Listening to somebody talk about how lucky he’d been to get shot struck Scipio as strange, but he’d heard white veterans go on the same way. He said, “So you fit the war and done everything the gummint want?” The customer nodded. Scipio hurried back to get his breakfast and bring it to him, then asked, “And now you is a citizen? Now you kin vote an’ do like the buckra all kinds o’ways?”
“Can’t marry no white woman.” The veteran shrugged. “Don’t want to marry no white woman—like the colored gal I got. But yeah,” he went on with quiet pride, “I’s a citizen.” He reached into his pocket and displayed an elaborately printed form attesting to his service in the war. “I carry this here ’stead of a passbook.”
Scipio hadn’t thought about the aspect of citizenship. He was deeply and sincerely jealous of the veteran, who enjoyed a liberty he was unlikely ever to know. “Freedom Party give you trouble?” he inquired. He didn’t know why he asked the question: was he trying to ease his own mind about what the Freedom Party could do, or was he hoping to make the veteran feel bad in spite of the privilege he’d earned?
The man’s mouth tightened. His eyes narrowed. A vertical groove appeared between them, and other lines by the edges of his lips. “Them bastards,” he said quietly. “You know any niggers don’t get trouble from them?”
“Sure enough don’t,” Scipio answered. “I was hopin’ you did.”
“Ain’t none.” The Negro veteran spoke with assurance. “Ain’t nothin’we can do about it, neither, nothin’ I can see. Yeah, I’m a citizen. I punch one o’ them sons o’ bitches for callin’ me names or givin’ me some other kind o’ hard time, what happen then? White folks’ jury send me to jail for about twenty years. That Freedom Party man kick me in the balls, what happen then? White folks’ jury say he didn’t do nothin’ wrong.” He didn’t try to hide his bitterness.
“But you kin vote against they,” Scipio said. “Most black folks can’t do nothin’ a-tall.”
“I can vote.” The veteran nodded. “I went an’ did it last election, an’ I’ll do it again come November. But so what? So what, God damn it? Ain’t but one o’ me, an’ all them Freedom Party white folks. Even if all the niggers in the country could vote, wouldn’t be enough of us. White folks can do what they want, near enough. Why shouldn’t they let me vote? They can afford it.”
He got up, laid two million dollars on the table, and stamped out without waiting for change.
“Hope you didn’t ride Antiochus so hard, he don’t come back,” Erasmus said. “That ain’t good business.”
“Sorry,” Scipio answered, which was true in the business sense if in no other. “You hear what he say?” He waited for Erasmus to nod, then went on, “You still reckon we ain’t got nothin’ to fear from no Freedom Party?”
Erasmus nodded again. “I keeps tellin’ you an’ tellin’ you, the white man ain’t gwine do the work hisself. If he ain’t gwine do it hisself, he ain’t gwine do us no harm—or no worse’n usual, anyways. You show me them Freedom Party fellas out in the cotton fields at pickin’ time, then I commence to worry. Till then—” He shook his head.
Scipio wished he could take matters in stride the way his boss did. Rationally, everything Erasmus said made sense. That should have sufficed for Scipio, himself a man rational by inclination and education both. It should have, but it didn’t.
The past few years had been hard on rationality. If the Negro uprising of 1915 hadn’t been an exercise in romanticism, he didn’t know what was. The Reds hadn’t had a chance, but they’d risen anyhow. He didn’t think the Freedom Party had a chance of restoring the status quo ante bellum, either. That didn’t stop whites from flocking to its banners. Most whites liked the way things had been before the war just fine.
And there were, as the Negro veteran had said, a lot of whites. If they got behind the Freedom Party, Jake Featherston and his pals might win. How far could they turn back the clock? Finding out would be as big a romantic folly as the Red uprising. But nothing had stopped Cassius and the other Red leaders, and likely nothing would stop Featherston, either.
Scipio sighed. “Life ain’t easy, and at the end you can’t do nothin’ but up and die. Don’t seem right.”
