Chapter XV
Roger Kimball whistled cheerfully as he tucked his white shirt into a pair of butternut trousers. A lot of Freedom Party leaders didn’t care to join in the brawling that had marked the Party’s rise. Kimball shrugged. He’d never backed away from a fight, and he’d gone toward a good many. And Ainsworth Layne was speaking in Charleston tonight, or thought he was.
“I need a tin hat,” Kimball said, buttoning his fly. A helmet was useless aboard a submersible. It was a handy thing to have with clubs and rocks flying, though.
He picked up his own club and headed for the door. He was about to open it when somebody knocked. He threw it wide. There stood Clarence Potter. The former intelligence officer eyed him with distaste. “If you don’t agree with what I have to say, you could simply tell me so,” Potter remarked.
“I don’t agree with what you have to say,” Kimball snapped. “I don’t have time to argue about it now, though. Can’t be late.”
Potter shook his head. “When we first got to know each other, I thought better of you. You were a man who wanted to build up his country, not a ruffian tearing down the fabric of the republic. We used to talk about riding Jake Featherston. Now he rides you—and you’re proud of it.”
“He doesn’t ride me,” Roger Kimball said. “We’re both going the same way, that’s all.”
“Toward riot and mayhem.” Potter pointed to the stout bludgeon in Kimball’s hand. Then he added, “Toward murder, too, maybe.”
“Clarence, I had nothing to do with Tom Brearley going up in smoke,” Kimball said evenly. “I don’t miss him, but I didn’t have anything to do with it. Far as I know”—he carefully hadn’t asked Featherston any questions—“the Freedom Party had nothing to do with it, either. The jury found those fellows up in Richmond innocent.”
“No, the jury found them not guilty, which isn’t close to the same thing,” Potter answered. “And if the jury had found anything different, how many out of those twelve do you suppose would be breathing today?”
“I don’t know anything about that. What I do know is, maybe you’d better not come around here any more.” Kimball hefted the club.
Potter had very little give in him. Kimball had seen as much when they first met in a saloon. The club didn’t frighten him. “You needn’t worry about that,” he said. Slowly and deliberately, he turned his back and walked away.
Kimball pulled his watch out of his pocket. Good—he wasn’t late yet. He frowned, then set the watch on a table by the door. Some of the Radical Liberals were liable to have clubs, too, and that could be hard on a timepiece.
He passed a policeman on his way to Freedom Party headquarters. The gray-clad cop inspected him. He wondered if the man would give him trouble. But the cop called “Freedom!” and waved him on his way. Kimball raised the club in salute as he hurried along.
Freedom Party stalwarts spilled out onto the sidewalk and into the street around the headquarters. They’d drawn a few policemen on account of that. “Come on, fellows, you don’t want to block traffic,” one of the policemen said. The men in white and butternut took no special notice of him. Yes, he had a six-shooter, but there were more than a hundred times six of them, combat veterans all, and some no doubt with pistols of their own tucked into pockets or trouser waistbands.
“Form ranks, boys,” Kimball called. The Freedom Party men did. They didn’t just spill into the street then: they took it over, in a long, sinewy column that put Kimball in mind of the endless close-order drill he’d gone through down at the Naval Academy in Mobile. The comparison was fitting, because the stalwarts—mostly ex-soldiers, with a handful of Navy men—had surely done their fair share of close-order drill, too.
“You can’t do that!” a cop exclaimed. “You haven’t got a parade permit!”
“We are doing it,” Kimball answered. “We’re out for a stroll together—isn’t that right, boys?” The men in butternut and white howled approval. Kimball waited to see if the policeman would have the nerve to try arresting him. The cop didn’t. Grinning, Kimball said, “On to Hampton Park! Forward—march!”
The column moved out, the stalwarts raising a rhythmic cry of “Freedom!” Kimball had all he could do not to break into snickers. Here he was, leading Freedom Party men to attack Radical Liberals in a park named for the family of the Whigs’ presidential candidate. If that wasn’t funny, what was?
Hampton Park lay in the northwestern part of Charleston, across town from Freedom Party headquarters. The column of stalwarts was ten men wide and a hundred yards long; it snarled traffic to a fare-thee-well. Some automobilists frantically blew their horns at the men who presumed to march past them regardless of rules of the road. More than a few, though, shouted “Freedom!” and waved and cheered.
“What do you aim to do?” a nervous policeman asked Kimball as the stalwarts strode up Ashley toward Hampton Park. By then, a couple of dozen cops were tagging along with the Freedom Party men. Tagging along was all they were doing; they seemed shocked to find themselves such a small, shadowy presence.
In Hampton Park, a couple of searchlights hurled spears of light into the sky. The Rad Libs hadn’t adopted the glowing cathedral Anne Colleton had come up with, but they were doing their best to keep pace. Kimball pointed toward the searchlights. “We aim to have a talk with those folks yonder.” The cop spluttered and fumed. He knew the Freedom Party aimed to do a hell of a lot more than that. But knowing it and being able to prove it were two different critters.
Ainsworth Layne had provided himself with a microphone, too. His amplified voice boomed out from the park. “—And so I say to you, people of the Confederate States, that with goodwill we can be reconciled to those with whom we have known conflict in the past: with our American brethren in the United States and with the colored men and women in our own country.” He sounded earnest and bland.
“Are you listening to that crap, boys?” Roger Kimball asked. “Sounds like treason to me. How about you?” A low rumble of agreement rose from the men marching behind him. He asked another question: “What does this country really need?”
“Freedom!” The thunderous answer put Layne’s microphone to shame. The Freedom Party men advanced into the park.
Dark shapes rushed out of the night to meet them. The Radical Liberals had a cry of their own: “Layne and liberty!”
“Freedom!” Kimball shouted, and swung his club. It struck flesh. A Rad Lib howled like a kicked dog. Kimball laughed. If the other side felt like mixing it up, he and his comrades were ready.
Dozens of searchlights marked Freedom Party rallies these days. The Radical Liberals used only a couple. The Radical Liberals incompletely imitated the Freedom Party when it came to assembling a strong-arm force, too. They’d recruited a few dozen bullyboys: enough to blunt the first charge of the men in white and butternut, but nowhere near enough to halt them or drive them back.
“Layne and liberty!” A Radical Liberal swung at Roger Kimball’s head. Kimball got his left arm up in time to block the blow, but let out a yip of anguish all the same. He shook the arm. It didn’t hurt any worse when he did that, so he supposed the Rad Lib hadn’t broken any bones—not from lack of effort, though. Kimball swung his own club. His foe blocked the blow with an ease that bespoke plenty of bayonet practice. But the Radical Liberal couldn’t take on two at once. Another Freedom Party man walloped him from behind. He fell with a groan. Kimball kicked him, hard as he could, then ran on. “Freedom!” he cried.
Ainsworth Layne must have caught the commotion at the back of the park. “And now, I see, the forces of unreason seek to disrupt our peaceable assembly,” he boomed through the microphone. “They pay no heed to the rights enumerated in the Confederate Constitution, yet they feel they have the right to govern. We must reject their violence, their radicalism, for we—”
“Freedom!” Kimball shouted again. Only a few of the Radical Liberals’ muscle boys remained on their feet. Kimball smashed one of them down. Blood ran dark along his club. He guessed he’d fractured a skull or two in the fight. He hoped he had.
