II
"Miss Colleton"—the broker in Columbia sounded agitated, even over the telephone wire—"I can do only so much. If you ask the impossible of me, you must not be surprised when I do not hand it to you on a silver platter."
Anne Colleton glared at the telephone. She could not exert all her considerable force of personality through it. But she could not leave St. Matthews, South Carolina, to visit the state capital, either. And so she would have to forgo the impact her blond good looks had on people of the male persuasion. She'd manage with hardheaded common sense—or, if she didn't, she'd find a new broker. She'd done that before, too.
"Mr. Whitson," she said, "are the Confederate dollar, the British pound, and the French franc worth more in terms of gold today, January 16, 1918, than they were yesterday, or are they worth less?"
"Less, of course," Whitson admitted, "but even so—"
"Do you expect that these currencies will be worth more in gold tomorrow, or less again?" Anne broke in.
"Less again," Whitson said, "but even so, you are gutting your holdings by—"
She interrupted: "If I convert my holdings in those currencies to gold and U.S. dollars and German marks while the C.S. dollar and the pound and the franc are still worth something, Mr. Whitson, I will have something left when the Confederate States get back on their feet. If I wait any longer, I will have nothing. I've waited too long already. Now, sir: will you do as I instruct you, or would you sooner converse with my attorneys?"
"I am trying to save you from yourself, Miss Colleton," Whit-son said peevishly.
"You are my broker, not my pastor," Anne said. "Answer the question I just gave you, if you would be so kind."
Whitson sighed. "Very well. On your head be it." He hung up.
So did Anne, angrily. Her brother, Tom, came into the room. "You look happy with the world," he remarked. His words held less in the way of lighthearted humor and more sardonicism than they would have before the war. He'd gone off, as if to a lark, a captain, and come back a lieutenant-colonel who'd been through all the horrors the Roanoke front had to offer.
"Delighted," Anne returned. She was still sorting out what to make of her brother. In a way, she was pleased he didn't let her do all his thinking for him, as he had before. In another way, that worried her. Having him under her control had been convenient. She went on, "My idiot broker is convinced I'm the maniac. Everything will be rosy day after tomorrow, if you listen to him."
"You're right—he's an idiot," Tom agreed. "You know what I paid for a pair of shoes yesterday? Twenty-three dollars—in paper, of course. I keep my gold and silver in my pocket. I'm not an idiot."
"It will get worse," Anne said. "If it goes on for another year, people's life savings won't be worth anything. That's when we really have to start worrying."
"I'll say it is." Her brother nodded. "If the Red niggers had waited to rise up till that happened, half the white folks in the country would have grabbed their squirrel guns and joined in."
"If they hadn't risen up when they did, we might not be in this mess now," Anne said grimly. "And they did bad enough when they rose."
Tom nodded. The Marxist Negroes had killed Jacob, his brother and Anne's, who was at the Marshlands plantation because Yankee poison gas left him an invalid. They'd burned the mansion, too; only in the past few months had their remnants been cleared from the swamps by the Congaree River.
"Hmm," Tom said. "We need an idiot to take Marshlands off our hands for us. Maybe we ought to sell it to your broker."
"As a matter of fact, I think we need an imbecile to take Marshlands off our hands," Anne said. "God only knows when anyone will be able to raise a crop of cotton on that land: one fieldhand in three is liable to be a Red, and how could you tell till too late? And the taxes—-I haven't seen anyone talking about taking the war taxes off the books, have you?"
"Not likely." Tom snorted. "Government needs every dime it can squeeze. Only good thing about that is, the government has to take paper. If they don't take the paper they print, nobody else will, either."
"Small favors," Anne said, and her brother nodded again. She went on, "I'd take just about any kind of offer for Marshlands, and I'd take paper. I'd turn it into gold, but I'd take paper. If that doesn't prove I'm desperate, I don't know what would."
"A hundred years," Tom said. "More than a hundred years— gone." He snapped his fingers. "Like that. Gone." He snapped them again. "Better than fifty years of good times for the whole country. That's gone, too."
