The Victorious Opposition (66 page)

At the top of the hour, every station gave forth with five minutes of news. It was as if they suddenly remembered they were part of the wider world after all. Lucien listened impatiently to accounts of riots in the Ukraine and Austria-Hungary and celebrations on the border between the United States and the Confederate States. All he wanted was a simple weather report, and nobody seemed willing to give him one.

Finally, at the very tail end of one of the newscasts, an announcer grudgingly said, “Our storm is expected to blow itself out by this afternoon. Snow will end before nightfall, and tomorrow will be clear and a little warmer.” Two sentences, and then the music resumed.

In January in Quebec,
a little warmer
didn’t mean
warm
. Lucien knew that all too well. He also knew the weather forecasters lied in their teeth about one time in three. Even so, he had reason to hope. Without hope, what was a man? Nothing worth mentioning.

Sure enough, that afternoon the wind dropped and the snow stopped falling. The sun came out and peeped around, as if surprised at everything that had happened since the last time it showed its face. It might have been embarrassed at what it saw, for it set half an hour later.

The night was long and cold, as January nights were. Lucien woke when it was still dark. He threw on his clothes and went out to the outhouse. The sky was brilliantly clear. Ribbons and curtains of aurora blazed in the north. He yawned and nodded, acknowledging that they were there. Then he trudged back to the farmhouse.

He was eating fried eggs when a snowplow grumbled by. The main road would be clear, then. Who could guess whether the little side roads to Éloise Granche’s house would be, though, and the ones from there to the dance?

“Well,” he said, “I will just have to find out.”

Before he could find out, he had to do some shoveling to let his auto get to the main road. That was hard work, and would have been for a man half his age. His heart was pounding before he finished, but finish he did. Under all those layers of warm clothes, sweat ran down his sides. He went back in and heated water for a bath. That helped soak out some of the kinks in his back, though others refused to disappear.

When evening came, he used a little more hot water, this time for a shave. He scraped his chin and cheeks with a straight razor he’d been using since before the turn of the century. None of these newfangled safety razors and blades for him. He stropped the razor on a thick, smooth piece of leather before it touched his face. If his shave wasn’t smooth, he had only himself to blame, not some factory down in the United States.

He dressed in clothes he might have worn to town: dark trousers, clean white shirt, and his least disreputable hat. The overcoat he put on had seen better days, but overcoats always got a lot of use in Quebec. Whistling a tune he’d heard on the wireless, he went out to the Chevrolet.

“I want no trouble from you,” he told the auto, as if it were the horse with which he’d had so many philosophical discussions over the years. The Chevrolet was old, but it knew better than to argue with him. It started right up.

Despite the snowplow and the rock salt it had laid down, the roads would still be icy. Galtier drove with care, and made sure he kept plenty of room between himself and other motorists—not that many others were out and about. He didn’t miss the traffic. He knew he wouldn’t be able to stop in a hurry.

He left the paved road and bumped along rutted dirt lanes till he came to the farm where Éloise Granche lived. The dim, buttery light of kerosene lamps poured out through her windows; she still had no electricity. He stopped the engine, wagged a finger at the Chevrolet to remind it to start up again, and went up the steps and knocked on the door.

“Hello,” she said with a smile. Then she was in his arms and they kissed hungrily for a long time.

Still holding her, he said, “When we do that, I want to forget all about the dance.”

“We can, if you want to,” she answered. “Would you rather just stay here?”

Regretfully, Galtier shook his head. “That would be a lot of staying for not much staying power, I’m afraid. If I were half my age, I would say yes.”

“If you were half your age, I wouldn’t want anything to do with you—not for that, anyhow,” Éloise said. “We’ll go to the dance, then, and we’ll come back, and who knows what will happen after that?”

“Who indeed?” Lucien kissed her again, then led her out to the motorcar.

That wagged finger did its job. The auto started up again without any fuss. The dance was at Pierre Turcot’s, not far from the little town of St.-Modèste. A rowdy sprawl of motorcars and wagons and buggies surrounded Turcot’s barn when the Chevrolet pulled up. Lucien handed Éloise out of the motorcar. They went in side by side.

People waved and called their names and hurried up to greet them. By now, they’d been together long enough that all their neighbors took them for granted. They might almost have been a married couple. Lucien’s son Georges was already out on the floor dancing. He waved to Lucien and blew Éloise a kiss.

