Chapter XX
As Hosea Blackford did whenever he came up to the Lower East Side of New York City, he looked around in astonishment. Turning to his wife, he said, “I can’t imagine what growing up here would have been like, with the buildings blocking out the sky and with swarms of people everywhere.”
Flora Blackford—after being married for a year, she hardly ever signed her name Flora Hamburger any more—shrugged. “It’s all what you’re used to,” she answered. “I couldn’t imagine there was so much open space in the whole world, let alone the USA, till I took that train trip out to Dakota with you this past summer. I felt like a little tiny bug on a great big plate.”
Up till 1917, New York City was all she’d ever known. Up till the train trip to Dakota, all she’d known were New York City, Philadelphia, and the ninety-odd built-up miles between them. Endless expanses of grass waving gently in the breeze all the way out to the horizon had not been part of her mental landscape. They were now, and she felt richer for it.
A boy in short pants ran by carrying a stack of the Daily Forward. “Buy my paper!” he yelled in Yiddish. “Buy my paper!”
“I understood that.” Blackford looked pleased with himself. “The German I took in college isn’t quite fossilized after all—and being around your family is an education in any number of ways.”
“I’ll tell my father you said so,” Flora said. She walked up the stairs of the apartment house that seemed so familiar and so strange at the same time.
Following her, Blackford said, “Go ahead. He’ll take it the right way. He has better sense than half the people in the Cabinet, believe you me he does.”
“Considering what goes on in the Cabinet, that’s not saying so much,” Flora answered. Her husband rewarded her with a gust of laughter. She laughed, too, but a little ruefully: the scent of cooking cabbage was very strong. “I don’t think this building is ready for the vice president of the United States.”
“Don’t worry about it,” he said, laughing again. “Compared to the farm I grew up on, it’s paradise—a crowded paradise, but paradise. It’s got running water and flush toilets and electricity. The farm I grew up on sure didn’t, not that anybody had electricity back then.”
“This building had gas lamps up until a few years ago,” Flora said. It did not have an elevator; she and Blackford walked upstairs hand in hand.
Knocking at the door to the flat where she’d lived so long seemed strange, too, but it also seemed right: she didn’t live here any more, and never would again. When the door swung open, David Hamburger was the one with his hand on the latch. His other hand held the cane that helped him get around.
Flora embraced her brother carefully, not wanting to make him topple over. David shook hands with Hosea Blackford, then shuffled through a turn and walked back to the kitchen table. Each slow, rolling step on his artificial leg was a separate effort, each a silent reproach against the war that, though more than six years over, would echo through shattered lives for most of the rest of the century.
Blackford shed his coat; the October evening might have had a nip to it, but the inside of the flat was warm enough and to spare. “Here, I’ll take that,” Flora’s younger sister Esther said, and she did.
“Chess?” David asked. He pulled out the board and pieces even before Blackford could nod.
“I’ll take on the winner,” Isaac said. The younger of Flora’s brothers wore in his lapel a silver Soldiers’ Circle pin inscribed 1918—the year of his conscription class. She thanked heaven that he, unlike David, hadn’t had to go to war…and wished to heaven he wouldn’t wear that pin. Soldiers’ Circle men could be almost as goonish as the Freedom Party’s ruffians down in the Confederate States. But he did as he pleased in such things. He was a man now, and let everyone know it on any excuse or none.
“Hello, Aunt Flora!” Yossel Reisen said. Coming home so seldom, Flora was amazed at how much her older sister’s son grew in between times. He’d been a baby when she went off to Congress, but he was in school now. He added, “Hello, Uncle Hosea!”
“Hello, Yossel,” Hosea Blackford answered absently, most of his attention on the board in front of him. He played well enough to beat David some of the time, but not too often. He’d already gone down a pawn, which meant he probably wouldn’t win this game.
Abraham Hamburger came in from the bedroom, puffing on his pipe. He hugged Flora, then glanced at the chess board. Setting a hand on Blackford’s shoulder, he said, “You’re in trouble. But you knew that when you decided to marry my daughter, eh? If you didn’t, you should have.”
“Papa!” Flora said, indignation mostly but not altogether feigned.
“He’s not kidding, dear,” Blackford said. “You know he’s not.” Since Flora did, she subsided. Her husband started a series of trades that wiped the board clear like machine-gun fire smashing a frontal assault. By the time the dust settled, though, he was down two pawns, not one. Stopping David from promoting one of them cost him his bishop, his last piece other than pawns. He tipped over his king and stood up. “You got me again.”
David only grunted. He grunted again when Isaac took Blackford’s place. Before he and his brother could start playing, Sophie stuck her head out of the kitchen and announced, “Supper in a couple of minutes.”
“We’d better wait,” David said then.
“Ha!” Isaac said. “You’re just afraid I’d beat you.” But he scooped his pieces off the board and put them in the box. He and David had been giving each other a hard time as long as they’d been alive.
Sophie came out with plates and silverware. Behind her came Sarah Hamburger with a platter on which rested two big boiled beef tongues. While Sophie and Esther and Flora set the table, their mother went back into the kitchen, returning with another platter piled high with boiled potatoes and onions and carrots.
“Looks wonderful,” Hosea Blackford said enthusiastically. “Smells wonderful, too.”
Isaac gave him a quizzical look. “When I was in the Army, a lot of…fellows who weren’t Jews”—he’d caught himself before saying goyim to his brother-in-law—“turned up their noses at the idea of eating tongue.”
“All what you’re used to, I suppose,” Blackford said. “When I was growing up on a farm, we’d have it whenever we butchered a cow—or a lamb, for that matter, though a lamb’s tongue has a skin that’s tough to peel and so little meat, it’s almost more trouble than it’s worth. I hadn’t eaten tongue for years before I first came here.”
“I knew then you liked,” Sarah Hamburger said, “so I make.” Her English was the least certain of anyone’s there, but she made a special effort for Blackford.
Over supper, Esther said, “What is it like, being vice president?” She laughed at herself. “I’ve been asking Flora what it’s like being in Congress ever since she got elected, and I still don’t really understand it, so I don’t know why I should ask you now.”
“Being in Congress is complicated, or it can be,” Blackford answered. “Being vice president is simple. Imagine you’re in a factory, and you have a machine with one very expensive part. If that part breaks, the whole machine shuts down till you can replace it.”
“And you’re that part?” Esther asked, her eyes wide.
Blackford laughed and shook his head. “I’m the spare for that part. I sit in the warehouse and gather dust. President Sinclair is the part that’s hooked up to the machine, and I hope to heaven that he doesn’t break.”
“You’re joking,” David said. He studied Blackford’s face. “No, I take it back. You’re not.”
“No, I’m not,” Blackford said. “Flora has heard me complain about this for as long as I’ve had the job. I have the potential to be a very important man—but the only way the potential turns real is if something horrible happens, the way something horrible happened to the Confederate president last year. Otherwise, I haven’t got much to do.”
Abraham Hamburger said, “This Mitchel, down in the Confederate States, seems to be doing a good job.”
“He does indeed,” Blackford said. “I’m not telling any secrets when I say President Sinclair is glad, too. If the regular politicians in the Confederate States do a good job, the reactionaries don’t get the chance to grab the reins.”
