Maybe she would have done something about it had she lived. Thanks to the U.S. raid on Charleston, she hadn’t. Scipio was free of her forever. But… She’d told Jerry Dover his right name. It was a gun in Dover’s hands no less than it had been in hers.
Dover opened a desk drawer and reached inside. What did he have in there? A pistol? Probably. What had Scipio’s face shown? What he was really thinking? A Negro in the CSA could do nothing more dangerous. Dover said, “You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”
“I know what you talkin’ ’bout, yes, suh,” Scipio said. Then he let the accent he’d used only once or twice since the downfall of the Congaree Socialist Republic, the educated white man’s accent Anne Colleton had made him learn, come out: “I know exactly what you are talking about, and I wish to heaven that I didn’t.”
Jerry Dover’s eyes widened. “You are a sandbagging son of a bitch. How many times did you tell me you could only talk like a swamp nigger?”
“As many times as I needed to, to keep myself safe,” Scipio answered. Bitterly, he added, “But I see there is no safety anywhere. Now-suppose you eliminate the nonsense. What must I deliver, and to whom, and why?”
Accent was almost as important in the CSA as color. Scipio remained black. He couldn’t do anything about that. But his skin said he was one thing. Now, suddenly, his voice said he was something else. His voice proclaimed that he was not just a white man, but someone to be reckoned with: a lawyer, a judge, a Senator. Jerry Dover shook his head, trying to drive out the illusion. Plainly, he wasn’t having an easy time of it.
He had to gather himself before he answered, “You don’t need to know that. You don’t need to know why. The less you know, the better for everybody.”
“So you say,” Scipio replied.
“Yeah. I do. And I say something else, too: you don’t want to mess with me. Anything happens to me, I got stuff written down. You’ll wish you was dead by the time they get through with you-and with your family, too.”
Bathsheba, whom he’d loved since they met at a boarding house in the Terry. Cassius, who had reached the age when every boy-almost a man-was as much a rebel as the Red he’d been named for. Cassius’s older sister, Antoinette, old enough for a husband now-but in these mad times, how much sense did marrying make?
Scipio wasn’t the only one whose life Jerry Dover held in the hollow of his hand. Everything in the world that mattered to him-and if Dover made a fist…
“All right, Mr. Dover,” he said, still with those white men’s tones. They helped him mask his feelings, and his feelings needed masking just then. “I shall do what you require of me.”
“Figured you would,” the restaurant manager said complacently. “Talkin’ fancy like that may help you, too.”
But Scipio held up a hand. “I had not finished. I shall do what you require-but you will pay my wife my usual wages and tips while I am away, and-”
“Wait a minute,” Dover broke in. “You think you can dicker with me?”
“Yes,” Scipio answered. “I can bargain with you because I can read and write, too. You have a way to protect yourself against me. That knife cuts both ways, Mr. Dover. I shall do what you require, and I shall carefully note everything I have done, and I shall leave my notes in a safe place. I have those, and they have nothing to do with this restaurant.”
Dover glared at him. “I ought to turn you in now.”
“That is your privilege.” Scipio masked terror with a butler’s impenetrable calm. “But if you do, you will have to find someone else to do your service, someone on whom you do not have such a strong hold.” He waited. Jerry Dover went on scowling, scowling fearsomely. But Dover nodded in the end. He hadn’t intended to end up with a bargain-he’d intended just to impose his will, as whites usually intended and usually did with blacks-but he’d ended up with one after all.
Dr. Leonard O’Doull was a tall, thin man with a long jaw and a face as Irish as his name. He worked in a U.S. Army aid station a few hundred yards behind the line in Virginia. A few hundred yards, in this case, was enough to put him on the north side of the Rapidan when the front was on the south side, in the almost impenetrable second-growth country called the Wilderness. He didn’t like that. Getting wounded men back over the river meant delay, and delay, sometimes, meant a death that faster treatment could have stopped.
But there was no help for it. The U.S. bridgehead over the Rapidan was small and under constant assault by air, armor, and artillery. The Confederates were no worse about respecting the Red Cross than their counterparts in green-gray, but there was nowhere in the bridgehead itself that an aid station could hope to escape the evil chances of war.
First Sergeant Granville McDougald waxed philosophical when O’Doull complained: “We do what we can do, Doc, not what we want to do.”
“Yeah, Granny, I know.” O’Doull had an M.D. He’d had a civilian practice up in Riviere-du-Loup, in the Republic of Quebec, where he’d settled after a stint as an army surgeon there in the Great War. McDougald had been a medic in the last go-round, and ever since. O’Doull wasn’t at all sure which of them knew more about medicine. He went on, “Just ’cause I know it doesn’t mean I have to like it.”
“Well, no,” McDougald allowed. “But there’s not a hell of a lot of point to flabbling about things you can’t help.”
O’Doull grunted. Like any doctor, he was an officer-he had a major’s oak leaves on his shoulder straps. Like any long-service noncom, McDougald had ways of subverting the privileges rank gave to officers. Being right most of the time was not the least of them.
Before O’Doull could do anything more than grunt, a flight of northbound shells roared by overhead. The sound put him in mind of a freight train rumbling down the track. Confederate artillery constantly tried to disrupt U.S. supply lines.
Disrupt supply lines. That was a nice, bloodless phrase. What the Confederates were really trying to do was blow up trucks and motorcars and trains, to turn the vehicles into fireballs and the men inside them into burnt, mangled, screaming lumps of flesh. That was what it boiled down to.
Granville McDougald also listened to the shells flying north. “Didn’t hear any gurgles that time,” he said.
“Happy day,” O’Doull answered. And it was a happy day… of sorts. Rounds filled with poison gas made a distinctive glugging noise on their way through the air. Mustard gas hardly ever killed quickly. But the blisters it raised on the skin could keep a man out of action for weeks. And the blisters it raised on the lungs could keep him an invalid for years, strangling him half an inch at a time and making all his remaining days a hell on earth.
Nerve agents, on the other hand… Get a whiff of those, or get even a little drop on your skin, and the world would go dark because your pupils contracted to tiny dots. Your lungs would lock up, and so would your heart, and so would your other muscles, too-but when your lungs and heart stopped working the rest of your muscles didn’t matter a whole hell of a lot.
Soldiers on both sides carried syringes full of atropine. Anyone who thought he was poisoned with a nerve agent was supposed to stab himself in the thigh and ram the plunger home. If he was right, the atropine would block the effects of the poison gas. If he was wrong, the antidote that would have saved him would poison him instead. That wasn’t usually fatal, they claimed.
All the same, it made for one hell of a war.
“You know,” O’Doull said meditatively, “twenty-five years ago I thought we’d hit bottom. I thought we were doing the worst things to each other that human beings could think of to do.” He laughed-in lieu of sobbing or screaming. “Only goes to show what I know, doesn’t it?”
“Well, I don’t suppose you were the only one with that idea,” McDougald said. “Kind of makes you wonder where we go from here, doesn’t it?”