XVII
In the officers’ mess on the USS Remembrance, Commander Dan Cressy nodded to Sam Carsten. “Well, Lieutenant, you called that one,” the exec said.
“Called which one, sir?” Sam asked. The carrier was rolling, but not too badly. He had no trouble staying in his chair.
“There are reports of Confederate soldiers assembling near the borders of Kentucky and Houston,” Cressy answered. “What do you want to bet they’ll be marching in as soon as we finish pulling out, just the way you said they would?”
“Sir, if you think I’m happy to be right, you’re wrong,” Sam said. “What happens if they do go in?”
Commander Cressy shrugged. “I don’t know. I hope President Smith does. He’d better. Somebody had better, anyhow.”
“If they go in, won’t it take a war to get them out?” That was Lieutenant Commander Hiram Pottinger, Carsten’s superior on the damage-control party.
Nobody in the officers’ mess said anything for some little while after that. They knew what war meant. Not many of them besides Sam had served in the Great War, but they’d all been through the inconclusive Pacific War against Japan.
“A lot will depend on what happens in Europe,” Commander Cressy said.
“France is starting to whoop and holler about Alsace and Lorraine,” Sam said meditatively. “I saw an Action Française riot before those boys came to power. I don’t think they’ll take no for an answer. They’re just as sure they’ve got God on their side as Jake Featherston is.”
“And the Russians are squawking about Poland, and they’re starting to squawk about the Ukraine, too,” Cressy said. “And the limeys are growling at the micks, and ain’t we got fun?”
Sam sighed. He wished for a cigarette, but the smoking lamp was out. “We’re going to hell in a handbasket all over again,” he said. “Didn’t anybody learn anything the last time around?”
“I’ll tell you one thing we didn’t learn,” the Remembrance’s exec said. “We didn’t learn to make sure the sons of bitches who lost took so many lumps, they couldn’t get back up on their feet and have another try. And I’m afraid we’re going to have to pay for it.”
Lieutenant Commander Pottinger said, “They’ve learned something in South America, anyhow. Argentina and the Empire of Brazil are cuddling up, even if Argentina and Chile are yelling again.”
“Sir, that’s good news for Britain, not for us,” Carsten said. “If there is a war, it means Brazil will let Argentina ship food through its territorial waters and then make the short hop across the Atlantic to French West Africa, same as happened the last time.”
“How do you know so much about that?” Commander Cressy asked, as if to say, You’re a mustang, so you’re not supposed to know much of anything.
“Sir, I was there, in the Dakota,” Sam answered. Cressy was a young hotshot. He had more book learning and learned faster than anyone Sam had ever seen. If war did come, he would likely have flag rank by the time it was done, assuming he lived. But he did sometimes forget that people could also learn by good, old-fashioned experience.
The other side of the coin was, Sam had only been a petty officer then. Officers also had the unfortunate habit of believing that men who weren’t didn’t know anything. (Petty officers, of course, were just as sure that officers’ heads either had nothing in them or were full of rocks.)
“We can lick the Confederates,” Pottinger said. “We did it before, and this time we won’t have to take on Canada, too.”
Everyone in the mess nodded. Somebody—Sam didn’t see who—said, “Goddamn Japs’ll try and sucker punch us in the Pacific when we’re busy close to home.”
More nods. Sam said, “They did that in the last war—the last big war, I mean. I was there for that, too.”
Something in his tone made Commander Cressy’s gaze sharpen. “The Dakota was the ship that went on that wild circle through the Battle of the Three Navies, wasn’t she?”
“Yes, sir,” Carsten said. “One of the hits we took jammed our steering, so all we could do was circle—either that or stand still, and the Japs or the limeys would have blown us out of the water if we had.”
“You’ve had an … interesting career, haven’t you?” the exec said.
“Sir, I’ve been lucky,” Sam answered. “Closest I came to buying a plot was from the Spanish influenza after the war. That almost did me in. Otherwise, hardly a scratch.”
“They tried taking the Sandwich Islands away from us in the Pacific War.” Hiram Pottinger went on with the main argument: “Odds are the bastards will try it again. And if they do, the Pacific coast had better look out.”
