He managed partly by not doing much, but that didn't matter, since he never seemed to do much. Pinkard minded less than he would have with a more capable partner. The more Leonidas did, the more he was liable to foul up.
The quitting whistle made the young Negro jerk as if he'd sat on a nail. 'Thank God, I can get out of here,' he said, and proceeded to do just that, moving faster than he had out on the floor.
Pinkard followed more slowly. He was just as tired as he would have been had Leonidas stayed home with an ice bag or whatever his preferred hangover cure was. He hadn't had to do quite so much as he would have had Leonidas stayed home, but being careful for two was hard work.
When he got back to his house, he built up the fire in the stove, sliced a few potatoes, and set them to frying in lard in a black iron skillet likely made from metal worked at the Sloss foundry. They'd go nicely with the pork roast Emily had put in the oven over a low fire before she went off to work. It wasn't really cooking, he told himself, only a way to save time and have supper ready sooner.
Emily came in about twenty minutes after he did. 'Smelled those potatoes outside, comin' up the walk,' she said. 'They always smell so good like that, give me some of my appetite back.'
'You haven't hardly been eating enough to keep a bird alive,' Pinkard said. He took the potatoes off the stove so they wouldn't burn while he was kissing his wife. He wondered if she was finally in a family way, only not far along enough to be sure. She was tired all the time, she hadn't been eating well, and he'd noticed at breakfast how sallow she was.
He took another look at her in the evening sunlight pouring through the kitchen window. She wasn't just sallow — her skin was downright yellow. 'Honey, what the dickens is the matter with you?' he demanded, and heard the alarm clanging in his voice.
'What do you mean, what's the matter with me?' Emily said.
He held her hand up in a sunbeam. It looked all the more yellow against his own rough, red, scarred skin. 'I mean you're only a couple steps this way from bein' the color of a baby chick, that's what.'
'Oh, that,' his wife answered. 'I didn't even hardly notice. It happens to a lot of the girls who work around the smokeless powder like me. It does somethin' to your liver, blamed if I know what, but it makes you yellow that way. Like I say, some of the girls are almost lemon color.'
'Does it get better?' Jeff demanded.
'Oh, yeah, it does,' Emily said casually. 'When somebody gets sick-not just yellow, I mean, but really sick- they move her to another section of the plant for a while, till she gets over it. We haven't had but a couple of people come down that bad.'
'Oh.' Pinkard was about to shout at her, to demand that she quit her job and come back home where she belonged. The words died unspoken. People got killed every year at the Sloss works, and had been getting killed there long before the war pushed everybody up into a higher gear. He remembered poor Sid Williamson. Emily and her comrades were making munitions for the CSA. The country depended on them, hardly less than it did on the courage and tenacity of the Confederate soldiers.
'It'll be all right, darlin',' Emily said. 'Now why don't you go sit down? I'll finish doin' up the potatoes and bring you your supper.'
Jeff went and sat down. His wife had the right way of looking at things, and he couldn't very well complain about it. He had to hope her supervisors or foremen or whatever they called them there were paying attention to what they were doing. From what she'd said, it sounded as if they were.
When she came in with a full plate for him, he asked anxiously, 'This color you're getting, it will go away if you stop doin' what you're doin', right?'
She nodded. 'I've seen it happen with some of the other girls, the ones they had to move away from the powder. But this here, what I've got, it ain't hardly nothin'. And besides'-she cocked her head at a saucy angle and stuck out her hip-'ain't you got a yen for a high-yellow gal?'
He'd just taken his first mouthful, and almost choked on it. Men told smoking-car and after-supper stories about Negro women with a lot of white blood in them. They were supposed to provide some of the fanciest stock in the fanciest sporting houses all over the CSA. Jeff didn't know anything about fancy sporting houses, not from experience. Some of the stories about high-yellow women were pretty fancy all by themselves, though.
He tried to sound severe: 'The way you do talk.' He couldn't do it; he started laughing. So did Emily. He said, 'Gal I got a yen for is you. An' if I say that after the day I put in, you better know it's the truth.'
'I like that,' Emily said. 'I feel the same way about you.' She'd always been a bold-talking woman. A lot of men, Pinkard supposed, wouldn't have liked that. He didn't understand why. As far as he was concerned, thinking about it and talking about it were almost as much fun as doing it.
After supper, he dried pots and dishes, as he'd been doing for a while. No sooner had he put the last plate back in the cupboard than Emily said, 'You are the helpingest man. That's another reason I love you.'
'Is that a fact?' He still didn't quite know himself how he felt about doing women's work. He never told anybody at the foundry he did it, for fear people would say he was henpecked. Emily usually didn't say much about it, either, maybe to keep him from worrying his own mind. Now that she had said it, he felt obliged to answer gruffly: 'You know why I'm doin' this, don't you?'
'Why, dear, I haven't got the faintest idea.' Her smile and her voice and the way she stood all conspired to make a liar out of her. 'Why don't you tell me?'
Instead of telling her — or rather, instead of telling her with words-he picked her up and carried her into the bedroom. She squealed and beat at his shoulders, but she was laughing while she did it. Getting out of his own clothes was the work of a moment. Getting her out of hers required more complicated unbuttonings, unhookings, unlacings. His hands were big and clumsy, but he managed.
He scraped a match afire and lighted a kerosene lamp on the nightstand by the bed. The light it gave was ruddier than sunlight; by it, he could hardly tell Emily's skin had changed color. He didn't care. That wasn't why he'd lighted it. 'You are one /zwe-lookin' woman,' he told his wife. The words came thick from his throat.
'And what do you propose to do about that?' she asked. He reached out for her and showed her, again without words.
Afterwards, with her curled up, head on his shoulder, both of them drifting off toward sleep, he wondered if Fanny Cunningham had listened to the bedsprings creaking. He and Bedford had teased each other about that every now and again, heading off toward work of a morning. If Fanny heard it now, though, it had to remind her that her husband wasn't there. Pinkard hoped Bedford was all right. He hadn't heard anything different, but what did that prove? Not enough.
'Might be my turn next,' he muttered; conscription had scooped more white men out of the Sloss works over the past couple of weeks.
'What's that, honey?' Emily asked drowsily. 'You say somethin'?'
'No,' he said, and she fell asleep. Eventually, he did, too.
Herman Bruck's face twisted in annoyance. 'Why don't you want to go to the play with me tonight?' he asked in a low voice, doing his best not to draw the notice of anyone else at the Socialist Party office.
'I just don't, Herman,' Flora Hamburger told him. 'When I'm done with work, I'm tired. What I want to do is go home and rest, nothing else.' That wasn't the entire reason, but it was polite and true, as far as it went.
Bruck, as usual, did not know how to take no for an answer. 'But it's one of Gordin's best,' he exclaimed. 'It has the most powerful arguments against the war I've seen anywhere.'
'I'm already against the war,' she reminded him. 'I don't need any fresh arguments to be against it. What educates the proletariat is liable to bore me.'
'But it shows the effect of the war on the poor, on the working classes,' he persisted. 'You'll find things you can borrow and get use of here.'
Flora exhaled. Bruck was drawn to her, and had trouble realizing she was not drawn to him in return. She'd done her best to avoid being rude; after all, whether she went out with him or not, they had to work together. Instead of sharply telling him to go away and stop bothering her, she answered, 'I can see the effect on my own family, thank you very much. My sister married to a soldier, my brothers both turning into militarists and liable to go through conscription as soon as they get old enough… I was against this war before it was declared, remember.'
'Do you have to keep throwing that in my face?' he said angrily. 'Maybe you were even right. I don't know.
