Chapter IX
A fat man with a nasty cough came up to the counter of the drugstore where Reggie Bartlett worked. “Help you?” Reggie asked.
“Hope to God you can,” the man answered, hacking again. “If I don’t shake this damn thing, it’s going to drive me right up a tree.” He pulled out a pack of cigarettes and tapped one in the palm of his hand.
“Here you go.” Reggie handed him a box of matches with HARMON’S DRUGS printed on the top—good advertising. He waited till the man lit up, then went on, “I can give you a camphorated salve to rub on your chest and under your nose. And we’ve got a new cough elixir in. It’s got a kind of denatured morphine in it—not nearly as strong, and not habit-forming, but it does the job.”
“Give me some of the salve, and a bottle of that stuff, too,” the sufferer said. He coughed some more and shook his head. “This is killing me. I can’t even enjoy my smokes any more.”
“Another thing you can do is, you can set a pot of water on the stove to boil, put in some of the salve, and breathe in the steam,” Bartlett said. “That’ll help clear out your lungs, too.”
“Good idea,” the fat man answered. His face took on a kind of apprehension that had nothing to do with his ailment. “Now—what do I owe you?”
“Two thousand for the salve,” Reggie said. The customer nodded in some relief. Reggie continued, “The elixir, though, it’s new stuff, like I said, and it’s expensive: $25,000.”
“Could be worse,” the fat man said. He took three $10,000 banknotes from his wallet and shoved them across the counter at Bartlett. Reggie gave him three $1,000 banknotes in change. As the fat man tucked them away, he shook his head in wonder. “It’s like play money, ain’t it? Reckon I’m a millionaire, and a whole hell of a lot of good it’s doing me.” He coughed again, then picked up the squat blue bottle of salve and the taller one of the elixir. “Much obliged to you, young fellow, and I hope these here give me some relief.” As he headed for the door, he called a last word over his shoulder: “Freedom!”
Bartlett started violently. He had all he could do to hold his tongue, and indeed to keep from running after the fat man and screaming curses at him. “Christ!” he said. His hands were trembling.
Jeremiah Harmon looked up from the tablets he was compounding. “Something troubling you, Reggie?” He was in his late forties, with a brown mustache beginning to go gray, and so quiet Bartlett was always straining to hear him. That wasn’t bad, not so far as Reggie was concerned. He’d walked out on McNally, his previous employer, because the man wouldn’t stop riding him.
“Yes, sir,” he answered. “That fellow who just left used the Freedom Party salute when he went out the door. I don’t fancy those people, not even a little I don’t.”
“Can’t say I do, either,” Harmon said, “but I doubt they’re worth getting very excited about.” As far as he was concerned, nothing was worth getting very excited about.
“Lord, I hope you’re right, but I just don’t know,” Bartlett said. “I watched their goons bust up a rally. They almost busted me up, too. That’s not the only brawl they’ve gotten into—not even close. And now Richmond’s got a Freedom Party Congressman. Makes me sick to my stomach.”
“Bicarbonate of soda will do the trick there,” Harmon remarked; he was a druggist down to the tips of his toes. After a moment, though, he realized Reggie had used a figure of speech. With a shrug, he went on, “My guess is, they’re a flash in the pan. Having a few of them in Congress is probably a good thing. Once they show they’re nothing but a pack of noisy windbags, people will wise up to them pretty fast.”
Bartlett grunted. “I hadn’t thought about it like that. Maybe you’ve got something there.” He didn’t take the Freedom Party seriously even now. When more people had a chance to see it in action, how could they take it seriously, either? “Sometimes the best thing you can do is let a fool prove he is one.”
“That’s right,” Jeremiah Harmon said. A customer came into the store. Harmon bent to his work again. “Why don’t you see to Mrs. Dinwiddie there?”
“All right. Hello, Mrs. Dinwiddie,” Reggie said. “What can I get for you today?” He thought he knew, but he might have been wrong.
He was right: Mrs. Dinwiddie answered, “I need a bottle of castor oil. My bowels have been in a terrible state lately, just a terrible state, and if I don’t get something to loosen them up, well, I swear to Jesus, I don’t know what I’ll do. Explode, I reckon.”
She went on in that vein for some time. She bought castor oil every other week; the purchases were regular as clockwork, even if her bowels weren’t. Every time she bought it, she gave the same speech. Bartlett was sick of listening to it. So, no doubt, was Jeremiah Harmon. Since Harmon was the boss, he had the privilege of avoiding Mrs. Dinwiddie. Reggie didn’t.
By the time she ran down, he was on much more intimate terms with her lower bowel than he’d ever wanted to be. “Well, I won’t keep you any more,” she said, having already kept him too long. She opened her handbag. “What do I owe you?”
“That’s $15,000, ma’am,” Reggie answered.
“It was only ten the last time I came in,” she said sharply. He shrugged. If she didn’t like the way prices jumped, she could take that up with Harmon. He figured out how much to charge. But, after grumbling under her breath, Mrs. Dinwiddie gave Bartlett a pair of $10,000 banknotes. He returned her change and the bottle of castor oil.
So the day went. It was something less than exciting, but it put money in his pockets. It put tens of thousands of dollars in his pockets. Those tens of thousands of dollars left him somewhat worse off than he had been before the war started, when he’d been making two dollars a day. Inflation made a bitter joke of everything he’d thought he knew about money.
He supposed that was one reason people voted for the Freedom Party and other outfits like it. They loudly proclaimed they had the answers to all the problems bedeviling the Confederate States. Proclaiming they had the answers was the easy part. Really having them, and making them work—that looked harder. That looked a hell of a lot harder to him. But some people would buy castles in the air because they were short of beans on the ground.
When six o’clock rolled around, he said, “See you tomorrow, Mr. Harmon.”
The druggist looked up in vague surprise. “Oh, yes, that will be fine.” He made no move to leave himself. Reggie was just hired help, and could come and go as he pleased—so long as he pleased to be on time most of the time. The drugstore belonged to Harmon. He worked as long as he thought he had to.
Reggie put on his overcoat and went out into the cold. It wasn’t too bad—no snow lay on the ground—but it wasn’t anything he enjoyed, either. He walked quickly, his feet clicking along the sidewalk. As long as he kept moving, he didn’t feel the chill too badly. And Bill Foster’s flat, where he had a supper invitation, lay only a few blocks away.
Sally Foster opened the door. “Hello, Reggie,” she said. “Come in, get warm, make yourself at home. How are you today?”
“I’ve been worse,” he answered, and heaven only knew that was true.
“Bill, hon,” Sally called, “Reggie’s here.” She was a short, slightly pudgy blonde in her mid-twenties. For reasons Bartlett couldn’t quite fathom, she thought well of him. He’d wondered if he would keep Bill Foster as a friend after Bill and Sally got married; a lot of men gave up their bachelor friends after they stopped being bachelors themselves. But Sally had gone out of her way to be cordial, and so the friendship stayed warm.
“Hello, Reggie,” Bill Foster said. Married life plainly agreed with him; he’d put on ten pounds, easy, since Sally started cooking for him. “Can I get you a little something to light a fire inside?”
“Thanks. I wouldn’t mind,” Reggie answered.