Erasmus busied himself making a fresh pot of coffee. When he was through, he said, “So tell me then, you gwine kiss your lady friend good-bye? You gwine lay in bed by your lonesome, waitin’ for to drop dead?”
“ ’Course not,” Scipio said angrily. Then he stopped and stared at Erasmus. The fry cook had pierced his gloomy pretensions as neatly as any white man with a fancy degree in philosophy might have done—and with a tenth, or more likely a hundredth, as many words. Instead of angry, Scipio felt foolish, to say nothing of sheepish. “Got to get on with your reg’lar ’fairs,” he mumbled.
“That there make a deal more sense’n what you was spoutin’a minute ago, don’t you reckon?” Erasmus demanded.
“Yes, suh,” Scipio said. So far as he could recall, he’d never called a black man sir before in his life. Whites got the title because they had the whip hand in the CSA. He gave it to Erasmus because—because he deserves it, was the thought that ran through Scipio’s mind.
Erasmus noticed, too. His head whipped around sharply. Scipio would have bet several million dollars—maybe even a Stonewall—nobody’d ever called him sir before that moment, either. “Just get back to work, will you?” he said, his voice gruff. He didn’t know how to respond to being treated with respect.
Why should he? Scipio thought. It’s altogether likely no one has ever shown him any. With that, Scipio came closer to understanding why the Reds had rebelled against the Confederate government than he ever had before. Was being treated like a human being worth fighting and dying for? Maybe it was.
What do I know about being treated like a human being? he thought. I was only a butler. He didn’t think in the dialect of the Congaree, but in the precise, formal English he’d had drilled into him. Sometimes that helped him: it gave him a wider, more detailed map for his world than he would have had if he’d gone to the cotton fields. Sometimes it left him neither fish nor fowl. And sometimes it made him angry at what the Colletons had done to his mind, to his life. They hadn’t done it for his sake, either. They hadn’t cared at all about him, except as a thing. They’d done it for their own convenience.
“Just got to get through the day and not worry about nothin’ you can’t change anyways,” Erasmus said. Scipio nodded. The fry cook was pursuing the thought he’d had a little before. But Scipio’s thought had veered in a different direction. How can a black man make life worth living in the Confederate States? he wondered. The question was easy to ask. Finding an answer, though…
“Here is the latest report, sir.” Lieutenant Colonel Abner Dowling set the document on General Custer’s desk.
“Well, let’s have a look at it.” The electric lights in the overhead fixture glittered off Custer’s reading glasses as he picked up the report and started to go through it. Abner Dowling waited for the explosion he guessed would not be long in coming. He was right. The commander of U.S. forces in Canada slammed the typewritten sheets on the desk. “Poppycock!” he shouted. “Twaddle! Harebrained idiocy! Who was the idiot who produced this nonsense?”
“Sir, Captain Fielding, our operative in Rosenfeld, is one of the best we have anywhere in this country,” said Dowling, who had read the report before giving it to Custer. “If he says there’s no evidence this McGregor planted the bomb in Hy’s chop house, you can rely on it.”
“If he says there’s no bloody goddamn evidence, he can’t see the nose in front of his face,” Custer snarled. “Christ on His cross, McGregor blew up this brilliant operative’s”—Custer’s sarcasm stung—“predecessor. Otherwise, this imbecile wouldn’t have the job in the first place. Look at McGregor’s photograph. Does that shifty-eyed devil look like an honest man to you?”
“There’s no evidence for that, either, sir,” Dowling said patiently. “They’ve searched Mc
Gregor’s farmhouse and barn and grounds any number of times, and they haven’t found a thing to suggest he’s the bomber.”
“Which only proves he’s not an imbecile, very much unlike our own people down there,” Custer said with a sneer that displayed the fine white choppers in his new upper plate. “The chap who was there during the war ordered McGregor’s son shot, didn’t he?”
“Among a good many other executions, yes,” Dowling answered with a sigh he barely tried to hide. He’d been certain ahead of time Custer would take this line. Custer was irresistibly attracted to the obvious.
