The Victorious opposition

XVI

"He's kept us out of war." Flora Blackford repeated the Socialist Party slogan to a street-corner crowd in her district. "He's kept us out of war, and he's done everything he could to keep food on the working man's table. If you want to see what the Democrats will do about that, look at what Herbert Hoover did. Nothing, that's what."

People in the mostly proletarian crowd clapped their hands. A sprinkling of hecklers at the back started a chant: "Taft! Taft! Robert Taft!"

Flora pointed at them. "I served in Congress with Senator Taft's father. William Howard Taft was an honorable man. So is Robert Taft. I don't say any differently. But I do say this: Senator Taft would be horrified at the way his supporters are bringing Freedom Party tactics into this campaign."

That got more applause. Next to nobody in this strongly Socialist district had a good word to say about Jake Featherston's gang. But one of the hecklers yelled, "Al Smith's the one who's in bed with the Freedom Party!"

"Al Smith is against war. I am against war. I had a brother-in-law killed and a brother badly wounded in the Great War," Flora said. "If you are going to tell me you are for war-if you are going to tell me Senator Taft is for war-you will have a hard time selling that to the people of this district."

"Taft is for keeping Kentucky and Houston," the heckler called.

"How can you keep a state in the country when its own people don't want to be here?" Flora asked. "That was the lesson of the War of Secession-you can't. Some things you can buy at too high a price."

The crowd applauded again, but less enthusiastically than before. Flora understood why: they wanted to have their cake and eat it, too; to have peace and to hold on to Kentucky and Houston. She wanted the same thing. She understood the people who said the USA had sacrificed too much even to think about giving back the two states. At least half the time, she felt that way herself. She would have liked the idea much better if it didn't involve giving them back to Jake Featherston.

"I don't love the Freedom Party," she said. "But it is in power in the Confederate States, and we can't very well pretend it isn't and hope it will go away. What can we do if we don't try to deal with it?" She was trying to convince herself as well as her audience, and she knew it.

"I'd sock it in the nose!" that iron-lunged heckler yelled. "Taft will sock it in the nose!"

"No, he won't." Flora shook her head. "If he does, he'll have a war on his hands, and I can't believe he wants one. He may talk tough, but his foreign policy won't look much different from President Smith's. And his domestic policy…" She rolled her eyes. "He grows like an onion-with his head in the ground." She said it in English. Some of the people her age and older in the crowd echoed it in Yiddish.

She managed to get through the rest of her speech without too much harassment. She had a pretty good idea why, too: the Democrats didn't think they could beat her. She'd never lost an election in this district. The Democrats had elected a candidate here while she was First Lady, but she'd trounced him as soon as she returned to the hustings.

At the end, she said, "If you're in favor of what President Smith has done, you'll vote for him again, and you'll vote for me. If you're not, you'll vote for Taft. It's about that simple, my friends. Forward with Smith or back with Taft?"

She stepped down from the platform with applause ringing in her ears. When she'd started agitating for the Socialists, she hadn't had a platform-not a real one. She'd made her first few speeches standing on crates or beer barrels. She was right around the corner from the Croton Brewery, where she'd spoken at the outbreak of the Great War. She'd opposed war then; she still did. In 1914, her party hadn't gone along with her. This year, it did.

Why aren't I happier, then? she wondered.

In 1914, the Confederate States hadn't been that different from the United States. Most of the oppressed proletariat in the CSA had been black, but capitalists had oppressed workers almost as savagely in the USA. Now… Things were different now.

A middle-aged man in a homburg limped up to her, leaning on a stick. "Good speech," he said. A Soldiers' Circle pin showing a sword through his conscription year in a silver circle sparkled on his lapel.

"Thank you, David," Flora said with a sigh. That her own brother could belong to a reactionary organization like the Soldiers' Circle-and not only belong but wear the pin that showed he was proud to belong-had always dismayed her. The Soldiers' Circle wasn't the Freedom Party, but some of its higher-ups wished it were.

"Good speech," David Hamburger repeated, "but I'm still going to vote for Taft."

"I hadn't expected anything different," she said. David had gone into the Great War a Socialist like the rest of the family. He'd come out a conservative Democrat. He'd also come out with one leg gone above the knee. Flora had no doubt the two were related.

She asked, "And will you vote for Chaim Cohen, too?" Cohen was the latest Democrat to try to unseat her.

Her brother turned red. "No," he said. "I don't like all of your ideas-I don't like most of your ideas-but I know you're honest. And you're family. I don't let family down."

"Being family isn't reason enough to vote for me," she said.

"I think it is." David laughed. "And you may not like my politics, but at least I care about things. Did you see your sisters or your other brother or Mother and Father at your speech?"

Now Flora was the one who had to say, "No." Sophie and Esther and Isaac had their own lives, and lived them. They were proud when she won reelection, but they didn't even come to Socialist Party headquarters any more. As for her parents… "Mother and Father don't get out as much as they did."

"I know. They're getting old." David shook his head. "They've got old. Bis hindert und tzvantzik yuhr."

"Omayn," Flora said automatically, though she know her mother and father wouldn't live to 120 years. People didn't, however much you wished they would. A stab of loss and longing for Hosea pierced her. She was grateful her parents had lived to grow old. So many people didn't, even in the modern world.

"Have you got plans for tonight, or can you go to dinner with your reactionary tailor of a little brother?" David asked.

