Breakthroughs (52 page)

“I only hope he’s alive
to
try and forget it, sir,” Pete Bradley said. “I couldn’t tell when we flew over his aeroplane.”

“Neither could I,” Moss and Stone said together.

“I will be goddamned,” Major Cherney repeated. He let out a long, slow sigh. “Maybe the Canucks will let us know. They do sometimes when one of our boys gets forced down on their side, same as we do for them.”

Two days later, an enemy aeroplane dropped a note behind the U.S. line in a washed-out jam tin made more noticeable by the small ’chute taken from a parachute flare. It duly made its way back to the Orangeville aerodrome, where Major Cherney called in Moss, Stone, and Bradley. “Hansie died of wounds,” he said heavily. “The Canadians buried him with full military honors, for whatever it’s worth.”

“Thank you, sir,” Jonathan Moss said. With one accord, he and his flightmates headed for the officers’ club after they left the squadron commander’s tent. After they had the first of what would be many drinks in front of them, Moss turned to the men on whom his life depended—and
vice versa
—and said, “Well, boys, I wonder what sort of bird’ll join our flock next.”

“Won’t be long till we find out,” Bradley said. Soberly—for the time being—Moss nodded.

Time hung heavy in the hospital. Lying there with a rubber drainage tube coming out of the shoulder that still stubbornly refused to heal, Reggie Bartlett had plenty of time to think and very little chance to do anything else.

One of the things he thought about—and disapproved of—was the weather. “You all sure this is really Yankee country?” he asked the wounded U.S. soldiers who filled most of the beds in the big ward. “Richmond doesn’t get any hotter and stickier than this.”

“St. Louis, sure as hell,” Pete reminded him. The one-legged soldier winked. “You ought to feel at home, ain’t that right?”

“Doesn’t mean I liked the weather,” Reggie said. “Anybody who likes summer in the Confederate States is crazy.” He turned to his countryman for support. “Isn’t that right, Rehoboam?”

The Negro was scratching toes on the foot he no longer had, as he often did. He said, “Don’t know nothin’ ’bout what it’s like in Richmond. Out in the fields down around Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where I’s from, it gets powerful hot in the summertime. This ain’t a patch on that, I don’t reckon.”

“From what I’ve heard about Mississippi, I expect hell would look chilly in the summertime next to it,” Reggie said thoughtfully. His shoulder twinged. He grunted and thought some more till the pain faded. Then he added, “Working in the fields down there doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun.”

Rehoboam looked at him from across the aisle. “You ain’t the stupidest white man I ever did see.”

Pete whistled. “You gonna let him talk to you like that, Reggie? I thought a smoke who talked to a white man like that down in the CSA could go and write his will—except you wouldn’t let him learn to write and he wouldn’t own enough to bother leaving it to anybody.”

“You’re a natural-born troublemaker,” Reggie told him. “If you still had that other leg, I’d tear it off you and beat Rehoboam to death with it. That’d settle both of you. There. Are you satisfied now?”

“Minute I woke up and found out I was shy a pin, I was satisfied and then some, I’ll tell you that right now,” the amputee answered. “Right then, I knew I’d had all the fighting I was ever going to do.”

Reggie only grunted in reply to that. He still wasn’t satisfied, not in that sense. If he ever got healed up, he’d try to escape again. He’d done it once; he didn’t think doing it again would be so hard. But, while his leg wound bothered him less each day, pus still dripped from that shoulder. It left him sore and weak and feverish. There were lots of things he told himself he should be doing, but he lacked the energy to do any of them. Lying here was what he was up to, and lying here was what he did.

In came the nurse with a tray of suppers. Everyone got an identical slab of chicken breast—or possibly it was baked cardboard—an identical lump of mashed potatoes with gravy that looked and tasted like rust and machine oil, and something that might have been bread pudding or might have been sponge in molasses.

After working his way through the dismal meal, Reggie said, “You Yankees are winning the damn war—or you say you are—and this is what they give you? God have mercy on you if you were losing, that’s all I can tell you.”

“If cooking was something they shot out of the barrel of a gun, we’d be good at it,” Pete said. “Since it ain’t, we haven’t much bothered with it since the end of the Second Mexican War. Had more important things to worry about instead.”

Rehoboam said, “The kind o’ cooking you Yankees do here, y’all ought to shoot it out the barrel of a gun.”

