American Front (63 page)

He was about halfway home when it started to rain. Herodotus and a couple of the other Negroes with whom he was walking ducked under an awning for protection. The awning, conveniently for them, was in front of a saloon. They went on inside. Cincinnatus kept going. He took off his hat and turned his face up to the warm rain, letting it wash the sweat off him. That felt good. Sometimes, after a hot, muggy day, he felt as crusted in salt as a pretzel.

When he walked past Conroy’s general store, he looked in through the window, as he often did. One lone white man was in there with the storekeeper. After a second glance, Cincinnatus stiffened. That white man was Tom Kennedy.

Kennedy saw him, too, and waved for him to come inside. He did, his heart full of foreboding. A U.S. Army patrol was walking down the other side of the street. One of the men paused to smear petroleum jelly on his bayonet to hold back the rain. All they had to do was look over and recognize Kennedy and everything went up in smoke. They didn’t. They just kept walking, one of them making a lewd crack about what else you could do with a greasy hand.

“Hello, Cincinnatus,” Kennedy said, about as cordially as if Cincinnatus had been white. He didn’t know whether he liked that or not. It made him nervous; he did know that. He wished Kennedy had never come knocking at his door in the middle of the night.

But Kennedy had. “Evenin’,” Cincinnatus answered reluctantly. “What kin I do for you today?”

“Glad you stopped in,” Kennedy said, again sounding as if Cincinnatus were a favorite customer rather than a Negro laborer. “Would have had somebody by to pay you a visit tonight if you hadn’t.”

“Is that a fact?” Cincinnatus sounded dubious. The last thing he wanted was some white man coming around his house late at night. He’d been lucky none of the neighbors had said anything to the U.S. soldiers after Kennedy paid him a visit that first time. Lucky once didn’t have anything to do with lucky twice, though. Half—probably more than half—the Negroes in Covington preferred the USA to the CSA, although
a plague on both their houses
had wide popularity among them, too. “Who wants to visit me, and how come?”

Kennedy and Conroy looked at each other: Kennedy kept doing the talking, which was smart, because Cincinnatus trusted him further than the storekeeper. He said, “We’ve got a delivery we need you to make.” He grinned. “Sort of like old times, isn’t it?”

“Not so you’d notice,” Cincinnatus answered. “What did you have in mind? Drive a truck up in front of my house? Don’t think I’d much fancy that.” He’d been trained to be cautious and polite around whites, so as not to let them know everything that was going on in his head. That was the only thing that kept him from shouting,
Are you out of your skull, Mr. Kennedy, sir?

“Nothing like that,” Kennedy said, raising a soothing hand. “We’ll have somebody bring by a wagon with a mule pulling it—nothing that would look out of place in your part of town.” The unspoken assumption that that was the way things ought to be in the Negro district of Covington grated on Cincinnatus. Oblivious, Kennedy went on, “We’ll have a colored fellow drivin’ it, too, so you don’t need to worry about that, either.”

“You already got a wagon and a driver, you don’t need me, Mr. Kennedy,” Cincinnatus said. He put his hat back on and touched a forefinger to the brim. “See you another time. Evenin’, Mr. Conroy.”

“Get back here,” Conroy snapped as Cincinnatus turned to go. “We know where you live, boy, remember that.”

Cincinnatus had had all the threats he could stomach. Blackmail cut both ways. “I know where you’re at, too, Mr. Conroy. Ain’t never had reason to talk to the Yankee soldiers, but I know.”

Impasse. Conroy glanced at Cincinnatus. He didn’t glare back; in the Confederacy, even the occupied parts of it, blacks showed whites respect whether they deserved it or not. “We’d really rather you did this, Cincinnatus,” Kennedy said. “We’ve got this other fellow, yeah, but we don’t know how reliable he is. We can trust you.”

“You can trust me?” Cincinnatus said. Kennedy’s reasonable tones, in their own way, irked him more than the storekeeper’s bluster. Bitterly, he asked, “How do I know I can trust you? Why should I? Suppose the Confederate States do win this here war. What kind of place are they gonna be for colored folks afterwards? Everything stay the same, it ain’t worth livin’ for us, not hardly.”

Conroy looked as if he’d just taken a big bite out of a Florida lemon. Tom Kennedy sighed. “Reckon it’s going to be some different,” he said. “All the niggers working in factories these days, the CSA could hardly fight the war without ’em. You think they can send ’em all packing, send ’em back to picking cotton and growing rice and tobacco when the war is over? They can try, but you can’t unring a bell. I don’t think it’ll work.”

