Blacks ate at the Kentucky Smoke House. So did Covington's whites, unwilling to let their colored brethren have such a good thing to themselves. And so did Yankee soldiers and administrators. A man who kept his ears open there would surely learn a lot.
Lucullus, Apicius' son, was turning the spit in the main room. The carcass of a pig went round and round above the firepit. However much his mouth watered, Cincinnatus ignored the prospect of barbecued pork. That Lucullus was working the spit meant Apicius had to be in one of the back rooms, and Apicius was the man he'd come to see.
But when he headed for the back rooms, Felix, Apicius' other son, stood in front of him to bar the way. "Pa's already in there talkin' with somebody," he said. "Be a good idea if you see him later."
"Who's he talkin' to that I ain't supposed to know nothin' about?" Cincinnatus answered scornfully. "Be a good idea if I see him now. I been drivin' all over creation the whole day long. I don't got to do none o' this, you know. I could go home to my wife and my little boy. Don't get to see them often enough, way things are. I'm goin'in."
Felix was a couple of years younger than Lucullus. He hadn't quite got his full growth, and he hadn't quite acquired the arrogance that would have let him tell a grown man no and get away with it. He looked toward Lucullus for support, but Lucullus kept basting that pig with a long-handled brush. When Cincinnatus took a step forward, Felix scowled but moved aside. Cincinnatus knew which back room Apicius was likely to use-why not? He'd been in there himself, often enough.
The fat Negro barbecue cook looked up in startlement when the door opened. So did the man with whom he'd been bent in intent conversation. All at once, Cincinnatus wished he'd paid attention to Felix. The man with whom Apicius had been talking was Tom Kennedy.
"I'm gonna have to give my boy a good kick in the slack o' his britches," Apicius said, and then, to Cincinnatus this time, "Well, come in and shut that thing behind you, 'fore people out front start payin'more heed to what's goin'on in here than they should ought to." To Kennedy, he said, "Sorry, Mister Tom. Didn't 'spect we'd get interrupted."
"Could be worse," Kennedy said. "Cincinnatus and me, we've known each other for a long time and we've done a deal of work together. You know about that, I suppose."
His tone was-cautious was the word on which Cincinnatus finally settled. Cincinnatus had put firebombs into U.S. supply dumps over much of central Kentucky. He'd gone right on doing that after Conroy's general store burned down. He didn't like doing it, but he thought it would be wise. The Confederate underground hadn't troubled him, so he supposed he'd made the right choice. Buildings did sometimes burn down without firebombs, after all, or seem as if they did. There had, in fact, been a fire in a livery stable down the block from the general store a couple of nights later.
"Well, all right, you're here," Apicius said roughly. He slid down on the bench he was occupying to give Cincinnatus room to sit beside him. "What you got to say that won't keep for nothin'?"
But Cincinnatus didn't say anything, not right away. He kept an eye on Tom Kennedy. Kennedy had used Apicius and his sons to help spread Confederate propaganda in occupied Kentucky. Cincinnatus didn't know whether Kennedy knew Apicius headed a Red cell in Covington. Till he found out, he wasn't going to say anything to let Kennedy in on the secret. The war between the Reds and the Confederate government was liable to continue, here in this land neither of those two sides controlled.
Kennedy said, "I was just telling Apicius here about what I told you months ago would come true-more rights for Negroes in the CSA on account of the war and on account of the goddamn uprising."
"You did tell me about that, Mr. Kennedy-that's a fact," Cincinnatus said. "I own I didn't reckon you knew what you was talking about, but it do look like you did."
"Got to get through the Congress before it's real, and the Congress don't move what anybody'd call real quick," Apicius observed.
"I think Congress will move quicker here than you figure," Kennedy said. "You read the papers-"
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.