“Yeah,” Cincinnatus said. He watched the roustabouts load more trucks. He’d done that work himself, before he’d convinced the U.S. forces to let him drive instead—and to pay him more money for doing it. Despite his own experience at their job, he muttered, “I wish they’d move faster, damn it.”
Herk didn’t make any cracks about lazy niggers. Lieutenant Straubing would have given him seventeen different kinds of hell if he had. Men of one color giving men of another a hard time about it interfered with getting matériel down to the front, so he refused to tolerate it. What Herk did say was, “You’ve been itchy to get on the road lately, haven’t you? Kid givin’ you a hard time at home?”
“Nah, it ain’t that so much,” Cincinnatus answered. “When I’m movin’, though, nobody’s botherin’ me, you know what I’m sayin’? There’s just me and the truck and the road, that’s all.”
“Yeah, sure—unless somebody’s layin’ in the bushes with a goddamn machine gun like happened before,” Herk said.
“Happen inside Covington easy as it can outside,” Cincinnatus said. “Had a man shot dead on my own front stoop, remember. Could have been me shot dead out there, easy as that other fella.”
When he was on the road, he didn’t have to worry about whether every stranger he passed on the sidewalk would carry tales about him to Luther Bliss…or to Apicius—no, Apicius Wood—and his Red friends…or to Joe Conroy and however many other Confederate diehards still operated in Covington. When he was on the road, he was free. Oh, he had to obey Lieutenant Straubing’s orders, but his spirit was free. That counted for more than he’d ever imagined.
At last, the cargo bay in his truck was full. Whistling under his breath, he cranked the White’s engine to loud, flatulent life. When it was going, he jumped into the cab and fed it more gas. Other trucks rumbled awake, too. With Lieutenant Straubing in the lead, they headed south.
More of the road down to Tennessee was paved every time Cincinnatus drove it. He suspected that wasn’t true only of the road that went through Covington. The United States would need to move supplies down every highway they could. When the war ended, Kentucky would have a pretty fine network of paved roads, or at least the north-south strands of such a network.
A man in the trucking business—a man like Cincinnatus Driver, say—might do well for himself. There were some rich Negroes in the USA: not many, but a few. That put the USA a few up on the CSA. “A chance,” Cincinnatus muttered. No one sitting beside him in the cab could have heard the words, but that didn’t matter. He knew what he was saying. “All I want is a chance. I ever get it, I’ll make the most of it.”
He wasn’t going to hold his breath hoping he would get it. Laws against blacks weren’t so tough as they were in the CSA, though that varied from state to state. What didn’t vary was that most whites in the USA would have been just as well pleased if they could have readmitted Kentucky without its Negroes.
He rolled past a truck by the side of the road, the driver, a black man, out there with a jack and a pump and a patch, repairing the puncture. Cincinnatus hoped it was only one of those things that happened now and again, and that the diehards hadn’t gone and strewn the road with nails or broken glass or specially made four-pronged inner-tube biters. That would make a lot of trucks late, and that would make Lieutenant Straubing unhappy. Very little else would, but that was guaranteed to do the trick.
Parts of the country were very much as they had been before the war began: prosperous farmlands raising wheat and corn and tobacco and horses. More, though, looked as if a mad devil had lost his temper and spent twenty years kicking it to pieces. That wasn’t even so far wrong, except that war had done the job faster than any devil could have managed.
Near Covington, almost three years had passed since U.S. forces overran the countryside. Grass had grown over trenches; rain had softened their outlines; some of the rubble and wrecked buildings had been cleared away; some had even been rebuilt. The farther south Cincinnatus went, the fresher the scars of war got. The Confederate States had fought as hard as they could to keep Kentucky one of their number—the tormented landscape told of their effort. But it spoke even more loudly of their failure.
Cincinnatus’ luck held: he got through the day without a puncture. After a stop for fuel for the truck and a bowl of pork and beans from an Army kettle at midday, he rolled on steadily until, toward evening, he crossed from Kentucky into Tennessee. He started passing bands of soldiers heading toward the front. They got off onto the soft shoulder for the truck convoy and smiled and waved as the big, square, clumsy machines passed them. They even smiled and waved at Cincinnatus. They had the world by the tail, and they knew it.
