American Front (28 page)

“Yeah,” his friend said with a strange kind of sigh: not quit defeat, but a long way from acceptance. As one, they turned their backs on the Negroes and left the Sloss Foundry building.

Walking home felt strange. Because they’d stayed past shift changeover, they were almost alone. A few men coming in late for evening shift rushed past them, worried expressions on their faces. They’d catch hell from the foremen and they’d see their pay docked. Would they get fired? An hour earlier, Pinkard would have thought no—who’d replace them with so many white men in the Army? Now that question had a possible new answer, one he didn’t like.

Sure enough, when they got back to their side-by-side yellow cottages—though they looked gray in the fast-fading evening twilight—Emily Pinkard and Fanny Cunningham were standing together on the grass of their front lawns, grass that was going brown from the cold December nights. “Where have you been?” the two women demanded as one.

“Stayed a little late at the foundry, is all,” Jefferson Pinkard said.

Emily came up and stood close to him. After a moment, he realized she was smelling his breath to see if he’d been off somewhere drinking up some illegal whiskey. Fanny Cunningham was doing the same thing with Bedford. When Bedford figured out what was going on, he angrily shoved his wife away. Pinkard just shrugged. If he’d been Emily, he would have guessed the same thing.

“What were you doing at the foundry?” Emily asked, evidently satisfied he was telling the truth.

Then the tale came out, Jefferson and Bedford splitting it, their breath steaming as they spoke. Their wives exclaimed in indignation and fear, both because of what had happened to Sid Williamson and because of the news about the black men. Pinkard understood that plenty well. Henry and Silas had been replaced by Negroes after they went into the Army. Would Pinkard and Cunningham be replaced so they could go into the Army? Or would they be replaced for no better reason than that the foundry bosses could save some money?

“Come on inside,” Bedford Cunningham said to his wife. “We got some things we better talk about, you an’ me.”

Pinkard had a pretty good notion what those things might be. Bedford had teased him when he’d let Emily go to work in the munitions factory, but all of a sudden he was pretty damn glad he had. Even if they did throw him out of work, he and Emily wouldn’t go hungry. If his friend wasn’t thinking about having Fanny look for some kind of work, he would have been surprised.

“I waited supper on you,” Emily said. “I put that roast and the potatoes in the covered crock ’fore I left this mornin’, and they’ll still be fine now.”

“All right.” Pinkard let her lead him up the walk to their house. He hung his cap on the tree inside the door, right beside the flowered hat Emily had worn to her job today. Now that she was going out in public every day, she’d bought several new hats. Each one cost a day’s pay for her, but she’d earned the money herself, so Pinkard didn’t see how he had any business complaining.

In spite of her promises, the cottage wasn’t so clean and tidy as it had been before Emily went to work. He’d said things once or twice, the first few weeks: after all, she had promised to keep up the housework. Before long, though, he’d stopped complaining. When you got right down to it, what difference did a little dust make? She was helping the CSA win the war. Didn’t that count for more?

And supper, as she’d promised, was fine. She made a lot of meals like that these days: things she could fix up in a hurry, put over a low fire before she went out the door, and then just serve as soon as she and Jefferson were both home.

“That’s mighty good,” he said, patting his belly. “And since I wasn’t off gettin’ lit up like you thought I was, why don’t you get me a bottle of beer?”

Even by the ruddy light of the kerosene lamp, he could see her face go red. “You knew, too?” she said over her shoulder as she went back into the kitchen. “You didn’t let on like Bedford did.”

“I think Fanny nags Bedford more’n you do me,” he answered. “Makes him feel like he got to get his own back every so often. Ah thanks.” He took the illicit bottle she handed him, swigged, and made a sour face. “He’s done a lot better’n that—tastes like he had a horse stand over the bottle.” He swigged again. “A sick horse, you ask me.”

Emily giggled, deliciously scandalized. She also drank. “It’s not
that
bad,” she said: faint praise. And, as usual, she was right. The beer was drinkable—or, if it wasn’t, Jefferson’s bottle emptied by magic.

He went into the kitchen with her and worked the pump at the sink while she washed the supper dishes. “How’d it go with you today?” he asked. He’d discovered, to his surprise, that he liked sharing work gossip with her. “You already heard my news for the day.”

