“All right,” Martin said. After bombs and barrels and shell fragments in the trenches, after cops and goons with pistols and clubs, candles struck him as a silly thing to worry about. But his father wasn’t wrong; people and houses did go up in flames every Christmas. Martin supposed that, absent big fears, small ones pushed their way to the fore.
Sue came in while they were still decorating. She scaled her broad-brimmed flowered hat across the room as if it were an aeroplane and said, “I get to put the star on top. After the day I had today, I’ve earned it.”
“What happened today?” Chester asked.
“Everyone wanted everything typed at the same time, and it was all stupid,” his sister answered. “And everyone yelled at me because I couldn’t do sixteen different things at the same time. If half the people in the office would have thought for even a couple of seconds before they started piling stuff onto me, everything would have been fine. But throwing things at me and then yelling their heads off was easier, so they did that instead.”
She took the gilded glass star and impaled it on top of the Christmas tree. Then she glared at her brother and her father, defying them to tell her she had no business getting angry. Chester was not about to take his life in his hands. He said, “Why don’t you go get a bottle of Schmidt’s out of the icebox?”
Sue didn’t usually drink beer. Tonight, she nodded briskly. “I’ll do that. Thank you, Chester.” Off toward the kitchen she went. Chester Martin grinned at Stephen Douglas Martin. He might have been trained as a soldier, but he’d just served the cause of peace.
Scipio seldom saw snow. Because he seldom saw it, he enjoyed it when he did. So did everyone else in Augusta. Pickaninnies made snow angels and threw snowballs. So did their parents. So did their grandparents, some of whom had hair as white as that snow.
Because of the clogged, slippery streets, he got to Erasmus’ later than he should have, and with his hat askew on his head. More and more boys played football Yankee-style these days, which meant more of them threw the ball, which meant they had practice they used to good effect with snowballs.
Erasmus’ eyes glinted with amusement, but all he said was, “Mornin’, Xerxes. How you be today?”
“Cold,” Scipio answered. “This here nothin’ but damnyankee weather. Far as I is concerned, it kin stay up there wid they.”
“Fish keep longer,” Erasmus said. “Don’t got to buy so much ice from that thief of an ice man for a couple days. Outside o’ dat, I ain’t gwine argue with you.”
Scipio had just started his morning sweeping when the first breakfast customer came in. Erasmus had found he made money serving breakfast, so he’d started. The customer shouted for hot coffee. Scipio didn’t blame him. He had to pry himself away from the nice, warm stove to bring the fellow the steaming cup, and then the fried eggs and grits that followed.
After pouring down several steaming cups and shoveling in his food, the black man got to his feet, stuck a hand in the pocket of his dungarees, and looked a question toward Scipio. Even if it was wordless, Scipio understood it. “A million and a half,” he said.
“Was only a million last week,” the customer said with a sigh. He gave Scipio two crisp, new $1,000,000 banknotes, with Robert E. Lee’s portrait on one side and a picture of Jefferson Davis taking the oath of office as provisional president in Montgomery on the other. Scipio handed him five $100,000 banknotes (older and more worn, because they’d been in circulation longer) for change. As he’d hoped, the customer left a couple of hundred thousand dollars’ tip when he went on his way.
“When was the last time you seen silver or gold money?” Erasmus asked, his voice wistful. “I ain’t even seen no pennies in a hell of a long time.”
“Me neither,” Scipio said. “Not since the war jus’ over. Somebody put down a dime or a qua’ter, reckon I fall over. Somebody put down a Stonewall, I
knows
I fall over.”
“How much paper you reckon a Stonewall buy these days?” Erasmus’ lips moved silently as he made his own calculation. “Somewheres around twenty, twenty-five million, I reckon. What you think?”
“Sound about right,” Scipio agreed. Erasmus had no formal education, but he was shrewd with figures. Scipio added, “Ain’t bad fo’ fi’ dollars in gold.”
“Sure ain’t,” Erasmus said, and said no more. Scipio wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised to find out his boss had a nice pile of Stonewalls hidden away somewhere. If he needed them, they’d come out. If times ever got better, so that money stopped stretching like India rubber, they’d come out then, too. Scipio wished he had his own pile.
He wondered how many goldpieces Anne Colleton had these days. He was willing to bet she had a good many. She’d always been one to land on her feet. And, if the papers didn’t lie, she’d been pumping money into the Freedom Party. That worried Scipio. His former boss didn’t back losers. He’d seen as much, time and again. But if the Freedom Party was a winner, every black man and woman in the CSA lost. What the men in the white shirts and butternut trousers had already done in Augusta made that crystal clear.
