Blood and Iron (26 page)

Lieutenant Colonel Abner Dowling stared out across the prairie from General Custer’s third-story offices in Winnipeg. He’d been there with the general since winter, and the view on a clear day never ceased to astonish him. Today, he managed to put that astonishment into words: “My God, sir, it’s flatter than Kansas!”

“It is, isn’t it?” Custer agreed. “You can see forever, or if you can’t, it certainly seems as though you can. Makes you think God pressed an iron to the countryside hereabouts, doesn’t it?”

“Yes, sir.” Dowling nodded. “Although, from what I’ve read, it wasn’t an iron at all. It was a great whacking sheet of ice that pressed the land down flat and didn’t pull back or melt or whatever it did till not so very long ago.”

“I can believe
that
.” Custer shivered melodramatically. “By the way the weather felt when we got to this place, I’d say the glacier had been gone about a day and a half—two days, tops.”

Dowling laughed. Custer rarely joked. Here, he might well have been kidding on the square. During several days that winter, the temperature never had managed to creep above zero, nor even get very close to it. There was a word for a place more than three hundred miles north of Minneapolis: Siberia.

But people lived here. Before the war, something like 150,000 of them had lived here. In Abner Dowling’s considered opinion, they’d been out of their minds. Oh, from May to September the weather was good enough, but that left a lot of time out of the bargain.

Nowhere near so many people were left in Winnipeg now. A lot had fled during the two and a half years in which Canadian and British forces had held the U.S. Army away from the critical rail junctions here. A lot more had fled when they realized the Canucks and limeys could hold the Americans no more. And a lot had died when the city finally fell.

One of the reasons Dowling could see so far was that the building housing Custer’s headquarters was one of the few in town to come through the war intact. Had it ever had any taller neighbors, they were rubble now. Nothing got in the way of the view.

A lot of the new houses that were starting to go up in Winnipeg these days were made from the wreckage of older structures. One construction outfit even advertised itself as
BEST
REBUILDERS IN TOWN
. The company had plenty of material with which to work.

Custer said, “I feel as though I can see all the way to the Rockies.”

“I wish we could see all the way to the Rockies from here, sir,” Dowling said. “It would make our jobs a lot easier—and that’s where a lot of our problems lie, anyhow.”

“The broom didn’t sweep clean,” Custer said. “That’s what the problem is. That’s why they sent me up here to set things to rights.”

For as long as Dowling had known him, Custer had had a remarkable gift for revising events so they fit neatly into a scheme of things sometimes existing only in his own mind. The first part of his statement, though, was objectively true. The U.S. broom had
not
swept clean, nor even come close. The USA had conquered Ontario and Quebec, severed eastern Canada from the vast West by—finally—seizing Winnipeg, and struck north into the Rockies to break the rail links with the Pacific. That had been enough to win the war. But it had also left a couple of million square miles unvisited by U.S. troops.

A lot of those square miles, especially in the far north, didn’t have enough people on them to make anyone worry. But the cities of the Canadian prairie—Regina and Saskatoon, Calgary and Edmonton—resented having been handed over to the United States when no soldier in green-gray had got anywhere near them during the war. They seethed with rebellion. So did the farms for which they gave markets. So did the logging and mining towns of British Columbia. So did the fishermen of Newfoundland. So, for that matter, did a great many people in the areas the United States had taken by force.

“Confound it, Lieutenant Colonel, how am I supposed to control half a continent without the soldiers I should have lost during one medium-sized battle in the Great War?” Custer demanded. “Every time there’s a new little uprising somewhere, I have to rob Peter of troops to pay Paul so Paul can put it down. And then twenty minutes later Peter needs the men back again.”

“We have kept the railroads hopping, haven’t we, sir?” Dowling shook his head at the understatement. “The way the budget’s going in Congress, we ought to count ourselves lucky that we still have as many soldiers up here as we do. It won’t get any better next year, either.”

“Socialists!” As Custer usually did, he turned it into a swearword. “I tell you, Dowling, the machine gun’s most proper use is for shooting down the Socialist blockheads who want to cut our country off at the knees. Blow enough of them to kingdom come and the rest might come to their senses—if they have any sense to come to, which I am inclined to doubt.”

