American Front (15 page)

Cunningham nodded. “He’s gonna kill somebody ’fore they take him off—and it ain’t likely it’ll be hisself. God don’t usually work things out that neat.” He spat into the new pig of steel, as if quenching it. His spittle exploded into steam the instant it touched the metal. Meditatively, he added, “Wish ol’ Herb hadn’t got hisself called to the colors.”

“Yeah.” Pinkard spat, too, in disgust with the world. “How the hell they gonna fight a war. Bedford, if they take all the men who know how to make things and stick ’em in the Army? If they don’t turn out guns and shells, what the hell they gonna shoot at the damnyankees?”

“You don’t need to go preachin’ to the choir,” Cunningham said. “I already believe, I surely do. Bunch o’ damn fools runnin’ things up in Richmond, dogged if they ain’t.” Then he paused again. He was more given to contemplation than his friend. “’Course, the other thing is, if they ain’t got enough soldiers, they can’t fight the war, neither.”

“They want more soldiers, they should oughta pull ’em off clerkin’ jobs and such like that, not the ones we do here,” Jefferson Pinkard said stubbornly. “Folks like us, we should be the last ones chose, not the first.”

“Reckon there’s somethin’ to that,” Cunningham admitted. “I think maybe—” Jeff never did find out what he thought maybe, because a steam whistle blew then, the shrill screech cutting through even the insensate racket of the foundry. Cunningham grinned. “I think maybe I’m goin’ home.”

When Pinkard turned around, he found his replacement and Bedford Cunningham’s waiting to take over for them. After a couple of minutes of the usual chatter—half Sloss Furnace gossip, half war news—the two men going off work grabbed their dinner pails and let the evening shift have the job. Another steelworker, Sid Williamson, joined them from the next big mold over. He could have been cousin to either one of them, though he was several years younger and hadn’t been at the furnace as long. “Tired,” he said, and then fell silent. He never could rub more than a couple of words together.

Along with a lot of other tired, dirty, sweaty men in overalls and cloth caps, they all trudged out toward the gate. Some of the workers—the sweepers, the furnace stokers, men with jobs like that—were black. They kept a little bit apart from the white men who did more highly skilled work and made more money.

Coming in with the evening shift was a white-mustached white man who wore a black suit and a plug hat instead of overalls. He dressed like a country preacher, but Jeff Pinkard had never set eyes on any preacher who looked so low-down mean.

He strode up to Pinkard and Cunningham as if he owned the walkway, then stopped right in front of them, so they either had to stop or run into him. “Do somethin’ for you?” Pinkard asked, not much deference in his voice: by his clothes and bearing, the stranger had more money than he was ever likely to see, but so what? One white man was as good as another—that was what the Confederate States were all about.

The stranger said, “Where’s your hiring office?”

“Back over yonder.” Pinkard pointed to a long, low clapboard building that got whitewashed about once a week in a never-ending battle against the soot Sloss Foundry and the rest of the Birmingham steel mills poured into the air. To get a little of his own back for the fellow’s arrogant attitude, Pinkard added, “Lookin’ for work, are you?”

“You ain’t as cute as you think you are.” By the way a cigar twitched in the stranger’s mouth, he was about ready to bite it in two. “I got me seven prime buck niggers done run off my plantation this past two weeks, lookin’ for city jobs, and I aim to get ’em back, every damn one.”

“Good luck, friend,” Pinkard said as the man stomped past him. He and Bedford Cunningham exchanged glances. As soon as the irascible stranger was out of earshot, Pinkard said, “He ain’t ever gonna see them niggers again.”

“Bet your ass he ain’t,” Cunningham agreed. “Hiring office, they don’t care what a nigger’s passbook says, not these days. They just want to know if he’s got the muscle to do the job. If he’s a prime cotton-pickin’ nigger, strong like that, they’ll fix his passbook so it looks the way it ought to.”

“Yeah.” Pinkard walked on another couple of steps, then said, “That ain’t the right way to do things, you know. Not even close.”

“I know,” Cunningham said. “But what are you gonna do, Jeff? This place has been jumpin’ out of its tree ever since it looked like the war was comin’. When we went to three shifts, we had to get the bodies from somewheres, you know what I mean? Hell, we was runnin’ tight for two, way things was. Night shift, I hear tell they got niggers doin’ white man’s work, on account of they just can’t get enough whites.”

“I heard that, too,” Pinkard said, “an’ I seen it when we come on shift in the mornin’. An’ that ain’t right, neither.”

