In at the Death (80 page)

And Morrell nodded as if his head were on springs. “That’s right. Negroes working the same jobs as white people, too, and getting the same pay. Oh, I don’t expect colored lawyers right away—you didn’t let them get the education for that. But they’ll get it from here on out.”

“I don’t reckon we’ll put up with it,” Butler said. “I truly don’t. Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, and segregation forever!”

“Are you saying that in your official capacity, Mr. Butler?” Morrell asked. “If you are, you just resigned.”

Clark Butler reconsidered. He had a well-paying, responsible job at a time and in a place where jobs of any kind were hard to come by. “Well, no. I wasn’t speaking officially,” he said after a brief pause. “I was just expressing the feelings of a lot of people in this part of the continent—and you know that’s so, General.”

Morrell knew, all right, much too well. After a pause of his own, he replied, “I don’t care what people feel. I can’t do anything about that. But I damn well can do something about how people behave. If you want to hate Negroes in your heart, go ahead. While you’re hating them, though, I will make you sorry if you treat them any different from whites. Have you got that?”

“Equality enforced at the point of a bayonet?” Butler jeered.

“Sounds pretty silly, doesn’t it?” Morrell said with a smile. The city commissioner nodded. But Morrell wasn’t finished: “Still, when you get right down to it, it beats the hell out of camps and ovens and mass graves.”

“I wasn’t involved with that,” Butler said quickly.

“You wouldn’t be talking with me now if you were,” Morrell replied. “But you think you’re serious about what you’re going to do? So are we. You can find out the easy way or the hard way. Up to you.”

Butler left in a hurry after that. Morrell wasn’t sorry to see him go, and resolved to keep a closer watch on him from here on out. He wondered whether the United States
could
enforce anything like equality on the old CSA. He still wasn’t sure—but he aimed to try.

T
he only way Clarence Potter could have avoided seeing the pamphlet called
Equality
was to stay in his apartment and never come out. The Yankees plastered the damn thing all over Richmond. During the war, that common a propaganda leaflet would have meant the Quartermaster Corps didn’t need to issue toilet paper for a while.

When he first read the pamphlet, he thought it was an A-number-one asswipe, nothing else but. After he looked at it again, he still thought it was an asswipe. But it was a clever asswipe, and a determined one. The damnyankees weren’t out to change hearts or minds in the dead CSA. They were out to change behavior. If they rammed different behavior down people’s throats from Richmond to Guaymas, they figured hearts and minds would eventually follow.

What worried Potter most was, they had a fighting chance of being right.

He’d watched the same thing happen when the Freedom Party took over the CSA. Even people who didn’t like Jake Featherston and the Party started greeting one another with “Freedom!” It was safer. You couldn’t get into trouble if you did it. And, after a while, you didn’t even feel self-conscious about it. You took it for granted. Pretty soon, you took the truth of everything the Party said for granted. And you, and the Confederate States of America with you, followed Jake Featherston into the abyss.

Now the Yankees wanted to push what was left of the Confederacy into…
Equality
. They didn’t ask whites to love Negroes. They just said,
Treat them the way you’d treat yourselves, or we’ll make you regret it
.

Was there ever a more perverted application of the Golden Rule?

Potter was sure lots of people hated the idea of Negro equality even more than he did. He’d spent sixty-odd years in the CSA; he knew what was what here. But he also knew he was being watched. The damnyankees didn’t waste subtlety showing him that—which didn’t mean there weren’t also subtle spies, ones he didn’t notice right away. He assumed his telephone was tapped and his mail read.

And so he sat tight and worked on his memoirs. A generation earlier, he’d done what he could to free the CSA from the onerous terms of the armistice after the Great War. But the Confederacy wasn’t crushed then. It wasn’t occupied, either. The USA had learned a bar fighter’s lesson since: once you knocked a guy down, you needed to kick him in the head so he couldn’t jump up and come after you with a broken bottle.

One day in early March, when spring was just starting to be in the air, he went over to Capitol Square to look around. Woodrow Wilson had declared war on the USA there in 1914. Potter himself and Nathan Bedford Forrest III had halfheartedly plotted against Jake Featherston there, too.

Forrest was dead now, because you needed to be a better plotter than he ever was to go up against the wily President of the CSA. Featherston never found out Potter was involved in that scheme. If he had, Potter knew he would have died himself.

