Apicius shook his head. “Felix does, and Lucullus. Not me. All I knows is how to cook meat till it fall off the bone into yo’ mouth.”
And how to sandbag, Cincinnatus thought. Maybe Apicius was illiterate. If he was, he had the remarkable memory people who couldn’t read and write often developed; details never slipped his mind.
The display of ignorance didn’t impress Kennedy, either. “You know what’s going on,” he corrected himself impatiently. “You know the Confederate States need all the help they can get against the USA, and you know that if that means giving Negroes more, they’ll do it.”
“Reckon I do know that,” the cook said. “Question is, do I care? The CSA is a pack o’ capitalists and oppressors, an’ de USA is a pack o’ capitalists and oppressors, too. Why the devil does we care what the devil happens to one pack o’ capitalists and imperialists or the other?”
Cincinnatus knew he was staring. Apicius chuckled. Tom Kennedy chuckled, too, a little self-consciously. They both started to talk at the same time. With a wave of the sort he’d probably learned as a boy back in slavery days, the black man deferred to the white. Kennedy said, “When you’re underground, things are different. Down in Mississippi, I’d hang Apicius from the first branch-well, the first really big branch-I could find…if he didn’t bushwhack me first. Up here, we both worry about the USA more than we do about each other.” He nodded to Cincinnatus. “I know who I’m working with. And I know who’s working with me, too.”
Was that a warning about Conroy’s store? What else could it be? But if Kennedy had drawn his own conclusions about that…Cincinnatus wondered why he was still breathing, in that case.
Apicius said, “That don’t mean what I said beforehand don’t hold. You got to remember that, Mister Tom. Most of the black folks who think about politics at all, we is Marxists. We is oppressed so bad, what else can we be? The war you got, it’s an imperialist war. Why shouldn’t we sit by and let the capitalists shoot each other full of holes?” Cincinnatus wondered how long the cook had been a Red, to talk that way if he couldn’t read the words.
Kennedy answered, “Because whoever’s left on top is going to lick the tar out of you if you do. You aren’t strong enough to go it alone. You’ve seen that. If you couldn’t lick the CSA when we had one hand and half of the other one tied behind our backs, you’ll never do it. You can’t fight, not well enough. You have to deal.”
“Who says we didn’t lick the CSA?” Apicius asked quietly. “The U.S. soldiers, they down in Tennessee these days. You think you ever gonna see soldiers in butternut back on the Ohio? Don’t hold your breath, Mister Tom.”
“The Yankees can put soldiers on every railroad track and streetcorner in this state. That doesn’t mean they can run it.” Kennedy would have been more impressive if he hadn’t sounded as if he were whistling in the dark.
“It don’t matter nohow,” Apicius said. “In the long run, Mister Tom, it don’t matter a-tall. The revolution gonna come in the CSA, and the revolution gonna come in the USA. Not all the soldiers in the world can stop it, on account of it’s the way things gonna work out everywhere in the world. You kin fight it an’ go under, or you kin be progressive an’ make yourself part of the risin’ power o’ the proletariat.”
“If the Yankees weren’t holding us both down-” Kennedy said. Apicius nodded, his heavy-jowled face calm and certain. Cincinnatus had seen that look before, most often on the faces of preachers convinced of their own righteousness than anywhere else.
He wondered if Apicius really knew what he was talking about. If the united workers of the world were so strong-“If the workers are so strong,” he said, more thinking aloud than intending to criticize, “why didn’t they all say two years ago they didn’t want to go out and kill each other, instead of lining up and cheering and waving their flags?”
But disagreeing with both of them at the same time, he did the same thing the U.S. invasion of Kentucky had done: he got Apicius and Tom Kennedy to unite against him, though for divergent reasons. “Why? Because they’re patriots, that’s why,” Kennedy said. “And they’ll go on being patriots, too, even the colored ones, when they find out they have something worth fighting for.”
Apicius shook his head. “They fight on account of they is mystified into thinking country and race count for more than class. The capitalists got them fooled, is why they go off cheerin’.”
“Nothing counts for more than country and race,” Kennedy said with conviction.
Although Cincinnatus had worked with the Confederate underground, he did not think of himself as Tom Kennedy’s political ally. But he had the feeling Kennedy was right here. You could usually tell a man’s race just by using your eyes. You could usually tell a man’s country just by using your ears to hear how he talked. Set against those basics, the idea of class seemed as fragile as something made from spun sugar.
As if to cleanse himself of agreeing with a white man against a black (and if that wasn’t race in action, what was it?), Cincinnatus said, “Some of the states in the USA, I hear tell, they already let their colored men vote.”
Kennedy accepted the challenge without flinching; he had nerve, no doubt of that. “Sure they do, Cincinnatus. They don’t have enough blacks to worry about. You think the white men of Kentucky are going to feel the same way?”
Apicius smiled a nasty smile. “Maybe that don’t matter none. Maybe the Yankees, they only think about who wants to do things for them, and about who they reckon they can’t noway trust. Maybe when the war is over, maybe only the black folks in Kentucky gets to vote. How you gonna like that there, Mister Tom?”
Kennedy’s face showed how well he would like that. He said, “There’d be an uprising so fast, it’d make your head swim. And you know what, Apicius? A lot of the damnyankee soldiers would join it, too.”
Cincinnatus thought about Lieutenant Kennan. Would he back whites against blacks and against his own government? He might. But Kennan wasn’t the only kind of Yankee there was. “Not all of them would,” he said with as much certainty as Kennedy had shown not long before. “Not all of them would, not by a long shot.”
“What are you doing here, then?” Kennedy asked. “You like the Yankees so well, why aren’t you with them?”
“Because I saved your neck, Mr. Kennedy, once upon a time,” Cincinnatus answered. That made Kennedy shut up. It also made Cincinnatus wonder if he was on the right side-any of the right sides-after all, which surely was not what the white man had had in mind.
Lucien Galtier led his family into the biggest church in Riviere-du-Loup for Sunday morning mass. More often than not, he and they worshiped in St.-Modeste or St.-Antonin, both of which were closer to his farm and both of which had priests less inclined to fawn on the American occupiers than was Father Pascal.
“Every so often, it is interesting to hear what the good father has to say,” he remarked to his wife as they and their children filed into a pew and took their seats. “He speaks very well, it is not to be doubted.”
“You have reason,” Marie agreed in fulsome tones. No informer could have taken their words in any way amiss. That was fortunate, since they were surely under suspicion for having failed to collaborate with Father Pascal and the Americans as fully as they might have done.
Even in the midst of war, peace filled the church-or did its best to do so. The buzzing roar of aeroplane motors pierced the roof. The aeroplanes were flying north, across the St. Lawrence, to drop bombs or shoot at the soldiers defending unconquered Quebec from the invaders. Lucien had neither seen nor heard aeroplanes flying south since the ones that had shot up the American troop train. More from that than from the improbabilities the newspapers published these days, he concluded that the defenders of the province were having a hard time.