Walk in Hell (60 page)

“My homeland is also occupied,” O’Doull answered. “England has done more and worse for longer to the Irish than she ever did to Quebec.” He spoke now with absolute seriousness. “My grandfather was a starving boy when he came to the United States because all the potatoes died and the English landowners sold the wheat in the fields abroad instead of feeding the people with it. We are paying back the debt.”

“The Irish rebellion has not thrown out the English,” Galtier said.

“No, but it goes on, and ties down their men,” O’Doull replied. “It would be better if the U.S. Navy could bring more arms to them, but boats do put in at little beaches every now and then, in spite of what the British fleet can do to stop them, and machine guns aren’t so big and bulky.”

“You say this here, to a country that might rise in revolt against the United States as Ireland has against England?” Even with applejack in him, Lucien would have spoken so openly to few men on such brief acquaintance: fewer still among the occupiers. But while the doctor might disagree, Lucien did not believe he would betray him to the authorities.

O’Doull said, “You will be freer with the United States than you ever were in Canada. It has proved true for the Irish; it will prove true for you as well. This I believe with all my heart.”

Charles, who usually kept his own counsel, said, “Few countries invade their neighbors for the purpose of making them free.”

“We came into Canada to beat the British Empire,” O’Doull answered, blowing a smoke ring. “They and the Rebels stabbed us in the back twice. But I think, truly, you will be better off outside the Empire than you were in it.”

“If we left Canada, if we left the British Empire, of our own will, then it could be you are right,” Lucien said. “Anyone who forces something on someone and then says he will be better for it—you will, I hope, understand me when I say this is difficult to appreciate.”

“It could be you said the same thing when your mother gave you medicine when you were small,” O’Doull replied.

“Yes, it could be,” Lucien said. With dignity, he continued, “But,
monsieur le docteur,
you are not my mother, and the United States are not Quebec’s mother. If any country is, it is France.”

“All right. I can see how you would feel that way, M. Galtier.” O’Doull got to his feet. “I do thank you and your wife and your enchanting family for the fine supper, and for your company as well. Is it possible that I might come back again one day, drink some more of this excellent applejack, and talk about the world again? And we might even talk of other things as well. If you will pardon me one moment, I would like also to say good-bye to Nicole.”

She was one of the other things the American would want to talk about, Galtier knew. He felt the pressure of his sons’ eyes on him. Almost to his own surprise, he heard himself saying, “Yes, this could be. Next week, perhaps, or the week after that.” Until the words were out of his mouth, he hadn’t fully realized he approved of the doctor in spite of his country and his ideas.
Well,
he thought,
the arguments will be amusing
.

“’Nother day done. Praise de lord,” Jonah said when the shift-changing whistle blew. “I see you in de mornin’, Nero.”

“See you then,” Scipio agreed. He was very used to his alias these days, sometimes even thinking of himself by it. He wiped his sweaty forehead on the coarse cotton canvas of his shirt. Another day done indeed, and a long one, too. The white foreman stuck his card in the time clock to punch him out of work. He trudged from the factory onto the streets of Columbia, a free man.

Even after three months or so at the munitions plant, he had trouble getting used to that idea. His time was his own till he had to get back to work in the morning. He’d never known such liberty, not in his entire life. As house servant and later as butler at Marshlands, he’d been at the white folks’ beck and call every hour of the day or night. As a member of the governing council of the Congaree Socialist Republic, he’d been at Cassius’ beck and call no less than at Miss Anne’s before. Now…

Now he could do as he pleased. If he wanted to go to a saloon and get drunk, he could. If he wanted to chase women, he could do that. If he wanted to go to a park and watch the stars come out, he could do that, too—though Columbia still had a ten o’clock curfew for blacks. And if he wanted to go back to his apartment and read a book, he could also do that, and not have to worry about getting called away in the middle of a chapter.

He walked into a restaurant not far from the factory, ordered fried chicken and fried okra and cornbread, washed it down with chicory-laced coffee, and came out full and happy. Nobody knew who he was. Nobody cared who he was. Oh, every now and then he still saw wanted posters for the uncaptured leaders of the Congaree Socialist Republic, and his name—his true name—still appeared among them, but that hardly seemed to matter. It might have happened a lifetime before, to someone else altogether.

