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.”
“Not going anywhere at all,” her husband agreed. George had drunk more than she had, but showed it less. The whiskey wasn’t making him laugh, either. It was just making him very certain about things. His certainty had swept her along, too, so that she lay altogether naked beside him even though the children couldn’t have been in bed more than fifteen minutes themselves.
If George, Jr., came in right now—well, that would be funny, too. Whiskey was amazing stuff, all right. Sylvia ran her hand over George’s chest, the hair there so familiar and so long absent. From his chest, her hand wandered lower. Ladies didn’t do such things. Ladies, in fact, endured it rather than enjoying it when their husbands touched them. If George gets angry, I’ll blame it on the whiskey, she thought as her hand closed around him.
“Oh,” he said, more an exhalation than a word. Nor was that the only way he responded to her touch.
“Is that what you learned in the Navy—how to come to attention, I mean?” she said. He laughed. Then, without even being asked, she slid down and took him in her mouth. Ladies not only didn’t do such things, they didn’t think of such things. A lot of ladies had never heard of or imagined such things. Since she had…His flesh was smooth and hot. The whiskey, she thought again. Being inexperienced in such things, she bore down more than she should have, and had to withdraw, choking a little.
If they hadn’t been married, if she hadn’t wanted him as much as he wanted her, what followed would have been a rape. As it was, she wrapped her arms and legs around him while he plunged above her, and whispered endearments and urged him on.
He shuddered and groaned sooner than she would have liked, which was, she supposed, a disadvantage of doing as she’d just done. Instead of pulling free, though, he stayed in her. In an amazingly short time, he was hard again. The second round was almost as frantic as the first, but, kindled by that first time, she felt all thought go away just as he spent, too.
“Always like a honeymoon, coming back to you after I’ve been away at sea,” he said, a smile in his voice. “I’ve been at sea a long time this time—and I never even saw the ocean.”
Sylvia didn’t answer right away. She felt lazy and sated, at peace with the world even if the world held no peace. But the body had demands other than those of lust and love. “Let me up, dear,” she said, and, regretfully, he rolled off her. She regretted it, too, when he came out. Nothing good ever lasts, that seemed to say.
She pulled the chamber pot out from under the bed and squatted to use it. Some of his seed ran out of her, too. That she did not mind; it made getting pregnant less likely. She got back into bed. George stood and used the chamber pot, too, then lay down beside her in the darkness once more.
“I got the telegram that said you were missing,” she said, “and—” She didn’t, couldn’t, go on with words. Instead, she clutched him to her, even tighter than when his hips had pumped him in and out of her as if he were the piston of a steam engine and she the receiving cylinder.
He squeezed her, too. “I hid in the woods with my pals till another boat got down there to see if anybody had lived through the explosion. They were the brave ones, ’cause the Rebs had that spot zeroed. None of the shells hit, though, and we rowed out to them and they got us away from there.”
“Four,” she said wonderingly. “Four, out of the whole crew.”
“Luck,” George answered. “Fool luck. We were up at this colored fellow’s shack on the riverbank. Charlie White would have killed anybody who kept a place that dirty, and they made the whiskey right around there. You drank it, you could run a gaslight on your breath. I had a glass, and some food—place was dirty, yeah, but they cooked better than anything our galley turned out—and I had some more whiskey, and then I went outside, and then…the Rebels dropped two, right on the Punishment.” Remembering made him shiver.
“What did you go outside for?” Sylvia asked.
She meant the question casually. To stand next to a tree was the answer she’d expected, or something of that sort. George stiffened in her arms, and not in the way she’d found so enjoyable. “Oh, just to get a breath of air,” he said, and she knew he was lying.
“What did you go outside for?” she repeated, and tried to see his face in the darkness. No good: he was only the vaguest blur.
He stayed unnaturally still a little too long. Was that the glitter of his eyes opening wide to try to see her expression, too? “It wasn’t anything,” he said at last.
Where the whiskey had made her giddy and then randy, now it made her angry. “What did you go outside for?” she said for the third time. “I want you to tell me the truth.”
George sighed. When Sylvia breathed in as he breathed out, she could smell and taste that they’d been drinking together. Sober, he might have found a lie she would believe, or else might have been able to keep his mouth shut till she got sick of asking questions. He’d managed that, every now and then.
He sighed again. “There was another place, next to this saloon or tavern or whatever you call it. I was going over there, but I never made it. I hadn’t taken more than a couple of steps that way when the shelling started.”
“Another place?” she echoed. George nodded, a gesture she felt instead of seeing. “Well, why didn’t you say so?” she demanded. “What kind of place was…?” All at once, she wanted to push him away from her as hard as she could. “You were going to a—” Her hiss might have been more deadly than a shout.
“Yeah, I was.” He sounded ashamed. That was something, a small something, but not nearly enough. He went on, “I didn’t get there. Sylvia, I swear to you it’s the only time I was gone that I was going that way. I’d been away so long, and I didn’t know when I’d be back or if I’d ever be back.” He laughed, which enraged her till he went on, “I guess God was telling me I shouldn’t do things like that even once.”
“And I let you—” Her voice was cold as the ice in the hold of a steam trawler. She hadn’t just let him touch her, she’d wanted him to touch her, she’d wanted to touch him. She couldn’t say that; her body had fewer inhibitions than her tongue did. Her tongue…She’d had that part of him in her mouth, and she tho
ught she’d throw up. She gulped, as if fighting back seasickness.
“Nothing happened,” George said.
She believed him. She wanted, or part of her wanted, to think he was lying; that would have given her all the more reason to force him away from her. Had he been telling the truth when he said that was the only time he’d gone to—or toward—such a place? Again, she thought so, but she wondered if it mattered when you got down to the bottom of things. Still in that frozen voice, she said, “Something would have happened, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes, I guess it would,” he answered dully.
He wasn’t trying to pretend. That was something, too. Try as she would, she had trouble keeping the flame of her fury hot. Being apart from him had been hard on her, too, and she’d known he wasn’t a saint before she married him. “You were pretty stupid, do you know that?” she said.
“I thought so myself,” he answered, quickly, eagerly, a man splashing in the sea grabbing for a floating spar. “If I hadn’t had that second glass of whiskey, I never would have done it.”
“Whiskey gets you into all sorts of trouble, doesn’t it?” she said, not quite so frosty now. “Makes you go after women you shouldn’t, makes you talk too much when you’re with the woman you should—”
He laughed in relief, feeling himself slide off the hook. His thumb and forefinger closed on her nipple; even in the dark, he found it unerringly. Sylvia twisted away: he wasn’t that forgiven yet.
“I was plenty stupid,” he said, which not only agreed with what she’d just said but had the added virtue of likely being truer than I’m sorry.
“I hope to heaven this terrible war ends soon, so you can come home and spend the rest of your days with me,” Sylvia said. And, she added to herself, so I can keep an eye on you. She’d never thought she’d need another reason for wishing the war over, but George had given her one.
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