The Victorious Opposition Read online

  Cincinnatus gave Elizabeth a quick kiss, then said, “Where’s Achilles at? He in his room?”

  She shook her head. She was cooking in the maid’s clothes she’d worn to work. “He blew in a little before you got home, stayed just long enough to change his clothes, and then he done blew out again,” she said.

  “Why’d he bother changin’?” Cincinnatus asked. “What he does, he don’t need to.” Thanks not least to Cincinnatus’ insistence—sometimes delivered with a two-by-four—his son had earned his high-school diploma. Then he’d amazed everyone—including, very likely, himself—by landing a clerk’s job at an insurance company. He wasn’t likely to work up much of a sweat filing papers or adding up columns of numbers.

  But Elizabeth said, “Why you think? He takin’ Grace out to the movin’ pictures again.”

  “Oh.” Cincinnatus didn’t know how to go on from there. Grace Chang lived in the apartment right upstairs from his own. Her father ran a laundry and brewed excellent beer (a very handy talent in a state as thoroughly dry as Iowa). Cincinnatus couldn’t deny that Grace was a sweet girl, or that she was a pretty girl. No one at all could deny that she was a Chinese girl.

  She’d been going out with Achilles for more than a year now. It made Cincinnatus acutely nervous. These weren’t the Confederate States, and Grace wasn’t white, but even so. . . . Having the two of them go out together also made Mr. Chang nervous. He liked Achilles well enough—he’d known him since he was a little boy—but there was no denying Achilles wasn’t Chinese.

  “Ain’t nothin’ good gonna come o’ this,” Cincinnatus said heavily.

  Elizabeth didn’t answer right away. She flipped the ham steaks over with a long-handled spatula. “Never can tell,” she said when they were sizzling again. “No, never can tell. Mebbe grandkids come o’ this.”

  “Do Jesus!” Cincinnatus exclaimed. “You reckon he wants to marry her?”

  His wife used the spatula on a mess of potatoes frying in a smaller pan. Then she said, “Don’t reckon he go with a gal for more’n a year unless he thinkin’ ‘bout that. Don’t reckon she go with him unless she thinkin’ ‘bout it, too.”

  “What do we do, he ends up marryin’ the Chinaman’s daughter?” Cincinnatus asked.

  Elizabeth turned more potatoes before answering, “Upstairs right about now, I reckon Mr. Chang sayin’ to his missus, ‘What we do, they git married?’ ” Her effort to reproduce a singsong Chinese accent was one of the funnier things Cincinnatus had heard lately.

  But that bad accent wasn’t the only reason he started laughing. Even though Achilles and Grace had been going out for more than a year, nobody outside their families had said a word to either one of them about their choice of partner. It was as if white Des Moines—the vast majority of the town—couldn’t get excited about what either a Negro or a Chinese did, so long as it didn’t involve any whites.

  Supper was fine. Cincinnatus wanted to stay up and wait for Achilles, but the day he’d put in caught up with him. He went to bed, where he dreamt he was trying to sneak into the USA in his truck so he could take Grace Chang to the moving pictures, but people kept throwing flowerpots at him, so he couldn’t get in.

  A snore came from behind Achilles’ door when Cincinnatus got up. His son didn’t have to be at the office till nine o’clock, so he got to sleep late. That meant Cincinnatus had to head out before Achilles got up. It also meant Cincinnatus couldn’t talk to him about Grace. He had told Achilles an education would come in handy all sorts of ways. Now, to his chagrin, he discovered just how right he was.

  Lucien Galtier got into his motorcar for the drive up to Rivière-du-Loup. The Chevrolet started when Galtier turned the key. One thing any Quebecois with an auto soon learned was the importance of keeping the battery strongly charged in winter—and, up there by the St. Lawrence, winter lasted a long time.

  “Here we go,” Galtier said. He was a small, trim man who’d just turned sixty. He looked it—a life outdoors had left his skin wrinkled and leathery—but he was still vigorous, his hair no lighter than iron gray. When he drove a wagon up into town, he’d had endless philosophical discussions with the horse. The motorcar made a less satisfying partner for such things than the horse had, but enjoyed certain advantages the beast lacked. No horse yet had ever come with a heater.

