Shadows of Annihilation Page 23

  The people she was talking about in her home state had tarpaper shacks or tumbledown one-room log cabins, some dating back to slavery days, with cotton planted right up to the door and often not even a vegetable garden to vary the diet of fatback and grits bought for extortionate prices, on credit, at interest rates indistinguishable from usury added on to debts they could never pay. Ciara sighed acknowledgment, then glanced over her shoulder for an instant.

  Luz gave a nod of permission; what she’d heard via the Party-insider grapevine was going to be announced by the Department of Public Information fairly soon anyway, with all possible bells and whistles and rah-rah, probably via a presidential speech if Public Information could pry Uncle Teddy away from the war for a day.

  To distract people from the fact that the war is frozen in place and our leaders are scratching their heads and wandering around asking each other What to do, what to do? in plaintive tones while Hindenburg and Ludendorff drop their trousers and slap their withered Prussian buttocks in our collective face.

  Ciara said confidentially: “Henrietta, a little bird told me that the Department of Lands and Agriculture back home is going to start breaking up the plantations in the South, making the planters sell what they can’t work themselves with their own equipment and hired labor, and hand the rest out to the tenants. To the sharecroppers, as they say down there.”

  Henrietta Colmer froze for a moment, and said in a voice that was soft and startled at the same time:

  “Lord Jesus!”

  The new regime had never been shy about making changes and stepping on toes—that was pretty much the New Nationalism’s whole point—but this would take a third of the country and pull it up by the roots. Henrietta blinked, engaged in some obvious hard thought including math, and went on:

  “That’d be better than half the cotton land on a big Black Belt spread anywhere . . . maybe two-thirds . . . and more over to the Delta country. Probably a lot of planters will just sell up and get out of the cotton business for good an’ all if they can get a fair price for the land. Or switch to growin’ something else: cattle, maybe, or peaches . . . pecans . . . truck . . . or goobers and hogs.”

  “Really?” Ciara said curiously. “They’re going to get paid . . . paid something at least . . . for the land they give up—wouldn’t that finance working the rest of it? Buy modern equipment and hire men to use it?”

  The way the Duráns have here went unspoken.

  Henrietta shook her head: “Reason they need lots of sharecroppers on a cotton plantation is to keep the hands for the picking. There’s plenty of machinery already can plow for cotton and plant cotton and even do most of the chopping . . . weeding, you Yankees say . . . but the planters don’t use it. They leave the croppers with one-mule walking plows and hoes like Granddaddy used in slavery days because nobody’s made a machine can pick cotton yet. So you can’t hire enough hands in picking season, not cash wage, not for a big property and still have it pay any profit.”

  “Why not?” Ciara said.

  “Planter hires a hand for cash right at the busy time of year, he has to pay cash out of his pocket . . . and planters like money going in there a lot better. He has to pay a hand by the day, pay before the cotton’s sold, and pay about the same if cotton’s selling at five cents a pound or twenty-five. And a hired hand can walk away just when the planter needs him most, because that time of year everyone’s looking to hire,” Henrietta said.

  “Ah, and the sharecroppers are stuck because they’re paid only the once in a year,” Ciara said, taking the point, and Henrietta nodded.

  “Not one red cent until after the landlord sells the cotton for whatever it fetches that year; the planter gets paid by the commission buyer, and then makes the division—about half and half, mostly. That’s if the planter keeps honest scales and honest books, and believe me, a lot don’t. A cropper can’t up and leave, either; he owes the planter money and it comes out of his share before he sees it, he owes the storekeeper money and that comes out of his share before he sees it. He owes money to every-damn-body in God’s creation, all the time! Except for three weeks after the harvest, maybe, if he’s lucky, and then it’s back to borrowing against next year’s share. He stays, and he picks, and so do his family, from can-see to can’t-see.”

  She looked back at Luz, who was nodding in respect at the concise explanation of the economics that had kept that part of the country a seedy, backward, down-at-heel national embarrassment for decades.

