Breakthroughs

boys, I wonder what sort of bird’ll join our flock next.”

“Won’t be long till we find out,” Bradley said. Soberly-for the time being-Moss nodded.

Time hung heavy in the hospital. Lying there with a rubber drainage tube coming out of the shoulder that still stubbornly refused to heal, Reggie Bartlett had plenty of time to think and very little chance to do anything else.

One of the things he thought about-and disapproved of-was the weather. “You all sure this is really Yankee country?” he asked the wounded U.S. soldiers who filled most of the beds in the big ward. “Richmond doesn’t get any hotter and stickier than this.”

“St. Louis, sure as hell,” Pete reminded him. The one-legged soldier winked. “You ought to feel at home, ain’t that right?”

“Doesn’t mean I liked the weather,” Reggie said. “Anybody who likes summer in the Confederate States is crazy.” He turned to his countryman for support. “Isn’t that right, Rehoboam?”

The Negro was scratching toes on the foot he no longer had, as he often did. He said, “Don’t know nothin’ ’bout what it’s like in Richmond. Out in the fields down around Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where I’s from, it gets powerful hot in the summertime. This ain’t a patch on that, I don’t reckon.”

“From what I’ve heard about Mississippi, I expect hell would look chilly in the summertime next to it,” Reggie said thoughtfully. His shoulder twinged. He grunted and thought some more till the pain faded. Then he added, “Working in the fields down there doesn’t sound like a whole lot of fun.”

Rehoboam looked at him from across the aisle. “You ain’t the stupidest white man I ever did see.”

Pete whistled. “You gonna let him talk to you like that, Reggie? I thought a smoke who talked to a white man like that down in the CSA could go and write his will-except you wouldn’t let him learn to write and he wouldn’t own enough to bother leaving it to anybody.”

“You’re a natural-born troublemaker,” Reggie told him. “If you still had that other leg, I’d tear it off you and beat Rehoboam to death with it. That’d settle both of you. There. Are you satisfied now?”

“Minute I woke up and found out I was shy a pin, I was satisfied and then some, I’ll tell you that right now,” the amputee answered. “Right then, I knew I’d had all the fighting I was ever going to do.”

Reggie only grunted in reply to that. He still wasn’t satisfied, not in that sense. If he ever got healed up, he’d try to escape again. He’d done it once; he didn’t think doing it again would be so hard. But, while his leg wound bothered him less each day, pus still dripped from that shoulder. It left him sore and weak and feverish. There were lots of things he told himself he should be doing, but he lacked the energy to do any of them. Lying here was what he was up to, and lying here was what he did.

In came the nurse with a tray of suppers. Everyone got an identical slab of chicken breast-or possibly it was baked cardboard-an identical lump of mashed potatoes with gravy that looked and tasted like rust and machine oil, and something that might have been bread pudding or might have been sponge in molasses.

After working his way through the dismal meal, Reggie said, “You Yankees are winning the damn war-or you say you are-and this is what they give you? God have mercy on you if you were losing, that’s all I can tell you.”

“If cooking was something they shot out of the barrel of a gun, we’d be good at it,” Pete said. “Since it ain’t, we haven’t much bothered with it since the end of the Second Mexican War. Had more important things to worry about instead.”

Rehoboam said, “The kind o’ cooking you Yankees do here, y’all ought to shoot it out the barrel of a gun.”

“Amen,” Reggie said. “But if you shot it at our side, you’d just make the boys fight harder, for fear of having to eat like that all the time.”

Pete laughed. So did the rest of the wounded U.S. soldiers. They were no fonder of the grub the military hospital doled out than were their Confederate counterparts. And so did Rehoboam. But his laugh had an edge to it, and his dark face twisted in a way that for once had nothing to do with the pain and phantom itches from his missing foot.

“What’s chewing on you?” Reggie called across the aisle.

