A bullet cracked past Jefferson Pinkard’s head. He ducked, not that that would do him any good if the bullet had his name on it. Somewhere not far off, rebel Mexican machine gunners started firing at something they imagined they saw. A field gun banged away, flinging shells into the uplands town of San Luis Potosí.
Like most Confederates, Pinkard had thought of the Empire of Mexico as his country’s feebleminded little brother—when he’d bothered thinking of it at all, which wasn’t very often. In the comfortable days before the war, the Empire did as the Confederacy asked. The Confederates, after all, shielded Mexico from the wrath of the USA, which had hated the Empire since its creation during the War of Secession.
The truth, nowadays, was more complicated. The USA backed the rebels against the Empire. The CSA couldn’t officially back Maximilian III, but Freedom Party volunteers like Pinkard numbered in the thousands—and the Freedom Party wasn’t the only outfit sending volunteers south to fight the Yankees and their proxies.
That all seemed straightforward enough. What Jeff hadn’t counted on was that there would have been—hell, there had been—rebels even without U.S. backing. Maximilian III would never land on anybody’s list for sainthood.
Pinkard shrugged. “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch, by God,” he muttered. Behind him, another field gun, this one on his side, started answering the rebels’ piece. It seemed to be firing as much at random as the enemy gun.
Stupid bastards, he thought, not sure whether he meant the enemy or his own side. None of them would have lasted long during the Great War; he was sure of that. Both sides were brave enough, but neither seemed to know just what it was supposed to do. They lacked the experience C.S. and U.S. forces had so painfully accumulated.
Another machine gun started rattling. Ammunition was tight. Both sides imported most of it. That didn’t keep gunners from shooting it off for the hell of it. Who was going to tell ’em they couldn’t? They had the weapons, after all.
A Mexican private came up to Jeff. Like Pinkard’s, his cotton uniform was dyed a particularly nasty shade of yellow-brown. It looked more like something from a dog with bad digestion than a proper butternut, but all the greasers and the Confederate volunteers wore it, so Jeff could only grouse when he got the chance. He couldn’t change a thing. The Mexican said, “Buenos días, Sergeant Jeff.” It came out of his mouth sounding like Heff. “The teniente, he wants to see you.”
“All right, Manuel. I’m coming.” Pinkard pronounced the Spanish name Man-you-well. He took that for granted, though what the locals did to his never ceased to annoy him. He walked bent over. The Mexicans built trenches for men of their size, and he overtopped most of them by half a head. The rebel snipers weren’t nearly so good as the damnyankees had been up in Texas, but he didn’t want to give ’em a target. He nodded to Lieutenant Hernando Guitierrez. “What can I do for you, sir? En qué puedo servirle?” Again, he made a hash of the Spanish.
It didn’t matter, not here. Lieutenant Guitierrez probably spoke better English than Pinkard did. He was every bit as tall, too, though not much more than half as wide through the shoulders. By his looks, he had a lot more Spaniard and a lot less Indian in him than did most of the men he commanded. He said, “I have a job for you, Sergeant.”
“That’s what I’m here for,” Pinkard agreed.
“Er—yes.” The Mexican lieutenant drummed his fingers on his thigh. Jeff had a pretty good idea what was eating the fellow. He was only a sergeant himself (and he’d never risen higher than PFC in the C.S. Army), but he got more money every month than Guitierrez did. And, although he was only a sergeant, it wasn’t always obvious that his rank was inferior to the other man’s. Why else were Confederate volunteers down here, if not to show the greasers the way real soldiers did things?
“What can I do for you, Lieutenant?” Jeff asked again, not feeling like pushing things today.
Guitierrez gave him what might have been a grateful look. “You are familiar, Sergeant, with the machines called barrels?”
“Uh . . . yeah.” Pinkard was familiar enough to start worrying, even though the clanking monsters had been few and far between in Texas during the Great War—especially on the Confederate side. “What’s the matter? The rebels going to start throwing ’em at us? That’s real bad news, if they are.”
“No, no, no.” The Mexican officer shook his head. He had a sort of melancholy pride different from anything Pinkard had known in his own countrymen. “We have three, built in Tampico by the sea and coming up here to the highlands by railroad. I want you to lead the infantry when we move forward with them against the peasant rabble who dare to oppose Emperor Maximilian.”
