Two women got into a catfight. They screeched and scratched and wrestled and swore. Rodriguez and his comrades hurried toward the squabble. The women were shrieking about somebody named Adrian. Was he a guard? Rodriguez couldn’t think of any guards named Adrian, but he might have missed somebody. Was he a black man in the other half of the prison? Or was he somebody they’d known back where they came from?
Whoever he was, he wasn’t worth disturbing the peace for. “Enough!” Rodriguez yelled. “Break it up!”
The women ignored him. They were too intent on maiming each other to care what a guard said. “You whore!” one of them shouted.
“I ain’t no whore!” The second woman pulled the first one’s hair, which produced a shrill scream. “You the whore!”
“Break it up!” Rodriguez yelled again. “Punishment cell for both of you!”
Life at Camp Determination was hard anyway. It was harder in a punishment cell. They didn’t give prisoners room to stand up or sit down. They had no stoves—you froze in the winter. In the summer, you baked, but everybody in the camp baked in the summer. You got starvation rations, even skimpier and nastier than the cooks doled out to anybody else.
But the two women really meant this brawl. They wouldn’t stop no matter what a man in uniform said. That was unusual. Rodriguez nodded to the junior guards with him. “Take care of it,” he said.
They did, using the butt ends of their submachine guns. Some of the models that went up to the front were of all-metal construction, so cheap they’d fall to pieces if you dropped them on the sidewalk. But the guards got better-made weapons with real wooden stocks. One reason they did was for times like this. Even if you didn’t want to shoot somebody, you sometimes had to knock sense into an empty head.
Now the women shrieked on a different note. Back when they first got half the camp to themselves, some of the guards were reluctant to clout them. No more. Familiarity had bred contempt.
“Didn’t you hear the troop leader yell for you to break it up?” one of the guards panted. “He tells you to do something, you cut the crap and you do it, you hear?”
If Rodriguez hadn’t had three stripes on his sleeve, he likely would have been nothing but a damn Mexican to the guard. Of course, even a damn Mexican stood higher on the Confederate ladder than a nigger (unless you were a white Texan from down near the Rio Grande). And a troop leader stood infinitely higher than a prisoner in an extermination camp.
One of the women had an eye swollen shut. The other one had blood running down the side of her head. They pointed at each other. At exactly the same time, they both said, “She started it.”
“Nobody cares who start it,” Rodriguez said. “You don’t stop when I say to stop. I say twice, you still don’t stop. Now you pay.” He turned to the guards. “To the punishment cells. They start this shit again, you shoot. You hear?”
“Yes, Troop Leader!” they chorused, their timing almost as good as the women’s.
Rodriguez wondered if the Negroes thought he was joking. If they did, it was the last mistake they’d ever make. Nobody in the Confederate States—nobody who mattered, anyway—would care whether a couple of colored women died a little sooner than they would have otherwise. Far away in the distance, artillery rumbled again. As long as it didn’t get much closer, everything was all right. Rodriguez hoped everything would go on being all right, too.
****
Willard Sloan was not a nice man. Scipio listened to him screaming on the telephone: “You call that lettuce? Holy Jesus, only thing it was good for was wiping my ass! What do I mean? I’ll tell you what I mean. It was limper than an old man’s dick, that’s what, and it looked like the bugs ate as much as you sold me. Nobody pulls that kind of shit on me twice, you hear?” Bang! Down went the receiver.
Sloan might have been nice before the Yankee bullet paralyzed him from the waist down. Or he might have been a son of a bitch from the start. If he’d ever heard the old saying about catching more flies with honey than with vinegar, he didn’t believe it. Maybe he just didn’t like flies.
Most restaurant managers worth their pay had some son of a bitch in them. Jerry Dover sure did. But the new man at the Huntsman’s Lodge took it to extremes. When something made him unhappy, you heard about it, loudly and profanely. Sloan operated on the theory that the squeaky wheel got the grease. He didn’t just squeak—he screeched.
