Breakthroughs (7 page)

A soldier playing traffic cop held up a hand. Cincinnatus trod on the brake and shifted the White into neutral. An officer in a chauffer-driven motorcar rolled past. The soldier waved the truck convoy on again.

Cincinnatus drove on up to the riverside, pulled into the loading area, and stopped the truck. The engine ticked as hot metal began to cool. He opened the door and climbed down onto the paving stones. The air was thick with the exhaust of a lot of trucks in a small space. He coughed a couple of times at the harsh stink.

More trucks rolled south on the bridge over the Ohio between Covington and Cincinnati. The Confederates had dropped it into the river as soon as the war began, but it was long since not only rebuilt but widened. A stream of barges crossed the river, too, carrying the sinews of war from U.S. factories toward the fighting front. Negro laborers unloaded the barges and hauled their contents over to the truck-transport unit of which Cincinnatus was a part.

He’d been one of those laborers till the head of the transport unit discovered he could drive. Since then, he’d made more money for less physical labor, but his hours were longer and more erratic than they had been. Now that the front reached down into Tennessee, it was most of a day’s drive from Covington. He didn’t like sleeping in a tent away from Elizabeth and their baby boy, Achilles, but nobody cared what he liked.

“Come on!” Lieutenant Straubing shouted. “Get yourselves checked off. You don’t get checked off, you don’t get paid.”

That blunt warning from their boss got the drivers moving into the shed to make sure the payroll sergeant put a tick by their names on his sheet. About half the drivers were white, the other half colored. If a man could do the job, Straubing didn’t give a damn what color he was. For a while, Cincinnatus had thought that meant Straubing had a better opinion of blacks than did most whites from either the USA or the CSA. He doubted that now. More likely, Straubing just grabbed the tools he needed without worrying about the paint job they had.

Even that attitude was an improvement on what most whites in the USA and the CSA thought about blacks.

The line in front of the payroll sergeant formed solely on the basis of who got there first. Cincinnatus fell in behind a white driver named Herk and in front of another white who, because he wore his hair cropped close to his skull, got called Burrhead a lot. They chatted amiably enough as the queue moved forward; black or white, they had work in common.

“God only knows when poor Smitty gonna get in,” Cincinnatus said. “Saw him pull off with
another
puncture. That man go through more patches’n a ragpicker.”

“He ain’t lucky, and that’s a fact,” Herk said.

“He’d be a hell of a lot luckier if the damn Rebs didn’t keep throwin’ nails in the road,” Burrhead added. “’Course, we’d all be a hell of a lot luckier if the damn Rebs didn’t keep throwin’ nails in the road.”

“I’ll tell you who’s lucky.” Herk pointed at Cincinnatus. “Here’s the lucky one.” Cincinnatus had rarely heard a white man call him that. But Herk went on, “You and me, Burrhead, we’ll sleep in the barracks tonight. He’s going home to his wife.”

“That ain’t bad,” Burrhead agreed.

Cincinnatus collected five dollars—two days’ pay. Herk got the same. Burrhead, who hadn’t been in the unit so long, got four and a half. Some of the white drivers had grumbled because experienced blacks got more than they did. Some had tried to do more than grumble. They were spending time at hard labor; Lieutenant Straubing tolerated nothing that got in the way of his unit’s doing its job.

A trolley line ran from the wharves to the edge of Covington’s Negro district, over by the Licking River on the east side of town. Cincinnatus set a nickel in the fare box without hesitation. When he’d been working on the wharves, making a dollar or a dollar and a half a day, he’d almost always walked to and from his house. By his standards of comparison, being able to sit down in the colored section at the back of the trolley was affluence.

The trolley ran past the charred ruins of a general store. Cincinnatus wondered if Conroy had been able to rebuild somewhere else. The white storekeeper was one of the stubborn Confederates still working against the U.S. occupiers. If he did get back in business, Cincinnatus expected he’d hear from him. He looked forward to that as much as he did to smallpox.

He might hear from Conroy even if the storekeeper didn’t get back into business. He looked forward to that even less than he did to smallpox. The fire that had gutted the store hadn’t been an accident.

When he got off the trolley car, he did not immediately hurry home as he’d thought he would. Instead, he paused and sniffed. A delicious, spicy odor hung in the air. Sure enough, around the corner came the horse-drawn delivery wagon from the Kentucky Smoke House, Apicius’ barbecue palace. Apicius’ son, Lucullus, was driving the wagon. He waved to Cincinnatus. “Sell you some ribs tonight?” he called, white teeth gleaming in his black face.

