He also wondered if Patrick O'Donnell would start asking questions. O'Donnell, after all, had commanded a naval vessel that had helped sink a Confederate submarine, while the lieutenant commander had the look of a man who didn't go to sea much. But the former skipper of the Ripple sat silent. He had too much Navy in his blood to pressure an officer.
The lieutenant commander coughed. Maybe he was having trouble coming to the point. George didn't like that. If somebody didn't want to tell you something, odds were you didn't want to hear it, either. At last, the officer did speak: "Men, we are ending the program in which you have been engaged. Results have not shown themselves to be commensurate to the effort involved."
Kemmel and Schoonhoven and a couple of other regular Navy men aboard the Spray nodded. It didn't matter to them. One job, another job—so what? They were little rivets on a big machine. They'd fit wherever someone put them.
Now Patrick O'Donnell found his voice: "But, sir, we did sink a submarine."
"I know you did," the lieutenant commander said. "Another towing couple sank one off the western coast of the Empire of Mexico, too. Both, though, came in the very earliest days of the program, and both, unfortunately, received wide publicity. Now our enemies are suspicious of targets that look too tempting to be true, and towed submersibles are operating with a far smaller range than would be the case if they were cruising on their own. And so—" He spread his hands.
"What do we do now, sir, in that case?" O'Donnell asked.
"You'll be reassigned, of course," the lieutenant commander answered crisply. "Orders have already been cut for all of you, and transportation arranged for those being moved out of the area." He pushed back his chair; the legs scraped against the floor. "I have them in my office. I'll distribute them to you. Wait here."
He left the room, returning a moment later with a manila folder from which he drew envelopes with names typed on them. He handed O'Donnell his without hesitation, but had to ask who the other men were.
George Enos' fingers fumbled with the flap of the envelope, as if they didn't want to find out what lay inside. No, not as if he had no desire whatever to learn that the faceless red-tape twisters in Philadelphia had sent him to New York or San Diego or San Francisco or—
Want to or not, he pulled out the papers folded into the fat envelope. The name leaped out at him at once: "St. Louis," he said, his voice a raw hiss of pain. Report at once to the river monitor USS Punishment, St. Louis, Missouri. A train ticket fell out of the mass of other papers. He stared at it in horrified dismay. "Sir, this says I'm supposed to leave this afternoon!"
'That's correct," the lieutenant commander agreed. "We expected the Spray in three or four days ago, and made arrangements accordingly. Your family will be notified, I assure you."
Your family will be notified. A bloodless way to say it, a gutless way to do it. Sylvia would be at the canning plant now; he couldn't reach her there. The children were at Mrs. Coneval's, but she had no telephone, any more than his own apartment did. Send a wire? He shook his head. That would make Sylvia think he'd been killed.
Charlie White said, "San Diego," in that same wounded, disbelieving voice. They looked at each other. Despite the difference in the color of their skins, they were, in that moment, very much alike.
Marshlands had two wheelchairs now, the old one for upstairs and a new one with bigger wheels, one also easier to maneuver outside, for downstairs. Anne Colleton had bought the second chair without a murmur after watching Scipio bump her brother down the stairway and escape losing control of the chair only by luck.
Getting Jacob Colleton downstairs without having to bring his chair along certainly made matters easier for Scipio. He wheeled the mistress' brother to the top of the staircase, helped him rise, draped one of Jacob's arms over his own shoulder, let the gassed man hang onto the banister with the other hand, and walked down more or less normally. Then he eased Jacob Colleton down into the other wheelchair. "My gun," Colleton rasped.
"Are you certain that is what you require, sir?" Scipio asked tonelessly. As usual, Jacob reeked of whiskey. He'd also given himself an injection of morphia not long before. The butler did not think well of a drunk, drugged man's prospects for straight shooting.
Jacob Colleton glared at him. His body was wrecked, his eyes red-tracked and blurry, but the hate and rage that poured out from them made Scipio back up half a step in alarm. They weren't aimed at him in particular, but at the world as a whole, the world that had done what it had done to Jacob. That made them more frightening, not less. "Bring me my gun," Colleton hissed. He paused to draw a painful breath, then added, "If you're lucky, I'll give you a running start."
