Breakthroughs (32 page)

Scipio snorted. “Don’ tell me you believes we gwine lick they any day now, an’ we jus’ fallin’ back to fool they. De papers prints de lies like that to keep de stupid buckra happy.”

“I knows it,” Cassius answered calmly. “De lies makes de buckra mo’ and mo’ stupid, too. But, Kip, you gots to recollect—de Congaree Socialist Republic ain’t at war wid de United States. The Confederate States, they is at war, but you ain’t no Confederate citizen, now is you? Never was, ain’t, never gwine be. This here the onliest country you gots, Kip.”

Instead of answering, Scipio buried his nose in the newspaper again. He did not trust himself to keep from saying what he really thought if he spoke at all. Since he would surely be shot the moment he did, shot and tossed in the river like catfish guts, he thought silence the wiser course.

A country! A country of mud and weeds and muddy water and stinks and furtive skulking and shells falling out of the sky whenever the militia managed to lay their hands on some ammunition. A country surrounded by a real country intent on wiping it from the face of the earth. A country that existed more in Cassius’ imagination than in the real world.

“We is the free mens,” Cassius said. “The ’pressors o’ de world got no power here.” Methodically, he gutted another fish.

Cherry came striding up in her tattered trousers. She moved like a free woman, or perhaps more like a catamount, graceful and dangerous at the same time. Scipio could readily understand how she’d enthralled Jacob Colleton. She didn’t just smolder. She blazed.

Now she squatted down beside Cassius and said, “What you think o’ dis story Vipsy bring back from Marshlands?”

“Woman, you knows what I thinks,” Cassius answered impatiently. “I thinks Miss Anne bait a trap fo’ we. I thinks I ain’t gwine be foolish enough to put this here head”—he tapped it, almost as if to suggest he had another one stored somewhere not far away—“in de noose.”

Cherry’s lips skinned back from her white teeth in a hungry smile. “But if it so, Cass, if it so an’ we can git our hands on de treasure—”

“But it ain’t, an’ you knows it ain’t, same as I knows it ain’t,” Cassius said, his voice still good-natured, but with iron underneath.

“How you know that for a fac’?” Cherry demanded. “You was a hunter. You wasn’t into the mansion all de time, no more’n me.”

Cassius pointed at Scipio, as Scipio had known he would. “Dis nigger here, he know if anybody do. Kip, you tell Cherry what you done tol’ her before. See if maybe she listen dis time, damn stubborn gal.”

Scipio found himself longing for the polite, precise formality of the English he’d spoken as Anne Colleton’s butler. He could have disagreed without offending much more readily in that dialect than in the speech of the Congaree. “Cassius, he right,” he said, as placatingly as he could—he might have been more afraid of Cherry than of Cassius. “Ain’t no treasure.”

“How you know dat?” Cherry snapped. “How
kin
you know dat? Miss Anne, she one white debbil bit of a ’pressor, but she one
sly
white debbil bitch, too. Couldn’t never git away from we las’ Christmas, she weren’t one sly white debbil bitch.”

In the other English, the English he spoke no more, Scipio would have talked about probabilities, and about the impossibility of proving a negative. He could not do that in the dialect of the Congaree. Instead, at last losing his temper, he answered, “I knows Miss Anne’s business better’n any other Marshlands nigger, and I says there ain’t no treasure. You wants to go lookin’ fo’ what ain’t dere, go on ahead. An’ if de buckra wid de guns blows yo’ stupid head off ’cause they layin’ fo’ you like you was a deer, don’ you come back here cryin’ afterwards.”

Cherry’s eyes blazed. Her high cheekbones and narrow, delicate chin told of Indian blood; now she looked as if she wanted to take Scipio’s scalp. Her voice was deadly: “An’ when I comes back wid de money, drag you down an’ cut your balls off—or I would, if I reckoned you gots any.”

“Easy, gal,
easy
,” Cassius said. Sometimes Scipio thought Cherry alarmed the hunter who led the Reds, too. Cherry had not an ounce, not a speck, of give anywhere about her splendidly shaped person. Cassius went on, “You make a man ’fraid to tell you de truth, or what he reckon de truth, sooner o’ later you gwine be sorry you done it.”

Cherry tossed her head in a gesture of magnificent contempt Scipio had seen from her many times before. Pointing to him, she said, “He don’ need me to make he afraid. He wish he was still Miss Anne’s house nigger, still Miss Anne’s lapdog.” She spat on the ground between Scipio’s feet.

