"Yes, sir. We'll try," Einsiedel said. "One of my lieutenants said we ought to shoot any storekeeper who won't sell to us."
Morrell laughed. "Damned if that doesn't sound like Michael Pound."
"How the devil did you know, sir?" The colonel in Florida sounded flabbergasted.
"You mean it is?" Morrell laughed again. "Well, I can't say I'm surprised. I've known Pound for twenty-five years now. He has a straightforward bloodthirstiness that would scare the crap out of any General Staff officer ever born. He's not always right, but he's always sure of himself."
"Boy, you can say that again," Einsiedel said. "All right, sir. We'll see what we can do to nip this stuff in the bud."
"Don't be too gentle," Morrell said. "We won the war. If they think they're going to win the peace, they can damn well think again."
"I sure hope so," Colonel Einsiedel said, which wasn't exactly the encouraging note on which Morrell would have wanted the conversation to end. But the colonel hung up after that, so Morrell couldn't pump him any more without calling him back. Deciding that would make more trouble than it saved, Morrell put the handset back into its cradle instead.
"Boycott, huh?" Brigadier General Parsons said. "That's…different."
"Yeah. It lets them annoy us without giving us a good excuse to shoot them," Morrell said. "Some of them are still fighting the war, even if they don't carry guns any more. Every time they make us blink, they figure they've won a battle."
"So we don't blink, then," Parsons said.
"That's about the size of it." Morrell hoped he could get his own officers to go along. Not all of them would see that this was a problem.
Michael Pound did, by God! Morrell smiled and shook his head. Pound saw problems and solutions with an almost vicious clarity. As far as he was concerned, everything was simple. And damned if watching him in action didn't make you wonder whether he had it right and everybody else looked at the world through a kaleidoscope that made everything seem much more complicated than it should have.
The telephone rang again. "General Morrell's office," Harlan Parsons said. This time, he didn't hesitate in answering on his own hook: "That's right. As of the surrender, Negroes have the same rights on ex-Confederate territory as whites do. Anyone who tries to go against that goes up against the U.S. government… Yes, that includes intermarriage, as long as the people involved want to go through with it."
After he hung up, Morrell asked, "Where?"
"Rocky Mount, North Carolina," his second-in-command answered. "Nice to know there are still some Negroes there."
"Still some Negroes all through the CSA," Morrell said. "Just not many." He'd heard so many stories of survival by luck and by stealth and by guerrilla war that they started to blur. He'd heard some of survival by the kindness of whites, but fewer than he wished he had.
"Featherston turned a whole country upside down and inside out," Parsons said. "It'll never be the same down here. Never. How many dead?"
"Six million? Seven? Ten?" Morrell shrugged helplessly. "I don't think anybody knows exactly. Maybe they can figure out how many Negroes the Confederates shipped to their camps. I bet it'd be easier to count how many are left now, though. Then subtract from how many there were before the Freedom Party started killing them, and the number you get is how many bought a plot."
"Those Freedom Party bastards had to be out of their skulls," Parsons said: far from the first time Morrell had heard that opinion. "Imagine all the effort they put into killing colored people. All the camps they had to build, all the trains they had to use…They would have done better if they aimed that shit at us."
"They would have done a hell of a lot better if they'd put their Negroes into factories to make stuff to throw at us, or if they put them in uniform and pointed them at us," Morrell said. "Or that's how it looks to me, anyhow. But they saw it different. Far as Featherston was concerned, getting rid of Negroes was every bit as important as whaling the snot out of us."
Parsons spiraled a forefinger by his right ear. "Out of his skull," he repeated.
"Yeah, I think so, too-most of the time. But for people who were crazy, they sure went at it like they knew what they were doing." Morrell shivered. "Those camps ran like barrel factories. Negroes went in, and corpses came out. If that was what they were aiming for, they couldn't have done a smoother job."
"I know. Those phony bathhouses, so the colored people wouldn't know they were gonna get it till too late…" Parsons shuddered, too. "But don't you have to be crazy to want to do something like that?"
"When the Ottomans started killing Armenians after the Great War, I sure thought so," Morrell answered. "Maniacs in fezzes…But shit, the Confederates aren't that different from us, or they weren't till they started yelling, 'Freedom!' all the damn time. Biggest difference is, they had lots of Negroes and we only had a few. So could we do something like that, too?"
Harlan Parsons looked horrified. "Christ, I hope not!"
"Yeah, well, so do I," Morrell said. "But what's that got to do with anything? If we decide we can't stand Negroes or Jews or Chinamen or whoever the hell, do we fish the designs for these asphyxiating trucks out of the file and start making our own?"
"I don't think so, sir," his second-in-command replied. "For one thing, the Confederates went and did that. Maybe we can learn our lesson from them."
"Here's hoping." Morrell nodded. "You might have something there. I sure hope you do. Who'd want to go down in history as the next Jake Featherston?" He answered his own question: "Nobody. I hope."
"Now if only the people down here could get it through their damn thick heads that what the Freedom Party did was wrong," Parsons said.
"If they would have thought it was wrong, it never would have happened in the first place," Morrell said. "If they hadn't voted Featherston in, or if they hadn't let him go after the colored people…They did, though. And you said it, General. This is a whole different landscape here now."
How would the area that had made up the CSA get along without Negroes to do the jobs whites didn't want or felt to be beneath their dignity? He'd already seen part of the answer. Lots of Mexicans had come north to work in the fields and to wait tables and cut hair and clean house. Unless the USA posted machine guns every few hundred yards along the Rio Grande, the Mexicans would keep on coming, too. They could do less and get more money for it here than they could in Francisco Josй's ramshackle empire. Without machine guns, how were you going to keep them away?
Well, that wasn't his worry. The Secretary of State and the Secretary of the Interior and the Secretary of War would figure out what to do about it, and then they'd tell him. And then he would have to do it-or try to, if it turned out to be one of the stupid orders that came out of Philadelphia every now and then.
Bang! When Morrell heard that noise, he ducked first and thought later. So did Harlan Parsons. Nothing else happened, though. Parsons straightened with a sheepish smile. "I think it was only a backfire."
"I think you're right," Morrell said. "That's a relief, isn't it? One of these days, we may even be able to hear that noise without flinching."
"One of these days-but not soon," Parsons said.
Morrell nodded. The war hadn't just changed the Confederate States. It had changed his own country. And it had changed him, and changed every soldier on both sides who came through alive. Starting at loud noises was the least of it. The last time around, one Confederate soldier came out changed enough to convulse his country a generation later. Who would change things this time around-and how?
"Congratulations, Dr. O'Doull! Congratulations, Lieutenant Colonel O'Doull!" Colonel Tobin said. He was the U.S. officer in charge of this part of Alabama, and he was proud of it, God help him. He handed Leonard O'Doull the little velvet box containing a lieutenant colonel's silver oak leaves as if it were the Holy Grail.