“Freedom!” the Party stalwarts roared as they crashed into the rear of the crowd. Some people tried to fight back. Others tried to run. They had a devil of a time doing it, with Layne’s partisans so tightly packed together. Men and women started screaming.
“Freedom!” It was not only a war cry for Kimball and his comrades, it was also a password. They did their best to maim anyone who wasn’t yelling their slogan.
They had fury on their side. They had discipline on their side, too. As they’d done in the trenches, they supported one another and fought as parts of a force with a common goal. The men in the crowd of Radical Liberals might have been their matches individually, but never got the chance to fight as individuals. The Freedom Party men mobbed them, rolled over them, and plunged deep into the heart of the crowd, aiming straight for the platform from which Ainsworth Layne still sent forth unheeded calls for peace.
Kimball stepped on someone. When she cried out, he realized her sex. He refrained from kicking her while she was down. Thus far his chivalry ran: thus far and no further. Swinging his club, he pressed on toward the platform.
Through the red heat of battle, he wondered what he and the rest of the Freedom Party men ought to do if they actually got there. Pull Layne off it and stomp him to death? A lot of the stalwarts would want to do that. Even with his blood up, Kimball didn’t think it would help the Party. Some people would cheer. More would be horrified.
When the shooting started, it sounded like firecrackers on the Fourth of July. Roger Kimball didn’t know whether a stalwart or a man in the crowd first pulled out a pistol, aimed it at somebody he didn’t like, and squeezed the trigger. No sooner did one gun come out, though, than a dozen or more on each side were barking and spitting furious tongues of fire.
What had been chaos turned to a panicked stampede. All the people in the crowd tried to get away from the Freedom Party men—and from the gunfire—as fast as they could. If they trampled wives, husbands, children…then they did, and they’d worry about it later. The only thing they worried about now was escape.
“Let us have peace!” Ainsworth Layne cried, but there was no peace.
Kimball saw a Freedom Party man taking aim at Layne. “No, dammit!” he shouted, and whacked the revolver out of the stalwart’s hand with his club. The fellow snarled at him. He snarled back. “We’ve got to get out of here!” he yelled. “We’ve done what we came to do, but every cop in Charleston’s going to be heading this way now. Time to go home, boys.”
He thought the stalwarts might be able to take on the whole Charleston police force and have some chance of winning. He didn’t want to find out, though. If the Freedom Party won here, the governor would have to call out the militia. Either the citizen-soldiers would slaughter the stalwarts or they’d mutiny and go over to them, in which case South Carolina would have a revolution on its hands less than a month before the election.
Jake Featherston would kill him if that happened. It was no figure of speech, and Kimball knew as much. “Out!” he yelled again. “Away! We’ve done what we came for!” Discipline held. The Freedom Party men began streaming out of Hampton Park. Even they forgot about Ainsworth Layne.
November 8 dawned chilly and drizzly in Richmond. Reggie Bartlett got out of bed half an hour earlier than he usually would have, so he could vote before going to work at Harmon’s drugstore. Yawning in spite of the muddy coffee he’d made, he went downstairs and out into the nasty weather. It wasn’t raining quite hard enough for an umbrella. He pulled his hat down and his coat collar up and muttered curses every time a raindrop trickled along the back of his neck.
A big Confederate flag flew in front of the house that served as his polling place. A couple of policemen stood in front of the polling place, too. He’d seen cops on election duty before. They’d always looked bored. Not this pair. Each of them had a hand on his pistol. After the riots that had ripped through the CSA in the weeks leading up to election day, Bartlett couldn’t blame them.
“Freedom! Freedom!” Four or five men in white shirts and butternut trousers chanted the word over and over again. They held placards with Jake Featherston’s name on them, and stood as close to the polling place as the hundred-foot no-electioneering limit allowed. The cops watched them as if they were enemy soldiers.
So did Reggie Bartlett. He carried a snub-nosed .38 revolver in his trouser pocket these days. A jury might have acquitted the Freedom Party goons who’d burned down Tom Brearley’s house around him, but Reggie knew—along with the rest of the world—who’d done what, and why. He’d signed his name on the letter that introduced Brearley to Tom Colleton. That presumably meant the Freedom Party knew it. No one had yet tried to do anything to him on account of it. If anyone did try, Reggie was determined he’d regret it.
As he walked past the policemen, they gave him a careful once-over. He nodded to them both and went inside. The voting officials waiting in the parlor all looked like veterans of the War of Secession. Reggie nodded to them, too; the next young voting official he saw would be the first.
They satisfied themselves that he was who he said he was and could vote in that precinct. Then one of them, a fellow with splendid white mustaches and a hook where his left hand should have been, gave Bartlett a ballot and said, “Use any vacant voting booth, sir.”
Reggie had to wait a couple of minutes, for none of the booths was open. A lot of men were doing their civic duty before heading for work. At last, a fellow in overalls came out of a booth. He nodded to Bartlett and said “Freedom!” in a friendly way. The voting officials glared at him. So did Reggie. The man didn’t even notice.
In the voting booth, Bartlett stared down at the names of the candidates as if they’d lost their meaning. That didn’t last long, though. As soon as he saw Featherston’s name, he wanted to line through it. Hampton or Layne? he wondered. Wade Hampton surely had the better chance against the Freedom Party, but he liked Ainsworth Layne’s ideas better.
In the end, he cast defiant ballots for Layne and the rest of the Radical Liberal ticket. If Jake Featherston took Virginia by one vote, he’d feel bad about it. Otherwise, he’d lose no sleep.
He came out of the voting booth and handed his ballot to the old man with the hook. The precinct official folded it and stuffed it into the ballot box. “Mr. Bartlett has voted,” he intoned, a response as ingrained and ritualistic as any in church. Secular communion done, Reggie left the polling place and hurried to the drugstore.
“Good morning,” Jeremiah Harmon said as he came in. “You vote?” He waited for Reggie to nod, then asked, “Have any trouble?”
“Not really,” Reggie answered. “Some of those Freedom Party so-and-so’s were making noise outside the polling place, but that’s all they were doing. I think the cops out front would have shot them if they’d tried anything worse, and I think they’d have enjoyed doing it, too. How about you?”
“About the same,” the druggist said. “I wonder if Featherston’s boys aren’t shooting themselves in the foot with all these shenanigans, I truly do. If they make everyone but a few fanatics afraid of them, they won’t elect anybody, let alone the president of the Confederate States.”
“Here’s hoping you’re right,” Bartlett said, and then, “You don’t mind my asking, boss, who’d you vote for?”
“Wade Hampton,” Harmon answered evenly. “He’s about as exciting as watching paint dry—you don’t need to tell me that. But if anybody’s going to come out on top of Featherston, he’s the man to do it. Layne’s a lost cause. He’s never been the same since that brawl down in South Carolina, and his party hasn’t, either.” He raised a gray eyebrow. “I suppose you’re going to tell me you voted for him.”
“I sure did,” Reggie said with a wry chuckle. “Why should I worry about lost causes? I live in the Confederate States, don’t I?”
“That’s funny.” Harmon actually laughed a little, which he rarely did. “It’d be even funnier if it weren’t so true.”
“We’ll find out tonight—or tomorrow or the next day, I suppose—just how funny it is,” Reggie said. “If Jake Featherston gets elected, the joke’s on us.”
“And isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” his boss replied. “Whoever wins, though, the work has to get done. What do you say we do it? After all, if we don’t make a few million dollars today, we’ll have to beg for our suppers.”
