Walk in Hell

II

Lieutenant General George Armstrong Custer slammed his fist down on the table that held the maps of western Kentucky. “By heaven,” he said, “the War Department’s finally come out with an order that makes sense. General attack all along the line! Draft the orders to implement it here in First Army country, Major Dowling. I’ll want to see them by two o’ clock this afternoon.”

“Yes, sir,” Abner Dowling said, and then, because part of his job as adjutant was saving Custer from himself, he added, “Sir, I don’t believe they mean all units are to move forward at the same moment, only that we are to take the best possible advantage of the Confederates’ embarrassment by striking where they are weakest.”

Saving Custer from himself was a full-time job. Dowling had broad shoulders-there wasn’t much about Dowling that wasn’t broad-and needed them to bear up under the weight of bad temper and worse judgment the general commanding First Army pressed down on him. Custer had always been sure of himself, even as a brash cavalry officer in the War of Secession. Now, at the age of seventy-five, he was downright autocratic…and no more right than he had ever been.

His pouchy, wrinkled, sagging face went from pasty white to dusky purple in the space of a couple of heartbeats. Neither color went well with his drooping mustache, which he peroxided to an approximation of the golden color it had once had naturally. The same applied to the locks of hair that flowed out from under his service cap. He wore the cap all the time, indoors and out, for it concealed the shiny expanse of the crown of his head.

“When I see the order ‘general attack,’ Major, I construe it to mean attack all along the line, and that is what I intend to do,” he snapped now. The only time his voice left the range from petulant to irritable was when he was talking to a war correspondent: then he spoke gently as any sucking dove. “We shall go at the enemy and smash him up.”

“Wouldn’t it be wise, sir, to concentrate our attacks where he shows himself to be less strong, break through there, and then use the advantages we’ve gained to make further advances?” Dowling said, doing his best-as he’d done his best since the outset of the war, with results decidedly mixed-to be the voice of reason.

Defiantly, Custer shook his head. Those dyed locks flipped back and forth. Not even the magic word breakthrough had reached him. “Without their niggers to help ’em, the Rebs are just a pack of weak sisters,” he declared. “One good push and the whole rotten structure they’ve built comes tumbling down.”

“Sir, we’ve been pushing with all we have for the past year and more, and it hasn’t tumbled down yet,” Dowling said. If it had, we’d be a lot deeper into the Confederacy than we are-and even good generals have trouble against the Rebs.

“We’ll drive them out of Morehead’s Horse Mill,” Custer said, “and that, thank God, will have the added benefit of getting us out of Bremen here. You can tell why this town is so small: no one in his right mind would want to live here. And once we have the railroad junction at Morehead’s Horse Mill, how in the name of all that’s holy can the Rebs hope to keep us out of Bowling Green?”

Dowling suspected there would be a number of ways the Confederate forces could keep the U.S. Army out of Bowling Green, even with Negroes in rebellion behind Rebel lines. He didn’t say that to Custer; a well-developed sense of self-preservation kept his lips sealed however much his brain seethed.

What he did say, after some thought, was, “So you’ll want me to prepare the orders with the Schwerpunkt aimed toward Morehead’s Horse Mill?” With the Confederates in disorder, they might actually take that town. Then, after another buildup, they could think about moving in the direction of-not yet on-Bowling Green.

“Schwerpunkt.” General Custer made it sound like a noise a sick horse might make. “It’s all very well to have the German Empire for an ally-without them, we’d be helpless against the Rebs and the limeys and the frogs and the Canucks. But we imitate them too much, if you ask me. A general in command of an army can’t walk to the outhouse without the General Staff looking in the half-moon window to make sure he undoes his trouser buttons in the proper order. And all these damned foreign words fog up the simple art of war.”

The United States had lost the War of Secession. Then, twenty years later, they’d lost the Second Mexican War. Germany or its Prussian core, in the meantime, had smashed the Danes, the Austrians, and the French, each in short order. As far as Dowling was concerned, the country that lost wars needed to do some learning from the side that won them.

That was something else he couldn’t say. He tried guile: “If we do break through at Morehead’s Horse Mill, sir, we’ll be in a good position to roll up the Rebel line all the way back to the Ohio River, or else to push hard toward Bowling Green and make the enemy react to us.”

All of that was true. All of it was reasonable. None of it was what Custer wanted to hear. Much of Dowling’s job was telling Custer things he didn’t want to hear and making him pay attention to them. What Dowling wanted was to get up to the front and command units for himself. The only reason he didn’t apply for a transfer was his conviction that more men could handle a battalion in combat than could keep General Custer out of mischief.

Before Custer could go off like a Yellowstone geyser, a pretty young light-skinned colored woman poked her head into the room with the map table and said, “General, suh, I got your lunch ready in the kitchen. Mutton chops, mighty fine.”

Custer’s whole manner changed. “I’ll be there directly, Olivia. Thank you, my dear,” he said, courtly as you please. To Dowling, he added, “We’ll resume this discussion after I’ve eaten. I do declare, Major, that young lady is the one redeeming feature I have yet found in western Kentucky.”

“Er-yes, sir,” Dowling said tonelessly. Custer took himself off with as much spry alacrity as a man carrying three quarters of a century could manage. He didn’t bother hiding the way he pursued Olivia. Amused First Army rumor said she’d been caught, too, not just chaste. Dowling thought the rumor likely true: the general carried on like an assotted fool whenever he was around his cook and housekeeper. The adjutant was more inclined to fault Olivia’s taste than Custer’s. You’d think the old boy would have had his last stand years before.

An orderly came in with the day’s mail. “Where shall I dump all this, sir?” he asked Dowling.

“Why don’t you give it to me, Frazier? The general’s eating his lunch.” Or possibly his serving wench. Dowling shook his head to get the lewd images out of it. Coughing, he went on, “I’ll sort through it for him so he can go through it quickly when he’s finished.”

“Yes, sir.” Frazier handed him the bundle and departed. Dowling made three piles on the map table. One was for administrative matters pertaining to First Army, most of which he’d handle himself. One was for communications from the War Department. He’d end up handling most of those, too, but Custer would want to look at them first. And one was for personal letters. Custer would answer some of those-most likely, the ones full of adulation-himself. Dowling would get stuck with the rest, typing replies for the great man’s signature. His lip curled.

And then, all at once, the sour expression vanished from his broad, plump, ruddy face. He arranged the piles and waited with perfect equanimity for General Custer to return. Meanwhile, he studied the map. If they could break through at Morehead’s Horse Mill, they really might accomplish something.

Custer came back looking absurdly pleased with himself. Maybe he’d managed to get a hand under Olivia’s long black dress. “The mail came in, sir,” Dowling said, as if reporting the arrival of a new regiment.

“Ah, capital! Let’s see what sort of big thing it brings us today,” Custer said grandly, hauling out a piece of slang forgotten by almost everyone since the War of Secession. As Dowling had known he would, he picked up the stack of personal mail first. As Dowling had known he would, he went from grand to glum in a matter of moments. “Oh. A letter from my wife.”

