Breakthroughs gw-3 Page 3

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he answered stolidly. “Been a goodish while since I let the horse kick me.”

  “That’s not what I meant.” Maude rolled over, turning her back on him. She was angry. She would have been angrier if she hadn’t had to tell him that, though. He was sure of it.

  Eventually, he slept. When he went downstairs the next morning, Julia had oatmeal ready and fried a couple of eggs while he ate it. The oatmeal and the eggs came straight from what the farm produced. The coffee Julia poured, however, he’d bought in Rosenfeld, the nearest town. He made a face when he drank it. “I’m sorry, Father. Didn’t I make it right?” Julia asked anxiously.

  “It’s as good as it can be,” he answered. “It’s about one part coffee to ten parts burnt roots and grain, is all. I expect the Americans think they’re good-hearted for letting us have any of the real bean at all.”

  “Are you sure it’s all right?” Julia said. McGregor was a serious man in a practical way, as farmers have to be. Julia was serious, too, but more thoughtfully so; she’d been outraged at the lies the Yankees were having the schools teach, and even more outraged because some of her classmates accepted those lies for truth. Now she seemed to wonder if her father was trying to deceive her about the coffee.

  “I’m sure,” he told her. “Your mother couldn’t have made it any better.” That did reassure her. McGregor went on, “And no matter what else, it’s hot. The Yanks can’t take that from us-unless they rob us of fuel, too, that is.”

  “I wouldn’t put it past them,” Julia said darkly.

  McGregor wouldn’t have put it past them, either. As far as he was concerned, the Americans were nothing but locusts eating their way through everything he and the rest of the Canadians whose land they occupied had spent years-sometimes generations-building up. Whatever fragments they happened to leave behind, the Canadians could keep. His mouth twisted in what was not a smile. He hoped such generosity wouldn’t bankrupt them.

  After finishing breakfast, he put on his coat, mittens, earmuffs, and a stout felt hat. He was already wearing two undershirts under a wool shirt and two pairs of long johns under jeans. Thus fortified against the weather, he opened the door, slamming it behind him as fast as he could.

  As always, the first breath of outside air made him feel as if he’d inhaled a lungful of knives and saws. His work boots crunched in the snow as he made his slow way toward the barn. The second breath wasn’t so bad; by the third, the air was just cold. He’d felt it much colder; he doubted it was any more than ten below. This sort of winter weather came with living in Manitoba.

  A north-south dirt road marked the eastern boundary of his farm. Most winters, it would have been all but empty of traffic. Not this one, nor the two previous. Big snorting White trucks painted green-gray growled over the frozen ground, hauling men and supplies toward the front south of Winnipeg.

  “Not far enough south of Winnipeg,” McGregor said under his steaming breath. Canadian and British troops still held the United States out of the link between the west and the more densely populated provinces to the east, but the sound of artillery from the front was no more than a low mutter on the horizon, not the thunder it had been the summer before, when for a while he’d hoped the Yanks would be driven from his land.

  Horse-drawn wagons and columns of marching men supplemented the trucks. McGregor hoped the marching soldiers would all come down with frostbite. Some of them surely would; the United States did not have winters to match these.

  Other trucks carried soldiers south, away from the fighting. Ambulances with red crosses painted on their green-gray side panels carried soldiers away from the fighting, too, probably for good. Any man hurt badly enough to need treatment so far away from the front was likely to be in bad shape. McGregor hoped so.

  He went into the barn and tended to the livestock. He didn’t have so much livestock to tend as he’d had before the war started; U.S. requisitions had made sure of that. He milked the cow and fed it and the horse and the pigs. He shoveled dung. When spring came, he’d manure his acres as best he could. He gathered eggs from under the chickens, who squawked and tried to peck. He put corn in a trough for them, glad he still had corn to give.

  Before too long, the work with the animals was done. He could have gone back to the house and its warmth. But it wasn’t so cold in here; the enclosed space and the body heat of the livestock brought the temperature up a good deal. He took off his mittens and stuffed them into a coat pocket.

  Along with the animals, he kept all sort of tools and supplies in the barn. Most of those tools were openly displayed, hung on pegs above his workbench. Near the workbench lay an old wagon wheel, a couple of wooden spokes broken, the iron tire streaked with rust the color of old blood. It looked as if it had lain there for a long time. It was supposed to look as if it had lain there for a long time.

  With a grunt, he picked it up and leaned it against the wall. A rake swept away the dirt under it, the dirt that concealed a board which he heaved up and leaned against the wagon wheel. Under the board was a hole in which sat a wooden crate about half full of sticks of dynamite, a couple of medium-sized wooden boxes, and a small cardboard box of blasting caps, a long coil of fuse, and, carefully greased against rust, a fuse cutter and crimper.

  McGregor looked down into the hole with considerable satisfaction. “If Captain Hannebrink ever finds out I’ve got this stuff, he puts me against a wall, the same as he did Alexander,” he said. He whistled a couple of bars of “God Save the King,” to which the Americans had written their own asinine lyrics. “Well, one fine day Captain Hannebrink will find out-and won’t he be surprised?”