“What are you gonna do?” Cunningham repeated, shrugging. “They don’t pay ’em like they was white, but even so, if you’re chopping cotton for seventy-five cents a day, a dollar an’ a half in the foundry looks like big money.”

“Yeah, an’ when they get enough niggers trained, you know what’s gonna happen next?” Pinkard said. “They’re gonna turn around and tell us, ‘We’ll pay you a dollar an’ a half a day, too, an’ if you don’t like it, Julius Caesar here’ll take your job.’ Mark my words, that day’s comin’.”

“It’s the damn war,” Cunningham said mournfully. “Plant’s gotta make the steel, no matter what, You complain about it even a little bit, they say you ain’t a patriot and somebody else has your job, even if it ain’t a nigger. What the hell can we do? We’re stuck, is all.”

The conversation had carried them out of the Sloss Furnace grounds and into the company housing that surrounded them. The Negro workers lived to the right of the railroad tracks, in cabins painted oxide red. The paint, like the cabins, was cheap.

Pinkard and Cunningham lived side by side in identical yellow cottages on the white men’s side of the tracks. Cunningham’s was closer to the foundry. He waved to Pinkard as he went up the walk toward his veranda. “See you in the mornin’,” he called.

Nodding, Pinkard headed for his own house. The windows were open and so was the front door, to let some air into the place. A delicious aroma floated out. Pinkard tossed his cap onto a chair and fetched his dinner pail into the kitchen. “Lord, that smells good,” he said, slipping an arm around the waist of his wife, Emily.

She turned and kissed him on the tip of the nose. The motion made her blue cotton skirt swirl away from the floor so he got a glimpse of her trim ankles. “Chicken and dumplings and okra,” she said. “Cornbread biscuits already baked.”

Spit flooded into his mouth. He thumped himself in the belly. “And it wasn’t even your cooking I married you for,” he exclaimed.

“Oh?” Something that looked like ignorant innocence, but wasn’t, sparkled in her blue eyes. “What did you marry me for, then?”

Instead of answering with words, he gave her a long, deep kiss. Even though she wasn’t wearing a corset, he could almost have spanned her waist with his two hands. She wore her strawberry-blond hair—almost the color of flames, really—in a braid that hung halfway down her back. She even smelled and tasted sweet to him.

When they broke apart, she said, “You still haven’t answered my question.”

He poked her in the ribs, which made her squeak. “On account of you were the prettiest gal I ever saw, an’ you look better to me now than you did five years ago. How’s that?” They didn’t have any children yet. He wondered how that was, too. Not from lack of trying, that was for certain.

Emily smiled at him. “You always were a sweet-talkin’ man. Probably why I fell for you. Why don’t you get a couple of bottles of beer out of the icebox? Supper should be ready in about two shakes.”

The beer was homebrew; Alabama had gone dry a couple of years before, which meant they didn’t ship Jax up from New Orleans any more. As he yanked the corks out of the bottles, Pinkard supposed going dry was a good thing for a lot of people. But a beer every now and then didn’t seem to him like drinking—and it went awful well with chicken and dumplings.

He handed one bottle to Emily, then cautiously swigged from the other. With homebrew, you never could tell what you’d get till you got it. He nodded in satisfaction and took a longer pull. “Old Homer, he did this batch pretty good.”

Emily drank, too. “He’s done worse, I’ll tell you that,” she agreed. “Why don’t you go sit down, and I’ll bring out supper.”

The chicken was falling-off-the-bone tender. He used the cornmeal biscuits to sop up the gravy on his plate. As he ate, he told Emily about the planter who’d come to the foundry looking for his field hands. “We got more work to do now than we got people to do it, a lot more,” he said, and mentioned how Negroes were doing white men’s work on the night shift.

She paused before answering. It wasn’t a full-mouth pause; she was thinking something over. At last, she said, “I went into town today to get some groceries—so much cheaper than the company commissary, when we’ve got the cash money to pay for things right there—and they were talkin’ about that same kind of thing, about how there’s so much work and not enough hands. It’s not just the foundry. It’s all over the place. Grocer Edwards, he was grumbling how he’d had to raise his clerk’s pay twice since the war started to keep him from goin’ off and workin’ in one o’ them ammunition plants.”

“Wish somebody’d go an’ raise my pay,” Jeff said. “Way things look, they’re liable to end up cuttin’ it instead.” Once more, he summarized part of what he and Bedford Cunningham had said.

