American Front (73 page)

Roosevelt listened with poker face till he was through, then said, “Have you presented these ideas to the General Staff with a view toward implementing them?”

“I have presented them, yes, sir,” Morrell answered. “My superiors are of the opinion they’re impractical.”

“Fiddlesticks,” TR burst out. “Your superiors are of the opinion that, since they didn’t think of these things themselves, they can’t be any good. That’s what you get for your low rank, Major Morrell.” He stood up straight and stuck out his chest. “
I
have not got a low rank, Major. When I see something worth doing, it has a way of getting done. I’m glad we had this little talk. A very good day to you.” He hurried off.

Morrell stared after him, somewhere between horror and delight. If Roosevelt started shouting orders, the plan for operations in Utah
would
change. Morrell was confident enough that the results could not be worse than those now being obtained. Would they be better? Would they be perceived as being better? If they were perceived as being better, would he get the credit for that—or the blame?

Roosevelt slammed a door behind him. He was shouting already. Morrell glanced over to the helmet he’d brought from General Wood’s office. He snorted. When he took it, he hadn’t imagined he’d need to wear it inside General Staff headquarters. But TR might have taken care of that.

Achilles started crying. This was the third time he’d started crying since Cincinnatus and Elizabeth had gone to bed. Cincinnatus didn’t think it was far past midnight. The baby might wake up a couple of more times before morning. When he woke up, Cincinnatus woke up. He’d be a shambling wreck on the Covington docks. He’d been a shambling wreck a lot of the days since Achilles was born.

With a small groan, Elizabeth staggered out of bed and over to the cradle where Achilles lay. She picked him up and carried him into the front room to nurse him. Nights were even harder on her than they were on Cincinnatus. She came back from her domestic’s work ready to fall asleep over supper.

Cincinnatus twisted and turned, trying to get comfortable and get back to sleep. In the process, he wrapped sheet and blanket around himself till he might have been a mummy. When Elizabeth came back, she had to unroll him to give herself some bedclothes. That woke him up again.

When the cheap alarm clock on the nightstand jangled, he jerked upright, as horrified as if a Confederate aeroplane had dropped a bomb on the house next door. Then he had to shake Elizabeth out of slumber; she hadn’t so much as heard the horrible racket the clock made.

They both dressed in a fog of fatigue. The smell of coffee drew Cincinnatus to the kitchen like a magnet, though the stuff for sale in Covington these days had more chicory in it than the genuine bean. Whatever it was made of, it pried his eyelids open. After bacon and eggs and combread, he was more nearly ready to face the day than he would have believed possible fifteen minutes earlier.

Someone knocked on the front door. Elizabeth opened it. “Hello, Mother Livia,” she said.

“Hello, dear,” Cincinnatus’ mother answered. “How’s my little grandbaby?” Without giving Elizabeth a chance to answer, she went on, “He must have been a terror in the night again—I kin see it in your face.”

Cincinnatus grabbed his dinner pail and hurried out the door, pausing only to kiss his mother on the cheek. That damned Lieutenant Kennan timed things with a stopwatch; if you were half a minute late, you could kiss work for the day good-bye. Cincinnatus had seen it happen to too many other people to intend to let it happen to him.

“Get your black ass going,” the U.S. lieutenant snarled at him when he got to the waterfront. From Kennan, that was almost an endearment. Barges full of crates of munitions had crossed the Ohio. Cincinnatus and his work crew unloaded the barges and loaded trucks and wagons. U.S. soldiers drove them off toward the front. Cincinnatus had given up asking to be a teamster. The Yankees wouldn’t hear of it, even if it would have freed up more of their men for actual fighting at the front lines.

He disguised a shrug in a stretch as he walked back to unload another crate. Whites in the CSA had better sense. Black men in the Confederacy did everything but fight. They drove, they cooked, they washed, they dug trenches. Without them, white Confederate manpower would have been stretched too thin to have any hope of holding back the U.S. hordes.

When the long day was done, the paymaster gave Cincinnatus the fifty-cent hard-work bonus. “God damn!” said Herodotus, who stood behind him in line. “That there’s gettin’ to be your reg’lar rate.”

“Got me a baby in the house now,” Cincinnatus said, as if that explained everything—which, to him, it did.

Herodotus said, “Plenty fellers here got five, six, eight chillun in de house. Don’t see them gettin’ no bonus.”

