He checked for himself before going to the front hall to open the door; the rest of the staff was not above playing small jokes. But, sure enough, here came Virgil Hobson on a mule, carrying with him a copy of the Charleston Mercury. Anne Colleton got the Daily Courier, too, and the South Carolinian and Southern Guardian from Columbia. Marshlands was a good way out of the way for all of them, but you declined to render its mistress a service at your peril.
Virgil was just climbing down off the mule as Scipio opened the door for him. "Good afternoon, sir," he said. Hobson was a poor buckra who spent half his time drinking and the other half hung over, but he was white folks- and the white folks who didn't deserve respect raised the most hell if they didn't get it.
"Afternoon," Virgil said. He walked straight, but very gently, as if touching the ground hurt. That meant he was after a binge, not in the middle of one. He thrust the Mercury at Scipio. "Here y'are." Without waiting for a reply, he turned and walked back toward his long-eared mount.
"Thank you, sir," Scipio said to his back. He waited till the delivery man rode away before shutting the door. As he set the newspaper on the tray to take it to Anne Colleton, he glanced down at the front page.
Big black headlines shouted up at him: SOCIALISTS AND MORMONS RAM PAGE IN NEW YORK CITY! REDS AND FANATICS RIOT, FORCE YANKS TO DECLARE MARTIAL LAW! UNREST IN U.S. ARMY REPORTED.
He didn't know how the Mercury had got the story or how much truth was in it, but if it was even a quarter true, the USA was in a peck of trouble.
On reading past the headlines, the other thing he noted, less happily, was that the U.S. Army, despite the claims of unrest in its ranks, was going about the business of keeping a lid on New York City. The people they were putting a lid on might be Socialists, but they were white folks. If damnyankee soldiers would put down an uprising from white folks, what would Confederate troops do if- when- their Negro labourers rose up under the red flag?
He was afraid he knew the answer to that question. He'd tried telling it to the Reds among the field hands here. They kept laughing at him. He resolved to hang on to this newspaper and the others that came in over the next few days, to let Cassius and his fellow revolutionaries see what happened in the real world. How could you expect a band of Marxist fanatics to seize power in a country? They didn't seem to understand how big a place a country was.
Going on with that argument, fortunately, could wait. He carried the Charleston Mercury upstairs to Anne Colleton's office: of an afternoon, you could expect to find her there. She was on the telephone. He stood in the doorway, waiting to be noticed.
"No," she said crisply into the mouthpiece. "I told you to buy, not sell. You shall carry out my instructions as I give them, sir, or I will find another broker and you will find a lawsuit… What?… An oversight? I have no more tolerance for oversights than I have for deliberate errors. Whatever it was, this is your first, last, and only warning. Good day." She hung up, muttered something sulphurous under her breath, and then, anger expunged, smiled at Scipio. "I hope you have better news for me than that chucklehead did."
"I believe so, yes." Without another word, Scipio set the tray with the Mercury on the desk in front of Anne Colleton, turning it as he did so to make sure the headlines were right side up for her.
Her eyes widened. Her mouth twisted into something halfway between a smile and the expression a tiger wears on spotting a juicy sheep. Scipio was heartily glad that expression bore on the newspaper, not on him. The mistress of Marshlands rapidly read through the stories having to do with the troubles in the USA, pursuing them into the inner pages. When she finished, she looked up at Scipio and asked, "Did you take any notice of these?" She paused. "You must have. You told me the news was good."
"I did look at the headlines, yes, ma'am," Scipio answered. You didn't want to be in a position of having to lie to Anne Colleton. She was sharp as the edge of a straight razor, and even more dangerous.
Her finger stabbed down at one of those headlines. "That's why we'll win the war, Scipio. The United States are divided against themselves. They haven't the stomach for a fight to the finish. We have no Socialists here, by God!" That predatory expression grew even fiercer. "We have no Mormons here, either, but that doesn't keep us from using them against the USA. Our states are truly united, even if the Yankees have the name. And because of that, we'll dictate terms to them in the end, as we did two generations ago and then again in my parents' time."
