The Victorious Opposition (70 page)

“Never thought I’d see it,” Cincinnatus agreed.

None of the plump, eager white men in earshot could have taken exception to his words or tone, either. In fact, one of them turned to another and said, “You see? Even the niggers is glad to have the damnyankees gone.”

“They know they was well off before,” his friend replied.

Cincinnatus didn’t look at Lucullus. Neither of them looked at Seneca. He didn’t look at them. None of them had any trouble knowing what the other two were thinking. Remarking on it would have been a waste of breath.

Off to the south, Cincinnatus heard a peculiar noise: partly musical, partly a low, mechanical rumble. Both pieces of the noise got louder as it came closer. Before too long, Cincinnatus recognized the music. A marching band was blaring out “Dixie,” playing the tune for all it was worth.

“That there song used to be against the law here,” Lucullus said. By the way he said it, he thought it was too bad “Dixie” had been illegal. Cincinnatus knew better. A casual listener—a white listener—wouldn’t have.

“Wonder what ever happened to that Luther Bliss,” Cincinnatus said. “Reckon he ain’t never gonna show his face here no more. Don’t miss him one damn bit.” Since the former head of the Kentucky State Police had thrown him in jail, most of him meant that. The rest, though, couldn’t help remembering how hard and how well Bliss had fought Confederate diehards—and anyone else he didn’t care for.

“Reckon you’s right,” Lucullus answered. Cincinnatus sent him a sharp look. A casual listener wouldn’t have heard anything wrong with his words there, either. Cincinnatus wondered if he knew more than he was letting on.

Here came the band. The Freedom Party men—and the smaller number of women with them—burst into applause. A lot of them began to sing. Cincinnatus couldn’t applaud, not with his hands on the crutches. His father and Lucullus did. He couldn’t blame them. Better safe than sorry.

Behind the band marched several companies of Confederate soldiers. Their uniforms didn’t look much different from the ones C.S. troops had worn during the Great War, but there were changes. Most of them had to do with comfort and protection. The collars on these tunics were open at the neck. The cut was looser, less restrictive. Their helmets came down farther over the ears and the back of the neck than the Great War models had. They weren’t the steel pots U.S. soldiers wore, but they weren’t much different from them.

The rifles they carried . . . “Funny-lookin’ guns,” Cincinnatus said to Lucullus in a low voice.

“Gas-operated. Don’t need to work the bolt to chamber a round after the first one in the clip.” Lucullus spoke with authority. “They’s new. Not everybody’s got ’em. They is very bad news, though.”

Not even all the parading soldiers carried the new rifles. Some had submachine guns instead. Cincinnatus didn’t see any with ordinary, Great War–vintage Tredegars. The Confederate States couldn’t arm as many men as the United States. They seemed to want to make sure the men they did have would put a lot of lead in the air.

The barrels that grumbled and clanked up the street were different from the ones Cincinnatus remembered from the Great War, too. They carried their cannon in a turret on top of the hull. They also looked as if they could go a lot faster than the walking pace that had been their top speed a generation earlier.

Trucks towed artillery pieces. Fighters and bombers with the C.S. battle flag on wings and tail roared low overhead. More marching soldiers finished the parade.

“Wonder what they think o’ this on the other side of the Ohio,” Cincinnatus said. The city that was nearly his namesake lay right across the river from Covington.

“If they’s happy, they’s crazy,” Lucullus said after looking around to make sure no white was paying undue attention. “Jake Featherston, he promised there wouldn’t be no Confederate soldiers in Kentucky for twenty-five years. He jump the gun just a little bit, I reckon.”

Cincinnatus’ father looked around, too. “We done seen the parade,” he said. “What I reckon is, we better git back to our own part o’ town.”

He was bound to be right. Even Negroes who weren’t doing anything to anybody were liable to be fair game in Covington. Moving on his crutches made Cincinnatus sweat with effort and pain in spite of the chilly day, but he moved anyhow. Once back inside the colored district, he said, “We got to get out of here. Ain’t easy no more, now that this here is a Confederate state, but we got to.”

“Best thing you kin do is jus’ walk right across the bridge to Cincinnati,” Lucullus said. “Ain’t quite legal like it was, but the U.S. soldiers don’t bother niggers much.”

