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A JUST AND LASTING
PEACE
Lois Tilton
New writer Lois Tilton has appeared in
The Magazine of Fantasy and
Science Fiction,
Aboriginal SF, Weird Tales, Women of Darkness,
Dragon, Sword & Sorceress, Borderlands II
, and elsewhere. Her first
novel,
Vampire Winter
, appeared late last year. She lives in Glen Ellyn,
Illinois.
In the moving and all-too-plausible Alternate History story that follows,
she shows us that sometimes the
real
suffering begins only after the war is
over…
I remember how my bare feet used to drag in the dust whenever I came up
the road to the Ross place, walking slower and slower as I got near to the
turn in the road. Let him not be there, I’d be thinking. Just this once. But
then the front porch would come into sight, and there he’d be—Nathan’s
grandpa, Captain Ross—sitting out in his old cane-bottom chair just like
always, black hickory stick across his knees, as ancient as Moses and as
close to the Lord.
I’d come up those steps onto the porch just like I was about to meet the
Final Judgment. And in fact, whenever I thought of the Lord, the image in
my mind was the face of Captain Joseph Buckley Ross, right down to the
flowing white beard and lowering eyebrows. And I figured the
punishments of Hell couldn’t be any worse either than the smart of that
black hickory stick coming down across the backs of my legs. He kept it by
him to beat the daylights out of any Yankee who dared come on his
land—or so Nathan said. My ma said it was on account of his arthritis.
 So I flinched at the crack of wood when he banged it down on the
warped planks of the porch. “Stand up straight, boy! Put your shoulders
back! Can’t tolerate a boy who slouches.
“Well, what is it?” he demanded when I’d straightened up. “Don’t just
stand there with your mouth open! What’s that there you’ve got?”
“Yes, sir. No, sir.” The empty tin pail I was holding knocked against my
shins. “My ma sent me to ask, could she please borrow a pail of molasses?”
He sat back in his chair and kind of sighed. “You just go back to the
kitchen and ask Miss Rachel.”
“Yes, sir. Thank you,” I said quickly, but before I could escape, the
hickory stick lowered to block my way.
“You know your grandpa served under me in the War, boy. Never a
better soldier than Sergeant James Dunbar. A damn shame to see his
namesake standing here shuffling and slouching like a mollycoddle. You
hear me, boy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Got to stand up straight, look the damn Yankees right in the eye. Like
your grandpa would, if he were still alive.”
“Yes, sir.”
When we were both barely out of shirttails, Nathan used to boast all the
time about how he was named for General Forrest.
Nathan Bedford
Forrest Ross
, he’d say, drawing out all the names. I was no more than five
or six, and a sergeant seemed awfully small to me next to a general, so I’d
bragged myself how I’d been named for the James brothers, the ones who
shot Old Abe. Only, the next time I came up to the house, Captain Ross
laid into me with his stick for denying my own grandpa’s name. Trouble
was, I never knew him, nor my pa, neither, not really. Nathan was always
as close to a brother as I ever had.
“Oh, go on, then,” the captain said. “Back to the kitchen.” The stick
moved aside to let me pass, and I ran down the stairs, the tin pail
racketing.
Miss Rachel, Nathan’s ma, was alone in the kitchen around the back of
the house, putting up butter beans. It sure looked like hot, steamy work,
standing over those boiling kettles. Her dress had a dark, damp splotch all
the way down the back. I said, “Miss Rachel,” and when she turned
around, I could see how her hair, going gray, was plastered against her
forehead with sweat. She straightened with a hand in the small of her
back, brushed her hair back, then wiped her hands on her threadbare,
 stained apron.
“Afternoon, Jamie,” she said, her eyes resting on the pail. “Your ma
send you?”
“Yes, ma’am. She said to ask, could you please spare a pail of molasses?”
Nervously glancing behind me to make sure no one was spying, I reached
into my overall pocket and took out a single tattered greenback, folded
small so you couldn’t see President Charles Sumner’s Yankee face on the
bill. Looking as guilty as me, she took the money, tucked it away into an
inside pocket of her apron.
“Come on,” she said then. “I’ll get your ma her molasses.”
I followed with the pail, trying not to look back behind me. Old Captain
Ross hated the sight of the occupation currency, swore he wouldn’t have a
greenback on his place. Which was just one more burden on Miss Rachel
and Mr. Jeff, the ones who had to do all the work around the place. Like
my ma told me, “You can’t eat pride, Jamie, no matter what men like
Captain Ross will tell you. All you can do is choke on it.”
So I stood uncomfortably shifting from one foot to the other till Miss
Rachel handed back my pail, heavy now. “Careful,” she warned me. “That
lid doesn’t fit quite tight.” There was something defiant in her face that
reminded me of my own ma, and so I just ducked my head and said, “Yes,
ma’am,“ and lit out of there careful not to spill the molasses. I went
around the back, to keep out of the captain’s eye, and find Nathan if I
could.
Out by the barn, I ran into Jefferson Ross bringing the mule in from the
field. The mule’s head was hanging low, and I wondered how much longer
it would hold out. “Afternoon, Mr. Jeff,” I called out to him, but, like
always, he never said a word. Dawn to dusk he worked that farm, Mr. Jeff
did, but you might not hear a word out of him from one Sunday to the
next, no more than Captain Ross would ever say to him, on account of he
thought his son was a coward. They were a peculiar bunch, the Rosses,
that was for sure, and it made me glad sometimes that it was just Ma and
me at home.
