Blood and Iron (9 page)

“They were wrong,” her husband agreed. “They will pay the price for being wrong. But we have paid a great price because they were wrong, too. I hope that will never happen again.”

“Oh, I hope so, too,” Nellie said. “I hope so with all my heart. But when I said people wouldn’t come back to the White House and the Capitol on account of they’d get blown up in the next war, I didn’t hear you telling me I was wrong.”

“We have fought three wars against the Confederate States,” Hal said. “I hope we do not fight a fourth one. I pray we do not fight a fourth one. A man should plan by what he has seen, though, not by what he hopes and prays. The older I get, the more certain I am this is true.”

Nellie studied him. No, he wasn’t handsome. No, he didn’t make her heart flutter. And yet, as she had seen during the war and as she saw even more strongly now, he had a core of solid good sense that was altogether admirable. She did admire it, and him.

She hadn’t been looking for anyone to make her heart flutter. That was for people Edna’s age. Good sense, though—good sense lasted. The older Nellie got herself, the plainer that became.

She smiled at her new husband. It was the most wifely smile she’d ever given him. It was also the smile of someone beginning to realize she’d made a good bargain after all.

John Oglethorpe came up to Scipio as the Negro was clearing dishes off a table a customer had just left. The restaurant owner coughed. Scipio knew what that sort of cough meant: Oglethorpe was about to say something he only half wanted to say. Scipio could make a good guess about what it was, too.

His guess wasn’t just good. It turned out to be right. After clearing his throat a couple more times, Oglethorpe said, “You’ve done a right good job for me here, Xerxes. I want you to know I mean that.”

“I thanks you very much, suh,” Scipio answered. Xerxes was the name he’d used since escaping the collapsing Congaree Socialist Republic and making his way across South Carolina to Augusta, Georgia. In his proper persona, he had a hefty price on his head, though Georgia worried more about its own black Reds on the loose than about those from other states.

“You’ve been just about as good a waiter as Aurelius, matter of fact,” Oglethorpe went on. The other Negro had conveniently put himself out of sight and earshot. Oglethorpe coughed yet again. “But him and me, we go back years, and I ain’t got enough business to keep two waiters busy any more, not with so much of the war work closed down, I ain’t.”

“You’s lettin’ me go,” Scipio said. The dialect of the Congaree was slow and thick as molasses. Scipio could speak far better formal English than his boss—years of training to be the perfect butler at Marshlands had forced him to learn—but that wouldn’t help now. It was likely to make things worse, in fact.

Oglethorpe nodded. “Hate to do it, like I say, but I’ve got to keep my own head above water first. You on the trail of another job waitin’ tables, you tell whoever’s thinking about hiring you to talk to me. You’re a brick, and I’ll say so.”

“That right kind o’ you, Mistuh Oglethorpe,” Scipio said. “You been a good boss.” He was, on the whole, sincere. Oglethorpe expected his help to work like mules, but he worked like a mule himself. Scipio had no complaints about that. Fair was fair.

Digging in his wallet, Oglethorpe peeled off brown banknotes. “It’s Wednesday today, but I’m payin’ you till the end of the week. Couple extra days of money never did anybody any harm.”

That was more than fair. “Thank you kindly, suh,” Scipio said. He counted the money, frowned, and counted it again. He took out a banknote and thrust it at the man who ran the restaurant. “Even if you is payin’ till the end o’ the week, you done give me twenty dollars too much.”

“Keep it.” Oglethorpe looked annoyed that he’d noticed. “Ain’t like it was twenty dollars before the war. Money was worth somethin’ in those days. Now—hell, look at you. You got all that money in your hand there, and you ain’t rich. What kind of world is it when you can be standin’ there with all that cash, and you got to worry about—” He checked himself. “No, you don’t have to worry about where your next meal is comin’ from. You get on back here with me.”

Scipio got. His boss hacked off a couple of slices of egg bread, yellow as the sun, then put them around a slab of ham that would have choked a boa constrictor. He added pickles and mustard, gave Scipio the monster sandwich, and stood there with hands on hips till he’d eaten it.

“I gets me a new job, I comes back here to eat,” Scipio declared.

