American Front (75 page)

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.”

You say that, to a Negro?
Scipio wanted to snatch the rifle out of his hand and smash in his skull. When whites came out with witless cracks like that, it did more than Cassius’ Red rhetoric to make Scipio think the black revolution was not only needed but might succeed. No matter how sharp Jacob Colleton’s eyes were, he was blind.

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.”

“I understand
that
.” Julia’s voice was impatient. He’d underestimated her, and disappointed her because of it. She went on, “I know they’re teaching us a pack of rubbish. I know what really happened, just like they taught me before when they were telling the truth. That isn’t what bothers me, or not so much, anyway. But I don’t think I can stand going back to school and listening to the teacher talk about all the lying things the Americans make him say and reading the books that say the same stupid things
and watching the other pupils at the schoolhouse listen to all the same lies and believe them
.”

“Do they?” McGregor wished he had enough tobacco to let himself light a pipe right now. It would have helped him think. He looked at the Dakota newspaper again. People all over American-occupied Manitoba were getting papers on the same order as this one. He didn’t take seriously the propaganda with which it was laced, and had assumed nobody else did, either. But how true was that assumption? All at once, he wondered.

“They really do, Pa,” Julia said seriously, making him wonder all the more. “It’s like they never paid attention before, so when the teacher tells them American lies and the books say the same thing, they don’t know any better. They just give it back like they were so many parrots.”

“Awrk!” Mary squawked. “Polly want a cracker?”

“Polly want to go to bed right now?” McGregor asked, and his youngest got very quiet. He sat there thinking, his chin in his hand. He was a hard-nosed, rock-chinned Scotsman; he knew what was so and what wasn’t. So did his wife. They’d brought up their children to do the same, and evidently succeeded.

But what about the people who weren’t the same and who didn’t do the same for their children? He hadn’t thought much about them. Now, listening to Julia, he realized that was a mistake. What about the light-minded souls who believed the Germans were about to take Petrograd and Paris and the Americans Richmond and Toronto, for no better reason than that the newspapers said as much? What about their children, who believed when they got told the Confederacy had had no right to secede from the United States or that Custer’s massacre of General Gordon’s brave column had been a heroic victory, not a lucky ambush? What about all the people like that?