Capitol Square had been battered when the two generals sat on a park bench and talked about where the Confederacy was going. Down the drain, though neither of them knew it at the time.

The square looked even worse now than it had then, which wasn’t easy. The grass was still mangy and leprous from winter’s freezes. No one had mowed it for a long time. It softened the outlines of bomb and shell craters without hiding them. Signs with big red letters shouted blunt warnings:
WATCH WHERE YOU STEP
! and
MINES & LIVE AMMO
!

Thus cautioned, Potter didn’t walk across the square to the remains of the Capitol. A neoclassical building, it had been bombed into looking like an ancient ruin. From the pictures he’d seen, the Colosseum and the Parthenon were both in a hell of a lot better shape than this place.

Workmen were hauling away the wreckage of Albert Sidney Johnston’s heroic statue. Like the Confederacy, it was good for nothing but scrap metal these days. George Washington’s statue, now out from under its protective pyramid of sandbags, had come through better. Even the Yankees still respected Washington…some, anyhow.

Two blue jays screeched in a tree. A robin hopped on the ground, eye cocked for bugs. A skinny red tabby eyed the robin from behind a low mound of earth. “Go get it,” Potter murmured. The cat had to eat, too. But the robin flew off. The cat eyed Potter as if it were his fault. It was a cat—it wouldn’t blame itself. Potter sketched a salute. “You’re a loser, too,” he said fondly. The cat yawned, showing off needle teeth. It ambled away.

He’d been looking for the bench where Forrest first broached getting rid of Featherston and getting out of the war. Once he sold his memoirs, that bench would become a historical monument of sorts. Or rather, it would have, because he saw no sign of it. One more casualty of war.

He found another bench, deeper into Capitol Square. Despite the signs, he didn’t blow up getting to it. He sat down. Getting out of the apartment felt good. So did the sun on his face, though he’d grown used to being pasty during the war. A man in a filthy Confederate uniform was sleeping or passed out drunk in the tall grass not far away. Some newspapers did duty for a blanket.

Potter didn’t think the derelict was watching him, though you never could tell. Somebody was, somewhere. He was sure of that. He looked around to see if he could spot the spy. Not this time. That proved exactly nothing, of course.

After the end of the last war, Jake Featherston had spent some time in Capitol Square as a drifter, one more piece of flotsam washed up by the armistice. Then he ran into the Freedom Party—and it ran into him. Before he joined, it was a tiny, hopeless outfit that could keep its membership rolls and accounts in a cigar box. Afterwards…

Now it was more than twenty-five years afterwards. Potter could see that everybody would have ended up better off if Jake Featherston went down some other street and never met the hopeless chucklehead who founded the Freedom Party. Once upon a time, he’d known that chucklehead’s name. He couldn’t remember it now to save his life. Well, it sure didn’t matter any more.

He closed his eyes. He wished he could close his nose. The stench of death still lingered in Richmond. It would only get worse as the weather warmed up, too. How many years would it need to go away for good?

“Hey, friend, you got any change you can spare?”

Clarence Potter opened his eyes. The sleeping soldier—he still had a sergeant’s chevrons on his sleeve—had come to life. He was filthy, and badly needed a shave. God only knew when he’d bathed last. But Potter didn’t smell whiskey along with the—what did that Yankee soap ad call it?—B.O.

“Here.” He dug in his pocket and found a half-dollar. “Buy yourself something to eat.” He tossed it to the man.

“Much obliged, sir.” The vet caught it out of the air. He eyed Potter. “You went through it, I reckon.”

“Twice,” Potter agreed. “Not always at the front, but yeah—twice.”

“You’ve got the look, all right.” The demobilized soldier stuck the fat silver coin in a trouser pocket. “You reckon we’ll ever get back on our feet again?”

“Sooner or later? I’m sure of it. When?” Potter shrugged. “It may be later. I don’t know if I’ll live to see it. I hope you do.”

The younger man eyed him. “You talk kinda like a Yankee.”
He
probably came from Alabama or Mississippi.

With another shrug, Potter answered, “I went to college up there.”

“Yeah? You like the Yankees, then? If you do, I’ll give you your money back, on account of I don’t want it.”

