The Victorious Opposition (14 page)

“This happened to me when I went into the Army,” Rodriguez said. “Shoes pinch. Up till then, I hadn’t worn anything but sandals.” He looked down at his feet. He wore sandals now. They were more comfortable than shoes any day. But comfort wasn’t always the only question. “For some of what you do, for working in the mountains, sandals won’t protect your feet. Good shoes like those will.”

“They’ll give us blisters,” Jorge said. Now Miguel was the one who nodded in agreement.

“For a little while, yes,” Rodriguez answered. “Then your feet will toughen up, and you’ll be fine.” He could afford to say that. His feet weren’t the ones suffering.

When they came to Baroyeca—Jorge limping a little and trying not to show it, for his shoes pinched tighter than Miguel’s—Rodriguez led them to the town square between the
alcalde
’s house and the church, as he’d been instructed to do. There he found most of the boys in the area, all standing solemnly in ranks that weren’t so neat as they should have been. One of the new members of the
guardía civil
, a man who’d been a sergeant during the war, was in charge of them.

“
¡Libertad,
Hipolito!” he called. “These are your boys?”

“My older ones, Felipe,” Rodriguez answered.
“¡Libertad!”

“They’ll do fine,” Felipe Rojas said. “They won’t have too much nonsense to knock out of them. Some of these little brats . . .” He shook his head. “Well, you can guess which ones.”

“A lot of them will be ones whose fathers don’t belong to the Party,” Rodriguez predicted. Felipe Rojas nodded. Rodriguez eyed the youths. He couldn’t tell by the uniforms; those were all the same. But the stance gave away who was who a lot of the time, that and whether a boy looked eager or frightened.

The bell in the church struck nine. Rodriguez let out a sigh of relief. He’d been told to get here before the hour. He hadn’t realized he’d cut it so close.

A few minutes later, another boy tried to join the ranks in the square. Rojas ran him off, shouting, “You don’t deserve to be here! You can’t even obey orders about when to come. You’re a disgrace to your uniform. Get out!
Get out!
”

“But,
señor
—” protested his father, who was not a Party man.

“No!” Rojas said. “He had his orders. He disobeyed them. You helped, no doubt. But anyone who doesn’t understand from the start that the Freedom Youth Corps is about obedience and discipline doesn’t deserve to be in it. Get him out of here, and you can go to the devil with him.” The boy slunk away, his face a mask of misery. His father followed, hands clenched into impotent fists. He was not the least important man in Baroyeca, but he’d been treated as if he were.

Robert Quinn came into the square, pushing a wheelbarrow full of shovels. “Hello, boys,” he said.
“¡Libertad!”

“¡Libertad!”
they echoed raggedly. Some of them were still looking after the youngster who’d been sent away.

“These are your spades,” Quinn said in his accented but fluent Spanish. “You will have the privilege of using them to make Sonora a better place.” Most of them smiled at that, liking the idea.

“These are your spades,” Felipe Rojas echoed. “You will have the privilege of taking care of them, of keeping them sharp, of keeping them shiny, of keeping their handles polished. You will take them everywhere you go in the Freedom Youth Corps. You will
sleep
with them,
por Dios.
And you will
enjoy
sleeping with them, more than you would with a woman. Do you hear me?
Do you hear me?
Answer when I talk to you!”

“Sí, señor,”
they chorused in alarm.

Now Hipolito Rodriguez smiled, and he wasn’t the only man his age who did. Rojas’ rant sounded much like what sergeants had said at the training camp during the war, except they’d been talking about rifles, not spades. Rojas took a shovel from the wagon and tossed it, iron blade up, to the closest youth. The boy awkwardly caught it. Another shovel flew, and another, till every boy had one.

“Attention!” Rojas shouted. They came to what they imagined attention to be. There were as many versions as there were boys. Rodriguez smiled again. So did the rest of the fathers and other men in the square. They’d been through the mill. They knew what attention was, even if their sons didn’t.

Felipe Rojas took a shovel from a youngster and showed the boys of the Freedom Youth Corps how to stand at attention, the tool lightly gripped in his right hand. More or less clumsily, the boys imitated him. He tossed the shovel back to the youth, who also came to attention.