That would have been funnier if it weren’t so true, too. Reggie dusted the shelves with a long-handled feather duster. He put out fresh bottles and boxes and tins to replace the ones customers had bought. He kept track of the prescriptions Harmon compounded, and set them under the counter to await the arrival of the people for whom the druggist made them. When customers came in, he rang up their purchases and made change.
Ringing things up wasn’t so easy. The cash register, a sturdy and massive chunk of gilded ironmongery, dated from before the Great War. It was a fancier machine than most of that vintage, and could handle a five-dollar purchase with the push of but one key. Had Reggie had to do all the pushing he needed to ring up something that cost $17,000,000—and a lot of things did this week, give or take a couple of million—he would have been banging that five-dollar key from now till doomsday.
Everyone wanted to talk politics, too. Women couldn’t vote, but that didn’t stop them from having opinions and being vociferous about them. “Isn’t Mr. Featherston the handsomest man you ever saw in your life?” asked a lady buying a tube of cream for her piles.
“No, ma’am,” Reggie answered. In the back of the drugstore, Jeremiah Harmon raised his head. He didn’t want to lose customers, regardless of Reggie’s own politics and opinions. Reggie thought fast. “Handsomest man I ever saw was my father,” he told the woman. “Pity I don’t take after him.”
She laughed. Bartlett’s boss relaxed. Reggie felt some small triumph. Even if he’d sugarcoated what he said, he hadn’t had to take it back.
He tried to gauge the shape of the election from conversations with customers. That wouldn’t prove anything, and he knew it. He kept trying anyhow. From what he saw and heard, Jake Featherston had a lot of support. So did Wade Hampton V. Only a few people admitted to backing Ainsworth Layne and the Radical Liberals. Reggie hadn’t expected anything different. He was disappointed just the same.
When six o’clock rolled around, he said, “Boss, I think I’m going to get myself some supper somewhere and then head over to the Richmond Examiner. I reckon they’ll be posting returns all night long.”
“I expect they will,” Harmon answered. “While you’re there, do try to recall you’re supposed to come in to work tomorrow.” The druggist’s voice was dry; he had a pretty good idea that Reggie was liable to be up late.
Supper was greasy fried chicken and greasier fried potatoes, washed down with coffee that had been perking all day. Reggie’s stomach told him in no uncertain terms what it thought of being assaulted in that fashion. He ignored it, shoved a few banknotes with a lot of zeros on them across the counter at the cook, and hurried on down Broad Street to the Examiner’s offices, which were only a few blocks from Capitol Square.
Like the Whig and the Sentinel and the other Richmond papers—like papers across the CSA—the Examiner was in the habit of setting up enormous blackboards on election night and changing returns as the telegraph brought in new ones. When Reggie got there, the blackboards remained pristine: the polls were still open throughout the country. Because of that, only a few people stood around in front of the offices. Reggie got an excellent spot. He knew he might have to defend it with elbows as the night wore along, but that was part of the game, too.
A man came up, loudly unhappy that all the saloons were closed on election day. “Bunch of damn foolishness,” he said. “Fools we’ve got running this year, we need to get drunk before we can stand to vote for any of ’em.” By his vehemence, he might already have found liquid sustenance somewhere.
At half past seven, a fellow in shirtsleeves and green celluloid visor came out with a sheaf of telegrams in his hand. He started putting numbers from states on the eastern seaboard in their appropriate boxes. Earliest returns showed Hampton ahead in South Carolina and Virginia, Jake Featherston in North Carolina and Florida, and the Radical Liberals—Reggie clapped his hands—in Cuba. The numbers meant hardly more than the blanks they replaced. He was glad to have them anyhow.
More numbers went up as the hour got later. Hardly any of them made the people who awaited them very happy. The Examiner leaned toward the Radical Liberals, and it soon became abundantly clear that, whatever else happened, Ainsworth Layne would not be the next president of the Confederate States.
That would have disappointed Reggie more had he thought going in that Layne enjoyed any great chance of winning. The Radical Liberals always did best on the fringes of the Confederacy; they were liable to win Sonora and Chihuahua, too, when results finally trickled out of the mountains and deserts of the far Southwest.
But the real battle would be decided between Texas and Virginia. Returns also came in slowly from the Confederate heartland. They hadn’t seemed so slow during the last Congressional election, nor the one before that. Bartlett had been in no position to evaluate how fast the returns for the last presidential election came in, not in November 1915 he hadn’t. Back in 1909, he hadn’t cared; he hadn’t been old enough to vote then.
“Hate to say it, but I’m pulling for Wade Hampton,” a man about his own age said not far away. “I’ve voted Radical Liberal ever since I turned twenty-one, and I’d get into screaming fights with Whigs. But you look around at what the other choice is—” The fellow shivered melodramatically.
“I voted for Layne,” Reggie said. “I’m not sorry I did, either. I’m just sorry more people didn’t.”
Off in the distance, somebody shouted, “Freedom!” But the Freedom Party muscle boys did not wade into the crowd outside the Examiner building. They would have paid for any attack they made; Reggie was sure he wasn’t the only Radical Liberal packing a revolver in case of trouble from goons.
More and more numbers went up. By midnight or so, they started to blur for Reggie. Strong coffee at supper or not, he couldn’t hold his eyes open any more. Things weren’t decided, but he headed back toward his flat anyway. He was glad the election remained up in the air. Only when he’d got very close to home did he realize he should have been sorry Jake Featherston hadn’t been knocked out five minutes after the polls closed.
Jake Featherston yawned so wide, his jaw cracked like a knuckle. He hadn’t been so tired since the battles of the Great War. It was half past four Wednesday morning, and he’d been up since first light Tuesday. He’d voted early, posed for photographers outside the polling place, and then headed here to the Spottswood Hotel at the corner of Eighth and Main to see what he would see. He’d wanted the Ford Hotel, right across the street from Capitol Square, but the Whigs had booked it first.
He looked down at the glass of whiskey in his hand. Yawning again, he realized he might not have felt so battered if he hadn’t kept that glass full through the night. He shrugged. Too late to worry about it now. He wasn’t in the habit of looking back at things he’d done, anyway.
Somebody knocked on the door to his room. He opened it. As he’d expected, there stood Ferdinand Koenig, his backer when the Freedom Party was tiny and raw, his vice-presidential candidate now that the Party was a power in the land…but not quite enough of a power. Koenig held the latest batch of telegrams in his left hand. His face might have been a doctor’s coming out of a sickroom just before the end.
“It’s over, Jake,” he said—like Roger Kimball and only a handful of others, he talked straight no matter how bad the news was. “Our goose is cooked. We won’t win it this time.”
Featherston noticed he was still holding that whiskey. He gulped it down, then hurled the glass against the wall. Shards sprayed every which way, like fragments from a bursting shell. “Son of a bitch,” he snarled. “Son of a bitch! I really reckoned we might pull it off.”
“We scared ’em,” Koenig said. “By God, we scared ’em. You’re still outpolling Ainsworth Layne. We took Florida. We took Tennessee. We took Texas. We’ve got—”
“We’ve got nothing,” Jake said flatly. “God damn it to f*cking hell, we’ve got nothing. During the war, we killed a million Yankees. Didn’t do us one damn bit of good. We lost. I didn’t want to scare Wade Hampton the goddamn Fifth. I wanted to whip the Whigs out of office like the cur dogs they are.”
Koenig stared, then shook his head in rueful admiration. “You never did aim to do anything by halves, did you?”