He also steered the truck past columns of men coming away from the front. A few of them, a very few, showed the same high spirits as the soldiers who were replacing them. Most simply trudged along toward the north, putting one foot in front of the other, their faces and no doubt their minds far away. They’d seen so much hell, they didn’t yet realize they’d escaped it—or perhaps they’d brought it with them.
They’d converted the White from acetylene lamps to electric ones not too long before; Cincinnatus enjoyed being able to throw light on the dimming road ahead at the turn of a knob, without having to stop and get out. He’d liked it even better the first time he’d done it in the rain.
At last, about nine o’clock, they pulled into the supply depot. “We expected you an hour ago,” complained an officer with a quartermaster’s badge: crossed sword and key over a wheel on which perched an eagle. Cincinnatus had never known a quartermaster with a good word to say to or about the men who fetched him the supplies he then grudgingly disbursed.
“Sorry, sir,” Lieutenant Straubing said. “We made the best time we could.” He had to give a soft answer: the other man outranked him.
“Likely story,” the quartermaster sniffed. “Well, you’re here now, so we’ll unload you.” He made it sound as if he were doing the truck convoy an enormous favor.
“That’s good, sir,” Straubing said equably. “I can certainly see you’ve been ready for us this past hour.”
In the cab of his truck, Cincinnatus chuckled. Nobody was waiting to unload the trucks. Plenty of people should have been. Straubing knew just how to place the dart to get the most damage with it. “Lieutenant…” the other officer began, doing his best to make Straubing wish he’d never been born. But the truth was too obvious for him to bluster his way past it. He seemed to deflate like a punctured observation balloon that hadn’t caught fire. Then he started shouting for soldiers to get off their lazy backsides and come unload the trucks.
Lieutenant Straubing, having got what he wanted, turned into the soul of helpfulness, offering all sorts of suggestions so the soldiers could do the job quicker and more efficiently. He seemed to be everywhere at once. When he passed Cincinnatus’ truck, he tipped him a wink. Cincinnatus grinned and winked back.
Straubing used the quartermaster’s embarrassment to get him to order his men to run up tents in which the drivers from the truck convoy could spend the night. More and more trucks kept rattling into the depot, as those that had had punctures or breakdowns on the road down from Covington caught up with the rest.
Straubing also arranged for bedrolls and hot meals for the men in his charge. Spooning up greasy stew full of meat that might have come from an elderly cow or a fairly tender mule, Herk said, “The lieutenant, he looks out for his people, no two ways about it.”
“He does that,” Cincinnatus agreed, talking with his mouth full. He’d seen as much before, when Lieutenant Straubing placed under arrest soldier-drivers who tried to refuse to work alongside Negroes from Covington. He didn’t mention that to Herk, because he wasn’t sure the white driver would take it as supporting his point of view. “I ain’t worked for many bosses as good as he is like that. Don’t know if I ever worked for any, now as I think about it.”
Tom Kennedy had come pretty close. Like Lieutenant Straubing, though
not to the same degree, he’d been more interested in the work he could get out of Cincinnatus than in what color he was. For a white citizen of the Confederate States, he’d been as good a boss as a colored resident—not citizen—of the CSA could hope for. If he hadn’t been, Cincinnatus would have turned him over to the Yankee soldiers, that night they came looking for him.
His life probably would have been simpler if he had. Too late to worry about that, though. Too late to worry about Tom Kennedy, too, except to wonder who had put a bullet through his head. Shaking his own head, Cincinnatus went back to get more stew and a tin cup full of coffee.
“Come on, boys—eat up and get some sleep,” Straubing called, like a father telling a houseful of children what to do. “We’re heading back to Covington before it gets light; they’ll need us again soon as we can be there. I told you before, the war’s not done till the Rebs roll over and play dead along the whole line.”
