thing about them.
Vespasian shook his head. 'No, suh, he ain't sick,' he answered. He sounded tired unto death, not just because of the night's work but also from a lifetime's worth of weariness. A moment later, the words dragging out of him one by one, he went on, 'No, suh, like I say, he ain't sick. He in de jailhouse.'
'In the jailhouse? Pericles?' That caught Pinkard by surprise. 'What the devil did he do? Get drunk and go after somebody with a busted bottle?' That didn't sound like Pericles, a sober-sided young buck if ever there was one.
And Vespasian shook his head again. 'No, suh. He do somethin' like that, we can fix it. He in de jailhouse for — sedition.' He whispered the word, pronouncing it with exaggerated care.
'Sedition?' Now Jefferson Pinkard frankly stared. Vespasian was right, he thought. You could fix a charge of brawling against a black man easily enough — provided he hadn't hit a white, of course. If he was a good worker, a couple of words from his boss to the police or the judge would get him off with a small fine, maybe just a lecture about keeping his nose clean. But sedition-that was another ball of wax.
Neither Vespasian nor Agrippa said much more about it. They waited till it was time for them to go off shift, then left in a hurry. Pinkard didn't suppose he could blame them. When one of your own got into trouble, you didn't spend a lot of time talking about that trouble with an outsider.
He had to start his shift by his lonesome, which left him too busy to think about anything else. About half an hour into the shift, a colored fellow who introduced himself as Leonidas joined him. Jeff hoped to high heaven Leonidas wouldn't take Pericles' place for good. He was strong enough, but he wasn't very smart, and he didn't remember from one minute to the next what Pinkard had told him. Jeff kept him from getting hurt or from messing up the job at least half a dozen times that morning. It was more nerve-racking than doing everything by himself would have been, because he never knew ahead of time when or how Leonidas would go wrong, and had to stay on his toes every second.
When the lunch whistle blew, Pinkard sighed with relief-half an hour when he wouldn't have to worry. 'See you at one, suh,' Leonidas said, taking his dinner bucket and heading off to eat with other Negroes.
'Yeah,' Pinkard said. He wondered if Leonidas could find some way to kill himself when he wasn't anywhere near the foundry floor. He wouldn't have been a bit surprised: the Negro was an accident waiting to happen, and probably could happen any old place.
Pinkard opened his own dinner pail. He had a chunk of cornbread and a couple of pieces of roasted chicken in there: leftovers from the night before. He'd just started to eat when a couple of middle-aged fellows in gray police uniforms came up to him. 'You Jefferson Davis Pinkard?' asked the one who wore a matching gray mustache.
'That's me,' Jeff said with his mouth full. He chewed, swallowed, and then asked more clearly, 'Who're you?'
'I'm Bob Mulcahy,' the policeman with the mustache answered. He pointed to his clean-shaven partner. 'This here's Bill Fitzcolville. We're looking into the matter of a nigger named Pericles. Hear tell he's been working alongside you a while.'
'That's a fact,' Pinkard agreed, and took another bite of chicken. They weren't going to hold things up on the floor because he was talking with po lice. If he didn't feed his face, he'd have to go hungry till suppertime.
'This Pericles, he been a troublemaker, uppity, anything like that?' Mul cahy asked.
'Not hardly.' Pinkard shook his head. 'Didn't cotton to the notion of workin' with a nigger, not even a little bit, I tell you. But it ain't worked out too bad. He does his job — did his job, I guess I oughta say. This nigger Leonidas, buck they gave me instead of him, he ain't fit to carry guts to a bear, doesn't look like. But Pericles, he pulled his weight.'
Fitzcolville scribbled down his words in a notebook. Mulcahy shifted a good-sized chaw of tobacco from right cheek to left, then asked. 'This nigger Pericles, he a smart fellow or a dumb one?'
'Nothin' dumb about him,' Jeff answered. 'You show him somethin' once, you tell him somethin' once, you don't need to do it twice, on account of he remembers it and does it right his own self.'
'Uh-huh,' Fitzcolville grunted, as if Pinkard had said something alto gether damning.