"I can go," Flora said. "And it's on me. I know I make more money than you do." She knew she made a lot more money than he did, but she didn't want to say so out loud.

With his usual touchy pride, David said, "I'm doing all right." He'd never asked her or anybody else for a dime, so she supposed he was. With a wry grin, though, he went on, "I'll let you buy. Don't think I won't. How does that go? 'From each according to her abilities, to each according to his needs'? Something like that, anyhow."

"I never heard anybody quote-I mean misquote-Marx to figure out who's getting dinner before," Flora said, and she couldn't help laughing. "Since I'm buying, how does Kornblatt's sound?"

"Let's go," her brother said, so the delicatessen must have sounded good.

When they got there, he ordered brisket and a schooner of beer. Flora chose stuffed cabbage, which just wasn't the same in Philadelphia. What she got at Kornblatt's wasn't the same as what she'd helped her mother make when she lived on the Lower East Side all the time, but it came closer.

David attacked the brisket as if he hadn't eaten in weeks. He'd devoured almost all of it before he looked up and said, "You really think we ought to give back what we won in the war? Give it back to those 'Freedom'-yelling mamzrim?"

"If the people who live there don't want to be part of the country, how can we keep them?" Flora asked.

"They were pretty quiet till Featherston started stirring them up," David said, which was true, or at least close to true. He speared his last bite of meat, chewed it, swallowed, and went on, "If we're not doing the same thing with the shvartzers in the CSA, we're missing a hell of a chance."

"I don't know anything about that," Flora said.

"Somebody ought to," her brother said, and somebody probably did. If the United States weren't trying to use Negroes in the Confederate States to make life difficult for the government there, then the War Department was indeed falling down on the job. Flora disliked a lot of the people and policies in the War Department, but she did not think the men at the top there were fools. Over almost a quarter of a century of public life, she'd learned the difference between someone who couldn't do his job and someone who simply disagreed with her about what the job should be.

"Say what you want," she told David, "but we'd just have endless trouble if we tried to keep those states."

David didn't reply with words, not right away. Instead, he rapped his artificial leg with his knuckles. By the sound that came from it, he might almost have been knocking on a door; it was made of wood and canvas and leather and metal. "You know how many men like me there are in the USA-men without legs, men without arms, men without eyes, men without faces? If we don't keep what we won, why did we get shot and blown up and gassed? Answer me that one, and then I'll say good-bye to Kentucky and Houston and Sequoyah."

"There is no answer," Flora said. "Sometimes something looks like a good idea when you do it but turns out not to be later on. Or haven't you ever had that happen?"

"Oh, yes. I've seen that. Who hasn't? But this one is kind of large to treat that way. And what do we do if giving back those states turns out to be that same kind of mistake? Taking them again would get expensive."

"I don't know," Flora said.

"Well, that's honest, anyhow. I said you were," her brother replied. "Does Al Smith know? Does anybody in the whole wide world know?"

"How can anybody know?" Flora asked, as reasonably as she could. "We'll just have to see how things turn out, that's all."

David paused to light a cigarette. He blew smoke up toward the ceiling, then said, "Seems to me that's a better reason for not doing something than for doing it. But I'm no politician, so what do I know?"

"It's going to happen." Flora knew she sounded uncomfortable. She couldn't help it. She went on, "If it makes you that unhappy, the thing to do is to vote for Taft. I think it will work out all right. I hope it does."

"I hope it does, too. But I don't think so. The Confederates on the banks of the Ohio again?" David Hamburger shook his head. "We had to worry about that for years, and then we didn't, and now we will again."

"When they were on the Ohio, they didn't cross it in the last war," Flora said.

"They didn't have barrels then. They didn't have bombers then, either," her brother said.

"Even if they do get it back, they've promised to leave it demilitarized afterwards," Flora said.

"Oh, yes. They've promised." David nodded. "So tell me-how far do you trust Jake Featherston's promises?"

Flora wished he hadn't asked that. She'd deplored Featherston in the U.S. Congress long before he was elected. She liked him no better, trusted him no further, now that he was president of the CSA. As she had on the stump, she said, "He's there. We have to deal with him." Her brother let the words fall flat, which left them sounding much worse than if he'd tried to answer them.

Chester Martin faced Election Day with all the enthusiasm of a man going to a doctor to have a painful boil lanced. His efforts to build a construction workers' union in antilabor Los Angeles had got strong backing from the Socialist Party. How could he forget that? He couldn't. But he couldn't make himself like the upcoming plebiscite, either.

His wife had no doubts. "I don't want another war," Rita said. "I lost my first husband in the last one." She hardly ever spoke of him, but now she went on, "Why should anybody else have to go through what I did? If we don't have to fight, that's good news to me."

But Chester answered, "Who says we won't?"

"Al Smith does, that's who." Rita sent him an exasperated stare. "Or are you going to vote for a Democrat for president again? Look how well that turned out the last time."

"I don't know. I'm thinking about it," Chester said. Rita looked even more exasperated. She'd always been a Socialist. He'd been a Democrat through the Great War, but the only time he'd voted for a Democratic presidential candidate was in 1932, when he'd chosen Calvin Coolidge over Hosea Blackford. Blackford had had three and a half years to end the business collapse, and hadn't done it. Coolidge, of course, dropped dead three weeks before taking office, and Herbert Hoover, his running mate, hadn't done it, either. For that matter, neither had Smith. Chester went on, "Giving back so much of what we fought for sticks in my craw."

