He didn’t need to be one of the big brains to figure that out. “On account of the Confederate States,” he said.
“Very good.” Mr. Wiedemann had a wide sarcastic streak. As long as he wasn’t aiming it at you, it made him pretty funny to listen to. “And from 1863 to the Great War, what happened to the border between the USA and the CSA?” He cupped a hand behind his ear. “Don’t everybody talk at once.”
“Nothing,” a girl said without raising her hand.
She would have got in trouble if she were wrong, but Wiedemann nodded. “Very good. For a long time, people thought that border would never change. Were they right?”
Herb Rosen, the greasiest grind in the whole class, stuck up his hand. Everyone said he would end up at Harvard if he could make it into the quota for Jews there. The government teacher pointed to him. Herb said, “Maybe they were.”
That made Armstrong sit up a little straighter. He knew the United States had taken land away from the Confederate States. The way his father went on, he would have needed to be dead not to know it. It wasn’t the answer Mr. Wiedemann had expected, either. The teacher said, “Suppose you explain yourself.” He didn’t come right out and call Herb a blockhead. When it came to splitting hairs, Herb could hold his own with anybody, and he’d won a couple of arguments with Wiedemann in class. No one else could claim that.
Now Herb said, “The way things are going, Kentucky and Houston will end up back in the CSA, and maybe Sequoyah, too.”
“God help us if you’re right,” Mr. Wiedemann said. “Why did we spend so much money and so much blood and so much pain to win them if we’re going to give them back to the Confederate States?” He tapped the end of his walking stick against the floor as he spoke. Armstrong didn’t think he knew he was doing it.
Like Armstrong, Herb Rosen hadn’t been born while the Great War was going on. For him, it was as much ancient history as the reign of Caesar Augustus. Unlike the teacher, who’d done his own bleeding and hurting, Herb could think and talk about that time dispassionately. “That’s the point I’m trying to make, Mr. Wiedemann. We took them, but did we really win them? Wouldn’t most of the people in those states sooner live in the CSA than the USA? Isn’t that why we’ve never let them have a plebiscite to decide?”
Mr. Wiedemann turned a blotchy purplish color. “What are you saying?” he asked, his voice shaking. “Are you saying we were wrong to take the spoils of victory? Are you saying we should have left the Confederates on the banks of the Ohio—and in easy artillery range of this very classroom?”
That last got home to Armstrong. His mother and grandmother had had plenty of stories of what Washington was like under bombardment. Most of them had to do with the long U.S. barrage that had preceded the reconquest of the city, but they’d talked about the Confederate shelling before the occupation, too. His mother didn’t go on about those things the way she had when he was younger, but she still talked about them every now and again.
Herb, plainly, had struck a nerve. Armstrong wondered if he would back down. Kids who got too far under the skin of grownups usually regretted it. They might be clever, but grownups were the ones with the clout.
“I’m saying things have changed since the War of Secession.” Herb sounded brash as ever. “Back then, states were more important than countries. Didn’t you say Kentucky even declared itself neutral after the war started, and for a long time the USA and the CSA both had to honor that?”
“Yes, I did say that,” Mr. Wiedemann admitted, “but I don’t see what—”
Herb charged ahead: “Can you imagine a state trying to be neutral during the Great War? Things were different. Countries counted most. You thought, I live in the United States, or, I’m a Confederate. You didn’t think, I’m a New Yorker first, or I’m from Georgia. And so when we took Kentucky and Houston away from the CSA, the people there didn’t stop thinking they were Confederates, the way their grandfathers might have. I’m saying that’s why we’ve had so much trouble. The Germans have, too, haven’t they, in Alsace and Lorraine?”
Before the government teacher could answer, the bell rang. Wiedemann looked like a prizefighter who’d been saved by it. “Dismissed,” he croaked, and sat down behind his desk.
Armstrong didn’t usually have much to do with Herb Rosen. In the tightly tribal world of high school, they traveled in different packs. As they left the classroom, though, he made a point of going up to Herb. “Boy, you tied him in knots,” he said admiringly.