I found Nathan like I thought I would, out in the field picking beans. He
was eighteen months older than me, Nathan was, though he liked to raise
it to two years, and he was starting to stretch out to the height of a grown
man, all arms and legs and bones. He straightened up when I called out to
him, pulled off his hat to wipe the sweat out of his face. He was a redhead,
with freckles the size of dimes all over his face and arms.
“Sure is hot!”
 “Sure is,” I agreed, and when his eyes went to the pail, I explained,
“Came to borrow some ‘lasses.”
He nodded, letting me know he knew about the greenbacks, but that
he’d keep it to himself, since I was really only a go-between, anyway.
“Listen, Jamie—” I could see he was all excited about something and
bursting to tell it to somebody. The handle of the molasses pail was
cutting into my fingers, and I set it down, right next to his half-full sack of
beans. “If I show you something, you got to swear to keep it a secret.”
“What’s the matter, don’t you trust me?”
“All right, then, come on.” He glanced around to make sure nobody was
watching us, and we lit out, going through the cornfield, the ears all
swelling in the summer heat, and down into the belt of woods by the creek.
It was cool in the woods, and I thought we might go down to the creek and
splash around some in the water, but instead, Nathan led me upstream a
ways, to a place where the bank had been worn away to expose a shelf of
limestone.
“We’re off our property here,” he said, with the low bitterness in his
voice there to remind me, in case I could forget that all this land had once
belonged to Captain Ross, hundreds of acres on both sides of the creek and
upstream for more than a mile. But these days, what it meant was that
whatever Nathan had hidden here, the Yankees couldn’t prove who it
belonged to.
Carefully, he knelt down and lifted up a slab of the stone, revealing a
narrow opening as deep as a man’s arm and maybe twice as long. There
was a bundle inside, done up in oilcloth, and Nathan pulled it out, started
to undo the wrappings. There was only one thing it could be, that size and
shape, and it made my heart hammer, knowing I was so close to it.
“Look at her!” Nathan pulled aside the last wrapping.
I caught my breath. “A Sharps repeater!”
“Grandpa gave her to me last week on my birthday. He says next spring
after the planting, I can go down to Texas.“ He stood there holding the
rifle, glowing with pride, and I felt, like I was expected to feel, no more
than a little kid next to him. He was all of thirteen and with a gun of his
own, just about nearly a man and joined up with the Raiders, or at least
he would be come next spring. He sighted down the barrel. ”My brother
Jeb says there’s a place for me in his company. My pa’s old company,“ he
added in a lower tone of voice.
I nodded solemnly. This was the bond between us, that both of our
 fathers had been killed fighting for the Cause—mine before I was even
born, his just six years ago, hanged after the raid on Shreveport. It was
worse for Nathan, I think, because he could remember his pa, and his
Uncle Andy, too, who was in the Yankee prison at Lexington. Of all
Captain Ross’s sons, only Jeff had stayed home to work the farm, and on
account of that, the captain hadn’t spoken a civil word to him since the
day Nathan’s pa was hanged. “Though he’ll eat the food on his table,” my
ma had said sharply once, defending Mr. Jeff.
The trouble with Ma was, she made too much sense. But next to an
almost-new Sharps repeating carbine, her words might as well have been
in some foreign tongue. “Can I hold it?” I dared to ask Nathan. “Is it
loaded?”
He put it into my hands, and I held it briefly, tasting the bittersweet
pangs of jealousy.
“Come on,” Nathan said suddenly, retaking possession, and I followed
him up the bank, moving Indian style like hunters through the trees and
brush. The thrill of danger raced through my veins, knowing it meant
prison if the Yankees ever caught us with the gun—that is, if we weren’t
shot on sight. But I suppose Nathan’s father and uncles must have hunted
these woods when they were boys, back before the Surrender. My own pa
hadn’t even been born yet then, not until after my Grandpa James had
come back from the Yankee prison camp at Fort Douglas, already
half-dead with consumption, so that he died before my pa was one year
old.
We came out of the woods into a strip of hayfield, full of heat and
sunshine, with grasshoppers whirring and flying up into my face. I knew
where we were, and I whispered to Nathan, “Careful,” but he just shook
his head for me to be quiet and follow him, and we crawled through the
hay on our bellies, up to the edge of the cotton field. Down at the other end
of the row, there was the figure of a black man with a hoe in his hand,
chopping up and down, up and down under the hot sun.
This was land where the Rosses had planted cotton before the War, but
the captain wouldn’t grow it now—most of the white farmers wouldn’t,
called it nigger’s work, even though they could have gotten a pretty good
price, a lot higher than corn, anyway. Yankees had taken the land after the
Surrender, parceled it out to the Rosses’ slaves, but it had long since been
lost to Yankee tax speculators who hired it out on shares to grow cotton.
Truth to tell, I don’t think those sharecroppers were all that much better
off than we were, but that didn’t mean anything to Nathan. All he could
see was the nigger on his grandpa’s land.
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