The Grapple

by Harry Turtledove

“We’ll just have to be careful, then, won’t we?” O’Doull said. Nicole was laughing at him, but she didn’t say no.

  She didn’t say no later that night, either, though she did lock the door first and she did insist on turning off the light. After nearly two years away, O’Doull felt almost as if he were having his wedding night all over again, just ahead of his son’s. He didn’t have the stamina Lucien would doubtless display, but he had the sincerity.

  “I’ve missed you more than I know how to tell you,” he said afterwards.

  “Why did you go, then?” Nicole asked.

  “It needs doing,” he answered. “I’m a doctor. I’m good at putting people back together. A good many men are alive because I happened to be there.”

  “So they can go back to the war and get killed somewhere else instead,” Nicole said tartly.

  He shrugged. That made the bed squeak, where their side-by-side lovemaking hadn’t, or not very much. It made Nicole squeak, too, in alarm. Laughing a little, O’Doull said, “I can’t do anything about that. God puts them where He wants them. I just patch them up when He looks the other way for a second.”

  After the things he’d seen, he wondered how he still believed at all. Granny McDougald didn’t, not so far as he could tell. But his own faith survived…as long as he didn’t lean on it too hard. And he was strong-willed enough to make his own choices. As he usually did, he wore a rubber tonight. Nicole wasn’t likely to catch; she was close to fifty. But why take chances? And if that made the Pope unhappy—O’Doull didn’t lose much sleep about it.

  He didn’t lose much sleep about anything. He couldn’t begin to guess how far behind he was. Nicole had to shake him awake the next morning. When he did come back to consciousness, the smells of coffee and of frying bacon helped reconcile him to the world. He found fried eggs and fried potatoes to go with the bacon. Susanne and Denise had been busy in the kitchen.

  “Thank you, my dears,” he said after he finished breakfast. “You’re just about as wonderful as your sister.” They laughed. Susanne made as if to throw a spatula at him. He made as if to duck. Everybody laughed then. After flying shell fragments and machine-gun bullets, a spatula didn’t seem very dangerous.

  He thought about wearing uniform to the wedding. He might have, if it were in the USA. In Rivière-du-Loup, he didn’t want to remind people he was a foreigner. He didn’t want to remind himself, either. His tailcoat smelled of mothballs, but he put it on anyway. It didn’t match Lucien’s hired suit, but that was all right: the groom was supposed to be noticed, while his father was perhaps the most easily disposable person in the wedding party. He wasn’t even footing the bill—Alphonse Archambault was.

  Doctor and dentist greeted each other at the Église St.-Patrice with a handshake and identical words: “Hello, quack.” They laughed and clapped each other on the back.

  Bishop Guillaume celebrated the mass. He wasn’t a patch on the former Bishop Pascal, who’d returned to secular life, but his lady friend hadn’t had twins, either, which was why the former Bishop Pascal had returned to secular life.

  Lucien lifted Paulette’s veil and kissed her. The O’Doulls and the Archambaults stood in a receiving line and shook enough hands to make politicians jealous. Then everyone repaired to the Archambaults’ house—only a few blocks from the O’Doulls’—and ate and drank with as much abandon as people had the day before. Archambault had either talked with Charles or knew somebody else who made damn good applejack.

  Rivière-du-Loup didn’t have a hotel. O’Doull and Nicole went down to old Lucien’s farm—run by Charles these days—to give Lucien and Paulette the privacy they needed for their first night. In the morning, the newlyweds would catch a train to honeymoon at Niagara Falls—on the American side, not the Canadian. The Canadian side was under martial law.

  Nicole squeezed O’Doull’s hand when they rolled past the hospital built on what was once Galtier land. “If the occupiers hadn’t wanted to punish your father by putting the hospital there, we probably wouldn’t have met,” O’Doull said.

  “See how many things we can blame on them?” Charles said from behind the wheel, his voice as dry as if he were Georges.

  “Since Father did eventually get paid, I suppose we can forgive them now,” Nicole said.

  “You don’t have any other reasons?” O’Doull asked, and she poked him in the ribs.

  The farmhouse hadn’t changed much with Charles living there. Even most of the furniture was the same as it had been. “So many memories,” Nicole murmured.

