Walk in Hell

Marks of the Negro uprising still scarred the countryside: burnt-out houses and barns, cotton fields gone to weeds, trees shattered by the artillery that had done more than anything else to break the Congaree Socialist Republic. Despite the scars, Scipio had the feeling he was walking back into his own past. He wondered if Anne Colleton would have a brass-buttoned tailcoat waiting for him when he got back to the plantation.

All things considered, he preferred life as a laborer, which had more freedom to it than he’d ever imagined. Very few people, though, had ever cared about what he preferred. He hiked through the forest where he’d killed Major Hotchkiss. If anyone ever found out about that, none of Miss Anne’s promises would matter in the least.

Coming up the familiar path, turning onto it, and seeing the Marshlands mansion in ruins brought home to him how much things had changed. The Negro cottages still standing alongside those charred ruins brought home to him how much things hadn’t.

A battered, filthy, rusty Ford was parked next to one of those cottages: no sign anywhere of the fancy motorcar Miss Anne had driven. None of the field hands would have had an automobile, though, no matter how battered. That had to be where the mistress was staying. As Scipio approached the cottage, a chill ran down his back. Before the uprising-the revolution that had failed-that had been Cassius’cottage. Scipio wondered if Anne Colleton appreciated the irony.

A few children were playing outside in spite of the drizzle. In his city clothes, he was a stranger to them. Strangers, these days, were objects of fear, not curiosity. “What you wan’?” asked one of the boys, a chap who would have been just too young to fight in the revolutionary army, which had had more than one twelve-year-old carrying a rifle.

“I wish to speak with the mistress of Marshlands, Ajax,” Scipio answered. “Will you be so good as to tell her I have arrived?”

Ajax and the other children stared at him, not expecting that kind of language to come from the mouth of a black man wearing a frayed, collarless shirt and a pair of dungarees with patches at the knees, a cloth cap on his head against the rain. Then the youngster recognized him in spite of the unfamiliar habiliments. “It Scipio!” he yelped. “Do Jesus, Scipio done come back!”

That shout brought faces to windows and made several doors come open so the inhabitants of those cottages could gape-or could warily study-the returned prodigal. One of the opening doors was that of the cottage formerly Cassius’. Out came Anne Colleton, who ignored the nasty weather. “Good morning, Scipio,” she said, almost-but not quite-as she might have done before the revolt. “You were wise to come.”

“Ma’am, I thought so myself, which is why I did,” he answered.

She stood aside. “Well, come in,” she said. “I have coffee waiting, and cold chicken, and sweet-potato pie. You’ll be hungry, I expect.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said again. He went into the cottage, pausing only to wipe his feet on the jute mat in front of the door. The cottage hadn’t boasted a mat when Cassius had lived there. It hadn’t boasted an icebox, either, or a small stove to supplement the fireplace. Nor had it held a bookcase, even if the titles on the shelves were worn secondhand copies like the ones he bought for himself. But there had been literature here: Marx and Engels and Lincoln and other Red and near-Red writers. Cassius, though, had had to keep all that hidden.

Anne Colleton closed the door behind them. “Help yourself to anything,” she said. “I don’t want anyone but the two of us hearing what we have to say to each other.” That explained why she had no servant present. And for her to serve him had undoubtedly never once crossed her mind. She was, after all, a sort of commingling of feudal landlord and capitalist oppressor. Scipio had read Cassius’ books, too.

Unless he planned on killing her and then fleeing, he had to do as she said for the moment. He’d thought about that, walking out from St. Matthews. But even if the field hands didn’t try stopping him as he ran, she would have put aside a letter or something somewhere to point the finger at him. She was not the sort to miss such a trick.

As if to underscore that, she pulled a pistol out of her handbag. “In case you were foolish,” she remarked. “I didn’t really expect you to be, but one never knows these days.”