“You people built barrels?” Once he’d said it, Jeff wished he hadn’t sounded quite so astonished. But that was too late, of course.
Lieutenant Guitierrez’s lips thinned. “Yes, we did.” But then he coughed. He was a proud man, but also an honest man. “I understand the design may have come from the Confederate States—unofficially, of course.”
“Ah. I get you.” Jeff laid a finger by the side of his nose and winked. The Confederates couldn’t build barrels on their own. The Yankees would land on them with both feet if they tried. But what happened south of the border was a different story. “When does the attack go in, and what are we aiming for?”
“We want to drive them from those little hills where they can observe our movements. They are shelling San Luis Potosí from that forward position, too,” Guitierrez replied. “If all goes well, this will be a heavy blow against them. As for when, the attack begins the morning after the barrels come into place.”
He didn’t say when that morning would be. He was probably wise not to. For one thing, Pinkard had already discovered what mañana meant. For another, barrels, no matter who built them, broke down if you looked at them sideways. Pinkard grunted. “All right, Lieutenant. Soon as they get here, I’ll lead your infantry against the rebels. You’ll follow along yourself to see how it’s done, right?”
He wasn’t calling Guitierrez a coward. He’d seen the other man had courage and to spare. And Guitierrez nodded now. “Claro que sí, Sergeant. Of course. That is why you are here: to show us how it is done.”
Jeff grunted again. In one sense, the Mexican lieutenant was right. In another . . . Pinkard was here because his marriage was as much a casualty of the Great War as a fellow with a hook for a hand. He was here because he had a fierce, restless energy and an urgent desire to kill something, almost anything. He couldn’t satisfy that desire back in Birmingham, not unless he wanted to fry in the electric chair shortly thereafter.
Three days later—not a bad case of mañana, all things considered—the barrels came into position, clanking and rattling and belching and farting every inch of the way. Pinkard wasn’t surprised to find more than half their crewmen were Confederate volunteers. He was surprised when he got a look at the barrels themselves. They weren’t the rhomboids with tracks all around that the CSA, following the British lead, had used during the Great War. And they weren’t quite the squat, hulking monsters with a cannon in the nose and machine guns bristling on flanks and rear the USA had thrown at the Confederacy.
They did have a conning tower like that of a U.S. barrel—their crewmen called it a turret. It revolved through some sort of gear mechanism, and carried a cannon and a machine gun mounted alongside it. Two more bow-mounted machine guns completed their armament. “Since the turret spins, we don’t need nothin’ else,” a crewman said. “Means we don’t have to try and shoehorn so many men inside, neither.”
“Sounds like somebody’s been doing a lot of thinking about this business,” Pinkard said.
“Reckon so,” the other man agreed. “Now if the same somebody would’ve thunk about the engine, too, we’d all be better off. A good horse can still outrun these miserable iron sons of bitches without breathing hard.”
During the Great War—even the attenuated version of it fought out in Texas—a big artillery barrage would have preceded the barrels’ advance. Neither side in this fight had enough artillery to lay down a big barrage. It didn’t seem to matter. The barrels rolled forward, crushing the enemy’s barbed wire and shooting up his machine-gun nests. “Come on!” Pinkard shouted to the foot soldiers loyal to Maximilian III. “Keep up with ’em! They make the hole, an’ we go through it. Stick tight, and the enemy’ll shoot at the barrels and not at you so much.”
That was how things had worked during the Great War. In English and horrible Spanish, Jeff urged his men forward. Forward they went, too. The only thing he hadn’t counted on was the effect barrels, even a ragged handful of barrels, had on troops who’d never faced them before. The rebels, or the braver men among them, tried shooting at the great machines. When their rifle and machine-gun bullets bounced off the barrels’ armor, they seemed to decide the end of the world was at hand. Some ran away. The barrels’ machine guns scythed them down like wheat at harvest time. Others threw down their rifles, threw up their hands, and surrendered. “Amigo!” they shouted hopefully.
Jefferson Pinkard had never had so many strangers call him friend in all his born days. In Texas, the Confederates had gone raiding to catch a handful of Yankee prisoners. Here, prisoners were coming out of his ears. “What do we do with ’em, Sergeant?” asked a soldier who spoke English—maybe he’d worked in the CSA once upon a time. “We go—?” The gesture he made wasn’t the throat-cutting one Pinkard would have used, but it meant the same thing.
