American Front (19 page)

At last, the back of the truck was full. Cincinnatus picked up a galvanized bucket, drank some water, and poured the rest over his head. The lieutenant glowered at him, but let him do it. Maybe he’d convinced the fellow he really was working.

A white man, a U.S. soldier, drove away in the truck. “I could do that, suh,” Cincinnatus told the lieutenant. “You could use your boys for nothin’ but fightin’ then.”

“No,” the lieutenant barked, and Cincinnatus shut up again. If the damnyankee wanted to be stupid, that was his lookout.

But the damnyankees weren’t stupid, not in everything, and you were in trouble if you didn’t remember that. The railroad bridge and the highway bridge over the Ohio had crashed into the water as soon as the war started, blown up by Confederate sappers to keep U.S. troops from using them. The Yankee bombardment had done a lot of damage to the Covington docks and, when invasion looked imminent, the Confederates had done a lot more, again to keep the United States from gaining a military advantage. When Cincinnatus came out of the storm cellar of his house after the Confederate army retreated southward and the artillery fire tapered off, he was horrified at the devastation all around.

Things still looked like hell. The fires were out, yes, but every third building, or so it seemed, was either wrecked or had a hole bitten out of it. You didn’t want to walk down the street without shoes; you’d slice your feet to ribbons on the knife-sharp shards of glass that sparkled like diamonds in the sun and were sometimes drifted inches deep.

None of that had kept U.S. forces from exploiting Covington once they’d seized it. Not one but two railroad bridges and one for wagons and trucks came down from Ohio now; they were pontoon bridges that blocked the river to water traffic, but the damnyankees didn’t seem to care about that. And the docks had got back in working order faster than Cincinnatus had imagined possible Barges and ferries—anything that would float—worked alongside the bridges in moving men and matériel down toward the fighting. The U.S. Army engineers knew what they were doing, no two ways about that.

Cincinnatus sighed. If the damnyankees had done as well dealing with the people of Covington as they had with transportation into and out of the place, everybody would have been better off. Nobody, though, had taught them the first thing about how to engineer human beings, and they weren’t good at it. This damn lieutenant was a case in point.

He screamed at Cincinnatus and the rest of the Negroes doing stevedore work on the docks from the minute they got there to the minute they left. And he didn’t just hate Negroes; whenever he had to deal with the white Southerner, he was every bit as bad.

When the owner of a livery stable complained about having had some horses requisitioned without getting paid for them, the lieutenant told him, “What you need isn’t money or horses; it’s the horsewhip, nothing else but. You damned traitor, you’re dealing with the United States of America now, not your Rebel government. You’d better walk small or you’ll be sorry. We’re back now, and we’re going to stay, and if you don’t like it, you can jump in the river for all I care.”

The livery stable man walked off. If looks could have killed, the lieutenant would have been the one in the Ohio, floating face down. Cincinnatus whispered to another black man working alongside him: “My mama always did say you catch mo’ flies with honey than with vinegar.”

“My mama say the same thing,” the other Negro answered, also in a low voice. “That buckra there, though, I bet he don’t have no mama.” He dropped his voice even further. “An’ he sure don’t know who his papa was.”

Cincinnatus laughed at that, loud enough to make the lieutenant glare at him. But he was working, and working hard, so the little man in the green-gray uniform went off to shout at somebody else.

When sunset came, the men on the docks lined up to get their pay. Armed guards stood around the paymaster to make sure nobody tried redistributing the wealth on his own. “Name,” said the paymaster, a middle-aged white man with sergeant’s stripes on his sleeves.

“Agamemnon,” said the Negro in front of Cincinnatus.

The paymaster handed him a green-gray U.S. dollar bill. Covington was a border town, so some of those bills, along with U.S. coins, circulated here all the time. Now, though, the brown Confederate banknotes were no longer legal tender in areas the United States controlled. Till that moment, Cincinnatus hadn’t noticed how each side’s paper money matched its army uniform.

“Name?” the paymaster asked him.

“Cincinnatus,” he answered.

“No.” Shaking his head, the paymaster pointed across the Ohio River. “Cincinnati’s over there.” He chuckled. Cincinnatus smiled back. It wasn’t the worst joke in the world, even if he heard it at least once a week. And the white sergeant didn’t seem to have a chip on his shoulder, the way most damnyankees did. The fellow checked his name off on the list in front of him, then handed him a dollar and a fifty-cent piece. “Lieutenant Kennan says you get a hard-work bonus.”

“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 Covington. 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 respectable 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.