The Victorious Opposition (12 page)

“I don’t know.” Lucien took another sip. Fire ran down his throat. “It will make a man drunk,
certainement.
But if I have a choice between drinking something that tastes of apples and something that tastes of burnt wood, I know which I would choose most of the time.”

“If you want it, I have some real Calvados, not the bootleg hooch you pour down,” O’Doull said.

“Maybe later,” Galtier replied. “I did tell you, most of the time. For now, for a change, the whiskey is fine.” He took another sip. Smacking his lips thoughtfully, he said, “I wonder how people came to savor the taste of burnt wood in the first place.”

Dr. O’Doull said, “I don’t know for certain, but I can guess. Once you distill whiskey, you have to put it somewhere unless you drink it right away. Where do you put it? In a barrel, especially back in the days before glass was cheap or easy to come by. And sometimes,
peut-être,
it stayed in the barrel long enough to take on the taste of the wood before anyone drank it. If someone decided he liked it when it tasted that way, the flavor would have been easy enough to make on purpose. I don’t know this is true, mind you, but I think it makes pretty good sense. And you,
mon beau-père,
what do you think?”

“I think you have reason—it does make good sense. I think you think like a man born of French blood.” Galtier could find no higher praise. Most Americans, from what he’d seen, were chronically woolly thinkers. Not his son-in-law. Leonard O’Doull came straight to the point.

He also recognized what a compliment Galtier had paid him. “You do me too much honor,” he murmured. Lucien shook his head. “Oh, but you do,” Dr. O’Doull insisted. “I am more lucky than I can say to have lived so long among you wonderful Quebecois, who actually—when you feel like it—respect the power of rational thought.”

“You phrase that oddly,” Lucien said. Maybe the whiskey made him notice fine shades of meaning he might otherwise have missed. “Why would you not live among us for the rest of your days?”

“I would like nothing better,” Leonard O’Doull replied. “But a man does not always get what he would like.”

“What would keep you from having this?” Galtier asked.

“The state of the world,” O’Doull answered sadly. “Nothing here,
mon beau-père.
I love Rivière-du-Loup. I love the people here—and not just you mad Galtiers. But it could be—and I fear it may be—that one day there will again be places that need doctors much, much more than Rivière-du-Loup.”

“What do you—?” Lucien Galtier broke off. He knew perfectly well how the American had come to town. He’d been one of the doctors working at the military hospital they’d built during the Great War. Thinking of that, Galtier gulped his whiskey down very fast and held out his glass for a refill.

“H
urry up with that coffee here!” The Confederate drawl set Nellie Jacobs’ teeth on edge. Her coffeehouse had had plenty of Confederate customers ever since the days of the Great War. Even now, with much of northern Virginia annexed to the USA, the border wasn’t far to the south. And Confederates were always coming to Washington for one reason or another: occupation during the war, business now.

“I’m coming, sir,” she said, and grabbed the pot off the stove. Her hip twinged as she carried the coffeepot to the customer’s table.
Sixty soon,
she thought. On long afternoons like this one, she felt the weight of all her years.

“Thank you kindly,” he said when she’d poured. She wondered if he would tell her he’d been a regular at the coffeehouse during the war. She didn’t recognize him, but how much did that prove? A man could easily lose his hair and gain a belly in twenty years. She wasn’t the same as she’d been in 1915, either. Her hair was gray, her long face wrinkled, the flesh under her chin flabby. Men didn’t look at her any more, not that way. To her, that was a relief. The Confederate sipped his coffee, then remarked, “Quiet around here.”

“Times are hard,” Nellie said. If this drummer or whatever he was couldn’t see that for himself, he was a bigger fool than she thought—which would have taken some doing.

“Yes, times are hard,” he said, and slammed his hand down on the tabletop hard enough to make her jump. Some coffee sloshed out of the cup and into the saucer on which it sat. “So why the . . . dickens aren’t you people doing anything about it?”

“Nobody seems to know what
to
do—here or anywhere else.” Nellie let a little sharpness come into her voice. “It’s not like the collapse only happened in the United States.”
You’ve got troubles of your own, buddy. Don’t get too sniffy about ours.