“Why do you think we are where we’re at?” Jake returned. “Anybody who settles for what he reckons is good enough deserves whatever happens to him. I want the whole damn shootin’ match. Now I have to wait till 1927 to try again. That’s a goddamn long time. What the hell’s going to happen to the country from now till then? Christ, we aren’t going to hell in a handbasket, we’re already there.”
“You can come down off the stump for a few minutes, anyway,” Ferdinand Koenig said. “The election’s over, even if the reporters are waiting downstairs to hear what you’ve got to say.”
“Goddamn vultures,” Featherston muttered. The election’s over meant nothing to him. His life was a seamless whole; he could not have told anyone, himself included, where Jake Featherston the man stopped and Jake Featherston the Freedom Party leader began. He wished he had another glass to shatter. “All right, I’ll go down. Maybe they’ll all be passed out drunk by then, and I won’t have to make a speech after all.”
Koenig was still trying to look on the bright side of things: “We picked up four, maybe five seats in Congress, not counting the Redemption League. Florida gave us a Senator; looks like we’ll pick up the governor’s spot in Tennessee, and maybe in Mississippi, too.”
“That’s all fine and dandy, but it’s not enough, either.” Even now, worn and half drunk and sorely disappointed, Jake knew he’d be happier in a few days. The Freedom Party had done very well. It just hadn’t done well enough to suit him. He’d have to start building on what it had done, and to start looking ahead to see what it could do for 1923. He made a fist and slammed it into his own thigh several times. The pain was oddly welcome. “The reporters are waiting, eh? Let’s go, by Jesus. Let’s see how they like it.”
Now his running mate looked faintly—no, more than faintly—alarmed. “If you want to get a couple hours’ sleep, Jake, those bastards won’t care one way or the other. Maybe you should grab the chance to freshen up a touch,” Koenig said.
“Hell with it,” Featherston replied. “Might as well get it over with.” He headed for the stairway. Had Koenig not jumped aside, Jake would have pushed him out of the way.
Down in the lobby of the Spottswood, the victory celebration for which the Freedom Party had hoped was a shambles now. A few young men in white shirts and butternut trousers remained on their feet and alert. They’d been detailed to keep order, and keep order they would. The task was easier than Jake had thought it would be when he assigned it. Six more years of waiting. The thought was as bitter as yielding to the damnyankees had been.
More Freedom Party men sprawled snoring on couches and chairs and on the floor, too, some with whiskey bottles close at hand, others simply exhausted. A lot of reporters, by the look of things, were already gone. Watching the Freedom Party lose an election so many thought it might win had been story enough for them. But half a dozen fellows in cheap but snappy suits converged on Jake when he showed himself.
“Do you have a statement, Mr. Featherston?” they cried, as if with a single voice.
“Damn straight I have a statement,” Featherston answered.
“Jake—” began Ferdinand Koenig, who had followed him downstairs.
“Don’t you worry, Ferd. I’ll be fine,” Jake said over his shoulder. He turned back to the reporters. “Reckon you boys are waiting for me to say something sweet like how, even though I wish I was the one who’d gotten elected, I’m sure Wade Hampton V will make a fine president and I wish him all the best. That about right? Did I leave anything out?”
A couple of the reporters grinned at him. “Don’t reckon so, Sarge,” one of them said. “That’s what we hear from the Radical Liberals every six years.”
“To hell with the Radical Liberals,” Featherston said. “And to hell with Wade Hampton V, too.” The reporters scribbled. Jake warmed to his theme, despite Koenig’s dark mutterings in the background: “To hell with Wade Hampton V, and to hell with the Whig Party. They led us off a cliff in 1914, they don’t have the slightest scent of a notion of how to turn things around, and now they’ve got six more years to prove they don’t know what the devil they’re doing.”
“If they’re such a pack of bums, why’d you lose the election?” a reporter called.
“Don’t you think you ought to ask, ‘How’d you do so well the first time you tried to run anybody for president?’” Jake returned. No matter how he felt in private, in public he put the best face on things he could. “Christ, boys, in 1915 there was no Freedom Party. We didn’t elect anybody to Congress till two years ago. And now, our first time out of the gate, we get more votes than the Radical Liberals, and they’ve been around forever. And what do you ask? ‘Why’d you lose?’” He shook his head. “We’ll be back. As long as Hampton and the Whigs leave us any kind of country at all, we’ll be back. You wait and see.”
“You really have it in for Hampton, don’t you?” a man from the Richmond Whig asked.
Jake bared his teeth in what was not a smile. “You bet I do,” he said. “He’s part of the crowd that’s been running the Confederate States since the War of Secession: all the fancy planters, and their sons, and their sons, too. And he’s part of the War Department crowd, like Jeb Stuart, Jr., and the other smart folks who helped the damnyankees lick us. When I look at Wade Hampton and the Whigs, I look at ’em over open sights.”
He’d let his journal by that name slip when the Freedom Party began to climb; the furious energy that had gone into the writing came out in Party work instead. Now, for the first time in a while, he might have some leisure to put his ideas down in paper. Have to look back over what I did before, he thought. Pick up where I left off.
“If you don’t work with the other parties, why should they work with you?” the reporter from the Whig asked.
“We’ll work with our friends,” Jake said. “I don’t have any quarrel with folks who want to see this country strong and free. People who want us weak or who try and sell us to the USA had better steer clear, though, or they’ll be sorry.”
“Sorry how?” Two men asked the question at the same time. The man from the Richmond Whig followed it up: “Sorry the way Tom Brearley’s sorry?”
Though half loaded himself, Jake knew a loaded question when he heard one. “I don’t know any more about what happened to that Brearley than I read in the papers,” he answered. That was true; he’d also made a point of not trying to find out any more. “I do know a jury didn’t convict the people the police arrested for burning down his house.”
“They were all Freedom Party men.” This time, three reporters spoke together.
“They were all acquitted,” Jake said. The reporters looked disappointed. Jake smiled to himself. Did they think he was stupid enough to carry ammunition to their guns? Too bad for them if they did. He went on, “A lot of people like the Freedom Party these days—not quite enough to win me the election, but a lot.”
“Are you saying you can’t be responsible for all the crazy people who follow you?” The fellow from the Whig wouldn’t give up.
“There’s crazy people in every party. Look in the mirror if you don’t believe me,” Jake replied. “And I’ll say it again, on account of you weren’t listening: the jury acquitted those fellows from the Freedom Party. I don’t know who burned Brearley’s house, and neither do the cops. No way to tell if it was Freedom Party men or a bunch of riled-up Whigs.”
“Not likely,” the reporter said.
Privately, Featherston thought he was right. Publicly, the Freedom Party leader shrugged. “Anything else, boys?” he asked. None of the reporters said anything. Jake shrugged again. “All right, then. We didn’t win, but we don’t surrender, either. And that’s about all I’ve got to say.” The newspapermen stood scribbling for a bit, then went off one by one to file their stories.
When the last one was out of earshot, Ferdinand Koenig said, “You handled that real well, Jake.”
“Said I would, didn’t I?” Jake answered. “Christ, I spent three years under fire. Damn me to hell if I’m going to let some stinking newspapermen rattle me.”
“All right,” Koenig said. “I was a little worried, and I don’t deny it. Hard loss to take, and you are sort of lit up.” Again, he told Featherston the truth as he saw it.