“A kholeriyeh on everybody in the Confederate States,” David muttered in Yiddish. Blackford glanced at Flora, but she didn’t translate. She didn’t blame her brother for feeling that way. Because of what the Confederates had done to him, she could hardly keep from feeling that way herself.
Her father nodded at what Blackford had said. “These Freedom Party mamzrim remind me of the Black Hundreds in Russia, except they go after Negroes instead of Jews.”
“Not enough Jews in the Confederate States for them to go after,” Isaac said. “If there were more, they would.”
“That’s probably true,” Flora said, and Blackford nodded. Flora’s laugh sounded a little shaky. “Funny to think of anybody going after anyone instead of Jews.”
“It is, isn’t it?” Isaac said. “People do it here, too, even though there are more Jews than Negroes in the USA. It makes life easier for us than it would be otherwise.”
Hosea Blackford looked around the crowded apartment. Flora knew what was in his mind: with so many people in so small a space, Jews still didn’t have it easy. She hadn’t been able to see how crowded the flat was, how crowded the whole Lower East Side was, till she moved away. Before, they’d been like water to a fish. Only going to Philadelphia had given her a standard for comparison.
But that standard for comparison didn’t mean her brother was wrong. Easier and easy weren’t the same thing. She said, “Wherever we end up, no matter how hard things are for us, we manage to get by.”
“That spirit is what made this country what it is today, no matter who has it,” Hosea Blackford said. He stopped with a bite of tongue halfway to his mouth and an astonished look on his face. “Will you listen to me. Will you listen to me? If you didn’t know better, wouldn’t you swear that was Teddy Roosevelt talking?”
“He’s set his mark on the country for a long time to come,” David said. He rapped his own artificial leg, which sounded of wood and metal. “He’s set his mark on me for the rest of my life. Having the Socialists running the country has turned out better for the country and better for us”—he grinned at Flora and at Hosea Blackford—“than I thought it would. I admit it. But I still think TR deserved a third term in 1920.”
Flora knew her brother’s opinion. She had never understood it, and still didn’t. But she refused to let him get her goat. “Now we’ll see how many terms President Sinclair deserves,” she said, which seemed to satisfy everyone. As her husband had, she heard what she’d said with some surprise. Will you listen to me? Will you listen to me? If you didn’t know better, wouldn’t you swear that was a politician talking?
Someone had plastered two-word posters—VOTE FREEDOM!—on every telegraph pole and blank wall in the Terry. As Scipio walked from his roominghouse to Erasmus’ fish store and restaurant, he wondered if all the Freedom Party men had gone round the bend. Only a handful of Negroes in Augusta, Georgia, were eligible to vote. Even if they’d all been eligible, the Freedom Party wouldn’t have picked up more than a handful of their votes.
When Scipio came up to the fish store, Erasmus was scrubbing a Freedom Party poster off his door. “Mornin’, Xerxes,” he said. “I don’t need me no extra work so early in the mornin’.”
“Crazy damnfool buckra,” Scipio said. “Ain’t nobody here got no use for no Freedom Party.”
“Freedom Party?” Erasmus exclaimed. “That whose poster this here is?” He was a clever man, and sharp with figures, but could hardly read or write. At Scipio’s nod, he scrubbed and scraped harder than ever. “Mus’ be tryin’ to make us afraid of ’em.”
“Mebbe so,” Scipio said; that hadn’t occurred to him. “I was feared o’ they befo’, but I ain’t now. They shoots theyselves when they shoots de president.”
Erasmus didn’t answer for a moment; he was busy getting rid of the last bits of the offending poster. “There—that’s better.” He kicked shreds of wadded-up paper across the sidewalk and into the gutter, then glanced over at Scipio. “Them bastards ain’t even collectin’ ‘taxes’ no more. You reckon they’s goin’ anywheres now?”
“Pray to Jesus they ain’t,” Scipio answered with all his heart. He still didn’t believe prayer helped, but the phrase came automatically to his lips.
“Amen,” Erasmus said. Then he reached into a pocket of his dungarees and pulled out a one-dollar banknote. “And I reckon this here hammers some nails in the coffin lid, too. Give ’em one big thing less to bellyache about.”
“Yeah.” Again, Scipio spoke enthusiastically. The Freedom Party hadn’t been alone in bellyaching about the inflation that had squeezed the CSA since the end of the Great War. He’d done plenty of that himself. “Been a year now, near enough, an’ the money still worth what it say. Almost done got to where I starts to trust it.”
“Wasn’t all bad.” Erasmus chuckled. “Still recollect the look on the white-folks banker’s face when I paid off what I owed. Thought he was gonna piss his pants. Money was still worth a little somethin’ then, so they couldn’t pretend it weren’t, like they done later. An’now I got my house free an’clear. Wish more niggers woulda did the same.”
Scipio shared that wish. Most of the Negroes in Augusta hadn’t been alert enough to the opportunity that had briefly glittered for them. “Reckon mos’ of the buckra don’ think of it till too late, neither,” he said.
“You right about that,” Erasmus answered. “Some folks is jus’ stupid, an’ it don’t matter none whether they’s black or white.” Before Scipio could say anything about that, his boss went on, “We done spent enough time chinnin’. Got work to do, an’ it don’t never go away.”
Once inside the fish store and restaurant, Scipio fell to with a will. Erasmus had told a couple of important secrets there. Fools weren’t the only ones who came in all colors. So did people who worked hard. One way or another, they got ahead. The ones with black skins didn’t get so far ahead and didn’t get ahead so fast, but they did better than their brethren who were content to take it easy.
After the lunch crowd thinned out, Scipio said, “You let me go downtown for a little bit, boss? Bathsheba want some fancy buttons for a shirtwaist she makin’, an’ she can’t find they nowhere in the Terry. Don’t reckon no buckra too proud to take my money.”
Erasmus waved him away. “Yeah, go on, go on. Be back quick, though, you hear?” Scipio nodded and left. He could take advantage of his boss’ good nature every once in a while because he did work hard—and because he didn’t try taking advantage very often.
Fewer Negroes were on the streets of downtown Augusta nowadays than had been there right after the war, when Scipio first came to town. The factory jobs that had brought blacks into town from the fields were gone now, gone or back in white hands. Two cops in the space of a couple of blocks demanded to see Scipio’s passbook. He passed both inspections.
“Don’t want no trouble from nobody, boy, you hear?” the second policeman said, handing the book back to him.
“Yes, suh,” Scipio answered. He might have pointed out that the policeman wasn’t stopping any whites to see if they meant trouble. He might have, but he didn’t. Had he, it would have meant trouble for him. The cop wouldn’t have needed to belong to the Freedom Party to come down hard on an uppity nigger.
The Freedom Party itself wasn’t lying down and playing dead. Posters shouting VOTE FREEDOM! covered walls and poles and fences here, as they did over in the Terry. Here, though, they competed with others touting the Whigs and the Radical Liberals. The more of those Scipio saw, the happier he was.
