Blood and Iron (62 page)

She’d been in his mind for five years. Now he was in hers. “What the hell am I going to do?” he muttered. “What the
hell
am I going to do?” His tongue found that chipped tooth again. He got very little work done the rest of the day.

Scipio hardly thought of himself by the name he’d been born with these days. His passbook called him Xerxes. His boss called him Xerxes. His friends called him Xerxes. Most important of all, his wife called him Xerxes. Bathsheba had no idea he’d ever owned another name.

Bathsheba knew very little about his life before he’d come to Augusta. One day, she asked him point-blank: “Why don’t you never come out an’ say where you was from and what you was doin’ when you was there?”

He wondered how she’d react if he answered her in the accent of an educated white, the accent he’d had to use while serving Anne Colleton at Marshlands. He didn’t dare find out. He didn’t dare tell her of his days on the plantation, or of the blood-soaked time in the Congaree Socialist Republic that had followed. As long as only he knew, he was safe. If anyone else found out—anyone—he was in trouble.

And so he answered as he usually did: “I done what I done, is all. Never done nothin’ much.” He tried to soften her with a smile. “You is the best thing I ever done.”

It worked—to a degree. Eyes glinting, Bathsheba said, “I bet you done ran away from a wife an’ about six children.”

Solemnly, Scipio shook his head. “No, ma’am. Done run away from three wives an’ fo’ teen chilluns.”

Bathsheba stared. For a moment, she believed him. Then, when he started to laugh, she stuck out her tongue. “You are the most aggravatin’ man in the whole world. Why won’t you never give me no straight answers?”

Because if I did, I might end up standing against a wall with a blindfold on my face. I wonder if they would waste a cigarette on a nigger before they shot him.
As usual, he heard his thoughts in the educated dialect he’d been made to learn. He sighed. That was a straight answer, but not one he could give Bathsheba. He tried jollying her once more instead. Batting his eyes, he said, “I gots to have some secrets.”

His wife snorted and threw her hands in the air. “All right,” she said. “All right. I give up. Maybe you done crawled out from under a cabbage leaf, like folks tell the pickaninnies when they’re too little to know about screwin’.”

“Mebbe so,” Scipio said with a chuckle. “My mama never tol’ me no different, anyways. Don’t matter where I comes from, though. Where I’s goin’ is what count.”

Bathsheba snorted again. “And where you goin’?”

“Right now, sweet thing, I believe I’s goin’ to bed.” Scipio yawned.

In bed, in the darkness, Bathsheba grew serious again. “When the Reds rose up, what did you do then?” She asked the question in a tiny whisper. Unlike so many she’d asked earlier in the evening, she knew that one was dangerous.

But she didn’t know how dangerous it was. Scipio answered it seriously without going into much detail: “Same as mos’ folks, I reckons. I done my bes’ to hide a lot o’ the time. When de buckra come with the guns, I make like I was a good nigger for they, an’ they don’ shoot me. Wish the whole ruction never happen. Do Jesus! I wish the whole ruction never happen.” There he told the complete truth. He set a hand on her shoulder. “What you do?” If she was talking about herself, she couldn’t ask about him.

He felt her shrug. “Wasn’t so much to do here. A couple-three days when folks done rioted and stole whatever they could git away with, but then the white folks brung so many police and sojers into the Terry, nobody dared stick a nose out the door for a while, or they’d shoot it off you.”

“Damn foolishness. Nothin’ but damn foolishness,” Scipio said. “Shouldn’t never’ve riz up. The buckra, they’s stronger’n we. I hates it, but I ain’t blind. If we makes they hate we, we’s sunk.”

Bathsheba didn’t say anything for a while. Then she spoke two words: “Jake Featherston.” She shivered, though the February night was mild.

Scipio took her in his arms, as much to keep himself from being afraid as to make her less so. “Jake Featherston,” he echoed quietly. “All the buckra in the Freedom Party hates we. They hates we bad. An’one white man out o’ every three, near ’nough, vote fo’ Jake Featherston las’ year. Six year down de road, he be president o’ de Confederate States?”

“Pray to Jesus he ain’t,” Bathsheba said. Scipio nodded. He’d been able to pray when he was a child; he remembered as much. He wished he still could. Most of the ability had leached out of him during the years he’d served Anne Colleton. The Marxist rhetoric of the Reds with whom he’d associated during the war had taken the rest. Marx’s words weren’t gospel to him, as they had been to Cassius and Cherry and Island and the rest. Still, the philosopher had some strong arguments on his side.

