Chapter III
Having been beached, Roger Kimball, like so many of his comrades, was making the painful discovery that very little he’d learned at the Confederate Naval Academy in Mobile suited him to making a living in the civilian world. He was a first-rate submarine skipper, but there were no civilian submarines. The C.S. Navy was no longer allowed to keep submersibles, either; otherwise, he would have stayed in command of the Bonefish.
He had a fine understanding of the workings of large Diesel engines. That also did him very little good. Outside the Navy, there were next to no large Diesel engines, nor small ones, either. He understood gasoline and steam engines, too, but so did plenty of other people. None of them seemed willing to sacrifice his own position for Kimball’s sake.
“Miserable bastards, every last one of ’em,” he muttered as he trudged through the streets of Charleston, South Carolina. Then he laughed at himself. Had he had a steady job, he wouldn’t have let go of it, either. Maybe he should have headed down to South America, as he’d told Anne Colleton he might.
A lot of former Navy men were trudging the streets of Charleston these days, most of them overqualified for the jobs that turned up—when any jobs turned up, which wasn’t often. Kimball kept money in his pocket partly because he wasn’t too proud for any kind of work that came along—having grown up on a hardscrabble farm in Arkansas, he was no pampered Confederate aristocrat—and partly because he was a damn fine poker player.
He walked into a saloon called the Ironclad. “Let me have a beer,” he told the barkeep, and laid a ten-dollar banknote on the bar.
He got back a beer and three dollars. Sighing, he laid some briny sardellen on a slice of cornbread from the free-lunch counter and gobbled them down. Pickled in brine, the little minnows were so salty, they couldn’t help raising a thirst. He sipped the beer, and had to fight the urge to gulp it down and immediately order another. Provoking just that response was the free lunch’s raison d’être.
A couple of men farther down the bar were talking, one of them also nursing a beer, the other with a whiskey in front of him. Kimball paid them only scant attention for a bit, but then began to listen more closely. He emptied his schooner and walked over to the fellow who was drinking whiskey. “You wouldn’t by any chance be from the United States, would you?” he asked. His harsh Arkansas drawl made it very plain he was not.
He was looking for a yes and a fight. As the man on the bar stool turned to size him up, he realized the fight might not be so easy. He was a little heavier and a little younger than the other man, but the fellow owned a pair of the steeliest gray eyes he’d ever seen. If he got in a brawl, those eyes warned he wouldn’t quit till he’d either won or got knocked cold.
And then his friend laughed and said, “Jesus, Clarence, swear to God I’m gonna have to stop taking you out in public if you don’t quit talking that way.”
“It’s the way I talk,” the man with the hard eyes—Clarence—said. He turned back to Kimball. “No, whoever the hell you are, I am not a damnyankee. I sound the way I sound because I went to college up at Yale. Clarence Potter, ex-major, Army of Northern Virginia, at your service—and if you don’t like it, I’ll spit in your eye.”
Kimball felt foolish. He’d felt foolish before; he expected he’d feel foolish again. He gave his own name, adding, “Ex-commander, C.S. Navy, submersibles,” and stuck out his hand.
Potter took it. “That explains why you wanted to wipe the floor with a Yankee, anyhow. Sorry I can’t oblige you.” He threw a lazy punch in the direction of his friend. “And this creature here is Jack Delamotte. You have to forgive him; he’s retarded—only an ex–first lieutenant, Army of Northern Virginia.”
“I won’t hold it against him,” Kimball said. “Pleased to meet the both of you. I’d be happy to buy you fresh drinks.” He wouldn’t be happy to do it, but it would make amends for mistaking Potter for someone from north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
“I’m pleased to meet damn near anybody who’ll buy me a drink,” Delamotte said. He was a big, fair-haired fellow who sounded as if he was from Alabama or Mississippi. He kicked the bar stool next to him. “Why don’t you set yourself down again, and maybe we’ll get around to buying you one, too.”
Being closer to Clarence Potter, Kimball sat beside him. The bartender served up two more beers and another whiskey. Kimball raised his schooner on high. “To hell with the United goddamn States of America!”
Potter and Delamotte both drank: no Confederate officer cut loose from his country’s service in the aftermath of defeat could refuse that toast. The ex-major who talked like a Yankee and looked like a tough professor offered a toast of his own: “To getting the Confederate goddamn States of America back on their feet!”
That too was unexceptionable. After drinking to it, Kimball found himself with an empty schooner. He wasn’t drunk, not on two beers, but he was intensely and urgently thoughtful. He didn’t much care for the tenor of his thoughts, either. “How the hell are we supposed to do that?” he demanded. “The United States are going to be sitting on our neck for the next hundred years.”
“No, they won’t.” Potter shook his head. “We will get the chance.”
He sounded positive. Roger Kimball was positive, too: positive his new acquaintance was out of his mind. “They made you butternut boys say uncle,” he said, which might have come close to starting another fight. Confederate Navy men, who’d battled their U.S. counterparts to something close to a draw, resented the Army for having to yield. But now, not intending pugnacity, he went on, “Why do you reckon they’ll be fools enough to ever let us do anything again?”
“Same question I’ve been asking him,” Delamotte said.
“And I’ll give Commander Kimball the same answer I’ve given you.” Potter seemed to think like a professor, too; he lined up all his ducks in a row. In rhetorical tones, he asked, “Toward what have the United States been aiming ever since the War of Secession, and especially since the Second Mexican War?”
“Kicking us right square in the nuts,” Kimball answered. “And now they’ve finally gone and done it, the bastards.” He’d done some nut-kicking of his own, even after the cease-fire. That last, though, was a secret he intended to take to the grave with him.
“Just so,” Clarence Potter agreed, emphasizing the point with a forefinger. “Now they’ve finally gone and done what they’ve been pointing toward since 1862. Up till now, they had a goal, and they worked toward it. Christ, were they serious about working toward it; you have no notion how serious they were if you’ve never seen a Remembrance Day parade. Scared me to death when I was up in Connecticut, believe you me it did. But now they don’t have a goal any more; they’ve achieved their goal. Do you see the difference, Commander?”
Before Kimball could answer, Jack Delamotte said, “What I see is, I’m thirsty, and I bet I’m not the only one, either.” He ordered another round of drinks, then ate some sardellen and lit a cigar almost as pungent as the fish.
After a pull or two at his beer, Kimball said, “Major, I don’t follow you. Suppose their next goal is wiping us out altogether? How in blazes are we supposed to stop ’em?”
“Goals don’t work like that, not usually they don’t,” Potter said. “Once you got to where you always thought you were going, you like to ease back and relax and smoke a cigar—a good cigar, mind you, not a stinking weed like the one Jack’s stuffed into his face—and maybe marry a chorus girl, if that’s what you reckoned you would do after you made it big.”
“So that’s what you figure is going to happen, eh?” Kimball chuckled. “You figure the United States scrimped and saved for so long, and now they’ll buy a fancy motorcar and put a beautiful dame in it? Well, I hope you’re right, but I’ll tell you this much: it won’t happen as long as that goddamn Roosevelt is president of the USA. He hates us too much to care about chorus girls.”
“I never said it would happen tomorrow,” Potter replied. “I said it would happen. Countries live longer than people do.” He knocked back his whiskey with a sharp flick of the wrist and ordered another round.