Since neither Cincinnatus nor his mother was up to much in the way of walking, he and his parents took a taxi to the nearest bridge two days later. His mother stared out the window as if she’d never been in an auto in her life. As far as she could remember, she hadn’t.

They didn’t get across. No one got across. To protest the Confederates’ military occupation of Kentucky, the USA had sealed the border between the two countries. Cincinnatus thought of getting a boat and crossing the Ohio any way he could. He thought of it, but not for long. He remembered too many stories about Negroes trying to cross into the USA getting turned back at gunpoint or sometimes just shot. He couldn’t take the chance, especially since his mother, with her wits wandering, was liable to give them away.

When U.S. forces pulled out of Kentucky, a consulate had opened in Covington. Hoping the official there might help, Cincinnatus visited the place. That turned out to be another wasted trip. A large sign on the window said,
CLOSED INDEFINITELY DUE TO ILLEGAL CONFEDERATE ACTION.
Frustrated and frightened, Cincinnatus went back to his parents’ house.

“Dammit, I’m a citizen of the USA. I live in Iowa,” he raged. “How come I can’t get home?”

“Be thankful it ain’t worse,” his father said: the philosophy of a man who’d spent the early years of his life as a piece of property. No matter how bad things were, he could easily imagine them worse.

Not so Cincinnatus. “Bein’ stuck here in Covington is as bad as it gits,” he said.

But Seneca was right. A few days later, the
Covington Courier
ran what it called,
A NOTIFICATION TO THE COLORED RESIDENTS OF THE CONFEDERATE STATE OF KENTUCKY.
It told them they had to be photographed for passbooks, “as is the accepted and required practice for Negroes throughout the Confederate States of America.”

Seneca took the order in stride. “Had to do this afore the war, I recollects,” he said.

That was so. Cincinnatus remembered his own passbook. But he said, “I done without one o’ them things the last twenty-five years. Don’t you recollect what it’s like to be free?”

“I recollects the trouble you finds if you don’t got one,” his father answered.

“I ain’t no Confederate nigger. I ain’t gonna be no Confederate nigger, neither,” Cincinnatus said. “I’m a citizen of the United States. What the hell I need a passbook for?”

“You don’t want to get in trouble with them Freedom Party fellas, you better have one,” his father answered.

That was all too likely to be true. Cincinnatus raged against it anyhow. Raging against it did him exactly no good. For the time being, he was stuck here in Kentucky. Sooner or later, he expected things to get back to normal and the border between the CSA and the USA to open up again. He also expected to get the cast off his leg and to learn to walk without crutches once more. And he expected to take his father and mother back to Des Moines with him. He always had been an optimist.

F
or a long time, Dr. Leonard O’Doull had been satisfied—no, more than satisfied, happy—to live in a place like Rivière-du-Loup.
The world forgetting, by the world forgot.
He couldn’t remember where he’d seen that line of poetry, but it suited the town very well. And it had suited him, too.

But, however much he sometimes wanted to, he couldn’t quite forget that he was an American, that he came from a wider world than the one in which he chose to live. Reading about the gathering storm far to the south—even reading about it in French, which made it seem all the farther away—brought that home to him. In an odd way, so did the passing of his father-in-law.

To Leonard O’Doull, Lucien Galtier had stood for everything he admired about Quebec: a curious mix of adaptability and a deeper stubbornness. Now that the older man was gone, O’Doull felt as if he’d lost an anchor that had been mooring him to
la belle République
.

His wife, of course, had other feelings about the way her father had died: one part shock, O’Doull judged, to about three parts mortification. “Did it have to be
there
?” she would say, over and over again. “Did he have to be doing
that
?”

“Coronary thrombosis comes when it comes,” O’Doull would reply, as patiently and sympathetically as he could. “The exertion, the excitement—they could, without a doubt, help bring it on.”

Patience and sympathy took him only so far. About then, Nicole would usually explode: “But people will never let us live it down!”

Knowing how places like Rivière-du-Loup and the surrounding farms worked, O’Doull suspected she was right. Even so, he said, “You worry too much. Many of the people I’ve talked to say they’re jealous of such an end.”