“Yes, sir,” Dowling said resignedly. He was a rock-solid Democrat himself, but not, he thought with a certain amount of pride, a political fossil like his superior.

Custer said, “If things get any worse, we’ll have to start borrowing soldiers from the Republic of Quebec, damn me to hell if I lie.”

Dowling started to laugh: for Custer to make two jokes in one day was well-nigh unprecedented. Then he realized Custer wasn’t joking. For a moment, he was inclined to scorn. Then, all at once, he didn’t feel scornful any more. Every so often, Custer came up with an interesting notion, sometimes without even realizing he’d done it.

“Do you know, sir, I’d bet the Frenchies over there would lend them to us,” Dowling said. “And do you know what else? I’d bet the soldiers from Quebec’d have a high old time clamping down on the Englishmen who sat on them for so long. That really might be worth looking into.”

“Take care of it, then,” Custer said indifferently. No, he hadn’t known that was a good idea. He’d just been talking to hear himself talk, something he was fond of doing.

Dowling scribbled a note to himself. “Have to make Quebec pay for the troops they send, too,” he said. “That will make Congress happy. It might not make Quebec happy, but I won’t lose any sleep over that. If we can’t twist Quebec’s arm, whose can we twist? If it weren’t for the United States, that wouldn’t even be a country today.” As far as he was concerned, it wasn’t much of a country, but nobody in Quebec had gone out looking for his opinion.

“Who cares whether Quebec likes it or not?” Custer said, which meant he’d thought along with Dowling, and which almost set Dowling wondering if he hadn’t miscalculated. If Custer agreed with him, he had a good chance of being wrong.

He said, “I think we have managed to put down the latest flare-up outside of Edmonton. That’s something, anyhow.”

“Putting down flare-ups doesn’t get the job done, Lieutenant Colonel,” Custer said. “I want to put them down so they don’t start again. One of these days, I expect we’ll have to raze one of these prairie towns to the ground. It’d serve the bastards right. And after we do that, the other Canucks will get the idea that we mean business.”

“Maybe, sir,” Dowling said, his tone plainly making that
maybe
a
no
. Sometimes you couldn’t be too plain for Custer, so he went on, “If we do that without good reason, the rest of the world will raise a big stink.”

“To hell with the rest of the world,” Custer said grandly: the philosophy of a lifetime, boiled down to eight words. Through the whole of his long span, Custer had done very much as he pleased. He’d had a good many breaks along the way, but no one could deny he’d made the most of them.

“Will there be anything more, General?” Dowling asked.

“As a matter of fact, there is one other thing.” Custer hesitated, which was most unlike him. At last, he resumed: “I’m afraid Libbie and I have had to let our housekeeper go. Could you arrange for the hiring of another one?”

“Wouldn’t your wife sooner take care of that for you, sir?” Dowling asked warily. When Elizabeth Custer joined her husband at a posting, she ran their household with a whim of iron.

Custer coughed a couple of times. “This once, Lieutenant Colonel, I’d like you to take care of it. Libbie is a marvelous woman—God never made a finer—but she does have a habit of hiring sour, dried-up sticks with whom I have a certain amount of trouble getting on well. I was hoping you might find a capable woman of cheerier disposition.”

“I see.” And Dowling did. Libbie Custer hired housekeepers in whom her husband could have no possible interest. That was only common sense on her part, for Custer did have an eye for a pretty woman. Whether anything more than an eye still functioned at his age, Dowling did not know. He didn’t want to find out, either. Now that Custer had a real command again, he didn’t need some pretty young popsy distracting him.

And Dowling didn’t want to anger Custer’s wife. Libbie made a far more vindictive, far more implacable foe than her husband ever dreamt of being. If Dowling hired Custer a popsy, she would not be pleased with him.

He had his own coughing fit. “Sir,” he said, “I really do think that’s something best left to Mrs. Custer’s judgment.”

“Fiddlesticks!” Custer said. “You handled such arrangements for me plenty of times during the war. Once more won’t hurt you a bit.”