Foster took down a whiskey bottle and a couple of glasses. “Do you want water with that?” he asked. Sometimes Reggie did, sometimes he didn’t.
Tonight, he didn’t. “Pipes are rusty enough already,” he said. Sally laughed. Maybe she hadn’t heard it before. It was an old joke in the trenches, though, as Foster’s resigned chuckle showed. When Reggie had the glass in his hand, he raised it and said, “Here’s to a long walk off a short pier for Jake Featherston.”
“Lord knows I’ll drink to that,” Bill said, and he did. So did Bartlett. Sure enough, the whiskey warmed him nicely. Foster said, “I’ll drink to that any day, and twice on Sunday, as a matter of fact. But what made you come out with it just then?”
Reggie told him about the fat man with the cough who’d called out the Freedom Party’s one-word slogan, and finished, “When he walked out, I was standing there wishing I’d given him rat poison instead of his cough elixir.”
“I’ve heard it, too,” Bill Foster said. “It makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck, same as the noise of a shell coming in. You’d reckon people had better sense, but a lot of ’em don’t.”
“The other thing I wondered was whether he was just somebody who voted for the Freedom Party, or if he was one of the tough guys who put on white and butternut and go out looking for heads to break,” Bartlett said. “He didn’t look like the type, but you never can tell.”
“They don’t need very many ruffians,” Foster said. “As long as folks think the fellows with the clubs are doing the right thing, they won’t try and stop ’em. And that worries me more than anything.”
It gave Reggie something new to worry about, too: “We can’t even write our Congressman and complain. He’d likely send goons right to our door.”
“What you can do,” Sally said, “is come and sit down and have supper. Once you get some food in your bellies to go along with the whiskey you’re pouring down, the world won’t seem like such a rotten place.”
Ham and applesauce and canned corn and string beans cooked with a little salt pork might not have changed the world, but Sally was right: they did improve Reggie’s opinion of it. Peach pie improved it even more. He patted his stomach. He had no trouble understanding how Bill had put on weight. “You don’t happen to have a sister, do you?” he asked Sally, knowing she didn’t.
He’d pleased her, though; he saw it in her eyes. “You should have got married a long time ago,” she told him.
He shrugged. “My mother says the same thing. She wants grandchildren. I never met a girl I felt like marrying.” He shook his head. “No. That’s not so. Before the war, I was sweet on a girl. But she wasn’t sweet on me. She wasn’t sweet on anybody, not back then she wasn’t. I heard she finally married some Navy man after the war. Now, what was his name? I heard it. It’s going to bother me if I can’t remember.” He paused, thinking hard. “Brantley? Buckley? No, but something like that…Brearley! That’s what it was, Brearley. I knew I’d come up with it.”
“Now, if you could just come up with a girl,” Sally said.
“If I wanted to listen to my mother, I’d have gone to visit my mother,” Reggie said. Everybody laughed. He held out his glass to Bill Foster. “You want to get me another drink? I know good and well my mother wouldn’t.” Everyone laughed again.
Sylvia Enos smoked in short, savage puffs. “That man!” she said.
Neither Sarah Wyckoff nor May Cavendish needed to ask about whom she was talking. “What did Frank do now?” Sarah asked.
“Felt me up,” Sylvia snarled. “He hadn’t bothered me for weeks, but this morning, all of a sudden, he grew more arms than an octopus. He came back to where I was working and he felt me up like I was a squash he was buying off a pushcart. I almost hauled off and belted him.”
“You should have,” Sarah said. “I would. I’d have knocked him into the middle of next week, too.” With her formidable build, she could have done it.
May said, “He’s been sniffing around Lillian for a while. He’s probably been doing more than sniffing, too; she’s a little chippy if I ever saw one.” She sniffed herself, then went on, “But I haven’t seen Lillian for the past couple days, and—”
“She quit,” Sylvia said. “I heard one of the bookkeepers talking about it. She’s moving out to California. It’s good for your lungs out there.”
“Well, if she quit, then Frank is going to be on the prowl for somebody new,” May said. “We’ve watched it happen often enough now.”
“Often enough to be good and sick of it,” Sylvia said. “And I wish to heaven he wouldn’t come sniffing around me. If he doesn’t know by now that I don’t feel like playing games, he’s an even bigger fool than I think he is.”
“He couldn’t be a bigger fool than I think he is,” Sarah Wyckoff said.
Sylvia took a big bite of her egg-salad sandwich. She wished she were a gigantic carnival geek, biting the head off of Frank Best instead of a chicken. Then she shook her head in bemusement. He really had to be on her nerves, or she would never have come up with such a bizarre mental image.
She said, “I wish I could find another job. But how am I even supposed to look for one when I’m here five and a half days a week? And jobs aren’t easy to come by, not like they were during the war.”
“It’s a nasty bind to be in, dearie,” May said. “I hope it turns out all right for you.”
“The worst he can do is fire me,” Sylvia said. “Then I will have time to look for a new job. When he gets to be like this, I almost wish he would fire me. You girls are dears, but I wouldn’t mind getting out of this place.”
“What makes you think it would be different anywhere else?” May asked. “You’d still have a man for a boss, and you know what men are like.”
“Careful,” Sarah said in a low voice. Frank Best strolled past and waved to the women at their dinner break. He doubtless thought his smile was charming. As far as Sylvia was concerned, it was so greasy, it might have been carved from a block of lard.
She lit a new cigarette. The foreman favored her with another oleaginous smile when he returned from wherever he’d gone. “Almost time to get back to the line,” he said.
“Yes, Mr. Best.” Sylvia looked forward to returning to work about as much as she looked forward to going to the doctor to have a carbuncle lanced. Sometimes, though, she had to go to the doctor. And, when the whistle blew, she had to go back and paint red rings on galoshes.
Frank Best left her alone for twenty minutes after that, which was about fifteen minutes longer than she’d expected. Then he came back toward her with a pair of rubber overshoes in his hand. The rings on them were perfect. Sylvia had made a point of painting perfect rings since he’d started bothering her again, to give him as little excuse as she could.
But, being the foreman, he didn’t necessarily need an excuse. Sylvia dipped her brush in the can of red paint by the line and painted two more perfect rings on the galoshes in front of her.
“Tried to slip these by on me, did you, Sylvia?” Best asked. He thrust the overshoes in his hand at her.
“I don’t see anything wrong with them,” Sylvia said.
That turned out to be a mistake—not that she had any right course. “Here. Take a closer look,” Best said, and stepped up right alongside her. He brushed her breast with his arm as he brought the galoshes up and held them under her nose. That might have been an accident—had he not been bothering her all morning.
She took half a step back—and knocked over the can of red paint so that most of it spilled on his shoes. That might have been an accident—had he not been bothering her all morning.
“Oh, Mr. Best!” she exclaimed. “I’m so very sorry!” I’m so very sorry I didn’t think of that a long time ago.
He jumped and hopped and used language no gentleman would have employed in the presence of a lady. He’d already proved he was no gentleman by treating Sylvia as if she were no lady. “You’d better watch yourself!” he said when something vaguely resembling coherence returned to his speech. “You’d better clean this mess up, and you’d better make sure nothing like it ever happens again, or you’ll be out on the sidewalk so fast, it’ll make your head spin.”