Scipio's laugh was dutiful. He might have found that funnier if he hadn't been sure Miss Anne's brother at least half meant it. "I'll be back directly, sir," he said, and went upstairs again. Hung on brackets above the bed in which he could sleep only propped up by pillows, Jacob Colleton had a Tredegar military rifle. Scipio took it and a couple of ten-round clips of ammunition and carried them down to Colleton. Jacob laid the rifle across the arms of his wheelchair and stuck the ammunition in one of the deep pockets of his robe.
"Push me over by that stand of trees," he told Scipio. "You know, the one by the nigger cottages."
"Yes, sir," Scipio said.
"See what kind of varmints I can get," Colleton went on. What a .303 caliber bullet meant for knocking over men at five hundred yards did to a squirrel at fifty wasn't pretty, but Jacob Colleton didn't seem to care much about that. He was a good shot—a far better shot than he had been before he went off to war. He looked up at Scipio, those pale eyes blazing. "I keep wishing it was damnyankees in my sights. Do you have any idea what I'm telling you? No, you wouldn't. How could you?"
But Scipio did. As he opened the front door so he could push Jacob Colleton out of Marshlands, he thought of the Negro revolutionary cell to which he'd so unwillingly become attached, and of their endless, hungry murmurs of Come de revolution. Come the revolution, they'd take aim at Jacob Colleton with exactly the same loving hate he lavished on the men of the USA.
A couple of Negro children broke off their games to stare at Jacob and Scipio as they went by. Colleton made as if to lift his rifle. "You better run fast, you damn little pickaninnies," he croaked. Run the children did, squealing in delicious fear. Colleton laughed his ghastly, shattered laugh. He looked up at Scipio again. "If I don't have any luck in the woods, I'll bag 'em on the way back to Marshlands."
Scipio maintained a prudent silence. Again, he thought Colleton was making a joke. Again, he wasn't sure enough to be comfortable.
Some of the trees by the Negro cabins bore fruit or nuts. The plantation hands shared out what they got from them. Some of the trees and bushes were just there, and had been there since before the War of Secession, maybe before the American Revolution.
Colleton clicked a magazine into the Tredegar and chambered the first round. Scipio stood behind the wheelchair. He had other things he needed to be doing, plenty of them. Unless Miss Anne called him, they wouldn't get done for a while. Jacob wanted to be moved every so often if he didn't shoot anything. If Scipio wasn't there to move him, he really might use the butler for target practice on his reappearance.
A crow flapped by and landed in a pecan tree. Fast as a striking snake, Jacob Colleton slapped the rifle to his shoulder, aimed, and fired. The report, as always, made Scipio jump and his heart start to pound. He wondered what war sounded like. Every time he tried to imagine it, his imagination rebelled.
The crow lost its perch and fell to the ground with a plop. It lay, a black puddle, on the grass and moss and leaves below the tree. With a click, Jacob Colleton worked the bolt and brought a fresh cartridge into the chamber. The brass casing he'd ejected glittered by the wheelchair.
"Good shot, sir," Scipio said. "Shall I recover the bird?"
"Don't bother," Colleton wheezed. "Crow isn't worth eating. No kind of crow is worth eating."
Colleton fired again, missed, and swore. His trainwrecked voice made ordinary words sound extraordinarily vile. Killing a foolish possum a few minutes later partially restored his spirits. "You can get that," he told Scipio. "Give it to one of those little niggers for the pot." Every once in a while, he remembered he was still supposed to be a gentleman.
Scipio carried the possum back by the tail. Jacob Colleton had put a bullet half an inch back of one eye. The ugly little beast couldn't have known what hit it. And possum, after some time in the pot or the bake oven, was tasty eating indeed. "Very good shooting, sir," Scipio said, laying the little body down beside the wheelchair.