“Was there, sir? I didn’t notice,” Dowling lied. He twisted the knife a little: “I’m sure you must be glad to hear from her.”

“Of course I am.” Custer sounded like a liar himself. His letter opener was shaped like a cavalry saber. He used it to slit the envelope. Elizabeth Custer was in the habit of writing long, even voluminous, letters. So was the general, come to that, when he bothered to write her at all. Dowling would have bet he hadn’t said anything about Olivia in any of them, though.

Custer fumbled for his reading glasses, perched them on his nose, and began to wade through the missive. Suddenly, he turned red, then white. His hand shook. He dropped one of the pages he hadn’t yet read.

“Is something wrong, sir?” Dowling asked, wondering if God had chosen this moment to give First Army a new commander.

But Custer shook his head, sending his curls flying once more. “No,” he said. “It’s good news, as a matter of fact.” If it was, no one had reacted so badly to good news since Pyrrhus of Epirus cried, One more such victory and we are ruined! Custer went on, “Libbie, it seems, has secured permission from the powers that be to enter into the war zone, and will soon be brightening my life here in Bremen for what she describes as an extended visit.”

“How lucky you are, sir, that you’ll have your own dear wife here to help you bear the heavy burden of command.” Dowling brought that out with an absolutely straight face. He was proud of himself. None of the delight he felt showed in his voice, either. Having Elizabeth Custer come to Bremen for a visit was better, more delightful news than any for which he’d dared hope.

He wondered what sort of convenient illness Olivia would contract the day before Mrs. Custer arrived, and whether she’d recover the day after Mrs. Custer left or perhaps that very afternoon. By the thoughtful look in his eye, the distinguished general might have been wondering the same thing.

Whatever Custer came up with, that, by God, was not something he could pile onto the shoulders of his long-suffering adjutant. He’d have to take care of it all by his lonesome.

“I’ll draft the orders for the push against Morehead’s Horse Mill,” Dowling said.

“Yes, go ahead,” Custer agreed abstractedly. Dowling had been sure he would be abstracted at the moment. Custer had made it plain he had no use for German terminology. Dowling reminded himself not to call the concentration against Morehead’s Horse Mill the Schwerpunkt of First Army action. But German was a useful language. English, for instance, had nothing close to Schadenfreude to describe the glee Dowling felt at his vain, pompous, foolish commander’s discomfiture.

Despite the many things Lieutenant Commander Roger Kim-ball had thought he might do in a submarine-and his fantasies had considerable scope, ranging from laying a pretty girl in the captain’s cramped cabin to sinking two Yankee battleships with the same spread of torpedoes-sailing up a South Carolina river on gunboat duty hadn’t made the list. But here he was, heading up the Pee Dee to bombard the revolting Negroes-in both senses of the word-who called themselves the Congaree Socialist Republic.

Diesel smoke poured from the exhaust of the Bonefish at the back of the conning tower on which he stood. The submersible drew only eleven feet of water, which meant it could go farther up the river before grounding itself than most of the surface warships that had been in Charleston harbor when the rebellion broke out.

All the same, Kimball was proceeding at a quarter speed and had a man with a sounding line at the bow. The sailor turned and called, “Three fathoms twain, sir!” He cast the line again. The lead weight splashed down into the muddy water of the Pee Dee.

“Three fathoms twain,” Kimball echoed to show he’d heard. Twenty feet-plenty of water under the Bonefish’s keel. He turned to the only other officer on the submersible, a junior lieutenant named Tom Brearley, who couldn’t possibly have been as young as he looked. “What I wish we had here is a river gunboat,” he said. “Then we could haul bigger guns further upstream than we’ll manage with our boat.”

“That’s a fact, sir,” Brearley agreed. He wasn’t long out of the Confederate naval academy at Mobile, and agreed with just about everything his commander said. After a moment, though, he added, “We have to do the best we can with what we’ve got.”

That was also a fact, as Kimball was glumly aware. His own features, blunter and harsher than Brearley’s, assumed a bulldog cast as he surveyed the weaponry aboard the Bonefish. The three-inch deck gun had been designed to sink freighters, not to bombard land targets, but it would serve that purpose. For the mission, a machine gun had been hastily bolted to the top of the conning tower and another one to the deck behind it. Take all together, the three guns and the vital sounding line used up everyone in the eighteen-man crew who wasn’t required to stay below and keep the diesel running.

The hatch behind Kimball was open. From it wafted the reek with which he had become intimately familiar in three years aboard submersibles, a reek made up of oil and sweat and heads that never quite worked in the manner in which they’d been designed. Here, at least, as opposed to out on the open sea, he didn’t have to keep the hatch dogged if he didn’t want to flood the narrow steel tube inside which he and his men did their job.

“Three fathoms twain!” the sailor with the lead sang out again.

“Three fathoms twain,” Kimball repeated. His eyes flicked back and forth, back and forth, from one side of the Pee Dee to the other. Most places, forest-or maybe jungle was a better word-came right down to the riverbank. He didn’t like that. Anything could be hiding in there. He felt eyes on him, though he couldn’t see anyone. He didn’t like that, either.

Here and there, plantations had been carved out of the forest. He didn’t know what they grew in these parts-maybe rice, maybe indigo, maybe cotton. He was from the hills of northeastern Arkansas himself. The farm where he’d grown up turned out a little wheat, a little tobacco, a few hogs, and a lot of strapping sons. Some Confederate officers looked down their noses at him because of his back-country accent. If you were good enough at what you did, though, how you talked mattered less.

But that wasn’t why he growled whenever they passed a plantation. The mansions in which the Low Country bluebloods had made their homes were one and all burnt-out shells of their former selves. “I wonder if that happened to Marshlands, too,” he muttered.

“Sir?” Tom Brearley said.

“Never mind.” Kimball knew how to keep his mouth shut. It was none of Brearley’s business that he’d been in the sack with the mistress of Marshlands at a cheap hotel when the Negro uprising broke out. He hoped Anne Colleton was all right. Like him, she had a way of running straight toward trouble. That was probably a good part of what had attracted the two of them to each other. It made for a good submarine commander. In a civilian, though, in what might as well have been the middle of a war…

A rifle cracked in the thick undergrowth. A bullet ricocheted off the side of the conning tower, a yard from Kimball’s feet. He felt the vibration through the soles of his shoes. The rifle cracked again-or maybe it was another one. The round slapped past his ear.

“Hose ’em down!” he shouted to the men at the machine guns. Both guns started hammering away in the general direction from which the shots had come. The greenery by the riverbank whipped back and forth, as if in a hailstorm rather than a hail of bullets. Whether that hail of bullets was doing anything about getting rid of the uprisen Negroes who’d fired on the Bonefish was another matter. Kimball didn’t know enough about fighting on land to guess one way or the other. He suspected he would acquire more of an education in that regard than he really wanted.

“Wouldn’t it be fine, Tom, if we could land a company of Marines and let them do the dirty work for us?” he said.