For once, Jeff’s blood lust was sated. Slaughter in the heat of battle was as fine as taking a woman, maybe finer. Killing prisoners felt like murder. Maybe I’m still a Christian, after all. “Nah, they’ve surrendered,” he answered. “We’ll take ’em back with us. We’d better. Till those barrels break down, they’re gonna keep bringin’ in plenty more.”
“Sí, es verdad,” the soldier said, and translated Pinkard’s words for the other Mexicans. They all assumed he knew how to handle a flood of prisoners of war, too—including the prisoners themselves, who swarmed up to him to kiss his hands and even try to kiss his cheeks in gratitude for being spared.
“Cut that out!” he roared. It made him wish he had ordered a massacre. Instead, he led the captured rebels—who were even more ragged and sorry-looking than the Mexican imperialists—back out of the fighting. Once he got them behind the line, he had to figure out what to do with them next. Nobody else seemed to want to do anything that looked like thinking.
He commandeered some barbed wire and some posts to string it from. After he herded the prisoners into the big square he’d made, he told off guards to make sure they didn’t head for the high country. Then he had to yell to make sure they got something—not much, but something—to eat and drink. And he had to go on yelling, to make sure mañana didn’t foul things up. By the time three or four days went by, all the Mexicans assumed he was in charge of the prisoner-of-war camp. Before very much longer, he started thinking the same thing himself.
Colonel Irving Morrell hated soldiering from behind a desk. He always had. As best he could tell, he always would. And he especially hated it when there was fighting going on and he found himself a thousand miles away. The reports filtering north from the civil war in the Empire of Mexico struck him as particularly maddening—and all the more so because he couldn’t get anybody else in the War Department to take them seriously.
“God damn it, the imperialists are cleaning up with these new barrels of theirs,” he raged to his superior, a stolid senior colonel named Virgil Donaldson. He waved papers in Donaldson’s face. “Has anybody besides me read this material? By what it’s saying, they’ve got just about all the features we put on our fancy prototype at Fort Leavenworth. But we built our prototype and said to hell with it. Those bastards have got a production line going in Tampico.”
Colonel Donaldson puffed on his pipe. He had a big red face and a big gray mustache. He looked more like somebody’s kindly uncle than a General Staff officer. He sounded like somebody’s kindly uncle, too, when he said, “Take an even strain, Colonel Morrell. You’ll burst a blood vessel if you don’t, and then where will you be?”
“But, sir—!” Morrell waved the papers again.
“Take an even strain,” Donaldson repeated. He liked the phrase. Before Morrell could explode, Donaldson went on, “Who cares what a bunch of goddamn greasers are up to, anyway?”
“But it’s not just greasers, sir,” Morrell said desperately. “These barrels have Confederate mercenaries as crew. They’ve got to have Confederates designing them, too. And the Confederate States aren’t allowed to build barrels. The armistice agreement makes that as plain as the nose on my face.”
A ceiling fan spun lazily. A fly buzzed. Outside Donaldson’s window, summer heat made the air shimmer. The government building across the street from General Staff headquarters might have belonged to some other world, some other universe. Morrell laughed softly. He’d had that feeling about the General Staff before, with no tricks of the eye to start it going.
Trying to come back to what he was sure was reality, he said, “We ought to protest to Richmond. The Confederate government is turning a blind eye toward what has to be several regiments’ worth of their veterans going south to fight on Maximilian’s side. That may not be against the letter of their agreements with us, but it’s dead against the spirit.”
After another puff on that pipe, Colonel Donaldson said, “Nice idea, but don’t hold your breath. President Sinclair is looking for good relations with the CSA. He doesn’t want to bother Richmond with trifles, and he thinks anything this side of a Confederate invasion of Kentucky is a trifle.”
Morrell muttered something under his breath. It wasn’t that he thought Donaldson was wrong. No, he feared his superior was right. “Why did we bother to win the war, if we won’t make it count?”
“You’d have to talk to President Sinclair about that, Colonel Morrell,” Donaldson answered. “Why isn’t my job, or yours, either. It’s for the civilians. They decide what to do, and they tell us. Doing it is our department.”
