Chapter XVIII
Arthur McGregor stared down at the copy of the Rosenfeld Register he’d just set on the kitchen table. The headline stared back at him: RETIRING GENERAL CUSTER TO VISIT ROSENFELD NEXT WEEK.
His wife eyed the newspaper, too: eyed it as she might have eyed a rattlesnake coiled and ready to strike. “Please let it go, Arthur,” she said. “Please let him go. The debts are paid, and more than paid. Let it go.”
“I’ll do what I have to do.” McGregor didn’t feel like quarreling, but he knew what that would be.
So did Maude. “Let it go,” she said again. “If you won’t do it for my sake, do it for the sake of the children you have left.”
That hurt. McGregor had to mask his feelings against his wife now, as he’d had to mask them so often against the outside world. When he answered, his voice was steady: “Ted Culligan will take care of Julia, I expect. Shall we ask Mary whether she wants to see George Custer go on breathing?”
Maude bit her lip. Like her husband, her younger daughter had never come close to reconciling herself to what the Americans had done to Canada or to Alexander. But Maude replied, “Shall we ask Mary whether she wants to see you go on breathing?”
“I’ll be fine,” McGregor answered easily.
His wife glared at him, her hands on her hips. “I don’t see how.”
“Well, I will,” he said. He even meant it. The bomb he intended for Custer had been sitting under the old wagon wheel in the barn since not long after he’d learned the U.S. commander in Canada would make a last gloating tour of the country he’d held down. With any kind of luck, McGregor thought he could make Custer pay and get away clean.
Instead of arguing any more, McGregor went out into the farmyard. He’d set a large, empty wooden keg in the middle of the yard, not far from the chopping block where hens spent their last unhappy moments on earth. A few feet away from the barrel lay a gray rock. He picked it up and hefted it. It weighed the same as the bomb he’d made, within an ounce or two. He’d checked them both on Maude’s kitchen scale, one night after she went to bed.
He paced off fifteen feet from the keg, tossing the rock up and down as he walked. If he stood at the back of the crowd watching General Custer, that was about how far away he’d be. He’d have no trouble seeing the general in his motorcar; he had several inches on most people. Custer’s automobile wouldn’t be moving very fast. The U.S. commander wouldn’t hold a parade if he didn’t want people gaping at him.
McGregor threw the rock. It thudded down into the keg. He strode over, bent down to pick it up, then paced off fifteen feet again. His next throw thudded home, too. He’d been practicing for weeks, and had got to the point where he could drop it in about eight times out of ten. If he could do that with a small-mouthed keg, he’d have no trouble landing a bomb in Custer’s motorcar.
He kept practicing for about twenty minutes, making sure each toss was slow and relaxed. He wouldn’t need to hurry. He didn’t want to hurry. When he finally threw the bomb, time would seem to stretch out, as if he had forever. He didn’t want to do anything foolish like heaving too hard. He’d get only one chance. Do it right, he told himself. You’ve got to do it right.
And then, as quietly and inconspicuously as he could, he’d slip away. When the bomb went off, people wouldn’t pay attention to him. They’d pay attention to Custer’s funeral pyre. With a little luck, nobody would notice he’d flung the nail-encased sticks of dynamite.
Maude watched him from the kitchen window. Her face was pale and set. He’d never said a word about why he kept throwing a rock into a keg. She’d never asked him, either; that wasn’t her way. But they’d been married a long time. Maude knew him well. She’d understand. He knew her well, too. She was no fool.
Her lips shaped a word the kitchen-window glass made silent. He could read her lips anyhow: “Please,” she was saying. He pretended he didn’t see her, and turned away. When he looked toward the farmhouse again, she wasn’t standing at the window any more.
What if he didn’t slip away? What if the Yanks caught him? They’d shoot him or hang him. He could figure that out for himself. But Julia, married to Ted Culligan, would be all right. Maude had grit and to spare. She’d get by. And Mary? She was his youngest, his chick, so of course he worried about her. But she was also his firebrand. She’d grieve for him. He wanted her to grieve for him. But she would understand why he had to do this. She would understand it better than Maude seemed able to do.
