Pinkard himself-took off his cloth cap and wiped sweat from his forehead. Winter might rule outside, but it was always summertime in hell on the foundry floor. Vespasian pointed toward the crucible operator. 'Hope to Jesus Billy up there figure out his job before he kill somebody. Ain't happened yet, but he come too damn close a couple times.'
'Yeah-one of 'em was me last month.' Pinkard jumped sideways to show how he'd escaped the misplaced stream of metal.
'You was right lively, that's a fact,' Vespasian said.
'Damn well had to be.' Pinkard shored up the edge of the mold at another place where it looked as if it might give way. 'The floor did run smoother before the war, and that's a fact, too.'
Vespasian didn't answer. He hadn't been on the foundry floor before the war. Back then, Negroes had fed the furnaces and done other jobs that took strong backs and no brains, but the better positions had been in white hands. Jeff's partner then had been his next-door neighbor and best friend, Bedford Cunningham.
But the war had sucked white men into the Confederate Army. The CSA had still needed steel-more steel than ever-to fight the damnyankees. Negroes started filling night-shift jobs once solely the property of white men, then evening-shift, and then, at last, day-shift, too.
Back then, before he got conscripted himself, Jeff hadn't wanted to work alongside a black man. He'd done it, though, for the sake of his country. Bedford Cunningham had come back to Birmingham without an arm. A lot of other steel men had come back as invalids. A lot more, like Herb Wallace, hadn't come back at all.
And so even now, with the war over for half a year, Negroes remained in some of the places they had taken during the war: they'd gained experience. Pinkard couldn't argue against experience, not when he'd just been griping about Billy. And Vespasian, who was in his forties, didn't get uppity the way a lot of younger blacks did. As far as the work went, he made a good enough partner. Jeff still felt uncomfortable working beside him.
He didn't quit. He'd have felt a lot more uncomfortable unemployed. Steel was all he knew. If he got a job at another foundry, he had no guarantee he wouldn't be working with another Negro, and one harder to get along with than Vespasian. He didn't care to move out of S loss company housing, either (though he wished he didn't live next door to Bedford any more). He endured.
He never once wondered what Vespasian thought of working next to him.
At shift-changing time, the steam whistle blew a blast that cut through the rest of the din on the floor like a hot knife through pork fat. 'See you in the mornin', Mistuh Pinkard,' Vespasian said.
'Yeah,' Jeff answered. 'See you.'
They clocked out separately, and left the enormous foundry building separately, too. It wasn't the way it had been, when Pinkard and Bedford had sometimes gone home to their side-by-side yellow cottages with their arms draped over each other's shoulders. Vespasian didn't have a yellow cottage. His cabin was painted primer red, which was cheaper.
Some of the white men going home waved to Pinkard, as did a couple coming onto the evening shift. He waved back. He was always glad to see familiar faces. He didn't see that many. Shift changes reminded him how little remained the same as it had been in 1914. Being reminded hurt.
His breath smoked as he hurried home. They'd had snow the week before, which wasn't common in Birmingham. On top of everything else, it had been a hard winter. The grass was yellow-brown and dead. Somebody sneezed not far from Jeff. He hoped it was from a cold, or from a tickling mustache hair. The Spanish influenza was killing men who'd lived through all the bullets the damnyankees aimed at them-and killing their wives and mothers and children, too.
In spite of the cold, Fanny Cunningham was standing in front of her house, gossiping with the woman who lived on the other side of her from the Pinkards. She waved to Jeff as he walked by. He waved back, calling, 'How's Bedford doing?'
'Right good,' she answered. 'He's been cheerful the whole day through.'
'Glad to hear it,' Pinkard said. He was especially glad to hear Fanny had had her husband under her eye the whole day through.
She said, 'You don't come over like you used to, Jeff. Bedford'd be powerful pleased to see more of you.'
