The Victorious Opposition (15 page)

And so Young left occupation headquarters in Salt Lake City undisturbed. But the question he’d asked before leaving lingered, and it disturbed Colonel Dowling more than a little. He hadn’t been lying to Young when he said he had agents among the Mormons. The best of them, a man almost completely invisible, was a dusty little bookkeeper named Winthrop W. Webb. He seemed to know everything in the Mormon community, sometimes before it happened. If a rumor or an answer was floating in the air, he would find it and contrive to get it back to Dowling.

Getting hold of him, necessarily, was a roundabout business. Setting up a meeting was even more roundabout. Were Webb to be seen with Dowling, his usefulness—to say nothing of his life expectancy—would plummet. In due course, Dowling paid a discreet visit to a sporting house to which he was in the occasional habit of paying a discreet visit. Waiting for him in one of the upstairs bedrooms, instead of a perfumed blonde in frills and lace, was dusty little Winthrop W. Webb.

After they shook hands, Dowling sighed. “The sacrifices I make for my country.”

“Don’t worry, Colonel,” Webb said with a small smile. “It’ll be Betty again next time.”

“Yes, I suppose—” Dowling broke off. How the devil did Webb know who his favorite was? Better not to ask, maybe. Maybe. Profoundly uneasy, Dowling told the spy what he’d heard from Heber Young.

Winthrop Webb nodded. “Yes, I know the people he’s talking about—know of them, I should say. They’re good at standing up at gatherings and popping off, and even better at disappearing afterwards. He’s right. Somebody’s backing them. I don’t know who. No hard evidence. Like I say, they’re good.”

“Any guesses?” Dowling asked.

“I’m here to tell you the truth—I really don’t know,” Webb answered, deadpan.

For a moment, Dowling took him literally. Then he snorted and scowled and pointed south. “You think the Confederates are behind them?”

“Who gets helped if Utah goes up in smoke?” the agent said. “That’s what I asked myself. If it’s not Jake Featherston, I’ll be damned if I know who it is.”

“You think these Mormon hotheads Heber Young was talking about are getting their orders from Richmond, then?” Dowling leaned forward in excitement. “If they are—if we can show they are and make it stick—that’ll
make
the president and the War Department move.”

“Ha, says I,” Winthrop Webb told him. “
Everybody
knows the Freedom Party’s turned up the heat in Houston, and are we doing anything about it? Not that I can see.”

“Houston’s different, though.” Dowling had played devil’s advocate for Custer many times. Now he was doing it for himself. “It used to be part of Texas, part of Confederate territory. You can see why the CSA would think it still belongs to them and want it back. Same with Kentucky and Sequoyah, especially for the redskins in Sequoyah. You may not like it, but you can see it. It makes sense. But the Confederates have no business meddling in Utah. None. Zero. Zip. Utah’s always belonged to the USA.”

“Not the way the Mormons tell it,” Webb said dryly. “But anyway, it’s not that simple. These people who speak up and start trouble, they aren’t from Richmond. They don’t go back to some dingy sporting-house room”—he winked—“and report to somebody from Richmond. Whoever’s behind this knows what he’s doing. There are lots of links in the chain. The hotheads—hell, half of them never even
heard
of the goddamn Confederate States of America.”

Dowling laughed, not that it was funny. “All right. I see what you’re saying. What
can
we do, then, if we can’t prove the Confederates are back of these fools?” He drummed his fingers on his thigh. “Not like there isn’t a new hothead born every minute here. Maybe more often than that—Mormons have big families.”

“They aren’t supposed to drink, they aren’t supposed to smoke, they aren’t even supposed to have coffee. What the hell else have they got to do but screw?” Winthrop W. Webb said, which jerked more startled laughter from Dowling. The spy went on, “I don’t know what we can do except hold the lid down tight and hope the bastards on the other side make a mistake. Sooner or later, everybody does.”

“Mm.” Dowling didn’t much care for that, but no better ideas occurred to him, either. And then, as he was getting up to leave, one did: “I’ll warn Heber Young some of the hotheads—provocateurs, he called them—are liable to be Confederate sympathizers.”

“You think he’ll believe you?” Webb asked, real curiosity in his voice. “Or will he just think you’re looking for another excuse to sit on that church of his—you know, the one that officially doesn’t exist?”

