Breakthroughs (74 page)

Rebellion came not from George, Jr., but from Mary Jane. “I hate string beans,” she said. “I want fried potatoes!”

Sylvia swatted her on the bottom. “You’re going to eat string beans tonight, anyhow,” she answered. “If you don’t feel like eating string beans, you can go to bed right now without any supper.”

Mary Jane stuck out her tongue and crossed her eyes. Sylvia swatted her again, harder this time. Sometimes she practically needed to hit her daughter over the head with a brick to get her to behave. Now, though, Mary Jane seemed to get the idea that she’d pushed things too far. She looked so angelic, any real angel who saw her would have been extremely suspicious. Sylvia laughed and shook her head and started cooking.

She’d just set supper on the table and was cutting Mary Jane’s pork chops into bite-sized pieces when someone knocked on the door. She muttered something she hoped the children didn’t catch, then went to see which neighbor had chosen exactly the wrong moment to want to borrow salt or molasses or a dollar and a half.

But the youth standing there wasn’t a neighbor. He wore a green uniform darker than that of the U.S. Army; his brass buttons read WU. “Sylvia Enos?” he asked. When Sylvia nodded, he thrust a pale yellow envelope at her. “Telegram, ma’am.” He hurried away before she could say anything.

Scratching her head—delivery boys usually hung around to collect a tip—she opened the envelope. Then she understood. “The Navy Department,” she whispered, and ice congealed around her heart.

DEEPLY REGRET TO INFORM YOU,
read the characterless letters,
THAT YOUR HUSBAND, GEORGE ENOS, WAS AMONG THE CREW ABOARD THE USS ERICSSON, WHICH WAS SUNK LAST NIGHT BY AN ENEMY SUBMERSIBLE. DESPITE DILIGENT SEARCH, NO TRACE OF SURVIVORS HAS BEEN FOUND OR IS EXPECTED. HE MUST BE PRE
SUMED DEAD. THE UNITED STATES ARE GRATEFUL FOR HIS VALIANT SERVICE IN THE CAUSE OF REMEMBRANCE AND VICTORY.
The printed signature was that of Josephus Daniels, Secretary of the Navy.

“Your pork chops are getting cold, Ma,” George, Jr., called from the table.

“If you don’t eat your green beans, you have to go to bed right now,” Mary Jane added gleefully.

Sylvia kept staring at the words of the telegram, hoping, praying, they would twist into some different shape, some different meaning. Twice now, when George had been captured by a Confederate commerce raider and when he’d survived the sinking of the
Punishment
, she’d feared the worst. This wasn’t like those times. She didn’t fear the worst now. She knew it. She felt it in her bones.

“What am I going to do?” she said, though no one could answer. “What am I going to do without George?”

“I’m right here, Ma,” her son said. “I didn’t go nowhere. Your pork chops are still getting cold. They’re no good if they get cold. You always say that, Ma. You do.”

She turned back to the table. She didn’t realize tears had started running down her face till Mary Jane asked, “Why are you crying, Ma?”

“Don’t cry, Ma,” George, Jr., added. “What’s wrong? We’ll fix it, whatever it is.”

They depended on her. She had to be strong, because they couldn’t do it for themselves. And she had to tell them the truth. They needed to know. She swiped her sleeve over her eyes. Then she held up the telegram. “This says—” She had to pause and gulp before she could go on. “This says your father…it says your father’s ship got sunk and he isn’t…isn’t alive any more. He isn’t coming home any more, not ever again.”

They took it better than she had imagined possible. Mary Jane, she realized, hardly remembered George. She’d been very little when he went into the Navy, and he’d come home but seldom since. How could she miss what she hadn’t truly known?

George, Jr., understood better, though he plainly didn’t want to. “He’s…dead, Ma?” he asked, his voice trembling. “Like Harry’s father at school, the one the dirty Canucks shot?”

“That’s right,” Sylvia said. “That’s…sort of what happened.”

A noise in the hallway behind her made her turn. There stood Brigid Coneval and several of her other neighbors. Somehow, almost as if by magic, everyone knew when a Western Union messenger brought bad news. Had anyone doubted the news was bad, the look on Sylvia’s face would have told the tale.

“Oh, you poor darling,” said Mrs. Coneval, who, if anyone, knew what Sylvia was feeling at the moment. “You poor darling. What a black shame it is, with the war so near won and all.”

