“If that’s what it’s called—yes.”
“Uh-huh … all that land … Sion Crossing—old Sion land … Sure, there’re paths all along the top, ’bove the stream.” The negro nodded. “No problem—no problem ’cept it’ll be a mite warm for a cold-blooded Englishman just now.” He estimated Latimer critically. “Might melt you down some—might be more than you could take.”
The memory of yesterday’s oven temperature, thus crudely recalled, still radiated uncomfortable heat. But after that challenge to his ability to withstand it Latimer could not have backed down even if he’d wanted to.
“You underestimate us.” He couldn’t look down on the man physically, but he had a historical advantage. “We’re quite accustomed to ridiculous temperatures. One of my ancestors fought on Delhi Ridge for four months in the Indian Mutiny, a few years before your Civil War—120 degrees, and no cover, before the rains … and cholera after that. I should think he’d regard your ridge at Sion Crossing a good place for a picnic, Mr Kingston.”
Kingston’s mouth opened for an instant, then rearranged itself in its almost-habitual grin. “Is that a fact? Hell—but of course it is!” He looked at Lucy. “It’s like in that song—
Mad dogs and Englishmen
Go out in the midday sun—
—you abs’lutely raht, Miz Lucy—it doan bother him none!”
Latimer, in his turn, looked at Lucy. “What?”
Lucy looked daggers at Kingston. “I didn’t say anything—”
“Yes, you did—you once said other countries has a climate, but the English Limeys … they just got weather, an’ they don’t do nothing about it ’cept complain, an’ they take everythin’ else for granted, whether it’s good or bad, ’cause it’s foreign, an’ there’s no point in trustin’ it, or worryin’ about it—they just ignores it, like it wasn’t there—is what you said, Miz Lucy.”
“I said no such thing.” Lucy looked at her watch. “And, in any case, are you going to Smithsville or not? Because if you aren’t, then I’ll have to take Oliver to Sion Crossing … Well?”
Kingston rolled a glance at Latimer. “You don’t want nothing to eat? ’Cause I was fixing to make you something really Southern—” The glance lowered offensively to Latimer’s stomach.
“Oliver wants to see Sion Crossing,” said Lucy acidly. “He can wait for his dinner until supper.”
Latimer looked from one to the other, if anything even more confused by their relationship. It seemed to him that in some ways Kingston was the family retainer—a competent chauffeur and a meticulous man-about-the-house … meticulous even to the point of unlocking locked drawers, and cleaning the pistols he discovered therein, as well as calmly battening down and securing everything last night. But he was also more than that …
But this was a different world, he had to remember that now … So okay—not only as a chauffeur and a man-about-the-house—but also as a cook—as a cook, Kingston’s performance last night, with that okra dish, as well as this morning, with that extraordinary breakfast, was enough above average to make him wish that he’d swallowed his pride just now, and settled for dinner (which was presumably lunch), instead of supper (which was presumably dinner, in a civilized world)—
But it was too late now.
The garage of the Professor’s house was enormous, and filled with all the equipment of American husbandry and do-it-yourself technology … and, along the back wall, on the other side of which lay the enticing blue lagoon of the swimming pool, a work-bench with drawers; in one of which drawers there had been an automatic pistol—he had to remember that, in order not to compare all this too unfavourably with the less sophisticated hardware of any equivalent British upper middle-class establishment, where burglars could not be shot down in their tracks.
And two cars—yesterday’s Volvo, and a curious vehicle which looked as though it had been slightly over-inflated from a sleeker design to distort the angularity of modern European drawing boards, so that it was almost bulbous in outline.
Kingston slapped the roof of the curious vehicle, flashing that eternal grin. “Okay, Oliver?”
Some sort of reply was required to that—some sort of reply was always required when Kingston addressed him. “This is Tat Albert’, is it?”
“This Fat Albert—” Kingston massaged the unmasculine curve of Fat Albert’s roof “—this Missus Professor Booth’s mode-of-transport … We go to Smithsville, we always use Fat Albert—the Professor, he drive the Volvo to Columbia, ’cause that’s his car, an’ they know that there … But, Smithsville—they know Fat Albert better here’bouts, so we drive Fat Albert here—okay?”
