till help from Memphis steams up the river, and then we'll see who runs, and how far.”
Shells from the New Era climbed high over the bluff, slow enough to be easily visible to the naked eye, then rained down someplace not too far from where Confederate troopers were moving. Seeing those bursts and the clouds of smoke rising from them heartened Leaming. Even so, he said, “I wish we had better signal arrangements with the gunboat. The way things are, she's almost firing blind.”
“I won't say you're altogether wrong, but I think we're doing as much as we can,” Booth replied. “Signal flags are about as good as we can manage, I'm afraid, even if they aren't perfect-her crew can't see their targets. The ground up here is too high, that's all, and the Rebs are moving faster than we can let the New Era know where they're moving to. But some of what the gunboat fires off is bound to come down on their heads.”
“Here's hoping, sir,” Mack Leaming said. When Booth put things the way he did, the New Era didn't seem so very formidable after all. Leaming was glad nobody else inside Fort Pillow had heard the commandant. That left him the only one to have his spirits lowered.
Major Booth seemed unworried about what the gunboat could or couldn't do. He hardly seemed worried about anything. Touching the brim of his black slouch hat, he went back to encouraging the gunners.
Despite their steady fire, and despite the work of the white and colored riflemen behind the earthwork, Forrest's men steadily worked their way forward. They came close enough to let Leaming hear their officers shouting orders, close enough to let him hear their wounded men groan when they were hit.
They came close enough to let him draw his revolver from the holster and fire two or three shots at them: the first shots he'd ever fired with intent to kill. He couldn't see if he hit anybody. That was probably just as well.
And then, instead of sliding forward, the Confederates slid back. They still kept up a steady and galling fire, but they didn't seem to think they could simply storm the parapet any more.
We taught them respect, by God, Leaming thought. Those loping, caterwauling shapes had been everywhere in front of the fort, or so it seemed to him. He found Major Bradford's estimate of their numbers far easier to believe than Major Booth's. Six or seven thousand Rebs? Looking at them out there, he could have believed there were six or seven million of them.
Not far away, two colored soldiers passed a dipper of sutlers' whiskey back and forth. Both of them grinned. One of them raised the dipper in salute to Lieutenant Leaming. “Want a snort, suh?” he called.
“No, thanks,” Leaming answered. Dutch courage, nigger courage, what difference did it make? And some of the whites from his own regiment were drinking, too. Put a soldier, white or colored, anywhere near whiskey and he'd find a way to get outside it.
One of the Negroes aimed an obscene gesture at the Confederates out there in the distance. His friend thought that was the funniest thing he'd ever seen, and sent the Rebs something even nastier. Several bullets snarled past them. They went right on laughing.
They weren't afraid, anyhow. And they were fighting the enemy. The colored men at the half-dozen field guns kept firing steadily, while the colored soldiers serving as riflemen loaded and shot shoulder to shoulder with the troopers from the Thirteenth Tennessee Cavalry. Leaming wouldn't have believed it if he weren't seeing it with his own eyes. He had trouble believing it even though he was seeing it with his own eyes.
A Negro let out a shrill screech. He staggered away from the parapet, clutching at his left elbow. “Do Jesus! The surgeon gonna cut off my arm!” he wailed. From what Leaming knew of wounds, he was likely to be right. If a bullet shattered bones, you almost had to amputate. Otherwise, the injured man would die of fever. Shy a limb, he might live.
“Po' George,” one Negro said. “Hard luck,” another agreed.
They both fired their Springfields less than a minute after George got hurt. The other colored soldiers shot at any Confederates they saw, too. Niggers really can fight, Lieutenant Leaming thought in swelling wonder. Maybe it's not a question of keeping them slaves from here on out. Maybe we were lucky to hold them in slavery as long as we did.
By now, the white captain and sergeant nominally in charge of Ben Robinson's twelve-pounder had seen that the colored gun crew knew what it was doing. They gave fewer and fewer orders. They gave fewer and fewer suggestions. The black men were doing plenty all by themselves to give the Confederates out beyond the earthwork a hard time.