And, sure enough, Custer charged ahead as if he hadn’t spoken: “Other bombs around Rosenfeld, too. All of them either had to do with families that got his brat in trouble or with people connected to that other operative down there, the one who got himself blown sky high the night the war ended. Coincidence? Are you telling me it’s coincidence?”
“Sir, someone’s been making bombs, yes,” Dowling said. “But it’s no more likely to be McGregor than anyone else down there. Major Hannebrink—the operative who’s dead now—had to hold down the countryside during the war, and he didn’t use a light hand. No one used a light hand during the war, sir.”
Again, Custer might not have heard him. He went right on with his own thoughts, such as they were: “And was this McGregor down on his farm when Hy’s was bombed? He was not. You know he was not.”
“I know where he was, too: visiting kin in Ontario,” Dowling said. “He didn’t make a secret of where he was going. His farm was checked after the bombing, and then again a little before Christmas, in the hope he might have gotten careless. I don’t think he could have gotten careless, sir, because I don’t think he had anything to get careless about.”
“Ought to haul him in,” Custer said. “Ought to haul him in, give him a blindfold and a cigarette, and stand him up against a wall and give him the same his son got.”
“Sir!” Dowling exclaimed in real alarm. “Sir, the country’s been pretty quiet lately. Do you want to give the Canucks a martyr? If you execute a man when you can’t prove he’s done anything, you’re asking for trouble. Don’t you think it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie?”
“That dog of a McGregor lies, all right, but he’s not asleep,” Custer retorted. “He’s wide awake and laughing at us, that’s what he’s doing. And as for asking for trouble…” He looked sly, always a dangerous sign. “With the damned Socialists coming into power in another five weeks, I’d love to see the Canucks turn fractious. It might remind the Reds in Philadelphia why we have soldiers up here.”
That was devious. Dowling wondered how a soldier who’d gained his reputation by charging straight at the foe—regardless of whether the situation called for it—had acquired such a byzantine sense of politics. It might even be a clever move…if you didn’t stop and think about what it meant to this Arthur McGregor and what was left of his family.
Dowling said, “Sir, this fellow’s already lost his son. If you shoot him, you leave a widow and a couple of orphaned daughters. That’s pretty hard, sir. If he were the bomber, he would have conspired with somebody, wouldn’t he? There’s nothing to show he’s done that. I mean nothing at all, sir. No claims, no circumstantial evidence—zero. He hasn’t done it, period.”
“Lone wolf,” Custer said, but he didn’t sound so cocksure as he had a moment before. Lone-wolf mad bombers weren’t that easy to believe in, even for Custer.
Pressing his advantage, Dowling went on, “So you see, sir, it really isn’t that bad a report. I know it would be more satisfying if they could tie up the bomber with a pretty pink ribbon, but there are millions of Canucks and millions of square miles in this miserable icebox of a country. Catching the stinking bastard isn’t easy.”
“Bah,” Custer said—a sign of weakening. Then, as if it proved something, he added, “He almost blew you up, too.”
“Believe me, sir, I know that,” Dowling said fervently. Nobody cared enough about him personally to want to do him in. But if Custer went, he was liable to go, too. He’d make one line in the fourth paragraph of the newspaper stories. The commanding general’s adjutant also perished in the blast—all the obituary he’d ever get.
He sighed. His name and photograph wouldn’t make it into the encyclopedias or the history books. If he ever wrote his memoirs, the only reason they might find a publisher would be that people had an endless appetite for stories about Custer. Dowling coughed. He could tell stories about Custer, all right, stories that would curl the hair of anybody with an ounce of sense.
He did not think he was boastful in reckoning himself smarter than the senior soldier in the U.S. Army. Custer had graduated dead last in his West Point class—hardly a shining example, save perhaps of what not to do. Whenever Custer had been right, all through his enormously long military career, he’d been right for the wrong reasons. The shouting match he’d got into with Teddy Roosevelt about how and why they’d used their Gatling guns in Montana Territory the way they had proved how far back that went.
And yet, for all his failings, Custer was, and deserved to be, famous. He might have been right for the wrong reasons, but he’d been right at the right times. That counted for more. And Custer, whatever else you said about him, never did anything by halves. That counted for a lot, too.
