Blood and iron ae-1 Page 6

  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 influe
nza 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.

  Nellie Semphroch woke with a start to find a man in her bed: a gray-haired fellow with a bushy mustache. The reason she woke, and woke with a start, was not hard to find, for he was snoring like a sawmill.

  As her racing heart slowed toward its normal rhythm, she relaxed and let out a small sigh. Here she'd been married since before the turn of the year, and she still wasn't used to sleeping with her husband. She wasn't used to thinking of herself by her new name, either. She'd worn the one Edna's father had given her for a good many years-most of them without him, as he'd died when his daughter was little, and Edna wasn't little any more.

  "One of the few decent things he ever did," Nellie muttered. Then, softly, she repeated her new name to herself, over and over: "Nellie Jacobs. Nellie Jacobs. Nellie Jacobs? She hadn't had so much trouble the first time she was married. That lay a quarter of a century in the past, though. She was more set in her ways now. "Nellie Jacobs."

  Hal Jacobs grunted and rolled over toward her. His eyes opened. Did he look a little confused, too, as if wondering where he was? He'd been a widower for a long time, as she'd been a widow, and had grown used to fending for himself. The room in which he'd lived, above the cobbler's shop across the street from her coffeehouse in Washington, D.C., was aridly neat.

  Then, seeing her, he smiled. "Good morning, my dear Nellie," he said, leaning over to kiss her on the cheek. He did that every morning they woke up together.

  "Good morning, Hal," Nellie said. Her husband, though far from young, remained very much the enchanted new bridegroom. Nellie wasn't so young as she wished she were, either. For her part, she remained bemused she'd ever agreed to marry him.

  His hand slid along under the covers and came to rest on the curve of her hip. "You have made me the happiest man in the world," he declared.

  He was sweet. Because he was sweet, Nellie had never told him how much she disliked having a man reach out and touch her like that. He wasn't young. He didn't seek his marital rights all that often. When he did, she had no troub
le getting through it. She'd got through far worse back in her own younger days.

  He wanted to please her. She let him think he did. Once or twice, he really had come close, which surprised her. She'd thought that part of her dead forever, not that it had ever had much life.

  She threw off the wool blankets. She wore a thick flannel nightgown and long underwear beneath it, but she was still cold. She'd been cold for months. "When will this winter end?" she asked, though that was not a question her husband could answer.

  Hal Jacobs got out of bed, too. He also had on long Johns under a nightshirt, and he also looked cold. "It has been a hard one," he agreed. "March and no sign of letup. And it has to be making the influenza epidemic worse."

  They both dressed rapidly. Nellie said, "I hate the influenza. It makes people afraid to go out in crowds, and that's bad for business."

  "With so much snow on the street, they have trouble getting about anyhow," Hal said. "This will not keep me from enjoying a cup of your wonderful coffee, though, or I hope not, Mrs. Jacobs."

  "I think we can probably take care of something like that, Mr. Jacobs," Nellie said. She'd always liked his old-fashioned, almost Old World, sense of courtesy. Now that they were married, she found herself imitating it.

  They went downstairs together. Edna, whose room was across the hall, joined them a few minutes later. They all stuck close to the stove, which heated the kitchen area as well as water for coffee.

  Sipping at his steaming cup, Hal Jacobs let out a grateful sigh.

  He looked from Nellie to Edna and back again. "My beautiful wife and her beautiful daughter," he said, beaming. "Yes, I am a lucky man "

  Edna glanced over to her mother. "You better keep him happy, Ma. He sure does talk pretty."

  "Foosh," Nellie said. She and Edna did look alike, with long faces, brown hair, and very fair skin. She didn't think she was particularly beautiful. Edna made a pretty young woman. She smiled more than Nellie did, which made her look more pleasant-but then, she was looking for a man. Nellie's opinion was that the joys of having even a good one were overrated, but Edna paid as little attention to Nellie's opinions as she could get away with.