either way, doesn’t it?”
Anne Colleton cranked to life the engine of the battered Ford they’d given her. The motorcar shivered and shuddered like a man with the grippe. It sounded as if it would fall to pieces at any moment-it was about as far a cry from her Vauxhall roadster as an automobile could possibly be.
She didn’t complain, not any more. She’d had to move heaven and earth to pry the Ford out of Confederate officialdom. It would, with luck, get her back to Marshlands, which was all she wanted for the time being. God only knew where the Vauxhall Major Hotchkiss had confiscated was now. That might well have been literally true; Hotchkiss himself, she was given to understand, was dead, killed along with so many others in the death throes of the Congaree Socialist Republic.
“Anyone want to ride with me?” Anne asked, not for the first time. None of the women with whom she’d shared a refugee tent for so many months made a move toward her. The bayoneted Tredegar with a full clip she’d laid in the middle of the seat probably had something to do with that.
“The officers say you’re asking to get yourself killed-or else somethin’ even worse-if y’all go into that country now,” the fat woman named Melissa declared. By her tone, she looked forward to that prospect for Anne.
“I’ll risk it,” Anne answered. “I’ve always been able to take care of myself, unlike a lot of people I can think of.” Being on the point of leaving gave her the last word. She hopped into the Ford, released the hand brake, put the motorcar in gear, and
Going was slow, as she’d known it would be. The Robert E. Lee Highway had been one of the main lines of Confederate advance, which meant the Red Negro rebels had defended it as well as they could, which in turn meant the artillery had gone to work, which meant what was called a road was in many places anything but. Anne was glad she’d managed to get her hands on several spare inner tubes and a pump and patches.
Not many trees along the road were standing; most had been blasted to tinder. Those that did stand often held ghastly fruit: rebels captured and then summarily hanged. Ravens and buzzards flew up from them as the noisy Ford rattled past. The stench of death was everywhere, and far stronger than the hanged bodies could have accounted for by themselves. Anne wondered if the fronts between the CSA and USA were full of this same dreadful reek. If they were, how did the soldiers endure it?
In a field by the side of the road, Negroes were digging trenches that would probably serve as mass graves. From a distance, the scene looked almost as it would have before the Red uprising began. Almost, for the couple of whites who supervised the laborers carried rifles: the spring sun glinted off the sharp edge of a bayonet.
Anne bit her lip. Putting Humpty-Dumpty back together again in the CSA wouldn’t be easy. If whites had to get labor out of blacks at gunpoint, how were they supposed to fight the damnyankees at the same time? And if they offered concessions to make Negroes more willing to go along with them, wasn’t that as much as saying the Reds had been right to rise against the government?
Reaching St. Matthews took her more than twice as long as she’d thought it would, and she hadn’t been optimistic setting out from the refugee camp. By the time she got to the town nearest Marshlands, she found herself astonished she’d made it at all. She was also filthy from head to foot, having repaired three punctures along the way.
St. Matthews shocked her again. It wasn’t so badly smashed up as some of the territory through which she’d driven; the rebellion had been dying on its feet by the time Confederate forces reached the town, and the Reds hadn’t fought house to house here. But St. Matthews was the town she knew best: in the back of her mind, she expected to see it as it always had been, with whitewashed picket fences, neatly painted storefronts and even warehouses, and streets lined with live oaks shaggy with moss.
Most of the fences had been knocked flat. Two of the four big cotton warehouses were only burnt-out wreckage. Some of the live oaks still stood, but the artillery bombardment before the assault on the town had put paid to most of them. It would be a hundred years before saplings grew into trees that could match the ones now ruined.
Anne’s eyes filled with tears. She’d kept trying to think of the rebellion as something that, once defeated, could in large measure be brushed aside. Negroes working under white men’s guns had gone a fair way toward telling her how foolish that was. The blasted oaks, though, warned even more loudly that the uprising would echo for generations.
A gray-haired white man in an old-fashioned gray uniform shifted a plug of tobacco from one ill-shaven cheek to the other and held up a hand, ordering her to stop. “What the-blazes you doin’here, lady?” he demanded. “Don’t you know there’s still all kinds o’ bandits and crazy niggers running around loose?”
“What am I doing here?” Anne replied crisply. “I am going home. Here is my authorization.” She handed the militiaman a letter she had browbeaten out of the colonel in charge of the refugee camp.
By the way this fellow stared at the sheet of paper, he couldn’t read. That she had it, though, impressed him into standing aside. “If’n they say it’s all right, reckon it is,” he said, touching the brim of his forage cap. “But you want to be careful out there.”
“I intend to be careful,” Anne said, a thumping lie if ever there was one. She put some snap in her voice: “Now kindly give that letter back, so I can use it again at need.”
“Oh. Yes, ma’am. Sorry, ma’am.” Where her grimy appearance and this beat-up motorcar hadn’t convinced the militiaman she was a person of quality, her manner did. He handed the letter back to her.
The road from St. Matthews to Marshlands was not so heavily cratered as the highway up to town had been. By the time the rebels abandoned St. Matthews, they’d pretty much abandoned organized resistance against Confederate forces, too. But that thought had hardly crossed her mind before she heard a couple of brisk spatters of gunfire from the north, the direction of the Congaree swamps. Not all the Reds, it seemed, had given up.
Woods blocked any view of Marshlands from the road till not long before a traveler needed to turn onto the lane leading up to the mansion.
Coughing and wheezing, the Ford passed the last trees. There, familiar as the mole she carried on one wrist, was the opening into that winding lane. Just before you turned, you looked along the lane and you saw…
“Hell,” she said quietly. She’d been hoping the place had survived, but it looked like a skeleton with most of the flesh rotted away. Altogether against her will, tears blurred her eyes. “Jacob,” she whispered. If Marshlands had burned, her brother must have burned with it.
By contrast, the Negro cottages off to one side of the great house looked exactly as they had before the Red uprising began. A couple of men were out hoeing in their gardens; a couple of women were feeding chickens; a whole raft of pickaninnies were running around raising hell.
After a little while, her eyes left the vicinity of the mansion and traveled out to the cotton fields. Her teeth closed hard on the soft flesh inside her lower lip. If anyone had done anything with the cotton since she’d left for Charleston all those months before, she would have been astonished. Was that what the Red revolution had been about-the freedom not to work? Her face twisted into an expression half sneer, half snarl.
If the rest of the plantations in what had been the Congaree Socialist Republic looked the same way, a lot of planters were bankrupt, busted, flat. She wasn’t; she’d invested wisely ever since Marshlands came into her hands. Most people, though, couldn’t see past their noses. And, speaking of seeing…
One of the men in the garden plots had spotted her. He dropped his hoe and pointed, calling out to the rest. One after another, heads swung in her direction. Other than that, none of the Negroes moved. That in itself chilled her. Before the uprising, they would have come running up to her motorcar, calling greetings and hoping she had trinkets for them.
For a moment, she was especially glad of the Tredegar on the seat beside her. Then, all at once, she wasn’t. How much good would it do her? What kind of arsenal did the Negroes have hidden in those cabins? She’d prided herself on knowing her laborers well. She hadn’t known them at all. Maybe the Army men had been right when they thought her crazy to come here by herself.
A woman walked slowly toward her. It was, she realized after too long, Julia, who had been her body servant. The young woman, instead of a maid’s shirtwaist and black dress, wore homespun made gaudy with bits of probably stolen finery. She was also several months pregnant.
The only reason Anne hadn’t taken her to Charleston was that she’d gone there for an assignation, not legitimate business. Had it been otherwise, would Julia have turned on her? The thought was chilling, but could hardly be avoided.