When Bedford Forrest's troopers pressed close to the parapet, Sergeant Robinson ordered a couple of rounds of canister on his own. He looked back to Captain Carron after he did it, but the officer didn't say a word. He just beamed and nodded, and Ben Robinson went on fighting the gun.
Each round of canister had sheet-metal sides and a thin wooden plug at the top. It held two or three hundred round bullets. In effect, it turned the twelve-pounder into God's shotgun. At short range, it was supremely deadly.
A man caught by the full fury of a blast of canister might be blown to red rags. He might simply cease to be, torn apart so completely that nothing recognizable as a human being was left. Or he might be killed or maimed in any number of more ordinary ways.
The Rebs didn't want to come close to any gun that was firing canister. No matter how much Ben Robinson hated those Secesh sons of bitches, he couldn't blame them for that. He wouldn't have wanted to make the acquaintance of a canister burst himself. Who would?
“Look at 'em run!” Charlie Key yelled. “You ever reckon you see Secesh run?”
Some of the Confederates couldn't run. Some of them would never run again. The rest… didn't want that to happen to them.
“Give 'em anudder round, jus' like de last one!” Charlie yelled.
Robinson shook his head. “They outa range now,” he said mournfully. “Don't want to waste the canister. We ain't got but a few rounds.”
“Too bad,” Charlie said. “How come dey don't give us mo'? Powerful good 'munition. Ain't nothin' else make the Rebs scamper like dat.” He mimed scampering himself. He was a dangerous mimic.
“Canister shift damn near anything-anything up close,” Robinson said. “Out past a couple hundred yards, though, it ain't much. So we got us dese shrapnel rounds an' shot fo' de long-range work.”
A twelve-pound iron ball would tear a fearful hole in a tight-packed group of men. Since the Rebs weren't fighting that way, shrapnel bursts did more damage here. Ben Robinson knew he could hurt the white men who'd done so much to make his life a misery. Sell me away from home, will you? he thought furiously as he lowered the altitude screw on the gun carriage. Sell me at all, will you? Treat me like a piece of meat, will you? Treat my sister like a piece of meat, will you? That was a separate outrage, one that burned all by itself.
Sergeant Clark pulled the lanyard. The shrapnel round roared away. The gun rolled back. As Sergeant Robinson put his shoulder to the carriage to wrestle it forward again, he hoped some of the iron fragments from that round blew a white man's balls off. Let's see you come round the slave cabins with a bulge in your pants then, God damn your scrawny soul to hell.
The reloading ritual began once more. It felt almost like a dance. Only the music was missing, and the gun crew didn't really need it. They could go through the steps with no accompaniment but the boom of the Springfields to either side and the whine and crack of enemy minnies darting past.
Like any soldier of any color, Robinson had hated all the hot, sweaty hours he spent on the drill field learning how to handle a cannon. He knew the rest of the colored men in the crew felt the same way. He'd hated white sergeants screaming at him. Dumb-ass coon! Clumsy fool! And those were some of the nicer things they said. But they turned raw black recruits into a real gun crew, something that was more than the sum of its parts, and he owed them a reluctant debt of gratitude for that.
He'd also heard that drill sergeants were just as merciless toward whites. That made him feel a little better. Fair was fair.
“Give 'em hell, boys!” Major Booth came up behind the crew. The gunners worked harder than ever under the commandant's eye. That, no doubt, was exactly what he had in mind. When the gun was ready, he tipped his hat to Sergeant Clark and asked, “May I do the honors?”
“Uh, yes, sir.” Clark handed him the lanyard. Booth gave it a hearty tug. The gun thundered. Looking pleased with himself, Booth returned the match to the sergeant.
A couple of bullets thumped into the earthwork close by. More cracked past. Enemy fire always picked up when Major Booth was around. “Suh, you wants to be careful,” Ben Robinson told him. “They got sharpshooters out