While the bored man behind the bar was drawing the beers, Jack Delamotte leaned toward Kimball and said, “Now you’re going to hear Clarence go on about how we need to find a goal of our own and stick to it like the damnyankees did.”
“It’s the truth.” Potter looked stubborn—and slightly pie-eyed. “If we don’t, we’ll be second-raters forever.”
“Won’t see it with the regular politicians,” Kimball said with conviction. “They got us into the swamp, but I’m damned if I reckon they’ve got even a clue about how to get us out.” Neither Potter nor Delamotte argued with him; he would have been astonished if they had. He went on, “I heard this skinny fellow on the stump a week or two ago. The Freedom Party, that was the name of his outfit. He wasn’t too bad—sounded like he knew what he wanted and how to get there. His name was Feathers, or something like that.”
To his surprise, Clarence Potter, who’d struck him as a sourpuss, threw back his head and guffawed. “Featherston,” the ex-major said. “Jake Featherston. He’s about as likely a politician as a catfish is on roller skates.”
“You sound like you know him,” Kimball said.
“He commanded a battery in the First Richmond Howitzers through most of the war,” Potter answered. “Good fighting man—should have been an officer. But that battery had belonged to Jeb Stuart III, and Jeb, Jr., blamed Featherston when his son got killed. Since Jeb, Jr.’s, a general, Featherston wouldn’t have got past sergeant if he’d stayed in the Army till he died of old age.”
Slowly, Kimball nodded. “No wonder he was ranting and raving about the fools in the War Department, then.”
“No wonder at all,” Potter agreed. “Not that he’s wrong about there being fools in the War Department: there are plenty. I was in intelligence; I worked with some and reported to others. But you need to take what Featherston says with a grain of salt about the size of Texas.”
“He’s got some good ideas about the niggers, though,” Kimball said. “If they hadn’t risen up, we’d still be fighting, by God.” He didn’t want a grain of salt, not one the size of Texas nor a tiny one, either. He wanted to believe. He wanted his country strong again, the sooner the better. He didn’t care how.
Clarence Potter shook his head. “I doubt it,” he said. “A good big man will lick a good little man—not all the time, but that’s the way to bet. Once we didn’t knock the USA out of the fight in a hurry—once it turned into a grapple—we were going to be in trouble. As I said, I was in intelligence. I know how much they outweighed us.” Even with a good deal of whiskey in him, he was dispassionately analytical like a scholar.
Kimball cared for dispassionate analysis only when calculating a torpedo’s track. Even then, it was a means to an end, not an end in itself. The end was action—blowing up a ship. Featherston wanted action, too. “You know how I can find out more about this Freedom Party?” he asked.
“They’ve started up an office here in town, I think,” Potter answered, distaste on his face. “Jake Featherston calls Richmond home, though, and I think the Party does, too.”
“Thanks,” Kimball said. “Do me a little poking around, I think.” He signaled to the bartender. “Set ’em up again, pal.”
Cincinnatus Driver—the Negro was getting more and more used to the surname he’d taken the year before—had hoped the war’s end would bring peace to Kentucky, and especially to Covington, where he lived. Now here it was the middle of spring, and Covington still knew no peace.
Every day when he left his house to start up the ramshackle truck he’d bought, his wife would say, “Be careful. Watch yourself.”
“I will, Elizabeth,” he would promise, not in any perfunctory way but with a deep and abiding sense that he was saying something important. He would crank the truck to noisy, shuddering life, climb into the cabin, put the machine in gear, and drive off to hustle as much in the way of hauling business as he could.
He wished he were inside one of the big, snarling White trucks the Army used to carry its supplies. He’d driven a White during the war, hauling goods that got shipped across the Ohio from Cincinnati through Covington and down to the fighting front. The Whites were powerful, they were sturdy, they were, in fact, everything his antiquated Duryea was not. That included expensive, which was why he drove the Duryea and wished for a White.
As he turned right onto Scott from out of the Negro district and drove up toward the wharves this morning, he kept a wary eye open. A good many U.S. soldiers in green-gray uniforms were on the streets. They also looked wary, and carried bayoneted Springfields, as if ready to start shooting or stabbing at any moment.
They needed to be wary, too. After more than fifty years in the Confederacy, Kentucky was one of the United States again. It was, however, like none of the other United States, in that a large part of the population remained unreconciled to the switch from Stars and Bars to Stars and Stripes.
The city hall had U.S. machine-gun nests around it. Somebody—odds were, a Confederate diehard—had taken a shot at the mayor a couple of weeks before. Cincinnatus wouldn’t have been broken-hearted had the malcontent hit him. The mayor cooperated with U.S. authorities, and tried to placate the locals with rabblerousing speeches against blacks.
Blue St. Andrew’s crosses, some of them new, marked buildings and suggested the Confederate battle flag. Two horizontal red stripes with a white one between similarly suggested the Confederate national flag. Some of those were new, too. The diehards hadn’t given up, not by a long chalk. I AIN’T NO YANKEE, someone had written beside one of those not-quite-flags.
New posters marred walls, too, some of them slapped over the pro-Confederate graffiti. The posters were solid red, with broken chains in black stretched across them. The Red uprising had not got so far among the Negroes of Kentucky as among their brethren still in Confederate-owned territory at its outbreak. But it had not been brutally suppressed here, either. Being a Red wasn’t illegal in the USA, even if it was hazardous to a black man’s health.
Red posters and blue crosses were both thick around the waterfront. Cincinnatus wondered if the diehards and the Reds had bumped into each other on their clandestine rounds of pasting and painting. Down in the CSA, they would have been deadly foes. Here in Kentucky, they sometimes reckoned the U.S. government a common enemy. Cincinnatus whistled softly. They sometimes didn’t, too.
Both soldiers and police patrolled the wharves. Confederate policemen had commonly worn gray, like soldiers from the War of Secession. Now that Kentucky belonged to the USA, policemen—sometimes the same policemen—wore dark blue, as their grandfathers might have done had they fought for the Stars and Stripes.
And some policemen wore no uniforms at all. Some of the idlers, some of the roustabouts who strode up and down the piers and along the waterfront, were sure to belong to Luther Bliss’ Kentucky State Police, an outfit that made Kentucky the only U.S. state with its own secret police force. Cincinnatus knew Luther Bliss better than he wanted to. Knowing Bliss at all was knowing him better than Cincinnatus wanted to; the chief of the State Police made a formidable foe.
Roustabouts were hauling crates and barrels off a barge. Cincinnatus braked to a halt: cautiously, as the Duryea didn’t like to stop any more than it liked to start. He hopped out of the cab and hurried over to a discontented-looking fellow holding a clipboard. “Mornin’, Mr. Simmons,” he said. “What you got, where’s it got to get to, and how fast does it got to be there?”
“Hello, Cincinnatus,” the steamboat clerk answered, pointing to some of the barrels. “Got oatmeal here: five for Twitchell’s general store, and another five for Dalyrimple’s, and three for Conroy’s. You fit all of them in there?” He pointed to Cincinnatus’ truck. “Damn tight squeeze, if you do.”