"We have to put the pieces back together," Anne said. "We have to make the country strong again, or else the damnyankees will run over us again whenever they decide they're ready. Even if they don't decide to run over us, they can make us their little brown cousins, the way we've done with the Empire of Mexico."
"I'm damned if I'll be anybody's little brown cousin," Tom Colleton ground out. He swore with studied deliberation. He'd never cursed in front of her before he went off to the trenches. He still didn't do it in the absentminded style he'd no doubt used there. But when he felt the need, the words came out.
"I feel the same way," Anne answered. "Anyone with an ounce of sense feels the same way. But the Congressional elections prove nobody knows how to take us from where we are to where we ought to be."
"What?" Her brother raised an eyebrow. "Split as near down the middle between Whigs and Radical Liberals as makes no difference? And a couple of Socialists elected from Chihuahua, and one from Cuba, and even one from New Orleans, for Christ's sake? Sounds to me like they'll have everything all straightened out by day after tomorrow, or week after next at the latest."
Anne smiled at Tom's pungent sarcasm, but the smile had sharp corners. "Even that mess shouldn't get things too far wrong. We have to do enough of what the Yankees tell us to keep the USA from attacking us while we're flat. Whatever dribs and drabs we happen to have left after that can go to putting us back on our feet. Lean times, yes, but I think we can come through them if we're smart."
"Outside of a couple of panics, we haven't had lean times before," Tom said. "We do need better politicians than the gang we've got. We could use somebody who'd really lead us out of the wilderness instead of stumbling through it for forty years."
"Of the current crop, I'm not going to hold my breath," Anne said. "I—"The telephone interrupted. She picked it up. "Hello?" Her mouth fell open, just a little, in surprise. "Commander Kimball! How good to hear from you. I was hoping you'd come through the war all right. Where are you now?"
"I'm in Charleston," Roger Kimball answered. "And what the hell is this 'Commander Kimball' nonsense? You know me better than that, baby." Unlike her brother, Kimball swore whenever he felt like it and didn't care who was listening. He not only had rough edges, he gloried in them. And he was right—she did know him intimately enough, in every sense of the word, to call him by his Christian name.
That she could, though, didn't mean she had to. She enjoyed keeping men off balance. "In Charleston? How nice," she said. "I hope you can get up to St. Matthews before long. You do know my brother, Lieutenant-Colonel Colleton, is staying with me here in town?" You do know that, even if you get up to St. Matthews, you 're not going to make love with me right now?
Kimball was brash. He wasn't stupid. Anne couldn't abide stupidity. He understood what she meant without her having to spell it out. Laughing a sour laugh, he answered, "And he'll whale the living turpentine out of me if I put my hands where they don't belong, will he? Sweetheart, I hate to tell you this, but I haven't got the jack for pleasure trips without much pleasure. I'm on the beach, same as every other submarine skipper in the whole goddamn Navy." Where he could banter about passing on a chance to pay a social call that was only a social call, his voice showed raw pain when he told her the Navy had cut him loose.
"I'm very sorry to hear that," she said, and trusted him to understand she understood what grieved him most. "What are you going to do now?"
"Don't know yet," Kimball said. "I may try and make a go of it here, or I may head down to South America. Plenty of navies there that could use somebody who really knows what he's doing when he looks through a periscope."
That was likely to be true. The South American republics had chosen sides in the Great War as the rest of the world had done. Losers would be looking for revenge. Winners would be looking to make sure they didn't get it.
Anne said, "Whatever you decide to do, I wish you the very best."
"But not enough for you to send your brother out to hunt possums or something, eh?" Kimball laughed again. "Never mind. We'll get another chance one of these days, I reckon. Good luck to the lieutenant-colonel, too, the son of a bitch." Before she could answer, he hung up.
So did she, and she laughed, too. She admired the submariner; he was, she judged, almost as thoroughly self-centered as herself. Tom raised an eyebrow. "Who's this Commander—Kimball, is it?"
