folks, ain't that right?'
'You ain't been enough of a Red your ownself to tell me what I ought to be doin', Cincinnatus,' Apicius said heavily.
'You don't fancy it, you don't got to listen,' Cincinnatus returned. 'Other thing you ought to be doin' is, you ought to start workin' to get black folks the vote. Ain't impossible, not in the USA.'
'Ain't possible, not in Kentucky,' Apicius said. 'Some of the sons of bitches in the Legislature remember when they used to own us. You was born after manumission. You don't know how things was. When I was a boy, I was a slave. I don't know how to tell you how bad bein' a slave is.'
'My pa was a slave,' Cincinnatus said. 'My ma, too. There's some states in the USA that let niggers vote. If we can't vote, we might as well still be slaves, on account of we ain't got no say in what happens to us.'
'Yeah, and you know what states they are,' Apicius said with a toss of the head. 'They're states that ain't got more than about a dozen niggers, maybe two dozen tops, so havin' 'em vote don't matter one way or the other. Kentucky ain't like that. We got to vote here, we'd have us some say. What that means is, we ain't never gettin' the vote here. White folks won't let it happen.'
That held an unpleasant ring of truth. Cincinnatus said, 'If we can't win a fight and we can't win the vote, what good are we?'
'Damned if I know what good you are, 'cept to drive me crazy,' Apicius said. 'What I'm good for is, I make some pretty good barbecue.'
Cincinnatus exhaled in exasperation. 'If you don't try, how the devil you find out what you can do?'
'I go up on the roof at city hall, I don't need to jump off to know I land in the street,' Apicius said. 'What you want I should do, hand Luther Bliss a petition to ask him to tell the gov'nor to give us the vote? Not likely!' That not likely didn't refer to the orders the chief of the Kentucky secret police might give the governor. But Apicius could never sign such a petition, being unable to read or write.
'This here is one of the United States now,' Cincinnatus said stubbornly. 'You and me, we're citizens of the United States. We weren't never citizens of the Confederate States. We can try now. Maybe we don't win, but maybe by the time my Achilles grows up, he be able to vote.'
'Don't hold your breath,' Apicius advised, 'or you end up the bluest damn nigger anybody ever seen.'
That also sounded altogether too likely to suit Cincinnatus. But he was not a man to give in to trouble if he could get around it. And, as a U.S. citizen, he had more ways to try to get around it than he'd had as a Confederate resident. 'I end up bangin' my head against a stone wall here, I can move to one of them states where they do let black folks vote.' He didn't know exactly which states allowed Negro suffrage, but a trip to the library would tell him.
He'd succeeded in startling Apicius. 'You'd move up to one of them Yankee states?' The barbecue cook seemed to listen to himself, for he laughed. 'Hellfire, this here's a Yankee state these days, ain't it?'
'Yeah, except most of the white folks here ain't figured that out,' Cincinnatus answered. 'So why the hell shouldn't I move? Couldn't be worse'n what I've got now, not in the USA it couldn't'-the Confederate States were a different story altogether, and both men knew it-'so what's keepin' me here? Ought to throw my family in the truck and get on the road.'
'I seen that truck,' Apicius said. 'If it ain't one thing keepin' you here, damned if I know what is. You be lucky to get over the river into Ohio, let alone anywheres else.'
'Maybe,' Cincinnatus said. 'It is a shame and a disgrace, ain't it?' But, even though he chuckled at the barb, the idea of packing up and leaving stayed in his mind. The more he thought about it, the better it seemed. He wouldn't have to worry about Luther Bliss, or Apicius and the Reds, or the diehards. He'd seen that white people from the rest of the USA didn't love Negroes-far from it-but white people in Kentucky didn't love Negroes, either.
He wondered what Elizabeth would say if he proposed pulling up stakes. He wondered what his mother and father would say, too. All of a sudden, finding out didn't seem like the worst idea in the world. He'd never cast a vote in his life. Being able to do that would be worth a lot.
'You got that look in your eye,' Apicius said.
'Maybe I do,' Cincinnatus answered. 'God damn, maybe I do.'
V
'There are times when I'm stupid,' Jonathan Moss said, 'and then there are times when I'm really an idiot.'
He looked around. The more he looked, the more this seemed like one of the times when he was really an idiot. Chicago winters were bad. He'd known about them. Winters up in Ontario were worse. He'd known about them, too. He'd shivered his way through three of them during the Great War. Hardly anything was more useless than the pilot of a flying scout in the middle of an Ontario winter.
'I can think of one thing, though,' he said, and his breath blew out in a great icy cloud, 'and that's a man who comes up here in December after a woman who can't stand him-a married woman who can't stand him, mind you.'
If he hadn't done it, though, he would have wondered for the rest of his life. Now, one way or the other, he would know. He had his doubts about whether knowing would make him happy. It would make him sure, though, and that counted, too. So he'd told himself, at any rate, when he left law school.
Coming into the battered little town of Arthur now, he wondered. No town in Ontario through which the front had passed was anything but battered. The Canucks and the British had fought with dreadful intensity for every square foot of ground they'd held. In the end, that had done them no good at all. But the end came much slower and much, much harder than any American had dreamt it would before the war began.
People in heavy coats and fur hats stared at Moss' sturdy Bucephalus as he halted the motorcar in front of the general store. If he'd been driving a lightweight Ford, say, he didn't think he'd have been able to make his way north from Guelph; the road, such as it was, would have defeated him. Here he was, though, and Arthur, Ontario, and Laura Secord would have to make the best of it.
As he got out of the automobile, he wished for the furs and leathers in which he'd flown. He'd lived in them in wintertime. Under canvas, without even a proper roof over his head, they were the only things that had kept him from freezing to death. A cloth coat, even a cloth coat with a for collar, wasn't the same.
Inside the general store, a potbellied stove glowed a cheery red. The storekeeper was shoveling more coal into it as Moss came inside. He went from being too cold to too warm in the twinkling of an eye.
Setting down the coal shovel, the storekeeper said the same thing any small-town storekeeper in the USA might have said: 'Help you, stranger?' Then his eyes narrowed. 'No. Wait. You ain't a stranger, or not quite. You were one o' them Yank fliers at the aerodrome outside of town, weren't you?'
'Yes.' Moss hadn't expected to be recognized. He didn't know whether that would make things easier or harder. The storekeeper would have been able to tell he was an American before long anyhow. Now the fellow knew which American, or which kind of American, he was. 'How are you today, Mr. Peterson?'
'I've been better, but I've been worse, too,' the Canuck allowed. He fixed Moss with a flinty stare. 'Other thing is, I'm mindin' my business in the town where I've lived all my days. You can boil me for tripe before I figure out why the hell a Yank'd want to come back here. You all of a sudden recollect you left a collar stud over at the aerodrome, or what?'
All at once, Jonathan Moss felt very much alone. No American occupation forces were within miles. The troops had more important places to occupy than a little town in the middle of nowhere like Arthur. If he had an unfortunate accident here, nobody would ever find out anything about it except what the locals revealed. And if it turned out not to be quite so accidental as it looked… he would be in no position to explain.
Even so, he decided to grasp the nettle. He'd come here to ask this question. He'd planned on doing it a little later, but he'd seen no plan survived contact with the enemy. Straight ahead, then: 'Did Laura Secord's husband come home safe from the war?'
Peterson the storekeeper gave him another long look. 'You're that crazy Yank,' he said at last. 'She told me there was one who'd come sniffing around her that was peskier than all the rest. Don't reckon she ever thought