He also grew happier when he saw exactly the kind of buttons Bathsheba wanted on a white cardboard card in the front window of a store that called itself Susanna’s Notions. When he went inside, the salesgirl—or possibly it was Susanna herself—ignored him till he asked about the buttons. Even then, she made no move to get them, but snapped, “Show me your money.”
He displayed a dollar banknote. That got her moving from behind the counter. She took the buttons back there, rang up twenty cents on the cash register, and gave him a quarter, a tiny silver half-dime, and a roll of pennies. By the look on her face, he suspected it would prove two or three cents short of the full fifty it should have held. A black man risked his life if he presumed to complain about anything a white woman did. The charges she could level in return…Reckoning his own life worth more than two or three cents, he nodded brusquely and left Susanna’s Notions. He wouldn’t be back. The woman might have profited from this sale, but she’d never get another one from him.
No sooner had he got out onto the sidewalk than he heard a cacophony of motorcar horns and a cry that still made his blood run cold: “Freedom!” Down the street, blocking traffic, came a column of Freedom Party marchers in white shirts and butternut trousers, men in the front ranks carrying flags, as arrogant as if it were 1921 all over again.
Scipio wanted to duck back into Susanna’s Notions once more; he felt as if every Freedom Party ruffian were shouting right at him, and glaring right at him, too. But the woman in there had been as unfriendly in her own way as were the ruffians. He stayed where he was, doing his best to blend into the brickwork like a chameleon on a green leaf.
“Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” The shout was as loud and, in Scipio’s ears, as hateful as it had been during the presidential campaign two years before.
But more white men shouted back from the sidewalks and from their automobiles: “Murderers!” “Shut up, you bastards!” “Get out of the road before I run you over!” “Liars!” “Sons of bitches!” Scipio had never heard shouts like that during Jake Featherston’s run for the Confederate presidency.
And, as if from nowhere, a phalanx of policemen, some with pistols, some carrying rifles, came off a side street to block the marchers’ path. “Disperse or face the consequences,” one of them growled. Nobody had ever spoken like that to a Freedom Party column during the 1921 campaign, either.
“We have the right to—” one of the men in white and butternut began.
“You haven’t got the right to block traffic, and if you don’t get the hell out of the way, you can see how you like the city jail,” the cop said. He and his men looked ready—more than ready—to arrest any Freedom Party stalwart who started to give them a hard time, and to shoot him if he kept it up.
The Freedom Party men saw that, too. By ones and twos, they began melting out of the column and heading back to whatever they’d been doing before they started marching. A couple of the men up front kept arguing with the police. They didn’t seem to notice they had fewer and fewer followers. Then one of them looked around. He did a double take that would have drawn applause on the vaudeville stage. The argument stopped. So did the march.
Scipio’s feet hardly seemed to touch the ground as he walked back to the Terry. When he told Erasmus what he’d seen, his boss said, “’Bout time them bastards gits what’s coming to ’em. Way past time, anybody wants to know. But better late than never, like they say.”
“Didn’t never reckon I live to see the day when the police clamps down on the buckra marchin’ ’long the street,” Scipio said.
“You never lose your shirt bettin’ on white folks to hate niggers,” Erasmus said. “You bet on white folks to be stupid all the time, you one broke nigger. They knows they needs us—the smart ones knows, anyways. An’ the Freedom Party done come close enough to winnin’ to scare the smart ones. Don’t reckon they gets free rein no more.”
“Here’s hopin’ you is right,” Scipio said. “Do Jesus, here’s hopin’ you is right.”
When he got home, Bathsheba examined the buttons with a critical eye, then nodded. “Them’s right nice,” she said.
“You’s right nice,” Scipio said, which made his wife smile. He went on, “I gots somethin’ else right nice to tell you,” and again described the ignominious end to the Freedom Party march.
That made Bathsheba jump out of her chair and kiss him. “Them white-and-butternut fellers used to scare me to death,” she said. “Tell the truth, them white-and-butternut fellers still scare me. But maybe, if you is right, maybe one fine day even us niggers can spit in their eye.”
“Mebbe so,” Scipio said dreamily. He’d already spit in the white man’s eye as a not altogether willing member of the ruling council of the Congaree Socialist Republic. This would be different. Echoing Erasmus, he said, “Even some o’ the buckra like to see we spit in the Freedom Party’s eye.”
“I got somethin’ else we can do about the Freedom Party,” Bathsheba said. Scipio raised a questioning eyebrow. His wife condescended to explain: “Forget there ever was such a thing as that there party.”
Now Scipio kissed her. “Amen!” he said. “Best thing is they disappears like a stretch o’ bad weather. After the bad weather gone, you comes out in the sunshine an’ you forgets about the rain. We done have more rain than we needs. Mebbe now, though, the sun come out to stay.” And, in the hope the good weather would last, he kissed Bathsheba again.
Tom Colleton dumped afternoon papers from Charleston and Columbia down on the kitchen table in front of Anne, who was eating a slice of bread spread with orange marmalade and drinking coffee fortified with brandy. Headlines on all the newspapers proclaimed thumping Whig victories in the election the day before.
“Got to give you credit, Sis,” Tom said. “Looks like you got out of the Freedom Party just in time.”
“If you think the bottom is going to fall out of a stock, you sell it right then,” Anne answered. “You don’t wait for it to go any lower, not unless you want to lose even more.”
Her brother had been content to look at the headlines. She studied the stories line by line, knowing headline writers often turned news in the direction their editors said they should. That hadn’t happened here; the Whigs would own a larger majority in both the House and Senate of the Thirty-second Confederate Congress than they had in the Thirty-first.
And the Freedom Party had lost enough seats to make Anne’s lips skin back from her teeth in a savage smile. They hadn’t lost quite so many as she’d hoped, but they’d been hurt. Nine Congressmen…how did Jake Featherston propose doing anything with nine Congressmen? He couldn’t possibly do anything but bellow and paw the air. People weren’t so inclined to pay attention to bellowing and pawing the air as they had been before Grady Calkins killed Wade Hampton V.
“Yes, I think he is finished,” Anne murmured.
“By God, I hope so,” Tom said. “Do you know what he reminded me of?” He waited for Anne to shake her head before continuing, “A wizard, that’s what. One of the wicked ones straight out of a fairy tale, I mean. When he started talking, you had to listen: that was part of the spell. He’s still talking, but the spell is broken now, so it doesn’t matter.”
Anne stared at her brother in astonishment, then got up and set the palm of her hand on his forehead. His oath should have left the smell of lightning in the air. “Oh, hush,” Anne said absently. “I was wondering if you had a fever—fancies like that aren’t like you. But you don’t, and it was a very good figure indeed, even if you won’t come up with another one like it any time soon.”
“Thanks a heap, Sis.” Tom’s grin made him look for a moment like the irresponsible young man who’d gone gaily off to war in 1914 rather than the quenched and tempered veteran who’d returned. “He wasn’t a wizard, of course, only a man too damn good at making everyone else angry when he was.”
“He was angry all the time. He still is. He always will be, I think,” Anne said. She’d just spoken of Featherston as finished. Even so, hearing Tom use the past tense in talking about him brought a small jolt with it.
Her brother said, “He sure had you going for a while.”