Scipio violently shook his head, the more violently because she told nothing but the truth. He’d never wanted anything to do with the revolutionary movement, partly because of a suspicion—an accurate suspicion, as things turned out—the Red revolt would fail, partly because he had indeed been comfortable in the life he was living at Marshlands. He’d always assumed that, if anyone in power among the revolutionaries learned as much, he was a dead man.

But then Cassius said, “I knows dat. We all knows dat. De lap dog like de sof’ pillow an’ de fancy meat in de rubber dish. He cain’t he’p it.”

Right then, Scipio was glad of his dark, dark skin. No one could see the flush that made him feel he was burning up inside. He schooled his features to the impassivity required of a butler.
Let no one know what you are thinking.
He’d had that beaten into him in his training. It served him in good stead now.

Cassius went on, “But Kip, he keep he mouf shut. He don’ never say boo to Miss Anne ’bout we. De proletariat, dey gots nuffing to lose in de revolution. Kip, he gots plenty to lose, an’ he wid us anyways. If dat don’ make he a hero o’ de revolution, you tell me what do.”

Cherry tossed her head again. “Shit, he jus’ too ’fraid to betray we. He know how he pay fo’ dat.”

She was right again. Fortunately for Scipio, Cassius didn’t think so. The hunter said, “He have plenty chances to give we away an’ git away clean, an’ he never done it. He
wid
us, Cherry.”

“He
ain’t
,” Cherry said positively. “Miss Anne spread she legs, he come runnin’ to lick dat pussy wid de yellow hair, same as he always done.”

“Liar!” Scipio shouted now, a mixture of horror, embarrassment, and fury in his voice. Only after that anguished cry passed his lips did he realize she might have been using a metaphor, if a crude one. Part of the embarrassment, he realized with a different kind of horror, was that Anne Colleton
was
beautiful and desirable. But a black man who was found out looking on a white woman with desire in the CSA was as surely dead as one who betrayed the revolutionary movement.

Even Cassius looked distressed. “Enough, Cherry!” he said sharply. “You gots no cause to rip he to pieces dat way.”

“Got plenty cause,” Cherry retorted. “An’ when I comes back with the treasure, Cass, we see who am de gen’l sec’tary o’ de Congaree Socialist Republic after dat.” She stalked off.

Cassius sighed. “Dat one hard woman. Ain’t nobody gwine stop she—she gwine try an’ fin’ dat treasure, an’ it don’t matter if it ain’t there. She try anyways.”

“She gwine get herself killed,” Scipio said. “She gwine get whoever go wid she killed, too.”

“I knows it,” Cassius said unhappily. “I ain’t no fool, an’ I weren’t borned yesterday. But how is I s’posed to stop she? If I shoot she wid my own gun, she dead, too—an’ dat bitch liable to shoot first. I done told her, don’ go. But she don’ listen to what I say.” He sighed again, a leader hard aground on the shoals of leadership. “I brings her up befo’ de revolutionary tribunal, they liable to do like she say, not like I say. Dere some stubborn revolutionary niggers on de tribunal. I oughts to know. I put ’em dere my ownself.”

“Maybe you jus’ let she go, then,” Scipio said. “Maybe you jus’ let she go an’ get herself killed.” His voice turned savage. “Maybe dat jus’ what she deserve.” If he could find a way to get a message to Anne Colleton, letting her know when Cherry was going to try to plunder Marshlands, he would do it, and it would be a true message, too. Letting—helping—one of the women who’d made the past year and a half of his life a nightmare dispose of the other had a sweet ring of poetic justice to it.

But Cassius was watching him with those hunter’s eyes. Somebody was watching him all the time. The surviving revolutionaries did not altogether trust him. They had good reason not to trust him. Casually, as if he weren’t thinking at all, he took from his belt a tin cup that had once belonged to a Confederate soldier now surely dead. He dipped up water from the river and drank. The water tasted of mud, too. Only because he’d grown up in a slave cabin not far away could he drink it without having his guts turn inside out.

Cherry and half a dozen men went treasure hunting the next day. Cassius watched them go with a scowl on his face. If by some accident Vipsy had been telling the truth, if by some accident Miss Anne had done something of which Scipio was ignorant, Cassius’ place at the head of the Congaree Socialist Republic was indeed in danger. Could the Red rebels survive a leadership struggle? Scipio had his doubts.

But Cherry came back after sundown, empty-handed. Scipio had hoped she wouldn’t come back at all. The glower she aimed at him almost made her return worthwhile, though. He concentrated on his bowl of stew—turtle and roots and other things he ate and tried not to think about.