"Giving the country back to the Democrats sticks in my craw," Rita said. "Do you think Taft cares about what you're trying to do here? If you do, you're nuts. His father didn't stand with the producers, and neither does he."

That had an unpleasant ring of truth. Plenty of people would think local issues were the most important ones in the election. Half the time, Chester did. But, the other half of the time, he didn't. He said, "If the Confederates want Houston and Kentucky back and then they're done, that's one thing."

"They say that's all," Rita reminded him.

He nodded. "I know what they say. But Jake Featherston says all sorts of things. If he gets them back and starts putting soldiers into them, that's a different story. If he does that, we've got trouble on our hands."

"Even if he does, we can beat the Confederates again if we have to," Rita said. "If we tell them to pull back, they'd have to back down, wouldn't they?"

"Who knows? The point is, we shouldn't have to find out." Chester muttered unhappily to himself. He wanted a party with a strong foreign policy, and he also wanted a party with a strong domestic policy. Trouble was, the Democrats offered the one and the Socialists the other. He couldn't have both. "Maybe I ought to vote for the Republicans. Then I'd have the worst of both worlds."

"Funny. Funny like a crutch," his wife said. "Well, I can't tell you what to do, but I know what I'm going to."

Chester didn't. He went through October and into November unsure and unhappy. Autumn in Los Angeles was nothing like what it had been in Toledo. It was the one season of the year where he might have preferred his old home town. Trees didn't blaze with color here. Most of them didn't even lose their leaves. The air didn't turn crisp and clean, either. It rained once, toward the end of October. That was the only real way to tell summer was gone for good. The Sunday before the election, it was back up to eighty-one. That wouldn't have happened in Toledo, but there was nothing wrong with sixty-one, either. Forty-one and twenty-one were different, to say nothing of one. Los Angeles might see forty-one as a low. Twenty-one? One? Never.

Picketing was a lot easier when you weren't freezing while you carried a sign. Chester and his fellow construction workers kept on getting help from the local Socialist Party. He did grumble about the plebiscite with Party men, but never very loudly. Like most people, he was shy about biting the hand that fed him. The Socialists probably wouldn't have dropped support for his young, struggling union if they knew he might vote for Taft, but why take chances?

Houses and apartment buildings and factories and shops went up all over Los Angeles and the surrounding suburbs, but not many went up without pickets around the construction sites. The Los Angeles Times kept screaming that the pickets were nothing but a bunch of dirty Reds who ought to be burned alive because hanging was too good for them. But the Times screamed that about everything it didn't like, and it didn't like much. Strikers and cops began to learn to get along, if not to love one another. Even the insults and cries of, "Scab!" as men crossed the picket line came to have a certain ritualistic quality to them.

November 5 dawned bright and clear, though the day plainly wouldn't reach the eighties. "What are you going to do?" Rita asked at breakfast.

"Vote." Martin reached for the pepper shaker and spread pungent black flakes over his fried eggs.

Rita made an irritated noise. "How?"

"Oh, about like this." He mimed picking up a stamp and making an X on a ballot with it.

"Thank you so much." Somehow, no sarcasm flayed like a spouse's. His wife asked a question he couldn't evade: "Who are you going to vote for?"

"To tell you the truth, honey, I won't know till I get inside the voting booth," Chester answered.

"If you don't vote for Al Smith, you'll end up sorry," Rita said. "You were when you didn't vote for Blackford eight years ago."

"I know I was. I think Coolidge might have been better than Hoover, but we'll never know about that, will we?" He spread butter and grape jam on a piece of toast, then started to throw out the empty jam jar.

"Don't do that," Rita said. "I'll wash it out and use it for a glass. Jelly glasses are better for Carl-they don't hold as much as real ones, and they're thick, so they don't break as easy if he drops them."

"All right," Martin said with his mouth full. He put the jam jar back on the table. When he finished the toast, he gave Rita a quick, greasy kiss, stuck a cloth cap on his head, and hurried out the door. Rita took a deep breath, as if to call something after him, but she didn't. She must have realized it wouldn't change his mind.

The polling place was in the auditorium of an elementary school three or four blocks from the apartment. Chester got there as it opened. As always, the child-sized chairs made him smile. Once upon a time, he'd fit into seats like those. No more, no more. He gave his name and address to the white-mustached man in charge of the list. The man matched it against the entry, then handed him a ballot. "Take any empty voting booth," he droned. How many times had he said that, and in how many elections? How many more would he say it today?

There it was, the big question, right at the top of the ballot. Smith or Taft? Taft or Smith? Chester ignored the Republicans' candidate. Not many people outside of his native Indiana cared about the businessman they'd nominated, which meant they weren't about to win with Willkie. Besides, how could a Wendell hope to prevail against the brute simplicity of Al and Bob? Smith or Taft? Taft or Smith?

Chester stamped the X by Taft's name, hoping he was doing the right thing. Had he voted for Smith, he would have had the same hope, and would have been just as unsure of himself. It's done, anyhow, he thought, and went down the rest of the ballot in a hurry. Most of the candidates he voted for were Socialists. That salved his conscience, at least a little.

He carried the finished ballot back to the table where he'd got it. Another old man took it, folded it, and thrust it through the slot in the ballot box. "Mr. Martin has voted," he intoned, the words as formal and unchanging as any this side of the Mass.

Having voted, Chester Martin hurried to the trolley stop. He rode across town to Westwood, not far from the Pacific and even closer to the southern campus of the University of California. Orange groves were going down, houses were going up, and union labor, as usual in Los Angeles, was being ignored.