“Alexander,” McGregor said. Were his son at his side, he might have accepted Yankee rule. Not now. Never again. “Not as long as I live,” he said.
He went to the barn and did some chores—even though he’d been contemplating his own death, life had to go on in the meanwhile. After a bit, he’d done everything that needed doing. He stayed out anyhow; if he went back to the farmhouse, he’d have another row with Maude. He knew he’d be having rows with Maude till Custer, like imperial Caesar, made his triumphal procession through Rosenfeld. After that, one way or another, they’d end. He looked forward to saying, I told you so.
When he finally went back inside, his wife wasn’t in the kitchen, but the wonderful smell of baking bread filled it. McGregor smiled before he knew what he was doing. Life still held pleasure for him. He didn’t want to throw it away. But he was ready, if that turned out to be what he had to do.
In the parlor, he found Mary reading the copy of the Register he’d brought back from Rosenfeld. She looked up at him, her eyes enormous. “He’s coming here,” she said. “He really is.”
McGregor didn’t have to ask who he was. He nodded. “He sure is,” he answered.
“He shouldn’t,” Mary said. “He’s got no business doing that. Even if they won the war, do they have to go and brag about it?”
“That’s how Yanks are,” McGregor said. “They like to boast and show off.” So it seemed by his self-effacing Canadian standards, anyhow.
“They shouldn’t,” Mary said, as if stating a law of nature. “And he shouldn’t have a parade through the middle of our town.” Something sharp and brittle as broken glass glinted in her pale eyes. “Something ought to happen to him if he does.”
She’s my daughter, McGregor thought. Flesh of my flesh, soul of my soul. He almost told her something just might happen to the famous Yank general, George Armstrong Custer. But no. Proud of her though he was, he kept his plans to himself. Custer might be a showy American. McGregor was no American, and glad not to be one. He held his secrets close.
“Something ought to happen to him,” Mary repeated, looking straight at McGregor. She knew what he’d done over the years. She had to know even if he’d said far less to her and to Julia than to Maude. So she knew what she was saying now. She wanted Custer blown sky high.
“Your mother thinks there’s nothing more to be done,” McGregor said, to see how Mary would take that.
His daughter hissed like an angry cat. She said, “Till we’re free again, there’s always more to be done.”
“Well, maybe so,” McGregor answered, and said no more. He wondered if Mary knew how risky throwing a bomb at Custer’s motorcar was. He couldn’t ask her. He couldn’t tell her, either. But he’d been right when he told Maude that Mary loved Custer as much as he did. Maybe he’d get to say I told you so twice.
Thoughtfully, Mary asked, “What would Alexander do now?”
“Why, he’d—” McGregor broke off. He realized he didn’t know what his son would do. Alexander had always denied to the American authorities that he’d had anything to do with the kids who were sabotaging the railroad track. If that was so, the Yanks had shot him for nothing—but he might agree with Maude when she said, Enough is enough. If, on the other hand, he’d been lying, he’d be all for trying to blow up Custer now—but the Americans would have had some reason for standing him against the wall. The more McGregor thought about it, the more confused he got.
Mary wasn’t confused; she had the clear, bright certainty of youth. “He’d want us to be free, too,” she said, and her father nodded. That, no doubt, was true.
Day inexorably followed day. When McGregor took care to note time passing, it seemed to crawl on hands and knees. When he didn’t note it, when he busied himself with farm chores as he had to do, it sped by. Faster than he’d looked for it came the day when Custer would parade through Rosenfeld.
At breakfast that morning, Maude said, “Maybe we could all go into town and watch the show.” Her smile pasted gaiety over stark fear.
McGregor paused with a bite of home-cured bacon halfway to his mouth. Tonelessly, he said, “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”
“Why not?” Maude said, determined to force the issue. “It would be jolly.” She waited for Mary to clamor to be allowed to go into town, as she usually did. But Mary just sat, toying with her breakfast. She looked from her mother to her father and said not a word.