"That's right. He captained a submarine," Anne answered. "I got to know him on the train to New Orleans not long after the war started." He'd seduced her in his Pullman berth, too, but she didn't mention that.
"How well do you know him?" Tom asked.
"We're friends," she said. / was in bed with him down in Charleston when the Red Negro uprising broke out She didn't mention that, either.
She didn't have to. "Are you more than . . . friends?" her brother demanded.
Before the war, he wouldn't have dared question her that way. "I've never asked what you did while you weren't fighting," she said. "What I did, or didn't do, is none of your business."
Tom set his jaw and looked stubborn. He wouldn't have done that before the war, either. No, she couldn't control him any more, not with certainty. He said, "If you're going to marry the guy, it is. If he's just after your money, I'll send him packing. What you're doing affects me, you know."
Nor would he have had that thought in 1914. "If he were just after my money, don't you think / would have sent him packing?" she asked in return. "I can take care of myself, you know, with a rifle or any other way."
"All right," Tom said. "People who fall in love are liable to go all soft in the head, though. I wanted to make sure it hadn't happened to you."
"When it does, you can shovel dirt on me, because I'll be dead." Anne spoke with great conviction. Tom came over and kissed her on the cheek. They both laughed, liking each other very much at that moment.
In the trenches down in Virginia, Chester Martin had heard New Englanders talk about a lazy wind, a wind that didn't bother blowing around a man but went straight through him. The wind coming off Lake Erie this morning while he picketed the Toledo steel mill where he would sooner have been working was just that kind. In spite of coat and long underwear, in spite of hat and ear muffs, he shivered and his teeth chattered as he trudged back and forth in front of the plant.
His sign was stark in its simplicity. It bore but one word, that in letters a foot high: thieves! "They want to cut our wages," he said to the fellow in front of him, a stocky man named Albert Bauer. "We went out and got shot at—hell, I got shot—and they stayed home and got rich. No, they got richer; they were already rich. And they want to cut our wages."
Bauer was a solid Socialist. He said, "This is what we get for reelecting that bastard Roosevelt"
"He's not so bad," Martin said. A Democrat himself, he walked the picket line with his more radical coworkers. "He visited my stretch of the front once; hell, I jumped on him when the Rebs started shelling us. Later, when I got wounded, he found out about it and sent me a note."
"Bully!" Bauer said. "Can you eat the note? Can you take it to the bank and turn it into money? Roosevelt will oblige. Feudal nobles do. But does he care about whether you starve? Not likely!"
"Hush!' Chester Martin said suddenly. He pointed. "Here come the scabs." The factory owners always had people willing to work for them, no matter how little they paid. They also had the police on their side.
Jeers and curses and all manner of abuse rained down on the heads of the workers taking the places of the men who'd gone on strike. So did a few rocks and bottles, in spite of Socialist calls for calm and in spite of the strong force of blue-uniformed policemen escorting them into the steel mill. "Well, now they've gone and done it," Albert Bauer said in disgusted tones. "Now they've given the goddamn cops the goddamn excuse they need to go on and suppress us."
He proved a good prophet. As soon as the police had hustled the scabs into the plant, they turned around and yanked the nightsticks off their belts. A whistle blew, as if an officer during the war were ordering his men out of the trenches and over the top. Shouting fiercely, the police charged the strikers.
Chester Martin had not been an officer. But, thanks to casualties in the ranks above him, he'd briefly commanded a company in Virginia not long before the CSA asked for an armistice. Almost all the men on the picket line had seen combat, too. "Come on!" he shouted. "We can take these fat sons of bitches! Let's give 'em some bayonet drill."
He tore the cardboard sheet off his picket sign. The stick he was left holding wasn't as good a weapon as a billy club, but it wasn't to be despised, either. All around him, his companions imitated his action.
Here came the cops, a solid phalanx of them. Even so, they were outnumbered. They relied on discipline and on being able to create fear to get their way. After gas and machine guns and artillery and Confederate barrels, Martin found absurd the idea that he should be afraid of conscription-dodgers with clubs. He heard laughter from the men to either side of him, too.