“Georges can be very foolish,” Éloise remarked. She eyed Galtier. “I wonder where he gets it.”

“I haven’t the faintest idea,” he answered with such dignity as he could muster.

The fiddlers and drummer and accordion player took a break. Pierre Turcot wound up a phonograph and put a record on it. The dancing went on. The musicians on the record played and sang better than the homegrown talent. Lucien had noticed that before. He wondered if the problem would kill off homegrown talent after a while. But once he started whirling Éloise around the floor, he stopped worrying about it.

They danced. They snacked and drank some of the potent punch Pierre had set out and danced some more. People talked about politics in the city of Quebec and the price of potatoes and who was fooling around with whom. Lucien didn’t think he and Éloise were high on the gossip list these days. Why get excited about old news?

Somewhere between ten and eleven, Éloise turned to him and said, “Shall we go?”

He smiled. “Yes, let’s.”

They went back to her house in companionable silence. When they got there, he got out first so he could open the door on her side. “Such a gentleman,” she said. “Would you like to come in for a little while?”

“Why not?”

They drank some applejack. One of Éloise’s neighbors had cooked it up. It was a good batch, almost as good as if it weren’t bootleg. And then, as they had a good many times before, they went upstairs to her bedroom.

Everything was dark in there, but Lucien knew where the bed was. He sat down on one side of it and got out of his clothes. When he was naked, he reached out. His hand found Éloise’s bare, warm flesh.

They kissed and caressed each other. Lucien’s heart pounded with excitement. Heart still pounding, he rolled onto his back. Éloise straddled him. She liked riding him, and he found it easier than the other way round.

“Oh, Lucien,” she whispered.

He didn’t answer. As his delight mounted, so did the thudding in his chest. He could hardly breathe. He’d never felt anything like this, not in all his years, not with Marie, not with Éloise, not with anyone. Pleasure shot through him. So did pain, pain in his chest, pain stabbing up his arm. Pain . . . He groaned and clutched at Éloise. In an instant, the darkness in the bedroom became darkness absolute.

“Lucien?” Éloise exclaimed. He never heard her scream, or anything else, ever again.

S
cipio might have known it would happen one of these days. Hell, he
had
known it might happen one of these days. The Huntsman’s Lodge was the best restaurant in Augusta. No other place even compared. If Anne Colleton ever came to town, this was where she’d have dinner.

And there she sat, at a table against the far wall, talking animatedly with several local big shots. Scipio hadn’t seen her for twenty years or so, but he had not the slightest doubt. She’d aged very well, even if he wouldn’t have called her beautiful any more. And she still sounded as terrifyingly self-assured as she ever had, maybe even more so.

As befit its status as a fancy place to eat, the Huntsman’s Lodge was dimly lit. Scipio didn’t think she recognized him. He was just another colored waiter, not one serving her table. He thanked heaven he hadn’t let Jerry Dover talk him into taking the headwaiter’s post. Then he would have had to escort her party to the table, and she would have been bound to notice him.

Even now, he wasn’t sure she hadn’t. She always held her cards close to her chest. He didn’t want to go anywhere near that table. He didn’t want to speak, for fear she would know his voice. He spent as much time as he could in the kitchens. The cooks gave him quizzical looks; he didn’t get paid for roasting prime rib or doing exotic things with lobster tails.

His boss knew it, too. “What the hell you doing hiding in there, Xerxes?” Jerry Dover demanded indignantly. “Get your ass out and wait tables.”

“I’s sorry, suh,” Scipio answered. “But I gots to tell you, I’s feelin’ right poorly tonight.”

Dover didn’t say anything for a little while. His eyes raked Scipio. “You know,” he remarked at last, “there’s niggers I’d fire on the spot, they tried to use that kind of line on me.”

“Yes, suh,” Scipio said stolidly. Firing was the least of his worries right now.

“You ain’t one of ’em, though. You never tried shirking on me before,” the restaurant manager said. He astonished Scipio by reaching out to put a palm on his forehead. “You don’t have a fever. At least it isn’t the grippe. You need to go home? Go on, then, if you’ve a mind to.”