Jacob Colleton started to say something, but coughed instead. He kept coughing, and finally started to turn blue. At last, as Scipio helplessly stood by, he mastered the spasm. "Lord God almighty," he whispered, "feels as if they're taking sandpaper and a blowtorch to my insides." Along with the clips of ammunition, he had a silver flask in one pocket of his robe. He gulped from it, swallowed, and gulped again. His color slowly improved. He looked down at the possum he had killed. "Good shooting, Scipio?" He shook his head. "This is nothing. It's not even proper sport. The possum can't shoot back."
"Sir?" Scipio knew he was supposed to say something in response to that, but for the life of him couldn't figure out what.
Colleton breathed whiskey up into his face. "Don't look at me like that. I wasn't joking, not even slightly. What better game to play, what more exciting game to play, than wagering your life that you're a better shot than the damnyankee on the far side of the barbed wire? But machine guns cheat, artillery cheats, gas cheats worst of all. It doesn't care how good a soldier you are. If you're in the wrong place, it kills you—and there's no sport at all about that."
Again, Scipio kept his mouth shut. A robin flew down toward a treetop. Jacob Colleton fired while it was still on the wing. It seemed to explode in midair. Feathers drifted to the ground. Scipio's eyes got wide. That wasn't just good shooting—it was outstanding shooting. And, since there wasn't much left of the poor songbird, Colleton hadn't done it for any reason but to show off... and maybe to savor the moment of killing something. Scipio shivered.
After he'd killed a squirrel and missed a couple of shots, Jacob said, "Enough of this. Take me back inside."
"Yes, sir," Scipio said, and he did. He helped Miss Anne's brother upstairs and back into the pillow-strewn bed in which he could not lie down. Scipio, whose mind took strange leaps these days, wondered how he did what he did with the women he summoned to his room. The Negro, who was very conventional in those matters, had trouble imagining alternatives.
He escaped from the bedroom with more than a little relief. But, try as he would, he could not escape Jacob Colleton. Down in the kitchen, he ran into Cassius; the hunter was bringing in a turkey he'd killed in the woods beyond the cotton fields. Cassius had been very quiet since his return from what he'd told Anne Colleton was Jubal Marberry's plantation. Now he signaled Scipio with his eyes. The two of them walked outside.
A stove had made the kitchen blazing hot. No stove burned outside, but it was blazing hot there, too, and so muggy Scipio expected rain. He and Cassius strolled along side by side. They made an incongruous pair because of their difference in dress, but nobody paid them any mind. Both the field hands and the white folks were used to seeing them together.
In a low, casual voice, Cassius said, "Kip, you got to keep Marse Jacob 'way from them trees." He pointed to the little wood into which Jacob Colleton had been shooting.
"How kin I do dat?" Scipio demanded. In a flash, he went from Congaree dialect to the English he used around Miss Anne and other whites. " 'I'm sorry, sir, but the huntsman-in-chief requires you to take your sport elsewhere' ?" He fell back into dialect: "Ain't gwine happen, Cass."
Cassius guffawed and slapped his thigh. "Do Jesus, that funny." He grew serious again in a hurry, though. "Don' care how you do it, but you do it, hear?"
Scipio stared at him in something approaching agony. "Ah cain't, Cass. He say go dere, we gots to go dere. I tell he no, I dance me all round why fo' no, he jus' git mo' and mo' 'spicious. You hear what I say?"
"I don't got to hear you, Kip. You got to hear me," Cassius said, not loudly, but not in a way Scipio thought he could ignore, either. "Don' wan' no white folks traipsin' through they woods. Don' wan' no white folks nowheres near they woods, you hear?"
"Better shoot me now," Scipio said. He'd never tried standing up to Cassius till this moment. He'd never had any chance before; the hunter had effortlessly dominated him. But now he'd asked the impossible. If he was too stupid to recognize that, too bad—too bad for everyone, too bad for everything.
He stared at Scipio now; defiance was the last thing he'd expected. "You got to, Kip," he said at last. "Ain' no two ways 'bout it. You got to." But he wasn't ordering now; he sounded more like a man who was pleading.
"How come I got to?" Scipio demanded.
Cassius didn't want to tell him. He could see that, with no room for doubt. After a long, long pause, the hunter said, "On account of I got a whole raf o' guns, whole raf o' bullets back in there. White folks finds that, ain't gwine do nothin' but hang all the niggers on this here plantation."