“Whenever your wife was with you, though, sir, she did prefer to keep such matters in her own hands,” Dowling said. “I wouldn’t care for her to think I was encroaching on her privileges.”

“You’re not helping, Lieutenant Colonel,” Custer said irritably.

Dowling stood mute. If Custer ordered him to choose a housekeeper, he resolved to find the general the homeliest old crone he could.
Let’s see you ask me to do something like that again,
he thought.

But Custer gave no such order. Instead, he let out a long, wheezy sigh. “Here I am, in command of all of Canada,” he said, “and I find I’m not even in command of my own household.” Dowling wondered how many other famous generals had been defeated by their wives. A good many, was his guess, and he did not think that guess likely to be far wrong.

Scipio was in love, and wondered why in God’s name he’d never been in love before. The best answer he could come up with—and he knew it was nowhere near good enough—was that he’d always been too busy. First, he’d had an education forcibly crammed down his throat. Then he’d been butler at Marshlands, which under Anne Colleton was a job to keep any four men hopping. And after that, he’d been swept up into the affairs of the Congaree Socialist Republic.

Now…Now, as far as anybody in Augusta, Georgia, knew, he was Xerxes the waiter, an ordinary fellow who did his job and didn’t give anybody any trouble. And Bathsheba, he was sure, was the most marvelous creature God had seen fit to set on the face of the earth.

He’d never had any trouble finding a woman to bed when he wanted one. But he’d never understood the difference between making love and being in love, not till now. He stroked Bathsheba’s cheek as they lay side by side on the narrow bed in his furnished room. “I is the most luckiest man in the whole wide world,” he said—no originality, but great sincerity.

She leaned over and kissed him. “And you are the kindliest man,” she said. No one had ever called Scipio anything like that before. He hadn’t had many chances to be kindly, either. Now that he did, he was doing his best to make the most of them.

Bathsheba got out of bed and started to dress for the trip back across the hall to her room. “Don’t want you to go,” Scipio said.

“I got to,” she answered. “Got to go clean for the white folks tomorrow mornin’. The work don’t never go away.”

He knew that. Among the reasons he loved Bathsheba was the solid core of sense he’d found in her. It wasn’t that he wanted to make love with her again that made him want her to stay. Since he’d reached his forties, second rounds didn’t seem so urgent as they once had. But he enjoyed talking with her more than with anyone else he’d ever met.

He wished he could recite some of the love poetry he’d learned. The only way he knew it, though, was in the educated white man’s accent he’d been made to acquire. Using that accent might—no, would—make her ask questions he couldn’t afford to answer.

That was the one fly in the ointment of his happiness: everything he said about his past had to be either vague or a lie. Even the name by which she knew him was false. He counted himself lucky that he quickly got used to the aliases under which he protected his real identity. Back in South Carolina, reward posters with his true name on them still hung in post offices and police and sheriff’s stations. Some might even have come into Georgia, though he’d never seen one in Augusta.

As if to flick him on that wound of secrecy, Bathsheba said, “One of these days, I’m gonna know all about you—everything there is to know. And do you know what else? I’m gonna like every bit of it, too.”

“I already likes everything there is to know ’bout you,” Scipio said, and her eyes glowed. As for him, he was glad of the butler’s training that let him think one thing and say another without giving any hint of what was going on behind the expressions he donned like convenient masks.

Bathsheba leaned down over the bed and gave him another kiss. “See you tomorrow night,” she said, her voice rich with promise. Then she was gone, gently closing the door behind her.

Scipio rose and put on a light cotton nightshirt. In Augusta in early summer, no one wanted anything more. He picked up a fan of woven straw. He wished the roominghouse had electricity: he would have bought an electric fan and aimed it at the bed as he slept. It got every bit as hot and oppressive here as it did over by the Congaree. He’d heard it got even worse down in Savannah. He found that hard to believe, but you never could tell.

His cheap alarm clock jangled him awake the next morning. He yawned, got out of bed, and started getting dressed. He had his white shirt halfway buttoned before his eyes really came open. Bathsheba’s door was closed when he left his room, and everything quiet within her place. She got up earlier than he did, to cram the most work she could into a day.