“Mr. Simmons, they’ll go in there if I got to make one of ’em drive,” Cincinnatus said, at which the white man laughed. Cincinnatus went on, “Half a dollar a barrel for haulage, like usual?”
Simmons looked more discontented than ever. At last, he said, “Wouldn’t pay it to any other nigger driving a raggedy old truck, that’s for damn sure. But yeah, fifty cents a barrel. Bring me your receipts and I’ll pay you off.”
“Got yourself a deal, suh.” Cincinnatus beamed. That was good money, and he might have the chance to pick up another load, or maybe even two, before the day ended. Then he hesitated, really hearing the third name Simmons had given him. “That Joe Conroy?” he asked. “Fat man, used to have hisself a store before it burned down?”
“Let me check.” Simmons flipped papers. “Joseph Conroy, that’s what it says. I don’t know about the other part. How come?”
“Didn’t know he was back in business, is all,” Cincinnatus replied. It wasn’t all, not even close, but he kept that to himself. “Where’s his new store at?”
Simmons checked his papers again. “Corner of Emma and Bakewell, it says here. You know where that is? This ain’t my town, you know.”
“I know where it’s at, yeah,” Cincinnatus said. “Over on the west side, gettin’ out towards the park. Twitchell’s over here on Third, and Dalyrimple’s on Washington, so I reckon I’ll deliver theirs first and then head over to Conroy’s.” He held out his hand. “Give me the papers I got to get signed.”
“Here you go.” The steamboat clerk handed them to him. “That’s the other reason I pay you like I would a white man, or almost: you read and write good, so things get done proper.”
“Thank you,” Cincinnatus said, pretending not to hear that or almost. He couldn’t do anything about it. Stowing the papers in his shirt pocket, he started crowding barrels of oatmeal into the back of the truck. He did end up with one of them on the seat beside him; Simmons was a keen judge of how much space merchandise took up.
The truck rode heavy, the weight in back smoothing out its motion and making it laugh at bumps that would have jolted Cincinnatus had it been empty. He appreciated that. The ponderous cornering and the greater likelihood of a blowout were something else again. He drove carefully, avoiding the potholes that pocked the street. A puncture would cost him precious time.
His first two stops went smoothly, as he’d thought they would. He’d delivered to both Hank Twitchell and Calvin Dalyrimple before. Twitchell, a big, brawny fellow, even helped him lug barrels of oatmeal into his general store. Calvin Dalyrimple didn’t; a strong breeze would have blown him away. They both signed their receipts and sent Cincinnatus on his way in jig time.
He drove out to the west side of town with much more trepidation. That didn’t shrink when he discovered Conroy’s new general store sat between a saloon and a pawnshop. None of the looks he got from passersby as he stopped the truck in front of the store was friendly, or anything close. Most of them translated to, What the hell you doing here, nigger? He hoped the truck would still be there when he got done with his business with Conroy.
He also hoped the storekeeper wouldn’t recognize him. When he brought the first barrel into the store, all he said was, “Here’s your oatmeal, suh, straight off the docks. Got two more barrels in the truck; fetch ’em right in for you. All you got to do is sign the receipt shows you got ’em, and I be on my way.”
Joe Conroy grunted. He was a round, middle-aged white man with narrow, suspicious eyes. He was also a Confederate diehard, and a friend of Cincinnatus’ former boss, Tom Kennedy. Kennedy had involved Cincinnatus with the diehards, too, having him plant firebombs on cargoes heading down to U.S. forces. Eventually, Cincinnatus had planted one in Conroy’s old store, but the white man had never figured that out.
Cincinnatus had never decided how smart Conroy was. Smarter than he let on, was the Negro’s guess. He proved smart enough to recognize Cincinnatus, whom he hadn’t seen in a year, and who would have been glad never to see him again. “Well, well,” he said slowly, the unlit cigar in his mouth jerking up and down. “Look what the cat drug in.”
“Mornin’, Mistuh Conroy.” Cincinnatus hurried out to the truck to haul in the second barrel of oatmeal. As long as he was working, he didn’t have to talk. He wished a customer would come into the cramped, dark general store. Conroy couldn’t afford to talk, not where anyone could hear him.
But nobody came in except Cincinnatus. Conroy gave him an appraising stare. “Hear tell it was that damnyankee you was workin’ for who shot Tom Kennedy,” he said.
“Yes, suh, that’s a fact. Hear him say so my ownself,” Cincinnatus agreed. He got in a dig of his own: “Wasn’t the Reds, like you told me in the park last year.”
“No, it wasn’t the Reds,” the storekeeper said. “But it was a friend of yours, just the same. We don’t forget things like that, no indeed, we don’t.”
“I saved Tom Kennedy’s bacon from the Yankees back when the war was new,” Cincinnatus said angrily. “I hadn’t done that, I never would’ve met you—and believe you me, that would’ve suited me fine.”
“We know where you’re at.” Conroy put menace in his voice.
“And I know where you’re at, too,” Cincinnatus said. “I get into trouble from you and your pals, Luther Bliss’ll know where you’re at and what you’ve been doin’. Don’t want no trouble, Conroy.” He used the white man’s unadorned surname with relish, to shock. “But I get trouble, I give it right back.”
“Damn uppity nigger,” Conroy growled.
“Yes, sir.” Cincinnatus went outside and manhandled the last barrel of oatmeal into the store. He thrust the receipt at Joe Conroy. “You want to sign right here, so I can go on about my business.”
“Why do I give a damn about that?” Conroy said.
“On account of if you don’t sign, I take this here oatmeal back to the docks and you don’t get no more shipments.” Cincinnatus wondered how much Conroy cared. If the store was nothing but a front for the diehards, he might not care at all. That would make Cincinnatus’ life more difficult.
But Conroy grabbed a pencil, scrawled his signature, and all but hurled the paper back at Cincinnatus. “Here, God damn you.”
“Much obliged, Mistuh Conroy.” Cincinnatus headed for the door. “Got me a lot of work left to do.”
“Come on,” Sylvia Enos said to her children. “Get moving. I’ve got to take you over to Mrs. Dooley’s so I can go to work.”
“I like it better when you’re not working, Ma,” Mary Jane said. She would be five soon, which Sylvia found hard to believe. “I like it when you stay home with us.”
“When she stays home with us, though, it’s because she’s out of work again, silly.” George, Jr., spoke with the world-weary wisdom of his seven years—and wasn’t shy about scoring points off his sister, either. “We have to have money.”
He had a hard streak of pragmatism in him. His father had been the same way. George, Jr., looked very much like his father, though he was missing the brown Kaiser Bill mustache Sylvia’s husband had worn. Seeing her son, Sylvia again cursed the fate that had put a submersible in the way of the USS Ericsson the night after the Confederate States yielded to the USA.
With the CSA out of the war, she thought, it had to be a British boat. George hadn’t worried about the Royal Navy. A Confederate submarine had almost sunk his destroyer earlier in the war. He’d fought Rebel boats all the way up to the end. To have his ship sunk by the limeys after that…even now, it was hard to take. George hadn’t deserved that much bad luck.
“Come on,” Sylvia said again. “I can’t be late on account of you. I can’t be late at all.”
