Chapter II
“Miss Colleton”—the broker in Columbia sounded agitated, even over the telephone wire—“I can do only so much. If you ask the impossible of me, you must not be surprised when I do not hand it to you on a silver platter.”
Anne Colleton glared at the telephone. She could not exert all her considerable force of personality through it. But she could not leave St. Matthews, South Carolina, to visit the state capital, either. And so she would have to forgo the impact her blond good looks had on people of the male persuasion. She’d manage with hardheaded common sense—or, if she didn’t, she’d find a new broker. She’d done that before, too.
“Mr. Whitson,” she said, “are the Confederate dollar, the British pound, and the French franc worth more in terms of gold today, January 16, 1918, than they were yesterday, or are they worth less?”
“Less, of course,” Whitson admitted, “but even so—”
“Do you expect that these currencies will be worth more in gold tomorrow, or less again?” Anne broke in.
“Less again,” Whitson said, “but even so, you are gutting your holdings by—”
She interrupted: “If I convert my holdings in those currencies to gold and U.S. dollars and German marks while the C.S. dollar and the pound and the franc are still worth something, Mr. Whitson, I will have something left when the Confederate States get back on their feet. If I wait any longer, I will have nothing. I’ve waited too long already. Now, sir: will you do as I instruct you, or would you sooner converse with my attorneys?”
“I am trying to save you from yourself, Miss Colleton,” Whitson said peevishly.
“You are my broker, not my pastor,” Anne said. “Answer the question I just gave you, if you would be so kind.”
Whitson sighed. “Very well. On your head be it.” He hung up.
So did Anne, angrily. Her brother, Tom, came into the room. “You look happy with the world,” he remarked. His words held less in the way of lighthearted humor and more sardonicism than they would have before the war. He’d gone off, as if to a lark, a captain, and come back a lieutenant-colonel who’d been through all the horrors the Roanoke front had to offer.
“Delighted,” Anne returned. She was still sorting out what to make of her brother. In a way, she was pleased he didn’t let her do all his thinking for him, as he had before. In another way, that worried her. Having him under her control had been convenient. She went on, “My idiot broker is convinced I’m the maniac. Everything will be rosy day after tomorrow, if you listen to him.”
“You’re right—he’s an idiot,” Tom agreed. “You know what I paid for a pair of shoes yesterday? Twenty-three dollars—in paper, of course. I keep my gold and silver in my pocket. I’m not an idiot.”
“It will get worse,” Anne said. “If it goes on for another year, people’s life savings won’t be worth anything. That’s when we really have to start worrying.”
“I’ll say it is.” Her brother nodded. “If the Red niggers had waited to rise up till that happened, half the white folks in the country would have grabbed their squirrel guns and joined in.”
“If they hadn’t risen up when they did, we might not be in this mess now,” Anne said grimly. “And they did bad enough when they rose.”
Tom nodded. The Marxist Negroes had killed Jacob, his brother and Anne’s, who was at the Marshlands plantation because Yankee poison gas left him an invalid. They’d burned the mansion, too; only in the past few months had their remnants been cleared from the swamps by the Congaree River.
“Hmm,” Tom said. “We need an idiot to take Marshlands off our hands for us. Maybe we ought to sell it to your broker.”
“As a matter of fact, I think we need an imbecile to take Marshlands off our hands,” Anne said. “God only knows when anyone will be able to raise a crop of cotton on that land: one fieldhand in three is liable to be a Red, and how could you tell till too late? And the taxes—I haven’t seen anyone talking about taking the war taxes off the books, have you?”
“Not likely.” Tom snorted. “Government needs every dime it can squeeze. Only good thing about that is, the government has to take paper. If they don’t take the paper they print, nobody else will, either.”
“Small favors,” Anne said, and her brother nodded again. She went on, “I’d take just about any kind of offer for Marshlands, and I’d take paper. I’d turn it into gold, but I’d take paper. If that doesn’t prove I’m desperate, I don’t know what would.”
“A hundred years,” Tom said. “More than a hundred years—gone.” He snapped his fingers. “Like that. Gone.” He snapped them again. “Better than fifty years of good times for the whole country. That’s gone, too.”
“We have to put the pieces back together,” Anne said. “We have to make the country strong again, or else the damnyankees will run over us again whenever they decide they’re ready. Even if they don’t decide to run over us, they can make us their little brown cousins, the way we’ve done with the Empire of Mexico.”
“I’m damned if I’ll be anybody’s little brown cousin,” Tom Colleton ground out. He swore with studied deliberation. He’d never cursed in front of her before he went off to the trenches. He still didn’t do it in the absentminded style he’d no doubt used there. But when he felt the need, the words came out.
“I feel the same way,” Anne answered. “Anyone with an ounce of sense feels the same way. But the Congressional elections prove nobody knows how to take us from where we are to where we ought to be.”
“What?” Her brother raised an eyebrow. “Split as near down the middle between Whigs and Radical Liberals as makes no difference? And a couple of Socialists elected from Chihuahua, and one from Cuba, and even one from New Orleans, for Christ’s sake? Sounds to me like they’ll have everything all straightened out by day after tomorrow, or week after next at the latest.”
Anne smiled at Tom’s pungent sarcasm, but the smile had sharp corners. “Even that mess shouldn’t get things too far wrong. We have to do enough of what the Yankees tell us to keep the USA from attacking us while we’re flat. Whatever dribs and drabs we happen to have left after that can go to putting us back on our feet. Lean times, yes, but I think we can come through them if we’re smart.”
“Outside of a couple of panics, we haven’t had lean times before,” Tom said. “We do need better politicians than the gang we’ve got. We could use somebody who’d really lead us out of the wilderness instead of stumbling through it for forty years.”
“Of the current crop, I’m not going to hold my breath,” Anne said. “I—” The telephone interrupted. She picked it up. “Hello?” Her mouth fell open, just a little, in surprise. “Commander Kimball! How good to hear from you. I was hoping you’d come through the war all right. Where are you now?”
“I’m in Charleston,” Roger Kimball answered. “And what the hell is this ‘Commander Kimball’ nonsense? You know me better than that, baby.” Unlike her brother, Kimball swore whenever he felt like it and didn’t care who was listening. He not only had rough edges, he gloried in them. And he was right—she did know him intimately enough, in every sense of the word, to call him by his Christian name.
That she could, though, didn’t mean she had to. She enjoyed keeping men off balance. “In Charleston? How nice,” she said. “I hope you can get up to St. Matthews before long. You do know my brother, Lieutenant-Colonel Colleton, is staying with me here in town?” You do know that, even if you get up to St. Matthews, you’re not going to make love with me right now?
Kimball was brash. He wasn’t stupid. Anne couldn’t abide stupidity. He understood what she meant without her having to spell it out. Laughing a sour laugh, he answered, “And he’ll whale the living turpentine out of me if I put my hands where they don’t belong, will he? Sweetheart, I hate to tell you this, but I haven’t got the jack for pleasure trips without much pleasure. I’m on the beach, same as every other submarine skipper in the whole goddamn Navy.” Where he could banter about passing on a chance to pay a social call that was only a social call, his voice showed raw pain when he told her the Navy had cut him loose.