“Yes, Mr. Best. I’m terribly sorry, Mr. Best,” Sylvia said. The foreman stomped off, leaving a trail of red footprints.
Sylvia soaked up as much of the red paint in rags as she could. She got some on her hands, but none on her dress or shirtwaist—she was careful about them, where she hadn’t cared at all about Best’s shoes. She opened another can of paint and went right on giving galoshes red rings, too. If she hadn’t done that, Best would have got another reason to come back and have a word with her.
As things worked out, he didn’t speak to her for the rest of the day. That suited her fine. Women from all along the production line found excuses to come by and say hello, though. Under their breath, they found considerably more than hello to say, too. She got more congratulations than she’d had on any one day since Mary Jane was born. If any of the women had a good word to say about Frank Best, nobody said it where she could hear.
Sarah Wyckoff said, “That was even better than knocking his teeth down his throat, on account of it made him look like the fool he is.”
May Cavendish added, “Now all the girls will be bringing paint to work, Sylvia, and it’s your fault, nobody else’s.”
“Good,” Sylvia said. May giggled.
When the closing whistle blew, Sylvia left the galoshes factory with a spring in her step that hadn’t been there at quitting time for quite a while. She got her children off the school playground, and was far from the only mother doing so. The school didn’t take care of children in the classrooms after teaching was done for the day, as it had during the war. But it did let kids play in the yard till their parents could pick them up. That was something, if not much.
“I’m frozen, Ma,” George, Jr., said.
“Me, too,” Mary Jane added. Half the time, she agreed with whatever her big brother said. The other half, she disagreed—violently. Sylvia never knew in advance which tack she would take.
“We’ll be home soon,” Sylvia said. “We’ve got the steam radiator, and I’ll be cooking on the stove, too, so things will be nice and toasty. The more time you spend complaining here, the longer it’ll be before you’re back.”
For a wonder, the kids got the message. In fact, they ran to the trolley stop ahead of her. She might have had a spring in her step, but they were children. They didn’t need to spill paint on anybody to feel energetic.
After they all got back to the apartment, Sylvia boiled a lot of cabbage and potatoes and a little corned beef for supper. The vegetables were cheap; the corned beef wasn’t. The children loved potatoes and ate cabbage only under protest. Sylvia had been the same way when she was small.
As long as she was boiling water for supper, she also heated some for the bathroom down at the end of the hall. The children were old enough now that she couldn’t bathe them together any more. That meant going down the hall first with Mary Jane, then with George, Jr., and last by herself. By the time she got to use the tub, she could hardly tell any hot water had ever gone into it.
That meant she bathed as fast as she could. Then she got out, threw on a robe, wrapped her wet hair in a towel, and hurried back to her flat. It was just as well that she did; she found the children doing their best to kill each other. Size favored George, Jr., ferocity and long fingernails Mary Jane.
“Can’t I leave the two of you alone for five minutes?” Sylvia demanded, despite the answer obviously being no. She did her best to get to the bottom of what had started the brawl. The children told diametrically opposite stories. She might have known they would. She had known they would. This time, she couldn’t sort out who was lying, or whether they both thought they were telling the truth. With fine impartiality, she whacked both their bottoms.
“I hate you!” Mary Jane screamed. “I hate you even worse than I hate him.” She pointed to George, Jr.
Ignoring his sister, he told Sylvia, “I’m never going to speak to you again as long as I live.” He’d made that threat before, and once made good on it for a solid half hour: long enough to unnerve her.
She went into the bedroom and looked at her alarm clock. “It’s after eight,” she said. “You both need to get ready for bed.” That produced more impassioned protests from the children; George, Jr., abandoned silence so he could squawk his head off. It did him no good. In fifteen minutes, he and Mary Jane were both in bed, and asleep very shortly after that.
Sylvia sat down on the couch with a weary sigh. She would have to go to bed pretty soon herself. When she got up, all she had to look forward to was another day at the galoshes factory. Life was supposed to be better than that, wasn’t it?
Life would have been better—she was sure of it—had George lived. Then he would have been going out to sea, true, and complaining about the drudgery when he was back on land. But, no matter how hard the work was, he’d liked it. Sylvia wouldn’t have liked making galoshes even had Frank Best not bothered her whenever he wasn’t bothering someone else. It was only a job, something she did to keep food on the table. She wished she could quit.
She sighed again. She was trapped. The only difference between her and a mouse in a trap was that her back wasn’t broken…yet.
“If I had that limey submersible skipper here,” she said, “I’d shoot him right between the eyes. What the hell was he doing in that part of the Atlantic?” She didn’t own a pistol; George hadn’t kept one in the flat. She would gladly have learned to shoot one, though, if she could have avenged herself on that Englishman. She shook her head. For all she knew, the King of England had pinned a medal on him. If there was any justice in the world, she had a devil of a time seeing where.
A nasty wind blew snow into Lucien Galtier’s face. He pulled down his hat and yanked up the collar of his coat as he made his slow way from the farmhouse to the barn. His way had to be slow; because of the snow, he could hardly tell where the barn lay. But his feet knew.
He accepted Quebec winter with the resignation of a man who had never known and scarcely imagined anything different. Moving to a warmer climate had never crossed his mind. Quebec boasted no warmer climates. Besides, moving would have taken him off the land his family had farmed since the seventeenth century. He was less likely to leave his patrimony than he was to leave his wife, and never once in all the years since the priest joined them together had he had any thought of leaving Marie.
When he got to the barn, he let out a sigh of relief. The horse snorted, hearing him come in. It was not a snort of friendly greeting, in spite of all the hours of conversation that had passed between the two of them as they traveled the roads around the farm. No, the only thing that snort meant was, Where’s my breakfast, and what kept you so long?
“Compose yourself in patience, greedy beast,” Galtier said. The horse snorted again. It was not about to compose itself in patience, or any other way. It wanted hay and it wanted oats and it wanted them right this second.
He fed all the livestock and cleaned up the muck. By the time he was done with that, the muscles in the small of his back were complaining. Why didn’t you send out Georges or Charles? was what they were complaining. He did do that a lot of the time, but they were busy elsewhere this morning.
“And,” he said, speaking to his muscles as if they were the horse, and therefore incapable of talking back, “I am not in my dotage. If I cannot do this work, what good am I?” But it was not that he couldn’t do the work. It was that doing the work exacted its price these days, and the price went up with the years.
He went back out into the cold, back to the farmhouse. Once he got close to it, he whistled in surprise. Dr. Leonard O’Doull’s Ford was parked by the house. Even though his son-in-law worked at the hospital on Galtier land, he didn’t come to visit all that often. Lucien picked up his pace, to see why O’Doull had come today.
“Bonjour, mon beau-père,” O’Doull said, rising to shake his hand. Marie had already given the young doctor a cup of coffee and a sweet roll.
“Bonjour,” Lucien said. “My daughter and my grandson, I trust they are well?”
“Yes,” O’Doull said, and Marie nodded: she must have asked the same question. The American went on, “I have come, as I was beginning to tell your wife before you got here, to ask a favor of you.”
“Vraiment?” Lucien said in some surprise. O’Doull was an independent fellow, and the favors he asked few and far between. Galtier waved his arms. “Well, if you came here to do that, you’d better get on with it, don’t you think?”