  The highway was a black asphalt line scribed on the whiteness of fresh snow. By now, with so many years of weathering behind them, the shell holes from the Great War were hard to spy with snow on the ground. Oh, here and there a pockmark gave a clue, but little by little the earth was healing itself.

  Healing, however, was not the same as healed. Every so often, the cycle of freeze and thaw brought to the surface long-buried shells, often rotten with corrosion. Demolition experts in the blue-gray uniforms of the Republic of Quebec disposed of most of those. The spring before, though, Henri Beauchamp had found one with his plow while tilling the ground. His son Jean-Marie now had that farm, a couple of miles from Galtier’s, and there hadn’t been enough left of poor luckless Henri to bury. Lucien didn’t know what to do about that danger. If he didn’t plow, he wouldn’t eat.

  Rivière-du-Loup sat on the bluffs from which the river that gave it its name plunged down into the St. Lawrence. It was a market town, a river port, and a railroad stop. It was the biggest town Galtier had ever seen, except for a few brief visits to Toronto while he was in the Canadian Army more than forty years before. How it measured up in the larger scheme of things he really didn’t know. He really didn’t care, either. At his age, he wasn’t going anywhere else.

  On this crisp, chilly Sunday morning, Rivière-du-Loup seemed even larger than it was. Plenty of farm families from the countryside had come in to hear Mass at the Église Saint-Patrice on Rue Lafontaine. As he usually did, Galtier parked on a side street and walked to the church. More and more motorcars clogged Rivière-du-Loup’s narrow streets, which had been built before anyone thought of motorcars. On Sunday mornings, a lot of horse-drawn wagons kept them company. Seeing a wagon much like the one he’d driven threw Lucien into a fit of nostalgia.

  He came to the church at the same time as his oldest daughter, Nicole; her husband, Dr. Leonard O’Doull; and their son, Lucien, whose size astonished his grandfather every time he saw his namesake. “What is it that you feed this one?” he demanded of the boy’s parents.

  Leonard O’Doull looked puzzled. “You mean we’re supposed to feed him?” he said. “I knew we’d been forgetting something.” He spoke very good Quebecois French; his American accent and his Parisian accent had both faded in the seventeen years since he’d been married to Nicole.

  “How are you, mon père?” Nicole asked.

  “Pas pire,” he answered, which, like the English not bad, would do for everything between agony and ecstasy. He’d known his share of agony a few years before, when his wife died. Ecstasy? Getting new grandchildren came as close as anything he was likely to find at his age.

  Pointing, Nicole said, “There’s Charles,” at the same time as her husband said, “There’s Georges.” Galtier waved to his older and younger sons and their families in turn. His second daughter, Denise, and her husband and children came up as he was greeting his sons. Maybe his other two girls were already in church, or maybe they hadn’t come into town this Sunday.

  “Come on.” Georges, who would always take the bull by the horns, led the way in. “The world had better look out, because here come the Galtiers.” He towered over both Lucien and Charles, who took after his father. With Georges in the lead, maybe the world did need to look out for the Galtiers.

  They weren’t the only large clan going into the church. Quebecois ran to lots of children and to close family ties, so plenty of brothers and sisters and cousins paraded in as units for their friends and neighbors to admire. Filling a couple of rows of pews was by no means an unusual accomplishment.

  Bishop Guillaume presided over Mass. No breath of scandal attached itself to him, as it had to his predecessor
in the see, Bishop Pascal. Pascal had been—no doubt still was—pink and plump and clever. He’d been too quick by half to attach himself to the Americans during the war. Galtier still thought he’d used their influence to get Rivière-du-Loup named an episcopal see—and that he’d done it more for himself than for the town. He’d left the bishopric—and Rivière-du-Loup—in something of a blaze of glory, when his lady friend presented him with twins.

  Galtier found it highly unlikely that Bishop Guillaume would ever father twins. He was well up into his sixties, and ugly as a mud fence. He had a wart on his chin and another on his nose; his eyes, pouched below, were those of a mournful hound; his ears made people think of an auto going down the street with its doors open. He was a good man. Lucien didn’t doubt that a bit. Who would give him the chance to be bad?

