Up ahead, something moved, or Paul thought it did. Then, for a split second, he thought he'd made a mistake. And then, as flame spat from a rifle muzzle, he realized he hadn't; it was just that the Confederates' uniforms made them almost impossible to spot when they were in the dirt.
The rifle spat fire again. Ten or fifteen feet to Mantarakis' left, a man went down clutching at his leg. Paul went down, too, landing heavily enough to jolt half the wind from him. He brought his Springfield to his shoulder and drew a bead on the shell hole where he'd spotted the Reb. Was that movement? He fired, then crawled away on his belly. His own uniform, especially smeared with mud and dirt, gave pretty good concealment, too.
He found out how good the concealment was a moment later, when an American soldier he hadn't even seen got up, peering into the hole at which he'd shot, and waved everyone on. Paul got up and started to run before realizing he'd just killed a man. / should be feeling something, he thought. The only thing he felt was fear.
He stumbled in a hole in the ground and fell, counting himself lucky he didn't twist an ankle. When he got back to his feet, he looked behind him. He'd intended to see how the men on the barge were doing and whether it was all unloaded, but he kept staring, heedless of the occasional bullets still flying, at the grand spectacle of the Ohio River.
The river was full of barges and ferries of every size and age, with all the vessels laden to the wallowing point, almost to the capsizing point, with men in green-gray. Smoke billowed from scores, hundreds, of stacks, a deep black smoke different from the kind artillery explosions kicked up. Paul cheered like a madman at the display of the might the United States were putting forth. With that great armada, with the stunning artillery the gunners were laying down to ease the way for the Americans, how could the Confederate States hope to resist?
The plain answer, Paul thought, was that they couldn't. He cheered again, seized for a moment by war's grandeur instead of its terror.
And then, without warning, most of the barrage still descending on the Confederates ahead ended. "What the hell?" Paul said when the shelling eased up. He'd been in combat half an hour at most, but he'd already learned a basic rule: if anything strange happens, hit the dirt.
But he kept looking back over his shoulder—and, to his horror, he spotted a gunboat flying the Stars and Bars steaming west toward the lumbering vessels struggling across the Ohio. The engineers were supposed to have put mines in the river to keep Rebel craft away from the defenseless barges, but something had gone wrong somewhere and here this one was, a tiger loose among rabbits.
The river monitor—Mantarakis knew the Rebs didn't call them that, but he did—carried a turret like those aboard armored cruisers out on the ocean. Shooting up barges at point-blank range with six-inch guns was like killing roaches by dropping an anvil on them: much more than the job required. But the job got done, either way.
When a six-inch shell hit a barge, it abruptly ceased to be. You could, if you were so inclined, watch men and pieces of men fly through the air. They flew amazingly high. Then the monitor's turret would revolve a little, pick another target, and blow it out of the water. If that kept on for very long, it wouldn't have any targets left to pick.
Shells rained down around the gunboat, too, and on it—that was why the U.S. artillery had stopped its covering fire for the landing. If the guns didn't knock it out in a tearing hurry, there wouldn't be a landing, or not one with any chance of success. All at once, Paul realized he was in enemy country. Behind him, the Ohio looked uncrossably wide. He wondered if he'd ever see the other side of it again if the gunboat wasn't destroyed. Then he wondered if he'd ever see the other side of it if the gunboat was destroyed.
A shell slammed into the armored turret holding the monitor's big guns—slammed into it and bounced off. Those turrets were armored to keep out projectiles from naval guns; shells from field pieces they hardly noticed. But the rest of the Confederate riverboat was more vulnerable. The stacks were shot away; so was the conning tower. Rifle and machine-gun fire from the shore and from the barges kept the Rebels from putting anyone on deck to make repairs. Then the rudder went. The monitor slewed sideways. At last, a shell penetrated to the boiler. The monitor blew up even more spectacularly than the barges it had wrecked.
The barges it hadn't wrecked kept on coming across the Ohio. More loaded up and left the U.S. side of the river. The United States had a lot more manpower than did the Confederacy. Paul Mantarakis wondered if they had enough manpower to compensate for the mistakes their generals were bound to make.
