American Front (46 page)

“Oh, for Christ’s sake!” Morrell exploded. “All right, you hunted through the pay records. We have in this battalion”—he glanced down at the list Craddock had given him—“four, count them, four Mormons. Has any one of them ever given the slightest sign of disloyalty?”

“No, sir,” Craddock said. “But you never can tell, not with these people you can’t. They looked loyal to the USA, too, till this Deseret rebellion kicked up. They might be laying low.”

“Lying,” Morrell corrected absently.

“Yes, sir, they might be lying, too,” Craddock agreed with earnest ignorance. Morrell heaved a silent sigh. The lieutenant said, “But the orders require that they be identified and interrogated. As you see, sir, I’ve identified them.”

He was trained in military subordination. That meant he didn’t yell,
Now you’ve got to interrogate them
. But he couldn’t have shouted it any louder than he didn’t say it. And he did have the orders, if not common sense, on his side.

Morrell sighed again, this time loud and long. “All right, Bill. Bring the Mormons to me and I’ll have a talk with them.” He didn’t think a Kentucky forest the ideal spot for this sort of procedure, but this was where he happened to be.

“Yes, sir!” Now Craddock sounded happier. Things were going as they were supposed to on paper, which warmed the cockles of his heart. “I’ll go get them. One at a time, of course, so they can’t overpower the two of us, escape through the woods, and warn the Rebs of our plans.”

Beyond arguing by then, Morrell said, “However you want to do it.” Craddock hurried away, intent on his mission. If he’d used that much ingenuity figuring out the trouble real enemies could cause, he would have been a better soldier for it.

He soon returned with a young, towheaded private who looked confused and worried. Morrell would have looked the same way if he’d suddenly been hauled up before his commanding officer. The soldier came to stiff attention. “Dinwiddie, Brigham,” he said, rattling off his pay number.

“At ease, Dinwiddie,” Morrell said. “You’re not in trouble.” Lieutenant Craddock’s face set in stern, disapproving lines. Morrell ignored him. Dinwiddie was from the company he’d commanded. He’d always thought of the youngster as too good to be true. Dinwiddie didn’t drink, he didn’t smoke, he didn’t gamble, he wasn’t out to lay every woman he set eyes on, and he obeyed every order promptly, cheerfully, and bravely. What little Morrell knew about Mormonism made him think it was a pretty silly religion, but it had to have something going for it if it turned out people like Dinwiddie. Picking his words with care, Morrell asked, “What do you think of what’s going on in Utah these days, son?”

He’d never seen Dinwiddie’s bright-blue eyes anything but open and candid. He did now. Shutters might have slammed down on the private’s face. He spoke like a machine: “Sir, I don’t know much about it.”

Lieutenant Craddock stirred. Morrell glared him into continued silence and tried again: “Have you heard from your family? Are they all right?”

“I got one letter not long ago,” Dinwiddie answered. “It was censored pretty bad, but they’re well, yes, sir.”

“Glad to hear it,” Morrell said, on the whole sincerely. “With things the way they are, how do you feel about being a soldier in the United States Army?”

That hooded look stayed on Dinwiddie’s face. “Sir, it doesn’t have anything to do with me right now, does it? Provo’s a long way from here.”

“So it is.” Morrell cocked his head to one side and studied the young Mormon. “Rebel lines, though, they’re only a few hundred yards off.” He waved southwest. As if on cue, a rifle shot rang out, silencing the spring peepers for a moment.

Dinwiddie looked horrified. If he was an actor, he belonged on the stage. “Sir, what the Rebs do to Latter-Day Saints in the CSA—You hear stories about what the Russians do to Jews. It’s like that, sir. They don’t want any of us, and they don’t make any bones about it.”

Morrell wondered what things were going to be like for Mormons in the USA after the Army finished crushing the Deseret revolt. They hadn’t been easy before; they’d get harder now. It had been more suppression than persecution. What it was going to be…Well, if Brigham Dinwiddie hadn’t thought of that for himself, no point doing the job for him. “All right, Dinwiddie—dismissed,” Morrell said. “Go on back to your unit.”

The Mormon saluted and left. Lieutenant Craddock said, “Sir, forgive me, but I didn’t think that was a very thorough interrogation.”

