He’d timed it well; Lucullus was just taking a sip. The cook choked, but the coffee didn’t—quite—go up his nose. After managing to swallow, Lucullus sent him a reproachful stare. “Damn you, you done that on purpose.”
“Who, me?” Cincinnatus was innocence personified—not easy for a black man on the wrong side of fifty with a ruined leg. But he’d been only partly malicious. “What
do
you hear from him?” he asked again.
Lucullus didn’t bother pretending he hadn’t had anything to do with the white man with the mahogany eyes of a hunting hound. “Says he owes you one on account of you done that truck for him.”
The truck had held mines that went into the Licking River. At least one of them had blown a Confederate gunboat sky-high. The news should have gladdened Cincinnatus’ heart. And so it did, in fact. All the same, he said, “Reckon I owe Luther Bliss more’n one.”
“Mebbe.” Lucullus calmly filched one of the ribs off Cincinnatus’ plate and took a bite out of it. Fiery barbecue sauce ran down his chin—an occupational hazard. “How come you didn’t spill your guts to the Confederates when they done grabbed you, you feel that way?”
Cincinnatus couldn’t squawk at Lucullus’ scrounging, not after all the free food the other man let him have. As for the other . . . “Well, I didn’t know where the bastard was at, or I might have.”
“Better be more to it than that,” Lucullus said severely.
There was, no matter how little Cincinnatus wanted to admit it. Scowling, he said, “Don’t reckon I’d tell the Confederates where a
dog
was at, let alone a son of a bitch like that one.”
Laughing, Lucullus said, “That’s better.” He lit a cigarette.
“Gimme one o’ them things,” Cincinnatus said. Lucullus did, and leaned across the table so Cincinnatus could take a light from his. After a long, satisfying drag, Cincinnatus added, “You don’t know you’re playin’ with a rattlesnake there, on account of I ain’t told you.”
“He is one, sure enough.” Lucullus sounded more pleased than otherwise. He explained why: “Dat man be a serpent, sure enough, but he be
our
serpent. He don’t bite niggers. He bites Confederates, an’ they shrivels up an’ dies.”
That wasn’t quite literally true, but it made a telling metaphor. Cincinnatus wanted no part of it, or of Luther Bliss. “He done bit me,” he said angrily.
“Well, but he reckon mebbe you got somethin’ to do with them Confederate diehards back then.” Lucullus cocked his head to one side and studied Cincinnatus. “Plenty other folks reckon the same thing. My pa, he was one of ’em.”
And Cincinnatus
had
had something to do with them, not that he intended to admit it now. “That man steal two years outa my life,” he growled. “You reckon I gonna trust him far as I can throw him after that?”
“Trust him to give the Freedom Party a boot in the balls,” Lucullus said. “He do dat every chance he git.”
Before Cincinnatus could answer, a gray-haired, stooped, weary-looking black man came into the barbecue place. One of the small hells of Cincinnatus’ injuries was that he couldn’t jump to his feet. He had to make do with waving. “Pa! I’m over here! What is it?”
But he knew what it was, what it had to be. Seneca Driver didn’t only look weary. He looked as if he’d just staggered out of a traffic accident. “She gone, son,” he said as Cincinnatus did fight his way upright. “Your mama gone.” Tears ran unnoticed down his face.
Lucullus had risen, too. He set a hand on Cincinnatus’ shoulder. “Sorry to hear the news,” he said in a low voice. “Why don’t you set your pa down, he tell you what happened.”
Numbly, Cincinnatus obeyed. As numbly, his father accepted the cup of coffee Aspasia brought him. His hands added cream and sugar. Cincinnatus didn’t think he knew they were doing it. He said, “She done laid down for her nap—”
“I know,” Cincinnatus broke in, wanting to say something. “She was asleep when I went out.”
“Uh-huh.” His father nodded. He sipped from the coffee, then stared at it in surprise, as if wondering how it had got there. “Sometimes I’m glad when she go to sleep, on account of I don’t got to worry none fo’ the nex’ little while.”
“I understand that,” Cincinnatus said. “Feel the same way my ownself.”
“But she don’t usually sleep this long,” Seneca said. “I go in to see how she is, an’—” He wrinkled his nose. “I don’t think nothin’ special of it, on account of she makin’ messes a while now.”
