Sion Crossing (23 page)

“It’s nothing.” He shivered in spite of what he was about to say. “I was just thinking that it’s pretty warm in here.”

“Warm?” Kingston relaxed. “Man—if you think this is warm … maybe you should go back inside … You get on the ridge there—” He opened Fat Albert’s door on the driver’s side, but now he slammed it again “—maybe you should wait ’til tomorrow morning, ’fore the sun come properly up, huh?”

“No.” Once again the challenge made him more resolute. Besides which, the sooner this charade was over, and he was safe back home, the better. “No … You said … war memorials?” He opened the passenger’s door decisively.

“Okay. It’s your funeral.” Kingston re-opened his door, and folded his height to enter Fat Albert.

Latimer followed suit almost gratefully, only to find that Fat Albert’s interior was no improvement. Instinctively he tried to wind down the window.

“Doan do that, for chrissake!” exclaimed Kingston.

Latimer pretended he had been reaching for his seat-belt. “War memorials, you said?”

“That’s right.” Kingston hurled Fat Albert out of the garage in a shower of gravel. “You know ’bout them? You got them in England, huh?”

It was on the tip of Latimer’s tongue to reply that England had bigger and better war memorials than America, and more of them going back to wars which Kingston had never heard of. Because—damn it!—there was one outside that hotel in Cheltenham, where he’d stayed that last GCHQ time, which listed the local dead of Britain’s last official war against Russia, back in the 1850s, which had once been adorned with captured Crimean cannon—cannon subsequently melted down, together with most of the town’s iron railings, for use against Hitler in 1940.

“Yes, we have a few.” He curbed his tongue. Admitting to more and bigger war memorials was not far short of claiming more and bigger lunatic asylums. “So what?”

“Man, they got
three
in Smithsville, for Barksdale County.” The negro spun the wheel and the gravel spurted again. “One’s for ’41 to ’45—mebbe twenty-thirty names, plus a few more they added for Korea and ’Nam … an’ there’s still plenty of room for more—” Fat Albert bucked as they left the drive for the road “—and then there’s one for the first war ’gainst the Krauts, back in ’17—’17-18—the First World War, okay?”

It was a very open road, hemmed in by trees but with not a car in sight. He had imagined America as the land of the car, but so far, except for the maelstrom of Atlanta airport (which had not been so very different from Heathrow or Gatwick), it had been more the land of trees. But then, it was a vast country and he’d seen but the tiniest and perhaps untypical part of it.

“The 1914-18 War.” Mitchell would have liked that correction. “The Great War, we sometimes call it.”

“That so? Well, it wasn’t so great in Barksdale County. Got a big memorial … statue of this guy wearin’ one of your funny steel helmets, like a soup-plate, on his head … But ain’t no more’n a dozen names on the whole damn thing.”

“Indeed?” Latimer remembered irrelevantly that Colonel Butler was morbidly fascinated by war memorials. Perhaps the negro shared that same rather unhealthy interest, unlikely as it seemed. But at least here was something he could take back to England with him, to tell the Colonel about. For lack of any common interest outside work, making small talk with Butler was usually quite beyond him. But now he had American funerary monuments to offer. “Very interesting.”

Kingston gave him a suspicious look. “That’s not what’s interesting, man—hell no! It’s the third one—the Confederate one—that you oughta see, for chrissake!”

Damn!
Latimer shook himself free from extraneous thoughts about Colonel Butler and the afforested nature of the Land of Cotton. He was
a Civil War man
—and it had taken hardly a minute for him to forget that, and he damn well mustn’t forget it again!

“Of course—yes …” He dredged into the information acquired during recent study “… that would be for the Georgia militia units who fought Sherman’s men hereabouts, I take it … as well as from the regular regiments in the main armies?” He returned the suspicious look with one of false expert knowledge. “I’ve always thought that the Governor—Governor Brown—was quite disgracefully obstructive over the use of the local militia. But then, if you’re fighting for the rights of individual states, you have to concede the right of any individual state to be obstructive, logically, I suppose … Only, in the South’s case, a defensive strategy was bound to fail eventually, given the disparity of resources, so long as Lincoln could hold the North together—”God! What was he saying? But that was roughly what the
real
experts appeared to have said, including Miss Lucy Cookridge’s anonymous real father, so far as he could make out; only … they had also hedged their bets at the same time—

“Uh?” Suspicion gave way to—was it mystification or boredom?—as Kingston took his eyes off the road to study him again.

