Return Engagement (78 page)

As he took orders and recommended specials, he thought about Marshlands, now a ruined ghost of its former self. Anne Colleton dead . . . That still amazed him. One of her brothers had died—bravely—at the very start of the black revolt in 1915. The other one, as far as Scipio knew, was still alive.

After the war, Tom Colleton had turned out to be more dangerous and more capable than he’d expected. The white man had crushed what was left of the Congaree Socialist Republic. Till then, Scipio hadn’t thought of him as anything but a lightweight. It only went to show, you never could tell.

That was probably true for almost all white men. Scipio laughed, not that it was funny. Whites in the CSA probably said the same thing about blacks. No, they certainly said the same thing about blacks. Hadn’t he overheard them often enough, at Marshlands and here at the Huntsman’s Lodge and plenty of places between the one and the other whenever they didn’t think blacks could listen?

Of course, when whites talked among themselves, they often didn’t pay enough attention to whether blacks were in earshot. Why should they, when blacks were hewers of wood and drawers of water? Blacks talking about whites? That was a different story. Blacks had known for hundreds of years that a white man overhearing them could spell disaster or death.

A white man at one of Scipio’s tables waved to him. “Hey, uncle, come on over here!” the man called.

“What you need, suh?” Scipio asked, obsequious as usual.

“How long do they need to do up a steak in the kitchen? Have they all died in there? Of old age, maybe?” He was playing to the rest of the whites at the table. His friends or business associates or whatever they were laughed at what passed for his wit.

“It come soon, suh. Dey needs a little extra time, git it well-done de way you wants it.”

“Oh. All right. Thanks, uncle. Make sure you bring it out the minute they get it finished.” The white man, mollified, forgot about Scipio, even though he was still standing right there.

“Yes, suh. I do dat.” Scipio could have laughed in the man’s face. He could have, but he didn’t. It wouldn’t have been polite. But he knew the kitchen was glad to get well-done orders. They let it dispose of meat too nasty to serve before searing it thoroughly enough to destroy all the flavor. They also let it get rid of meat too tough to be worth eating; once cooked well-done, almost all meat was too tough to be worth eating. If the customer couldn’t tell the difference—and the customer never could—the kitchen only smiled.

After Scipio brought that dinner and the rest of the food to that table, he got a better tip than he’d expected. He thought that was pretty funny, too. No matter what he thought, his face never showed a thing.

It had looked like rain when he came to work, but the clouds had blown through by the time he left the restaurant. A big yellow moon hung in the sky; its mellow light went a long way toward making up for the street lamps that shone no more. Farther north, they would have called it a bombers’ moon, but no bombers had come to Augusta.

Scipio and Aurelius walked along side by side. Scipio was glad to have company on the way back to the Terry. Neither of them said much. They just walked in companionable silence, both of them puffing on cigarettes. Then, about a block and a half from the edge of the colored part of town, Aurelius stopped. So did Scipio, half a step later. Aurelius pointed ahead. “Somethin’ goin’on up there, Xerxes.”

“I sees it.” Scipio squinted. The moonlight wasn’t enough to let him make out what it was. It seemed as if it ought to be that bright, but it wasn’t. Moonlight had a way of letting you down when you needed it most. Suddenly, absurdly, Scipio remembered a girl from more than fifty years before, not long after he was manumitted. She’d seemed pretty enough by moonlight. Come the day . . . Come the day, he wondered what he’d been thinking the night before. He
hadn’t
been thinking the night before, which was exactly the point.

Aurelius had similar doubts. “Reckon we ought to find out what it is?” he asked.

“Can’t stay here,” Scipio said. “The buckra find we here in de mornin’, we gwine wish we was dead.”

“Uh-huh.” Aurelius took a couple of steps forward, then stopped again. “We go on, maybe we
be
dead.”

“We gots to go on,” Scipio said. “They catches we in de white folks’ part o’ town, we be dead then, too. Either that or they puts we in jail, and only one place a nigger go from jail dese days—to one o’ dem camps.”

Aurelius plainly wanted to argue. No matter what he wanted to do, he couldn’t. With dragging feet, he and Scipio approached. “Halt! Who goes there?” a white man barked at them, and then, “Advance and be recognized.”

Even more hesitantly, the two Negroes obeyed. As Scipio drew near, he saw that uniformed white men were surrounding the Terry with barbed wire. There were gateways; he and Aurelius were coming up to one. Trying to keep his voice from shaking, he asked, “What you do?”