Into the silence, McGregor repeated, “I don’t think that would be a good idea.” He ate a couple more forkfuls of bacon and eggs, emptying his plate, then got to his feet. “I’m going out to the barn and hitch up the wagon. I don’t want to be late, not today.”
Mary nodded at that, not looking up at McGregor, still not saying a word. Before McGregor could get out the door, Maude ran to him and took him in her arms. “Come home,” she whispered fiercely.
“I intend to,” McGregor answered, which was true. He disentangled himself from his wife and went to the door.
The day was mild, not too warm, so the coat with big pockets he wore wouldn’t particularly stand out. His one worry was that the U.S. Army might have set up security checkpoints around Rosenfeld, as the Yanks had done during the Great War. He’d built a false bottom to his seat to leave a space in which he could conceal the bomb, but he didn’t want to have to rely on it, and it would make life more difficult even if it worked. But the Americans seemed sure all their Canadian subjects were cowed. He had no trouble getting into Rosenfeld.
He hitched the wagon on a side street well away from the post office and general store; he didn’t want Wilf Rokeby or Henry Gibbon spotting him, not today. Then he casually took a place from which he’d be able to see the parade. Before long, people started filling the space in front of him. He didn’t mind. He could still see well enough.
Custer’s train pulled into Rosenfeld right on time and started disgorging all the trappings of the U.S. commandant’s triumphal procession: soldiers, a marching band, and the Packard limousine McGregor had seen up in Winnipeg.
And here came the band, blaring out “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Some people were shameless enough to cheer. McGregor’s hand went into his pocket. He took out the bomb and held it by his side. No one noticed. He pulled out a match, too, and palmed it.
Here came the limousine behind the band, a gaudily uniformed Custer standing in it to receive the plaudits of the crowd. Nearer, nearer…Custer’s eyes went wide—he recognized McGregor. McGregor smiled back at him. He hadn’t expected this, but it only made things sweeter. He scraped the match on the sole of his shoe and touched it to the bomb’s fuse. Smiling still, McGregor threw the bomb. All that practice paid off. The throw, straight for Custer, was perfect.
Down the track toward Rosenfeld rattled the train. In his fancy Pullman car, General George Armstrong Custer whipped a long-barreled Colt revolver out of his holster and pointed it not quite far enough away from Lieutenant Colonel Abner Dowling.
“Sir, will you please put that…thing away?” his adjutant asked. Dowling commended himself for not modifying thing with a pungent adjective, or perhaps even a participle. The pistol, he knew, was loaded. Fortunately, the retiring U.S. commandant in Canada wasn’t.
With a grunt, Custer did set the revolver back in the holster, only to yank it out again a moment later. This time, he did point it at Dowling. His adjutant yelped. “Don’t you turn into an old woman on me,” Custer said peevishly. “You never know when an assassin may strike.”
Dowling couldn’t even tell him that was nonsense, not after the bomb in Winnipeg the summer before, and especially not after Wade Hampton V had been gunned down only a couple of months earlier. Custer’s adjutant did say, “I think you’ll be safe enough in a sleepy little town like Rosenfeld, sir.”
“Oh, you do, do you?” Custer sneered. “Have you forgotten that blackguard Arthur McGregor makes his home just outside this sleepy little town?”
As a matter of fact, Dowling had forgotten that till Custer reminded him of it. “Sir,” Dowling answered, taking a firm grip on his patience, “there really is no evidence this McGregor is a blackguard, or anything but a farmer. The experts are all convinced he’s an innocent man.”
“Experts?” Custer rolled his rheumy eyes. “The experts were all convinced we should use barrels by dribs and drabs, too. What the devil do experts know, except how to impress other experts?” He holstered the revolver again, then took out the report the experts had compiled on Arthur McGregor and flipped through it till he found a photograph of the man. “Here!” He thrust it at Dowling. “If this isn’t the face of a villain, what is it?”
Relieved that that miserable pistol wasn’t aimed at his brisket any more, Dowling studied the photograph of McGregor for the first time in several months. He reached the same conclusion now as he had then. “Sir, he just looks like a farmer to me.”