“No thanks,” Cincinnatus answered. “Elizabeth’s got some chicken stew waitin’ for me when I get home.”

Lucullus waved again and drove on. Cincinnatus let out a small sigh of relief. Had Lucullus asked him if he wanted red-hot ribs, that would have been an instruction to show up at Apicius’ place. All sorts of red-hot things went on there, Apicius and his sons being Reds themselves.

But not tonight. Tonight Cincinnatus was free to be simply a man, not a political man. As neighborhoods in the colored part of town went, his was one of the better ones. The clapboard house in which he lived was neat and well kept. As best he could, given his color, he’d been a man on the rise before the war. As best he could, given a great many complications, he remained a man on the rise now.

When he opened the door, he grinned. The chicken stew smelled as good—well, almost as good—as the barbecue Lucullus hadn’t called red-hot tonight. In the kitchen, Elizabeth exclaimed, “That’s your pa!”

“Dadadadada!” Achilles came toddling out toward him on stiff legs spread wide. An enormous grin spread over his face, wide enough to show he had four teeth on top and two on the bottom.

Cincinnatus picked him up and swung him around. Achilles squealed with glee, then squawked indignantly when Cincinnatus set him on the floor again. His father swatted him on the bottom, so softly that he laughed instead of crying.

Elizabeth came out, too, and tilted her face up for a kiss. “You look tired,” she said. She was still in the shirtwaist and skirt in which she cleaned house for white Covingtonians.

“So do you,” he answered. They both laughed—tiredly. “Ain’t life bully?” he added. They laughed again. He had a pretty good notion of how the rest of the night would go. They’d eat supper. She’d wash dishes while he played with the baby. They would sit and talk and read for a little while—they both had their letters, unusual for black couples even on what had been the northern edge of the Confederate States. Then they’d get Achilles to bed, and then they’d go to bed themselves. Maybe they would make love. Odds were better they’d fall asleep as soon as their heads hit the pillows, though.

Through the first half of the evening, things went very much as he’d expected. The stew was delicious, and Cincinnatus said so. “Your mother gits half the credit—she kept an eye on it and the baby while I was workin’,” Elizabeth said. After dinner, Cincinnatus chased Achilles around the house hoping to tire him out so he’d fall asleep in a hurry. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.

Elizabeth was just drying the last dish when somebody knocked on the door. “Who’s that?” she asked, frowning. “Curfew’s comin’.”

“I’d better find out.” Cincinnatus strode to the door and opened it.

Tom Kennedy stood there, as he had on the horrible night when his mere presence dragged Cincinnatus, all unwilling, into the Confederate resistance against U.S. forces in Kentucky. As his former boss had then, he gasped, “You got to hide me, Cincinnatus! They’re right on my heels, the sons of bitches.”

“Who?” Cincinnatus demanded. Christ, if Kennedy had led the Yankees to him—

Before the white man could answer, a rifle shot rang out. “My God! I am hit!” Kennedy cried. He clutched at his chest. Before he could fall—as he surely would have fallen—the rifle cracked again. The left side of his head exploded, spraying Cincinnatus with blood and brains and bits of bone. Behind him, Elizabeth screamed. Tom Kennedy went down now, like a sack of peas. Blood poured from him in a wet, sticky flood over Cincinnatus’ front porch.

In the barrel yard behind the U.S. First Army’s front in northern Tennessee, mechanics swore sulfurously as they worked in the twin White engines that sent their enormous toys rumbling forward. Other mechanics were on their knees in the mud, tightening the tracks that let the barrels go down into shell holes and trenches and climb out the other side.

Armorers carried belts of machine-gun ammunition and crates of two-inch shells for the guns of the traveling fortresses. Each one mounted not only a cannon but also half a dozen machine guns on a chassis twenty-five feet long and more than ten feet high. They needed a lot of ammunition to fill them up.

Lieutenant Colonel Irving Morrell walked slowly along a path through the mud corduroyed with fence posts and house timbers and whatever other scraps of wood the folks who had made the path had been able to come up with. He was a lean, fit man in his mid-twenties, with a long face, pale eyes, and sandy hair he wore short. When he wasn’t paying attention to the way he walked, he limped a little, a reminder of the leg wound he’d taken not long after the start of the war. Whenever he caught himself doing it, he stopped and made himself walk straight.