Another sharp command (all of these were in English): “Shoulder—spades!” Again, the boys made a hash of it. One of them almost brained the youngster beside him. Hipolito Rodriguez didn’t laugh at that. He remembered what a deadly weapon an entrenching tool could be.

Again, Rojas took the shovel from the boy. He stood at attention with it, then smoothly brought it up over his shoulder. After demonstrating once more, he returned it.

“Now you try,” he told the youths. “Shoulder—spades!” They did their best. Rojas winced. “That was terrible,” he said. “I’ve seen burros that could do a better job. But you’ll improve. We’ll practice it till your right shoulders grow calluses. You’ll find out.” His voice, like the voice of any proper drill sergeant making a promise like that, was full of gloating anticipation.

He showed them left face, right face, and about-face. He marched them, raggedly, across the square. No one hit anyone else with a shovel as they turned and countermarched.
Why
nobody hit anybody else Rodriguez couldn’t have said. He thought he ought to go light a candle in the church to show his gratitude to the Virgin for the miracle.

“I have one last piece of advice for you,” Felipe Rojas said when the boys had got to their starting place without casualties. “Here it is. You’ve been fooling your fathers and talking back to your mothers ever since you found out you could get away with it. Don’t try it with me, or with any other Freedom Youth Corps man. You’ll be sorry if you do. You have no idea how sorry you’ll be. But some of you will find out. Boys your age are damn fools. We’ll get rid of some of that, though. You see if we don’t.”

Some of them—most of them—didn’t believe him. No boys of that age believed they were fools. They thought they knew everything there was to know—certainly more than the idiot fathers they had the misfortune to be saddled with. They’d find out. And, in the Freedom Youth Corps, they wouldn’t have to bang heads with their fathers while they were finding out. That might make the Corps worthwhile all by itself.

Robert Quinn drifted over to Rodriguez. “Two boys going in, eh,
señor
? Good for you, and good for them. They’re likely-looking young men.”

“They aren’t young men yet,” Rodriguez said. “They just think they are. That’s why the Freedom Youth Corps will be good for them, I think.”

“I think you are right,
Señor
Rodriguez,” the Freedom Party organizer said. “This will teach them many of the things they will need to know if, for example, they are called into the Army.”

Rodriguez looked at the English-speaker who’d come from the north. “How can they be called into the Army,
Señor
Quinn? There has been no conscription in
los Estados Confederados
since the end of the Great War.”

“This is true,” Quinn said. “Still, the Freedom Party aims to change many things. We want the country strong again. If we are not allowed to call up our own young men to serve the colors, are we strong or are we weak?”

“Weak,
señor,
without a doubt,” Hipolito Rodriguez replied. “But
los Estados Unidos
are strong now. What will they do if we begin conscription once more?”

“This is not for you to worry about. It is not for me to worry about, either,” Quinn said. “It is for Jake Featherston to take care of. And he will,
Señor
Rodriguez. You may rely on that.” He spoke as certainly as the priests did of Resurrection.

And Rodriguez said, “Oh, I do.” He meant it, too. Like so many others in the CSA, he wouldn’t have joined the Freedom Party if he hadn’t.

“W
ell, well,” Colonel Abner Dowling said, studying the
Salt Lake City Bee
. “Who would have thought it, Captain?”

“What’s that, sir?” Angelo Toricelli asked.

Dowling tapped the story on page three with his fingernail. “The riots in Houston,” he told his adjutant. “They just go on and on, now up, now down, world without end, amen.” He was not a man immune to the pleasure of watching someone else struggle through a tough time. Serving under General George Custer, he’d had plenty of tough times of his own. He’d come to savor those that happened to other people, not least because they sometimes ended up getting him off the hook.

Captain Toricelli said, “Of course they go on and on. The Freedom Party in the CSA keeps stirring things up there. If we could seal off the border between Houston and Texas, we’d be able to put a lid on things there.”

“I wish that were true, but I don’t think it is,” Dowling said. Toricelli looked miffed. Dowling remembered looking miffed plenty of times when General Custer said something particularly idiotic. Now the shoe was on the other foot. He’d been stuck then. His adjutant was now. And he didn’t think he was being an idiot. He explained why: “The way things are these days, Captain, don’t you believe the Confederates could pull strings just as well by wireless?”

