spook us into runnin’ right over some explosives they planted?”
“Jesus!” Jefferson Pinkard said. He was glad he wasn’t the only one who said it. He’d thought working at the Sloss foundry was such a dangerous job, war would hardly faze him afterwards. But in the Sloss works even Leonidas, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding, wasn’t actively trying to kill him and devoting all his ingenuity toward that end. The idea that the Red Negroes might be using a small incident to give rise to a big one, as if they were throwing stones to flush game out of deep cover to where it could more readily be shot-that made the hair stand up at the back of his neck.
Acceleration pressed him against his seat. Things in his pack dug into his spine and his kidneys. He tried to brace himself against an explosion that would fling the car off the tracks like a toy kicked by a brat with a nasty temper. He didn’t think anything he did would help much, but sitting there like a lump of coal wouldn’t help at all.
Without warning, he wasn’t being pressed back any more. He had everything he could do to keep from going facefirst into the back of the seat in front of him. Soldiers in the corridor, who could not steady themselves, tumbled over one another in a shouting, cursing heap.
Iron screamed on iron, rails and wheels locking in an embrace so hot, it sent orange-red sparks leaping up higher than the window through which Jefferson Pinkard stared. Absurdly, he wondered if he’d helped bring any of that iron into being.
Groaning and shuddering, the train staggered to a halt. Pinkard saw a couple of men with kerosene lanterns outside. Their voices came through the shattered windows of the car: “Out! Out! Everybody out!”
That wasn’t easy or quick. It wouldn’t have been easy or quick with veteran troops. With raw recruits, all the shouting of their officers and noncoms helped only so much. They got in one another’s way, went in this direction when they should have gone in that, and generally blundered their way out of the coaches into the night.
Cold nipped at Pinkard as he stood in the darkness. A coal stove and a lot of bodies had kept the car warm. Now he got out the overcoat stowed in his pack. He wished he were home in bed with Emily, who would warm him better than any Army overcoat could. Most of the time, he’d been too busy to notice how much he missed her. Not now, standing here all confused, breathing in coal smoke from the engine, breathing out fog from the chill.
“Just in time-” The phrase started going through the raw soldiers, some of them plainly repeating it without any clear idea of why they were. Then somebody who sounded as if he did know what he was talking about spoke up: “We hadn’t been able to flag the engineer down in time, reckon this here train would have blown sky high.”
“What did I say?” Corporal Peter Ploughman sounded both vindicated and smug. Pinkard shrugged. If Ploughman didn’t know more about the soldiering business than the men he led, he had no business wearing stripes on his sleeves. But Jeff supposed the noncom did need to impress them every now and again with how much he knew.
“Where are we?” someone asked.
“About twenty miles outside of Albany,” the authoritative-sounding voice answered. Albany, or its outskirts, had been their destination. Jeff had a ghastly suspicion he knew how they were going to get there now.
A moment later, that suspicion was confirmed. Captain Connolly, the company commander, shouted, “Form column of fours!” Grumbling and cursing in low voices, the soldiers obeyed, again less efficiently than veterans might have done. And off they tramped, eastward along the line of the railroad toward Albany.
Pinkard promptly tripped over a rock, almost falling on his face. “They’re going to pay for this,” he muttered. He’d had to make only one night march during his abbreviated training. He hadn’t liked it for beans. Now he discovered practice was a lot easier than the real thing.
After some endless time, dawn began to break. What had been dark punctuated by deeper black turned into trenches and shell crates and burned-out Negro shacks and also the occasional burned-out mansion. Fresh-turned red earth in the middle of winter meant new graves. There were a lot of them. A faint odor of corruption hung in the air.
“Niggers are playing for keeps,” Stinky Salley remarked, in tones full of the same surprise and disbelief Pinkard felt. “Never would have reckoned they could do nothin’ like this.”
“Whole damn world’s gone crazy since the war started,” Jeff said. “Women workin’ men’s jobs, niggers workin’ white men’s jobs, and now, hell, niggers fightin’ damn near like white men. Shitfire, I wish they were fightin’ the damnyankees, not me.”
That argument had raged on the train and in the training camp, as it had all over the Confederacy since the Negro uprising began. Stinky Salley was on the other side. He stared at Pinkard with withering scorn. “Yeah, and I bet you wish they was marrying your womenfolks, too,” he said.
“Don’t wish anything of the kind, goddammit,” Pinkard said. “Just use your eyes instead of your mouth for a change, why don’t you? If niggers was the happy-go-lucky stay-at-homes everybody been sayin’ they are, you and me wouldn’t be
“Let’s get moving,” Captain Connolly shouted. “You don’t want to fall out of line hereabouts-niggers’d sooner cut your throat than look at you. Sooner we put these stinking Reds down, sooner we can get back to whipping the damnyankees. Train can’t do the work, so your legs got to. Keep movin’!”
Keep moving Pinkard did, though his feet began to ache. He wondered if the CSA really could recover from this rebellion as if nothing had happened. The captain certainly seemed to think so. Looking at the devastation through which they were marching, Pinkard wasn’t so sure. Who would repair everything that had been damaged?
A couple of Negroes, a man and a woman, were working in a garden plot near the tracks. They looked up at the column of white men in butternut. Had they been rebels a few days before? Had they hidden their weapons when government forces washed over them? Would they cut his throat if they saw half a chance? Or were they as genuinely horrified by the uprising as a lot of blacks in Birmingham were?
How could you know? How were you supposed to tell? Pinkard pondered that as he tramped past them. Try as he would, he found no good answers.
Lucien Galtier spoke to his horse as the two of them rolled down the road from Riviere-du-Loup toward his home: “This paving, it is not such a bad thing, eh? Oh, I may have to put shoes on you more often now, but we can go out and about in weather that would have kept us home before,
The horse didn’t answer. The horse never answered. That was one of the reasons Lucien enjoyed conversing with it. Back at the house, he had trouble getting a word in edgewise. He looked around. Snow lay everywhere. Even with overcoat, wool muffler, and wool cap pulled down over his ears, he was cold. The road, however, remained a black ribbon of asphalt through the white. The Americans kept it open even in the worst of blizzards.
They did not do it for him, of course. The racket of an engine behind him and the raucous squawk of a horn told him why they did do it. Moving as slowly as he could get away with, he pulled over to the edge of the road and let the U.S. ambulance roar past. It picked up speed, racing with its burden of wounded men toward the hospital the Americans had built on Galtier’s land.
“On my patrimony,” he told the horse. It snorted and flicked its ears, as if here, for once, it sympathized with him. His land had been in his family for more than two hundred years, since the days of Louis XIV. That anyone should simply appropriate a piece of it struck him as outrageous. Had the Americans no decency?
He knew the answer to that, only too well. Major Quigley, the occupier in charge of dealing with the Quebecois, had blandly assured him the benefits of the road would make up for having lost some of his land. Quigley hadn’t believed it himself; he’d taken the land for no other reason than to punish Lucien. But it might even turn out to be so.
“And what if it is?” Lucien asked. Now, sensibly, the horse did not respond. How could anyone, even a horse, make a response? Thievery was thievery, and you could not compensate for it in such a way. Did they reckon him devoid of honor, devoid of pride? If they did, they would be sorry-and sooner than they thought. So he hoped, at any rate.
Another ambulance came up the road toward him. He took his time getting out of the way for this one, too. That was a tiny way to resist the American invaders, but even tiny ways were not to be despised. Perhaps a man who might have lived would die on account of the brief delay.
He glanced toward the west. Ugly clouds were massing there: another storm coming. Even on a paved road,