He cussed Scipio out when the black man made mistakes. Scipio did make some—with all the things that went on in a busy restaurant, he couldn’t help it. But he didn’t make many, and Willard Sloan noticed. “Well, looks like Dover knew what he was talking about,” he said one day. “You do know what the fuck you’re doin’.”
“I thanks you, suh,” Scipio said. “You do somethin’, you likes to do it good.”
“Ha!” Sloan said. “Most people”—he didn’t say most niggers, for which Scipio gave him credit—“only want to do enough to get by. You show up every day, and you work like a bastard.”
“I does my job bes’ way I knows how,” Scipio said.
“Well, that’s what you’re supposed to do,” the manager said. “Doesn’t happen as often as it ought to, though. I can hire a hundred people who could wait tables kinda half-assed, you know what I mean? Good enough to get by, but not really good. One of you is worth all of them put together. You’re the kind of waiter a place like this is supposed to have. You’re the kind of waiter who makes the Huntsman’s Lodge the kind of place it is.”
“Thank you, suh. Don’t reckon I hear many finer compliments.” Scipio meant it. Willard Sloan didn’t have to waste praise on him. If Sloan did it, he meant it. Maybe hearing that praise made Scipio rash, for he went on, “How much it matter, though, when they kin ship me off to a camp whenever they please?”
As soon as the words were gone, he wished he had them back. Whining to a white man never did a Negro any good. Willard Sloan didn’t answer for a while. Then he said, “When I got shot, I was out in no-man’s-land, between our lines and the damnyankees’. A nigger soldier brought me back, or maybe I would’ve died out there.”
“What happen to him afterwards?” Scipio asked.
Sloan sighed. “Xerxes, I don’t know. I just don’t know. I don’t know where he’s from. I don’t know his name. I don’t know if he got himself killed next day or next week or next month. I can’t tell you, that’s all. I wasn’t an officer leading colored troops or anything—their sector was next to ours, that’s all. I don’t even know if he was out there already or if he came out to get me. I was in the hospital a hell of a long time after that. I never had the chance to find out.”
“All right, suh.” Thus encouraged, Scipio felt bold enough to add, “If he still ’live now, reckon he either in a camp or worried about goin’ in. Don’t hardly seem fair.”
Sloan sighed again. He spread his hands. “Ain’t much I can do about it. Who pays attention to a guy in a wheelchair who runs a restaurant? Maybe I can help my own people some. I hear tell Dover did. Things are getting tougher all the time. I don’t know if it’ll still work. I aim to try, anyhow.”
“Can’t ask for no more’n dat,” Scipio said. So a human being did lurk under that acid-tongued exterior. Worth knowing, maybe.
Human being or not, Sloan didn’t put up with slackness, any more than Jerry Dover had. When a cook came in late three times in two weeks, he was gone. The Mexican who took his place spoke next to no English, but showed up early every day. He picked up the language in a hurry, especially the obscenities that laced the conversation of the rest of the kitchen staff.
How many Mexicans were in Augusta these days? How many Mexicans were in towns and fields all over the Confederacy, doing what had been nigger work till blacks started getting cordoned off by barbed wire and disappearing into camps? Not so many as the Negroes they replaced, surely. But enough to keep crops coming in, wheels turning, meals cooked and served, hair cut.
They can get along without us. The idea terrified Scipio. He
hadn’t thought the Freedom Party could strike at Negroes in any really important way. He hadn’t thought the CSA could do without the hard, unglamorous labor colored men and women provided. He hadn’t thought so, but maybe he was wrong.
One good thing about a busy shift: it left him no time to brood. He was always hopping, taking orders, bringing food out from the kitchen, barking at the busboys, trying to hear the gossip at his tables without letting the whites know he was listening.
Everybody talked about Pittsburgh. The more that people knew, the gloomier they sounded. Some of them sounded very gloomy indeed. “We’re going to lose that whole army,” a colonel home on leave told his banker friend. “We’re going to lose a big piece of Ohio, too. It’s just a mess—a mess, I tell you.”
“What can we do?” the banker asked.
“Hold on tight everywhere else and hope we can ride it out,” the officer answered. “Don’t know what else there is to do. Give up? Not while we’ve still got bullets in the gun. You reckon the last peace was bad? It’d be a walk in the park next to what we’d get from the damnyankees this time around.”