“Too many troublemakers getting in and out,” the white man answered briskly. “High time we kept a closer eye on things, by God. And what the hell are you coons doing out after curfew anyways?”

“We works at the Huntsman’s Lodge, suh. Dey closes late,” Scipio answered.

“Yeah? If that’s so, you’ll have fancy dress on under those topcoats. Let’s have a look,” the white—a Freedom Party stalwart—said. Scipio and Aurelius hastily unbuttoned their coats to display the tuxedos beneath.

“I know them two niggers, Jerry,” an Augusta cop told the stalwart. “They are what they say they are. They don’t give anybody trouble.” He pointed at Scipio and Aurelius with his nightstick. “Ain’t that right, boys?”

“Yes, suh!” the waiters chorused.

“Any nigger’ll give trouble if he gets the chance.” Jerry spoke with great conviction. But then he shrugged. “All right—have it your way, Rusty. Pass on, you two.”

“Yes, suh!” Scipio and Aurelius said again. The gates were barbed wire, too, strung on wooden frames instead of fastened to metal posts. Scipio doubted the barrier would stop all unsupervised traffic between the Terry and the outside, but it was bound to slow that traffic to a trickle.

Once they got on their own side of the barbed wire, he and Aurelius let out identical exhalations: half sigh, half groan. “Do Jesus!” Scipio said. “We is caged in.”

“Sure enough,” Aurelius agreed. “They kin feed us through the bars—if they want to. An’ if they want to, they kin poke us through the bars, too.”

“Or they kin take we out an’ git rid o’ we if they wants to.” Scipio paused. “But why dey bodder? Dey done made de whole Terry a camp.”

Aurelius’ jaw worked, as if he were literally chewing on that. “We’re in trouble,” he said in a low voice. “All the niggers in Augusta is in trouble.”

“In Augusta?” Scipio’s fears reached wider than that. “You reckon dis here the onliest place in the country where dey runs up de barbed wire?”

Now Aurelius was the one who whispered, “Do Jesus!” That bright, cheerful moon showed how wide his eyes went. “You suppose they doin’ this everywhere?”

“You got a wireless?” Scipio asked. The other Negro nodded. Scipio went on, “Reckon the news say one way or de other. If they do it all over everywhere, they won’t hide it. They brag an’ be proud.”

Slowly, Aurelius nodded. Scipio shivered, there in the night. He’d finally found something he feared more than the regime’s hatred of blacks. Its grim certainty that it was doing right frightened him far worse.

T
he move from Ohio to Virginia had changed life very little for Dr. Leonard O’Doull. He still worked in an aid station not far behind the line. The wounds he and his crew faced changed not at all. The weather was a little milder, but he had scant leisure to notice it. Going outside the aid tent for a quick cigarette every now and then hardly counted.

Repair, stabilize, send the successes back out of harm’s way, send the failures back for burial . . . Sometimes he thought the wounded were war’s mistakes—if everything had gone just the way the enemy planned, they would be dead. Or would they? In his more cynical moments, he reminded himself that a wounded soldier made the USA spend more resources on him than an easily replaceable dead one did.

When he mentioned that to Granville McDougald, the medic only nodded. “Same thing’s occurred to me, Doc—you bet it has,” he said. “Take a look at mustard gas, for instance. That shit hardly ever kills outright. It just makes casualties.”

O’Doull hadn’t even thought about mustard gas.
“Tabernac!”
he said.

McDougald laughed at him. “When you get excited, you start talking like a Frenchy.”

“I know. I spoke French every day for almost twenty-five years, remember. I wasn’t sure my English would come back as well as it has.” O’Doull paused, then said, “Son of a bitch! There. You feel better now, Granny?”

He got another laugh out of McDougald. “Sure. Much better. I’ll take two aspirins and you can see me in the morning.”

“What I’d like to see in the morning is home,” O’Doull said. His longing for Rivière-du-Loup suddenly pierced like an arrow. “I feel like nothing but a goddamn butcher down here.”

“That’s not right,” McDougald said. “The butchers are the ones with the stars on their shoulder straps—and that maniac down in Richmond. If it weren’t for Featherston, you’d be in Quebec and I wouldn’t be worrying about anything more urgent than shortarm inspections.”

“With the new drugs, we can even do something about a dose of the clap.” O’Doull preferred thinking of gonorrhea to mustard gas. “Who would have figured that ten years ago?”