  “The croppers will be getting forty acres and a mule, ma’am?” Henrietta asked skeptically.

  That half promise hadn’t worked out well for her people after the Civil War, which she’d have heard about from her own grandparents.

  “More like eighty acres, a team or a small Ford tractor on hire purchase, a line of credit from a credit union, and a co-op running the cotton gin and buying fertilizer and supplies, Miss Colmer,” Luz said, and added: “It’s not just for colored tenant farmers, of course.”

  “There are about as many white ones, walkfoot bookra they’re called, gettin’ treated near as bad by the boss-man,” Henrietta observed, incidentally confirming Luz’s guess at a Gullah speaker in her background. “Sometimes they even realize it, until the planters turn one of their bought politicians loose screaming uppity nigra! and their cracker brains turn to . . . buttered grits . . . and run out their ears.”

  “So it’s not just altruism, either,” Luz said.

  “Good,” Henrietta said dryly. “Altruism’s not what you’d call real reliable, most times, ma’am.”

  Luz nodded. “The Party always thought that section was an anti-Progressive . . . medieval . . . drag on the country’s economy. And now that Negroes have the vote again it’s not enough to put down night riding and lynching, the Party needs to keep the planters and crop-lien storekeepers from putting the knuckle on them to vote for the Democrats.”

  “By twisting a noose made out of their debts around their necks, right? I suppose it helps a bit that the planters are all Democrats and Bourbon Democrats hot for state’s rights at that. They spit whenever they hear el jefe’s name,” Henrietta said.

  Unlike the hacendados here, who we need, so we have to be easier on them went unspoken.

  “If they’re already enemies, the Party can afford to ignore it when they scream,” Luz agreed. “Especially now, with this being wartime and that making it so unpopular and risky . . .”

  Make that lethally risky, she added to herself with tactful restraint, and carefully did not mention Savannah or what had happened to Colmer’s family as she continued. It would be painful enough anyway.

  “. . . to be labeled pro-German. Which to be fair is mostly unfair to them; only a few went anything like that far and the rest were as horrified as anyone, but we’re going to do it to them anyway to keep them weak.”

  Henrietta grinned, and Luz went on:

  “The plan is to use this to peel the poor white tenants away from them and into the fold too; there will never be a better time to cut their bosses off at the knees.”

  “That’s smart thinkin’,” Henrietta said, and patted Ciara on the shoulder in thanks for getting her the news a little early, and then: “Here we are.”

  Here was a broad semicircular drive done in pink crushed stone up to the front of the casa grande. It too would be lined by imposing Italian cedars, presently six-foot saplings; there was a fair start at lawns and plantings around the house, a rarity in this land.

  A fountain with water spraying around a cavorting of elongated elfin-looking bronze maidens and greyhounds in the modern style played in the open area before the iron-strapped oak main doors, but the building itself was a hundred feet of two-story 1750s Mexican baroque in dark-rose limestone masonry, pillars and arches over a raised tile-floored veranda, and a long mirador balcony much like it above. At either end were four-story towers, lavish with carving and with
little ornamental white-and-green tiled domes above; you could just see an identical pair at the rear of the complex. The cross-shaped church a few hundred yards away had a dome of its own, in robin’s-egg blue.

  Though I think that glint is off the muzzles of aircraft-type twin Brownings inside the uppermost story of the casa grande’s towers, so they’re not just ornamental, Luz thought. And I can tell why they’ve put in those Talavera tile surrounds on the windows—you can see the staining from a smoke plume on the stone above that one where the tile’s not all on yet. As Julie said, this place didn’t burn all the way down, but it did burn.

  It was only around six thirty, but there were already quite a few big Peerless, Reno, Owen, and Packard touring cars to show guests arriving, and several horse-drawn carriages owned by the more conservative local gentry that looked as if they had been splendid, back around the turn of the century. The vehicles included a massive six-wheeled staff car built on the chassis of a Mac AC truck, accompanied by a little Ferret light armored car and a few Ford trucks, enough to carry a platoon of motor riflemen. The soldiers were there too, a squad on alert and the rest at ease but with their weapons to hand.

