They're gonna hold the plebiscite, Cincinnatus thought dolefully. They're gonna hold it, and the Confederate States are gonna win. That meant he had to get his mother and father out of Kentucky before it left the USA and returned to the CSA. He knew what being a Negro in the Confederate States was like-and it was bound to be even worse now, under Jake Featherston and the Freedom Party, than it had been before the Great War.
He wished his mother were in better shape than she was. He could have sent his father and her train fare, and they would have ended up in Des Moines not long afterwards. As things were, with her sinking ever deeper into her second childhood, he knew he would have to go down to Covington to help his father bring her out. Elizabeth wouldn't like it-he didn't like it himself-but he saw no way around it.
He pulled into the railroad yard at a quarter to seven, yawning despite all the coffee. When he jumped out of his trunk and hurried over to see what cargoes he could pick up, first one railroad dick and then another waved to him. He was accepted here. He belonged. He never remembered In-longing in Covington-certainly not in any part of it where he bumped up against white men. The first conductor whose train he approached greeted him with, "Hey, Cincinnatus. How you doing?"
"Not bad, Jack," he answered. He never would have called a white man in Covington by his first name. "What you got?"
But Jack felt like gabbing. "Four more years of Smith," he said. "I'm happy. My son got conscripted not long ago, and I don't want him getting shot at. I saw too goddamn much of that myself twenty-five years ago."
That gave Cincinnatus a new slant on things. He'd been shot at during the Great War, too, if only as a truck driver behind the lines. But he didn't have to worry about Achilles getting conscripted. The USA didn't conscript Negroes, any more than the CSA did. If war came, Achilles would be as safe as anybody. Even so, Cincinnatus said, "You won't find anybody colored who wants to go back to livin' in the Confederate States."
By the way Jack blinked, he'd no more thought about that than Cincinnatus had worried about conscription. The white man said, "I don't suppose there's enough colored folks to change the vote, though."
Cincinnatus grimaced. That was painfully true. Not wanting to dwell on the likely fate of Kentucky (and Houston, and perhaps Sequoyah, but Kentucky mattered most to him), he asked again, "What you got here?"
"Furniture," Jack said, and Cincinnatus' eyes lit up. He and Jack haggled for a while, but not too long. He loaded the truck as full as he could, then roared off for the shops taking delivery. If he got rid of everything in a hurry, he thought he could be back for another equally profitable load by lunchtime.
He was, too. Plenty of things held back a colored man: fewer in the USA than in the CSA, but still plenty. Adding laziness on top of everything else would only have made matters worse. Cincinnatus was a lot of different things. Whatever he was, though, he'd never been afraid of hard work.
His back ached when he pulled up to the apartment building that night, but the money in the pocket of his overalls made the ache seem worthwhile. He opened the mailbox in the lobby, crumpled up the advertising circulars, and winced when he saw a letter with a Covington postmark and the sprawling handwriting of his father's neighbor. News from Covington was unlikely to be good. Because he wished he didn't have to find out what the letter said, he carried it upstairs without opening it.
When he walked in, Amanda was doing homework. He smiled at her. Gonna have me two high-school graduates soon, he thought proudly. That ain't bad for a Kentucky nigger who never went to school at all.
From the kitchen came the crackle and the mouth-watering smell of frying chicken. Cincinnatus went in to say hello to Elizabeth, who was turning pieces with long-handled tongs. After a quick kiss, she asked, "What you got there?"
"Letter from Covington."
"Oh." She understood his hesitation, but asked the next question anyhow: "What's it say?"
"Don't know yet. Ain't opened it," he said. The look his wife sent him was sympathetic and impatient at the same time. He tore off the end of the envelope, took out the letter, unfolded it, and read. By the time he got to the end, his face was as long as the train from which he'd taken off furniture.
"What is it?" Elizabeth asked.
"I got to git down there. Got to do it quick," Cincinnatus said heavily. "Neighbor says my mama, she start wanderin' off every chance she get. Pa turn his back on her half a minute, she out the door an' lookin' for the house where she growed up. Can't have that. She liable to git lost for good, or git run over on account of she go out in the street and don't look where she goin'." Stress and the thought of Covington made his accent thicken.
Elizabeth sighed. Then hot fat spattered, and she yipped and jerked back her hand. She said, "I reckon maybe you do, but, Lord, I wish you didn't."
"So do I, on account of Ma and on account of I don't want to go back to Kentucky, neither," Cincinnatus said. "But it ain't always what you want to do. Sometimes it's what you got to do." He waited. Elizabeth sighed again, then reluctantly nodded.
He bought a round-trip train ticket, knowing he would have to get oneway fares for his parents in Covington. He sent the neighbor down there a wire to let him know when he'd be getting into town. Then he stuffed a few days' clothes and sundries into a beat-up suitcase and went to the railroad station to catch the eastbound train.
It pulled into Covington at eleven that night. The neighbor, Menander Pershing, stood on the platform with his father. Cincinnatus' father looked older and smaller and wearier than Cincinnatus had dreamt he would. After embracing him, Cincinnatus looked nervously across the brightly lit platform.
"Ain't none o' them Kentucky State Police this time," Seneca Driver said. He'd been born a slave, and still talked like it. After so long hearing the accents of the white Midwest, Cincinnatus found his father's way of speaking strange and ignorant-sounding, even though he'd sounded like that himself when he was a boy. His father hadn't even had a surname (and neither had he) till they'd all taken the same one after Kentucky returned to the USA in the Great War.
Cincinnatus couldn't help looking around some more. As far as he could tell, nobody was paying any attention to him. Little by little, he began to relax. "Freedom Party don't give you no trouble?" he asked.
"Don't want trouble from nobody," his father said. "I minds my business, an' I don't git none."
"Ain't too bad," Menander Pershing added. He was about Cincinnatus' age, lean, with a few threads of gray in his close-cropped hair. He fixed autos for a living, and wore a mechanic's greasy overalls. "They reckon they win come January, so they bein' quiet till then." He jerked a thumb toward the exit. "Come on. I got my motorcar out in the lot."
U.S. soldiers were searching some passengers' bags as they left the station. The men in green-gray waved Seneca and his companions through without bothering. It might have been the first time in his life when being colored made things easier for him. The soldiers didn't think Negroes would back the Freedom Party no matter what. They were likely to be right, too.
Menander Pershing's auto was an elderly Oldsmobile, but its motor purred when he started it. Getting in, Cincinnatus asked, "How's Ma?"
"Well, she sleepin' now. That's how I come away," his father answered. "You see in the mornin', that's all." He wouldn't say anything more.
Even by moonlight, the house where Cincinnatus' parents lived was smaller and shabbier than he remembered. He lay down on the rickety sofa in the front room and got what sleep he could.