“It surely would, sir,” Brearley answered. He looked up and down the length of the Bonefish. “It would be nice if this boat could hold a company of Marines. For that matter, it would be nice if this boat would hold all of us.”

“Hey, don’t talk like that. You’re an officer, so you’ve got a bunk to call your own, and a good foot of room between the edge of it and the main corridor,” Kimball said. “You sleep in a hammock or triple-decked in five and a half feet of space and you’ll find out all about crowded.”

“Yes, sir,” Brearley said. “I know about that from training.”

“You’d better remember it,” Kimball told him. Another reason he’d joined the submersible service was that you couldn’t be an aristocrat here-the boats weren’t big enough to permit it.

He was about to say something more when the man at the bow cried out and tumbled into the Pee Dee. The fellow came up a moment later, splashing feebly. Around him, the muddy water took on a reddish cast.

Then one of the sailors working the conning-tower machine gun crumpled. He pounded at the roof of the conning tower in agony, but his legs didn’t move-he’d been hit in the spine. Crimson spread from around a neat hole in the back of his tunic.

For a moment, that didn’t mean anything to Kimball. Then another bullet cracked past his head, and he realized the fire was coming not from the northern bank of the Pee Dee, the one the machines guns were working over, but from the southern bank.

“Christ, we’re caught in a crossfire!” he exclaimed. The Pee Dee was no more than a couple of hundred yards wide. The Negroes hiding in the bushes had only rifles (he devoutly hoped they had only rifles), but they didn’t need to be the greatest shots in the world to start picking off his men. He thought about turning the deck gun on the southern riverbank, but that would have been like flailing around with a sledgehammer, trying to smash a cockroach you couldn’t even see.

“What do we do, sir?” Brearley asked.

Without waiting for orders, one of the men from the deck gun crew had leaped into the river after the wounded leadsman. He hauled the fellow back up onto the deck. It might have been in the nick of time. Kimball thought he saw something sinuous moving through the water toward the submersible, then going away. Did alligators live in the Pee Dee? Nobody had briefed him, one way or the other.

He didn’t have a doctor on board the Bonefish, or even a pharmacist’s mate. He knew a little about first aid, and so did one of the petty officers who kept the diesels going. He wished again for a river gunboat, one with its guns housed in protective turrets against just this sort of nuisance fire. It would have been nuisance fire against such a gunboat, anyway. Against the vessel he commanded, it was a great deal worse.

“All hands below!” he shouted. The sailors on deck scrambled up the ladder to the top of the conning tower, then swarmed down into the Bonefish. The leadsman had a bullet through his upper left arm, a wound from which he’d recover if it didn’t fester. He got up and down as fast as an uninjured sailor. The man who’d been hit in the spine presented a harder problem. Moving him at all would do his wound no good, but leaving him where he sprawled was asking for him to be hit again and killed.

Kimball waited until he and the wounded machine gunner were the only men left on top of the conning tower. Bullets kept whipping past them. At the top of the ladder, Tom Brearley waited. “Nichols, I’m going to get you below now,” Kimball said.

“Don’t worry about me, sir,” the sailor answered. “What the hell good am I like this?”

“Lots of people in your shoes now,” Kimball told him. “That’s a fact-goddamn war. They’ll figure out plenty of things for you to do. And the wheelchairs they have nowadays let you get around pretty well.”

Nichols groaned, maybe in derision, maybe just in pain. Kim-ball ignored that. As carefully as he could, he slid the wounded sailor toward the hatch. When Brearley had secure hold of Nichols’ feet, he guided the man’s torso through the hatchway, then hung on to him as they descended.

The petty officer-his name was Ben Coulter-was already bandaging the leadsman’s arm. His jowly, acne-scarred face twisted into a grimace when he saw how Nichols was dead from the waist down. “Nothing I can do about that, sir,” he told Kim-ball. “Wish there was, but-” He spread his hands. He’d washed them before he got to work, but he still had dirt ground into the folds of his knuckles and grease under his nails.

“I know,” Kimball said unhappily. Then he burst out, “God damn it to hell, we’re not built to fight close-in actions. We have any sheet metal or anything we can use to shield our gunners’ backs?” The deck gun had a shield for the front, good against shell splinters but maybe not against bullets. As things stood, the machine guns were altogether unprotected.

“Maybe we could do something like that, sir,” Coulter said. He hesitated. “You mean to go on after this?”

“Hadn’t thought of doing anything else,” Kimball answered. He looked from the petty officer to Tom Brearley to the rest of the crew packed together in the cramped chamber under the conning tower. “Haven’t had any orders to do anything else, either. Anybody who doesn’t want to go on, I’ll put him off the boat right now and he can take his chances!”

“You mean here, among the niggers?” somebody asked. Lucky for him, he was behind Kimball, who couldn’t tell who he was.

“Hell, yes, I mean here among the niggers,” the submersible commander said. “Anybody who thinks I’m going to back off and let those black bastards-those Red bastards-take my country away from me or help the damnyankees whip us had better think twice. Maybe three times.” He looked around again. If anybody disagreed with him, it didn’t show. That was the way things were supposed to work. He nodded once, brusquely. “All right. Let’s get to work and figure out how to do what needs doing.”

Tiny Yossel Reisen woke up and started to wail. When he woke up, everyone in the crowded apartment woke up with him. Flora Hamburger opened her eyes. It was dark. She groaned-softly, so as not to disturb anyone who, by some miracle, might still have been asleep. This was the third time her baby nephew had awakened in the night. Her parents and siblings had to get up too early to go to work as things were. When a howling baby cut into what little sleep they got, life was hard.

“Sha, sha-hush, hush,” Sophie Reisen murmured wearily as she stumbled toward the baby’s cradle. Flora’s older sister scooped Yossel out, sat down in a chair, and began to nurse him. Little urgent sucking noises replaced his desperate cries.

Flora rolled over on the bed she shared with her younger sister Esther and tried to go back to sleep. She’d just succeeded when the alarm clock beside her head went off, clattering as if all the fire alarms in New York City were boiled down into its malevolent little case.

Blindly, almost drunk with weariness, she fumbled at the clock till it shut up. Then she staggered out of bed and splashed cold water on her face to bring back a semblance of life. She stared at herself in the mirror above the sink. Her dark eyes, usually so lively, were dull, with purplish circles under them. Her skin had a pallor that had nothing to do with fashion, but threw her cheekbones and prominent nose and chin into sharp relief. And he’s not even my baby, she thought with tired resentment.

Esther pushed her away from the mirror. She dressed quickly. By the time she got out to the kitchen, her mother had sweet rolls and coffee pale with milk already on the table. Her younger brothers, David and Isaac, were there eating and drinking. They’d risen no earlier than she had, but they hadn’t had to struggle with a recalcitrant corset.

Her father came in a moment after she did. The biggest mug of coffee was reserved for him. He already had his pipe going. The tobacco was harsher than what he’d used before the war cut off imports from the Confederacy, but the odor of smoke was still part of breakfast as far as Flora was concerned. Benjamin Hamburger bit into a roll, sipped his coffee, and nodded approvingly. “That’s good, Sarah,” he called to Flora’s mother, as he did every morning.

