VIII
To Anne Colleton’s ears, J.B.H. Norris’ drawl sounded harsh and ignorant. But the Texas oil man had proved a sharp operator in spite of that backwoods accent. “Hope you’ll see fit to invest in our operation here, ma’am,” he said, tipping his hat to her. The Stetson, with its high crown and wide brim, also told her she wasn’t in South Carolina any more.
She was near the banks of the Brazos River, northwest of Fort Worth. And she had questions that went beyond profit and loss. She pointed west. “That new Yankee state of Houston isn’t very far away. What happens if there’s another war? How are you going to keep U.S. soldiers and aeroplanes from wrecking everything you’ve got?”
“Ma’am, you’d do better asking Richmond about that than me,” Norris answered. “If they hadn’t given up so much last time, we wouldn’t need to fret about it now.”
“Yes, but they did, and so we do.” Anne slapped at something. The mosquitoes were coming out early this afternoon. It wasn’t quite so muggy as it would have been back home, but it would do.
J.B.H. Norris said, “Don’t quite know what to tell you about that, except I don’t think a war’s coming any time soon.”
“No,” Anne said bleakly. “I don’t, either. We’re too weak.”
“That’s about the size of it,” Norris agreed. “At least President Mitchel has the sense to see it. That Featherston maniac would get us into a fight we can’t hope to win.”
“I used to like him better than I do now, but he hasn’t got any real chance of getting elected, anyway,” Anne said. “So I’m a Whig again. Some people don’t much like that, but I’ve never much cared for what people like or don’t like.” She changed the subject, but only a little: “What do you think of the Supreme Court ruling that lets Mitchel run again?”
“Well, the Constitution says a president serves the six-year term he’s elected for, and then he’s done.” Norris shrugged. “President Mitchel didn’t run for the job—he got it when that Calkins bastard—pardon me, ma’am—killed President Hampton. So I suppose it’s only fair to let him try and win it again on his own. And Calkins was one of those Freedom Party fools, so I’m not surprised the Supreme Court gave it to Featherston right between the eyes.”
“Yes, that occurred to me, too. Featherston frightened people—powerful people—a few years ago. Now they’re going to make him pay for it.” Anne Colleton’s smile had a certain predatory quality, enough so that J.B.H. Norris flinched when she turned it on him rather than the world at large. She went on, “I do thank you for showing me around. You’ve given me a lot to think about—more than I expected when I came out to Texas, in fact. I may well put some of my money here once I get home.”
Norris beamed. “That’d be wonderful. We can use the capital, and I’m not lyin’ when I tell you so.” He scratched his cheek with his left hand. Only then did Anne notice his ring finger was just a stump. A war wound? Probably. A lot of men had such small mutilations. He added, “If you’re heading back East, you’d better not waste a lot of time. From what the papers say, the flood in the Mississippi Valley just keeps gettin’ worse and worse.”
“I know.” Anne had been reading the papers, too. Anger roiled her voice: “And it’s hurt us so much worse than it hit the damnyankees. If they hadn’t stolen Kentucky and that piece of Arkansas from us, it wouldn’t have hurt them much at all. Cairo, Illinois, got flooded.” She rolled her eyes. “Cairo, Illinois, never was any sort of a place to begin with. But we’ve had Memphis and Little Rock just drowned, and the levees in New Orleans were holding by this much”—she held thumb and forefinger close together—“when I went through Louisiana on my way here.”
“May not be so easy gettin’ back,” Norris warned.
“Why not?” Anne said. “Most of the bridges over the Mississippi are still standing.”
“Yes, ma’am.” The oil man nodded again. “The bridges over the Mississippi are still good. They’re the big, strong ones, and they were built to take whatever the river could throw at ’em. But what about the bridges on the way to the Mississippi? An awful lot of them’ll go down, I bet. I may be wrong, but that’s sure enough how it looks to me.”