"Hey, Chester!" another organizer called as he came up. "You vote yet?"

"Sure did, before I came here," Martin answered. Westwood wasn't bright and sunny. Fog lingered here, and probably wouldn't burn off till mid-morning. "How about you, Ralph?"

"I'll take care of it on the way home," Ralph answered. "Who'd you vote for?" He winked and laughed uproariously. He was sure he already knew, which meant Chester didn't have to tell him. Under the circumstances, that came as something of a relief.

The strikers carried their picket signs around and around the construction site. They stayed on the sidewalk. Once, at a different site, a man had stumbled and gone onto what would be a lawn. The cops nabbed him for trespassing. Not here, not today.

"Scabs!" the picketers shouted-along with other things, even less complimentary-when workers crossed the picket line and went into the construction site. They had to watch what they said, too. The police had been known to run strikers in for public obscenity. Still, endearments like "You stinking sack of manure!" got the message across.

Most of the strikebreakers went in with their heads down. Watching them cross the picket line was one thing that made Chester glad he'd chosen this side. He had yet to see a scab who didn't act as if his conscience bothered him. A man might go and decide he had to eat any way he could, but he seldom seemed happy about it.

One of the scabs here, a big man on whom the picketers had showered a lot of abuse, finally got fed up and shouted back: "Wait till the Pinkertons get into town, you bastards! They'll kick your asses but good!"

Not one but two foremen ran up to the strikebreaker. They both started cussing him up one side and down the other. The cops didn't jug them for the language they used, any more than they'd arrested the scab.

Chester didn't stop marching or yelling. But he sure as hell did prick up his ears. If the bosses were bringing in Pinkerton men, they were going to try breaking the union. The more notice he had about that, the better he could fight back, because the Pinkertons, notorious union-busters, fought dirty, really dirty. If he'd been one of those foremen, he would have cussed out that scab, too, for tipping the other side's hand.

At lunch, Ralph came up to him and said, "Pinkertons, is it? Well, there'll be a hot time in the old town tonight."

"You bet there will," Chester said. "We can lick 'em, though. They're bastards, sure as hell, but we can lick 'em. And if we do, what have the bosses got left to throw at us? Soldiers? Whose side would they be on?"

"Pinkertons." Ralph made a disgusted face. "I fought those fuckers years ago, in Pittsburgh. Never thought I'd see their ugly mugs again."

Martin nodded. "Same with me in Toledo. They're goons, all right. You think we're going to back down, though? I sure as hell don't. I've got brass knucks, and I can always get a.45 if it looks like I need one."

The other union man looked worried. "You gotta be careful with that, though. You pull it, the cops have the perfect excuse to blow you to kingdom come."

"I know. I know. Like I said, I did this before," Chester said. "But I know something else, too-if they get us on the run, we're in trouble. I don't aim to let that happen."

Cincinnatus Driver refused to buy a paper as he steered his truck toward the railroad yard. He was too disgusted to want to hear anything more about Al Smith's reelection than he had the night before on the wireless. He'd stayed up till the West Coast returns came in, and poured down three cups of coffee to try to make up for not enough sleep. Taft, behind in the race, had needed to sweep the Coast to win enough electoral votes to overtake the president. He'd won in California, but lost Oregon and Washington-and the election.

They're gonna hold the plebiscite, Cincinnatus thought dolefully. They're gonna hold it, and the Confederate States are gonna win. That meant he had to get his mother and father out of Kentucky before it left the USA and returned to the CSA. He knew what being a Negro in the Confederate States was like-and it was bound to be even worse now, under Jake Featherston and the Freedom Party, than it had been before the Great War.

He wished his mother were in better shape than she was. He could have sent his father and her train fare, and they would have ended up in Des Moines not long afterwards. As things were, with her sinking ever deeper into her second childhood, he knew he would have to go down to Covington to help his father bring her out. Elizabeth wouldn't like it-he didn't like it himself-but he saw no way around it.

He pulled into the railroad yard at a quarter to seven, yawning despite all the coffee. When he jumped out of his trunk and hurried over to see what cargoes he could pick up, first one railroad dick and then another waved to him. He was accepted here. He belonged. He never remembered In-longing in Covington-certainly not in any part of it where he bumped up against white men. The first conductor whose train he approached greeted him with, "Hey, Cincinnatus. How you doing?"

"Not bad, Jack," he answered. He never would have called a white man in Covington by his first name. "What you got?"

But Jack felt like gabbing. "Four more years of Smith," he said. "I'm happy. My son got conscripted not long ago, and I don't want him getting shot at. I saw too goddamn much of that myself twenty-five years ago."

That gave Cincinnatus a new slant on things. He'd been shot at during the Great War, too, if only as a truck driver behind the lines. But he didn't have to worry about Achilles getting conscripted. The USA didn't conscript Negroes, any more than the CSA did. If war came, Achilles would be as safe as anybody. Even so, Cincinnatus said, "You won't find anybody colored who wants to go back to livin' in the Confederate States."

By the way Jack blinked, he'd no more thought about that than Cincinnatus had worried about conscription. The white man said, "I don't suppose there's enough colored folks to change the vote, though."

Cincinnatus grimaced. That was painfully true. Not wanting to dwell on the likely fate of Kentucky (and Houston, and perhaps Sequoyah, but Kentucky mattered most to him), he asked again, "What you got here?"

