Cincinnatus knew he'd busted his hump, but Kennan wasn't handing out fifty-cent bonuses to anybody, not today.
'Mus' be his time of the month,' Herodotus said. 'He's sure enough cranky like that.'
Some of the work gang stood at the trolley stop and waited for a ride back to the Negro district of Covington. Others-men who saved every nickel-left them with waves and weary calls of, 'See you in the mornin',' and started walking south, away from the Ohio. Cincinnatus was one of those. He hadn't ridden the trolley since he found out Elizabeth was in a family way.
A little south of downtown, he peeled off from the group of labourers. 'Got to buy me some new laces for my shoes,' he said. 'Got so many knots holding these ones together, it's like puttin' rocks in my shoes.'
'You could pick a better place,' Herodotus said. 'Conroy there'-he pointed to the name on the awning above the storefront-'he don't like black folks much. Feldman down the street, he's a better bet.'
'I ain't never had no trouble with Conroy, an' he's cheaper to buy from than the Jew,' Cincinnatus answered. Herodotus shrugged, waved, and kept on walking.
Conroy's general store was typical of the breed. The proprietor, a big, red-faced fellow with a formidable grizzled mustache and a wad of tobacco in one cheek, looked a lot more pregnant than Elizabeth did. He had dry goods at the right of the store, yard goods at the back, groceries to the left, with barrels of flour, sugar, and crackers in front of his counter. Cigars and candy reposed in glass jars on the counter.
A white man and a couple of white women were in the store. Cincinnatus took off his cap and waited till Conroy served them. Another white man came in after Cincinnatus but before the storekeeper was done taking care of the others. He got served ahead of Cincinnatus, too.
At last, the labourer's turn came. The storekeeper got him three pairs of shoelaces and gave back ninety cents change on the day's dollar Cincinnatus handed him. Some of the coins were Confederate, others U.S.
'Seen somethin' interesting,' Cincinnatus remarked, making sure Conroy hadn't short-changed him. Casually, as if it were no particular import- and, for all he knew, it wasn't- he described the unending loads of crates he'd hauled all day long, and the curious words on them.
Conroy tugged at one end of his mustache. 'That a fact?' he said. 'Well, you're right. Mebbe that is interesting.' He spat, and fell a little short of the cuspidor. By the brown stains on the pale pine boards near the spittoon, he missed a good deal of the time.
With ninety cents in change clinking in his pocket, Cincinnatus irrationally felt richer than he had with a single silver cartwheel. He got out of the store as fast as he could; passing the time of day like that with a white man felt unnatural to him, and, by Conroy's attitude, to the storekeeper as well.
When he got home, Elizabeth had a stew of chicken and okra and rice waiting for him. 'I was startin' to be worried about you,' she said, and then yawned. She'd been tired all the time since she was expecting, but she hadn't worked any less. With everything more expensive because of war and occupation, she couldn't afford that.
'Put in some extra time,' Cincinnatus explained. 'Didn't get any extra money for it, but I didn't have no choice, neither. And afterwards, I stopped by Conroy's, bought me some shoelaces.'
'Did you?' Elizabeth said, and let out a long sigh. 'Dear God, I wish we didn't have to have nothin' to do with Conroy or any of the other people still spyin' for the CSA up here.'
'Lord have mercy, so do I,' Cincinnatus said, 'but after we didn't give Tom Kennedy to the Yankees, they got themselves a hold on us.'
'No good will come of it,' Elizabeth predicted gloomily. 'No good at all.'
Cincinnatus couldn't argue, and didn't try. While Kennedy was in the house, he'd had the upper hand on the white man. Once Kennedy had left, though, despite whatever profuse thanks he gave, the upper hand was his again, because he could blackmail Cincinnatus and Elizabeth, threatening to let U.S. authorities know what they'd done. He hadn't ever made that threat, but when he asked Cincinnatus to let Conroy the storekeeper know about anything intriguing he picked up on the wharfs, his former driver didn't see how he could say no.
'Besides the shoelaces, why did you stop by Conroy's?' Elizabeth asked him. He explained. His wife nodded. 'That's peculiar, it sure is. Did Conroy say anything about it when you told him?'
'Not a word,' Cincinnatus answered. 'But he wouldn't. If I don't know it, I can't blab it.'
'That's so,' Elizabeth said. 'What do you suppose is in them crates?'
'No way to know,' he replied, 'but I expect we'll find out.'
XIV
Lucien Galtier looked up in the sky with something like approval. Winters were long. Winters were hard. They wore at a man; it seemed he never saw the sun for weeks at a time. But spring, when it finally burgeoned, made up for that… at least until winter came again.
Fluffy white clouds drifted from west to east, their shadows sailing across the farmland like clipper ships across a smooth sea. The weather-he paused to thank God-had been very good this year. True, from time to time, there were Americans on the road, in trucks or on horseback or in long columns afoot, but God didn't take care of all the little details in your life. You had to do some of the work for yourself. If the farm survived the ravages of rabbits and rats and insects, it was likely to survive the ravages of Americans, too.
Here came Georges, running up the path that separated potatoes on the one side from rye on the other. 'Papa!' he called, and waved when Lucien straightened up from weeding the potato plot. 'Papa, Father Pascal is back at the house with an American officer, and they want to see you.'
'Calisse,' Galtier said; he'd been so engrossed in his hoeing, he'd paid no attention to traffic on the road for a while. Now he put the hoe up on his shoulder, as if it were a rifle. 'Well, if they want to see me, then see me they shall. It is an invitation I cannot refuse, not so?'
His younger son's eyes twinkled. 'They want to see you, but they did not bother to ask if you wanted to see them,' Georges said with Gallic precision.
'They do not care. They have no reason to care. They are the authorities, and I? I am but a farmer of the humblest sort.' Lucien sounded too humble to be quite convincing, but that was what happened when you took on an unfamiliar role. And, as he had said, whether he wanted to see them was an irrelevance. He tramped back toward the farmhouse, Georges running ahead to let the important visitors know he was coming.
Father Pascal and the American officer, whoever he was, had come in the priest's buggy; the horse bent its head down to crop grass by the rail to which it was tethered. Seeing the buggy relieved Galtier's mind. He would have thought senility closing in on him had he missed the noisy arrival of a motorcar.
Inside, Marie and Nicole had already presented the priest and the officer-he was, Lucien saw, the heavyset major with whom Father Pascal had been talking when Galtier first went into Riviere-du-Loup not long after the Americans arrived-with coffee and cakes. He would have been astonished had his wife and eldest daughter done anything less. Even if your guests' going would have been more welcome than their coming, you had duties as a host- or hostess.
'Here he is,' Father Pascal said, rising from the sofa with a wide smile on his smooth, plump face. 'Allow me to present to you the truly excellent husbandman, Lucien Galtier. Lucien, I have brought here Major Jedediah Quigley.'
'Enchante, Monsieur Galtier,' Quigley said in the elegant Parisian French Lucien had heard him using up in town. 'Father Pascal has been loud in singing your praises.'
'He honors me far beyond my poor worth,' Galtier replied, wishing the priest had chosen to throw himself into the St. Lawrence rather than praising him to the occupying authorities. The less notice he attracted from them, the happier he was.
'You are a modest man,' Father Pascal said. 'This is the mark of a godly man, a Christian man of solid virtue. I have also taken the liberty of passing on to Major Quigley your generous willingness to inform me of anyone who misunderstood my role in the situation as it is.'
Galtier spread his hands. They were hard and rough, with callused palms and dirt under his nails and ground into the folds of skin at each knuckle. 'I am desolate, Father, that I have had nothing of which to inform you. Spring
