Starting the War of Secession.
He glanced up, opened his mouth, but Sawyer was talking again. "That's the general idea, then," he was saying. "I'm sure you've got lots of questions.
"So now, let's get down to details."
TWO
The bouillon was ready. Vyry Lewis turned off the gas and poured the liquid carefully into a cracked china cup. The hot steam, beef-redolent, curled up into her eyes, and whether for that or some other reason she blinked back tears as she walked into the bedroom of her flat and knelt by the man in her bed.
He looked powerful even in sleep. Great thick muscles bulged smoothly beneath the tattooed skin of his arms. His massive chest was covered with a thick mat of coarse curly hair. His neck was thick and sinewy; his jaw broad, and scarred from numberless waterfront fights; his nose, mashed almost flat by bottle, fist, or police truncheon. His hair was cut short in the standard government-worker haircut.
She set the cup down carefully, trying not to wake him. Sleep, now, that's what my man needs, she thought. That do him more good than food.
Cautiously, she lifted the worn sheet that covered his lower body. His chest rose and fell gently. The bandage, still in place on his thigh, showed only a small stain of blood. Thank the Lord, she thought. He was naked underneath the sheet, and his manhood moved and stirred as she watched….
"You rascal," she said, dropping the sheet and smiling into his opened eyes. "Ain't nothing else ever on your mind?"
"So who's stealing looks?" Johnny Turner tried to move his leg and his mouth tightened. "What time's it gettin' to be?" he said, looking toward the drawn shades.
"'Bout the middle of the afternoon. Near to three. You feel like eating, Johnny?"
"Oh, yeah."
"I made you some bouillon."
"Boy-yon?" He took the cup and sniffed distrustfully. "Looks like tea. You know I don't like this English whitey shit, Vy."
"That ain't tea, Johnny. It's like beef soup. Go on, try you a little; if you really hungry, I'll cook you up something more."
Eyes on hers, he drank the cup down, then looked into it. "Say, that wa'nt bad."
"Want more?"
"No."
"You want some real food?"
"l want to get up, that's what I want. I shouldn't be here." His eyes moved around the tiny room. The exposed, rusting radiator; the water-stained ceiling; the small window, cracks patched with yellowing transparent tape; the few sticks of scarred second- and third-hand furniture. It was clean, but the neighborhood was poor and in the night he'd listened to furtive scurryings in the walls. "I shouldn't be at your place. They catch me here, and—"
"Hush your mouth now." She pushed him gently back down on the bed and nailed him there with a kiss. "You going to stay here with me for a day or two at least. Till you can walk. And I will admit" — she straightened — "it sure is nice, having you here all to myself."
She watched him close his eyes and exhale slowly and then she got up and went back into the kitchen alcove.
It's not a bad apartment, she thought, filling a coffeepot; not for a CE. A sitting room, the bedroom, and then this snug little half-kitchen. Running water and a flush toilet down the hall. Not bad for West Main, the crowded Colored Area of the city. It felt right having Johnny in it. If only he weren't hurt — she shoved the fear, fear of his dying, fear of his or their capture, out of her mind and took a packaged meal from the shelf. They were insipid and the food was all starch or fat, but they were issued free to every workcard holder and on her House salary she was glad to have them. She opened it and poured in water from the tap and put it in the oven and then began to set the table. Her dishes, like everything else she owned, were mismatched and cracked, patched together. Makeshift.
It wasn't easy being black in this Confederacy. A long time ago, her mother had told her when she was little, down in South Carolina, when their people had not been Conditionally Emancipated but slaves, they'd had a legend that someday, someday, would come the Jubilee.
Ain't never been no Jubilee, Mama, she thought, opening the stove and checking the meal with a fork. President Lee "freed" us over a hundred years ago; but still slaves in all 'cept the name. Free on paper; but we can't vote, can't go no place without a pass. Can't get a job outside the government factories or the government farms. Got to carry the green workcards, got to say "sir" to every white foreman, live in the Colored Areas, be off the streets ten at night. Got to do what you're told, or you go to the Hospital.
She shivered. The Hospital. They didn't whip you like they did in the old days. It was worse, what they did to you there — the machines, the drugs, the "conditioning."
They'd caught her in Charleston, out after curfew with a bulge in her blouse. When the patrollers had torn it off her the pamphlets had fallen to the sidewalk in a white-and-black cascade. Railroad propaganda, carried for a friend she never saw again.
That was a Hospital offense, but she'd been underage, fifteen. First offense; juvenile; relocate and assign work, said the white judge. She'd never seen Charleston or her mother again. She'd hoped once to be a nurse, had studied, she was smart, top of her class in the colored school. But with conspiracy in her file, her life held only two choices. Take the work they assigned, no matter how degrading… or turn in her workcard.
And starve.
When she went back in Johnny had his eyes open again, the sheet off, and his fingers under the edge of the bandage. "You let that alone," she said, too sharply.
"Don't tell me what to do, woman. I got to see it for myself."
"Here, then." She forced the anger out of her voice; that only riled him. "Let me do it."
She pulled a chair up to the bed and wet the bandage with the dregs of the bouillon. With careful fingers she pulled at the tape until only the clotted blood held the cotton to the wound. She stopped then, and looked at him.
"Go ahead," he said, closing his eyes.
When she had it free and had cleaned the dried blood off she helped him sit up. "Now, don't touch it. It ain't real serious. See, here, the bullet just like scraped you, came in here and out here. This flap of skin might shrivel up, come off."
"Don't look too bad to me."
"You go down to the docks like that too soon and you lose your leg. Now I'm going to pour some this whiskey on it and fix you a new dressing. Then we going to eat."
His face tightened when she poured the cheap brown liquor into the gash, but he made no sound. She taped a fresh cotton pad down over it. "There. Now, lean on me, and we'll get you to the dinner table."
Meat loaf, mixed greens, potatoes. He asked her for catsup but there had been none in the colored store when she last went. She turned on the radio to get his mind off himself but the first thing that came on was the news.
"Secession Day festivities interrupted by shooting! The big news in the Tidewater area today, and the subject of intense police activity, occurred at Town Point late last night. A party of terrorists fired at random into a peaceful, biracial crowd, enjoying Secesh Day fireworks provided by the city and presented by His Honor Mayor Driver Etheridge.
"The terrorists — whose identities are as yet unknown, though Police Chief Richard 'Dick' Mays has several suspects — fired from the tops of nearby buildings, wounding six and killing two, including a thirteen-year-old child, Williams Burwin Jefferson, of Portsmouth. City officials and community leaders from all walks of life, including influential colored churchmen, have condemned this act as a cowardly and—"