The men in the convoy obeyed as children would obey their father, too. Cincinnatus gulped down his coffee—he was tired enough, he knew it wouldn’t keep him awake long—and ducked into one of the tents. He took off his shoes, wrapped himself in a blanket as much to hold bugs at bay as for warmth, and drifted toward sleep.
Outside the tent, the officer from the depot spoke: “Lieutenant, I will say you have yourself a pretty fair batch of men there.”
“I’ve spent a lot of time getting them to where I want them, sir,” Lieutenant Straubing answered. “I must say, I’m not altogether displeased with them now myself. By whatever means necessary, they get the job done. They took a while to learn that from me, but now they’ve got it down solid. They get the job done, and that’s what counts.”
In Augusta, Georgia, Scipio didn’t turn around every few seconds, as if afraid his own shadow were about to rise up and stab him in the back. It wasn’t that a price didn’t remain on his head. It did. It probably would, as long as he lived: certainly as long as Anne Colleton lived. However unenthusiastically, he’d played too big a role in the Congaree Socialist Republic for that to change.
But, with the Confederate States tottering on the brink of losing the war against the USA—actually, the war was lost, but the CSA hadn’t yet been able to persuade the USA to stop advancing on the fronts where fighting went on—earlier victories over the Socialist Republics were forgotten. Whites on the streets in Augusta went around with stunned, dazed expressions on their faces. They’d never lost a war before. They’d never imagined they could lose a war. The Confederacy had gone from one triumph to another. Now the whites here were learning what the United States had learned half a century before: what defeat tasted like. Next to that, chasing Reds was of small import.
The other side of the coin was that Scipio had got to Georgia. Whatever he’d done in South Carolina, he might as well have done in a foreign country. Confederate states often seemed proud of paying no attention to what went on in their neighbors’ backyards. Georgia had reward posters up for its own Red Negro rebel fugitives, but none for those from South Carolina. Here, Scipio was just one more anonymous black man looking for work.
He was looking harder than he’d expected, too. Factories weren’t hiring the way they had been a year before. “We’re already letting people go,” a clerk told Scipio. “What’s the point of bringing more onto the lines when the war orders are gonna dry up and blow away any minute now?”
“I understands that, suh,” Scipio said, “but I gots to eat, too. What is I s’posed to do?”
“Go pick cotton,” the white clerk answered. “Reckon that’s what you were up to before the war started. Won’t hurt you to get on back. When the Army shrinks, the soldiers’ll need their own jobs back again.”
White men will need their old jobs back again, Scipio thought. And the Negroes who were doing those jobs? Well, the hell with them. They might have been good enough to help out for a little while, but now they’re going to have to learn their place again.
He’d got rebuffs from every factory he tried. For a while, he’d wondered if he would have to work in the fields. The money he’d earned from odd jobs as he made his way across South Carolina was almost gone. His life at Marshlands had convinced him of one thing: he did not want to be a field hand. But he did not want to starve, either.
And then he passed a little restaurant on Telfair Street with a sign in the window: WAITER WANTED. He started to go in, then shook his head. Reluctantly, he spent a couple of quarters on a shirt and a pair of pants that, if long past their salad days, were not ragged and falling to pieces. Then he went back to his flophouse in the Terry, the Negro district in the southeastern part of town, and bathed in a tin tub that plainly hadn’t been used as often as it should have. Only after his clothes and he were as fresh as he could make them did he head back toward the restaurant.
Inside, a colored fellow was setting cheap silverware on a table. “What you want?” he asked in neutral tones as he slowly put down the last couple of pieces.
“I seen the sign in the window,” Scipio answered. “I’s lookin’ for work. I works hard, I does.” He wondered if the proprietor had already hired the other man, in which case he’d parted with money he couldn’t afford to lose.
But the other Negro just shrugged and asked, “You wait tables befo’?”
“I’s done that.” Scipio nodded emphatically. He pointed to the place setting the fellow had just finished laying out. “De soup spoon belong on the udder side o’de teaspoon.”
Smiling now, the fellow reversed them. “You has waited tables.” He raised his voice: “Hey, Mistuh Ogelthorpe! I think we got you a waiter here.”
