not a big wheel with a diamond ring on his pinky.'
I'm talking politics with a nigger, he realized. And if that didn't beat all, when Pericles couldn't even vote. But the young black man had touched Pinkard's own dissatisfaction with the way things were, and had brought it out into the open so he could see all of it for himself.
After that, Pericles clammed up. Now it was Jeff who wanted to talk more, and the Negro who went about his job without wasted words. Pinkard started to get angry, but his temper cooled down after a bit. Pericles had walked dangerous ground, saying even as much as he'd said. But Pinkard was feeling damn near as trampled on as the black man. That was just what the bosses were doing, he thought: trying to turn white men into niggers.
When the closing whistle wailed, Pinkard almost ran home, he was so anxious to find out from Emily whether Pericles had the straight goods about Herb's widow. He got back to the yellow cottage before his wife did; she was probably still on the trolley. He busied himself by setting the table for the two of them, as he'd got into the habit of doing when he made it home first. Bedford Cunningham, had he known about that, would have given him a hard time over it. But Bed was worried about machine-gun bullets these days, not china and cheap iron flatware.
The door opened. In came Emily. 'You'll never guess what they've done to Daisy Wallace,' she said.
'Herb's widow? Thrown her out on the street like a dog, on account of her husband got hisself shot savin' the Sloss family's greedy behinds,' Jeff answered.
Emily stared at him. 'For heaven's sake, how did you know that?' He hadn't usually heard the gossip she brought home.
'I got ways,' he answered, a little smugly. 'Sure does stink, don't it?'
'Sure does,' she agreed, hanging up her hat and taking off the apron that protected her skirt. 'Makes me want to spit, is what it does.' She walked past Jeff into the kitchen, slowly shifting gears from work to home. When she saw the table ready for supper, she paused and said, 'Oh, thank you, honey,' in a voice suggesting his thoughtfulness had surprised her. That made him feel better about helping than he would have if she'd taken it for granted.
Even over the stew of salt pork and hominy and green beans, both of them kept on fuming about the way the crucible man's widow had been treated. Borrowing Pericles' idea, Jeff said, 'We'd all be better off, I reckon, if the workers had the say in how the factories got run.'
He'd expected Emily to agree to that. Instead, she paused with a bit of meat halfway to her mouth. 'That sounds like somethin' a Red would say,' she told him, her voice serious, maybe even a little frightened. 'They been warnin' us about Reds almost all the time lately, maybe 'cause makin' shells is such an important business. Never can tell who's a bomb-flingin' revolutionary in disguise, they say.'
'You ain't talkin' about me,' Jefferson Pinkard declared. 'Don't want no revolution-nothin' like it. Just want what's right and what's fair. Lord knows we ain't been gettin' enough of that.'
'Well, that's so,' Emily said, nodding. She ate the bite that had hung suspended. Neither one of them said much more about politics afterwards, though.
Jeff worked the pump while Emily did the dishes. Afterwards, he slid his arm around her waist. He didn't need to do much talking about that to let her know what he had in mind. By the way she smiled at him, she was thinking the same thing. They went into the bedroom. He blew out the lamp. In the darkness, the iron frame of the bed creaked, slow at first, building to a rhythm almost frantic.
Afterward, Emily, spent and sweaty, fell asleep almost at once. Jeff stayed awake a little longer, his mind not on the feel of his wife's arms around him but on Red revolutionaries. As far as he could see, these days people feared Reds and anarchists the same way they'd feared slave uprisings back before manumission.
Pericles, a Red? The idea was ridiculous. He was just a poor damned nigger sick of getting stuck with the short straw every draw. In his shoes, Jefferson figured he would have felt the same way. Hell, he did feel that way, thanks to the dislocations the war was bringing. He'd thought having a white skin made him immune to such worry, but he'd turned out to be wrong.
'Maybe we need another revolution, after all,' he muttered. He was glad Emily hadn't heard that; it would have made her fret. But saying it seemed to ease his mind. He rolled over, snuggled down into his pillow, and fell asleep.
