Blood and Iron (66 page)

“Oh, you don’t?” Galtier said, and Nicole shook her head, defying him to make something of it. She wouldn’t have done that when she was living at home, either. Leonard O’Doull, Lucien thought, kept too loose a rein on her now. But she
had
shown she could drive. If she could, were Marie and Denise too ignorant? They would never let him forget it if he thought so. With a shrug that made little Lucien giggle, Galtier added, “It could be that you have reason,” and then, “It could even be that I will tell them you have reason.”

“Oh, Papa,” Nicole said fondly, and Galtier was reduced to mumbling.
Tabernac!
he thought.
She is a wife now, and so she sees right through me.

Sylvia Enos didn’t go down to T Wharf nearly so often these days as she had in the past. For one thing, her connections with the fishermen and the folk who worked in the fish markets had slipped with the passage of time. For another, going down to the wharf where George had worked tore open old wounds.

But all her old wounds had been torn open when she found out that that Confederate submersible skipper had fired the torpedo that sank the USS
Ericsson
. She knew her husband’s killer’s name: Roger Kimball. Even though he’d attacked the U.S. destroyer after the war was over, he still walked free down in the CSA.

President Sinclair had done no more than issue a tepid protest. That ate at Sylvia, too. Lots of people still sang the Socialists’ praises. Sylvia supposed they had done good things for the workers of the USA. But they hadn’t done what she most wanted. Had she had a vote, Upton Sinclair would have lost it.

With the old wounds already bleeding again, going to T Wharf couldn’t make them hurt any worse. After Sylvia got off work from her Saturday half day, she gathered up George, Jr., and Mary Jane and took them down by the sea. They enjoyed it; they kept exclaiming over the raucous gulls and over all the fishing boats tied up to the wharf.

“Sure does stink, Ma,” Mary Jane said, more admiringly than not.

“It’s supposed to smell this way,” Sylvia answered. Tar and salt air, horse manure and old fish—without them, T Wharf would have been a different, a lesser, place.

Seeing the boats made Sylvia want to exclaim, too, but for a different reason from that of her children. The fishing fleet had changed while she wasn’t looking, so to speak. Before the war, most of the boats had been steamers, with some still relying on sail. Now diesel- and gasoline-powered boats were driving steam from the scene. They changed one element of the wharf’s familiar smell, and not to the better in her mind. She far preferred coal smoke to the stink of diesel exhaust.

She walked along the wharf, looking into the boats for men she knew, men from whom she might buy some choice fish before they ever got to market. That sort of business was highly unofficial, but went on all the time. Fishermen needed extra cash in their pockets enough to make them anything but shy about taking it from the pockets of the boat owners.

Sylvia was discovering to her dismay that the fishermen were almost as unfamiliar as the boats they took to sea when, from behind her, someone called, “Mrs. Enos!”

She turned. So did her children. George, Jr., asked, “Who’s the spook, Ma?”

Fortunately, he kept his voice down. “You hush your mouth,” she told him. “Charlie White isn’t a spook; he’s a very nice man. He used to be the cook on the
Ripple
when your father sailed in her.” She waved to White, who was coming up the wharf toward her. “Hello, Charlie. It’s been a long time. You stayed in the Navy, I see.”

He brushed a hand across the front of his dark blue uniform tunic. “I surely did, Mrs. Enos. Work’s not near as hard, and that’s a fact. In the Navy, all I’ve got to do is cook.” His accent was two parts Boston, one part something that put Sylvia in mind of the CSA. He looked at George, Jr., and Mary Jane. “Good God, but they’ve grown! Fine-looking children, Mrs. Enos.”

“Thank you,” Sylvia said, her voice shaky. Seeing an old friend of her husband’s—and Charlie had been a friend, even if he was colored—here at this place where George had worked left her close to tears.

White solemnly nodded, perhaps understanding some of what was going through her mind. He said, “I was right sorry when I found out George didn’t come home from the war, ma’am.”

“Thank you,” Sylvia said again, even more softly than before. But then fury filled her, and she asked, “Did you find out George was aboard the
Ericsson
?”

She didn’t have to explain that to the Negro cook. No doubt she wouldn’t have had to explain it to any Navy man. “No, ma’am,” he said. “I didn’t know that. I think it’s a crying shame we ain’t going after the dirty rotten coward who sank that ship a…lot harder than we are.”

“So do I,” Sylvia said grimly.

“The president is lily-livered,” Mary Jane declared. She was just echoing her mother, but Sylvia didn’t want her views aired in public. No, on second thought, maybe she did.

“Weren’t a lot of people in the Navy who voted for Sinclair,” Charlie White said. “Must have been an awful lot of people on dry land who did, though.”

