A grenade flew down into the trench. The blast was deafening. A fragment bit McSweeney’s leg. But when a Rebel followed the grenade, he too became a torch. No more Confederate soldiers tried coming down into the U.S. trenches, not anywhere the flame could reach. The sight of the blazing barrel took the heart out of their attack.
“You’ll get a medal for this!” someone shouted: someone in captain’s bars. Schneider hadn’t run, then. That was something. The company commander went on, “A Medal of Honor, if I have anything to do with it.”
“Thank you, sir.” McSweeney was as unflinchingly honest about himself as about everything and everyone around him. “I earned it.”
The envelope with the familiar handwriting had caused a small stir when it got to Scipio’s apartment house. Any time mail arrived there was a small occasion, for only a few of the Negroes in the building were able to read and write. “Who it from?” asked the apartment manager, a plump black fellow named Demosthenes. “Sho’’nuf write pretty.”
Scipio had professed ignorance; the imperturbable mask a butler had to be able to don at will was proof against Demosthenes’ curiosity. Behind that mask, he’d been trembling. How did Miss Anne find out where I was living? he wondered. The war had made people forget about registering newly arrived blacks, and in any case he was but one Nero among many Negroes by that name in Columbia.
In his haste to find out what his former mistress wanted, he’d ignored yet another inviting glance from the widow Jezebel, ignored it so flagrantly that he knew he’d offended. He hadn’t cared.
The message, as was Anne Colleton’s way, was to the point. Come to Marshlands Sunday before noon, she’d written. If you do, no harm will come to you. If you do not, I shall not answer for the consequences.
And so, early Sunday morning, Scipio, not doubting her word for a moment, had hopped aboard the beat-up Negro car of a train at Confederacy Station, traveled southeast and then southwest around two sides of a triangle to reach St. Matthews (no direct rail route on the third side existing), and then trudged out of town down a muddy road that got muddier as a chilly drizzle came down, heading west toward the plantation where he’d lived his whole life till the past year.
Marks of the Negro uprising still scarred the countryside: burnt-out houses and barns, cotton fields gone to weeds, trees shattered by the artillery that had done more than anything else to break the Congaree Socialist Republic. Despite the scars, Scipio had the feeling he was walking back into his own past. He wondered if Anne Colleton would have a brass-buttoned tailcoat waiting for him when he got back to the plantation.
All things considered, he preferred life as a laborer, which had more freedom to it than he’d ever imagined. Very few people, though, had ever cared about what he preferred. He hiked through the forest where he’d killed Major Hotchkiss. If anyone ever found out about that, none of Miss Anne’s promises would matter in the least.
Coming up the familiar path, turning onto it, and seeing the Marshlands mansion in ruins brought home to him how much things had changed. The Negro cottages still standing alongside those charred ruins brought home to him how much things hadn’t.
A battered, filthy, rusty Ford was parked next to one of those cottages: no sign anywhere of the fancy motorcar Miss Anne had driven. None of the field hands would have had an automobile, though, no matter how battered. That had to be where the mistress was staying. As Scipio approached the cottage, a chill ran down his back. Before the uprising-the revolution that had failed-that had been Cassius’cottage. Scipio wondered if Anne Colleton appreciated the irony.
A few children were playing outside in spite of the drizzle. In his city clothes, he was a stranger to them. Strangers, these days, were objects of fear, not curiosity. “What you wan’?” asked one of the boys, a chap who would have been just too young to fight in the revolutionary army, which had had more than one twelve-year-old carrying a rifle.
“I wish to speak with the mistress of Marshlands, Ajax,” Scipio answered. “Will you be so good as to tell her I have arrived?”
Ajax and the other children stared at him, not expecting that kind of language to come from the mouth of a black man wearing a frayed, collarless shirt and a pair of dungarees with patches at the knees, a cloth cap on his head against the rain. Then the youngster recognized him in spite of the unfamiliar habiliments. “It Scipio!” he yelped. “Do Jesus, Scipio done come back!”
That shout brought faces to windows and made several doors come open so the inhabitants of those cottages could gape-or could warily study-the returned prodigal. One of the opening doors was that of the cottage formerly Cassius’. Out came Anne Colleton, who ignored the nasty weather. “Good morning, Scipio,” she said, almost-but not quite-as she might have done before the revolt. “You were wise to come.”
“Ma’am, I thought so myself, which is why I did,” he answered.
She stood aside. “Well, come in,” she said. “I have coffee waiting, and cold chicken, and sweet-potato pie. You’ll be hungry, I expect.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said again. He went into the cottage, pausing only to wipe his feet on the jute mat in front of the door. The cottage hadn’t boasted a mat when Cassius had lived there. It hadn’t boasted an icebox, either, or a small stove to supplement the fireplace. Nor had it held a bookcase, even if the titles on the shelves were worn secondhand copies like the ones he bought for himself. But there had been literature here: Marx and Engels and Lincoln and other Red and near-Red writers. Cassius, though, had had to keep all that hidden.
Anne Colleton closed the door behind them. “Help yourself to anything,” she said. “I don’t want anyone but the two of us hearing what we have to say to each other.” That explained why she had no servant present. And for her to serve him had undoubtedly never once crossed her mind. She was, after all, a sort of commingling of feudal landlord and capitalist oppressor. Scipio had read Cassius’ books, too.
Unless he planned on killing her and then fleeing, he had to do as she said for the moment. He’d thought about that, walking out from St. Matthews. But even if the field hands didn’t try stopping him as he ran, she would have put aside a letter or something somewhere to point the finger at him. She was not the sort to miss such a trick.
As if to underscore that, she pulled a pistol out of her handbag. “In case you were foolish,” she remarked. “I didn’t really expect you to be, but one never knows these days.”
“I have no intention of being foolish,” he answered gravely. She’d put out two coffee cups. He poured one for her, one for himself. Since she’d set out only one plate, he assumed she’d already eaten. The food was plain, nothing like the fancy banquets she’d served in the days before the war, but good enough. Since he’d had nothing but a slice of bread before leaving for the train station, he ate his fill now.
With more patience than she usually showed, his former mistress let him finish before saying anything. When he was done, she began without preamble: “I want you to tell me how my brother Jacob died.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He made his voice as flat as he could, a fitting complement to the features he schooled to stillness. Her face and voice were similarly chary of giving him clues. How much did she know? How much did he dare lie? After no more than a heartbeat, he decided that anyone who lied to her was a fool. The truth, then, as much of it as he could give. “Ma’am, he perished most courageously.”
“I wouldn’t have expected anything else,” she answered. “Courage Jacob always had. No brains to speak of, but courage. That wench Cherry would have played a part in it, wouldn’t she?”
“Ma’am, if you know the answers, what need have you to question me?” Scipio asked.