“I know, sir.” The lesson had been drilled into Morrell since his West Point days. During the War of Secession, U.S. generals had spoken of overthrowing the republic and becoming military dictator. Then they’d gone out and lost the war, so they’d never had the chance to do more than talk about it. No one had wanted to take the risk of such things since, though it was only now, a lifetime later, that the United States had to deal with the consequences of victory rather than defeat.
“In fairness, we could use some peace and quiet with Richmond right about now,” Donaldson said. “After all, we’ve got Germany to worry about, too.”
“Well, yes,” Morrell admitted reluctantly. He knew why he was reluctant to admit any such thing, too: “But if we ever do fight the Kaiser, that’ll be the Navy’s worry, not the Army’s. At least, I have a devil of a time seeing how the Germans could invade us, or how we could land troops in Europe.”
“It wouldn’t be easy, would it?” Donaldson said. “But, of course, a lot depends on who’s friends with whom. The Germans have the same worries about France and England as we do about the CSA. And God only knows what’s going to happen to the Russians, even now. They’re having more trouble putting down their Reds than the Confederates ever did during the war.”
“Not our worry, thank God.” Morrell chuckled. The puff of smoke Donaldson sent up might have been a fragrant question mark. Morrell explained: “The Russian Reds make up the best names for themselves. I especially like the two who are operating in that town on the Volga—Tsaritsin, that’s the name of the place. The Red general is the Man of Steel, and his second-in-command goes by the Hammer. The Reds in the CSA weren’t so fancy.”
“They were nothing but a bunch of coons,” Donaldson said. “You can’t expect much from them.”
That made Morrell thoughtful. “I wonder,” he said. “I do wonder, sir. When I was in the field, I ran up against Negro regiments a few times. Far as I could tell, they didn’t fight any worse than raw regiments of white Confederate troops.”
“Huh.” The older man sounded deeply skeptical. But then he shrugged. “That’s not our worry, either, thank God.”
“No, sir,” Morrell agreed. “Are you sure there’s no point to writing that report about the barrels down in Mexico, sir? I really do think that’s alarming.”
Donaldson sighed the sigh of a man who’d been a cog in a bureaucratic machine for a long time. “You can write the report, Colonel, if it makes you happy. I’ll even endorse it and send it on. But I can tell you what will happen. The most likely thing is, nothing. It’ll go into a file here along with a million other reports. That’s what happens if you’re lucky.”
“I don’t call that luck,” Morrell said.
“Compared to the other thing that could happen, it’s luck,” Donaldson told him. “Believe you me, it’s luck. Because the other thing that could happen is, somebody reads the report and passes it on to somebody else, somebody outside the General Staff, and it gets into the hands of one of those precious civilians—say, somebody like N. Mattoon Thomas, the assistant secretary of war.”
“But he’s just the man—just the sort of man—who ought to see a report like this one,” Morrell said. “He thought well of the one I did on the mess in Armenia.”
“Well, maybe. But maybe not, too. Armenia’s a long ways off, you see. The Confederate States are right next door,” Colonel Donaldson said. “If you’re lucky, he reads it and then he throws it into a file in the War Department offices. Different file, but that’s all right.” He held up a hand to silence Morrell, then went on, “If you’re not so lucky, he reads it and he thinks, Who’s this smart-aleck soldier trying to tell me how to do my job? And if that’s what somebody like N. Mattoon Thomas thinks, pretty soon you’re not here in Philadelphia any more. You’re commanding a garrison in the middle of nowhere: Alberta or Utah or New Mexico, somewhere like that.”
He spoke as if of a fate worse than death. That was probably how he saw it. That was how any soldier who was first of all a cog in a bureaucratic machine and only afterwards a fighting man would have seen it. But Morrell didn’t want to be here in the first place. Getting back out into the field, even somewhere in the back of beyond, sounded pretty good to him.
Yes, it does—to you, he thought then, several beats later than he should have. What will Agnes think about it? You’ve got a little girl now, Morrell. Do you want to haul Mildred off to God knows where, just because you couldn’t stand to keep your big mouth shut?
He muttered unhappily. Colonel Donaldson thought he was contemplating the horrors of life outside Philadelphia. “Dismissed,” Donaldson said.
Unhappily, Morrell left his superior’s office. Even more unhappily, he went back to his own. Where does your first loyalty lie? To your wife and daughter, or to the United States of America?