“Keep it, son. It’s no secret that I don’t care for the United States. We can’t fight them now—we’re licked. I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to fight them again. But I won’t like them if I live to be a hundred, and my bones tell me I won’t.”

“Huh,” the vet said gravely, and then, “We oughta fight ’em. We oughta kick the snot out of ’em for what they done to us.”

Was he another Jake Featherston, still unburst from his chrysalis of obscurity? It was possible. Hell, anything was possible. But long odds, long odds. How many tens of thousands had there been after the last war? Potter had no idea. He did know only one rose to the top.

He also knew this grimy fellow might be a provocateur, not an embryo Featherston. The Yankees wouldn’t be sorry to have an excuse to stand him against a wall with a blindfold and a last cigarette. No, not even a little bit.

“I have fought the USA as much as I intend to,” he said. “Keeping it up when it’s hopeless only makes things worse for us.”

“Who says it’s hopeless?” the young vet demanded.

“I just did. Weren’t you listening? Even if we rise, even if we take Richmond, what will the damnyankees do? Pull their people out of the city and drop a superbomb on it? How do you aim to fight that?”

“They wouldn’t.” But the man’s voice suddenly held no conviction.

“Sure they would. And if we’d won, we’d’ve done the same thing to Chicago if it rebelled and we couldn’t squash it with soldiers. What else are the damn bombs for?”

The man in the shabby, filthy butternut uniform looked up into the sky, as if he heard the drone of a U.S. heavy bomber. One would be all it took. The cities of the conquered CSA lay naked before airplanes. No antiaircraft guns any more. No Hound Dogs waiting to scramble, either. The only reason the damnyankees hadn’t done it yet was that nobody’d provoked them enough.

“Teddy Roosevelt used to talk about the big stick,” Potter said quietly. “They’ve got the biggest stick in the world right now, and they’ll clobber us with it if we get out of line. We lost. I wish like hell we didn’t. I did everything I knew how to do to keep it from happening. We can’t get too far out of line now, though. It costs too goddamn much.”

“What am I supposed to do with myself, then?” the veteran asked. Tears filled his voice and glistened in his eyes. “I been living on hate ever since we gave up. Don’t hardly got nothin’ else to live on.”

“Clean up. Find a job. Go to work. Find a girl. Plenty of ’em out there, and not so many men. Help build a place where your kids would want to live.” Potter shrugged. “Where we are now, what else is there?”

“A place where kids’d want to live? Under the Stars and Stripes? Likely tell!” the young man said scornfully.

“Right now, it’s the only game in town. Maybe things will change later on. I don’t know. You’ll see more of that than I do.” Potter’s hair was nearer white than gray these days. “But if you go on feeling sorry for yourself and sleeping in the square, maybe get drunk so you don’t have to think about things, who wins? You? Or the USA?”

“I need to think about that,” the vet said slowly.

Potter rose from the bench. “You’ve got time. Don’t take too long, though. It’s out there. Grab with both hands.” He never would have had to say that to Jake Featherston. Jake always grabbed.

And look what it got him. Look what it got all of us.
Clarence Potter walked back toward the street the way he’d come, trying to step just where he had before. Again, nothing blew up under him. But how much difference did that make now? Jake Featherston had blown up his whole country.

F
lora Blackford loved the smell of a kosher deli: the meaty odors of salami and corned beef harmonizing with the brine and vinegar of the pickle barrel and contrasting with the aromas of bagels and fresh-baked bread. Philadelphia had some decent delis, but you needed to go back to New York City for the real thing.

Her brother waved from a table in the back. David Hamburger had a double chin these days. His brown hair was thinning and going gray. Flora was graying, too. She thought the thirty years just past would have grayed anybody, even if they’d somehow happened in the blink of an eye.

“Don’t get up,” she called as she hurried over to David.

“I wasn’t going to. It’s too much like work,” he said. The artificial leg he’d worn since 1917 stuck out in front of him, unnaturally straight. “Good to see you. You still talk to me even though we won for a change?”

“Maybe,” Flora said. They both smiled. David had been a Democrat, and a conservative one, ever since he got hurt. Violence had done its worst to him, so he seemed to think it would solve anything. After this round of war, that seemed less foolish to Flora than it had before. Sometimes nothing else would do.