“I’m pleased to meet damn near anybody who’ll buy me a drink,” Delamotte said. He was a big, fair-haired fellow who sounded as if he was from Alabama or Mississippi. He kicked the bar stool next to him. “Why don’t you set yourself down again, and maybe we’ll get around to buying you one, too.”
Being closer to Clarence Potter, Kimball sat beside him. The bartender served up two more beers and another whiskey. Kimball raised his schooner on high. “To hell with the United goddamn States of America!”
Potter and Delamotte both drank: no Confederate officer cut loose from his country’s service in the aftermath of defeat could refuse that toast. The ex-major who talked like a Yankee and looked like a tough professor offered a toast of his own: “To getting the Confederate goddamn States of America back on their feet!”
That too was unexceptionable. After drinking to it, Kimball found himself with an empty schooner. He wasn’t drunk, not on two beers, but he was intensely and urgently thoughtful. He didn’t much care for the tenor of his thoughts, either. “How the hell are we supposed to do that?” he demanded. “The United States are going to be sitting on our neck for the next hundred years.”
“No, they won’t.” Potter shook his head. “We will get the chance.”
He sounded positive. Roger Kimball was positive, too: positive his new acquaintance was out of his mind. “They made you butternut boys say uncle,” he said, which might have come close to starting another fight. Confederate Navy men, who’d battled their U.S. counterparts to something close to a draw, resented the Army for having to yield. But now, not intending pugnacity, he went on, “Why do you reckon they’ll be fools enough to ever let us do anything again?”
“Same question I’ve been asking him,” Delamotte said.
“And I’ll give Commander Kimball the same answer I’ve given you.” Potter seemed to think like a professor, too; he lined up all his ducks in a row. In rhetorical tones, he asked, “Toward what have the United States been aiming ever since the War of Secession, and especially since the Second Mexican War?”
“Kicking us right square in the nuts,” Kimball answered. “And now they’ve finally gone and done it, the bastards.” He’d done some nut-kicking of his own, even after the cease-fire. That last, though, was a secret he intended to take to the grave with him.
“Just so,” Clarence Potter agreed, emphasizing the point with a forefinger. “Now they’ve finally gone and done what they’ve been pointing toward since 1862. Up till now, they had a goal, and they worked toward it. Christ, were they serious about working toward it; you have no notion how serious they were if you’ve never seen a Remembrance Day parade. Scared me to death when I was up in Connecticut, believe you me it did. But now they don’t have a goal any more; they’ve achieved their goal. Do you see the difference, Commander?”
Before Kimball could answer, Jack Delamotte said, “What I see is, I’m thirsty, and I bet I’m not the only one, either.” He ordered another round of drinks, then ate some sardellen and lit a cigar almost as pungent as the fish.
After a pull or two at his beer, Kimball said, “Major, I don’t follow you. Suppose their next goal is wiping us out altogether? How in blazes are we supposed to stop ’em?”
“Goals don’t work like that, not usually they don’t,” Potter said. “Once you got to where you always thought you were going, you like to ease back and relax and smoke a cigar—a good cigar, mind you, not a stinking weed like the one Jack’s stuffed into his face—and maybe marry a chorus girl, if that’s what you reckoned you would do after you made it big.”
“So that’s what you figure is going to happen, eh?” Kimball chuckled. “You figure the United States scrimped and saved for so long, and now they’ll buy a fancy motorcar and put a beautiful dame in it? Well, I hope you’re right, but I’ll tell you this much: it won’t happen as long as that goddamn Roosevelt is president of the USA. He hates us too much to care about chorus girls.”
“I never said it would happen tomorrow,” Potter replied. “I said it would happen. Countries live longer than people do.” He knocked back his whiskey with a sharp flick of the wrist and ordered another round.
While the bored man behind the bar was drawing the beers, Jack Delamotte leaned toward Kimball and said, “Now you’re going to hear Clarence go on about how we need to find a goal of our own and stick to it like the damnyankees did.”
“It’s the truth.” Potter looked stubborn—and slightly pie-eyed. “If we don’t, we’ll be second-raters forever.”