“I’m very sorry to hear that,” she said, and trusted him to understand she understood what grieved him most. “What are you going to do now?”
“Don’t know yet,” Kimball said. “I may try and make a go of it here, or I may head down to South America. Plenty of navies there that could use somebody who really knows what he’s doing when he looks through a periscope.”
That was likely to be true. The South American republics had chosen sides in the Great War as the rest of the world had done. Losers would be looking for revenge. Winners would be looking to make sure they didn’t get it.
Anne said, “Whatever you decide to do, I wish you the very best.”
“But not enough for you to send your brother out to hunt possums or something, eh?” Kimball laughed again. “Never mind. We’ll get another chance one of these days, I reckon. Good luck to the lieutenant-colonel, too, the son of a bitch.” Before she could answer, he hung up.
So did she, and she laughed, too. She admired the submariner; he was, she judged, almost as thoroughly self-centered as herself. Tom raised an eyebrow. “Who’s this Commander—Kimball, is it?”
“That’s right. He captained a submarine,” Anne answered. “I got to know him on the train to New Orleans not long after the war started.” He’d seduced her in his Pullman berth, too, but she didn’t mention that.
“How well do you know him?” Tom asked.
“We’re friends,” she said. I was in bed with him down in Charleston when the Red Negro uprising broke out. She didn’t mention that, either.
She didn’t have to. “Are you more than…friends?” her brother demanded.
Before the war, he wouldn’t have dared question her that way. “I’ve never asked what you did while you weren’t fighting,” she said. “What I did, or didn’t do, is none of your business.”
Tom set his jaw and looked stubborn. He wouldn’t have done that before the war, either. No, she couldn’t control him any more, not with certainty. He said, “If you’re going to marry the guy, it is. If he’s just after your money, I’ll send him packing. What you’re doing affects me, you know.”
Nor would he have had that thought in 1914. “If he were just after my money, don’t you think I would have sent him packing?” she asked in return. “I can take care of myself, you know, with a rifle or any other way.”
“All right,” Tom said. “People who fall in love are liable to go all soft in the head, though. I wanted to make sure it hadn’t happened to you.”
“When it does, you can shovel dirt on me, because I’ll be dead.” Anne spoke with great conviction. Tom came over and kissed her on the cheek. They both laughed, liking each other very much at that moment.
In the trenches down in Virginia, Chester Martin had heard New Englanders talk about a lazy wind, a wind that didn’t bother blowing around a man but went straight through him. The wind coming off Lake Erie this morning while he picketed the Toledo steel mill where he would sooner have been working was just that kind. In spite of coat and long underwear, in spite of hat and ear muffs, he shivered and his teeth chattered as he trudged back and forth in front of the plant.
His sign was stark in its simplicity. It bore but one word, that in letters a foot high: THIEVES! “They want to cut our wages,” he said to the fellow in front of him, a stocky man named Albert Bauer. “We went out and got shot at—hell, I got shot—and they stayed home and got rich. No, they got richer; they were already rich. And they want to cut our wages.”
Bauer was a solid Socialist. He said, “This is what we get for reelecting that bastard Roosevelt.”
“He’s not so bad,” Martin said. A Democrat himself, he walked the picket line with his more radical coworkers. “He visited my stretch of the front once; hell, I jumped on him when the Rebs started shelling us. Later, when I got wounded, he found out about it and sent me a note.”
“Bully!” Bauer said. “Can you eat the note? Can you take it to the bank and turn it into money? Roosevelt will oblige. Feudal nobles do. But does he care about whether you starve? Not likely!”
“Hush!” Chester Martin said suddenly. He pointed. “Here come the scabs.” The factory owners always had people willing to work for them, no matter how little they paid. They also had the police on their side.
Jeers and curses and all manner of abuse rained down on the heads of the workers taking the places of the men who’d gone on strike. So did a few rocks and bottles, in spite of Socialist calls for calm and in spite of the strong force of blue-uniformed policemen escorting them into the steel mill. “Well, now they’ve gone and done it,” Albert Bauer said in disgusted tones. “Now they’ve given the goddamn cops the goddamn excuse they need to go on and suppress us.”
He proved a good prophet. As soon as the police had hustled the scabs into the plant, they turned around and yanked the nightsticks off their belts. A whistle blew, as if an officer during the war were ordering his men out of the trenches and over the top. Shouting fiercely, the police charged the strikers.
Chester Martin had not been an officer. But, thanks to casualties in the ranks above him, he’d briefly commanded a company in Virginia not long before the CSA asked for an armistice. Almost all the men on the picket line had seen combat, too. “Come on!” he shouted. “We can take these fat sons of bitches! Let’s give ’em some bayonet drill.”
He tore the cardboard sheet off his picket sign. The stick he was left holding wasn’t as good a weapon as a billy club, but it wasn’t to be despised, either. All around him, his companions imitated his action.
Here came the cops, a solid phalanx of them. Even so, they were outnumbered. They relied on discipline and on being able to create fear to get their way. After gas and machine guns and artillery and Confederate barrels, Martin found absurd the idea that he should be afraid of conscription-dodgers with clubs. He heard laughter from the men to either side of him, too.
In the instant before the red-faced policemen slammed into the picketers, Martin saw surprise and doubt on the features of a couple of blue-uniformed goons. Then he was at close quarters with them, and had no chance to study their expressions in any detail.
One of them swung a nightstick at his head. As if the cop were a Rebel with a clubbed rifle, Martin ducked. Things seemed to move very slowly, as they had in combat in the trenches. As he would have with a bayoneted rifle, Martin jabbed the end of his stick into the policeman’s beefy side. A bayonet would have deflated the fellow for good. As things were, the cop grunted in pain and tried to twist away. Martin kicked him in the belly. He folded up like a concertina, the nightstick flying out of his hand.
Martin wished he could have grabbed the solid club, but it landed on the sidewalk, well out of his reach. He caught another policeman in the throat with the end of what had been the handle for his picket sign. Anyone who’d been in the trenches would have had no trouble blocking that lunge or knocking it aside. The cop let out a gargling shout and went over on his back.
“See?” Martin shouted. “They aren’t so goddamn tough—the Rebs’d eat ’em for breakfast. And we can whip ’em, too.”
“Rally!” one of the policemen shouted. The cops were taking longer than the strikers to figure out what was going on. Not until something close to half their number had fallen or had their nightsticks taken away did another cry ring out: “Drop back and regroup!”
Yelling in triumph, the men from the picket line surged after them. “Down with the scabs!” they roared. “Down with the cops!” They trampled underfoot the policemen who couldn’t fall back and regroup.
Maybe one of those police officers was first to yank out his pistol and start shooting at the men who were stomping him. But after one or two sharp cracks rang out, it suddenly seemed as if every cop in Toledo were drawing his revolver and blazing away at the striking steelworkers.
Against gunfire, the strikers had no defense. Some fell screaming in pain. Some fell silently, and would not rise again. A few kept trying to advance on the police in spite of everything. Most, though, Chester Martin among them, knew how hopeless that was. He was not ashamed to run.
