Part 27 (1/2)

It didn't work. She should have realized it wouldn't work, not if he'd gone through the war in a submersible. He said, ”If you want to make sure the story gets to the United States, arranging an accident for me is the best way to go about it. I didn't come here without taking the precautions a sensible man would take before he stuck his head in the lion's mouth.”

”I didn't threaten you, Mr. Brearley,” Anne said: a technical truth that was in fact a great, thumping lie.

”Of course not,” Brearley said-another lie.

Anne wondered if she ought to offer to pay him to keep the secret of the Bonefish Bonefish from reaching the United States. After some thought, she decided not to. If he wanted money in exchange for silence, let him bring it up. If he wanted Confederate paper money in exchange for silence, he was a bigger fool than he'd shown himself to be. from reaching the United States. After some thought, she decided not to. If he wanted money in exchange for silence, let him bring it up. If he wanted Confederate paper money in exchange for silence, he was a bigger fool than he'd shown himself to be.

Her brother said, ”Mr. Brearley, you do understand that, whatever score you may want to settle with Mr. Kimball, you're liable to hurt the whole country if this story gets told too widely.” Anne looked at him now, in nothing but admiration. She hadn't been able to come up with anything nearly so smooth.

Brearley nodded. ”Of course I do. That's why I've kept quiet for so long. You may call me a great many things, but I love my country. If you'll forgive me, I love my country too well to want to see it fall into the hands of the Freedom Party.”

”I'll forgive you for that,” Tom Colleton said. ”Whether my sister will is liable to be a different question.”

Brearley glanced at Anne. She looked back, bland as new-churned b.u.t.ter. ”I don't agree, but Mr. Brearley didn't come down here for me to change his politics, either,” she said.

Brearley looked relieved. Anne almost laughed in his face. One thing he plainly didn't understand about the Freedom Party was that so many people joined it because they wanted revenge: revenge against the United States, revenge against the Negroes in the Confederate States, and revenge against the government and Army that had failed to live up to the CSA's long tradition of victory. Hunger for revenge had led Anne into the Party. Now she had one more piece of revenge to attend to, as opportunity arose: revenge against Tom Brearley.

He said, ”I'll leave it at that, then. I do thank you kindly for hearing me out. Next train north doesn't come in till tomorrow, does it?”

”No,” Tom Colleton said. ”St. Matthews isn't the big city. You'll have seen that for yourself, I reckon. If you want to come along with me, we'll see whether the hotel has an empty room.” He snorted. ”Let's see if the hotel has any rooms that aren't empty besides the one you'll be in. Come on.”

As soon as her brother took Tom Brearley out of the flat, Anne tried to get a telephone connection through to Richmond. She didn't want to put anything down in writing, which eliminated both the telegraph and a letter. Telegraphers weren't supposed to pay any attention to what they sent, but they did, or they could. Letters could go astray, too.

And so could telephone connections. ”Sorry, ma'am,” the operator reported. ”Don't look like you can get there from here today.” She laughed at her own wit.

Anne didn't. Anne was not-was emphatically not-amused. She snarled something wordless but potent and hung up the telephone with a crash. She hoped it rattled the operator's teeth. Who could guess where the trouble lay? Storms knocking down wires? Squirrels gnawing through insulation and shorting out the line? Anything was possible-anything except getting through to Richmond.

Her brother came in a couple of minutes later. ”Well, what do you think of Kimball now?” he asked.

”The same as before,” Anne answered, to Tom's evident disappointment. ”Like I told that fellow, if I'd been in the Bonefish Bonefish, I'd have torpedoed that destroyer, too.”

”My fire-eating sister,” Tom said, more admiringly than not.

”That's right,” Anne said. ”That's exactly right. And anybody who forgets it for even a minute will be sorry the rest of his livelong days.”

Cincinnatus Driver looked back at the house in which he'd lived his whole married life. He looked around at the Covington, Kentucky, neighborhood in which he'd lived his whole life. There was a last time for everything, and this was it.

He cranked the engine. The shabby old Duryea truck thundered into life. It didn't give half the trouble it usually did, as if it too were glad to shake the dust of Kentucky from its tires. Cincinnatus hurried back to the cab.

There sat Elizabeth, Achilles on her lap. ”We ready?” Cincinnatus asked as he slid in behind the wheel. In one way, it was a foolish question: everything they owned and aimed to take along was behind them in the bed of the truck. In another way, though, it was the the question, and Cincinnatus knew it. He still didn't know whether he and his family were ready to abandon everything they'd ever known in the hope for a better life. question, and Cincinnatus knew it. He still didn't know whether he and his family were ready to abandon everything they'd ever known in the hope for a better life.

Ready or not, they were going to do it. Elizabeth nodded. Achilles yelled ”Ready!” at the top of his lungs. Cincinnatus put the truck in gear. He waited for the engine to die or for something else dreadful to happen. Nothing did. Smooth as if it were ten years newer, the Duryea began to roll.

As Cincinnatus turned out of Covington's colored district and onto Greenup, Elizabeth said, ”I do wish your ma and pa decided to come along with us.”

”I do, too,” he answered. ”But they're set in their ways, like folks can get. I ain't gonna worry about it much. Once we find a place, you wait and see if they don't come after us.”

