opinion.
'Who cares whether Quebec likes it or not?' Custer said, which meant he'd thought along with Dowling, and which almost set Dowling wondering if he hadn't miscalculated. If Custer agreed with him, he had a good chance of being wrong.
He said, 'I think we have managed to put down the latest flare-up outside of Edmonton. That's something, anyhow.'
'Putting down flare-ups doesn't get the job done, Lieutenant Colonel,' Custer said. 'I want to put them down so they don't start again. One of these days, I expect we'll have to raze one of these prairie towns to the ground. It'd serve the bastards right. And after we do that, the other Canucks will get the idea that we mean business.'
'Maybe, sir,' Dowling said, his tone plainly making that maybe a no. Sometimes you couldn't be too plain for Custer, so he went on, 'If we do that without good reason, the rest of the world will raise a big stink.'
'To hell with the rest of the world,' Custer said grandly: the philosophy of a lifetime, boiled down to eight words. Through the whole of his long span, Custer had done very much as he pleased. He'd had a good many breaks along the way, but no one could deny he'd made the most of them.
'Will there be anything more, General?' Dowling asked.
'As a matter of fact, there is one other thing.' Custer hesitated, which was most unlike him. At last, he resumed: 'I'm afraid Libbie and I have had to let our housekeeper go. Could you arrange for the hiring of another one?'
'Wouldn't your wife sooner take care of that for you, sir?' Dowling asked warily. When Elizabeth Custer joined her husband at a posting, she ran their household with a whim of iron.
Custer coughed a couple of times. 'This once, Lieutenant Colonel, I'd like you to take care of it. Libbie is a marvelous woman-God never made a finer-but she does have a habit of hiring sour, dried-up sticks with whom I have a certain amount of trouble getting on well. I was hoping you might find a capable woman of cheerier disposition.'
'I see.' And Dowling did. Libbie Custer hired housekeepers in whom her husband could have no possible interest. That was only common sense on her part, for Custer did have an eye for a pretty woman. Whether anything more than an eye still functioned at his age, Dowling did not know. He didn't want to find out, either. Now that Custer had a real command again, he didn't need some pretty young popsy distracting him.
And Dowling didn't want to anger Custer's wife. Libbie made a far more vindictive, far more implacable foe than her husband ever dreamt of being. If Dowling hired Custer a popsy, she would not be pleased with him.
He had his own coughing fit. 'Sir,' he said, 'I really do think that's something best left to Mrs. Custer's judgment.'
'Fiddlesticks!' Custer said. 'You handled such arrangements for me plenty of times during the war. Once more won't hurt you a bit.'
'Whenever your wife was with you, though, sir, she did prefer to keep such matters in her own hands,' Dowling said. 'I wouldn't care for her to think I was encroaching on her privileges.'
'You're not helping, Lieutenant Colonel,' Custer said irritably.
Dowling stood mute. If Custer ordered him to choose a housekeeper, he resolved to find the general the homeliest old crone he could. Let's see you ask me to do something like that again, he thought.
But Custer gave no such order. Instead, he let out a long, wheezy sigh. 'Here I am, in command of all of Canada,' he said, 'and I find I'm not even in command of my own household.' Dowling wondered how many other famous generals had been defeated by their wives. A good many, was his guess, and he did not think that guess likely to be far wrong.
VII
Scipio was in love, and wondered why in God's name he'd never been in love before. The best answer he could come up with- and he knew it was nowhere near good enough-was that he'd always been too busy. First, he'd had an education forcibly crammed down his throat. Then he'd been butler at Marshlands, which under Anne Colleton was a job to keep any four men hopping. And after that, he'd been swept up into the affairs of the Congaree Socialist Republic.
Now… Now, as far as anybody in Augusta, Georgia, knew, he was Xerxes the waiter, an ordinary fellow who did his job and didn't give anybody any trouble. And Bathsheba, he was sure, was the most marvelous creature God had seen fit to set on the face of the earth.
He'd never had any trouble finding a woman to bed when he wanted one. But he'd never understood the difference between making love and being in love, not till now. He stroked Bath-sheba's cheek as they lay side by side on the narrow bed in his furnished room. 'I is the most luckiest man in the whole wide world,' he said-no originality, but great sincerity.
She leaned over and kissed him. 'And you are the kindliest man,' she said. No one had ever called Scipio anything like that before. He hadn't had many chances to be kindly, either. Now that he did, he was doing his best to make the most of them.
Bathsheba got out of bed and started to dress for the trip back across the hall to her room. 'Don't want you to go,' Scipio said.
'I got to,' she answered. 'Got to go clean for the white folks tomorrow mornin'. The work don't never go away.'
He knew that. Among the reasons he loved Bathsheba was the solid core of sense he'd found in her. It wasn't that he wanted to make love with her again that made him want her to stay. Since he'd reached his forties, second rounds didn't seem so urgent as they once had. But he enjoyed talking with her more than with anyone else he'd ever met.
He wished he could recite some of the love poetry he'd learned. The only way he knew it, though, was in the educated white man's accent he'd been made to acquire. Using that accent might-no, would-make her ask questions he couldn't afford to answer.
That was the one fly in the ointment of his happiness: everything he said about his past had to be either vague or a lie. Even the name by which she knew him was false. He counted himself lucky that he quickly got used to the aliases under which he protected his real identity. Back in South Carolina, reward posters with his true name on them still hung in post offices and police and sheriff's stations. Some might even have come into Georgia, though he'd never seen one in Augusta.
As if to flick him on that wound of secrecy, Bathsheba said, 'One of these days, I'm gonna know all about you-everything there is to know. And do you know what else? I'm gonna like every bit of it, too.'
'I already likes everything there is to know 'bout you,' Scipio said, and her eyes glowed. As for him, he was glad of the butler's training that let him think one thing and say another without giving any hint of what was going on behind the expressions he donned like convenient masks.
Bathsheba leaned down over the bed and gave him another kiss. 'See you tomorrow night,' she said, her voice rich with promise. Then she was gone, gently closing the door behind her.
Scipio rose and put on a light cotton nightshirt. In Augusta in early summer, no one wanted anything more. He picked up a fan of woven straw. He wished the roominghouse had electricity: he would have bought an electric fan and aimed it at the bed as he slept. It got every bit as hot and oppressive here as it did over by the Congaree. He'd heard it got even worse down in Savannah. He found that hard to believe, but you never could tell.
His cheap alarm clock jangled him awake the next morning. He yawned, got out of bed, and started getting dressed. He had his white shirt halfway buttoned before his eyes really came open. Bathsheba's door was closed when he left his room, and everything quiet within her place. She got up earlier than he did, to cram the most work she could into a day.
The fry joint where he worked didn't serve breakfast. He got eggs and grits and coffee at a place that did, and paid for them with a $500 banknote. 'Need another hundred on top o' that,' the black man behind the counter said.
With a grimace, Scipio peeled off another banknote and gave it to him. 'Be a thousand tomorrow, I reckons,'
