But when he looked up, Nathan Bedford Forrest III was picking his way across the battered ground. Forrest already had a cigarette going, the coal furiously red. He sat down next to Potter and smoked in angry silence for a minute or so. Then he said, “I do thank you kindly for coming.”
“I should get out and about more often,” Potter answered. “Keeps me fresh. What’s on your mind?”
Instead of answering right away, Forrest lit another cigarette. He smoked it halfway down, blowing out an almost continuous stream of smoke. At last, he asked, “Do you . . . think Jake Featherston’s got all his oars in the water?”
Whatever Potter had expected, that wasn’t it. He looked around again to make sure nobody was paying extra attention to a couple of officers sitting on a park bench. Seeing nothing and no one out of the ordinary, he said, “Well, I haven’t always been in love with the man”—which was a bigger understatement than Nathan Bedford Forrest III might realize—“but I never thought he was ready for the straitjacket, either. How come you do?”
Forrest hesitated again. Potter had no trouble figuring out why—if he went telling tales to the President, the chief of the General Staff was a dead man. But Forrest must have known that before he asked to meet with Potter. The Intelligence officer gestured impatiently, as if to say, Piss or get off the pot. Unhappily, Forrest said, “Well, things aren’t going as well as we wish they were in Pittsburgh.”
“That makes me unhappy, but it doesn’t make Jake Featherston a candidate for the booby hatch.” Potter’s voice was desert-dry.
“No, of course not.” Nathan Bedford Forrest III looked down at the ground between his feet. He bent and picked up something: a little chunk of shrapnel from a bomb casing. With a grimace, he tossed it away. “But a few days ago I went and asked him if maybe we wouldn’t do better just wrecking Pittsburgh than throwing away more men and matériel than we can afford.”
“And?” Potter asked. “There’s always an ‘and’ to a story like that.”
“Oh, there is,” Forrest said. “And he damn near threw me out of his office—damn near threw me through the door, matter of fact. We’re going to take Pittsburgh, take it away from the damnyankees, come hell or high water, no matter how many soldiers or barrels or airplanes we lose. He . . . just wouldn’t listen to me. It was like he couldn’t listen to me. His mind was made up, and nothing anybody could say would change it.”
“And so?” Potter said. “The President’s never been what you’d call good at listening to other people or changing his mind. I don’t suppose he’d be President if he were, because he would have quit trying a long time ago.” Not liking Jake Featherston didn’t mean you could ignore his furious, driving, almost demonic energy.
“This wasn’t like a stubborn man talking,” Forrest said—stubbornly. “This was like—like a crazy man talking.” He looked relieved at finally getting that out. “By God, Potter, it really was.”
“All right. Let’s say it was.” Potter knew he sounded as if he might be humoring a lunatic himself. “If it was, what do you propose to do about it? Bear in mind that we’re in the middle of a small disagreement with our neighbors right now.” His wave encompassed the sandbagged statues, the cratered square, the ruins of the Confederate Capitol.
Nathan Bedford Forrest III’s eyes followed his hand. Forrest grimaced again, as if he hadn’t noticed how things were till then. Maybe he hadn’t—maybe he hadn’t let himself. “Jesus Christ, if we followed a nut into this war—”
“You didn’t reckon he was a nut as long as things went our way,” Potter said brutally. Forrest flinched. Potter went on, “Do you really think this is the time to start plotting a coup d’état? That’s what it would have to be, you know. You’d have to take him down. He’d never leave or change on his own.”
“I do understand that,” Forrest said. “That’s why I wanted to talk to you. You were a red-hot Whig even after it wasn’t safe to be a Whig anymore.” He did know a fair bit about Potter’s past, then. “If anybody could see the need for putting our house in order, I reckoned you’d be the man. For God’s sake, Potter, we can’t afford to lose another war. It would ruin us for good.”
“This one’s a long way from lost. We may get Pittsburgh yet.” Part of Potter wanted to leap at any chance to cast down Jake Featherston. That made him even more careful about what he said than he would have been otherwise. He didn’t think Forrest was trying to entrap him—the other officer sounded too upset for that—but he wasn’t a hundred percent sure. When three men plot, one is a fool and two are government spies. What about two men?