“Oh, irrigation with permanganate would cure some of the time,” McDougald said. “Of course, most of the guys who went through it would sooner have had the disease.”

“It wasn’t pleasant,” O’Doull agreed. He’d had to administer that treatment a good many times himself. Quebecois civilians were no fonder of it than U.S. soldiers. “A few pills or shots are a lot easier—and they work a lot better, too.”

“And what’s that going to do, Doc?” McDougald asked. “If we can screw as much as we want without worrying about coming down with VD, don’t a lot of the old rules fly right out the window?”

“You come up with the most . . . interesting questions,” O’Doull said admiringly. “I don’t think the rules go till women don’t have to worry about getting knocked up whenever they sleep with a guy. Rubbers aren’t reliable enough for that, and a lot of men don’t want to use ’em.”

“Makes sense.” Granville McDougald started to nod, then caught himself. He pointed a finger at O’Doull. “You’re a Catholic, Doc. Won’t you get in trouble with the Church for saying stuff like that?”

“In trouble? I doubt it. The Church isn’t the Freedom Party, and the Pope isn’t Jake Featherston. Nobody’s going to come and burn me at the stake for having a mind of my own. The Spanish Inquisition went out of style a long time ago, even in Spain.”

“Well, all right.” McDougald seemed happy enough to return to the point: “You think we can do that? Make really good contraceptives, I mean?”

“Sure we can,” O’Doull said. “It’s just a matter of putting our minds to it and doing the research. It’ll happen. I don’t know when, but it will. And the world will be a different place.”

Far above the tent with the Red Cross on each side, shells flew back and forth. O’Doull gauged how the fighting was going by the quality of those sounds. If more came in from the Confederate side of the line than went out at the C.S. forces, he might have to pull back in a hurry. If U.S. gunfire was outdoing the enemy’s, he might have to move up quickly, which could be almost as big a nuisance. Right now, things seemed pretty even.

McDougald was listening, too, but in a different way. “Goddamn gurglers,” he said. “I hate those goddamn gurglers. They’re throwing gas around again. You’d think we had more sense than that. Hell, you’d think the Confederates had more sense than that.”

“No such luck,” O’Doull said sadly.

“I don’t know what the hell good gas is.” McDougald sounded bitter. “It kills people and it ruins people, and that’s about it. You can’t win a battle with it, not when both sides use it. It’s only one more torment for the poor damned fools with guns in their hands.”

“Every word you say is true,” O’Doull answered. “Every single word. But saying it, no matter how true it is, doesn’t make anybody on either side change his mind.”

“Don’t I know it? Haven’t we seen it? Christ!” The way McDougald took the name of the Lord in vain wasn’t so far removed from the Quebecois habit of swearing by the host and the chalice. He went on, “At least we have an antidote that does some good against nerve gas, as long as the casualties get here before it’s too late. But mustard gas? Once you’ve got mustard gas on you or in your lungs, it will do what it does, and that’s that.”

A shell landed a couple of hundred yards away: not close enough to be dangerous—though O’Doull wouldn’t have believed that when he first put on a uniform again—but plenty close enough to be alarming. “Was that a short round of theirs or a short round of ours?” O’Doull wondered.

“What difference does it make?” McDougald asked. “Whoever it comes down on is screwed either way.”

O’Doull sighed. “Well, I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong, because you’re right. How many have we treated where our own guns did the damage?”

“I don’t have the slightest idea, and neither do you,” McDougald said. “The only thing I can tell you is, it’s too goddamn many.”

He was right again. Accidents of all sorts were only too common in war. Some of them made O’Doull think God had a nasty sense of humor. Two U.S. companies would attack the same bit of high ground from different directions. Maybe neither would know the other was in the neighborhood. Maybe somebody in one or the other—or both—would see soldiers moving toward him and open up regardless of what uniform they wore. In a split second, dozens of soldiers would be blazing away at one another, trained reflex overriding thought . . . and adding to the casualty lists.

Artillery wasn’t always the infantryman’s friend, either. Very often, U.S. and C.S. lines would lie close together. Rounds didn’t have to fall short by much to come down on soldiers in green-gray rather than those in butternut. Some of the fault, no doubt, lay in mismanufactured shells and in powder that didn’t do everything it was supposed to. And some, just as surely, lay in the calculations artillerymen botched when they were in a hurry—and sometimes when they weren’t. All those blunders bloated the butcher’s bill.