“Oh?” That dichotomy of the Volvo and Fat Albert, and of Professor and Mrs Booth, baffled Latimer; was the Professor a more dangerous driver than his wife—or a better one? “Yes?”
Kingston bobbed his head. “Maybe I oughta take you there first, only Miz Lucy sez no … They got a big parade there, this weekend, all dressed up like you never saw … But mebbe we can do that this evening, huh?”
“A parade?” But, of course, Americans were always parading: they had pretty girls in short skirts who marched at the head of bands, tossing batons and flags into the air above them: that was why American parades were so much more successful than British ones.
“Uh-uh.” Kingston shook his head. “You oughta see the war memorials they got in the square, Oliver—that’s what you oughta see—you bein’ a Civil War man, you see.”
“Oh?” The identification momentarily threw Latimer. He had just started to admonish himself for being unjust to his own country: the British did some parades better than anyone—the stiffly formal ones, like the Trooping of the Colour, and the Royal occasions … But it still had to be admitted that the Americans were far superior on more popular occasions—and although they must have their riots, he could never recall having read of American football hooligans—
But Kingston was looking at him curiously across Fat Albert’s roof—
“Oh … yes?” What had the man said? Not parades—but war memorials … ‘you being a Civil War man’, of course! But what was really disorientating him was this unaccustomed need to play a rôle: it had been years since he had had to do anything like this, pretending that he was something that he was not. And that uncomfortable conclusion pricked another discomfort, of which he had been aware the moment he had stepped into the garage, but which he had tried to ignore.
“What’s the matter?” Doubt succeeded curiosity on the negro’s face. And when he wasn’t grinning, or at least smiling, it revealed itself as a face not architect-designed for laughter: somewhere far back in that bloodline, maybe before some enslaved ancestor in the Americas, there had been an original Kingston whose mouth had been cruel and whose eyes had been watchful—whose sneer of cold command had put the fear of dark unknown gods up his Dahomeyan or Ashanti subjects.
“It’s nothing.” He shivered in spite of what he was about to say. “I was just thinking that it’s pretty warm in here.”
“Warm?” Kingston relaxed. “Man—if you think this is warm … maybe you should go back inside … You get on the ridge there—” He opened Fat Albert’s door on the driver’s side, but now he slammed it again “—maybe you should wait ’til tomorrow morning, ’fore the sun come properly up, huh?”
“No.” Once again the challenge made him more resolute. Besides which, the sooner this charade was over, and he was safe back home, the better. “No … You said … war memorials?” He opened the passenger’s door decisively.
“Okay. It’s your funeral.” Kingston re-opened his door, and folded his height to enter Fat Albert.
Latimer followed suit almost gratefully, only to find that Fat Albert’s interior was no improvement. Instinctively he tried to wind down the window.
“Doan do that, for chrissake!” exclaimed Kingston.
Latimer pretended he had been reaching for his seat-belt. “War memorials, you said?”
“That’s right.” King
ston hurled Fat Albert out of the garage in a shower of gravel. “You know ’bout them? You got them in England, huh?”
It was on the tip of Latimer’s tongue to reply that England had bigger and better war memorials than America, and more of them going back to wars which Kingston had never heard of. Because—damn it!—there was one outside that hotel in Cheltenham, where he’d stayed that last GCHQ time, which listed the local dead of Britain’s last official war against Russia, back in the 1850s, which had once been adorned with captured Crimean cannon—cannon subsequently melted down, together with most of the town’s iron railings, for use against Hitler in 1940.
“Yes, we have a few.” He curbed his tongue. Admitting to more and bigger war memorials was not far short of claiming more and bigger lunatic asylums. “So what?”
“Man, they got three in Smithsville, for Barksdale County.” The negro spun the wheel and the gravel spurted again. “One’s for ’41 to ’45—mebbe twenty-thirty names, plus a few more they added for Korea and ’Nam … an’ there’s still plenty of room for more—” Fat Albert bucked as they left the drive for the road “—and then there’s one for the first war ’gainst the Krauts, back in ’17—’17-18—the First World War, okay?”