"Furniture," Jack said, and Cincinnatus' eyes lit up. He and Jack haggled for a while, but not too long. He loaded the truck as full as he could, then roared off for the shops taking delivery. If he got rid of everything in a hurry, he thought he could be back for another equally profitable load by lunchtime.

He was, too. Plenty of things held back a colored man: fewer in the USA than in the CSA, but still plenty. Adding laziness on top of everything else would only have made matters worse. Cincinnatus was a lot of different things. Whatever he was, though, he'd never been afraid of hard work.

His back ached when he pulled up to the apartment building that night, but the money in the pocket of his overalls made the ache seem worthwhile. He opened the mailbox in the lobby, crumpled up the advertising circulars, and winced when he saw a letter with a Covington postmark and the sprawling handwriting of his father's neighbor. News from Covington was unlikely to be good. Because he wished he didn't have to find out what the letter said, he carried it upstairs without opening it.

When he walked in, Amanda was doing homework. He smiled at her. Gonna have me two high-school graduates soon, he thought proudly. That ain't bad for a Kentucky nigger who never went to school at all.

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 itself. She had grumbled about that.

Brigadier General-Rowling? — wouldn't listen. He said, "Your president agreed to it, so you're stuck with it."

She had no answer for that. What Jake Featherston said, went. "Let them enjoy it while they can, then," she said, "because they sure won't be doing any voting after Kentucky comes back where it belongs."

The U.S. officer scowled. She'd hoped he would. He said, "Maybe you'd like to go into the colored district yourself on Tuesday so you can see everything is on the up and up?"

"I'm not afraid, if that's what you mean," she said.

"Bully for you," said the fat man from the United States. Anne couldn't remember the last time she'd heard anyone say bully, even sardonically.

January 7, 1941, dawned clear and cold. Anne Colleton got up to see the sun rise to make sure she missed none of the plebiscite. Polls opened at seven. Polling places were officially marked by the Stars and Stripes and the Stars and Bars flying in front of them-and unofficially by the armed U.S. soldiers who stood outside each one to make sure there was no trouble. Jake Featherston had offered to send Confederate soldiers into Kentucky and Houston and Sequoyah to help with that, but President Smith had told him no, and he hadn't pushed it. For the moment, they remained U.S. territory.

For the moment, Anne thought with a ferocious smile.

Both the USA and the CSA had poll watchers at every polling place. They checked the men and women who came in to vote against the lists of those who were eligible. Every now and then, they would argue. Both sides kept lists of contested voters. If the plebiscite turned out to be close, those lists would turn into weapons. In Kentucky and Houston, at least, Anne didn't think the vote would be close.

She did go into the colored part of Covington. Her motorcar flew the Stars and Bars from the wireless aerial. In most of Covington, people had cheered when they saw it. In the colored district… Anne wished she'd thought to take down the flag.

Some of the U.S. poll watchers in the colored part of town were Negroes: young men who'd grown up and got an education while Kentucky belonged to the USA. Because the voting rolls for Negroes were new and imperfect, they bickered constantly with their C.S. counterparts, and argued with them as if they believed they were just as good as whites. In the Confederate States, that would have been a death sentence.

One of the Confederate poll watchers said as much: "When this here state goes back where it belongs, you better recollect what happens to uppity niggers, Lucullus."

The Negro-Lucullus-looked steadily back at him. "You better recollect what happens when you push folks too far," he answered. "You push 'em so far they don't care if they lives or dies, why should they care if you lives or dies?"

"Talk is cheap," the white man fleered. Lucullus said not a word. Anne feared he'd won the exchange.

When she came out of the polling place-a little storefront church-she discovered her auto had a smashed windscreen (though they said windshield in the USA). Her driver was out of the motorcar, hopping mad and yelling at a U.S. soldier: "Why the hell didn't you stop that goddamn nigger? He flung a brick right in front of your nose, and you just stood there."

"I'm sorry, sir." The green-gray-clad soldier sounded anything but sorry. By his accent, he was from nowhere near Kentucky. "I didn't see a thing."

"What is your name?" Anne demanded. "I'm going to report you to your commanding officer."

"Jenkins, ma'am. Rudy Jenkins," the soldier answered. "And you can report as much as you please, but I won't lose any sleep over it."

She thought about telling him where to go and how to get there in the sort of language he would use himself-thought about it and decided it would do no good. Oh, she intended to give his name to that stuffed pork chop in a brigadier general's uniform, but she was sure that would do her no good, either. Jenkins might get a public slap on the wrist, but he was bound to get some private congratulations along with it.

She turned to the driver. "Just take us on to the next stop. This fellow can laugh as much as he pleases, but he'll be leaving soon, and we're going to stay."

The driver fumed. But Rudy Jenkins fumed even more. Anne nodded to herself. She'd done that right.

Before she left the colored district, the auto picked up a couple of more dents. The driver plainly wanted to curse some more; her presence in the motorcar inhibited him. "To hell with these goddamn bastards," she said, her voice crisp. "From now on, no one will give a shit what they think. Right?"

"Uh, yes, ma'am." He sounded scandalized. She smiled; she'd heard a lot of men sound that way. On they went, to a new polling place in the white part of town. There, Freedom Party stalwarts waving Party flags paraded just outside the hundred-foot electioneering limit. The U.S. soldiers by the polling place looked as if they wanted to shoot the men in white shirts and butternut trousers. The stalwarts were careful not to give them an excuse.

