He spoke in English: “You’ll be all right.” From what he could see of the wound, he thought that was true. The bullet looked to have blown off a chunk of flesh, but not to have shattered any bones. He turned to McDougald. “Put him under.”
“Right you are, Doc.” McDougald settled the ether cone over the wounded man’s face. He and Eddie had to keep the soldier from yanking it off; a lot of men thought they were being gassed when they inhaled the anesthetic. After a few breaths, the Mexican’s hands fell away and he went limp.
O’Doull cleaned out the wound and sewed it up. Had men from the soldier’s own side brought him in, it would have been a hometowner: good for convalescent leave, but nothing that would keep him from coming back to the front. As things were, he’d sit out the rest of the war in a POW camp.
When the job was done, O’Doull nodded to Eddie. “You can take him back to the rear now. If they have anybody who speaks Spanish handy, they’ll probably want to grill him.”
“I suppose,” Eddie said. “Like worrying about the Confederates wasn’t bad enough. Now we’ve got the greasers jumping on us, too.”
No matter what he called Mexicans, he handled this one with the same rough compassion he would have shown any wounded soldier, white, brown, black, or even green. He and the other stretcher bearers carried away the still-unconscious man.
“Interesting,” Granville McDougald said. “Does this mean the Confederates are starting to run low on their own men?”
“Don’t know,” said O’Doull, who hadn’t looked at it like that.
“Well, neither do I,” McDougald allowed. “I don’t think like Jake Featherston or Francisco Jose, thank God. I hope I’m not a son of a bitch or a moron.” That startled a laugh out of O’Doull. The medic went on, “But even if I don’t know, that’s sure how it looks to me.”
“It makes sense,” O’Doull said. “We beat the CSA last time by hammering on them till they couldn’t hammer back anymore. If we’re going to win this war, we’ll have to knock ’em flat again.”
“Flatter,” McDougald said. “Last time, we let ’em up again. If we beat ’em this time, we’d better not do that again. I don’t know how long we’ll have to sit on ’em, but we need to do it, however long it takes.”
“I suppose so,” O’Doull said mournfully. “But remember what Kentucky and Houston were supposed to be like before the plebiscite?”
“I’d better remember-I was in Houston for a while. Half of what went on never made the papers in the USA, let alone in Quebec, I bet.” Granville McDougald paused. He looked very unhappy. “I don’t want to think about how much trouble sitting on the whole Confederacy would be. Those people purely hate us, no two ways about it. But if we don’t occupy them and control them, we’ll have to fight ’em again in another twenty years, and I sure as hell don’t want to do that, either.”
“So what you’re telling me is, we’re in trouble no matter what happens,” O’Doull said. “Thanks a lot, Granny.”
“There’s trouble, and then there’s trouble,” McDougald said. “Trouble is us occupying the Confederate States. Trouble is the Confederates occupying us. If I’ve got a choice, I know which one I’d take.”
“Yeah, me, too,” O’Doull said. “Here’s hoping we’ve got a choice.”
“Now why would you say something like that?” McDougald inquired. “Haven’t you got confidence in our brilliant leaders? Doesn’t the fact that we’re fighting in Pennsylvania mean victory’s right around the corner?”
“That’s what I’m afraid of,” O’Doull answered. “The only trouble is, whose victory are you talking about?”
McDougald laughed, for all the world as if they were sitting in a saloon telling jokes. The fate of nations? Who could get excited about the fate of nations if the beer was cold and the joint had a halfway decent free-lunch spread? The medic said, “If we were a little farther back of the line and we talked like this, we’d catch hell for defeatism, you know?”
“Yeah, they’d yell at us,” O’Doull agreed. “But that’s all they’d do. If we talked like this on the Confederate side of the line, they’d probably shoot us.”
“Y’all are damnyankee sympathizers.” McDougald’s Southern drawl wouldn’t get him into espionage. “Y’all can have blindfolds. I ain’t gonna waste good Confederate tobacco on you, though-that’s for damn sure.”
“A Kentucky colonel you’re not,” O’Doull said. But then he thought about the warning that had come in: Confederate soldiers in U.S. uniform were supposed to be operating behind U.S. lines. They were supposed to have good U.S. accents, too. O’Doull had no idea if that was true, or how you went about telling a disguised Confederate from an average screwup. He also wondered what to do if one of those Confederates in U.S. clothing came into the aid station. Then he wondered how the devil he’d know.
Scipio got more frightened every day. Nothing had changed in the Terry since the sweep that would have swept out his family and him. Nothing had changed, no, but trouble was in the air. Something new was stirring, and he didn’t know what it was.
He came right out and asked Jerry Dover. The manager at the Huntsman’s Lodge just shrugged and said, “I haven’t heard anything.”
“Do Jesus!” Scipio said. “Them Freedom Party stalwarts, they looks like they gwine kill all o’ we, an’ you ain’t heard nothin’?”
“If I had, I’d tell you,” Dover said. “This time, I think you’re flabbling over nothing.”
“Ain’t you got no mo’ errands fo’ me to run? Ain’t you got no errands fo’ me an’ my whole fambly to run?” Scipio paused, then switched dialects to the one he hardly ever used: “Mr. Dover, please understand me-I am a desperate man, sir.” He had to be desperate to use his white man’s voice.
It rocked Dover, the way it would have rocked any white in the CSA. Biting his lip, the restaurant manager muttered, “If I’d known you were that goddamn sharp, I never would’ve sent you to Savannah.”
Scipio wanted to laugh, or possibly to scream. Jerry Dover had worked alongside him for more than twenty years. If that didn’t give Dover the chance to figure out what kind of brains he had… Scipio knew what the trouble was, of course. All that time, he’d talked like a nigger, and an ignorant nigger at that. Perception clouded reality. Like so many whites, Dover had assumed anybody who sounded like an illiterate field hand had to be as ignorant and probably as stupid as a field hand.
Of course, there were holes in that line of thought. Dover had known all along that he could read and write and cipher. Set that against sounding like a buck from the Congaree swamps, though, and it suddenly became small potatoes.
“What was in that envelope I took there?” Scipio pressed his advantage. He didn’t get one very often, and knew he had to make the most of it. “Something for the United States? Something for the Freedom Party? Something for a lady friend of yours, perhaps?” Even to himself, he sounded smarter when he talked like a white man. If that wasn’t a measure of what living in the Confederate States his whole life had done to him, he didn’t know what would be.
Jerry Dover turned red. “Whatever it was, it’s none of your damn beeswax,” he snapped. “The less you know about it, the better off we both are. Have you got that?”
He made sense, no matter how much Scipio wished he didn’t. If they arrested Scipio instead of just hauling him off to a camp, he couldn’t tell them what he didn’t know. Of course, he could tell them Dover’s name, at which point they’d start tearing into the restaurant manager. And how would he stand up to the third degree? Scipio almost looked forward to finding out. If Dover’s ruin didn’t so surely involve his own, he would have.
“Somethin’ else you better keep in mind,” Dover said. “Wasn’t for me, you’d be dead. Wasn’t for me, you’d be in wherever niggers go when they clean out part of the Terry. Instead, you’re still walkin’ around Augusta, and you don’t seem any too goddamn grateful for it.”