People crowded round her, holding her and telling her they would do what they could to help. Someone pressed a coin into her hand. She thought it was a quarter. When she looked at it through tear-blurred eyes, she discovered it was a gold eagle. She stared in astonishment at the ten-dollar goldpiece. “Who did this?” she demanded. “It’s too much. Take it back.”

No one said a word. No one made any move to claim the coin.

“God bless you, whoever you are,” Sylvia said. She started crying again.

Mary Jane said, “You’re going to have to go to bed without any supper, because you aren’t eating your pork chops.” Small things mattered to her; she didn’t understand the difference between what was small and what was not.

Sylvia wished she didn’t understand that difference, either. Not understanding it would have made life much simpler and much easier…for a little while. Life wasn’t going to be easy, not ever again. Life probably wouldn’t be comfortable, not ever again. If she lost her job at the shoe factory, she’d have to find another one, and right away. If she didn’t find another one right away, her children would go hungry, and so would she. Even if she did, money was going to be tight from now on.

What could she do if she lost the factory job? She had no idea. She couldn’t think. Her wits felt stunned, strangled. She knew she had to use them, but they didn’t want to work.

“Mourning clothes!” she exclaimed suddenly, out of the blue. “I have to fix up some mourning clothes.”

Brigid Coneval put an arm around her shoulder and steered her back to the sofa in the front room. When the Irishwoman pushed her down, her legs gave way and she sat. “You wait right here. Don’t move, now. Don’t even twitch. Back in a flash, I’ll be.” She hurried out of the apartment.

Sylvia didn’t move. She didn’t think she could move. George, Jr., and Mary Jane, seeing their mother upset, picked their way through the crowd of neighbors and crawled up into her lap. She did manage to put her arms around them.

“Out of my way, now. Move aside.” Brigid Coneval spoke with as much imperious command as General Custer or some other famous war hero might have used. She thrust a tumbler of whiskey at Sylvia. “Drink it off, and be quick about it.”

“I don’t want it,” Sylvia said.

“Drink it,” Mrs. Coneval insisted. “He was a good man, your George, sure and he was. Hardly ever a cross word from him did I hear. But he’s gone, darling. You may as well drink. What could you do that’s better, pray?” She rolled her eyes. “Drink!”

Without much will—without much anything—of her own, Sylvia took the glass and gulped down what it held, choking a little as she did. As far as she could tell, it didn’t do anything. Her head was already spinning. “What am I going to do without George?” she asked again, as if one of her neighbors might know.

No one answered. As Mrs. Coneval had, people kept praising her husband. He would have been a happier man had they said all those nice things about him while he was there to hear them.

Then Sylvia started to cry again as another thought struck through the walls of grief and liquor. “He won’t even have a funeral,” she said. “He would have hated that.” Fishermen dreaded being lost at sea. They ate of its creatures, and did not want those creatures turning the tables.

After a while, even in the midst of disaster, routine reasserted itself. Sylvia had to put the children to bed. After she did that, she went to put the pork chops she hadn’t been able to eat into the icebox. She discovered a couple of silver dollars and a tiny gold dollar on the kitchen table, along with some smaller coins. When she opened the icebox, she found a dressed chicken in there she had not bought, and also a package wrapped in butcher paper that might have been sausage or fish.

“Thank you,” she said. “Thank—” She couldn’t go on. Brigid Coneval put her to bed, much as she’d taken care of George, Jr., and Mary Jane. She lay awake and stared and stared at the ceiling.
What will I do?
she thought, endlessly, uselessly.
What will I do?

When his name was called, Jefferson Pinkard marched up to a pair of officers, his Tredegar on his shoulder. “Pinkard, Jefferson Davis,” he said, and then his pay number. He tossed the rifle down on a growing pile of weapons.

“Pinkard, Jefferson Davis,” echoed a Confederate captain from divisional headquarters. He had a list of the soldiers in Jeff’s regiment. After lining through his name, he turned to the other officer and spoke in formal tones: “Jefferson Davis Pinkard has turned in his rifle.”

“Jefferson Davis Pinkard has turned in his rifle,” the other officer agreed. He was also a captain, but wore a uniform of green-gray, not butternut. He lined through Pinkard’s name on his copy of the list.

Yankee officers freely crossed the line between their positions and those of the CSA these days. Confederate soldiers had to obey them as they obeyed their own officers. Confederate officers, even those of higher rank, had to obey them, too. The Yanks didn’t sneer or gloat, but they didn’t take any nonsense, either.