“Neither did I,” Morrell said. “The way I see it is, if I rake these people over the coals when they haven’t done anything, I’ll give them a reason to be disloyal even if they didn’t have one before. Now go fetch me Corporal”—he cheeked the list—“Corporal Thomas.”

Corporal Orson Gregory Thomas—who made a point of asking to be called Gregory—echoed Brigham Dinwiddie’s comments almost word for word. Lieutenant Craddock found that suspicious. Morrell found it natural—put two men of the same beliefs in the same awkward situation and you could expect to get the same kind of answers out of them.

Homer Benson, another private, again gave almost the same set of responses. Lieutenant Craddock’s granite jaw stuck out like the Rock of Gibraltar as he listened, his face even more disapproving than it had been at the start of the interrogations. He didn’t say anything when Morrell dismissed Benson back to his unit, but his stiff posture and even stiffer manner spoke volumes.

Dick Francis, still another private, was the last man on the list Craddock had so laboriously compiled. He looked enough like Dinwiddie to have been his first cousin, and shared his diffident manner. But when Morrell asked him what he thought about the Mormon uprising in Utah, he said, “I hope they kick the Army out of there, sir. That’s our land. All the United States ever did was give us grief.”

Morrell pointed to the green-gray uniform Francis had on. “What are you doing wearing that, then?”

“Sir, I was rendering unto Caesar,” the private answered. “When the Prophet and the Elders said that, since we were part of the United States, we should take part in this war, I obeyed: it was a teaching inspired by God. But now that they see things differently, I won’t lie and say I’m sorry. I think Deseret should be free, so we can worship as we please.”

“Want a whole houseful of wives, do you?” Lieutenant Craddock said, a nasty leer on his face.

“That will be enough, Lieutenant,” Morrell said sharply.

But the damage was done. “You see what I mean, sir?” Francis said. “Why should I love a government that looks at us like that? The way we get treated, we’re the niggers of the USA.”

From what Morrell had heard, the Mormons didn’t treat Negroes as if they were their brothers. That, though, was neither here nor there. Morrell rubbed his chin. “What the devil am I supposed to do with you, Francis?” he asked. He hadn’t expected this problem, assuming all the Mormons in the battalion would stay loyal. Craddock looked vindicated.

Dick Francis shrugged. “Why are you asking me, sir? You’re the United States Army officer.” While sounding perfectly respectful, he somehow managed to turn Morrell’s title into one of reproach.

Morrell thought hard about doing nothing whatever to him. When the Rebs started shooting his way, he’d have to shoot back if he wanted to go on living. But Morrell couldn’t take the chance, not with somebody who’d openly admitted he was hoping for the ruination of the USA.

“I’m going to send you back to divisional headquarters,” he said. “I don’t want any man on the front line whose first loyalty isn’t to his country and to the men on either side of him.”

He didn’t know what Division HQ did with people like Francis. The Mormon soldier did; he’d had more incentive to learn such things. “Detention camp for me, then,” he said, sounding not a bit put out. “I’ll pray for you, sir. For a gentile, you’re a good man.”

Not knowing what to do with such faint praise, Morrell turned to Craddock. “Take him back to Division,” he said. “Tell them he doesn’t feel in good conscience he can go on being a soldier.” He tried not to think about what lay in store for Francis. He hadn’t made a point of learning about detention camps, either, but they bore an evil reputation.

“Yes, sir,” Craddock said enthusiastically. He turned to Francis. “Let’s go, you.”

Watching them tramp away from the front, Morrell shook his head. War would have been a much simpler, easier business with politics out of the mix.

XII

Emily Pinkard looked at the alarm clock, which, as she did every morning, she’d carried out from the bedroom to the kitchen. “Oh, goodness, I’m late,” she said, and gulped down her coffee.

Jefferson Pinkard was still plowing his way through bacon and eggs. He got up, though, when his wife set her cup in the tin sink, and grabbed her. “Give me a kiss before you go,” he said. When she did, he tightened his arms around her. Her lips and tongue were warm and sweet and promising. “Mm,” he said, still holding her. “I don’t think I want you to leave.”