Outside, rain started tapping against the bedroom window. That was a good sound, one Scipio heard several times a week. He wished he hadn’t been thinking about the Red rebellion and the Freedom Party tonight. He couldn’t find any other reason why the raindrops sounded like distant machine-gun fire.

“The Freedom Party ever elect themselves a president, what we do?” Bathsheba asked. Maybe she was having trouble praying, too.

“Dunno,” Scipio answered. “Maybe we gots to rise up again.” That was a forlorn hope, and he knew it. All the reasons he’d spelled out for the failure of the last black revolt would hold in the next one, too. “Maybe we gots to run away instead.”

“Where we run to?” his wife asked.

“Ain’t got but two choices,” Scipio said: “the USA an’ Mexico.” He laughed, not that he’d said anything funny. “An’the Mexicans don’t want we, an’ the damnyankees
really
don’t want we.”

“You know all kinds of things,” Bathsheba said. “How come you know so many different kinds of things?”

It wasn’t what he’d said, which was a commonplace, but the way he’d said it; he had, sometimes, a manner that brooked no contradiction. Butlers were supposed to be infallible. That he could sound infallible even using the Congaree dialect, a dialect of ignorance if ever there was one, spoke well of his own force of character.

“I knows what’s so,” he said, “an’ I knows what ain’t.” He slid his hand under the hem of Bathsheba’s nightgown, which had ridden up a good deal after she got into bed. His palm glided along the soft cotton of her drawers, heading upwards. “An’ I knows what I likes, too.”

“What’s that?” Bathsheba asked, but her legs drifted apart to make it easier for his hand to reach their joining, so she must have had some idea.

Afterwards, lazy and sated and drifting toward sleep, Scipio realized he’d found the best way to keep her from asking too many questions. He wished he were ten years younger, so he might use it more often. Chuckling at the conceit, he dozed off. Bathsheba was already snoring beside him.

The alarm clock gave them both a rude awakening. Scipio made coffee while Bathsheba cooked breakfast. Erasmus trusted Scipio with the coffeepot, but not with anything more. Scipio occasionally resented that; he could cook, in a rough and ready way. But both Erasmus and Bathsheba were better at it than he was.

When he got to Erasmus’ fish market and fry joint, he found the gray-haired proprietor uncharacteristically subdued. Erasmus was never a raucous man; now he seemed to have pulled into himself almost like a turtle pulling its head back into its shell. Not until Scipio pulled out the broom and dustpan for his usual morning sweep-up did his boss speak, and then only to say, “Don’t bother.”

Scipio blinked. Erasmus had never encouraged him to keep the place tidy, but he’d never told him not to do it, either. “Somethin’ troublin’ you?” Scipio asked, expecting Erasmus to shake his head or come back with one of the wry gibes that proved him clever despite a lack of education.

But the cook and fish dealer nodded instead. “You might say so. Yeah, you just might say so.”

“Kin I do anything to he’p?” Scipio asked. He wondered if his boss had been to a doctor and got bad news.

Now Erasmus shook his head. “Ain’t nothin’ you can do,” he answered, which made Scipio think he’d made a good guess. Erasmus continued, “You might want to start sniffin’ around for a new place to work. I be goddamned if I know how much longer I can keep this here place open.”

“Do Jesus!” Scipio exclaimed. “Ain’t nothin’
a
-tall the doctor kin do?”

“What you say?” Erasmus looked puzzled. Then his face cleared. “I ain’t sick, Xerxes. Sick an’ tired, oh yes. Sick an’ disgusted, oh my yes. But I ain’t sick, not like you mean.” He hesitated, then added, “Sick o’white folks, is what I is.”

“All o’we is sick o’ the buckra,” Scipio said. “What they do, make you sick this time?”

“After you go home las’night, these four-five white men come in here,” Erasmus said. “They tell me they’s puttin’ a special tax on all the niggers what owns business in the Terry here. Now I know the laws. I got to know the laws, else I find even more trouble’n a nigger’s supposed to have. An’ I tell these fellers, ain’t no such thing as no special tax on nigger businesses.”

Scipio had the bad feeling he knew what was coming. He asked, “These here buckra, they Freedom Party men?”

“I don’t know yes and I don’t know no, not to swear,” Erasmus answered. “But I bet they is. One of ’em smile this mean, chilly smile, an’ he say, ‘There is now.’ Any nigger don’t pay this tax, bad things gwine happen to where he work. He still don’t pay, bad things gwine happen to him. I seen a deal o’ men in my day, Xerxes. Don’t reckon this here feller was lyin’.”