“What do you reckon?” Rehoboam returned. “When you was talkin’ ’bout what the boys’d do, you didn’t mean me. I ain’t the boys to you, an’ I ain’t never gwine be the boys, neither. I’s just a nigger, an’ I’d be a nigger without a gun if all the whites in the CSA wasn’t worse afeared o’ the damnyankees kickin’ ’em in the ass than they was of putting a Tredegar in my hands and callin’ me a sojer.”

He hadn’t spoken in a loud voice, but he hadn’t particularly kept it down, either. Everybody in the ward must have heard him. Silence slammed down. Everybody looked toward Reggie Bartlett, to see what he would say.

He hadn’t the faintest idea what the devil to say. He’d seen for himself that Confederate blacks harbored a deep and abiding loathing for the whites who ruled them. Outside of the prisoner- of-war camp in West Virginia, though, none of them had ever come out and said so to his face.

Rehoboam pressed the point, too: “What you think, Reggie? Is that the truth, or ain’t it?”

Bartlett had never had a Negro simply call him by his name before, either. He said, “Yeah, that’s the truth. I was there in Capitol Square in Richmond when President Wilson declared war on the USA, and I cheered and threw away my straw boater, same as every other damn fool in the place. If we could have licked these fellows here”-he waved with his good arm at the men in the green-gray hospital gowns-“without giving black men guns, of course we’d’ve done it.”

“Kept things like they always was, you mean,” Rehoboam said.

“Of course,” Reggie repeated. Only after the words were out of his mouth did he realize it wasn’t necessarily of course. White Confederate public opinion was so wedded to the status quo that realizing other choices were possible came hard.

Then Pete stuck his oar in the water, saying, “Blacks got guns of their own any which way.”

“Don’t know much about that, especially not firsthand,” Bartlett said. “I got captured over on the Roanoke front before the risings started, and they’d been put down by the time I got loose.”

“Bunch of Reds.” Pete gleefully stoked the fire.

He got Rehoboam hot, too. “You take a man and you work him like they works niggers in the CSA,” the Negro growled, “and if he don’t turn into no Red, he ain’t much in the way of a man. Wasn’t for the risings, I don’t reckon Congress never would’ve done nothin’ about the Army.”

“Wouldn’t be surprised if you’re right,” Reggie said. “But they did do something, you know. I was thinking about that a while ago. When you go back to Mississippi, you’ll be a citizen, with all the same rights I’ve got.”

“Mebbe,” Rehoboam said through clenched teeth. “Mebbe not, too.”

“It’s what the law says,” Bartlett pointed out.

“Ain’t got no black police. Ain’t got no black lawyers. Ain’t got no black judges. Ain’t got no black politicians.” Rehoboam rolled his eyes at Reggie’s naivete. “How much good you reckon the law gwine do fo’ the likes o’me?”

To Reggie, a law was a law, to be obeyed automatically for no better reason than that it was there. Seeing another side of things made him feel jittery, as if an earthquake had just shaken his bed. Still, he answered, “If there’s enough of the likes of you, you’ll do all right.”

“You reckon the stork brings the babies, too?” Rehoboam asked acidly. “Or do you figure they finds ’em under the cabbage leaves when they wants ’em?”

The ward erupted in laughter, laughter aimed at Reggie. His ears got hot. “No,” he said with venom of his own. “The Red party chairman or general secretary assigns ’em. That’s how it worked in the Socialist Republics, isn’t it?”

“You liable to be too smart for your own good,” Rehoboam said after a pause.

“I doubt it, not if I volunteered for the Army,” Bartlett replied. “And if you didn’t want to be a citizen, and if you didn’t think being a citizen was worth anything, what made you put on butternut?”

That made the Negro pause again. “Mebbe I was hopin’ more’n I was expectin’, you know what I’m sayin’?”

As a white man, as a white man living in a country that had beaten its neighbor two wars in a row, Bartlett had seldom had to worry about hope. His expectations, and those of his white countrymen, were generally fulfilled. He said, “I wonder what the Confederate States will look like after the war’s over.”

“Smaller,” Pete put in.

Both men from the CSA ignored him. Rehoboam said, “We don’t get what’s comin’ to us, we jus’ rise up