The fry joint where he worked didn’t serve breakfast. He got eggs and grits and coffee at a place that did, and paid for them with a $500 banknote. “Need another hundred on top o’ that,” the black man behind the counter said.

With a grimace, Scipio peeled off another banknote and gave it to him. “Be a thousand tomorrow, I reckons,” he said.

After considering, the counterman shook his head. “Not till next week, I don’t think,” he answered seriously.

Despite those serious tones, it was funny in a macabre way. Every day, Confederate paper dollars bought less and less. Scipio had just put down six hundred of them on a cheap breakfast. If it was a thousand tomorrow, or a thousand next week at the latest, so what? The printing presses would run off more banknotes with more zeros on them, and another cycle would begin.

The good, sweet smell of baking cornbread filled Scipio’s nostrils when he went into Erasmus’ fish store and restaurant. The grizzled Negro who ran the place nodded to him and said, “Mornin’.”

“Mornin’,” Scipio answered. He grabbed a broom and dustpan and started sweeping the floor. He kept his furnished room as neat as he could, and he did the same here, even though Erasmus had given him no such duty.

Erasmus watched him now as he plied the broom. The cook rarely said anything about it. Maybe he didn’t know what to make of it. Maybe he was afraid that, if he said anything, Scipio would quit doing it.

A couple of minutes later, Erasmus took the pan of cornbread out of the oven and set it on the counter to cool. Then he said, “Make sure nobody steal the store, Xerxes. I’m gonna git us fish fo’ today. The ice man come before I git back, put it in the trays there like you know how to do.”

“I takes care of it,” Scipio promised.

Erasmus, by now, had good reason to know his promises were reliable. He headed out the door. A fat bankroll made a bulge in his hip pocket. The roll would be considerably thinner after he came back from the riverside fish market. He’d get good value for the money he spent, though. Even in these times of runaway prices, he always did.

Off he went. Left behind to his own devices, Scipio went right on cleaning. The ice man did come in. Scipio stuck some of the slabs of ice in the display trays and put the rest in the damp sawdust underneath those trays so it wouldn’t melt before it was needed. Then he got a hammer and an ice pick and began to break up the ice in the trays from slabs to glistening chunks.

By the time he’d finished dealing with the ice, Scipio wasn’t hot any more. His teeth chattered, and he could barely feel his fingers. He wondered if that was what living through a winter up in the USA felt like. He doubted he’d ever find out.

He didn’t stay cold for long. Nothing could stay cold very long, not in that weather. He took a little chunk of cracked ice and dropped it down the back of his shirt. It made him squirm and felt good at the same time.

Erasmus came back with a burlap bag slung over his shoulder. He grunted when he saw the ice in the trays. “Come on,” he said to Scipio. “Got to clean us these here fish.”

He did most of the cleaning himself. He’d long since seen that Scipio knew how, but he was an artist with the knife; had he had a fancy education, he might have made a surgeon instead of a fry cook. Scipio carried fish and set them on ice. He also carried pink, bloody fish guts out to the alley in back of the shop and flung them into a battered iron trash can. He always hosed the can out right after the refuse collectors emptied it. It still stank of stale fish. Flies buzzed around it. Flies buzzed everywhere in Augusta when the weather was warm.

People knew when Erasmus would be getting back with his fish. Within fifteen minutes of his return, housewives started coming in to buy for their husbands and families. When Scipio first started working there, they’d viewed him with suspicion, as people had a way of viewing anyone or anything new with suspicion. By now, they took him for granted.

One woman, carrying away a couple of catfish wrapped in old newspapers, turned back and said to Erasmus, “That Xerxes, he jew me down better’n you ever could, old man.”

“It ain’t so hard these days, not with money so crazy ain’t nobody knows what nothin’ supposed to cost,” Erasmus answered. The woman took her fish and departed. Scipio glanced over to his boss, wondering if her comments had annoyed him. Erasmus gave no sign of that; catching Scipio’s eye, he grinned at him, as if to say the housewife had paid him a compliment.