Bullets zipped past his head. Now that the police had opened fire, they seemed intent on emptying their revolvers and slaying as many strikers as they could. In their shoes, Martin probably would have done the same. After the men from the picket line had come so close to overwhelming the cops altogether, they wanted their own back. If strikers got to thinking they could defeat the police, no man in blue would be safe.
“Next time,” somebody not far away panted, “next time we bring our own guns to the dance, by Jesus!”
“That’s right,” somebody else said. “They want a war, we’ll give ’em a f*cking war, see if we don’t.”
All Martin wanted was to be able to work and to bring home a halfway decent wage. He didn’t think that was too much to ask. The men who ran the steel mill—the trust bosses with their top hats and diamond pinky rings, so beloved of editorial cartoonists—evidently thought otherwise. A bullet slapped into the flesh of a man close by. Martin had heard that sound too many times on too many fields to mistake it for anything else. The steelworker crumpled with a groan.
Martin dashed around a corner. After that, he didn’t need to worry about getting shot. The people on the street weren’t striking; they were going about their ordinary business. If the cops suddenly started spraying lead through their ranks, they—or their survivors—could complain to city hall with some hope of being heard.
It looked to be open season on picketers, though. Martin realized he was still holding the stick he’d used against the police to such good effect. As casually as he could, he let it fall to the pavement. Pulling his cap down over his eyes (and wondering how it had managed to stay on his head through the melee), he trudged down the street toward the nearest trolley stop.
Several policemen, pistols drawn, ran past him while he stood waiting. His eyes widened; maybe he’d been wrong about how much mayhem the cops were willing to dish out to the general public. Since he didn’t do anything but stand there, they left him alone. If he’d tried to flee…He didn’t care to think what might have happened then.
When the trolley came clanging up to the stop, he threw a nickel in the fare box and took a seat even though it was heading away from his parents’ flat, where he was staying. He rode for more than a mile, till he’d put the steel mill well behind him. When he did get off, he was only a block or so away from the county courthouse.
Across the street from the building stood a statue of Remembrance, a smaller replica of the great one in New York harbor. Remembrance had finally brought the United States victory over the CSA. What sort of statue would have to go up before anyone recognized that the working man deserved his due? How long would it take before he did?
Those were questions that made Martin look at Remembrance in a new way. His left arm bore a large, ugly scar, a reminder of what he’d suffered for his country’s sake. What was his country willing to do for him?
“Shoot me again, that’s what,” he muttered. “Is that what I fought for?”
Teddy Roosevelt made noises about caring over what happened to the ordinary working man. Martin’s brief meeting with the president in the trenches had made him think Roosevelt was sincere. He wondered what Roosevelt would say about what had happened in Toledo. That would tell whether he meant what he said.
Martin wondered if writing him a letter would do any good. He doubted it. He knew what happened when a private wrote a general a letter: either nothing, or somebody landed on the private like a ton of bricks. Roosevelt would do what he would do, and Chester Martin’s view of the matter wouldn’t count for beans.
“That’s not right,” he said. “That’s not fair.” But it was, he knew too well, the way the world worked.
After a while, he took a streetcar back to his parents’ apartment building in Ottawa Hills. His younger sister, Sue, was at work; she’d landed a typist’s job after he recovered from his wound and went back to the front. His father was at work, too. That graveled him some; Stephen Douglas Martin had been a steelworker longer than Chester had been alive. He labored down the street from the plant his son was striking. He had a good job and a good day’s pay; Chester wondered if he himself would have to wait till he was gray and wrinkled to say the same. He wondered if he’d ever be able to say the same.
His mother, Louisa, who looked like an older version of Sue, exclaimed in surprise when he came through the door. “I thought you’d be out there all day,” she said. She didn’t approve of his striking, but he was her son, and she stayed polite about it.
At the moment, he knew a certain amount of relief he’d made it here ahead of the news of trouble. “It got a little lively when the scabs came in,” he said, which was technically true but would do for an understatement till a better one came along.
“Were the cops busting heads?” his mother asked. He nodded. She shook her own head, in maternal concern. “That’s why I don’t want you out there picketing, Chester. You could get hurt.”
He started to laugh. He couldn’t help it. It wasn’t that she was wrong. It was much more that she had no idea how right she was. “If I came through the war, I’m not going to let Toledo goons worry me,” he answered.
“You need to worry. You could step in front of a streetcar tomorrow,” his mother said. He nodded. She said that a lot. If he was going to worry, trolley cars wouldn’t go high on the list. Two other questions topped it. One was, had anyone recognized him while he nerved the strikers to resist the police? The second followed hard upon the first: would any of those people let the police know who he was?
Jefferson Pinkard kept a wary eye on the crucible as it swung into position to pour its molten contents onto the Sloss Works foundry floor. The kid handling the crucible had some notion of what he was doing, but only some. Herb Wallace, the best crucible man Jeff had ever known, had gone off to fight the damnyankees—conscription nabbed him early—but he hadn’t come home to Birmingham. His bones lay somewhere up in Kentucky.
This time, the pouring went smoothly. Only a tiny, fingerlike rivulet of molten steel broke through the earth and sand walling the mold, and Pinkard and his partner had no trouble stemming it with more earth. Leaning on his rake afterwards, Jeff said, “Wish they were all that easy.”
His partner nodded. “Yes, suh, Mistuh Pinkard,” Vespasian agreed. The big, bulky Negro—as big and bulky as Pinkard himself—took off his cloth cap and wiped sweat from his forehead. Winter might rule outside, but it was always summertime in hell on the foundry floor. Vespasian pointed toward the crucible operator. “Hope to Jesus Billy up there figure out his job before he kill somebody. Ain’t happened yet, but he come too damn close a couple times.”
“Yeah—one of ’em was me last month.” Pinkard jumped sideways to show how he’d escaped the misplaced stream of metal. “You was right lively, that’s a fact,” Vespasian said.
“Damn well had to be.” Pinkard shored up the edge of the mold at another place where it looked as if it might give way. “The floor did run smoother before the war, and that’s a fact, too.”
Vespasian didn’t answer. He hadn’t been on the foundry floor before the war. Back then, Negroes had fed the furnaces and done other jobs that took strong backs and no brains, but the better positions had been in white hands. Jeff’s partner then had been his next-door neighbor and best friend, Bedford Cunningham.
But the war had sucked white men into the Confederate Army. The CSA had still needed steel—more steel than ever—to fight the damnyankees. Negroes started filling night-shift jobs once solely the property of white men, then evening-shift, and then, at last, day-shift, too.
Back then, before he got conscripted himself, Jeff hadn’t wanted to work alongside a black man. He’d done it, though, for the sake of his country. Bedford Cunningham had come back to Birmingham without an arm. A lot of other steel men had come back as invalids. A lot more, like Herb Wallace, hadn’t come back at all.
And so even now, with the war over for half a year, Negroes remained in some of the places they had taken during the war: they’d gained experience. Pinkard couldn’t argue against experience, not when he’d just been griping about Billy. And Vespasian, who was in his forties, didn’t get uppity the way a lot of younger blacks did. As far as the work went, he made a good enough partner. Jeff still felt uncomfortable working beside him.
