The Victorious Opposition (67 page)

Bathsheba’s mind went in a different direction. Suddenly, she said, “I bet Xerxes ain’t even your right name.”

“Is now. Has been fo’ years.”

“What your mama call you?”

“Scipio,” he said, and wondered how long it had been since he’d spoken his own name. More than twenty years; he was sure of that.

“Scipio.” Bathsheba tasted it, then slowly shook her head. “Reckon I like Xerxes better. I’s used to it.” She sent him an anxious look. “You ain’t mad?”

“Do Jesus, no!” he exclaimed. “You go an’ forget you ever hear de other one. Dat name get around, de buckra after we fo’ sure. Dey still remembers me in South Carolina.” Was that pride in his voice? After all these years, after all that terror, after being sure at the time that he was walking into a disaster (and after proving righter than even he’d imagined), was that pride? God help him, it was.

His wife gave him a kiss. “Good.” She was proud of him, too, proud of him for what had to be the stupidest thing he’d ever done in his life. Madness. It had to be madness. There was no sensible explanation for it. But no sooner had that thought crossed his mind than Bathsheba said, “Every once in a while—Lord, more’n every once in a while—them white folks
deserves
a whack in the chops, they truly does.”

And that did make sense. When things were bad, you tried your best to make them better. How didn’t matter much. “Let’s go to bed,” he said.

“How you mean dat?” Bathsheba asked.

Now he kissed her. “However you wants, sweetheart.”

He went up to the Huntsman’s Lodge the next day with a certain amount of apprehension. He checked the autos parked near the restaurant with special care. None of them looked as if it belonged to either the police or Freedom Party goons. He had to go to work. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t eat, and neither would his family. In he went.

Jerry Dover met him just inside the door. “Go home,” the manager said bluntly. “Get the hell out of here. You’re still sick. You’ll be sick another couple of days, too.”

Scipio blinked. “What you say?”

“Go home,” Dover repeated. “Damn Freedom Party woman asking all kinds of questions about you.”

Ice congealed in Scipio’s belly. He might have known Anne Colleton would spot him. Did she ever miss a trick? “What you say to she?” he asked, already hearing hounds baying on his trail.

“I told her you ain’t who she thinks you are. I told her you been working here since 1911,” Jerry Dover answered. His eyes twinkled.

“God bless you, Mistuh Dover, but when she catch you in de lie—”

“She ain’t gonna catch me.” Dover grinned at him. “I showed her papers from back then to prove it.”

“How you do dat?” Now Scipio was all at sea.

Still grinning, the manager said, “ ’Cause a nigger named Xerxes did work here then. He was only here a couple months, but those were the papers I showed her. Bastard stole like a son of a bitch. That’s why they canned his ass. I heard one of the owners bitching about it not too long after we hired you. The name stuck in my head, and so I watched you close after that, but old Oglethorpe was right—you’re first-rate. Anyway, this here gal like to shit, I’ll tell you. You don’t ever want to tell that one she’s wrong. She ain’t got no wedding ring, and I can see why.”

That made a perfect thumbnail sketch of the Anne Colleton Scipio had known. She would have thought she had him at last—and then she would have seen her hope snatched away. No, she wouldn’t be happy, not even a little bit. “God bless you, Mistuh Dover,” Scipio said again.

“Go home,” Jerry Dover repeated once more. “She may come back and try to raise some more trouble for you. I don’t want that. I need you here too bad. And don’t get your bowels in an uproar. I’ll pay your wages.”

Home Scipio went, in a happy daze. Safe—really safe—from Anne Colleton at last! He was back in the Terry before he realized this wonderful silver lining had a cloud. Maybe he was free of Anne Colleton. But now Jerry Dover had a hold on him. Miss Anne had been far away. Dover was right here in town. If he ever decided to go to the police . . . Scipio shivered, but he kept on walking.

“I
’m Jake Featherston, and I’m here to tell you the truth,” the president of the Confederate States said into the microphone as soon as the engineer behind the glass wall gave him the high sign. “And the truth is, folks, that Kentucky is ours again and Texas is whole again and our country is a long way back towards being what it’s supposed to be again.

“The people spoke, and the Yankees had to listen. The people said they were sick and tired of being stuck in the USA. They came back where they belonged. The Stars and Bars are flying in Lubbock and San Antonio and Frankfort and Louisville. We took back what was ours, because that was how the people wanted it.”