“I thanks you kindly, suh.” As he had years before with John Oglethorpe, Scipio needed to remind himself that white men could be decent. He found it especially remarkable now, with the Freedom Party in the saddle for the past seven years. Things were set up to give whites every excuse to be bastards, and a lot of them didn’t need much excuse. “Somehow or other, I finds a way to pay you back.” He felt like the mouse talking to the lion in the fable. But the mouse actually had found a way to do it. How could he?

Dover only shrugged. He wasn’t worrying about it. “Get the hell out of here,” he said. “You got your reasons, whatever they are. I’ve known you for a while now. You don’t fuck around with me. So get.”

Scipio got. He wasn’t used to being out on the street so early. He made a beeline for the Terry. The sooner he got into his own part of town, the safer he’d feel.

Then he heard a gunshot down an unlit alleyway, a scream, and the sound of running feet. Maybe he wasn’t so safe in the Terry after all. Whites preyed on blacks, but blacks also preyed on one another. He wondered why. His own people had so little. Why not try to rob whites, who enjoyed so much more? Unfortunately, an answer occurred to him almost at once. If a Negro robbed a white, the police moved heaven and earth to catch him. If he robbed another Negro, they yawned and went about their business.

“Hey, nigger!” A woman’s voice, all rum and honey, called from the darkness. “You in your fancy clothes, I show you a good time like you ain’t never seen.” Scipio didn’t even turn to look. He just kept walking. “Cocksuckin’ faggot!” the woman yelled after him, all the sweetness gone.

Bathsheba stared when Scipio came into the apartment so early. “What you doin’ here?” she demanded. “I jus’ put the chillun to bed.”

He’d been trying to figure out what to tell her ever since he left the Huntsman’s Lodge. “Once upon a time, you asked me how I came to be able to speak like this,” he answered in soft, precise, educated white man’s English. Bathsheba’s eyes went wide. The only time he’d ever spoken like that in her hearing was to save their lives in the rioting not long after the Freedom Party took over. Now he had to tell the truth, or some of it. In that same dialect, he went on, “A long time ago, I was in the upper ranks of one of the Socialist Republics we tried to set up. Someone came into the restaurant tonight who knew me in those days. I’m not certain whether she recognized me, but she might have. She’s . . . very sharp.” Seeing Anne Colleton forcibly reminded him how sharp she was.

“You learn to talk like dat on account of you was a Red?” Bathsheba asked.

Scipio shook his head. “No. I was useful to the Reds because I could already talk like this. I . . . I was a butler, a rich person’s butler in South Carolina.” There. Now she knew—knew enough, anyhow.

He waited for her to shout at him for not telling his secret years before. But she didn’t. “If you was a big Red, no wonder you don’t say nothin’,” she told him. “What we do now?”

“Dunno.” He fell back into the slurred speech of the Congaree Negro. Talking in that other voice took him off to a world that had died in fire and blood and hate—but also a world where he’d grown to manhood. The contrasts terrified him. “Mebbe nuttin’. Mebbe run fas’ as we kin.”

“How?” Bathsheba asked, and he didn’t have a good answer for her. Passbooks were checked these days as they’d never been before the war. Any black without a good reason for being where he was—and without the papers to back up that reason—was in trouble. People talked about camps. No one knew much about them, though; they were easy to get into, much harder to leave.

Even so, he said, “Better we takes de chance. They catches me . . .” He didn’t go on. If they caught him and realized who he was, he wouldn’t last ten minutes. No trial. No procedure. They’d just shoot him.

Bathsheba was still staring at him. His wife clucked sadly, a sound of reproach: self-reproach, he realized when she said, “I shoulda pussected what you was.” He needed a heartbeat or two to figure out that she meant
suspected
. She went on, “If you was a Red, you had to hide out. And you was smart, gettin’ out o’ the state where you was at.”

“I weren’t no Red, not down deep, not for real an’ for true,” Scipio said. “But dey suck me in. I don’t go ‘long wid dey, dey shoots me jus’ like de buckra shoots me.” That was the truth. Cassius and Cherry and the rest of the Reds on the Marshlands plantation had been in deadly earnest. Confidence in their doctrine had sustained them—till rifles and what little else they got from the USA ran up against the whole panoply of modern war, and till they discovered their oppressors wouldn’t vanish simply because they were called reactionaries.