"I wasn't involved with that," Butler said quickly.
"You wouldn't be talking with me now if you were," Morrell replied. "But you think you're serious about what you're going to do? So are we. You can find out the easy way or the hard way. Up to you."
Butler left in a hurry after that. Morrell wasn't sorry to see him go, and resolved to keep a closer watch on him from here on out. He wondered whether the United States could enforce anything like equality on the old CSA. He still wasn't sure-but he aimed to try.
T he only way Clarence Potter could have avoided seeing the pamphlet called Equality was to stay in his apartment and never come out. The Yankees plastered the damn thing all over Richmond. During the war, that common a propaganda leaflet would have meant the Quartermaster Corps didn't need to issue toilet paper for a while.
When he first read the pamphlet, he thought it was an A-number-one asswipe, nothing else but. After he looked at it again, he still thought it was an asswipe. But it was a clever asswipe, and a determined one. The damnyankees weren't out to change hearts or minds in the dead CSA. They were out to change behavior. If they rammed different behavior down people's throats from Richmond to Guaymas, they figured hearts and minds would eventually follow.
What worried Potter most was, they had a fighting chance of being right.
He'd watched the same thing happen when the Freedom Party took over the CSA. Even people who didn't like Jake Featherston and the Party started greeting one another with "Freedom!" It was safer. You couldn't get into trouble if you did it. And, after a while, you didn't even feel self-conscious about it. You took it for granted. Pretty soon, you took the truth of everything the Party said for granted. And you, and the Confederate States of America with you, followed Jake Featherston into the abyss.
Now the Yankees wanted to push what was left of the Confederacy into…Equality. They didn't ask whites to love Negroes. They just said, Treat them the way you'd treat yourselves, or we'll make you regret it.
Was there ever a more perverted application of the Golden Rule?
Potter was sure lots of people hated the idea of Negro equality even more than he did. He'd spent sixty-odd years in the CSA; he knew what was what here. But he also knew he was being watched. The damnyankees didn't waste subtlety showing him that-which didn't mean there weren't also subtle spies, ones he didn't notice right away. He assumed his telephone was tapped and his mail read.
And so he sat tight and worked on his memoirs. A generation earlier, he'd done what he could to free the CSA from the onerous terms of the armistice after the Great War. But the Confederacy wasn't crushed then. It wasn't occupied, either. The USA had learned a bar fighter's lesson since: once you knocked a guy down, you needed to kick him in the head so he couldn't jump up and come after you with a broken bottle.
One day in early March, when spring was just starting to be in the air, he went over to Capitol Square to look around. Woodrow Wilson had declared war on the USA there in 1914. Potter himself and Nathan Bedford Forrest III had halfheartedly plotted against Jake Featherston there, too.
Forrest was dead now, because you needed to be a better plotter than he ever was to go up against the wily President of the CSA. Featherston never found out Potter was involved in that scheme. If he had, Potter knew he would have died himself.
Capitol Square had been battered when the two generals sat on a park bench and talked about where the Confederacy was going. Down the drain, though neither of them knew it at the time.
The square looked even worse now than it had then, which wasn't easy. The grass was still mangy and leprous from winter's freezes. No one had mowed it for a long time. It softened the outlines of bomb and shell craters without hiding them. Signs with big red letters shouted blunt warnings: WATCH WHERE YOU STEP! and MINES amp; LIVE AMMO!
Thus cautioned, Potter didn't walk across the square to the remains of the Capitol. A neoclassical building, it had been bombed into looking like an ancient ruin. From the pictures he'd seen, the Colosseum and the Parthenon were both in a hell of a lot better shape than this place.
Workmen were hauling away the wreckage of Albert Sidney Johnston's heroic statue. Like the Confederacy, it was good for nothing but scrap metal these days. George Washington's statue, now out from under its protective pyramid of sandbags, had come through better. Even the Yankees still respected Washington…some, anyhow.
Two blue jays screeched in a tree. A robin hopped on the ground, eye cocked for bugs. A skinny red tabby eyed the robin from behind a low mound of earth. "Go get it," Potter murmured. The cat had to eat, too. But the robin flew off. The cat eyed Potter as if it were his fault. It was a cat-it wouldn't blame itself. Potter sketched a salute. "You're a loser, too," he said fondly. The cat yawned, showing off needle teeth. It ambled away.
He'd been looking for the bench where Forrest first broached getting rid of Featherston and getting out of the war. Once he sold his memoirs, that bench would become a historical monument of sorts. Or rather, it would have, because he saw no sign of it. One more casualty of war.
He found another bench, deeper into Capitol Square. Despite the signs, he didn't blow up getting to it. He sat down. Getting out of the apartment felt good. So did the sun on his face, though he'd grown used to being pasty during the war. A man in a filthy Confederate uniform was sleeping or passed out drunk in the tall grass not far away. Some newspapers did duty for a blanket.
Potter didn't think the derelict was watching him, though you never could tell. Somebody was, somewhere. He was sure of that. He looked around to see if he could spot the spy. Not this time. That proved exactly nothing, of course.
After the end of the last war, Jake Featherston had spent some time in Capitol Square as a drifter, one more piece of flotsam washed up by the armistice. Then he ran into the Freedom Party-and it ran into him. Before he joined, it was a tiny, hopeless outfit that could keep its membership rolls and accounts in a cigar box. Afterwards…
Now it was more than twenty-five years afterwards. Potter could see that everybody would have ended up better off if Jake Featherston went down some other street and never met the hopeless chucklehead who founded the Freedom Party. Once upon a time, he'd known that chucklehead's name. He couldn't remember it now to save his life. Well, it sure didn't matter any more.
He closed his eyes. He wished he could close his nose. The stench of death still lingered in Richmond. It would only get worse as the weather warmed up, too. How many years would it need to go away for good?
"Hey, friend, you got any change you can spare?"
Clarence Potter opened his eyes. The sleeping soldier-he still had a sergeant's chevrons on his sleeve-had come to life. He was filthy, and badly needed a shave. God only knew when he'd bathed last. But Potter didn't smell whiskey along with the-what did that Yankee soap ad call it?-B.O.
"Here." He dug in his pocket and found a half-dollar. "Buy yourself something to eat." He tossed it to the man.
"Much obliged, sir." The vet caught it out of the air. He eyed Potter. "You went through it, I reckon."
"Twice," Potter agreed. "Not always at the front, but yeah-twice."
"You've got the look, all right." The demobilized soldier stuck the fat silver coin in a trouser pocket. "You reckon we'll ever get back on our feet again?"
"Sooner or later? I'm sure of it. When?" Potter shrugged. "It may be later. I don't know if I'll live to see it. I hope you do."
The younger man eyed him. "You talk kinda like a Yankee." He probably came from Alabama or Mississippi.
With another shrug, Potter answered, "I went to college up there."