and he seemed to have been right to wonder. Had they bought their lives at too high a price?
They wouldn't say so. As for Cincinnatus, he was mostly surprised the Confederates had let them live. Maybe the whites just hadn't had time to kill them before Covington fell. How many Negroes down here had made the same Devil's bargain to survive? He was heading back to Des Moines, back to the USA. He thanked God he wouldn't have to find out.
With a wheeze that said it might not get much farther, the train stopped at the little station in Baroyeca. Jorge Rodriguez wore his butternut uniform, shorn of his stripes and all Confederate insignia. It was all the clothing he had. He'd been living on the ration cans the Yankees gave him when they let him out of the POW camp. If he never ate anything that came from a tin can again, he wouldn't be sorry. He was even sick of the famous deviled ham. Enough was enough, and then some.
Jorge was the only one who got off at Baroyeca. There on the platform stood his mother, his brother Pedro, and his sister Susana and two of her little children. Jorge hugged everybody and kissed everybody and slapped Pedro on the back. His older brother had been a POW much longer than he had.
'Do you know when Miguel is getting home?' Jorge asked.
Their other brother had been captured, too, and wounded as well. Pedro shook his head. 'I haven't heard anything. One of these days, that's all.'
'Soon, God, please.' Their mother crossed herself.
When Jorge saw the alcalde's house, he saw the Stars and Stripes flying above it. 'Even here!' he said in dismay.
'Even here,' Pedro agreed. 'We lost. You can get into big trouble if you show the Confederate flag. All we can do is what the Yankees tell us-for now.'
He sounded as if he was ready to pick up the fight again if he ever saw the chance. Jorge wasn't so sure. He'd seen a lot more war than his brother had-enough to satisfy him for a long, long time, if not forever. As long as you could live your life, how much difference did it really make which flag flew over the alcalde's house?
There was Freedom Party headquarters, where his father spent so much time. It stood empty, deserted. 'What happened to Seсor Quinn?' Jorge asked.
'He went off to war himself, when things got hard and they started calling in older men,' his mother answered. 'After that, nobody here knows. He hasn't come back-I know that.'
'Maybe he will,' Jorge said. Who could guess how long all the Confederate soldiers would need to come home, especially if they lived in out-of-the-way places like Baroyeca? Maybe Robert Quinn lay in a U.S. hospital. Maybe he was still in a camp. As the war ran down and surrender finally came, the Yankees took prisoners by the tens, maybe by the hundreds, of thousands.
'Let's go home,' his mother said. Actually, what she said was Vamos a casa. She mixed English and Spanish indiscriminately. Most people her age did. Jorge and Pedro smiled at each other. They'd used more English even when they lived here. Since going into the Army, the only time Jorge had spoken any Spanish was when he ran into another soldier from Sonora or Chihuahua. Even then, he and the other man would mostly speak English so their buddies from the rest of the CSA wouldn't tab them for a couple of dumb greasers.
Home was a three-mile walk. Jorge carried his little nephew part of the way. After a sixty-pound pack and a rifle on his back, Juanito didn't seem to weigh much. It was hot, but Jorge was used to heat. The air was dry, anyhow; he wouldn't have to wring himself out when he got to the farmhouse.
'Better weather than farther east,' he said, and Pedro nodded.
A black-headed magpie-jay sat on a power line and screeched at the people walking by below. Jays in the rest of the CSA were smaller, with shorter tails. They didn't sound the same-but they did sound like cousins.
When he got to the farmhouse, it seemed smaller than he remembered. It also seemed plainer and poorer. He hadn't thought anything of the way he lived before he went into the Army. People who lived around Baroyeca either scratched out a livelihood from farms like this one or went into the mines and grubbed lead and silver-never quite enough silver-out of the ground.
By local standards, his family was well off. They had running water and electricity, though they hadn't when Jorge was younger. They'd talked about getting a motorcar. Jorge had needed to go up into the rest of the CSA, the part where everyone spoke English all the time, to realize how much he'd grown up without. If nobody around you had it, though, you didn't miss it.
'Like old times, having two of my sons home and the third one on the way.' His mother was invincibly optimistic. He thought so, anyhow, till her face clouded and she went on, 'If only your father were here to see it.'
'Sн,' Jorge said. Nobody seemed to want to say any more than that. Hipolito Rodriguez's death, so far from all his family, would cast a shadow over them for the rest of their lives. Why had he shot himself? He'd been doing work he thought the country needed, and doing it for his Army buddy from the last war. What could have gone wrong?
It was almost as if he'd listened to Yankee propaganda about the camps, and that even before there was much Yankee propaganda. If mallates were people like anybody else, then putting them in those camps was wrong. If. No matter what the damnyankees said, Jorge had trouble believing it. Most Confederate citizens would. His father would have-he was sure of that.
Could something he saw, something that happened at the camp, have changed his mind? Jorge also had trouble believing that. And, with no way to look inside his father's mind and understand what he was thinking, it would stay a mystery forever.
His mother cooked tacos stuffed with shredded pork and spices fiery enough to make his nose run-he wasn't used to them any more. He ate and ate. Yes, this kind of food beat the devil out of canned deviled ham. And there were chicharrones-pieces of pigskin fried crisp and crunchy that gave your teeth a workout.
'This is wonderful,' Jorge said. 'I ate boring food so long, I forgot how good things could be.'
His older brother laughed. 'I said the very same thing when I got here-didn't I, mamacita?'
'Yes, exactly the same thing,' Magdalena Rodriguez answered.
'Let's hope we can hear Miguel say it, too,' Susana said.
'And soon, please, God,' their mother said. Someone knocked on the door. 'It's the postman.' She got up to see what he had.
There were a couple of advertising circulars and a large envelope that looked official. And it was: it came from something called the U.S. occupying authority in the former state of Sonora. Magdalena Rodriguez fought through the pronunciation of that. When she opened the envelope and unfolded the piece of paper inside, she made a face.
'All in English,' she said.
'Let me see.' Jorge could read English well enough. And, in fact, the paper was aimed at Pedro and him. He frowned at the eagle in front of crossed swords on the letterhead; people using that emblem had done their level best to kill him. Now they were telling him what he had to do as a returned prisoner of war.
And they weren't kidding around, either. Returned POWs had to report to the alcalde's office once a week. They had to renounce the Freedom Party. They had to report all meetings of more than five people they attended.
Pedro laughed when Jorge said that. 'More than five people here now,' he observed. 'Do we report this?'
'I wouldn't be surprised,' Jorge said. He kept reading. Returned POWs could not write or subscribe to forbidden literature. They couldn't keep weapons of caliber larger than.22-either pistols or longarms.
'I'm surprised they let you have any,' his sister said when he read that.
'Somebody who was writing the rules had to know every farm down here has a varmint gun,' Jorge said. His father had taught him to shoot, and to be careful with firearms, when he was a little boy. 'If they said we couldn't keep guns at all, we wouldn't pay any attention to them. They think this keeps them out of trouble.'
'You can kill somebody with a.22,' Pedro said.
'Sure,' Jorge agreed. 'But you have to hit him just right.'
'Are you sure they really let us out of the camps?' his brother asked.
He shrugged. 'We're here. This isn't so good, but they'll get tired of it after a while. They have to. How many soldiers can they put in Baroyeca?'
'As many as they want,' Pedro said.