Had Cassius understood that desire to escape the revolutionary past, it probably would have been enough for him to want to liquidate Scipio. Out in the swamps by the Congaree, Cassius and his diehards kept up a guerrilla war against Confederate authority even yet. Every so often, the newspapers complained of some outrage or another the rebels—the papers commonly called them bandits—had perpetrated.

But the papers talked much more about the bill to arm Negroes under debate up in Richmond. People talked about it, too, both white and black. The talk had only intensified once it cleared the House and got into the Senate. More than half of the black men Scipio knew were for it. As best he could judge, fewer than half the whites in Columbia were. How much his judgment was worth, he had trouble gauging.

When he got back to his apartment building, he let out a heartfelt sigh of relief. Now that he no longer had to pay half his salary to the white clerk who’d hired him, he could afford something better than the dismal flophouse where he’d endured his first nights in Columbia. The place was shabby but clean, with gas lights and a bathroom at the end of the hall. It had cockroaches, but not too many, and his own astringently neat habits gave them little sustenance.

Coming up the corridor from the bathroom, the mulatto woman who had the apartment across the hall from his smiled. “Evenin’, Nero,” she said.

“Evenin’, Miss Sempronia,” he answered. He thought she was a widow, but he wasn’t sure. He didn’t pry into the business of others, not least because he couldn’t afford to have anyone prying into his. That smile, though, and others he’d got from her, made him think he wouldn’t have to run very fast if he decided to chase her.

He went into his own apartment and closed the door after him. It was getting dark early these days; though he’d left the drapes open, he had to fumble to find the matches he’d set on the shelf near the gaslight. He struck one and got the lamp there going. That gave him the light he needed to start the lamp above his favorite chair.

Since the apartment boasted only one chair, that made the choice easier than it would have been otherwise. But it
was
comfortable, so he didn’t complain. If the upholstery was battered, well, so what? This wasn’t Marshlands. “I am, however, not the tiniest bit dissatisfied with my present circumstances,” he said softly, in the starchy white-folks’ voice he hadn’t used more than a couple of times since the Red uprising broke out. He smiled to hear himself. Now that he wasn’t used to it any more, that accent struck him as ridiculous.

On the rickety pine table beside the chair lay a battered copy of Flaubert’s
Salammbô
he’d picked up for a nickel. He opened it almost at random and plunged in. He wondered how many times he’d read it. More than he could count on his fingers, he was sure of that. Most literate Negroes in the CSA had read
Salammbô
a good many times. The story of the revolt of the army of dark-skinned mercenaries against Carthage after the First Punic War struck a chord in the heart of the most peaceable black man.

He grimaced and sighed. That revolt had failed, too. He kept reading anyhow.

When the cheap, loudly ticking alarm clock he’d bought said it was a little past nine, he carried a couple of towels and a bar of soap down to the bathroom. One thing years of being a butler had done: made him more fastidious than most factory hands, white or black, in the CSA. The weather was still warm enough for him to find a cold-water bath invigorating. How he’d feel about that when winter came around, he didn’t want to think.

Next morning, the alarm clock’s clatter got him hopping out of bed, heart pounding as if Confederate soldiers were bombarding the apartment house. He dressed, made himself coffee, breakfasted on bread and jam, and made a sandwich of bread and tinned beef to throw in his dinner pail. Thus fortified, he walked the half a mile to work, the dinner pail brushing his left thigh with every step he took.

A lot of black men in overalls and collarless shirts and heavy shoes were on the street; he might have been invisible among them. Some, like him, went bareheaded; some wore homemade straw hats, as if they still labored in the fields; some wore cloth caps like most white factory hands. Not many white factory hands were left, though: supervisors, youngsters not yet ripe for conscription, wounded veterans no longer fit for the front, and a few others with skills or pull enough to keep them out of butternut.

