Breakthroughs (76 page)

A U.S. cruiser with the flotilla launched its aeroplane to shadow the British ships. That must have been allowed under the terms of the armistice, because nobody started shooting.

U.S. aeroplanes could have tracked the British ships at the outbreak of the war, too, but neither they nor their wireless sets could have reached as far as they did now. Sam had had that same thought not long before, when he’d spotted the
Dakota
’s aeroplane before it landed by the battleship. Now, reminded of it in a different context, he muttered, “I wish that flying machine could follow those bastards all the way back to London.”

He didn’t notice Commander Grady standing behind him, also watching the Royal Navy force withdraw. “That would be pretty fine, wouldn’t it, Carsten?” the commander of the starboard secondary armament said.

“Huh?” Sam spun around, startled. “Uh, yes, sir.” He made himself think straight. “I expect the day is coming when they’ll be able to do just that. I expect it’s coming sooner than most people think, too.”

Grady studied him. “I expect you’re right. If we don’t do it, some other navy will, and they’ll do it to us.” He rubbed his chin. “Matter of fact, I happen to know we are doing something along those lines. Would you by any chance be interested in becoming part of that?”

“Would I?” Sam said. “Yes, sir! Hell yes, sir! Where do I sign up?”

“You don’t, not yet,” Grady answered. “But you’re a sharp fellow—sharper than you let on sometimes, I think. When we get into port in the United States, you remind me about this. I think the effort could use you.”

“Thank you very much, sir,” Carsten said. Part of that was real gratitude—he’d been talking about doing something like this. Part of it, too, was prudent calculation. Even if the Navy did shrink after the war, they wouldn’t drop him on the beach if he was part of this new project. Having a job he was sure of wasn’t the worst thing in the world—no, not even close.

“Bartlett, Reginald, Confederate States Army, private first class,” Reggie Bartlett said to the paymaster in U.S. green-gray. He rattled off his pay number and the date of his capture.

The paymaster found his name, checked both the pay number and the date of capture against his own records, and lined through them. He gave Reggie a sheaf of green banknotes—bills, the Yankees called them—and some pocket change. “Here is the pay owed you under the Geneva Convention, Private First Class Bartlett,” he said. “Frankly, between you, me, and the wall, you’re damn lucky to get it in greenbacks instead of your own money. These will still be worth something six months from now. God only knows if the Confederate dollar will.”

Reggie grunted. From things he’d heard, the paymaster was likely to be right. He put the money into a pocket of the butternut trousers the U.S. authorities had given him—along with a matching tunic—to wear on the train ride back to Richmond, where all released Confederate prisoners were being shipped. Neither color nor cut was quite that of a C.S. uniform, but both were close.

His shoulder ached when he bent his arm to put the money in his pocket, but not too badly. A Yankee doctor had given him chloroform and then gone in there and drained an abscess that refused to clear up on its own. Now the wound really was healing. For a long time, he’d wondered if it ever would.

He could walk with only a bare trace of a limp, too, and his leg hardly bothered him at all. Put everything together and the damnyankees had treated him pretty well. Of course, they were also the ones who’d shot him. Given a choice, he would sooner not have been shot. Then he wouldn’t have had to worry about how the damnyankees treated him. But who ever gave a soldier a choice?

Here came Rehoboam, on two sticks and an artificial foot. The Negro prisoner made slow but steady progress toward the paymaster. With nothing better to do, Reggie waited till he too got paid off, then asked, “What are you going to do when you get back to Mississippi?”

“I be goddamned if I know,” Rehoboam answered. “Ain’t no use in the cotton fields no more. Ain’t no good on any kind o’ farm no more. Reckon I got to go to town, but I be goddamned if I know what the hell I do there, neither.”

“You have your letters,” Bartlett said. “I’ve seen that. It’s something.”

“It ain’t much,” Rehoboam said with a scornful toss of his head. “Ain’t like I’m gonna put on no necktie and sit behind no desk at the bank and loan the white folks money. Ain’t gonna be no doctor. Ain’t gonna be no lawyer or preacher. Ain’t gonna be no newspaperman, neither. So what the hell good my letters do me?”

“If you didn’t have ’em, how could you read all the lies the Reds tell?” Reggie asked innocently.

Rehoboam started to give him a straight answer. Then the black man started to get angry. And then, grudgingly, he started to laugh. “You ain’t no stupid white man,” he said at last. “Wish to Jesus you was.”