Sophie sat down, too. “He’s asleep again,” she said, sounding half asleep herself. “How long it will last-Gott vayss.” Her shrug was barely visible, as if she lacked the energy to raise her shoulders any higher. She probably did.

Flora Hamburger’s eyes went to the framed photograph of Yossel Reisen-baby Yossel’s father-near the divan in the living room. There he stood in his Army uniform, looking nothing like the yeshiva-bucher he’d been till he enlisted. Because he was going into the Army and might very well never come back, Sophie, who’d been his fiancee then, had given him a going-away present as old as history. He’d given her one as old as history, too, though it had taken nine months to find out whether that one was a boy or a girl.

He had married her when he came back to the Lower East Side on leave: the baby did bear his name. That was all of him it had, though; shortly before Sophie’s time of confinement, he’d been killed in one of the meaningless battles down in Virginia.

Flora had hated the war long before it came home to her family. As a Socialist Party activist, she’d done everything she could to keep the Socialist delegation in Congress-the second-largest bloc, behind the dominant Democrats but far ahead of the Republicans-from voting for war credits. She’d failed. Now it was the Socialists’ war, too. She and her party were to blame for that picture of a man who wasn’t coming home, and for so many like it from the black-bordered casualty lists the papers printed every day.

Her father, her sisters, her brother hurried off to work in the sweatshops that, these days, turned endless bolts of green-gray cloth into tunics and trousers and caps and puttees for men to wear as they went out to get slaughtered. David had just turned eighteen. She wondered how long it would be before he got his conscription call. Not long, she thought worriedly, not at the rate the war was going through the young men of two continents.

Before long, it was time for Flora to go, too. She kissed her mother on the cheek, saying, “I’ll see you tonight. I hope the baby isn’t too much trouble.”

Sarah Hamburger smiled. “I’ve had a lot of practice with babies by now, don’t you think?” She turned a speculative eye on Flora. “One of these days, alevai, it would be nice to take care of one of yours.”

That got Flora out of the apartment in a hurry. She didn’t even wait to adjust her picture hat in front of the mirror, but put it on as she was walking downstairs. If it was crooked, too bad. Her mother didn’t see, wouldn’t see, that living a full life didn’t have to include a life full of men (or full of one man) and full of babies.

Socialist Party headquarters for the Fourteenth Ward were in a crowded second-floor office above a butcher shop on Centre Market Court, across the street from the stalls and little shops in the Centre Market. Buyers already went from stall to store, looking for early morning bargains. Soldiers’ Circle men prowled through the marketplace, some of them wearing armbands, others pins, all of them carrying truncheons or wearing pistols on their hips. They’d been suppressing dissent and resistance to the war in Socialist neighborhoods ever since the Remembrance Day riots.

As often happened, a couple of them were leaning up against the brick wall near the stairway up to Socialist Party headquarters. They’d eased off on that for a time, but had come back in greater force since the Socialist uprising in the Confederate States. If the oppressed Negroes could rise up in righteous revolutionary fury there, what about the oppressed proletariat of all colors in the USA?

Flora waved to Max Fleischmann, the butcher downstairs. He waved back, smiling; she helped keep the Soldiers’ Circle goons from bothering him. Nothing could keep them from leering at her. Not by accident did the flowers in her hat conceal a couple of long, sharp hatpins.

Perhaps grouchy from lack of sleep, she glared back at the Soldiers’ Circle men. “I don’t know why you waste your time hanging around here,” she said, exaggerating for effect. “Aren’t you grateful that people who see the need for class struggle are helping the United States win the war?”

“Reds are Reds, whether they’re black or white,” one of the men answered. “We’ve got the answer for any what gets out o’ line.” He set his fist by the side of his neck, then jerked his arm sharply upward and let his head fall to one side, as if he’d been hanged. “Anybody tries a revolution here, that’s what they get, and that’s what they deserve.”

“I’m sure you would have told George Washington the same thing,” Flora said, and went upstairs. She felt the eyes of the Soldiers’ Circle men like daggers in her back till she opened the door and walked inside.

Party headquarters, as usual, put her in mind of a three-ring circus crammed into about half a ring. Typewriters clattered. People shouted into telephones in Yiddish and English, often with scant regard for which language they were using at any given moment. Other people stood in the narrow spaces between desks or sat on the corners of the desks themselves and argued loudly and passionately about anything that happened to cross their minds. Flora looked on the chaos and smiled. It was, in an even larger, even more disorderly style, her family writ large.

“Good morning, Maria,” she said to her secretary as she hung her hat on a tree near the desk.

“Good morning,” Maria Tresca answered. She was one of the few gentiles at the Fourteenth Ward office, but was as enthusiastic for Socialism and its goals as anyone else; her sister, Angelina, had died in the Remembrance Day riots the year before. She studied Flora, then added, “You look pleased with yourself.”

“Do I? Well, maybe I do,” Flora said. “I gave the bully boys downstairs something to think about.” She explained her crack about Washington. Maria grinned from ear to ear and clapped her hands together.

Over at the next desk, Herman Bruck hung up the telephone on which he’d been speaking and sent Flora a stern look. A stern look from Bruck was not something to bear lightly. He might have stepped out of the pages of a fashion catalogue, from perfectly trimmed hair and neat mustache to suits always of fine wool and most modish cut. He often made a spokesman for the Socialists, simply because he looked so elegant. Money had not done it for him; coming from a family of fancy tailors had.

“Washington was no revolutionary, not in the Marxist sense of the word,” he said now. “He didn’t transfer wealth or power from the aristocracy to the bourgeoisie, and certainly not to the peasants. All he did was replace British planters and landowners with their American counterparts.”

Flora tapped a fingernail against the top of her desk in annoyance. Herman Bruck would probably have made an even better Talmudic scholar than poor Yossel Reisen; he delighted in hairsplitting and precision. Only in chosen ideology did he differ from Yossel.

“For one thing, Soldiers’ Circle goons don’t care about the Marxist sense of the word,” Flora said, holding onto her patience with both hands. “For another, by their use of the term, Washington was a revolutionary, and I got them to think about the consequences of denying the right to revolution now. Either that or I got them angry at me, which will do as well.”

“It’s not proper,” Bruck answered stiffly. “We should be accurate about these matters. Educating the nation must be undertaken in an exact and thoroughgoing fashion.”

“Yes, Herman.” Flora suppressed a sigh. The one thing Bruck lacked that would have made him a truly effective political operative was any trace of imagination. Before he could go on with what would, no doubt, have been a disputation to consume the entire morning, his telephone rang. He gave whoever was on the other end of the line the same sharply focused attention he had turned on Flora.

Her own phone jangled a moment later. “Socialist Party, Flora Hamburger,” she said, and then, “Oh-Mr. Levitzsky. Yes, by all means we will support the garment workers’ union there. That contract will be honored or the rank and file will strike, war or no war. Teddy Roosevelt makes a lot of noise about a square deal for the workers. We’ll find out if he means it, and we’ll let the people know if he doesn’t.”

