The Grapple (13 page)

“Do Jesus!” Relief flooded through Scipio. “Thank you, suh. Thank from from de bottom o’ my heart. You see dey again, you tell dey I’s doin’ fine.” No black in Camp Determination was doing fine. His wife and daughter were bound to know that as well as he did. They didn’t want him to worry, though, and he didn’t want them to, either.

“I tell ’em.” The guard sergeant from Sonora or Chihuahua gave him one more brusque nod, then strode away, the two bigger men still at his heels.

Bathsheba and Antoinette were still alive. There was still hope. And Lubbock belonged to the Yankees. Like a lot of Negroes in the CSA, Scipio would have been a patriot if only the whites around him let him. The Confederate States were the only country he had. But if his own homeland set out to do horrible things to him and the people he loved, then its enemies became his friends.

He laughed, not that it was funny. From everything he’d heard, the Mormons up in Utah were as firm in denying Negroes equality as white Confederates were, even if they had different reasons. He sympathized with them now, no matter what they believed. What the United States were doing to them wasn’t that different from what the Confederate States were doing to blacks.

And yet you never could tell. Even in this hellhole, that guard went out of his way to deliver the message from Bathsheba and Antoinette. He didn’t have to do that. He could have refused them straight out. He could have promised to pass along their words and then gone on about his business. He hadn’t. Decency cropped up in the strangest places.

Scipio looked north. He could see the women’s barracks, there on the other side of the railroad line that brought his family here. Not one but two barbed-wire perimeters separated him from his loved ones. He drew himself up a little straighter. The train ride from Augusta didn’t kill him. If it didn’t, could anything? He didn’t believe it. He wouldn’t believe it.

His gaze swung from the north, the unattainable, toward the northwest. The Yankees might well come down to Camp Determination. If Lubbock was gone, other west Texas towns could fall. He just had to stay alive till U.S. troops arrived.

Just. That made it sound easier than it was.

He still didn’t know how many people died in that cattle car. He didn’t know why he still lived, either. Plenty of men and women younger and stronger than he was were dead. If he could make the Yankees listen to his story, maybe his survival would mean something. Bathsheba would say so. She believed things happened for reasons. She believed God watched over people.

Scipio wished he could do the same. He also wished God did a better job of watching over the Negroes in the CSA. He wished God did any kind of job of watching over them. As far as he could see, God was out to a film, leaving them to fend for themselves. The only trouble with that was, the Freedom Party had a lot more fending power than the Negroes did.

“Labor gang!” a guard shouted. “Need fifty volunteers for a labor gang!”

Labor gangs left the camp with men chained to one another like criminals. They worked killing hours on little food. When they came back, the men in them were worn to nubs.

The guard could have got five hundred volunteers, or five thousand. Work on a labor gang was real work, and you did come back when you went out. Nobody knew what happened when you got shipped to another camp. A lot of people muttered about that. If you muttered too loud, you had a way of getting shipped out yourself. Then other people muttered about what happened to you.

Except for the labor gangs, there was nothing to do inside the camp but stew and starve. If the Confederate authorities were smart, they could have set up factories where the Negroes they’d dragged from the cities and countryside could make things for them. The authorities didn’t bother. They just didn’t care.

The only sport in camp was watching new fish come in. Scipio had been a new fish himself, not so long before. Now he watched other dazed, thirsty, half-starved—or sometimes more than that—men stagger into Camp Determination. Their astonishment was funny, as his must have been to those who arrived before him.

“What you lookin’ at?” a black man would yell at the newcomers. “Y’all reckon you’s in New Yawk City?”

Scipio didn’t understand why, but talking about New York City never failed to send the prisoners into gales of laughter. For as long as he could remember, the biggest town in the USA had been the symbol of degeneracy and depravity to white Confederates. In films made in the CSA, New York City seemed entirely populated by villains and lounge lizards and slutty women. Maybe that was part of it.