Well, either would do. “But, then again, a defensive strategy
might
have worked … It
was
the era of defensive warfare—from Sebastopol—” Simultaneously the image of the Cheltenham Crimean War memorial superimposed itself on what Lucy Cookridge’s real father had written “—through Plevna and Paris—and even Port Arthur—” Where the hell was
Plevna
? He’d never heard of it! “—to Gallipoli, and the Somme—” He could see that Kingston had heard of at least some of them “—and Verdun.”

“Plevna?” Fat Albert swerved slightly as Kingston glanced at him, and then began to slow down. “What’s that?”

Fat Albert was slowing even more—was actually coming to a halt, nosing onto a grassy hard shoulder beside the road—with
Plevna
still unidentified—

“Yes.” Latimer decided that Plevna was a place, since all the rest of them had been geographical. “The siege of Plevna … But, you know, if the Confederacy had maximized its defensive capabilities—if General Johnston had had enough men in the West, to cover Sherman’s flanking movements … Because Johnston was probably a better general than Sherman, given half a chance, you know—remember Kennesaw Mountain—?” It was undoubtedly boredom now, in Kingston’s eye, thank God!

“I’m sorry, Mr Kingston—I’m digressing.” But that, at least, was an authentic touch: asked a straight question, historians usually digressed to other periods of history to cover their ignorance. “You were saying … the Confederate war memorial in Smithsville—?”

“Yeah.” Mercifully, the negro abandoned Plevna. “Well, there’s a lot of writing on it, at the front, about ‘The Cause’, an’ ‘the noble sacrifice’ an’ ‘patriotic devotion’, an’ all that—ain’t no room for another line. An’ no room on the other three sides, either.” He looked at Latimer.

“Yes?” Latimer waited.

“Names, Oliver. It’s all covered with names—must be a thousand of ’em—mostly widows ’n orphans in Barksdale County hundred years back—an’ old maids. “ Kingston shook his head, and turned away to scan the woods on his left. “All because of ‘The Cause’—helluva thing … Me, I don’t go for causes.” He craned his neck to study the roadside behind them. “No way!”

Latimer frowned at the back of the negro’s head, and thought that he would like to know a lot more about the man, as well as the phenomenon of colour itself. The trouble with an utterly absorbing specialization—the trouble with knowing more than anyone else about certain areas of the KGB’s operations in Western Europe without having to consult Colonel Butler’s new computer—was that he knew so little about most other things, not excluding everyday life as well as all things American: he was as specialized as a giraffe or a polar bear—and at this moment he was as far away from his own specialization as from the African bush and the Arctic wastes.

“What do you go for, Mr Kingston?”

Kingston didn’t turn around. “Whatever I’m paid to go for, Mister Latimer … Did you see a sign back there, just round the bend behind?”

“No, I was listening to you—”

Kingston turned at last. “You got that sketch map, huh?” He waited for Latimer to produce Lucy Cookridge’s father’s map of Sion Crossing. “Thanks … yeah—I think we’re just about
there
—on the edge of the ridge, where there’s a path … You stay here, an’ I’ll go look—okay?” He opened the car door.

Latimer studied the map while he waited for the negro to return. With the trees all around, except for Kingston’s location of their position, he might have been anywhere in Georgia. But, if Kingston was correct, the road would fall away towards the stream just round the next corner.

There was a certain confusion about all this
Sion
nomenclature. What Kingston called “Sion land” seemed to be everything beyond the bridge, on this side of the water: that must be the original extent of the old Sion Crossing plantation, where the trees had reconquered the original cotton fields over the last century, since the out-riding raiders of General Sherman’s wrath-of-God army—“the Bummers”—had devastated everything worth devastating in a twenty or thirty mile swathe on each side of the main line of advance towards the Atlantic, tearing the rich heart of the Confederate States of America to pieces in the process.

So … hereabouts, on Sion
land
, there had been Sion
Creek
, and Sion
Church
—he had seen both of them yesterday, as he had descended in the car to what he had thought of as Sion
Crossing
—with the site of the old Sion Crossing House of the Alexander family hidden in the trees somewhere along the ridge, to his right—to his right
then
, but to his left
now
—

But in fact,
Sion
had been the abbreviation for all the different ingredients of the whole, which (according to Lucy Cookridge’s father, whose scholarship could certainly be trusted) had derived from the original James Alexander’s vision of his promised land, when he had brought his worldly goods across the creek nearly two hundred years ago—worldly goods which included wife and sons and slaves—to dispute possession with the last Indians here.

