“She,” said somebody who fancied himself an expert on things that had to do with ships. “Boats are always she. “
“She's a god damn bitch, is what she is. She don't hold still for no body,” another trooper said.
“Sounds like a woman, all right,” Ward said. His own experience in such things was limited-he'd been kissed twice, not counting cousins-but he got a laugh.
“Let's try again, boys.” Yes, the sergeant who'd taken charge of the twelve-pounder was as stubborn as they came.
No matter how stubborn he was, three misses made his crew start melting away. “Hell with it,” a trooper said as he stooped to pick up his carbine. “I'm gonna go shoot me some niggers and Tennessee Tories. I can damn well hit them bastards.”
“That's right.” Ward grabbed his Enfield, too. “I know how to aim this critter.”
The sergeant squawked, but they all went farther along the edge of the cliff till they looked down on the soldiers in blue scrambling down toward the riverbank. Ward raised the rifle musket and aimed at a white man descending feet first. The homemade Yankee saw him and waved desperately. “Don't shoot!” he cried. “I ain't done nothin' to you!”
Killing a man in the heat of battle was one thing. Killing a man in cold blood, killing a man begging for his life, killing a defenseless man-for the trooper in blue had dropped his piece-proved something else again. With a swallowed obscenity, Matt swung the Enfield away from the other man.
Not all the bluebellies going down the slope and already at the bottom had given up. A soldier down there fired at Ward. He didn't know how to gauge such a steep uphill shot, and the minnie slapped into the mud about ten feet below the Confederate.
If I don't kill' em, they'll kill me, Ward thought. He aimed at a Negro. This time, nothing stayed his trigger finger. The ball caught the black in the short ribs. Although the runaway slave-for what else could he be?-was halfway down toward the Mississippi, the howl he let out reached Ward up on the bluff. The black rolled and tumbled all the way down to the riverbank.
“Nice shot!” another Confederate trooper said. “He looked just like one o' them clowns in the circus, way he turned somersets there.”
“He did, didn't he?” Ward paused in reloading, though not for long-his hands knew what to do even without direction. “Let's see if I can get me another coon like that.”
“Well, it ain't like we don't have plenty to pick from,” said the other soldier in butternut.
“Yeah.” Ward brought the loaded Enfield up to his shoulder and found another target.
A colored soldier rolled past Sergeant Ben Robinson. The man was groaning and trying to clutch at his chest, but his arms and legs kept flying out every which way. “Poor bastard,” Sandy Cole said. “He ain't dead yet, he gonna be by the time he fetch up 'longside the river.
“Ain't it the truth?” Robinson said. A Mini? ball cracked past his head. A few inches lower and he would have rolled and slid all the way down to the Mississippi, too. The only difference was, nobody would have wondered if he was dead.
Aaron Fentis looked up the slope to the top of the bluff, where Bedford Forrest's troopers were taking potshots at the whites and Negroes below them. “Why the hell those officers of our'n want us to come down here?” he demanded. “Dem Secesh sojers, dey shoot us down like we was so many wild turkeys.”
“They say the gunboat keep the Rebs off us,” Robinson said.
“Dey say, dey say.” Fentis's voice went high and mocking. “I say dey don' know what dey talkin' 'bout. Dey say we hold out Forrest, too. Was dey right? How much good dat damn gunboat do us up till now? Any a-tall? I ain't seen it. You seen it, Sergeant?” Even in disaster, he remembered to stay respectful to Ben Robinson's chevrons.
He should have stayed respectful to the white officers in command at Fort Pillow, too. Robinson should have reproved him for not sounding respectful enough. He knew he should, but couldn't make himself do it. Aaron Fentis might be disrespectful, but that didn't mean he was wrong. The whites in command at Fort Pillow hadn't known what was going on. Well, maybe Major Booth had, but he got killed too soon for it to matter. Since then…
Robinson wouldn't have wanted to surrender to the Confederates, even if they did offer to treat Negroes as prisoners of war. But he'd thought, as Major Bradford had thought, that Fort Pillow could hold. That turned out to be mistaken. And now there was no talk of taking anybody prisoner, colored man or white. The Rebs kept yelling, “Black flag!” and firing away for all they were worth.
“Maybe they stop killin' people if we surrender now,” Charlie Key said.
“Who kin do it?” Robinson asked bleakly. “Major Booth, he dead. Major Bradford, he want to go on fightin'.”
“He git killed, he go on fightin' much longer,” Key said. “Then somebody else kin tell the Rebs we is givin' up.” He paused, then added, “Do Jesus, I surrender right now if I don't reckon they shoot me dead fo' tryin'.”
That was defeatism. Sergeant Robinson knew he shouldn't let anybody get away with it. In happier times, he wouldn't have. But how could you blame a man for defeatism after you were defeated? If scrambling down toward the riverbank with Confederate soldiers shooting at you from above wasn't defeat, Robinson didn't want to find out what was.
If he thought some Reb would let him give up, he supposed he would throw down his Springfield, too. He'd done everything he could reasonably do to defend the fort. But getting anyone in butternut to accept a black man's surrender wouldn't be easy-and might not be possible.
If the Federals couldn't quit, they had to go on fighting. But Robinson couldn't even do that, not now. No Confederate soldiers were within bayonet reach, and he had no cartridges for the rifle musket he'd picked up. He wondered if any of the Union soldiers going down toward the riverbank carried more than a handful of ammunition.
But no sooner had that thought crossed his mind than a white man below him yelled, “You need to shoot back at the stinkin' Rebs, get over here! We got us crates and crates of cartridges.”
“Major Bradford, he done thought o' somethin', anyways,” Sandy
Cole said.
“I reckon,” Robinson said. “Reckon that make once, too.”
Was he bitter? Just because everything Bradford tried turned out to be wrong? For a moment, he tried to deny it even to himself. He wondered why, when it was so plainly true. Only one thing occurred to him: that as a black man, he had no right to criticize what a white man did.
“Hell I don't,” he muttered. What that white man did was altogether too likely to get him killed. Was a damn fool any less a damn fool because he was white? Whites seemed to think so, or at least to believe a damn fool was more a damn fool if he happened to be black.
There were black damn fools. Robinson had known enough of them to have no doubts about that. But there were white damn fools, too. And if one of them wore oak leaves on his shoulders, he could be a damn fool on a scale most Negroes only dreamt of.
Robinson awkwardly made his way down toward the crates of cartridges. If he had to go on fighting, he would make the best fight he could. He was clumsy loading the Springfield, too; most of his training was as an artilleryman, not a foot soldier.
He'd just finished setting a percussion cap on the nipple when a burst of fire came from farther south along the riverbank. Panic swept through him. If the Rebs were shooting at the garrison from there as well as from the top of the bluff, the surviving Federals wouldn't last long. But not many minnies tore into the Negroes and whites in blue uniforms.
Instead, bullets clattered off the gunboat's iron sides. They sounded like hail on a tin roof. For a moment, Robinson wondered what good they would do the Rebs. Ironclads were supposed to be proof against cannonballs, let alone Mini? balls.