“Stupid enough to get shot,” Reggie said. “You come right down to it, how can anybody get any stupider than that?”

“You in one piece,” Rehoboam said. “I ain’t gonna see my foot again till Judgment Day, and I don’t believe in Judgment Day no more.”

“You
are
a damned Red,” Bartlett said. He meant
damned
in a more literal way than he was in the habit of using it. He didn’t think of himself as all that pious, but he’d gone to church on Sunday back in Richmond. Hearing Rehoboam casually deny the Last Judgment rocked him.

“Reckon bein’ a Red is more dangerous’n the other,” the Negro answered. “But if the damn gummint ain’t cheatin’ me, I’m gonna be a citizen, like you been sayin’, so I reckon I can think any kind o’ damnfool thing I like, an’ say so, too. That’s what bein’ a citizen’s about, ain’t it?”

“I suppose so.” Reggie hadn’t thought that much about it. He hadn’t needed to think much about it. Citizenship was natural to him as water to a fish, and so he took it altogether for granted. Whatever else Rehoboam did, he wouldn’t do that.

A military policeman in green-gray came up. “You Rebs been paid off?” he asked. When they didn’t deny it, he jerked a thumb toward a doorway at the end of the hall. “Shake a leg, then. Trucks to take you to the train station are right through there. You think we’ll be sorry to get you off our hands, you’re crazy.”

As the two men from the CSA made their way toward the door—they could hardly shake a leg—Bartlett spoke in a sly voice: “See? He treats you just like me—far as he’s concerned, we’re both scum.”

“I’m used to white folks what reckon I’m scum,” Rehoboam said after a moment. “How about you?”

Outside, Reggie proved he wasn’t used to it. Thinking to be helpful, he asked a Yankee guard, “Which one of these trucks is for the coloreds?”

“We ain’t bothering with any of that shit here,” the U.S. soldier answered. “You and Snowball look like you’re pals. You can sit together.”

Reggie had to help Rehoboam up into the back of the truck. Conscious of the Negro’s eye on him, he said not a word as they sat down side by side. None of the other freed prisoners—all of them white—already in the truck said anything, either.

Most places in the USA, Negroes—a relative handful, not close to a third of the population as they were in the CSA—had to take a back seat to whites, as they did in the Confederacy. Bartlett figured the damnyankees were piling one last humiliation on his comrades and him. He also figured he would survive it—and that he would catch hell if he complained about it. That made keeping quiet look like a smart idea.

The Yankees also made no distinction between white and black C.S. prisoners on the train that set out from Missouri toward Richmond. Reggie and Rehoboam ended up sitting side by side in a crowded, beat-up coach. Bartlett resigned himself to that, too, and told himself it wouldn’t be so bad. They knew each other, anyhow; after weeks of lying across the aisle from each other, they couldn’t help it.

Until it crossed into Virginia, the train stayed in territory that had belonged to the USA before the war began. Reggie stared out through the dirty window glass at countryside Confederate soldiers hadn’t been able to reach or damage. Here and there, in Cincinnati and a couple of other towns, he did see craters and wrecked buildings that had taken bomb hits, but not till the train got into central Pennsylvania, more than a day after it set out, did the landscape take on the lunar quality with which he’d grown so unpleasantly familiar.

“We fought like hell here,” he remarked to Rehoboam.

“Reckon we did,” the Negro answered, “or you white folks did, anyways. Yankees licked you just the same.”

Bartlett sighed; he could hardly argue with that. He did say, “We might have done better if you Red niggers hadn’t jumped on our backs while we were fighting the USA.”

“Mebbe,” Rehoboam said. “You might’ve did better if you didn’t go an’ make all the black folks in the country hate you like pizen, too.”

Since that held only too much truth, Reggie forbore from replying. He kept looking out the window. Maryland seemed just like Pennsylvania, a hell of wreckage and shell craters and forests smashed to toothpicks. The smell of death was fresher there, and filled the train. And when he rolled through Washington, D.C., he stared and stared. The whole city was a field of rubble, with most of the buildings knocked flat and then pounded to pieces. The stub of the Washington Monument stuck up from the desolation all around like a broken tooth in a mouth otherwise empty.

Rehoboam gaped at what was left of Washington, too. “Didn’t see nothin’ like this here in Arkansas,” he allowed. “This here, this is a hell of a mess.”