“They aren’t hiring niggers to work at the ammunition plants hereabouts—I know that for a fact,” Emily said. She paused again, so long that Jeff wondered if something was really wrong. Then, instead of going on, she got up, carried the plates to the sink, and lighted the kerosene lamp that hung not far from the table. Only after that did she continue, in a rush: “I hear tell they are hiring women, though. Dotty Lanchester—I ran into her at the grocer’s—she says she’s gonna start next week. She says they really
want
women: what with sewin’ and everything, we’re good with little parts an’ stuff, an’ shells have ’em, I guess, even if you wouldn’t think it to look at ’em.”

“Milo’s letting Dotty go to work at a factory?” Pinkard said, surprised. If your wife had to work, that meant you couldn’t support her the way you should.
Shiftless
wasn’t a name you wanted to wear.

“She said it was her patriotic duty to do it,” Emily answered. “She said our boys in butternut need everything we can give ’em to beat the damnyankees, and if she could help ’em, she would.”

How were you supposed to argue with that? Jefferson Pinkard turned it over in his mind. Far as he could see, you couldn’t argue with it, not very well.

And then, after yet another hesitation, Emily said, “You know, honey, I wouldn’t mind goin’ to work there my own self. They got lots of ladies, like I said, so it wouldn’t be like I was the only one, and with an extra two dollars a day, we could really set some money aside for when we do have young’uns.” She looked at him sidelong. “Might be any day. You never can tell.”

Two dollars a day was a little more than half what the ammunition factory paid the men who worked there: better than nigger wages, but not a whole lot. That was probably one reason the bosses were hiring women. But women were dexterous, too; Pinkard wouldn’t have argued with that. He’d struggled a couple of times to thread a needle with his clumsy, work-roughened hands. Watching Emily do it easy as pie made him swear off trying to sew for good.

But wages weren’t what made him hesitate. “Any other time, I’d say no straight out,” he said.

“I know you would, honey,” Emily answered. “But I’d be able to keep things goin’ here, too; I know I would. It ain’t like I’m thinkin’ about it just on account of gettin’ out of housework or that I don’t love you or that I don’t think you’re workin’ hard enough to make us all the money we need. It’s nothin’ like that, I swear to God it’s not. You know I’m speakin’ the truth, now don’t you?”

“Yeah, I do,” he admitted. He knew she was wheedling, too, but he didn’t know what to do about it. What with the war, all of a sudden nothing was simple.

No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than Emily said, “If the damnyankees lick us, it don’t hardly matter that we stuck by what was right and proper beforehand, now does it?”

He threw his hands in the air in defeat. “All right, Emily. That’s what you want to do, you go do it. Like you say, the war’s makin’ everything all topsy-turvy. We’ll put it back to rights oncet we done licked the United States again. Shouldn’t take long, I reckon.”

“Thank you, honey!” Emily got up, threw herself down into his lap, and flung her arms around his neck. The dining-room chair creaked; it wasn’t used to holding two people’s worth of weight. They didn’t stay there long, though. Pretty soon, they got up and went into the bedroom.

From a mile in the air, the world looked like a map spread out below you. Not many people had been lucky enough to see the world that way, but Lieutenant Jonathan Moss was one of them.

He had a speck of something on the inside of one lens of his goggles. It wasn’t enough to interfere with his vision, but it was annoying. Speck or no speck, though, he knew he could keep a close eye on the U.S. Army troops pushing from New York into Ontario, and on the struggles of the Canadians and British to stop them.

Shells pounded the enemy line south of Hamilton. “That’s the way to go, boys!” Moss shouted, slamming a fist down on his thigh. The U.S. eagle and crossed swords were painted big and bold and bright on the fuselage, wings and tail of his Curtiss Super Hudson pusher biplane. He liked the pusher configuration; it gave him a better view of the ground than he could have got from a tractor machine, and also let him mount a machine gun in front of him to shoot at any aeroplanes that rose up to challenge his aircraft. If you mounted a forward-facing machine gun on a tractor aeroplane, you’d chew your own prop to bits when you opened fire.

Somebody ought to do something about that
, Moss thought. The idea vanished from his head a moment later, though, for a Canadian battery started returning fire on the advancing—or rather, the stalled—Americans. Scribbling awkwardly in a notebook he held between his knees, Moss noted the position of the guns. When he landed, he’d pass the sketch on to Artillery. The enemy guns would get a wake-up call in short order.