Anne muttered something under her breath. It wasn’t quite far enough under, for J.B.H. Norris’ gingery eyebrows leapt upwards. He’ll never think of me as a lady again, Anne thought, and did her best not to giggle. Well, fair enough, because I’m damn well not. Worry wiped out the temptation to laugh. “You’re dead right, Mr. Norris, and I wish I’d thought of that myself. Please take me back to my hotel. I can’t afford to waste much time, can I?”
“No, I don’t reckon you can,” Norris said. “Wish I could see more of you, but I know how things are. Car’s right over there.” He pointed to a middle-aged Birmingham outside the shack that did duty for an office.
How does he mean that? Anne wondered. Spend more time with me, or see me with my clothes off? Ten years, even five years, before, she would have had no doubt. But she wasn’t so young as she had been. I’m just as picky as I ever was, though, maybe pickier. That’s likely why I haven’t got a husband yet. Nobody suits me. Maybe Tom was right. I’ve been on my own too long.
The ride back to Fort Worth took close to three hours. A blowout halfway there didn’t help. J.B.H. Norris fixed it with the aplomb of one who’d done it many times before—and what driver hadn’t?—but it still cost a half hour Anne wished she could have got back. She checked out of the Dandridge as soon as Norris stopped the motorcar in front of the hotel. Then she hurled her luggage into a cab and made for the train station across town.
Before the war, she would have had a colored servant, or more than one, taking care of her. No more. And she didn’t miss them, either. She’d discovered she was more efficient than anyone whose main aim was to do as little as possible. That had proved oddly liberating, where she would have expected losing servants to do just the opposite.
But the time lost to the blowout rose up to haunt her at the station. “Sorry, ma’am, but the eastbound express pulled out of here about twenty minutes ago,” the clerk in the ticket window said. “Next one doesn’t leave till ten tonight.”
“Damnation,” Anne said. “Can I take a local and connect with another express east of here sooner than that? I do want to beat the flood if I can; I have to get back to South Carolina.”
“I understand, ma’am. Let’s see what I can do.” The clerk flipped through schedules so complex, God would have had trouble understanding them. People in line behind Anne surely fumed at the delay. She would have, had she been back there and not at the front. At last, with an unhappy half smile, he shook his head. “Sorry, ma’am, but no. And I’ve got to tell you, there’s no Pullman berths left on the ten o’clock train. You’ll have to take an ordinary seat. I’ll refund the difference, of course.”
“Damnation,” Anne said again, this time with more feeling. She’d be a frazzled wreck by the time she finally got back to St. Matthews. But if she didn’t leave as soon as she could, heaven only knew when she would get back. “Give me whatever you can, then.”
“Sure will.” The clerk handed her a ticket and several brown Confederate banknotes. “Your train will be leaving from Platform W. It’s over that way.” He pointed. “Follow the signs—they’ll take you straight to it. Hope everything turns out all right for you.”
“Thanks.” Anne waved for a porter to handle her suitcases. The colored man put them on a wheeled cart and followed her to Platform W. She bought food there, and a cheap novel to while away the time till the train got in.
It was late. By then, Anne had stopped expecting anything else. It didn’t arrive till half past one. She’d put the novel aside an hour earlier, and was trying without much luck to doze in a chair. The car to which she was assigned didn’t even have compartments, only row after row of seats bolted to the floor. The man who sat down next to her was so fat, he encroached on her without meaning to. He hadn’t had a bath any time recently. She gritted her teeth. Nothing she could do about it, though. As soon as the train pulled out of Fort Worth, the fat man threw back his head, fell asleep, and began snoring like a thunderstorm. That added insult to injury. Anne felt like jabbing him with a pin.
Unable to sleep herself, she stared glumly out the window at the night. Only blackness met her eye, blackness and an occasional handful of lights burning in the small towns at which the express didn’t stop. She almost resented the lights, which put her in mind of fireflies. Blackness suited her mood much better.
The express did stop at Dallas. Anne understood the need, but hated the delay. The fat man beside her scarcely stirred. He didn’t wake up. After what seemed forever but was by her watch forty-five minutes, the train rumbled east again. Presently, Anne had to use the toilet. She took more than a little pleasure in waking her seatmate to get by, though she sounded polite. By the time she returned, he was snoring again. She woke him once more. It did no good to speak of. He fell back to sleep, while she stayed awake.