He didn’t quit. He’d have felt a lot more uncomfortable unemployed. Steel was all he knew. If he got a job at another foundry, he had no guarantee he wouldn’t be working with another Negro, and one harder to get along with than Vespasian. He didn’t care to move out of Sloss company housing, either (though he wished he didn’t live next door to Bedford any more). He endured.
He never once wondered what Vespasian thought of working next to him.
At shift-changing time, the steam whistle blew a blast that cut through the rest of the din on the floor like a hot knife through pork fat. “See you in the mornin’, Mistuh Pinkard,” Vespasian said.
“Yeah,” Jeff answered. “See you.”
They clocked out separately, and left the enormous foundry building separately, too. It wasn’t the way it had been, when Pinkard and Bedford had sometimes gone home to their side-by-side yellow cottages with their arms draped over each other’s shoulders. Vespasian didn’t have a yellow cottage. His cabin was painted primer red, which was cheaper.
Some of the white men going home waved to Pinkard, as did a couple coming onto the evening shift. He waved back. He was always glad to see familiar faces. He didn’t see that many. Shift changes reminded him how little remained the same as it had been in 1914. Being reminded hurt.
His breath smoked as he hurried home. They’d had snow the week before, which wasn’t common in Birmingham. On top of everything else, it had been a hard winter. The grass was yellow-brown and dead. Somebody sneezed not far from Jeff. He hoped it was from a cold, or from a tickling mustache hair. The Spanish influenza was killing men who’d lived through all the bullets the damnyankees aimed at them—and killing their wives and mothers and children, too.
In spite of the cold, Fanny Cunningham was standing in front of her house, gossiping with the woman who lived on the other side of her from the Pinkards. She waved to Jeff as he walked by. He waved back, calling, “How’s Bedford doing?”
“Right good,” she answered. “He’s been cheerful the whole day through.”
“Glad to hear it,” Pinkard said. He was especially glad to hear Fanny had had her husband under her eye the whole day through.
She said, “You don’t come over like you used to, Jeff. Bedford’d be powerful pleased to see more of you.”
Jefferson Pinkard didn’t answer that. He waved again, almost—but not quite—as if to say he’d think about it, then headed up the walk to his own cottage. He hesitated before opening the door. He had to do it, though, if he intended to go inside. When at last he did, the savory smell of stewing pork made his mouth water.
“That you, darlin’?” Emily called from the kitchen.
“It’s me, all right,” Jeff said.
Emily came out, a smile on her face. She had a barmaid’s good looks and a barmaid’s good buxom figure and hair of a bright shade somewhere between red and gold. Now that she wasn’t working in a munitions plant any longer, she was letting it grow out. Now that she was out of the plant, too, the jaundice working with cordite had given her was gone, leaving her rosy and altogether desirable.
Jeff took her in his arms. She pulled his face down to hers. Her lips were greedy against his. She’d always been greedy for loving. When Jeff hadn’t been there to give it to her…That was when he’d become a less than happy man.
“What did you do today?” he asked her after they broke apart.
“Usual kinds of things,” she answered. “Did my cleaning. Did my cooking. Went out and bought me some cloth to make a dress with.” She nodded toward the sewing machine in a corner of the front room. Then she stuck out a hip, tilted her head a little, and looked at him sidelong. “Thought about you. Thought about you a lot, Jeff.”
“Did you?” he said.
Emily nodded, batting her eyelashes. She played the role of seductress to the hilt. That didn’t mean Jeff failed to respond to it. The collarless neck of his shirt suddenly felt like a choker. Some evenings, supper turned out to be later than he expected when he walked through the door.
“Did—?” That was the question Jeff knew he shouldn’t ask. Did you see Bedford Cunningham today? If he wanted to let the poison seep out of their marriage instead of putting more in, he couldn’t keep harping on that. He changed course in midstream: “Did we have any more beer in the icebox?”
Alabama had gone dry not long before the war. What that meant, Pinkard had found, was that you had to know somebody before you could buy beer or whiskey, and that the quality of the stuff you could buy, especially the whiskey, had gone down. He’d evidently managed to ask the question without perceptible pause, for Emily nodded again. “Sure do,” she said. “Couple bottles. Shall we have ’em with the stew? It ought to be just about ready.”
“That sounds pretty good,” Jeff said. Supper, for the moment, was more on his mind than going back to the bedroom. He found another question that wasn’t dangerous, or wasn’t dangerous that way: “What did you pay for the cloth?”
Now Emily’s blue eyes flashed with fury, not any more tender emotion. “Dollar and a half a yard. Can you believe it?” she said. “I wasn’t buying fancy silk taffeta, Jeff. I know we ain’t rich. It wasn’t anything but printed cotton dress percale, like I used to get before the war for eleven cents a yard. Wasn’t as nice as what I could get then, neither.”
He sighed; he’d feared the answer would be something like that. “They haven’t bumped my pay in a bit,” he said. “Don’t know when they’ll do it again.” His laugh held fury, too. “Here I am, making more money than I ever reckoned I would in all my born days, and I can’t even keep my head above water. That ain’t right, Em. That purely ain’t right. And hellfire, the little bit we’d stashed away in the bank before the war—what’ll it buy us now? Not what we hoped it would, that’s certain sure.”
His wife didn’t argue. Instead, she went into the kitchen, pulled the cork from a bottle of beer, and brought it out to him. “Here,” she said. “Won’t make things better, but it’ll make ’em look better for a spell.” While Jeff took a long pull, she got the other bottle for herself.
Things did look a little better after some beer. Getting some pork stew under his belt made Pinkard more charitably inclined toward the world, too. It even made him more charitably inclined toward Emily. He hadn’t married her for any other reason than getting her drawers down, but she’d shown him some others in the years since they tied the knot.
While she washed the supper dishes, he read yesterday’s newspaper by the light of a kerosene lamp. Kerosene was heading through the roof, too, especially since the Yankees weren’t going to let go of Sequoyah, from which the Confederate States had drawn a great part of their oil.
A story caught his eye. “Look here,” he said to Emily when she came out of the kitchen, drying her hands on a towel. “They had themselves a riot in Richmond: folks saying we’re selling ourselves down the river to the USA. We’re sure as hell selling ourselves down the river to somebody. Dollar and a half a yard for cotton! That kind of thing means we need to get ourselves set to rights, but I’m hanged if I know how.”
“I don’t want you hanged, Jeff, sweetheart, but I like the way you’re hung,” Emily said. She cared nothing for politics. Sweeping the newspaper aside, she sat down on her husband’s lap.
His arms went around her. One hand closed on her breast. She sighed in his ear, her breath warm and moist. He knew she wanted him. He’d never stopped wanting her, even when…. That hand squeezed tight. Emily whimpered a little, but only a little.
Later, in the bedroom, she whimpered in a different way, and gasped and moaned and thrashed and clawed. Sated, sinking toward sleep, Jeff slowly nodded. She wanted him, all right—no doubt of that. But whom would she want when his back was turned? He drifted off, wondering, wondering.
Nellie Semphroch woke with a start to find a man in her bed: a gray-haired fellow with a bushy mustache. The reason she woke, and woke with a start, was not hard to find, for he was snoring like a sawmill.