“Bah!” Custer snatched back the report. “All I can say is, you are no judge of the imprint character makes on physiognomy.”
All I can say is, you’re an old fraud starting at shadows, Dowling thought. And he couldn’t even say that, not really. Pretty soon, Custer would at last officially step down as the longest-serving soldier in the history of the U.S. Army. And then, perhaps, just perhaps, Abner Dowling would get an assignment where he could use his talents as something other than a nursemaid.
Iron wheels squealed against iron rails as the train began to slow outside of Rosenfeld. Custer pulled out the revolver yet again. He had the fastest draw Dowling had ever seen in an eighty-two-year-old man. Since he was the only eighty-two-year-old man Dowling had ever seen draw a pistol, that proved less than the tubby lieutenant colonel might have liked.
Dowling was convinced that, were an assassin lurking in Rosenfeld, Custer was unlikely to hit him with a pistol shot. The retiring general had a far better chance of nailing an innocent bystander or two, or himself, or Dowling. He had a better chance still of forgetting he wore the revolver. But, since no assassin would be lurking, Dowling didn’t have to worry about any of that…too much.
Libbie Custer ignored them both. She lay in her Pullman berth, gently snoring. She was down with a bad cold, or maybe the grippe. Combined with the medicine she’d taken for it—like most such nostrums, almost as potent as brandy—the sickness had knocked her for a loop. She would not be parading today.
And now, evidently, Custer had done all the practicing he intended to do. After putting the pistol back into the holster, he clapped on a black felt cocked hat gleaming with gold braid, adjusted it to a jaunty angle with the help of the mirror atop the walnut sideboard, and then turned back to Dowling to ask, “How do I look?”
“Magnificent,” his adjutant answered. Custer was a spectacle, no two ways about it. He’d always worn a uniform as splendid as regulations allowed, and then a little more besides. Now that no one could possibly criticize him for his outfits, he’d stopped even pretending to pay attention to the regulations. He looked something like a South American emperor, something like God on a particularly tasteless afternoon. Dowling found another fancy word: “Refulgent, sir.”
“Thank you very much,” Custer said, even though Dowling hadn’t meant it altogether as a compliment. Dowling glanced out the Pullman car’s window. The sun was going in and out behind clouds. With a little luck, the medals and gold cords on Custer’s tunic and the gold stripes down each trouser leg wouldn’t blind too many of the spectators.
The train pulled into the Rosenfeld station. By this time, the people who formed Custer’s procession worked together as smoothly as circus acrobats, and a good deal more smoothly than most of the forces under his command had done during the Great War. “Here comes your motorcar, sir,” Dowling said as the limousine descended from the flatcar on which it rode.
“And about time, too,” Custer said—nothing ever satisfied him. He looked around. “What a miserable excuse for a town this is. The only reason I can think of for scheduling a parade through it is that it is on the railroad line.”
“Do you want to cancel the parade and go on, sir?” Dowling asked. If Custer did that, he’d stop worrying about the bomber who, his adjutant remained sure, was a bomber only in the retiring general’s mind.
Custer’s mind was certainly full of the fellow. “And let McGregor think he’s frightened me away?” he demanded haughtily. “Never!” He looked around again. “We stopped here once before, didn’t we? On the way up to Winnipeg, I mean. We drove through the streets then, too, and almost ran over some yahoo who’d probably never seen a motorcar before in his life.”
“Why, so we did, sir.” Dowling had forgotten that. Custer was an old man, but his memory hadn’t slipped. He still vividly recalled slights he’d suffered during the War of Secession, and had never forgotten his quarrels with Teddy Roosevelt during the Second Mexican War—even if TR didn’t remember things the way he did.
“I thought as much.” Now Custer sounded complacent. He knew his memory still worked, and delighted in showing off. He pulled from a trouser pocket that photograph of Arthur McGregor, which he’d removed from the report. “And if we run into this fellow, I’ll be ready, by thunder.”