“Won’t see it with the regular politicians,” Kimball said with conviction. “They got us into the swamp, but I’m damned if I reckon they’ve got even a clue about how to get us out.” Neither Potter nor Delamotte argued with him; he would have been astonished if they had. He went on, “I heard this skinny fellow on the stump a week or two ago. The Freedom Party, that was the name of his outfit. He wasn’t too bad—sounded like he knew what he wanted and how to get there. His name was Feathers, or something like that.”
To his surprise, Clarence Potter, who’d struck him as a sourpuss, threw back his head and guffawed. “Featherston,” the ex-major said. “Jake Featherston. He’s about as likely a politician as a catfish is on roller skates.”
“You sound like you know him,” Kimball said.
“He commanded a battery in the First Richmond Howitzers through most of the war,” Potter answered. “Good fighting man—should have been an officer. But that battery had belonged to Jeb Stuart III, and Jeb, Jr., blamed Featherston when his son got killed. Since Jeb, Jr.’s, a general, Featherston wouldn’t have got past sergeant if he’d stayed in the Army till he died of old age.”
Slowly, Kimball nodded. “No wonder he was ranting and raving about the fools in the War Department, then.”
“No wonder at all,” Potter agreed. “Not that he’s wrong about there being fools in the War Department: there are plenty. I was in intelligence; I worked with some and reported to others. But you need to take what Featherston says with a grain of salt about the size of Texas.”
“He’s got some good ideas about the niggers, though,” Kimball said. “If they hadn’t risen up, we’d still be fighting, by God.” He didn’t want a grain of salt, not one the size of Texas nor a tiny one, either. He wanted to believe. He wanted his country strong again, the sooner the better. He didn’t care how.
Clarence Potter shook his head. “I doubt it,” he said. “A good big man will lick a good little man—not all the time, but that’s the way to bet. Once we didn’t knock the USA out of the fight in a hurry—once it turned into a grapple—we were going to be in trouble. As I said, I was in intelligence. I know how much they outweighed us.” Even with a good deal of whiskey in him, he was dispassionately analytical like a scholar.
Kimball cared for dispassionate analysis only when calculating a torpedo’s track. Even then, it was a means to an end, not an end in itself. The end was action—blowing up a ship. Featherston wanted action, too. “You know how I can find out more about this Freedom Party?” he asked.
“They’ve started up an office here in town, I think,” Potter answered, distaste on his face. “Jake Featherston calls Richmond home, though, and I think the Party does, too.”
“Thanks,” Kimball said. “Do me a little poking around, I think.” He signaled to the bartender. “Set ’em up again, pal.”
Cincinnatus Driver—the Negro was getting more and more used to the surname he’d taken the year before—had hoped the war’s end would bring peace to Kentucky, and especially to Covington, where he lived. Now here it was the middle of spring, and Covington still knew no peace.
Every day when he left his house to start up the ramshackle truck he’d bought, his wife would say, “Be careful. Watch yourself.”
“I will, Elizabeth,” he would promise, not in any perfunctory way but with a deep and abiding sense that he was saying something important. He would crank the truck to noisy, shuddering life, climb into the cabin, put the machine
in gear, and drive off to hustle as much in the way of hauling business as he could.
He wished he were inside one of the big, snarling White trucks the Army used to carry its supplies. He’d driven a White during the war, hauling goods that got shipped across the Ohio from Cincinnati through Covington and down to the fighting front. The Whites were powerful, they were sturdy, they were, in fact, everything his antiquated Duryea was not. That included expensive, which was why he drove the Duryea and wished for a White.
As he turned right onto Scott from out of the Negro district and drove up toward the wharves this morning, he kept a wary eye open. A good many U.S. soldiers in green-gray uniforms were on the streets. They also looked wary, and carried bayoneted Springfields, as if ready to start shooting or stabbing at any moment.
They needed to be wary, too. After more than fifty years in the Confederacy, Kentucky was one of the United States again. It was, however, like none of the other United States, in that a large part of the population remained unreconciled to the switch from Stars and Bars to Stars and Stripes.
The city hall had U.S. machine-gun nests around it. Somebody—odds were, a Confederate diehard—had taken a shot at the mayor a couple of weeks before. Cincinnatus wouldn’t have been broken-hearted had the malcontent hit him. The mayor cooperated with U.S. authorities, and tried to placate the locals with rabblerousing speeches against blacks.