“Yes, certainly.” But O’Doull hesitated again before finally continuing, “My mother and father have decided they would like to come up to Quebec to see their first grandson. You know our house, and know that it is not of the largest. Is it—would it be—possible that you might put them up here for a few days’ visit? If it cannot be done, you must know I will understand, but it would be good if it could.”
Before answering, Galtier glanced toward Marie. The farmhouse was her province. He knew there would be disruption, but she was the one to gauge how much. Only after she gave him a tiny nod did he answer in effusive tones: “But of course! They would be most welcome. When would they be traveling up to see you?”
“In a couple of weeks, if that’s all right,” O’Doull answered. “They’re so looking forward to meeting Nicole and seeing little Lucien and to meeting all of you, for your doings have filled the pages of our letters.”
“I hope we are not so bad as you will have made us out to be,” Galtier said.
While Leonard O’Doull was still figuring out how to take that, Marie asked, “Is it that your mother and father speak French?”
“My father does, some,” O’Doull replied. “He is a doctor himself, and studied French in college. My mother has been trying to learn since I decided to live here, but I do not know how much she has picked up.”
“We will get along,” Galtier said in his rusty English. Then he had to translate for his wife. Marie nodded, though she had almost no English of her own.
“I thank you very much,” O’Doull said with a nod of his own that was almost a bow. “I will wire them and tell them it is arranged. Truly, they do want to meet you. I will also, naturally, let you know when I hear just when they will arrive in Rivière-du-Loup.” With one more nod, he went back to his motorcar and then back to the hospital.
After the door closed behind him, Lucien and Marie looked at each other. They both raised eyebrows and then both started to laugh. Galtier said, “Well, this will be something out of the ordinary, at the very least.”
“Out of the ordinary, yes,” Marie agreed. “And the work we will have to do to be ready in time will be out of the ordinary, too.” She drew herself up straight with pride. “But we will do it. We will not shame ourselves before Leonard’s rich American parents.”
Doctors weren’t necessarily rich, but Lucien didn’t bother contradicting his wife. Contradicting Marie rarely did any good. Besides, she was in essence right. Galtier too wanted to put on the best show he could for his son-in-law’s parents.
Over the next couple of weeks, a tornado might have passed through the house. Doing spring cleaning and the laundry that went with spring cleaning while snow lay on the ground wasn’t easy, but Marie and her daughters managed, with help from Lucien and the two boys whenever they could be roped into it. Denise, who’d had the room she’d once shared with Nicole to herself since her sister’s wedding, was bundled off to sleep with Susanne and Jeanne to give the guests a room of their own.
“Why have we no electricity?” Marie moaned. “Why have we no piped water?”
“Why does not matter for these things,” Galtier said with a shrug. “We do not have them, and we cannot have them before the O’Doulls arrive. Save your worries for things we can help.”
“They will think we are backwards,” Marie said.
“They will think we live on a farm.” Galtier looked around. “As best I can see, they will be right.” She wrinkled her nose at him. Shrugging again, he added, “I have heard from our son-in-law that it is the same on farms in the United States as it is here.”
That quieted Marie for the time being. She got nervous a dozen more times before Leonard O’Doull, having met his parents at the train station in Rivière-du-Loup, brought them and Nicole and little Lucien down to the farmhouse. By then, the suits Lucien and Charles and Georges wore had been aired long enough that they no longer smelled of mothballs.
Harvey O’Doull looked like a shorter, older, more weathered version of his son. Rose, his wife, resembled nothing so much as a suet pudding, but her eyes, green like Leonard’s, were kind. “I was pleased to meet your lovely daughter at last, and I am pleased to meet all of you,” Harvey said, his accent about two-thirds American, one-third Parisian. “I am glad to have you in our family, and to be in yours.”
“Moi aussi,” his wife said. Her accent was considerably worse than his, but she made the effort to speak at least a little French.
Because she did, Lucien answered in his own creaky English: “And I am glad also to meet you. Please to come inside, where it is more hot.”
Harvey O’Doull’s eyes had been flicking back and forth around the farm, as if they were a camera taking snapshots. His face showed a good deal of knowledge; how many farms had he seen in the course of his practice? A lot, probably. When he said, “This is a good place,” he spoke with authority.
“This is precious!” Rose said in English when they did go inside. It wasn’t quite the word Galtier would have used to describe the house where he lived, but it was meant as praise, and he accepted it in the spirit offered.
Leonard O’Doull carried in suitcases. His father opened one and rummaged through it. “I have here for the baby many toys,” he said in his rather strange French, “and one also for you, M. Galtier.” With the air of a man performing a conjuring trick, he held up a large bottle of whiskey.
“Since I cannot drink all that by myself—at least not right away—I will share it with anyone who would like some,” Galtier said. “Denise, run into the kitchen and fetch glasses, would you?”
There was plenty of whiskey to go around. There would be enough to go around several times. “To Lucien O’Doull!” Harvey O’Doull said loudly. Everyone drank. It was, Lucien Galtier discovered, not only abundant whiskey but excellent whiskey as well.
Lucien O’Doull, without whom the gathering would not have taken place, drank no whiskey. He kept pulling himself up to a stand, letting go, and falling on his bottom. His cries were much more of indignation than of hurt. He knew he was supposed to get up there on his hind legs, but he didn’t quite know how.
Dinner featured roast chicken and sausage and mashed potatoes and buttered turnips and Marie’s fresh-baked bread. Nothing was wrong with either senior O’Doull’s appetite, and they both praised the food in two languages. The first awkward moment came when Rose asked in careful French, “Où est le W.C.?”
“Il n’y a pas de W.C.,” Galtier answered, and then, in English, “No toilet.” With resigned regret, he pointed outside. One small advantage of cold weather was that the outhouse was less ripe than it would have been in summer.
Rose O’Doull blinked, but wrapped herself in her thick wool coat and sallied forth. When she came back, she was, to Lucien’s surprise, smiling. “I haven’t been on a two-holer since Hector was a pup,” she said in English. Lucien didn’t know exactly what that meant, but he had a pretty fair notion.
Rose also insisted on going back and helping the Galtier women with the dishes. Harvey proved to have brought a box of cigars to go with the fine whiskey. After the menfolk were puffing happy clouds, he said, “I hope, M. Galtier, we do not put you to too much trouble.”
“Not at all,” Lucien said. “It is our pleasure.”
“All except Denise’s,” the incorrigible Georges murmured.
Fortunately, Harvey O’Doull either did not hear or did not understand. He went on with his own train of thought: “I know how much work a farm is. I was a child on a farm. To have guests is not easy for a man with much work to do.”
“When the guests are the other grandparents of my grandson, they are, in a way, of my own flesh and blood,” Galtier replied.
Harvey O’Doull nodded. “You are very much as my son has written of you in his letters. He says you are the finest gentleman he ever met.”
The key word was in English, but Galtier understood it. He glared at Leonard O’Doull and spoke fiercely: “See what lies you have been spreading about me!”
Harvey O’Doull started to explain himself, thinking Lucien had misunderstood and really was insulted. Leonard O’Doull, who knew his father-in-law better, wagged a forefinger at him, a thoroughly French gesture for an Irishman to use. “If I had not heard the words come from your lips, I would have thought Georges had spoken them.”