Anne went from one polling place to another till the polls closed at eight o'clock. Then the driver took her to the Covington city hall, where the votes would be counted. As at the polling places, both the USA and the CSA had observers present to make sure the count went straight.

Watching it progress, Anne found more people in Covington voting to stay in the United States than she would have liked: certainly more than the Negro vote-and what a mad notion that was! — accounted for. Some of the whites who'd grown up in the USA must have been too lazy to want a change. Even so, returning to the Confederacy took an early lead in Covington, and never lost it.

Wireless sets blared in the white-painted, windowless, smoke-filled room where the ballots were tallied. They let the counters and the observers keep track of what was going on in the rest of Kentucky and in the other states where there were plebiscites. Return to the CSA held the same sort of lead in Kentucky as a whole as it did in Covington-less than Anne would have liked, but plenty to win. Houston was going for the CSA in a rout: better than three to one. Sequoyah… Sequoyah gave the damnyankees something to smile about, because the people there seemed to be choosing to stay in the United States.

The tally in Covington finished about half past one. By then, Anne's driver had fallen asleep in a folding chair. She eyed him in some admiration; she didn't think she could have done that in a quiet room, let alone in the noisy chaos at city hall. He jerked and almost fell out of the chair when she shook him awake again. She was sorry about that, but not sorry enough to keep from doing it.

Noisy chaos roiled through the rest of Covington, too, as she saw on the short trip back to her hotel. Freedom Party stalwarts and others who backed the CSA danced in the streets, waving Party flags, the Stars and Bars, and the Confederate battle flag. A lot of them were drunk. They cheered the Confederate flag on the aerial of Anne's battered auto. Somehow, the cheers turned into a rousing chorus of "Dixie."

Anne wondered if the celebrants would go into the colored district and take their revenge on Covington's Negroes for voting to stay in the USA-or for having the nerve to vote at all. Maybe the U.S. soldiers who still patrolled the town would keep them from doing that. But any Negroes who stayed in Covington after Kentucky changed hands wouldn't have a happy time of it. Anne supposed a lot of them would go while the going was good. The United States are welcome to them, she thought.

She snatched a few hours' sleep. When she came downstairs for breakfast, she got a copy of the Covington Chronicle. The banner headline summed things up:

UNTIED STATES!

A smaller subhead below gave the details:

KENTUCKY, HOUSTON RETURN TO CSA!

SEQUOYAH STAYS UNDER STARS AND STRIPES!

After bacon and eggs and lots of coffee, Anne paid a call on the U.S. commandant in Covington. "The people have spoken, Brigadier General," she said-and if she was gloating, she thought she had good reason to.

A cup of coffee steamed on the fat officer's desk. He looked to have had even less sleep than she had. "The people are a bunch of damned fools," he said. "They elected Featherston, didn't they?"

"I don't talk about your president that way," she said.

"Why not? I do." The commandant swigged from the coffee cup. He got down to business: "Under the agreement, we have thirty days to withdraw our men. Yours are not to follow. Kentucky will stay demilitarized. U.S. citizens wishing to leave the state may do so until it passes under Confederate sovereignty. A lot of them, I expect, will already have made plans to do so."

"Collaborators and niggers," Anne said scornfully. "You can have 'em."

"They'll do all right for themselves in the United States," the U.S. general predicted. "And I'll give you-and your president-some free advice, too."

"Free advice?" Anne didn't laugh in his face, but she came close. "I'm sure it's worth every penny you charge for it."

She hoped that would make him angry. If it did, he didn't show it. He just nodded, setting his chins in motion, and said, "Oh, no doubt. Well, I'll give it to you anyway, mostly 'cause I know you won't listen to it."

Anne could simply have turned her back and walked out the door. Instead, with ill-concealed impatience, she said, "Go ahead, then. Get it over with."

"Thanks a lot." The U.S. officer wasn't bad at sarcasm, either, even if he was built like a zeppelin. "If you people are smart, you won't land on this state too hard. You won the plebiscite, yes. But you didn't win it by as much as you thought you would, and you can't tell me any different. If you come down on Kentucky with both feet, you'll have about as much fun holding it down as we have since the last war."

That made more sense than Anne wished it did-enough that she decided to mention it in her report to President Featherston. She wouldn't suggest that he follow the fat man's advice; she knew better. But noting it as an item of intelligence wouldn't hurt.

She also decided she would note the way-Rowling? she had to check that-had spoken of the last war. Unless she altogether misread his tone, he was already thinking about the next one.

As had been his habit since the days of the Mexican civil war, Jefferson Pinkard prowled the barracks in the prison camp he ran in Louisiana. Camp Dependable wouldn't boil over while his back was turned.

It might boil over anyway. He knew that. The black prisoners in the camp had little to lose. They'd been captured in arms against the Confederate States. Nothing good was going to happen to them. They only thing that kept them in line was the certain knowledge that they would die if they rose up against the guards. Jeff's endless prowling was designed not least to make sure they stayed certain of that.

Whenever he stepped into a barracks, he had a pistol in his hand and half a squad of guards with submachine guns at his back. The Negro captives jumped down from their bunks and sprang to attention as soon as he came in. They were certain of what would happen if they didn't show him that courtesy, too.

"You, boy!" Pinkard pointed to one of them, a big, muscular buck. "Give me your name and number and where you were captured."