Marshall was the next stop, near the Louisiana border. By the time the train left, the sky ahead was getting light. Morning had come by the time the express got into Shreveport, on the Red River. The Red was flooding, too, but not enough to delay the train any worse.
Monroe, Louisiana, on the Ouachita, was the next scheduled stop—by then, Anne had the schedule all but memorized. But the express didn’t make it to Monroe. First, Anne saw tent cities on high ground, where people who’d escaped the floodwaters were staying till someone did something more for them. Then, as the ground got lower, mud and water covered more and more of it. The air was thick and humid and full of the stink of decay. At last, the train had to stop, for the simple reason that going forward would have meant going underwater. The tracks were laid on an embankment that raised them above the surrounding countryside, but that finally stopped helping.
“What do we do now?” Anne asked the conductor.
“Don’t rightly know, ma’am,” he answered. “I reckon we’ll back up and try and find a way around—if there is one. Don’t rightly know about that, either. Only other thing we can do is wait for the water to go down, and Lord only knows how long that’d take.”
Trying to hold in her anger, she snapped, “Why didn’t you find out in Shreveport that the way would be flooded?”
“On account of it wasn’t when we left Shreveport,” the conductor said. “Ma’am, this here is a . . . heck of a bad flood, worst anybody’s seen since Hector was a pup. An’ it just keeps gettin’ worser an’ worser.”
He’d fought not to swear in her presence. Now she fought not to swear in his. After what seemed a very long time, the train shuddered into motion—backwards. It crawled that way till at last it came to a cross track. Anne felt like cheering when it started moving ahead once more.
But it didn’t go far. Before long, the encroaching floodwaters blocked its path again. This time, Anne did curse, and didn’t care who sent her shocked looks. By the time the train had made three or four false starts, everyone in the car was swearing. It didn’t help.
Yet another tent city sprouted like a forest of giant toadstools outside the whistlestop hamlet of Anabell, Louisiana, where the express was balked again. “How are those people going to eat?” someone asked. “If trains have trouble getting through . . .”
It was a good question. It got an answer even as Anne watched. An aeroplane landed in a field only a couple of hundred yards from the train. The pilot started throwing out sacks of flour and flitches of bacon. A great light blazed in Anne’s mind. “Let me off the train!” she told the conductor. “This instant, do you hear me?”
“What about your luggage?” he asked, blinking.
“To hell with my luggage,” she said. The conductor tapped the side of his head with his index finger, but did as she asked. She ran over to the aeroplane, waving and calling, “Can you fly me over the Mississippi and past the floods to where I can catch another train east?”
“Maybe I can, lady,” the pilot answered, shifting a plug of tobacco in his cheek. “Why the devil should I?”
“I’ll pay you three hundred dollars,” she said. “Half now, half when we land.”
That wad of tobacco shifted again. She wondered if he’d swallow it, but he didn’t. “Lemme finish unloading,” he said around it. “Then you got yourself a deal.” Half an hour later, the biplane bumped across the soggy field and threw itself into the air. Anne Colleton whooped with delight. She’d never flown before, and wondered why not. Three hundred dollars was a small price to pay for this kind of fun—and for the money she hoped to make when she got home.
Floodlights glared into Jake Featherston’s face, so that he couldn’t see the crowd in the New Orleans auditorium. He didn’t care; he’d made enough speeches so that he didn’t need to see the people out there to know what they were thinking. “Good to be back here,” he said. “This is the town where I was nominated six years ago. We did pretty good then, we did. And we’ll do better this time, you just wait and see if we don’t!”
“Freedom!” The roar came from over a thousand throats. Featherston grinned fiercely. That sound hit him harder than a big slug of hooch. Its absence was the one thing he hated most about making speeches on the wireless—it felt as if he were shouting at a bunch of deaf men, and he couldn’t tell if he was getting through or not. This speech was going out over the wireless, too, and it would go complete with shouts of approval and excitement from the crowd.