“What you do?” Scipio said.

Erasmus looked old and beaten. “Can’t hardly go to the police, now can I? Nigger complain about white folks, they lock him in jail an’ lose the key. Likely tell they beat him up, too, long as he there. Can’t hardly pay this here tax, neither. I ain’t gettin’ rich here. Bastards want to squeeze a million dollars out of every three million I make. That don’t leave no money for me, an’ it sure as hell don’t leave no money to pay no help. You work good, Lord knows. But I don’t reckon I can keep you.”

“Maybe you kin go to the police,” Scipio said slowly. “Freedom Party done lose the election.”

“Came too close to winning,” Erasmus said, the first time he’d ever said anything like that. “An’ besides, you know same as I do, half the police, maybe better’n half, spend their days off yellin’ ‘Freedom!’ loud as they can.”

It was true. Every word of it was true. Scipio wished he could deny it. He’d been comfortable for a while, comfortable and happy. As long as he had Bathsheba, he figured he could stay happy. If he lost this job, how long would he need to get comfortable again? He hoped he wouldn’t have to find out.

Abner Dowling went into General Custer’s office. The commander of U.S. forces in Canada was scribbling changes on a report Dowling had typed. Some of them, Dowling saw, reversed changes he’d made in an earlier report. Usually, that would have infuriated Custer’s adjutant—not that Dowling could do anything about it. Today, though, he felt uncommon sympathy for his vain, irascible superior.

“Sir?” he said. Custer didn’t look up. Maybe he didn’t hear. Maybe he didn’t want to hear. Dowling could hardly have blamed him were that so. But he had to make Custer notice him. “Sir!”

“Eh?” With surprise perhaps genuine, perhaps well feigned, Custer shoved the papers aside. “What is it, Dowling?”

Either he’d entered his second childhood the night before or he knew perfectly well what it was. Dowling didn’t think senility had overcome the old coot as suddenly as that. He said, “Sir, Mr. Thomas is here to see you. He’s from the War Department.” He added that last in case Custer
had
gone around the bend in the past twenty-four hours.

Custer sighed, his wrinkled features drooping. He knew what that meant, all right. “No reprieve, eh?” he asked, like a prisoner who would hang in the morning if the governor didn’t wire. Dowling shook his head. Custer sighed again. “Very well, Lieutenant Colonel. Bring him in. If you care to, you may stay and listen. This will affect you, too.”

“Thank you, sir. By your leave, I will do that.” Dowling tried to recall the last time Custer had been so considerate. He couldn’t. He went out to the anteroom and said, “Mr. Thomas, General Custer will see you now.”

“Good.” N. Mattoon Thomas got to his feet. He was a tall, long-faced man in his late thirties, and looked more like a preacher than Upton Sinclair’s assistant secretary of war. He walked with a slight limp; Dowling knew he’d taken a machine-gun bullet in the leg during the Great War.

When they’d gone down the short hallway to Custer’s sanctum, Dowling said, “Mr. Thomas, I have the honor to present to you General George Custer. General, the assistant secretary of war.” Being one of the civilians overseeing the Army, Thomas took precedence over Custer in the introductions.

“Pleased to meet you, sir,” Custer said: a palpable lie. He waved to the chair in front of his desk. “Please—sit down. Make yourself comfortable.” As Thomas did so, Abner Dowling also took a seat. He tried to be unobtrusive, which wasn’t easy with his bulk. N. Mattoon Thomas’ blue eyes flicked his way, but the assistant secretary of war only nodded, accepting his presence.

Custer would have said something more then, but the words seemed stuck in his throat. He sent Dowling a look of appeal, but it wasn’t Dowling’s place to speak. He was here only as an overweight fly on the wall.

Before the silence could grow too awkward, Thomas broke it, saying, “General, I wish to convey to you at the outset President Sinclair’s sincere appreciation for the excellent service you have given your country in this difficult and important post.”

“That’s kind of him,” Custer said. “Very kind of him. I’m honored to have him send someone to deliver such a generous message in person. You came a long way to do it, sir, and I’m grateful.”

He was going to be difficult. Dowling would have bet he’d be difficult, but hadn’t looked for him to be quite so gracefully difficult. Maybe Libbie had coached him. She was even better at being difficult than her husband.