A white man in his late fifties came out of the back room. He walked with the aid of a stick. Scipio wondered if he’d been wounded in this war or the Second Mexican War. More likely the latter, by his age—or, of course, he might just have been in a train wreck or some other misfortune. He looked Scipio over with gray eyes that were far from foolish. “What’s your name, boy?” he asked.
“I’s called Xerxes, suh,” Scipio replied. He’d been called a lot of different things lately. He was glad he could keep them straight and remember who he was supposed to be at any given moment.
Ogelthorpe turned back to the other waiter. “How come you reckon he’s a waiter, Fabius?”
“On account of he knows the difference ’tween a soup spoon and a teaspoon, and where each of ’em goes on the table,” the other Negro—Fabius—said.
“That a fact?” Ogelthorpe said, and Fabius nodded. The white man who owned the restaurant turned to Scipio and asked, “Where’d you learn the business, Xerxes?”
“Here an’ dere, suh,” Scipio answered. “I been doin’ factory work since de war start, mostly, but de factories, dey’s shuttin’ down.”
“Here and there?” Ogelthorpe rubbed his chin. “You tell me you got anything like a passbook, I’m liable to fall over dead from the surprise.”
“No, suh,” Scipio said. “Times is rough. Lots o’ niggers ain’t got none dese days, on account of we’s moved around so much.”
“Or for other reasons.” No, Ogelthorpe wasn’t stupid, not even close. A frown twisted his narrow mouth. “Wish you didn’t talk like you been pickin’ cotton all your born days.”
Had Scipio wanted to, he could have talked a great deal more elegantly than Ogelthorpe. He’d used that ability to speak like a polished white man to help escape from the swamps of the Congaree. But, if he didn’t speak like a polished white man, speaking like a field hand was all he could do. He’d never before missed his lack of a middle way. Now he did, intently.
“I’s powerful sorry, suh,” he said. “I tries to do better.”
“You read and write and cipher?” Ogelthorpe looked as if anything but a no there would have surprised him, too.
But Scipio read the names and prices of the soups and sandwiches and stews and meat dishes on the wall. He found a pencil and a scrap of paper on the counter and wrote his name and Fabius’ and Ogelthorpe’s in his s
mall, precise script. Then he handed Ogelthorpe the paper and said, “You write any numbers you wants, an’I kin cipher they out fo’you.”
He’d wondered if his demonstration would make Ogelthorpe not bother, but the white man scrawled a column of figures—watching, Scipio saw they were the prices of items he served—and thrust back the sheet and the pencil. “Go ahead—add ’em up.”
Scipio did, careful not to make any mistakes. “They comes to fo’ dollars an’ seventeen cents all told,” he said when he was done.
Ogelthorpe’s expression said that, while they did indeed come to $4.17, he rather wished they didn’t. Fabius, on the other hand, laughed out loud. “You got anything else you want to give him a hard time about, boss?”
“Don’t reckon so,” Ogelthorpe admitted. With a sigh, he turned back to Scipio. “Pay’s ten dollars a week, an’ tips, an’ lunch an’ supper every day you’re here. You play as good a game as you talk, I’ll bump you up a slug or two in a month. What do you say?”
“I says, yes, suh. I says, thank you, suh,” Scipio answered. He wouldn’t get rich on that kind of money, but he wouldn’t starve, especially not when he could feed himself here. And he’d be able to get out of the grim Terry flophouse and into a better room or even a flat.
Ogelthorpe said, “You can tell me I’m crazy if you want, but I got the idea you ain’t got a hell of a lot of jack right now. You’re clean enough, I’ll say that, but I want you to get yourself black trousers an’ a white shirt like Fabius is wearin’, and I want you to do it fast as you’re able. You don’t do it fast enough to suit me, back on the street you go.”
“I takes care of it,” Scipio promised. He thought Fabius was dressed up too fancy for the kind of food the place dished out, but realized his own tastes were on the snobbish side. One more thing I can blame on Miss Anne, he thought. Maybe, now that he was outside of South Carolina, she wouldn’t be able to track him down. He hoped to Jesus she couldn’t.
Breakthroughs Page 57