  O’Doull nodded. He had a lot of memories of this place, too, though not so many as she did. But he also had other memories, more recent ones, darker ones. All too soon, he would have to get back on a train for himself, not for a honeymoon but to return to nightmare. What was I doing? What was I thinking? he wondered. Even though he saved lives, even though he wanted to save lives, he also wanted to stay here. He knew he couldn’t, and got drunk again so he didn’t have to remember.

  Spring in Georgia. What could be finer? Mild air, occasional showers, everything green and growing, the countryside full of birdsong, hummingbirds flitting like bad-tempered jewels from flower to flower. Everything was lovely.

  Cassius noticed none of it. He cared about none of it. All he wanted to do was stay alive one more minute, one more hour, one more day.

  Had he gone to church with his family in Augusta that Sunday morning, he wouldn’t be wandering the Georgia countryside now. When his father and mother and sister didn’t come back, he went looking for them—and almost ran right into the cops and Freedom Party stalwarts who’d rounded them up. The ofays were still laughing and joking about their haul, and didn’t notice him in the shadows. Every once in a while, a dark skin came in handy.

  Of course, if he were born with a white skin, he wouldn’t have ended up shut in behind barbed wire in the Terry like a zoo animal. He would have been on the other side of the wire—probably with a submachine gun in his hand and a Freedom Party pin on his lapel.

  He didn’t dwell on that. He did realize he had to get out of the Terry, and right away. If he didn’t, the whites would nab him in a cleanout before long. Off he’d go to a camp. People didn’t come out of those places.

  He waited till after midnight that night. He had two weapons when he headed for the wire—a pair of tin snips and the biggest, stoutest knife from his mother’s kitchen. If anyone spotted him, he aimed to fight. If he could kill somebody with a gun, then he’d have one. He didn’t think about dying himself. He was too young to take the idea seriously.

  All the heroics he imagined ahead of time evaporated. The tin snips cut through the wire well enough. Come morning, people would have no trouble figuring out where he’d got away, but he didn’t care. He’d be long gone by then.

  And he was, heading west. He couldn’t very well stay inside Augusta. It wouldn’t be thirty seconds till he heard, Let’s see your papers, boy! Nothing in his passbook said he had any business being out and about. Again, they’d ship him off to a camp—or maybe they’d just kill him on the spot.

  Out in the country…There’d be more Negroes there. Maybe he’d fit in better. And then he could start paying the Freedom Party goons back for everything they were doing.

  He’d had connections with the resistance in the city—had them and lost them as people kept dying or getting seized. Now he had to rely on his wits and on the kindness of strangers: black strangers, of course. He’d long since given up on expecting anything from whites. His father always said he got on well with Jerry Dover. He even said Dover had kept their whole family safe more than once. Maybe so—but Dover was in the Army now, and the rest of Cassius’ family was in a camp.

  When the sun came up, Cassius was walking along a road heading west. He didn’t know where he was going. All he knew was that he’d made it out of Augusta alive, and that he was getting hungry and getting thirsty. All the money that had been in the apartment was in his pocket. How long could he make $27.59 (he’d coun
ted it to the last penny—counted it twice, in fact, hoping it would be more the second time around and absurdly disappointed when it wasn’t) last? Well, he’d find out.

  Maybe he’d find out. On the other hand, maybe he’d get killed before he came close to going through his meager funds. Every time he saw a motorcar, he ran for the pine woods through which the road ran most of the time. Nobody stopped to go after him. None of the vehicles that went by was an armored car, so nobody sprayed the woods with machine-gun fire.

  That was good luck, as good luck for Negroes in the CSA ran these days.

  Cassius didn’t see it so. Aside from being hungry and thirsty, he had sore feet. He couldn’t remember when he’d done so much walking. He didn’t think he ever had. He wondered if he ought to throw his shoes away. For a while, he didn’t. He didn’t want to look like a shiftless country nigger. He might have argued with his father, but his attitudes faithfully respected the way he was raised.

  He did a little thinking. Why didn’t he want to look like a shiftless country nigger? Wasn’t that his best bet for survival? Away went the shoes, and his socks, too.