“I’ll take that word to the factory manager,” Levitzsky said. “If he knows the union and the Party are in solidarity here, he won’t have the nerve to go on calling the contract just a scrap of paper. Thank you, Miss Hamburger.”

That was the sort of phone call that made Flora feel she’d earned her salary for the day. Workers were so vulnerable to pressure from employers, especially with the war making everything all the more urgent: or at least seem all the more urgent. The Party had the collective strength to help redress the balance.

Herman Bruck got off the phone himself a minute or so later. In a new tone of voice-as if he hadn’t been criticizing her ideological purity a moment before-he asked, “Would you like to go to the moving pictures with me tonight after work? Geraldine Farrar is supposed to be very fine in the new version of Carmen.”

“I really don’t think so, not tonight-” Flora began.

Bruck went on as if she hadn’t spoken: “The bullfight scene, they say, is especially bully.” He smiled at his pun. Flora didn’t. “So many people wanted to sit in the amphitheater while it was being photographed, I’ve heard, that they didn’t have to hire any extras.”

“I’m sorry, Herman. Maybe when Yossel sleeps a little better, so I can be sure I’ll sleep a little better. He kept everyone awake through a lot of last night.”

Herman Bruck looked like a kicked puppy. He’d been trying to court Flora almost as long as they’d known each other. The next luck he had would be the first. That didn’t stop him from going right on trying. Abstractly, Flora admired his persistence: the same persistence he showed in his Party work. She admired it even more there than when it was aimed at her.

Turning away from Bruck and toward Maria Tresca, she asked, “What’s next?”

Jake Featherston stuck out his mess tin. The Negro cook for the First Richmond Howitzers gave him a tinful of stew. He carried it back among the ruins of Hampstead, Maryland, and sat down with his gun crew to eat.

Michael Scott, the three-inch howitzer’s loader, said, “Stew tastes pretty good, Sarge. Now all we have to do is hope it ain’t poisoned.”

“Funny,” Jake said. “Funny like a truss.” He dug in with his spoon. Scott had been right; the stew was good. Trying to look on the bright side of things, he went on, “This Metellus, he seems like a good nigger. He knows his place, and he don’t give anybody any trouble.”

“Not that we know about, anyways.” That was Will Cooper, one of the shell haulers for the three-inch gun. Like Scott, he was a kid; both of them had joined the regiment after heavy casualties along the Susquehanna thinned out most of the veterans who had started the war with Jake. But the kids had been around for a while now; their butternut uniforms were stained and weather-beaten, and the red facings on their collar tabs that showed them to be artillerymen had faded to a washed-out pink.

Featherston kept on eating, but scowled as he did so. The trouble was, Cooper was right, no two ways about it. “Be a long time before we can trust the niggers again,” Jake said glumly.

Heads bobbed up and down in response to that. “At this here gun, we were lucky-this whole battery, we were lucky,” Scott said. “Our laborers just ran off. They didn’t try and turn our guns on us or on the infantrymen in front of us.”

Now Jake spoke with fond reminiscence: “Yeah, and we gave the damnyankees a good warm welcome when they came up out of their trenches, too. They figured we couldn’t do nothin’ about ’em with all our niggers givin’ us a hard time, but I reckon we showed ’em different.”

When the wind blew out of the north, it wafted the stench of unburied Yankee bodies into the Confederate lines. It was a horrible stench, sweet and ripe and thick enough to slice. But it was also the stench of victory, or at least the stench of defeat avoided. U.S. forces had driven the Confederacy out of Pennsylvania, but the Stars and Bars still flew over most of Maryland and over Washington, D.C.

Occasional crackles of gunfire came from the front: scouts thinking they’d spotted Yankee raiders, snipers shooting at enemies in the trenches rash enough to expose any part of themselves even for a moment, and, on the other side of the line, Yankee riflemen ready to do unto the Confederates what was being done unto them.

Another rifle shot rang out, then two more. Featherston’s head came up and his gaze sharpened, as if he were a coon dog taking a scent. Those shots hadn’t come from the front, but from well behind the line. He scowled again. “That’s likely to be some damn nigger trying to bushwhack our boys.”

“Bastards,” Cooper muttered. “We finish dealin’ with them, they’re gonna spend the next hundred years wishin’ they didn’t try raisin’ their hands to us, and you can take that to church.”

“I know,” Featherston said. “Back in the old days, my old man was an overseer. Till they laid him in the ground, he said we never ought to have manumitted the niggers. I always thought, you got to change with the times. But with the kind of thanks we got, damned if I think that way any more.”

The whole gun crew nodded in response to that. Jake finished his stew. Maybe Metellus really knew which side his bread was buttered on and did all the things he was supposed to do. But for all Jake knew, maybe he unbuttoned his fly and pissed in the stewpot when nobody was looking. How could you tell for sure? You couldn’t, till maybe too late.

From what he’d heard, it had been like that up and down the CSA-worst in the cotton belt, where whites were thin on the ground in big stretches of the country, but bad everywhere. He didn’t know how many of the ten million or so Negroes in the Confederacy had joined the rebellion, but enough had so that some troops had had to leave the fighting line against the USA to help put them down.

No wonder, then, that the damnyankees were pushing forward in western Virginia, in Kentucky, and in Sonora. The wonder was that the Confederate positions hadn’t fallen apart altogether. He glanced over to his gun. The quick-firing three-incher, copied from the French 75, was one big reason they hadn’t. The USA lacked a field piece that came close to matching it.

He heard footsteps coming up from the south. He wore a pistol on his hip, in case Yankee infantry somehow God forbid got close enough to his gun for him to need a personal weapon. He hadn’t drawn it till trouble broke out among the Negroes. Now-Now he was a long way from the only artilleryman to have a weapon ready. “Who goes there?” he demanded.

“This Battery C, First Richmond Howitzers?” Whoever owned the voice, he sounded crisp and decisive. He also sounded white. Featherston knew that didn’t necessarily mean anything, though. He’d known plenty of Negroes who could put on white accents. But this voice…He scratched his head. He thought he’d heard it before.

“You’re in the right place,” he answered. “Advance and be recognized.” He didn’t take his hand off the pistol.

Into the firelight came a small, spruce major and a bedraggled Negro. Jake and the rest of the men in the gun crew scrambled to their feet and stood at attention. The major’s pale eyes flashed; a hawk might have wished for such a piercing gaze. Those pale eyes fixed on Jake. “I know you. You’re Sergeant Featherston.” The fellow spoke with assurance.

“Yes, sir,” Featherston said. He had met this officer before. “Major Potter, isn’t it, sir?”

“That’s right. Clarence Potter, Intelligence, Army of Northern Virginia.” None too gently, he shoved the Negro up close to the fire. “And since you were here when I last visited the battery, perhaps you will be good enough to confirm for me that this ragged scoundrel”-he shoved the Negro again-“is in fact Pompey, former body servant to your commander, Captain Stuart. Captain Jeb Stuart III, that is.” He spoke the battery commander’s full name with a certain savage relish.

