whiskey.
“I’ll be right back,” Nellie told him.
As she started frying the eggs and toasting the bread, Lieutenant Kincaid said, “Ma’am? Can you give me your answer, ma’am?” He sounded plaintive as a calf calling for its mother.
“No,” Nellie snarled. The Rebel officer looked as if she’d kicked him.
Edna set a hand on his arm. “It’ll be all right, Nick. Don’t you worry about it none. She’s just my mother. She ain’t my jailer, and she can’t hold me back when I go with you.” Not
“I don’t know what this world is coming to,” she said, “when children don’t pay any attention at all to the people who brought them into this world in the first place.” Edna didn’t answer. She kept staring at Lieutenant Kincaid as if she’d just invented him. Nellie sighed and slipped a metal spatula under the eggs to turn them in the pan. She repeated what she’d said a moment before: “I don’t know what this world is coming to.”
Lieutenant Kincaid leaned over and pecked Edna on the lips. He set his hat back on his head, tipped it to Nellie, and went out of the coffeehouse whistling “Dixie” loudly and off-key. “Isn’t he wonderful?”
“No,” Nellie snapped. A couple of other Confederate officers came in. Nellie pointed their way. “You take care of them.” She slid the eggs out of the frying pan, took the toast from the rack above the fire in the stove, spread butter on it, poured coffee, and carried Bill Reach his breakfast. “Here you are. That’ll be a dollar ten.”
He winced slightly, but laid down a dollar and a quarter. “Don’t worry any about the change,” he said. He spread salt and pepper liberally over the eggs before he began to eat. Then he looked up at her. “Back in those days, I didn’t know you could cook, too.”
She glared. “Do you think I won’t turn you in?” she said in a low, savage voice. “You better think again. My daughter is going to marry a Confederate officer.” And then, to her helpless horror, she began to cry.
“Are you all right, Ma?” Edna came rushing over. She looked daggers at Bill Reach. “What’d he do?” Hearing that, the two Confederate officers jumped to their feet. They were nothing if not gentlemen.
Nellie waved everyone away. “It’s all right,” she insisted. “I’m just-happy for you, that’s all.” She’d told Edna a lot of lies for the foolish girl’s own sake. After so many, what was one more?
Doubtfully, Edna retreated. The Rebs settled back into their seats. In a half-apologetic mumble, Bill Reach said, “Hal told me not to come around here any more.”
“Then why didn’t you listen to him?” Nellie said. She sat down at the table with Reach, which made Edna stare in surprise but succeeded in convincing the Confederates nothing was wrong.
“Now that I found you, I can’t stay away from you,” Reach answered. He started to reach out to set his hand on hers, but stopped when she made as if to pull away. He sighed, then coughed. “All these years, all that water over the dam, and I never forgot even a little of what we did, and I knew it had to be the same for you.”
She wanted to cry some more, or maybe scream. If he’d been mooning after her since before Edna was born…that made him crazy, was what it did. Try as she would, she had trouble remembering him at all from those long-ago days. Just another face, just another cock-But nowadays, he was the USA’s number-one spy in Washington. She wondered if the people to whom he fed his information knew he was on, or over, the ragged edge.
He got to his feet, tipped his battered black homburg, and said, “I’ll see you again, Nellie, one day before too long.” His walk to the door was slow and deliberate, as if he was daring her to tell the Rebs who he was.
He hadn’t called her Little Nell. She kept quiet. But he hadn’t taken any notice when she’d told him to go away and stay away, either.
“Sir,” the truck driver in green-gray said to Lieutenant Straubing, packing what should have been a title of respect with all the scorn he could, “it ain’t right, us white men working alongside niggers.” He set hands on hips and glared at Cincinnatus, who happened to be the black man closest to him.
“See here, Murray,” Straubing said, “you will do as you are ordered or you will face military punishment.”
“Then we will, won’t we, boys?” Murray turned for support to the new truck drivers-well over half the unit- who had joined the transport company to replace the men killed, wounded, or captured in the Confederate raid south of Berea, Kentucky. He was a little, skinny, bandy-legged fellow, with a narrow face, a receding chin, a beaky nose, and a shock of red hair: all in all, he reminded Cincinnatus of an angry chicken.
But he had backers. The new men in the unit were fresh out of the USA. A lot of them, probably, had never seen a Negro before coming down to Covington, let alone thought of working alongside one-or rather, a good many more than one.
“Don’t want to maybe trust my life to a coon,” one of them said.
“Hear tell some of them get paid more’n white men,” another added. “Ain’t nobody can tell me that’s proper.”
Cincinnatus looked over to Herk. The two of them had escaped the Rebel raiders together, and had shared what food they could steal and what miserable shelter they could find till they came upon a U.S. outpost. Herk hadn’t treated Cincinnatus like a nigger then. Of course, Herk had needed him then. Now the white man stood silent as a stone, when Cincinnatus needed him.
“You men are making a mutiny,” Lieutenant Straubing warned. “A court-martial will take a dim view of that.”
Murray, who had enough mouth for any three men, laughed out loud. “No court’s going to say anything but that white men are better than niggers, sir, and that’s the truth.”
Under the tan he’d got from going out with his trucks, Straubing turned pale. Cincinnatus’ heart sank. His guess was that Murray knew what he was talking about. Without much conscious thought, Cincinnatus and the rest of the black truck drivers bunched together. The whites with whom they’d been driving stood apart from them. Those whites didn’t go over with the new men who backed Murray, but they didn’t support their colored comrades, either.
“That’s your last word, Murray?” Lieutenant Straubing demanded tensely. When the redheaded driver nodded, Straubing hurried out of the warehouse depot, biting his lip. A chorus of jeers rang out behind him, as if chasing him away.
“Get you black boys hauling like mules, the way God made you to,” Murray said to the Negro truck drivers. The men at his back nodded.
“Don’t know why you so down on us,” Cincinnatus said. “We just doin’ our jobs, makin’ our pay, feedin’ our families.”
“Doing white man’s work,” Murray snapped. Like Lieutenant Kennan, he looked to be one of those U.S. whites who hated Negroes more savagely than any Confederate did, not least because he was so much less familiar with them than Confederates were. Cincinnatus, who had been driving a truck in the CSA before the war broke out, thought about pointing his old job out to the damnyankee. But he didn’t think it would help, and kept quiet.
The door to the depot flew open. In strode Lieutenant Straubing, followed by a squad of soldiers carrying bayoneted Springfields. Straubing pointed to Murray. “Arrest that man,” he snapped. “Charges are insubordination and refusal to obey lawful orders.”
Two of the men in green-gray stomped up to Murray, who looked comically amazed. One of them grabbed him by the arm. “Come on, you,” he snapped. Murray perforce came.
Straubing’s gaze traveled over the other new drivers. “Anyone else?” he asked in a voice that held nothing but ice. A couple of drivers stirred where they stood. “Vasilievsky, Heintzelman, you are under arrest, too. Same charges as Murray.”
“Come on, you two lugs,” one of the soldiers Straubing had brought said when neither driver moved for a moment. “You won’t like it if we have to come and get you, I promise.”
Numbly, their eyes wide with shock, the two white men obeyed. “Anyone else?” Lieutenant Straubing said again. None of the new drivers moved or spoke. As Cincinnatus had seen other soldiers do, they tried to disappear while standing in plain sight. Straubing nodded. “Very well.” He turned to the men he’d called. “Take those three to the stockade. Murray-this fellow here-is the ringleader. I will prefer formal written charges when I have the time, which I don’t right now. These shenanigans are liable to make me late, and I won’t stand for that.”
