Beneath Gray Skies (5 page)

“And why do I call Mr. Fitchman a ‘poor man’? And me a ‘poor woman’? Because we’re trapped by you people. You heard what Mr. Fitchman said—he’s scared of all of you, and I don’t blame him, considering how awful we’ve treated you colored folks. If you hated us all, I wouldn’t blame you. And me, I’m trapped in my comfortable life. Look at me. You and Betsy and Horace take such good care of me, and I never have to lift a finger to serve myself. I’m trapped by your goodness to me and by the hate of all those round me who want to keep all you people like this. It’s not fair on any of us.” She was weeping softly by now. Christopher was too embarrassed to say anything sensible, and muttered another “yes, ma’am”, more to himself than Miss Justin.

“Sorry, Christopher,” she said, wiping her eyes with a lace-edged handkerchief. “I just hate living here in this way of life. If I had more courage, I’d sell the house, and set you free with the money, and move myself up to the North. But I don’t have that kind of courage. I’m too old.”

Christopher stood up. “I think I understand you, Miss Justin,” he said, slowly.

“I’m sure you do, Christopher. You understand me very well. If only you hadn’t been born the way you are, I’d have welcomed you as Kitty’s husband,” referring to her niece and ward, who was a few years younger than Christopher, and who had married a businessman from Atlanta eighteen months previously.

“Now, please don’t go talking foolishness, Miss Justin.”

“It’s not foolishness, Christopher, it’s the truth. Do you pray?” she suddenly asked him.

“Why, yes, ma’am, I do.”

“What do you pray for? Revenge against us? Your freedom?”

“I pray for justice, ma’am.”

“What a perfectly wonderful thing to pray for. You see, Christopher, I just pray for all this horror to end. You’re praying for something better. Something positive. Maybe I’ll sell the house, and you and me and Betsy and Horace will all get on that airplane from Atlanta out to Bermuda, and from there we’ll go up to New York, some day.”

“Too cold for me, Miss Justin. The one time I went up above the gnat line, I felt cold.”

“Then we’ll take the railroad, and go to California. How’s that?”

“Whatever you say, Miss Justin. Can I get you another drink?”

“No thank you, Christopher. I’ll walk to the house with you.”

And so tall black slave and frail white mistress walked together in silence back to the house, thinking their own thoughts, bound together by the peculiar institution that had shaped and warped both their lives.

“
We’ve gotten us some strange orders. We’re going to Berlin.”

D
avid wasn’t sure what to make of the new arrival in their barracks. For one thing he was too old. At least twenty-five, David reckoned, but no stripes on his sleeve. And tall. At least six three or four, a lot taller than the rest of them, with short dark hair and a habit of putting his head to one side when he talked to you and looked at you with those green eyes of his. Another thing, when he talked, he spoke funny. Not like the rest of the good old boys, and not like the few Yankees that David had heard.

“Where y’all from, anyways?” David had asked him.

“Jolly old England, what?” answered Brian. David had discovered his name on his knapsack. Brian de Q. Finch-Malloy, whatever kind of a name that was.

David didn’t know what to reply to the “what?”, so fired his second volley. “So why y’all here?”

“Spot of bother with the bobbies.” David had looked puzzled. “The police, sonny-boy. The police in London would like to get their hands on yours truly.” Thanks to Brian’s accent, it took some time for this to penetrate into David’s understanding. He asked the obvious question.

“That’s for me to know and you to find out, lad.” And not another word would Brian say on the subject.

“He’s one of them queers,” Tom said. “He’s a Limey, they’re all like that. Watch your ass, Davy-boy.” But Tom was wrong about that, David reckoned. He didn’t know a lot about that sort of thing, but he’d already seen something in his short period of service, and he’d fought off a couple of half-serious attempts by an older soldier. Either Tom was wrong about Brian, or Brian was a lot more subtle in his approach than his previous would-be seducer.

“Play chess?” asked Brian one evening.

“Saw some fellows playing it once. How does it work?” asked David.

Brian produced a chess board from his knapsack and set out the pieces. “Now, the object of the game is to checkmate the other bloke’s king.”

“What’s ‘checkmate’, then?”

“It means that you get the other bloke’s king in a position where you could take him, and he can’t wriggle out. It’s a sort of war-game between two armies.”

David sat up a little straighter.

“Now this here’s a rook, or a castle. See how it looks like a castle tower?”

David, who’d never seen a castle, or even a picture of one, nodded. “What’s the horses?”

“Those are knights. But first look at how the castles move, straight up and down like this, or straight across like this.”

The lesson proceeded. “Ready for your first game?” asked Brian after about thirty minutes of explanation. Ten minutes later it was over. “I don’t know how you did that, David, I really don’t.”

“I really won? You weren’t trying!” accused David.

“On the contrary, dear boy, I was trying. Not very hard, maybe, but I was trying. Do you want to play again?”

This time, it took nearly twenty minutes. “I don’t believe it,” said Brian, holding out his hand across the board. Feeling rather foolish, David shook it. “I was the bally chess champion at Harrow in my last year. I used to reckon I was pretty good and all that. Just shows how wrong a chap can be about himself.”

“Another game?” asked David.

