The Victorious Opposition (64 page)

She snatched a few hours’ sleep. When she came downstairs for breakfast, she got a copy of the
Covington Chronicle
. The banner headline summed things up:

UNTIED STATES!

A smaller subhead below gave the details:

KENTUCKY, HOUSTON RETURN TO CSA!
SEQUOYAH STAYS UNDER STARS AND STRIPES!

After bacon and eggs and lots of coffee, Anne paid a call on the U.S. commandant in Covington. “The people have spoken, Brigadier General,” she said—and if she was gloating, she thought she had good reason to.

A cup of coffee steamed on the fat officer’s desk. He looked to have had even less sleep than she had. “The people are a bunch of damned fools,” he said. “They elected Featherston, didn’t they?”

“I don’t talk about your president that way,” she said.

“Why not? I do.” The commandant swigged from the coffee cup. He got down to business: “Under the agreement, we have thirty days to withdraw our men. Yours are not to follow. Kentucky will stay demilitarized. U.S. citizens wishing to leave the state may do so until it passes under Confederate sovereignty. A lot of them, I expect, will already have made plans to do so.”

“Collaborators and niggers,” Anne said scornfully. “You can have ’em.”

“They’ll do all right for themselves in the United States,” the U.S. general predicted. “And I’ll give you—and your president—some free advice, too.”

“Free advice?” Anne didn’t laugh in his face, but she came close. “I’m sure it’s worth every penny you charge for it.”

She hoped that would make him angry. If it did, he didn’t show it. He just nodded, setting his chins in motion, and said, “Oh, no doubt. Well, I’ll give it to you anyway, mostly ’cause I know you won’t listen to it.”

Anne could simply have turned her back and walked out the door. Instead, with ill-concealed impatience, she said, “Go ahead, then. Get it over with.”

“Thanks a lot.” The U.S. officer wasn’t bad at sarcasm, either, even if he was built like a zeppelin. “If you people are smart, you won’t land on this state too hard. You won the plebiscite, yes. But you didn’t win it by as much as you thought you would, and you can’t tell me any different. If you come down on Kentucky with both feet, you’ll have about as much fun holding it down as we have since the last war.”

That made more sense than Anne wished it did—enough that she decided to mention it in her report to President Featherston. She wouldn’t suggest that he follow the fat man’s advice; she knew better. But noting it as an item of intelligence wouldn’t hurt.

She also decided she would note the way—Rowling? she had to check that—had spoken of the last war. Unless she altogether misread his tone, he was already thinking about the next one.

A
s had been his habit since the days of the Mexican civil war, Jefferson Pinkard prowled the barracks in the prison camp he ran in Louisiana. Camp Dependable wouldn’t boil over while his back was turned.

It might boil over anyway. He knew that. The black prisoners in the camp had little to lose. They’d been captured in arms against the Confederate States. Nothing good was going to happen to them. They only thing that kept them in line was the certain knowledge that they would die if they rose up against the guards. Jeff’s endless prowling was designed not least to make sure they stayed certain of that.

Whenever he stepped into a barracks, he had a pistol in his hand and half a squad of guards with submachine guns at his back. The Negro captives jumped down from their bunks and sprang to attention as soon as he came in. They were certain of what would happen if they didn’t show him that courtesy, too.

“You, boy!” Pinkard pointed to one of them, a big, muscular buck. “Give me your name and number and where you were captured.”

“I’s Plutarch, suh,” the Negro replied. He rattled off the camp number, finishing, “I was cotched up in Franklin Parish, suh. Some damn nigger sell me out. I ever find out who, dat one dead coon.”

A lot of prisoners here had similar complaints. Some Negroes didn’t want guerrilla war in their back yards. The ones who didn’t had to be careful with what they did and said, though. A lot of them had ended up gruesomely dead when the men they were trying to betray took vengeance.

“Any complaints?” Pinkard asked.

Plutarch nodded. “I ain’t got enough to eat, I ain’t got enough to wear, an’ I’s
here
. ‘Side from that, everything fine.”

“Funny nigger,” growled one of the guards behind Pinkard. “You’ll laugh outa the other side of your face pretty damn quick, funny nigger.”

