'You wouldn't say that? Does that mean it's not true?'
When she had him, he folded up. To his credit, he didn't usually bluff and bluster, the way so many men did. He took her by surprise by not folding up now. 'It wasn't just the captain,' he insisted. 'Like I said, a lot of it was the way the Rebs treated us down there, like we were dirt because we came from the USA. They shot poor Lucas. And what they did to Charlie White… He's joining the Navy, too. For all I know, he may have signed up already-I haven't seen him, past couple of days.'
That surprised Sylvia, too, in a different way. She said, 'I didn't know they let colored people into the Navy.'
'Not in the Army, no,' George said, 'but in the Navy they do. Even back in the War of Secession, they did. Coal-heavers, cooks, that kind of thing. The way Charlie is with a frying pan, he'd get himself whatever rank they give number one cooks in no thin' flat.'
Sylvia had no great use for Negroes in general, but Charlie wasn't a Negro in general. He was a Negro in particular, and somebody who fed her husband at least as often as she did. She saw him more as a man and less as a colored man than anyone else of his race she'd ever known-not that that took in any great sample of Boston 's Negro community.
'I can see why Charlie would want revenge, but-' she said, and then stopped in dismay at her own words. He got me, so I'm going to get him back. God in heaven, where did it end?
'Like I said, we all owe the Rebs,' George said, sensing her hesitation. 'And me joining the Navy is the best I can do. Safer than being a fisherman these days, safer than being in the Army by a long shot. If I sit idle or if I get a land job, the Army hooks me sure.'
If you looked at things logically, what he said made good sense. Sylvia didn't want to look at things logically. What she wanted, now that George was home at last, was for him to stay home. He didn't want to stay home. Even if he had reasons for not wanting to stay home, it still hurt. She put her face in her hands and started to cry. She'd kept up a strong front for the children for so long that when the dam finally broke, it broke wide open.
'Honey, cut that out.' George sounded nervous, almost alarmed. Sylvia didn't cry very often, and he didn't know how to cope when she did. Helplessly, he went on, 'It doesn't do any good.'
He was right, but Sylvia couldn't stop. 'You just came back, and now you're-going away again,' she sobbed. That was it, in a nub.
George slid closer on the sofa. He reached out awkwardly to stroke her wet cheek. His hand wasn't so hard and rough as it had been before the Rebs captured him. Whatever they'd had him doing down there in the prison camp, it was easier than fishing. 'It'll be all right,' he said, and put his arm around her.
They ended up in the bedroom not much later. Since he'd come home, they'd made love more than they had even when they were first married; Sylvia had joked about pausing to take an occasional look at the floor, because all she ever saw was the ceiling. This had more a feel of desperation to it. Even when she gasped and quivered as powerfully as she ever had in her life, fear as much as healthy excitement drove her to that height.
And afterwards, lying there spent in the darkness beside her husband, she realized making love didn't do any more good than crying did. When you were done, the world hadn't changed a bit.
'God damn the war,' she whispered as she got up to put on her nightgown. George didn't hear her. He was already breathing the deep, regular breaths of sleep. She lay down beside him. She knew she had to go to the canning plant in the morning, but lay a long time awake even so.
Ugly as a drunk white man with a chunk of firewood in his hand looking for a Negro to beat on, the barge made its slow way up to the Covington wharf. Unlike a drunk white man, though, it was in full and complete control. The fellow piloting it was a master, in fact; Cincinnatus had never seen anybody do a better job of easing such an ungainly craft into place.
The Army men on board threw lines up to a couple of roustabouts on the wharf. Even before the barge was fully fast, they ran a gangplank up to the wharf, too. That was what Lieutenant Kennan had been waiting for. 'All right, you lazy niggers,' he shouted to the work gang of which Cincinnatus was a part, 'you been lollygagging long enough. Now get your black asses down there and get to work. Two men to a crate. That's what my order says, and that's how we're gonna do it. Move, God damn you!'