  He laughed then. Contemplating revenge on the U.S. officer who had arrested his son and later ordered the youth’s execution was one of the few things that could take the scowl off his face these days.

  He picked up a blasting cap, a couple of sticks of dynamite, and the crimper and carried them over to the workbench. A case waited for them there, one more box made from scrap lumber and carefully varnished and smeared with petroleum jelly to keep moisture from getting in. Before he got to work on loading the explosives into it, he blew on his hands till his fingers were as warm and supple as they could be.

  When he was done working, he set the bomb in the hole along with the crimper. He put the board over the top of the hole, then raked and swept dirt and straw onto it till it looked no different from the surrounding ground. With another grunt, he put the old wagon wheel back where it had been. While it was there, no searcher would step on the board and hear the hollow sound a footfall made.

  He put on his mittens again, then left the barn. The tracks in the snow he had made coming from the house were still unchanged. He grimaced as he started back. As long as snow lay quiet, he couldn’t go out and use any of his toys, not without leaving a trail that would lead Captain Hannebrink and his chums straight back to the farmhouse.

  “A blizzard,” he whispered hoarsely. “Give me a blizzard, God.” If the snow was falling fast and blowing hard, it would hide his tracks almost as soon as he made them. And, if he did come across a Yankee sentry then, he would have bet on himself in the snow against any Yankee ever born. He’d known Canadian winters all his life-and he’d served his hitch as a conscript soldier, too, half a lifetime before. He knew the tricks of the business.

  Business…Instead of going straight back to the house, he made a detour to the outhouse. He did his business there as fast as he could. During winter, a man thanked God if he was constipated; the fewer trips you made, the better. The only advantage to winter was that it held down the stink.

  He set his clothes to rights in jig time, then started back to the farmhouse. He was halfway there when he realized he’d forgotten the milk in the barn. Cursing under his breath, he went back and retrieved it. When he went into the farmhouse, the first breath of warm air inside was almost as shocking as going the other way had been. “What took you so long, Pa?” Mary asked.
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  “I was working,” he told his youngest daughter. Mary’s gingery eyebrows rose; she knew how long his chores should have taken. He didn’t care, not at the moment. Turning to his wife, he asked, “What smells so good?”

  “Blackberry pie-our own berries from down by the creek.” Maude asked him no questions about why he’d worked so long in the barn. She never asked him any questions about things like that. He didn’t think she wanted to know. But she never told him to stop, either.

  Along with a good part of Greenville, South Carolina’s, population-both white and black-Scipio spent a Sunday afternoon in City Park watching Negro recruits for the Confederate Army practice marching and countermarching over the broad expanse of grass.

  “Ho there, Jeroboam!” called one of the colored men who worked at the same textile mill as did Scipio. “How you is?”

  “I’s middlin’,” he answered. “How you is, Titus?” Jeroboam was a safer name than his own. As Scipio, he had a price on his head. The government of the Confederate States and the government of South Carolina would both hang him if they caught him. He’d been a leader in the revolutionary Congaree Socialist Republic, one of the many black Socialist republics that had flared to life in the great uprising at the end of 1915-and been crushed, one after another, the following year.

  Bayonets glittered on the black recruits’ Tredegars. Scipio wondered how many of those soldiers who now wore butternut had worn the red armband of revolution a year earlier. Without a doubt, some had. Why were they serving the government they had tried to overthrow? To learn what they had not known before, what they would need to know to make their next uprising succeed? Or-

  Titus came up alongside Scipio. Like Scipio’s, his hair had some gray in it. He said, “Wish I was young enough to jine up my own self. Them sojers, when they gets out, they be as good as white in the eyes of the law.”

  “De gummint say so,” Scipio answered dubiously. “De gummint need we niggers now. De gummint don’ need we no mo’, what happen den?” His accent was thicker and richer than Titus’: the accent of the swamp country down by the Congaree River, south and east of Greenville.

  When he chose, he could also speak like an educated white. Before he unwillingly became a revolutionary, he’d been the butler at Anne Colleton’s Marshlands plantation. If God was kind, he would never have to talk like a white man again. If God was very kind, he would never see Anne Colleton again.

  Titus said, “They git to vote, don’t they, once they’s done bein’ sojers? They git to sit on juries, don’t they, once they’s out o’ the Army?”

  “De gummint say so,” Scipio repeated. “I hopes de gummint tell de truth. But it de gummint.”

  That got through to Titus. “Maybe so, Jeroboam. Maybe so. They make a law today say one thing, they make another one tomorrow, say somethin’ else.” He pointed. “But the law they make today, it give ’em niggers with guns. Niggers with guns, they ain’t so easy to trifle with.”

