The Grapple Read Free Page B

honey buckets that were the only sanitary facilities, so he fouled himself when he couldn’t hold it any more. He wasn’t the only one—far from it.
    He got a couple of sips from a dipper of water that went through the miserable throng, but nothing more. If the boxcar held any food, he never saw it. By the time the train finally got wherever it was going, his nose told him the car held dead bodies.
    Had they made this journey in high summer, everyone would have died. He was as sure of that as he was of his own name—surer, since he’d gone by Xerxes for many years. Scipio was still a wanted man in South Carolina for his role in the Red Negro uprisings during the Great War.
    But it was February, so heat and humidity didn’t add themselves to starvation and overcrowding.
What a mercy,
Scipio thought.
    “Bathsheba?” he croaked through a dust-dry throat. “Antoinette?”
    He heard no answer from either of them. Maybe they were dead. Maybe they were just too dry to talk. Maybe they couldn’t hear his husk-filled voice. Or maybe the noise other people were making covered their replies. His ears weren’t what they had been once upon a time. He was getting close to seventy. He’d been born a slave, back in the days before the Confederate States reluctantly manumitted their Negroes.
    There was a bitter joke! Technically free, blacks didn’t have a prayer of equality with whites even in the best of times. Here in the worst of times…Scipio wasn’t worried about seeing another birthday now. He wondered if he would see another day, period.
    Then what seemed like a miracle happened. The door to the boxcar opened. A cold, biting wind blew in. Fresh air hit Scipio almost as hard as a slug of whiskey would have. His eyes opened very wide. He thought his heart beat a little faster.
    “Out!” White men’s voices, harsh as ravens’ croaks, roared out the word. “Come on out o’ there, you goddamn shitty niggers! Form two lines! Men on the left, women and pickaninnies on the right! Move! Move! Move!”
    A few people stumbled out of the boxcar. A few corpses fell out. That eased the pressure that had held Scipio upright for so long. He started to sag to the planking of the floor. If he did, though, he didn’t think he’d be able to get up again. And the way these ofays—guards; he could see they were guards—were screaming at people to come out, he could guess what would happen to a man who couldn’t rise.
    He wanted to live. He wondered why. After what he’d gone through, dying might have come as a relief. But he stumbled forward and awkwardly got down from the boxcar.
    “Men on the left! Women and pickaninnies on the right!” the guards yelled again. Then one of them smacked a black man with a club he pulled from his belt. “You dumb fucking coon, don’t you know which one’s your right and which one’s your left? Get your lazy ass over where you belong!” Blood pouring down his face, the Negro staggered into the proper line.
    Somebody touched Scipio’s hand. There stood Bathsheba, with Antoinette beside her. They looked like hell, or maybe a little worse. Scipio tried not to think about what he looked like himself. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except that they were all alive.
    “We gots to get in our line,” Bathsheba said in a voice like ashes. “The good Lord keep you safe, darlin’. We see you when we can.”
    His wife had always been a churchgoing woman. She’d got Scipio to go with her a good many times. They were captured in church, in fact. Education and Marxism had corroded Scipio’s faith. If they hadn’t…Well, the trip he’d just finished would have turned St. Thomas Aquinas into an atheist. Somehow, though, it hadn’t shaken Bathsheba, not that way.
    “You move, old man.” The Mexican-looking guard who gave the order had three stripes on the left sleeve of his gray uniform tunic. “You move, or you be sorry.” He didn’t sound particularly mean. He just sounded like a man