'Lord have mercy,' said a gray-haired Negro named Herodotus. 'I been workin', doin' bard work, since slavery days, an' I didn't never have no overseer with as mean a mouth as that Yankee.'
'Watch out he don't hear you,' Cincinnatus warned, though the other Negro, being no one's fool, had kept his voice down. 'Ain't just his mouth that's mean. He'd just as soon kick a black man as look at him.'
Along with the rest of the work crew, he and Herodotus went down into the barge. The crates they were to unload were a funny shape, as long as a man, but only a foot or so high and wide. They were of more solid wood than the usual run of box, and bound with iron straps, too. Whatever was in there, the people back in the USA who'd packed it didn't want it coming out.
Each crate had, neatly stencilled on it, BATTERY F, and, below that, DISIN FECTION. CINCINNATUS SCRATCHED HIS HEAD. YOU PUT THOSE TWO TOGETHER, THEY DIDN'T MAKE A WHOLE LOT OF SENSE. BUT THEN, YOU COULD SAY THAT ABOUT A WHOLE LOT OF THINGS HE'D SEEN SINCE THE WAR STARTED.
He and Herodotus lifted a crate. It was heavy enough to need two men on it, sure enough. 'You niggers want to watch out what you're doin',' Lieutenant Kennan said as they started up the gangplank. 'Anybody who drops one of these here crates, he doesn't just get his ass fired. He gets himself blacklisted-no work at all for him. And you want to know what I think about that, I hope the fucker starves, and all the little pickaninnies he's spawned, too.'
'Give that man a whip and put him in the cotton field, he get five hundred bales to the acre,' Herodotus said.
'Yeah, till one fine mornin' they find him with his head broke in, and what a shame, nobody knows who done it,' Cincinnatus said. 'Wouldn't take long, neither.' Herodotus nodded. That sort of thing happened, every so often.
But Lieutenant Kennan had more than a whip to back him up. He had the United States Army on his side. If anything happened to him, the Yankees would take hostages and shoot them. That had happened before, too.
Cincinnatus and Herodotus loaded the long, narrow crate into the back of a motor truck. Whatever it was, that said it had a certain amount of importance, because things that weren't of high priority got hauled to the front in horse-drawn wagons. More than the usual number of U.S. soldiers were standing around the trucks, too, keeping an eye on the loading but not, of course, deigning to help with what they, like whites in the CSA, called nigger work.
Back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Cincinnatus was glad he was wearing leather gloves. His hands were hard, but the rough boards of the crates would have torn them up anyhow. He didn't want to stop for the dinner break. He'd got into a rhythm. Pausing to eat took him out of it. When you were working like a machine, that happened sometimes. But stop he did. If you didn't take whatever breaks the Yankees doled out to you, they were liable to figure you didn't need 'em and not dole out any; they were nasty in a more efficient, cold-blooded way than Confederate whites.
Sure enough, when he went back to work after his sowbelly and greens and his canteen full of cold coffee, he needed a while to get used to things again, and he never did quite find the trancelike state in which he'd been working before dinner. Thinking about what he was doing made the afternoon seem to last three times as long as the morning had.
About halfway through the afternoon, another big barge came across the river from Cincinnati. It too was loaded almost to the wallowing point with long, skinny crates stencilled BATTERY F and DISINFECTION. AS the Negro labourers unloaded the crates, U.S. soldiers strung up electric lamps so another crew could eventually replace them and keep working through the night.
Herodotus raised an eyebrow. 'Ain't never seen 'em do that before,' he said. Cincinnatus nodded; he hadn't seen them do that before, either.
At last, Lieutenant Kennan shouted, 'All right, nigs, knock off. Anybody back here even one minute later than seven o'clock tomorrow morning, he can kiss my ass, but he still won't get any work. Go on now, get the hell out, and we'll put some fresh mules on the job.'
'That's how he thinks of us-mules,' Cincinnatus said as he and Herodotus lined up to get their day's pay.