He cursed softly. But he didn’t need long to make up his mind. Agnes had been a soldier’s widow before she met him, dammit. She knew what the price of duty could be. If they had to go off to Lethbridge or Nehi or Flagstaff, she’d take that in stride. It might even end up better for Mildred.
Morrell nodded to himself. He fed a sheet of paper into the typewriter that squatted on his desk like some heathen god. He typed with his two index fingers—a slower way of doing things than proper touch-typing, but it got the job done well enough. If the powers that be chose to ignore his report, that was their business. But he was going to make sure they saw what he saw.
He did warn his wife what he’d done, and what might happen as a result. To his relief, she only shrugged. “Philadelphia’s a nice town,” she said. “But I got along well enough in Leavenworth, too.”
He kissed her. “I like the way you think.”
“It isn’t a question of thinking,” Agnes said. “It’s a question of doing what you have to do.” Mildred Morrell didn’t say anything. She just kicked her legs and grinned up at her father from her cradle, showing off her first two brand new baby teeth. Some of her babbles and gurgles had dada in them, but she didn’t yet associate the sound with him.
“What will you think, if you grow up in Lethbridge or Nehi instead of Philadelphia?” Morrell asked her. Mildred only laughed. She didn’t care one way or the other. “Maybe, just maybe,” her father said, “I’m fixing things so you don’t have to go through a war when you grow up. I hope I am, anyway.”
He was eating lunch the next day when Lieutenant Colonel John Abell came up to him. Without preamble, General Liggett’s adjutant said, “You do believe in cooking your own goose, don’t you, Colonel?”
“Ah.” Morrell smiled. “You’ve read it, then?”
“Yes, I’ve read it.” The astringently intellectual General Staff officer shook his head in slow wonder. “Amazing how a man can analyze so brilliantly and be so blind to politics, all at the same time.”
After another bite of meat loaf, Morrell said, “You’ve told me as much before. What am I being blind to today?”
“One and a half million dead men, Colonel, and I’d think even you should notice them,” Lieutenant Colonel Abell answered with a certain somber relish. “One and a half million dead men, or a few more than that—all the reasons why there’s no stomach in the USA for another war against the Confederate States.”
Morrell winced. His smile faded. John Abell was a snob. That didn’t mean he was a fool—anything but. “Don’t you believe most people would rather fight a small war now if the Confederates don’t back down—which I think they would—than fight a big one ten or twenty years down the road?”
“Some people would. A few people would. But most?” Abell shook his head. “No, sir. Most people don’t want to fight any war at all, and they’ll do almost anything to keep from fighting. Meaning no offense, sir, but I think you’ve just cooked your own goose.”
With a shrug, Morrell said, “Well, even if I have, I won’t mind getting back in the field again.” Lieutenant Colonel Abell looked at him as if he’d spoken in Hindustani, or maybe Choctaw. Like Colonel Donaldson, Abell was a creature of the General Staff, and didn’t care to contemplate life outside it. Morrell did, which gave him a certain moral advantage. And how much good will that do you in Lethbridge when the blizzards come? he wondered, and wished he hadn’t.
Tom Colleton held out a package too well wrapped for him to have done it himself. “Happy birthday, Sis!” he told Anne.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said in fond exasperation. “You shouldn’t have.” She kissed him on the cheek, but at least half of her meant every word of that. The birthday in question was her thirty-ninth, and the only one she would have felt less like celebrating was her fortieth.
“Well, whether I should have or not, I damn well did,” her younger brother answered. Tom still had a few years to go before facing middle age—and forty meant less to a man than it did to a woman, anyhow. From forty, a woman could see all too well the approaching end of too many things, beauty among them. From thirty-nine, too, Anne thought gloomily. But Tom was grinning at her. “Go on—open it.”
“I will,” she said, and she did, tearing into the wrapping paper as she would have liked to tear into Father Time. “What on earth have you got here?”
“I found it the last time I was in Columbia,” he said. “There. Now you’ve got it. See? It’s—”
“A book of photographs of Marcel Duchamp’s paintings!” Anne exclaimed.
“Seeing as he exhibited at Marshlands, I thought you’d like it,” her brother said. “And take a look at page one seventy-three.”