In the instant before the red-faced policemen slammed into the picketers, Martin saw surprise and doubt on the features of a couple of blue-uniformed goons. Then he was at close quarters with them, and had no chance to study their expressions in any detail.
One of them swung a nightstick at his head. As if the cop were a Rebel with a clubbed rifle, Martin ducked. Things seemed to move very slowly, as they had in combat in the trenches. As he would have with a bayoneted rifle, Martin jabbed the end of his stick into the policeman's beefy side. A bayonet would have deflated the fellow for good. As things were, the cop grunted in pain and tried to twist away. Martin kicked him in the belly. He folded up like a concertina, the nightstick flying out of his hand.
Martin wished he could have grabbed the solid club, but it landed on the sidewalk, well out of his reach. He caught another policeman in the throat with the end of what had been the handle for his picket sign. Anyone who'd been in the trenches would have had no trouble blocking that lunge or knocking it aside. The cop let out a gargling shout and went over on his back.
"See?" Martin shouted. "They aren't so goddamn tough—the Rebs'd eat 'em for breakfast. And we can whip 'em, too."
"Rally!" one of the policemen shouted. The cops were taking longer than the strikers to figure out what was going on. Not until something close to half their number had fallen or had their nightsticks taken away did another cry ring out: "Drop back and regroup!"
Yelling in triumph, the men from the picket line surged after them. "Down with the scabs!'" they roared. "Down with the cops!"They trampled underfoot the policemen who couldn't fall back and regroup.
Maybe one of those police officers was first to yank out his pistol and start shooting at the men who were stomping him. But after one or two sharp cracks rang out, it suddenly seemed as if every cop in Toledo were drawing his revolver and blazing away at the striking steelworkers.
Against gunfire, the strikers had no defense. Some fell screaming in pain. Some fell silently, and would not rise again. A few kept trying to advance on the police in spite of everything. Most, though, Chester Martin among them, knew how hopeless that was. He was not ashamed to run.
Bullets zipped past his head. Now that the police had opened fire, they seemed intent on emptying their revolvers and slaying as many strikers as they could. In their shoes, Martin probably would have done the same. After the men from the picket line had come so close to overwhelming the cops altogether, they wanted their own back. If strikers got to thinking they could defeat the police, no man in blue would be safe.
"Next time," somebody not far away panted, "next time we bring our own guns to the dance, by Jesus!"
"That's right," somebody else said. "They want a war, we'll give 'em a fucking war, see if we don't."
All Martin wanted was to be able to work and to bring home a halfway decent wage. He didn't think that was too much to ask. The men who ran the steel mill—the trust bosses with their top hats and diamond pinky rings, so beloved of editorial cartoonists— evidently thought otherwise. A bullet slapped into the flesh of a man close by. Martin had heard that sound too many times on too many fields to mistake it for anything else. The steelworker crumpled with a groan.
Martin dashed around a corner. After that, he didn't need to worry about getting shot. The people on the street weren't striking; they were going about their ordinary business. If the cops suddenly started spraying lead through their ranks, they—or their survivors—could complain to city hall with some hope of being heard.
It looked to be open season on picketers, though. Martin realized he was still holding the stick he'd used against the police to such good effect. As casually as he could, he let it fall to the pavement. Pulling his cap down over his eyes (and wondering how it had managed to stay on his head through the melee), he trudged down the street toward the nearest trolley stop.
Several policemen, pistols drawn, ran past him while he stood waiting. His eyes widened; maybe he'd been wrong about how much mayhem the cops were willing to dish out to the general public. Since he didn't do anything but stand there, they left him alone. If he'd tried to flee ... He didn't care to think what might have happened then.
When the trolley came clanging up to the stop, he threw a nickel in the fare box and took a seat even though it was heading away from his parents' flat, where he was staying. He rode for more than a mile, till he'd put the steel mill well behind him. When he did get off, he was only a block or so away from the county courthouse.