That was nothing less than the gospel truth. With men home from the war in droves, jobs for women were harder and harder to come by. She didn’t know how long the work at the galoshes factory would last, and she couldn’t afford to anger the people over her in any way. She was the sole support for her family as much as any man was for his, but nobody looked at things that way. Men came first. Women had been fine during the war. Now…
Now she couldn’t even vote for anyone who might better her plight. Massachusetts had no women’s suffrage. Had she been able to cast a ballot, she would have voted Socialist in a heartbeat. The Democrats had been fine when it came to winning the war. What were they good for in peacetime? Only counting their profits, as far as she could see.
She hurried the children out of the apartment and down to the clamorous streets of Boston. With a sigh of regret, she walked past a newsboy hawking the Globe. She couldn’t justify laying out a couple of cents on it, not when she didn’t know if she’d have work next week.
“England signs treaty!” the newsboys shouted, trying to persuade others to part with pennies. “Limeys give up all claim to Sandwich Islands and Canada! England signs treaty! Recognizes Ireland and Quebec!”
It was, she supposed, good news. The best news, though, as far as she was concerned, would have been for the ocean to swallow England and all her works. And while the ocean was at it, it could swallow the CSA, too.
Mrs. Dooley was an aging widow with wavy hair defiantly hennaed, and with bright spots of rouge on her cheeks. To Sylvia, it looked more like clown makeup than anything alluring, but she would never have said so. The woman took good care of her children and did not charge too much.
After kissing George, Jr., and Mary Jane good-bye, Sylvia went back to the trolley stop, tossed another nickel in the fare box (and soon she would have to start paying Mary Jane’s fare, too: one more expense), and headed to the galoshes factory. To her relief, she got there on time.
The place stank of rubber from which the rubber overshoes were made. Sylvia’s post came just after the galoshes emerged from the mold. She painted a red ring around the top of each one. Had the firm been able to train a dog to do the job, it would have. That failing, it grudgingly paid her.
When she’d worked in a mackerel-canning plant, she’d been able to operate the machine that glued gaudy labels to cans almost without thinking about it; sometimes, when she was lucky, she would hardly notice the time going by between getting to the factory and dinner or between dinner and going home. She hadn’t had that luxury at the shoe factory where she’d been working when George was killed. If she didn’t pay attention to what she was doing there, the powerful needle on the electric sewing machine would tear up her hand. She’d seen it happen to operators who’d been at the place longer than she’d been alive. A moment’s lapse was all it took.
All that could happen with a moment’s lapse here was her ending up with red paint on her hand, not red blood. Still, she couldn’t let her mind wander, as she’d been able to do in the canning plant. What she did here wasn’t simple repetitive motion, the way that had been. She had to pay attention to painting the rings precisely. If she didn’t, the foreman started barking at her.
Frank Best wasn’t a hardened old Tartar like Gustav Krafft, the foreman at the shoe factory where she’d worked, who gave a walking demonstration of why the limeys and frogs thought of Germans as Huns. Best’s style was more the sly dig: “Thought you were going to slip that one by me, did you?” was a favorite remark.
The other difference between the two men was that Krafft had been too old to serve in the Army. Frank Best wore a Soldiers’ Circle pin with the year 1904 on it. That being his conscription class, he was only a handful of years older than Sylvia. He was also single, and convinced he was the greatest gift to women God had ever set on the planet.
A lot of women who worked in the galoshes factory were widows, some still wearing mourning, others not. Most of them, like Sylvia, heartily despised the foreman. “Like to put a certain part of him in the mold—the size-two mold,” Sarah Wyckoff, one of those widows, said at dinner on a day when Best was being particularly obnoxious. “Wouldn’t need nothin’ bigger.”
That produced a good set of giggles. Sylvia said, “No, for goodness’ sake, you don’t want him vulcanized there. He’d never keep quiet about it then.” More giggles rose.
“If so many of us hate him,” said May Cavendish, another widow, “why does he think he’s so bully?”
“He’s a man,” Sarah Wyckoff said, as if she expected that to cover everything. By the way the other women nodded, it probably did.
May Cavendish tossed her head; her blond curls bounced on her shoulders. “What frosts me is that some of the girls do like him.”
“I can’t imagine that anybody would really like him,” Sylvia said with a shudder. Her companions nodded. She went on, “But if he says, ‘Be nice to me or go look for another job,’ some of the girls are going to be nice to him. Times are hard. Believe me, I know.”
“We all know, sweetheart,” Sarah said. “If he said anything like that to me, though, I’d break him in half.” She was built like a longshoreman; Sylvia didn’t think she meant it any way but literally.
“There ought to be a law,” Sylvia said. She’d had that thought before, when she lost her job at the canning plant because she’d had to stay home and tend to her children after they came down with the chicken pox.
“There ought to be a lot of things that there ain’t,” Sarah Wyckoff said with authority. “If I was Teddy Roosevelt—”
“You’d look silly with a mustache, Sarah, and you haven’t got enough teeth to be TR,” May Cavendish said. She pulled a pack of cigarettes from her handbag, scraped a match on the sole of her shoe, got the cigarette lighted, and blew out a creditable smoke ring. Then she coughed. “Sorry. I’m still getting the hang of this.”
“Doesn’t it make people think you’re fast?” Sylvia asked.
May shook her head. “Not the way it would have before the war,” she said, and drew on the cigarette again. The coal glowed red. She let the smoke go without showing off this time. “It’s not like it’s a big, smelly cigar or anything. It’s not like it was hooch, either. You don’t get drunk or anything—you feel better about things for a little while, that’s all.” She extended the pack toward Sylvia. “Want to try one?”
“Sure. Why not?” Sylvia said. “It’s not like they can hurt you or anything.” She took a cigarette. May Cavendish struck another match. Sylvia didn’t drag deeply on the cigarette, the way May had done. She drew in a cautious mouthful of smoke—or so she thought. When she tried to suck it down into her lungs, she hacked and wheezed and started to choke.
“Very same thing happened to me the first time I tried,” May assured her. “It gets easier, believe me it does. You get used to it.”
Sylvia’s mouth tasted as if someone had just doused a campfire in there. She stared at the cigarette in dismay. “Why would you want to get used to it?” she asked, and coughed again. But she felt tingly all the way out to her fingers and toes, tingly and light-headed in a strange and pleasant sort of way. Ever so cautiously, she took another puff.
It still tasted bad. It made her chest burn. But the tingles and that good feeling in the middle of her brain got stronger.
“Don’t do too much the first time,” May Cavendish advised her. “You can get sick if you do. Think about whether you like it or not. It’s not like cigarettes are expensive, or anything like that.”
“That’s true,” Sylvia said. “They’ve come down since the war ended, too. I’ve noticed that, even if I don’t usually buy them.”
May nodded. “And the tobacco’s better now. It’s the one good thing you can say about the Rebs—they grow better tobacco than we do. Some of the stuff they were selling while the war was still on…Honey, I swear to Jesus they were sweeping the horseballs off the street and wrapping paper around ’em.”
“People kept smoking, though,” Sarah Wyckoff said.
