The Victorious opposition

"Send 'em a wire back," the guard suggested.

"Maybe I will." But Jeff doubted he would. If the big boys got the idea he couldn't handle whatever they threw at him, they'd toss him out on his ear and put in somebody who wouldn't say shit if he had a mouthful.

As promised-threatened?-the new shipment of colored prisoners did come in that afternoon. Pinkard had his clerks as ready as they could be. They got swamped anyway. It would have been worse if they hadn't been braced. That was the most Jeff could say for it. The shipment was even larger than he'd expected. For a little while, he feared he wouldn't be able to shoehorn everybody inside the barbed-wire perimeter.

He did manage that, though he had prisoners curled up on bare ground between barracks without a blanket to call their own. The cooks served out the supper ration, share and share alike. The new prisoners ate like starving wolves. Pinkard wondered how long they'd gone with even less, or with nothing. By their gaunt faces and hollow cheeks, some of them had gone quite a while. The men already inside Camp Dependable grumbled at what they got. They didn't grumble too loud, though; if they had, they would have offended people who'd been through worse.

About midnight, a thunderstorm loosed an artillery barrage of rain on the prison camp. The new prisoners struggled to get into the barracks: it was either that or sink into what rapidly became a bottomless gumbo of mud. Not all of them could. The buildings simply would not hold so many men.

We'll see pneumonia in a few days, Jeff thought, lying in bed while lightning raved. They'll die like flies, especially if nobody ups the ration.

He shrugged. His initial panic had receded. What could he do about this? Nothing he could see, except ride herd on things the best way he knew how. It wasn't as if the prisoners hadn't done plenty of things that made them deserve to be here. Anybody who came here deserved to be here, by the very nature of things. Jake Featherston had got Kentucky and Houston back for the Confederate States. If that didn't prove he knew what was what, nothing could. Nodding to himself-figured that one out-Pinkard rolled over and went back to sleep.

Hipolito Rodriguez had always been better at saving money than most of his neighbors. That Magdalena had the same sort of thrifty temperament certainly helped. Some of the people around Baroyeca thought of him as a damned judio. He didn't lose any sleep about those people's opinions. In general, he didn't think much of them, either.

He did believe that working hard and hanging on to as much cash as he could paid off sooner or later. Sooner or later often simply meant later. He wasn't rich. He wasn't about to get rich any time soon. But he didn't mind living more comfortably when the chance came along.

And it was coming. He could see it coming, in the most literal sense of the words: a row of poles stretching nut along the road from Baroyeca that ran alongside his farm. Every day, the Freedom Youth Corps planted more of them, as if they were some crop that would grow.

Electricity had come to the town a few years earlier. That it should come to the farms outside of town… Rodriguez hadn't been sure he would live to see the day, but here it was, and he was going to take advantage of it. He'd had the money to pay an electrician to wire the house before the poles reached it. He'd had enough to buy electric lamps and the bulbs that went with them, too. And he'd had enough for a surprise for Magdalena. The surprise waited in the barn. (He also dreamt of buying an automobile, and a tractor to take the place of the mule. He knew that was and would stay a dream, but savored it anyhow.)

The day came when the poles reached and marched past his house. That turned out to be something of an anticlimax, for the wires that made the poles anything more than dead trees hadn't yet come so far. Still, looking out at the long shadows the poles cast in the low January sun, he nodded to himself. Those poles were the visible harbingers of a new way of life.

Three days later, the electrical wires arrived. Freedom Youth Corps boys strung them from pole to pole under the supervision of a foul-mouthed electrician from Hermosillo. Even Rodriguez, who'd done his time in the Army, heard some things he'd never run into before. For the boys from the Freedom Youth Corps, this had to be part of their training that they hadn't expected.

Baroyeca's electrician was a moon-faced man named Cйsar Calderon. He never swore. The day after the wires passed the farmhouse, he came out on a mule that made the one Rodriguez owned seem like a thoroughbred by comparison. He ran a wire from the closest power pole to the fuse box he'd installed on the side of the house. He tested the circuits with a device that glowed when the current was flowing. Seeing it light up made Rodriguez swell with pride.

"їTodo estб bien?" he asked.

Calderon nodded. "Oh, yes. Everything is fine, exactly how it should be. If you like, you can plug in a lamp and turn it on."

Fingers trembling, Rodriguez did. He pushed the little knob below the light bulb. The motion felt strange, u

Magdalena crossed herself. "Madre de Dios," she whispered. "It's like having the sun in the house."

Rodriguez solemnly shook hands with the electrician. "Muchas gracias."

"De nada," Calderon replied. But it wasn't nothing, and they both knew it. Calderon packed up his tools, climbed onto the mule, and rode away. Rodriguez turned off the lamp and turned it on again. Yes, the electricity stayed even after the electrician went away. Rodriguez had thought it would, but he hadn't been quite sure. When he lit a kerosene lamp, he understood what was going on: the flame from the match made the wick and the kerosene that soaked up through it burn. But what really happened when he pushed that little knob? The light came on. How? Why? He couldn't have said.

But even if he didn't know how it worked, he knew that it worked. And knowing that it worked was plenty. He turned out the lamp again-they didn't really need it right this minute-and headed out to the barn, telling Magdalena, "I'll be back," over his shoulder.

The crate was large, heavy, and unwieldy. He'd brought it to the farm from Baroyeca in the wagon. Now it rested on a sledge. He'd been warned to keep it upright; bad things would happen, he was told, if it went over on its side. He didn't want bad things to happen, not after the money he'd spent. He dragged the crate out of the barn and toward the farmhouse.

Magdalena came outside. "What have you got there?" she asked.

Hipolito Rodriguez smiled. He'd made a point of coming back from town after sundown, so she wouldn't see what was in the wagon. "It's-a box," he said.

"Muchas gracias," Magdalena replied with icy sarcasm. "And what is in the box?"

"Why, another box, of course," he replied, which won him a glare from his wife. By then, he'd hauled the crate to the base of the steps. He went back to the barn for a hammer, which he used to pull up the nails holding the crate closed. "You don't believe me? Here, I'll show you."

"Show me what?" Magdalena demanded. But then she gave a little gasp, for, just as Rodriguez had pla

He nodded. "Sн, sweetheart. It's a refrigerator."

She crossed herself again. She did that several times a day. It was nothing out of the ordinary. Then she started to cry. That made him hurry up the stairs and take her in his arms, because she hardly ever did it. She sobbed on his shoulder for a few seconds. At last, pulling away, she said, "I never thought we would have electricity. Even when we got electricity, I never thought we would have one of these. And I wanted one. I wanted one so much." She suddenly looked anxious. "But can we afford it?"