He rose, grunting under the weight of his pack, and moved forward, deeper into Kentucky. One way or another, he'd find out. Jefferson Pinkard always got the feeling he'd died and gone to hell on the job. Flame and sparks were everywhere. You couldn't shout over the triphammer din; no point in even trying. If you got accustomed to it, you could hear people talking in their ordinary voices under it. You could even hear a whisper, sometimes.
Steel poured from a crucible into a cast-iron mold. The blast of heat sent Pinkard reeling. "Godalmightydamn," he said in the harsh-soft accent of a man who'd grown up on an Alabama farm, bringing up a gloved hand to shield his face. "I don't care how long you work iron, you don't never get used to that. And doin' it in summertime just makes it worse."
"You think I'm gonna argue with you, Jeff, you're even crazier than I know you are," Bedford Cunningham answered. They'd worked side by side at the Sloss Furnaces for going on ten years now, and were like as two peas in a pod: broad-shouldered, fair-haired men with pale skins that turned red from any sun and even redder from the furnace atmosphere in which they labored.
The big crucible from which the molten metal had come swung away, not so smoothly as Pinkard would have liked. "New kid han-dlin' that thing don't know what the hell he's doin'," he observed.
Cunningham nodded. "He's gonna kill somebody 'fore they take him off—and it ain't likely it'll be hisself. God don't usually work things out that neat." He spat into the new pig of steel, as if quenching it. His spittle exploded into steam the instant it touched the metal. Meditatively, he added, "Wish ol' Herb hadn't got hisself called to the colors."
"Yeah." Pinkard spat, too, in disgust with the world. "How the hell they gonna fight a war, Bedford, if they take all the men who know how to make things and stick 'em in the Army? If they don't turn out guns and shells, what the hell they gonna shoot at the damnyankees?"
"You don't need to go preachin' to the choir," Cunningham said. "I already believe, I surely do. Bunch o' damn fools runnin' things up in Richmond, dogged if they ain't." Then he paused again. He was more given to contemplation than his friend. " 'Course, the other thing is, if they ain't got enough soldiers, they can't fight the war, neither."
"They want more soldiers, they should oughta pull 'em off clerkin' jobs and such like that, not the ones we do here," Jefferson Pinkard said stubbornly. "Folks like us, we should be the last ones chose, not the first."
"Reckon there's somethin' to that," Cunningham admitted. "I think maybe—" Jeff never did find out what he thought maybe, because a steam whistle blew then, the shrill screech cutting through even the insensate racket of the foundry. Cunningham grinned. "I think maybe I'm goin' home."
When Pinkard turned around, he found his replacement and Bedford Cunningham's waiting to take over for them. After a couple of minutes of the usual chatter—half Sloss Furnace gossip, half war news—the two men going off work grabbed their dinner pails and let the evening shift have the job. Another steelworker, Sid Williamson, joined them from the next big mold over. He could have been cousin to either one of them, though he was several years younger and hadn't been at the furnace as long. "Tired," he said, and then fell silent. He never could rub more than a couple of words together
Along with a lot of other tired, dirty, sweaty men in overalls and cloth caps, they all trudged out toward the gate. Some of the workers—the sweepers, the furnace stokers, men with jobs like that—were b
lack. They kept a little bit apart from the white men who did more highly skilled work and made more money.
Coming in with the evening shift was a white-mustached white man who wore a black suit and a plug hat instead of overalls. He dressed like a country preacher, but Jeff Pinkard had never set eyes on any preacher who looked so low-down mean.
He strode up to Pinkard and Cunningham as if he owned the walkway, then stopped right in front of them, so they either had to stop or run into him. "Do somethin' for you?" Pinkard asked, not much deference in his voice: by his clothes and bearing, the stranger had more money than he was ever likely to see, but so what? One white man was as good as another—that was what the Confederate States were all about.
The stranger said, "Where's your hiring office?"
"Back over yonder." Pinkard pointed to a long, low clapboard building that got whitewashed about once a week in a never-ending battle against the soot Sloss Foundry and the rest of the Birmingham steel mills poured into the air. To get a little of his own back for the fellow's arrogant attitude, Pinkard added, "Lookin' for work, are you?"
