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[Continuing chapter two]
Compared to Allison Nelson, Patton decided, the late Captain Menard had been a babbling brook. They’d been riding nearly two hours before Nelson uttered more than a grunt in response to one of Patton’s attempts to draw the Georgian into conversation. I never thought I’d miss that sad-faced French-Canadian, Patton thought, but right now I’d give a month’s pay to have someone to talk to who’d actually answer me from time to time.
The country through which they rode was a rich one, and the further they got from New Orleans the less pestilential the climate seemed to Patton. The road they took roughly paralleled the river, but at a distance that their New Orleans druggist friend, Patrick Cleburne, said had been arrived at through bitter experience of the Mississippi’s erratic changes of course and tendency to flood in the spring. The river approach itself was hidden by trees, many of them trailing long strands of Spanish Moss. To his left as they rode Patton could see large farmhouses that would shame most of Virginia’s plantation homes. Crowds of Negroes worked the fields here just as they did on the other side of the Mississippi, and Patton could not understand how their supposed freedom made life any better for these people; in the Confederacy, at least, their owners were charged with looking after the welfare of the slaves. In Canada, “free” Negroes were free to work themselves to death for wages too low for sustenance.
Freedom also made the Negroes arrogant, he reminded himself. This didn’t bother him, he admitted to himself, anywhere near as much as it did Stewart, but he was still annoyed by it; that sort of behavior would never be tolerated in Virginia, and Virginia was a more civilized place for it.
“I can’t wait to be shut of this place,” he muttered—and it was that which finally prompted intelligible words from Nelson.
“You ain’t been here near as long as I have, boy,” he said. “You can’t know the half of what it’s like.”
That wasn’t much to build on, but Patton was determined to make Nelson into at least a semblance of an ally, so he nodded agreement. “Can’t have been fun,” he said.
“I used to think that Yankees was smug and self-satisfied,” Nelson said. “They got nothin’ on Canadians and Limeys, though.”
Patton had no trouble agreeing with that. “I hope that before I die I’ll see this part of the continent under our flag. You have to think that’s part of God’s plan. Why cause our nation to be created if not to give it dominion over the whole of this continent?”
“What nation you talking about?” Nelson smiled, eyes narrowed a little. Patton saw brown and yellow teeth. “That ‘Manifest Destiny’ garbage was written about the old Union, not the Confederacy. And you should know that dominion is a word Canadians sometimes use too.”
“The Confederacy is the true inheritor of the spirit of the Founding Fathers,” Patton said, refusing to allow himself to be drawn. “We’re the ones who live up to those words about liberty and rights—both for states and for men.
“I would have liked the old Union to continue,” he said. “But not the way it was going. Those people up North were going to ruin it if we didn’t do something. Tell me you don’t agree that the best part of the old Union came with us into the Confederacy.”
“Can’t really answer to that,” Nelson said, “‘cause I don’t know much about the Confederacy. I been kind of busy the last few years. Ain’t been home much.”
Patton straightened himself in the saddle. “I wanted to ask you about that,” he said. “How exactly is Colonel Walker’s force organized? How did he fight in Cuba? What sort of tactics does he use? Do you fight on horseback like dragoons, or do you dismount and skirmish?”
Nelson laughed, and it wasn’t a pleasant-sounding laugh. Patton immediately flushed, knowing that he’d embarrassed himself and simultaneously resenting Nelson’s response. Those had been perfectly intelligent questions.
“I think,” Nelson said, “that there’ll be plenty of time for you to learn that.” He gave Patton a death’s-head grin. “Meantime, let’s try to pick up the pace a bit. I’d like to get this over with sooner rather than later.”
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