  They and the housemaids who’d brought out trays of coffee and varieties of pan dulce were chatting easily, trying out bits of English in return for badly pronounced Spanish from phrasebooks; some of the troopers actually had the phrasebooks in hand, leafing through them in a hurried hunt for something more appropriate to mild flirtation than: Halt or we shoot!

  Or: Tell me at once . . .

  —where the bandits are!

  —where the weapons are hidden!

  —where . . .

  Uncle Teddy and General Wood had seen to it from the very beginning of the Intervention that the American military down here took being properly respectful to the local womenfolk very seriously indeed—originally by means that had included a few well-publicized summary executions after drumhead courts-martial in the field pour encourager les autres, to get the idea of discipline home among the first wave of enthusiastic volunteer Rough Rider–style regiments.

  A pennant with two silver stars on a yellow-edged triangle of black flew from the bumper of the staff car, a major general’s banner, the sign of a divisional commander.

  “That’s a guard detachment from the Reconnaissance Battalion of the 32nd Infantry,” Luz said thoughtfully; the soldiers were all Negroes. “General Young must be here already. Good.”

  A man she recognized was also there, waiting at the steps and greeting guests and looking harassed if you knew him well, wearing the sort of well-cut sack suit and homburg you displayed just before changing to evening dress for a formal event. It was also fairly obvious he’d feel more comfortable in cowboy boots, chaps, and Stetson, though that might be her personal knowledge speaking.

  “¿Por qué tan triste en una fiesta, Alfredito?” she said to Julie’s brother-in-law as they came to the steps: Why the long face at a party, Alfie?

  “¡Lu—Graciela! ¡Ay!”

  Alfredo, or in some circles Alfred, Durán was her own age and only a bit taller, lean and hard and hawk-faced, with a mustache and cropped black hair and eyes as dark as her own without the narrow blue streaks, his skin a weathered outdoorsman-brown; he had a stiff left knee courtesy of a bullet in 1914, caught while leading his unit of New Mexican mounted riflemen as they fought their way out of a guerilla ambush.

  “It looks like being mayordomo”—which meant manager—“here suits you, Fred,” she replied.

  They shook hands—the etiquette of that had changed a bit since she was a girl—and she introduced Ciara under her cover name. Henrietta and he just shook without more than hello, since she was a familiar fixture here. Normally he would have given Luz a kiss on the cheek and an embrace, as she was an old friend of the family and more or less qualified as a family member herself by virtue of being his niece Alice’s madrina, which made her a comadre. That . . . more or less . . . meant “joint mother” and made Alfredo her sort-of-notional brother.

  “It does suit, or at least the parts I can do from the saddle, and it’s a good way to get experience . . . Graciela,” he said, in his archaic-sounding nuevomexicano hillbilly Spanish.

  Julie had said she’d slip him a word. His last-minute recall of her cover identity proved she had.

  “Where’s Julie?”

  “She’s in the kitchen, and she tells me I have you to blame for this nightmare!” he said. “Noemi’s there too.”

  That was his wife, and also third cousin. The Duráns were a sprawling, expansive clan, affluent and well-educated, but still rather provincial in some ways.

  “Julie decided we had to do this at short notice, so she brought the town cook and staff out here to help . . . So far, there hasn’t been any actual gunfire or slit throats.”

  Luz chuckled; two head cooks and their staffs suddenly pitched without warning into one cocina was a recipe for war to the knife if she’d ever heard one, or at least for rolling chaos.

  “And General Young’s wife volunteered to help get things in order too; his party got here a couple of hours ago and she was taking tea with Julie and Noemi when the news of mortal combat came via an assistant cook’s helper sobbing helplessly and falling on her knees and kissing Julie’s hand while she begged for aid,” he said.

  “Well, I regret that’s a problem for our beloved Noemi, but . . .”