If it hadn’t been for Bathsheba, he wouldn’t have worried so much. He’d always been able to take care of himself. Even after the Congaree Socialist Republic collapsed in blood and fire, he’d taken care of himself. Taking care of somebody else, though, somebody he loved—that was different. It was harder, too: he didn’t dare take risks for Bathsheba that he would have cheerfully taken for himself.
Another Negro came in, asking for flapjacks and eggs. He wore a ribbon on his jacket. After a moment, Scipio recognized what it was: the ribbon for a Purple Heart. Pointing to it, he asked, “Where you git that?”
“Up in Virginia,” the man answered. “Some damnyankee shot me in the leg. I was damn lucky, let me tell you. All he did was blow off a chunk o’ meat. Bullet didn’t hit no bone or nothin’, or I reckon I’d be walkin’ around with a peg leg.”
Listening to somebody talk about how lucky he’d been to get shot struck Scipio as strange, but he’d heard white veterans go on the same way. He said, “So you fit the war and done everything the gummint want?” The customer nodded. Scipio hurried back to get his breakfast and bring it to him, then asked, “And now you is a citizen? Now you kin vote an’ do like the buckra all kinds o’ways?”
“Can’t marry no white woman.” The veteran shrugged. “Don’t want to marry no white woman—like the colored gal I got. But yeah,” he went on with quiet pride, “I’s a citizen.” He reached into his pocket and displayed an elaborately printed form attesting to his service in the war. “I carry this here ’stead of a passbook.”
Scipio hadn’t thought about the aspect of citizenship. He was deeply and sincerely jealous of the veteran, who enjoyed a liberty he was unlikely ever to know. “Freedom Party give you trouble?” he inquired. He didn’t know why he asked the question: was he trying to ease his own mind about what the Freedom Party could do, or was he hoping to make the veteran feel bad in spite of the privilege he’d earned?
The man’s mouth tightened. His eyes narrowed. A vertical groove appeared between them, and other lines by the edges of his lips. “Them bastards,” he said quietly. “You know any niggers don’t get trouble from them?”
“Sure enough don’t,” Scipio answered. “I was hopin’ you did.”
“Ain’t none.” The Negro veteran spoke with assurance. “Ain’t nothin’we can do about it, neither, nothin’ I can see. Yeah, I’m a citizen. I punch one o’ them sons o’ bitches for callin’ me names or givin’ me some other kind o’ hard time, what happen then? White folks’ jury send me to jail for about twenty years. That Freedom Party man kick me in the balls, what happen
then
? White folks’ jury say he didn’t do nothin’ wrong.” He didn’t try to hide his bitterness.
“But you kin vote against they,” Scipio said. “Most black folks can’t do nothin’ a-tall.”
“I can vote.” The veteran nodded. “I went an’ did it last election, an’ I’ll do it again come November. But so what? So what, God damn it? Ain’t but one o’ me, an’ all them Freedom Party white folks. Even if all the niggers in the country could vote, wouldn’t be enough of us. White folks can do what they want, near enough. Why shouldn’t they let me vote? They can afford it.”
He got up, laid two million dollars on the table, and stamped out without waiting for change.
“Hope you didn’t ride Antiochus so hard, he don’t come back,” Erasmus said. “That ain’t good business.”
“Sorry,” Scipio answered, which was true in the business sense if in no other. “You hear what he say?” He waited for Erasmus to nod, then went on, “You still reckon we ain’t got nothin’ to fear from no Freedom Party?”
Erasmus nodded again. “I keeps tellin’ you an’ tellin’ you, the white man ain’t gwine do the work hisself. If he ain’t gwine do it hisself, he ain’t gwine do us no harm—or no worse’n usual, anyways. You show me them Freedom Party fellas out in the cotton fields at pickin’ time, then I commence to worry. Till then—” He shook his head.
Scipio wished he could take matters in stride the way his boss did. Rationally, everything Erasmus said made sense. That should have sufficed for Scipio, himself a man rational by inclination and education both. It should have, but it didn’t.
The past few years had been hard on rationality. If the Negro uprising of 1915 hadn’t been an exercise in romanticism, he didn’t know what was. The Reds hadn’t had a chance, but they’d risen anyhow. He didn’t think the Freedom Party had a chance of restoring the
status quo ante bellum
, either. That didn’t stop whites from flocking to its banners. Most whites liked the way things had been before the war just fine.
