Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

And did Nathan Bedford Forrest III know what he was talking about? Was the President of the Confederate States of America nuttier than a five-dollar fruitcake? Potter shook his head. That was the wrong question. If Featherston was nuttier than a five-dollar fruitcake, what about it? Being out of your tree didn’t necessarily disqualify you from holding office. Some people said only a crazy man would want to be President of the CSA. Potter wasn’t one of them, but he could see their point.

Was Featherston crazy enough to be unfit to lead during wartime? That was what it came down to. Potter would have loved to believe it. He wouldn’t have been sorry for an excuse to throw Jake Featherston out on his ear-no, to kill him, because he wouldn’t go without a fight, and he’d fight hard. He always did. Forrest said he’d seemed crazy when he refused to pull back from Pittsburgh.

Maybe the chief of the General Staff was right. But Potter wasn’t ready to upset the Confederate applecart on a maybe. Featherston was at least as likely to be crazy like a fox. He’d proved that time and again. Taking Pittsburgh might prove it once more.

“Better to wait,” Potter murmured. Acting was irrevocable, and he didn’t think the time ripe. If going into Pittsburgh proved a fiasco… Well, so what? Did that mean Featherston had gone around the bend, or just that he’d made a mistake?

Did it matter? If Pittsburgh proved a fiasco, the Confederate States were in trouble either way. Somebody would have to take the blame. Who else but Jake Featherston then?

Nodding to himself, Potter got to his feet with one more thing to worry about. If Pittsburgh proved a fiasco, who took the blame might not matter, either.

To say Jefferson Pinkard was not a happy man failed to use the full power of language. Somebody in Richmond got a brainstorm. Who got to make that brainstorm real? Pinkard did. Some damnfool Negro in Jackson blew himself up, and a bunch of white women with him? Yeah, all right, he was a dirty, stinking son of a bitch. But get rid of all the Negroes in Jackson on account of him? At once? That was lunacy. That was also what Jeff had orders to do.

When the telegram came in, he telephoned Ferdinand Koenig and asked, “How many niggers are we talking about here?”

“Hell, I don’t know off the top of my head,” the Attorney General answered, which did not fill Jeff with confidence. Koenig said, “I’ll get back to you this afternoon. You want to know what you’re getting into, do you?”

“You might say so,” Pinkard said tightly. “Yeah, you just might.”

Ferdinand Koenig was as good as his word. Just after Jeff’s lunch, he got another telegram. TWENTY-FIVE OR THIRTY THOUSAND. F.K., it said. What Pinkard said when he saw that had an f and a k in it, too, with a couple of other letters in between. He said several other things right afterwards, most of them even hotter than what he’d started with.

Once his spleen was well and truly vented-once it had blown off about three counties’ worth of steam-he called Vern Green into his office and gave the guard chief the news. “Well, Jesus Christ!” Green said. “We got to get rid o’ these niggers? We don’t just try and stuff ’em on in here?”

“That’s what the orders are,” Jeff said grimly.

“How soon they gonna start coming?” Green asked.

“I don’t exactly know-not exactly,” Pinkard answered. “But it won’t be long-I sure as hell know that. Fast as they can throw ’em on trains and ship ’em out here. A few days-a week, tops.”

“You figuring on using the bathhouses and the trucks?”

Jeff nodded. “Don’t see how we’ve got even a prayer of doing it if we don’t. You get the ’dozer crews out to the other place, too, and have ’em dig lots of new trenches. If we’re doing all of Jackson, that’ll take up some room.” He didn’t talk about mass graves, not in so many words.

The guard chief followed him even so. “I’ll see to it,” he promised. “We’re gonna be busy as shit, ain’t we?”

“No,” Jeff answered. Green looked at him in surprise. He condescended to explain: “We’ll be a hell of a lot busier than that.”

“Oh. Yeah,” Green said. “Wish to God I could tell you you were wrong, but that’s how it’s gonna be, all right.” He scowled. “We’ll have a fuck of a time keeping the rest of the niggers from figuring out what’s goin’ on, too.”

“Uh-huh. That already crossed my mind,” Pinkard said. “Don’t know what we can do about it. We got orders on this-orders right from the top.” Ferdinand Koenig wasn’t the top, of course, but he was only one short step down. And he’d made it real clear the President of the CSA wanted every black from Jackson wiped off the face of the earth. What Jake Featherston wanted, Jake Featherston got.

Green sighed. “Well, we’ll just have to take care of that when it turns into a problem, that’s all. In the meantime… In the meantime, I’ll let the boys know a big pile of shit’s rolling down the hill, and we’re on the bottom.” He got to his feet. “Freedom!”

“Freedom!” Jeff echoed. The guard chief left his office. Jeff pulled his copy of Over Open Sights off the shelf by his desk. He knew just the passage he was looking for: the one where Featherston talked about how killing off a few thousand Negroes before the Great War would have saved a lot of trouble during and after. Jeff nodded to himself. That was true, every word of it. When he read the words, he could hear Jake Featherston’s hot, angry voice.

Even so, after a while he scratched his head and put down the book. This didn’t seem the same as that. People on the outside would know Jackson’s blacks had been sent away to camps, but that was all they would know. Even the Negroes already in the camps weren’t supposed to know they’d never come out alive. So what, exactly, was the point?

But that did have an answer. The point was to get rid of as many spooks as the Freedom Party and the Confederate government could arrange to get rid of. Jeff didn’t see anything wrong with what the Party wanted-just the opposite. But doing it in such a big lump made things work less smoothly than they might have, less smoothly than they should. Camp Determination’s profile was going to look like a boa constrictor that had swallowed a big old pig. You’d be able to see the lump the pig made as it worked its way from one end of the snake to the other.

Both sides of the camp, men’s and women’s, were on edge even before the first trains rolled in out of the east. The Negroes knew something was going on, even if they didn’t know what. They must have got that from the guards. Pinkard thought about reaming Vern Green out about it, but he didn’t. The guards wouldn’t have been human if they didn’t pass on the feeling that something was cooking. They hadn’t said what, for which Jeff was duly grateful.

He went out to watch his crews at work when the first train from Jackson came in. He was proud of them. They had a routine, and they stuck to it as much as they could. They hauled the luckless blacks off the train and separated them, men to the left, women and children off to the right. Then they went through the train and pulled out any Negroes who’d tried to get cute and hide. Then more blacks-men as close to trusties as Camp Determination held-removed the bodies of those who’d died on the way.

There were more of those than usual. The survivors moaned about how they’d been packed like sardines, about how they hadn’t had anything to eat or drink. Most of them moaned about how they hadn’t even been able to pack a carpetbag.

The guards did their best to soothe them. “Don’t y’all worry ’bout a thing,” a troop leader called reassuringly, smooth and confident as a preacher in the pulpit. “We’re gonna ship some of you out to other camps right away, and we’re gonna let the rest of you get cleaned up before we move you. You do what people tell you, and you’ll be just fine.”