"Reckoned it were sumpin' like dat," Scipio said, nodding; wherever Cassius had been when he was away, it wasn't in bed with a nineteen-year-old wench named Drusilla. Where had he got the weapons? How had he got them back here? Scipio didn't know, or want to know. He pointed toward the woods in question. "You worry too much, you know dat? Marse Jacob, he cain't git out o' that chair, not hardly. He shoot hisself a possum, I gits it an' brings it back. He ain't goin' in they woods. An' you wants me to ruin everything on account of you gits de vapors. Do Jesus!" He clapped a hand to his forehead.
Cassius soberly studied him. "All right, Kip, we does it yo' way," he said, and Scipio breathed again. "You better be right. You is wrong, you is dead. You is wrong, we all dead."
He walked off shaking his head, perhaps wondering if he'd done the right thing. Scipio stood where he was till he stopped trembling. He'd got away with it. Not only had he been right, he'd made Cassius recognize that he was right. As triumphs went, it was probably a small thing, but he felt as if he'd just won the War of Secession all by himself.
"Pa," Julia McGregor asked with the intent seriousness of which only eleven-year-old girls seem capable, "are you going to send me back to school when it opens again after harvest time?"
Arthur McGregor looked up from the newspaper he was reading. He rested while he could; harvest would be coming soon. The paper was shipped up from the USA, and full of lies; since the demise of the Rosenfeld Register (which had been only half full of lies), no local paper had been permitted. But even lies could be interesting if they were new lies: why else did people read so many books and magazines?
"I'd thought I would," he answered slowly. "The more you learn, the better off you'll be." He brought that last out like an article of faith, even if he couldn't see how he was all that much better off for his own schooling. He studied his elder daughter. "Why? Don't you want me to?"
"No!" she said, and shook her head so vigorously that auburn curls flipped into her face.
"I don't want to go, either," Mary exclaimed. "Hush," he told her. "I'm talking to your big sister." Mary did hold her tongue, but looked mutinous. She had an imp in her that wouldn't placidly let her do as she was told. Her backside got warmed more often than Julia's or Alexander's ever had. But the imp also drove her to acts of real, even foolhardy, courage, as when she'd charged at the American officer who'd wanted to take McGregor hostage in Rosenfeld. Her father turned back toward Julia. "You used to
like school. Why don't you want to go any more?"
"You remember how I went last spring, when the Yankees let the schools open up again?" Julia asked. Arthur McGregor nodded. His daughter went on, "The books they made the teachers use, they were American books." She couldn't have spoken with greater contempt had she called them Satan's books.
"Numbers are numbers, and you do have to learn to cipher," he said. Reluctantly, Julia nodded back at him. He added, "Words are words, too."
"No, they aren't," his daughter said. "Americans spell funny."
McGregor spelled funny himself. His spelling had probably got funnier in the years since he'd escaped the classroom. Julia, though, had always been clever in school. That must have come from Maude's side of the family; he knew it hadn't come from his. He said, "They don't spell all their words different—not even most." He thought that was true. He hoped it was.
At any rate, Julia didn't argue it. What she did say was, "It's not that stuff so much, Pa. It's the history lessons. I don't ever want to go to another one of those again." She looked and sounded on the edge of tears.
McGregor glanced down at the newspaper, which had come from a little town in the state of Dakota. He remembered what he'd thought about it moments before. 'They telling you lies in the schoolroom, sweetheart?" he asked.
Julia's nod was as emphatic as her headshake had been. 'They sure were, Pa," she answered. "All kinds of lies about how America was right to have the Revolution, and the king of England was a wicked tyrant, and the Loyalists were traitors, and they should have conquered us in 1812, and Canada was worse off for staying with England, and how England and France and the CSA kept stabbing the United States in the back. None of it's true, not even a little bit."
"Not even a little bit," Mary echoed happily.
"Hush," Arthur McGregor told her. He picked his words with care as he spoke to Julia: "It's what they have to teach to keep the schools open at all, same as the Register had to print what the Americans told it to a lot of the time."
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