“I have no intention of being foolish,” he answered gravely. She’d put out two coffee cups. He poured one for her, one for himself. Since she’d set out only one plate, he assumed she’d already eaten. The food was plain, nothing like the fancy banquets she’d served in the days before the war, but good enough. Since he’d had nothing but a slice of bread before leaving for the train station, he ate his fill now.

With more patience than she usually showed, his former mistress let him finish before saying anything. When he was done, she began without preamble: “I want you to tell me how my brother Jacob died.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He made his voice as flat as he could, a fitting complement to the features he schooled to stillness. Her face and voice were similarly chary of giving him clues. How much did she know? How much did he dare lie? After no more than a heartbeat, he decided that anyone who lied to her was a fool. The truth, then, as much of it as he could give. “Ma’am, he perished most courageously.”

“I wouldn’t have expected anything else,” she answered. “Courage Jacob always had. No brains to speak of, but courage. That wench Cherry would have played a part in it, wouldn’t she?”

“Ma’am, if you know the answers, what need have you to question me?” Scipio asked.

“I am in a position to question you,” Anne said. “You are not in a position to question me. She would have used her charms to soften him up, wouldn’t she?” That was not a question; she sounded wearily sure she knew whereof she spoke. “And Cassius. He’s still stealing things hereabouts, you know.”

“So I have heard, yes,” Scipio said. The more he talked about Cassius now, the less he would have to talk about what had happened a year before.

“He still has a price on his head, too,” Anne said. “If he comes round here”-the pistol twitched in her hand-“I shall kill him.” She studied Scipio, as if deciding whether to butcher a hog now or to wait. “And, of course, you still have a price on your head as well.”

“You said no harm would come to me if I visited you here,” Scipio said quickly. If she hadn’t had the pistol, he would have thought about trying to kill her. Living with her, serving her, had taught him how devious she was.

But when she said, “And I meant that,” he thought she was telling the truth. She went on, “You and Julia are the only members of the house staff I’ve been able to find. She and the field hands deny knowing anything. I’ve made my investigations, but you are the only eyewitness to what happened I’ve been able to…find.”

Catch was what she meant. Wherever she’d learned whatever she’d learned, she knew a good deal. Scipio had not defied Cassius when the Red leader made it plain his choices were cooperation and death. The stuff of defiance was not in him. Maybe it never had been; maybe his servile upbringing had trained out whatever he’d once owned.

He told the whole story, from Cherry’s claim of abuse to the gun battle in which Jacob Colleton had defended himself so well to the storming of the bedroom door behind which Anne’s gassed brother had barricaded himself. “Three or four men did that,” he said. “They rushed past me so fast, I do not know for certain who they were. I do not know which of them fired the fatal shot, either. Ma’am, you may do with me what you will, but I am being truthful in this regard.”

“I believe you,” Anne said, which caught Scipio by surprise. Sitting where she sat, he wouldn’t have believed himself. She went on, “The reason I believe you is that, if you were lying to me, you would have come up with a better story. The truth, I’ve found, is usually confused.”

“Yes, ma’am,” he said.

“Now-” Her voice sharpened. “Who burned the Marshlands mansion?”

“That was Cassius, ma’am,” he answered, adding, “I wish he had not done it. Many beautiful things were lost.”

“In five words, you’ve just given the story of this war,” she said. “I know you had a role in the so-called Congaree Socialist Republic. From what I’ve heard, you usually did what you could to stop its excesses. I suspect your reasons had as much to do with what would happen after the uprising was put down as they did with any special milk of human kindness in your veins, but only God can look into a man’s heart, and I’ve found out that, whatever else I may be, I am not God.”

Not knowing what to say to that, Scipio kept quiet. If Anne Colleton hadn’t thought she was God before the Red revolt, she’d done a fine job of concealing the fact. He wondered what she’d gone through. He didn’t have the nerve to ask. He didn’t have the nerve for a lot of things. In a nutshell, that was the tale of his life.

Wearily, Anne said, “Go back to Columbia. Go back to your work. Once we win the war, that will have been