But New York City was also full of riches and luxury. No matter how white Confederates despised the place, they couldn’t deny or ignore it. That probably made the camp jokes funnier. And sometimes things didn’t have to make any sense at all to be funny. Sometimes not making sense was the point of the joke.

“You park your Cadillac car outside befo’ you come in?” the wit would call to the new fish. It was always a Cadillac car, never just a Cadillac. Scipio didn’t know why that was so, but it was. It was one more thing that made the jokes funnier.

Sometimes a new fish would have spirit enough to say something like, “You niggers crazy.”

That would send the camp veterans into capers as wild as they had the energy to perform. “We sure is crazy,” someone would say. “If you ain’t crazy in dis here place, you gots to be nuts.”

At one level, that made no sense at all. At another level, it held a profound truth. Scipio was used to thinking in terms like that. Anne Colleton made sure he was thoroughly educated, not for his sake but so he made a better butler, a better ornament, for the Marshlands plantation. Marshlands was a ruin today. Anne Colleton was dead, killed in the early days of the war when U.S. carrier-based bombers hit Charleston.

And here I am, in Camp Determination. Much good my education did me,
Scipio thought. The one thing that mattered in the CSA was his color. How smart he was? That he could quote Shakespeare from memory? Nobody white cared a bit.

The Negro who’d made the crack about craziness was just making a joke. Scipio was sure he didn’t see that he was kidding on the square. He talked like a field hand. He certainly wasn’t educated. He probably wasn’t very smart. What difference did it make? Here he was, and here Scipio was. They had equality of a sort—equality of misery.

This batch of new fish had no trouble finding bunks—a large number of men were transferred to other camps just a couple of days before they got here. People came into Camp Determination. They went out. Nobody seemed to stay very long. That could have been why all the rumors swirled around the trucks and the bathhouses. Scipio hoped that was the reason.

And then he got the chance to find out for himself. When his barracks lined up for roll call one morning, a guard shouted, “We’re gonna ship your asses to Abilene. Head on over to the bathhouse. Don’t want you bringin’ lice an’ fleas an’ shit like that with you, so we’re gonna wash you off and delouse you.”

“Befo’ breakfast?” somebody said in dismay.

“You’ll get breakfast on the trucks that take you east,” the guard said. “They got bread an’ all kinds of good stuff. From what I hear, they feed you better in Abilene than we do here.” That sent a buzz through the assembled Negroes. Whatever the food in Abilene was like, it couldn’t very well be worse than it was here.

Nobody raised any particular fuss as the guards marched the Negroes to the bathhouse. Anyone who did raise a fuss would have been sorry; the guards carried automatic rifles as well as submachine guns, and looked very ready to use them. Among the guards was the Mexican-looking sergeant who’d delivered the message from Bathsheba and Antoinette. Seeing him made Scipio feel better. He didn’t think the man would let anything bad happen to him.

Inside the bathhouse, the guards ordered the Negroes to take off their rags and store them in cubbies. One of the gray-uniformed men who watched them do it said, “Remember where your shit’s at. Anybody tries stealing somebody else’s duds, he’s gonna wish he was never born.”

A sign pointed the way to the delousing station. The naked black men walked along the corridor in that direction. It was a big chamber, but they filled it up. Scipio noticed the door was steel, with rubber gasketing around the edges. His unease began there. But for a few metal columns with grillwork at the bottom, the chamber was bare. A sign over a door in the far wall said,
TO THE BATHS
.

He’d heard veterans, both white and black, go on about Great War delousing stations. Either they’d changed the way things worked since or…

Some kind of gas started pouring out of the grillwork. Even a tiny whiff of it set Scipio’s lungs on fire. He ran toward that door in the far wall. Other blacks got there ahead of him. They screamed in despair—the door didn’t open.
They fooled us,
Scipio thought.
They fooled us good, damn them.
Half crushed in the panic, half poisoned by the gas, he crumpled. Blackness enfolded him.