“Why not?” Sylvia said. “It’s not a bad thing, and May’s right—it does make you feel nice for a little bit.” Despite saying that, she had no great urge to smoke the rest of the cigarette May Cavendish had given her. She let it fall to the ground and crushed it with her foot. Maybe she’d acquire the habit and maybe she wouldn’t. If she did, she’d do it slowly. If she tried to do it in a hurry, she had the feeling she would get sick instead.
“Time to get back to work,” Sarah said, “or Frank’ll start sweet-talking us again.” She rolled her eyes to show how much she looked forward to that.
When Sylvia went back into the plant, it didn’t stink so badly of rubber, or so it seemed. After a while, she realized the cigarette had numbed her sense of smell. That seemed a good reason to start smoking all by itself.
The line began to move. Sylvia painted red rings on a pair of galoshes. The machinery sent them down the line to the next worker, who would trim off extra rubber. Sylvia dipped her brush in the paint can and painted more rings.
Lucien Galtier was the sort to enjoy summer while it lasted. Up here, close to the St. Lawrence, a few miles outside the town of Rivière-du-Loup, it did not last long. The farmer did not hold that against summer. It was what it was. He accepted along with enjoying.
He accepted weeds, too, but he did not enjoy them. At the moment, he was hoeing the potato patch. When he saw a bit of green of the wrong shade and in the wrong place, the hoe lashed out without his conscious direction. The decapitated weed toppled.
“Strike them all dead, cher papa,” Lucien’s son, Georges, said from a couple of rows over, seeing the hoe come down. At eighteen, Georges overtopped his father by several inches, and was wider through the shoulders, too—Lucien’s strength was of the wiry, enduring sort. Georges’ humor was also wider than his father’s; he enjoyed playing the buffoon, while Lucien met the world with irony.
“Strike them all dead, eh?” Lucien said as he got rid of another weed. “One fine day, my son, you will make your country a fine general.”
“If the Republic of Quebec needs me as a general, it will be in a great deal of trouble,” Georges said with conviction. He looked down at the ground. “Come on, you weeds—get out of the potato trenches and charge the machine guns! Die, and save me the trouble of grubbing you out.” Beaming at Lucien, he went on, “Perhaps you have reason. I can talk like a general, n’est-ce pas?”
His father snorted. “As always, you are a nonpareil.” He bent his back to the weeding, not wanting Georges to see any surprise on his face. He’d forgotten, as he sometimes could in the daily routine of farm life, that this was, and had been for the past year and more, the Republic of Quebec, dancing attendance on the United States, and not the province of Quebec, a French-speaking appendage to the British Empire.
He laughed—at himself, as he often did. He’d forgotten the American-fostered Republic of Quebec, and that with an American son-in-law. There was absentmindedness worthy of a professor or a priest.
When he straightened again, he glanced over in the direction of the hospital the Americans had built on his land to care for their wounded from the fighting north of the St. Lawrence. The hospital remained, but no longer flew the Stars and Stripes. Instead, the Republic’s flag (which had also been the provincial flag) floated above it: a field of blue quartered by a white cross, and in each quadrant a white fleur-de-lys. These days, the hospital drew its patients from the people of Quebec.
As the sun went down, he and Georges shouldered their hoes like rifles and trudged back toward the farmhouse. A Ford was parked by the house: not one in a coat of green-gray U.S. official paint, nor the Republic’s equivalent blue-gray, but somber civilian black. Georges grinned when he saw it. “Ah, good,” he said. “My sister is here for me to harass.”
“Yes, and her husband is here to give you what you deserve for harassing her, too,” Lucien replied, to which his son responded with a magnificent Gallic shrug.
Charles, Georges’ older brother, came out of the barn just as Lucien and Georges headed toward it to hang the hoes on the rack Lucien’s grandfather had built long years before. Charles looked like Lucien, but was more sobersided—he had to take after his mother there.
Marie greeted her husband and sons on the front porch, as much to make sure they wiped their feet as for any other reason. She was a small, dark, sensible woman, ideally suited to be a farm wife. Her younger daughters, Susanne, Denise, and Jeanne, who ranged in age from sixteen down to eleven, also came out. Susanne sixteen! Galtier shook his head. She had been a child when the war started. Seeing her ripening figure forcibly reminded him she was a child no longer.
Lucien waded through his younger daughters to give Nicole a hug. She looked very much the way Marie had as a young wife. She also looked happy, which made her father happy in turn. When she turned Lucien loose, he shook his son-in-law’s hand. “And how does it march with you, the distinguished Dr. O’Doull?” he asked.
Dr. Leonard O’Doull looked back over his shoulder, as if to see whether Galtier were speaking to someone behind him. With a chuckle, he answered, “It marches well enough with me, mon beau-père. And with you?”
“Oh, with me?” Galtier said lightly as he got out a jug of the applejack one of his neighbors—most unofficially—cooked up. “It is good of you to ask. It is good of you to deign to visit my home here, instead of returning to the palace in which you dwell in Rivière-du-Loup.”
“Father!” Nicole said indignantly.
“Be calm, my sweet,” Leonard O’Doull said, laughter in his green eyes. “He was trying to make you squeak, and he did it.” He’d spoken French—Parisian French—before he came up to Quebec. He still spoke Parisian French, but now with a heavy Quebecois overlay. In another few years, he would probably sound like someone who’d grown up here.
Nicole sniffed. “I expected such behavior from my brother, not from my own dear papa.” She laid the treacle on with a trowel. Her eyes glowed.
“Why?” Georges asked innocently. “What did you expect Charles to do?” That set Nicole to spluttering, Charles to glaring, and the young ladies of the family to chaffing both their brothers impartially.
In the midst of that racket, Lucien spoke more seriously to Dr. O’Doull: “It is always good to see you.” He handed his son-in-law a glass of the apple brandy. “To your health.”
“And to yours,” O’Doull said. They drank. Galtier gasped a little as the applejack clawed its way down to his belly: this was a rougher batch than most his neighbor made. If it fazed Leonard O’Doull, he didn’t let on. Irishmen were supposed to have well-tempered gullets, and he lived up to that. After another sip, he went on, “Nicole and I finished our work at about the same time, and we thought we would pay you a visit.”
“You should have such thoughts more often,” Galtier said, but then qualified that by adding, “Are you certain it has been good for Nicole to continue to work instead of keeping house full time?”
“She has become a good nurse,” O’Doull answered, “and the hospital would be the poorer if it lost her. And she desires to work, and I, believe me, I am perfectly happy with the way she keeps house.”
“So long as a man is happy, everything will march well,” Lucien said gravely, and his son-in-law nodded. The farmer raised an eyebrow. “Is it for this reason—to boast of your happiness—that you do us the honor of this visit?”
“By no means.” O’Doull could match Georges absurdity for absurdity and Lucien dry for dry. “It is because a little bird whispered in my ear that Nicole’s mother was fixing a great stew of lapins aux pruneaux.”
“Ah, is that the reason?” Lucien slowly nodded. “Very well. Very well indeed, in fact. The rabbits think I set the cabbages there for them to enjoy. I, on the other hand, think God put the rabbits there for me to enjoy. After you taste of the stew”—whose hot, meaty odor filled the farmhouse—“you will decide.”
“Any rabbit who presumes to taste of your cabbages surely deserves to end up aux pruneaux,” his son-in-law agreed with a face so perfectly straight that Galtier, well pleased, elbowed him in the ribs as if he were a son of his own flesh and poured him another glass of the homemade Calvados.