Across the street from the building stood a statue of Remembrance, a smaller replica of the great one in New York harbor. Remembrance had finally brought the United States victory over the CSA. What sort of statue would have to go up before anyone
recognized that the working man deserved his due? How long would it take before he did?
Those were questions that made Martin look at Remembrance in a new way. His left arm bore a large, ugly scar, a reminder of what he'd suffered for his country's sake. What was his country willing to do for him?
"Shoot me again, that's what," he muttered. "Is that what I fought for?"
Teddy Roosevelt made noises about caring over what happened to the ordinary working man. Martin's brief meeting with the president in the trenches had made him think Roosevelt was sincere. He wondered what Roosevelt would say about what had happened in Toledo. That would tell whether he meant what he said.
Martin wondered if writing him a letter would do any good. He doubted it. He knew what happened when a private wrote a general a letter: either nothing, or somebody landed on the private like a ton of bricks. Roosevelt would do what he would do, and Chester Martin's view of the matter wouldn't count for beans.
"That's not right," he said. "That's not fair." But it was, he knew too well, the way the world worked.
After a while, he took a streetcar back to his parents' apartment building in Ottawa Hills. His younger sister, Sue, was at work; she'd landed a typist's job after he recovered from his wound and went back to the front. His father was at work, too. That graveled him some; Stephen Douglas Martin had been a steelworker longer than Chester had been alive. He labored down the street from the plant his son was striking. He had a good job and a good day's pay; Chester wondered if he himself would have to wait till he was gray and wrinkled to say the same. He wondered if he'd ever be able to say the same.
His mother, Louisa, who looked like an older version of Sue, exclaimed in surprise when he came through the door. "I thought you'd be out there all day," she said. She didn't approve of his striking, but he was her son, and she stayed polite about it.
At the moment, he knew a certain amount of relief he'd made it here ahead of the news of trouble. "It got a little lively when the scabs came in," he said, which was technically true but would do for an understatement till a better one came along.
"Were the cops busting heads?" his mother asked. He nodded. She shook her own head, in maternal concern. "That's why I don't want you out there picketing, Chester. You could get hurt."
He started to laugh. He couldn't help it. It wasn't that she was wrong. It was much more that she had no idea how right she was. "If I came through the war, I'm not going to let Toledo goons worry me," he answered.
"You need to worry. You could step in front of a streetcar tomorrow," his mother said. He nodded. She said that a lot. If he was going to worry, trolley cars wouldn't go high on the list. Two other questions topped it. One was, had anyone recognized him while he nerved the strikers to resist the police? The second followed hard upon the first: would any of those people let the police know who he was?
Jefferson Pinkard kept a wary eye on the crucible as it swung into position to pour its molten contents onto the Sloss Works foundry floor. The kid handling the crucible had some notion of what he was doing, but only some. Herb Wallace, the best crucible man Jeff had ever known, had gone off to fight the damnyankees— conscription nabbed him early—but he hadn't come home to Birmingham. His bones lay somewhere up in Kentucky.
This time, the pouring went smoothly. Only a tiny, fingerlike rivulet of molten steel broke through the earth and sand walling the mold, and Pinkard and his partner had no trouble stemming it with more earth. Leaning on his rake afterwards, Jeff said, "Wish they were all that easy."
His partner nodded. "Yes, suh, Mistuh Pinkard," Vespasian agreed. The big, bulky Negro—as big and bulky as Pinkard himself—took off his cloth cap and wiped sweat from his forehead. Winter might rule outside, but it was always summertime in hell on the foundry floor. Vespasian pointed toward the crucible operator. "Hope to Jesus Billy up there figure out his job before he kill somebody. Ain't happened yet, but he come too damn close a couple times."
"Yeah—one of 'em was me last month." Pinkard jumped sideways to show how he'd escaped the misplaced stream of metal.
"You was right lively, that's a fact," Vespasian said.
"Damn well had to be." Pinkard shored up the edge of the mold at another place where it looked as if it might give way. "The floor did run smoother before the war, and that's a fact, too."