“Sort of,” Jake allowed. “But hell, you think those fellows with the notebooks are stone cold sober? Not likely! They’ve been drinking my booze all night long.”
Koenig laughed. “That’s true, but nobody cares what they say. People do care what you say. What do you say about where we go from here?”
“Same thing I’ve been saying all along.” Jake was surprised the question needed asking. “We go straight ahead, right on down this same road, till we win.”
As she did any evening she was at her apartment by herself, Flora Hamburger waited for a knock on the door. All too often, the quiet, discreet knock didn’t come. There were times these days—and, especially, these nights—when she felt lonelier than she had when she’d first got to Philadelphia almost five years before. That it was a few days before Christmas only made things worse. The whole city was in a holiday mood, which left her, a Jew, on the outside looking in.
She sat on the sofa, working her way through President Sinclair’s proposed budget for the Post Office Department. It was exactly as exciting as it sounded. Did the president really need to revise the definitions for third- and fourth-class post offices? At the moment, she hadn’t the faintest idea. Before long, though, the bill would come to a vote. She owed it to her constituents—she owed it to the country—to make her vote as well informed as she could.
Someone knocked on the door: the knock she’d been waiting for, the knock she’d almost given up expecting.
She sprang to her feet. Pages of the Post Office budget flew every which way. Flora noticed, but didn’t care. She hurried to the door and threw it open. There stood Hosea Blackford. “Come in,” Flora said, and the vice president of the United States did. She closed the door behind him, closed it and locked it.
Blackford kissed her, then said, “You’d better have something to drink in this place, dear, or I’ll have to go across the hall and come back.”
“I do,” Flora said. “Sit down. Wait. I’ll be right back.” She went into the kitchen, poured him some whiskey, and then poured herself some, too.
“You are a lifesaver,” he said, and gulped it down.
Flora sat down beside him. She drank her whiskey more slowly. “You look tired,” she said.
To her surprise, Blackford burst into raucous laughter. “God knows why. All I do is sit in a corner and gather dust—excuse me, preside over the Senate. There’s not much difference between the two, believe me. I’ve spent most of my life in the middle of the arena. Now…now I’m a $12,000-a-year hatrack, is what I am.”
“You knew this would happen when Sinclair picked you,” Flora said.
“Of course I did. But there’s a difference between knowing and actually having it happen to you.” Blackford sighed. “And I wanted it when he picked me. The first Socialist vice president in the history of the United States! I’ll go down in history—as a footnote, but I’ll go down.” His laugh was rueful. Flora thought he’d ask for another whiskey, but he didn’t. All he said was, “I feel like I’ve already gone down in history—very ancient history.”
“If you have so little to do, why haven’t you stopped by here more often?” Flora’s question came out sharper then she’d intended. After she’d said it, though, she was just as well pleased she’d said it as she had.
He raised an eyebrow. “Do you really want me here crying on your shoulder every night? I can’t believe that.”
“Of course I do!” she exclaimed, honestly astonished. And she’d astonished him—she saw as much. She wondered if they really knew each other at all, despite so much time talking, despite lying down together in her bedroom.
“Well, well,” he said, and then again, in slow wonder: “Well, well.” He reached out and brushed the backs of his fingers against her cheek. She didn’t know whether to pull away or clutch him to her. Deciding she was lonelier than angry took only a moment. She reached for him at the same time as he reached for her.
Later, in the bedroom, she moaned beneath him, enclosed in the circle of his arms, his mouth hot and moist and urgent on her nipple. His hand helped her along as he drove deep into her. Her pleasure was just beginning to slide down from the very peak when he gasped and shuddered and spent himself.
He kissed her again, then got off her and hurried into the bathroom. From behind the door came a plop as he tossed the French letter he’d been wearing into the toilet. He was careful not to leave them in the wastebasket for the maid to find. Usually, that wet plop made her laugh. Tonight, it only reminded her how wary they had to be. She was a mistress, after all, not a wife.
Usually, she managed not to think about that. Tonight, piled onto everything else, it hit her hard, harder than it ever had before. What had she done to her life, not even realizing she was doing it? While Blackford loosed a long stream into the toilet, she rolled over onto her belly and softly began to cry.
“I’ve been thinking,” he said, and punctuated that by flushing. Flora didn’t answer. He opened the door, turned out the light, and stood there for a moment while his eyes got used to dimness again—or maybe his ears caught her quiet sobs first. He hurried over to the bed and set a hand on her back. “What on earth is the matter, dear?”
“Nothing!” Flora shrugged the hand away. She tried to stop crying, but discovered she couldn’t.
“I’ve been thinking,” Blackford repeated, and then, this time, went on: “I’ve been thinking we ought to figure out where we’re going.”
“Where are we going?” Flora asked bitterly. “Are we going anywhere?” She didn’t want to roll back over. She didn’t want to look at him.
“Well, that doesn’t just depend on me. That depends on both of us,” Blackford said. He waited for Flora to reply. When she didn’t, he shrugged; she felt the mattress shake. He spoke again: “We can’t very well get married, for instance, unless you want to marry me, too.”
Flora’s head jerked up. She swiped at her eyes with her arm—she didn’t want to see Blackford, or what she could see of him in the near darkness, through a haze of tears. Gulping to try to steady her voice, she said, “Married?”
Hosea Blackford nodded. She both saw and felt him do that. “It seems to be the right thing to do, don’t you think?” he said. “Heaven knows we love each other.” He waited for Flora again. She knew she had to respond this time, and managed a nod. That seemed to satisfy Blackford, who went on, “All over the world, you know, when people love each other, they do get married.”
“But—” The objections that filled Flora’s head proved she’d been in Philadelphia, in Congress, the past five years. “If you marry me, Hosea, what will that do to your career?” She didn’t just mean, If you marry me. She also meant, If you marry a Jew.
He understood her. One of the reasons she loved him was that he understood her. With another shrug, he answered, “When you’re vice president, you haven’t got much of a career to look forward to, anyhow. And I don’t think the party will ever nominate me for president—Dakota doesn’t carry enough electoral votes to make that worthwhile. So after this term, or after next term at the latest, I’m done.”
“In that case, you go back to Dakota and take your old seat back,” Flora declared. “Or you could, anyhow. Could you do it with a Jewish wife?”
“I don’t know that I particularly want my old seat back. It seems in pretty good hands with Torvald Sveinssen, and he’ll have had it for a while by the time I’m not vice president any more,” Blackford said. He reached out and put his hand on her bare shoulder. This time, she let it stay. He went on, “All you’ve done is talk about me. What about you, Flora? How will people in New York City like it if you came home with a gentile husband?”
“I don’t think it would bother them too much—the Fourteenth Ward is a solidly Socialist district,” she answered. “And you wouldn’t be just any gentile husband, you know. You’re a good Socialist yourself—and you’re the vice president.”
“It could be,” Blackford said. “I can see how it could be that that would do well enough for your district. But I don’t have a lot of family back in Dakota. What will your family think if you go home and tell them you’re marrying a gentile?”
Flora rejected the first couple of answers that sprang to mind. Her family might indeed be delighted she was marrying at all, but Hosea didn’t have to know that. And her father, an immigrant tailor, might indeed be so awed she was marrying the vice president that he wouldn’t say a word even if her fiancé were a Mohammedan—but she doubted that. Abraham Hamburger wasn’t so outspoken as either Flora or her brothers and sisters, but he never had any trouble making his opinions known.
