Hosea Blackford laughed. “You
She nodded. “Yes, I did. I hate to admit it, but I thought the president was generous to invite the whole Congress to his residence, Socialists and Republicans along with the Democrats.”
“Stinginess isn’t one of Teddy’s besetting sins,” Blackford said. “He has enough besides that. Are you going?”
“I was thinking of it, yes,” Flora said. Only weeks out of the Lower East Side, she knew her fascination with the glamour she was encountering was un-Socialist, but she couldn’t help it. “Are you?”
“Oh, no, and I wish you wouldn’t, either,” he said. Alarm stabbed through her: was she committing some dreadful
She stared at him, then laughed so loud, Roosevelt looked back over his shoulder to see what was funny. “Let me ask you again,” she said, her voice dangerous: “Are you going to the inaugural ball?” A little sheepishly, Blackford nodded. So did Flora, with the air of having won a victory. “Good. As I said, so am I. I’ll see you there.”
Sergeant Jake Featherston sat on an upended barrel of flour atop Round Hill, Virginia. He’d bought a Gray Eagle scratchpad in the Round Hill general store, and his pencil scraped over the paper. He knew he wasn’t the best writer ever born, or anything close to it. He didn’t care. So many things he hadn’t been able to say to anybody-so many things he had said that nobody would hear. If he got them down, he would, at least, be able to prove he’d been right all along.
“Got any makings, Sarge?” Michael Scott called as he walked up to Featherston. “My pouch is empty as Teddy Roosevelt’s head.”
“Yeah, I got some,” Jake answered. Before he pulled his own leather tobacco pouch out of a pocket, he slammed the notebook shut and put a hand over the cover. What was in there was
“Thanks,” the loader said, and rolled himself a cigarette. He gave the tobacco back to Featherston. “You been writin’ up a storm there, past couple days.” He lit a match. His cheeks hollowed as he sucked in smoke.
“Somethin’to pass the time,” Featherston said uncomfortably. It was much more than that to him, but he wouldn’t admit as much, not to Scott, not to anybody else, barely to himself. He wondered how he’d managed to get through so much of the war without trying it before. If he’d gone much longer without setting down what he thought, what he felt, he was sure he’d have gone crazy.
Scott didn’t seem to notice anything out of the ordinary, which eased Jake’s mind. “Yeah, we’ve had some time to pass lately,” Scott said, taking another drag on the handmade cigarette. “Yankees got down here into Virginia, and they haven’t done a whole hell of a lot since.”
“I know it.” That didn’t make Featherston any happier, though. Nothing made Featherston very happy these days. Every silver lining had its cloud. “Last time they were quiet like this, back in Pennsylvania, they were building for the push that threw us back to where we’re at now. If they hit us another lick like that one there, where the hell will we end up?”
“I don’t reckon it’s that bad, Sarge,” Scott said. “Remember how you were all up in arms about the niggers going into line in front of us? They haven’t done so bad, and the damnyankees haven’t exactly given ’em a big kiss on the cheek to say good morning, neither.”
“Rifles,” Jake said scornfully, and then, a little less so, “Well, hell, all right, machine guns, too. But they ain’t seen real artillery, and they ain’t seen gas, and they ain’t seen barrels. Till they do, God damn me to hell if I think they’ll make anything like proper soldiers.”
“You’re a stubborn cuss, Sarge,” the loader said with a laugh.
“Bet your ass I am,” Featherston said. “If I wasn’t, I’d have given up long since. But I pay all my bills, and I got a hell of a lot of bills to pay.”
“Uh-huh.” Scott took a last drag on the cigarette, threw it down, and crushed the butt under his heel. He headed off, perhaps a little faster than he had to.
Featherston sighed with relief to see him go. He opened the tablet and began to write again:
“Featherston.” The voice was sharp and precise, so much so that it almost seemed a Yankee voice. Jake jumped and slammed the tablet shut.
He whirled, jumped to his feet, and saluted. “Major Potter, sir!” he said. “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t hear you come up.” He would have had to show respect for any officer. He actually felt some for Clarence Potter.
“At ease, Sergeant,” the bespectacled major from Intelligence said. He pointed north, toward the U.S. lines, the lines that still bubbled and seethed like a pot boiling atop a stove but that, to Featherston’s surprise, had not yet boiled over. “What do you make of the quiet?”
“Funny you should ask, sir,” Jake said. “My loader and I were just talking about that very same thing. Last time they were this quiet this long was before they hit us that first big lick up in Pennsylvania.”
“So it was.” Potter rubbed his chin. “That’s very well reasoned-reasoned like an officer, I would say, if I didn’t think it’d make you pick up that barrel and break it over my head.”
“Sir, I reckon your head is harder than this barrel ever dreamed of being,” Featherston answered, intending it as a compliment. “Reckon your head is as hard as one of the damnyankees’ iron barrels with treads.”
“Heh,” Potter said. “No, those really hard heads are the ones down in the War Department in Richmond. It’d take about an eight-inch gun, maybe a twelve-inch, to blow a hole through one of them and let in some light.”
“Yes, sir,” Jake said. One of the reasons he thought Potter superior to the general run of officer in the Army of Northern Virginia was the boundless contempt they shared for the hidebound aristocrats who held so many important posts in Richmond.
Potter said, “Now that the colored troops have been in the line for a bit, what do you think of them?”
“Don’t like ’em for hell,” Featherston said promptly. “Not for hell. They’re in the line, yeah, but what happens when they really get hit? We haven’t seen it yet. Like I told Scott, I’ll believe they can stand it when I see ’em do it.”
Potter’s jaws worked as if he were chewing tobacco, but he didn’t have a plug in one cheek. “Here’s another question for you, then, Sergeant-which would you rather have in front of you, those full colored units or white units somewhere between a quarter and half strength? Those are your choices. We’ve squeezed out about all the white manpower in the CSA there is to squeeze.”
“I don’t know the answer to that,” Jake said. “I just don’t know. I have a notion of what understrength white units can do. These niggers-who can guess? Might be better. Might be a hell of a lot worse.”
In musing tones, Major Potter said, “Some white units without the proper experience will break and run the first time they come under truly heavy fire, or the first time they have to face barrels. If the black soldiers don’t perform as well as veteran troops, you need to remember it may be because they’re raw, not because they’re black.”
“Yes, sir, I understand what you’re telling me,” Featherston said. “But then again, it may be because they’re niggers, too. Hell of a choice we’ve got, ain’t it, sir? We can lose the war without ’em, or we can put ’em in the line and pray to Jesus they don’t turn their guns on us or go over to the damnyankees in droves.”
Fussily neat, Potter took out a clasp knife and scraped dirt from under a thumbnail. He said, “You know, the United States have a holiday called Remembrance Day coming up next month. They’ve been keeping a list of everything we’ve done to them since we fired on Fort Sumter to start the War of Secession. By now, it’s a long list. If they do lick us, they’re going to pay it all back and make us start a list of our own.”
“You’re saying they’d better not lick us,” Jake said slowly.
“We won’t be happy if they do,” Clarence Potter agreed. Behind his spectacles, his eyes missed very little. He pointed to Featherston’s Gray Eagle notebook. “Are you keeping a list of your own, Sergeant?”
Jake’s ears got hot. He was indeed keeping a list of his own. If anyone besides him saw it, he’d be lucky to escape hard labor. If Major Potter asked-or demanded-to see it, he didn’t know what he’d do. Keeping his voice as light as he could, he answered, “Maybe I’ll do me up a book once the war is over.