Past tense again, and another jolt with it. But Anne could hardly disagree. “Yes, I reckon he did,” she said, her accent less refined than usual. “Looking back on it, maybe he was a wizard. For a while there, I would have done anything he wanted.”
Had President Hampton not been assassinated, Anne knew she would have gone on doing whatever Featherston wanted, too. She was honest enough to admit it to herself, if to no one else, not even her brother. Perhaps especially not to Tom, who’d always shown more resistance to Featherston’s spell than she had.
Would I have gone to bed with him, if he’d wanted that? Anne wondered. Slowly, reluctantly, she nodded to herself. I think I would have. She hadn’t been in control of things, not with Jake she hadn’t. With every other man she’d ever known—even Roger Kimball after their first encounter—yes. With Featherston? No, and again she was honest enough to admit it to herself.
But he hadn’t wanted her. So far as she knew, he hadn’t wanted any woman. She didn’t think that made him a sodomite. It was more as if he poured all his energy into rage, and had none left for desire.
All that flashed through her mind in a couple of heartbeats: before her brother said, “If I don’t see him or hear him again, I won’t be sorry.”
“As long as the money stays good, you probably won’t,” Anne said, and Tom nodded. She went on, “And as long as the niggers know their place and stick to it.”
Tom nodded again. “Featherston’s closest to sound on the niggers, no doubt about that. It’s still worth a white man’s life, sometimes, to get any decent work out of field hands. They’d sooner loll around and sleep in the sun and collect white men’s wages for doing it.”
“It won’t ever be the way it was before the war,” Anne said sadly, speaking in part for Marshlands, in part for the entire Confederacy. The desire to make things again as they had been before the war had won the Freedom Party votes by the thousands, and had helped win her backing, too. But the war was almost six and a half years over, and life did go on, even if in a different way.
“I want another chance at the United States one day,” Tom said. “Featherston was sound about that, too, but he wanted it too soon.”
“Yes,” Anne said, “but we will have another chance at the United States sooner or later, no matter who’s in charge of the CSA. And we’ll have a good chance at them, too, as long as the Socialists hold the White House.”
“They don’t,” her brother remarked with no small pride. “We wrecked it during the fight for Washington.”
“It’s almost rebuilt,” Anne said. “I saw that in one of the papers the other day. We’ll have a harder time knocking it down again, too, with the Yankees holding northern Virginia.”
“We’ll manage,” Tom said. “Even if our soldiers don’t get that far—and I think they will—we’ll have plenty of bombing aeroplanes to flatten it—and Philadelphia, and New York City, too, I hope.”
“Yes,” was all Anne said to that. She would never be ready to live at peace with the United States, not even when she turned old and gray. Turning old and gray was on her mind a good deal these days. Nearer forty than thirty, she knew the time when her looks added to the persuasiveness of her logic would not last much longer.
As Tom was doing more and more often since coming home from the war, he thought along with her. “You really ought to get married one of these days before too long, Sis,” he said. “You don’t want to end up an old maid, do you?”
“That depends,” Anne Colleton answered. “Compared to what? Compared to ending up with a husband who tells me what to do when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about? Compared to that, being an old maid looks mighty good, believe me.”
“Men aren’t like that,” her brother protested. “We’ve got a way of knowing good sense when we hear it.”
Anne laughed loud and long. What Tom had said struck her as so ridiculous, she didn’t even bother getting angry. “When you finally get married yourself, I’ll tell your wife you said that,” she remarked. “She won’t believe me—I promise she won’t believe me—but I’ll tell her.”
“Why wouldn’t she believe that about me?” Tom asked with such a tone of aggrieved innocence, Anne laughed harder than ever.
“Because it’d be lying?” she suggested, but that only made her brother angry. Changing the subject seemed like a good idea. She did: “When are you going to get married, anyhow? You were bothering me about it, but turnabout’s fair play.”
Tom shrugged. “When I find a girl who suits me,” he replied. “I’m not in any big hurry. It’s different for a man, you know.”
“I suppose so,” Anne said in a voice that supposed nothing of the sort. “People would talk if I married a twenty-year-old when I was fifty. If you do that, all your friends will be jealous.”
“How you do go on, Sis!” Tom said, turning red. Anne had indeed managed to get him to stop thinking about marrying her off. But the dismal truth was, he had a point. It was different for men. They often got more handsome as they aged; women, almost never. And men could go right on siring children even after they went bald and wrinkled and toothless. Anne knew she had only a few childbearing years left. Once they were gone, suitors would want her only for her money, not mostly for it as they did now.
“God must be a man,” she said. “If God were a woman, things would work a lot different, and you can take it to the bank.”
“I don’t know anything about that,” Tom said. “If you really reckon it’s fun and jolly to go up out of a trench when the machine guns are hammering, or to hope you’ve got your gas helmet good and snug when the chlorine shells start falling, or to sit in a dugout wondering whether the next eight-inch shell is going to cave it in, then you can go on about what a tough row women have to hoe.”
“I’ve fought,” Anne said. Her brother only looked at her. She knew what she’d been through. So did he. He’d been through some of it with her, cleaning Red remnants out of the swamps by the Congaree after the war against the USA was lost. She had some notion of what Tom had experienced on the Roanoke front, but only some. She hadn’t done that. By everything she knew, she wouldn’t have wanted to do it.
“Never mind,” Tom said. “For now, it’s over. We don’t need to quarrel about it today. Might as well leave that for the generals—all of ’em’ll spend the next twenty, thirty years writing books about how they could have won the war single-handed if only the fellows on their flanks and over ’em hadn’t been a pack of fools.”
He walked over to a cupboard and took out a couple of glasses. Then he yanked the cork from a bottle of whiskey on the counter under the cupboard and poured out two hefty belts. He carried one of them back to Anne and set it on the table by the newspapers. She picked it up. “What shall we drink to?” she asked.
“Drinking to being here and able to drink isn’t the worst toast in the world,” Tom said. He raised his glass. Anne thought about that, nodded, and raised hers in turn. The whiskey was smoke in her mouth, flame in her throat, and a nice warm fire in her belly. Before long, the glass was empty.
Anne went over to the counter and refilled it. While she was pouring, Tom came over with his glass, from which the whiskey had also vanished. She gave him another drink, too. “My turn now,” she said, as if expecting him to deny it.
He didn’t. He bowed instead, as a gentleman would have done before the war. Not so many gentlemen were left these days; machine guns and gas and artillery had put them under the ground by the thousands, along with their ruder countrymen by the tens of thousands.
She raised her glass. “Here’s to freedom from the Freedom Party!”
“Well, you know I’ll drink to that one.” Her brother suited action to word.
Again, the glasses emptied fast. The whiskey hit—Anne understood why the simile was on her mind—like a bursting shell. Everything seemed simple and clear, even things she knew perfectly well weren’t. She weighed Jake Featherston in the balances, as God had weighed Belshazzar in the Bible. And, as God had found Belshazzar wanting, so she found Featherston and the Freedom Party.
“No, I don’t reckon he’ll be back. I don’t reckon he’ll be back at all,” she said, and that called for another drink.