And the question Blackford had asked cut close to the one she was asking herself: how do I feel about marrying a gentile? Somehow, she’d hardly given that a thought while they were lovers. She wondered why. Because being lovers was impermanent, something she wouldn’t have to worry about forever? She didn’t think that was the whole answer, but it was surely part.
She ended up answering the question in her own mind, not the one Blackford had asked: “When we have children, I want to raise them as Jews.”
“Children?” Blackford started, then laughed wryly. “I’m getting a little long in the tooth to worry about children. But you’re not; of course you’ll want to have children.” Much more to himself than to Flora, he muttered, “I won’t be sorry not to wear a sheath any more, that’s for sure.” After a few seconds’ thought, he spoke to her again: “Your faith has a stronger hold on you than mine does on me; I’ve been a pretty pallid excuse for an Episcopalian for a long time now. If I’m not shooting blanks after all these years, I suppose it’s only fair we bring up the children your way.”
That was as rational an approach to the irrational business of religion as Flora could imagine. She’d seen in Congress that Blackford approached problems in a commonsense way. She’d seen he did the same in his private life, too, but this was an important proof. She said, “I think my father and mother will get along with you just fine.”
“Does that mean you’ll marry me, then?”
“I think it does.” Flora knew she shouldn’t sound surprised at a moment like that, but couldn’t help herself.
“Bully!” Blackford said softly. He took her in his arms. She felt his manhood stir a little against her flank, and tried her best to revive him. Her best turned out not to be good enough. He made a joke of it, saying, “See? This is what’s liable to happen when you have an old man for a husband.” Under that light tone, though, she could tell he was worried.
“It’s all right,” she said, but it plainly wasn’t all right. She cast about for a way to reassure him, and finally found one, even if it meant coming out with the most risqué thing she’d ever said in her life: “Your tongue never gets tired.” She was glad the only light came from a single lamp in the front room; he couldn’t possibly see her blush.
“Yes, some parts do still work better than others,” Blackford said, doing his best not to sound as if he were taking things too seriously. But, however hard saying that had been, Flora was glad she’d done it. She knew she’d eased his mind.
“I didn’t really expect—this,” she said, and then, “I didn’t expect any of this, not when I first came down from New York City. I was green as paint.”
“I didn’t know what to expect, either, when I met you at the Broad Street station,” Blackford answered. “Lord knows I didn’t expect this—but then, I didn’t expect any of the wonderful things you turned out to be, in Congress or out of it.”
Nobody else said things like that about Flora. She didn’t know how to take them. “Thank you,” she whispered. She said it again, on a slightly different note: “Thank you.” The day had been long and boring. The night had been even longer, and lonely. Going to sleep was the most she’d had to look forward to. Now, in the space of an hour, her whole world had changed. That had happened once before, when she was elected to Congress. She looked forward to these changes even more.
Judge Mahlon Pitney slammed down the gavel. He looked every inch a jurist: a spare, erect, handsome gray-haired man in his early sixties, his gray eyes clear and alert. “Here is my verdict in the action Smith v. Heusinger,” he said, with a glance toward the court clerk to make sure that worthy was ready to record the verdict. “It is the decision of this court that title to the property at issue in the above-entitled action does rightfully rest with the plaintiff, John Smith, who has shown right of possession sufficient to satisfy the court.”
Letting out a whoop would have been undignified, unprofessional. That very nearly didn’t stop Jonathan Moss, who instead reached out and shook hands with his client. John Smith looked more nearly amazed than delighted.
On the other side of the courtroom in Berlin, Ontario, Paul Heusinger stared daggers at Moss. Well he might have: Moss had just shown Judge Pitney he did not have good title to the land on which he’d built his office building—the building in which Moss had his law office. “You’re gone,” Heusinger mouthed. Moss nodded. He’d known he was gone whichever way the case went. At least he was going out a winner.
John Smith tugged at Moss’ sleeve. “Will he appeal?” the mousy little Canadian whispered.
“Can’t say for sure now,” Moss whispered back. “I’d guess not, though. I think we have a solid case here—and appeals are expensive.”
Back in the spectators’ seats, a couple of reporters scribbled furiously. They’d been covering the case since it first showed up on the docket; occasional man-bites-dog stories appeared in the Berlin Bulletin and, Moss supposed, some other papers as well. He didn’t mind—on the contrary. The stories had already brought him three or four clients much more able to pay his usual fees than John Smith was.
But for the reporters, the spectators’gallery was empty. As far as Moss could tell, Heusinger had not a friend in town. Smith probably had had friends here, but those who weren’t dead were scattered. The war had been hard on Berlin.
One of the reporters asked, “Now that you have your property back, Mr. Smith, what do you aim to do with it?”
Smith looked amazed all over again. “I don’t really know. I haven’t really thought about it, because I didn’t believe the Yanks would play fair and give it back to me. I don’t suppose they would have without Mr. Moss here.”
“No, that’s not true, and I don’t want anyone printing it,” Moss said. “Americans respect the law as much as Canadians do. It wasn’t a judge who said Mr. Smith has good title to that land. It was the law. And the law would have said the same thing regardless of whether Mr. Smith’s attorney came from the United States or Canada.”
The reporters took down what he said. If they didn’t believe him, they were too businesslike to show it on their faces. John Smith, less disciplined, looked highly dubious. Moss felt dubious himself. One of the things he’d already discovered in his brief practice was that judges were not animate law books in black robes. They were human, sometimes alarmingly so.
After a little more back-and-forth with the reporters, Moss reclaimed his overcoat, hat, and galoshes from the cloakroom. In a pocket of the overcoat were mittens and earmuffs. He put them on before venturing outside. Even so, the cold tore at him. The coat that had been better than good enough for winter in Chicago was just barely good enough for winter in Ontario. He wished for a nosemuff to go with the earmuffs.
He also wished for taller rubber overshoes. As he kicked his way through the new-fallen snow toward his apartment, some of the freezing stuff got over the red-ringed tops of the galoshes and did its best to turn his ankles into icicles. He wished he would have driven his motorcar over to the courthouse. If he had, though, it was only about even money the Bucephalus would have started after sitting so long unprotected in the snow.
The people of Berlin took the weather in stride in a way even Chicagoans didn’t. When it stayed this cold this long, people in Chicago complained. Complaining about the weather was as much Chicago’s sport as football was America’s. People up here simply went about their business. Moss didn’t know whether to admire them for that or to conclude they hadn’t the brains to grumble.
He hurled coal into the stove when he got into his flat, then stood in front of the black iron monstrosity till he was evenly done on all sides. He didn’t have a whole lot of room to stand anywhere in the apartment. Ever since he’d started the action against his landlord, he’d been moving crates of books out of his office, anticipating that Paul Heusinger or his own client would give him the bum’s rush.
“Tomorrow,” he said, having picked up the habit of talking to himself down in Chicago, “tomorrow I get to find myself some new digs. Then maybe I’ll be able to turn around in this place again.”
He took some pork chops out of the icebox, dipped them in egg and then in flour, and fried them in a pan on the hot stove. He fried potatoes in another pan at the same time. Practice had made him a halfway decent cook—or maybe he just thought so because he’d got used to eating what he turned out.
He didn’t go office hunting the next day, nor the several days after that, either. The blizzard that roared through Berlin kept even the locals off the streets. It was the sort of blizzard that sent Americans running back over the border. Moss didn’t think of leaving—not more than a couple of times, anyhow—but he was damn glad he had plenty of coal in the scuttle.