What he said made the storekeeper look even more unhappy. “Never should have set the niggers free in the first place,” Conroy muttered.

“A little too late to worry about that now, wouldn’t you say?” Kennedy scraped a match on his shoe and lighted a stogie. “Hell, I hear there’s talk about putting Negroes in butternut and giving ’em rifles. You get in a war like this, you’ve got to fight with everything you have.”

“Damn foolishness,” Conroy said. He looked Cincinnatus straight in the eye. “And if you want to tell the Yankees I said so, go right ahead.” He was, at least, honest in his likes and dislikes.

Tom Kennedy blew a smoke ring, then held his cigar in a placatory hand. “We don’t want to get in a quarrel here, Joe,” he said, from which Cincinnatus learned Conroy’s Christian name. “But if a nigger fights for the CSA, how are you going to take his gun away and tell him he’s got to go back to being a nigger once the fighting’s done? He’d spit in your eye, and would you blame him?”

“Shit,” Conroy said, “even the damnyankees got better sense than to go giving niggers guns.”

“Mr. Conroy,” Cincinnatus said quietly, “I ain’t carryin’ no Tredegar rifle, but ain’t I fightin’ for the CSA? The Yankees catch me, they won’t give me no medal. All they do is put me up against a wall and shoot me, same as they’d do with you.”

“He’s right, Joe,” Kennedy said. “Go ahead, tell him he isn’t.”

“He doesn’t want to take the packages over to the Kentucky Smoke House, he ain’t right at all—just a damn lyin’ nigger,” Conroy said.

“Kentucky Smoke House? Hell, you don’t need me to take anything there,” Cincinnatus said. “Y’all could go your own selves, an’ nobody’d notice anything different.” That was only the slightest of exaggerations. The Kentucky Smoke House did up the best barbecue anywhere between North Carolina and Texas. That was what the proprietor, an enormous colored fellow named Apicius, claimed, and by the hordes of Negroes and steady stream of whites who came to the tumbledown shack out of which he operated, he might well have been right.

“Easier sending somebody colored—safer, too,” Kennedy said, which was probably true. “If you’re making the delivery, people will think you’re bringing him tomatoes or spices or something like that. Joe or me, we’d stick out too much hauling crates.”

That was also probably true. Cincinnatus sighed. Sensing his weakening, Conroy said, “Got the wagon and mule out back in the alley, waiting to be loaded.”

Cincinnatus sighed again, and nodded. “Good fellow,” Kennedy said, and tossed him something he caught automatically. “This is for taking the risk.” Cincinnatus looked down at the five-dollar Stonewall in his hand. A moment later, the goldpiece was in his pocket, along with the dollar and a half he’d made (bonus included) for eleven and a half hours of grueling labor on the docks.

Without another word, Conroy led him into the back room and pointed to a couple of crates and a tarp. He opened the door out onto the alley. Cincinnatus picked up the crates, which felt very full and were heavy for their size, then heaved the canvas sheet over them. The rain had stopped, but no guessing whether it might start up again. The weight of the crates and the need for the tarpaulin made Cincinnatus guess they held pamphlets or papers of some sort.

He hadn’t driven a mule for a while; Kennedy had bought motor trucks three years before. But, he discovered, he still knew how. And the mule, a tired beast with drooping ears, didn’t give him any trouble.

Kennedy and Conroy had done one thing right: no one, black or white, paid any attention to a Negro on a battered wagon pulled by a lazy mule. If they’d wanted him to leave a bomb in front of U.S. Army headquarters, he could have done that, too, he thought, and slipped away with no one the wiser.

His nose guided him to the Kentucky Smoke House. A lot of buggies and wagons were tied up nearby, along with a couple of motorcars. Again, he remained inconspicuous. The sweet smell of smoke and cooking meat made spit flood into his mouth when he went inside. There stood Apicius, splashing sauce on a spitted pig’s carcass with a paintbrush.

“Got a couple boxes for you from Mistuh Conroy,” Cincinnatus said, coming up close so nobody else could hear.

The fat cook nodded. “Felix!” he bawled. “Lucullus!” Two youths with his looks but without his bulk came hurrying up to him. He jerked a thumb at Cincinnatus. “He got the packages we been waitin’ fo’.”

His sons—for so Cincinnatus figured them to be—hurried outside and carried the boxes into a back room of the restaurant. One of them gave Cincinnatus a package wrapped in newspapers through which grease was starting to soak. “Best ribs in town,” he said.