One by one, in alphabetical order, the soldiers of his regiment surrendered their weapons. Hipolito Rodriguez came only a few men after Pinkard. Once he’d thrown his rifle onto the stack, he came over and stood by the big steelworker.
“Finito,”
he said.

That was close enough to
finished
for Jeff to understand it. “Yeah, it’s done,” he said. “It’s done, and we got licked. Who the hell would have reckoned on that when we started out?”

Rodriguez shrugged.
“Así es la vida,”
he said, and then translated that: “Such is life. Now they must send us to our homes once more.”

“Bully,” Pinkard said in a hollow voice. He hated the west Texas prairie, no doubt about that, but he dreaded going back to Birmingham, too. What had Emily been doing since the leave when he’d walked in at just the wrong moment? Even if she hadn’t been doing anything since then (which, knowing her, he found less likely than he would have wanted), could he live with her once he did get home? Or—the other side of the same coin—could he live without her?

And how was he supposed to go on living next door to Bedford Cunningham? That was a smaller question, but not a small one. They’d been best friends and foundry partners for years. But Bedford wouldn’t be going back to the Sloss Works, not shy an arm he wouldn’t, and how could you be friends with a man when you’d found your wife naked on her knees in front of him?

Hip Rodriguez sighed. “I hope everything goes good for you,
amigo.
”

“Thanks,” Jeff said. “Same to you.” Here, unlike talk about going home, he could speak freely. “I never knew any Sonorans before you. You’re a good fellow. You ever get tired of trying to scratch out a living down where you’re at, you bring your family on up to Alabama. Plenty of good farm country there. You’d live high on the hog.”

“Thanks,
amigo,
but no thanks.” Rodriguez’s smile was sweet and sad. “I want to go home. I want to talk
español
, to see my friends and family. And in Sonora, I am a man. In Alabama, I am a damn greaser.” He tapped a brown hand with a brown finger to remind Pinkard of what he meant.

In the trenches, Jeff had long since stopped worrying about their being of different colors. Hip was right, though; it would matter in Alabama. Jeff put the best face on it he could: “It’s not like you was a nigger.”

“Too close,” Rodriguez said positively, and odds were he was right. “You go to your home, and I go to my home, and maybe God lets us both be happy.”

The last Tredegar thudded onto the pile. The C.S. captain addressed his U.S. counterpart: “All weapons for this unit are now accounted for.”

“All
rifles
for this unit are now accounted for,” the U.S. officer answered sharply. “This regiment still has two machine guns outstanding.”

“Destroyed in combat,” the Confederate captain said blandly. “Can’t give you what we haven’t got.”

Pinkard wouldn’t have believed that from a beaten foe, and neither did the Yankee. “You’re holding out on us,” he growled. His sharp, quick accent made him sound suspicious even when he wasn’t. When he was…“That’s a violation of the terms of the armistice, and you’ll be sorry for it. Weapons
are
to be turned over.”

“I can’t give you what we haven’t got,” the C.S. captain repeated. He waved to Jeff Pinkard and his companions. “This here is an infantry company, not a machine-gun outfit. They’ve turned in
their
weapons. Why don’t you let them go and take the other up with division HQ?”

For a long moment, Jeff thought the U.S. officer would hold them up out of sheer cussedness, if for no other reason. In the end, though, he said, “All right, these bastards can go. But I
am
going to take it up with your superiors, Captain, and heads
will
roll. Yours among ’em, unless I miss my guess.” His eyes measured the Confederate for a coffin.

What passed between the two captains afterwards, Pinkard never learned. His company was marched away to the paymaster, who gave each man what he was owed—in banknotes, not specie. He also gave a word of advice: “Don’t waste your time before you spend it, on account of it won’t be worth as much tomorrow as it is today.”

“How come?” Jeff asked.

“Government’s gonna have a devil of a time payin’ its bills, especially in gold,” the paymaster answered. “Yankees’ll soak us till our eyes pop—you wait and see if I’m wrong. And everybody’s gonna wanna buy things, and there won’t be a hell of a lot of things to buy. You put that all in the pot and cook it, and you get prices going straight through the roof. Like I say, wait and see. People’ll be wiping their asses with dollar banknotes, ’cause they won’t be good for anything else.”