That was especially true since the new crucible operator still wasn't so smooth as Herb, who'd gone into the Army when the war was new and looked like being over in a hurry. But Herb wasn't coming back. Somewhere up in Kentucky, near a town nobody two towns over had ever heard of till the war started, he'd stopped a bullet or a shell. His widow worked with Emily, too, and wore sombre black all the time.
This pour, though, went well. A great cloud of steam hissed out of the mold, steam heavy with the bloody smell of hot iron. Jeff and Pericles worked side by side, going right up to the pour and making sure it didn't escape the mold before it started solidifying. "Warm this mornin'," Pericles said with a grin. The heat of the foundry floor dried the sweat on his face as fast as it tried to spring forth.
Pinkard knew the same thing happened with him, but he turned fiercely red from working up by the pour. Pericles seemed unaffected, as if he were made of cold-forged iron himself. He handled his tools with nonchalant confidence; a little more experience and he'd be as good a steel man as Bedford Cunningham ever was.
"You are gettin' to know what you're doin'," Pinkard said, acknowledging that.
"Thank you, Mistuh Pinkard," Pericles answered. That was fine. So was his self-effacing tone of voice. But then he added, "Ain't so hard, is it? Once you get the hang of it, I mean."
Neither Agrippa nor Vespasian would have said anything like that. Even if they thought it, they wouldn't have said it. Every once in a while, though, Pericles came out with something like that, something that made the way he acted around Jefferson Pinkard seem just that: an act. You couldn't call him for being uppity; he never showed disrespect, nor anything close to it. But even a Negro with self-confidence was something new on Jeff's mental horizon.
After a while, Pericles said, "Mistuh Pinkard, you knew Herb, didn't you?"
"Sure did," Pinkard said. "That's funny: I was thinking about him not so long ago, when the kid up there was pouring. What about him?"
"Did you hear tell they gonna throw his widow and her children out o' their company house, on account o' he don' work here no mo' an' he ain't never comin' back? Agrippa, he tol' me that this mornin'. His wife, she go over there with some catfish fo' to give her las' night, an' she all cryin' an wailin' to beat the band. Don' hardly seem right, the bosses do that."
"It sure as hell don't," Pinkard agreed. He thought about it for a little while. "That grates so much, I don't know that I want to swallow it."
Pericles held up his right hand. The bottom of the pale patch on his palm showed below the edge of his leather glove. "I ain't makin' it up, swear to God I ain't," he said, now sounding completely serious.
"Emily will know," Jeff said. "I'll ask her when she gets home tonight. If it is so, it's a pretty low-down piece of dealing, that's all I've got to say."
" 'Fore I started workin' here, what I was thinkin' was that everybody white in this whole country had it easy, just on account o' he was white," Pericles said. "More I look, though, more I see it ain't like that. The white folks in the suits an' the collars an' the tall hats, they do things to the white factory hands, ain't so much different than happens to niggers every day."
"That there is a natural-born fact," Pinkard said, slamming one gloved fist into the palm of the other hand to emphasize his words. "Damn all we can do about it, though. They got the money, they got the factories, like you say. All we got is our hands, an' there's always plenty more hands around."
"You dead right, Mistuh Pinkard," Pericles said. "Same way in the fields-planter don't like what a nigger does, he gets hisself another nigger. Don' matter what the first one did. Don' matter he did anything. They don' like him, he gone. Didn't think it was like that fo' white folks."
"Shouldn't ought to be." Having his position in life compared to a Negro's made Pinkard sit up and take notice. "They shouldn't be able to throw us out like an asswipe with shit on it. Wasn't for the work we did, what would they have? Nothin'. Not one thing, I tell you."
"Hard row everybody hoes these days," Pericles said. "Shouldn't be harder'n it's got to. The men who work in the factory, they should have some kind o' say in how the factory runs. Got more right to it than the fat cats with the bulgin' money bags, you ask me." He paused, as if wondering whether he'd said too much.
But Jefferson Pinkard clapped his hands together. "Damn straight!" he said. "Things'd run a hell of a lot smoother if somebody who knew what he was doin'-if somebody who'd done the work himself-had charge of things, not a big wheel with a diamond ring on his pinky."
I'm talking politics with a nigger, he realized. And if that didn't beat all, when Pericles couldn't even vote. But the young black man had touched Pinkard's own dissatisfaction with the way things were, and had brought it out into the open so he could see all of it for himself.
After that, Pericles clammed up. Now it was Jeff who wanted to talk more, and the Negro who went about his job without wasted words. Pinkard started to get angry, but his temper cooled down after a bit. Pericles had walked dangerous ground, saying even as much as he'd said. But Pinkard was feeling damn near as trampled on as the black man. That was just what the bosses were doing, he thought: trying to turn white men into niggers.
When the closing whistle wailed, Pinkard almost ran home, he was so anxious to find out from Emily whether Pericles had the straight goods about Herb's widow. He got back to the yellow cottage before his wife did; she was probably still on the trolley. He busied himself by setting the table for the two of them, as he'd got into the habit of doing when he made it home first. Bedford Cunningham, had he known about that, would have given him a hard time over it. But Bed was worried about machine-gun bullets these days, not china and cheap iron flatware.
The door opened. In came Emily. "You'll never guess what they've done to Daisy Wallace," she said.
"Herb's widow? Thrown her out on the street like a dog, on account of her husband got hisself shot savin' the Sloss family's greedy behinds," Jeff answered.
Emily stared at him. "For heaven's sake, how did you know that?" He hadn't usually heard the gossip she brought home.
"I got ways," he answered, a little smugly. "Sure does stink, don't it?"
"Sure does," she agreed, hanging up her hat and taking off the apron that protected her skirt. "Makes me want to spit, is what it does." She walked past Jeff into the kitchen, slowly shifting gears from work to home. When she saw the table ready for supper, she paused and said, "Oh, thank you, honey," in a voice suggesting his thoughtfulness had surprised her. That made him feel better about helping than he would have if she'd taken it for granted.
Even over the stew of salt pork and hominy and green beans, both of them kept on fuming about the way the crucible man's widow had been treated. Borrowing Pericles' idea, Jeff said, "We'd all be better off, I reckon, if the workers had the say in how the factories got run."
He'd expected Emily to agree to that. Instead, she paused with a bit of meat halfway to her mouth. "That sounds like somethin' a Red would say," she told him, her voice serious, maybe even a little frightened. "They been warnin' us about Reds almost all the time lately, maybe 'cause makin' shells is such an important business. Never can tell who's a bomb-flingin' revolutionary in disguise, they say."