“Yeah.” Cincinnatus looked down at the gnawed ribs on the plate in front of him. His mother had cleaned him when he was a baby. He’d found cleaning her one of the cruelest parts of her slide into senility.
“I put my hand on her shoulder, an’ she gettin’ cold,” his father said. “Jus’ like somebody blowed out a candle. She go easy. I bless the good Lord fo’ dat. Pray to Jesus I go so easy when my time come.”
Cincinnatus made himself nod. Grief and relief warred inside him, along with shame that he should feel relief. “It’s over now,” he said, and choked on his own tears.
Aspasia brought Seneca a plate of ribs. “Why, thank you, child,” he said in mild surprise. “You didn’t have to do nothin’ like that.”
“On the house,” she said softly. “You need anything else, you jus’ sing out, you hear?” She hurried away.
As automatically as he’d fixed the coffee to suit him, Seneca started to eat. He said, “What am I gonna do without your mother?”
“Got to let the undertaker know,” Cincinnatus said.
“I do
dat.
” His father sounded impatient, almost irritable. “Yeah, I do
dat.
But so what? Your mama an’ me, we been together close to sixty years. Now she ain’t there no more.” He waved before Cincinnatus could speak, so Cincinnatus didn’t. “I know she ain’t hardly been here this las’ couple years, but it ain’t the same. It just ain’t.” He started crying again, as unknowingly as he had before.
“Maybe we get you up into Iowa,” Cincinnatus said. “Start everything all over up there. You got great-grandchildren you never seen.”
“I don’t believe no ofays. I especially don’t believe no Confederate ofay
po
liceman,” Seneca Driver replied with a shrug.
“Even if he lied, maybe we get there on our own.” Cincinnatus knew it would be easier—not easy, but easier—with his mother gone. He didn’t say that; even thinking it gave his relief and shame fresh ammunition.
“We see.” His father sounded altogether indifferent. “Got other things to fret about right now.”
With Cincinnatus at his side, he arranged them. The funeral was four days later, on a bright spring day. Cincinnatus wore a suit he’d brought down from Des Moines. It wasn’t funereally dark, but it was the only one he had. None of the neighbors and friends who’d come presumed to say anything about it.
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” the preacher intoned. “God bless and keep Livia Driver, who is free of the evils of this world and free to enjoy a kinder one beyond. We pray for her in Jesus’ name. Amen.”
“Amen,” Cincinnatus echoed. Preachers always said such things. He knew that. But for a Negro in the CSA, the evils of this world were altogether too real.
P
art of Clarence Potter wished he hadn’t gone to school in the USA. It wasn’t that he begrudged the education; he didn’t. Yale was a first-rate school. Back before the Great War, quite a few Confederates and Yankees had studied in each other’s homelands. Some people had thought that would bring the CSA and USA closer together. It hadn’t. It never would. They were as different as chalk and Friday.
So it seemed to a patriot from either one, anyhow. Potter, despite his own differences with the government he served, certainly qualified. But not even the most ardent patriot from either country could deny that they were similar in some important ways, too, language high on the list.
Potter listened to a sergeant talking. “Where did you learn to sound like a damnyankee?” he asked.
“Sir, I grew up in Pittsburgh,” the noncom answered. “My father was in the tobacco business, and he lived up there. Wasn’t much fun when I came down here, because I already had the accent, and people got on me for it.”
“I believe that,” Potter said. Somebody else would have to check the man’s story. If it was true, it accounted for the accent. If it wasn’t, it was outstanding cover for the Yankees to sneak one of their own into a secret Confederate operation.
But that wasn’t Potter’s worry, or not directly. All he could do was note the possibility. Somebody else
would
have to deal with it. His job was checking the way the sergeant sounded. And the man sounded pretty good to him. He scribbled notes in a loose-leaf binder, then nodded to the sergeant.
“I think you may well hear back from us,” he said.
“I hope so, sir,” the man said, still sounding much too much like a damnyankee for comfort. “This sounds like a good way to give the United States a good, stiff kick in the nuts.”
Potter hadn’t said much about the operation. The sergeant, however, plainly had the brains to add two and two and get something close to four. “If you do hear from us, you’ll get the details then,” Potter told him.
He also had the brains not to ask too many questions. He said, “I hope I do, sir,” saluted, and left the underground room in the War Department.
Instead of calling in another candidate, Potter telephoned Nathan Bedford Forrest III. The chief of the Confederate General Staff said, “Forrest here. What can I do for you, General?”