Business picked up as noon approached. Men started coming in and having their fish fried in the shop for dinner. Erasmus fried potatoes to go with them, too, and a big pot of greens never seemed to go off the stove. A man could leave the table hungry, but it wasn’t easy.

And how the money flowed in! Hundred-dollar banknotes, five hundreds, thousands, even a ten-thousand now and then—Scipio felt like a bank cashier as he made change. He would have felt even more like a bank cashier and less like a poor Negro if he hadn’t been making $40,000 a week himself. Next week, Erasmus would probably give him fifty or sixty or seventy. However much it was, it would keep food in his belly and a roof over his head, and it wouldn’t go a great deal further than that.

One more reason to marry Bathsheba as soon as he could was that then they’d need only one roof over their two heads, and save the cost of the second—not that anyone could save anything much with prices as mad as they were.

Trouble started about half past twelve. The first hint of it Scipio got was an angry shout from not far away: “Freedom!” A moment later, it came again, from a lot of throats: “Freedom!”

“They’s buckra!” Scipio exclaimed. “Why fo’ buckra come into de Terry carryin’ on like dat?”

“Don’t know.” Erasmus tucked a knife into his belt. “Don’t much fancy the notion, neither. They ain’t got no business in this part o’ town.”

Whether they had business or not, here they came, straight up the street past the café: a dozen or so white men, all of them in white shirts and butternut trousers. “Freedom!” they shouted, again and again. As they shouted, they knocked down any Negro in their path, man, woman, or child.

“What we do ’bout dat?” Scipio said. “What
can
we do ’bout dat? I know they’s white folks, but they got no call to do nothin’ like that. You reckon yellin’ fo’ the police do any good, Erasmus?”

Erasmus shook his gray head. “Not likely. Two-three of them fellas, they
was
the police.” Scipio thought about that for a little while. He thought he’d escaped terror for good when he’d got free from the last wreck of the Congaree Socialist Republic. Now he discovered he’d been wrong.

“I never thought I’d live to see the day,” Sam Carsten said as the USS
Remembrance
steamed through St. George’s Channel. If he looked to starboard, he could see England—no, Wales. Ireland lay to port.

George Moerlein nodded. “I know what you mean,” he said. “Pretty damn crazy, us paying a courtesy call in Dublin harbor.”

“Only way a U.S. warship would’ve been able to get into Dublin harbor before the war or during it would’ve been to kick its way in,” Sam agreed. “Of course, Ireland belonged to the limeys then, and we weren’t exactly welcome visitors.”

“Well, we are now,” Moerlein said. “And if England doesn’t like it, let her try and start something. She’ll get the idea pretty damn quick after we give her a good boot in the ass.”

Despite that bravado, he looked east more than a little nervously. The Royal Navy had been beaten in the Great War, but it hadn’t been crushed. England hadn’t been crushed, not the way the Confederate States and France had been. He had no doubt the USA and the German Empire could crush her if they had to. He also had no doubt they’d know they’d been in a scrap by the time they were through.

A destroyer flying a green-white-orange flag with a harp in the middle of the white led the way for the
Remembrance
. The destroyer had started life as a U.S. four-stacker; dozens much like her had gone into the water during the Great War. Her crew consisted of Irishmen who’d begun their careers in the Royal Navy. Men like that, thousands of them, formed the basis for the Irish Navy.

“I hope they’ve got a good pilot up there,” Carsten said. A moment later, he added, “I hope he’s got good charts, too.” A moment later still, he made another addendum: “I hope none of the mines from the fields are drifting loose through the Irish Sea.”

He thought that covered everything, but his buddy showed him he was wrong. “As long as you’re doing all that hoping, hope the limeys haven’t snuck out and planted a few of those little bastards right in our path,” George Moerlein said.

“That wouldn’t be very nice of them, would it?” Sam grimaced. “And they could always say something like, ‘Oh, we’re very sorry—we didn’t have any notion that one was there.’ How would anybody prove anything different?”

“You couldn’t,” Moerlein said. “You wouldn’t have a prayer of doing it. Of course, the good thing is that Teddy Roosevelt wouldn’t need any proof. If we come to grief here, he’ll make England pay. The limeys have to know it, too. I don’t think they’ll get gay with us.”