As her racing heart slowed toward its normal rhythm, she relaxed and let out a small sigh. Here she’d been married since before the turn of the year, and she still wasn’t used to sleeping with her husband. She wasn’t used to thinking of herself by her new name, either. She’d worn the one Edna’s father had given her for a good many years—most of them without him, as he’d died when his daughter was little, and Edna wasn’t little any more.
“One of the few decent things he ever did,” Nellie muttered. Then, softly, she repeated her new name to herself, over and over: “Nellie Jacobs. Nellie Jacobs. Nellie Jacobs.” She hadn’t had so much trouble the first time she was married. That lay a quarter of a century in the past, though. She was more set in her ways now. “Nellie Jacobs.”
Hal Jacobs grunted and rolled over toward her. His eyes opened. Did he look a little confused, too, as if wondering where he was? He’d been a widower for a long time, as she’d been a widow, and had grown used to fending for himself. The room in which he’d lived, above the cobbler’s shop across the street from her coffeehouse in Washington, D.C., was aridly neat.
Then, seeing her, he smiled. “Good morning, my dear Nellie,” he said, leaning over to kiss her on the cheek. He did that every morning they woke up together.
“Good morning, Hal,” Nellie said. Her husband, though far from young, remained very much the enchanted new bridegroom. Nellie wasn’t so young as she wished she were, either. For her part, she remained bemused she’d ever agreed to marry him.
His hand slid along under the covers and came to rest on the curve of her hip. “You have made me the happiest man in the world,” he declared.
He was sweet. Because he was sweet, Nellie had never told him how much she disliked having a man reach out and touch her like that. He wasn’t young. He didn’t seek his marital rights all that often. When he did, she had no trouble getting through it. She’d got through far worse back in her own younger days.
He wanted to please her. She let him think he did. Once or twice, he really had come close, which surprised her. She’d thought that part of her dead forever, not that it had ever had much life.
She threw off the wool blankets. She wore a thick flannel nightgown and long underwear beneath it, but she was still cold. She’d been cold for months. “When will this winter end?” she asked, though that was not a question her husband could answer.
Hal Jacobs got out of bed, too. He also had on long johns under a nightshirt, and he also looked cold. “It has been a hard one,” he agreed. “March and no sign of letup. And it has to be making the influenza epidemic worse.”
They both dressed rapidly. Nellie said, “I hate the influenza. It makes people afraid to go out in crowds, and that’s bad for business.”
“With so much snow on the street, they have trouble getting about anyhow,” Hal said. “This will not keep me from enjoying a cup of your wonderful coffee, though, or I hope not, Mrs. Jacobs.”
“I think we can probably take care of something like that, Mr. Jacobs,” Nellie said. She’d always liked his old-fashioned, almost Old World, sense of courtesy. Now that they were married, she found herself imitating it.
They went downstairs together. Edna, whose room was across the hall, joined them a few minutes later. They all stuck close to the stove, which heated the kitchen area as well as water for coffee.
Sipping at his steaming cup, Hal Jacobs let out a grateful sigh. He looked from Nellie to Edna and back again. “My beautiful wife and her beautiful daughter,” he said, beaming. “Yes, I am a lucky man.”
Edna glanced over to her mother. “You better keep him happy, Ma. He sure does talk pretty.”
“Foosh,” Nellie said. She and Edna did look alike, with long faces, brown hair, and very fair skin. She didn’t think she was particularly beautiful. Edna made a pretty young woman. She smiled more than Nellie did, which made her look more pleasant—but then, she was looking for a man. Nellie’s opinion was that the joys of having even a good one were overrated, but Edna paid as little attention to Nellie’s opinions as she could get away with.
A customer came in and ordered a fried-egg sandwich to go with his coffee. He was young and moderately handsome, with a brown Kaiser Bill mustache whose upthrust points were waxed to formidable perfection. Edna took care of him before Nellie could. That might have been funny, were it happening for the first time. Having seen it throughout the war, Nellie was sick and tired of it.
She made eggs for herself and her husband, too—after so many years as a widow, she found the idea of having a husband very strange. When Hal had eaten, he said, “I’m going to go across the street and get some things done.” He chuckled. “Can’t have folks say my wife does all the work in the family, now can I?”
“Not when it isn’t true,” Nellie said. “Go upstairs and get your overcoat, though, before you set foot outdoors.” Jacobs nodded and headed for the stairs.
Edna laughed. “There you go, Ma! You’re telling him what to do like you’ve been married twenty years.” Nellie made a face at her, and not a happy one. Jacobs laughed again going upstairs. That was luck, nothing else. He could as easily have grown angry at the idea of being ordered about.
Well bundled, he walked across the snowy street and opened the cobbler’s shop. He wouldn’t get much business today. He had to know it, too. The shop was part of his routine, though, as running the coffeehouse was part of Nellie’s. She was glad he kept his independence and let her keep hers.
A barrel with a bulldozer blade welded to the prow rumbled down the street, pushing snow aside—and up onto the sidewalk, making the drifts higher and making it even harder for people to come into the coffeehouse or the cobbler’s shop. The barrel driver cared nothing about that. Having been occupied by the Confederates for more than two and a half years and then devastated in the U.S. reconquest, Washington remained under martial law with the war months over.
Trucks roared by in the barrel’s wake: it was for them that the bigger, heavier machine had cleared a path. Rubble filled their beds. Had rubble been gold, Washington would have spawned a rush to make the stampede to California seem as nothing beside it. But it wasn’t gold. It was only rubble. It had to be disposed of, not sought out.
When Nellie opened the front door to take a cup of coffee to Hal, she found she couldn’t, not without shoveling her way to the street. By the time she and Edna did the shoveling, the coffee was cold. She poured it out, got a fresh one, and took it across the street. Then she discovered she had to shovel her way into her husband’s shop. That meant another trip back for coffee that was hot. Some of the things she said about the U.S. government were less than complimentary.
Her husband was fixing a soldier’s boot when she finally came in. The only difference between 1918 and 1916 was that it was a U.S., not a Confederate, boot. “Coffee? How nice. How thoughtful,” he said. His eyes twinkled. “And what do you hear in the coffeehouse that might interest an old shoemaker, eh?”
Nellie laughed. He hadn’t just been a shoemaker during the war. He’d been part of a spy ring keeping tabs on what the Confederates did in and around Washington. He’d helped Nellie get coffee and food when they were scarce and hard to come by. Since she had them, her place had been popular among Confederate officers and homegrown collaborators. In turn, she’d passed on what she overheard to him.
She had an Order of Remembrance, First Class, straight from the hands of Theodore Roosevelt because of that. Edna had an Order of Remembrance, Second Class, which was richly undeserved: she’d been on the point of marrying a Confederate officer when he died in a U.S. artillery barrage. So far as Nellie knew, Hal had no decorations of his own. That struck her as dreadfully unfair, but he’d never once said a word about it where she could hear.
Nor did he now. He drank the coffee quickly, savoring the warmth she’d had to work so hard to get him. Then he remarked, “If you look over there, you’ll see they are building the Washington Monument a little higher now.”