”Maybe they will,” his wife said. ”I hope they do. Won't be so lonesome if they do, that's for sure.”

”Yeah.” If Cincinnatus had let his hands drive the truck for him, he would have gone on to the waterfront. He'd been heading there, walking or taking the trolley or driving the truck, since the early days of the war. But he wasn't going to head there any more. Instead, he took the suspension bridge north across the Ohio River and over into Cincinnati.

”The United States,” Elizabeth said softly.

Cincinnatus nodded. Oh, Kentucky was one of the United States these days, but in many ways Kentucky still seemed as it had when it belonged to the Confederacy. That was the biggest reason Cincinnatus had decided to better his luck and his family's elsewhere. He wasn't going to wait around holding his breath till he got the vote and other privileges whites in Kentucky took for granted.

Back in the days before the war, he'd spent a lot of time looking across the Ohio. Negroes didn't have it easy in the USA. He knew that. Had he not known it, he would have got his nose rubbed in it during the war. A lot of men down from the United States thought they had to act like slave drivers to get any kind of work out of Negroes. But not all of them did, and laws restricting what blacks could do were milder in the USA than in the CSA: he didn't have to worry about a pa.s.sbook any more, for instance.

One reason for such mildness, of course, was that blacks were far thinner on the ground in the United States than in the Confederate States. That did worry Cincinnatus. He'd always spent most of his time among his own kind. That would be much harder now. Covington hadn't had a huge colored community, but what would he do in a town with only a handful of blacks?

Down off the bridge, down into Cincinnati, went the truck. The waterfront on the northern bank of the Ohio didn't look much different from the one with which Cincinnatus was so familiar. But Elizabeth noted one difference right away: ”Look at all the white folks doin' roustabouts' work. Wouldn't never seen nothin' like that in Covington. Wouldn't never see nothin' like that nowhere in the CSA. White folks doin' n.i.g.g.e.r work?” She shook her head.

”This here's what I been tellin' you, honey,” Cincinnatus said. ”Ain't no such thing as n.i.g.g.e.r work in the USA, or not hardly. Ain't enough n.i.g.g.e.rs to do all the dirty work that needs doin', so the white folks have to lend a hand. A lot of 'em is foreigners, I hear tell, but not all of 'em, I don't reckon.”

”What's a foreigner, Pa?” Achilles asked.

”Somebody who's in a country he wasn't born in,” Cincinnatus replied.

His son thought about that, then asked, ”How do you tell a foreigner from somebody who ain't?”

”A lot of times, on account of he'll talk funny-they don't talk English in a lot of them foreign places,” Cincinnatus said. By that standard, though, a foreigner's son, somebody who went to school in the USA, would turn into an American indistinguishable from any other. If Achilles ended up as educated and eloquent as Teddy Roosevelt, he still wouldn't be an American indistinguishable from any other. That struck Cincinnatus as unfair.

He shrugged. It was was unfair, no two ways about it. His hope was that Achilles would find things less unfair elsewhere in the USA than in Kentucky. unfair, no two ways about it. His hope was that Achilles would find things less unfair elsewhere in the USA than in Kentucky.

People were looking at him: people on the sidewalk, people in motorcars, even a couple of men who stopped painting a sign to stare. They were all white. Cincinnati had some Negroes; Cincinnatus knew as much. But he saw none on the streets. That was a change, a jolting change, from the way things were back in Covington, over on the other side of the river.

A fat, red-faced policeman held up his hand. Cincinnatus stopped in front of him, as he should have done. He was very pleased at how well the spavined old Duryea was behaving. He'd spent a lot of time getting the truck into the best shape he could, but the only thing that would really have cured its multifarious ills was a new truck, and he knew it.

The expression of distaste on the cop's face was broad enough for him and the truck both. The fellow jerked a thumb toward the curb. ”Pull over that wagon,” he said in gutturally accented English. ”I will with you speak.”

”Is he a foreigner, Pa?” Achilles asked excitedly. ”He talks funny, like you said.”

”Reckon he might be,” Cincinnatus answered. ”They do say Cincinnati's chock full of Germans.”

”Real live Germans?” Achilles'eyes were enormous. The USA's European allies were folk to conjure with, just as Frenchmen had been in the CSA...until the war came, and France lost.

When Cincinnatus stopped the truck by the curb, the policeman strutted over. ”You are from where?” he demanded.

”Covington, Kentucky, suh-just the other side of the river,” Cincinnatus answered. He wouldn't have got uppity with a Covington cop, and he wasn't so rash as to think the police would be much friendlier on the north side of the Ohio.

”What do you do here?” the policeman asked. ”Why don't you stay on the other side of the river where you belong?”

”I ain't plannin' on settling down in Cincinnati, suh,” Cincinnatus said hastily. ”My family and me, we're just pa.s.sin' through.”

”Where are you going to?” the policeman inquired.

”Headin' for Iowa,” Cincinnatus told him. ”Des Moines, Iowa.”

”This is a good long way from Cincinnati,” the cop said, as much to himself as to Cincinnatus. ”You will the worry of the people in Iowa be, not the worry of the people here. Very well. You may go on.” He even condescended to stop traffic and let Cincinnatus pull out once more. Cincinnatus would have been more grateful had it been less obvious that the policeman was getting rid of him.