Nobody argued with him. After the wake-up call the Japanese had given Los Angeles in 1932, nobody could. They’d built their Navy to fight far out into the Pacific, and so had the United States. If the two countries ever went at each other with everything they had …
“If we go at the Japs full bore, instead of doing a half-assed job of it the way we did the last time, we’ll lick ’em,” Sam said.
Commander Cressy nodded. “If we could do that, we would,” he said. “But if we’re at war with Japan any time soon, we’re also likely to be at war with the Confederate States. And if we’re at war with the CSA, we aren’t going to be able to hit the Japs with everything we’ve got. And they’ve built up a tidy little empire for themselves since the last war.”
That was true enough. Japan had owned Chosen, Formosa, and the Philippines going into the Great War. Since then, she’d gained a lot of influence in China and quietly acquired Indochina from France and the oil-rich East Indies from Holland. In the aftermath of defeat, Britain hadn’t been able to do anything but grumble and hope she could hold on to Malaya and Singapore if she ever got on Japan’s bad side. But, since the limeys and the Japs both worried about the USA, they put up with each other.
“If they hit us again, those sons of bitches are going to put a rock in their fist,” somebody predicted gloomily.
“Well, gentlemen, that’s why we wear the uniform.” Commander Cressy got to his feet. He was always sharply turned out. Sam envied him the knife-edged creases in his trousers. His own clothes were clean, but they weren’t what you’d call pressed. Neither were those of anybody else in the officers’ mess—except the exec’s. Cressy nodded to the other men and left, ignoring the ship’s motion with the air of a man who’d known worse.
Sam stayed long enough to drink another cup of coffee. Then he left the mess, too. As often happened, the officers’ bull session went aimless and foolish without Cressy’s sharp wit to steer it along. The exec also had the rank to make that wit felt. Sam thought he might have done some steering, too, but he was junior in grade, too damn old, and a mustang to boot. Nobody would take him seriously.
More than a little wistfully, he went up to the flight deck. He wished he had more to do with sending airplanes off into battle. That was why he’d wanted to serve on the Remembrance in the first place. He’d done good work, useful work, in damage control since returning to the ship as an officer. He knew that. He was even proud of it. But it still wasn’t what he wanted to be doing.
Mechanics in coveralls had the cowl off a fighter’s engine. They were puttering with a fuel line, puttering and muttering and now and then swearing like sailors. Funny how that works, Carsten thought, smiling at the bad language that flavored the conversation the way pepper flavored scrambled eggs.
The fighter itself was a far cry from the wire-and-canvas two-deckers that had flown off the Remembrance when Sam first came aboard her. It was a sleek, aluminum-skinned one-decker with folding wings, so the belowdecks hangar could hold more of its kind. Because of the strengthening it needed to cope with being sent forth with a kick from a catapult and landing with an arrester hook, it was a little heavier and a little slower than a top land-based fighter—a little, but not much.
Carsten looked out to sea. As always, destroyers shepherded the Remembrance on all sides. The way things were these days, you just couldn’t tell. If the Confederates or the limeys wanted to use a submersible to get in a quick knee in the nuts, those destroyers were the ones that would have to make sure they couldn’t. He’d served aboard a ship not much different from them. Compared to the Remembrance, they were insanely crowded. They were also much more vulnerable to weather and the sea. But they did a job no other kind of vessel could do.
For that matter, so did the Remembrance herself. With her aircraft, she could project U.S. power farther than any battleship’s big guns. All by herself, she could make the Royal Navy thoughtful about poking its nose into the western Atlantic. Because of that, Sam was surprised when, half an hour later, the carrier suddenly picked up speed—the flight deck throbbed under his feet as the engines began working harder—and swung toward the west. Like any good sheepdogs, the destroyers stayed with her.
“What’s going on, sir?” Sam called to the officer of the deck.
“Beats me,” that worthy replied.
She kept on steaming west all the rest of that day and into the night. By the time the sun came up astern of her the next morning, rumor had already declared that she was bound for Boston or Providence or New York or Philadelphia or Baltimore to be scrapped or refitted or to have the captain court-martialed or because she was running low on beans. Sam didn’t believe the skipper had done anything to deserve a court-martial. Past that, he kept an open mind.