Cincinnatus shrugged again. That wasn’t his lookout. An awful lot of people in this world wanted just to get by, no more. He’d always had his eye on doing better than that. Even now, in the middle of the war, he had his eye on the main chance. He didn’t know what would come of it, but he did know he couldn’t win if he didn’t bet.

Herodotus made a point of not walking home with him, as if to say he disapproved of such effort. That meant Cincinnatus was by himself when he noticed a wonderful smell in the warm, wet, late summer air. A moment later, a delivery wagon with the words
KENTUCKY SMOKE HOUSE
painted in big red letters rounded the corner. He waved to the driver, Apicius’ son Felix.

Felix slowed down and waved back. “My pa, he say for you to come in some time before too long,” he called. “He got somethin’ he want to talk over with you.”

“Do it right now,” Cincinnatus said. Felix nodded, flicked the reins, and got the wagon moving again.

When Cincinnatus got to the Kentucky Smoke House, the aroma there reminded him how hungry he was after a day hauling heavy crates. Apicius’ other son, Lucullus, was basting the meat that turned on a spit over the firepit. Seeing Cincinnatus, he waved him into a little back room.

In there, Apicius was stirring spices into a bubbling pot, making up more of the wonderful sauce that went onto his barbecued beef and pork. “Ha!” he said when Cincinnatus came in. “Saw Felix, did you?”

“Sure did,” Cincinnatus answered. “He said you wanted to see me ’bout somethin’. Somethin’ to do with the underground, I reckon.” He spoke quietly, after having closed the door behind him.

Apicius gave the mixture in the iron pot another stir. “Might say that,” he replied after a moment. He gave Cincinnatus a thoughtful glance. “How’d you get mixed up with those underground folks, anyways?”

“Wish I hadn’t, pretty much,” Cincinnatus said, “but the white man I used to work for, he’s one of ’em, and he was always pretty decent to me. ’Sides, from what I’ve seen, I ain’t got much use for the USA, neither.” He met and held Apicius’ eyes. “How ’bout you?” Unless he got answers that satisfied him, he wasn’t going to say anything more.

Apicius’ massive shoulders went up and down in a shrug. “First time the Yankee soldiers come in here, they clean me out of everything I got, they say they shoot me if I squawk, an’ they call me more kind o’ names’n I ever hear before. They ain’t done nothin’ like that since, mind you, but it don’t make me want to cheer for the Stars an’ Stripes.”

“Yeah, that’s about right.” Cincinnatus sighed. “I be go to hell, though, if I see us black folks gettin’ any kind o’ square deal after the war, an’ it don’t matter if the USA or the CSA win.”

“Dat’s the exact truth,” Apicius said emphatically. “The exact truth, an’ nothin’ but the truth, so help me God.” He held up a meaty hand, as if taking oath in court—not that blacks could testify against whites in court, not in the CSA. After stirring the barbecue sauce again, he went on, “On de odder hand, there’s undergrounds and then there’s undergrounds.”

“Is that a fact?” Cincinnatus said. If Apicius was going to come to a point, he hoped the fat cook would do it soon.

And, in his own way, Apicius did. Offhandedly, he asked, “You ever hear tell about the
Manifesto
?”

He didn’t say what kind of manifesto. If Cincinnatus hadn’t heard of it, he probably would have slid the talk around to something innocuous, then sent him on his way none the wiser. But Cincinnatus did know what he was talking about. He stared, wide-eyed. “Be you one of the people who—” He didn’t go on. He’d heard
about
Reds a good many times, always in the whispers that were the only safe way to mention such people. He hadn’t really imagined he would meet such an exotic specimen.

“We git justice for ourselves,” Apicius said in a voice that had nothing in it of the jolly-fat-man persona he affected, only steely determination. “Come the revolution, nobody treat a workin’ man like dirt only on account of he be black.”

That was a heady vision. Cincinnatus, however, had already met the heady visions of the Confederacy and the United States, and seen how neither reality lived up to those visions. He had no reason save hope blinder than he could justify to believe the Red vision would be different. And besides—“Even if the revolution come in the CSA, right now we be under the USA, and it don’t look like they gonna give us up.”

“Revolution comin’ in the USA, too,” Apicius replied with calm certainty. “Now we kin help the Red brothers in the CSA—we git stuff they kin use, ship it south, an’—What so funny?”

