Her brother said, 'He sure had you going for a while.'
Past tense again, and another jolt with it. But Anne could hardly disagree. 'Yes, I reckon he did,' she said, her accent less refined than usual. 'Looking back on it, maybe he was a wizard. For a while there, I would have done anything he wanted.'
Had President Hampton not been assassinated, Anne knew she would have gone on doing whatever Featherston wanted, too. She was honest enough to admit it to herself, if to no one else, not even her brother. Perhaps especially not to Tom, who'd always shown more resistance to Featherston's spell than she had.
Would I have gone to bed with him, if he d wanted that? Anne wondered. Slowly, reluctantly, she nodded to herself. / think I would have. She hadn't been in control of things, not with Jake she hadn't. With every other man she'd ever known-even Roger Kimball after their first encounter-yes. With Featherston? No, and again she was honest enough to admit it to herself.
But he hadn't wanted her. So far as she knew, he hadn't wanted any woman. She didn't think that made him a sodomite. It was more as if he poured all his energy into rage, and had none left for desire.
All that flashed through her mind in a couple of heartbeats: before her brother said, 'If I don't see him or hear him again, I won't be sorry.'
'As long as the money stays good, you probably won't,' Anne said, and Tom nodded. She went on, 'And as long as the niggers know their place and stick to it.'
Tom nodded again. 'Featherston's closest to sound on the niggers, no doubt about that. It's still worth a white man's life, sometimes, to get any decent work out of field hands. They'd sooner loll around and sleep in the sun and collect white men's wages for doing it.'
'It won't ever be the way it was before the war,' Anne said sadly, speaking in part for Marshlands, in part for the entire Confederacy. The desire to make things again as they had been before the war had won the Freedom Party votes by the thousands, and had helped win her backing, too. But the war was almost six and a half years over, and life did go on, even if in a different way.
'I want another chance at the United States one day,' Tom said. 'Featherston was sound about that, too, but he wanted it too soon.'
'Yes,' Anne said, 'but we will have another chance at the United States sooner or later, no matter who's in charge of the CSA. And we'll have a good chance at them, too, as long as the Socialists hold the White House.'
'They don't,' her brother remarked with no small pride. 'We wrecked it during the fight for Washington '
'It's almost rebuilt,' Anne said. 'I saw that in one of the papers the other day. We'll have a harder time knocking it down again, too, with the Yankees holding northern Virginia.'
'We'll manage,' Tom said. 'Even if our soldiers don't get that far-and I think they will-we'll have plenty of bombing aeroplanes to flatten it-and Philadelphia, and New York City, too, I hope.'
'Yes,' was all Anne said to that. She would never be ready to live at peace with the United States, not even when she turned old and gray. Turning old and gray was on her mind a good deal these days. Nearer forty than thirty, she knew the time when her looks added to the persuasiveness of her logic would not last much longer.
As Tom was doing more and more often since coming home from the war, he thought along with her. 'You really ought to get married one of these days before too long, Sis,' he said. 'You don't want to end up an old maid, do you?'
'That depends,' Anne Colleton answered. 'Compared to what? Compared to ending up with a husband who tells me what to do when he doesn't know what he's talking about? Compared to that, being an old maid looks mighty good, believe me.'
'Men aren't like that,' her brother protested. 'We've got a way of knowing good sense when we hear it.'
Anne laughed loud and long. What Tom had said struck her as so ridiculous, she didn't even bother getting angry. 'When you finally get married yourself, I'll tell your wife you said that,' she remarked. 'She won't believe me-I promise she won't believe me-but I'll tell her.'
'Why wouldn't she believe that about me?' Tom asked with such a tone of aggrieved innocence, Anne laughed harder than ever.
'Because it'd be lying?' she suggested, but that only made her brother angry. Changing the subject seemed like a good idea. She did: 'When are you going to get married, anyhow? You were bothering me about it, but turnabout's fair play.'
Tom shrugged. 'When I find a girl who suits me,' he replied. 'I'm not in any big hurry. It's different for a man, you know.'
'I suppose so,' Anne said in a voice that supposed nothing of the sort. 'People would talk if I married a twenty-year-old when I was fifty. If you do that, all your friends will be jealous.'
'How you do go on, Sis!' Tom said, turning red. Anne had indeed managed to get him to stop thinking about marrying her off. But the dismal truth was, he had a point. It was different for men. They often got more handsome as they aged; women, almost never. And men could go right on siring children even after they went bald and wrinkled and toothless. Anne knew she had only a few childbearing years left. Once they were gone, suitors would want her only for her money, not mostly for it as they did now.
'God must be a man,' she said. 'If God were a woman, things would work a lot different, and you can take it to the bank.'
'I don't know anything about that,' Tom said. 'If you really reckon it's fun and jolly to go up out of a trench when the machine guns are hammering, or to hope you've got your gas helmet good and snug when the chlorine shells start falling, or to sit in a dugout wondering whether the next eight-inch shell is going to cave it in, then you can go on about what a tough row women have to hoe.'
'I've fought,' Anne said. Her brother only looked at her. She knew what she'd been through. So did he. He'd been through some of it with her, cleaning Red remnants out of the swamps by the Congaree after the war against the USA was lost. She had some notion of what Tom had experienced on the Roanoke front, but only some. She hadn't done that. By everything she knew, she wouldn't have wanted to do it.
'Never mind,' Tom said. 'For now, it's over. We don't need to quarrel about it today. Might as well leave that for the generals- all of 'em'll spend the next twenty, thirty years writing books about how they could have won the war single-handed if only the fellows on their flanks and over 'em hadn't been a pack of fools.'
He walked over to a cupboard and took out a couple of glasses. Then he yanked the cork from a bottle of whiskey on the counter under the cupboard and poured out two hefty belts. He carried one of them back to Anne and set it on the table by the newspapers. She picked it up. 'What shall we drink to?' she asked.
'Drinking to being here and able to drink isn't the worst toast in the world.' Tom said. He raised his glass. Anne thought about that, nodded, and raised hers in turn. The whiskey was smoke in her mouth, flame in her throat, and a nice warm fire in her belly. Before long, the glass was empty.
Anne went over to the counter and refilled it. While she was pouring, Tom came over with his glass, from which the whiskey had also vanished. She gave him another drink, too. 'My turn now,' she said, as if expecting him to deny it.
He didn't. He bowed instead, as a gentleman would have done before the war. Not so many gentlemen were left these days; machine guns and gas and artillery had put them under the ground by the thousands, along with their ruder countrymen by the tens of thousands.
She raised her glass. 'Here's to freedom from the Freedom Party!'
'Well, you know I'll drink to that one.' Her brother suited action to word.
Again, the glasses emptied fast. The whiskey hit-Anne understood why the simile was on her mind-like a bursting shell. Everything seemed simple and clear, even things she knew perfectly well weren't. She weighed Jake Featherston in the balances, as God had weighed Belshazzar in the Bible. And, as God had found Belshazzar wanting, so she found Featherston and the Freedom Party.
'No, I don't reckon he'll be back. I don't reckon he'll be back at all,' she said, and that called for another drink.
Sam Carsten was using his off-duty time the way he usually did now: he sprawled in his bunk aboard the Remembrance, studying hard. His head felt filled to the bursting point. He had the notion that he could have built and outfitted any ship in the Navy and ordered its crew about. He didn't think the secretary of the navy knew as much as he did. God might have; he supposed he was willing to give God the benefit of the doubt.
George Moerlein, his bunkmate, came by to pull something out of his duffel bag. 'Christ, Sam, don't you ever take a break?' he said. He had to repeat himself before Carsten knew he was there.