She turned out to be heading for the Boston Naval Yard. The powers that be admitted as much before she’d been steaming west for a day. They remained close-mouthed about why she’d been called in to port early in her cruise. Maybe she really was running low on beans. Sam couldn’t have proved she wasn’t. Sailors hoped for shore leave while she stayed in port.
When she came in, a tugboat guided her into Boston harbor. By the way the tug dodged and zigged, Carsten suspected the minelayers had been busy. That saddened him, but didn’t surprise him very much.
More tugs nudged the Remembrance up against a quay. It was snowing hard, the temperature down close to zero. That didn’t keep a swarm of electrician’s mates and machinist’s mates led by several officers from coming aboard and going straight to work. By all appearances, the refit rumor had been true.
But what were the technicians fitting? Sam couldn’t figure it out on his own, and nobody seemed willing to talk. Whatever it was, it involved some funny-looking revolving installations atop the island, and a bunch of new gear inside the armored command center. After a little while, Sam stopped asking questions. Whenever he did, people looked at him as if he were a traitor. He went on about his own business and watched from the corner of his eye. Sooner or later, he figured, he’d find out.
Lucien Galtier stretched uncomfortably as he shooed another hen off the nest to see if she’d laid. She hadn’t; his fingers found no new egg. The hen clucked at the indignity. Galtier went on to the next nest. He grunted when he reached into it. The grunt was part satisfaction, for he found an egg there, and part unhappiness, for he still couldn’t get rid of the tightness in his chest.
No help for it. Even if he had pulled something in there, the work didn’t go away. He finished gathering eggs, fed the animals and mucked out their stalls, and did everything else in the barn that needed doing. Then he picked up the basket of eggs, pulled his hat down on his forehead, lowered the earflaps and tied them under his chin, pulled the thick wool muffler Nicole had knitted up to cover his mouth and nose, and left the barn.
That first breath of outside air was as bad as he’d known it would be. He might have inhaled a lungful of daggers. It was cold inside the barn with the animals’ body heat and an oil heater warming things up and with the wooden walls keeping out wind and snow. Outside, in the space between the barn and the farmhouse, it was a good deal worse than merely cold.
Snow blew horizontally out of the northwest. It had a good running start by the time it got to his farm. It stung his eyes and tried to freeze them shut. Despite hat and muffler and heavy coat and sweater and stout dungarees and woolen, itchy long johns, the wind started sucking heat from his body the instant it touched him.
In the swirling white, he could hardly see the house ahead. He’d known worse blizzards, but not many. If he missed the house, he’d freeze out here. That happened to a luckless farmer or two every winter in Quebec.
Lucien didn’t miss. He staggered up the stairs, opened the kitchen door, lurched inside, and slammed it shut behind him. “Calisse!” he muttered. He shook himself like a dog. Snow flew everywhere. The stove was already hot, but he built up the fire in it and stood in front of it, gratefully soaking up the warmth.
Only after he’d done that did he worry about the clumps of melting snow on the floor. He cleaned up as best he could. Then he went back to the stove and made himself a pot of coffee. He gulped it down as hot as he could stand it. He wanted to be warm inside and out.
Outside, the wind kept howling. He watched the blowing, swirling whiteness and sent it some thoughts that weren’t compliments. There was supposed to be a dance tomorrow night. If the blizzard went on roaring, how would anybody get to it?
He turned on the wireless set in the front room. The wireless was a splendid companion for a man who lived by himself. It made interesting noise, and he didn’t have to respond unless he wanted to. Music poured out of the speaker. Right now, though, he didn’t care for music. He changed the station. He wanted to find out whether they were going to get another foot and a half of snow before tomorrow night.
But the wireless stations blathered on about what they were interested in, not about what he was interested in. That was the drawback of the marvelous machine. He didn’t have to respond to it unless he wanted to, but it didn’t have to respond to him at all.
He went from station to station for the next twenty minutes, until the top of the hour, and not one of them seemed the least bit interested in the weather outside. For all they cared, it could have been summer out there, with blue sky and warm sun. It could have been, but he knew it wasn’t.
