all spread out on the kitchen floor.
Once he had them all out, he saw that several boards at the back of the pantry were rotten at the bottom. He hadn't noticed that before, but Elizabeth had. He stepped into the little cramped space and pulled at the boards. They came out with squeaks and squeals of nails, revealing a black opening behind them.
'God bless you both,' Tom Kennedy said, and squeezed into the opening. Cincinnatus replaced the boards as well as he could by hand. He hoped Kennedy would be able to breathe with them back. One thing seemed pretty clear, though: if U.S. soldiers caught up with Kennedy, his former boss wouldn't be breathing much longer. Still muttering to himself, Cincinnatus put back the produce sacks; Elizabeth swept up a few beans that had escaped from one of them.
When she was done, she and Cincinnatus looked at each other. They both shook their heads. 'Let's go to bed,' Cincinnatus said, though he didn't think he was going to sleep much, no matter how tired he'd been.
'All right.' By her tone, Elizabeth was thinking the same thing. If they didn't sleep like the dead tonight, they'd shamble like the living dead tomorrow. Nothing to be done about that, not now.
After he'd blown out the lamp in the bedroom, Cincinnatus said, 'We can't keep him in there long. He go crazy, cooped up like that. An' we didn't even think to give him a thundermug or nothin'.'
'I'll take care of that in the morning,' Elizabeth answered around an enormous yawn. Cincinnatus felt himself fading, too. Now that he was horizontal, he suspected sleep might sneak up on him after all.
Sure enough, the wham! wham! wham! in the middle of the night woke him out of deep, sound slumber. At first, groggy and confused, he thought it was hail pounding on the roof. Then he realized that, while it certainly was pounding, it was all coming from one direction: that of the front door.
'Soldiers,' he whispered to Elizabeth. She nodded. He felt the motion rather than seeing it. Wham! Wham! Wham! He groped for a match, found the box, struck a light, and lighted the lamp he'd blown out. Carrying it, he went out and opened the front door.
An electric torch blazed into his face, blinding him. 'You just saved your door, nigger,' a Northern voice said. 'We were gonna break it down.'
'What you want?' Cincinnatus asked. He didn't have to struggle very hard to sound stupid, not as tired as he was. Fright came easy, too.
The Yankee officer, hard to see past that powerful torch, said, 'You know a white man name of Tom Kennedy, boy?'
'Yes, suh,' Cincinnatus admitted. If they'd come here, they already knew he knew Kennedy. A lie would have got him in deeper trouble than the truth.
'You seen him any time lately?' the officer demanded.
Cincinnatus shook his head. 'No, suh. Sure ain't, not since jus' a little while after de war start. He run out o' town, I hear tell, 'fore you Yankees come.' He laid the Negro accent on with a trowel; it would help make the U.S. soldiers think he was stupid. He'd have done that for Confederates, too.
'Wish to Jesus he had,' the officer said, so feelingly that Cincinnatus blinked; he hadn't thought any damnyankees took Jesus Christ seriously. The fellow went on, 'He's been seen in Covington, and he's been seen not far from right here, so what we're gonna do is, we're gonna search this shack.' He waved to the soldiers with him.
In they came. Cincinnatus got out of the way in a hurry. If he hadn't, they would have trampled him, or maybe bayoneted him. The U.S. troops turned his tidy little house-he bristled at hearing it called a shack-upside down and inside out looking for Tom Kennedy. They stabbed those bayonets into the sofa and into his mattress through the sheets. Had Kennedy been in there, he would have regretted it. As things were, Cincinnatus did the regretting, for his bed linen and the upholstery. Elizabeth, watching with round eyes, made distressed noises. The Yankees ignored her.
One of the soldiers got down on hands and knees to peer under the stove, though a midget would have had trouble hiding there. Another one flung open the pantry door. The officer-short, skinny, with gold-rimmed spectacles and a mean look-shone that torch in there. Cincinnatus' heart thumped- had he got those boards back well enough? He did his best not to show what he was thinking.