I’m already a spy, Potter thought. He laughed inside, though he held his face straight. But he was a spy for the Confederate States. He wasn’t a spy for Jake Featherston and the Freedom Party, and he was damned if he’d turn into one. And if he did ever turn into such a debased creature, he doubtless would be damned.
“So we may.” Forrest spoke cautiously, too. “But how likely do you think that is, what with the way things look now?”
“I don’t know,” Potter said: the exact and literal truth. He thought about Henderson FitzBelmont over at Washington University. He thought about 235 and 238, and the trouble FitzBelmont and his fellow physicists were having in separating the one from the other. He had no idea whether Forrest knew about FitzBelmont’s project. He couldn’t ask, either, for fear the chief of the General Staff didn’t.
If the physicists could build their bomb, the CSA would win the war. Drop one of those on Pittsburgh, and it wouldn’t cause problems anymore. Drop one on Philadelphia, one on New York City, one on Boston, one on Pontiac . . . That would knock the United States flat and kick them in the teeth while they were down.
Then Potter thought about the U.S. project in Washington State. He thought about bombs blowing Richmond and Atlanta and Louisville and Birmingham and New Orleans and Dallas off the map. It was a race, a race into the unknown. Whoever first played Prometheus and stole fire from the gods would drop that fire on his enemies’ heads.
He tried to imagine fighting a war where both sides had bombs like that. His mind recoiled like a horse shying at a snake. That wouldn’t be submachine guns at two paces. It would be flamethrowers at two paces.
And what sort of weapons would you use in the war after that one? To his surprise, the answer formed almost as soon as the question did.
You would fight that next war with rocks.
“We’re on the tiger’s back right now, and we’ve got hold of his ears,” he said, not knowing and not much caring whether he was talking about Featherston or about the war. “If you tell me that’s not where we want to be, I won’t argue with you. But if you say we’d do better letting go and jumping off, I have to say I think you’re out of your mind—sir. Do you want Don Partridge trying to run things?” He supposed he’d been talking about Jake after all.
Nathan Bedford Forrest III hissed like a wounded snake himself. “Damn you, Potter, you don’t fight fair.”
“I didn’t know that was part of the requirement,” Potter said. “I thought the only thing you had to do was win.”
“That’s it,” Forrest agreed. “And that’s what I wanted to ask you. Do you think we can win the war with Jake Featherston in charge of things?”
“Do you think we can win without him?” Potter asked in return. “Do you think we can even get out of the war without him?” He didn’t ask about getting out of the war with Featherston still in the Gray House. That wouldn’t happen. Period. Exclamation point, even.
Forrest sat on the bench with a faraway look in his eyes. Potter suspected his own face bore a similar expression. How would the Confederate States do if they had to fight on without that pillar of fire at their heart? No, he didn’t love Featherston—far from it. He did, reluctantly, respect him.
Slowly, the chief of the General Staff got to his feet. “Maybe we’ll talk about this another time,” he said. “I hope we don’t, but maybe we will.” He tipped his hat and walked away.
<
br /> A starling perched in a shattered tree not far from where Potter sat. It chirped metallically. The shimmering summer gloss was off its feathers; it wore a duller autumn plumage. Potter swore under his breath. The gloss was off the war, too. He thought of one question he hadn’t asked himself before. Could the CSA win even with Jake Featherston at the helm?
Potter had thought so when the barrels charged from the Ohio up to Lake Erie. He hadn’t believed he was guilty of the old Confederate error of underestimating how tough the damnyankees were. He hadn’t believed it, but evidently he was, because the United States refused to fold up. Would even the fall of Pittsburgh knock them out of the fight? Again, he just didn’t know.
And did Nathan Bedford Forrest III know what he was talking about? Was the President of the Confederate States of America nuttier than a five-dollar fruitcake? Potter shook his head. That was the wrong question. If Featherston was nuttier than a five-dollar fruitcake, what about it? Being out of your tree didn’t necessarily disqualify you from holding office. Some people said only a crazy man would want to be President of the CSA. Potter wasn’t one of them, but he could see their point.
