“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.”
With that cheery prediction ringing in his ears, Pinkard marched with the men with whom he’d been through so much toward the nearest railhead. It was, he realized, the last time he would ever march with them. He tried to sort out how he felt about that. He wouldn’t miss marching, or the trenches, or the horror that went with war. The men, though, and the comradeship-those he would miss. He wondered if he would ever know their like back in Birmingham.
He kicked at the dirt. He’d thought he had that kind of comradeship with Bedford Cunningham, and what was left there? Dust and ashes, nothing more. After Bedford and Emily had let him down, could he ever trust anybody again? He wasn’t going to hold his breath.
He did hold his breath when the company got to the train. Almost all the cars were boxcars stenciled with the words 36 MEN, 8 HORSES. They’d held a lot of horses lately; the stink made that plain. He clambered up into a car and made himself as comfortable as he could on none-too-fresh straw. After all the cars were filled, the train headed east. By the way the engine coughed and wheezed, it, like the boxcars, was what remained after all the better rolling stock had been used in more important places.
Nobody bothered feeding the soldiers or giving them water. Pinkard emptied his canteen and ate the tortillas and the chunk of sausage he had with him. After that was gone, he got hungrier and hungrier and thirstier and thirstier till, some time in the middle of the night, the train pulled into Fort Worth.
He’d fallen into an uneasy, unpleasant doze by then, and woke with a start. At the station, men shouted through megaphones: “Check the signboards! Find the train heading toward your hometown and get aboard! Men in uniform travel free, this week only!”
Amid handclasps and good-luck wishes and promises to keep in touch, the company broke apart. Jeff found a signboard and discovered, to his surprise, that a train that would stop in Birmingham was leaving early in the morning. He found the right platform after a couple of false starts and settled down to wait.
He hadn’t been there more than a couple of minutes before a woman came up to him and snapped, “If you men hadn’t been a pack of yellow cowards, you would have whipped those damnyankees.” She stomped off before he could answer. It was, he decided, a good thing he’d had to turn in his Tredegar. Otherwise, he might have answered her with a bullet.
Had he had the rifle, he might have shot eight or ten people, mostly women, by the time his train pulled up to the station. Everyone who spoke to him seemed to think he was personally responsible for losing the war. He boarded a second-class passenger car with nothing but relief. It didn’t end there, though. About half the people on the car were eastbound soldiers like him. The civilians who filled the other half of the seats showered them with abuse.
And the abuse got worse the farther east the train went. Every time a soldier got off and a civilian took his place, the abuse got worse. The farther from the front the train went, the more convinced people were that the war should have been won, and won in short order, too.
One heckler, a man who had plainly never seen the war at first hand, went too far. A soldier got up, knocked him cold with one punch, and said, “We might not’ve licked the damnyankees, but I sure as hell licked you.” After that, the rude remarks diminished, but even then they did not stop.
The train pulled into the Birmingham station just over a day after it set out from Fort Worth. No one sat close to Pinkard when he got on the trolley that would take him out to the factory housing by the Sloss Works. Maybe that was because he still wore his uniform. Maybe, too, it was because he’d had no chance to bathe since coming out of the line.
He walked from the trolley stop toward his house. He felt as if he were heading toward the doctor’s, and likely to be diagnosed with a deadly disease. He tried the front door. It was locked. Emily had gone to work, though how long she’d keep her munitions-plant job was anyone’s guess. He had a key in his trouser pocket-about the only thing he did have with him from when he’d gone into the Army. He let himself in. (He wouldn’t get that diagnosis till she came home.)
Doing nothing much felt strange and good. He took hot water from the stove’s reservoir and bathed and put on a shirt and trousers he found in the closet. They hung loosely on him; he’d lost weight. He got cold chicken out of the icebox, then read an old Richmond Review: so old, one of the articles talked about how to drive back the Yankees. Laughing bitterly, he tossed the magazine aside.
At last, the front door opened. Emily stared at him. “Jeff!” she exclaimed, and then, “Darling!”
Was there too much hesitation between the one word and the other? Pinkard didn’t get the chance to think much about that. His wife threw herself into his arms. They tightened around her. He’d never stopped wanting her, even though…
He didn’t get the chance to think about that, either. Her kiss made him dizzy. “Thank God you’re home,” she breathed in his ear. “Thank God you’re safe. Everything’s going to be fine now, just fine.” Her voice went low and throaty. “I’ll show you how fine.” She led him back toward the bedroom. He went willingly, even gladly. That would do for now. Later?
“I’ll just have to find out about later, that’s all,” Jeff muttered.
“What did you say, darling?” Emily was already getting out of her clothes.
“Never mind,” he said. “It’ll keep. It’ll keep till later.”