She twisted away from him. “I got to, Jeff,” she said. “You can just walk on over to the foundry, but I got to catch the trolley if I’m gonna get where I’m going. They dock you every minute you’re not there, too. I’ll see you tonight, honey.” Her eyes told what she meant by that. It was everything he could have hoped for and then some.

Reluctantly, he nodded, no matter how much he wanted to take her back to the bedroom now. By the time they got home tonight, they’d both be worn to nubs. “Miserable war,” he growled, and sat back down to finish his breakfast.

Emily nodded from the front hall. “Sure enough is.” She pointed to the stove. “I got supper goin’ in there. Don’t forget to soak your dishes ’fore you leave. Makes ’em a lot easier—and quicker—to wash.” She blew him another kiss, then hurried out the door, closing it after herself.

Jeff did soak his breakfast dishes. The quicker Emily got them clean, the more time she’d have for other things. He’d been doing more chores around the house than he’d expected when she started working, just to keep her from being too tired to feel like making love. Life got crazy sometimes, no two ways about it.

He grabbed his dinner pail and headed out the door himself. Walking to work alone still felt unnatural, but Bedford Cunningham was toting a gun these days, not a sledgehammer or a crowbar or a long-handled slag rake. The Cunningham house looked sad and empty. Fanny was gone, too, on her way to work. Pinkard wondered if she and Emily were riding the same trolley car.

He had his own job to worry about, though, and trudged off to Sloss Foundry. You had to take care of your business first, and worry about the rest later. What he did didn’t take a wagonload of brains, but his life had got a lot more complicated, these months since the shooting started.

He’d got used to greeting Vespasian and Agrippa when he came down onto the casting floor every morning. It wasn’t the same as talking with the white men who’d been there before, but it wasn’t so bad. Both of them were old enough to have been born before manumission, and they both understood their place in the scheme of things. You could work with a nigger like that, Pinkard thought. When the time came for them to go back to stoking the furnaces or whatever they’d done before the war, they’d do it, and keep whatever complaint they had to themselves.

Pericles, now…“Mornin’, Pericles,” Pinkard said. He talked to the young black man now, the same way he did with Agrippa and Vespasian. He’d decided life was too short to get yourself all in an uproar over little things, and working the day through without gabbing with the guy alongside reminded him of nothing so much as a fellow who’d had a fight with his wife trying to show her who was boss by clamming up. It didn’t work at home, and it didn’t work here, either.

“Mornin’, Mistuh Pinkard,” Pericles answered. There wasn’t anything wrong with the way he acted, not so you could put your finger on it there wasn’t, but his manner was somehow different from those of the older Negroes who worked the night shift. Pericles acted as deferential to Jefferson Pinkard as they did, but—

Maybe that was it, Pinkard thought as a huge crucible swung by over his head and positioned itself to pour a fresh load of molten steel into the big cast-iron mold that waited to receive it. Then he stopped thinking about such things for a while. You had to watch the pouring like a hawk. If anything went wrong, you needed to be ready to jump and run—either that or you got yourself burned to a crisp, dead or wishing you were. Sid Williamson had lingered a week before he finally died, poor bastard.

That was especially true since the new crucible operator still wasn’t so smooth as Herb, who’d gone into the Army when the war was new and looked like being over in a hurry. But Herb wasn’t coming back. Somewhere up in Kentucky, near a town nobody two towns over had ever heard of till the war started, he’d stopped a bullet or a shell. His widow worked with Emily, too, and wore somber black all the time.

This pour, though, went well. A great cloud of steam hissed out of the mold, steam heavy with the bloody smell of hot iron. Jeff and Pericles worked side by side, going right up to the pour and making sure it didn’t escape the mold before it started solidifying. “Warm this mornin’,” Pericles said with a grin. The heat of the foundry floor dried the sweat on his face as fast as it tried to spring forth.

Pinkard knew the same thing happened with him, but he turned fiercely red from working up by the pour. Pericles seemed unaffected, as if he were made of cold-forged iron himself. He handled his tools with nonchalant confidence; a little more experience and he’d be as good a steel man as Bedford Cunningham ever was.