The meal was a great success. Afterwards, Nicole helped her mother and sisters with the dishes—with so many hands, the work could not help being light. O’Doull handed fragrant Habanas to Lucien and his sons and lit one for himself. Galtier savored the aroma before drawing the first sweet smoke from his own panatela. He whistled. “Tabernac,” he said reverently. “By the tobacco they grow there, Habana must be very close to Paradise.”
“Closest part of the Confederate States, anyhow, not that that’s saying much,” Dr. O’Doull replied.
Charles said nothing, which was not surprising. Georges said nothing, which was an astonishment. Both young men puffed happy clouds. So did Lucien. He could not recall the last time he’d been more content, at least outside the marriage bed.
And then another astonishment took place: Nicole came out of the kitchen, followed by Marie and Susanne and Denise and Jeanne. Galtier did not find that an astonishment of the pleasant sort; custom was that the women let their menfolk linger over liquor and tobacco. He reckoned that a good custom, one in no need of breaking. “What’s this?” he asked. “A parade?”
“No, cher papa, only something I have to tell you—something I have to tell everyone,” Nicole said. “Everyone except Leonard, that is, for he knows.” Even by the ruddy light of kerosene lamps, Lucien could see her blush. He knew then what was coming, knew it before she spoke: “Cher papa, cher maman, you will be grandparents next year.”
“A grandfather?” Lucien exclaimed. Even knowing what was coming, he found himself surprised. But I am too young to be a grandfather! he wanted to cry. Foolishness, of course: if he had a married daughter, he was not too young to be a grandfather. Still, he felt as if he were.
He looked down at his hands, gnarled and scarred and callused by years of farm work, tanned by the sun when there was sun, roughened by the wind and the snow. They were not the hands of a man too young to be a grandfather.
From them, he looked to Marie. She, without any possible doubt, was too young to be a grandmother. But her beaming face said she didn’t think so. It also said she looked forward to the role.
“What of me?” Georges said with fine mock anger. “I will be an uncle next year, but do you say one word about that? No! You leave it to me to figure out for myself. Is that fair? Is that just?”
Nicole said, “What you will be next year is what you are this year and what you have always been: a nuisance.”
“Thank you.” Georges nodded, as at a great compliment.
“We’ll be aunts,” Susanne and Denise and Jeanne chorused. Jeanne, who was the youngest of them, added, “I can’t wait!”
“You’ll have to,” Nicole said. “I am not ready to have the baby just yet.”
Lucien got up from his chair and embraced his daughter. “Congratulations,” he said. “May all be well. May all be well with you always.” He let her go and shook his son-in-law’s hand. “Who would have thought I would have a grandchild named O’Doull?”
The young doctor’s eyes twinkled. “See what you get for letting your daughter go to work in the American hospital?”
“At the time,” Galtier said gravely, “I did not think that a good idea. Perhaps I was right.” Leonard O’Doull just grinned at him. He had to wait for Nicole to let out an irate squawk before he could go on, “Perhaps, too, I was wrong. But only perhaps, mind you.” Someone—he did not see who—had filled his glass with applejack again. If it was full, it needed emptying. Before the war, he’d never imagined a half-American grandchild. Now, though, he discovered he liked the idea.
Jonathan Moss sat in a coffeehouse not far outside the Northwestern University campus. A breeze from Lake Michigan ruffled his light brown hair. An internal breeze ruffled his thoughts.
“What’s the matter, Johnny my boy?” asked his companion at the table, a curly-haired fellow named Fred Sandburg. “You look like you’ve got bullets whizzing past your head again.”
Sandburg had served on the Roanoke front in Virginia, helping to take the riverside town of Big Lick and the nearby iron mines away from the Confederate States. That had been some of the worst fighting of the whole war. He knew all about bullets flying past his head. He had a Purple Heart with an oak-leaf cluster to show how much he knew.
He knew more about it than did Jonathan Moss, and Moss would have been the first to admit as much. He’d been a flier up in Ontario through the fighting, and never had been shot. When the war was new, he’d thought of himself as a cavalier, meeting other cavaliers in single combat. Three years of flying had convinced him he was as much a gear in a killing machine as an infantryman in the mud. Only the pay and the view and the hours were better.
Moss sipped at his coffee. Conversation buzzed in the background. It was the sort of coffeehouse where vast issues were hashed out and settled every day: the nature of the universe, the effect of the war on the history of the world, whether the waitress would go home with the college kid who’d propositioned her. Vast issues whirled through Moss’ head, too.
“I’m trying to sort out whether I really give a damn about studying the law,” he said.
“Ah,” said Sandburg, who was also in law school. “You finished your first year before the war started, same as I did, right?”
“You know I did,” Moss answered. “Then, it seemed important. Now…I have a tough time caring now. I guess the war made me look at the scale of things differently, if you know what I mean. I mean, in the big picture, what difference does it make whether or not I hang out my shingle and start drafting wills for wheat traders with more money than sense?”
“Maybe it doesn’t make any difference in the big picture,” his friend said. “It sure as hell does make a difference in the way your life goes. Don’t you care about that? Me, I want to be in a spot where nobody can make me pick up a Springfield for the rest of my days.”
“Something to that, no doubt about it,” Moss admitted. He finished his coffee and waved to the waitress for another cup. Had she said she would go home with the student or she wouldn’t? Try as he would, Moss couldn’t tell. “But I have trouble giving a damn. I have trouble giving a damn about almost everything.”
“Aha!” Fred Sandburg stabbed out a forefinger. He would make a formidable attorney: he listened. “Almost everything, eh? All right, Johnny my boy, what do you give a damn about?”
Suddenly, Moss wished the coffee the waitress brought were whiskey. In the officers’ clubs during the war, he’d had plenty of high-proof lubrication against the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. He’d needed it, too. He needed it now, needed it and didn’t have it. At last, slowly, he said, “Up in Ontario, in Canada, there was this girl, this woman…” He ran out of steam.
“Oho!” Sandburg laid that forefinger by the side of his nose. “Was she pretty? Was she built?” His hands described an hourglass in the air.
“Yeah, I guess so,” Moss answered, a puzzled tone in his voice: he wasn’t really quite sure. “She was…interesting.” He nodded. That was the right word. He repeated it: “Interesting.”
“Hell with whether she was interesting,” said Sandburg, a relentlessly practical man. “Was she interested?”
“In me?” Moss laughed. “Only to spit in my eye. Her name’s Laura Secord. She’s somehow related to the original who had the same name a hundred years ago, and played Paul Revere against the USA in the War of 1812. She hates Americans. She told me where to head in I don’t know how many times. Besides,” he added morosely, “she’s got a husband.”
“Oh, bully.” Fred Sandburg made silent, sardonic clapping motions. “You sure know how to pick ’em, don’t you?”
“Sure do,” Moss said. “Last time I saw her was just after the Canucks surrendered. I drove over from Orangeville, where our last aerodrome was, back to this little town called Arthur, where it had been. She was keeping a farm going there. She didn’t know whether her husband was alive or dead. She hadn’t heard from him in a long time—he was in the Canadian Army. But everything would be ready for him if he came down the road.”