At the top of the hour, every station gave forth with five minutes of news. It was as if they suddenly remembered they were part of the wider world after all. Lucien listened impatiently to accounts of riots in the Ukraine and Austria-Hungary and celebrations on the border between the United States and the Confederate States. All he wanted was a simple weather report, and nobody seemed willing to give him one.
Finally, at the very tail end of one of the newscasts, an announcer grudgingly said, “Our storm is expected to blow itself out by this afternoon. Snow will end before nightfall, and tomorrow will be clear and a little warmer.” Two sentences, and then the music resumed.
In January in Quebec, a little warmer didn’t mean warm. Lucien knew that all too well. He also knew the weather forecasters lied in their teeth about one time in three. Even so, he had reason to hope. Without hope, what was a man? Nothing worth mentioning.
Sure enough, that afternoon the wind dropped and the snow stopped falling. The sun came out and peeped around, as if surprised at everything that had happened since the last time it showed its face. It might have been embarrassed at what it saw, for it set half an hour later.
The night was long and cold, as January nights were. Lucien woke when it was still dark. He threw on his clothes and went out to the outhouse. The sky was brilliantly clear. Ribbons and curtains of aurora blazed in the north. He yawned and nodded, acknowledging that they were there. Then he trudged back to the farmhouse.
He was eating fried eggs when a snowplow grumbled by. The main road would be clear, then. Who could guess whether the little side roads to Éloise Granche’s house would be, though, and the ones from there to the dance?
“Well,” he said, “I will just have to find out.”
Before he could find out, he had to do some shoveling to let his auto get to the main road. That was hard work, and would have been for a man half his age. His heart was pounding before he finished, but finish he did. Under all those layers of warm clothes, sweat ran down his sides. He went back in and heated water for a bath. That helped soak out some of the kinks in his back, though others refused to disappear.
When evening came, he used a little more hot water, this time for a shave. He scraped his chin and cheeks with a straight razor he’d been using since before the turn of the century. None of these newfangled safety razors and blades for him. He stropped the razor on a thick, smooth piece of leather before it touched his face. If his shave wasn’t smooth, he had only himself to blame, not some factory down in the United States.
He dressed in clothes he might have worn to town: dark trousers, clean white shirt, and his least disreputable hat. The overcoat he put on had seen better days, but overcoats always got a lot of use in Quebec. Whistling a tune he’d heard on the wireless, he went out to the Chevrolet.
“I want no trouble from you,” he told the auto, as if it were the horse with which he’d had so many philosophical discussions over the years. The Chevrolet was old, but it knew better than to argue with him. It started right up.
Despite the snowplow and the rock salt it had laid down, the roads would still be icy. Galtier drove with care, and made sure he kept plenty of room between himself and other motorists—not that many others were out and about. He didn’t miss the traffic. He knew he wouldn’t be able to stop in a hurry.
He left the paved road and bumped along rutted dirt lanes till he came to the farm where Éloise Granche lived. The dim, buttery light of kerosene lamps poured out through her windows; she still had no electricity. He stopped the engine, wagged a finger at the Chevrolet to remind it to start up again, and went up the steps and knocked on the door.
“Hello,” she said with a smile. Then she was in his arms and they kissed hungrily for a long time.
Still holding her, he said, “When we do that, I want to forget all about the dance.”
“We can, if you want to,” she answered. “Would you rather just stay here?”
Regretfully, Galtier shook his head. “That would be a lot of staying for not much staying power, I’m afraid. If I were half my age, I would say yes.”
“If you were half your age, I wouldn’t want anything to do with you—not for that, anyhow,” Éloise said. “We’ll go to the dance, then, and we’ll come back, and who knows what will happen after that?”
“Who indeed?” Lucien kissed her again, then led her out to the motorcar.
That wagged finger did its job. The auto started up again without any fuss. The dance was at Pierre Turcot’s, not far from the little town of St.-Modèste. A rowdy sprawl of motorcars and wagons and buggies surrounded Turcot’s barn when the Chevrolet pulled up. Lucien handed Éloise out of the motorcar. They went in side by side.