It was a very open road, hemmed in by trees but with not a car in sight. He had imagined America as the land of the car, but so far, except for the maelstrom of Atlanta airport (which had not been so very different from Heathrow or Gatwick), it had been more the land of trees. But then, it was a vast country and he’d seen but the tiniest and perhaps untypical part of it.
“The 1914-18 War.” Mitchell would have liked that correction. “The Great War, we sometimes call it.”
“That so? Well, it wasn’t so great in Barksdale County. Got a big memorial … statue of this guy wearin’ one of your funny steel helmets, like a soup-plate, on his head … But ain’t no more’n a dozen names on the whole damn thing.”
“Indeed?” Latimer remembered irrelevantly that Colonel Butler was morbidly fascinated by war memorials. Perhaps the negro shared that same rather unhealthy interest, unlikely as it seemed. But at least here was something he could take back to England with him, to tell the Colonel about. For lack of any common interest outside work, making small talk with Butler was usually quite beyond him. But now he had American funerary monuments to offer. “Very interesting.”
Kingston gave him a suspicious look. “That’s not what’s interesting, man—hell no! It’s the third one—the Confederate one—that you oughta see, for chrissake!”
Damn! Latimer shook himself free from extraneous thoughts about Colonel Butler and the afforested nature of the Land of Cotton. He was a Civil War man—and it had taken hardly a minute for him to forget that, and he damn well mustn’t forget it again!
“Of course—yes …” He dredged into the information acquired during recent study “… that would be for the Georgia militia units who fought Sherman’s men hereabouts, I take it … as well as from the regular regiments in the main armies?” He returned the suspicious look with one of false expert knowledge. “I’ve always thought that the Governor—Governor Brown—was quite disgracefully obstructive over the use of the local militia. But then, if you’re fighting for the rights of individual states, you have to concede the right of any individual state to be obstructive, logically, I suppose … Only, in the South’s case, a defensive strategy was bound to fail eventually, given the disparity of resources, so long as Lincoln could hold the North together—”God! What was he saying? But that was roughly what the real experts appeared to have said, including Miss Lucy Cookridge’s anonymous real father, so far as he could make out; only … they had also hedged their bets at the same time—
“Uh?” Suspicion gave way to—was it mystification or boredom?—as Kingston took his eyes off the road to study him again.
Well, either would do. “But, then again, a defensive strategy might have worked … It was the era of defensive warfare—from Sebastopol—” Simultaneously the image of the Cheltenham Crimean War memorial superimposed itself on what Lucy Cookridge’s real father had written “—through Plevna and Paris—and even Port Arthur—” Where the hell was Plevna? He’d never heard of it! “—to Gallipoli, and the Somme—” He could see that Kingston had heard of at least some of them “—and Verdun.”
“Plevna?” Fat Albert swerved slightly as Kingston glanced at him, and then began to slow down. “What’s that?”
Fat Albert was slowing even more—was actually coming to a halt, nosing onto a grassy hard shoulder beside the road—with Plevna still unidentified—
“Yes.” Latimer decided that Plevna was a place, since all the rest of them had been geographical. “The siege of Plevna … But, you know, if the Confederacy had maximized its defensive capabilities—if General Johnston had had enough men in the West, to cover Sherman’s flanking movements … Because Johnston was probably a better general than Sherman, given half a chance, you know—remember Kennesaw Mountain—?” It was undoubtedly boredom now, in Kingston’s eye, thank God!
“I’m sorry, Mr Kingston—I’m digressing.” But that, at least, was an authentic touch: asked a straight question, historians usually digressed to other periods of history to cover their ignorance. “You were saying … the Confederate war memorial in Smithsville—?”
“Yeah.” Mercifully, the negro abandoned Plevna. “Well, there’s a lot of writing on it, at the front, about ‘The Cause’, an’ ‘the noble sacrifice’ an’ ‘patriotic devotion’, an’ all that—ain’t no room for another line. An’ no room on the other three sides, either.” He looked at Latimer.