“I knows dat treasure there,” Cherry said. “I’s gwine find it. I ain’t done. Don’t nobody think I’s done.” She glared at Scipio, at Cassius, at everyone but the men who’d followed her. Scipio wore his butler’s mask. Behind it, he kept on trying to figure out how to get a message to Anne Colleton.

Marie Galtier held out a tray loaded with stewed chicken to Dr. Leonard O’Doull. O’Doull held up both hands, palms out, as if warding off attack. “
Merci,
Mme. Galtier, but mercy, too, I beg you,” he said. “One more drumstick and I think I’ll grow feathers.”

Marie sniffed. “I do not see how you could grow feathers when you do not eat enough to keep a bird alive.”

“Mother!” Nicole said reprovingly, and Marie relented.

Dr. O’Doull looked over to Lucien Galtier. “Seeing how she feeds you, it is to me a matter of amazement that you do not weigh three hundred pounds.”

“Our father is very light for his weight,” Georges said before Lucien could answer.

“In the same way that you, my son, are very foolish for your brains,” Galtier said, and managed to feel he had got a draw with his son, if not a win over him.

Serious as usual, Charles Galtier asked, “Is it true,
monsieur le docteur,
that U.S. forces continue their advance against Quebec City?”

“Yes, from what I hear at the hospital, that is true,” Dr. O’Doull told Galtier’s elder son.

“Is it also true that fighting alongside the forces of the United States is a corps from the
soi-disant
Republic of Quebec?” Charles asked.

“Charles…” Lucien murmured warningly. Speaking of it as the so-called Republic of Quebec before an American, one of the people who called it that, was something less than the wisest thing his son might have done.

But Leonard O’Doull, fortunately, took no offense. “Not a corps, certainly, for there are not nearly enough volunteers for a Quebecois corps,” he replied. “But a regiment, perhaps two regiments of Quebecois from the Republic—yes, I know they are in the line, for I have treated some of their wounded, being called upon to do so because I am lucky enough to speak French.”

It was a straightforward, reasonable, matter-of-fact answer. Lucien waited with some anxiety to hear how his son replied to it. If Charles denounced the Republic, life could grow difficult. But Charles said only, “I do not see how Quebecois could volunteer to fight Quebecois.”

“In the War of Secession, brother fought brother in the United States—what was the United States,” O’Doull said. “It is not an easy time when such things happen.”

“But no one outside created the Confederate States,
n’est-ce pas
?” Charles said, doggedly refusing to let go. “They came into being of themselves.”

To Lucien’s relief, his son once more failed to get a rise out of Dr. O’Doull. “Perhaps at the beginning, yes,” the American said, “but England and France have helped prop them up ever since. Now, though, the props begin to totter.”

Charles could have said something like,
Just as the United States prop up the Republic of Quebec
. But O’Doull made it plain he was likely to agree with a statement like that, not argue with it. That took half—more than half—the fun away from making it. To his father’s relief, Charles kept quiet.

After Marie, Nicole, Susanne, Denise, and Jeanne cleared the plates away from the supper table, Lucien got out a bottle of the homemade apple brandy that helped keep nights warm in Quebec. “Is it possible, M. Galtier, that I might talk to you alone?” Dr. O’Doull asked, staring at the pale yellow liquid in the glass in front of him as if he had never seen it before.

Lucien’s head came up alertly. Charles and Georges looked at each other. “Well, I can tell when I am not wanted,” Georges said, and stomped upstairs in exaggerated outrage. Charles said nothing. He simply rose, nodded to O’Doull, and left the dining room.

“And for what purpose is it that you desire to talk to me alone, Dr. O’Doull?” Galtier said, also examining his applejack with a critical eye. He could without much difficulty think of one possible reason.

And that proved to be the reason Dr. Leonard O’Doull had in mind. The American physician took a deep breath, then spoke rapidly: “M. Galtier, I desire to marry your daughter, and I would like your blessing for the match.”

Galtier lifted his glass and knocked back the applejack in one long, fiery gulp. No, O’Doull’s words were not a surprise, but they were a shock nonetheless. Instead of answering straight out in brusque, American fashion, the farmer returned a question: “You have, I take it, had somewhat to say of this matter with Nicole.”

“Oh, yes, I have done that.” Dr. O’Doull’s voice was dry. “I will tell you, sir, she likes the idea if you will give your approval.”