This is the way it ought to be, he thought, and resumed: “People say we’re gonna have trouble electing me. People say that, but they don’t always know what the devil they’re talking about. And you tell me, friends—haven’t the Confederate States got themselves enough trouble already?”
“Yes!” people shouted, and, “Hell, yes!” and, “You bet!” One woman cried, “Oh, Jake!” as if they were in bed together and he’d just given her the best time she’d ever had in her life.
His grin got wider. Maybe he’d have a flunky look for her after the speech was done. And maybe he wouldn’t, too; he couldn’t afford to get too much of a reputation as a tomcatting man, not when so many people who went to church every Sunday were likely to vote Freedom. He hated compromise, but that was one he’d had to make.
“Haven’t we got ourselves enough trouble?” he said again. “Folks, I tell you, the Whigs have been carrying the ball too long. They’ve been carrying it too long, and now they’ve gone and dropped it.” He slammed his fist down on the podium.
More applause from the crowd. Cries of, “Tell ’em, Jake!” and, “Give ’em hell!” rang out over the general din. They might have been listening to a preacher on the revival circuit, not an ordinary politician. Jake Featherston wasn’t an ordinary politician, which was both his greatest weakness and his greatest strength.
“They’ve gone and dropped it,” he repeated—again, as a preacher might have. “What else would you call it when here in the middle of July, a good month after the flood finally started going down, the Confederate States of America have still got more than half a million people—half a million, I tell you, and I’m not lying; it’s what the Confederate Red Cross says—living in tents? If that’s not a shame and a disgrace, you tell me what it is.”
A lot of those people, maybe a majority, were colored cotton pickers who worked for white plantation owners in what differed from slavery in little more than name. More often than not, Jake would have gloated at their suffering. But if he could use them as a club with which to beat the present administration, he would.
He went on, “Up in the USA, there’s not a soul still stuck in a tent. Oh, I know they didn’t get hurt as bad as we did, but it makes a point. When the Yankees need to get things done, they up and do ’em. When we need to get things done, what happens?” He threw his arms wide in extravagant disgust. “Not a damn thing, that’s what! I tell you, folks, you’re just lucky New Orleans didn’t go out to sea, on account of the government in Richmond wouldn’t’ve done a thing—not a single, solitary thing—to stop it if it had.”
That drew more applause: baying, angry applause. They know I’m telling the truth, he thought. Being a Whig meant doing as little as you could to get by.
The line wasn’t in the text of his speech, but he used it, adding, “Folks say that works all right. Maybe it did, once upon a time. But this here ain’t no fairy tale, and we haven’t got no happy ending. People, we need a government in Richmond that’ll stand up on its hind legs and do things.
“Who stumbled into the war? The Whigs! Who let the niggers stab us in the back without even knowing they were going to? The Whigs! Who went and lost the war? The Whigs!” Now the crowd shouted out the name of the CSA’s longtime ruling party with him. He rolled on: “Who let the damnyankees steal Kentucky? The Whigs! Who let ’em steal Sequoyah? The Whigs! Who let ’em cut Texas in half? The Whigs! Who let ’em take northern Virginia away from us? The Whigs! I fought in the Army of Northern Virginia, and I’m proud of it, but the Yankees have taken the place away from us. And who let the Yankees tell us what we could do with our Army and Navy? Who left us too weak to fight back when those bastards started throwing their weight around? The Whigs again!”
He slammed his fist down on the podium. The crowd in the hall roared. They might have been so many coon dogs taking a scent. Featherston took a scent from them, too. If he didn’t make a crowd hot and sweaty, he wasn’t doing his job. His nose told him he was tonight.
“They’ve done everything they could to tear this country down,” he went on. “Now they had their day once. I give ’em that. Jeff Davis was a great president. Nobody can say different. So was Lee. So was Longstreet. But that was a long time ago. We had friends back then. Where are our friends now? The Frenchmen have the Kaiser on their back. England’s trying to keep from starving every year. We’re on our own, and the Whigs are too damn dumb to know it. God helps the people who help themselves. And as long as the Whigs hang on in Richmond, God better help us, ‘cause we’ll need it bad!”