“Want another one?” Oglethorpe asked, reaching for the bread again. Scipio shook his head and, belly bulging, managed to make his escape. Only when he was out on the streets of Augusta did he wish he’d taken the restaurant owner up on his generosity. A sandwich like that kept a man’s belly from complaining for most of a day.

Augusta had a shabby, run-down look to it these days. From things he’d heard, Scipio suspected the whole Confederacy had a shabby, run-down look to it these days. A lot of men, white and black, were walking along not quite aimlessly, looking for anything that might be work. As Oglethorpe had said, the factories that had boomed during the war—cotton mills, brickworks, fertilizer plants, canneries—were booming no more.

More than a few men remained in their uniforms, though the war had been over since the summer before and spring wasn’t far away. Most of the whites who still wore draggled butternut looked to be wearing it because they had nothing better to put on. The Negroes in uniform, though, might have been in business suits. They were advertising that they had served their country, as plainly as if they carried sandwich boards, and were hoping that would help them land work. What sort of place the Confederate States were going to give their black veterans remained to be seen.

Scipio headed east along Telfair toward the Terry, the colored district in Augusta. Somebody was holding a rally in May Park, a couple of blocks south of Telfair; he saw waving flags from the corner of Telfair and Elbert. He didn’t really need to go back to his room: he was, at the moment, a gentleman of leisure. He wandered down toward the park to find out what was going on.

The flags were Confederate flags. They flew at the edge of the street to draw people toward the rally—as they’d succeeded in drawing Scipio—and fluttered in a mild breeze on and beside the platform on which the speaker stood. Behind the fellow was a sign that did not look to have been painted by a professional. It read,
FREEDOM PARTY
.

What was the Freedom Party? Whatever it was, Scipio had never heard of it before. No one at Anne Colleton’s elegant dinner parties had ever mentioned it, so far as he recalled. Of course, he hadn’t paid that much attention to politics, at least till he’d been dragooned into the leadership of the Congaree Socialist Republic. Why should he have? He couldn’t vote; the Confederate States didn’t recognize him as a citizen. Maybe this new outfit would help make things better.

And maybe it wouldn’t, too. The skinny fellow up there on the platform was long on complaints: “Aren’t our generals pretty in their fancy uniforms? Wouldn’t you have liked it better if they’d had any notion how to fight the goddamn war? Wouldn’t you have liked ’em better if they weren’t in the damnyankees’ pockets?”

Scipio blinked at that. Generals had occasionally visited Marshlands. He knew good and well they’d done everything they knew how to do to beat the United States. They hadn’t known enough, but they’d tried.

Most of the men in the crowd looked to be either white veterans or men who’d had wartime factory jobs and had no jobs now. They’d never seen any generals, except perhaps whizzing by in fancy motorcars. When this loudmouthed madman ranted about traitors in high places in Richmond, they ate it up and shouted for more.

And he gave them more, saying, “And if the goddamn generals weren’t traitors and fools, how come they sat there with their thumbs up their asses while the niggers plotted up the biggest goddamn rebellion in the history of the world? Were they blind, or did they shut their eyes on purpose? Either which way, throw ’em on the rubbish heap, every stinking one of ’em.”

“That’s right!” voices in the crowd said. “Tell it!” As far as they were concerned, the speaker might have been one of the colored preachers who went around the plantations testifying to the power of the Lord. These battered white men responded the way colored fieldhands, as oppressed a group as was ever born, did when the preacher started going strong.

“And we’d have whipped the damnyankees—
whipped
’em, I tell you—if the niggers hadn’t risen up,” the man from the Freedom Party shouted. He believed every word he was saying; Scipio could hear conviction jangling in his voice. “They stabbed us—they stabbed our country—in the back. Get rid of the traitor niggers and the traitor generals and I’ll tell you, we’d have been past Philadelphia and heading for New York City!” He pumped his fist in the air.

His audience pumped their fists in the air, too. Scipio stood only on the outermost fringes of the audience. By the glares coming his way, he suddenly realized even that was much too close to the platform. He made himself scarce before anybody decided pounding him into the ground would be a good way to settle lunch.

Behind him, the crowd erupted in more cheers. He didn’t turn around to find out why. He suspected he’d be happier not knowing. Once he got back inside the Terry—local colored dialect for
Territory
—he felt better. Being surrounded by black faces eased the alarm he’d felt at the Freedom Party rally.

