American Front (3 page)

“
You
go to hell, Shaw!” Enos shouted back at him. He turned to the Cookie. “Don’t pay him any mind, Charlie. Remember, his family were mucky-mucks before the damn Rebels broke loose. They lost everything after the war, and he blames colored folks for it.”

“Lots of white folks do that,” Charlie said, and then shut up. It was hard for the few Negroes in the United States to get away from the scapegoat role that had dogged them for more than fifty years now. Compared to their colored brethren south of the Mason-Dixon line, they had it easy, but that wasn’t saying much. The Rebels didn’t have nigger hunts through the streets, either—those were an American invention, like the telegraph and the telephone.

“You’re jake with us, Charlie,” Lucas Phelps said, and all the fishermen from the
Ripple
nodded. They’d proved that, in brawls on the wharf and in the saloons just off it. George Enos rubbed a scarred knuckle he’d picked up in one of those brawls.

T Wharf was chaos—horse-drawn wagons and gasoline trucks, pushcarts and cats and dealers and screeching gulls and arguments and, supreme above all else, fish—in the wagons, in the trucks, in the carts, in the air.

Shouting newsboys only added to the racket and confusion. George didn’t pay them any mind till he noticed what they were shouting: “Archduke dies in Sarajevo! Bomb blast kills Franz Ferdinand and his wife! Austria threatens war on Serbia! Read all about it!”

He dug in the pocket of the overalls he wore under his oilskins for a couple of pennies and bought a
Globe
. His crewmen crowded round him to read along. A passage halfway down the column leaped out at the eye. He read it aloud: “President Roosevelt stated in Philadelphia yesterday that the United States, as a member of the Austro-German Alliance, will meet all commitments required by treaty, whatever the consequences, saying, ‘A nation at war with one member of the Alliance is at war with every member.’” He whistled softly under his breath.

Lucas Phelps’ finger stabbed out toward a paragraph farther down. “In Richmond, Confederate President Wilson spoke in opposition to the oppression of small nations by larger ones, and confirmed that the Confederate States are and shall remain part of the Quadruple Entente.” Phelps spoke up on his own hook: “England and France’ll lead ’em by the nose the way they always do, the bastards.”

“They’ll be sorry if they try anything, by jingo,” Enos said. “I did my two years in the Army, and I wouldn’t mind putting the old green-gray back on, if that’s what it comes down to.”

“Same with me,” Phelps said.

Everybody else echoed him, sometimes with profane embellishments, except Charlie White. The Negro cook said, “They don’t draft colored folks into the Army, but damned if I know why. They gave me a rifle, I’d shoot me a Confederate or three.”

“Good old Charlie!” George declared. “’Course you would.” He turned to the rest of the crew. “Let’s buy Charlie a beer or two.” The motion carried by acclamation.

From the heights of Arlington, Sergeant Jake Featherston peered across the Potomac toward Washington, D.C. As he lowered the field glasses from his eyes, Captain Jeb Stuart III asked him, “See anything interesting over there in Yankeeland?”

“No, sir,” Featherston answered. His glance slipped to one of the three-inch howitzers sited in an earthen pit not far away. “Time may come when, if we do see anything interesting, we’ll blow it to hell and gone.” He paused to shift the chaw of tobacco in his cheek and spit a stream of brown juice onto the red dirt. “I’d like that.”

“So would I, Sergeant; so would I,” Captain Stuart said. “My father got the chance to hit the damnyankees a good lick thirty years ago, back in the Second Mexican War.” He pointed over the river. “They repaired the White House and the Capitol, but we can always hit them again.”

He struck a pose intended to show Featherston he was not only a third-generation Confederate officer but also as handsome as either his famous father—hero of the Second Mexican War—or his even more famous grandfather—hero of the War of Secession and martyr during the Second Mexican War. That might even have been true, though the mustache and little tuft of chin beard he wore made him look more like a Frenchman than a dashing cavalry officer of the War of Secession.

Well, Featherston had nothing against handsome, though he didn’t incline that way himself. Though he was a first-generation sergeant, he had nothing against third-generation officers…so long as they knew what they were doing. And he certainly had nothing against Frenchmen. The guns in his battery were copies of French 75s.

Pointing over to the one at which he’d looked before, he said, “Sir, all you got to do is tell me which windows you want knocked out of the White House and I’ll take care of it for you. You can rely on that.”

