Drive to the East (78 page)

“Can’t ask for no more’n dat,” Scipio said. So a human being did lurk under that acid-tongued exterior. Worth knowing, maybe.

Human being or not, Sloan didn’t put up with slackness, any more than Jerry Dover had. When a cook came in late three times in two weeks, he was gone. The Mexican who took his place spoke next to no English, but showed up early every day. He picked up the language in a hurry, especially the obscenities that laced the conversation of the rest of the kitchen staff.

How many Mexicans were in Augusta these days? How many Mexicans were in towns and fields all over the Confederacy, doing what had been nigger work till blacks started getting cordoned off by barbed wire and disappearing into camps? Not so many as the Negroes they replaced, surely. But enough to keep crops coming in, wheels turning, meals cooked and served, hair cut.

They can get along without us.
The idea terrified Scipio. He hadn’t thought the Freedom Party could strike at Negroes in any really important way. He hadn’t thought the CSA could do without the hard, unglamorous labor colored men and women provided. He hadn’t thought so, but maybe he was wrong.

One good thing about a busy shift: it left him no time to brood. He was always hopping, taking orders, bringing food out from the kitchen, barking at the busboys, trying to hear the gossip at his tables without letting the whites know he was listening.

Everybody talked about Pittsburgh. The more that people knew, the gloomier they sounded. Some of them sounded very gloomy indeed. “We’re going to lose that whole army,” a colonel home on leave told his banker friend. “We’re going to lose a big piece of Ohio, too. It’s just a mess—a mess, I tell you.”

“What can we do?” the banker asked.

“Hold on tight everywhere else and hope we can ride it out,” the officer answered. “Don’t know what else there is
to
do. Give up? Not while we’ve still got bullets in the gun. You reckon the last peace was bad? It’d be a walk in the park next to what we’d get from the damnyankees this time around.”

Scipio wished for the destruction of the Freedom Party with all his heart. He had mixed feelings about the Confederate States of America. Every man needed a country, and the Confederate States, for better and often for worse, were his. He’d had no trouble getting along before Jake Featherston took power. Things hadn’t been perfect or even very good, but they hadn’t been so bad, either. He’d known where he fit.

But Negroes didn’t fit anywhere in Featherston’s CSA. And enough whites agreed with Featherston to bring him and his followers into places where they could do something about their ideas. And so . . .

And so, when Scipio went home that night, he passed the barbed-wire perimeter around the Terry. No street lights inside kept him from tripping. Power had been off for a long time. He stepped slowly and carefully. Falling would be bad, not just because he was an old man and getting brittle but because he might tear his trousers. That would be a real disaster.

He made it back to the apartment undamaged. It was chilly in there. No buildings in the Terry had heat anymore. The handful of people left here used makeshift wood-burning stoves for cooking and heating. One of these days, maybe, a fire would get loose. Scipio dreaded that, but didn’t know what he could do about it.

Bathsheba stirred when he came to bed. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to bother you none.”

“ ’S all right,” his wife answered sleepily. “Sunday tomorrow. We kin go to church.”

“All right.” Scipio didn’t argue. He thought God had long since stopped listening to the Confederacy’s Negroes, but Bathsheba still believed. Going along was easier than quarreling.

He thought so, anyway. In the morning, Cassius said, “I ain’t goin’. I got to see some people about some business.”

“What kind of business?” Scipio asked.

His son just looked at him—looked through him, really. Cassius didn’t answer. Some kind of resistance business, then. Scipio sighed but didn’t insist. Bathsheba tried to. It didn’t work. Cassius was going to go his own way. Seeing what things were like these days, Scipio had a harder time thinking him wrong than he would have a couple of years earlier.

The church was as rundown as everything else in the Terry. The preacher’s coat and trousers were shiny with age. The reverend preached a careful sermon, praying for peace and for justice and for an end to misery and oppression. He made a point of not saying that the members of his congregation should rise up against oppression. Somebody was bound to be listening for the authorities. If the government or the Freedom Party—assuming there was any difference between the two—didn’t like what he said, he would vanish off the face of the earth as if he’d never been born.

He might have preached fire and brimstone. He might have preached revolt and revolution. It wouldn’t have mattered. He was just finishing his sermon when somebody at the back of the church exclaimed, “Lord have mercy, dey is out dere!”