Several of the other blacks in the barracks had smiled and nodded at what Plutarch had to say. None had been rash enough to laugh out loud. Now even the men who’d smiled tried to pretend they hadn’t. Pinkard said, “You get the same rations and same clothes as everybody else. And if you didn’t want to be here, you never should have picked up a gun.”

“Huh!” Plutarch said. “White folks rise up against what they don’t like, they’s heroes. Black folks do the same, we’s goddamn niggers.”

“Bet your ass you are, boy,” that guard said.

“There’s a difference,” Pinkard said.

Plutarch nodded. “Sure enough is. Y’all won. We lost. Ain’t no bigger difference’n dat.” That wasn’t the difference Jeff had had in mind, which didn’t mean the prisoner was wrong. Pinkard poked through the barracks. He knew how things were supposed to be, and carefully checked out everything that didn’t match the pattern. Nothing looked like the start of an escape attempt, but you couldn’t be sure without a thorough inspection.

On to the next barracks. As before, prisoners tumbled out of their bunks and stood at stiff attention. There was one difference here, though: Willy Knight dwelt in Barracks Six. The tall, blond, former vice president stood out from the black men all around him like a snowball in a coal field.

He was not the man he had been when Freedom Party guards brought him to Camp Dependable. He was scrawnier; camp rations weren’t enough to let anybody keep the weight he’d come in with. He was dirtier, too—water for washing was in short supply. And, in an odd way, he was tougher than he had been. That he’d been tough enough to stay alive surprised Jeff Pinkard, who wouldn’t have given him the chance of a snowball: a snowball in hell.

Hell this might well have been. But none of the Negro inhabitants here had taken advantage of the chance to get rid of a Freedom Party big shot. That surprised Pinkard, too—it did, but then again, it didn’t. The blacks might have suspected Knight was in here as much as bait as for any other reason. Anybody who harmed him was liable to pay the price.

They might not have been wrong, either. For the moment, Jeff’s orders were to look the other way if anything happened to Willy Knight. But one telegram could change that, and could change it days or weeks or months after something nasty happened to the ex–vice president.

Almost as if Knight were any other prisoner, Pinkard pointed at him and snapped, “You! Give me your name and number!” He couldn’t make himself call another white
boy
.

Knight repeated his name and camp number, then added, “I was captured in Richmond, Virginia, trying to save the country.”

“I want something from you, I’ll ask for it,” Jeff said.

The guard who’d growled at Plutarch growled at Willy Knight, too: “You really want to catch hell, just go on runnin’ your mouth.”

Knight shut up. The first time someone had said something like that to him, he’d asked what could be worse than coming to the camp to begin with. The guards had spent the next couple of weeks showing him what could be worse. Another way he was different now was that he didn’t have any front teeth. He’d learned something, but not everything, about keeping quiet.

Pinkard didn’t ask him if he had any complaints. Even if Knight did, nobody was going to do anything about them. That being so, why waste time and breath?

The warden did inspect Barracks Six with care unusual even for him. If some of the colored prisoners escaped, that would be a misfortune. He’d get called on the carpet. If Willy Knight escaped, that would be a catastrophe. Somebody’s head would have to roll, and he knew whose. He might end up in one of these hard, narrow bunks himself—or they might simply shoot him and get it over with. Nobody, but nobody, was going to escape from Barracks Six.

Everything seemed shipshape. Pinkard didn’t trust the way things seemed. He had no reason not to. He just didn’t. He took out a little book and scribbled a note to himself. Half the men in here would get cleared out before the day was done, to be replaced by prisoners from other barracks. If plots were stirring, that would slow them down. People would have to figure out who could be trusted and who couldn’t.
I better stick a new informer or two in here, too,
Jeff thought. The less that went on without his knowing it, the better the camp ran.

He was heading for the next barracks when a guard came up to him with a yellow envelope. “This here wire just came in, boss,” the man said, and thrust it at him.

“What the hell?” Pinkard took the envelope, opened it, and extracted the telegram inside. “What the
hell
?” he said again, this time in tones of deep dismay.

“What’s the matter?” the guard asked.

“What’s the matter?” Jeff would echo anybody, not just himself. “I’ll tell you what’s the matter. We’re going to get a new shipment of prisoners, that’s what—a big new shipment of prisoners. Nice of ’em to let us know, wasn’t it? They’re supposed to start comin’ in this afternoon.”