Here and there, men who worked in his plant waved to him and called out his
nom de travaille
. “Mornin’, Nero.” “How you is, Nero?” The broader he made his Congaree patois in answer, the happier the other workers seemed. He’d seen that back at Marshlands, too. It saddened him—his fellows were locking themselves away from much that was worthwhile—but he also understood it.

Greetings flew thick and fast as he lined up to punch in. He’d made his own place here, and felt no small pride at having done so. “Mornin’, Solon,” he said with a wave. “How you is, Artaxerxes? A good mornin’ to you, Hadrian.”

The foreman said, “Apollonius already took off, Nero, so I reckon you got yourself a few crates to haul there.”

“I’ll do it,” was all Scipio said, to which the white man nodded. The fellow who worked the night shift slid out of the factory as fast as he possibly could every morning. One day he’d slide out too fast, and have the door slammed in his face when he came back. It wasn’t as if the bosses couldn’t find anyone to replace him.

Sure enough, several crates of empty shell casings waited to be hauled to the belt that would take them to the white women who filled them and installed their fuses and noses. Scipio loaded two onto a dolley and pushed it over to Jonah, who stood waiting to receive it. When he hurried back to do more, Jonah shook his head. “Dat Apollonius, he one lazy nigger,” he observed. “You, Nero, you does yo’ work good.”

“T’ank you,” Scipio said. Jonah, as usual, sounded faintly surprised to admit that, no doubt because he remembered Scipio from his soft-handed days as a butler. None of the then-field hands had ever realized how much work Scipio actually did at Marshlands because so much of it was with his head rather than his hands or his back. He was ready to admit headwork was easier, but it was still work.

Back and forth, back and forth. He got no credit for the dolly, but it helped. Lift, carry, push, lift, carry, push. His hands and his muscles had hardened; he didn’t go home every night shambling like a spavined horse any more. He knew a certain amount of pride in that. He was stronger than he had been, and sometimes tempted to get into fights to show off his new strength. He resisted that temptation, along with most others. Fighting might make him visible to the whites of Columbia, which was the last thing he wanted.

Working with his body left his mind curiously blank. He listened to what was going on around him, to the clatter of the lines, to the chatter of the people working them, and, after a while, to the foreman out front: “Are you sure you want to go back there? It’s a dirty, smelly place, and parts of it are dangerous, too, what with the explosives and fuses and such-like.”

The words weren’t far out of the ordinary. The tone was. The foreman, normally master of all he surveyed here, sounded deferential, persuasive. That more than what he was saying made Scipio notice his voice in the first place. A moment later, he understood why the foreman sounded as he did. The reply came with the unquestioning, uncompromising arrogance of a Confederate aristocrat: “I am a stockholder, and not a small stockholder, in this corporation. I have the right to see how its operations function. You may guide me, or you may get out of the way and let me see for myself. The choice is yours.”

Scipio dropped at Jonah’s feet the crate he was hauling; the shell casings clanked in their plywood-partitioned pigeonholes. “Do Jesus!” Scipio exclaimed in a horrified whisper. “Dat are Miss Anne!”

“I knows it,” Jonah answered, looking at least as discomfited as Scipio felt. Regardless of what his passbook had said he could do, Jonah had left Marshlands for his factory job two years earlier. His position was less desperate than Scipio’s, but far from what he would have wanted.

Before Scipio could make up his mind whether to hope he wasn’t recognized or to flee, Anne Colleton came in, the foreman trailing after her and still trying ineffectually to slow her down. As Scipio knew, anyone who tried to slow her down was bound to be ineffectual. “This area here, ma’am,” the foreman said, still not grasping how outgunned he was, “is where the casings come off the line over yonder and go to get filled over here.”

“Is it?” Anne said. She nodded to the Negro laborers. “Good day, Scipio, Jonah.” Then, without another word, she headed off into the filling area. The two Negroes looked at each other. She knew who they were—she knew and she hadn’t done a thing about it. That worried Scipio more than anything else he could think of.

Sylvia Enos knew how drunk she was. She rarely touched whiskey, but she’d made an exception tonight. She was ready to make exceptions about lots of things tonight. She giggled. “Good thing I’m not going anywhere,” she said, and giggled again. “I couldn’t get there.”