"I's Plutarch, suh," the Negro replied. He rattled off the camp number, finishing, "I was cotched up in Franklin Parish, suh. Some damn nigger sell me out. I ever find out who, dat one dead coon."

A lot of prisoners here had similar complaints. Some Negroes didn't want guerrilla war in their back yards. The ones who didn't had to be careful with what they did and said, though. A lot of them had ended up gruesomely dead when the men they were trying to betray took vengeance.

"Any complaints?" Pinkard asked.

Plutarch nodded. "I ain't got enough to eat, I ain't got enough to wear, an' I's here. 'Side from that, everything fine."

"Funny nigger," growled one of the guards behind Pinkard. "You'll laugh outa the other side of your face pretty damn quick, funny nigger."

Several of the other blacks in the barracks had smiled and nodded at what Plutarch had to say. None had been rash enough to laugh out loud. Now even the men who'd smiled tried to pretend they hadn't. Pinkard said, "You get the same rations and same clothes as everybody else. And if you didn't want to be here, you never should have picked up a gun."

"Huh!" Plutarch said. "White folks rise up against what they don't like, they's heroes. Black folks do the same, we's goddamn niggers."

"Bet your ass you are, boy," that guard said.

"There's a difference," Pinkard said.

Plutarch nodded. "Sure enough is. Y'all won. We lost. Ain't no bigger difference'n dat." That wasn't the difference Jeff had had in mind, which didn't mean the prisoner was wrong. Pinkard poked through the barracks. He knew how things were supposed to be, and carefully checked out everything that didn't match the pattern. Nothing looked like the start of an escape attempt, but you couldn't be sure without a thorough inspection.

On to the next barracks. As before, prisoners tumbled out of their bunks and stood at stiff attention. There was one difference here, though: Willy Knight dwelt in Barracks Six. The tall, blond, former vice president stood out from the black men all around him like a snowball in a coal field.

He was not the man he had been when Freedom Party guards brought him to Camp Dependable. He was scrawnier; camp rations weren't enough to let anybody keep the weight he'd come in with. He was dirtier, too-water for washing was in short supply. And, in an odd way, he was tougher than he had been. That he'd been tough enough to stay alive surprised Jeff Pinkard, who wouldn't have given him the chance of a snowball: a snowball in hell.

Hell this might well have been. But none of the Negro inhabitants here had taken advantage of the chance to get rid of a Freedom Party big shot. That surprised Pinkard, too-it did, but then again, it didn't. The blacks might have suspected Knight was in here as much as bait as for any other reason. Anybody who harmed him was liable to pay the price.

They might not have been wrong, either. For the moment, Jeff's orders were to look the other way if anything happened to Willy Knight. But one telegram could change that, and could change it days or weeks or months after something nasty happened to the ex-vice president.

Almost as if Knight were any other prisoner, Pinkard pointed at him and snapped, "You! Give me your name and number!" He couldn't make himself call another white boy.

Knight repeated his name and camp number, then added, "I was captured in Richmond, Virginia, trying to save the country."

"I want something from you, I'll ask for it," Jeff said.

The guard who'd growled at Plutarch growled at Willy Knight, too: "You really want to catch hell, just go on runnin' your mouth."

Knight shut up. The first time someone had said something like that to him, he'd asked what could be worse than coming to the camp to begin with. The guards had spent the next couple of weeks showing him what could be worse. Another way he was different now was that he didn't have any front teeth. He'd learned something, but not everything, about keeping quiet.

Pinkard didn't ask him if he had any complaints. Even if Knight did, nobody was going to do anything about them. That being so, why waste time and breath?

The warden did inspect Barracks Six with care unusual even for him. If some of the colored prisoners escaped, that would be a misfortune. He'd get called on the carpet. If Willy Knight escaped, that would be a catastrophe. Somebody's head would have to roll, and he knew whose. He might end up in one of these hard, narrow bunks himself-or they might simply shoot him and get it over with. Nobody, but nobody, was going to escape from Barracks Six.

Everything seemed shipshape. Pinkard didn't trust the way things seemed. He had no reason not to. He just didn't. He took out a little book and scribbled a note to himself. Half the men in here would get cleared out before the day was done, to be replaced by prisoners from other barracks. If plots were stirring, that would slow them down. People would have to figure out who could be trusted and who couldn't. I better stick a new informer or two in here, too, Jeff thought. The less that went on without his knowing it, the better the camp ran.

He was heading for the next barracks when a guard came up to him with a yellow envelope. "This here wire just came in, boss," the man said, and thrust it at him.

"What the hell?" Pinkard took the envelope, opened it, and extracted the telegram inside. "What the hell?" he said again, this time in tones of deep dismay.

"What's the matter?" the guard asked.

"What's the matter?" Jeff would echo anybody, not just himself. "I'll tell you what's the matter. We're going to get a new shipment of prisoners, that's what-a big new shipment of prisoners. Nice of 'em to let us know, wasn't it? They're supposed to start comin' in this afternoon."

"A new shipment of prisoners?" The guard proved he could repeat what he'd just heard, too. Then he exploded, much as Jeff wanted to do. "Jesus H. Christ! Where the hell we gonna put 'em? We already got niggers swingin' from the rafters. Shit, we got niggers comin' out our assholes, is what we got."

"You know that, Wes, and I know that, and anybody who knows one goddamn thing about this here camp knows it, too," Pinkard said. "But you know what else? The folks in Richmond don't know it. Either that or they just don't give a fuck." He looked around more than a little frantically. "Where am I gonna put all them nigger bastards? How am I gonna stop 'em from runnin' away? Christ! How are we gonna feed 'em? This here don't say word one about extra rations."