A voice with a Southern twang: 'Ma'am?' An arm encased in a butternut sleeve, holding up an empty coffee cup. 'Fill me up again, if you please.'
'Of course, sir,' Nellie Semphroch said, taking the cup from the Rebel lieutenant colonel. 'You were drinking the Dutch East Indian, weren't you?'
'That's right,' the officer answered. 'Sure is fine you have so many different kinds to choose from.'
'We've been lucky,' Nellie said. She carried the cup to the sink, then took a clean one and filled it with the spicy brew the Confederate evidently enjoyed. She brought it back to him. 'Here you are, sir.'
He thanked her, but absently. He and the other Rebs at the table were busy rehashing an engagement up along the Susquehanna that had happened a couple of weeks before. 'Damnyankees would have crossed for sure,' an artillery captain said, 'if one of my sergeants hadn't fought his gun with niggers toting shells and loading: his own crew got knocked out in the bombardment.'
'Heard tell about that,' the lieutenant colonel said. 'Damned-pardon me, ma'am,' he added with a glance toward Nellie, 'I say, damned if I know whether they ought to pin medals on those niggers or take 'em out somewhere quiet, have 'em kneel down in front of a hole, and then shoot 'em, cover 'em up, and try to make out the whole thing never happened.' All the Rebs around the table nodded. The lieutenant colonel nodded to the artillery captain. 'You're closest to the matter, Jeb. What do you think about it?'
'Me?' The captain-Jeb-was boyishly handsome, with a little tuft of beard under his lower lip that should have looked absurd but somehow seemed dashing instead. 'I think I'd like another cup of our hostess' excellent coffee, too.' He held out his cup to Nellie. As she hurried off to refill it, he lowered his voice-but not quite enough to keep her from overhearing-and said, 'I wouldn't mind a go with our hostess' excellent daughter, either.'
Hoarse male laughter rose. Nellie stiffened. If Edna judged by looks-if Edna judged by anything-she probably wouldn't have minded a go with this Jeb, either. Nellie thought hard about dosing his coffee with a potent purgative. In the end, she didn't. All men were like that. Some, at least, were honest about it.
When she got back to the table, the artillery captain was saying, '… niggers don't seem to be putting on airs on account of it. They're back to driving and fetching, same as they were before. You ask me, it's worth knowing niggers can fight if their necks are on the block. Way we're losing men, we may need black bodies one of these days.'
One of the other officers-a major-got out a silvered flask and poured a hefty shot of something into his coffee. 'That's not the most cheerful notion I've ever heard,' he said, taking a big swig of the augmented brew. 'Ahh! Don't like the idea of niggers' getting their hands on guns. Don't like 'em getting their hands on military discipline, either.'
'I don't like it myself,' the lieutenant colonel said. 'We've got ourselves a white man's country. That's how it ought to be, and that's how it ought to stay.'
'Well, gentlemen, you won't hear me disagreeing there,' Jeb said, 'but if it turns into a matter of winning the war with niggers or losing it without 'em, what do we do then?'
An uncomfortable silence followed that question. The major with the flask poured another shot into his cup. What he had in there was probably more hooch than coffee. That didn't keep him from gulping it down as if it were water. 'Ahh!' he said again, and then, 'What we do is, we pray to God to keep that cup from passing to us.'
'Amen,' Jeb said, and the rest of the officers nodded. But the artillery captain went on, 'War's already gone on longer than we thought it would. The middle of April now, and no end in sight. Christ! We ought to be ready in case it goes on longer yet.'
'Not up to you and me to decide that kind of thing, thank heaven,' the lieutenant colonel said, which brought another round of nods. 'The president and the secretary of war, they'll do whatever they choose to do, and we'll make the best of it. That's what the Army's for.'
The major started telling a long, complicated story about a mule that had tried to kick an aeroplane to death. It would have been funnier if he hadn't had to go back and repeat and correct himself over and over again. That's what the demon rum does to you, Nellie thought; in her mind, all liquor got lumped together as rum. It calcifies the brain, and serves you right.
She had other tables on which to wait. The coffeehouse was jumping these days, business better than it had