And there were, as the Negro veteran had said, a lot of whites. If they got behind the Freedom Party, Jake Featherston and his pals might win. How far could they turn back the clock? Finding out would be as big a romantic folly as the Red uprising. But nothing had stopped Cassius and the other Red leaders, and likely nothing would stop Featherston, either.
Scipio sighed. “Life ain’t easy, and at the end you can’t do nothin’ but up and die. Don’t seem right.”
Erasmus busied himself making a fresh pot of coffee. When he was through, he said, “So tell me then, you gwine kiss your lady friend good-bye? You gwine lay in bed by your lonesome, waitin’ for to drop dead?”
“ ’Course not,” Scipio said angrily. Then he stopped and stared at Erasmus. The fry cook had pierced his gloomy pretensions as neatly as any white man with a fancy degree in philosophy might have done—and with a tenth, or more likely a hundredth, as many words. Instead of angry, Scipio felt foolish, to say nothing of sheepish. “Got to get on with your reg’lar ’fairs,” he mumbled.
“That there make a deal more sense’n what you was spoutin’a minute ago, don’t you reckon?” Erasmus demanded.
“Yes, suh,” Scipio said. So far as he could recall, he’d never called a black man
sir
before in his life. Whites got the title because they had the whip hand in the CSA. He gave it to Erasmus because—
because he deserves it,
was the thought that ran through Scipio’s mind.
Erasmus noticed, too. His head whipped around sharply. Scipio would have bet several million dollars—maybe even a Stonewall—nobody’d ever called him
sir
before that moment, either. “Just get back to work, will you?” he said, his voice gruff. He didn’t know how to respond to being treated with respect.
Why should he?
Scipio thought.
It’s altogether likely no one has ever shown him any.
With that, Scipio came closer to understanding why the Reds had rebelled against the Confederate government than he ever had before. Was being treated like a human being worth fighting and dying for? Maybe it was.
What do I know about being treated like a human being?
he thought.
I was only a butler.
He didn’t think in the dialect of the Congaree, but in the precise, formal English he’d had drilled into him. Sometimes that helped him: it gave him a wider, more detailed map for his world than he would have had if he’d gone to the cotton fields. Sometimes it left him neither fish nor fowl. And sometimes it made him angry at what the Colletons had done to his mind, to his life. They hadn’t done it for his sake, either. They hadn’t cared at all about him, except as a thing. They’d done it for their own convenience.
“Just got to get through the day and not worry about nothin’ you can’t change anyways,” Erasmus said. Scipio nodded. The fry cook was pursuing the thought he’d had a little before. But Scipio’s thought had veered in a different direction.
How can a black man make life worth living in the Confederate States?
he wondered. The question was easy to ask. Finding an answer, though…
“Here is the latest report, sir.” Lieutenant Colonel Abner Dowling set the document on General Custer’s desk.
“Well, let’s have a look at it.” The electric lights in the overhead fixture glittered off Custer’s reading glasses as he picked up the report and started to go through it. Abner Dowling waited for the explosion he guessed would not be long in coming. He was right. The commander of U.S. forces in Canada slammed the typewritten sheets on the desk. “Poppycock!” he shouted. “Twaddle! Harebrained idiocy! Who was the idiot who produced this nonsense?”
“Sir, Captain Fielding, our operative in Rosenfeld, is one of the best we have anywhere in this country,” said Dowling, who had read the report before giving it to Custer. “If he says there’s no evidence this McGregor planted the bomb in Hy’s chop house, you can rely on it.”
“If he says there’s no bloody goddamn evidence, he can’t see the nose in front of his face,” Custer snarled. “Christ on His cross, McGregor blew up this brilliant operative’s”—Custer’s sarcasm stung—“predecessor. Otherwise, this imbecile wouldn’t have the job in the first place. Look at McGregor’s photograph. Does that shifty-eyed devil look like an honest man to you?”
“There’s no evidence for that, either, sir,” Dowling said patiently. “They’ve searched McGregor’s farmhouse and barn and grounds any number of times, and they haven’t found a thing to suggest he’s the bomber.”
“Which only proves he’s not an imbecile, very much unlike our own people down there,” Custer said with a sneer that displayed the fine white choppers in his new upper plate. “The chap who was there during the war ordered McGregor’s son shot, didn’t he?”