“So if she was keeping the home fires burning for him, what did she say to you?” Sandburg asked.
Moss’ face heated at the memory. “She told me she never wanted to set eyes on me again. She told me she wished the Canucks had shot me down. She told me she wished her husband had fired the bullet that shot me down. She told me she hoped the train I took back to the USA went off the rails and smashed to bits. After that, she got angry.”
Fred Sandburg stared, then started to guffaw. “And you call this broad interesting? Jesus Christ, Johnny my boy, you can go down to New Mexico and marry a rattlesnake and do it cheaper. You’ll live happier, too.”
“Maybe,” Moss said. “Probably, even.” His grin lifted up only one corner of his mouth, making it more grimace than smile. “But I can’t get her out of my mind.”
Sandburg was just warming to his theme: “Or you could take to drinking absinthe to forget, or smoking cigarettes doped with opium or hashish. Then if she ever saw you again, she’d take pity on you because you were so pale and wasted and decadent-looking, and clutch you to her bosom.” He leaned forward and made as if to clutch Moss to his bosom.
“Funny,” Moss said, evading him. “Funny like a crutch.” With so many veterans on one crutch or two these days, the cliché had taken on fresh life.
“All right, all right,” Sandburg said. “But what are you going to do, moon about this woman the rest of your life? When you have grandchildren, you can talk about her the way fishermen go on: the one that got away. You’re probably better off, you know. You’re almost sure to be better off.”
“Yeah, I know,” Moss said. “I’ve been telling myself the same thing ever since I got back to the States. Trouble is, I can’t make myself believe it.”
“What are you going to do, then? Head back up to wherever it was in Canada you said she lived?” Sandburg shook his head. “That sounds like an awful lot of trouble to go through to have some girl tell you to go to hell twice.” He glanced over toward the waitress, a pert brunette. “She’ll probably tell you to go to hell right here. And if she doesn’t, what does this Canuck gal have that she’s missing? They’re all the same when the lamp goes out.”
“I never thought so,” Moss said. He’d never thought of going back to Arthur, Ontario, again, either, not seriously. In musing tones, he went on, “Maybe I should. I’d get her out of my system, anyhow.”
“That’s the spirit.” Sandburg raised his coffee mug in salute. “The hell with courses. The hell with examinations. If you can only see this woman who hates your guts one more time, you’ll die happy. I expect they’ll make a moving picture about it, and every organ player in the country can milk the minor chords for all they’re worth.”
“Oh, shut up,” Moss said. But the more his friend ridiculed the idea, the more it appealed to him. If he felt like going up to Ontario, he could do that, provided the occupation authorities didn’t give him any trouble. Had he not come from a family with money, he wouldn’t have been studying law at Northwestern in the first place. Leaving for a semester wouldn’t be hard.
He wondered what his parents would say. Variations on the theme of You’re out of your mind occurred to him. Maybe he’d be wiser just to tell them he was going up to visit someone he’d met during the war, without going into too many details. They might think he meant an Army buddy. He’d have a lot less to explain afterwards if he came home unsuccessful.
He was not a fool. I’m not a fool except about this, he thought. No matter how foolish he was when he thought about Laura Secord, he understood the odds weren’t in his favor. The odds weren’t always in his favor when he played poker, either. Of course, he generally lost money when he played poker, which meant he didn’t play it very often.
“Come on,” Sandburg said after a look at his pocket watch. “We’ve got Bricker’s lecture on courtroom defense and cross-examination tactics to go to, and he’s worth listening to. Besides, he hasn’t lost a case in years, and if that doesn’t prove he knows what he’s talking about, I don’t know what would.”
Moss laid a quarter on the table to cover his two cups of coffee. The waitress brought back fifteen cents’ change; he left her a nickel tip. As he was heading out the door, he said, “I’m glad we’re not down at Clemson or one of those other Confederate universities. If we were, we’d be paying five bucks for coffee, not five cents.”
“Yeah, but we’d be somewhere close to millionaires—in Confederate dollars, anyhow,” Fred Sandburg said. He shook his head. “Before the war, their dollar was at par with ours. God only knows when it will be again.”
“They’re giving us their specie and letting the printing presses run for themselves,” Moss said. “You let that go on for a while and pretty soon you take five pounds of bills to the grocery store and trade ’em for five pounds of beans.”
“Either that or the bills start getting crowded on account of all the extra zeros they have to put on each one,” Sandburg agreed. He checked his watch again. “Come on. Shake a leg. We’re going to be late.”
By shaking a leg, they got to Swift Hall on time. Moss liked the campus, with its buildings scattered among emerald-green lawns and the deeper tone of trees. Lake Michigan beyond could almost have been the sea.
As Fred Sandburg had said, Professor Bricker was an impressive lecturer. Not only was he a strikingly handsome man, with broad shoulders and a thick head of black hair, he also had a deep and musical voice and a presence an actor might have envied. Moss could see how juries would believe anything he said; no wonder he’d been a burr under the saddle of local district attorneys for years.
And yet, however fine a lecturer Bricker was, Jonathan Moss had trouble paying attention to him today. His thoughts kept wandering up to Canada, wondering what Laura Secord was doing, wondering what she would say when she saw him again.
He would find out. No doubt that was stupid. He recognized as much. But he was sure—almost sure—he’d do it anyway.
Anne Colleton’s broker looked like the very unhappy man he was. “It was good of you to come up to Columbia when I asked,” he said. “I do appreciate it, believe me. I wanted to tell you in person that, as of August first, I shall no longer be able to represent you.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Mr. Whitson,” Anne said, not altogether truthfully. “Are you retiring altogether from your profession?” Whitson was not a young man, but not so old as that, either.
“Yes, and not voluntarily,” he answered, his voice bitter. “As of that date, I shall be declaring bankruptcy to protect myself from my creditors. I doubt very much whether you or anyone else would have any use for a bankrupt broker.”
“I’m sorry to hear of your misfortune.” But Anne could not resist getting in a shot of her own: “You might have done better if you’d invested along the lines I chose—the lines about which you had some unkind things to say when I presented them to you.”
“Go ahead—rub it in,” Whitson muttered. Anne did not dislike him enough to do any more gloating, so she pretended not to hear. He went on, “I must admit, your ideas proved sounder than mine. I am, as I say, bankrupt, with holdings in worthless stocks. Your financial position is not as it was before the war—”
“Whose is, in the Confederate States?” Anne asked harshly.
“Not many folks’, I’ll tell you that,” the broker said. “But you are merely poorer than you were. In the CSA, and especially here in South Carolina, that’s an impressive accomplishment. Most plantation owners have long since gone belly up. You’re still in the fight.”
“Who else is?” Anne asked, interested in the competition.
“Importers,” Whitson answered. “Steel men. Petroleum men in Texas and Louisiana—they’re thriving, because Sequoyah’s gone. Some of the Sonoran copper kings: the ones whose mines the Yankees didn’t reach. But anybody who grew anything with Negro labor—cotton, tobacco, rice, sugarcane, indigo—has troubles the way a stray dog has fleas.”
