Breakthroughs

back to Richmond, where all released Confederate prisoners were being shipped. Neither color nor cut was quite that of a C.S. uniform, but both were close.

His shoulder ached when he bent his arm to put the money in his pocket, but not too badly. A Yankee doctor had given him chloroform and then gone in there and drained an abscess that refused to clear up on its own. Now the wound really was healing. For a long time, he’d wondered if it ever would.

He could walk with only a bare trace of a limp, too, and his leg hardly bothered him at all. Put everything together and the damnyankees had treated him pretty well. Of course, they were also the ones who’d shot him. Given a choice, he would sooner not have been shot. Then he wouldn’t have had to worry about how the damnyankees treated him. But who ever gave a soldier a choice?

Here came Rehoboam, on two sticks and an artificial foot. The Negro prisoner made slow but steady progress toward the paymaster. With nothing better to do, Reggie waited till he too got paid off, then asked, “What are you going to do when you get back to Mississippi?”

“I be goddamned if I know,” Rehoboam answered. “Ain’t no use in the cotton fields no more. Ain’t no good on any kind o’ farm no more. Reckon I got to go to town, but I be goddamned if I know what the hell I do there, neither.”

“You have your letters,” Bartlett said. “I’ve seen that. It’s something.”

“It ain’t much,” Rehoboam said with a scornful toss of his head. “Ain’t like I’m gonna put on no necktie and sit behind no desk at the bank and loan the white folks money. Ain’t gonna be no doctor. Ain’t gonna be no lawyer or preacher. Ain’t gonna be no newspaperman, neither. So what the hell good my letters do me?”

“If you didn’t have ’em, how could you read all the lies the Reds tell?” Reggie asked innocently.

Rehoboam started to give him a straight answer. Then the black man started to get angry. And then, grudgingly, he started to laugh. “You ain’t no stupid white man,” he said at last. “Wish to Jesus you was.”

“Stupid enough to get shot,” Reggie said. “You come right down to it, how can anybody get any stupider than that?”

“You in one piece,” Rehoboam said. “I ain’t gonna see my foot again till Judgment Day, and I don’t believe in Judgment Day no more.”

“You are a damned Red,” Bartlett said. He meant damned in a more literal way than he was in the habit of using it. He didn’t think of himself as all that pious, but he’d gone to church on Sunday back in Richmond. Hearing Rehoboam casually deny the Last Judgment rocked him.

“Reckon bein’ a Red is more dangerous’n the other,” the Negro answered. “But if the damn gummint ain’t cheatin’ me, I’m gonna be a citizen, like you been sayin’, so I reckon I can think any kind o’ damnfool thing I like, an’ say so, too. That’s what bein’ a citizen’s about, ain’t it?”

“I suppose so.” Reggie hadn’t thought that much about it. He hadn’t needed to think much about it. Citizenship was natural to him as water to a fish, and so he took it altogether for granted. Whatever else Rehoboam did, he wouldn’t do that.

A military policeman in green-gray came up. “You Rebs been paid off?” he asked. When they didn’t deny it, he jerked a thumb toward a doorway at the end of the hall. “Shake a leg, then. Trucks to take you to the train station are right through there. You think we’ll be sorry to get you off our hands, you’re crazy.”

As the two men from the CSA made their way toward the door-they could hardly shake a leg-Bartlett spoke in a sly voice: “See? He treats you just like me-far as he’s concerned, we’re both scum.”

“I’m used to white folks what reckon I’m scum,” Rehoboam said after a moment. “How about you?”

Outside, Reggie proved he wasn’t used to it. Thinking to be helpful, he asked a Yankee guard, “Which one of these trucks is for the coloreds?”

“We ain’t bothering with any of that shit here,” the U.S. soldier answered. “You and Snowball look like you’re pals. You can sit together.”

Reggie had to help Rehoboam up into the back of the truck. Conscious of the Negro’s eye on him, he said not a word as they sat down side by side. None of the other freed prisoners-all of them white-already in the truck said anything, either.

