“T’ank you,” Scipio said. Jonah, as usual, sounded faintly surprised to admit that, no doubt because he remembered Scipio from his soft-handed days as a butler. None of the then-field hands had ever realized how much work Scipio actually did at Marshlands because so much of it was with his head rather than his hands or his back. He was ready to admit headwork was easier, but it was still work.
Back and forth, back and forth. He got no credit for the dolly, but it helped. Lift, carry, push, lift, carry, push. His hands and his muscles had hardened; he didn’t go home every night shambling like a spavined horse any more. He knew a certain amount of pride in that. He was stronger than he had been, and sometimes tempted to get into fights to show off his new strength. He resisted that temptation, along with most others. Fighting might make him visible to the whites of Columbia, which was the last thing he wanted.
Working with his body left his mind curiously blank. He listened to what was going on around him, to the clatter of the lines, to the chatter of the people working them, and, after a while, to the foreman out front: “Are you sure you want to go back there? It’s a dirty, smelly place, and parts of it are dangerous, too, what with the explosives and fuses and such-like.”
The words weren’t far out of the ordinary. The tone was. The foreman, normally master of all he surveyed here, sounded deferential, persuasive. That more than what he was saying made Scipio notice his voice in the first place. A moment later, he understood why the foreman sounded as he did. The reply came with the unquestioning, uncompromising arrogance of a Confederate aristocrat: “I am a stockholder, and not a small stockholder, in this corporation. I have the right to see how its operations function. You may guide me, or you may get out of the way and let me see for myself. The choice is yours.”
Scipio dropped at Jonah’s feet the crate he was hauling; the shell casings clanked in their plywood-partitioned pigeonholes. “Do Jesus!” Scipio exclaimed in a horrified whisper. “Dat are Miss Anne!”
“I knows it,” Jonah answered, looking at least as discomfited as Scipio felt. Regardless of what his passbook had said he could do, Jonah had left Marshlands for his factory job two years earlier. His position was less desperate than Scipio’s, but far from what he would have wanted.
Before Scipio could make up his mind whether to hope he wasn’t recognized or to flee, Anne Colleton came in, the foreman trailing after her and still trying ineffectually to slow her down. As Scipio knew, anyone who tried to slow her down was bound to be ineffectual. “This area here, ma’am,” the foreman said, still not grasping how outgunned he was, “is where the casings come off the line over yonder and go to get filled over here.”
“Is it?” Anne said. She nodded to the Negro laborers. “Good day, Scipio, Jonah.” Then, without another word, she headed off into the filling area. The two Negroes looked at each other. She knew who they were-she knew and she hadn’t done a thing about it. That worried Scipio more than anything else he could think of.
Sylvia Enos knew how drunk she was. She rarely touched whiskey, but she’d made an exception tonight. She was ready to make exceptions about lots of things tonight. She giggled. “Good thing I’m not going anywhere,” she said, and giggled again. “I couldn’t get there.”
“Not going anywhere at all,” her husband agreed. George had drunk more than she had, but showed it less. The whiskey wasn’t making him laugh, either. It was just making him very certain about things. His certainty had swept her along, too, so that she lay altogether naked beside him even though the children couldn’t have been in bed more than fifteen minutes themselves.
If George, Jr., came in right now-well, that would be funny, too. Whiskey was amazing stuff, all right. Sylvia ran her hand over George’s chest, the hair there so familiar and so long absent. From his chest, her hand wandered lower. Ladies didn’t do such things. Ladies, in fact, endured it rather than enjoying it when their husbands touched them. If George gets angry, I’ll blame it on the whiskey, she thought as her hand closed around him.
“Oh,” he said, more an exhalation than a word. Nor was that the only way he responded to her touch.
“Is that what you learned in the Navy-how to come to attention, I mean?” she said. He laughed. Then, without even being asked, she slid down and took him in her mouth. Ladies not only didn’t do such things, they didn’t think of such things. A lot of ladies had never heard of or imagined such things. Since she had…His flesh was smooth and hot. The whiskey, she thought again. Being inexperienced in such things, she bore down more than she should have, and had to withdraw, choking a little.
If they hadn’t been married, if she hadn’t wanted him as much as he wanted her, what followed would have been a rape. As it was, she wrapped her arms and legs around him while he plunged above her, and whispered endearments and urged him on.
He shuddered and groaned sooner than she would have liked, which was, she supposed, a disadvantage of doing as she’d just done. Instead of pulling free, though, he stayed in her. In an amazingly short time, he was hard again. The second round was almost as frantic as the first, but, kindled by that first time, she felt all thought go away just as he spent, too.
“Always like a honeymoon, coming back to you after I’ve been away at sea,” he said, a smile in his voice. “I’ve been at sea a long time this time-and I never even saw the ocean.”
Sylvia didn’t answer right away. She felt lazy and sated, at peace with the world even if the world held no peace. But the body had demands other than those of lust and love. “Let me up, dear,” she said, and, regretfully, he rolled off her. She regretted it, too, when he came out. Nothing good ever lasts, that seemed to say.
She pulled the chamber pot out from under the bed and squatted to use it. Some of his seed ran out of her, too. That she did not mind; it made getting pregnant less likely. She got back into bed. George stood and used the chamber pot, too, then lay down beside her in the darkness once more.
“I got the telegram that said you were missing,” she said, “and-” She didn’t, couldn’t, go on with words. Instead, she clutched him to her, even tighter than when his hips had pumped him in and out of her as if he were the piston of a steam engine and she the receiving cylinder.
He squeezed her, too. “I hid in the woods with my pals till another boat got down there to see if anybody had lived through the explosion. They were the brave ones, ’cause the Rebs had that spot zeroed. None of the shells hit, though, and we rowed out to them and they got us away from there.”
“Four,” she said wonderingly. “Four, out of the whole crew.”
“Luck,” George answered. “Fool luck. We were up at this colored fellow’s shack on the riverbank. Charlie White would have killed anybody who kept a place that dirty, and they made the whiskey right around there. You drank it, you could run a gaslight on your breath. I had a glass, and some food-place was dirty, yeah, but they cooked better than anything our galley turned out-and I had some more whiskey, and then I went outside, and then…the Rebels dropped two, right on the Punishment.” Remembering made him shiver.
“What did you go outside for?” Sylvia asked.
She meant the question casually. To stand next to a tree was the answer she’d expected, or something of that sort. George stiffened in her arms, and not in the way she’d found so enjoyable. “Oh, just to get a breath of air,” he said, and she knew he was lying.
“What did you go outside for?” she repeated, and tried to see his face in the darkness. No good: he was only the vaguest blur.
He stayed unnaturally still a little too long. Was that the glitter of his eyes opening wide to try to see her expression, too? “It wasn’t anything,” he said at last.