Mulcahy kept on with his questions, steadily, imperturbably: 'He ever talk about anything political while the two of you was working together?'
'Political?' Pinkard paused for a bite of cornbread. 'What the hell kind of politics is a nigger supposed to have? It ain't like he can vote or nothin'.'
'Oh, niggers have politics, all right,' Mulcahy said. 'Red politics, too damn many of 'em. This Pericles, he ever talk about how the war was going or how the war was changing things here back at home?'
Red politics. Emily had said something like that, and he hadn't taken it seriously. The Birmingham police did. Jeff said, 'We was talkin' one time about how, after Herb Wallace got hisself killed in the war, the Sloss folks threw his widow out of factory housing here. Pericles didn't reckon that was fair.'
'Uh-huh,' Fitzcolville said again, and scrawled more notes.
'You gonna call him a Red for that?' Pinkard demanded. 'You better call me a Red right at the same time, 'cause I think it stinks like shit, too, what they done to Daisy. Here her husband's gone and got killed for the sake of the fat cats up in Richmond, and they throw her out of her place like a dog. You call that the way things oughta be?'
He'd gone too far. He could see it by the way the two policemen stared at him-stared through him, really. 'Maybe you are a Red,' Mulcahy said, 'but I doubt it. Most of the ones who are have too much sense to run off at the mouth like you do. 'Sides, white men can pretty much say what they please- it's a free country. Niggers, now, we gotta watch niggers.'
'I been watchin' this crazy damnfool nigger Leonidas every goddamn minute of the mornin' shift,' Pinkard said. 'You give me a choice between him and Pericles, I'll take Pericles every goddamn time. When he's here, he does his job. I don't know what he does when he ain't here, and I don't care.'
'That's not your job,' Mulcahy said. 'It is our job, and we've found this nigger tied up in all sorts of stuff niggers got no business sticking their noses into.'
'Whatever else he is, he's a steel man,' Jeff answered. 'Steel he's helped make, I reckon it's done more to hurt the damnyankees than anything else he's done has hurt us.'
The two policemen looked at each other. Maybe they hadn't thought of it like that. Maybe, too, they just didn't care for the idea of a white man speak ing up for a black. That second maybe soon proved the true one, for Mulcahy said, 'You like that nigger pretty well, don't you?'
Pinkard surged to his feet. 'Get out of here,' he said, his voice thick with anger and cornbread both. Both policemen gave back a step, too. The foundry floor was no place for anyone unused to it to feel comfortable, either. Jeff had an advantage, and he used it. 'You got a lot o' damn nerve, you know that? Callin' me a nigger-lover like I ain't a proper white man. Go on, get the hell out.'
'Didn't mean it like that, Pinkard,' Bob Mulcahy said. 'Just trying to get to the bottom of who all this damn nigger's been messing with.'
'He ain't messed much with me, and he know what he's doin', too, not like this lamebrained halfwit they saddled me with now that you took him away,' Pinkard said. 'Pretty soon, way things look, they're gonna drag my ass off to war — hell of a lot o' white men gone already. You want to keep makin' steel, it's gonna be niggers doin' the work, mostly. Maybe you ought to think about stuff like that a little more often, 'fore you start haulin' hard- workin' bucks off to the jailhouse for no reason at all.'
'We've been thinking about it,' Bill Fitzcolville said, proving he did have more words in him than ub-bub. 'Don't like the answers we get, neither.'
'But this here Pericles, we got him dead to rights,' Mulcahy said. 'Found all kinds of subversive literature at his house: Marx and Engels and Lincoln and Haywood and I don't know who all else. Niggers ain't allowed to have that kind of stuff. He'll spend a while cooling off in jail, that's for damn sure. We're trying to track down how much damage he's done, is what we're doing here.'
'Like I said, he ain't done me any damage I know of,' Pinkard said. The policemen shrugged and left. But he didn't think that meant he was going to get Pericles back any time soon. He'd just have to go and see if he couldn't turn Leonidas into something a little bit like a steelworker. The odds were against him; he could see that much already. He sighed. Life could be a real pisser sometimes, no two ways about it.