Blue St. Andrew’s crosses, some of them new, marked buildings and suggested the Confederate battle flag. Two horizontal red stripes with a white one between similarly suggested the Confederate national flag. Some of those were new, too. The diehards hadn’t given up, not by a long chalk. I AIN’T NO YANKEE, someone had written beside one of those not-quite-flags.
New posters marred walls, too, some of them slapped over the pro-Confederate graffiti. The posters were solid red, with broken chains in black stretched across them. The Red uprising had not got so far among the Negroes of Kentucky as among their brethren still in Confederate-owned territory at its outbreak. But it had not been brutally suppressed here, either. Being a Red wasn’t illegal in the USA, even if it was hazardous to a black man’s health.
Red posters and blue crosses were both thick around the waterfront. Cincinnatus wondered if the diehards and the Reds had bumped into each other on their clandestine rounds of pasting and painting. Down in the CSA, they would have been deadly foes. Here in Kentucky, they sometimes reckoned the U.S. government a common enemy. Cincinnatus whistled softly. They sometimes didn’t, too.
Both soldiers and police patrolled the wharves. Confederate policemen had commonly worn gray, like soldiers from the War of Secession. Now that Kentucky belonged to the USA, policemen—sometimes the same policemen—wore dark blue, as their grandfathers might have done had they fought for the Stars and Stripes.
And some policemen wore no uniforms at all. Some of the idlers, some of the roustabouts who strode up and down the piers and along the waterfront, were sure to belong to Luther Bliss’ Kentucky State Police, an outfit that made Kentucky the only U.S. state with its own secret police force. Cincinnatus knew Luther Bliss better than he wanted to. Knowing Bliss at all was knowing him better than Cincinnatus wanted to; the chief of the State Police made a formidable foe.
Roustabouts were hauling crates and barrels off a barge. Cincinnatus braked to a halt: cautiously, as the Duryea didn’t like to stop any more than it liked to start. He hopped out of the cab and hurried over to a discontented-looking fellow holding a clipboard. “Mornin’, Mr. Simmons,” he said. “What you got, where’s it got to get to, and how fast does it got to be there?”
“Hello, Cincinnatus,” the steamboat clerk answered, pointing to some of the barrels. “Got oatmeal here: five for Twitchell’s general store, and another five for Dalyrimple’s, and three for Conroy’s. You fit all of them in there?” He pointed to Cincinnatus’ truck. “Damn tight squeeze, if you do.”
“Mr. Simmons, they’ll go in there if I got to make one of ’em drive,” Cincinnatus said, at which the white man laughed. Cincinnatus went on, “Half a dollar a barrel for haulage, like usual?”
Simmons looked more discontented than ever. At last, he said, “Wouldn’t pay it to any other nigger driving a raggedy old truck, that’s for damn sure. But yeah, fifty cents a barrel. Bring me your receipts and I’ll pay you off.”
“Got yourself a deal, suh.” Cincinnatus beamed. That was good money, and he might have the chance to pick up another load, or maybe even two, before the day ended. Then he hesitated, really hearing the third name Simmons had given him. “That Joe Conroy?” he asked. “Fat man, used to have hisself a store before it burned down?”
“Let me check.” Simmons flipped papers. “Joseph Conroy, that’s what it says. I don’t know about the other part. How come?”
“Didn’t know he was back in business, is all,” Cincinnatus replied. It wasn’t all, not even close, but he kept that to himself. “Where’s his new store at?”
Simmons checked his papers again. “Corner of Emma and Bakewell, it says here. You know where that is? This ain’t my town, you know.”
“I know where it’s at, yeah,” Cincinnatus said. “Over on the west side, gettin’ out towards the park. Twitchell’s over here on Third, and Dalyrimple’s on Washington, so I reckon I’ll deliver theirs first and then head over to Conroy’s.” He held out his hand. “Give me the papers I got to get signed.”
“Here you go.” The steamboat clerk handed them to him. “That’s the other reason I pay you like I would a white man, or almost: you read and write good, so things get done proper.”
