Three or four guys in uniform were walking up the other side of the street toward Maggie Stevenson's place. One of them, he saw with amusement, was a spruced-up Hiram Kidde. He started to wave, then stopped. Later on, maybe, he'd find out if the 'Cap'n' thought he'd got his money's worth.
IX
Cincinnatus and his wife Elizabeth were getting ready for bed when some one knocked on the back door. It wasn't that late, but, ever since Elizabeth had found out she was going to have a baby, she'd been tired a lot of the time, even more tired than her domestic's work usually made her. 'Who is that?' she said in some irritation. 'I don't want visitors.'
'You'd think visitors would come to the front of the house,' Cincinnatus said as he headed out of the bedroom toward the kitchen. From the hall, he added over his shoulder, 'One thing-it ain't U.S. soldiers. They don't just come to the front of the house, they go and break down the door, you don't let 'em in fast enough.'
The knock came again. It wasn't very loud, as if whoever was out there didn't want the neighbors to notice. Cincinnatus frowned, wondering if it was a strong-arm man trying to trick him into opening the door. Crooks were having a field day. The Yankees didn't seem to care what people in Covington did to one another, so long as they left U.S. troops alone.
If it was a strong-arm man, Cincinnatus vowed to give him a hell of a surprise. He plucked a heavy iron spider out of the draining rack by the sink. Clout somebody upside the head with that and he'd forget about everything for a good long while.
Spider in his right hand, he opened the back door with his left. When he did, he almost dropped the frying pan. 'Mistuh Kennedy!' he exclaimed. 'What the devil you doin' here?'
Even in the dim light of the lamp from the kitchen, Tom Kennedy looked as if the devil had indeed brought him to his present state. He was haggard and skinny and dirty, and his eyes tried to move every which way at once, the way a fox's did when hounds were chasing it. 'Can I come in?' Cincinnatus' former boss asked.
'I think maybe you better,' Cincinnatus said. 'What you doin' out, anyways? Curfew's eight o'clock, and I know it's past that.'
'Sure is,' Kennedy said, and said no more.
That made Cincinnatus ask the next question: 'What are you doin' here, Mr. Kennedy? You don't mind me sayin' so, this ain't your part of town.' If that wasn't the understatement of 1915, it would do till a better one came along. Why the devil would a white man come into the colored part of Covington after curfew? The only thing Cincinnatus was sure about was that it wasn't any simple, ordinary, innocent reason.
'Who is it?' Elizabeth called from the bedroom.
'It's Mr. Tom Kennedy, sweetheart,' Cincinnatus answered, trying to sound as ordinary and innocent as he could, and knowing he wasn't having much luck.
Kennedy's hunted look got even worse. 'Don't say my name so loud,' he hissed urgently. 'The fewer people who know I'm here, the better off everybody will be.'
Elizabeth came into the kitchen. She'd put on a quilted cotton housecoat over her nightgown. Her eyes got wide. 'It is Mr. Kennedy,' she said, and then, determined to be a good hostess no matter what the irregular circumstances in which she found herself, 'Shall I put on some coffee for you?'
Kennedy shook his head, a quick, jerky motion. 'No, nothing, thanks. I've been running on nerves for so long, coffee would just make things worse.'
'Mr. Kennedy,' Cincinnatus said with a mixture of deference and annoyance that struck him odd even at the time, 'what are you doing here after curfew?'
'Can you hide me for a couple of days?' Kennedy asked. 'I won't tell you any lies-I'm on the dodge from the damnyankees. They catch up with me, it's a rope around my neck or a blindfold and a cigarette-except I don't think they'd bother with the cigarette.'
'You're in real trouble,' Cincinnatus said quietly. A moment later, he realized that meant he was in real trouble, too. The U.S. authorities didn't take kindly to people who harboured fugitives from what they called justice. Elizabeth 's eyes widened again. She must have figured out the same thing at the same time. Cincinnatus clicked his tongue between his teeth. 'Why'd you come here?' he asked, directing the question as much to the world at large as to Tom Kennedy.
'Yes, I'm in real trouble,' Kennedy said. 'My life is in your hands. You want to holler for the patrols, I'm a goner. They'll put money in your pocket, too. Up to you, Cincinnatus. All depends on how you like living under the USA, because I'm doing everything I can to throw the damnyankees out of Kentucky. That's why they're after me, in case you haven't worked it out.'
'Oh, I worked it out, Mr. Kennedy,' Cincinnatus said, softly still. 'I'm studying' what I should oughta do about it, is all.' He had no reason to love the CSA; what black man did? But the men from the United States hadn't shown him his lot was better with them in charge, not even close.
He glanced over to Elizabeth. Her belly hadn't started to swell, certainly not to the point where anyone could notice it when she was wearing clothes. He was acutely aware of her pregnancy all the same. It made him less willing to take chances than he would have been a few months before, and far less willing to take chances than he would have been before he got married.
And so he said, 'What did you do, Mr. Kennedy? How come the damnyankees are after you so bad?'
'I don't want to tell you,' Kennedy answered. 'The more things you know, the more they can squeeze out of you if they ever take a mind to.'
That made a certain amount of sense. Most times, Cincinnatus would have accepted it without argument. Now- He felt a curious sense of reversal. For what might well have been the first time in his life, he had the upper hand in a conversation with a white man. Even though he did, he used it cautiously, deferentially: 'I don't know why they want you, suh, I don't know whether I should oughta help you or help them get you. You understand what I'm sayin'?'
'You won't buy a pig in a poke, not even from me,' Kennedy said. Cincinnatus nodded-that was it, in a nutshell. Tom Kennedy sighed. He recognized the reversal, too. 'All right, have it your way. I haven't broken any little old ladies' legs with a crowbar or stolen from the church poor box or anything like that. But I'm in the hauling and moving business, Cincinnatus, right? Some of the things I've hauled into Covington aren't the ones the U.S. Army's real happy to have here.'
He meant guns. He had to mean guns, and maybe explosives, too. Under U.S. military law, the penalty, for that kind of thing was death. Soldiers had nailed up placards saying as much, all over Covington. Warnings appeared in the newspapers about twice a week. And if you harboured a gun runner, you got the same thing he did. Those warnings were in the papers, too.
'You don't make it easy, Mr. Kennedy,' Cincinnatus said. He came close to hating his former boss for putting him in a spot like this-not just his neck on the line now, but Elizabeth's and the coming baby's, too. If he turned him out into the street without saying anything to the authorities but Kennedy got caught later, he'd be in just as much trouble as if he'd concealed him. The only way not to be in trouble with the U.S. authorities was to hand Kennedy over to them now. He didn't have the stomach for that. As white men went, Kennedy had been pretty decent to him-far better than that screaming U.S. lieutenant who bossed him nowadays.
He had just reached that conclusion when Elizabeth said, 'Here, come on with me, Mistuh Kennedy. I got a good place to put you.'
That relieved Cincinnatus, because he hadn't come up with any good place to hide Kennedy. He didn't want him under the bed, and the Yankees would be sure to look behind the couch and down in the storm cellar. He'd been wondering if he could take Kennedy over to his mother's or some other relative's, but he wasn't enthusiastic about involving them in the danger the white man had brought to him.
Elizabeth opened the door to the pantry by the stove. It was full of sacks of potatoes and beans and black- eyed peas. Cincinnatus didn't feel the least bit guilty about hoarding. No matter how bad things got, he and his wouldn't starve.
When Elizabeth started taking out the sacks, he quickly moved her aside and did it himself. That wasn't something he wanted his wife doing, not when she was in a family way. The sacks took up a surprising lot of room,