He heard the crunch of Kingston’s large feet on the edge of the road behind him, on the passenger’s side of Fat Albert. But this time he would not attempt to lower the window: it was no longer cool inside the car, but it would be far beyond warm out there.

Sion Crossing was what it all had been: the red earth on this side of the creek which old James Alexander had grasped in his hand as his own, although it didn’t belong to him except by his own law, just as William the Bastard had taken England nearly nine hundred years before—by right of conquest!

Kingston opened his door, and a draught of super-heated air entered Fat Albert.

“Okay!” Kingston grinned. “This the place, Oliver. Jus’ back there, there’s the path … You follow that, an’ keep the creek on your right—go by the church mebbe half-mile, an’ there’s the chimneys still there somewhere, jus’ by the path—mebbe more’n half-mile, I can’t say for sure, ’cause I ain’t never bin that far … But where the chimneys are—that’s where the house wuz.”

Latimer climbed out of Fat Albert, and felt the heat embrace him. But there was no going back now: he had offered up his St John ancestor, who had sweltered on Delhi Ridge in an even more dreadful temperature: compared with Delhi Ridge, Sion Ridge was nothing.

“Okay?” Kingston enlarged his grin.

“Yes.” Latimer slipped out of his English summer jacket, hanging it casually over his shoulder. “Fine.”
God!
he thought.
Not fine
—
had Lieutenant Marmaduke Arthur St John really served the guns on Delhi Ridge, to breach the Red Fort, while battered by this sort of ridiculous heat?
“Fine.”

“Okay.” Kingston gave him an old-fashioned look, as though reading his thoughts, and at the same time estimating his ability to withstand high summer in Georgia. “’Bout an hour, say? Meet you here, same place?”

“Very well.” If Lieutenant Marmaduke Arthur St John could fight, then Oliver St John Latimer could walk—that was the least he could do. “About an hour, then.”

“Fine.” Kingston echoed the word cautiously. “But … now, don’t you go off the path—right?”

Latimer looked at him, askance. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t mean nothing, really. But there’s mebbe some old snakes in there, off the path … But they won’t do you no harm … But there’s poison ivy—an’ sumac—an’ you don’t want to take hold of that … Like, mebbe you wouldn’t want to take hold of stinging nettles in England, huh?”

Latimer glanced at the forest. “What d’you mean?”

Kingston shrugged, still smiling. “Jus’ keep to the path that’s all.” Another shrug. “Jus’ remember—this is Georgia, not Hertford-shire … okay?” Suddenly his expression clouded, and he gestured towards the woods. “What I mean is … if you’re not used to it, that poison ivy’ll sting you—that’s all … So don’t think you’re back home, is what I mean—huh?”

Latimer tore himself away from the innocent-looking forest. Stinging nettles were fair enough—they were a well-remembered minor childhood hazard … but
snakes
—

“What sort of snakes?” He had to conceal his gibbering irrational fear under what he hoped sounded like a casual inquiry: Kingston would assuredly make a meal of the cowardly truth. “Poisonous ones?”

“There’s some are. Big ol’ rattler now—you leave him alone.” The innumerable white teeth flashed. “The Professor … he got a big ol’ black snake I seen near the okra patch, in the veg’table garden back at the house—
he
won’t do no harm … Man, you jus’ got to watch where you put your feet, that’s all … Hell—I remember, when I was boy, way down south from here, after we left Jamaica … I was out in the swamp, catchin’ frogs with a flashlight—I caught myself a water moccasin—a cottonmouth—instead …” Kingston chuckled at the hideous memory “… jus’ behind the head I ketched him. An’ he wound himself all around my arm … I had to unwind him an’
throw
him—an’ I can tell you I throwed him clear out of the swamp!”

“Indeed?” If the man was setting out to terrify him, he was doing rather well, thought Latimer bitterly.

“But that was
my
fault, you see,” confided Kingston. “He was only out there catchin’ frogs—jus’ like me—” he looked at his watch quickly “—Hell! I got to go … You jus’ keep to the path, Oliver—an’ keep the creek on your right goin’, an’ on your left comin’ back—an’ you’ll be jus’ fine … An’ I’ll be waitin’ here for you … ’Cause I’m fixin’ to cook you a real Southern Supper this even’—all dipped in corn-meal an’ fried in hog-lard in a black iron skillet … An’ you’re gonna like that jus’ fine—’cause that’ll be real soul-food!”