“I know that already,” Cincinnatus said, “Obliged.”

He drove Conroy’s wagon back to the general store, then walked home. The smell of the ribs tormented him all the way there. When he opened the door, Elizabeth started to yell at him for being late. That savory package started the job of calming her down. The five-dollar goldpiece finished it.

Because of the Yankee curfew, nights were usually quiet. The sound of banging—not gunfire, but something else—woke Cincinnatus a couple of times. When he headed for the docks the next morning, every other telegraph pole and fence post was adorned with a full-color poster of Teddy Roosevelt leading a detachment of U.S. soldiers, all of them wearing German-style spiked helmets, each one with a baby spitted on the bayonet of his rifle.
PEACE
, the poster said.
FREEDOM
.

In his mind’s eye, Cincinnatus saw lots of Negro boys with hammers and nails running here and there, putting up posters in the dead of night. With his real eyes, he saw U.S. soldiers tearing them down. He didn’t know for certain he’d had anything to do with that. Doing his best to take no notice of the angry U.S. troops, he kept on walking toward the docks.

Once upon a time, Provo, Utah, had probably been a pretty town. Mountains towered to the east and northeast; to the west lay Utah Lake. The streets were wide, and shade trees had lined them. This July, as far as Paul Mantarakis was concerned, the place was nothing but a bottleneck, corking the advance of U.S. forces toward Salt Lake City. The trees had either been blasted to bits by artillery fire or cut down to form barricades across the broad streets. Thanks to the mountains and the lake, you couldn’t go around Provo. You had to go through it.

Mantarakis scratched his left sleeve. He was probably lousy again. The only notice he took of the third stripe on that sleeve was that the double thickness of cloth made scratching harder.

Captain Norman Hinshaw—a captain because of casualties, the same reason Mantarakis was a sergeant—squatted down in a foxhole beside him. He pointed ahead. “The big set of buildings—that big set of ruins, I should say—that’s what’s left of Brigham Young College. That’s where the damned Mormons have all their machine guns, too. That’s what keeps us from taking the whole town.”

“Yes, sir,” Mantarakis said. He knew where the Mormons had their machine guns, all right. They’d killed enough Americans with them. Deadpan, he went on, “Of course, it’s just a few goddamn fanatics doing all the fighting. The rest of the Mormons all love the USA.”

Hinshaw’s narrow, sour face looked even narrower and more sour than usual. “They’re still feeding that tripe to the people back home,” he said. “Some of them may even still believe it. Only soldiers who still believe it are the ones who got shot right off the train.”

“That’s about the size of it, sir,” Mantarakis agreed. As he spoke, he checked right, left, and to the rear. As in Price, the Mormons in Provo had the nasty habit of letting U.S. soldiers overrun their positions, then turning around and shooting them in the back. Paul summed it up as best he could: “If you’re a Mormon in Utah, you hate the USA.”

“Isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” Hinshaw said. “Only people who give us any sort of assistance at all are the ones the Mormons call gentiles—and they assassinate them whenever they get the chance.” He snorted. “Even the sheenies in Utah are gentiles, if you can believe it.”

“I’d believe anything about this damn place,” Paul said. “Anybody who’s seen what we’ve seen getting this far would believe anything.”

Back of the line, back behind the train station, U.S. artillery opened up on Brigham Young College again. Up above, an aeroplane buzzed, spotting for the guns. The Mormons shot at it, but it was too high for their machine guns to reach.

Hinshaw looked up at the aeroplane. “Good for him,” he said. “He’ll find out where the bastards are at, and we’ll blow ’em up. I like that. The more of ’em we kill, the less there are left to kill.”

“You said it, sir,” Paul agreed. “They
do
fight harder than the Rebs, every damn one of ’em.”

“Amen to that,” the captain said. “The Rebs, they’re sons of bitches, but they’re soldiers. When the war comes through, the civilians get the hell out of the way like they’re supposed to. Here, though, anybody over the age of eight, boy or girl, is an even-money bet to be a
franc-tireur
. I heard tell they planted an explosive under a baby, and when one of our soldiers picked up the kid—
boom!
”

Mantarakis wondered if that was true, or something somebody had made up for the sake of the story, or something somebody had made up to keep the troops on their toes. No way to tell, not for certain. That it was even within the realm of possibility said everything that needed saying about the kind of fight the Mormons were putting up.