“Ah, you’ve got your bloodlust up. Just give my ego a few minutes to revive itself and I’ll be ready. You wouldn’t happen to have any of that bloody awful whiskey on you, would you?” David passed the bottle over. “Ah, you’re a gentleman, David, even if you aren’t an officer yet,” said Brian, shuddering as the moonshine went down, and passing the bottle back to David.

David won that game too.

-o-

T
he next week, the Captain sent for David.

“Sir,” said David, saluting as he entered the office, and stood at attention.

“Had that Limey in to see me about a half an hour back after prayers. Tells me you whupped him at chess once, and you keep on doing it. Don’t play the game myself, but they say it shows you got some kind of brains. You got brains, kid? Can you read?”

“Of course, sir,” replied David indignantly.

“Keep calm, kid. Lotta kids we get in here, can’t hardly read nor write, and can’t figger past two. Here, read this to me,” and passed a book over to David.

David read fluently and without hesitation: “We propose to consider first the single elements of our subject, then each branch or part, and, last of all, the whole, in all its relations—therefore to advance from the simple to the complex. But it is necessary for us to commence with a glance at the nature of the whole, because it is particularly necessary that in the consideration of any of the parts their relation to the whole should be kept constantly in view.”

“Know what that means?”

“Not rightly, sir. But I think he means that soldiers have to look at the big things and the little things all together.”

“Not bad. Now copy that sentence for me onto this piece of paper.” David had been taught his letters by a strict teacher, and his handwriting was the product of a more leisurely elegant age. The Captain whistled as he looked at it. “Private Slater, this is better than the Colonel’s own writing. You can figger as well as you can read and write?”

“Not as well, sir, but I can manage.”

“Well, Private Slater, I’m going to get you promoted to Corporal and you’ll become the assistant company orderly. You’re too smart to be out on the fence all day. You’ll be inside, out of the hot sun, checking papers from HQ and letting me know what’s going on, and sending my answers back to HQ. Fellow we have now gets sick mighty often, and the paperwork piles up while he’s puking up his guts. Reckon you can handle all that?”

“Yes sir. Thank you, sir.”

“Thank your Limey friend. Congratulations, Corporal Slater. Report to my office at 8 o’clock tomorrow morning. Dismissed.” And with a snappy salute, Acting-Corporal David Slater almost bounced down the steps to the parade ground.

-o-

T
hanks, Brian,” he said that evening.

“Eh? For what, old man?”

“You’re talking to Corporal Slater now, Private. Assistant company orderly.” David was almost glowing with pride as he grinned at Brian.

Big smiles and a hand to shake. “Well done, old boy. I’m awfully glad my few words were useful. But when I saw how bally good at chess you turned out to be, I thought to myself, that lad’s got hidden talents. He’s wasted where he is. And so I had a word with the Left-tenant” (Brian always pronounced it that way for some reason) “and he listened to me, I’m pleased to say, and passed my words of wisdom up to the Captain. My dear good man, this calls for a celebration. No, no,” as David reached for his bottle. “The pleasure’s all mine, as the bishop said to the actress. Oh, never mind,” in answer to David’s puzzled look. He pulled out a bottle of whiskey. “Now this will warm the cockles of your heart. Real whisky from a Scottish island. After you.” He extended the bottle. David sipped—it was as different from his usual moonshine as Brian was from Tom. He drank again.

“Not too much,” warned Brian. “I’ll bet you have to be up early tomorrow for this orderly job, and you’re not going to be at your best with a hangover. Goodnight, Corporal Slater.” He picked up the bottle and walked with it to the other end of the hut.

-o-

D
avid soon grew into the job of company orderly. To start with, he wasn’t sure what some of the long words on the orders meant, but he got into the habit of copying the difficult parts and asking Brian to help him with the long words and complicated phrases in the evenings. Sometimes Tom joined them, and he learned to play chess too, but he was no match for either David or Brian. When they played poker together, Tom was the one who usually ended up with more matchsticks than the rest of them, though.

“You lads don’t make enough in this bloody outfit for me to let you play for money,” said Brian, who seemed to have appointed himself as a kind of honorary uncle to half the soldiers in David’s company, but still managed to find time to play chess with David and chat about his work at least two or three times a week.

-o-

O
ne evening, David came to Brian with a question. “Where’s Berlin? There’s nowhere called that round this way, is there?”

“The only Berlin I can think of is in Germany. That’s the other side of the ocean, a week or so away by ship. Why?”

“I thought that’s what they were talking about. We’ve gotten us some strange orders. We’re going there. Looks like I’ll be traveling outside the Confederacy for the first time in my life. And you know something else? We’re not going to be in Germany in uniform, neither, if I understand them orders rightly. We’re all of us booked on a ship called the
Robert E. Lee
, setting off from Savannah in two weeks’ time, which means we have to be packing up the day after tomorrow, I reckon.”

“Just us? Our company, I mean?”

“No, looks like the whole of us in the 3rd Alabama, and then the 7th North Texas, and the signals company from the 9th North Carolina. Why in heck would they want to send us over there?”

-o-

T
hat night, David missed seeing Brian creep out of the hut when everyone else was asleep. He didn’t miss him coming back in.

“Pssst. Brian!”

“Yes? Go back to sleep.”

“Where the heck were you?”

“Gone to look at the stars. Couldn’t sleep at all. Always does me good to go out and look at the stars. Makes me remember my place in the universe, I suppose. Reminds me just how small I am in the great scheme of things.”