Nobody wondered who
they
were. With gasps of horror, people sprang up from their rickety seats and hurried out of the church, hoping to get away before it was too late. “God be with you, brothers and sisters!” the preacher called after them. He didn’t try to get them to stay. Maybe he had his own escape route planned.

Scipio and Bathsheba and Antoinette scurried away with the rest of the congregation.
Like rats,
he thought. Any kind of hiding place would do now.

But there were no hiding places. Augusta policemen and Freedom Party stalwarts and guards waited out in the street. They had smiles on their faces and rifles and submachine guns in their hands. One of them shifted a wad of tobacco into his cheek so he could talk more clearly: “Y’all can come along with us quiet-like, or y’all can get shot right here. Don’t matter none to us. Which’ll it be?”

One young man, only a little older than Cassius, ran for it. A submachine gun spat fire. The young man fell and writhed on the cracked pavement. The stalwart who’d cut him down ambled over and put a bullet through his head. The Negro groaned and lay still.

“Anybody else?” asked the cop with the chaw. No one moved. No one spoke.

Cassius. Thank God Cassius isn’t here. Someone may get away,
Scipio thought. He glanced over at his wife. She nodded when their eyes met. She had to be thinking along with him.

The policeman spat a brown stream of tobacco juice in the dead man’s direction. “All right,” he said. “Get moving.”

Away the Negroes went. The congregation was only part of the cleanout. Some men tried to offer money to get away. Some women tried to offer themselves. The white men only laughed at them.

Out of the Terry they went. A lot of white Augustans were worshiping and praying at this hour of the day. Maybe God listened to them. He sure hadn’t paid any attention to the colored preacher. The whites who weren’t at church stared at the Negroes herded along like cattle. Some just stared. Some jeered. No one called out a word of protest.

Confederate Station was by Eighth and Walker, right next to St. Patrick’s Catholic Church. Did God listen harder if you called on Him in Latin? Scipio wouldn’t have bet on it. The station wasn’t far from the Terry. The captured Negroes were lucky in that, because he was sure they would have had to walk no matter how far it was.

And then all their luck ran out. Everything happened so fast, neither Willard Sloan nor anyone else had the slightest chance to do anything. “In! Get in, God damn you!” shouted the white men with guns. They stuffed cars tighter than should have been humanly possible. By the way the boxcar Scipio and his family went into smelled, it had hauled cattle the last time. The whites packed it till no one could sit down, then slammed the door shut. That cut off almost all of the air. Scipio resigned himself to dying before he got wherever the train was going. With a jerk and a lurch, it began to roll.

D
r. Leonard O’Doull sometimes thought he was trapped in one of the nastier suburbs of hell. One bleeding, mangled, screaming man after another, from the time he gulped coffee to wake up to the moment he lay down for a stolen bit of sleep. Some of the soldiers wore green-gray, others butternut. He’d almost stopped noticing which color uniform he had to cut away to get at the latest mutilation.

“When will this end?” he groaned to Granville McDougald after amputating a shattered arm.

“You’re asking the wrong guy,” the medic answered. “Only one who can tell you is the Confederate CO.”

“He should have quit three weeks ago,” O’Doull said.

McDougald shrugged. “He’s got orders to hold to as long as he can, and he’s got ammo for his guns. Featherston would probably send a people bomb after him if he did throw in the towel. As soon as we smash him flat, that frees up all of our men here to roll west and knock the Confederates out of Ohio. So he’s holding down a lot more men than he’s still got left himself.”

“You spent all these years as a medic, right?” O’Doull asked. McDougald nodded. The doctor went on, “So how come you talk like you come from the General Staff?”

“Me?” Granville McDougald laughed. “I’m just picking up stuff I hear from the wounded. We’ve got enough of ’em.”

“Well, God knows you’re right about that,” O’Doull said. The University of Pittsburgh hospital held U.S. wounded ranging in rank from private to brigadier general—and Confederates ranging from private to full colonel. It was always stuffed. Men lay on gurneys in the hallway, sometimes on mattresses on the floor, sometimes—when things were at their worst—on blankets on the floor.

