He’d heard veterans, both white and black, go on about Great War delousing stations. Either they’d changed the way things worked since or…
Some kind of gas started pouring out of the grillwork. Even a tiny whiff of it set Scipio’s lungs on fire. He ran toward that door in the far wall. Other blacks got there ahead of him. They screamed in despair-the door didn’t open. They fooled us, Scipio thought. They fooled us good, damn them. Half crushed in the panic, half poisoned by the gas, he crumpled. Blackness enfolded him.
IV
Up until a few years earlier, sharecroppers lived in this sorry little collection of shacks. Now the buildings stood sad and vacant under Georgia’s mild spring sun. “Where did everybody go?” Jonathan Moss asked. “Did the Freedom Party catch the people who were here and send them to a camp?”
To his surprise, Spartacus shook his head. “Don’t reckon so,” the black guerrilla leader answered. “Reckon they went to town, to look for work there. Weren’t no’ mo’ work here, that’s fo’ damn sure.”
“Why the hell not?” Nick Cantarella asked. “You got nothin’ but miles and miles of cotton farms and tobacco farms and shit like that.”
Spartacus surprised Moss again, this time by chuckling in grim amusement. “You is a city fella,” Spartacus said, not unkindly. “You is a city fella, an’ you don’t see how the country work. Used to be plenty jobs fo’ nigger field hands, yeah. Then the Freedom Party make all these tractors an’ harvesters an’ shit, throw Lawd only know how many niggers outa work. Goddamn bastards.”
“That’s not all it did,” Cantarella said. “Factories they built to turn out those tractors and harvesters, they’re making barrels and armored cars nowadays. You can bet your ass on that.”
“Sly,” Moss said. “Sly twice, because it let them drive the Negroes off the fields and let them gear up for turning out war machines without making the USA flabble about it.”
“Fuck me,” Spartacus said, looking from one of them to the other. “I seen the first part o’ dat, on account of it happen to me an’ mine. But the other half…Didn’t worry ’bout dat none.”
“Yeah, well, those Freedom Party fuckers wouldn’t be half so dangerous if the guys running the show for ’em were dumb,” Cantarella said. “Featherston’s a maniac, but he’s a goddamn smart maniac, you know what I mean?”
Jonathan Moss did, and wished he didn’t. Fighting the war against the Confederates hadn’t proved anything to him one way or the other. Soldiers were soldiers, and sometimes where they came from hardly mattered. Military life had rhythms of its own. But his time since escaping from Andersonville told a different story.
He’d wondered how the Confederates could hold down the countryside with so many whites of military age off fighting the USA. Now he knew. If Negroes in the countryside lost their jobs, a lot of them had to go to the CSA’s cities and towns, where they were easier to keep track of and get hold of. No, the people at the top of the Freedom Party weren’t dumb at all. Too damn bad.
Meanwhile, some of the blacks still in the countryside did their best to make the Confederates unhappy. Spartacus said, “Reckon we kin spend the night heah. Ain’t nobody round seen us go in. Better’n sleepin’ on bare ground.”
Moss didn’t argue with that. His middle-aged bones thought anything was better than sleeping on bare ground. War was a young man’s game. As a fighter pilot, he’d made up in experience what he lacked in exuberance. Even so, he’d needed more rest and more regular rest than his young comrades, and he wasn’t able to fly as many missions.
Here, on the ground in Georgia, his years shoved themselves in his face in all kinds of ways. He got tired. He got hungry. When the shooting started, he got scared. Spartacus’ black guerrillas were mostly young and entirely fearless. When they attacked whites, they did it with a fierce joy, almost an exaltation, that left him admiring and astonished. He didn’t think he’d ever felt that ferocious in an airplane over Canada in the last war.
Of course, he hadn’t had such good reasons for ferocity, either.
He went into one of the cabins. It smelled all musty; it had been deserted for some time, and water and mold had their way inside. But even brand-new, it would have indicted the system that produced it. No running water. No plumbing. No electricity. No gas. Not even a wood-burning stove-all the cooking was done over a fireplace.
“I’ve seen horses with better stalls than this,” he said.
“Yeah.” Nick Cantarella nodded. “Tell you something else, too-horses deserve better than this. So do people.”
Not much was left inside the cabin to show how the people who used it had lived. A cheap pine stool lay tumbled in a corner. A few dishes, just as cheap, some of them broken, sat on a counter. When Moss put the stool back on its legs, he found a rag doll, face leprous with mildew, forgotten behind it. Did some little colored girl cry and cry because that doll was lost? He’d never know now, any more than he’d know whether that little girl was still alive.
“Can’t even light a fire,” Cantarella grumbled. “Anybody white sees smoke coming out of the chimney, he’ll sic the Mexicans on us.”
“Yeah, well, it could be worse,” Moss said. “They could have guys after us who really want to fight.”
Nick Cantarella laughed, though he wasn’t kidding. Francisco Jose’s soldiers rapidly discovered the black guerrillas were desperately in earnest. Spartacus’ men didn’t need long to figure out that the soldiers from the Empire of Mexico weren’t, at least if not under direct attack. The Mexicans didn’t want to be in Georgia. They resented C.S. whites almost as much for making them come up here as they resented C.S. blacks for having the gall to shoot back. It wasn’t quite a plague on both your houses, but it came close.
“What do we have for food?” Cantarella asked.
“I’ve got some ham and cornbread. How about you?”
“Cornbread, too, and I’ve still got a couple of ration cans from that dead Mexican we found.” Cantarella grimaced. “Damned if I know how the Confederates go on eating that slop. I mean, the stuff we have is lousy, but this is a hell of a lot worse.”
“It’s pretty bad,” Moss agreed. Pilots ate better than soldiers in the field-most of the time, anyway. He went on, “It’s better than what we got in Andersonville, though, except when the Red Cross packages came through.” Rations for POWs were supposed to be the same as what the captor’s soldiers got. Theory was wonderful-either that or the Confederate States were in more trouble than anybody north of the Mason-Dixon Line suspected.
They shared what they had. It filled their bellies, although a chef at the Waldorf-Astoria-or even a mess sergeant-would have turned up his nose, or more likely his toes. Despite lacking a fire, Moss appreciated being able to sleep with a wall, no matter how drafty, between him and the outside world. What Georgia called winter had been mild by the standards of Ontario or Chicago, but it still got chilly. Spring days were warmer. Spring nights didn’t seem to be.
Then again, Moss suspected he could sleep through an artillery duel in the middle of a blizzard. Any chance for sleep he got, he grabbed with both hands. He knew his age was showing, knew and didn’t care.
Captain Cantarella shook him awake much too early the next morning. Any time before the next afternoon would have been too early, but the sun was barely over the horizon. Moss’ yawn almost made the top of his head fall off. “Already?” he croaked.
“’Fraid so,” Cantarella answered. “They’ve got coffee going out there, if that makes you feel any better.”
“Not much,” Moss said, but he sat up. “What they call coffee’ll be nothing but that goddamn chicory, anyhow.”
“Maybe a little bit of the real bean,” Cantarella said. “And chicory’ll open your eyes, too.”