“Mine ain’t much better,” Emily said, scrubbing a greasy plate with harsh lye soap. “Clara Fuller, she hurt her hand on a drill press. They say she’s liable to lose her little finger.”

“That’s no good,” Pinkard said. “Accident like that, the whole shift is looking over its shoulder the next two days.” Only after he’d said it did he realize how strange the idea of a woman at a machine would have struck him before the war started. About as strange as the idea of a Negro doing his job on the evening shift, as a matter of fact.

When the dishes were done and dried and put away, they went out to the living room and talked and read for a little while, till they were both yawning more than they were talking. After a few minutes of that, they gave up with sleepy laughs. They went out to the outhouse, first Emily, then Jeff. She was in bed by the time he came back to put on his pajamas. He slid under the cover and blew out the lamp.

Her back was to him. He reached over and closed a hand around her right breast. She didn’t stir. She didn’t say anything. She was already deep asleep. A moment later, so was he.

Somewhere up ahead along the muddy, miserable road lay the town of Morton’s Gap, Kentucky. Somewhere beyond and maybe a little north of Morton’s Gap lay Madisonville. Somewhere beyond Madisonville—in a mythical land far, far away, as best as Paul Mantarakis could tell—lay the much-promised, seldom-seen glittering thing called Breakthrough.

Just at sunrise, Mantarakis walked slowly down the trench line. You couldn’t walk any way but slowly; with every step you took, the mud grabbed your boot and made you fight to pull it out again. If you lay down in the mud, you were liable to drown. He’d heard of its happening, more than once, as the U.S. line congealed in the face of Confederate resistance and winter.

There stood Gordon McSweeney, his canvas shelter half wrapped around his shoulders as a cloak to hold the rain at bay, water dripping off the brim of his green-gray—now green-gray-brown—forage cap. His long, angular face was muddy, too, and set in its usual disapproving lines. McSweeney disapproved of everything on general principles, and of Mantarakis not just on general principles but also—and particularly—because he wasn’t Presbyterian.

And then, to Mantarakis’ amazement, those gloomy features rearranged themselves into a smile so bright, it was almost sweet. “Merry Christmas, Paul,” McSweeney said. “God bless you on the day.”

“Christmas?” Mantarakis stared blankly before nodding and smiling back. “Merry Christmas to you, too, Gordon. Doesn’t seem like much of a spot for doing anything about it, though, does it?”

“If Christ is in your heart, where your body rests does not matter,” McSweeney said. When he talked like that, he usually sounded angry. Today, though, the words came out as if he meant them, no more. He really must have had the Christmas spirit deep in his heart.

“Merry Christmas,” Mantarakis repeated. He kept walking. It was Christmas for McSweeney, it was Christmas for everybody in his until—and for the Rebs in their wet trenches a couple-three hundred yards away—but it wasn’t Christmas for him. It wouldn’t be Christmas for him till January 6. The Orthodox Church had never cottoned to the Gregorian calendar.
Maybe I should tell McSweeney it’s Papist
, Mantarakis thought with a wry smile. That would give the Bible-thumper something new to get in a sweat about, not that you could sweat in this miserable weather.

He shook his head. For one thing, having McSweeney act like a human being for a change was too good to fool with. And, for another, he was too used to having the whole world celebrate Christmas almost two weeks ahead of him to try and change anybody’s mind about it now.

“Hey, Paul!” Sergeant Peterquist called from a little way down the trench. “We got us a sheep here—Ben brought it up with the regular supplies. Don’t know where he came by it, but I’m not asking questions, neither. You wanna see what you can turn it into?”

“Sure will, Sarge,” Mantarakis said. He wasn’t officially company cook, but he was better at the job than Ben Carlton, who was supposed to have it, and everybody knew as much. And what a Greek couldn’t do with mutton couldn’t be done. He added, “Merry Christmas,” as he came up to the sergeant.

“Same to you, Paul,” Dick Peterquist answered. He wasn’t much bigger than Mantarakis, but towheaded instead of swarthy. Because he was so fair, he looked younger than the forty years Mantarakis knew he had. He might have carried a few gray hairs, but who could tell, in amongst the gold? He pointed down to the carcass at his feet. “Doesn’t that look good?”

Paul whistled softly. It wasn’t really a sheep, it was an almost yearling lamb from this past spring’s birth. “Ben outdid himself this time,” he said. Carlton might not have been much of a cook, but he was a hell of a scrounger. “You said sheep, Sarge, and I figured something old and tough and gamy. This here, though—” His mouth watered just thinking about it. “Make stew with some and mast the rest, I guess. You can’t beat roast lamb.”

