"They say they're investigating to see if they need to charge any of us with this 'crimes against humanity' crap," he reported.
Jerry Dover didn't like the sound of that. It struck him as being vague enough to let the United States do whatever they pleased. "What exactly do they mean by that?" he asked.
"Well, what they were mostly talking about with me was finding out whether we ever gave niggers up to the people who shipped 'em off to the camps," Telford answered.
"Oh." Dover relaxed. About the most hideous thing he'd done as a quartermaster officer was send gas shells up to the front. Since the damnyankees had used gas themselves, they couldn't very well get their bowels in an uproar about it…unless they felt like getting their bowels in an uproar. If they did, who was going to stop them?
Nobody this side of the Kaiser, that was who.
Someone said, "They can't treat us this way," so maybe he thought he was the Kaiser, or else somebody even more important.
Kirby Smith Telford looked bleak and sounded bleaker. "Not much we can do about it. Not anything we can do about it, far as I know. If they decide to line us up and shoot us, who's going to complain to them?"
"It ain't right," the other Confederate officer said. Telford only shrugged.
Who'd complained when the Confederacy got rid of its Negroes? Dover knew he hadn't. He also knew his fellow officers wouldn't appreciate his pointing that out. Sometimes the smartest thing you could do was just keep your big mouth shut. Dover, a man who liked to yell at people, had been a long time learning that. He had the lesson now, though.
One by one, the officers in his barracks hall got summoned to their interrogations. A few left Camp Liberty! not much later. The rest stayed where they were, fuming and cursing their damnyankee captors. Dover wondered how smart the victors were. If these POWs hadn't been embittered Yankee-haters who would do anything they could to hurt the USA once they finally got free, they were more likely to turn into men with views like that the longer they sat and stewed.
Of course, maybe the U.S. authorities didn't intend to let them go at all. Dover imagined stooped, white-haired POWs dying of old age as the twentieth century passed into the twenty-first. He shivered. Not even the Yankees could stay vengeful for upwards of half a century…could they?
They seemed to be questioning prisoners in roughly the order the Confederates had been captured. That meant Jerry Dover had quite a while to wait. He was perfectly willing to be patient.
Kirby Smith Telford came back from his grilling hot enough to cook over. "I'm a special case, the sons of bitches say," he rasped.
"How come?" Dover asked. "You were just a combat soldier, right? Why are they flabbling about you, then?"
"On account of I'm from Texas, that's why," Telford answered. "From the goddamn traitor Republic of Texas, now. If I'm gonna get outa here, I have to swear to be loyal to a country"-he made as if to spit at the very idea-"that betrayed the country I grew up in."
"You could just ask them to ship you back to some other part of the CSA," Dover said.
"I tried that. It only made things worse," Telford said bleakly. "They reckoned I said that because I wanted to raise trouble for them. I didn't mean it that way-not then I didn't. But Jesus God! If I get out of here now…" He didn't say what he would do then. What he didn't say, nobody could report to the authorities. Dover didn't have much trouble figuring it out, though.
"Probably should have done whatever they told you to do, and then gone on about your business afterwards," he said.
"Yeah. I figured that out, too, only not quick enough to do me any goddamn good." Kirby Smith Telford sounded almost as disgusted at himself as he did at his Yankee interrogators.
Dover's turn came about a week later, on a summer day as hot and sticky as any in Savannah. The officer who questioned him was a major about half his age, a fellow named Hendrickson. He had a manila folder with Dover's name on it. It was fat with papers. Dover wondered whether that was a good sign or a bad one.
"You were in the Quartermaster Corps," Major Hendrickson said. He had a prissy little hairline mustache that didn't go with the shape of his face.
"I sure was," Dover said.
"You were taken outside of Huntsville."
"That's right."
"You fought in the Great War, but you're not career military."
"Right again." This ground seemed safe enough.
Hendrickson lit a cigarette-a nasty U.S. brand. He didn't offer one to Dover. Instead, he went through some of the papers in the folder. "Tell me what you did between the wars."
"I managed a restaurant in Savannah, Georgia," Dover replied. Hendrickson asked him for the name of the place. "The Huntsman's Lodge," Dover said, wondering why that could possibly matter.
It seemed to; Major Hendrickson grunted and checked something off. Dover tried to see what it was, but he couldn't read upside down well enough to tell. The interrogator went on, "Did you employ Negroes in this restaurant?"
"Yeah," Dover said. "Cooks and waiters and cleanup crew. Couldn't hardly get along without 'em."
"We don't seem to have any trouble," Hendrickson said primly. Dover only shrugged; he didn't care how damnyankees ran their eateries. The interrogator riffled through his papers some more. "Was one of these Negroes a man named, uh, Xerxes?"
He botched the name, so Dover almost didn't recognize it. "Xerxes?" He said it the right way, as if the first X was a Z. "Yeah, he worked for me for years. Hell of a smart guy. Probably would've been a lawyer or a Congressman if he was white. But how the devil did you know that?"
Annoyingly, Hendrickson answered a question with another question: "Do you remember his son's name?"
"Have to think about that-I only met him a couple of times. He was…Cassius. How come?" Before the Yankee major answered, Dover's jaw dropped. "Sweet suffering Jesus! Not that Cassius?" The U.S. wireless wouldn't shut up about the Negro who'd shot Jake Featherston.
Major Hendrickson nodded. "The very same. And it just so happened your name came up a couple-three times when we questioned him."
"Oh, yeah?" Dover had never imagined his fate could rest on a black man's-hell, on a black kid's-word. "What'd he have to say?"
Before answering, Hendrickson shuffled papers, even though he had to know already. Dover wanted to clout him, but made himself sit tight. "He said you treated his old man pretty decent. Said you saved his whole family from a cleanout once. Is that a fact?"
"Yeah." Dover didn't want to make a big deal out of it now. He'd saved Scipio and his family-and several other colored workers and theirs-as much to keep the Huntsman's Lodge going as for any other reason. But this U.S. soldier didn't need to know that. "What about it?"
"Well, it means you aren't real likely to be a hardcore Freedom Party man," Hendrickson said. "Will you swear an oath to live peacefully in Georgia and not to cause trouble for the United States if we let you go?"
"Major, I have lived through two wars now. I have had enough trouble to last me the rest of my days," Dover said. "Read me out your oath. I will swear to it, and I will live up to it."
"Raise your right hand," Hendrickson said. Dover did. The oath was what the U.S. soldier said it was. Dover repeated it, swore to it, and then signed a printed copy in triplicate. "Show one copy to U.S. military authorities on request," Hendrickson told him. "We will give you the balance of your back pay and a train ticket to Augusta. You can wear your uniform, but take off your rank badges before you leave the camp. The C.S. Army is out of business."
Kirby Smith Telford scowled at Dover as he packed a meager duffel and took the stars off his collar. Other POWs eyed him with varying mixtures of envy and hatred. He didn't care. He was going home.