“Amen,” Reggie said. “But if you shot it at our side, you’d just make the boys fight harder, for fear of having to eat like that all the time.”

Pete laughed. So did the rest of the wounded U.S. soldiers. They were no fonder of the grub the military hospital doled out than were their Confederate counterparts. And so did Rehoboam. But his laugh had an edge to it, and his dark face twisted in a way that for once had nothing to do with the pain and phantom itches from his missing foot.

“What’s chewing on you?” Reggie called across the aisle.

“What do you reckon?” Rehoboam returned. “When you was talkin’ ’bout what the boys’d do, you didn’t mean me. I ain’t
the boys
to you, an’ I ain’t never gwine be
the boys
, neither. I’s just a nigger, an’ I’d be a nigger without a gun if all the whites in the CSA wasn’t worse afeared o’ the damnyankees kickin’ ’em in the ass than they was of putting a Tredegar in my hands and callin’ me a sojer.”

He hadn’t spoken in a loud voice, but he hadn’t particularly kept it down, either. Everybody in the ward must have heard him. Silence slammed down. Everybody looked toward Reggie Bartlett, to see what he would say.

He hadn’t the faintest idea what the devil
to
say. He’d seen for himself that Confederate blacks harbored a deep and abiding loathing for the whites who ruled them. Outside of the prisoner-of-war camp in West Virginia, though, none of them had ever come out and said so to his face.

Rehoboam pressed the point, too: “What you think, Reggie? Is that the truth, or ain’t it?”

Bartlett had never had a Negro simply call him by his name before, either. He said, “Yeah, that’s the truth. I was there in Capitol Square in Richmond when President Wilson declared war on the USA, and I cheered and threw away my straw boater, same as every other damn fool in the place. If we could have licked these fellows here”—he waved with his good arm at the men in the green-gray hospital gowns—“without giving black men guns, of course we’d’ve done it.”

“Kept things like they always was, you mean,” Rehoboam said.

“Of course,” Reggie repeated. Only after the words were out of his mouth did he realize it wasn’t necessarily
of course
. White Confederate public opinion was so wedded to the
status quo
that realizing other choices were possible came hard.

Then Pete stuck his oar in the water, saying, “Blacks got guns of their own any which way.”

“Don’t know much about that, especially not firsthand,” Bartlett said. “I got captured over on the Roanoke front before the risings started, and they’d been put down by the time I got loose.”

“Bunch of Reds.” Pete gleefully stoked the fire.

He got Rehoboam hot, too. “You take a man and you work him like they works niggers in the CSA,” the Negro growled, “and if he
don’t
turn into no Red, he ain’t much in the way of a man. Wasn’t for the risings, I don’t reckon Congress never would’ve done nothin’ about the Army.”

“Wouldn’t be surprised if you’re right,” Reggie said. “But they did do something, you know. I was thinking about that a while ago. When you go back to Mississippi, you’ll be a citizen, with all the same rights I’ve got.”

“Mebbe,” Rehoboam said through clenched teeth. “Mebbe not, too.”

“It’s what the law says,” Bartlett pointed out.

“Ain’t got no black police. Ain’t got no black lawyers. Ain’t got no black judges. Ain’t got no black politicians.” Rehoboam rolled his eyes at Reggie’s naïveté. “How much good you reckon the law gwine do fo’ the likes o’me?”

To Reggie, a law was a law, to be obeyed automatically for no better reason than that it was there. Seeing another side of things made him feel jittery, as if an earthquake had just shaken his bed. Still, he answered, “If there’s enough of the likes of you, you’ll do all right.”

“You reckon the stork brings the babies, too?” Rehoboam asked acidly. “Or do you figure they finds ’em under the cabbage leaves when they wants ’em?”

The ward erupted in laughter, laughter aimed at Reggie. His ears got hot. “No,” he said with venom of his own. “The Red party chairman or general secretary assigns ’em. That’s how it worked in the Socialist Republics, isn’t it?”

“You liable to be too smart for your own good,” Rehoboam said after a pause.

“I doubt it, not if I volunteered for the Army,” Bartlett replied. “And if you didn’t want to be a citizen, and if you didn’t think being a citizen was worth anything, what made you put on butternut?”

That made the Negro pause again. “Mebbe I was hopin’ more’n I was expectin’, you know what I’m sayin’?”

As a white man, as a white man living in a country that had beaten its neighbor two wars in a row, Bartlett had seldom had to worry about hope. His expectations, and those of his white countrymen, were generally fulfilled. He said, “I wonder what the Confederate States will look like after the war’s over.”