“Didn’t see anything like this in Sequoyah, either,” Bartlett said. “But in the Roanoke valley, especially around Big Lick—we saw plenty of it there. Too many men smashed together into too small a space, with no room for anybody to give way, that’s what does it. Over across the Mississippi, the fighting didn’t get this crowded. The Yankees and us had more room to move.”

“When we was fightin’ to keep ’em away from Memphis, it got plenty bad, but not like this,” Rehoboam said. “No, ain’t never seen nothin’ like this.”

After the train crossed the Potomac on a pontoon bridge and went into Virginia, Reggie expected the devastation to be even worse than it had been in Yankee country. For the most part, it wasn’t. It was fresher, but not worse. After a little while, he thought he understood why: by the time the fighting moved down into Virginia, U.S. forces had gained such a preponderance over those of the CSA that the Army of Northern Virginia had to give ground before it and everything around it were pounded completely flat. A war of movement didn’t tear up the landscape so badly as one of position.

And then, as soon as the train got south of the reach of U.S. guns, the countryside was the one Reggie had always known, with only an occasional bomb crater to remind him of the war. Coming into Richmond, though, brought it home once more. U.S. aeroplanes had done their worst to the capital of the Confederate States. Richmond was in better shape than Washington, but it wouldn’t win prizes any time soon.

“Check the signboards for trains going toward your home towns!” railroad officials—or perhaps they were government functionaries—shouted.

To his own surprise, Reggie reached out to shake Rehoboam’s hand. The Negro took the offered hand, looking a little surprised himself. “Good luck to you,” Reggie said. “I don’t care if you
are
a Red, or not too much. Good luck.”

“Same to you,” Rehoboam said. “You ain’t the worst white man I ever run acrost.” He made that sound like high praise.

They got off the train together. Rehoboam slowly headed toward a platform from which a train would leave for Mississippi. He didn’t need to hurry; it wasn’t scheduled to head out for another six hours, and might well run late. Bartlett left the station. He would have to stay in his parents’ home till he found work.

A taxi driver hailed him: “Hey, pal, take you anywhere in town for three beans. Won’t find anybody cheaper.”

“Three
dollars
?” Reggie stared at him as if he’d started talking Hindustani. The paymaster back at the hospital had known what he was talking about. Bartlett’s hand went into his pocket and closed on a coin. “I’ll give you a quarter, U.S.”

“Deal,” the driver said at once.

Reggie wondered if he’d offered too much. By the way the cabbie bounced out of the motorcar—a Birmingham that had seen better days—and held the door open for him, he probably had. He clicked his tongue between his teeth. No help for it now. He gave the driver his parents’ address.

“Hope you didn’t get hurt too bad,” the cab driver said, evidently recognizing the kind of clothes Bartlett had on. Reggie only grunted by way of reply. Not a bit put out, the driver asked, “What’ll you do now that you’re home?”

“Damned if I know,” Reggie said. “Try and find my life again, I reckon.” By the way the cabbie nodded, he’d heard that answer plenty of times already.

Colonel Irving Morrell scrambled down into the Confederate works that would have defended Murfreesboro, Tennessee. Without soldiers in them, the trenches seemed unreal, unnatural. Before the armistice, Morrell would have had to pay in blood, and pay high, for the privilege of examining them. Now he had Colonel Harley Landis, CSA, as his personal guide.

Not that Landis was delighted with the job. “If I had my choice, Colonel,” he said, “the only excavation of ours I’d show you would be six feet by three feet by six feet deep.” He raised an eyebrow. “Nothing personal, of course.”

“Of course,” Morrell agreed with a dry chuckle. “Believe me, if you were going through our trenches outside Chicago, I’d feel the same way.”

“Chicago?” The Confederate officer snorted ruefully. “In my dreams, maybe. You have the stronger power. We aimed at nothing more than defending ourselves.”

Now Morrell was the one to arch his brows. “Aimed at Philadelphia, you mean. Aimed at Kansas, too, for that matter, and Missouri. Talk straight, Colonel, if you don’t mind. This poor-little-us business wears thin after the War of Secession and the Second Mexican War.”

Colonel Landis stared at him. “But surely you can see…” He checked himself, then shook his head. “Maybe not—who knows? But if you can’t, the world must seem a very strange place from the Yankee side of the hill.”