“Why? What’s he done there?” Anne asked suspiciously. Tom’s grin only got wider and more annoying. She flipped through the book till she got to page 173. The painting, especially in a black-and-white reproduction, resembled nothing so much as an explosion in a prism factory. That didn’t surprise Anne. When Duchamp displayed his Nude Descending a Staircase at Marshlands just before the Great War broke out, the work had hung upside down for several days before anyone, including the artist, noticed. But here . . .
Tom looked over her shoulder to make sure she’d got to the right page. “You see?” he said. “You see?” He pointed to the title below the photograph.
“ ‘Mademoiselle Anne Colleton of North Carolina, Confederate States of America,’ ” Anne read. She said something most unladylike, and then, “For God’s sake, he doesn’t even remember what state he was in! I’m not surprised, I suppose—all he cared about while he was here was getting drunk and laying the nigger serving girls.”
“What do you think of the likeness?” her brother asked.
Before the war, Anne had been a champion of everything modern. Life was harder now. She had little time for such fripperies. And I’m older than I was then, she thought bleakly. It’s harder to stay up to date, and to stay excited about being up to date.
She took a longer look at “Mlle. Anne Colleton.” It still seemed made up of squares and triangles and rectangles flying in all directions. But lurking among them, cunningly hidden, were features that might have been her own. Slowly, she said, “It’s not as bad as you make it out to be.”
“No, it’s worse,” Tom said. “When I was in the trenches, I saw men who got hit by shells and didn’t look this bad afterwards.” He brought his experience to the abstract painting, just as Anne brought hers. That was bound to be what Marcel Duchamp had had in mind. Anne might have cared more if he hadn’t made such a nuisance of himself while at Marshlands, and if he hadn’t been such a coward about recrossing the Atlantic after the war began and both sides’ submersibles started prowling.
As things were, she only shrugged and said, “It is a compliment of sorts. Whatever he thought of me, he didn’t forget me once he got back to France.”
“Nobody ever forgets you, Sis,” Tom Colleton said. Then he added something he never would have dared say before the war. Going into the Army had made a man of him; he’d been a boy, a comfortable boy, till then. He asked, “How come you never married any of the fellows who sniffed around after you? There were always enough of ’em.”
Had he presumed to ask such a question before the Great War, she would have slapped him down, hard. Now, though she didn’t like it, she gave it a serious answer: “Some of them wanted to run me and to run my money. Nobody runs me, and I run the money better than most men could. I’ve said that before. And the others, the ones who didn’t care so much about the money . . .” She laughed a hard and bitter laugh. “They were sons of bitches, just about all of them. I recognize the breed. I’d better—takes one to know one, people say.”
Almost fondly, she remembered Roger Kimball. The submarine officer had been a thoroughgoing son of a bitch. He’d also been far and away the best lover she ever had. She didn’t know what that said. (Actually, she did know, but she didn’t care to dwell on it.) But, in the end, Kimball had chosen the Freedom Party over her. And he was dead now, shot by the widow of a U.S. seaman whose destroyer he’d sunk after the CSA had asked for and been granted an armistice.
She waited for Tom to give her a lecture. But he only asked another question: “Can you go on by yourself for the rest of your days?”
“I don’t know,” Anne admitted. To keep from having to think about it, she tried to change the subject: “What about you, Tom? You’re as single as I am.”
“Yeah, I know,” he said with a calm that surprised her. “But there are a couple of differences between us. For one thing, I’m a few years younger than you are. For another, I’m starting to look hard, and you’re not.”
“Are you?” she said, surprised. “You didn’t tell me anything about that.”
Tom nodded, almost defiantly. “Well, I am, and yes, I know I haven’t told you anything. No offense, Sis, but you like running people’s lives so much, you don’t like it when they try and run their own.” That held enough truth to make Anne give him a wry nod in return. He dipped his head, acknowledging it, and continued, “There’s one more thing, no offense. A lot of ways, when a man gets married matters a lot less than when a woman does.”
And that was all too true, as well. In a fair, just world it wouldn’t have been, but Anne had never been naive enough to imagine the world either fair or just. Looks weren’t what kept a man, but they were what lured him. She’d used her own blond beauty to advantage more times than she could count. Again, turning thirty-nine reminded her she wouldn’t be able to do that forever. If she wanted to have a baby or two, she wouldn’t be able to do that forever, either.