Herb shrugged skinny shoulders. “I like to try to get to the bottom of things. It’s interesting, you know what I mean?”
“Till just now, I didn’t think government class could be interesting,” Armstrong said. And, had he been coming out of math or science or literature, he would have said the same thing.
Herb blinked behind thick glasses. He looked just like what he was: a smart little sheeny. Armstrong realized he’d taken him by surprise, first by speaking to him at all and then by what he’d said. After another blink, Herb said, “It’s like putting a puzzle together for me. I want to see where all the pieces go.”
Only once in a while, as today, did Armstrong get the feeling there was a bigger puzzle that held pieces in a pattern. Keeping track of one piece at a time seemed plenty hard enough to him. He said, “You see more of them than old man Wiedemann does.”
“I hope so,” Herb Rosen answered. “He doesn’t know all that much.”
He surprised Armstrong again. Teachers knew more about what they taught than Armstrong did himself, so he’d always been willing to believe they knew a lot. Believing anything else hadn’t even occurred to him. Now it did. He suddenly saw teachers as people like store clerks or truck drivers or trombone players: all doing their jobs, some good at them, some not so good. They weren’t little tin gods, even if they wanted kids to think they were.
“You’re all right, you know?” Armstrong said.
Herb blinked again, then beamed. He’d probably been wondering if he was going to get the snot knocked out of him. “You, too,” he said, and hurried off to his next class. Armstrong went off to his, too, in what was, for him, an unusually thoughtful state of mind.
Cincinnatus Driver sighed as he pulled his truck over to the curb in front of his apartment building. He was angry at himself when he got out of the truck. It was a big, growling Studebaker, only two years old. The hauling business had been good lately. It would have been better yet if he could have got Achilles to throw in with him. He could have afforded a second truck—and if they’d had two, they would have had more before very long. Cincinnatus could see himself as somebody in charge of a real trucking outfit.
Trouble was, Achilles didn’t want to drive a truck. He would have made more money than he did clerking, but he didn’t want to come home to Grace and his children dog-tired every night, with beat-up hands and an aching back. Part of Cincinnatus scorned his son for being soft. Another part, though, admired Achilles for getting by on brains instead of brawn.
Cincinnatus went into the lobby of the apartment building and checked his mail. He sighed again once he had, this time in relief: no letter from his parents’ neighbor in Covington. That meant no more news about his slowly failing mother. But even the relief held sorrow. It didn’t mean his mother was getting better. She wasn’t. She wouldn’t. Once you went into your second childhood, you didn’t come out again.
He trudged up the stairs to his flat. How tired he really was washed over him then. His back felt as if he’d been carrying an elephant up a mountain ever since he got up in the morning. He looked forward to a long soak in a hot tub. That would get some of the kinks out. When he went upstairs, he also understood exactly why his son wanted no part of the business he’d spent so long building up. If Achilles didn’t have to, why would he want to feel like this?
And what happens if you throw your back out? Cincinnatus didn’t want to think about that, but sometimes—especially when things in there ached more than usual—he couldn’t help i
t. He knew what would happen. He’d be in trouble, and so would his whole family.
The key went into the lock. He opened the door. Amanda sat at the dining-room table doing homework. Her face was set in concentration. Her tongue stuck out of the corner of her mouth. Cincinnatus smiled. His daughter never noticed when she did that. Both my children gonna graduate high school, he thought, and the smile got wider. That wasn’t bad at all, not for a black man who hadn’t been allowed to go to school at all growing up in Confederate Kentucky. He’d learned to read catch as catch can, and he’d had to be careful about letting white people know he could do it. Iowa wasn’t paradise—far from it—but it was better than what he’d known when he was small.
“Hello, sweetheart,” he said
Amanda jumped. “I didn’t hear you open the door.”
“I know. You was—were—thinkin’ about your schoolwork.”
“Test tomorrow,” she said, and sank down into that sea of study.