“Yes,” Sylvia said. Then she remembered her manners. “How’s your family, Charlie? Everyone well?”

“Sure are, and praise the Lord for that,” the colored man answered. “Got me a new little boy since I saw you last, I think. Eddie’s going to turn two in a couple weeks.”

“Good for you,” Sylvia said. She and George might have had more children by now, if only…She pulled back from that. “What are you doing on T Wharf now?”

“Same thing you are, I bet,” White said: “buying fish. I’m chief cook on the
Fort Benton
—big armored cruiser. Sailors eat like pigs, you know that?”

“They’re men,” Sylvia said, and Charlie White laughed. Sylvia wasn’t sure she’d said anything funny. Men had appetites; women satisfied them. That was the way the world had always worked. Nobody’d ever bothered asking women what they thought of it. Men had power, too.

“Well, well, what have we got here?” someone said. “Looks like old home week, or I’m a Chinaman.”

Sylvia knew that voice. “Hello, Fred,” she said, turning. “It’s been a while.” Fred Butcher had been first mate aboard the
Ripple
. When Sylvia got a good look at him, she had to fight to keep her face straight. He was up in his fifties now, and his hair and Kaiser Bill mustache had gone snowy white. He’d put on weight, too, which shocked her even more: he’d always been skinny and quick-moving, like a lizard. Only his eyes, clever and knowing, were as she remembered. Fixing on them let her say, “Good to see you,” and sound as if she meant it.

“Anything I can do for you folks?” Butcher asked, shaking hands with Charlie White. He’d always known the angles; a first mate who didn’t know them couldn’t do his job. “You need fish, talk to me. I’m not going to sea any more; I’m a factor with L.B. Godspeed and Company. If I can’t get it for you better and cheaper than anybody else on T Wharf, I’ll eat my straw boater.”

“That would be funny,” Mary Jane said, and Butcher took off the hat and made as if to do it. She laughed. So did George, Jr.

“Godspeed’s a good outfit,” Charlie White said seriously. “They’ve been in business since not long after the War of Secession, haven’t they?”

“That’s right—used to be called Marston and Company,” Butcher said. “So what can I do for you, Charlie? Cod? Halibut?”

“Five hundred pounds of each, for delivery to the
Fort Benton
at the Navy Yard,” White said. They haggled hard over the price. White gave Butcher no special deference either because of his race or from old association; business was business.

Sylvia’s children were fidgeting by the time Fred Butcher said, “All right, Charlie; that’s a deal. Jesus, the way you jewed me down, anybody’d reckon you were spending your own money, not Uncle Sam’s.”

“Things are tight these days,” White answered. “My own boss’ll be all over me if I don’t watch every dime.”

“Well, you’ve done that, by God,” Butcher said. “I’m liable to catch the dickens for giving you such a good deal.” Charlie White grinned proudly. Sylvia didn’t believe Butcher for a minute; he’d never hurt himself or his firm. Nodding to her, Butcher asked, “How about you, Mrs. E? You want a thousand pounds of fish, too? I’ll give you the same deal I gave Charlie.” He winked at her.

“Give me the same price per pound for five pounds of good cod as you gave Charlie for five hundred, then,” Sylvia said at once.

Instead of winking, Fred Butcher looked pained. “Come on, Mrs. E, have a heart. He gets a discount for quantity.” Then he seemed to listen to what he’d said a moment before. “All right, already. We won’t go broke over five pounds of cod. Come on down to Number Sixteen and I’ll take care of you. You want to come, too, Charlie, see what you’re getting?”

“You bet I do,” the Negro said. “And if what you deliver ain’t what I see now, Godspeed’ll have some talking to do with the U.S. Navy. Like I say, it’s a good company, but things like that can happen. I want to make sure ahead of time they don’t.”

“I’ll make sure of it,” Butcher promised. Charlie nodded, as if to say he’d check anyway. His ex-shipmate, unfazed, led him and Sylvia and her children along the wharf to Number 16. Sylvia got first choice, and picked a couple of fine young cod. When she started to open her handbag, Butcher waved for her not to bother. “Now that I think about it, these are on the house.”

Sylvia couldn’t have been more astonished if he’d burst into song. “You don’t have to do that, Fred,” she said. “You were doing me a favor when you gave me a good deal. This is too much.”

“No, no, no.” The quick, decisive way Butcher shook his head reminded Sylvia of the dapper man he’d been only a few years before. “I just recalled—George was on the
Ericsson
, wasn’t he?” He waited for Sylvia to nod, then went on, “Take ’em, then, and don’t say another word about it. Times can’t be easy for you.”