Everybody in the gun crew stared at the Negro. Jake could make a pretty good guess as to what the men were thinking. He was thinking a lot of the same things himself. But Potter hadn’t asked the question of anyone save him. He had to look closely to be certain, then said, “Yes, sir, that’s Pompey. He’s usually a lot neater and cleaner than he is now, that’s all.”

“He’s been living a little harder lately than he’s used to, poor darling.” Potter spoke with flaying sarcasm. He pointed to Will Cooper. “You. Private. Go find Captain Stuart and bring him here, wherever he is and whatever he’s doing. I don’t care if he’s got some woman in bed with him-tell him to take it out, get dressed, and get his ass down here.”

“Yes, sir,” Cooper said, and disappeared.

Pompey spoke up: “I never done nothin’ bad to you, did I, Marse Jake?” His voice didn’t have the mincing lilt it had carried when he served as Captain Stuart’s man. He’d put on airs then, as if he were something special himself because of who his master was.

Before Featherston could answer, Potter’s voice cracked like a whiplash: “You keep your mouth shut until I tell you to speak.” Pompey nodded, which Jake thought wise. The major was not the sort of man to disobey, most especially not if you were in his power.

Will Cooper came back with Captain Stuart a few minutes later. The captain bore a strong resemblance to his famous father and even more famous grandfather, except that, instead of their full beards, he wore a mustache and a little tuft of hair under his lower lip, giving him the look of a seventeenth-century French soldier of fortune.

“Captain,” Major Potter said, as he had to Jake Featherston, “is this nigger here your man Pompey?”

“Yes, he’s my servant,” Stuart replied after a moment; he’d needed a second look to be certain, too. “What is the meaning of-?”

“Shut up, Captain Stuart,” Potter interrupted, as harshly as he had when Pompey spoke without his leave. Jake’s eyes widened. Nobody had ever addressed Jeb Stuart III that way in his presence. Jeb Stuart, Jr., wore wreathed stars on his collar tabs and was a mighty power in the War Department down in Richmond. But Potter sounded utterly sure of himself: “I’ll ask the questions around here.”

“Now see here, Major,” Stuart said. “I don’t care for your tone.”

“I don’t give a damn, Stuart,” Clarence Potter returned. “I was trying to sniff out Red subversion among the niggers attached to this army last year-last year, Stuart. And I got information that your nigger Pompey wasn’t to be trusted, and I wanted to interrogate him properly. Do you remember that?”

“I did nothing wrong,” Stuart said stiffly. But he looked like a man who had just taken a painful wound and was trying to see if he could still stand up.

“No, eh?” The major from Intelligence knocked him down with contemptuous ease. “You didn’t talk to your daddy the general? You didn’t have me overruled and the investigation quashed? You know better than that, I know better than that-and the War Department knows better than that, too.”

Till now, Jake had never seen Captain Stuart at a loss. Whatever else you said about him, he fought his guns as aggressively as any man would like, and showed a contempt for the dangers of the battlefield any hero of the War of Secession would have envied. But he’d never been threatened with loss of status and influence, only death or mutilation. Those latter two might have been easier to face.

“Major, I think you misunderstood-” he began.

“I misunderstood nothing, Captain,” Potter said coldly. “I was trying to do my duty, and you prevented that. If you’d been right, you’d have gotten away with it. But this nigger was taken in arms with a band of Red rebels, and every sign is that he wasn’t just a fighter. He was a leader in this conspiracy, and had been for a long time. If I’d questioned him last year-but no, you wouldn’t let that happen.” Potter’s headshake was a masterpiece of mockery.

“Pompey?” Stuart shook his head, too, but in amazement. “I can’t believe it. I won’t believe it.”

“Frankly, Captain, I don’t give a damn,” Potter said. “If I had my way, I’d bust you down to private, give you a rifle, and let you die gloriously charging a Yankee machine gun. Can’t have everything, I suppose, no matter how much damage your damn-fool know-it-all attitude cost your country. But your free ride to the top is gone, Stuart, and that’s a fact. If you drop dead at ninety-nine and stay in the Army all that time, you’ll be buried a captain.”

Silence stretched. Into it, Pompey said, “Marse Jeb, I-”

“Shut up,” Potter told him. “Get moving.” He shoved the Negro on his way. Jeb Stuart III stared after them. Jake Featherston studied his battery commander. He didn’t quite know what he thought. With Stuart under a cloud, life was liable to get harder for everybody: the captain’s name had been one to conjure with when it came to keeping shells in supply and such. On the other hand, as an overseer’s son Jake wasn’t sorry to watch an aristocrat taken down a peg. More chances for me, he thought, and vowed to make the most of them.

The USS Dakota steamed over the beautiful deep-blue waters of the Pacific, somewhere south and west of the Sandwich Islands. Sam Carsten was delighted to have the battleship back in fighting trim once more; she had been laid up in a Honolulu dry-dock for months, taking repairs after an unfortunate encounter with a Japanese torpedo.

Carsten admired the deep blue sea. He admired the even bluer sky. He heartily approved of the tropic breezes that kept it from seeming as hot as it really was. The sun that shone brightly down from that blue, blue sky…

Try as he would, he couldn’t make himself admire the sun. He was very, very fair, with golden hair, blue eyes, and a pink skin that turned red in any weather and would not turn tan for love nor money. When he was serving in San Francisco, he’d thought himself one step this side of heaven, heaven being defined as Seattle. Honolulu, however pretty it was, made a closer approximation to hell. He’d smeared every sort of lotion known to pharmacist’s mate and Chinese apothecary on his hide. None had done the least bit of good.

“Far as I’m concerned, the damn limeys were welcome to keep the Sandwich Islands,” he muttered under his breath as he swabbed a stretch of the Dakota’s deck. He chuckled wryly. “Somehow, though, folks who outrank me don’t give a damn that I sunburn if you look at me cross-eyed. Wonder why that is?”

“Wonder why what is?” asked Vic Crosetti, who was sanitizing the deck not far away and who slept in the bunk above Carsten’s. “Wonder why people who outrank a Seaman First don’t give a damn about him, or wonder why you look like a piece of meat the galley didn’t get done enough?”

“Ahh, shut up, you damn lucky dago,” Sam said, more jealousy than rancor in his voice. Crosetti had been born swarthy. All the sun did to him was turn him a color just this side of Negro brown.

“Hey, bein’ dark oughta do me some good,” Crosetti said. No matter what color he was, nobody would ever mistake him for a Negro, not with his nose and thick beard and arms thatched with enough black hair to make him look like a monkey.

Sam dipped his mop in the galvanized bucket and got another stretch of deck clean. He’d been a sailor for six years now, and had mastered the skill of staying busy enough to satisfy officers and even more demanding chief petty officers without really doing anything too closely resembling work. Crosetti wasn’t going at it any harder than he was; if the skinny little Italian hadn’t been born knowing how to shirk, he’d sure picked up the fundamentals in a hurry after he joined the Navy.