Jefferson Pinkard didn't answer that. He waved again, almost- but not quite-as if to say he'd think about it, then headed up the walk to his own cottage. He hesitated before opening the door. He had to do it, though, if he intended to go inside. When at last he did, the savory smell of stewing pork made his mouth water.
'That you, darlin'?' Emily called from the kitchen.
'It's me, all right,' Jeff said.
Emily came out, a smile on her face. She had a barmaid's good looks and a barmaid's good buxom figure and hair of a bright shade somewhere between red and gold. Now that she wasn't working in a munitions plant any longer, she was letting it grow out. Now that she was out of the plant, too, the jaundice working with cordite had given her was gone, leaving her rosy and altogether desirable.
Jeff took her in his arms. She pulled his face down to hers. Her lips were greedy against his. She'd always been greedy for loving. When Jeff hadn't been there to give it to her… That was when he'd become a less than happy man.
'What did you do today?' he asked her after they broke apart.
'Usual kinds of things,' she answered. 'Did my cleaning. Did my cooking. Went out and bought me some cloth to make a dress with.' She nodded toward the sewing machine in a corner of the front room. Then she stuck out a hip, tilted her head a little, and looked at him sidelong. 'Thought about you. Thought about you a lot, Jeff.'
'Did you?' he said.
Emily nodded, batting her eyelashes. She played the role of seductress to the hilt. That didn't mean Jeff failed to respond to it. The collarless neck of his shirt suddenly felt like a choker. Some evenings, supper turned out to be later than he expected when he walked through the door.
'Did-?' That was the question Jeff knew he shouldn't ask. Did you see Bedford Cunningham today? If he wanted to let the poison seep out of their marriage instead of putting more in, he couldn't keep harping on that. He changed course in midstream: 'Did we have any more beer in the icebox?'
Alabama had gone dry not long before the war. What that meant, Pinkard had found, was that you had to know somebody before you could buy beer or whiskey, and that the quality of the stuff you could buy, especially the whiskey, had gone down. He'd evidently managed to ask the question without perceptible pause, for Emily nodded again. 'Sure do,' she said. 'Couple bottles. Shall we have 'em with the stew? It ought to be just about ready.'
'That sounds pretty good,' Jeff said. Supper, for the moment, was more on his mind than going back to the bedroom. He found another question that wasn't dangerous, or wasn't dangerous that way: 'What did you pay for the cloth?'
Now Emily's blue eyes flashed with fury, not any more tender emotion. 'Dollar and a half a yard. Can you believe it?' she said. 'I wasn't buying fancy silk taffeta, Jeff. I know we ain't rich. It wasn't anything but printed cotton dress percale, like I used to get before the war for eleven cents a yard. Wasn't as nice as what I could get then, neither.'
He sighed; he'd feared the answer would be something like that. 'They haven't bumped my pay in a bit,' he said. 'Don't know when they'll do it again.' His laugh held fury, too. 'Here I am, making more money than I ever reckoned I would in all my born days, and I can't even keep my head above water. That ain't right, Em. That purely ain't right. And hellfire, the little bit we'd stashed away in the bank before the war-what'll it buy us now? Not what we hoped it would, that's certain sure.'
His wife didn't argue. Instead, she went into the kitchen, pulled the cork from a bottle of beer, and brought it out to him. 'Here,' she said. 'Won't make things better, but it'll make 'em look better for a spell.' While Jeff took a long pull, she got the other bottle for herself.
Things did look a little better after some beer. Getting some pork stew under his belt made Pinkard more charitably inclined toward the world, too. It even made him more charitably inclined toward Emily. He hadn't married her for any other reason than getting her drawers down, but she'd shown him some others in the years since they tied the knot.
While she washed the supper dishes, he read yesterday's newspaper by the light of a kerosene lamp. Kerosene was heading through the roof, too, especially since the Yankees weren't going to let go of Sequoyah, from which the Confederate States had drawn a great part of their oil.
A story caught his eye. 'Look here,' he said to Emily when she came out of the kitchen, drying her hands on a