People waved and called their names and hurried up to greet them. By now, they’d been together long enough that all their neighbors took them for granted. They might almost have been a married couple. Lucien’s son Georges was already out on the floor dancing. He waved to Lucien and blew Éloise a kiss.
“Georges can be very foolish,” Éloise remarked. She eyed Galtier. “I wonder where he gets it.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea,” he answered with such dignity as he could muster.
The fiddlers and drummer and accordion player took a break. Pierre Turcot wound up a phonograph and put a record on it. The dancing went on. The musicians on the record played and sang better than the homegrown talent. Lucien had noticed that before. He wondered if the problem would kill off homegrown talent after a while. But once he started whirling Éloise around the floor, he stopped worrying about it.
They danced. They snacked and drank some of the potent punch Pierre had set out and danced some more. People talked about politics in the city of Quebec and the price of potatoes and who was fooling around with whom. Lucien didn’t think he and Éloise were high on the gossip list these days. Why get excited about old news?
Somewhere between ten and eleven, Éloise turned to him and said, “Shall we go?”
He smiled. “Yes, let’s.”
They went back to her house in companionable silence. When they got there, he got out first so he could open the door on her side. “Such a gentleman,” she said. “Would you like to come in for a little while?”
“Why not?”
They drank some applejack. One of Éloise’s neighbors had cooked it up. It was a good batch, almost as good as if it weren’t bootleg. And then, as they had a good many times before, they went upstairs to her bedroom.
Everything was dark in there, but Lucien knew where the bed was. He sat down on one side of it and got out of his clothes. When he was naked, he reached out. His hand found Éloise’s bare, warm flesh.
They kissed and caressed each other. Lucien’s heart pounded with excitement. Heart still pounding, he rolled onto his back. Éloise straddled him. She liked riding him, and he found it easier than the other way round.
“Oh, Lucien,” she whispered.
He didn’t answer. As his delight mounted, so did the thudding in his chest. He could hardly breathe. He’d never felt anything like this, not in all his years, not with Marie, not with Éloise, not with anyone. Pleasure shot through him. So did pain, pain in his chest, pain stabbing up his arm. Pain … He groaned and clutched at Éloise. In an instant, the darkness in the bedroom became darkness absolute.
“Lucien?” Éloise exclaimed. He never heard her scream, or anything else, ever again.
Scipio might have known it would happen one of these days. Hell, he had known it might happen one of these days. The Huntsman’s Lodge was the best restaurant in Augusta. No other place even compared. If Anne Colleton ever came to town, this was where she’d have dinner.
And there she sat, at a table against the far wall, talking animatedly with several local big shots. Scipio hadn’t seen her for twenty years or so, but he had not the slightest doubt. She’d aged very well, even if he wouldn’t have called her beautiful any more. And she still sounded as terrifyingly self-assured as she ever had, maybe even more so.
As befit its status as a fancy place to eat, the Huntsman’s Lodge was dimly lit. Scipio didn’t think she recognized him. He was just another colored waiter, not one serving her table. He thanked heaven he hadn’t let Jerry Dover talk him into taking the headwaiter’s post. Then he would have had to escort her party to the table, and she would have been bound to notice him.
Even now, he wasn’t sure she hadn’t. She always held her cards close to her chest. He didn’t want to go anywhere near that table. He didn’t want to speak, for fear she would know his voice. He spent as much time as he could in the kitchens. The cooks gave him quizzical looks; he didn’t get paid for roasting prime rib or doing exotic things with lobster tails.
His boss knew it, too. “What the hell you doing hiding in there, Xerxes?” Jerry Dover demanded indignantly. “Get your ass out and wait tables.”
“I’s sorry, suh,” Scipio answered. “But I gots to tell you, I’s feelin’ right poorly tonight.”
Dover didn’t say anything for a little while. His eyes raked Scipio. “You know,” he remarked at last, “there’s niggers I’d fire on the spot, they tried to use that kind of line on me.”
“Yes, suh,” Scipio said stolidly. Firing was the least of his worries right now.