  Alfredo visibly held on to his temper. “Mi amiga, did it occur to you when you asked Julie to put this do on, that this is the end of the summer-crop planting season? Which comes right after the wheat harvest, the sheep shearing, and the first cutting on the alfalfa? No? And we’re putting in a hundred and sixty acres of sunflowers as an experiment this year, so it’s completely new to everyone? Every delay after the rains start reduces yields! It couldn’t wait another week?”

  “No it couldn’t, Alfredito. It’s . . . business.”

  Which meant Black Chamber business; he sighed and shrugged acknowledgment. That was what his brother and his sister-in-law did; the hacienda was a business, but it wouldn’t be the family business until they both retired. He planned to be running his own spread by then, of course.

  “And it’s not as if you’re out in the fields yourself,” Luz added.

  “I should be, keeping things running smoothly, not standing around drinking cocktails in a penguin suit! And we have to give the people a fiesta if we’re having one! Especially given how hard I suddenly pushed our workers when Julie gave me the news, we’re finishing the last of the sunflowers this afternoon, three days ahead of schedule. Everyone had to give up unnecessary luxuries like sleep.”

  “We saw that, the tractors. Very . . . efficient.”

  Efficiency and virtue were more or less the same thing in the New Nationalist lexicon.

  “They’re roasting old-fashioned pigs and inefficient sheep down in the calpanería right now and rolling out the barrels!” he began. “All-out burst efforts like this are not efficient. The hangovers tomorrow alone will—”

  TEN

  Hacienda of the Sweet Arrival, near Jerez

  State of Zacatecas

  United States Protectorate of México

  JUNE 20TH, 1917, 1917(B)

  Four of Alfredo’s subordinates came trotting up, caporales—foremen—hats in hand, two of them in the usual peon dress and two in more modern blue bib overalls and print cotton shirts and smaller American-style Western hats rather than the huge local sombrero, and all obviously burdened with questions only Don Alfredo could answer. He held up a hand to them, turned over his shoulder to wave the house servants forward for the baggage—and one to take the Thompson gun and its ammunition to the Casa’s armory, after Luz removed the drum and worked the action to make absolutely sure nothing was in the chamber—and Luz led her small party into the entry hall.

  Fortunate for the mission that I never got down here
since they bought this place, Luz thought.

  She’d seen Julie often enough over the past few years, but that was usually while her old friend and her family were on visits north. In Santa Fe late last summer, just before Luz left on that mission to Europe that had led to her meeting Ciara, for instance, and then again this spring while Ciara was off doing technical consultant work at the Telemobiloscope plant.

  So at least the house staff here don’t know me.

  They were in the upper corridor leading to their rooms before they ran into two people who did know her. Fortunately and almost certainly by no coincidence whatsoever, that was Julie’s daughter—and Luz’s ahijada—Alice, and her niñera Anita, who was about forty, sensible-looking in a good dark dress with her hair coiled over her ears, and could be relied on for discretion.

  As the timing of the chance encounter here in a safely private part of the house and her use of a polite but distant nod showed, rather than the friendly deference that would have been the normal greeting to Luz in her own persona. As opposed to the we-work-for-the-same-boss smile she gave Henrietta.

  The child she was leading by the hand was a few months short of three; she looked at Luz dubiously for a moment, searching her memory over massive depths of time that stretched all the way back to Ferris wheel rides and cotton candy in April—and to vomiting all over Luz’s frock—then broke into a dazzling smile of recognition and charged full-tilt with her arms spread, caroling:

  “Nannnnaaaa Loooooz!”

  The projectile topped with brown-yellow curls ran into her at speed and enthusiastically embraced her leg, making her stagger. A bouncing golden retriever puppy a couple of months old and with about the same color of pelt followed, perfectly ready to be joyous if his deity-playmate Alice was and sniffing with vigor and lolling tongue.

  “I gotta . . . puppy!” Alice informed her, looking upward from her waist. “Diego! Diego licks!”

  Diego did, rather indiscriminately, when she offered her hand to sniff and at Ciara’s and Henrietta’s patting.