“Thank you,” Cincinnatus said, pretending not to hear that or almost. He couldn’t do anything about it. Stowing the papers in his shirt pocket, he started crowding barrels of oatmeal into the back of the truck. He did end up with one of them on the seat beside him; Simmons was a keen judge of how much space merchandise took up.
The truck rode heavy, the weight in back smoothing out its motion and making it laugh at bumps that would have jolted Cincinnatus had it been empty. He appreciated that. The ponderous cornering and the greater likelihood of a blowout were something else again. He drove carefully, avoiding the potholes that pocked the street. A puncture would cost him precious time.
His first two stops went smoothly, as he’d thought they would. He’d delivered to both Hank Twitchell and Calvin Dalyrimple before. Twitchell, a big, brawny fellow, even helped him lug barrels of oatmeal into his general store. Calvin Dalyrimple didn’t; a strong breeze would have blown him away. They both signed their receipts and sent Cincinnatus on his way in jig time.
He drove out to the west side of town with much more trepidation. That didn’t shrink when he discovered Conroy’s new general store sat between a saloon and a pawnshop. None of the looks he got from passersby as he stopped the truck in front of the store was friendly, or anything close. Most of them translated to, What the hell you doing here, nigger? He hoped the truck would still be there when he got done with his business with Conroy.
He also hoped the storekeeper wouldn’t recognize him. When he brought the first barrel into the store, all he said was, “Here’s your oatmeal, suh, straight off the docks. Got two more barrels in the truck; fetch ’em right in for you. All you got to do is sign the receipt shows you got ’em, and I be on my way.”
Joe Conroy grunted. He was a round, middle-aged white man with narrow, suspicious eyes. He was also a Confederate diehard, and a friend of Cincinnatus’ former boss, Tom Kennedy. Kennedy had involved Cincinnatus with the diehards, too, having him plant firebombs on cargoes heading down to U.S. forces. Eventually, Cincinnatus had planted one in Conroy’s old store, but the white man had never figured that out.
Cincinnatus had never decided how smart Conroy was. Smarter than he let on, was the Negro’s guess. He proved smart enough to recognize Cincinnatus, whom he hadn’t seen in a year, and who would have been glad never to see him again. “Well, well,” he said slowly, the unlit cigar in his mouth jerkin
g up and down. “Look what the cat drug in.”
“Mornin’, Mistuh Conroy.” Cincinnatus hurried out to the truck to haul in the second barrel of oatmeal. As long as he was working, he didn’t have to talk. He wished a customer would come into the cramped, dark general store. Conroy couldn’t afford to talk, not where anyone could hear him.
But nobody came in except Cincinnatus. Conroy gave him an appraising stare. “Hear tell it was that damnyankee you was workin’ for who shot Tom Kennedy,” he said.
“Yes, suh, that’s a fact. Hear him say so my ownself,” Cincinnatus agreed. He got in a dig of his own: “Wasn’t the Reds, like you told me in the park last year.”
“No, it wasn’t the Reds,” the storekeeper said. “But it was a friend of yours, just the same. We don’t forget things like that, no indeed, we don’t.”
“I saved Tom Kennedy’s bacon from the Yankees back when the war was new,” Cincinnatus said angrily. “I hadn’t done that, I never would’ve met you—and believe you me, that would’ve suited me fine.”
“We know where you’re at.” Conroy put menace in his voice.
“And I know where you’re at, too,” Cincinnatus said. “I get into trouble from you and your pals, Luther Bliss’ll know where you’re at and what you’ve been doin’. Don’t want no trouble, Conroy.” He used the white man’s unadorned surname with relish, to shock. “But I get trouble, I give it right back.”
“Damn uppity nigger,” Conroy growled.
“Yes, sir.” Cincinnatus went outside and manhandled the last barrel of oatmeal into the store. He thrust the receipt at Joe Conroy. “You want to sign right here, so I can go on about my business.”
“Why do I give a damn about that?” Conroy said.
“On account of if you don’t sign, I take this here oatmeal back to the docks and you don’t get no more shipments.” Cincinnatus wondered how much Conroy cared. If the store was nothing but a front for the diehards, he might not care at all. That would make Cincinnatus’ life more difficult.
Blood and Iron Page 9
