surging up over the steps. Somebody gave Bartlett a shove. He stumbled forward. His feet hit the first step and climbed all by themselves, regardless of what his mind was telling them. Then he was up on level if battered ground. He ran toward the even more battered firing pits and trenches ahead.
He could hardly see them because of all the smoke and dust the barrage had kicked up. Men in butternut trotted ahead of him, alongside him, behind him. He was part of the thundering herd. As long as he did what everyone else did, he'd be all right. A little more than a quarter of a mile-surely less than half a mile-and what had been Yankee lines would belong to the Confederacy once more.
Through the smoke of dust- the fog of war, he thought with the small part of his mind that was thinking-evil yellow lights began winking and flashing. The bombardment hadn't killed all the U.S. soldiers, then. Men started falling. Some crawled ahead. Some thrashed and twisted and screamed. Some didn't move.
Bartlett leaned forward, as if into a gale. He wasn't the only one. Lots of the soldiers still on their feet had that forward lean, as if bracing against a bullet's anticipated impact. Then, rifles and machine guns (he turned to tell Clarence Randolph that machine guns were satanic tools, but Clarence wasn't there, wasn't anywhere nearby-had, in fact, taken only a few steps before a bullet tore out his throat, but Bartlett didn't know that) tearing at them, they struggled through the Yankee wire and, screeching, threw themselves at the men in green-gray who had invaded their nation.
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