Vespasian didn't answer. He hadn't been on the foundry floor before the war. Back then, Negroes had fed the furnaces and done other jobs that took strong backs and no brains, but the better positions had been in white hands. Jeff's partner then had been his next-door neighbor and best friend, Bedford Cunningham.
But the war had sucked white men into the Confederate Army. The CSA had still needed steel—more steel than ever—to fight the damnyankees. Negroes started filling night-shift jobs once solely the property of white men, then evening-shift, and then, at last, day-shift, too.
Back then, before he got conscripted himself, Jeff hadn't wanted to work alongside a black man. He'd done it, though, for the sake of his country. Bedford Cunningham had come back to Birmingham without an arm. A lot of other steel men had come back as invalids. A lot more, like Herb Wallace, hadn't come back at all.
And so even now, with the war over for half a year, Negroes remained in some of the places they had taken during the war: they'd gained experience. Pinkard couldn't argue against experience, not when he'd just been griping about Billy. And Vespasian, who was in his forties, didn't get uppity the way a lot of younger blacks did. As far as the work went, he made a good enough partner. Jeff still felt uncomfortable working beside him.
He didn't quit. He'd have felt a lot more uncomfortable unemployed. Steel was all he knew. If he got a job at another foundry, he had no guarantee he wouldn't be working with another Negro, and one harder to get along with than Vespasian. He didn't care to move out of S loss company housing, either (though he wished he didn't live next door to Bedford any more). He endured.
He never once wondered what Vespasian thought of working next to him.
At shift-changing time, the steam whistle blew a blast that cut through the rest of the din on the floor like a hot knife through pork fat. "See you in the mornin', Mistuh Pinkard," Vespasian said.
"Yeah," Jeff answered. "See you."
They clocked out separately, and left the enormous foundry building separately, too. It wasn't the way it had been, when Pinkard and Bedford had sometimes gone home to their side-by-side yellow cottages with their arms draped over each other's shoulders. Vespasian didn't have a yellow cottage. His cabin was painted primer red, which was cheaper.
Some of the white men going home waved to Pinkard, as did a couple coming onto the evening shift. He waved back. He was always glad to see familiar faces. He didn't see that many. Shift changes reminded him how little remained the same as it had been in 1914. Being reminded hurt.
His breath smoked as he hurried home. They'd had snow the week before, which wasn't common in Birmingham. On top of everything else, it had been a hard winter. The grass was yellow-brown and dead. Somebody sneezed not far from Jeff. He hoped it was from a cold, or from a tickling mustache hair. The Spanish influenza was killing men who'd lived through all the bullets the damnyankees aimed at them—and killing their wives and mothers and children, too.
In spite of the cold, Fanny Cunningham was standing in front of her house, gossiping with the woman who lived on the other side of her from the Pinkards. She waved to Jeff as he walked by. He waved back, calling, "How's Bedford doing?"
"Right good," she answered. "He's been cheerful the whole day through."
"Glad to hear it," Pinkard said. He was especially glad to hear Fanny had had her husband under her eye the whole day through.
She said, "You don't come over like you used to, Jeff. Bedford'd be powerful pleased to see more of you."
Jefferson Pinkard didn't answer that. He waved again, almost— but not quite—as if to say he'd think about it, then headed up the walk to his own cottage. He hesitated before opening the door. He had to do it, though, if he intended to go inside. When at last he did, the savory smell of stewing pork made his mouth water.
"That you, darlin'?" Emily called from the kitchen.
"It's me, all right," Jeff said.
Emily came out, a smile on her face. She had a barmaid's good looks and a barmaid's good buxom figure and hair of a bright shade somewhere between red and gold. Now that she wasn't working in a munitions plant any longer, she was letting it grow out. Now that she was out of the plant, too, the jaundice working with cordite had given her was gone, leaving her rosy and altogether desirable.
Jeff took her in his arms. She pulled his face down to hers. Her lips were greedy against his. She'd always been greedy for loving. When Jeff hadn't been there to give it to her. .. That was when he'd become a less than happy man.