Not all white men were like that shouting would-be politician. Scipio patted his hip pocket, where the money John Oglethorpe had given him rested. Oglethorpe was as good as they came, black or white. Even Anne Colleton didn’t scare Scipio the way he’d been scared in May Park. Miss Anne wanted to go on running things, and she wanted revenge on the people who’d killed her brother and gutted Marshlands and almost killed her. That made sense to Scipio, even if it had put him in hot water. The fellow on the platform…

“Ain’t gwine think about he no more,” Scipio muttered. That was easy to say. It wasn’t so easy to do.

He stuck his head into every little hole-in-the-wall café and cookshop he passed, to see if anybody was looking for help. Even if a waiter didn’t get paid a whole lot, he didn’t go hungry, not if his boss had so much as a particle of heart. Waiting tables was easier than factory work, too, not that any factory work was out there these days.

He didn’t find any restaurant jobs in the Terry, either. He would have been surprised if he had. Half of these joints didn’t have any waiters at all: the fellow at the stove did everything else, too. At a lot of the other places, the waiter looked to be the cook’s son or brother or cousin. Still, you never could tell. If you didn’t bet, how were you going to win?

The Terry had even more places to get a drink than it did places to get food. Scipio was tempted to stick his head into one of them, too, not to look for work but to find somewhere he could kill an afternoon over a mug of beer or two. In the end, he stayed out. Unless a man had silver to spend, beer cost three or four dollars a mug even in the dingiest dive. Without a job at the moment, Scipio didn’t care to throw his banknotes around like that.

He ended up back at his roominghouse. The landlady gave him a fishy stare. A working man who unexpectedly showed up long before quitting time couldn’t figure on anything else. The landlady didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. If Scipio was late with his rent, he’d end up on the sidewalk, and everything he owned—not that that amounted to much—out there with him. He was paid up till the end of the week, and he had plenty for the next week’s rent.

He hoped he wouldn’t have to worry past then. He’d never before had trouble finding a job. That cheered him, till he remembered he hadn’t looked for one since the war ended. Everybody was scrambling for work now.

He went upstairs. The furniture in his room was no better than could be expected in a Terry roominghouse, but he kept the place spotlessly clean. The books on the battered bookshelf were his. He pulled out a beat-up abridgement of Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall
and read with a smile on his face of the Moorish conquest of the blond Visigoths of Spain.

General George Armstrong Custer was not a happy man. “God damn it to hell and gone, Lieutenant Colonel,” he shouted, “I don’t want to go back to Philadelphia. I’m perfectly content to stay here in Nashville.”

“I’m sorry, sir,” Lieutenant Colonel Abner Dowling said. Custer’s adjutant was in fact a good deal less than devastated, but knew better than to show it. “The telegram just now came in. I’m afraid it leaves you little room for discretion.”

“I don’t want to go back to Philadelphia,” Custer repeated. He
had
scant discretion. Once set on a course, he kept on it, and derailing him commonly took the rhetorical equivalent of dynamite. He’d been stubborn and hard-charging for more than seventy-eight years; no wire from the War Department would make him change his ways. Abner Dowling was convinced nothing would make him change his ways.

“Sir,” Dowling said, “I suspect they want to honor you. You are, after all, the senior soldier in the United States Army.”

“Don’t pour the soft soap on me, even if you’re shaped like a barrel of it,” Custer growled. His description of Dowling’s physique was, unfortunately, accurate, although he was hardly the dashing young cavalryman himself these days. He tapped at the four stars on the shoulder of his fancy—as fancy as regulations permitted, and then some—uniform. “Took me long enough to make full general, by God. When I think of the fools and whippersnappers promoted ahead of me…I could weep, Lieutenant Colonel, I could just weep.”

Custer’s slow promotion had also meant Dowling’s slow promotion. Custer never thought of such things, nor that calling a fat man fat to his face might wound his feelings. Custer thought of Custer, first, last, and always.

Dowling scratched at his mustache, in lieu of reaching out and punching the distinguished general commanding the U.S. First Army right in the nose. He took a deep breath and said, “Sir, they may have taken a while to recognize your heroism, but they’ve gone and done it.”