IV

U
p until a few years earlier, sharecroppers lived in this sorry little collection of shacks. Now the buildings stood sad and vacant under Georgia’s mild spring sun. “Where did everybody go?” Jonathan Moss asked. “Did the Freedom Party catch the people who were here and send them to a camp?”

To his surprise, Spartacus shook his head. “Don’t reckon so,” the black guerrilla leader answered. “Reckon they went to town, to look for work there. Weren’t no’ mo’ work here, that’s fo’ damn sure.”

“Why the hell not?” Nick Cantarella asked. “You got nothin’ but miles and miles of cotton farms and tobacco farms and shit like that.”

Spartacus surprised Moss again, this time by chuckling in grim amusement. “You is a city fella,” Spartacus said, not unkindly. “You is a city fella, an’ you don’t see how the country work. Used to be plenty jobs fo’ nigger field hands, yeah. Then the Freedom Party make all these tractors an’ harvesters an’ shit, throw Lawd only know how many niggers outa work. Goddamn bastards.”

“That’s not all it did,” Cantarella said. “Factories they built to turn out those tractors and harvesters, they’re making barrels and armored cars nowadays. You can bet your ass on that.”

“Sly,” Moss said. “Sly twice, because it let them drive the Negroes off the fields and let them gear up for turning out war machines without making the USA flabble about it.”

“Fuck me,” Spartacus said, looking from one of them to the other. “I seen the first part o’ dat, on account of it happen to me an’ mine. But the other half…Didn’t worry ’bout dat none.”

“Yeah, well, those Freedom Party fuckers wouldn’t be half so dangerous if the guys running the show for ’em were dumb,” Cantarella said. “Featherston’s a maniac, but he’s a goddamn smart maniac, you know what I mean?”

Jonathan Moss did, and wished he didn’t. Fighting the war against the Confederates hadn’t proved anything to him one way or the other. Soldiers were soldiers, and sometimes where they came from hardly mattered. Military life had rhythms of its own. But his time since escaping from Andersonville told a different story.

He’d wondered how the Confederates could hold down the countryside with so many whites of military age off fighting the USA. Now he knew. If Negroes in the countryside lost their jobs, a lot of them had to go to the CSA’s cities and towns, where they were easier to keep track of and get hold of. No, the people at the top of the Freedom Party weren’t dumb at all. Too damn bad.

Meanwhile, some of the blacks still in the countryside did their best to make the Confederates unhappy. Spartacus said, “Reckon we kin spend the night heah. Ain’t nobody round seen us go in. Better’n sleepin’ on bare ground.”

Moss didn’t argue with that. His middle-aged bones thought anything was better than sleeping on bare ground. War was a young man’s game. As a fighter pilot, he’d made up in experience what he lacked in exuberance. Even so, he’d needed more rest and more regular rest than his young comrades, and he wasn’t able to fly as many missions.

Here, on the ground in Georgia, his years shoved themselves in his face in all kinds of ways. He got tired. He got hungry. When the shooting started, he got scared. Spartacus’ black guerrillas were mostly young and entirely fearless. When they attacked whites, they did it with a fierce joy, almost an exaltation, that left him admiring and astonished. He didn’t think he’d ever felt that ferocious in an airplane over Canada in the last war.

Of course, he hadn’t had such good reasons for ferocity, either.

He went into one of the cabins. It smelled all musty; it had been deserted for some time, and water and mold had their way inside. But even brand-new, it would have indicted the system that produced it. No running water. No plumbing. No electricity. No gas. Not even a wood-burning stove—all the cooking was done over a fireplace.

“I’ve seen horses with better stalls than this,” he said.

“Yeah.” Nick Cantarella nodded. “Tell you something else, too—horses deserve better than this. So do people.”

Not much was left inside the cabin to show how the people who used it had lived. A cheap pine stool lay tumbled in a corner. A few dishes, just as cheap, some of them broken, sat on a counter. When Moss put the stool back on its legs, he found a rag doll, face leprous with mildew, forgotten behind it. Did some little colored girl cry and cry because that doll was lost? He’d never know now, any more than he’d know whether that little girl was still alive.