“You are gettin’ to know what you’re doin’,” Pinkard said, acknowledging that.

“Thank you, Mistuh Pinkard,” Pericles answered. That was fine. So was his self-effacing tone of voice. But then he added, “Ain’t so hard, is it? Once you get the hang of it, I mean.”

Neither Agrippa nor Vespasian would have said anything like that. Even if they thought it, they wouldn’t have said it. Every once in a while, though, Pericles came out with something like that, something that made the way he acted around Jefferson Pinkard seem just that: an act. You couldn’t call him for being uppity; he never showed disrespect, nor anything close to it. But even a Negro with self-confidence was something new on Jeff’s mental horizon.

After a while, Pericles said. “Mistuh Pinkard, you knew Herb, didn’t you?”

“Sure did,” Pinkard said. “That’s funny: I was thinking about him not so long ago, when the kid up there was pouring. What about him?”

“Did you hear tell they gonna throw his widow and her children out o’ their company house, on account o’ he don’ work here no mo’ an’ he ain’t never comin’ back? Agrippa, he tol’ me that this mornin’. His wife, she go over there with some catfish fo’ to give her las’ night, an’ she all cryin’ an wailin’ to beat the band. Don’ hardly seem right, the bosses do that.”

“It sure as hell don’t,” Pinkard agreed. He thought about it for a little while. “That grates so much, I don’t know that I want to swallow it.”

Pericles held up his right hand. The bottom of the pale patch on his palm showed below the edge of his leather glove. “I ain’t makin’ it up, swear to God I ain’t,” he said, now sounding completely serious.

“Emily will know,” Jeff said. “I’ll ask her when she gets home tonight. If it is so, it’s a pretty low-down piece of dealing, that’s all I’ve got to say.”

“’Fore I started workin’ here, what I was thinkin’ was that everybody white in this whole country had it easy, just on account o’ he
was
white,” Pericles said. “More I look, though, more I see it ain’t like that. The white folks in the suits an’ the collars an’ the tall hats, they do things to the white factory hands, ain’t so much different than happens to niggers every day.”

“That there is a natural-born fact,” Pinkard said, slamming one gloved fist into the palm of the other hand to emphasize his words. “Damn all we can do about it, though. They got the money, they got the factories, like you say. All we got is our hands, an’ there’s always plenty more hands around.”

“You dead right, Mistuh Pinkard,” Pericles said. “Same way in the fields—planter don’t like what a nigger does, he gets hisself another nigger. Don’ matter what the first one did. Don’ matter he did anything. They don’ like him, he gone. Didn’t think it was like that fo’ white folks.”

“Shouldn’t ought to be.” Having his position in life compared to a Negro’s made Pinkard sit up and take notice. “They shouldn’t be able to throw us out like an asswipe with shit on it. Wasn’t for the work we did, what would they have? Nothin’. Not one thing, I tell you.”

“Hard row everybody hoes these days,” Pericles said. “Shouldn’t be harder’n it’s got to. The men who work in the factory, they should have some kind o’ say in how the factory runs. Got more right to it than the fat cats with the bulgin’ money bags, you ask me.” He paused, as if wondering whether he’d said too much.

But Jefferson Pinkard clapped his hands together. “Damn straight!” he said. “Things’d run a hell of a lot smoother if somebody who knew what he was doin’—if somebody who’d done the work himself—had charge of things, not a big wheel with a diamond ring on his pinky.”

I’m talking politics with a nigger
, he realized. And if that didn’t beat all, when Pericles couldn’t even vote. But the young black man had touched Pinkard’s own dissatisfaction with the way things were, and had brought it out into the open so he could see all of it for himself.

After that, Pericles clammed up. Now it was Jeff who wanted to talk more, and the Negro who went about his job without wasted words. Pinkard started to get angry, but his temper cooled down after a bit. Pericles had walked dangerous ground, saying even as much as he’d said. But Pinkard was feeling damn near as trampled on as the black man. That was just what the bosses were doing, he thought: trying to turn white men into niggers.