“Oh, I do, Sergeant, I do,” Captain Stuart answered. A horsefly landed on the sleeve of his butternut tunic. The British called the same color khaki, but, being tradition-bound themselves, they didn’t try to make the Confederacy change the name it used. Stuart jerked his arm. The fly buzzed away.

“If they’d had guns like this in your grandfather’s day, sir, we’d have given Washington hell from the minute Virginia chose freedom,” Featherston said. “Not much heavier than an old Napoleon, but four and a half miles’ worth of range, and accurate out to the end of it—”

“That would have done the job, sure enough,” Stuart agreed. “But God was on our side as things were, and the Yankee tyrants could no more stand against men who wanted to be free than King Canute could hold back the tide.” He took off his visored cap—with piping in artillery red—and fanned himself with it. “Hot and sticky,” he complained, as if that were surprising in Virginia in July. He raised his voice: “Pompey!” When the servant did not appear at once, he muttered under his breath: “Shiftless, worthless, lazy nigger!
Pompey!
”

“Here I is, suh!” the Negro said, hurrying up at a trot. Sweat beaded his cheeks and the bald crown of his head.

“Took you long enough,” Stuart grumbled. “Fetch me a glass of something cold. While you’re at it, bring one for the sergeant here, too.”

“Somethin’ col’. Yes, suh.” Pompey hurried off.

Watching him go, Stuart shook his head. “I do wonder if we made a mistake, letting our British friends persuade us to manumit the niggers after the Second Mexican War.” He sighed. “I don’t suppose we had much choice, but even so, we may well have been wrong. They’re an inferior race, Sergeant. Now that they are free, we still can’t trust them to take a man’s place. So what has freedom got them? A little money in their pockets to spend foolishly, not a great deal more.”

Featherston had been a boy when the Confederacy amended the Constitution to require manumission. He remembered his father, an overseer, cussing about it fit to turn the air blue.

Captain Stuart sighed again. He might have been thinking along with Featherston, for he said, “The amendment never would have passed if we hadn’t admitted Chihuahua and Sonora after we bought them from Maximilian II. They didn’t understand things so well down there—they still don’t, come to that. But we wouldn’t have our own transcontinental railroad without them, so it may have been for the best after all. Better than having to ship through the United States, that’s certain.”

“Yes, sir,” Featherston agreed. “The Yankees thought so, too, or they wouldn’t have gone to war to keep us from having ’em.”

“And look what it got them,” Stuart said. “Their capital bombarded, a blockade on both coasts, all the naval losses they could stand, their cities up on the Great Lakes shelled. Stupid is what they were—no other word for it.”

“Yes, sir,” the sergeant repeated. Like any good Southerner, he took the stupidity of his benighted distant cousins north of the Potomac as an article of faith. “If Austria does go to war against Serbia—”

It wasn’t changing the subject, and Captain Stuart understood as much. He picked up where Featherston left off: “If that happens, France and Russia side with Serbia. You can’t blame ’em; the Serbian government didn’t do anything wrong, even if it was crazy Serbs who murdered the Austrian crown prince. But then what does Germany do? If Germany goes to war, and especially if England comes in, we’re in the scrap, no doubt about it.”

“And so are they.” Featherston looked across the river again. “And Washington goes up in smoke.” His wave encompassed the heights. “Our battery of three-inchers here is a long way from the biggest guns we’ve got trained on ’em, either.”

“Not hardly,” Stuart said with a vigorous nod. “You think Cowboy Teddy Roosevelt doesn’t know it?” He spoke the U.S. president’s name with vast contempt. “Haven’t seen him south of Philadelphia since this mess blew up, nor anybody from their Congress, either.”

Featherston chuckled. “You don’t see anybody much there when it gets hot.” He wasn’t talking about the weather. “The last thirty years, they find somewheres else to go when it looks like there’s liable to be shooting between us and them.”

“They were skedaddlers when we broke loose from ’em, and they’re still skedaddlers today.” Stuart spoke with conviction. Then his arrogant expression softened slightly. “One thing they always did have, though, was a godawful lot of guns.”

Now he looked across the Potomac, not at the White House and Capitol so temptingly laid out before him but at the heights back of the low ground by the river on which Washington sat. In those heights were forts with guns manned by soldiers in uniforms not of butternut but of green so pale it was almost gray. The forts had been there to protect Washington since the War of Secession. They’d been earthworks then. Some, those with fieldpieces like the ones Captain Stuart commanded, still were. Those that held big guns, though, were concrete reinforced with steel, again like their Confederate opposite numbers.

