"You ain't talkin' about me," Jefferson Pinkard declared. "Don't want no revolution-nothin' like it. Just want what's right and what's fair. Lord knows we ain't been gettin' enough of that."
"Well, that's so," Emily said, nodding. She ate the bite that had hung suspended. Neither one of them said much more about politics afterwards, though.
Jeff worked the pump while Emily did the dishes. Afterwards, he slid his arm around her waist. He didn't need to do much talking about that to let her know what he had in mind. By the way she smiled at him, she was thinking the same thing. They went into the bedroom. He blew out the lamp. In the darkness, the iron frame of the bed creaked, slow at first, building to a rhythm almost frantic.
Afterward, Emily, spent and sweaty, fell asleep almost at once. Jeff stayed awake a little longer, his mind not on the feel of his wife's arms around him but on Red revolutionaries. As far as he could see, these days people feared Reds and anarchists the same way they'd feared slave uprisings back before manumission.
Pericles, a Red? The idea was ridiculous. He was just a poor damned nigger sick of getting stuck with the short straw every draw. In his shoes, Jefferson figured he would have felt the same way. Hell, he did feel that way, thanks to the dislocations the war was bringing. He'd thought having a white skin made him immune to such worry, but he'd turned out to be wrong.
"Maybe we need another revolution, after all," he muttered. He was glad Emily hadn't heard that; it would have made her fret. But saying it seemed to ease his mind. He rolled over, snuggled down into his pillow, and fell asleep.
A voice with a Southern twang: "Ma'am?" An arm encased in a butternut sleeve, holding up an empty coffee cup. "Fill me up again, if you please."
"Of course, sir," Nellie Semphroch said, taking the cup from the Rebel lieutenant colonel. "You were drinking the Dutch East Indian, weren't you?"
"That's right," the officer answered. "Sure is fine you have so many different kinds to choose from."
"We've been lucky," Nellie said. She carried the cup to the sink, then took a clean one and filled it with the spicy brew the Confederate evidently enjoyed. She brought it back to him. "Here you are, sir."
He thanked her, but absently. He and the other Rebs at the table were busy rehashing an engagement up along the Susquehanna that had happened a couple of weeks before. "Damnyankees would have crossed for sure," an artillery captain said, "if one of my sergeants hadn't fought his gun with niggers toting shells and loading: his own crew got knocked out in the bombardment."
"Heard tell about that," the lieutenant colonel said. "Damned-pardon me, ma'am," he added with a glance toward Nellie, "I say, damned if I know whether they ought to pin medals on those niggers or take 'em out somewhere quiet, have 'em kneel down in front of a hole, and then shoot 'em, cover 'em up, and try to make out the whole thing never happened." All the Rebs around the table nodded. The lieutenant colonel nodded to the artillery captain. "You're closest to the matter, Jeb. What do you think about it?"
"Me?" The captain-Jeb-was boyishly handsome, with a little tuft of beard under his lower lip that should have looked absurd but somehow seemed dashing instead. "I think I'd like another cup of our hostess' excellent coffee, too." He held out his cup to Nellie. As she hurried off to refill it, he lowered his voice-but not quite enough to keep her from overhearing-and said, "I wouldn't mind a go with our hostess' excellent daughter, either."
Hoarse male laughter rose. Nellie stiffened. If Edna judged by looks-if Edna judged by anything-she probably wouldn't have minded a go with this Jeb, either. Nellie thought hard about dosing his coffee with a potent purgative. In the end, she didn't. All men were like that. Some, at least, were honest about it.
When she got back to the table, the artillery captain was saying, "… niggers don't seem to be putting on airs on account of it. They're back to driving and fetching, same as they were before. You ask me, it's worth knowing niggers can fight if their necks are on the block. Way we're losing men, we may need black bodies one of these days."
One of the other officers-a major-got out a silvered flask and poured a hefty shot of something into his coffee. "That's not the most cheerful notion I've ever heard," he said, taking a big swig of the augmented brew. "Ahh! Don't like the idea of niggers' getting their hands on guns. Don't like 'em getting their hands on military discipline, either."
"I don't like it myself," the lieutenant colonel said. "We've got ourselves a white man's country. That's how it ought to be, and that's how it ought to stay."
"Well, gentlemen, you won't hear me disagreeing there," Jeb said, "but if it turns into a matter of winning the war with niggers or losing it without 'em, what do we do then?"
An uncomfortable silence followed that question. The major with the flask poured another shot into his cup. What he had in there was probably more hooch than coffee. That didn't keep him from gulping it down as if it were water. "Ahh!" he said again, and then, "What we do is, we pray to God to keep that cup from passing to us."
"Amen," Jeb said, and the rest of the officers nodded. But the artillery captain went on, "War's already gone on longer than we thought it would. The middle of April now, and no end in sight. Christ! We ought to be ready in case it goes on longer yet."
"Not up to you and me to decide that kind of thing, thank heaven," the lieutenant colonel said, which brought another round of nods. "The president and the secretary of war, they'll do whatever they choose to do, and we'll make the best of it. That's what the Army's for."
The major started telling a long, complicated story about a mule that had tried to kick an aeroplane to death. It would have been funnier if he hadn't had to go back and repeat and correct himself over and over again. That's what the demon rum does to you, Nellie thought; in her mind, all liquor got lumped together as rum. It calcifies the brain, and serves you right.
She had other tables on which to wait. The coffeehouse was jumping these days, business better than it had been since before the war, maybe better than it had ever been. Being able to get her hands on all the coffee she needed didn't hurt there. A lot of places in Washington had gone belly-up, just as she had been at the point of doing not so long before.
She'd wondered if anyone would ask how she managed to keep getting coffee beans in the middle of a tightly rationed town. But that hadn't happened. Even Edna hadn't been unduly curious. She probably thinks I'm sleeping with someone, Nellie thought sadly. It was, she feared, what her daughter would have done in her place. Or maybe Edna only noticed the beans were there and truly did think no more about it.
The next morning, Nellie and Edna were sweeping up the floor by the light of a couple of kerosene lamps-neither gas nor electricity had yet come back to this part of Washington. Outside, black night brightened toward dawn; a coffeehouse's customers started showing up early. As Nellie emptied the dustpan into a wastebasket, a light went on across the street.
A small pot of coffee was already on the coal stove, to give her and Edna an eye-opener before customers started coming in. Nellie poured a cup from the pot and set it in a saucer. "I see Mr. Jacobs is up and about, too," she said. "I'll take this over to him. It will be better than anything he's likely to make for himself."
"All right, Ma." Edna's laugh was not altogether kindly. "Beyond me what you see in a little wrinkled old shoemaker, though."
"Mr. Jacobs is a very nice man," Nellie said primly. Her daughter laughed again. Nellie took a haughty tone: "Your mind may be in the gutter, but that doesn't mean mine is."