  Don’t go barefoot. You get chiggers, an’ hookworm, too. His old man’s voice still rang in his ears, or rather, between them. Ignoring it wasn’t easy, but Cassius managed. The blisters on his heels sighed with relief. Before long, though, his soles started to complain.

  And his luck ran out with the pine woods. For miles ahead, the road ran through fields: cotton, peanuts, tobacco, even rice. He couldn’t stay where he was. Living on what he could grub out of the ground—mushrooms and maybe berries—and on the squirrels and rabbits he killed with rocks wasn’t living. It was just starving a little more slowly. For better or for worse, he’d grown up in the city. No doubt there were tricks to living out here. Only one trouble: he didn’t know them.

  He took a deep breath and set out down the road through the fields. A few years earlier, they would have been full of colored sharecroppers. Tractors and harvesters and combines drove Negroes off the land in swarms, though. Like so many towns in the CSA, Augusta had filled with farm workers who couldn’t find work. Having them in the cities made it easier for the Freedom Party to scoop them up, too.

  Here came a motorcar. It was fairly new and in good repair—not noisy, not belching smoke. That made it a good bet to belong to a white man. Cassius straightened up, squared his shoulders, and kept walking along as if he had every right to be there. Every Negro learned that trick: if you pretended you belonged somewhere, the ofays would believe you really did.

  And it worked, damned if it didn’t. The driver here wasn’t a white man but a white woman, her blond hair blowing in the breeze that came in through the open windows. Her head didn’t even turn toward Cassius. As far as she was concerned, he was part of the scenery, like a cow or a dog or a turkey vulture sitting on a telegraph pole.

  In a way, that was good. She didn’t notice him, and he couldn’t afford to be noticed. In another way…He thought he deserved to be more important than a cow or a dog or a turkey vulture. Whites in the CSA didn’t see things like that. They never had. Odds were they never would.

  We have to make ’em see, Cassius thought fiercely.

  Then a white did notice him, and it made his heart leap into his throat. He was walking past a farmhouse when somebody shouted, “Hey, you! Yeah, you, boy!” The farmer wore bib overalls and a big straw hat. He carried a shotgun, at the moment pointed down at the ground.

  “What you want, uh, suh?” Cassius tried not to show how scared he was.

  “You chop wood? Got me a pile of wood needs chopping,” the farmer said. “Pay you a dollar for it when you get done.”

  Part of Cassius wanted to leap at that. The rest…The rest was naturally leery of trusting any white man. “Half a dollar now, half when I get through,” he said.

  “Reckon I’d stiff you?” the farmer said. Cassius just spread his hands, as if to say you never could tell. The farmer shrugged. “All right. But if you take off halfway through, I’ll send the sheriff after you, hell with me if I don’t.”

  “That’s fair,” Cassius allowed. “Reckon I could get me a ham sandwich an’ maybe a Dr. Hopper at noontime ’long with my other four bits?” If he was going to bargain, he’d go all out.

  The farmer took the request in stride. “Don’t see why not. Good Book says something about not binding up the mouths of the kine that tread the grain. Reckon that goes for people, too.”

  How could he quote the Bible and go along with what was happening to Negroes in the CSA? Maybe he didn’t go along, or not all the way, anyhow. He didn’t ask to see Cassius’ passbook, and he didn’t ask any inconvenient questions about what a young black man in city clothes was doing here.

  As soon as Cassius saw the mountain of wood he was supposed to chop, he understood at once why the man didn’t ask questions. If he chopped all that, he’d earn his dollar three or four times over. He was tempted to light out with the farmer’s two quarters in his pocket. One thing held him back: fear. County sheriffs were supposed to use bloodhounds to track people, just the way their grandfathers did back in slavery days. If this one caught him…He didn’t want to think about that.

  With a sigh, he set to work. Before long, sweat ran down his face even though the weather wasn’t too warm. He got blisters on his palms bigger than the ones on his heels. The farmer came to check on him, took a look at those, and gave him strips of cloth to wrap around his hands. They helped.

  At least an hour before noon, the man brought him an enormous sandwich, a big slice of sweet-potato pie, and a cool Dr. Hopper. The bottle was dripping; maybe it had been in the well. “Much obliged, suh,” Cassius said.