"What did you do today?" he asked her after they broke apart.
"Usual kinds of things," she answered. "Did my cleaning. Did my cooking. Went out and bought me some cloth to make a dress with." She nodded toward the sewing machine in a corner of the front room. Then she stuck out a hip, tilted her head a little, and looked at him sidelong. "Thought about you. Thought about you a lot, Jeff."
"Did you?" he said.
Emily nodded, batting her eyelashes. She played the role of seductress to the hilt. That didn't mean Jeff failed to respond to it. The collarless neck of his shirt suddenly felt like a choker. Some evenings, supper turned out to be later than he expected when he walked through the door.
"Did—?" That was the question Jeff knew he shouldn't ask. Did you see Bedford Cunningham today? If he wanted to let the poison seep out of their marriage instead of putting more in, he couldn't keep harping on that. He changed course in midstream: "Did we have any more beer in the icebox?"
Alabama had gone dry not long before the war. What that meant, Pinkard had found, was that you had to know somebody before you could buy beer or whiskey, and that the quality of the stuff you could buy, especially the whiskey, had gone down. He'd evidently managed to ask the question without perceptible pause, for Emily nodded again. "Sure do," she said. "Couple bottles. Shall we have 'em with the stew? It ought to be just about ready."
"That sounds pretty good," Jeff said. Supper, for the moment, was more on his mind than going back to the bedroom. He found another question that wasn't dangerous, or wasn't dangerous that way: "What did you pay for the cloth?"
Now Emily's blue eyes flashed with fury, not any more tender emotion. "Dollar and a half a yard. Can you believe it?" she said. "I wasn't buying fancy silk taffeta, Jeff. I know we ain't rich. It wasn't anything but printed cotton dress percale, like I used to get before the war for eleven cents a yard. Wasn't as nice as what I could get then, neither."
He sighed; he'd feared the answer would be something like that. "They haven't bumped my pay in a bit," he said. "Don't know when they'll do it again." His laugh held fury, too. "Here I am, making more money than I ever reckoned I would in all my born days, and I can't even keep my head above water. That ain't right, Em. That purely ain't right. And hellfire, the little bit we'd stashed away in the bank before the war—what'll it buy us now? Not what we hoped it would, that's certain sure."
His wife didn't argue. Instead, she went into the kitchen, pulled the cork from a bottle of beer, and brought it out to him. "Here," she said. "Won't make things better, but it'll make 'em look better for a spell." While Jeff took a long pull, she got the other bottle for herself.
Things did look a little better after some beer. Getting some pork stew under his belt made Pinkard more charitably inclined toward the world, too. It even made him more charitably inclined toward Emily. He hadn't married her for any other reason than getting her drawers down, but she'd shown him some others in the years since they tied the knot.
While she washed the supper dishes, he read yesterday's newspaper by the light of a kerosene lamp. Kerosene was heading through the roof, too, especially since the Yankees weren't going to let go of Sequoyah, from which the Confederate States had drawn a great part of their oil.
A story caught his eye. "Look here," he said to Emily when she came out of the kitchen, drying her hands on a towel. "They had themselves a riot in Richmond: folks saying we're selling ourselves down the river to the USA. We're sure as hell selling ourselves down the river to somebody. Dollar and a half a yard for cotton! That kind of thing means we need to get ourselves set to rights, but I'm hanged if I know how."
"I don't want you hanged, Jeff, sweetheart, but I like the way you're hung," Emily said. She cared nothing for politics. Sweeping the newspaper aside, she sat down on her husband's lap. His arms went around her. One hand closed on her breast. She sighed in his ear, her breath warm and moist. He knew she wanted him. He'd never stopped wanting her, even when. . .. That hand squeezed tight. Emily whimpered a little, but only a little.
Later, in the bedroom, she whimpered in a different way, and gasped and moaned and thrashed and clawed. Sated, sinking toward sleep, Jeff slowly nodded. She wanted him, all right—no doubt of that. But whom would she want when his back was turned? He drifted off, wondering, wondering.