She looked out the window. Before the war, she would have been able to see only the tip of the monument over the buildings between it and the shop. Rebel bombardment and U.S. counterattacks had truncated the white stone obelisk. She could still see more of it now than she’d seen before the war, because the fighting had also leveled most of the buildings formerly in the way.
Hal said, “I hear they’re starting to rebuild the White House and the Capitol, too.”
“They’ll be pretty,” Nellie said. “Past that, I don’t know why anybody would bother. They’ll just get blown up again when the next war comes, and I can’t see the president and Congress coming down from Philadelphia, can you?”
“To spend all their time here, the way they used to do?” Hal Jacobs shook his head. “No. Not when we are still so close to Virginia, even though the USA will hold the land down to the Rappahannock. But maybe to come down for ceremonial sessions: that, yes. That I could see.”
“I suppose you may be right,” Nellie said after a little thought. “Teddy Roosevelt is the sort to enjoy ruffles and flourishes, no doubt about that. He’d love to make the Rebs grind their teeth, too. They were going on about how Washington would be theirs forever. Reckon they didn’t know everything there is to know.”
“They were wrong,” her husband agreed. “They will pay the price for being wrong. But we have paid a great price because they were wrong, too. I hope that will never happen again.”
“Oh, I hope so, too,” Nellie said. “I hope so with all my heart. But when I said people wouldn’t come back to the White House and the Capitol on account of they’d get blown up in the next war, I didn’t hear you telling me I was wrong.”
“We have fought three wars against the Confederate States,” Hal said. “I hope we do not fight a fourth one. I pray we do not fight a fourth one. A man should plan by what he has seen, though, not by what he hopes and prays. The older I get, the more certain I am this is true.”
Nellie studied him. No, he wasn’t handsome. No, he didn’t make her heart flutter. And yet, as she had seen during the war and as she saw even more strongly now, he had a core of solid good sense that was altogether admirable. She did admire it, and him.
She hadn’t been looking for anyone to make her heart flutter. That was for people Edna’s age. Good sense, though—good sense lasted. The older Nellie got herself, the plainer that became.
She smiled at her new husband. It was the most wifely smile she’d ever given him. It was also the smile of someone beginning to realize she’d made a good bargain after all.
John Oglethorpe came up to Scipio as the Negro was clearing dishes off a table a customer had just left. The restaurant owner coughed. Scipio knew what that sort of cough meant: Oglethorpe was about to say something he only half wanted to say. Scipio could make a good guess about what it was, too.
His guess wasn’t just good. It turned out to be right. After clearing his throat a couple more times, Oglethorpe said, “You’ve done a right good job for me here, Xerxes. I want you to know I mean that.”
“I thanks you very much, suh,” Scipio answered. Xerxes was the name he’d used since escaping the collapsing Congaree Socialist Republic and making his way across South Carolina to Augusta, Georgia. In his proper persona, he had a hefty price on his head, though Georgia worried more about its own black Reds on the loose than about those from other states.
“You’ve been just about as good a waiter as Aurelius, matter of fact,” Oglethorpe went on. The other Negro had conveniently put himself out of sight and earshot. Oglethorpe coughed yet again. “But him and me, we go back years, and I ain’t got enough business to keep two waiters busy any more, not with so much of the war work closed down, I ain’t.”
“You’s lettin’ me go,” Scipio said. The dialect of the Congaree was slow and thick as molasses. Scipio could speak far better formal English than his boss—years of training to be the perfect butler at Marshlands had forced him to learn—but that wouldn’t help now. It was likely to make things worse, in fact.
Oglethorpe nodded. “Hate to do it, like I say, but I’ve got to keep my own head above water first. You on the trail of another job waitin’ tables, you tell whoever’s thinking about hiring you to talk to me. You’re a brick, and I’ll say so.”
“That right kind o’ you, Mistuh Oglethorpe,” Scipio said. “You been a good boss.” He was, on the whole, sincere. Oglethorpe expected his help to work like mules, but he worked like a mule himself. Scipio had no complaints about that. Fair was fair.
Digging in his wallet, Oglethorpe peeled off brown banknotes. “It’s Wednesday today, but I’m payin’ you till the end of the week. Couple extra days of money never did anybody any harm.”
That was more than fair. “Thank you kindly, suh,” Scipio said. He counted the money, frowned, and counted it again. He took out a banknote and thrust it at the man who ran the restaurant. “Even if you is payin’ till the end o’ the week, you done give me twenty dollars too much.”
“Keep it.” Oglethorpe looked annoyed that he’d noticed. “Ain’t like it was twenty dollars before the war. Money was worth somethin’ in those days. Now—hell, look at you. You got all that money in your hand there, and you ain’t rich. What kind of world is it when you can be standin’ there with all that cash, and you got to worry about—” He checked himself. “No, you don’t have to worry about where your next meal is comin’ from. You get on back here with me.”
Scipio got. His boss hacked off a couple of slices of egg bread, yellow as the sun, then put them around a slab of ham that would have choked a boa constrictor. He added pickles and mustard, gave Scipio the monster sandwich, and stood there with hands on hips till he’d eaten it.
“I gets me a new job, I comes back here to eat,” Scipio declared.
“Want another one?” Oglethorpe asked, reaching for the bread again. Scipio shook his head and, belly bulging, managed to make his escape. Only when he was out on the streets of Augusta did he wish he’d taken the restaurant owner up on his generosity. A sandwich like that kept a man’s belly from complaining for most of a day.
Augusta had a shabby, run-down look to it these days. From things he’d heard, Scipio suspected the whole Confederacy had a shabby, run-down look to it these days. A lot of men, white and black, were walking along not quite aimlessly, looking for anything that might be work. As Oglethorpe had said, the factories that had boomed during the war—cotton mills, brickworks, fertilizer plants, canneries—were booming no more.
More than a few men remained in their uniforms, though the war had been over since the summer before and spring wasn’t far away. Most of the whites who still wore draggled butternut looked to be wearing it because they had nothing better to put on. The Negroes in uniform, though, might have been in business suits. They were advertising that they had served their country, as plainly as if they carried sandwich boards, and were hoping that would help them land work. What sort of place the Confederate States were going to give their black veterans remained to be seen.
Scipio headed east along Telfair toward the Terry, the colored district in Augusta. Somebody was holding a rally in May Park, a couple of blocks south of Telfair; he saw waving flags from the corner of Telfair and Elbert. He didn’t really need to go back to his room: he was, at the moment, a gentleman of leisure. He wandered down toward the park to find out what was going on.
The flags were Confederate flags. They flew at the edge of the street to draw people toward the rally—as they’d succeeded in drawing Scipio—and fluttered in a mild breeze on and beside the platform on which the speaker stood. Behind the fellow was a sign that did not look to have been painted by a professional. It read, FREEDOM PARTY.
What was the Freedom Party? Whatever it was, Scipio had never heard of it before. No one at Anne Colleton’s elegant dinner parties had ever mentioned it, so far as he recalled. Of course, he hadn’t paid that much attention to politics, at least till he’d been dragooned into the leadership of the Congaree Socialist Republic. Why should he have? He couldn’t vote; the Confederate States didn’t recognize him as a citizen. Maybe this new outfit would help make things better.