Sam Carsten was using his off-duty time the way he usually did now: he sprawled in his bunk aboard the Remembrance, studying hard. His head felt filled to the bursting point. He had the notion that he could have built and outfitted any ship in the Navy and ordered its crew about. He didn’t think the secretary of the navy knew as much as he did. God might have; he supposed he was willing to give God the benefit of the doubt.
George Moerlein, his bunkmate, came by to pull something out of his duffel bag. “Christ, Sam, don’t you ever take a break?” he said. He had to repeat himself before Carsten knew he was there.
At last reminded of Moerlein’s existence, Sam sheepishly shook his head. “Can’t afford to take a break,” he said. “Examinations are only a week away. They don’t make things easy on petty officers who want to kick their way up into real officer country.”
Moerlein had been a petty officer a long time, a lot longer than Carsten. He had no desire to become anything else, and saw no reason anyone else should have such a desire, either. “I’ve known a few mustangs, or more than a few, but I’ll be damned if I ever knew a happy one. Real officers treat ’em like you’d treat a nigger in a fancy suit: the clothes may be right, but the guy inside ’em ain’t.”
“If I don’t pass this examination, it won’t matter one way or the other,” Sam said pointedly. “And besides, officers can’t be any rougher on mustangs than they are on ordinary sailors.”
“Only shows how much you know,” Moerlein answered. “Well, don’t mind me, not that you was.” He went on about his business. Sam returned to his book. He came across a section on engine maintenance he didn’t remember quite so well as he should have. From feeling he knew about as much as God, he fearfully sank to thinking he knew less than a retarded ordinary seaman on his first day at sea.
Mess call was something of a relief. Sam stopped worrying about keeping a warship fueled and running and started thinking about stoking his own boiler. With the Remembrance still tied up in the Boston Navy Yard, meals remained tasty and varied—none of the beans and sausage and sauerkraut that would have marked a long cruise at sea.
Somebody sitting not far from Sam said, “I’d sooner spend my days belching and my nights farting, long as that meant I was doing something worthwhile.”
Heads bobbed up and down in agreement, all along the mess table. “We ought to be thankful they ain’t breaking us up for scrap,” another optimist said.
Somebody else added, “God damn Upton Sinclair to hell and gone.”
That brought more nods, Carsten among them, but a sailor snapped, “God damn you to hell and gone, Tad, you big dumb Polack.”
Socialists everywhere, Carsten thought as Tad surged to his feet. A couple of people caught him and slammed him back down. Sam nodded again, this time in approval. “Knock it off,” he said. “We don’t want any brawls here, not now we don’t. Anything that makes the Remembrance look bad is liable to get her taken out of commission and land the lot of us on the beach. Congress isn’t throwing money around like they did during the war.”
“Hell, Congress isn’t throwing money around like they did before the war, neither,” Tad said. “We busted a gut building a Navy that could go out and win, and now we’re flushing it right down the head.”
“Rebs ain’t got a Navy worth anything any more,” said the Socialist sailor who’d called him a Polack. “Limeys ain’t, either. No such thing as the Canadian Navy these days. So who the hell we got to worry about?”
“Goddamn Japs, for one.” Three men said the same thing at the same time, differing only in the adjective with which they modified Japs.
“Kaiser Bill’s High Seas Fleet, for two,” Sam added. “Yeah, us and the Germans are pals for now, but how long is that going to last? Best way I can think of to keep the Kaiser friendly is to stay too tough to jump on.”
That produced a thoughtful silence. At last, somebody down at the far end of the mess table said, “You know, Carsten, when I heard you was studying for officer, I figured you was crazy. Maybe you knew what you was doing after all.”
Sam looked around to see who was in earshot. Deciding the coast was clear, he answered, “Maybe you don’t have to be crazy to be an officer, but I never heard tell that it hurts.”
Amidst laughter, people started telling stories about officers they’d known. Sam pitched in with some of his own. Inside, he was smiling. A book about leadership he’d read had suggested that changing the subject was often the best way to defuse a nasty situation. Unlike some of the things he’d read, that really worked.
After supper, he went back to studying, and kept at it till lights-out. George Moerlein shook his head. “Never reckoned you was one of those fellows with spectacles and a high forehead,” he said.
“You want to get anywhere, you got to work for it,” Sam answered, more than a little nettled. “Anybody wants to stay in a rut, that’s his business. But anybody who doesn’t, that’s his business, too, or it damn well ought to be.”
“All right. All right. I’ll shut up,” Moerlein said. “Swear to Jesus, though, I think you’re doing this whole thing ’cause you want I should have to salute you.”
“Oh, no,” Carsten said in a hoarse whisper. “My secret’s out.” For a moment, his bunkmate believed him. Then Moerlein snorted and cursed and rolled over in his bunk and, a couple of minutes later, started to snore.
Sam ran on coffee and cigarettes and very little sleep till the day of the examinations, which were held in a hall not far from the Rope Walk, the long stone building in which the Navy’s great hemp cables were made. Commander Grady slapped Sam on the back as he left the Remembrance. “Just remember, you can do it,” the gunnery officer said.
“Thank you, sir,” Sam said, “and, if you please, sir, just remember, this was your idea in the first place.” Grady laughed. Sam hurried past him and down the gangplank.
Sitting at a table in the examination hall waiting for the lieutenant commander at the front of the room to pass out the pile of test booklets on his desk, Sam looked around, studying the competition. He saw a roomful of petty officers not a whole lot different from himself. Only a few were younger than he; several grizzled veterans had to be well past fifty. He admired their persistence and hoped he would outscore them in spite of it.
Then he stopped worrying about anything inessential, for the officer started giving out the booklets. “Men, you will have four hours,” he said. “I wish you all the best of luck, and I remind you that, should you not pass, the examination will be offered again in a year’s time. Ready?…Begin.”
How many times had some of those grizzled veterans walked into this hall or others like it? That thought gave Sam a different perspective on persistence. He wondered if he’d keep coming back after failing the examination half a dozen or a dozen times. Hoping he wouldn’t have to find out, he opened the booklet and plunged in.
The examination was as bad as he’d feared it would be, as bad as he’d heard it would be. As he worked, he felt as if his brain were being sucked out of his head and down onto the paper by way of his pencil. He couldn’t imagine a human mind containing all the knowledge the Navy Department evidently expected its officers to have at their fingertips. Panic threatened to overwhelm him when he came upon the first question he couldn’t even begin to answer.
Well, maybe these other bastards can’t answer it, either, he thought. That steadied him. He couldn’t do anything more than his best.
Sweat soaked his dark uniform long before the examination ended. It had nothing to do with the hall, which was very little warmer than the Boston December outside. But he noticed he was far from the only man wiping his brow.
After what seemed like forever—and, at the same time, like only a few minutes—the lieutenant commander rapped out, “Pencils down! Pass booklets to the left.” Sam had been in the middle of a word. That didn’t matter. Nothing mattered any more. He joined the weary, shambling throng of sailors filing out of the hall.
“There’s always next year,” someone said in doleful tones. Carsten didn’t argue with him. Nobody argued with him. Sam couldn’t imagine anyone being confident he’d passed that brutal examination. He also couldn’t imagine anyone showing confidence without getting lynched.