Cincinnatus went into the kitchen. Elizabeth was wrapping spiced ground beef in cabbage leaves. Cincinnatus’ mouth watered; he loved pigs in blankets. His wife looked over her shoulder. He gave her a quick kiss. “How’s things?” she asked.
“Not bad,” he answered. “Busy day. I’m tired.”
“Sore, too, I bet,” Elizabeth said. “I can see it, way you move.” He nodded. She wasn’t wrong. She went on, “Why don’t you take your bath now an’ soak for a while? These ain’t gonna be ready for at least half an hour.”
“All right, I do that,” Cincinnatus said. “I was thinkin’ comin’ up the stairs, hot water feel good. Maybe I put the wireless set in the hall so I can listen to it in there, too. That way, I don’t have to turn it on so loud, it’ll bother Amanda.”
“Well, go on, then,” Elizabeth told him. “Longer you stand here talkin’, less time you got to git clean and git warm.”
When they moved in, it had been a cold-water flat. They’d been happy enough because it had electricity, which they’d done without in Covington. Heating water on the stove hadn’t seemed like much. These past few years, though, the building had changed hands, and the new owner had put a water heater in the basement along with the furnace. The rent had gone up a few dollars a month to pay for it, but Cincinnatus didn’t know a single tenant who was inclined to complain. All the hot water you wanted, without having to heat it and carry it . . . If that wasn’t a bargain, he didn’t know what was.
He put the wireless on the floor in the hall, and ran it back to a plug in the bedroom with an extension cord. If he left the door open a couple of inches, he could hear just fine. He picked the station that would carry the football game in a little while. The Tri-State Association wasn’t a top league, but the Des Moines Hawks were one of the two or three best teams—and they were playing Keokuk, a doormat, tonight.
“Dutch will be along at half past the hour with the game,” the announcer said earnestly. “First, though, here is the news.”
Soaking in a steaming tub, Cincinnatus was inclined to be tolerant. “Go on, then. Tell me,” he said.
The announcer did, starting with the latest scandal at the State House. It sounded as if some Socialist legislators were going to spend some time in quarters less fancy than their present offices, but you never could tell. More than a few politicians here had managed to wiggle off the hook.
Farm news came next. Most of Iowa was farm country. They took prices for grain and hogs and cattle seriously here. They had to; an awful lot of people either made a decent living or didn’t, depending on whether those prices went up or down.
Only after the local and state news did the announcer bother to admit a wider world was out there. President Smith remained optimistic, or said he did, that an old-age pension bill would finally fight its way through Congress. The Socialists had been saying that for years. The Democrats had been filibustering for years. Smith was quoted as saying, “If they vote against it, they’ll pay at the polls next November, and they’ll deserve to.” Cincinnatus had long since decided he would believe in the pension when he saw his first check.
Someone in Houston had taken a shot at the U.S. commandant there. He’d missed, and been killed by the officer’s guards for his trouble. Someone in Sequoyah had blown up an oil well. “A spectacular fireball,” the announcer said, “and damage in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.” He sounded almost gleeful about having such exciting news to read.
“And in Kentucky,” he went on, “a plot to wreck the bridges crossing from Covington to Cincinnati was foiled by the vigilance of soldiers commanded by Brigadier General Abner Dowling. Dowling is quoted as saying Kentucky will stay in the USA as long as he is in charge there, and radicals and agitators had better get used to the idea.” Cincinnatus was sure the man on the wireless would have been more cheerful if he’d got to talk about the bridges falling into the Ohio River.
In the CSA, an auto bomb had gone off in Montgomery, killing four—three whites and a Negro—and wounding seventeen. The newsman said, “Like most of the recent rash of auto bombs, this is surely the work of Negro guerrillas, although no one has claimed responsibility for it. In Richmond, President Featherston has vowed vengeance for the attack, and has stated that, if necessary, he will hold the entire colored community responsible for the actions of the bombers, who, in his words, ‘are cowards destroying innocent lives but afraid to come out and fight like men.’ ”
Cincinnatus snorted. If you fought somebody stronger than you were, you had to be a fool to meet him face to face. Cincinnatus despised the idea of blowing up innocent bystanders. But he also despised what the Freedom Party was doing to blacks in the Confederacy. How could he blame them for hitting back with whatever weapons they found?