The Confederates never had made it over the Allegheny River. They never had tried to break out of Pittsburgh to the west, either. They’d waited till the relieving column could link up with them—but it never did. Now, outside the pocket, there were no Confederate soldiers for miles and miles. The men who’d tried to relieve Pittsburgh had turned west themselves, to try to stem the U.S. advance out of northwestern Ohio and Indiana.

“One thing,” O’Doull said. McDougald raised an eyebrow. O’Doull went on, “I bet the poor bastards stuck here don’t think Jake Featherston is always right anymore.”

“That doesn’t matter,” McDougald said. “What matters is the people down in the CSA. When they figure out Featherston’s led ’em down the primrose path, that’s when things get interesting.”

“Maybe—but maybe not,” O’Doull said. “Yeah, some of them may hate Featherston after things go wrong. But won’t they go on hating us even worse? They really do, you know.” He’d listened to wounded men, too, and some of the captured Confederates were alarmingly frank.

“I don’t care if they hate us. I hate them, too.” Granville McDougald was so matter-of-fact, he might have been talking about the weather. “What I want ’em to remember is, if they mess with us, we’re going to pound the kapok out of ’em, and they better get used to the idea.”

“Oderint dum metuant,”
O’Doull murmured. McDougald made a questioning noise. Half embarrassed, O’Doull explained: “I did a lot of Latin when I was an undergrad—in those days, you had to when you went to college. It’s helped with the medical terms, I will say. But the Emperor Caligula said that.”

“Caligula? The crazy one?”

“That’s him. He was nuttier than Jake Featherston, to hell with me if he wasn’t. But it means, ‘Let them hate, as long as they fear.’ ”

“Three words,” McDougald said admiringly. “Boy, that packs more into three words than anything this side of ‘I love you.’ There I was, yakking about how I feel about the Confederates, and that old son of a bitch got it into three words.”

“He wasn’t an old son of a bitch. He was a young son of a bitch,” O’Doull said. “I think he was twenty-seven when they murdered him.”

“Well, he’s been dead long enough that he seems old,” McDougald said. O’Doull nodded; he was right about that. It was something over 1,900 years now.

He didn’t get the chance to cudgel his brains over exactly how many years it was, because the PA system brayed, “Major O’Doull! Sergeant McDougald! Report at once to OR Three! Major O’Doull! Sergeant McDougald! Report at—”

“No rest for the wicked,” McDougald said.

“I thought that was ‘weary,’ ” O’Doull said.

“Works both ways, don’t you think?” McDougald was right about that, too.

They hastily scrubbed in and gowned and masked. Then they found what they were dealing with: a soldier who’d stepped on a mine. That was an even worse misfortune than it might have been, because the Confederates, or possibly the Devil, had come up with a new model. Instead of just exploding and blowing off a man’s foot or his leg, it bounced up to waist height and then burst . . . with the results they had in front of them.

The kid on the table was shrieking in spite of surely having had a morphine shot. He held his hands in front of his crotch like a maiden surprised, and wouldn’t move them no matter what. “My nuts!” he moaned. “It got my nuts!”

“You’re gonna be all right, son.” O’Doull feared he was lying through his teeth. He turned to McDougald and spoke in a quick, low voice: “Get him under.”

“Right, Doc.” In one swift, practiced motion, McDougald put the ether cone over the soldier’s face and turned the valve on the gas cylinder. The wounded man choked on the pungent fumes, but didn’t try to yank off the mask the way a lot of people did. His hands stayed right where they were till the ether got him and he went limp.

“Let’s see how bad it is,” O’Doull said grimly. Now he could move those blood-dripping hands. When he did, he wished he hadn’t. What he saw made him want to cover himself up the same way.

“How bad?” McDougald asked.

“Well, he won’t need to worry about getting a girl in trouble anymore—that’s for damn sure,” O’Doull answered. “I’ll see if I can put his dick back together well enough for him to piss through it. And he’s got some nasty belly wounds, too.”

“Remember we were talking about the Geneva Convention a while ago?” McDougald said as O’Doull, his mouth a tight line behind the mask, got to work.

“Yeah,” he answered absently, trimming mangled tissue as conservatively as he could. “What about it?”

“Nobody’d thought of Popping Paula back when they were hammering it out,” McDougald said. “Otherwise, it’d be on the list for sure.”