“Pretty hard to smuggle rifles in by wireless,” Toricelli remarked.

“If not from Texas, Houston could get them from Chihuahua,” Dowling said. “To stop the traffic, we’d really need to seal our whole border with the Confederate States. I’d love to, but don’t hold your breath. There’s too much land, and not enough people to cover it. I wish things were different, but I don’t think they are.”

Toricelli pondered that. At last, reluctantly, he nodded. “I suppose you’re right, sir,” he said with a sigh. “If we can’t seal off Utah, we probably won’t be able to seal off Houston, either.”

That stung. Dowling wished the USA would have been able to keep contraband out of the state where he was stationed. While he was at it, he wished for the moon. The Mormons had their caches of rifles. The reason they didn’t use them was simple: enough soldiers held down Utah to make any uprising a slaughter. Even the locals understood that. However much they hated the U.S. Army, they knew what it could do.

“May I see the story, sir?” Captain Toricelli asked, and Dowling passed him the
Bee
. He zipped through; he read very fast. When he was done, he looked up and said, “They’ve got plenty of barrels down there, and it sounds like they’re doing a good job. I wish we had some.”

Dowling’s experience with barrels during the Great War had not been altogether happy. Wanting to mass them against War Department orders, Custer had had him falsify reports that went in to Philadelphia. Custer had succeeded, and made himself into a hero and Dowling into a hero’s adjutant. Custer had never thought about the price of failure. Dowling had. If things had gone wrong, they’d have been court-martialed side by side.

Maybe not thinking about the price of failure was what marked a hero. On the other hand, maybe it just marked a damn fool.

Still, despite Dowling’s mixed feelings about barrels, Toricelli had a point. “We
could
use some here,” Dowling admitted. “I’ll take it up with Philadelphia. I wonder if they have any to spare, or if they’re using them all in Houston.”

“They’d better not be!” his adjutant exclaimed. That didn’t mean they weren’t, and both Dowling and Toricelli knew it.

That afternoon, Heber Young came to call on the commandant of Salt Lake City. The unofficial head of the proscribed Mormon church looked grave. “Colonel, have you provocateurs among the . . . believers of this state?” he asked, not naming the faith to which he couldn’t legally belong.

“I have agents among them, certainly. I’d be derelict in my duty if I didn’t,” Dowling replied. “But provocateurs? No, sir. Why do you ask?”

“Because . . . certain individuals . . . have been urging a . . . more assertive course on us in our efforts to . . . regain our freedom of conscience.” Young picked his words with enormous, and obvious, care. “It occurred to me that, if we become more assertive, the occupying authorities might use that as justification for more oppression.”

If we get out of line even a little, you’ll squash us.
That was what he meant. Being a scrupulously polite man, he didn’t quite come out and say it. Abner Dowling’s jowls wobbled as he shook his head. “No, sir. I give you my word of honor: I have not done any such thing. My desire—and it is also my government’s desire—is for peace and quiet in the state of Utah. I do not wish to do anything—anything at all—to disturb what peace and quiet we already have.”

Heber Young eyed him. “I believe I believe you,” he said at last, and Dowling couldn’t help smiling at the scrupulous precision of his phrasing. Young continued, “One way to insure peace and quiet, of course, would be to grant us the liberties the citizens of the rest of the United States enjoy.”

“There are certain difficulties involved with that, you know,” Dowling said. “Your people’s conduct during the Second Mexican War, the Mormon revolt of 1915, the assassination of General Pershing . . . How long do you suppose it would be, Mr. Young, before Utah made Houston seem a walk in the park by comparison?”

“I recognize the possibility, Colonel,” Young replied, which was as much as he’d ever admitted. “But if you do not grant us our due liberties, would you not agree we will always be vulnerable to provocateurs? And I will take the liberty of asking you one other question before I go: if these men are not yours, who
does
give them their orders? For I am quite sure someone does. Good day.” He got to his feet, set his somber homburg on his head, and departed.

Had Young been any other Mormon, Dowling would have called him back and demanded to know more. Dowling would have felt no compunctions about squeezing him if he’d denied knowing more, either. But Heber Young? No. His . . .
goodwill
was too strong a word. His tolerance toward the occupiers went a long way toward keeping the lid on Utah. Dowling didn’t want to squander it.