That got him a laugh. He’d known it would. He understood that it should. But it wasn’t funny to him. The contempt and hatred he felt for the Whigs—for all the Confederate elite, including the second- and third-generation officers who’d done so much to lose the Great War—were big as the world. They hadn’t given him a chance to show what he could do, no matter how right he’d been. In fact, they’d scorned him all the more because he’d been right.
Just see what I do if I win this election, you sons of bitches, he thought. Just you see then.
Meanwhile, he had this speech to finish: “If you want to go on the way the Confederate States have been going, you vote Whig,” he thundered. “If you want your country to go straight down the toilet, that’s the way to vote.” He got another laugh there, an enormous one. He continued, “The Supreme Court says you can keep on having just what you’ve had—and aren’t you lucky?” Their day would come, too. He’d promised himself that. “But if you want change, if you want strength, if you want pride—if you want to be able to look at yourselves in the mirror and look the USA straight in the eye, y’all vote . . .”
“Freedom!”
The shout from the crowd, more than a thousand voices speaking as one, made his ears ring. He threw up his hands. “That’s right, folks. Thank you. And remember—no matter what else you do, fight hard!”
More applause shook the hall as he stepped away from the podium. The house lights came up, so he could see the people he’d been haranguing. He waved to them again. “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” they chanted, over and over again. The rhythmic cry rolled through him, rolled under him, and swept him along on its crest. He’d read somewhere that in the Sandwich Islands the natives rode waves lying or even standing up on flat boards. He supposed that was true. If it weren’t true, who could make it up? He felt something like that now, buoyed up by the crowd’s enthusiasm.
As he went offstage, the bodyguards and other men who’d come west from Virginia with him pumped his hand and told him what a great speech he’d given. “Thanks, boys,” he said, and then, “For Christ’s sake, somebody get me a drink!”
Louisiana had never surrendered to the siren song of prohibition. He could drink his whiskey here without shame or hypocrisy. It seared his throat and sent warmth exploding out from his middle. As soon as he emptied the glass, somebody got him a fresh one.
He sipped the second drink more slowly. Got to keep my wits about me, he thought. Not everybody was going to like the speech as well as his flunkies had.
No sooner had that thought crossed his mind than a tall, blond, handsome man in a suit that must have cost plenty came up and shook hands with him. “You gave ’em hell out there tonight, Jake,” he said, a Texas twang in his voice.
“I thank you kindly, Willy,” Featherston answered. Willy Knight had headed up the Redemption League, an outfit with goals much like those of the Freedom Party, till the bigger Party enfolded it. He wasn’t the best number-two man around, mostly because he still had thoughts of being number one.
“Damn good speech,” agreed Amos Mizell. He led the Tin Hats, the biggest Confederate veterans’ organization. The Tin Hats weren’t formally aligned with the Freedom Party, but they shared many of the same ideas.
“Thank you, too,” Jake Featherston said. Mizell wore the ribbon for a Purple Heart on his shirt. “You were out there, same as me. You know how the Whigs sold us down the river. You know how they’ve been selling us down the river ever since.”
“Sure do.” Mizell nodded. “What Willy and I aren’t so sure of, though, is whether you’re the fellow who’s going to kick ’em out on the street where they belong.”
“No, huh?” Featherston looked from one of them to the other. “You boys felt like that, how come you didn’t try and keep me from getting the nomination last month?” He wanted his enemies out there in the open where he could see them and smash them, not lurking in dead leaves like a couple of rattlesnakes.
“Wouldn’t’ve been much point to that, on account of we’d’ve lost,” Willy Knight said. “We’ll see how you do come November, and we’ll go from there. You really think you’re going to win?”
Featherston made an impatient, scornful gesture. “That’s to keep the troops happy, and you know it as well as I do. I’m hoping I finish ahead of the damn Rad Libs, and that we hold our ground in Congress. I think we can do that.” He hoped the Freedom Party could do that. Before the great flood, he wouldn’t even have bet on so much. But the flood had shown that the Whigs weren’t so slick as they thought they were, and that they didn’t respond well in emergencies. Some voters, at least, would see the light.