“Can’t even light a fire,” Cantarella grumbled. “Anybody white sees smoke coming out of the chimney, he’ll sic the Mexicans on us.”

“Yeah, well, it could be worse,” Moss said. “They could have guys after us who really want to fight.”

Nick Cantarella laughed, though he wasn’t kidding. Francisco José’s soldiers rapidly discovered the black guerrillas were desperately in earnest. Spartacus’ men didn’t need long to figure out that the soldiers from the Empire of Mexico weren’t, at least if not under direct attack. The Mexicans didn’t want to be in Georgia. They resented C.S. whites almost as much for making them come up here as they resented C.S. blacks for having the gall to shoot back. It wasn’t quite
a plague on both your houses,
but it came close.

“What do we have for food?” Cantarella asked.

“I’ve got some ham and cornbread. How about you?”

“Cornbread, too, and I’ve still got a couple of ration cans from that dead Mexican we found.” Cantarella grimaced. “Damned if I know how the Confederates go on eating that slop. I mean, the stuff we have is lousy, but this is a hell of a lot worse.”

“It’s pretty bad,” Moss agreed. Pilots ate better than soldiers in the field—most of the time, anyway. He went on, “It’s better than what we got in Andersonville, though, except when the Red Cross packages came through.” Rations for POWs were supposed to be the same as what the captor’s soldiers got. Theory was wonderful—either that or the Confederate States were in more trouble than anybody north of the Mason-Dixon Line suspected.

They shared what they had. It filled their bellies, although a chef at the Waldorf-Astoria—or even a mess sergeant—would have turned up his nose, or more likely his toes. Despite lacking a fire, Moss appreciated being able to sleep with a wall, no matter how drafty, between him and the outside world. What Georgia called winter had been mild by the standards of Ontario or Chicago, but it still got chilly. Spring days were warmer. Spring nights didn’t seem to be.

Then again, Moss suspected he could sleep through an artillery duel in the middle of a blizzard. Any chance for sleep he got, he grabbed with both hands. He knew his age was showing, knew and didn’t care.

Captain Cantarella shook him awake much too early the next morning. Any time before the next afternoon would have been too early, but the sun was barely over the horizon. Moss’ yawn almost made the top of his head fall off. “Already?” he croaked.

“’Fraid so,” Cantarella answered. “They’ve got coffee going out there, if that makes you feel any better.”

“Not much,” Moss said, but he sat up. “What they call coffee’ll be nothing but that goddamn chicory, anyhow.”

“Maybe a little bit of the real bean,” Cantarella said. “And chicory’ll open your eyes, too.”

“Yeah, but it tastes like you’re drinking burnt roots,” Moss said.

“That’s ’cause you are,” Cantarella said cheerfully. “If you don’t get your ass in gear, though, you
won’t
get to drink any burnt roots, on account of everybody else will have drunk ’em all up.” There was a threat to conjure with. Moss got to his feet. He creaked and crunched, but he made himself move.

After a tin cup full of essence of burnt roots—and maybe a little bit of the real bean—life looked better, or at least less blurry. Moss munched on a chunk of cornbread. Spartacus squatted beside him. “Nigger come out from Americus in the night,” the guerrilla leader remarked. “He say there’s a train comin’ we gots to blow. Gots to sabotage.” He spoke the last word with sardonic relish.

And Jonathan Moss liked the idea of striking a train better than he liked going into these half-assed Georgia towns and shooting them up. Shooting up a town annoyed the Confederates and made them flabble. Wrecking a train, though, meant the men and munitions aboard either wouldn’t get into the fight against the USA or would get there late. “Sounds good,” he said. “What’s on this one? Do you know?”

“Oh, I know, all right.” Spartacus sounded thoroughly grim. “Niggers is on it.”

“Huh?” Even after the mostly ersatz coffee, Moss wasn’t at his best.

“Niggers,” Spartacus repeated. “From No’th Carolina, I reckon. They’s headin’ for them camps. They git there, they don’t come out no mo’. So we gots to make sure they ain’t gonna git there.”