“You’ve already done it, sir,” Potter said. “You’ve got me playing God for these fellows you’re recruiting.”
“And so?” Forrest said. “This isn’t the first time you’ve had to select people for a dangerous mission. That’s part of your job.”
“Oh, yes, sir,” Potter agreed. “Usually, though, the men I pick and choose from aren’t so eager as these kids. They’re going to get killed. Some of them will get a blindfold and a cigarette if they’re lucky, or a bullet in the back of the head if they aren’t. But they don’t care. I could give you a division if willingness were all it took.”
“Well, willingness damn well isn’t,” Forrest said. “These man have got to be
good.
They’ll have to convince Yankees that they’re Yankees. We don’t want just anybody here. We want men who can get well behind enemy lines and raise hell.”
“I understand that. There was a fellow a couple of days ago who’d played a Yankee two or three times in amateur theatricals down in Mississippi.” Potter sighed. “He was every bit as bad as that would make you think, but he didn’t believe it. He got mad as hops when I told him he’d have to fight the war the regular way.”
Forrest laughed, not that it was really funny. “Amateur theatricals, eh? I believe you—you couldn’t make that up. He must have convinced
somebody
he could sound like he came from the USA, or he never would have got as far as you.”
“I suppose he did.” Potter drummed his fingers on the binder. “Have to see who he did convince, and weed that man out—whoever he is, he’s got a tin ear.” He wrote himself another note.
“You think of everything, don’t you?” Forrest said admiringly.
“Don’t I wish I did? If I’m so smart, how come I’m not rich?” Potter said. Forrest laughed, though again he wasn’t joking. He went on, “I’m just trying to stay one step ahead of the damnyankees.”
“We’ll be farther ahead of them than that if things go the way I hope they do,” Lieutenant General Forrest said.
Potter almost asked what kind of things the chief of the General Staff had in mind. He refrained at the last moment, at least as much because he feared Forrest would tell him as because he feared Forrest wouldn’t. He didn’t have a need to know, no matter how badly he wanted to know. He didn’t want to make Forrest responsible for breaching security.
I really have spent too much time in Intelligence,
he thought.
Instead of prodding at things that weren’t his proper concern, he asked something that was relevant: “Any sign the United States are training infiltrators who wear butternut?”
He got silence on the line for about half a minute. Then Forrest said, “Thank you for reminding me that anything we can do to the USA, the USA can do to us. No, General, I haven’t had any reports like that. But just because I haven’t had them doesn’t mean the damn-yankees aren’t doing something like that. They could, couldn’t they?”
“Oh, yes—maybe more easily than we could,” Potter answered. Kentuckians loyal to the USA had no trouble sounding as if they came from Confederate Tennessee. Men from the less mountainous parts of West Virginia sounded like their Virginia neighbors. And the United States had their share of people who’d grown up in the Confederate States or gone to school here.
“One more thing we’ll have to watch out for,” Forrest said mournfully. “The President won’t be jumping up and down when he hears about it.”
“No, he won’t,” Potter agreed. “But I’ll tell you one thing: he’ll be a lot angrier if you don’t tell him about it till it ups and bites you, if it does.”
“You’re likely right,” Forrest said.
“Yes, I think so,” Potter said. He’d known Jake Featherston longer than even the President’s oldest Freedom Party buddies. He didn’t know Featherston so deeply, but he’d spent a lot of time brooding over what the head of the Freedom Party was likely to do next, and he’d been right more often than he’d been wrong.
“All right, then. I will pass it along,” Forrest said. “And I’ll try to make sure no more ham actors get as far as you. So long.” He didn’t quite suppress a snort before hanging up.
It
was
funny. Potter couldn’t deny that, though he’d been annoyed at the inept Mississippian and even more annoyed at the officer who’d passed the man. That officer would soon find himself in a new assignment. Potter didn’t know whether it would be defusing mines with his teeth or just counting thumbtacks in Georgia or Alabama or somewhere else far away from the real war. Wherever it was, the fellow wouldn’t have anything to do with this project.
At the moment, Clarence Potter didn’t want to have anything more to do with this project, either. He suddenly seemed to feel the weight of the whole War Department pressing down on him. If he didn’t get out, he thought he’d suffocate. That set of symptoms had afflicted other men who worked in the subbasement, but never him, not till now.