“Tabernac!” Galtier exploded. “Now I am insulted!”
“So am I,” Georges said. They all laughed. Lucien had not thought his meeting with these Americans would begin so well. But then, he reflected, he had not thought his meetings with any Americans would go so well as they had. Occasionally—but only occasionally, the stubborn peasant part of him insisted—surprises were good ones.
Scipio stood in line outside the Augusta, Georgia, city hall with more worry in his heart than he let his face show. The queue of black people stretched for blocks. Every so often, a white passing by would offer a jeer or a curse. Gray-clad policemen kept the whites from doing anything worse, if they’d intended to.
Bathsheba squeezed his hand. “Hope none o’ them Freedom Party buckra come to raise a ruction.”
He nodded. “Me, too.” That was indeed one of the worries he was doing his best to conceal. As those worries went, though, it was only a small one.
Bathsheba cheerfully went on, “Passbooks won’t be so bad. Did well enough with ’em before, an’ I reckon we can again. Just a nuisance, is all.”
“I hopes you’s right,” Scipio said. He had his doubts. The Freedom Party men in Congress were the ones who’d introduced the law tightening up the passbook system in the CSA, which had fallen to pieces during the Great War. He distrusted anything that had anything to do with the Freedom Party. But that worry wasn’t at the top of his list, either.
The line slowly snaked forward, not toward the front entrance to the city hall—whites wouldn’t have stood for blacks’ impeding their progress that way—but toward a side door. Negroes newly issued passbooks went out the back way. Some of them came around to talk with friends still in line.
“Look like a police station in there,” one of them said. “They got wanted posters up for every nigger ever spit on the sidewalk.”
A couple of blacks, hearing that, suddenly found other things to do than stand in line just then. Scipio felt like finding something else to do, too. But, from what he read in the papers, he was more likely to get in trouble without a passbook later than he was to be recognized now. Maybe a poster with his name—his real name—on it would be hanging there with all the rest. Nobody in Georgia wanted him except Bathsheba, and he was glad she had him. Everything he’d done for the Congaree Socialist Republic had been over in South Carolina. He was perfectly happy to have people beating the bushes for him there; he never intended to set foot in the state again.
Up the worn stone steps leading to the side door he and Bathsheba went. “Glad we ain’t doin’ this in the summertime,” he said. “We melt jus’ as fas’ as the ice under the fish over at Erasmus’ place.”
“For true,” Bathsheba agreed. When they got inside, she looked along the hallway. “That fellow weren’t lyin’. Who would have thought there was so many bad niggers in this here town?”
Scipio scanned the wanted posters. Sure as hell, there was a faded one with his name on it. The poster, though, bore no picture. He’d been photographed only a couple of times in his life, and those images had gone up in smoke when Marshlands burned. He’d never had any brushes with the police, as had the men and women whose photos adorned most of the fliers. On the other hand, if caught for his political crimes, he’d face the gallows or a firing squad.
At last, he came before a sour-faced white clerk. “Name?” the fellow asked.
“Xerxes,” Scipio answered, and then had to spell it for the clerk, who’d started it with a Z instead of an X.
Being corrected by a black man made the clerk’s face even more sour, but he made the change. “Residence address?” he said, and Scipio gave him the address of the roominghouse over in the Terry. The clerk didn’t have any trouble getting that down on paper. Then he asked, “Birthplace?”
“I were borned on a plantation over in South Carolina.” Scipio hoped his sudden tension didn’t show. He hadn’t expected that question.
But the clerk only nodded. “You talk like it,” he said, and wrote SOUTH CAROLINA on the passbook and on the form that would record its new owner. He asked about Scipio’s age (on general principles, Scipio lied five years off it), his employer, and his employer’s address. After taking all that down, he said, “State the time and reason your previous passbook was lost.”
“Suh, it were 1916, I reckons,” Scipio said, “an’ I were gettin’ the hell out o’ where I was at, on account of I didn’t want to git kilt. Didn’t take nothin’ but de clothes on my back.”
The clerk grunted. “Another patriotic nigger running away from the Reds,” he said. “If I had a dime—a real silver dime, I mean—for every time I’ve heard that one the past couple days, I’d be a hell of a rich man.” But he was just blowing off steam in general; he didn’t seem to disbelieve Scipio in particular. When Scipio didn’t flinch, the clerk grunted again. “Raise your right hand.”
Scipio obeyed.
“Do you solemnly swear that the information you have given me in regard to this book is true and complete, so help you God?” the white man droned.
“Yes, suh,” Scipio said.
Still droning, the clerk went on, “The penalty for perjury in regard to this book may be fine or imprisonment or both, as a court of law may determine. Do you understand?” Scipio nodded. The clerk looked miffed, perhaps at finding a black man who didn’t need the word perjury explained to him. Thrusting the new passbook at Scipio, he said, “Keep this book in your possession at all times. It must be shown or surrendered on demand of any competent official. If you move or change jobs in Augusta, you must notify city hall or a police station within five days. You must have the proper stamp in the book before you travel outside Richmond County. Penalty for violating those provisions is also fine or imprisonment or both. Do you understand all that?”
“Yes, suh,” Scipio repeated.
“All right, then,” the clerk said, as if washing his hands of him. “Go down that hall and into one of the rooms on the left. Get yourself photographed. A copy of the photograph will be sent to you. It must go into your passbook, on the blank page opposite your personal information. If you do not receive it within two weeks, come back here to be photographed again. Next!”
Bathsheba, who’d gone to the clerk next to the one who’d dealt with Scipio, was waiting when he finished. Together, they went to get their pictures taken. The photography room was full of flash-powder smoke, as if soldiers with old-fashioned weapons had fought a battle in there.
Foomp! A photographer set off more flash powder. Scipio’s eyes watered at the blast of light. “Do Jesus!” he exclaimed. A blowing green-purple spot danced at the center of his vision before slowly fading.
“That was just like lookin’ into the sun,” Bathsheba said as the two of them made their blinking way to the back door and out of the Augusta city hall.
“Sure enough was,” Scipio said. He put the passbook in the pocket of his dungarees. If he couldn’t leave the county without getting the book stamped, Confederate authorities were tightening up with a vengeance. And yet, oddly, that bothered him only a little. Now he had an official document to prove he was Xerxes of Augusta, Georgia. That made it much harder for Anne Colleton—or anyone else, but he worried most about Miss Anne—to accuse him of ever having been Scipio the bloodthirsty Red.
He spotted Aurelius in the line of men and women waiting to get passbooks, and waved to the waiter with whom he’d worked at John Oglethorpe’s restaurant before the white man let him go. Aurelius waved back. “How you is?” Scipio called.
Aurelius waggled his hand back and forth. “Same as always.” He looked from Scipio to Bathsheba and back again. “You look like you’s doin’ pretty good for yourself,” he said with a smile.
“This here my intended,” Scipio answered proudly. He introduced Bathsheba and Aurelius, then asked, “How Mistuh Oglethorpe doin’?”
“He don’t change,” Aurelius said. “Tough as rocks on the outside, sof’ as butter underneath.”
