“Where are we?” someone asked.
“About twenty miles outside of Albany,” the authoritative-sounding voice answered. Albany, or its outskirts, had been their destination. Jeff had a ghastly suspicion he knew how they were going to get there now.
A moment later, that suspicion was confirmed. Captain Connolly, the company commander, shouted, “Form column of fours!” Grumbling and cursing in low voices, the soldiers obeyed, again less efficiently than veterans might have done. And off they tramped, eastward along the line of the railroad toward Albany.
Pinkard promptly tripped over a rock, almost falling on his face. “They’re going to pay for this,” he muttered. He’d had to make only one night march during his abbreviated training. He hadn’t liked it for beans. Now he discovered practice was a lot easier than the real thing.
After some endless time, dawn began to break. What had been dark punctuated by deeper black turned into trenches and shell crates and burned-out Negro shacks and also the occasional burned-out mansion. Fresh-turned red earth in the middle of winter meant new graves. There were a lot of them. A faint odor of corruption hung in the air.
“Niggers are playing for keeps,” Stinky Salley remarked, in tones full of the same surprise and disbelief Pinkard felt. “Never would have reckoned they could do nothin’ like this.”
“Whole damn world’s gone crazy since the war started,” Jeff said. “Women workin’ men’s jobs, niggers workin’ white men’s jobs, and now, hell, niggers fightin’ damn near like white men. Shitfire, I wish they were fightin’ the damnyankees, not me.”
That argument had raged on the train and in the training camp, as it had all over the Confederacy since the Negro uprising began. Stinky Salley was on the other side. He stared at Pinkard with withering scorn. “Yeah, and I bet you wish they was marrying your womenfolks, too,” he said.
“Don’t wish anything of the kind, goddammit,” Pinkard said. “Just use your eyes instead of your mouth for a change, why don’t you? If niggers was the happy-go-lucky stay-at-homes everybody been sayin’ they are, you and me wouldn’t be here. We’d be fighting the USA instead.” Salley’s glare didn’t get any friendlier, but he shut up. Not even he could argue that they were where they’d figured on being, or that Negroes in arms weren’t opposing the Confederate government.
“Let’s get moving,” Captain Connolly shouted. “You don’t want to fall out of line hereabouts-niggers’d sooner cut your throat than look at you. Sooner we put these stinking Reds down, sooner we can get back to whipping the damnyankees. Train can’t do the work, so your legs got to. Keep movin’!”
Keep moving Pinkard did, though his feet began to ache. He wondered if the CSA really could recover from this rebellion as if nothing had happened. The captain certainly seemed to think so. Looking at the devastation through which they were marching, Pinkard wasn’t so sure. Who would repair everything that had been damaged?
A couple of Negroes, a man and a woman, were working in a garden plot near the tracks. They looked up at the column of white men in butternut. Had they been rebels a few days before? Had they hidden their weapons when government forces washed over them? Would they cut his throat if they saw half a chance? Or were they as genuinely horrified by the uprising as a lot of blacks in Birmingham were?
How could you know? How were you supposed to tell? Pinkard pondered that as he tramped past them. Try as he would, he found no good answers.
Lucien Galtier spoke to his horse as the two of them rolled down the road from Riviere-du-Loup toward his home: “This paving, it is not such a bad thing, eh? Oh, I may have to put shoes on you more often now, but we can go out and about in weather that would have kept us home before, n’est-ce pas?”
The horse didn’t answer. The horse never answered. That was one of the reasons Lucien enjoyed conversing with it. Back at the house, he had trouble getting a word in edgewise. He looked around. Snow lay everywhere. Even with overcoat, wool muffler, and wool cap pulled down over his ears, he was cold. The road, however, remained a black ribbon of asphalt through the white. The Americans kept it open even in the worst of blizzards.
They did not do it for him, of course. The racket of an engine behind him and the raucous squawk of a horn told him why they did do it. Moving as slowly as he could get away with, he pulled over to the edge of the road and let the U.S. ambulance roar past. It picked up speed, racing with its burden of wounded men toward the hospital the Americans had built on Galtier’s land.
“On my patrimony,” he told the horse. It snorted and flicked its ears, as if here, for once, it sympathized with him. His land had been in his family for more than two hundred years, since the days of Louis XIV. That anyone should simply appropriate a piece of it struck him as outrageous. Had the Americans no decency?
He knew the answer to that, only too well. Major Quigley, the occupier in charge of dealing with the Quebecois, had blandly assured him the benefits of the road would make up for having lost some of his land. Quigley hadn’t believed it himself; he’d taken the land for no other reason than to punish Lucien. But it might even turn out to be so.
“And what if it is?” Lucien asked. Now, sensibly, the horse did not respond. How could anyone, even a horse, make a response? Thievery was thievery, and you could not compensate for it in such a way. Did they reckon him devoid of honor, devoid of pride? If they did, they would be sorry-and sooner than they thought. So he hoped, at any rate.
Another ambulance came up the road toward him. He took his time getting out of the way for this one, too. That was a tiny way to resist the American invaders, but even tiny ways were not to be despised. Perhaps a man who might have lived would die on account of the brief delay.
He glanced toward the west. Ugly clouds were massing there: another storm coming. Even on a paved road, Galtier did not care to be caught in it. He flicked the reins and told the horse to get moving. The horse, which had been listening to him for many years, snorted and increased its pace from a walk…to a walk.
Here came a buggy toward his wagon. He stiffened on the seat. The man in the seat did not wear American green-gray. American soldiers at least had the courage to fight their foes face to face, however reprehensible their other habits might be. The small, plump man in black there, far from fighting his foes, embraced them with a fervor Galtier found incomprehensible and infuriating.
The priest waved to him. “Bonjour, Lucien,” he called.
“Bonjour, Father Pascal,” Galtier called back, adding under his breath, “Mauvais tabernac.” Even English-speaking Canadians thought the Quebecois way of cursing peculiar, but Lucien did not care. It satisfied him more than their talk of manure and fornication.
Father Pascal’s cheeks were always pink, and doubly so with the chilly wind rising as it was now. “I have given those poor injured men a bit of spiritual solace,” he said, smiling at Lucien. “Do you know, my son, a surprising number of them are communicants of our holy Catholic church?”
“No, Father, I did not know that.” Galtier did not care, either. They might be Catholics, but they were unquestionably Americans. That more than made up for a common religion, as far as the farmer was concerned.
Father Pascal saw the world differently. “C’est vrai-it’s true,” he said. Father Pascal, Lucien thought, saw the world in terms of what was most advantageous for Father Pascal. The Americans were here, the Americans were strong, therefore he collaborated with the Americans. Nodding again to Lucien, he went on, “I had the honor also to see your lovely daughter Nicole at the hospital. In her whites, I did not recognize her for a moment. The doctors tell me she is doing work of an excellent sort. You must be very proud of her.”