“Have to start burning books if I run out,” he said. He had enough books in the flat for…He looked around. “Eight or ten years, is my guess.”
Despite the dreadful weather, he did get some work done. He’d already seen that the Canadians were good at keeping telegraph and telephone lines up and functioning in the teeth of the worst winter could do. The telephone in his flat rang several times a day. Somehow, the newspapers had gone out, and with them word of his victory for John Smith. Other Canadians with similar problems wanted him to give them a hand, too.
He had just headed for the bathroom to dispose of some used coffee when the telephone jangled yet again. He thought about ignoring it—anyone who really wanted him would call back—but duty defeated his bladder. Stepping over a crate, he went back to the telephone. “Jonathan Moss, attorney at law.”
“Hello, Mr. Moss. I called to congratulate you for getting Mr. Smith what belongs to him.”
“Thank you, ma’am.” He wondered where the woman was calling from. The line had more clicks and pops on it than he would have expected from a call placed inside Berlin, but the storm might have had something to do with that, too. He waited for the woman to say more. When she didn’t, he asked, “Can I do anything else for you?”
“I don’t think so,” she answered. “I’ve already found out that you aren’t what I thought you were during the war. No—you may be what I thought you were, but you’re more than that, too.”
Moss almost dropped the telephone earpiece. “Laura,” he whispered.
He didn’t know if Laura Secord would hear him, but she did. “Yes, that’s right,” she said. “When I found out what you had done, I knew I had to come into Arthur to ring you up and say thank you.”
He hadn’t stirred out of doors since coming home from winning the case. Did that say she was hardier than he, or just that she was out of her tree? Moss couldn’t make up his mind. Whatever else it said, it said she’d very badly wanted to telephone him. “How are you?” he asked.
“Well enough,” she said. “As well as I can be with my country occupied. I’d heard you’d set up in Empire”—she would be one not to call it Berlin—“but I didn’t know what sort of practice you had, and so I didn’t think it right to speak to you. From the way you lent me money, I thought you were a decent man, and I am glad to see you proved me right when you had nothing else on your mind.”
“Ah,” he said. Then he shrugged. She could hardly have helped knowing what he’d felt about her. He’d gone up to Arthur in weather almost this bad—Christ, had it been three years ago?—to tell her so. And she’d told him to get lost.
He noticed how he thought about that as if it were in the past tense. And, he realized, some of it was. He’d been surprised—hell, he’d been flabbergasted—to have her call, but some of what he’d felt, or thought he’d felt, was missing. That flabbergasted him, too. Where did it go? Into the place where everything that doesn’t work out goes, he thought.
Now she’d been waiting for him to say something more, and seemed nonplussed when he didn’t. “When the weather gets better, maybe you could come up for a picnic, if you care to,” she said. “We haven’t seen each other in a long time.”
Moss didn’t know whether to laugh or to weep. Had she said that in 1919, he would have driven his Bucephalus through fire, never mind ice, to go to her side. But it was 1922. He’d got over some of his infatuation without quite noticing he was doing it. While he was doing that, had she grown interested in him? So it seemed.
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said, which was polite, even friendly sounding, and committed him to nothing.
“All right,” Laura Secord said. “I hope to see you. I’d better go now. Good-bye.” She hung up. The line went dead.
Slowly, Moss set the earpiece back on its cradle. He stood staring at the telephone for a long moment before his body reminded him of what he’d been about to do before the phone rang. He took care of that, then went into the kitchen, which wasn’t so overrun with books and crates as the rest of the apartment. To make up for that, it did contain several bottles of whiskey. He picked one, yanked out the cork, and looked around for a glass.
He didn’t see one. “Hell with it,” he said, and took a long pull straight from the bottle. He coughed a couple of times, drank again—not so much—and set the bottle down. He started to pick it up once more, but changed his mind. Instead, he shoved in the cork and put it back in the cupboard, where it would be out of sight.
“Laura Secord,” he said. “My God.” He started to giggle, which was surely the whiskey working. “That telephone call would shut Fred Sandburg up forever all by itself.”
He didn’t need Fred to tell him he’d been foolish to fall so hard. He’d figured it out all by himself. And now, if he wanted to, he had the chance to make his dreams turn real. To how many men was that given? Of them, how many would have the sense to steer clear?
He laughed out of the side of his mouth. He wasn’t nearly sure he would have the sense to steer clear, or even that it was sense. As the snowstorm howling through Berlin attested, picnic weather was a long way away. Now his mind would start coming back to Laura Secord, the way his tongue kept coming back to a chipped front tooth. It hardly seemed fair. Just when he’d thought he was over her at last…
He’d known Arthur wasn’t that far from Berlin when he started his practice here. He’d figured the John Smith case would draw wide notice. Had he hoped Laura Secord would be one of the people who noticed it? Maybe he had. He shook his head. He knew damn well he had, even if he hadn’t admitted it to himself.
She’d been in his mind for five years. Now he was in hers. “What the hell am I going to do?” he muttered. “What the hell am I going to do?” His tongue found that chipped tooth again. He got very little work done the rest of the day.
Scipio hardly thought of himself by the name he’d been born with these days. His passbook called him Xerxes. His boss called him Xerxes. His friends called him Xerxes. Most important of all, his wife called him Xerxes. Bathsheba had no idea he’d ever owned another name.
Bathsheba knew very little about his life before he’d come to Augusta. One day, she asked him point-blank: “Why don’t you never come out an’ say where you was from and what you was doin’ when you was there?”
He wondered how she’d react if he answered her in the accent of an educated white, the accent he’d had to use while serving Anne Colleton at Marshlands. He didn’t dare find out. He didn’t dare tell her of his days on the plantation, or of the blood-soaked time in the Congaree Socialist Republic that had followed. As long as only he knew, he was safe. If anyone else found out—anyone—he was in trouble.
And so he answered as he usually did: “I done what I done, is all. Never done nothin’ much.” He tried to soften her with a smile. “You is the best thing I ever done.”
It worked—to a degree. Eyes glinting, Bathsheba said, “I bet you done ran away from a wife an’ about six children.”
Solemnly, Scipio shook his head. “No, ma’am. Done run away from three wives an’ fo’ teen chilluns.”
Bathsheba stared. For a moment, she believed him. Then, when he started to laugh, she stuck out her tongue. “You are the most aggravatin’ man in the whole world. Why won’t you never give me no straight answers?”
Because if I did, I might end up standing against a wall with a blindfold on my face. I wonder if they would waste a cigarette on a nigger before they shot him. As usual, he heard his thoughts in the educated dialect he’d been made to learn. He sighed. That was a straight answer, but not one he could give Bathsheba. He tried jollying her once more instead. Batting his eyes, he said, “I gots to have some secrets.”
His wife snorted and threw her hands in the air. “All right,” she said. “All right. I give up. Maybe you done crawled out from under a cabbage leaf, like folks tell the pickaninnies when they’re too little to know about screwin’.”
“Mebbe so,” Scipio said with a chuckle. “My mama never tol’ me no different, anyways. Don’t matter where I comes from, though. Where I’s goin’ is what count.”
Bathsheba snorted again. “And where you goin’?”
“Right now, sweet thing, I believe I’s goin’ to bed.” Scipio yawned.
In bed, in the darkness, Bathsheba grew serious again. “When the Reds rose up, what did you do then?” She asked the question in a tiny whisper. Unlike so many she’d asked earlier in the evening, she knew that one was dangerous.