Most places in the USA, Negroes-a relative handful, not close to a third of the population as they were in the CSA-had to take a back seat to whites, as they did in the Confederacy. Bartlett figured the damnyankees were piling one last humiliation on his comrades and him. He also figured he would survive it-and that he would catch hell if he complained about it. That made keeping quiet look like a smart idea.

The Yankees also made no distinction between white and black C.S. prisoners on the train that set out from Missouri toward Richmond. Reggie and Rehoboam ended up sitting side by side in a crowded, beat-up coach. Bartlett resigned himself to that, too, and told himself it wouldn’t be so bad. They knew each other, anyhow; after weeks of lying across the aisle from each other, they couldn’t help it.

Until it crossed into Virginia, the train stayed in territory that had belonged to the USA before the war began. Reggie stared out through the dirty window glass at countryside Confederate soldiers hadn’t been able to reach or damage. Here and there, in Cincinnati and a couple of other towns, he did see craters and wrecked buildings that had taken bomb hits, but not till the train got into central Pennsylvania, more than a day after it set out, did the landscape take on the lunar quality with which he’d grown so unpleasantly familiar.

“We fought like hell here,” he remarked to Rehoboam.

“Reckon we did,” the Negro answered, “or you white folks did, anyways. Yankees licked you just the same.”

Bartlett sighed; he could hardly argue with that. He did say, “We might have done better if you Red niggers hadn’t jumped on our backs while we were fighting the USA.”

“Mebbe,” Rehoboam said. “You might’ve did better if you didn’t go an’ make all the black folks in the country hate you like pizen, too.”

Since that held only too much truth, Reggie forbore from replying. He kept looking out the window. Maryland seemed just like Pennsylvania, a hell of wreckage and shell craters and forests smashed to toothpicks. The smell of death was fresher there, and filled the train. And when he rolled through Washington, D.C., he stared and stared. The whole city was a field of rubble, with most of the buildings knocked flat and then pounded to pieces. The stub of the Washington Monument stuck up from the desolation all around like a broken tooth in a mouth otherwise empty.

Rehoboam gaped at what was left of Washington, too. “Didn’t see nothin’ like this here in Arkansas,” he allowed. “This here, this is a hell of a mess.”

“Didn’t see anything like this in Sequoyah, either,” Bartlett said. “But in the Roanoke valley, especially around Big Lick-we saw plenty of it there. Too many men smashed together into too small a space, with no room for anybody to give way, that’s what does it. Over across the Mississippi, the fighting didn’t get this crowded. The Yankees and us had more room to move.”

“When we was fightin’ to keep ’em away from Memphis, it got plenty bad, but not like this,” Rehoboam said. “No, ain’t never seen nothin’ like this.”

After the train crossed the Potomac on a pontoon bridge and went into Virginia, Reggie expected the devastation to be even worse than it had been in Yankee country. For the most part, it wasn’t. It was fresher, but not worse. After a little while, he thought he understood why: by the time the fighting moved down into Virginia, U.S. forces had gained such a preponderance over those of the CSA that the Army of Northern Virginia had to give ground before it and everything around it were pounded completely flat. A war of movement didn’t tear up the landscape so badly as one of position.

And then, as soon as the train got south of the reach of U.S. guns, the countryside was the one Reggie had always known, with only an occasional bomb crater to remind him of the war. Coming into Richmond, though, brought it home once more. U.S. aeroplanes had done their worst to the capital of the Confederate States. Richmond was in better shape than Washington, but it wouldn’t win prizes any time soon.

“Check the signboards for trains going toward your home towns!” railroad officials-or perhaps they were government functionaries-shouted.

To his own surprise, Reggie reached out to shake Rehoboam’s hand. The Negro took the offered hand, looking a little surprised himself. “Good luck to you,” Reggie said. “I don’t care if you are a Red, or not too much. Good luck.”

“Same to you,” Rehoboam said. “You ain’t the worst white man I ever run acrost.” He made that sound like