  Scipio nodded. Titus couldn’t read and signed his name with an X, but he wasn’t stupid. Black men who’d carried rifles and shown they could fight would be harder to cheat after the war was over. Maybe it was only because the Negro had shown he could fight in the Red uprisings that the Confederate government had decided to put him into the line against the United States. If the USA crushed the CSA, the Confederate way of life was wrecked forever. If the Negro helped save the CSA, change would also come, but perhaps less of it.

  A white drill sergeant put the black troops through their paces. “By the right flank…harch!” he barked, and they went as one man to the right. “To the rear…harch!” The recruits turned back on themselves. “By the left flank…harch!” They changed direction once more. “Eyes…right!” Their heads swung so that they looked into the crowd as they marched past Scipio and Titus. “Count cadence-count!”

  “One!..Two!..Three!..Four!” the Negro soldiers shouted in unison, calling out a number at every other step. Then they doubled the pace of the count: “One two three four! One two three four!”

  “Companeee-halt!” the drill sergeant shouted. His men might suddenly have turned to stone. He nodded, then looked angry at himself for betraying the slightest hint of approval. “Present-arms!” The Tredegars that had been on the Negroes’ shoulders leaped in front of their faces, held by both hands. “Shoulder-arms!” The rifles returned to the men’s shoulders. “For’ard…harch!” Like a well-oiled machine, the company went back into motion.

  After a few minutes, Scipio said, “I’s goin’ on home. See you in de mornin’.” Titus nodded absently. The soldiers seemed to entrance him.

  The room Scipio rented was large and cheap. He kept it scrupulously clean. That was a leftover from his days at Marshlands, though he didn’t think of it as such. All he knew was, dirt annoyed him. He bathed more often than most of his fellow boarders, too. He wished he had a bathtub in his own room. The one down at the end of the hall would have to do, though.

  He read under the gaslight till six o’clock, then went downstairs to supper. It was a stew of rice and carrots and turnips and okra and a little chicken. A cook at Marshlands who turned out such a stingy supper would have been looking for a new situation the next morning. Scipio ate a big plateful and said not a word. Since the ill-fated black revolt broke out, he’d learned a full belly, however obtained, was nothing at which to sneer.

  His cheap alarm clock jangled far too early the next morning. He shaved in cold water at the sink in his room, put on wool pants and a collarless cotton shirt, threw a cotton jacket over the shirt, and plopped a flat cap on his head. Coffee and rolls were waiting downstairs. The coffee was brewed from about as much chicory as the real bean, but it made his eyes come open, which counted for more. The only word he had for the rolls was delicious.

  Thus fortified, he made his way to the mill where he worked. The morning was brisk, but not so chilly as to make walking unpleasant. He fell in with a couple of other Negro men who worked at the same mill. One of his friends told a lewd, improbable, and highly entertaining story about his exploits with several women-just how many kept changing from one minute to another.

  Black faces streamed in at the entry gate. Only a few whites put salt among the pepper. Most of the white faces belonged to women, the rest to men either unfit for service or too badly injured to go back into the military.

  “Befo’ the war,” one of Scipio’s friends said, “niggers couldn’t get these here jobs, ’cept maybe the dirtiest ones an’ the hardest ones. They was all fo’ the buckra, but nowadays the buckra all off fightin’ the Yankees. If us niggers don’t do the work, the work don’t get did.”

  “That’s a fac’,” Scipio said. He never expressed an opinion of that sort on his own. To have done so might have drawn attention to him. The more nearly invisible he was, the better. Agreeing with what someone else said, though, seemed safe enough.

  He punched the time clock and went to work: throwing heavy bolts of butternut cloth onto a low cart with tiny wheels and pushing the cart from the enormous room where the cloth was woven to the equally enormous one where it was cut into uniforms. He got three dollars a day, up from the $2.50 the mill had paid when he first hired on. Part of the increase was because wages were rising along with prices, though not so fast. The rest came simply from his staying on the job. A lot of men started, lasted a couple of days or a couple of weeks, and quit. Some got better work elsewhere, while others left the factory for the service.

  At forty-four-give or take a year-Scipio was too old to join the service. He wasn’t particularly interested in better work, either. The job he had was hard, but not too hard. He had better wind and a slimmer waistline than he’d owned back at Marshlands. He also had work that he did and did well, without anyone giving him orders every other minute.

  He hadn’t learned what a luxury that was till his first factory job in Columbia, after he’d managed to escape the collapsing Congaree Socialist Republic. Before then, all he’d ever known were Anne Coll
eton’s endless commands, and those of her brothers, and, in earlier days, those of her father.

  Now all he had to do was shove this cart across fifty feet of bumpy floor, unload the bolts of cloth, and then pull the cart back and fill it up again. He had plenty of time to think while he worked, and his natural pace was fast enough to keep the foreman happy. Had the foreman pushed him, he could easily have worked half again as hard; the fellow never would have lasted as an overseer in the Marshlands cotton fields.

  At noon, the lunch whistle blew. Scipio clocked out, hurried to one of the many little greasy spoons across the 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.”