“Can’t trust ’em, not any more,” Anne said. “That’s never going to be the same again. That’s why I’ve still got Marshlands like a millstone around my neck. Who would want the place now? What would anyone do with it if he bought it?”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” Whitson said, “but I don’t know what that proves, either.” His mouth tightened to a thin, pale line. “The ideas I have had haven’t been good ones.”
“The whole country is having a rough time,” Anne said with more sympathy than she’d thought she would show. “It’s hard for anyone to prosper. We need to put some heart back into ourselves, but I don’t know how.”
“This inflation is eating us out of house and home,” the broker said. “Before long, everybody will be a millionaire and everybody will be broke.”
I told you so trembled on the edge of being spoken, but Anne held her tongue. She had told Whitson so, and he hadn’t listened, and now he was paying the price. Because she’d converted her holdings into currencies that still meant something in terms of gold, she’d come through pretty well. When the upturn finally arrived, she would be rich again—if she could wait long enough.
Whitson said, “If you like, Miss Colleton, I can recommend a new broker for you. I know several very able men who—”
Anne got to her feet. “No, thank you. I hope you will forgive me for saying so, but your recommendation does not strike me as the ideal warrant for a man’s quality.”
Whitson bit his lip. “I deserve that.”
“Maybe you’ll have better luck in times to come. I hope you do,” Anne said, telling more of the truth than not—she had nothing personal against the luckless broker. “I see you have all my papers here. Please give them to me now.”
“Very well.” Whitson sighed as he handed them to her. “I should have been listening to your investment advice, not the other way round. The world has turned upside down since the end of the war.”
“Since the beginning of the war,” Anne said. “But you’re right. The Confederate States were on top, and now we’re on the bottom. Some people are going to be content to stay on the bottom, too. Some are going to try to see how to get back on top again. What will you do, Mr. Whitson?”
She didn’t wait for an answer, but swept the papers into her valise and left the broker’s office. As she turned around to close the door, she saw him staring after her. She let out a tiny sigh. Whitson was going to be one of the ones who stayed on the bottom for a long time.
His office stood only a few blocks away from the Capitol. Anne thought about going over to see the governor, but sighed again. She didn’t have the influence she’d enjoyed before the war, either. Not only had her fortunes suffered, she’d called in too many favors fighting the black Reds who lurked in the swamps by the Congaree long after their revolt was stamped out elsewhere. She’d almost had to seduce the governor to pry a machine gun loose for the militia.
“God damn you, Cassius,” she muttered. The former chief hunter at Marshlands had proved a far more stubborn and resourceful foe than she’d imagined any Negro could. She’d underestimated the blacks at Marshlands time and again, underestimated them and let them fool her.
“It won’t happen again,” she muttered as she hurled the valise into the back seat of her beat-up Ford. Before the Negro uprising, she’d driven a powerful Vauxhall. When the revolt broke out, she’d driven it up from Charleston toward Marshlands. South of the front—the Negroes of what they called the Congaree Socialist Republic had been able to hold a regular front for a while—a militia officer had confiscated the Vauxhall for use against the black rebels. She’d never seen it again. She wondered how many bullet holes scarred the fine coachwork these days.
After cranking the Ford’s engine to rough, noisy life, she climbed in and drove south down the Robert E. Lee Highway, from which she would eventually turn left to get to St. Matthews. She was about thirty miles away from home: a little more than an hour, if she didn’t have a puncture or a breakdown. If she did, the time might double, or it might go up by some much larger factor.
What struck her as she rattled along in the decrepit motorcar was how still and empty the countryside felt. Cotton and tobacco should have been ripening in the fields, and Negro laborers should have been tending both crops. Here and there, they were. But so many fields were a rank tangle of weeds and vines and shrubs, with no one even trying to bring in a crop on them.
It wasn’t the way it had been. It would never again be the way it had been. Tears stung her eyes, so that she had to slow down till they cleared—not that the Ford could go very fast anyhow. The cotton fields at Marshlands looked like this these days.
Colletons had thrived on the plantation since the end of the eighteenth century. Even so, she was ever more tempted to cut her losses on it, quit paying the exorbitant taxes, and let the state of South Carolina take it off her hands. As far as she was concerned, the state of South Carolina was welcome to it.
The Lee Highway crossed the Congaree on a steel suspension bridge. The Red rebels had damaged the bridge, but hadn’t managed to destroy it. Well before she came to the river and the swamps to either side of it, Anne took a revolver from the valise and laid it on the seat, where she could grab it in a hurry. As a force for rebellion against the government of South Carolina and that of the CSA, the Congaree Socialist Republic was dead. Not quite all the Negroes had been hunted out of the swamps yet, though. Some still made a living of sorts as bandits.
If bandits were lurking there, they gave no sign. She spotted a couple of pickaninnies fishing and passed an old black man leading a skinny, swaybacked mule laboring along under some enormous burden tied to its back. She thought about stopping and making the old man show her what the mule carried. How many rifles and pistols had traveled through the CSA in bundles like that before the uprising of 1915? Too many, surely.
In the end, she drove on. She felt bad about it afterwards, but one person could do only so much. If the old man was moving guns or explosives, what was she supposed to do with him? Arrest him? Driving with one hand on the wheel and one on the pistol didn’t appeal to her. Shoot him on the spot? That did appeal to her, powerfully, but it wasn’t so simple as it would have been before the war, either. She would certainly have to go to court about it, which wouldn’t have been certain at all before 1914. The number of Negro veterans enrolled on the South Carolina voting lists remained tiny. The uprising during the war, though, showed how dangerous ignoring Negro opinion could be.
When she got into St. Matthews, she smiled. Several women on the street were wearing trousers. She’d started that fashion herself, getting Aaron Rosenblum the tailor to make her several pairs so she could go into the swamps to fight the Reds in clothing more convenient than an ankle-length skirt. These women didn’t wear pants because they intended to hunt Reds. They wore them because one of the most prominent women in Calhoun County did.
Tom Colleton chuckled when she remarked on that. “I had noticed it myself, as a matter of fact,” he said. “Gives a whole new kick to watching a pretty girl.”
“Does it?” Anne wasn’t sure whether to be angry or amused. She ended up a little of both. “That’s not why I got them, you know.”
“I never said it was,” her brother answered. “That doesn’t make what I did say any less true, though.” While Anne digested that and finally nodded, Tom went on, “Have we got any money left?”
“All things considered, we’re doing well—as well as we can be, anyhow.” With a certain amount of malicious pleasure, she added, “We’re doing a lot better than clever Mr. Whitson,” and explained how he’d gone bankrupt.
“So the broker’s broke, is he?” Tom said.
Anne made a face at him. Then she started to laugh. “That’s the sort of thing you would have said back before the war. You’re usually more serious these days.”
“I can laugh when somebody else falls on his face in the mud,” Tom told her. “Laughing when I’m down there myself is harder. Laughing when the whole country’s down there is hardest of all. I still don’t know how we’re going to get back on our feet, Sis.”
“Neither do I, not with the damnyankees standing over us with a club,” Anne said. “Sooner or later, though, they’ll ease up. They have troubles of their own, what with all their strikes and trying to hold the Canadians down and Socialists yelling their heads off. When they get too busy at home, that’s when we’ll find somebody who can help us get moving again.” She sighed. “I wish it would happen faster, though.”