“They aren’t,” Sylvia admitted. “God bless you, Fred.” She dipped her head to Charlie White. “Remember me to your wife, please.” As he promised to do that, she steered her children out of the Godspeed & Co. shop.

“That was nice of that man, Ma,” George, Jr., said.

“He used to sail with your father,” Sylvia answered. “Now we’ll have some good suppers with this fish.” And her budget, which was always tight, would have a little more stretch to it during the coming week. That was as well, because…“There’s one more thing I want to get while we’re out. Come on, you two. We’re going to Abie’s.”

“Hurray!” Sylvia couldn’t tell whether George, Jr., or Mary Jane cheered louder. They both loved going to the pawnshop. Anything in the world—anything from anywhere in the world—was liable to be there. Sylvia remembered seeing a set of false teeth smiling at her from the front window one day. Next to that, who could get excited about something as mundane as a stuffed owl?

Abie Finkelstein, the proprietor of the pawnshop, looked rather like a frog. “Hello, Mrs. Enos,” he said in a thick, not quite German accent. “Vot can I do for you today? If your little children a piece candy from the bowl there on the counter take, I do not think I even notice.” At Sylvia’s nod, George, Jr., and Mary Jane helped themselves. Finkelstein looked a question at Sylvia.

“I don’t want any candy, thanks.” But that wasn’t all of what he’d asked, not even close. She pointed to the items hanging on brackets on the wall behind him. “Let me have that one, please.”

“All right.” He got it down. “Everybody needs these days to be safe.”

“Yes,” Sylvia said. “Everybody does.”

Cincinnatus Driver pulled into the Des Moines railroad yard well before six in the morning, well before sunup. Most of the year, he’d found, business there was better and steadier than along the riverfront. He missed going over by the river; he’d been doing it for a long time, both down in Covington and since moving to his new home here. But he didn’t miss an empty wallet, not even a little he didn’t.

Early as he was, several other trucks were already waiting for the Chicago and North Western Railroad Line train to pull into the yard. Three or four others came in while he drank lukewarm coffee from a flask Elizabeth had given him. He sat in the cab of the Duryea and yawned. It wasn’t so much that he hadn’t got enough sleep the night before: more that he was always busy and always tired.

The train pulled into the yard at 6:35, right on time. Then the drivers scrambled to make deals with the conductor, who did the same job as a steamboat clerk and had the same cold blood in his veins.

For a while, Cincinnatus had had trouble getting any work at all from these hard-eyed gentlemen. That was partly because he’d been new to Des Moines and even more because he had a dark skin. He knew as much. He’d expected nothing more.

But he was still here. He’d got his foot in the door, he’d proved he was reliable…and now he was dickering with a conductor over a load of rolled oats for one of the last few livery stables in town. “Have a heart, Jerry,” he said, putting a hand over his own heart. “You wouldn’t pay that low if I was white.”

Jerry rolled his eyes. “You’re a Hebe in blackface, Cincinnatus, that’s what you are. You want me to see if I can get somebody else to haul the stuff for that price?”

“Go ahead,” Cincinnatus said. “Somebody else wants to lose money on gasoline and wear and tear on his truck, that’s his affair. You don’t pay me another dollar, it ain’t worth my time and trouble.”

“You
are
a Hebe,” the conductor said. “All right, dammit, another four bits.”

“Six bits,” Cincinnatus said. “Six bits and I break even, anyways.”

“What a damn liar you are. Tell me you don’t sandbag when you play poker.” Jerry puffed out his cheeks, then exhaled. “Awright, six bits. The hell with it. Deal?”

“Deal,” Cincinnatus said at once, and went to get his hand truck to move the barrels of oats.

When he got to the livery stable, the proprietor, a big, ruddy, white-haired man named Hiram Schacht, said, “Stow the barrels in that corner there.” He pointed.

“Will do, Mistuh Schacht,” Cincinnatus answered. From everything he’d seen, Schacht didn’t treat him any worse because he was colored. The stable owner approved of anyone who helped him care for his beloved horses. The trouble was, he had fewer horses to care for every month. People kept buying automobiles.

As Cincinnatus rolled barrel after barrel past the old man, Schacht sighed and said, “Getting harder and harder to stay in business. Back before the war, I’d have gone through an order this size in a week. Now it’ll last me two, maybe three.” He scratched at his bushy mustache. “Pretty soon, I won’t need to order any oats at all. That’ll cut down on my overhead, now won’t it?” His laugh held little mirth.

“Well, suh, you don’t see me bringin’ you these oats in a wagon with a team pullin’ it, now do you?” Cincinnatus said. “Automobiles and trucks, they’re the coming thing.”