  He was also a pious man. Lucien didn’t doubt that, either, where he’d always wondered about Bishop Pascal—and, evidently, had excellent good reason to wonder. Guillaume preached sermons that were thoughtful, Scriptural, well organized . . . and just a little dull.

  After this one, and after receiving Holy Communion, Lucien said, “Sermons are the one thing I miss about Pascal. You’d always get something worth hearing from him. It might not have anything to do with the church, but it was always interesting.”

  “Pascal’s favorite subject was always Pascal,” Georges said.

  Leonard O’Doull raised an eyebrow. His long, fair face marked him as someone out of the ordinary in this crowd of dark, Gallic Quebecois. “And how is he so different from you, then?” he asked mildly.

  Georges’ brother and sisters laughed. Lucien chuckled. As for Georges . . . well, nothing fazed Georges. “How is he different from me?” he echoed. “Don’t be silly, my dear brother-in-law. My favorite subject was never Pascal.”

  His family, or those among them old enough to understand the joke, groaned in unison. “Someone must have dropped you on your head when you were a baby,” Lucien said. “Otherwise, how could you have turned out the way you are?”

  “What’s this you say?” Georges asked in mock astonishment. “Don’t you think I take after you?”

  That was absurd enough to draw another round of groans from his kin. Charles, who really did resemble Lucien in temperament as well as looks, said, “You should count yourself lucky Papa didn’t take after you—with a hatchet.”

  Incorrigible Georges did an impersonation of a chicken after it met the hatchet and before it decided it was dead and lay still. He staggered all over the sidewalk, scattering relatives—and a few neighbors—in his wake. He managed to run into Charles twice, which surprised Lucien very little. When they were younger, Charles had dominated his brother till Georges grew too big for him to get away with it any more. Georges had been getting even ever since.

  “Come back to my house, everyone,” Dr. O’Doull urged, as he did on most Sundays. “We can eat and drink and talk, and the children can take turns getting in trouble.”

  “So can the grownups,” Nicole said, with a sidelong look at Georges.

  O’Doull was doing well for himself; he was probably the most popular doctor in Rivière-du-Loup. He had a good-sized house. But it could have been as big as the Fraser Manor—the biggest house in town by a long shot—and still seemed crowded when Galtiers filled it.

  Lucien found himself with a glass of whiskey in his hand. He stared at it in mild wonder. He was much more used to drinking beer or locally made applejack that didn’t bother with tedious government formalities about taxes. He sipped. He’d had applejack that was stronger; he’d had applejack where, if you breathed towards an open flame after a swig, your lungs would catch fire. He sipped again. “What gives it that flavor?”

  “It comes from the charred barrels they use to age the whiskey,” his son-in-law answered.

  “So we are drinking . . . burnt wood?” Galtier said.

  “So we are,” Leonard O’Doull agreed. He sipped his own whiskey, with appreciation. “Tasty, n’est-ce pas?”

  “I don’t know.” Lucien took another sip. Fire ran down his throat. “It will make a man drunk, certainement. But if I have a choice between drinking something that tastes of apples and something that tastes of burnt wood, I know which I would choose most of the time.”

  “If you want it, I have some real Calvados, not the bootleg hooch you pour down,” O’Doull said.

  “Maybe later,” Galtier replied. “I did tell you, most of the time. For now, for a change, the whiskey is fine.” He took another sip. Smacking his lips thoughtfully, he said, “I wonder how people came to savor the taste of burnt wood in the first place.”

  Dr. O’Doull said, “I don’t know for certain, but I can guess. Once you distill whiskey, you have to put it somewhere unless you drink it right away. Where do you put it? In a barrel, especially back in the days before glass was cheap or easy to come by. And sometimes, peut-être, it stayed in the barrel long enough to take on the taste of the wood before anyone drank it. If someone decided he liked it when it tasted that way, the flavor would have been easy enough to make on purpose. I don’t know this is true, mind you, but I think it makes pretty good sense. And you, mon beau-père, what do you think?”

  “I think you have reason—it does make good sense. I think you think like a man born of French blood.” Galtier could find no higher praise. Most Americans, from what he’d seen, were chronically woolly thinkers. Not his son-in-law. Leonard O’Doull came straight to the point.