He didn’t have any leave coming, so he couldn’t even get drunk after the miserable thing was over. He had to return to the Remembrance and return to duty. When Commander Grady asked him how he’d done, he rolled his eyes. Grady laughed. Sam didn’t see one thing funny about it.
Day followed day; 1923 gave way to 1924. Coming up on ten years since the war started, Sam thought. That seemed unbelievable, but he knew it was true. He wished ten years had gone by since the examination. When results were slow in coming, he did his best to forget he’d ever taken the miserable thing. There’s always next year, he thought—except, by now, this was next year.
Then, one day, the yeoman in charge of mail called out “Carsten!” and thrust an envelope at him. He took it with some surprise; he seldom got mail. But, sure enough, the envelope had his name typed on it, and DEPARTMENT OF THE NAVY in the upper left-hand corner. He stuck his thumb over that return address, not wanting his buddies to know he’d got news he expected to be bad.
He marched off down a corridor and opened the envelope where no one could watch him do it. The letter inside bore his name and pay number on Navy Department stationery. It read, You are ordered to report to Commissioning Board 17 at 0800 hours on Wednesday, 6 February 1924, for the purpose of determining your fitness to hold a commission in the United States Navy and…
Sam had to read it twice before he realized what it meant. “Jesus!” he whispered. “Sweet suffering Jesus! I passed!”
He had to remind himself that he wasn’t home free yet. Everybody said commissioning boards did strange things. In this particular case, what everybody said was likely to be true. Standing there in the cramped corridor, he refused to let what everybody said worry him in the least. The worst had to be over, for the simple reason that nothing could have been worse than that examination. The worst was over, and he’d come through it. He was on his way.
These days, Lucien Galtier thought of himself as an accomplished driver. He didn’t say he was an accomplished driver, though. The one time he’d done that, Georges had responded, “And what have you accomplished? Not killing anyone? Bravo, mon père!”
No matter how accomplished he reckoned himself (Georges to the contrary notwithstanding), he wasn’t planning on going anywhere today. That he had a fine Chevrolet mattered not at all. He wouldn’t have gone out on the fine paved road up to Rivière-du-Loup even in one of the U.S. Army’s traveling forts—why the Americans called the infernal machines barrels he’d never figured out. The snowstorm howling down from the northwest made the trip from the farmhouse to the barn cold and hard, let alone any longer journey.
When he got inside, the livestock set up the usual infernal racket that meant, Where have you been? We’re starving to death. He ignored all the animals but the horse. To it, he said, “This is ingratitude. Would you sooner be out on the highway in such weather?”
Only another indignant snort answered him as he gave the beast oats for the day. When it came to food, the horse could be—was—eloquent. On any other subject, Galtier might as well have been talking to himself whenever he went traveling in the wagon. He knew that. He’d known it all along. It hadn’t stopped him from having innumerable conversations with the horse over the years.
“I cannot talk with the automobile,” he said. “Truly, I saw this from the moment I began to drive it. It is only a machine—although this, I have seen, does not keep Marie from talking with her sewing machine from time to time.”
The horse let drop a pile of green-brown dung. It was warmer in the barn than outside, but the dung still steamed. Lucien wondered whether the horse was offering its opinion of driving a motorcar or of conversing with a sewing machine.
“Do you want to work, old fool?” he asked the horse. The only reply it gave was to gobble the oats. He laughed. “No, all you want to do is eat. I cannot even get you a mare for your amusement. Oh, I could, but you would not be amused. A gelding is not to be amused in that way, n’est-ce pas?”
He’d had the vet geld the horse when it was a yearling. It had never known the joys not being gelded could bring. It never would. Still, he fancied it flicked its ear at him in a resentful way. He nodded to himself. Had anyone done such a thing to him, he would have been more than merely resentful.
“Life is hard,” he said. “Even for an animal like yourself, one that does little work these days, life is hard. Believe me, it is no easier for men and women. Most of them, most of the time, have very little, and no hope for more than very little. I get down on my knees and thank the Lord for the bounty He has given me.”
Another ear flick might have said, Careful how you speak, there—I am a part of your bounty, after all. Maybe the horse was exceptionally expressive today. Maybe Galtier’s imagination was working harder than usual.
“Truly, I could have been unfortunate as easily as I have been fortunate,” Galtier said. The horse did not deny it. Galtier went on, “Had I been unfortunate, you would not be eating so well as you are now. Believe me, you would not.”
Maybe the horse believed him. Maybe it didn’t. Whether it did or not, it knew it was eating well now. That was what mattered. How could a man reasonably expect a horse to care about might-have-beens?
But Lucien Galtier cared. “Consider,” he said. “I might have been driven to try to blow up an American general, as was that anglophone farmer who blew himself up instead, poor fool. For I will not lie: I had no love for the Americans. Yes, that could have been me, had chance driven me in the other direction. But I am here, and I am as I am, and so you have the chance to stand in your stall and get fat and lazy. I wonder if that other farmer had a horse, and how the unlucky animal is doing.”
His own horse ate all he had given it and looked around for more, which was not forthcoming. It sent him a hopeful look, rather like that of a beggar who sat in the street with a tin cup beside him. Galtier rarely gave beggars money; as far as he was concerned, men who could work should. He did not insist that the horse work, not any more, but he knew better than to overfeed it.
After finishing in the barn, he walked through the snow to the farmhouse. The heat of the stove in the kitchen seemed a greater blessing than any Bishop Pascal could give. As Galtier stood close by it, Marie poured him a cup of steaming hot coffee. She added a hefty dollop of cream and, for good measure, a slug of applejack, too.
“Drink it before it gets cold,” she said in a tone that brooked no argument. “You should be warmed inside and out.” And, before he could answer, almost—but not quite—before he could even think, she added, “And do not say what is in your mind, you dreadful brute of a man.”
“I?” After sipping the coffee, which was delicious, Galtier said, “I declare to the world that you have wronged me.”
“So you do,” his wife replied. “You should remember, though, that declaring a thing does not make it true.”
She was laughing at him. He could hear it in her voice. She was also laughing because of him, a very different business. He waggled a forefinger at her. “You are a very troublesome woman,” he said severely.
“No doubt you have reason,” Marie said. “And no doubt I have my reasons for being troublesome. One of those reasons that comes straight to my mind is that I have a very troublesome husband.”
“Me?” Lucien shook his head. “By no means. Not at all.” He took another sip of fortified coffee. “How could I possibly be troublesome when I am holding here a cup of the elixir of life?” He put down the elixir of life so he could shrug out of his wool plaid coat. It was not quite warm enough in the bitter cold outside, but much too warm for standing by the stove for very long. As Lucien picked up the coffee cup again, Georges came into the kitchen. Lucien nodded to himself. “If I am troublesome, it could be that I understand why.”
“How strange,” Marie said. “I just now had this same thought at the same time. Men and women who have been married a long while do this, they say.”
“How strange,” Georges said, “I just now had the thought that I have been insulted, and for once I do not even know why.”
“Never fear, son,” Galtier said. “There are always reasons, and they are usually good ones.”