“Oh, I know, I know,” Schacht said, unoffended; they’d had this conversation before. “But I’m heading toward my threescore and ten, as the Good Book says. Up till a couple years ago, I was sure the stable would last out my lifetime, and I was damn glad of it, too: I’m just flat-out crazy about horses. Motorcars have no soul to ’em, and they smell bad, too. Anyway, though, I ain’t so sure now. I’m lasting longer than I reckoned I would, and more people are getting rid of their horses faster than I reckoned they would.”

“Can’t blame me for that,” Cincinnatus said as he trundled the dolly back out to the Duryea for another barrel of oats. “Never had me a horse—never could afford one—before I got the chance to buy my truck. By then, I figured a truck’d do me more good.”

“Do your wallet more good, anyway,” Schacht said, and Cincinnatus nodded; that was what he’d meant, all right. The stable owner went on, “A horse’d do your spirit more good, though. You can make friends with a horse—oh, not with all horses; some of ’em are stupid as fenceposts and a hell of a lot meaner, and God knows I know it—but with some horses, anyways. What can you feel about a truck? When it breaks down, all you want to do is kill it, but you can’t even do that, on account of the son of a bitch is already dead.”

Having had the urge to murder the Duryea a good many times since buying it, Cincinnatus could only nod. He did say, “Man’s got to eat.”

“Oh, no doubt about it,” Schacht said. “I don’t begrudge folks their autos and their trucks—well, not much I don’t, anyways. But back when you were a pup, everybody had horses—near enough everybody, I guess I ought to say—and motorcars were toys for rich men. By the time you get as old as I am, it’ll be the other way round, I bet: everybody’ll have himself a motorcar, but only rich folks’ll be able to keep horses.”

“Could be so,” Cincinnatus agreed. In fact, he found it very likely, and likely to happen sooner than Schacht had predicted, too. He wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that the livery-stable man thought the same thing.

“You take care of yourself, Cincinnatus,” Schacht said after he’d brought in the last barrel of oats, “and take care of that rattletrap contraption you drive.”

“Thank you kindly, Mistuh Schacht.” Cincinnatus touched the brim of his cloth cap in salute. “Hope it’s me bringin’ your oats next time you need some.”

“I wouldn’t mind.” Schacht scratched at that walrus mustache again; he didn’t bother waxing it up into a stylish Kaiser Bill. As Cincinnatus fired up the Duryea, the stable owner added, “By the time you get as old as I am, folks will be trading in their autos for flying machines—but rich folks’ll still keep horses.” He shouted to make himself heard over the thunderous roar of the engine.

“Flying machines,” Cincinnatus said to himself. All he knew about them was that he didn’t want to go up in one; the miserable things were too likely to fall out of the sky, with gruesomely fatal results the newspapers liked to play up. Maybe they’d solve all the problems by the time Achilles was an old man. Maybe they wouldn’t, too. Either way, it would be for his son to worry about.

He picked up another hauling job when he went back to the railroad yard, and then another one. That one took him through his own neighborhood—right past the school where Achilles went. The kindergarten classes were just letting out as he drove by: sure enough, there was Achilles along with his schoolmates, who included blacks, whites, and the daughter of the Chinese laundryman upstairs. In Kentucky, Cincinnatus would never have dreamt that his son would go to a school whites also used. Iowans seemed to take it for granted.

Cincinnatus squeezed the bulb of the Duryea’s raucous horn. All the little kids looked his way. “That’s my pa!” Achilles squealed, loud enough for Cincinnatus to hear him over the Duryea’s motor.

“Wow! What a swell truck!” a white boy exclaimed, also loudly. Cincinnatus laughed, waved, and drove on. Only to a six-year-old would this truck have seemed swell. Had the kid said
funny-looking
or
beat-up
, he would have been closer to the mark. But Cincinnatus had succeeded in impressing one of his son’s pals, so swinging by the school had been all to the good.

“Pals.” Cincinnatus spoke the word he’d just thought. Could a Negro boy in Des Moines have real white friends? He’d probably have to be able to, if he expected to have more than a handful of friends: there wouldn’t be enough other colored boys to go around. But, for a Negro from Covington, it was a strange and troubling notion. Cincinnatus would have been willing to bet it was a strange and troubling notion for a lot of whites from Des Moines, too.

When he got home that evening, Achilles was still bubbling over with pride. “Louie Henderson and Joey Nichols both said that was the swellest truck they ever saw,” he reported.