“You ain’t one of ’em, though. You never tried shirking on me before,” the restaurant manager said. He astonished Scipio by reaching out to put a palm on his forehead. “You don’t have a fever. At least it isn’t the grippe. You need to go home? Go on, then, if you’ve a mind to.”
“I thanks you kindly, suh.” As he had years before with John Oglethorpe, Scipio needed to remind himself that white men could be decent. He found it especially remarkable now, with the Freedom Party in the saddle for the past seven years. Things were set up to give whites every excuse to be bastards, and a lot of them didn’t need much excuse. “Somehow or other, I finds a way to pay you back.” He felt like the mouse talking to the lion in the fable. But the mouse actually had found a way to do it. How could he?
Dover only shrugged. He wasn’t worrying about it. “Get the hell out of here,” he said. “You got your reasons, whatever they are. I’ve known you for a while now. You don’t fuck around with me. So get.”
Scipio got. He wasn’t used to being out on the street so early. He made a beeline for the Terry. The sooner he got into his own part of town, the safer he’d feel.
Then he heard a gunshot down an unlit alleyway, a scream, and the sound of running feet. Maybe he wasn’t so safe in the Terry after all. Whites preyed on blacks, but blacks also preyed on one another. He wondered why. His own people had so little. Why not try to rob whites, who enjoyed so much more? Unfortunately, an answer occurred to him almost at once. If a Negro robbed a white, the police moved heaven and earth to catch him. If he robbed another Negro, they yawned and went about their business.
“Hey, nigger!” A woman’s voice, all rum and honey, called from the darkness. “You in your fancy clothes, I show you a good time like you ain’t never seen.” Scipio didn’t even turn to look. He just kept walking. “Cocksuckin’ faggot!” the woman yelled after him, all the sweetness gone.
Bathsheba stared when Scipio came into the apartment so early. “What you doin’ here?” she demanded. “I jus’ put the chillun to bed.”
He’d been trying to figure out what to tell her ever since he left the Huntsman’s Lodge. “Once upon a time, you asked me how I came to be able to speak like this,” he answered in soft, precise, educated white man’s English. Bathsheba’s eyes went wide. The only time he’d ever spoken like that in her hearing was to save their lives in the rioting not long after the Freedom Party took over. Now he had to tell the truth, or some of it. In that same dialect, he went on, “A long time ago, I was in the upper ranks of one of the Socialist Republics we tried to set up. Someone came into the restaurant tonight who knew me in those days. I’m not certain whether she recognized me, but she might have. She’s … very sharp.” Seeing Anne Colleton forcibly reminded him how sharp she was.
“You learn to talk like dat on account of you was a Red?” Bathsheba asked.
Scipio shook his head. “No. I was useful to the Reds because I could already talk like this. I … I was a butler, a rich person’s butler in South Carolina.” There. Now she knew—knew enough, anyhow.
He waited for her to shout at him for not telling his secret years before. But she didn’t. “If you was a big Red, no wonder you don’t say nothin’,” she told him. “What we do now?”
“Dunno.” He fell back into the slurred speech of the Congaree Negro. Talking in that other voice took him off to a world that had died in fire and blood and hate—but also a world where he’d grown to manhood. The contrasts terrified him. “Mebbe nuttin’. Mebbe run fas’ as we kin.”
“How?” Bathsheba asked, and he didn’t have a good answer for her. Passbooks were checked these days as they’d never been before the war. Any black without a good reason for being where he was—and without the papers to back up that reason—was in trouble. People talked about camps. No one knew much about them, though; they were easy to get into, much harder to leave.
Even so, he said, “Better we takes de chance. They catches me …” He didn’t go on. If they caught him and realized who he was, he wouldn’t last ten minutes. No trial. No procedure. They’d just shoot him.
Bathsheba was still staring at him. His wife clucked sadly, a sound of reproach: self-reproach, he realized when she said, “I shoulda pussected what you was.” He needed a heartbeat or two to figure out that she meant suspected. She went on, “If you was a Red, you had to hide out. And you was smart, gettin’ out o’ the state where you was at.”