The Confederate nodded, conceding the point. He lit a cigar. When he did, Nellie took out a cigarette and put it in her mouth. She smoked only when her customers did. He struck another match and lit it for her. As she nodded, too, in thanks, he said, “But you-all don’t even look like you’re trying up here. Down in
my
country”—his chest swelled with pride till it almost stuck out farther than his gut—“since the Freedom Party took over, we’ve got jobs for people who were out of work. They’re building roads and fences and factories and digging canals and I don’t know what all, and pretty soon they’ll start taming the rivers that give us so much trouble.”

“Wait a minute. Didn’t your Supreme Court say you couldn’t do that?” Nellie asked. “That’s what the papers were talking about a while ago, if I remember right.”

“You do,” the fellow said. “But didn’t you hear President Featherston on the wireless the other day?”

“Can’t say that I did,” Nellie admitted. “The Confederate States aren’t my country.”
And a good thing, too,
she thought. But politeness made her ask, “What did he say?”

“I’ll tell you what he said, ma’am. What he said was, he said, ‘James McReynolds has made his decision, now let him enforce it!’ ” The Confederate looked as proud as if he’d defied the Supreme Court in Richmond himself. He went on, “That’s what a leader does. He
leads
. And if anybody gets in his way, he knocks the . . . so-and-so for a loop, and goes on and does what needs doing. That’s Jake Featherston for you! And people are cheering, too, all the way from Sonora to Virginia.”

Nellie was cynical enough to wonder how much people were encouraged to cheer. But that wasn’t what really took her by surprise. She said, “You couldn’t get away with thumbing your nose at the Supreme Court like that here in the USA.”

“Well, ma’am, I’m going to tell you the truth, and the truth is, you can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.” The Confederate beamed and puffed on his cigar as if he’d come up with a profound and original truth. He continued, “Take the niggers, for instance. We’re still settlin’ with them, on account of they got uppity beyond their station since they rose up during the war. They got to learn where they belong, and we’ll teach ’em, too. You got to go on towards where you’re headed no matter what, on account of otherwise you’ll never get there.”

Although Nellie had no particular use for colored people, she said, “I’m sure I don’t know what burning down people’s houses has got to do with the Supreme Court.”

“Oh, it’s all part of the same thing,” her customer said earnestly. “That’s the truth. It is.” He might have been talking about the Holy Ghost. “Whatever you have to do, you go ahead and you
do
that, and you don’t let anything stop you. If you think you can be stopped, you’re in trouble. But if you
know
you can win, you will.”

“I’m not so sure about that,” Nellie said. “You people were sure you were going to win the Great War, but you didn’t.”

“You can say that if you want to,” the Confederate answered. “You can say it, but that doesn’t make it so. Truth is, we were stabbed in the back. It hadn’t been for the niggers risin’ up, we would’ve whipped you-all. Sure as I’m standing here before you, that’s the gospel truth. Like I said before, they need paying back for that. Now they’re starting to get it. Serves ’em right, if you care about what I think.”

Since Nellie didn’t, she retreated behind the counter. She hoped this noisy fellow would go away, and she hoped more customers would come in so she’d have an excuse to ignore him. He did eventually get up and leave. He’d put down a dime tip on a bill of half a dollar for a sandwich and coffee, so Nellie forgave him his noise.

Clara, Nellie’s daughter, came home from school a few minutes later. Nellie stared at her in bemusement, as she often did. Part of her wondered how Clara had got to be fifteen years old, a high-school freshman with a woman’s shape. And part of her simply marveled that Clara was there at all. Nellie had never intended to have a baby by Hal Jacobs. She hadn’t always worried about rubbers simply because she’d thought she didn’t need to worry about catching, either. That proved wrong. And here was Clara, only a couple of years older than her nephew Armstrong Grimes, the son of Clara’s half sister, Edna.

“Hello, dear,” Nellie said. “What did you learn today?” She always asked. With little book learning herself, she hoped getting more would mean Clara wouldn’t have to work so hard as she had, or have to worry about making some of the mistakes she’d made—and she’d made some humdingers.

“Quadratic equations in algebra.” Clara made a horrible face. “Diagramming sentences in English.” She made another one. “And in government, how a bill becomes a law.” Instead of a grimace, a yawn. Then she brightened. Her face, like Hal’s, was rounder than Nellie’s, and lit up when she smiled. “And Walter Johansen asked me if I could go to the moving pictures with him this Saturday. Can I, Ma? Please? Wally’s so cute.”