Knight and Mizell looked at each other. “All right, Jake,” Knight said at last. “That sounds fair. If the Party does that well come fall, we’ll keep on backing your play. But if we take another hammering, the way we did in the last couple of Congressional elections, everybody’s gonna have to do a lot of thinking.”
“I carried the Freedom Party on my back, God damn it,” Jake growled.
“Nobody says you didn’t, so keep your shirt on.” Willy Knight was a bigger man than Featherston, but Jake, in a fury, was a match for anybody. Knight knew it, too. Still speaking placatingly, he went on, “Moses took the Hebrews out of Egypt, but he wasn’t the one who got ’em into the Promised Land.”
Amos Mizell nodded. “If the Party’s vote slips again, the Tin Hats will have to think about getting what we want some other way.”
Featherston had thought he wanted enemies openly declared. Now he had them, and wished he didn’t. “And I suppose the two of you will try and screw me over so we don’t get what I said we would.”
They almost fell over themselves denying it. “As long as we do what you said we’d do, we’re still in business,” Knight said. “If we fall down now, who knows if there’ll be any pieces worth picking up later on? We’re still with you.”
“You’d better be,” Jake said. “Let’s see what happens in November, then, and afterwards.” Knight and Mizell both nodded. Featherston shook hands with each of them in turn. And if you bastards think I’ll let go without a fight even if things do go wrong, you’re a hell of a lot dumber than I think you are.
* * *
In the Terry, the colored district of Augusta, Georgia, Election Day meant next to nothing. Only a handful of Negro veterans of the Great War were registered to vote. To most people, it was just another Tuesday.
As usual, Erasmus was in his fish store and restaurant when Scipio walked in. Scipio got himself a cup of coffee to drink while sweeping up the place. His boss was setting newly bought fish on ice in the counter. Scipio said, “What you think? De Whigs gwine win again?”
“Dunno,” Erasmus said with a shrug. “Them or the Rad Libs, don’t matter one way or t’other. Long as it ain’t that goddamn crazy man.” He threw a crappie into place with more force than he usually used while handling fish. That Election Day meant next to nothing didn’t mean it meant nothing at all.
“Dat Featherston buckra, he ain’t gwine do nothin’ much,” Scipio said.
“Better not,” Erasmus answered, and slammed down a gutted catfish. “That son of a bitch win, everything’s even tougher for us niggers. And things is tough enough as they is.”
Voice sly, Scipio said. “You ain’t got it so bad. You owns your house free an’ clear—”
“I ain’t stupid,” Erasmus said, and Scipio nodded. His boss had been damn smart there. He’d paid off his mortgage just when inflation was starting to ravage the CSA, when he’d had a pretty easy time accumulating the money he needed but before Confederate dollars became nothing but a joke. The bankers had taken the money, even if they’d been unhappy about it. A few weeks later and they would have refused him. “I ain’t stupid,” he repeated. “I’m smart enough to know I ain’t got it easy long as I’s a nigger in the CSA.”
He was right about that. Scipio didn’t need to be a genius to understand as much. He said, “No, you ain’t got it easy—I takes it back. But you has it worse—all us niggers has it worse—if dat Featherston, he win.” Working for Anne Colleton had given him a feel for the way Confederate politics worked. Again, though, he didn’t need to be a genius to find the truth in what he’d just said.
“Not so many parades with them goddamn white men in the white shirts an’ the butternut pants yellin’, ‘Freedom!’ this year,” Erasmus observed. “They ain’t been tryin’ to bust up the other parties’ meetin’s, neither, like they done before. They walkin’ sof’ again.”
“Don’ want to remind nobody what that one buckra done,” Scipio said. “But too many folks, dey recollects any which way.”
“Hell, yes,” Erasmus said. “Thing of it is, Freedom Party, they needs the white folks to be stupid, or else to act stupid on account of they scared. Now, Lord knows the white folks is stupid—”
“Do Jesus, yes!” Scipio said, as if responding to a preacher’s sermon.
