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He made it back to the apartment undamaged. It was chilly in there. No buildings in the Terry had heat anymore. The handful of people left here used makeshift wood-burning stoves for cooking and heating. One of these days, maybe, a fire would get loose. Scipio dreaded that, but didn’t know what he could do about it.
Bathsheba stirred when he came to bed. “Sorry,” he said. “Didn’t mean to bother you none.”
“ ’S all right,” his wife answered sleepily. “Sunday tomorrow. We kin go to church.”
“All right.” Scipio didn’t argue. He thought God had long since stopped listening to the Confederacy’s Negroes, but Bathsheba still believed. Going along was easier than quarreling.
He thought so, anyway. In the morning, Cassius said, “I ain’t goin’. I got to see some people about some business.”
“What kind of business?” Scipio asked.
His son just looked at him-looked through him, really. Cassius didn’t answer. Some kind of resistance business, then. Scipio sighed but didn’t insist. Bathsheba tried to. It didn’t work. Cassius was going to go his own way. Seeing what things were like these days, Scipio had a harder time thinking him wrong than he would have a couple of years earlier.
The church was as rundown as everything else in the Terry. The preacher’s coat and trousers were shiny with age. The reverend preached a careful sermon, praying for peace and for justice and for an end to misery and oppression. He made a point of not saying that the members of his congregation should rise up against oppression. Somebody was bound to be listening for the authorities. If the government or the Freedom Party-assuming there was any difference between the two-didn’t like what he said, he would vanish off the face of the earth as if he’d never been born.
He might have preached fire and brimstone. He might have preached revolt and revolution. It wouldn’t have mattered. He was just finishing his sermon when somebody at the back of the church exclaimed, “Lord have mercy, dey is out dere!”
Nobody wondered who they were. With gasps of horror, people sprang up from their rickety seats and hurried out of the church, hoping to get away before it was too late. “God be with you, brothers and sisters!” the preacher called after them. He didn’t try to get them to stay. Maybe he had his own escape route pla
Scipio and Bathsheba and Antoinette scurried away with the rest of the congregation. Like rats, he thought. Any kind of hiding place would do now.
But there were no hiding places. Augusta policemen and Freedom Party stalwarts and guards waited out in the street. They had smiles on their faces and rifles and submachine guns in their hands. One of them shifted a wad of tobacco into his cheek so he could talk more clearly: “Y’all can come along with us quiet-like, or y’all can get shot right here. Don’t matter none to us. Which’ll it be?”
One young man, only a little older than Cassius, ran for it. A submachine gun spat fire. The young man fell and writhed on the cracked pavement. The stalwart who’d cut him down ambled over and put a bullet through his head. The Negro groaned and lay still.
“Anybody else?” asked the cop with the chaw. No one moved. No one spoke.
Cassius. Thank God Cassius isn’t here. Someone may get away, Scipio thought. He glanced over at his wife. She nodded when their eyes met. She had to be thinking along with him.
The policeman spat a brown stream of tobacco juice in the dead man’s direction. “All right,” he said. “Get moving.”
Away the Negroes went. The congregation was only part of the cleanout. Some men tried to offer money to get away. Some women tried to offer themselves. The white men only laughed at them.
Out of the Terry they went. A lot of white Augustans were worshiping and praying at this hour of the day. Maybe God listened to them. He sure hadn’t paid any attention to the colored preacher. The whites who weren’t at church stared at the Negroes herded along like cattle. Some just stared. Some jeered. No one called out a word of protest.
Confederate Station was by Eighth and Walker, right next to St. Patrick’s Catholic Church. Did God listen harder if you called on Him in Latin? Scipio wouldn’t have bet on it. The station wasn’t far from the Terry. The captured Negroes were lucky in that, because he was sure they would have had to walk no matter how far it was.
And then all their luck ran out. Everything happened so fast, neither Willard Sloan nor anyone else had the slightest chance to do anything. “In! Get in, God damn you!” shouted the white men with guns. They stuffed cars tighter than should have been humanly possible. By the way the boxcar Scipio and his family went into smelled, it had hauled cattle the last time. The whites packed it till no one could sit down, then slammed the door shut. That cut off almost all of the air. Scipio resigned himself to dying before he got wherever the train was going. With a jerk and a lurch, it began to roll.
Dr. Leonard O’Doull sometimes thought he was trapped in one of the nastier suburbs of hell. One bleeding, mangled, screaming man after another, from the time he gulped coffee to wake up to the moment he lay down for a stolen bit of sleep. Some of the soldiers wore green-gray, others butternut. He’d almost stopped noticing which color uniform he had to cut away to get at the latest mutilation.
“When will this end?” he groaned to Granville McDougald after amputating a shattered arm.
“You’re asking the wrong guy,” the medic answered. “Only one who can tell you is the Confederate CO.”
“He should have quit three weeks ago,” O’Doull said.
McDougald shrugged. “He’s got orders to hold to as long as he can, and he’s got ammo for his guns. Featherston would probably send a people bomb after him if he did throw in the towel. As soon as we smash him flat, that frees up all of our men here to roll west and knock the Confederates out of Ohio. So he’s holding down a lot more men than he’s still got left himself.”
“You spent all these years as a medic, right?” O’Doull asked. McDougald nodded. The doctor went on, “So how come you talk like you come from the General Staff?”
“Me?” Granville McDougald laughed. “I’m just picking up stuff I hear from the wounded. We’ve got enough of ’em.”
“Well, God knows you’re right about that,” O’Doull said. The University of Pittsburgh hospital held U.S. wounded ranging in rank from private to brigadier general-and Confederates ranging from private to full colonel. It was always stuffed. Men lay on gurneys in the hallway, sometimes on mattresses on the floor, sometimes-when things were at their worst-on blankets on the floor.
The Confederates never had made it over the Allegheny River. They never had tried to break out of Pittsburgh to the west, either. They’d waited till the relieving column could link up with them-but it never did. Now, outside the pocket, there were no Confederate soldiers for miles and miles. The men who’d tried to relieve Pittsburgh had turned west themselves, to try to stem the U.S. advance out of northwestern Ohio and Indiana.
“One thing,” O’Doull said. McDougald raised an eyebrow. O’Doull went on, “I bet the poor bastards stuck here don’t think Jake Featherston is always right anymore.”
“That doesn’t matter,” McDougald said. “What matters is the people down in the CSA. When they figure out Featherston’s led ’em down the primrose path, that’s when things get interesting.”
“Maybe-but maybe not,” O’Doull said. “Yeah, some of them may hate Featherston after things go wrong. But won’t they go on hating us even worse? They really do, you know.” He’d listened to wounded men, too, and some of the captured Confederates were alarmingly frank.
“I don’t care if they hate us. I hate them, too.” Granville McDougald was so matter-of-fact, he might have been talking about the weather. “What I want ’em to remember is, if they mess with us, we’re going to pound the kapok out of ’em, and they better get used to the idea.”