Scipio wished for the destruction of the Freedom Party with all his heart. He had mixed feelings about the Confederate States of America. Every man needed a country, and the Confederate States, for better and often for worse, were his. He’d had no trouble getting along before Jake Featherston took power. Things hadn’t been perfect or even very good, but they hadn’t been so bad, either. He’d known where he fit.
But Negroes didn’t fit anywhere in Featherston’s CSA. And enough whites agreed with Featherston to bring him and his followers into places where they could do something about their ideas. And so . . .
And so, when Scipio went home that night, he passed the barbed-wire perimeter around the Terry. No street lights inside kept him from tripping. Power had been off for a long time. He stepped slowly and carefully. Falling would be bad, not just because he was an old man and getting brittle but because he might tear his trousers. That would be a real disaster.
He made it back to the apartment undamaged. It was chilly in there. No buildings in the Terry had heat anymore. The handful of people left here used makeshift wood-burning stoves for cooking and heating. One of these days, maybe, a fire would get loose. Scipio dreaded that, but didn’t know what he could do about it.
Bathsheba stirred when he came to bed. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to bother you none.”
“ ’S all right,” his wife answered sleepily. “Sunday tomorrow. We kin go to church.”
“All right.” Scipio didn’t argue. He thought God had long since stopped listening to the Confederacy’s Negroes, but Bathsheba still believed. Going along was easier than quarreling.
He thought so, anyway. In the morning, Cassius said, “I ain’t goin’. I got to see some people about some business.”
“What kind of business?” Scipio asked.
His son just looked at him—looked through him, really. Cassius didn’t answer. Some kind of resistance business, then. Scipio sighed but didn’t insist. Bathsheba tried to. It didn’t work. Cassius was going to go his own way. Seeing what things were like these days, Scipio had a harder time thinking him wrong than he would have a couple of years earlier.
The church was as rundown as everything else in the Terry. The preacher’s coat and trousers were shiny with age. The reverend preached a careful sermon, praying for peace and for justice and for an end to misery and oppression. He made a point of not saying that the members of his congregation should rise up against oppression. Somebody was bound to be listening for the authorities. If the government or the Freedom Party—assuming there was any difference between the two—didn’t like what he said, he would vanish off the face of the earth as if he’d never been born.
He might have preached fire and brimstone. He might have preached revolt and revolution. It wouldn’t have mattered. He was just finishing his sermon when somebody at the back of the church exclaimed, “Lord have mercy, dey is out dere!”
Nobody wondered who they were. With gasps of horror, people sprang up from their rickety seats and hurried out of the church, hoping to get away before it was too late. “God be with you, brothers and sisters!” the preacher called after them. He didn’t try to get them to stay. Maybe he had his own escape route planned.
Scipio and Bathsheba and Antoinette scurried away with the rest of the congregation. Like rats, he thought. Any kind of hiding place would do now.
But there were no hiding places. Augusta policemen and Freedom Party stalwarts and guards waited out in the street. They had smiles on their faces and rifles and submachine guns in their hands. One of them shifted a wad of tobacco into his cheek so he could talk more clearly: “Y’all can come along with us quiet-like, or y’all can get shot right here. Don’t matter none to us. Which’ll it be?”
One young man, only a little older than Cassius, ran for it. A submachine gun spat fire. The young man fell and writhed on the cracked pavement. The stalwart who’d cut him down ambled over and put a bullet through his head. The Negro groaned and lay still.
“Anybody else?” asked the cop with the chaw. No one moved. No one spoke.
Cassius. Thank God Cassius isn’t here. Someone may get away, Scipio thought. He glanced over at his wife. She nodded when their eyes met. She had to be thinking along with him.
The policeman spat a brown stream of tobacco juice in the dead man’s direction. “All right,” he said. “Get moving.”
Away the Negroes went. The congregation was only part of the cleanout. Some men tried to offer money to get away. Some women tried to offer themselves. The white men only laughed at them.