Carsten stared off to port. The destroyer Jarvis was frisking through the light chop maybe half a mile away, quick and graceful as a dolphin. Its wake trailed creamy behind it. The Jarvis could steam rings around the big, stolid Dakota. That was the idea: the destroyer could keep torpedo boats and submersibles away from the battlewagon. That the idea still had some holes in it was attested by the repairs just completed on the Dakota.

Crosetti looked out over the water, too. “Might as well relax,” he said to Carsten. “Nobody in the Navy’s seen hide nor hair of the Japs or the limeys since we got bushwhacked the last time. Stands to reason they’re mounting patrols to make sure we ain’t goin’ near the Philippines or Singapore, same as we’re doing here.”

“Stood to reason last time, too,” Sam answered. “Only thing is, the Japs weren’t being reasonable.”

Crosetti cocked his head to one side. “Yeah, that’s so,” he said. “You got a cockeyed way of looking at things that makes a lot of sense sometimes, you know what I’m saying?”

“Maybe,” Carsten said. “I’ve had one or two guys tell me that before, anyway. Now if there was some gal who’d tell me something like that, I’d have something. But hell, gals here, they ain’t gonna look past the raw meat.” He ran a sunburned hand down an equally sunburned arm.

“If that’s the way you think, that’s what’ll happen to you, yeah,” Crosetti said. “It’s all in the way you go after ’em, you know what I’m saying? I mean, look at me. I ain’t pretty, I ain’t rich, but I ain’t lonesome, neither, not when I’m on shore. You gotta show ’em they’re what you’re after, and you gotta make ’em think you’re what they’re after, too. All how you go about it, and that’s a fact.”

“Maybe,” Sam said again. “But the ones you really want to hook onto, they’re the ones who won’t bite for a line like that, too.”

“Who says?” Crosetti demanded indignantly. Then he paused. “Wait a minute. You’re talkin’ about gettin’ married, for God’s sake. What’s the point to even worrying about that? You’re in the Navy, Sam. No matter what kind of broad you marry, you ain’t gonna be home often enough to enjoy it.”

Carsten would have argued that, the only difficulty being that he couldn’t. So he and Crosetti talked about women for a while instead, no subject being better calculated to help pass time of a morning. Sam didn’t really know how much his bunkmate was making up and how much he’d really done, but he’d been blessed with either a hell of a good time or a hell of an imagination.

An aeroplane buzzed by. Sam looked at it anxiously: following a Japanese aeroplane had got the Dakota torpedoed. But this one bore the American eagle. It had been out looking for enemy ships. Carsten guessed it hadn’t found any. Had it sent back a message by wireless telegraph, the fleet would have changed course toward any vessels presumptuous enough to challenge the USA in these waters.

“You really think the English and the Japanese are just sitting back, waiting for us to come to them?” Sam asked Crosetti. “They could cause a lot of trouble if they took the Sandwich Islands back from us.”

“Yeah, they could, but they won’t,” Crosetti said. “When the president declared war on England, I don’t figure he waited five minutes before he sent us sailing for Pearl Harbor. We caught the damn limeys with their drawers down. They hadn’t reinforced the place yet, and they couldn’t hold it against everything we threw at ’em. But we got more men, more ships there than you can shake a stick at. They want it back, they’re gonna hafta pay one hell of a bill.”

“That’s all true,” Carsten said. “But now that we’ve got all those men there and we’ve got all those ships there, what are the limeys and the Japs going to think we’ll do with ’em? Sit there and hang on tight? Does that sound like Teddy Roosevelt to you? They’re going to figure we’re heading out toward Singapore and Manila sooner or later unless they do something about it. Even if they don’t land on Oahu, they’re going to do their damnedest to smash up the fleet, right?”

Vic Crosetti scratched at one cheek while he thought. If Sam had done anything like that, he probably would have drawn blood from his poor, sunbaked skin. After a bit, Crosetti gave him a thoughtful nod. “Makes pretty good sense, I guess. How come the only stripe you got on your sleeve is a service mark? Way you talk, you oughta be a captain, maybe an admiral in one of those damnfool hats they wear.”

Carsten laughed out loud. “All I got to say is, if they’re so hard up they make me an admiral, the USA is in a hell of a lot more trouble than the Japs are.”

The grin that stretched across Crosetti’s face was altogether impudent. “I ain’t gonna argue with you about that,” he said, whereupon Sam made as if to wallop him over the head with his mop. They both laughed. Crosetti grew serious, though, unwontedly fast. “You do talk like an officer a lot of the time, you know that?”

“Do I?” Carsten said. His fellow swabbie-at the moment, in the most literal sense of the word-nodded. Sam thought about it. “Can’t worry about chasing women all the damned time. You got to keep your eyes open. You look around, you start seeing things.”

“I see a couple of lazy lugs, is what I see,” a deep voice behind them said. Sam turned his head. There stood Hiram Kidde, gunner’s mate on the five-inch cannon Carsten helped serve. He had plenty of service stripes on his sleeve, having been in the Navy for more than twenty years. He went on, “Go ahead, try and tell me you were workin’ hard.”

“Have a heart, ‘Cap’n,’” Carsten said, using Kidde’s universal nickname. “Can’t expect us to be busy every second.”

“Who says I can’t?” Kidde retorted. He was broad-faced and stocky, thick through the middle but not soft. He looked like a man you wouldn’t want to run into in a barroom brawl. From what Sam had seen of him in action, his looks weren’t deceiving.

“Petty officers never remember what it was like when they were seamen,” Crosetti said. He looked sly. “’Course, it is kind of hard remembering back to when Buchanan was president.”

Kidde glared at him. Then he shrugged. “Hell, I figured you were gonna say, when Jefferson was president.” Shaking his head, he walked on.

“Got him good, Vic,” Carsten said. Crosetti grinned and nodded. They went back to swabbing the deck-still not working too hard.

Jefferson Pinkard kissed his wife, Emily, as she headed out the door of their yellow-painted company house to go to the munitions plant where she’d been working the past year. “Be careful, honey,” he said. He meant that a couple of ways. For one, her usually fair skin was still sallow from the jaundice working with some of the explosives caused. For another, riding the trolley in Birmingham, as in a lot of cities in the Confederacy these days, was something less than safe.

“I will,” she promised, as she did whenever he warned her. She tossed her head. These days, she’d cut her strawberry-blond hair short, to keep it from getting caught in the machinery with which she worked. Jeff missed the braid she’d worn halfway down her back. She kissed him again, a quick peck on the lips. “I got to go.”

“I know,” he said. “You may get home a little before me tonight-I got to vote, remember.”

“I know it’s today,” she agreed. She gave him a sidelong look. “One of these days, I reckon I’ll be voting, too, so you won’t have to remind me about it.”

He sighed and shrugged. It wasn’t worth an argument. She’d come up with more radical ideas since she started working than in all the time they’d been married up till then. She hurried off toward the trolley. He stood in the doorway for half a minute or so, watching her walk. He would have forgiven a lot of radical ideas from a woman who moved her hips like that. It gave him something to look forward to when he came home from work.