“You do it up the best way you know how, that’s all,” Peterquist said. “Make us a hell of a Christmas dinner.”

Mantarakis nodded. He figured he’d save the tongue and the brains and the kidneys and sweetbreads for himself; nobody else was likely to want them, anyhow. To most soldiers, they were “guts,” and not worth having. He wished he could get his hands on a little wine so he could sauté the kidneys in it. Of course, he wished he were back in Philadelphia, too, so what were wishes worth?

He unsheathed the bayonet he wore on his left hip: twenty inches of sharp steel. It wasn’t a proper butcher knife, but it would do the job. He’d just squatted down over the lamb when a Southern voice, thin in the distance, called, “Hey, you Yanks! Wave a hankie an’ stick a head up! We won’t shoot y’all—it’s Christmas!”

“What do we do?” Mantarakis asked Peterquist.

“Shit, they ain’t gonna lie to us like that,” the sergeant answered. He dug in his pocket and pulled out a handkerchief, then gave it a dubious look: it was more nearly brown than white. He waved it anyway, and stuck his head up above the front lip of the trench. Now he whistled. “I’ll be damned.”

That made Mantarakis look, too. The calls kept coming, from up and down the Confederate line. Some men in butternut were walking about in front of their trench line. Any other day of the year, they would have been asking to be shot dead. On Christmas, no. U.S. troops were coming up out of the trenches, too, and heading on over toward the drifts of barbed wire that separated one line from the other.

Without waiting on anybody’s permission, Paul scrambled up onto the ground between the trench lines and headed toward the Confederate positions, too. He waited for Peterquist to yell at him or try to drag him back, but, a moment later, the sergeant was right up there beside him. “I’ll be damned,” he said again, and Mantarakis nodded.

Realizing he was still holding the bayonet he’d intended to use to cut up the lamb, he stuck it back in its leather sheath. He wasn’t going to need it, not today. Rebs and U.S. soldiers were snipping through barbed wire not to kill one another but to get together, say “Merry Christmas,” and shake hands. For a day, or at least a moment, fifty years and more of hatred vanished as if they’d never been.

Some of the Confederates had rifles slung on their shoulders, but they, like he, seemed to have forgotten about them. “Hey, you! Yank!” one of them called, and pointed at him. “Want some see gars? Got anything you can swap me for ’em?”

This was tobacco country, but the fields had been fought over, not harvested. And cigars, with any luck, were going to be Habanas anyhow. Kentucky tobacco couldn’t come close to what they grew in Cuba. “I’ve got some garlic powder and some mint,” Mantarakis answered. “Make your stews taste better, if you want ’em.”

“Don’t like garlic,” the Rebel said, and made a face. “Stinks, if it you ask me. But mint’s right nice. What other kind o’ tasty things y’all got?”

“Got some cinnamon, a little bit,” Paul said. He hid the scorn he held for the Confederate: how could you dislike garlic? But the fellow’s eyes lit up when he mentioned cinnamon, so maybe they had some hope of a deal after all. Mantarakis dug in his pack and displayed the little tins of spice, whereupon the Rebel held up four cigars. After some dickering, they settled on six.

By then, a couple of paths through the wire had been cleared Paul went through one of them, toward the Confederate lines. He had the feeling of being partly in a dream, as if nothing could happen to him no matter what he did. It was the exact opposite of what he usually felt on a battlefield: that he was liable to end up dead or mangled in spite of everything he could do to prevent it.

He handed the tins over to his Confederate counterpart and received the cigars in return. The bands, printed on shiny, metallic paper, bore the picture of a fellow with a bushy gray beard, who, the gold letters underneath his face declared, was Confederate President Longstreet, who’d licked the United States in the Second Mexican War. Maybe the cigars were Habanas, then. He sniffed them. Wherever they came from, they smelled pretty good.

“Merry Christmas, Yankee,” the Confederate said. He was a medium-sized, stocky fellow with muttonchops and light brown hair that stuck out from under his cap in all directions. As he stowed away the spices, he laughed a little. “Don’t think I hardly ever said nothin’ to a damnyankee before, ’cept maybe somethin’ like ‘Hands up ’fore I shoot you!’”