Out of the Terry they went. A lot of white Augustans were worshiping and praying at this hour of the day. Maybe God listened to them. He sure hadn’t paid any attention to the colored preacher. The whites who weren’t at church stared at the Negroes herded along like cattle. Some just stared. Some jeered. No one called out a word of protest.
Confederate Station was by Eighth and Walker, right next to St. Patrick’s Catholic Church. Did God listen harder if you called on Him in Latin? Scipio wouldn’t have bet on it. The station wasn’t far from the Terry. The captured Negroes were lucky in that, because he was sure they would have had to walk no matter how far it was.
And then all their luck ran out. Everything happened so fast, neither Willard Sloan nor anyone else had the slightest chance to do anything. “In! Get in, God damn you!” shouted the white men with guns. They stuffed cars tighter than should have been humanly possible. By the way the boxcar Scipio and his family went into smelled, it had hauled cattle the last time. The whites packed it till no one could sit down, then slammed the door shut. That cut off almost all of the air. Scipio resigned himself to dying before he got wherever the train was going. With a jerk and a lurch, it began to roll.
****
Dr. Leonard O’Doull sometimes thought he was trapped in one of the nastier suburbs of hell. One bleeding, mangled, screaming man after another, from the time he gulped coffee to wake up to the moment he lay down for a stolen bit of sleep. Some of the soldiers wore green-gray, others butternut. He’d almost stopped noticing which color uniform he had to cut away to get at the latest mutilation.
“When will this end?” he groaned to Granville McDougald after amputating a shattered arm.
“You’re asking the wrong guy,” the medic answered. “Only one who can tell you is the Confederate CO.”
“He should have quit three weeks ago,” O’Doull said.
McDougald shrugged. “He’s got orders to hold to as long as he can, and he’s got ammo for his guns. Featherston would probably send a people bomb after him if he did throw in the towel. As soon as we smash him flat, that frees up all of our men here to roll west and knock the Confederates out of Ohio. So he’s holding down a lot more men than he’s still got left himself.”
“You spent all these years as a medic, right?” O’Doull asked. McDougald nodded. The
doctor went on, “So how come you talk like you come from the General Staff?”
“Me?” Granville McDougald laughed. “I’m just picking up stuff I hear from the wounded. We’ve got enough of ’em.”
“Well, God knows you’re right about that,” O’Doull said. The University of Pittsburgh hospital held U.S. wounded ranging in rank from private to brigadier general—and Confederates ranging from private to full colonel. It was always stuffed. Men lay on gurneys in the hallway, sometimes on mattresses on the floor, sometimes—when things were at their worst—on blankets on the floor.
The Confederates never had made it over the Allegheny River. They never had tried to break out of Pittsburgh to the west, either. They’d waited till the relieving column could link up with them—but it never did. Now, outside the pocket, there were no Confederate soldiers for miles and miles. The men who’d tried to relieve Pittsburgh had turned west themselves, to try to stem the U.S. advance out of northwestern Ohio and Indiana.
“One thing,” O’Doull said. McDougald raised an eyebrow. O’Doull went on, “I bet the poor bastards stuck here don’t think Jake Featherston is always right anymore.”
“That doesn’t matter,” McDougald said. “What matters is the people down in the CSA. When they figure out Featherston’s led ’em down the primrose path, that’s when things get interesting.”
“Maybe—but maybe not,” O’Doull said. “Yeah, some of them may hate Featherston after things go wrong. But won’t they go on hating us even worse? They really do, you know.” He’d listened to wounded men, too, and some of the captured Confederates were alarmingly frank.
“I don’t care if they hate us. I hate them, too.” Granville McDougald was so matter-of-fact, he might have been talking about the weather. “What I want ’em to remember is, if they mess with us, we’re going to pound the kapok out of ’em, and they better get used to the idea.”
“Oderint dum metuant,” O’Doull murmured. McDougald made a questioning noise. Half embarrassed, O’Doull explained: “I did a lot of Latin when I was an undergrad—in those days, you had to when you went to college. It’s helped with the medical terms, I will say. But the Emperor Caligula said that.”
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