“That’s good,” Cincinnatus said. He paused and listened again in his mind to what his son had just told him. When he’d been Achilles’ age, back before the turn of the century, he would surely have said
they ever seen
. He still said things like that every now and then, or maybe more often than every now and then. Achilles had said them, too, till he started going to school: he’d listened to his mother and father and, while they were still down in Covington, to his grandmother as well. Now he listened to his teacher and to the boys and girls in class with him.

“Yeah, he’s learnin’ to talk like a Yankee, all right,” Elizabeth said when Cincinnatus remarked on it over supper. “I seen that myself.” She didn’t notice her own slip. To her, it wasn’t a slip: it was just the way she talked. It had been the same for Cincinnatus, too, but it wasn’t any more. The more like a white he talked, the less likely people here—even other Negroes here, he’d seen—were to reckon him a dumb nigger. Not being thought of that way usually worked to his advantage.

After supper, Achilles read aloud from his primer and Cincinnatus read to him from an abridgement of
Robinson Crusoe
he’d picked up for a dime in a secondhand store. The sentences in the primer and the story of the castaway both used white folks’ grammar—they used it rather better than a lot of the white folks with whom Cincinnatus did business. The more of those kinds of sentences Achilles read and had read to him, the more natural they would seem, and the more he would likely end up sounding like a white man himself. Up here, that couldn’t help but be useful.

After Achilles had gone to bed, Cincinnatus sat on the sofa and read ahead in
Robinson Crusoe
; he was enjoying the tale himself. Elizabeth mended clothes on a chair under the other electric lamp. She’d sew a few stitches along a seam, yawn, and then sew a few more stitches.

Cincinnatus set down his book. “You know,” he said, “we’ve done a lot better for ourselves up here than I figured we would ’fore we left Covington. Things keep going good a little while longer, maybe we can think about buyin’ us a house here.” He spoke hesitantly; he wasn’t used to getting even a little ahead of the game.

Elizabeth yawned again. “You reckon Achilles asleep yet?” she asked.

Despite the yawn, Cincinnatus thought he knew why she asked that question. “Hope so,” he answered, a large, male grin on his face. “Sure do hope so.”

His wife would usually make a face of her own in response to that grin. Tonight, she ignored it. “Didn’t want to say nothin’ where he can hear it,” she told Cincinnatus, “not yet—too soon. But I reckon I’m in the family way again.”

“For true?” he said, and Elizabeth nodded. He thought about that, then started to laugh.

His wife’s eyes flashed. “What’s funny? Don’t you want another baby?”

“Don’t have much choice, do I?” Cincinnatus said, but that wasn’t close to the right answer. He tried to improve it: “Just when you think you get up on things, life goes and hands you another surprise. This one, though, it sure enough is a nice surprise.” He waited anxiously, then thought of something better to do: he walked over and kissed Elizabeth. Even without words, that did turn out to be the right answer.

Jefferson Pinkard put on his white shirt and butternut trousers. Both were freshly laundered and pressed. Ever since throwing Emily out of his cottage, he’d grown careless about the shirts and overalls and dungarees he wore to work. When he donned the white and butternut, though, he wasn’t just himself: he was part of the Freedom Party. If he didn’t look sharp, he let the Party down.

He went into the bathroom, examined himself in the streaky mirror there, and frowned. He rubbed some Pinaud’s brilliantine into his hair, washed the greasy stuff off his hands, and combed out a nice, straight part. “That’s more like it,” he said. He grabbed his club off the sofa in the front room and headed out the door.

Bedford Cunningham sat on his front porch, enjoying the warm June Sunday afternoon. By the glass at his side and by the way he sprawled, he’d been enjoying it for quite a while. Pinkard raised the club as he walked by. His neighbor, his former friend, cringed. That was what he’d wanted to accomplish. He kept walking.

He wasn’t the only man in Party regalia who’d come to the trolley stop by the Sloss Works company housing. Three or four of his comrades greeted him as he came up: “Freedom!”

“Freedom!” he answered, and grinned a fierce grin. “Reckon we’re going to teach Wade Hampton V a thing or two about sticking his nose in where it’s not welcome, ain’t we, boys?”

“That’s right. That’s just right,” the other Freedom Party men said, almost in chorus. Jeff was glad to have the reassurance, though he didn’t really need it. Hampton might have won the election, but he had a lot of damn nerve to go barnstorming around the country making speeches and trying to pump up the Whigs. Who did he think he was, Jake Featherston or somebody?

Nobody sat near the men in white and butternut as the trolley rattled through the streets of Birmingham all the way out to the Alabama State Fairgrounds at the west edge of town, where Hampton would speak. When Negroes got on or off, they edged past the Freedom Party men and made their way to or from the back of the trolley car as if afraid they would be set upon at any moment. They had reason to fear; such things had happened before.