He didn’t say anything about losing the plebiscite in Sequoyah. The papers and the wireless in the CSA hadn’t said much about it, either. People got the news he wanted them to have, slanted the way he wanted it to go. Oh, his coverage wasn’t perfect. By the nature of things, it couldn’t be. Too many people could also pick up wireless stations from across the U.S. border. But not a lot of them did. Confederates and Yankees had disliked and distrusted one another for a long time now.

“Here and there along the border, the Yankees are still holding on to what’s ours: in Sonora, in Arizona, in Arkansas, and right here in Virginia,” Jake continued. “Al Smith tried to make me promise I wouldn’t talk about those things if we had the elections last month, but I don’t call that an honest kind of promise. No, sir, folks, I don’t call it honest at all, not even a little bit. He was saying, ‘I’ll give you back some of what’s yours if you forget about the rest of what’s yours.’ Now you tell me, friends—is that fair? Is that right?”

Bang!
He slammed his fist down on the table, a favorite trick of his. “I tell you it’s not fair! I tell you it’s not right! And I tell you that the Confederate States of America deserve to be whole again! The CSA
will
be whole again! This here that we’ve done now is only the beginning. We don’t want trouble with the United States. We don’t want trouble with anybody. But we want what’s ours, and we’re going to get it!”

He ended just as the light went red. This wasn’t one of his long speeches, only a little one to remind people that he’d got back two of the states the Whigs had lost. He stood up, stretched, and left the studio.

As always, Saul Goldman waited for him outside in the hallway. “Good speech, Mr. President,” the director of communications said. “I don’t think you can make a bad one.”

“Thanks, Saul,” Featherston answered. “We have a lot of things to take care of over the next few weeks. You’ve got the incident simmering?”

“Oh, yes.” The little Jew nodded. “We’ll have something worked up if they don’t take care of things for us. They’re liable to, you know.”

Jake nodded. “Hell, of course I know. But we’ll be able to get the story out the way we want it if it’s our incident to begin with.”

Bodyguards came up alongside of Saul Goldman. Goldman nodded to them in an absent-minded way. He didn’t take security as seriously as he should have. Of course, nobody was gunning for him, either. Featherston didn’t have the luxury of making that assumption. He nodded to the men in the butternut uniforms. They carried submachine guns at an identical angle. Their expressions were also identical: tough and watchful. Jake was watchful, too, though he tried not to let it show. Party stalwarts had tried to bump him off once. Could he really trust Party guards? If he couldn’t, could he trust anybody in the whole wide world?

The guards led him out into the street. They spread out before he got into his new armored limousine. With Virgil Joyner shot dead, his driver was new, too. He missed Virgil. He missed anybody who’d known him in the old days and stuck with him through thick and thin. Harold Stowe, the new man, was probably a better driver than Joyner had been. Jake didn’t care. The man was—and acted like—a servant, not a drinking buddy.

“Back to the Gray House, Harold,” Featherston said. Harold. He sighed to himself. Stowe didn’t even go by Hal or Hank or anything interesting.

“Right, Mr. President,” the driver said, and put the limousine in gear. Jake sighed again, a little louder this time. Virgil Joyner had called him
Sarge
. He’d had the right, too. Not many people did, not any more.

Climbing Shockoe Hill was hard work for the heavy limousine. There’d been an ice storm the night before. Despite rock salt on the road, the going was still slippery. They crawled to the top in first gear.

When he strode back into the presidential residence, his secretary met him just inside the door. “You know you’re scheduled to meet with Lieutenant General Forrest in ten minutes, don’t you, sir?” she said, as if sure he’d forgotten.

“Yes, Lulu, I do know that,” he said. “Let me go to the office and look at a couple of things, and I’ll be ready for him.”

An officer named Nathan Bedford Forrest III should have raised Featherston’s hackles. He’d campaigned against all the Juniors and IIIs and even VIs who clung to power in the CSA by virtue of what their ancestors had done, and who hadn’t done anything much on their own. But, for one thing, the first Nathan Bedford Forrest had been as much of a self-made son of a bitch as Jake was, and he’d been proud of it, too. And, for another, his great-grandson wasn’t a Great War General Staff relic. He’d been too young even to fight in the trenches from 1914 to 1917. He was a hell of a soldier now, though, with notions of how to use barrels as radical as his illustrious ancestor’s ideas about horses. Featherston liked the way he thought.