When the closing whistle wailed, Pinkard almost ran home, he was so anxious to find out from Emily whether Pericles had the straight goods about Herb’s widow. He got back to the yellow cottage before his wife did; she was probably still on the trolley. He busied himself by setting the table for the two of them, as he’d got into the habit of doing when he made it home first. Bedford Cunningham, had he known about that, would have given him a hard time over it. But Bed was worried about machine-gun bullets these days, not china and cheap iron flatware.

The door opened. In came Emily. “You’ll never guess what they’ve done to Daisy Wallace,” she said.

“Herb’s widow? Thrown her out on the street like a dog, on account of her husband got hisself shot savin’ the Sloss family’s greedy behinds,” Jeff answered.

Emily stared at him. “For heaven’s sake, how did you know that?” He hadn’t usually heard the gossip she brought home.

“I got ways,” he answered, a little smugly. “Sure does stink, don’t it?”

“Sure does,” she agreed, hanging up her hat and taking off the apron that protected her skirt. “Makes me want to spit, is what it does.” She walked past Jeff into the kitchen, slowly shifting gears from work to home. When she saw the table ready for supper, she paused and said, “Oh, thank you, honey,” in a voice suggesting his thoughtfulness had surprised her. That made him feel better about helping than he would have if she’d taken it for granted.

Even over the stew of salt pork and hominy and green beans, both of them kept on fuming about the way the crucible man’s widow had been treated. Borrowing Pericles’ idea, Jeff said, “We’d all be better off, I reckon, if the workers had the say in how the factories got run.”

He’d expected Emily to agree to that. Instead, she paused with a bit of meat halfway to her mouth. “That sounds like somethin’ a Red would say,” she told him, her voice serious, maybe even a little frightened. “They been warnin’ us about Reds almost all the time lately, maybe ’cause makin’ shells is such an important business. Never can tell who’s a bomb-flingin’ revolutionary in disguise, they say.”

“You ain’t talkin’ about me,” Jefferson Pinkard declared. “Don’t want no revolution—nothin’ like it. Just want what’s right and what’s fair. Lord knows we ain’t been gettin’ enough of that.”

“Well, that’s so,” Emily said, nodding. She ate the bite that had hung suspended. Neither one of them said much more about politics afterwards, though.

Jeff worked the pump while Emily did the dishes. Afterwards, he slid his arm around her waist. He didn’t need to do much talking about that to let her know what he had in mind. By the way she smiled at him, she was thinking the same thing. They went into the bedroom. He blew out the lamp. In the darkness, the iron frame of the bed creaked, slow at first, building to a rhythm almost frantic.

Afterward, Emily, spent and sweaty, fell asleep almost at once. Jeff stayed awake a little longer, his mind not on the feel of his wife’s arms around him but on Red revolutionaries. As far as he could see, these days people feared Reds and anarchists the same way they’d feared slave uprisings back before manumission.

Pericles, a Red? The idea was ridiculous. He was just a poor damned nigger sick of getting stuck with the short straw every draw. In his shoes, Jefferson figured he would have felt the same way. Hell, he
did
feel that way, thanks to the dislocations the war was bringing. He’d thought having a white skin made him immune to such worry, but he’d turned out to be wrong.

“Maybe we need another revolution, after all,” he muttered. He was glad Emily hadn’t heard that; it would have made her fret. But saying it seemed to ease his mind. He rolled over, snuggled down into his pillow, and fell asleep.

A voice with a Southern twang: “Ma’am?” An arm encased in a butternut sleeve, holding up an empty coffee cup. “Fill me up again, if you please.”

“Of course, sir,” Nellie Semphroch said, taking the cup from the Rebel lieutenant colonel. “You were drinking the Dutch East Indian, weren’t you?”

“That’s right,” the officer answered. “Sure is fine you have so many different kinds to choose from.”

“We’ve been lucky,” Nellie said. She carried the cup to the sink, then took a clean one and filled it with the spicy brew the Confederate evidently enjoyed. She brought it back to him. “Here you are, sir.”

He thanked her, but absently. He and the other Rebs at the table were busy rehashing an engagement up along the Susquehanna that had happened a couple of weeks before. “Damnyankees would have crossed for sure,” an artillery captain said, “if one of my sergeants hadn’t fought his gun with niggers toting shells and loading: his own crew got knocked out in the bombardment.”