Rescuing a trainload of blacks wouldn’t do the USA much good, but Moss didn’t even dream of trying to talk the guerrilla chieftain out of it. Spartacus had his own worries, his own agenda. When those took him on a track that also helped the United States, he didn’t mind. When they didn’t, he didn’t care.

One of his men knew more about dynamiting train tracks than Nick Cantarella did, and Cantarella was no blushing innocent. The U.S. officer did suggest a diversionary raid a few miles away to give the explosives man—his name, also likely a
nom de guerre,
was Samson—a chance to work undisturbed. Spartacus liked that. “Sneaky fucker, you,” he said, nothing but admiration in his voice.

He sent off a few of his men to shoot at trucks on the highway. That would be plenty to draw the Confederates’ attention—and that of their Mexican stooges, too. The rest of the band lurked close by where Samson did his job.

The train pushed a heavily laden flat car ahead of the locomotive. That kept Samson’s bomb from wrecking the engine itself. Against some kinds of sabotage, it might have mattered. But the bomb still made the train stop. Then the guerrillas sprayed the engine and the men inside with gunfire. Steam plumed from the punctured boiler.

Some of Spartacus’ men ran forward to open the passenger cars and freight cars in the train. Others stayed back to cover them. Jonathan Moss was one of those who hung back—he doubted the Negroes in there would welcome any white face just then.

Blacks began spilling out, more and more and more of them. “Sweet Jesus!” Cantarella said. “How many smokes did those Freedom Party bastards cram in there?”

“Too many,” Moss said, and then, “Now I believe every atrocity story I ever heard. You don’t pack people in like that if you don’t mean to dispose of them.”

He watched in horrified fascination as the Negroes scattered over the countryside. They didn’t know where they were going, where they would sleep, or what—if anything—they would eat. But they were sure of one thing, and so was he: whatever happened to them here, they would be better off than if this train got to where it was going.

M
ost of the time, Irving Morrell didn’t like getting called back to Philadelphia for consultation. Some things, though, were too big to plan on the back on an envelope. What to do once the USA drove the CSA out of Ohio seemed to fall into that category.

Brigadier General John Abell met him at the Broad Street Station. The tall, thin, pale General Staff officer was as much a product of the War Department as Morrell was of the field. Morrell was sure Abell distrusted him as much as he distrusted the other man, and for reasons probably mirroring his own.

“Good to see you under these circumstances,” Abell said, shaking his hand.

“Good to be here under these circumstances,” Morrell answered. Better by far to come to Philadelphia to plan the next attack than to figure out how to defend the city. More than eighty years had passed since a Confederate army reached Philadelphia. Morrell devoutly hoped the city never saw another one.

As they walked from the station to the auto Abell had waiting, the General Staff officer said, “When we beat the Confederates this time, we’re going to beat them so flat, they’ll never give us trouble again. We’ll beat them so flat, they won’t even
think
about raising a hand against us from now on.”

“I like that,” Morrell said. The enlisted man driving the government-issue Chevrolet sprang out to open the back door for his exalted passengers. After Morrell slid into the green-gray auto, he went on, “Can we bring it off?”

“Militarily? I think we can. It won’t be easy or cheap, but we can do it.” Abell sounded coldly confident. “We can, and we need to, and so we will.” As if to underscore his determination, the Chevy rolled by a downed Confederate bomber. Behind a barricade of boards on sawhorses, technicians swarmed over the airplane, partly to see if the enemy had come up with anything new and partly to salvage whatever they could.

“Oh, yeah—I think we can whip ’em, too,” Morrell said. “But we have to occupy them once we do. Otherwise, they’ll just start rearming on the sly the way they did after the Great War.”

John Abell nodded. “You and I are on the same page, all right.” He let out a small chuckle; they’d known each other for close to thirty years, and that wasn’t the kind of thing either one of them said every day. Then he went on, “Plans for doing that are already being prepared.”