Because the company housing was only a few hundred yards away from the Sloss foundry, he didn’t have to leave as soon as his wife did to get to work on time. He went back in, finished his coffee and ham and eggs, set the dishes to soak in soapy water in the sink, grabbed his dinner pail, and then headed out the door himself.

As he walked into the foundry, he waved to men he knew. There weren’t that many, not any more: most of the whites in the Sloss labor force had already been conscripted. Every time he opened his own mailbox, Pinkard expected to find the buff-colored envelope summoning him to the colors, too. He sometimes wondered if they’d lost his file.

Along with the white men in overalls and caps came a stream of black men dressed the same way. Many of them, nowadays, were doing jobs to which they wouldn’t have dared aspire when the war began, jobs that had been reserved for whites till the front drained off too many. They still weren’t getting white men’s pay, but they were making more than they had before.

Pinkard had been working alongside a Negro for a good long while now. Though he’d hated the notion at first, he’d since come to take it for granted-until the uprising had broken out the month before. Leonidas, the buck he was working with these days, had kept right on coming in, uprisings or no uprisings. That would have made Pinkard happier, though, had Leonidas shown the least trace of brains concealed anywhere about his person.

He went into the foundry and out onto the floor. The racket, as always, was appalling. You couldn’t shout over it; you had to learn to talk-and to hear-under it. When it was cold outside, it was hot in there, hot with the heat of molten metal. When it was hot outside, the foundry floor made a pretty good foretaste of hell. It smelled of iron and coal smoke and sweat.

Two Negroes waited for him: night shift had started hiring blacks well before they got onto the day crew. One was Agrippa, the other a fellow named Sallust, who didn’t have a permanent slot of his own but filled in when somebody else didn’t show up.

Seeing Sallust made Jeff scratch his head. “Where’s Vespasian at?” he asked Agrippa. “I don’t ever remember him missin’ a shift. He ain’t shiftless, like that damn Leonidas.” He laughed at his own wit. Then, after a moment, he stopped laughing. Leonidas was shiftless, and, at the moment, late, too.

Agrippa didn’t laugh. He was in his thirties, older than Pinkard, and right now he looked older than that-he looked fifty if a day. His voice was heavy and slow and sober as he answered, “Reason he ain’t here, Mistuh Pinkard, is on account of they done hanged Pericles yesterday. Pericles was his wife’s kin, you know, an’ he stayed home to help take care o’-things.”

“Hanged him?” Pinkard said. “Lord!” Pericles had been in jail as an insurrectionist for months. Before that, he’d worked alongside the white man in the place Leonidas had now. He’d been a damn sight better at it than Leonidas, too. Pinkard shook his head. “That’s too damn bad. Maybe he was a Red, but he was a damn fine steel man.”

“I tell Vespasian you say dat,” Agrippa said. “He be glad to hear it.” Sallust sent him a hooded glance. Pinkard had seen its like before. It meant something on the order of, Go on, tell the white man what he wants to hear. Very slightly, as if to say he meant his words, Agrippa shook his head.

The two black men from the night shift left. Jeff got to work. He had to work harder without Leonidas around, but he worked better, too, because he didn’t have to keep an eye on his inept partner. One of these days, Leonidas would be standing in the wrong place, and they’d pour a whole great crucible full of molten metal down on his empty head. The only things left would be a brief stink of burnt meat and a batch of steel that needed resmelting because it had picked up too much carbon.

Leonidas came strutting onto the floor twenty minutes late. “Lord, the girl I found me las’ night!” he said, and ran his tongue across his lips like a cat after a visit to a bowl of cream. He rocked his hips forward and back. He was always talking about women or illegal whiskey. A lot of men did that, but most of them did their jobs better than Leonidas, which meant their talk about what they did when they weren’t working was somehow less annoying.

Pinkard tossed him a rake. “Come on, let’s straighten up the edges of that mold in the sand pit,” he said. “We don’t want the metal leaking out when they do the next pouring.”

Leonidas rolled his eyes. He couldn’t have cared less what the metal did in the next pouring, and didn’t care who knew it. Without the war, he would have had trouble getting a janitor’s job at the Sloss works; as things were, he’d been out here with Pinkard for months. One more reason to hate the war, Jeff thought.

He kept Leonidas from getting killed, and so wondered, as he often did, whether that made the day a success or a failure. Pericles, now, Pericles had been a good worker, and smart as a white man. But he’d also been a Red, and now he was a dead Red. A lot of the smart Negroes were Reds. Pinkard supposed that meant they weren’t as smart as they thought they were.

When the quitting whistle blew, he headed out of the foundry with barely a good-bye to Leonidas. That was partly because he didn’t have any use for Leonidas and partly because he was heading off to vote and Leonidas wasn’t. Given what Leonidas used for brains, that didn’t break Jeff’s heart, but rubbing the black man’s nose in it at a time like this seemed less than clever.

Sometimes a couple of weeks would go by between times when Jefferson Pinkard left company grounds. He spent a lot of time in the foundry, his friends-those who weren’t in the Army-lived in company housing as he did, and the company store was conveniently close and gave credit, even if it did charge more than the shops closer to the center of town.

The polling place, though, was at a Veterans of the War of Secession hall a couple of blocks in from the edge of company land. He saw two or three burnt-out buildings as he went along. Emily had seen more damage from the uprising than he had, because she took the trolley every day. He shook his head. Steelworkers armed with clubs and a few guns had kept the rampaging Negroes off Sloss land; the black workers, or almost all of them, had stayed quiet. They knew which side their bread was buttered on.

A line of white men, a lot of them in dirty overalls like Pinkard’s, snaked out of the veterans’ hall, above which flapped the Stars and Bars. He took his place, dug a stogie out of his pocket, lighted it, and blew out a happy cloud of smoke. If he had to move slowly for a bit, he’d enjoy it.

By their white hair and beards, the officials at the polling place were War of Secession veterans themselves. “Pinkard, Jefferson Davis,” Jeff said when he got to the head of the line. He took his ballot and went into a booth. Without hesitation, he voted for Gabriel Semmes over Doroteo Arango for president; as Woodrow Wilson’s vice president, Semmes would keep the Confederacy on a steady course, while Arango was nothing but a wild-eyed, hot-blooded southerner. Jeff methodically went through the rest of the national, state, and local offices, then came out and pushed his ballot through the slot of the big wood ballot box.

“Mr. Pinkard has voted,” one of the elderly precinct workers said, and Pinkard felt proud at having done his democratic duty.

He walked home still suffused with that warm sense of virtue. If you didn’t vote, you had no one to blame but yourself for what happened to the country-unless, of course, you were black, or a woman. And one of these years, the way things looked, they’d probably let women have a go at the ballot box, no matter what he thought about it. He supposed the world wouldn’t end.

Emily came out onto the porch as he hurried up the walk toward the house. “Hi, darlin’!” he called. Then he saw the buff-colored envelope she was holding.