Wes frowned. Then he shrugged. "Split up what you get with as many mouths as we got inside. What the hell else can you do?"

"Damfino." Jefferson Pinkard shook his head in deep discontent. "Prisoners we got are already hungry as can be on what we're feeding 'em. Nothin' left to scrounge off the countryside. If they got to make do with three-quarters as much-or maybe only half as much: how can I guess? — they're gonna start starving to death in jigtime."

"You don't need to get your bowels in an uproar about it, boss," Wes said. "They're only niggers, for Chrissake. Ain't like you was starvin' Uncle Henry and Aunt Daisy."

"Oh, hell, I know that," Pinkard said. "But this is all just a bunch of crap." His sense of order, of propriety, was offended. "If they send us extra men, they oughta send us the extra rations to go with 'em. Ain't fair if they don't. It's like in the Bible where old what's-his-name-Pharaoh-made the Jews make bricks without straw." He wanted things to work the way they were supposed to.

"Reckon the sheenies had it coming to 'em, same as the coons do now," Wes said.

But Pinkard shook his head. "No. You give somebody something to do, you got to give him the chance to do it, too. And Richmond ain't."

"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, unnatural, unpracticed. The knob clicked into the new position. The light came on. It was even brighter than Rodriguez had expected.

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 planned, the front panel of the crate fell away. She stared at him. "Is that-?"

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?"

"It wasn't as much as I thought it would be," he answered. "And it isn't supposed to use that much electricity. Look." He wrestled off the rest of the crate. That done, he opened the refrigerator door. "In the freezer compartment, it even makes its own ice in little trays."

"What will they think of next?" Magdalena whispered. "A few years ago, I don't think there was any ice in all of Baroyeca. Who in the whole town had ever seen ice?"

"Anyone who'd gone north to fight los Estados Unidos." Rodriguez shivered at the memory. And he'd only been in Texas. The men who'd fought in Kentucky and Tennessee had had it worse. "I have seen ice, por Dios, and I wish I hadn't."

"You'd seen God make ice," Magdalena said with a snort. "Had you ever seen people making ice?"

"Even the people had it up there," he said. "They're richer than we are. But we're gaining. I know we are. I didn't used to think so, not before the Freedom Party won. Now I'm sure of it."

"Electricity," his wife said, as if the one word proved everything that needed proving. As far as Rodriguez was concerned, it did.

He went back and closed the refrigerator's door. Then, grunting with effort, he picked up the machine and carried it up the stairs. It wasn't any taller than his navel, but it was plenty heavy. He'd found that out getting the crate into the wagon in the first place. When he set it down on the porch, the boards groaned under the weight. "Open the door for me, please," he said, and Magdalena did.

The kitchen wasn't far. A good thing, too, Rodriguez thought. He set the refrigerator against the wall near an outlet and plugged it in. It started to hum: not loudly, but noticeably. He hadn't known it would do that. He cocked his head to one side, listening and wondering how annoying it would be. Would he get used to it, or would it start to drive him crazy? He didn't know, but he expected he'd find out.

Magdalena came in to stare at the new arrival in the kitchen. "Is it cold yet?"

"I don't know." Rodriguez opened the door and stuck his hand inside. "It feels cooler, anyhow, I think." He took out the ice-cube trays. "Fill these with water. We'll see how long they take to freeze."

"All right." Magdalena did. Carefully, she put the trays back into the freezer compartment, closed its door, and closed the refrigerator door. The hum, which had got louder with the door open, quieted down again. "Not too bad," Magdalena murmured, and Hipolito nodded; he'd been thinking the same thing. She went on, "We have lamps. We have this wonderful refrigerator." She pronounced the unfamiliar word with care. "Do you know what I would like next, when we can afford it?"

"No. What?" Rodriguez hadn't begun to think about what might come after the refrigerator.

But Magdalena had. "A wireless set," she said at once. "That has to be the most wonderful invention in the whole world. Music and people talking here inside our own house whenever we want them-what could be more marvelous?"

"I don't know." Rodriguez hadn't heard the wireless all that often himself. It had brought returns from the last election to Freedom Party headquarters. The cantina had a set, too, one that usually played love songs. He shrugged. "If you want one, I suppose we can do that one of these days. They aren't too expensive."

"I do want one," Magdalena said emphatically. "If we have a wireless set, we can hear everything that happens as soon as it happens. We wouldn't be on a farm outside a little town in a state most of los Estados Confederados don't care about. We would be in New Orleans or Richmond itself."

Rodriguez laughed. "Now I understand," he said. "You want the wireless set so you can catch up on gossip all over the world."

His wife poked him in the ribs. He squirmed. He wasn't usually ticklish, but she'd found a sensitive spot. She said, "And you never gossip at all when you visit La Culebra Verde."

"That's different," he declared. Magdalena didn't say anything, which made him wonder how it was different. He tried his best: "Men talk about important things."

Magdalena laughed in his face. Evidently his best wasn't good enough. But she let him down easy, asking, "Is it ice yet?"

"Let's find out." He opened the refrigerator door. The air that came out was definitely chilly now. The water in the ice-cube trays was still water, though. He touched it with a fingertip. "It's getting colder."

Magdalena touched it, too. She nodded and closed the door. They stood there in front of the refrigerator, listening to the soft hum of the future.