Flaws and all—and Dowling, from long exposure to them, knew how massive they were—Custer would live in the country’s memory for generations to come. And, when authors got around to writing historical novels about him, they would have to invent a character to play his adjutant, because no one would remember that perfectly competent but uninspired lieutenant colonel, Abner Dowling, whose only measurable defect was measurable indeed, in his uncommon and ever-increasing girth. It hardly seemed fair.
No doubt it wasn’t fair. But then, life wasn’t fair. Some people were smarter than others. Some were handsomer than others. Some—Custer sprang to mind—were pushier than others. You did what you could with what you had. And, even if no one would recall the contributions of an obscure officer named Dowling, Custer had done more than he might have otherwise because he’d had that obscure officer at his side and guarding his back.
Testily, Custer said, “Oh, very well, Dowling—have it your way. If you think this McGregor is pure as the driven snow”—a comparison that hardly required a poetic spirit in Winnipeg in January—“we’ll leave him alone. On your head be it. And if he sets off another bomb, on your head it will be.”
“You already pointed that out, sir.” Dowling sounded on the testy side himself. “I would point out to you in return that this is not merely my opinion. It is the opinion of the expert on the spot. If we pay no attention to the opinion of the expert on the spot, where are we?”
He’d meant it for a rhetorical question. Custer answered as if it were literal: “In the General Staff offices in Philadelphia.” That jerked a startled snort of laughter out of Dowling. Custer went on, “But if we fall down and worship the expert on the spot, where are we then? With the Israelites who fell down and worshiped the Golden Calf, that’s where.”
Dowling thought the second comparison far-fetched. What Custer meant was that he wanted the liberty to do as he damn well pleased. That was all Custer had ever wanted. Since he was eighty-one years old and still hadn’t learned the difference between liberty and license, he wasn’t likely to gain that knowledge in however much time he had left.
“I do think you’re doing the right thing by letting this McGregor alone,” Dowling said. “The whole country has been noticeably calmer lately than it was when you first took over.”
“I put the fear of God in the Canucks, that’s why, and I had my own good reasons for doing it,” Custer said. There might even have been some truth in his words, though Dowling thought the Canadians’ despair over a cause obviously lost had more to do with it. “We will make a desert if we have to, and we shall call it peace.”
“Yes, sir,” his adjutant said resignedly. No use expecting Custe
r to become a decent Latin scholar at his age, either (more hope that he might become a scholar of indecent Latin). When Tacitus had said the Romans made a desert and called it peace, he was condemning them. Custer took it for praise.
“I don’t care if they hate us,” Custer added, “as long as they’re afraid of us.” That was another Latin tag. Custer probably knew as much; having thought of the one, coming up with the other would have been easier for him. But did he remember the phrase came from Caligula’s lips? Not likely, Dowling judged. He glanced over at Custer. Would Caligula have been like this if he’d lasted to eighty-one? Dowling’s shiver had nothing to do with the subzero cold outside. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d had such a frightening thought.
He said, “Now that they are quiet, sir, I really do think it’s best not to stir them up.”
“So you’ve said—over and over and over,” Custer said. “So everyone says. Well, I have something to say to you, too: you and everyone else had better be right, or the United States are going to end up with egg on their face. And what do you think of that?”
“I think you’re right, sir.” Dowling didn’t see what good pointing out Custer’s unfailing gift for the obvious would do.
Jefferson Pinkard’s alarm clock went off with a sound like doom. The steelworker thrashed and writhed and finally managed to turn the bloody thing off. He wished he could thump himself in the head and get rid of his headache the same way. Alabama was a dry state, but that didn’t mean he and his Freedom Party buddies couldn’t lay their hands on some whiskey after meetings when they set their minds to it.
“Ought to know better than to go into work hungover,” he said. He did know better. He’d learned better the hard way. He hadn’t headed for the Sloss Works hurting in years—not till he threw Emily out of the house after catching her whoring with Bedford Cunningham a second time. Since then…since then, he knew he’d been drinking more than he should, but knowing and stopping were two different critters.
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