She sighed. “Well, Tom, when you’re right, you’re right, and you’re right, dammit. I’m going to have to do something about it.”
Her brother blinked. He’d probably been expecting a shouting match, not agreement. “Just like that?” he asked.
Anne nodded briskly. “Yes, just like that, or as close to just like that as I can make it. Or don’t you think I can do what I set my mind to doing?” If he said he didn’t, he would have a shouting match on his hands.
But he only laughed. “Anybody who thinks that about you is a damn fool, Sis. Now, I may be a damn fool—plenty of people have called me one, and they’ve had their reasons—but I’m not that particular kind of a damn fool, thank you kindly.”
Although Anne laughed, too, she also gave him another nod. “Good. You’d better not be.”
She meant what she said. As if to prove it, she drove up to Columbia a couple of days later. She knew the eligible bachelors in little St. Matthews, South Carolina, much too well to have the slightest interest in marrying any of them. He was too old; he was too dull; he was too grouchy; he couldn’t count to twenty-one without dropping his pants. The pickings had to be better, or at least wider, in the state capital.
They would be better still down in Charleston, but Columbia was a lot closer. That made it more convenient both for her and for the battered Ford she drove. Keeping the motorcar alive would probably let the local mechanic send his children to college, but she had to let it keep nibbling her to death a bit at a time. She couldn’t afford a new one, however much she wanted one.
Before the war—that phrase again!—and even into it, she’d driven a powerful, comfortable Vauxhall, imported from England. Confederate soldiers had confiscated it at gunpoint during the Red uprising of 1915. Almost ten years ago now, she thought with slow wonder. The Ford, now, the Ford was a boneshaker that couldn’t get past thirty-five miles an hour unless it went over a cliff. And it was a Yankee machine. But it was what she had, and it ran . . . after a fashion.
She did like driving into Columbia. The town’s gracious architecture spoke of the better days of the last century. When the Negroes rebelled here, some houses, some blocks, had gone up in flames, but most of the city remained intact—and the damage, at last, was largely repaired. She couldn’t imagine a conflagration big enough to destroy the whole town. Columbia was too big for such disasters.
Charleston had better hotels than Columbia, but the Essex House, only a few blocks from the green bronze dome of the State Capitol, would do. The Essex House also boasted a first-rate switchboard. She had no trouble keeping up with her investments while away from home. And she could even study day-old copies of the New Orleans Financial Mercury and three-day-old editions of the Wall Street Journal. Since she kept most of her money in U.S. rather than C.S. markets, the latter did her more good.
But here she was more interested in men who might have investments of their own than in investments themselves. Dinner at the hotel restaurant the first night she got into town made her wonder if she’d waited several years too long to make this particular hunting expedition. Before the war, she couldn’t possibly have eaten without shooing away anywhere from two to half a dozen men more interested in other pleasures than in those of the table. Here, she enjoyed—or didn’t so much enjoy—some very tasty fried chicken without drawing so much as a single eye.
I might as well be eating crow, she thought as she rose, unhappy, from the table.
A visit to her assemblyman the next day was no more reassuring. Edgar Stow was younger than she was. He wore the ribbon for the Purple Heart in his lapel; the three missing fingers on his left hand explained why. Because of those missing digits, he had what she took to be a wedding band on the surviving index finger. He was polite to Anne, but polite to Anne as if she was an influential constituent (true) rather than a good-looking woman (false?). He also seemed maddeningly unaware of what she was trying to tell him.
“Parties? Banquets?” He shook his head. “It’s pretty quiet here these days, ma’am. The old-timers, the men who’ve held their seats since before the war, they complain all the time about how dead it is. But we get a lot more business done nowadays than they ever did.”
Stow sounded pleased with himself. He had an ashtray on his desk made from the brass base of a shell casing, with a couple of dimes bent into semicircles and welded to it to hold cigarettes. He’d surely made it, or had it made, while he was in the Army. Anne wanted to pick it up and brain him with it. His blindness stung. But that ma’am hurt worse. By the way he said it, he might have been talking to his grandmother.
“So what exactly can I help you with today, ma’am?” he asked, polite, efficient—and stupid.
Anne didn’t tell him. Why waste my time? she thought as she left his office. But she had to wonder if she’d already wasted too much time.