“Yes?” Latimer waited.
“Names, Oliver. It’s all covered with names—must be a thousand of ’em—mostly widows ’n orphans in Barksdale County hundred years back—an’ old maids. “ Kingston shook his head, and turned away to scan the woods on his left. “All because of ‘The Cause’—helluva thing … Me, I don’t go for causes.” He craned his neck to study the roadside behind them. “No way!”
Latimer frowned at the back of the negro’s head, and thought that he would like to know a lot more about the man, as well as the phenomenon of colour itself. The trouble with an utterly absorbing specialization—the trouble with knowing more than anyone else about certain areas of the KGB’s operations in Western Europe without having to consult Colonel Butler’s new computer—was that he knew so little about most other things, not excluding everyday life as well as all things American: he was as specialized as a giraffe or a polar bear—and at this moment he was as far away from his own specialization as from the African bush and the Arctic wastes.
“What do you go for, Mr Kingston?”
Kingston didn’t turn around. “Whatever I’m paid to go for, Mister Latimer … Did you see a sign back there, just round the bend behind?”
“No, I was listening to you—”
Kingston turned at last. “You got that sketch map, huh?” He waited for Latimer to produce Lucy Cookridge’s father’s map of Sion Crossing. “Thanks … yeah—I think we’re just about there—on the edge of the ridge, where there’s a path … You stay here, an’ I’ll go look—okay?” He opened the car door.
Latimer studied the map while he waited for the negro to return. With the trees all around, except for Kingston’s location of their position, he might have been anywhere in Georgia. But, if Kingston was correct, the road would fall away towards the stream just round the next corner.
There was a certain confusion about all this Sion nomenclature. What Kingston called “Sion land” seemed to be everything beyond the bridge, on this side of the water: that must be the original extent of the old Sion Crossing plantation, where the trees had reconquered the original cotton fields over the last century, since the out-riding raiders of General Sherman’s wrath-of-God army—“the Bummers”—had devastated everything worth devastating in a twenty or thirty mile swathe on each side of the main line of advance towards the Atlantic, tearing the rich heart of the Confederate St
ates of America to pieces in the process.
So … hereabouts, on Sion land, there had been Sion Creek, and Sion Church—he had seen both of them yesterday, as he had descended in the car to what he had thought of as Sion Crossing—with the site of the old Sion Crossing House of the Alexander family hidden in the trees somewhere along the ridge, to his right—to his right then, but to his left now—
But in fact, Sion had been the abbreviation for all the different ingredients of the whole, which (according to Lucy Cookridge’s father, whose scholarship could certainly be trusted) had derived from the original James Alexander’s vision of his promised land, when he had brought his worldly goods across the creek nearly two hundred years ago—worldly goods which included wife and sons and slaves—to dispute possession with the last Indians here.
He heard the crunch of Kingston’s large feet on the edge of the road behind him, on the passenger’s side of Fat Albert. But this time he would not attempt to lower the window: it was no longer cool inside the car, but it would be far beyond warm out there.
Sion Crossing was what it all had been: the red earth on this side of the creek which old James Alexander had grasped in his hand as his own, although it didn’t belong to him except by his own law, just as William the Bastard had taken England nearly nine hundred years before—by right of conquest!
Kingston opened his door, and a draught of super-heated air entered Fat Albert.
“Okay!” Kingston grinned. “This the place, Oliver. Jus’ back there, there’s the path … You follow that, an’ keep the creek on your right—go by the church mebbe half-mile, an’ there’s the chimneys still there somewhere, jus’ by the path—mebbe more’n half-mile, I can’t say for sure, ’cause I ain’t never bin that far … But where the chimneys are—that’s where the house wuz.”
Latimer climbed out of Fat Albert, and felt the heat embrace him. But there was no going back now: he had offered up his St John ancestor, who had sweltered on Delhi Ridge in an even more dreadful temperature: compared with Delhi Ridge, Sion Ridge was nothing.
Sion Crossing Page 18