"Yes, ma'am," Scipio repeated. Some of the sweat springing out on his face came from having to wear tailcoat, vest, and boiled shirt on a muggy spring day that threatened summer. Part, though, came from his own fear. Sharp as Anne Colleton was, she looked right at Negroes-at one person in three in the CSA- without even seeing them… or maybe seeing them only as labourers, not as people. An awful lot of white folks saw-or didn't see- blacks the same way. Anne Colleton was more clever than most of them, though. If she ever really looked instead of taking things for granted She looked… toward a clock on the wall. Her expression faded to one of discontent. "Probably too late for Cassius to bring in a couple of turkeys before nightfall. Go tell him to hunt tomorrow. I want to lay on a fancy supper then."
"Yes, ma'am." Scipio slid the tray out from under the Charleston Mercury and took it back to the table in the front hall where it rested. He was always delighted at escaping the mistress' attention-except when she sent him out to Cassius. Her eyes remained closed to the double game Scipio was playing. Whatever else you said about him, Cassius had his eyes wide, wide open.
He was sitting on the steps in front of his cottage, running a cleaning patch through the barrels of his shotgun, when Scipio came up. The hunter's weathered face cracked into a leathery grin. He jumped to his feet, limber as a man half his age. "Kip! What fo' you do me de favor o' yo' comp'ny?" Ignoring the irony, Scipio told him what Anne Colleton wanted. Cassius nodded vigorously. "I do that." He waved Scipio an invitation. "Come inside. You 'n' me, we talk."
Normally, Scipio dreaded that invitation, though he found it impossible to refuse. Today, though, he thought he would do more talking than usual. As soon as Cassius shut the door to give them privacy, he began, "You know what de Socialists do in New York City? They rise up, an' do Jesus! they make the USA — "
Cassius waved him to silence. "Kip, dat ol' news," he said scornfully. "Dat happen las' week. It over an' done with now, 'cep' fo' de 'pression. De 'pression, dat go on a long time. Always do." He sounded very cynical, very sure.
Scipio stared. "But de newspaper jus' say today-"
"White folks' paper." Cassius laced his voice with even more scorn than before. "Dey got to wait, dey got to decide what they want they good little boys an' girls to hear about. De buckra, you give bad news to they, they get res'less."
"How you know 'fo' de newspaper come?" Scipio asked.
"Somebody not so far, they got a wireless set," Cassius answered after a moment's hesitation. In lieu of staring, Scipio looked down at the weathered pine boards of the floor. That somebody-presumably a Negro-among the Red would-be revolutionaries had the knowledge to run a wireless set, that that somebody (and, unless Scipio was wrong, a lot of somebodies in the CSA) had acquired such knowledge under the nose of the Confederate authorities… put that together with the undoubted desperation of the rising that would come, and maybe, just maybe…
"Maybe, jus' maybe, come de revolution, we win," Scipio said softly.
"Do Jesus! Hell yes, we win," Cassius declared. "De dialectic say, when de whole of de proletariat rise up, de capitalists an' de bourgeoisie, they cain't no way put we down again."
Saying a thing didn't make it so. Scipio knew that. He'd even tried telling Cassius and Island and the other Reds as much. They didn't listen to him, any more than the preacher would have if he'd denied Jesus. If they had men on wireless sets-maybe, just maybe, they had reason not to listen.
Chester Martin ducked behind a stretch of brick wall that reached up to his belly button. It was a hard landin
g; more bricks lay all around what was left of the wall. Somewhere not far away were two whitewashed pieces of wood nailed together at right angles. Once upon a time, this had been a church on the outskirts of Big Lick, Virginia. Now it offered him a different kind of salvation.
A Confederate bullet smacked the other side of the bricks. Maybe it had been aimed at him, maybe fired at random. He had no way of knowing. What he did know was that the bricks were good and solid, and would keep rifle and machine-gun fire from him, as long as he stayed low. Anybody who hadn't learned to stay low by now was already dead or wounded.
Martin took advantage of the momentary respite to put a fresh, full clip on his Springfield. Never could tell when you'd have to try to kill somebody- or several somebodies-in a hurry. If one of the Rebs had more bullets in his rifle than you did in yours… "You'd be sorry," Martin muttered. "I don't want to be sorry. I want the other son of a bitch to be sorry."
Paul Andersen crawled up beside him. "Ain't this fun?" he said, also pausing to reload.