“But they ain’t that stupid, not unless they’s scared bad,” Erasmus went on, as if he hadn’t spoken. “Things ain’t too bad for ’em right now—money’s still worth somethin’, most of ’em’s got jobs—so they ain’t gwine vote for no Jake Featherston, not this year they ain’t. That’s how I sees it, anyways.”
“Way I sees it, you should oughta write fo’ de newspapers,” Scipio said, not intending it as any sort of flattery. On the contrary—he’d read plenty of editorials about what was likely to happen that didn’t sum things up anywhere near so neatly as his illiterate but ever so shrewd boss had managed in a couple of sentences.
Erasmus lit a cigarette. He blew out a cloud of smoke, then said, “You bangin’ your gums on all this politics so as you kin git out o’ workin’—ain’t that right, Xerxes?”
“Oh, yassuh, Marse Erasmus, suh.” Scipio laid on his Low Country accent even thicker than usual. “Ah ain’t nevah done one lick o’ work, not since de day you hire me. Ah jus’ eats yo’ food an’ drinks yo’ coffee an’ steals yo’ smokes.” He held out his hand, pale palm up, for a cigarette.
Laughing, Erasmus gave him one, then leaned close so Scipio could get a light from the one he already had in his mouth. He’d just taken his first drag of the morning and coughed a couple of times when the first customer of the day came in, calling for coffee and ham and eggs and, instead of grits, hash browns. Erasmus got busy at the stove. Scipio got busier doing everything else. They stayed busy all day long. When Scipio finally went home, Erasmus was still busy. Scipio sometimes wondered whether his boss ever went to bed.
And when Scipio got back to his roominghouse, he heard splashes and squeals from the bathroom at the end of the hall. He also heard Bathsheba’s voice, rising in ever-growing exasperation and wrath. He smiled to himself. Antoinette was going on two years old now, and an ever-growing handful to bathe.
A few minutes later, Bathsheba carried the baby into the room. Antoinette, swaddled in a towel, saw Scipio and said, “Dada!” in delight. Scipio’s wife looked wetter than the baby did. She also looked a lot less happy.
“What de matter, sweetheart?” Scipio asked. “Givin’ ‘Toinette a bath ain’t dat hard. I even done it my ownself a time or two.” He spoke as if that were some enormous accomplishment. In his mind, it was. He hadn’t heard many fathers talk about giving their children even that much in the way of care.
But Bathsheba’s baleful stare made him stop with his mouth half open. “The baby shit in the damn tub,” she said bleakly.
“Oh,” Scipio said. “Aw . . . golly.” The first expression of sympathy that came to mind wouldn’t have been to Bathsheba’s liking, not just then.
Instead of saying anything, Scipio went to a cupboard and pulled out a bottle of moonshine. Georgia was officially dry, but contraband liquor wasn’t hard to come by. He poured his wife a stiff drink, and a smaller one for himself. Holding out the glass to Bathsheba, he said, “Here you is. Reckon you done earned dis here.”
“Reckon I did.” She poured down half of it. Then she puffed out her cheeks and exhaled violently. “Whew! Dat’s nasty stuff.” Scipio was inclined to agree. He’d always preferred rum even to good whiskey, and the murky yellowish fluid in his glass bore a closer relationship to paint thinner than it did to good whiskey.
Antoinette saw her parents drinking something, and naturally wanted some, too. Bathsheba fixed her a bottle. Then she started making supper. Since the room had only a hot plate for cooking, everything took a while. Scipio was glad for the chance to sit down and play with his little girl and talk with his wife and drink the moonshine and let it relax him.
“Buckra ladies I was cleanin’ for, they all talkin’ ‘bout the election today,” Bathsheba said. “Dunno why. They can’t vote any more’n us black folks kin.”
Bills allowing women’s suffrage showed up in the Georgia Legislature almost every session. They got tabled or voted down with monotonous regularity. Even so, Scipio asked, “Who dey say dey husbands vote fo’?”