“Here, then—I will give you a reason,” Georges said. He left the kitchen, and flicked the light switch on the way out. The electric bulb in the lamp hanging from the ceiling went dark, plunging the room into gloom.
“Scamp!” Galtier called after him. Georges laughed—he was being troublesome, all right. Muttering, Galtier went over and turned on the lamp again. The kitchen shone as if he’d brought the sun indoors. “Truly electricity is a great marvel,” he said. “I wonder how we ever got along without it.”
“I cannot imagine,” Marie said. “It makes everything so much easier—and you were clever enough to squeeze it out of the government.”
“And the Americans,” Galtier said. “You must not forget the Americans.”
“I am not likely to forget the Americans.” His wife’s voice was tart. “Without the Americans, we would not have the son-in-law we now have, nor the grandson, either. Believe me, I remember all this very well.”
“Without the Americans, we would not be living in the Republic of Quebec,” Galtier said, looking at the large picture as well as the small one. “We would still be paying our taxes to Ottawa and getting nothing for them, instead of paying them to the city of Quebec…and getting nothing for them.” Neither independence nor wealth reconciled him to paying taxes. Wealth, indeed, left him even less enthusiastic than he had been before, for it meant he had to pay more than he had when he was not doing so well.
“When the Americans came, we thought it was the end of the world,” Marie said.
“And we were right,” Lucien answered. “It was the end of the world we had always known. We have changed.” From a Quebecois farmer, that was blasphemy to rank alongside tabernac and calisse. “We have changed, and we are better for it.” From a Quebecois farmer, that was blasphemy viler than any for which the local French dialect had words.
His wife started to contradict him. He could tell by the way she opened her mouth, by the angle at which her head turned, by any number of other small things he could not have named but did see. Before she could speak, he wagged a finger at her—only that and nothing more. She hesitated. At last, she said, “Peut-être—it could be.”
That was a greater concession than he’d thought he could get from her. He’d been ready to argue. Instead, all he had to say was, “We are lucky. The whole family is lucky. Things could so easily be worse.” He thought again of the farmer out in Manitoba who’d tried to kill General Custer.
“God has been kind to us,” Marie said.
“Yes, God has been kind to us,” Galtier agreed. “And we have been lucky. And”—he knew just how to forestall an argument, almost as if he’d read a book on the subject—“this is excellent, truly excellent, coffee. Could you fix me another cup, exactly like this one?” His wife turned to take care of it. Galtier smiled behind her back. He’d had good luck and, wherever he could, he’d made good luck. And here he was, in his middle years and happy. He wondered how many of his neighbors could say that. Not many, unless he missed his guess. With an open smile and a word of thanks, he took the cup from Marie.
Jake Featherston tore open the fat package from the William Byrd Press. Dear Mr. Featherston, the letter inside read, Thank you for showing us the manuscript enclosed herewith. We regret that we must doubt its commercial possibilities at the present time, and must therefore regretfully decline to undertake its publication. We hope you will have success in placing it elsewhere.
He cursed. He couldn’t place Over Open Sights anywhere, and a lot of the letters he got back from Richmond publishers—and even from one down in Mobile—were a lot less polite than this one. “Nobody wants to hear the truth,” he growled.
“Nothing you can do about it now, Jake,” Ferdinand Koenig said, slapping him on the back in consolation. “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”
“Stupid bastards,” Featherston snarled. “And they’re proud of it, damn them. They want to stay stupid.” But he was glad to escape the Freedom Party offices. Even to him, they stank of defeat.
When he went out onto the streets of Richmond, he could have pulled the brim of his hat down low on his forehead or tugged up his collar so it hid part of his face. He could have grown a chin beard or bushy side whiskers to change his looks. He didn’t. He hadn’t. He wouldn’t. As always, he met the world head-on.
The world was less fond of him than it had been before Grady Calkins murdered Wade Hampton V. About every other person on the street recognized him, and about every third person who did recognize him showered him with abuse. He gave as good as he got, very often better.
Koenig shook his head while Jake and a passerby exchanged unpleasantries. After the man finally went on his way, Koenig said, “Christ, sometimes I think you look for trouble.”
“No such thing.” Featherston shook his head. “But I’ll be goddamned if I’ll run from it, either. After the damnyankee artillery, fools with big mouths aren’t enough to put me off my feed.”
“I still think you ought to lay low till it gets closer to the next election, let people forget about things,” Koenig said.
He was one of the very few people these days who spoke frankly to Jake instead of telling him what they thought he wanted to hear. That made him a valuable man. All the same, Jake shook his head again. “No, dammit. I didn’t do anything I’m ashamed of. The Party didn’t do anything I’m ashamed of. One crazy man went and fouled things up for us, that’s all. People need to forget about Calkins, not about me.”
“They didn’t forget last November,” Koenig pointed out.
“We knew that was going to happen,” Featherston said. “All right, it happened. It could have been a lot worse. A lot of people reckoned it would be a lot worse.”
“You know what you sound like?” Koenig said. “You sound like the War Department in the last part of 1916, the first part of 1917, when the damnyankees had started hammering us hard. ‘We hurt the enemy very badly and contained him more quickly than expected,’ they’d say, and all that meant was, we’d lost some more ground.”
Featherston grunted. Comparing him to the department he hated hit home. Stubbornly, he said, “The Freedom Party’s going to get the ground back, though. The War Department never did figure out how to manage that one.”
“If you say so, Sarge,” Ferdinand Koenig replied. He didn’t sound like a man who believed it. He sounded like a man humoring a rich lunatic—and he made sure Featherston knew he sounded that way.
“We can come back,” Jake insisted. As long as he believed it, he could make other people believe it. If enough other people believed it, it would come true.
He and Koenig turned right from Seventh onto Franklin and walked on toward Capitol Square. Jake’s hands folded into fists. After the war was lost—thrown away, he thought—discharged soldiers had almost taken the Capitol; only more soldiers with machine guns had held them at bay. A good bloodbath then would have been just what the CSA needed.
And in 1921 he’d come so close to storming his way into power in spite of everything the Whigs and all their Thirds and Fourths and Fifths could do to stop him. Sure as hell, he would have been elected in 1927. He knew he would have been—if not for Grady Calkins.
If even he was thinking about what might have been instead of what would be now—if that was so, the Freedom Party was in deep trouble. A man with a limp—wounded veteran, Jake judged—came toward him along Franklin. Jake nodded to him—he still had plenty of backers left, especially among men who’d fought like him.
“Freedom!” the fellow said by way of reply, but he loaded the word with loathing and made an obscene gesture at Jake.
“You go to hell!” Featherston cried.
“If I do, I’ll see you there before me,” the man with the limp answered, and went on his way.
“Bastard,” Jake muttered on his breath. “F*cking bastard. They’re all f*cking bastards.” Then he saw a crowd on the sidewalk ahead and forgot about the heckler. “What the hell’s going on here, Ferd?”
“Damned if I know,” Koenig answered. “Shall we find out?”
“Yeah.” Jake elbowed his way to the front of the crowd, ably assisted by his former running mate. He’d expected a saloon giving away free beer or something of that sort. Instead, men and women were trying to shove their way into…a furniture store? He couldn’t believe it till Ferdinand Koenig pointed to the sign taped in the window: NEWEST MAKES OF WIRELESS RECEIVERS, FROM $399.