"You ain't as cute as you think you are." By the way a cigar twitched in the stranger's mouth, he was about ready to bite it in two. "I got me seven prime buck niggers done run off my plantation this past two weeks, lookin' for city jobs, and I aim to get 'em back, every damn one."
"Good luck, friend," Pinkard said as the man stomped past him. He and Bedford Cunningham exchanged glances. As soon as the irascible stranger was out of earshot, Pinkard said, "He ain't ever gonna see them niggers again."
"Bet your ass he ain't," Cunningham agreed. "Hiring office, they don't care what a nigger's passbook says, not these days. They just want to know if he's got the muscle to do the job. If he's a prime cotton-pickin' nigger, strong like that, they'll fix his passbook so it looks the way it ought to."
"Yeah." Pinkard walked on another couple of steps, then said, "That ain't the right way to do things, you know. Not even close."
"I know," Cunningham said. "But what are you gonna do, Jeff? This place has been jumpin' out of its tree ever since it looked like the war was comin'. When we went to three shifts, we had to get the bodies from somewheres, you know what I mean? Hell, we was runnin' tight for two, way things was. Night shift, I hear tell they got niggers doin' white man's work, on account of they just can't get enough whites."
"I heard that, too," Pinkard said, "an' I seen it when we come on shift in the mornin'. An' that ain't right, neither."
"What are you gonna do?" Cunningham repeated, shrugging. 'They don't pay 'em like they was white, but even so, if you're chopping cotton for seventy-five cents a day, a dollar an' a half in the foundry looks like big money."
"Yeah, an' when they get enough niggers trained, you know what's gonna happen next?" Pinkard said. "They're gonna turn around and tell us, 'We'll pay you a dollar an' a half a day, too, an' if you don't like it, Julius Caesar here'll take your job.' Mark my words, that day's comin'."
"It's the damn war," Cunningham said mournfully. "Plant's gotta make the steel, no matter what. You complain about it even a little bit, they say you ain't a patriot and somebody else has your job, even if it ain't a nigger. What the hell can we do? We're stuck, is all."
The conversation had carried them out of the Sloss Furnace grounds and into the company housing that surrounded them. The Negro workers lived to the right of the railroad tracks, in cabins painted oxide red. The paint, like the cabins, was cheap.
Pinkard and Cunningham lived side by side in identical yellow cottages on the white men's side of the tracks. Cunningham's was closer to the foundry. He waved to Pinkard as he went up the walk toward his veranda. "See you in the mornin'," he called.
Nodding, Pinkard headed for his own house. The windows were open and so was the front door, to let some air into the place. A delicious aroma floated out. Pinkard tossed his cap onto a chair and fetched his dinner pail into the kitchen. "Lord, that smells good," he said, slipping an arm around the waist of his wife, Emily.
She turned and kissed him on the tip of the nose. The motion made her blue cotton skirt swirl away from the floor so he got a glimpse of her trim ankles. "Chicken and dumplings and okra," she said. "Cornbread biscuits already baked."
Spit flooded into his mouth. He thumped himself in the belly. "And it wasn't even your cooking I married you for," he exclaimed.
"Oh?" Something that looked like ignorant innocence, but wasn't, sparkled in her blue eyes. "What did you marry me for, then?"
Instead of answering with words, he gave her a long, deep kiss. Even though she wasn't wearing a corset, he could almost have spanned her waist with his two hands. She wore her strawberry-blond hair—almost the color of flames, really—in a braid that hung halfway down her back. She even smelled and tasted sweet to him.
When they broke apart, she said, "You still haven't answered my question."
He poked her in the ribs, which made her squeak. "On account of you were the prettiest gal I ever saw, an' you look better to me now than you did five years ago. How's that?" They didn't have any children yet. He wondered how that was, too. Not from lack of trying, that was for certain.
Emily smiled at him. "You always were a sweet-talkin' man. Probably why I fell for you. Why don't you get a couple of bottles of beer out of the icebox? Supper should be ready in about two shakes."