Scipio nodded. That described his former boss very well. He was about to say so when a shout from farther up Greene Street made him whip his head around. The shout was one he’d heard before: “Freedom!” It seemed to come from a great many throats.
All up and down the queue, Negroes looked at one another and up the street in alarm. No one with a dark skin thought of the Freedom Party with anything but dread. “Freedom!” That great shout was closer now. Scipio glanced at the policemen who’d been keeping the line orderly. He’d always seen the white police as a tool for keeping Negroes in their place. Now he hoped they could protect him and his people.
Past the line of Negroes came the Freedom Party marchers. Scipio stared at them in dismay: hundreds of men tramped along in disciplined ranks. They all wore white shirts and butternut pants. Many of them had steel helmets on their heads. The men in the first rank carried the Stars and Bars and Confederate battle flags. The men in the second rank bore white banners with FREEDOM printed on them in angry red letters, and others that might have been Confederate battle flags save that they featured a red St. Andrew’s cross on blue, not blue on red.
“Freedom!” the marchers roared again. Had they turned on the Negroes in line outside the city hall, the handful of policemen could not have hoped to stop them. But they just kept marching and shouting their one-word slogan. That showed discipline, too, and frightened Scipio almost as much as an attack would have done.
He looked from the marchers back to the police. Not only were the policemen outnumbered, they also seemed cowed by the Freedom Party’s show of force. It was almost as if the marchers represented the Confederate government and the police were civilian spectators.
“Them bastards is bad trouble,” Aurelius said, speaking in a low voice to make sure he gave the white men no excuse to do anything but march.
“Every time the Freedom Party do somethin’, mo’ poor buckra join they than the time befo’,” Scipio said. “That go on, they gwine end up runnin’ this here country one fine day. What they do then?”
“Whatever they please,” Bathsheba said. “They do whatever they please.”
“Ain’t nothin’we can do about it, anyways,” Aurelius said.
Scipio suddenly felt the weight of the passbook in his pocket. It might have been the weight of a ball and chain. For the very first time, he truly sympathized with the Red uprising in which he’d played an unwilling part. This march was what Cassius and Cherry and the other Reds had feared the most.
But their uprising had helped spawn the Freedom Party—Scipio understood the dialectic and how it worked, even if he didn’t think of it as revealed truth. And the black uprising had failed, as any black uprising was bound to do: too few blacks, too few weapons. What did that leave for Negroes in the CSA? Nothing he could see.
“We’s trapped,” he said, hoping Bathsheba or Aurelius would argue with him. Neither of them did, which worried him more than anything.
Sam Carsten slammed a shell into the breech of the five-inch gun he served aboard the USS Remembrance. “Fire!” Willie Moore shouted. Carsten jerked the lanyard. The cannon roared. The shell casing fell to the deck with a clang of brass on steel. One of the shell-jerkers behind Sam handed him a fresh round. Coughing a little from the cordite fumes, he reloaded the gun.
Moore peered out through the sponson’s vision slit. “I think we’ve got to bring it down a couple hundred yards to drop it just where we want it,” he said, and fiddled with the elevation screw to achieve the result he wanted. When he was satisfied, he nodded to Sam. “Give ’em another one.”
“Right, Chief.” Sam yanked the lanyard again. The gun bellowed. Carsten said, “Christ, by the time we’re through with Belfast, there won’t be anything left of it.”
“Damn stubborn crazy micks,” Moore said. “The ones who want to stay part of England, I mean, not the ones who aim to put all of Ireland into one country. They’re damn stubborn crazy micks, too, but they’re on our side.”
Overhead, two aeroplanes roared off the deck of the Remembrance, one on the other’s heels. “They’ll give the Belfasters something to think about,” Sam said.
“That they will,” the commander of the gun crew agreed. “No doubt about it.” He peered through the slit again. “Sons of bitches!” he burst out. “The bastards are shooting back. One just splashed into the water a few hundred yards short of us.”
One of the shell-jerkers, Joe Gilbert—like most in his slot, a big, muscular fellow—said, “Goddamn limeys must have smuggled in some more guns.”
“Yeah,” Carsten said. “And if we call ’em on it, they’ll say they never did any such thing—their pet micks must’ve come up with the guns and the shells under a flat rock somewhere, or else made ’em themselves.”
Officially, Britain recognized Ireland’s independence. She’d had to; the United States and the German Empire had forced the concession from her. The Royal Navy never ventured into the Irish Sea to challenge the Remembrance or any other U.S., German, or Irish warship.
But hordes of small freighters and fishing boats smuggled arms and ammunition and sometimes fighting men into the loyalist northeastern part of Ireland. The British Foreign Office blandly denied knowing anything about that. However many ships stood between Ireland on the one hand and England and Scotland on the other, the gun runners always found gaps through which they could slip.
Willie Moore said, “The damn micks—our damn micks, I mean—had better start doing a better job of patrolling, that’s all I’ve got to tell you. It’s their goddamn country. If they can’t hang on to it all by their lonesome, I can tell you we ain’t gonna hang around forever to pull their chestnuts out of the fire.” He adjusted the elevation screw again. “Let ’em have the next one now.”
“Aye aye.” Sam fired the five-inch gun again. He had to step smartly to keep the casing from landing on his toes.
Joe Gilbert passed him another shell. He was bending to load it into the breech when a shell from the shore slammed into the sponson. That he was bending saved his life. Most of the shell’s force was spent in penetrating the armor that protected the sponson, but a fragment gutted Willie Moore as if he were a muskie pulled from a Minnesota lake. Another one hissed over Sam’s head and into Gilbert’s neck. The shell-jerker fell without a sound, his head almost severed from his body. Moore screamed and screamed and screamed.
Sam could look out through the hole the shell had torn and see the ocean and, beyond it, burning Belfast. He wasted only a tiny fraction of a second on that. What to do when the sponson got hit had been drilled into him during more than ten years in the Navy. No fire—he checked that first. Inside the sponson, it was just bare metal, with no paint to burn. That didn’t always help, but it had this time. The ammunition wouldn’t go up.
Next, check the gun crew. Joe Gilbert was beyond help. Blood dripped from Sam’s shoes when he picked up his feet. Calvin Wesley, the other shell-hauler, hadn’t been scratched. He gaped at Gilbert’s twitching corpse as if he’d never seen one before. He was a veteran—everybody aboard the Remembrance was a veteran—so that was hard to imagine, but maybe it was so.
Willie Moore kept shrieking. One glance at what the shell had done told Sam all he needed to know. He opened the aid kit on the wall of the sponson; a shell fragment had scarred the thick metal right beside it. From the kit, he drew two syringes of morphine. One might have been enough, but he wanted to make sure.
He stooped beside Moore. “Here, Chief, I’ll take care of you.” He gave the gunner’s mate all the morphine in both syringes. After a very little while, Moore fell silent.
“That’s too much,” Wesley said. “It’ll kill him.”
“That’s the idea,” Sam said. He watched Moore’s chest. It stopped moving. Like a man waking up from a bad dream, Carsten shook himself. “Come on, God damn it. We’ve got this gun to fight. You know how to load, right?”
“I better,” Wesley answered. “I seen you guys do it often enough.”
