From the kitchen came the crackle and the mouth-watering smell of frying chicken. Cincinnatus went in to say hello to Elizabeth, who was turning pieces with long-handled tongs. After a quick kiss, she asked, 'What you got there?'
'Letter from Covington.'
'Oh.' She understood his hesitation, but asked the next question anyhow: 'What's it say?'
'Don't know yet. Ain't opened it,' he said. The look his wife sent him was sympathetic and impatient at the same time. He tore off the end of the envelope, took out the letter, unfolded it, and read. By the time he got to the end, his face was as long as the train from which he'd taken off furniture.
'What is it?' Elizabeth asked.
'I got to git down there. Got to do it quick,' Cincinnatus said heavily. 'Neighbor says my mama, she start wanderin' off every chance she get. Pa turn his back on her half a minute, she out the door an' lookin' for the house where she growed up. Can't have that. She liable to git lost for good, or git run over on account of she go out in the street and don't look where she goin'.' Stress and the thought of Covington made his accent thicken.
Elizabeth sighed. Then hot fat spattered, and she yipped and jerked back her hand. She said, 'I reckon maybe you do, but, Lord, I wish you didn't.'
'So do I, on account of Ma and on account of I don't want to go back to Kentucky, neither,' Cincinnatus said. 'But it ain't always what you want to do. Sometimes it's what you got to do.' He waited. Elizabeth sighed again, then reluctantly nodded.
He bought a round-trip train ticket, knowing he would have to get oneway fares for his parents in Covington. He sent the neighbor down there a wire to let him know when he'd be getting into town. Then he stuffed a few days' clothes and sundries into a beat-up suitcase and went to the railroad station to catch the eastbound train.
It pulled into Covington at eleven that night. The neighbor, Menander Pershing, stood on the platform with his father. Cincinnatus' father looked older and smaller and wearier than Cincinnatus had dreamt he would. After embracing him, Cincinnatus looked nervously across the brightly lit platform.
'Ain't none o' them Kentucky State Police this time,' Seneca Driver said. He'd been born a slave, and still talked like it. After so long hearing the accents of the white Midwest, Cincinnatus found his father's way of speaking strange and ignorant-sounding, even though he'd sounded like that himself when he was a boy. His father hadn't even had a surname (and neither had he) till they'd all taken the same one after Kentucky returned to the USA in the Great War.
Cincinnatus couldn't help looking around some more. As far as he could tell, nobody was paying any attention to him. Little by little, he began to relax. 'Freedom Party don't give you no trouble?' he asked.
'Don't want trouble from nobody,' his father said. 'I minds my business, an' I don't git none.'
'Ain't too bad,' Menander Pershing added. He was about Cincinnatus' age, lean, with a few threads of gray in his close-cropped hair. He fixed autos for a living, and wore a mechanic's greasy overalls. 'They reckon they win come January, so they bein' quiet till then.' He jerked a thumb toward the exit. 'Come on. I got my motorcar out in the lot.'
U.S. soldiers were searching some passengers' bags as they left the station. The men in green-gray waved Seneca and his companions through without bothering. It might have been the first time in his life when being colored made things easier for him. The soldiers didn't think Negroes would back the Freedom Party no matter what. They were likely to be right, too.
Menander Pershing's auto was an elderly Oldsmobile, but its motor purred when he started it. Getting in, Cincinnatus asked, 'How's Ma?'
'Well, she sleepin' now. That's how I come away,' his father answered. 'You see in the mornin', that's all.' He wouldn't say anything more.
Even by moonlight, the house where Cincinnatus' parents lived was smaller and shabbier than he remembered. He lay down on the rickety sofa in the front room and got what sleep he could.
In the morning, heartbreak began. His father had to introduce him to his mother; she didn't recognize him on her own. After she came out of the kitchen with a cup of coffee in her hand, she looked at him and said, 'Who are you?'
'I'm Cincinnatus, Ma,' he said quietly, and felt the sting of tears.
As long as they stayed in the room together, she seemed to know who he was. When she left to go to the outhouse, though, she came back and looked at him as if she'd never seen him before in her life. As far as she knew, she hadn't. Fighting the stab at his heart, he introduced himself again.
'She like that,' Cincinnatus' father said sadly. 'She still know me all the time. She better, after all these years. But she don't know nobody else, not so it stick.'
Cincinnatus pounded a fist into his thigh. 'Damn!'
'Don't you talk like that, young man! I switch you if you cuss in the house!' For two sentences, his mother sounded just the way she had when he was thirteen. Hearing that damn might have flipped a switch in her head. Old things seemed more familiar to her than new ones. But then her eyes went vague again. She forgot her own annoyance. Seeing her forget might have been harder to bear than anything.
Or so Cincinnatus thought, till he too went out back to use the outhouse- a fixture he hadn't had to worry about for many years-and returned to find his father rushing out to get him. 'She run off!' Seneca cried. 'I go back in the kitchen for a minute, and she run off!'
'Do Jesus!' Cincinnatus exclaimed. 'We got to find her.' He and his father hurried out to the front yard. Cincinnatus looked left and right. No sign of her. 'You go this way,' he told his father. 'I'll go that way. She ain't gone real far.'
Off he went, quick as he could. When he got to a corner, he hesitated. Up or down? Either way might prove a dreadful mistake-and he had the chance for another one at every corner he came to. Swearing under his breath, he dog-trotted along the street. Each time he came to a corner, his curses got louder.
But luck was with him. He rounded one last corner and there she was, on the far side of the street, strolling along as if she knew just where she was going. 'Ma!' Cincinnatus yelled. 'Ma!' She paid no attention to him. Maybe she didn't hear. Maybe she'd forgotten a grown man could call her his mother.
Cincinnatus ran out into the street after her-and his luck abruptly changed. He remembered a squeal of brakes, a shout, and an impact… and then, nothing.
When he woke, he wanted that nothing back. One leg was on fire. Someone was taking a sledgehammer to his head. He opened his eyes a crack. Everything was white. For a moment, he thought it was heaven. Then, blearily, he realized it had to be a hospital.
He made a noise. A nurse appeared, as if by magic. He tried to talk. At last, after some effort, he succeeded: 'Wha' happen?'
'Fractured tibia and fibula,' she said briskly. 'Fractured skull, too. When they brought you in a week ago, they didn't think you'd make it. You must have a hard head. You had to be nuts, running out there like that. The guy in the auto never had a chance to stop. And how are you going to pay your bills?'
That was the least of his worries. His wits didn't want to work. The injury? Drugs? Whatever it was, he tried to fight it. 'Ma?' he asked. The nurse only shrugged. 'Got to get out of here,' he said.
She shook her head. 'Not till you're better. And you aren't going anywhere for quite a while, believe you me you're not.'
'Plebiscite,' he said in dismay. The nurse shrugged again. Cincinnatus drifted back into unconsciousness. If he whimpered, it might have been pain and not fear. Pain was what the nurse took it for, anyhow. She gave him another shot of morphine.
Winter in Covington, Kentucky, was of positively Yankee fury. Anne Colleton didn't care for it a bit. But she didn't complain, either. She'd pulled every wire she could reach to get to be a Confederate election inspector. Now that she was here, she intended to make the most of it.
Disapproval stuck out like spines from the fat brigadier general who commanded the local U.S. garrison. He knew what was going to happen when the votes were cast on Tuesday. He knew, but he couldn't do one damned thing about it.
Anne disliked the idea of Negroes voting in the plebiscite as much as Brigadier General Rowling (she thought that was his name, but wasn't quite sure-he wasn't worth remembering, anyhow) disliked the idea of the plebiscite