  “You’re doing an honest job,” the farmer said. “Looks like you could use a meal.”

  “Maybe some.” Cassius wolfed down the food. He savored the Dr. Hopper, and smiled when bubbles went up his nose. “Can I pour a bucket o’ water over my head? Feel mighty good if I do.”

  “Go right ahead,” the farmer answered.

  Cassius walked over to the well and did. He finished somewhere between three and four in the afternoon. The farmer didn’t make any fuss about giving him the second installment of his pay, and even brought him another sandwich without being asked. “Thank you kindly,” Cassius said with his mouth full.

  “Want to stick around for a spell?” the white man asked him. “I could use a hand, and you pull your weight. Say…four dollars a week and board?”

  The money was chicken feed, though a place to sleep and three—or at least two—meals a day made up for some of that. But Cassius shook his head. “I better keep movin’ on,” he said.

  “You won’t find many better deals,” the farmer warned.

  Not from ofays, Cassius thought. With Negroes, though, he had a chance for something this fellow couldn’t hope to give him: vengeance. That still burned in him. “Obliged,” he said again, “but I got places to go.”

  “And I know where you’ll end up: in trouble,” the farmer said. “You come sneakin’ round here after dark raisin’ Cain, I’ll give you a bellyful of double-aught buckshot. Wouldn’t be the first time.”

  That meant guerrillas were active in these parts: for Cassius, good news. Still, he said, “I wouldn’t do nothin’ like that with you, suh. You treated me fair. You treated me better’n fair, an’ I know it.”

  “How long will you remember, though?” The white man shrugged. “Reckon we’re quits. I don’t have anything against you—you did a job of work there. Ain’t seen anybody go at it like that for a long time.”

  “I was hungry,” Cassius said with a shrug.

  “Makes a difference,” the farmer agreed.

  “You know what they’re doin’ in the city, suh?” Cassius asked. “You know they got all the niggers shut up inside barbed wire? You know they’re takin’ ’em to camps an’ killin’ ’em? They took my ma and my pa and my sister yesterday.”

  “No. I didn’t know any of that. They don’t
talk about it much,” the farmer said.

  Only after Cassius was a couple of miles down the road, still another sandwich tied up in a rag, did he realize the man had to be lying. Who were they? What did they say? He wondered why the man bothered to waste time lying to a black. Why not just tell the truth and gloat? One answer occurred to him after another half a mile or so. He’d been closer to the axe than the farmer was, and he’d shown he knew how to use it.

  Armstrong Grimes was fit to be tied, and he didn’t care who knew it. What was his reward, what was his regiment’s reward, what was his division’s reward for making the Mormons realize they couldn’t throw enough bodies on the fire to put it out? Why, to go to Canada, to go up against a bigger rebellion. He’d called the shot too well.

  “How many people in Utah?” he demanded of Yossel Reisen.

  “I don’t know,” his fellow sergeant answered as the train rattled along through the upper Midwest—or maybe it was in Canada. One stretch of plain looked just as dreary as another. Yossel went on, “Half a million, maybe?”

  “Yeah, and not all of ’em were Mormons, either,” Armstrong said. “All right—how many people in Canada?”

  “Millions,” Reisen said. “Got to be millions.”

  “Fuckin’-A it does. That’s what I figure, too,” Armstrong said. “So what do we have to do? Kill every goddamn one of them?”

  “Hey, don’t get sore at me,” Yossel told him. “I didn’t give the orders. I’ve got to take ’em, same as you do.”

  “I’ll tell you what’s sore. My ass is sore,” Armstrong grumbled. The car he was in had hard benches packed too close together to squeeze in as many soldiers as possible. The smell and a dense cloud of cigarette smoke thickened the air. The Army cared nothing for comfort. It valued efficiency much more. Armstrong shifted from one weary cheek to the other. He nudged his buddy. “You oughta write your Congresswoman.”

  “Armstrong, the first time you said that, it was funny,” Yossel Reisen said. “The fifth time you said it, I could put up with it. By now, though, by now it gives me a fucking pain in the ass, you know?”