“I . . . don’t know,” Abner Dowling admitted after a pause. He and Young had a certain mutual respect. He thought he could rely on Young’s honesty. But did the Mormon leader feel the same about him? Or was he, in Young’s eyes, just the local head of the government that had spent the past fifty years and more oppressing Utah? “I’ve got to try, though, any which way.”

When he went downstairs, the madam smiled as if he’d spent his time with Betty. Why not? He’d paid her as if he had. The girls in the parlor looked up from their hands of poker and bridge and fluttered their fingers at him as he left. But he’d never gone out the door of the sporting house less satisfied.

E
verything in the white part of Augusta, Georgia, seemed normal. Autos and trucks chugged along the streets. A sign painter was putting a big
SALE!
sign in a shoe store’s front window. A man came out of a saloon, took two steps, and then turned around and went back in. A workman with a bucket of cement carefully smoothed a square of sidewalk.

None of the white people on the sidewalk—or those who dodged into the street for a moment to avoid the wet cement—paid Scipio or the other Negroes among them any special attention. The riots that had leveled half the Terry were over, and the whites had put them out of their minds.

Scipio wished he could. His family was still sleeping in a church, and he knew how lucky he was. He still
had
a family. Nobody’d been killed. Nobody’d been worse than scratched. They’d even got their money out of the apartment before the building burned.

Luck.

Scipio walked past a wall plastered with election posters.
SNOW FOR CONGRESS!
they said.
VOTE FREEDOM!
Still four months to November, but Ed Snow’s posters, featuring his plump, smiling face and a Freedom Party flag, were everywhere. A few Whig posters had gone up at about the same time. They’d come right down again, too. No new ones had gone up to take their place. Scipio had never seen any Radical Liberal posters this year.

Maybe nobody from the Rad Libs wanted to run against the Freedom Party. Maybe nobody dared run against it.

A cop coming down the street gave Scipio a hard stare. “You, nigger!” he snapped. “Let me see your passbook.”

“Yes, suh.” Scipio handed it over. For a while after the end of the Great War, nobody’d much worried about whether a black man had a passbook. Things had tightened up again before too long, though, and they’d got even worse after Jake Featherston won the presidency.

The cop made sure Scipio’s photo matched his face. “Xerxes.” He made a mess of the alias, but Scipio didn’t presume to correct him. He looked Scipio up and down. “Why the hell you wearin’ that damn penguin suit, boy, when the weather’s like this?” His own gray uniform had darker gray sweat stains under the arms and at the collar.

“Suh, I waits tables at de Huntsman’s Lodge,” Scipio answered. Getting called
boy
by a man half his age rankled, too. He didn’t let it show. Negroes who did let such resentment show often didn’t live to grow old.

Grudgingly, a little frustrated that Scipio hadn’t given him any excuse to raise hell, the policeman thrust the passbook back at him. “All right. Go on, then. Stay out of trouble,” he said, adding, “Freedom!”

“Freedom!” Scipio echoed, sounding as hearty as he could. Satisfied, the cop walked on. So did Scipio, heart pounding and guts churning with everything he had to hold in. A colored man who didn’t give back that
Freedom!
was also in trouble, sometimes deadly trouble.
A colored man born in the CSA is
born
in trouble,
Scipio thought. He’d always known that. He hadn’t imagined how
much
trouble a colored man could be born into, though, not till the Freedom Party came to power.

The Huntsman’s Lodge was probably the best restaurant in Augusta. It was certainly the fanciest and most expensive. “Hey there, Xerxes.” The manager was a short, brisk fellow named Jerry Dover. “How are you?”

“Gettin’ by.” Scipio shrugged. “I thanks de Lord Jesus I’s doin’ dat much.”

“Bunch of damn foolishness, not that anybody cares what I think,” Dover said. “Bad for business.”

He was a decent man, within the limits imposed on whites in the Confederate States.
Bad for business
and
damn foolishness
were as far as he would go in saying anything about the riots, but Scipio couldn’t imagine him rampaging down into the Terry to rip up and destroy what little the Negroes of Augusta had.

Now he jerked a thumb in the direction of the kitchen. “You aren’t on for half an hour. Get yourself some supper.”

“Thank you kindly, suh,” Scipio said. Waiters always ate where they worked. Even a white cook would feed them, and as for his colored assistants . . . In a place like this, though, the manager often tried to hold back the tide, not wanting to waste expensive food on the help. Not Dover. Scipio liked not having to sneak.