“I don’t care what they have,” Featherston declared. “It won’t stop us from blowing that nest of damnyankees right off the map.”

“That’s so.” Captain Stuart’s gaze swung from the United States back to his own side of the river and Arlington mansion, the Doric-columned ancestral estate of the Lee family. “That won’t survive, either. They’d have wrecked it thirty years ago if their gunnery hadn’t been so bad. They aren’t as good as we are now”—again, he spoke of that as if it were an article of faith—“but they’re better than they used to be, and they’re plenty good enough for that.”

“’Fraid you’re right, sir,” Featherston agreed mournfully. “They hate Marse Robert and everything he stood for.”

“Which only proves what kind of people
they
are,” Stuart said. He turned his head. “Here’s Pompey, back at last. Took you long enough.”

“I’s right sorry, Marse Jeb,” said the Negro; he carried on a tray two sweating glasses in which ice cubes tinkled invitingly. “I’s right sorry, yes I is. Here—I was makin’ this here nice fresh lemonade fo’ you and Marse Jake, is what took me so long.
Ju
-ly in Virginia ain’t no fun for nobody. Here you go, suh.”

Featherston took his glass of lemonade, which was indeed both cold and good. As he drank, though, he narrowly studied Pompey. He didn’t think Stuart’s servant was one bit sorry. When a Negro apologized too much, when he threw “Marse” around as if he were still a slave, odds were he was shamming and, behind his servile mask, either laughing at or hating the white men he thought he was deceiving. Thanks to what Jake’s father had taught him, he knew nigger tricks.

What could you do about that kind of shamming, though? The depressing answer was,
not much
. If you insisted—rightly, Featherston was convinced—blacks show whites due deference, how could you punish them for showing more deference than was due? You couldn’t, not unless they were openly insolent, which Pompey hadn’t been.

In fact, his show of exaggerated servility had taken in his master. “Get on back to the tent now, Pompey,” Stuart said, setting the empty glass on the Negro’s tray. He smacked his lips. “That was mighty tasty, I will tell you.”

“Glad you like it, suh,” Pompey said. “How’s yours, Marse Jake?”

“Fine,” Featherston said shortly. He pressed the cold glass to his cheek, sighed with pleasure, and then put the glass beside the one Stuart had set on the tray. With a low bow, Pompey took them away.

“He’s all right, even if I do have to get down on him,” Stuart said, watching the Negro’s retreat. “You just have to know how to handle niggers, is all.”

“Yes, sir,” Featherston said once more, this time with the toneless voice noncommissioned officers used to agree with their superiors when in fact they weren’t agreeing at all. Stuart didn’t notice that, any more than he’d noticed Pompey laying the dumb-black act on with a trowel. He was a pretty fair officer, no doubt about it, but he wasn’t as smart as he thought he was.

Of course, when you got right down to it, who was?

Cincinnatus stepped on the brake as he pulled the Duryea truck up behind the warehouse near the Covington docks. He muttered a curse when a policeman—worse, by the peacock feather in his cap a Kentucky state trooper—happened to walk past the alleyway and spy him.

The trooper cursed, too, and loudly: he didn’t have to hide what he thought. He yanked his hogleg out of its holster and approached the Negro at a swag-bellied trot. Pointing the revolver at Cincinnatus’ face, he growled, “You better show me a pass, or you is one dead nigger.”

“Got it right here, boss.” Cincinnatus showed more respect than he felt. He pulled the precious paper out of his passbook and handed it to the state trooper.

The man’s lips moved as he read: “Cincinnatus works for Kennedy Shipping and has my leave to drive the Kennedy Shipping truck in pursuit of his normal business needs. Thomas Kennedy, proprietor.” He glowered at Cincinnatus. “I don’t much hold with niggers drivin’, any more’n I do with women.” Then, grudgingly: “But it ain’t against the law—if you’re really Tom Kennedy’s nigger. What do you say if I call him on the tellyphone, hey?”

“Go ahead, boss,” Cincinnatus said. He was on safe ground there.

The trooper stuck the pistol back in its holster. “Ahh, the hell with it,” he said. “But I tell you somethin’, an’ you better listen good.” He pointed north toward the Ohio River. “Just across there it’s the You-nited States, right?” He waited for Cincinnatus to nod before going on, “Any day now, all hell’s gonna break loose between us and them. Some people, they see niggers like you down here by the docks or anywhere near, they ain’t gonna ask to see your pass. They gonna figger you’re a spy an’ shoot first, then stop an’ ask questions.”