“All right, then. You load and fire, and I’ll aim the damn gun.” Sam had seen that done often enough, too, and practiced it himself when he got the chance during drills. The hit had torn the left side of the sponson too badly for the gun to track all the way in that direction. Otherwise, though, he was still in business. “Fire!”
Calvin Wesley sent on its way the shell Sam had been loading when they were struck. He was setting the next round into the breech when someone out in the passage pounded on the dogged hatch. A shout came through the thick steel: “Anybody alive in there?”
“Fire!” Sam said, and the gun roared. That should have answered the question, but the pounding went on. He nodded to Wesley. “Undog it.”
“Aye aye.” The shell-jerker obeyed.
Half a dozen men spilled into the sponson, Commander Grady among them. “Two dead, sir,” Carsten said crisply, “but we can still use the gun.”
“So I gather.” Grady looked at the bodies. His rabbity features stayed expressionless; he’d seen his share of bodies before. After a moment’s thought, he nodded briskly. “All right, Carsten, this is your gun for the time being. I’ll get you shell-heavers. We’ll clean up this mess and get on with the job.”
Another shell from the shore splashed into the Irish Sea, close enough to the Remembrance to send some water through the hole the hit had made in the sponson’s armor. Sam said, “Sir, if we can use a couple of aeroplanes to shoot up that gun and its crew, our life will get easier.”
Even as he spoke, one of the Wright fighting scouts buzzed off the deck of the aeroplane carrier, followed a moment later by another and then another. Commander Grady said, “You aren’t the only one with that idea, you see.”
“Never figured I would be,” Sam answered, not altogether truthfully. All his time in the Navy had taught him that officers often had trouble seeing things that should have been obvious.
Grady pointed to two of the ratings with him. “Drinkwater, you and Jorgenson stay here and jerk shells. Carsten, can Wesley cut the mustard as a loader?”
“Sir, if we fired with a two-man crew, we’ll sure as hell do a lot better with four,” Sam answered. Calvin Wesley shot him a grateful glance. Loader would be a step up for Wesley, as crew chief was a step up for Sam. Sam wished he hadn’t earned it like this, but, as was the Navy way, nobody paid any attention to what he wished.
Grady pointed to the dead meat that had been Willie Moore and Joe Gilbert. “Get these bodies out of here,” he ordered the men he hadn’t appointed to the gun crew. “We’ve already spent too much time here.”
As the sailors dragged the corpses out of the sponson, Sam took what had been Willie Moore’s spot. The chief of a gun crew had an advantage denied the rest of the men—he could see out whenever he chose: through the vision slit, through the rangefinder, and now through the hole that would, when time allowed, no doubt have a steel plate welded over it.
Sam peered southwest, toward the shore half a dozen miles away. The fighting scouts the Remembrance had launched were buzzing around something. A flash told Carsten it was the gun that had fired on his ship. The shell fell astern of the aeroplane carrier.
He twisted the calibration screw on the rangefinder and read out the exact distance to the target: 10,350 yards. Willie Moore had known without having to think how far to elevate the gun for a hit at that distance. Sam didn’t. He glanced at a yellowing sheet of paper above the vision slit: a range table. Checking the elevation, he saw the gun was a little low, and adjusted it. Then he traversed it ever so slightly to the left.
“Fire!” he shouted. He’d given the order before, with only Calvin Wesley in the sponson with him, but it seemed more official now. If he fought the gun well, it might be his to keep.
Wesley let out a yelp as the shell casing just missed mashing his instep. But when one of the new shell-heavers handed him the next round, he slammed it home in good style.
“You want to mind your feet,” Sam said, traversing the gun a little farther on its track. “You can spend some time on crutches if you don’t.” He turned the screw another quarter of a revolution. “Fire!”
He spied another flash in the same instant as his own gun spoke. The shell the pro-British rebels launched was a near miss. At the range at which he was fighting, he could not tell whether he’d hit or missed. But the gun on the shore did not fire again. Either his shell had silenced it, one from a different five-incher had done the trick, or the aeroplanes from the Remembrance had exterminated the crew.
He didn’t waste time worrying over which was so. As long as the Irish rebels couldn’t hurt the Remembrance any more, he was free to go back to what his gun had been doing before the ship came under fire: pounding Belfast to bits. Sooner or later, the rebels would figure out they couldn’t win the war against their more numerous opponents—and against the might of Germany and the United States. If they needed help figuring that out, he would gladly lend a hand.
The shell-heavers were just hired muscle, big men with strong backs. Calvin Wesley did his new job well enough, though Sam knew he’d done it better himself. He shrugged. Willie Moore would have handled the gun better than he was doing it. Experience counted.
“Only one way to get it,” he muttered, and set about the business of acquiring as much as he could.
Roger Kimball’s heart thumped with anticipation as he knocked on the hotel-room door. He’d met Anne Colleton this way whenever she’d let him. Once, she’d opened the door and greeted him naked as the day she was born. Her imagination knew no bounds. Neither did his own appetites.
With a slight squeak, the door opened. The figure in the doorway was not naked. It was not Anne Colleton, either. Kimball’s heart kept pounding just the same. Vengeance was an appetite, too, as Anne would have agreed in a flash. “Welcome to Charleston, Mr. Featherston,” Kimball said.
“Thank you kindly, Commander Kimball,” Jake Featherston answered. The words were polite enough, but he didn’t sound kindly, not even a little bit. And he bore down on Kimball’s title in a way that was anything but admiring. But, after he stood aside to let Kimball come in, his tone warmed a little: “I hear tell I’ve got you to thank for whispering my name into Miss Colleton’s ear. It’s done the Party good, and I won’t say anything different.”
That was probably why he’d agreed to see Kimball. Did he recall the dismissive telegram he’d sent down to Charleston? He must have; he had the look of a man who remembered everything. Kimball didn’t intend to bring it up if Featherston didn’t. As for whispering Featherston’s name into Anne Colleton’s ear…well, mentioning it on the telephone was one thing, but when Anne let him get close enough to whisper in her ear, he had other things to say.
“Want a drink?” Featherston asked. When Kimball nodded, the leader of the Freedom Party pulled a bottle out of a cabinet and poured two medium-sized belts. After handing Kimball one glass, he raised the other high. “To revenge!”
“To revenge!” Kimball echoed. That was a toast to which he’d always drink. He took a long pull at the whiskey. Warmth spread from his middle. “Ahh! Thanks. That’s fine stuff.”
“Not bad, not bad.” Jake Featherston pointed to a chair. “Set yourself down, Kimball, and tell me what’s on your mind.”
“I’ll do that.” Kimball sat, crossed his legs, and balanced the whiskey glass on his higher knee. Featherston seemed as direct in his private dealings as he was on the stump. Kimball approved; nobody diffident ever commanded a submersible. “I want to know how serious you are about going after the high muckymucks in the War Department.”
“I’ve never been more serious about anything in my life.” If Featherston was lying, he was damn good at it. “They made a hash of the war, and they don’t want to own up to it.” Something else joined the anger that filled his narrow features, something Kimball needed a moment to recognize: calculation. “Besides, if the Freedom Party Congressmen keep asking for hearings and the Whigs and the Radical Liberals keep turning us down, who looks good and who looks bad?”