“Men!” Nicole snarled. “
Tabernac!
What do you know?” That was unfair to half the human race, not that she cared. Then she went on, “And what of poor Éloise Granche? Is she jealous of such an end?”

That, unfortunately, wasn’t unfair, and was very much to the point. Éloise wasn’t jealous. She was horror-stricken, and who could blame her? To have to watch someone die at such a moment . . . How would she ever forget that? How could she ever want to get close to another man as long as she lived?

O’Doull said, “Your father didn’t leave us . . . unappreciated.” He needed to pause there to pick the right word. After another moment, he went on, “Would you rather it had happened while he was mucking out the barn?”

“I’d rather it didn’t happen at all,” Nicole answered. But that wasn’t what he’d asked, and she knew it. Now she hesitated. At last, she said, “Maybe I would. It would have been more, more dignified.”

“Death is never dignified.” O’Doull spoke with a doctor’s certainty. “Never. Dignity in death is something we invent afterwards to make the living feel better.”

“I would have felt better if it had happened while Papa was in the barn,” Nicole said. “Whether he—” She broke off, not soon enough, and burst into tears. “
’Osti!
Do you see? Even I’m starting to make jokes about it. And if I do, what’s everyone else doing?”

“The same thing, probably,” O’Doull said. “People are like that.”

“It’s not right!” Nicole said. “He wouldn’t have wanted to be remembered—this way.” She cried harder than ever.

Although Leonard held her and patted her and did his best to comfort her, he was far from sure she was right. He’d known his father-in-law for a quarter of a century. Wouldn’t Lucien Galtier have taken a certain wry pride in the reputation that grew out of his end? Lucien might even have taken a pride that wasn’t so ordinary. Any number of ways to go. To how many, though, was it given to go like a
man
?

Which brought him back to the question Nicole had asked. What about Éloise? She was wounded, no doubt about it, and Lucien wouldn’t have wanted that. He’d cared for her, even if he hadn’t necessarily loved her. But would things have been any easier for her if he’d dropped dead while they were dancing, not after they’d gone back to her farmhouse? Maybe a little. Maybe a little, yes, but not much.

One of these days,
O’Doull told himself,
yes, one of these days, I’ll have to pour a few drinks into Georges and find out what
he
really thinks about this
. The time wasn’t ripe yet. He knew that. But it would come. A lot of things for which the time hadn’t been ripe looked to be coming. Most of them were a lot less appetizing than lying down with a nice woman and being unlucky enough not to get up again.

That evening, the newscaster on the wireless gave an account of a speech President Smith had made at Camp Hill, Pennsylvania. “The president of the United States spoke with just anger regarding the Confederate States’ violation of their pledge not to send soldiers into Kentucky and the state formerly known as Houston.” The French-speaker made heavy going of the place names. He continued, “The president of the United States also reminded the president of the Confederate States that he had pledged himself to ask for no more territorial changes on the continent of North America. If he ignores this solemn undertaking, President Smith said, he cannot seriously expect the United States to return to him the portions of Virginia, Arkansas, and Sonora to which he has referred.” He had trouble pronouncing
Arkansas
, too. And why not? Arkansas was a long, long way from the Republic of Quebec.

Al Smith finally seemed to have decided he couldn’t trust Jake Featherston. As far as O’Doull could see, the U.S. president had taken longer than he might have to figure that out. He had it down now, though. More than what he’d said, where he’d made the speech spoke volumes. Almost eighty years ago now, Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia had crushed McClellan’s Army of the Potomac at Camp Hill, ensuring that the Confederate States would triumph in the War of Secession. No president of the United States would have anything to do with the place these days unless he wanted to tell his own people,
We’re in trouble again.

Nicole didn’t understand any of that. Neither did little Lucien, who was anything but little these days. O’Doull found himself envying his wife and son for being so thoroughly Quebecois. He also found himself reminded that, no matter how long he’d lived here, he was at bottom an American. He’d sometimes wondered about that. He didn’t any more.

When he went to his office the next morning, newsboys were hawking papers by shouting about President Smith’s speech. Papers in Quebec always seemed to back the USA to the hilt: more royalist than the king, more Catholic than the Pope. Again, why not? The Great War had touched lightly here, which it hadn’t anywhere else between Alaska and the Empire of Mexico.