And maybe it wouldn’t, too. The skinny fellow up there on the platform was long on complaints: “Aren’t our generals pretty in their fancy uniforms? Wouldn’t you have liked it better if they’d had any notion how to fight the goddamn war? Wouldn’t you have liked ’em better if they weren’t in the damnyankees’ pockets?”
Scipio blinked at that. Generals had occasionally visited Marshlands. He knew good and well they’d done everything they knew how to do to beat the United States. They hadn’t known enough, but they’d tried.
Most of the men in the crowd looked to be either white veterans or men who’d had wartime factory jobs and had no jobs now. They’d never seen any generals, except perhaps whizzing by in fancy motorcars. When this loudmouthed madman ranted about traitors in high places in Richmond, they ate it up and shouted for more.
And he gave them more, saying, “And if the goddamn generals weren’t traitors and fools, how come they sat there with their thumbs up their asses while the niggers plotted up the biggest goddamn rebellion in the history of the world? Were they blind, or did they shut their eyes on purpose? Either which way, throw ’em on the rubbish heap, every stinking one of ’em.”
“That’s right!” voices in the crowd said. “Tell it!” As far as they were concerned, the speaker might have been one of the colored preachers who went around the plantations testifying to the power of the Lord. These battered white men responded the way colored fieldhands, as oppressed a group as was ever born, did when the preacher started going strong.
“And we’d have whipped the damnyankees—whipped ’em, I tell you—if the niggers hadn’t risen up,” the man from the Freedom Party shouted. He believed every word he was saying; Scipio could hear conviction jangling in his voice. “They stabbed us—they stabbed our country—in the back. Get rid of the traitor niggers and the traitor generals and I’ll tell you, we’d have been past Philadelphia and heading for New York City!” He pumped his fist in the air.
His audience pumped their fists in the air, too. Scipio stood only on the outermost fringes of the audience. By the glares coming his way, he suddenly realized even that was much too close to the platform. He made himself scarce before anybody decided pounding him into the ground would be a good way to settle lunch.
Behind him, the crowd erupted in more cheers. He didn’t turn around to find out why. He suspected he’d be happier not knowing. Once he got back inside the Terry—local colored dialect for Territory—he felt better. Being surrounded by black faces eased the alarm he’d felt at the Freedom Party rally.
Not all white men were like that shouting would-be politician. Scipio patted his hip pocket, where the money John Oglethorpe had given him rested. Oglethorpe was as good as they came, black or white. Even Anne Colleton didn’t scare Scipio the way he’d been scared in May Park. Miss Anne wanted to go on running things, and she wanted revenge on the people who’d killed her brother and gutted Marshlands and almost killed her. That made sense to Scipio, even if it had put him in hot water. The fellow on the platform…
“Ain’t gwine think about he no more,” Scipio muttered. That was easy to say. It wasn’t so easy to do.
He stuck his head into every little hole-in-the-wall café and cookshop he passed, to see if anybody was looking for help. Even if a waiter didn’t get paid a whole lot, he didn’t go hungry, not if his boss had so much as a particle of heart. Waiting tables was easier than factory work, too, not that any factory work was out there these days.
He didn’t find any restaurant jobs in the Terry, either. He would have been surprised if he had. Half of these joints didn’t have any waiters at all: the fellow at the stove did everything else, too. At a lot of the other places, the waiter looked to be the cook’s son or brother or cousin. Still, you never could tell. If you didn’t bet, how were you going to win?
The Terry had even more places to get a drink than it did places to get food. Scipio was tempted to stick his head into one of them, too, not to look for work but to find somewhere he could kill an afternoon over a mug of beer or two. In the end, he stayed out. Unless a man had silver to spend, beer cost three or four dollars a mug even in the dingiest dive. Without a job at the moment, Scipio didn’t care to throw his banknotes around like that.
He ended up back at his roominghouse. The landlady gave him a fishy stare. A working man who unexpectedly showed up long before quitting time couldn’t figure on anything else. The landlady didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. If Scipio was late with his rent, he’d end up on the sidewalk, and everything he owned—not that that amounted to much—out there with him. He was paid up till the end of the week, and he had plenty for the next week’s rent.
He hoped he wouldn’t have to worry past then. He’d never before had trouble finding a job. That cheered him, till he remembered he hadn’t looked for one since the war ended. Everybody was scrambling for work now.
He went upstairs. The furniture in his room was no better than could be expected in a Terry roominghouse, but he kept the place spotlessly clean. The books on the battered bookshelf were his. He pulled out a beat-up abridgement of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall and read with a smile on his face of the Moorish conquest of the blond Visigoths of Spain.
General George Armstrong Custer was not a happy man. “God damn it to hell and gone, Lieutenant Colonel,” he shouted, “I don’t want to go back to Philadelphia. I’m perfectly content to stay here in Nashville.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” Lieutenant Colonel Abner Dowling said. Custer’s adjutant was in fact a good deal less than devastated, but knew better than to show it. “The telegram just now came in. I’m afraid it leaves you little room for discretion.”
“I don’t want to go back to Philadelphia,” Custer repeated. He had scant discretion. Once set on a course, he kept on it, and derailing him commonly took the rhetorical equivalent of dynamite. He’d been stubborn and hard-charging for more than seventy-eight years; no wire from the War Department would make him change his ways. Abner Dowling was convinced nothing would make him change his ways.
“Sir,” Dowling said, “I suspect they want to honor you. You are, after all, the senior soldier in the United States Army.”
“Don’t pour the soft soap on me, even if you’re shaped like a barrel of it,” Custer growled. His description of Dowling’s physique was, unfortunately, accurate, although he was hardly the dashing young cavalryman himself these days. He tapped at the four stars on the shoulder of his fancy—as fancy as regulations permitted, and then some—uniform. “Took me long enough to make full general, by God. When I think of the fools and whippersnappers promoted ahead of me…I could weep, Lieutenant Colonel, I could just weep.”
Custer’s slow promotion had also meant Dowling’s slow promotion. Custer never thought of such things, nor that calling a fat man fat to his face might wound his feelings. Custer thought of Custer, first, last, and always.
Dowling scratched at his mustache, in lieu of reaching out and punching the distinguished general commanding the U.S. First Army right in the nose. He took a deep breath and said, “Sir, they may have taken a while to recognize your heroism, but they’ve gone and done it.”
In an odd sort of way, he was even telling the truth. As with the rest of his life, Custer knew only one style of fighting: straight-ahead slugging. First Army had paid a gruesome toll for that aggressiveness as it slogged its way south through western Kentucky and northern Tennessee.
When Custer saw his first barrel, he’d wanted to mass the traveling forts and beat his Confederate opponents over the head with them, too. War Department doctrine dictated otherwise. Custer had ignored War Department doctrine (lying about it along the way, and making Dowling lie, too), assembled his barrels exactly as he wanted to, hurled them at the Rebs—and broken through. Other U.S. armies using the same tactics had broken through, too. If that didn’t make him a hero, what did?
If he’d failed…if he’d failed, he would have been retired. And Dowling? Dowling would probably be a first lieutenant in charge of all the battleship refueling depots in Montana and Wyoming. He knew what a narrow escape they’d had. Custer didn’t even suspect it. He could be very naive.