Slowly, Kimball nodded. “Isn’t that pretty?” he said. “It keeps the Party’s name in the papers, too, same as the passbook bill did.”
“That’s right.” The calculation left Featherston’s face. The anger stayed. Kimball got the idea that the anger never left. “Niggers haven’t gotten half of what they deserve, not yet they haven’t. And even the nigger-loving Congressmen up in Richmond now won’t stop us from giving it to ’em.”
“Bully.” Roger Kimball’s voice was savage. “When the uprising started, they kept my boat, the Bonefish, from going out on patrol against the damnyankees. Instead, I had to sail up the Pee Dee and pretend I was a river gunboat so I could fight the stinking Reds.”
“I knew they were going to rise up,” Featherston said. “I knew they were going to try and kick the white race right in the balls. And when I tried to warn people, what did I get? What did the goddamn War Department give me? A pat on the head, that’s what. A pat on the head and a set of stripes on my sleeve they might as well have tattooed on my arm, on account of I wouldn’t get ’em off till Judgment Day. That’s what I got for being right.”
His eyes blazed. Roger Kimball was impressed in spite of himself, more impressed than he’d thought he would be. He’d known how Featherston could sway crowds. He’d been swayed in a crowd himself. He’d expected the force of the Freedom Party leader’s personality to be less in a personal meeting like this. If anything, though, it was greater. With all his heart, he wanted to believe everything Jake Featherston said.
Kimball had to gather himself before he could say, “You don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, though. The War Department could do the country some good, once the dead wood got cleared out.”
“Yeah, likely tell,” Featherston jeered. “Best thing that could happen to the War Department would be blowing it to hell and gone. And anybody who says anything different is just as big a traitor as the lying dogs in there.”
“That’s shit,” Kimball said without raising his voice. Featherston’s eyes opened very wide. Kimball grinned; he got the idea nobody had spoken that way to Featherston in quite a while. Grinning still, he went on, “Without the War Department, for instance, how are we going to get decent barrels built? You’d best believe the damnyankees are working to make theirs tougher, same as they are with aeroplanes. Don’t you reckon we ought to do the same?”
“Barrels. Stinking barrels,” Featherston muttered under his breath. He’d stopped jeering. Now he watched Kimball as a man might watch a rattlesnake in the shocked instant after its tail began to buzz. No, he hadn’t had a supporter talk back to him for a while. It threw him off stride, left him startled and confused. But he rallied quickly. “Well, yes, Christ knows we’ll need new barrels when we fight the USA again. But where the hell are they? Are we working on them? Not that I’ve ever heard, and I’ve got ears in all sorts of funny places. We’ve got people—mercenaries—using some old ones down south of the border, but new ones? Forget it. Proves what I told you, doesn’t it?—pack of damn traitors in the War Department.”
When we fight the USA again. Featherston’s calm acceptance of the next war took Kimball’s breath away, or rather made it come fast and hard, as if Anne Colleton had greeted him in the doorway naked. He wanted that next war, too. He hadn’t wanted to give up on the last one, but he’d had no choice. Seeing how much Featherston longed for it made him forget their disagreement of a moment before.
When he didn’t answer back right away, the sparkle returned to Featherston’s eye. The Freedom Party leader said, “Reckon you were just sticking up for the officers in Richmond, seeing as you were one yourself.”
“Screw the officers in Richmond,” Kimball said evenly. “Yes, I was an officer. I f*cking earned being an officer when I won an appointment at the Naval Academy in Mobile off a lousy little Arkansas farm. I earned my way through the Academy, too, and I earned every promotion I got once the war started. And if you don’t like that, Sarge”—he laced Featherston’s chosen title with scorn—“you can go to hell.”
He thought he’d have a fight on his hands then and there. He wasn’t sure he could win it, either; Jake Featherston had the hard, rangy look of a man who’d cause more than his share of trouble in a brawl. But Featherston surprised him by throwing back his head and laughing. “All right, you were an officer, but you ain’t one of those blue-blooded little goddamn pukes like Jeb Stuart III, that worthless sack of horse manure.”
“Blue-blooded? Me? Not likely.” Kimball laughed, too. “After my pa died, I walked behind the ass end of a mule till I figured out I didn’t want to do that for a living any more. I’ll tell you something else, too: it didn’t take me real long to figure that out, either.”
“Don’t reckon it would have,” Featherston said. “All right, Kimball, you were an officer, but you were my kind of officer. When I’m president, reckon I can find you a place up in Richmond, if you want it.”
When I’m president. He said that as calmly as he’d said, When we fight the USA again. He said it as surely, too. His confidence made Kimball gasp again. A little hoarsely, the ex-submersible skipper said, “So you are going to run next year?”
“Hell, yes, I’ll run,” Featherston answered. “I won’t win. The people here aren’t ready yet to do the hard things that need doing. But when I run, when I tell ’em what we’ll have to do, that’ll help make ’em ready. You know what I’m saying, Kimball? The road needs building before I can run my motorcar down it.”
“Yeah, I know what you’re saying.” Kimball knew he sounded abstracted. He couldn’t help it. He’d thought about guiding Jake Featherston the way a rider guided a horse. After half an hour’s conversation with Featherston, that seemed laughable, absurd, preposterous—he couldn’t find a word strong enough. The leader of the Freedom Party knew where he wanted to go, knew with a certainty that made the hair stand up on the back of Kimball’s neck. Whether he would get there was another question, but he knew where the road went.
Far more cautiously than he’d spoken before, Kimball said, “I’m not the only officer you could use, you know. You shouldn’t be down on all of us. Take Clarence Potter, for instance. He—”
Featherston cut him off with a sharp chopping gesture. “You and him are pals. I remember that. But I haven’t got any real use for him. There’s no fire in the man; he thinks too damn much. It’s not the fellow who thinks like a professor who gets a pile of ordinary working folks all het up. It’s somebody who thinks like them. It’s somebody who talks like them. He’d just piss and moan about that, on account of he can’t do it himself.”
Recalling Potter’s Yale-flavored, Yankee-sounding accent and his relentless precision, Kimball found himself nodding. He said, “I bet you would have had more use for him, though, if he’d come over to the Party right away.”
“Hell and blazes, of course I would,” Featherston said. “But I can see him now, lookin’ down his nose, peerin’ over the tops of his spectacles”—he gave a viciously excellent impression of a man doing just that—“and reckoning I was nothing but a damn fool. Maybe he knows better nowadays, but maybe it’s too late.”
Kimball didn’t say anything at all. Featherston’s judgment of Clarence Potter was close to his own. Clarence was a fine fellow—Kimball wouldn’t have gone so far in denigrating him as Featherston had—but he did think too much for his own good.
“We’re on the way up,” Featherston said. “We’re on the way up, and nobody’s going to stop us. Now that I’m here, I’m damn glad I came down to Charleston. I can use you, Kimball. You’re a hungry bastard, just like me. There aren’t enough of us, you know what I’m saying?”
“I sure do.” Kimball stuck out his hand. Featherston clasped it. They clung to each other for a moment, locked in the alliance of the mutually useful. The president of the Confederate States, Kimball reflected, was eligible for only one six-year term. If Jake Featherston did win the job, who would take it after him? Roger Kimball hadn’t known any such ambition before, but he did now.