“In South America, talks between Venezuela and the Empire of Brazil on their latest border dispute are said to have made some progress,” the announcer said. “However, Argentina and Chile have recalled their ambassadors from each other’s capitals. They are said to be closer to war with each other than at any time since 1917.” Cincinnatus remembered that one of the South American countries had been on the USA’s side in the Great War, the other on the CSA’s. Sprawling there in the nice, warm tub, he couldn’t have said which was which. They were both too far away.
“King Charles of France has demanded a plebiscite in Alsace and Lorraine, much as President Featherston has demanded a similar vote in Kentucky and Houston,” the announcer declared. “No immediate reply is expected from Kaiser Wilhelm’s government, not least because of the Kaiser’s failing health. In Britain, Prime Minister Churchill announced his support for the French demand, saying, ‘The Germans have decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.’ ”
From what Cincinnatus had seen in the papers, this Churchill was a reactionary. The only reason he was prime minister was that the Conservatives had named him to the post to keep the Silver Shirts from eating their party the way the Socialists had eaten the Republicans in the USA. He was an old man, and cartoonists liked to show him with jowls like a bulldog’s. But he could turn a phrase.
“Churchill has also introduced a bill instituting conscription in Britain,” the newsman went on. “In his speech in the House of Commons, he said, ‘Come on now, all you young men, all over the kingdom. You are needed more than ever now to fill the gap of a generation shorn by the war. You must take your place in life’s fighting line. Raise the glorious flags again; advance them upon the new enemies.’ He pointed to the achievements of the British Unicorn Legion in Spain, and its role in helping the Nationalists seize Madrid from the German-backed Monarchists. ‘Surely Wellington would have praised their pluck,’ he said, amidst loud applause.”
Who was Wellington? Cincinnatus supposed the British knew. Achilles and Amanda might have known, too. He had no idea himself.
He didn’t much care, either. After giving the day’s stock-market figures (dismal, as usual) and the weather forecast (not
much better), the newsman went away. The excited background mutter from a packed football stadium came out of the wireless speaker. “Hello, Hawks fans. A very pleasant good evening to you, wherever you may be,” the sportscaster said. “This is your pal Dutch, bringing you tonight’s game between Des Moines and the Keokuk Colonels. Des Moines has to be the favorite, but you’ve got to watch out for Keokuk because they’re coming off a win against Waterloo, and . . .”
“Ahhh.” Cincinnatus knew he would enjoy hearing the game regardless of whether the Hawks won or lost. Even if it was 49-7 at the half, Dutch would find a way to keep the broadcast exciting till the final gun sounded. Dutch could read the telephone book and make it interesting. If there ever was a great communicator, he was the man.
And then, with the Hawks driving (“There they go again!” Dutch said after yet another gain), Elizabeth spoiled things by yelling, “Supper’s ready!” Cincinnatus didn’t want to get out of the tub, but he did.
Jonathan Moss was chewing a piece of roast beef when Dorothy looked across the table at him and asked, “Daddy, why are you a damned Yank?”
He didn’t choke. It took an effort, but he didn’t. After carefully swallowing, he looked not at his little girl but at his wife. Laura shook her head. “I’ve never called you that, Jonathan—well, never where Dorothy could hear.”
He believed her. She was straightforward in what she thought and said; he couldn’t imagine her lying about it to his face. Turning back to Dorothy, he asked, “Who called me that, dear?”
“Some of the kids at school,” she answered. “They said Mommy was a collabo-something. I don’t know what that means.”
Laura turned red. She bit her lip. She knew what it meant, too well. Quickly, Jonathan said, “It means those kids don’t know what they’re talking about, that’s what.”
The Victorious Opposition Page 49