"Now that you mention it," Chester said, "no."
Andersen's grin was wry. "Let me ask it a different way. Ain't this fun, next to leave back in White Sulphur Springs?"
Martin considered that fine philosophical point. "Nobody's trying to kill you back there," he said at last. "Other than that, though, you got a point."
"Nobody's trying to kill you back there?" Andersen exclaimed. "You mean you didn't think they were trying to bore you to death?"
"Hmm," Martin said, and then, "Yeah, maybe they were. I mean, if you don't like lemonade and you don't like hot water that stinks like somebody cut the cheese in it, not a hell of a lot to do back there."
"I hear they got saloons-hell, I hear they got whorehouses-in leave towns on what used to be Confederate territory," Andersen said. "The Army has charge there, and the Army knows what soldiers want to do when they get away from the front for a while. But White Sulphur Springs, that's back in the USA, and it ain't the Army in charge. It's the damn preachers."
"No whiskey," Chester Martin agreed. "No women, except the Red Cross girls handing out the lemonade. A couple of them were pretty, but once I'm back there and cleaned up, I want to do more than look at a woman, you know what I'm saying?"
"You bet I do," Andersen answered. "Me, too. Hell, looking is harder, some ways, than not being around 'em at all."
"I think so, too," Martin said. "I-" He shut up then, and flattened him self out among the bricks, because the Rebs started throwing whizz-bangs into the neighborhood. The shells burst all around, throwing deadly fragments every which way.
The barrage-mostly those damned three-inchers that seemed to fire almost as fast as machine guns, but some bigger cannon, too-went on for about half an hour. Stretcher-bearers hauled groaning, thrashing U.S. soldiers back toward the doctors. Some men didn't need stretcher-bearers. If all that was left of you was your leg from the knee down, your foot still in your boot, doctors wouldn't do you any good.
As soon as the bombardment stopped, Martin and Andersen popped up like a couple of jack-in-the-boxes. Sure as hell, here came the Rebs, dashing forward through the ruins of Big Lick. They ran low and bent over, not wanting to expose themselves any more than they had to. Veteran troops, Martin thought; new fish had less sense.
He was a veteran, too. The more you let the other guys take advantage of a bombardment, the worse off you'd be. The time to smash them was as soon as they jumped out of their holes. If you could pot a couple then, the rest lost enthusiasm for the work they'd been assigned.
He squeezed the trigger. The Springfield slammed against his shoulder. A Reb pitched over on his face. Martin worked the bolt and fired again. Another Confederate soldier fell, this one grabbing at his arm. Martin seemed to have all the time in the world to swing his rifle toward a third figure clad in butternut, to squeeze the trigger, to watch the fellow topple.
Beside him, Paul Andersen was also banging away. Somewhere not far off, a machine gun started hammering. A lot of Rebels went down. But a lot of them kept coming, too. They pitched improvised grenades at the U.S. soldiers. Martin didn't like the idea of carrying those damn things around-if a bullet hit one, it would blow a hole in you they could throw a dog through. But he didn't like being on the receiving end of grenades, either. It was as if the infantry started having its own artillery.
Shouts of alarm from the left made him whip his head around. The Confederates were in among the U.S. trenches and foxholes, trying to drive the Americans back to White Sulphur Springs without benefit of leave.
Martin ran toward the battling, cursing men. In a fight like that, you used anything you had: rifle, bayonet, knife, the sawed-off spade you carried to dig yourself in. The question was brutally simple: would enough Rebs get past the U.S. rifle and machine-gun fire to overwhelm the defenders and make this wrecked stretch of suburb their own once more, or would the men who were in place and whatever reinforcements who could get forward blunt the attack and throw it back?
Butternut smeared with mud and grass stains didn't look much different from similarly dirty green-gray. Being sure of who was who was anything but easy. You didn't want to go after the wrong man by mistake, but you didn't want to hesitate and get yourself killed, either.
An unmistakable Rebel leaped out from behind a pile of rubble and swung one of those short-handled shovels at Chester Martin's head. He threw up his rifle just in time to fend off the blow. The force of it staggered him even so. The Confederate, intent on his work, drew back the shovel for another blow. Before he could deliver it, a bullet-from a U.S. soldier or a Rebel, Martin never knew-caught him in the shoulder. The spade spun from his hands. "Ahh, shit," he said loudly. "You got me now, Yank."