To Dowling’s relief, he didn’t demonstrate his fast draw. By then, the members of the marching band were forming up in front of the Packard limousine. They wore uniforms far more ornate and colorful than those of the platoon of ordinary soldiers who were taking their places behind the automobile, but were moons beside the sun compared to Custer.
“One good thing,” Custer said as his chauffeur got out of the Packard and opened the door so he and Dowling could go up into the back seat: “at least this will be a short procession. Then I’ll be able to get back to Libbie.”
He really did love her, Dowling realized with some reluctance. He wasn’t always faithful to her—or, at least, he did his best to be unfaithful when he saw the chance—but she mattered to him. After almost sixty years of marriage, Dowling supposed that was inevitable.
Dowling sat in the motorcar. Custer stood erect and proud. “Are we ready, Captain?” he called to the bandleader.
“Let me see, sir.” The young officer checked his watch. “It still lacks a couple of minutes of one, sir.”
“Very well,” Custer said. “Commence precisely on the hour. Let the people know they can expect absolute certainty from the rule of the United States.”
Absolute certainty Custer had—enough for a regiment, let alone one man, his adjutant thought. Sometimes that had led to great disasters. Sometimes it had led to great triumphs. It always made the retiring general hard to deal with.
At one on the dot—or so Dowling assumed, for he did not take his own watch out of his pocket—the bandleader raised his hands. The musicians in his charge struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner.” They began to march. The chauffeur put the limousine in low gear and followed them. Custer’s honor guard, in turn, followed the automobile.
Rosenfeld might not have been a big city, but people lined both sides of the short, narrow main street to get a good look at General Custer. Some of them applauded the band. That didn’t happen in every Canadian town; sometimes spectators received the U.S. national anthem in stony silence.
Here, though, most of the men and women seemed to accept that they had been conquered and that the United States were here to stay. Dowling saw smiles, he saw waves…and then, beside him, he saw Custer stiffen. “There!” Custer said, his eyes wide. “Right there. That’s McGregor!”
Dowling’s head swung to the right. He had a brief moment to recognize the Canadian, an even briefer moment to think that, even if McGregor was here, it meant nothing—and then the Canuck threw something in the direction of the motorcar. How embarrassing—he was sure it was his last thought—the old boy was right all along.
Custer didn’t whip out his pistol, as he’d been practicing. The bomb—Dowling saw the sizzling fuse—flew straight toward him. He caught it as a U.S. footballer might have caught a forward pass, then underhanded it back the way it had come.
Very clearly, Dowling saw the astonishment on Arthur McGregor’s face. He lacked the time to feel any astonishment of his own. The bomb landed at McGregor’s feet and blew up. Dowling felt a sudden, sharp pain in his left arm. He looked down and discovered he had a torn sleeve and was bleeding.
So was Custer, from a wound on the outside of his thigh. If he noticed the injury, he gave no sign of it. “Stop the car!” he shouted to the chauffeur, and then, to the soldiers behind him, “See to the wounded.” Now he drew his revolver. “And you and I, Dowling, we shall see to Mr. Arthur McGregor.”
“I think, sir, you may have done that already.” Dowling was astonished at how steady he sounded. He squeezed the fingers of his left hand. They worked. Like Custer, he’d taken only a minor wound. The men and women standing between McGregor and the motorcar had borne the brunt of the bomb and shielded the Americans from the worst.
Some of those people were down and screaming and thrashing, blood pouring from them. Blood poured from others, too, men and women who would not get up again. And there, flung against a wall like a bundle of rags, lay Arthur McGregor. His eyes were set and staring, his belly and groin a shredded, gory mass. Custer thrust the pistol back into his holster. “I don’t need this—he did it to himself.”
“No, sir.” Abner Dowling spoke more humbly than he ever had in his life. “You did it to him. You were ready for anything.”
Custer shrugged. “He cut his fuse just a bit too long—otherwise, we’d look like that now.” His tone was one of dispassionate criticism of another man’s work. “He had a good run, but no one man can lick the United States of America. Sooner or later, his luck had to give out. And I’ve paid Tom back, too, by God—in person.”