Nellie’s first impulse was to scream,
No! All he wants to do is get your undies down!
As she knew—oh, how she knew!—that was true of most men most of the time. But if she made a big fuss about it, she would just make Clara more eager to taste forbidden fruit. She’d found that out raising Edna, and she also remembered as much from her own stormy journey into womanhood a million years before—that was what it felt like, anyhow.

And so, instead of screaming, she asked, “Which one is Walter? Is he the skinny blond kid with the cowlick?”

“No, Ma.” Clara clucked, annoyed her mother couldn’t keep her friends straight. “That’s Eddie Fullmer. Walter’s the football player, the one with the blue, blue eyes and the big dimple in his chin.” She sighed.

That sigh did almost make Nellie yell,
No!
By the sound of things, it was a word Clara wouldn’t even think about using to Mr. Football Hero. But Nellie made herself think twice. “I suppose you can go with him,” she said, “if he brings you straight back here after the film. You have to promise.”

“I do! I will! He will! Oh, Ma, you’re swell!” Clara did a pirouette. Skirts were long again, for which Nellie thanked heaven. She wouldn’t have wanted a girl Clara’s age wearing them at the knee or higher, the way they’d been in the 1920s. That was asking for trouble, and girls between fifteen and twenty had an easy enough time finding it without asking. As things were, the skirt swirled out when Clara turned, showing off shapely calves and trim ankles.

Do I want to be swell?
Nellie had her doubts. “I wish your pa would have seen you so grown-up,” she said.

That sobered Clara. “So do I,” she said quietly. Hal Jacobs had died a couple of years before, of a rare disease: carcinoma of the lung.

Nellie absently lit a fresh cigarette, and then had to stub it out in a hurry when a customer came in. Clara served him the coffee he ordered. She could handle the coffeehouse at least as well as Nellie, and why not? She’d been helping out here since she was tall enough to see over the top of the stove.

A few minutes after the customer left, Edna walked into the coffeehouse. Her son Armstrong accompanied her, which he didn’t usually do. Nellie was very fond of Armstrong’s father, Merle Grimes: fonder of him than she’d been of any other man she could think of except perhaps Hal. She was positive she liked Edna’s husband much more than she’d ever liked Edna’s father. If he hadn’t got her pregnant, she wouldn’t have wanted to see him again, let alone marry him.

Armstrong, on the other hand . . . Yes, he was her grandson. Yes, she loved him on account of that. But he was a handful, no two ways about it, and Nellie was glad he was Edna’s chief worry and not her own.

Clara reacted to Armstrong the way a cat reacts to a dog that has just galumphed into its house. They’d never got along, not since the days when baby Armstrong pulled toddler Clara’s hair. Now, at thirteen, Armstrong was as tall as she was, and starting to shoot up like a weed.

“Behave yourself,” Edna told Armstrong—she did know he was a handful, where some mothers remained curiously blind to such things. “I want to talk to your grandma.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Armstrong said.

“Yet,” Clara put in, not quite
sotto
enough
voce
.

“That’ll be enough of that, Clara,” Nellie said; fair was fair. She gave her attention back to her older daughter. “What’s going on, Edna?”

“With me?” Edna Grimes shrugged and pulled out a pack of Raleighs. “Not much. I’m just going along, one day at a time.” She lit the cigarette, sucked in smoke, and blew it out. “You can say what you want about the Confederates, Ma, but they make better cigarettes than we do.” Nellie nodded; that was true. Her daughter went on, “No, I just want to make sure you’re all right.”

“I’m fine,” Nellie answered, “or I will be if you give me one of those.” Edna did, then leaned close so Nellie could get a light from hers. After a couple of drags, Nellie said, “I keep telling you, I’m not an old lady yet.” Edna didn’t say anything. Nellie knew what that meant.
Not yet. But soon.
She drew on the cigarette again. No matter how smooth the smoke was, it gave scant comfort.

J
ake Featherston turned to Ferdinand Koenig. A nasty gleam of amusement sparkled in the Confederate president’s eye. “Think we’ve let him stew long enough, Ferd?” he asked.

“Should be about right,” the attorney general answered. “Twenty minutes in the waiting room is enough to tick him off, but not enough to where it’s an out-and-out insult.”