N. Mattoon Thomas gave him the look of a preacher who’d had the collection plate come back with thirty-seven cents and a subway token on it. “In view of your long career in the U.S. Army, General, the president feels it is time for you to come home to well-deserved thanks and to rest on your laurels hereafter,” he said.

“Mr. Thomas, I have no desire to rest on my laurels,” Custer replied. “I am as hale and spry as a man of my years can be, and I do not believe those years have adversely affected my ability to reason clearly and to issue appropriate orders. I have been in the saddle a long time. I should like to continue.”

“I am afraid I must remind you, General, that you serve at the pleasure of the president of the United States.” Thomas was less than half Custer’s age. But he had the power in this situation, and also had the ruthlessness that came naturally to many young men given power over their elders.

Dowling saw that, and pitied Custer. Custer saw it, too, and grew angry. He dropped his polite mask as if he’d never donned it. “Christ, I despise the notion of taking orders from that Socialist pipsqueak,” he growled.

“Which is one reason the president takes a certain pleasure in giving them to you,” Thomas replied easily. “Would you prefer to retire, General, or to be sacked? Those are your only choices now.”

“Teddy Roosevelt could sack me and not worry about what happened next,” Custer said. “He was a soldier himself—not so good a soldier as he thought he was, but a soldier nonetheless. President Sinclair will have a harder time of it: the papers will hound him for months if he dismisses me, for he has not the prestige, the authority—call it what you like—to do so without reminding people of his own inexperience in such matters.”

That all made excellent political sense to Abner Dowling. Custer the political animal had always been far more astute than Custer the soldier. Dowling glanced toward Thomas, wondering how Upton Sinclair’s assistant secretary of war would take such defiance.

It fazed him not at all. He said, “General Custer, the president predicted you would say something to that effect. He told me to assure you he was determined to seek your replacement, and that he would dismiss you out of hand if you offered difficulties. Here is his letter to you, which he instructed me to give you if it proved necessary.” Thomas reached into his breast pocket and took out an envelope, which he passed across the desk to Custer.

The commandant of U.S. forces in Canada had taken off his reading glasses when Thomas came in. Now he put them back on. He opened the envelope, which was not sealed, and drew forth the letter inside. It must have been what Thomas said it was, for his cheeks flushed with rage as he read.

“Why, the arrogant puppy!” he burst out when he was through. “I saved the country from the limeys when he was still making messes in his drawers, and he has the impudence to write a letter like this? I ought to let him sack me, by jingo! I can’t think of anything else likely to do the Socialists more political harm.”

“General—” Dowling began. Custer had a large—indeed, an enormous—sense of his own importance. Much of that was justified. Not all of it was, a fact to which he sometimes proved blind.

N. Mattoon Thomas held up a large, long-fingered hand. “Let General Custer decide as he will, Lieutenant Colonel,” he said. “If he prefers being ignominiously flung out of the Army he has served so well for so long to being allowed to retire and to celebrate his achievements as they deserve, that is his privilege.”

Dowling sucked in a long breath. President Sinclair had sent the right man up to Winnipeg to do this job. Thomas could be smooth, but under that smoothness he had steel, sharp steel. Dowling had not realized it till that moment. Like so many professional soldiers, he’d assumed any Socialist had to be soft.

Custer, evidently, had assumed the same thing. Hearing the cool contempt in Thomas’voice, he was discovering he’d made a mistake. He could hardly have looked more horrified. “Mr. Thomas…” he began.

“Yes, General?” Once again, Thomas was the picture of urbanity.

“Perhaps I was a mite hasty, Mr. Thomas,” Custer said. He’d never willingly retreated in battle, but he was backpedaling now.

“Perhaps you were.” The assistant secretary of war let the slightest hint of scorn show in his agreement. Dowling eyed him with respect verging on alarm. He was a formidable piece of work, was N. Mattoon Thomas.

“Could—Could we arrange it so that I need not retire immediately?” Custer asked. Now he was grasping at straws. Soldiers in the USA had political power only when politicians chose to acknowledge it. By refusing to do that, Sinclair and Thomas left Custer nowhere to stand.

And Thomas, now that he’d won, was willing to let Custer have a straw. “We could indeed,” he said. “President Sinclair has instructed me that your retirement may take effect as late as the first of August—provided you give me a letter announcing your intention to retire before I leave this room.”