But she didn’t know how dangerous it was. Scipio answered it seriously without going into much detail: “Same as mos’ folks, I reckons. I done my bes’ to hide a lot o’ the time. When de buckra come with the guns, I make like I was a good nigger for they, an’ they don’ shoot me. Wish the whole ruction never happen. Do Jesus! I wish the whole ruction never happen.” There he told the complete truth. He set a hand on her shoulder. “What you do?” If she was talking about herself, she couldn’t ask about him.
He felt her shrug. “Wasn’t so much to do here. A couple-three days when folks done rioted and stole whatever they could git away with, but then the white folks brung so many police and sojers into the Terry, nobody dared stick a nose out the door for a while, or they’d shoot it off you.”
“Damn foolishness. Nothin’ but damn foolishness,” Scipio said. “Shouldn’t never’ve riz up. The buckra, they’s stronger’n we. I hates it, but I ain’t blind. If we makes they hate we, we’s sunk.”
Bathsheba didn’t say anything for a while. Then she spoke two words: “Jake Featherston.” She shivered, though the February night was mild.
Scipio took her in his arms, as much to keep himself from being afraid as to make her less so. “Jake Featherston,” he echoed quietly. “All the buckra in the Freedom Party hates we. They hates we bad. An’one white man out o’ every three, near ’nough, vote fo’ Jake Featherston las’ year. Six year down de road, he be president o’ de Confederate States?”
“Pray to Jesus he ain’t,” Bathsheba said. Scipio nodded. He’d been able to pray when he was a child; he remembered as much. He wished he still could. Most of the ability had leached out of him during the years he’d served Anne Colleton. The Marxist rhetoric of the Reds with whom he’d associated during the war had taken the rest. Marx’s words weren’t gospel to him, as they had been to Cassius and Cherry and Island and the rest. Still, the philosopher had some strong arguments on his side.
Outside, rain started tapping against the bedroom window. That was a good sound, one Scipio heard several times a week. He wished he hadn’t been thinking about the Red rebellion and the Freedom Party tonight. He couldn’t find any other reason why the raindrops sounded like distant machine-gun fire.
“The Freedom Party ever elect themselves a president, what we do?” Bathsheba asked. Maybe she was having trouble praying, too.
“Dunno,” Scipio answered. “Maybe we gots to rise up again.” That was a forlorn hope, and he knew it. All the reasons he’d spelled out for the failure of the last black revolt would hold in the next one, too. “Maybe we gots to run away instead.”
“Where we run to?” his wife asked.
“Ain’t got but two choices,” Scipio said: “the USA an’ Mexico.” He laughed, not that he’d said anything funny. “An’the Mexicans don’t want we, an’ the damnyankees really don’t want we.”
“You know all kinds of things,” Bathsheba said. “How come you know so many different kinds of things?”
It wasn’t what he’d said, which was a commonplace, but the way he’d said it; he had, sometimes, a manner that brooked no contradiction. Butlers were supposed to be infallible. That he could sound infallible even using the Congaree dialect, a dialect of ignorance if ever there was one, spoke well of his own force of character.
“I knows what’s so,” he said, “an’ I knows what ain’t.” He slid his hand under the hem of Bathsheba’s nightgown, which had ridden up a good deal after she got into bed. His palm glided along the soft cotton of her drawers, heading upwards. “An’ I knows what I likes, too.”
“What’s that?” Bathsheba asked, but her legs drifted apart to make it easier for his hand to reach their joining, so she must have had some idea.
Afterwards, lazy and sated and drifting toward sleep, Scipio realized he’d found the best way to keep her from asking too many questions. He wished he were ten years younger, so he might use it more often. Chuckling at the conceit, he dozed off. Bathsheba was already snoring beside him.
The alarm clock gave them both a rude awakening. Scipio made coffee while Bathsheba cooked breakfast. Erasmus trusted Scipio with the coffeepot, but not with anything more. Scipio occasionally resented that; he could cook, in a rough and ready way. But both Erasmus and Bathsheba were better at it than he was.
When he got to Erasmus’ fish market and fry joint, he found the gray-haired proprietor uncharacteristically subdued. Erasmus was never a raucous man; now he seemed to have pulled into himself almost like a turtle pulling its head back into its shell. Not until Scipio pulled out the broom and dustpan for his usual morning sweep-up did his boss speak, and then only to say, “Don’t bother.”
Scipio blinked. Erasmus had never encouraged him to keep the place tidy, but he’d never told him not to do it, either. “Somethin’ troublin’ you?” Scipio asked, expecting Erasmus to shake his head or come back with one of the wry gibes that proved him clever despite a lack of education.
But the cook and fish dealer nodded instead. “You might say so. Yeah, you just might say so.”
“Kin I do anything to he’p?” Scipio asked. He wondered if his boss had been to a doctor and got bad news.
Now Erasmus shook his head. “Ain’t nothin’ you can do,” he answered, which made Scipio think he’d made a good guess. Erasmus continued, “You might want to start sniffin’ around for a new place to work. I be goddamned if I know how much longer I can keep this here place open.”
“Do Jesus!” Scipio exclaimed. “Ain’t nothin’ a-tall the doctor kin do?”
“What you say?” Erasmus looked puzzled. Then his face cleared. “I ain’t sick, Xerxes. Sick an’ tired, oh yes. Sick an’ disgusted, oh my yes. But I ain’t sick, not like you mean.” He hesitated, then added, “Sick o’white folks, is what I is.”
“All o’we is sick o’ the buckra,” Scipio said. “What they do, make you sick this time?”
“After you go home las’night, these four-five white men come in here,” Erasmus said. “They tell me they’s puttin’ a special tax on all the niggers what owns business in the Terry here. Now I know the laws. I got to know the laws, else I find even more trouble’n a nigger’s supposed to have. An’ I tell these fellers, ain’t no such thing as no special tax on nigger businesses.”
Scipio had the bad feeling he knew what was coming. He asked, “These here buckra, they Freedom Party men?”
“I don’t know yes and I don’t know no, not to swear,” Erasmus answered. “But I bet they is. One of ’em smile this mean, chilly smile, an’ he say, ‘There is now.’ Any nigger don’t pay this tax, bad things gwine happen to where he work. He still don’t pay, bad things gwine happen to him. I seen a deal o’ men in my day, Xerxes. Don’t reckon this here feller was lyin’.”
“What you do?” Scipio said.
Erasmus looked old and beaten. “Can’t hardly go to the police, now can I? Nigger complain about white folks, they lock him in jail an’ lose the key. Likely tell they beat him up, too, long as he there. Can’t hardly pay this here tax, neither. I ain’t gettin’ rich here. Bastards want to squeeze a million dollars out of every three million I make. That don’t leave no money for me, an’ it sure as hell don’t leave no money to pay no help. You work good, Lord knows. But I don’t reckon I can keep you.”
“Maybe you kin go to the police,” Scipio said slowly. “Freedom Party done lose the election.”
“Came too close to winning,” Erasmus said, the first time he’d ever said anything like that. “An’ besides, you know same as I do, half the police, maybe better’n half, spend their days off yellin’ ‘Freedom!’ loud as they can.”
It was true. Every word of it was true. Scipio wished he could deny it. He’d been comfortable for a while, comfortable and happy. As long as he had Bathsheba, he figured he could stay happy. If he lost this job, how long would he need to get comfortable again? He hoped he wouldn’t have to find out.