He could also be very canny. “I know why they’re calling me to Philadelphia,” he said, leaning toward his adjutant so he could speak in a conspiratorial whisper. “They’re going to put me out to pasture, that’s what they’re going to do.”
“Oh, I hope not, sir,” Dowling lied loyally. He’d fought the good fight for a lot of years, keeping Custer as close to military reality as he could. If he didn’t have to do that any more, the War Department would give him something else to do. Anything this side of latrine duty looked more pleasant.
“I won’t let them,” Custer said. “I’ll go to the newspapers, that’s what I’ll do.” Dowling was sure he would, too. Publicity was meat and drink to him. He might even win his fight. He’d won many of them in his time.
All that was for the moment beside the point, though. “Sir, you are ordered to report in Philadelphia no later than Sunday, twenty-first April. That’s day after tomorrow, sir. They’ve laid on a special Pullman car for you and Mrs. Custer, with a berth in the next car for me. You don’t have to take that particular train, but it would be a comfortable way to get there.” Dowling was, and needed to be, skilled at the art of cajolery.
Custer sputtered and fumed through his peroxided mustache. He did know how to take orders—most of the time. “Libbie would like going that way,” he said, as if to give himself an excuse for yielding. Dowling nodded, partly from policy, partly from agreement. Custer’s wife would like going that way, and would also approve of his acquiescence. But then, Elizabeth Bacon Custer, in Dowling’s view, had more brains in her fingernail than her illustrious husband did in his head.
The train proved splendid. Dowling wondered if the Pullmans and dining car had been borrowed from a wealthy capitalist to transport Custer in splendor—and he himself got only a reflection of the splendor Custer had to be enjoying to the fullest. As he ate another bite of beefsteak in port-wine sauce, he reflected that life could have been worse.
A brass band waited on the platform as the locomotive pulled into the Broad Street station—and not just any brass band, but one led by John Philip Sousa. Next to the band stood Theodore Roosevelt. Dowling watched Custer’s face when he saw the president. The two men had been rivals since they’d combined to drive the British out of Montana Territory at the end of the Second Mexican War. Each thought the other had got more credit than he deserved—they’d quarreled about it in Nashville, as the Great War was ending.
Now, though, Roosevelt bared his large and seemingly very numerous teeth in a grin of greeting. “Welcome to Philadelphia, General!” he boomed, and advanced to take Custer’s hand as the band blared out “The Stars and Stripes Forever” and photographic flashes went off like artillery rounds. “I trust you will do me the honor of riding with me at the head of the Remembrance Day parade tomorrow.”
Dowling could not remember the last time he had seen George Custer speechless, but Custer was speechless now, speechless for half a minute. Then, at last, he took Roosevelt’s hand in his and huskily whispered, “Thank you, Mr. President.” Beside him, Libbie (who thought even less of Roosevelt than he did) dropped the president a curtsy.
And Abner Dowling felt something that might almost have been a tear in his eye. Roosevelt had done Custer honor, not the other way round. President Blaine had instituted Remembrance Day at the close of the Second Mexican War as a memorial to the humiliation of the United States by their foes. It had always been a day of mourning and lamentation and looking ahead to fights unwon.
And now the fight was over, and it had been won. Instead of lying prostrate in defeat, the United States stood triumphant. With Remembrance Day come round again, the country could see that all the sacrifices its citizens had made for so many years were not in vain. Flags wouldn’t fly upside down in distress any more.
Custer asked, “Mr. President, where will you seat my wife? That I have come to this moment is in no small measure due to her.”
“Thank you, Autie,” Libbie said. Dowling thought Custer dead right in his assessment. He hadn’t thought Custer perceptive enough to realize the truth in what he said. Every once in a while, the old boy could be surprising. Trouble was, so many of the surprises proved alarming.
“I had in mind placing her in the motorcar directly behind ours,” Roosevelt answered, “and putting your adjutant with her, if that be satisfactory to you all. Lieutenant Colonel Dowling has given his country no small service.”
Dowling came to stiff attention and saluted. “Thank you very much, sir!” His heart felt about to burst with pride.
“The people will want to look at the general and the president, so I am perfectly content to ride behind,” Libbie said. In public, she always put Custer and his career ahead of his own desires. In private, as Dowling had seen, she kept a wary eye on Custer because his own eye, even at his advanced age, had a tendency to wander.
“Good. That’s settled.” Roosevelt liked having things settled, especially his way. “We’ll put you folks up for the night, and then tomorrow morning…tomorrow morning, General—”
Custer presumed to interrupt his commander-in-chief: “Tomorrow morning, Mr. President, we celebrate our revenge on the world!” It was a typically grandiose Custerian phrase, the one difference being that Custer, this time, was inarguably right. Theodore Roosevelt laughed and nodded and clapped his hands with glee. The victory the United States had won looked to be big enough to help heal even this longtime estrangement.
Up until the war, the Hindenburg Hotel had been called the Lafayette. Whatever you called it, it was luxury beyond any Dowling had ever known, surpassing the train on which he’d come to Philadelphia to the same degree the train surpassed a typical wartime billet. He feasted on lobster, drank champagne, bathed in a tub with golden faucets, plucked a fine Habana from a humidor on the dresser, and slept on smooth linen and soft down. There were, he reflected as he drifted toward that splendid sleep, people who lived this life all the time. It was enough to make a man wish he were one of the elect—either that, or to make him a Socialist.
The next morning, he was whisked along with the Custers on a whirlwind inspection of the units that would take part in the parade. He endured rather than enjoying most of the inspection: he’d seen his share of soldiers. But some of the barrels and their crews were from the First Army brigade Colonel Morrell had assembled and commanded. They greeted Custer and Dowling with lusty cheers.
Dowling thought those cheers lusty, at any rate, till the parade began and he heard the Philadelphians. Their roar was like nothing he had ever imagined. It was as if they were exorcising more than half a century of shame and disgrace and defeat—Lee had occupied Philadelphia at the end of the War of Secession—in this grandest of all grand moments.
Some women in the crowd looked fierce as they waved their flags—thirty-five stars, now that Kentucky was back in the USA, and the new state of Houston would make it thirty-six on the Fourth of July. God only knew what would happen with Sequoyah and with the land conquered from Canada. Abner Dowling didn’t, and didn’t worry about it.
Other women, he saw, seemed on the point of ecstasy at what their country had finally achieved. Tears streamed down the faces of old men who remembered all the defeats and embarrassments, of boys who hadn’t been old enough to go and fight, and of men of fighting age who had given of themselves to make this parade what it was. Even a young man wearing a hook in place of his left hand wept unashamed at this Remembrance Day to be remembered forever.
In the motorcar ahead, Custer and Roosevelt took turns rising to accept the plaudits of the crowd. And the crowd did cheer each time one of them rose. But the crowd would have cheered anyhow. More than anything else, it was cheering itself.
Libbie Custer leaned close to Dowling and said, “Lieutenant Colonel, I thank God that He spared me to see this day and rejoice at what we have done.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he said, and then, half to himself, “And what do we do next?”