Martin dashed past him. If he'd stayed there an instant longer, he would have shot the wounded Rebel in the head. Accepting the surrender of a man who'd been doing his best to kill you till he got hurt himself felt fiercely unnatural. A lot of such attempted surrenders never got made. Machine gunners, in particular, had a way of dying heroically at their posts.
Yells from the rear told of fresh U.S. troops coming up. The Confederates still battling in among their foes weren't getting reinforcements; their barrage hadn't made the U.S. defenders say uncle. "Give up!" Martin shouted to the Rebs. "We got you outnumbered, and you ain't gonna make it back to your own lines. You want to keep breathin', throw down what you got."
For a few seconds, he thought that call would do no good. The Rebs were stubborn bastards; he'd seen them die in place before. But then a sergeant in butternut said, "Hell with it," and threw up his hands. His example was enough for his comrades, who dropped their rifles and whatever other lethal hardware they were holding.
The U.S. soldiers stripped their prisoners of ammunition, grenades, and knives, and of their pocket watches and cash, too. None of the Confederates said a word about that. Several of them had U.S. coins and bills in their pockets, which argued they'd stripped a prisoner or two themselves.
"Hammerschmitt, Peterson, take the Rebs back to where they can deal with 'em," Martin said. The rest of the U.S. soldiers looked enviously at the two men their sergeant had chosen: they'd get away from the front and the righting, if only for a little while.
"Hear tell the food in Yankee prisoner camps ain't too bad," the Confederate sergeant who'd been first to throw down his Tredegar said hopefully.
As Specs Peterson and Joe Hammerschmitt gestured with their bayoneted rifles to get the prisoners of war moving, Chester Martin answered, "Listen, Rebs, I'll give you one warning: whatever you do, don't let 'em ship you to White Sulphur Springs."
The sergeant nodded, grateful for the advice, then looked puzzled when the U.S. soldiers started laughing. "Come on, you lugs," Peterson said, sounding as fierce as any man with glasses could. Hands still high, the Confederates shuffled off into captivity.
"You're a regular devil, Sarge, you are," Paul Andersen said as the U.S. soldiers shared out the weapons and other loot they'd got from the Rebels. F
our men all wanted a knife with a brass handle made as a knuckle-duster; they had to go down on their knees and roll dice to decide who got to keep it.
"Who, me?" Martin said. "Listen, how much difference is there really between a prisoner camp and where they sent us? You can't do what you want either place, now can you?"
"Hadn't looked at it like that," the corporal admitted after a little thought.
"And I'll tell you another thing," Martin said, warming to his theme: "we can joke however goddamn much we want, but they're both better than being at the front." This time, Paul Andersen nodded at once.
XIII
Usually, Scipio or one of the lesser servants looked out from the front windows to see who was coming. This time, Anne Colleton did the job herself. It would not give the Negroes any wrong ideas about her place and theirs in the Marshlands scheme of things, not when the motorcar she was waiting for had her brother in it.
She wondered whether she ought to give Tom a sisterly hug and a kiss or box his foolish ears for him. The first clue she'd had that he was anywhere but up in Virginia was a telephone call from Columbia less than an hour before. He'd just got off the train, he'd said, and was on his way.
Scipio came up to her, tall, imposing, perfectly formal. "Have you any special suggestions on how we may make your brother's stay as comfortable and pleasant as possible?" he asked in his pipe-organ voice.
Anne waved him away. "I leave it in your hands, Scipio. I can't think now. Maybe I'll have some ideas later. If I do, I'll tell you." The butler bowed and withdrew. Since the start of the war, he'd pulled back even further than usual into the shell of service he wore around himself like armour. He'd always been a private person, even before his training for high service, but now it was as if he didn't want anyone having the slightest inkling of what he was thinking or feeling.
Stinking war — it oppresses everyone, she thought. Sometimes I wish I were a simple field nigger, so I wouldn't have to think about it. But even the plantation hands were thinking about the war, thinking how they could make money from it by going to work in the factories instead of staying here where they belonged and raising cotton. Anne sighed. Even for a field nigger, life wasn't simple any more.
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