“I weren’t no Red, not down deep, not for real an’ for true,” Scipio said. “But dey suck me in. I don’t go ‘long wid dey, dey shoots me jus’ like de buckra shoots me.” That was the truth. Cassius and Cherry and the rest of the Reds on the Marshlands plantation had been in deadly earnest. Confidence in their doctrine had sustained them—till rifles and what little else they got from the USA ran up against the whole panoply of modern war, and till they discovered their oppressors wouldn’t vanish simply because they were called reactionaries.
Bathsheba’s mind went in a different direction. Suddenly, she said, “I bet Xerxes ain’t even your right name.”
“Is now. Has been fo’ years.”
“What your mama call you?”
“Scipio,” he said, and wondered how long it had been since he’d spoken his own name. More than twenty years; he was sure of that.
“Scipio.” Bathsheba tasted it, then slowly shook her head. “Reckon I like Xerxes better. I’s used to it.” She sent him an anxious look. “You ain’t mad?”
“Do Jesus, no!” he exclaimed. “You go an’ forget you ever hear de other one. Dat name get around, de buckra after we fo’ sure. Dey still remembers me in South Carolina.” Was that pride in his voice? After all these years, after all that terror, after being sure at the time that he was walking into a disaster (and after proving righter than even he’d imagined), was that pride? God help him, it was.
His wife gave him a kiss. “Good.” She was proud of him, too, proud of him for what had to be the stupidest thing he’d ever done in his life. Madness. It had to be madness. There was no sensible explanation for it. But no sooner had that thought crossed his mind than Bathsheba said, “Every once in a while—Lord, more’n every once in a while—them white folks deserves a whack in the chops, they truly does.”
And that did make sense. When things were bad, you tried your best to make them better. How didn’t matter much. “Let’s go to bed,” he said.
“How you mean dat?” Bathsheba asked.
Now he kissed her. “However you wants, sweetheart.”
He went up to the Huntsman’s Lodge the next day with a certain amount of apprehension. He checked the autos parked near the restaurant with special care. None of them looked as if it belonged to either the police or Freedom Party goons. He had to go to work. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t eat, and neither would his family. In he went.
Jerry Dover met him just inside the door. “Go home,” the manager said bluntly. “Get the hell out of here. You’re still sick. You’ll be sick another couple of days, too.”
Scipio blinked. “What you say?”
“Go home,” Dover repeated. “Damn Freedom Party woman asking all kinds of questions about you.”
Ice congealed in Scipio’s belly. He might have known Anne Colleton would spot him. Did she ever miss a trick? “What you say to she?” he asked, already hearing hounds baying on his trail.
“I told her you ain’t who she thinks you are. I told her you been working here since 1911,” Jerry Dover answered. His eyes twinkled.
“God bless you, Mistuh Dover, but when she catch you in de lie—”
“She ain’t gonna catch me.” Dover grinned at him. “I showed her papers from back then to prove it.”
“How you do dat?” Now Scipio was all at sea.
Still grinning, the manager said, “ ’Cause a nigger named Xerxes did work here then. He was only here a couple months, but those were the papers I showed her. Bastard stole like a son of a bitch. That’s why they canned his ass. I heard one of the owners bitching about it not too long after we hired you. The name stuck in my head, and so I watched you close after that, but old Oglethorpe was right—you’re first-rate. Anyway, this here gal like to shit, I’ll tell you. You don’t ever want to tell that one she’s wrong. She ain’t got no wedding ring, and I can see why.”
That made a perfect thumbnail sketch of the Anne Colleton Scipio had known. She would have thought she had him at last—and then she would have seen her hope snatched away. No, she wouldn’t be happy, not even a little bit. “God bless you, Mistuh Dover,” Scipio said again.
“Go home,” Jerry Dover repeated once more. “She may come back and try to raise some more trouble for you. I don’t want that. I need you here too bad. And don’t get your bowels in an uproar. I’ll pay your wages.”
Home Scipio went, in a happy daze. Safe—really safe—from Anne Colleton at last! He was back in the Terry before he realized this wonderful silver lining had a cloud. Maybe he was free of Anne Colleton. But now Jerry Dover had a hold on him. Miss Anne had been far away. Dover was right here in town. If he ever decided to go to the police … Scipio shivered, but he kept on walking.