Between giggles, Cincinnatus got out, “We take stuff the white men in the Confederate States ship north, an’ use it to drive the damnyankees crazy. Then we take stuff the damnyankees ship south, an’ use it to drive the white men in the CSA crazy. If that ain’t funny, what is?”

Apicius’ smile was thin (the only thin thing about him), but it was a smile. “You wif us, then?”

When Elizabeth found out, she’d want to kill him. He had a baby now. He was supposed to be careful. That consideration made him hesitate a good half a second before he answered, “Yes.”

Up in Pennsylvania, Jake Featherston had been acutely conscious that he’d come to a foreign country. Houses looked different; the winter weather had been harsher than he was used to; the local civilians, those who hadn’t fled before the advancing Army of Northern Virginia, had looked and sounded different from their counterparts in the CSA; and they hadn’t made any bones about despising the men in butternut who’d overrun their farms and towns.

Now the Army of Northern Virginia wasn’t advancing any more. It wasn’t in Pennsylvania any more, either. Hampstead, Maryland, where Jake’s battery in the First Richmond Howitzers was stationed, looked a lot more like a corresponding small town in Virginia than had anything he’d seen in Pennsylvania. The Old Hampstead Store, for instance, wouldn’t have been out of place in some rural county seat outside of Richmond: a two-story clapboard building, a hundred years old if it was a day, in the shape of an L, with a massive water pump shielded from the street by the longer side of the L.

Nero was working the pump. When he’d filled a bucket, Perseus lugged it over to the horse trough. The draft animals that had pulled the battery’s cannons and ammunition limbers drank greedily. “Don’t give ’em too much too fast,” Jake said warningly. “They’re liable to get the colic and peg out, and we can’t afford that, not now.”

“Yes, suh, Marse Jake, I knows,” Perseus answered. “But they got to drink some. They been workin’ hard.”

“I know,” Featherston said. “I don’t think we’ll do much more moving back, though.” He paused to wipe his sweaty forehead. “We better not, or we’ll be fighting this damn war back in Virginia.”

Jeb Stuart III came round the corner in time to hear that. “It will not happen, Sergeant,” he said crisply. “They will not get past us. They will not come any farther. All right: we couldn’t take Philadelphia. That’s too bad; it might have made the damnyankees roll over and show us their bellies like the cowardly curs they are. But Maryland we hold, Washington we hold, and we’re going to keep them.”

“Yes, sir,” Jake said—you didn’t get anywhere arguing with your captain. But he couldn’t help adding, “If the damnyankees are such terrible cowards, how come they’re moving forward and we’re going back?”

“We aren’t,” Stuart said. “Not one more step back—I have that straight from the War Department in Richmond.”

When Jeb Stuart III had something straight from the War Department in Richmond, he had it straight from his father, who’d worn the wreathed stars of a Confederate general for a good many years. That sort of information came straight from the horse’s mouth, then. Featherston said, “It’s good to hear, sir—if the Yankees cooperate.”

For a moment, Stuart seemed more a tired modern soldier than the cavalier he tried to be. His shoulders sagged a little. “The trouble with the Yankees, Sergeant, is that God was having an off day when he made them, because he turned out altogether too many. They die by thousands, but more thousands keep coming—as you may perhaps have noticed.”

“Who, me, sir?” All too well, Featherston remembered the U.S. barrage that had cost him his first gun crew, and remembered pouring shells into oncoming green-gray waves till they broke barely beyond rifle range of his piece. “There’s a lot of weight behind them,” he agreed.

“There certainly is—weight of metal and weight of men,” Stuart said. “And they use that advantage of size in place of true courage, battering us down by stunning us with their big guns and then drowning us in those assaults that leave hillsides and meadows paved with broken bodies from one end to the other. You ask me, Sergeant, that has very little to do with real courage, real
élan
, as our gallant French allies call it.
Élan
consists of throwing yourself at the foe regardless of his size, and in going forward for the simple reason that you refuse to admit to yourself you might be beaten. Look what it did for us in the opening days of the war.”

“Yes, sir,” Jake said. “Took us all the way to the Susquehanna—but not quite to the Delaware.”

“If we’d made it to the Delaware, we surely would have crossed it and broken into Philadelphia,” Stuart agreed, “and Baltimore would have withered on the vine. But without
élan
, could we have stopped the Yankee breakout from Baltimore before it trapped all our forces up in Pennsylvania?”