The beer was homebrew; Alabama had gone dry a couple of years before, which meant they didn't ship Jax up from New Orleans any more. As he yanked the corks out of the bottles, Pinkard supposed going dry was a good thing for a lot of people. But a beer every now and then didn't seem to him like drinking— and it went awful well with chicken and dumplings.
He handed one bottle to Emily, then cautiously swigged from the other. With homebrew, you never could tell what you'd get till you got it. He nodded in satisfaction and took a longer pull. "Old Homer, he did this batch pretty good."
Emily drank, too. "He's done worse, I'll tell you that," she agreed. "Why don't you go sit down, and I'll bring out supper."
The chicken was falling-off-the-bone tender. He used the corn-meal biscuits to sop up the gravy on his plate. As he ate, he told Emily about the planter who'd come to the foundry looking for his field hands. "We got more work to do now than we got people to do it, a lot more," he said, and mentioned how Negroes were doing white men's work on the night shift.
She paused before answering. It wasn't a full-mouth pause; she was thinking something over. At last, she said, "I went into town today to get some groceries—so much cheaper than the company commissary, when we've got the cash money to pay for things right there—and they were talkin' about that same kind of thing, about how there's so much work and not enough hands. It's not just the foundry. It's all over the place. Grocer Edwards, he was grumbling how he'd had to raise his clerk's pay twice since the war started to keep him from goin' off and workin' in one o' them ammunition plants."
"Wish somebody'd go an' raise my pay," Jeff said. "Way things look, they're liable to end up cuttin' it instead." Once more, he summarized part of what he and Bedford Cunningham had said.
'They aren't hiring niggers to work at the ammunition plants hereabouts—I know that for a fact," Emily said. She paused again, so long that Jeff wondered if something was really wrong. Then, instead of going on, she got up, carried the plates to the sink, and lighted the kerosene lamp that hung not far from the table. Only after that did she continue, in a rush: "I hear tell they are hiring women, though. Dotty Lanchester—I ran into her at the grocer's— she says she's gonna start next week. She says they really want women: what with sewin' and everything, we're good with little parts an' stuff, an' shells have 'em, I guess, even if you wouldn't think it to look at 'em."
"Milo's letting Dotty go to work at a factory?" Pinkard said, surprised. If your wife had to work, that meant you couldn't support her the way you should. Shiftless wasn't a name you wanted to wear.
"She said it was her patriotic duty to do
it," Emily answered. "She said our boys in butternut need everything we can give 'em to beat the damnyankees, and if she could help 'em, she would."
How were you supposed to argue with that? Jefferson Pinkard turned it over in his mind. Far as he could see, you couldn't argue with it, not very well.
And then, after yet another hesitation, Emily said, "You know, honey, I wouldn't mind goin' to work there my own self. They got lots of ladies, like I said, so it wouldn't be like I was the only one, and with an extra two dollars a day, we could really set some money aside for when we do have young'uns." She looked at him sidelong. "Might be any day. You never can tell."
Two dollars a day was a little more than half what the ammunition factory paid the men who worked there: better than nigger wages, but not a whole lot. That was probably one reason the bosses were hiring women. But women were dexterous, too; Pinkard wouldn't have argued with that. He'd struggled a couple of times to thread a needle with his clumsy, work-roughened hands. Watching Emily do it easy as pie made him swear off trying to sew for good.
But wages weren't what made him hesitate. "Any other time, I'd say no straight out," he said.
"I know you would, honey," Emily answered. "But I'd be able to keep things goin' here, too; I know I would. It ain't like I'm thinkin' about it just on account of gettin' out of housework or that I don't love you or that I don't think you're workin' hard enough to make us all the money we need. It's nothin' like that, I swear to God it's not. You know I'm speakin' the truth, now don't you?"
"Yeah, I do," he admitted. He knew she was wheedling, too, but he didn't know what to do about it. What with the war, all of a sudden nothing was simple.
No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than Emily said, "If the damnyankees lick us, it don't hardly matter that we stuck by what was right and proper beforehand, now does it?"
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