The farther he went into the barrel yard, the slower he walked and the more noticeable the limp became. Finally, he stopped altogether, and stood and stared in complete fascination. He might have stood there for quite a while, had a soldier coming up the path with a roll of tent cloth on his shoulder not found him in the way and, in lieu of cursing him, inquired, “May I help you, sir?”

Thus recalled to himself, Morrell said, “Yes, if you please. I’m looking for Colonel Ned Sherrard.”

“That tent right over there, sir,” the soldier answered, pointing to one erection of green-gray among many. “Now if you’ll excuse me—”

More slowly than he should have, Morrell realized he’d been given a hint. “Sorry,” he said, and stepped aside. The soldier trudged on. He was shaking his head and muttering under his breath. Morrell had no doubt what sorts of things he was muttering, either.

No corduroyed track ran toward the tent to which the soldier had directed Morrell. Without hesitation, he stepped off the path and tromped through the mud. A couple of mechanics looked up as he squelched past them. He caught a snatch of what one of them said to the other: “—ficer not too proud to get his boots dirty.” He had been walking straight before he heard that. He walked straighter afterwards.

As he neared the tent, the flap opened and an officer came out: a medium-tall, wide-shouldered fellow with a graying Kaiser Bill mustache and, Morrell saw, eagles on his shoulder straps. “Colonel Sherrard, sir?” he asked.

“That’s right,” the other officer answered. “And you’d be Lieutenant Colonel Morrell, eh?”

“Yes, sir.” Morrell saluted. “Reporting as ordered, sir.” Among the other service ribbons above Sherrard’s left breast pocket, he noticed a black-and-gold one showing the colonel had been on the General Staff. Morrell had that same ribbon on his tunic. Sherrard’s service badge, though, was not the General Staff’s eagle on a star. Instead, he wore a barrel pierced by a lightning bolt.

He was scanning the fruit salad on Morrell’s chest as Morrell looked over his. Morrell got the idea that what he saw didn’t altogether please him, and had trouble figuring out why. Without false modesty, he knew he had a good record. Along with General Staff service, he’d fought in Sonora (where he was wounded), in eastern Kentucky, and in the Canadian Rockies. He’d distinguished himself in each of the latter two theaters, too. So why did Sherrard look as if he smelled sour milk?

With what looked like a deliberate effort of will, Sherrard made his face altogether blank. “Come inside, Lieutenant Colonel,” he said. “Let’s get you settled in and see how we can best use you.”

“Yes, sir.” Morrell ducked through the tent flap ahead of Colonel Sherrard, who introduced him to his adjutant, Captain Wallace, and his clerk typist, Corporal Norton. Either one of them might have been a power behind the throne. Off his first impression of Sherrard, Morrell was inclined to doubt that. The colonel to whom he’d been ordered to report seemed to need no one to prop him up.

Morrell accepted a tin cup full of muddy coffee, then sat down with Colonel Sherrard to drink it. Sipping from his own cup, Sherrard asked, “So how did you happen to come down from General Staff headquarters just now?”

The question was so elaborately casual, Morrell knew it held more than met the eye. For the life of him, though, he couldn’t figure out what. As he would have anyway, he answered with the simple truth: “The more I’ve looked at things, sir, the more important barrels have looked to me. I thought I ought to see some action with them. Besides”—his grin made him look even younger than he was—“running down the enemy in something as big as a house sounds like a hell of a lot of fun.”

That got him the first smile he’d seen from Sherrard. “As a matter of fact, it is, when the damn things feel like running and when the Rebs don’t have a cannon handy and don’t chuck a grenade or a whiskey bottle full of burning gasoline through one of your hatches.”

“If you knew beforehand who’d win, you wouldn’t have to fight the war,” Morrell replied with a shrug. “Since you don’t, you take your chances.”

That got him another smile, a wider one. “You’ll have studied barrels some, then, I take it, even if you haven’t served in them?” Sherrard said. After Morrell nodded, the older officer asked, “What’s your opinion of our current doctrine on barrel deployment?”

“Spreading them out widely along the line, do you mean, sir?” Morrell said. Now he waited for Sherrard to nod. When the colonel did, Morrell went on, “Sir, I don’t like it for beans. The barrels give us a big stick. As long as we’ve got it, we ought to shellack the Rebels with it.”