At the moment, though, Forrest looked worried. “Sir, if the Yankees decide to jump us for moving troops into Kentucky and west Texas”—he wouldn’t call it Houston, refusing to recognize the validity of the name—“they’ll whip us. They can do it. If you don’t see that, you’ll land the country in a hell of a mess.”

“I never said they couldn’t,” Featherston answered. “But they won’t.”

Nathan Bedford Forrest III looked exasperated. The first officer to bear the name had been a rawboned man who looked a bit like Jake Featherston. His descendant had a rounder face, though he kept his great-grandfather’s dangerous eyes. They looked all the more dangerous when he glowered. “Why won’t they? You’ve promised to keep those states demilitarized, and you’re going back on your solemn word. What better excuse do they need?”

“If they attack me for moving my men into my states, they’ve got a war on their hands,” Jake said calmly. “I’m telling you, General, they don’t have the stomach for it.”

“And I’m telling you, Mr. President, you’ll take the country down in ruins if you’re wrong.” The first Nathan Bedford Forrest had had a reputation for speaking his mind. His great-grandson took after him.

“To hell with the country,” Featherston said. Nathan Bedford Forrest III gasped. Jake went on, “I’ve got twenty dollars of my own money against twenty dollars of yours, General. The damnyankees won’t move.”

Forrest frowned. “You sound mighty damn sure of yourself, Mr. President.”

“I am mighty damn sure of myself,” Jake Featherston answered. “That’s my job. Suppose you let me tend to it while you tend to yours.”

“I
am
tending to my job,” Nathan Bedford Forrest III said. “If I didn’t point out to you that we’re liable to have a problem here, I wouldn’t be tending to it. The damnyankees outweigh us. They’re always going to outweigh us. Remember how much trouble the Germans had against the Tsar’s armies in the Great War? That wasn’t because one Russian was as good a soldier as one German. It was because there were a hell of a lot of Russians. There are a hell of a lot of soldiers in the USA, too.”

Jake Featherston nodded. “They’ll be able to outnumber us, like you said. That means we’ll just have to outquick ’em. You going to tell me we can’t do that?” His voice developed a hard and ugly rasp. If General Forrest was going to tell him something along those lines, he’d be sorry.

“No, sir.” Forrest didn’t try. “We’ve got the airplanes, and we’ve got the barrels, and we’ve got the trucks, too. We’ll run ’em ragged.” Like Jake, like most of the Confederates who were really involved with them, he called barrels by the name they had in the USA. Some of the men who’d done their service well away from the trenches still used the British name instead: tanks. Featherston found that a useless affectation. But the general wasn’t through, for he added, “If there is a war, sir, we’d better win it pretty damn fast. If we don’t, we’ve got troubles. They’re bigger than we are, like I say, and they can take more punishment. We don’t want to get into a slugging match with them. Do you hear what I’m saying?”

“I hear you,” Jake said coldly. “You make yourself very plain.”

“Good. That’s good. I want you to understand me,” Nathan Bedford Forrest III said. “If I have a choice, I’d just as soon see us not have a war at all. Three years of the last one should have been enough to satisfy us for the rest of our days.”

Three years of war hadn’t been enough to satisfy Jake Featherston. He’d fought with undiminished hatred from beginning to end. Some of that hatred had been aimed at the Yankees, the rest at his own side. He’d had plenty to go around. He still did. “General, I don’t need to explain my policies to you. I just need you to carry them out,” he said. “Is that plain enough for you, or shall I draw you a picture?”

Nathan Bedford Forrest III looked back at him. “Oh, that’s plain enough,” he answered. “But if you’re being a damn fool, sir, don’t you think somebody has the duty to come out and tell you so?”

“People told me that before I got Kentucky and Houston back,” Jake said in a low, furious voice. “Was I right, or were they? People told me that when I brought dams and electricity into the Tennessee Valley. Was I right, or were they? People told me that when I made damn sure the farms in this country had the mechanical gear they needed, so we wouldn’t get stuck relying on niggers we can’t trust. Was I right, or were they?”

“Damned if I know about that last one,” Forrest said. “Now we’ve got those niggers robbing houses in town instead.” Featherston waited. The general nodded. “All right, sir. I get your point. But you’d better be able to take my twenty dollars. That’s all I’ve got to say.”