He liked the trout and brussels sprouts and delicate mashed potatoes he got, too. Bathsheba and the children were eating either soup-kitchen food or what they could find at the handful of cafés still open in the Terry. Part of Scipio felt guilty about getting meals like this. The rest reminded him it was food he didn’t have to pay for. That counted, too.

He was at the tables the minute his shift started. Back and forth to the kitchen he went, bringing orders, taking food. To the customers, he was part of the furniture. He couldn’t help wondering if any of them had gone down to the Terry to take from his people what small store of happiness they had. Maybe not. These men had too much money to need to feel the Negro as a threat. On the other hand . . . On the other hand, you never could tell.

He worked his shift. He made pretty good tip money. Everyone knew him as Xerxes. Nobody thought he was an educated fellow. The customer who’d seen him when he was Anne Colleton’s butler had scared him half to death. And now he’d had to use that fancy accent again, had to use it with Bathsheba listening. The echoes from that hadn’t even come close to dying down.

When midnight came, Scipio told Jerry Dover, “I see you tomorrow, suh.”

“See you tomorrow,” the white man echoed. “Be careful on the way home, you hear? Plenty of drunks out looking for trouble this time of night.”

Spotting a black man would give them the excuse to start some, too. Scipio couldn’t help saying, “Can’t very well be careful goin’ home, Mistuh Dover, on account of I ain’t got no home. White folks done burn it down.”

“I knew that,” his boss said. “Telling you I’m sorry doesn’t do you a hell of a lot of good, does it? Go on. Get out of here. Go back to your family.”

That Scipio could do. He slipped out the kitchen door to the Huntsman’s Lodge and down the alley behind the place. That made him harder to spot than if he’d gone right out onto the sidewalk. He took back streets and alleys south and east into the Terry. Telling when he got there wasn’t hard. It wouldn’t have been hard even before the riots: the edge of the Terry was where the street lights stopped.

He didn’t dare relax once he got into the Negro district, either. Whites might have beaten him or shot him for the sport of it. Blacks would do the same to find out how much money he carried. The destruction of the riots had left plenty of people desperate—and some had been robbers before the riots, too.

No one troubled Scipio tonight. He made it back to the Godliness Baptist Church with nothing more dangerous than a stray cat (and not even a black one) crossing his path. Most of the people in the church were already asleep, on cots or on blankets spread over the pews.

Because a few men worked odd hours, the pastor had put up more blankets to give them a sheltered place to change. Scipio shed his formal clothes there and put on a nightshirt that fell down to his ankles. A cot by the one where his wife lay was empty. When he lay down, a sigh of relief escaped him. He’d been on his feet a long time. The cot was hard and lumpy, but weariness made it feel like a featherbed. He drifted toward sleep amidst the snores and occasional groans of several dozen people.

And then Bathsheba’s voice, a thin thread of whisper, penetrated the rhythmic noise of heavy breathing: “How’d it go?”

He thought about pretending to have drifted off, but knew he couldn’t get away with it. “Not bad,” he whispered back.

The iron frame of Bathsheba’s cot creaked as she shifted her weight. “Any trouble?” she asked.

He couldn’t pretend he didn’t know what she meant. Shaking his head, he answered, “Not today.
Po
liceman check my passbook, but dat’s all. I pass. I’s legal.”

“Legal.” His wife laughed softly. “Is you?”

“Xerxes, he legal,” Scipio said, not liking the way this was going. “An’ I ain’t nobody but Xerxes. If I ain’t Xerxes, who is?”

Bathsheba stopped laughing. “That ain’t the right question. Right question is, if you ain’t Xerxes, who
you
is?”

“I done tol’ you everything.” Scipio didn’t like lying to Bathsheba. He lied here anyhow, and without hesitation. He liked talking about his years at Marshlands and his brief, hectic weeks in the Red Congaree Socialist Republic even less. He’d told her as little as he possibly could.

Trouble was, she knew it. Her bed creaked again, this time because she shook her head. “All them years we been together, and I never knew you could talk that way. I never
imagined
it. I lived with you. I had your babies. And you done hid that from me. You hid all the things that . . . that made it possible for you to talk that way.” She didn’t usually speak with such precision herself, but then, she didn’t usually have to get across such a difficult idea, either. She was far from stupid—only ignorant. She went on, “It’s like I never really knew you at all. Somebody you’re in love with, that ain’t right.”