Was Featherston crazy enough to be unfit to lead during wartime? That was what it came down to. Potter would have loved to believe it. He wouldn’t have been sorry for an excuse to throw Jake Featherston out on his ear—no, to kill him, because he wouldn’t go without a fight, and he’d fight hard. He always did. Forrest said he’d seemed crazy when he refused to pull back from Pittsburgh.
Maybe the chief of the General Staff was right. But Potter wasn’t ready to upset the Confederate applecart on a maybe. Featherston was at least as likely to be crazy like a fox. He’d proved that time and again. Taking Pittsburgh might prove it once more.
“Better to wait,” Potter murmured. Acting was irrevocable, and he didn’t think the time ripe. If going into Pittsburgh proved a fiasco . . . Well, so what? Did that mean Featherston had gone around the bend, or just that he’d made a mistake?
Did it matter? If Pittsburgh proved a fiasco, the Confederate States were in trouble either way. Somebody would have to take the blame. Who else but Jake Featherston then?
Nodding to himself, Potter got to his feet with one more thing to worry about. If Pittsburgh proved a fiasco, who took the blame might not matter, either.
****
To say Jefferson Pinkard was not a happy man failed to use the full power of language. Somebody in Richmond got a brainstorm. Who got to make that brainstorm real? Pinkard did. Some damnfool Negro in Jackson blew himself up, and a bunch of white women with him? Yeah, all right, he was a dirty, stinking son of a bitch. But get rid of all the Negroes in Jackson on account of him? At once? That was lunacy. That was also what Jeff had orders to do.
When the telegram came in, he telephoned Ferdinand Koenig and asked, “How many niggers are we talking about here?”
“Hell, I don’t know off the top of my head,” the Attorney General answered, which did not fill Jeff with confidence. Koenig said, “I’ll get back to you this afternoon. You want to know what you’re getting into, do you?”
“You might say so,” Pinkard said tightly. “Yeah, you just might.”
Ferdinand Koenig was as good as his word. Just after Jeff’s lunch, he got another telegram. TWENTY-FIVE OR THIRTY THOUSAND. F.K., it said. What Pinkard said when he saw that had an f and a k in it, too, with a couple of other letters in between. He said several other things right afterwards, most of them even hotter than what he’d started with.
Once his spleen was well and truly vented—once it had blown off about three counties’ worth of steam—he called Vern Green into his office and gave the guard chief the news. “Well, Jesus Christ!” Green said. “We got to get rid o’ these niggers? We don’t just try and stuff ’em on in here?”
“That’s what the orders are,” Jeff said grimly.
“How soon they gonna start coming?” Green asked.
“I don’t exactly know—not exactly,” Pinkard answered. “But it won’t be long—I sure as hell know that. Fast as they can throw ’em on trains and ship ’em out here. A few days—a week, tops.”
“You figuring on using the bathhouses and the trucks?”
Jeff nodded. “Don’t see how we’ve got even a prayer of doing it if we don’t. You get the ’dozer crews out to the other place, too, and have ’em dig lots of new trenches. If we’re doing all of Jackson, that’ll take up some room.” He didn’t talk about mass graves, not in so many words.
The guard chief followed him even so. “I’ll see to it,” he promised. “We’re gonna be busy as shit, ain’t we?”
“No,” Jeff answered. Green looked at him in surprise. He condescended to explain: “We’ll be a hell of a lot busier than that.”
“Oh. Yeah,” Green said. “Wish to God I could tell you you were wrong, but that’s how it’s gonna be, all right.” He scowled. “We’ll have a fuck of a time keeping the rest of the niggers from figuring out what’s goin’ on, too.”
“Uh-huh. That already crossed my mind,” Pinkard said. “Don’t know what we can do about it. We got orders on this—orders right from the top.” Ferdinand Koenig wasn’t the top, of course, but he was only one short step down. And he’d made it real clear the President of the CSA wanted every black from Jackson wiped off the face of the earth. What Jake Featherston wanted, Jake Featherston got.