'Nothin' but a pile of beans,' the officer said disgustedly, and slammed the pantry door. He turned to Cincinnatus. 'All right, boy, looks like you were tellin' the truth.' He dug into his pocket, pulled out a silver dollar, and tossed it to the Negro. 'For the damage.' He raised his voice. 'Come on, men. We got other places to search.'
Cincinnatus stared down at the coin he'd automatically caught. It wasn't enough, but it was a dollar more than he'd expected to get. He set it on the counter. When the U.S. soldiers were gone, he opened the pantry door and asked quietly, 'You all right, Mr. Kennedy?'
The disembodied voice floated back from behind the wall: 'Yes, thanks. God bless you.'
'We take better care of you come mornin',' Cincinnatus promised, and went off to see if he could get some rest. He sighed. He wasn't even close to sure he'd done the right thing in hiding Kennedy. But that didn't matter now. Right or wrong, he was committed. He'd have to see what came of that.
Nellie Semphroch sighed wearily as she carried the big cloth grocery bag back toward the coffeehouse. The bag itself was lighter than she'd wished it would be; the grocers had trouble keeping things in stock. But she was tireder than she thought she should have been, and felt old beyond her years. Winter always wore at her, and this year it wasn't just winter, it was Rebel occupation, too.
She slipped, and had to flail her arms wildly to keep from falling: the sidewalk was icy in spots. Across the street, Mr. Jacobs came out of his shop with a Confederate soldier wearing one pair of boots and carrying another. The Reb strutted up the street as if he owned it, which, in effect, he did. As far as he was concerned, Nellie wasn't worth noticing.
Mr. Jacobs, being occupied rather than occupier, could see-and admit seeing-his fellow U.S. citizens. 'You are all right, Widow Semphroch?' he called.
'Yes, I think so, thank you,' Nellie answered. 'One more thing on top of everything else.' She bit her lip. What she wanted to say was, I've been through so much. Why can't life be easy for a change? The answer to that one was depressingly obvious, though: her life had never been easy, so why should it start now?
'I hope it will be better soon,' the shoemaker said.
'So do I, Mr. Jacobs; so do I,' Nellie said. A good Christian, she knew, would not resent another's honestly earned success, but she was jealous of Jacobs. His business flourished, while hers withered on the vine. Why not? Leather was easy to come by, coffee wasn't. The Confederate soldiers in Washington went through a lot of shoes and boots. They'd gone through a lot of coffee, too, but now only a tiny bit was left.
'Widow Semphroch, is there anything I can do to help you?' Mr. Jacobs asked. Nellie shook her head. Things had come to a pretty pass, hadn't they, when even the shoemaker knew she was failing and pitied her? With stubborn pride, she picked up the grocery bag and went into the coffeehouse.
The little bell above the door didn't tinkle as she went in. After surviving the Confederate bombardment at the start of the war, it had fallen off its mounting a few weeks before, and she'd never bothered replacing it. Not much point to that, not when she or Edna was almost always there-and not when customers were few and far between, too.
But Edna wasn't behind the counter now. Frowning, Nellie set down the grocery bag. No customers were being slighted-all the tables in the front part of the shop were empty. But her daughter hadn't told her she was going anywhere-and, if Edna had decided to go out, she should have locked the front door. Nellie started down the hall, turned the corner-and there stood Edna, kissing a cavalryman in butternut, her arms tight around him, his big, hairy hands clutching at her posterior. Nellie gasped-not in dismay, but in fury. 'Stop that this instant!' she snapped.
Intent on each other and nothing more, her daughter and the cavalry officer hadn't noticed her till she spoke. When she did, they sprang apart from each other as if they were a couple of the clever magnetic toys that had been all the go a couple of years before.
'Mother, it's all right-' Edna began.
Nellie ignored her. 'Young man, what is your name?' she demanded of the Confederate soldier.
'Nicholas Henry Kincaid, ma'am,' he answered, polite even though Nellie could still see the bulge in his trousers, the bulge he'd got from rubbing up against Edna.
'Well, Mr. Nicholas Henry Kincaid'-Nellie freighted the name with all the scorn it would bear-'your