“Smaller,” Pete put in.

Both men from the CSA ignored him. Rehoboam said, “We don’t get what’s comin’ to us, we jus’ rise up again.”

“You’ll lose again,” Reggie said. “Aren’t enough of you, and you still won’t have enough guns. And we won’t be fighting the damnyankees any more.”

“Mebbe they give us a hand,” Rehoboam said. “Mebbe they give us guns.”

“Not likely.” Now Reggie’s voice was blunt. “They don’t much fancy black folks themselves, you know. If we deal with you, that’d suit them fine.”

And Rehoboam, who had answered back as boldly as if he were a man who had known himself to be free and equal to all other men since birth, now fell silent. His eyes flicked from one of the wounded U.S. soldiers with whom he shared the ward to the next. Whatever he saw there did not reassure him. He buried his face in his hands.

Pete said, “I guess you told him.”

“I guess I did,” said Reggie, who had not expected the Negro to have so strong a reaction over what was to him simply a fact of nature. He called to Rehoboam, “Come on, stick your chin up. It’s not that bad.”

“Not for you.” Rehoboam’s voice was muffled by the palms of his hands. “You’re white, you goddamn son of a bitch. You got the world by the balls, just on account of the noonday sun kill you dead.”

“If I had the world by the balls, none of these damnyankee bastards would have shot me,” Bartlett pointed out.

Rehoboam grunted. Finally, he said, “You had the world by the balls when you wasn’t in the Army, anyways. It’s the rich white bastards who don’t never have to fight got the world by the balls all the time.”

“See? I knew you were a Red,” Reggie said.

“Maybe he’s just a good Socialist,” Pete said.

“What the hell’s the difference?” Reggie demanded.

Rehoboam and Pete both got offended. They both started to explain the difference. Then they started to argue about the difference, as if one of them were a Methodist preacher and the other a hardshell Baptist. Reggie lay back and enjoyed the show. It was the most entertainment he’d had since he got wounded.

Bertha came back into Flora Hamburger’s private office. “Congresswoman, Mr. Wiggins is here to see you. Your two o’clock appointment.”

“Thank you,” Flora told the secretary. “Send him in.”

She put away the Transportation Committee report she’d been reading and wondered again whether she should have made the appointment with Mr. Edward C.L.—he’d insisted on both middle initials—Wiggins. Over the telephone, he hadn’t described his reason for wanting to see her as anything more specific than “a matter of possible common interest.” Well, if that was a polite way of leading up to offering her a bribe, she’d show him out the door one minute and put the U.S. marshals on his trail the next.

In he came. He proved to be a chunky little man in his late forties, sweating in a wool tweed suit and vest and fanning himself with a straw hat. “Very pleased to make your acquaintance in person, ma’am,” he said, giving Flora a nod just short of a bow. His manner was courtly, almost stagily so.

“Pleased to meet you, too,” Flora answered, wondering if she was lying. She did not believe in beating around the bush: “Now that we
are
meeting in person, I hope you will tell me what you have in mind.”

“I certainly aim to,” Edward C.L. Wiggins replied. “I want you to know, I truly do admire the way you’ve spoken out against the war, both before you got elected to Congress and since. I think it does you great credit.”

Flora had not expected that tack. “Thank you,” she said. “But I don’t quite see what that has to do with—”

“I’ll tell you, then,” Wiggins broke in. “You are not the only one who thinks this war was a mistake from the beginning and has gone on far too long already. I do hope your brother is doing well.”

“As well as you can with one leg,” Flora said tightly. Then she stared at her visitor. “How do you know about David and what happened to him? Are you connected with the War Department, and coming around here to gloat because I wouldn’t play along with you?”

“No, ma’am.” Edward C.L. Wiggins raised his right hand, as if taking an oath. “I have nothing to do with the U.S. government, nothing whatsoever. The people I have to do with don’t want this war to go on any more. They want to end it as soon as may be. That’s why I’m here: because you’ve been bold enough and brave enough and wise enough to want the killing stopped, too.”

“Thank you,” Flora repeated. “Who
are
the people you have to do with?” He was not a Socialist. She was sure of that. He behaved like a prominent man in his own circle, whatever that was, and it was not hers. Were the remnant Republicans approaching her with some kind of deal? Was he a renegade Democrat? A capitalist who’d grown a conscience?