Green sighed. “Well, we’ll just have to take care of that when it turns into a problem, that’s all. In the meantime . . . In the meantime, I’ll let the boys know a big pile of shit’s rolling down the hill, and we’re on the bottom.” He got to his feet. “Freedom!”
“Freedom!” Jeff echoed. The guard chief left his office. Jeff pulled his copy of Over Open Sights off the shelf by his desk. He knew just the passage he was looking for: the one where Featherston talked about how killing off a few thousand Negroes before the Great War would have saved a lot of trouble during and after. Jeff nodded to himself. That was true, every word of it. When he read the words, he could hear Jake Featherston’s hot, angry voice.
Even so, after a while he scratched his head and put down the book. This didn’t seem the same as that. People on the outside would know Jackson’s blacks had been sent away to camps, but that was all they would know. Even the Negroes already in the camps weren’t supposed to know they’d never come out alive. So what, exactly, was the point?
But that did have an answer. The point was to get rid of as many spooks as the Freedom Party and the Confederate government could arrange to get rid of. Jeff didn’t see anything wrong with what the Party wanted—just the opposite. But doing it in such a big lump made things work less smoothly than they might have, less smoothly than they should. Camp Determination’s profile was going to look like a boa constrictor that had swallowed a big old pig. You’d be able to see the lump the pig made as it worked its way from one end of the snake to the other.
Both sides of the camp, men’s and women’s, were on edge even before the first trains rolled in out of the east. The Negroes knew something was going on, even if they didn’t know what. They must have got that from the guards. Pinkard thought about reaming Vern Green out about it, but he didn’t. The guards wouldn’t have been human if they didn’t pass on the feeling that something was cooking. They hadn’t said what, for which Jeff was duly grateful.
He went out to watch his crews at work when the first train from Jackson came in. He was proud of them. They had a routine, and they stuck to it as much as they could. They hauled the luckless blacks off the train and separated them, men to the left, women and children off to the right. Then they went through the train and pulled out any Negroes who’d tried to get cute and hide. Then more blacks—men as close to trusties as Camp Determination held—removed the bodies of those who’d died on the way.
There were more of those than usual. The survivors moaned about how they’d been packed like sardines, about how they hadn’t had anything to eat or drink. Most of them moaned abou
t how they hadn’t even been able to pack a carpetbag.
The guards did their best to soothe them. “Don’t y’all worry ’bout a thing,” a troop leader called reassuringly, smooth and confident as a preacher in the pulpit. “We’re gonna ship some of you out to other camps right away, and we’re gonna let the rest of you get cleaned up before we move you. You do what people tell you, and you’ll be just fine.”
“This way!” guards yelled. “This way!” The Negroes obeyed. They were too dazed and battered not to—and the guards had automatic weapons to make sure they didn’t get out of line. Most of them didn’t even try.
One man did ask, “How come we gonna git shipped somewheres else when we only just got here?” Nobody answered him, and he didn’t ask twice.
“Listen up, y’all!” an officer shouted. “You’re gonna be in two groups. One group goes on to a camp by Lubbock, the other one goes down by El Paso.” There were camps in both places, small ones. They were there mainly to keep Negroes from panicking when they heard something like that. The officer went on, “Those of you bound for the Lubbock camp, we’re gonna bathe and delouse y’all right here, on account of we got bigger bathhouses than they do at that camp. Y’all goin’ to El Paso, they’ll take care of that when you get there.”
Pinkard and his top officers had hammered out the story in the time before the trains started coming in. He didn’t like it; it had holes you could throw a dog through. But it gave some kind of explanation, anyway, and the Negroes wouldn’t have much time to wonder and worry.
Guards started going along the lines of Negroes. They would say, “Lubbock,” to some and, “El Paso,” to others. Every so often, they would add, “Remember where you’re supposed to go, or you’ll catch hell!”
When everybody had an assignment, officers yelled, “El Paso, this way!” and, “Lubbock, this way!” Two columns of men and two of women and children formed. “Now get moving!” the officers shouted.
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