“Whigs, mostly.” Bathsheba knew why he was worried, and added, “That Featherston fella, don’t reckon he gwine go nowhere much.”
“Do Jesus, hope you right,” Scipio answered.
Bathsheba took lamb chops out of the pan and started frying potatoes in the grease they’d left behind. “Got me somethin’ more important to tell you, anyways.”
“What dat?” Scipio asked as he stuck a little bite of lamb in Antoinette’s mouth. The baby made a face, but ate the morsel. Scipio gave her another one.
Bathsheba pointed at her. “Reckon she gwine have herself a little brother or sister come summertime.”
“I was wonderin’ about dat my ownself,” Scipio said as he got up to give her a hug. “Didn’t t’ink you monthlies, dey come.” Her breasts had been tender lately, too, and she’d started falling asleep early in the evening.
As if to prove he was right, Bathsheba yawned. She laughed a moment later. “Better sleep now. When the new young ‘un come, ain’t never gwine sleep again.”
“We gots to find a bigger place, too,” Scipio said. The room they had was intended for one. It was tolerable for two, provided they got on well—which Scipio and Bathsheba certainly did. With three in it, there wasn’t room to swing a cat. With four . . . Scipio thought about that. With four people in this room, there wouldn’t have been room to bring in a cat, let alone swing it.
“What you reckon Antoinette make o’ the new baby?” Bathsheba asked.
“She ain’t gwine like it,” Scipio answered. “Young chillun, dey don’ never like no new baby in de fambly. But she git over it. She have to. Dey allus does. Jus’ sometimes take longer, is all.”
Bathsheba nodded. “Reckon you’s right.” She yawned again. “I gots to get to sleep. Come here, ‘Toinette. Time we both go to bed.”
The baby didn’t want to. She was convinced she’d miss something. Some evenings she was right, others wrong. Tonight, she fussed and fumed—and then got up the following morning not just ready but eager to play. Scipio was the one who, yawning, went out to face the day.
He paid his five cents for a copy of the Constitutionalist on his way to Erasmus’ place. Newsboys shouted of Burton Mitchel’s victory as president of the Confederate States. “President Mitchel reelected!” they yelled. A Confederate president wasn’t supposed to get reelected, but the Supreme Court said this didn’t count. No matter what the Supreme Court said, the newsboys knew what was what.
The Whigs had won easily this time, nothing like their razor-thin victory in 1921. The Freedom Party took Tennessee, Mississippi, and Texas, the Radical Liberals Arkansas and Chihuahua. Sonora still looked too close to call. Everywhere else, the people had voted Whig.
Scipio read that with more relief than he’d felt for a long time. Life in the CSA was hard enough for a black man any time. He imagined going to bed one morning and waking up to discover Jake Featherston was president. The mere idea chilled him worse than the cool November morning.
He methodically worked his way through the election stories below the headlines. The Freedom Party hadn’t taken quite so many lumps as he would have liked to see. It had lost one Senator, but gained a pair of Congressmen—maybe three, because one of the races in Texas remained very tight.
“I may not be going to the Gray House next March,” the Constitutionalist quoted Featherston as saying, “but we’ll make ourselves heard in Congress, and in state houses all over the country. We aren’t about to go away, no matter how much the Whigs wish we would. We’re just reloading for the next round of the fight.”
He’d lost. He hadn’t come close to winning. But he still sounded confident right was on his side, and that he’d win one of these days. He reminded Scipio of nothing so much as Cassius and the other colored Reds who’d formed the ill-fated government of the Congaree Socialist Republic and dragged him into it. Their faith in the dialectic had kept them going through thick and thin. Jake Featherston sounded like a man with the same kind of faith.
He’d kill me if I could tell him so, Scipio thought. The Reds would kill me, too—if they weren’t already dead themselves. No, neither side here would see its resemblance to the other. That didn’t mean the resemblance wasn’t there.
The Reds had proved wrong—dead wrong—about the dialectic. With any luck, the Freedom Party would prove just as wrong. That thought heartened Scipio. He tossed the Constitutionalist into a trash can and hurried to work. Erasmus would skin him if he was late.