  He also recognized what a compliment Galtier had paid him. “You do me too much honor,” he murmured. Lucien shook his head. “Oh, but you do,” Dr. O’Doull insisted. “I am more lucky than I can say to have lived so long among you wonderful Quebecois, who actually—when you feel like it—respect the power of rational thought.”

  “You phrase that oddly,” Lucien said. Maybe the whiskey made him notice fine shades of meaning he might otherwise have missed. “Why would you not live among us for the rest of your days?”

  “I would like nothing better,” Leonard O’Doull replied. “But a man does not always get what he would like.”

  “What would keep you from having this?” Galtier asked.

  “The state of the world,” O’Doull answered sadly. “Nothing here, mon beau-père. I love Rivière-du-Loup. I love the people here—and not just you mad Galtiers. But it could be—and I fear it may be—that one day there will again be places that need doctors much, much more than Rivière-du-Loup.”

  “What do you—?” Lucien Galtier broke off. He knew perfectly well how the American had come to town. He’d been one of the doctors working at the military hospital they’d built during the Great War. Thinking of that, Galtier gulped his whiskey down very fast and held out his glass for a refill.

  “Hurry up with that coffee here!” The Confederate drawl set Nellie Jacobs’ teeth on edge. Her coffeehouse had had plenty of Confederate customers ever since the days of the Great War. Even now, with much of northern Virginia annexed to the USA, the border wasn’t far to the south. And Confederates were always coming to Washington for one reason or another: occupation during the war, business now.

  “I’m coming, sir,” she said, and grabbed the pot off the stove. Her hip twinged as she carried the coffeepot to the customer’s table. Sixty soon, she thought. On long afternoons like this one, she felt the weight of all her years.

  “Thank you kindly,” he said when she’d poured. She wondered if he would tell her he’d been a regular at the coffeehouse during the war. She didn’t recognize him, but how much did that prove? A man could easily lose his hair and gain a belly in twenty years. She wasn’t the same as she’d been in 1915, either. Her hair was gray, her long face wrinkled, the flesh under her chin flabby. Men didn’t look at her any more, not that way. To her, that was a relief. The Confederate sipped his coffee, then remarked, “Quiet around here.”

  “Times are hard,” Nellie said. If this drummer or whatever he was couldn’t see that for himself, he was a bigger fool than she th
ought—which would have taken some doing.

  “Yes, times are hard,” he said, and slammed his hand down on the tabletop hard enough to make her jump. Some coffee sloshed out of the cup and into the saucer on which it sat. “So why the . . . dickens aren’t you people doing anything about it?”

  “Nobody seems to know what to do—here or anywhere else.” Nellie let a little sharpness come into her voice. “It’s not like the collapse only happened in the United States.” You’ve got troubles of your own, buddy. Don’t get too sniffy about ours.

  The Confederate nodded, conceding the point. He lit a cigar. When he did, Nellie took out a cigarette and put it in her mouth. She smoked only when her customers did. He struck another match and lit it for her. As she nodded, too, in thanks, he said, “But you-all don’t even look like you’re trying up here. Down in my country”—his chest swelled with pride till it almost stuck out farther than his gut—“since the Freedom Party took over, we’ve got jobs for people who were out of work. They’re building roads and fences and factories and digging canals and I don’t know what all, and pretty soon they’ll start taming the rivers that give us so much trouble.”

  “Wait a minute. Didn’t your Supreme Court say you couldn’t do that?” Nellie asked. “That’s what the papers were talking about a while ago, if I remember right.”

  “You do,” the fellow said. “But didn’t you hear President Featherston on the wireless the other day?”

  “Can’t say that I did,” Nellie admitted. “The Confederate States aren’t my country.” And a good thing, too, she thought. But politeness made her ask, “What did he say?”

  “I’ll tell you what he said, ma’am. What he said was, he said, ‘James McReynolds has made his decision, now let him enforce it!’ ” The Confederate looked as proud as if he’d defied the Supreme Court in Richmond himself. He went on, “That’s what a leader does. He leads. And if anybody gets in his way, he knocks the . . . so-and-so for a loop, and goes on and does what needs doing. That’s Jake Featherston for you! And people are cheering, too, all the way from Sonora to Virginia.”