“They’re all the go nowadays,” Koenig said. “Even at those prices, everybody wants one.”
“I’ve heard people talking about them,” Featherston admitted. “Haven’t heard one myself, I don’t think. I’ll be damned if I can see what the fuss is about.”
“I’ve listened to ’em,” Koenig said. “It’s—interesting. Not like anything else you’ll ever run across, I’ll tell you that.”
“Huh.” But, having got so close to the store’s doorway, Featherston decided not to leave without listening to a wireless receiver. More judicious elbowing got him and Koenig inside.
The receivers were all big and boxy. Some cabinets were made of fancier wood than others; that seemed to account for the difference in price. Only one machine was actually operating. From it came tinny noises that, after a bit, Jake recognized as a Negro band playing “In the Good Old Summertime.”
“Huh,” he said again, and turned to the fellow who was touting the receivers. “Why would anybody want to listen to this crap, for God’s sake?”
“Soon, sir, there will be offerings for every taste,” the salesman answered smoothly. “Even now, people all over Richmond are listening to this and other broadcasts. As more people buy receivers, the number of broadcasts and the number of listeners will naturally increase.”
“Not if they keep playing that garbage,” Ferdinand Koenig said. He nodded to Featherston. “You were right—this is lousy.”
“Yeah.” But Jake had listened to the salesman, too. “All over Richmond, you say?”
“Yes, sir.” The rabbity-looking fellow nodded enthusiastically. “And the price of receivers has fallen dramatically in the past few months. It will probably keep right on falling, too, as they become more popular.”
“People all over Richmond,” Jake repeated thoughtfully. “Could you have people all over the CSA listening to the same thing at the same time?”
To his disappointment, the salesman replied, “Not from the same broadcasting facility.” But the fellow went on, “I suppose you could send the same signal from several facilities at once. Why, if I might ask?”
Plainly, he didn’t recognize Featherston. “Just curious,” Jake answered—and, indeed, it was hardly more than that. Behind his hand, he whispered to Koenig: “Might be cheaper to make a speech on the wireless than hold a bunch of rallies in a bunch of different towns. If we could be sure we were reaching enough people that way—”
One of the other customers in the shop was whispering behind his hand to the salesman. “Oh?” the salesman said. “He is?” By the tone of voice, Jake knew exactly what the customer had whispered. The salesman said, “Sir, I am going to have to ask you to leave. This is a high-class establishment, and I don’t want any trouble here.”
“We weren’t giving you any trouble.” Featherston and Koenig spoke together.
“You’re from the Freedom Party,” said the customer who’d recognized Jake. “You don’t have to give trouble. You are trouble.”
Several other men from among those crowding the shop drifted toward the fellow. A couple of others ranged themselves behind Featherston. “Freedom!” one of them said.
“I am going to call for a policeman if you don’t leave,” the salesman told Jake. “I do not want this place broken apart.”
If breaking the place apart would have brought the Party good publicity, Featherston would have started a fight on the spot. But he knew it wouldn’t—just the opposite, in fact. The papers would scream he was only a ruffian leading a pack of ruffians. They hadn’t talked about him and the Party like that when he was a rising power in the land, or not so much, anyhow. Now they thought they scented blood. He wouldn’t give them any blood to sniff.
“Come on, Ferd,” he said. “If anybody starts trouble, it won’t be us.”
“Look at the cowards cut and run,” jeered the man who’d recognized him. “They talk big, but they don’t back it up.”
He never knew how close he came to getting his head broken and his nuts kneed. Jake’s instinct was always to hit back at whoever and whatever struck at him, and to hit harder if he could. Only a harsh understanding that that would bring no advantage held him back.
“One day,” he growled once he and Ferdinand Koenig were out on Franklin again, “one fine day I’m going to pay back every son of a bitch who ever did me wrong, and that loud-mouthed bastard will get his. So help me God, he will.”
“Sure, Sarge,” Koenig said. But he didn’t sound sure. He sounded like a man buttering up his boss after said boss had come out with something really stupid. Featherston knew flattery when he heard it, because he heard it too damn often. He hadn’t heard it much from Koenig, though.
Sourly, he studied the man who’d run for vice president with him. He and Koenig went back to the old days together, to the days when the Freedom Party operated out of a cigar box. If Koenig hadn’t backed him, odds were the Party would still be a cigar-box outfit. Koenig was as close to a friend as he had on the face of the earth. And yet…
“If you don’t fancy the way things are going, Ferd, you can always move on,” Jake said. “Don’t want you to feel like you’re wearing a ball and chain.”
Koenig turned red. “I don’t want to leave, Jake. I’ve come too far to back out now, same as you. Only…”
“Only what?” Featherston snapped.
“Only Moses got to the top of the mountain, but God never let him into the Promised Land,” Koenig said, going redder still. “Way things are these days, I don’t know how we can win an election any time soon.”
“We sure as hell won’t if people lie down and give up,” Jake said. “Long as we don’t quit, long as we keep fighting, things will turn our way, sooner or later. It’ll take longer now than I reckoned it would in 1921; I’d be a liar if I said anything different. But the time is coming. By God, it is.”
Koenig grunted. Again, the sound failed to fill Featherston with confidence. If even the man closest to him had doubts, who was he to be sure triumph did lie ahead? He shrugged. He’d kept firing against the damnyankees up to the very last minute. He would struggle against fate the same way.
There ahead lay Capitol Square, with its great statues of George Washington and Albert Sidney Johnston. Pointing, Jake said, “Look at ’em, Ferd. If Washington had given up, we’d still belong to England. And Johnston died so the Confederate States could be free. How can we do anything else and still look at ourselves in the mirror afterwards?”
“I don’t know,” Koenig said. “But you don’t see people building statues to what’s-his-name—Cornwallis—or to General Grant, the Yankee who licked Johnston. Damned if I know what happened to Cornwallis. Grant died a drunk. They were both big wheels in their day, Sarge.”
“And we’ll be big wheels in ours.” Jake understood what Koenig was saying, but wouldn’t admit it even to himself. Admitting it would mean he might also have to admit he wasn’t sure whether he’d end up among the winners or the losers when the history books got written. He couldn’t bear that thought.
“Hope you’re right,” Koenig said.
“Hell, yes, I’m right.” Jake spoke with great assurance, to convince not only his follower but also himself. Ferdinand Koenig nodded. If he wasn’t convinced, Featherston couldn’t prove it, not from a nod.
And what about you? Jake asked himself. He’d been—the Freedom Party had been—that close to seizing power with both hands. Now, with Wade Hampton dead, with the Confederate currency sound again…He kicked at the sidewalk. The Party should have gone forward again in 1923. Instead, he counted himself lucky, damn lucky, it hadn’t gone further back.
Could things turn around? Of course they could—that was the wrong question. How likely were they to turn around? Coldly, as if in a poker game, he reckoned up the odds. Had he been in a poker game, he would have thrown in his cards. But the stakes here were too high for him to quit.
“It’ll work out,” he said. “Goddammit, it will work out.” He did his best to sound as if he meant it.