“Damn you,” Custer muttered. Thomas pretended not to hear. Dowling knew he was pretending, because he himself had no trouble hearing at all. The general pulled a piece of paper from a desk drawer and wrote rapidly—and furiously, if the way the pen scratched over the paper gave any clue. When he was done, he thrust the sheet at Thomas. “There!”

The assistant secretary of war read it carefully before nodding. “Yes, this appears to be satisfactory,” he said. “I will announce it directly on my return to Philadelphia.” He folded it and put it into the envelope in which he’d brought President Sinclair’s letter to Custer. “And, now that the retirement is in order, you may, as I said before, mark it in any way you like. If you want to stop at every town between here and the U.S. border and parade through it with a brass band, go right ahead. When you reach Philadelphia, the president will lead the cheers for you.”

“Of course he will—it’ll make him look good.” Now that the deed was done, Custer bounced back fast. He leaned forward across the desk toward N. Mattoon Thomas. “And I’ll tell you why he won’t let me retire after August first, either—because he knows damn well it’ll raise a stink, and he wants to make sure the stink dies down before the Congressional elections this fall.”

“It could be,” Thomas answered. “I’m not saying it is, mind you, but it could be.” He got to his feet. “Whether it is or not, though, is neither here nor there. No, no need to escort me out, Lieutenant Colonel Dowling. Now that I have what I came for, my driver will take me back to the train station, and then I can return to my duties in Philadelphia. A very good day to you both, gentlemen.” Away he went, young, confident, powerful.

George Custer let out a long sigh. “Well, Dowling, I think it may at last be just about over. I squeezed a couple of more years of active duty out of Teddy Roosevelt, and got what I really wanted from him, too, but you can’t win all the time.”

“There can’t be many who had a longer run, sir,” Dowling answered. He did his best to sound consoling while he wondered what his own career would look like once he finally got free of Custer.

He’d said the right thing. Custer nodded. “Only one I can think of is Wilhelm I, Kaiser Bill’s grandfather. He fought under Napoleon—imagine it!—and he was still German Kaiser when I licked Gordon in 1881, and for six or seven more years after that, too. He was up over ninety when he finally gave up the ghost.”

“That’s…quite something, sir.” Dowling could easily imagine Custer up over ninety. He wouldn’t go till they came and dragged him away—and neither would Libbie, come to that.

And now Custer was scheming again. “A brass band in every town, that damn Red told me,” he said. “I’ll take him up on it, too—and if he thinks I aim to head straight south for the border from here, he can damn well think again, and so can Upton goddamn Sinclair. I aim to have the bulliest farewell tour in the history of the world.”

“Yes, sir,” Dowling said, knowing full well who would have to plan that tour.

“A good morning to you, Arthur,” Wilfred Rokeby said as Arthur McGregor walked into the post office in Rosenfeld, Manitoba.

“Morning to you, too, Wilf,” McGregor answered. He thrust a hand into the pocket of his overalls. Coins jingled. “Need to buy a mess of stamps.”

“That’s what I’m here for,” Rokeby said. “This have to do with Julia and Ted Culligan? Congratulations. I expect they’ll be happy together.”

“Hope so,” McGregor said. “The Culligans are nice folks, and Julia’s so happy, she thinks she invented Ted. If she still feels that way ten years from now, they’ll have done it up right. For now, though, Maude and me, we’ve got invitations to write.”

“You can have some of your kinfolk come out here for a change,” Rokeby said, “instead of you going back to Ontario.”

“That’s right,” McGregor said. Since he hadn’t been in Ontario as Rokeby thought, that was liable to get awkward, but he figured he could slide through it. And he wasn’t about to give the postmaster any hint that he’d actually been in Winnipeg. He didn’t think Wilf Rokeby told the Yanks things they didn’t need to know, but he didn’t want to find out he was wrong the hard way.

He bought a dollar’s worth of stamps, about as many as he’d bought at one crack in his life. “Thank you kindly,” Wilfred Rokeby said. Maybe because McGregor had been such a good customer, he slid a copy of the
Rosenfeld Register
across the counter to him. “You can have this, too, if you like. I’m done with it.”

“Thanks, Wilf. That’s nice of you.” Because an American was putting out the new
Register
, McGregor didn’t like to buy it. He’d read it, though, if he got the chance. As it had in the old days, the
Register
reserved the top right part of the front page for important news from out of town. The headline leaped out at McGregor. He pointed to it. “So Custer’s finally going back to the USA, is he? Good riddance.” He didn’t mind saying that to the postmaster; most Canadians would likely have said worse.