“A new shipment of prisoners?” The guard proved he could repeat what he’d just heard, too. Then he exploded, much as Jeff wanted to do. “Jesus H. Christ! Where the hell we gonna put ’em? We already got niggers swingin’ from the rafters. Shit, we got niggers comin’ out our assholes, is what we got.”

“You know that, Wes, and I know that, and anybody who knows one goddamn thing about this here camp knows it, too,” Pinkard said. “But you know what else? The folks in Richmond don’t know it. Either that or they just don’t give a fuck.” He looked around more than a little frantically. “Where am I gonna put all them nigger bastards? How am I gonna stop ’em from runnin’ away? Christ! How are we gonna feed ’em? This here don’t say word one about extra rations.”

Wes frowned. Then he shrugged. “Split up what you get with as many mouths as we got inside. What the hell else can you do?”

“Damfino.” Jefferson Pinkard shook his head in deep discontent. “Prisoners we got are already hungry as can be on what we’re feeding ’em. Nothin’ left to scrounge off the countryside. If they got to make do with three-quarters as much—or maybe only half as much: how can I guess?—they’re gonna start starving to death in jigtime.”

“You don’t need to get your bowels in an uproar about it, boss,” Wes said. “They’re only niggers, for Chrissake. Ain’t like you was starvin’ Uncle Henry and Aunt Daisy.”

“Oh, hell, I know that,” Pinkard said. “But this is all just a bunch of crap.” His sense of order, of propriety, was offended. “If they send us extra men, they oughta send us the extra rations to go with ’em. Ain’t fair if they don’t. It’s like in the Bible where old what’s-his-name—Pharaoh—made the Jews make bricks without straw.” He wanted things to work the way they were supposed to.

“Reckon the sheenies had it coming to ’em, same as the coons do now,” Wes said.

But Pinkard shook his head. “No. You give somebody something to do, you got to give him the chance to do it, too. And Richmond
ain’t
.”

“Send ’em a wire back,” the guard suggested.

“Maybe I will.” But Jeff doubted he would. If the big boys got the idea he couldn’t handle whatever they threw at him, they’d toss him out on his ear and put in somebody who wouldn’t say shit if he had a mouthful.

As promised—threatened?—the new shipment of colored prisoners did come in that afternoon. Pinkard had his clerks as ready as they could be. They got swamped anyway. It would have been worse if they hadn’t been braced. That was the most Jeff could say for it. The shipment was even larger than he’d expected. For a little while, he feared he wouldn’t be able to shoehorn everybody inside the barbed-wire perimeter.

He did manage that, though he had prisoners curled up on bare ground between barracks without a blanket to call their own. The cooks served out the supper ration, share and share alike. The new prisoners ate like starving wolves. Pinkard wondered how long they’d gone with even less, or with nothing. By their gaunt faces and hollow cheeks, some of them had gone quite a while. The men already inside Camp Dependable grumbled at what they got. They didn’t grumble too loud, though; if they had, they would have offended people who’d been through worse.

About midnight, a thunderstorm loosed an artillery barrage of rain on the prison camp. The new prisoners struggled to get into the barracks: it was either that or sink into what rapidly became a bottomless gumbo of mud. Not all of them could. The buildings simply would not hold so many men.

We’ll see pneumonia in a few days,
Jeff thought, lying in bed while lightning raved.
They’ll die like flies, especially if nobody ups the ration.

He shrugged. His initial panic had receded. What could he do about this? Nothing he could see, except ride herd on things the best way he knew how. It wasn’t as if the prisoners hadn’t done plenty of things that made them deserve to be here. Anybody who came here deserved to be here, by the very nature of things. Jake Featherston had got Kentucky and Houston back for the Confederate States. If that didn’t prove he knew what was what, nothing could. Nodding to himself—
figured that one out
—Pinkard rolled over and went back to sleep.

H
ipolito Rodriguez had always been better at saving money than most of his neighbors. That Magdalena had the same sort of thrifty temperament certainly helped. Some of the people around Baroyeca thought of him as a damned
judio
. He didn’t lose any sleep about those people’s opinions. In general, he didn’t think much of them, either.

He did believe that working hard and hanging on to as much cash as he could paid off sooner or later.
Sooner or later
often simply meant
later
. He wasn’t rich. He wasn’t about to get rich any time soon. But he didn’t mind living more comfortably when the chance came along.