street from the mill, and bought a ham sandwich on fresh-baked bread, with homemade mustard sharp enough to bring tears to his eyes. Then it was back to the mill, and an afternoon just like the morning.
His replacement on the evening shift, a fellow about half his age named Midas, got there a couple of minutes before the shift whistle blew. Scipio was pleasantly surprised; this was the first time in several days Midas had been early. They gossiped till the whistle screeched. Then Scipio said, “See you in de mornin’,” and headed for the boardinghouse.
Supper that evening was another starchy, watery stew, this one eked out with bits of salt pork. Scipio wolfed it down as if he never expected to eat again, then took the stairs to his room two at a time. That got him into the bathtub ahead of any of the other four people on his floor. Feeling clean and contented, he went back to his room to read and relax for an hour or two before he had to go to bed.
About half past eight, someone knocked on the door. When he got up and opened it, he found two large white men outside. They did not look friendly. One of them pointed a large, heavy revolver at his chest, which seemed anything but friendly. In a flat voice, the other one said, “You are a nigger named Scipio.”
Had Scipio been white, he would have turned pale. “No, suh.” He shook his head violently. “I’s Jeroboam. I’s had de name all my born days.”
“Passbook,” the white man holding the revolver said.
Now, were Scipio white, he would have flushed. “Ain’t got none,” he admitted. He put the best face on it he could: “Hell of a lot of niggers ain’t got no passbook no mo’. De war, de nasty uprisin’-” Frantically, he wondered who had recognized him and turned him in. Titus? One of the soldiers who’d marched past him in the park? He doubted he would ever know.
“Liar,” the white man with the pistol said. His comrade whispered something to him. Reluctantly, he nodded. When he spoke again, his tone was grudging: “We do want to make sure you really are Scipio the Red, so we know we’re killin’ the right nigger and not letting him run loose to make more mischief. So I ain’t gonna get rid of you now, not unless you do somethin’ stupid like try and run. So we’ll take you to somebody who damn well knows who you are. Once we’re certain sure,
“Whoever say I ain’t Jeroboam, he a liar,” Scipio declared.
“Anne Colleton ain’t no
Sergeant Chester Martin wrinkled his long, rather beaky nose as he made his way up the muddy zigzag of the communications trench toward the front line. He’d lived with mud and the stink of rotting meat and shit and garbage from the U.S. invasion of the Roanoke valley when the war was new till he got wounded the autumn before. Convalescing in Toledo, he’d almost managed to forget the nature of the stench, but it came back in a hurry.
He rubbed his chin, which was as pointed as his nose. Now the United States were getting ready to invade Virginia again, this time from the north rather than the west. In the early days of the fighting, the CSA had overrun Maryland and southern Pennsylvania before being halted on the line of the Susquehanna. The grinding war since then had driven the Rebels back toward their own border. Now-
Now the United States had bridgeheads south of the Potomac, on Confederate soil. Martin trudged past a wrecked barrel-a Confederate model, with treads all around the hull-from which Army engineers were scavenging whatever they could.
A shell burst a couple of hundred yards to Martin’s left. He didn’t bother ducking; going home to heal hadn’t made him lose the knack for knowing when an incoming round was dangerous and when it wasn’t. Rifle and machine-gun fire told him he was getting very close to the front. The shooting was sporadic, almost desultory. Neither side was pushing hard here, not right this second.
A grimy, tired-looking fellow with several days’ growth of beard was leaning against the wall of the trench while he smoked a cigarette. Martin paused. The soldier studied him. He could read the fellow’s thoughts. Nearly clean uniform-a point against. New Purple Heart ribbon-a point for, maybe even a point and a half, because it explained the clean uniform. Sergeant’s stripes-three points against, without a doubt.
But the stripes also meant the fellow couldn’t safely ignore him. Sure enough, after another drag on the hand-rolled cigarette, the soldier asked, “You lookin’ for somebody in particular, Sergeant?”
“B Company, 91st Regiment,” Martin answered. “They told me back at division HQ it was up this way.”
“They gave you the straight goods,” the soldier said with a nod. “Matter of fact, I’m in B Company myself. Name’s Tilden Russell.”
“Chester Martin,” Martin said.
Russell looked him over again, this time with more interest. “You don’t mind me askin’, Sarge, where’d you pick up your grape-jelly ribbon there?”
“Two years on the Roanoke front?” Russell’s eyebrows rose toward the brim of his helmet. “Come on. I’ll take you up to the line myself. God damn, you can play on my team any day of the week.”
“Thanks.” Martin hid a smile. If he’d come from Arkansas or, say, Sequoyah, Tilden Russell wouldn’t have wanted to give him the time of day, let alone escort him up to the forward trenches. Compared to this front, the fighting out west wasn’t anything to speak of. The fighting in the Roanoke valley, though, didn’t take a back seat to anything.
“Captain Cremony!” Russell called as he came into the front-line trenches, and then, to a soldier in a green- gray uniform, “You seen the captain, Eddie? This here’s our new sergeant-spent two years on the Roanoke front.” He sounded as proud of that as if he’d done the fighting himself.
“Yeah?” Eddie looked impressed, too. He pointed to the nearest vertical jog in the horizontal trench. “He ducked into that traverse there, last I saw him.”
“Thanks. Come on, Sergeant.” Russell led Martin down the firebay toward the traverse. Some of the trench floor was corduroyed with wood. Some was just mud, into which Martin’s boots sank with wet, squelching noises. He rounded the corner on Tilden Russell’s heels. Russell let out a pleased grunt and said, “Hey, Captain, I found our new sergeant comin’ up to the line. His name’s Martin, sir-he was on the Roanoke front before he got wounded.”
In spite of a fearsomely waxed, upthrusting Kaiser Bill mustache, Captain Cremony couldn’t have seen his twenty-fifth birthday. He was skinny and swarthy and looked more like a clerk than a soldier, but clerks didn’t commonly have two oak-leaf clusters under their Purple Heart ribbons. “Roanoke, eh?” he said. “You’ll know what it’s all about, then.”
“I hope so, sir,” Martin answered.
“You ought to fit in well,” the company commander said. “You mark my words, Sergeant-when the weather clears up, this front will see movement like nothing since the early days.”
“I hope so, sir,” Martin said again. In the early days, the Confederates had been doing all the moving on this front. He was willing to assume that wasn’t what Captain Cremony meant.
“About time, too,” Cremony said. “We’ve owed these bastards for two wars and fifty years. Now we’re going to get our own back.”
“Yes, sir!” Martin’s voice took on real warmth. “My grandfather lost a leg in the War of Secession. He died before we got to pay the Rebs back for that and for everything else. Next to what he got, this”-he waggled his arm-“isn’t anything worth talking about.”
He listened to himself in something close to amazement. After two and a half years of what surely came closer to hell than anything else man had managed to build on earth, he could still sound like a patriot. If that didn’t mean he was crazy, it did mean the United States had owed a hell of a big debt for a hell of a long time: a debt of pain, a debt of humiliation. And if they won this time, they would pay it back in the same coin. Martin didn’t look forward to the fighting that lay ahead. But the repayment…oh, yes, he looked forward to the repayment.
Captain Cremony said, “Russell, take him down the line to the section he’ll be leading. The sooner he fits himself into the scheme of things, the better for everybody.”
“Yes, sir,” Tilden Russell said. “You come with me, Sergeant. It’s not far.” As soon as he and Martin were out of earshot of Captain Cremony, he added, “The one you’re going to have to watch out for, Sarge, is Corporal