“Yes, sir.” Dowling said what needed saying: “How does it feel to be a hero—again?”
Custer drew himself up as straight as he had stood in the limousine. The dramatic pose he struck came straight out of the nineteenth century. “Dowling, it feels bully!”
Summer in Ontario wouldn’t last much longer. Jonathan Moss knew that very well. Before long, the idea of sitting out on the grass with an attractive woman would have been an absurdity. Better, then, to enjoy such times while they lasted and not to worry about the snow surely only weeks away.
Laura Secord didn’t make that easy. In all the time he’d known her, Laura Secord had never made anything easy. Now she said, “I wish that brave man had managed to blow your famous General Custer higher than the moon.”
“I don’t suppose I should be surprised,” Moss answered. “If you want to know what I think, though, somebody who hides bombs or throws them and doesn’t care if he kills innocent bystanders isn’t much of a hero. Pass me that plate of deviled eggs, will you? They’re good.”
“I’m glad you like them.” But, after she’d passed him the eggs, she returned to the argument: “I think anyone who keeps up the struggle against impossible odds is a hero.”
“If the odds are impossible, anyone who keeps up the struggle against them is a fool,” Moss returned.
“Canada still has a few fools left,” Laura Secord said. She leaned forward and picked up a deviled egg herself.
“One fewer now.” Law school and his practice had sharpened Moss’ wits and made his comebacks quicker than when he’d been here as a pilot.
“We won’t just turn into pale copies of Americans and of the United States,” Laura said. “We won’t.”
Moss nodded. “That’s easy enough to say. I don’t know how easy it will be to do. The fellow who threw the bomb at General Custer thought the same way you do. Now he’s dead. There’s no revolution up here. And you’re feeding a Yank a picnic lunch. Have I told you that you make really good pickles?”
She glared at him. “If you keep going on like this, I won’t ask you to come back.”
“I’m still not sure I should be coming up here at all,” Moss answered. “For me, coming to picnics with you is what going to an opium den is for somebody who can’t shake the poppy.” He spoke lightly, which didn’t mean he wasn’t telling the truth.
Laura Secord raised an eyebrow. “Is that a compliment or an insult?”
“Probably,” he answered, which startled a laugh out of her. Maybe he would have done better to stay down in Berlin and meet some nice girl there. But he hadn’t met any girls there—or women, either, as Laura was unquestionably a woman—who’d struck his fancy. And so, still with the fragments of what was, without a doubt, an obsession left over from the Great War, he’d started driving up to Arthur. He didn’t know what would come of this. He didn’t know if he wanted anything to come of it.
She waved her hand, a wave encompassing the farm she’d stubbornly kept going on her own. “I don’t know whether I ought to be inviting you here, either,” she said, her voice troubled. “It feels a lot like giving aid and comfort to the enemy. But you were the one who aided me, after all.” Was she trying to convince herself, as Moss tried to convince himself coming here was all right?
He said, “I don’t know about aid, but I’m certainly comforted.” He lay back on the grass. A couple of cows grazing twenty or thirty yards away looked at him with their large, dark eyes, then went back to their own lunches. He thumped his belly to show how comforted he was. The waist of his trousers felt pleasantly tight.
“I’m glad of that.” Laura reached for a pewter pitcher. “More tea?”
“All right,” Moss answered. “One thing I will say for tea: it makes a better cold drink than coffee does.”
“It makes a better hot drink than coffee does, too,” she said. Moss shrugged. She made as if to pour the pitcher over his head before filling his tumbler. “You Yanks have no taste.”
“I suppose not,” he said, watching puffy white clouds drift across the blue sky. The weather wouldn’t stay good that much longer. He thought about how bad it could get. That made him smile, and then laugh.
“And what’s so funny?” Laura Secord asked. “That you Yanks have no taste?”
“As a matter of fact, yes.” He sat up and sipped at the tea she’d given him. “I was just thinking about the snowstorm I drove through three years ago to come up here and visit you. If that doesn’t prove I’ve got no taste, I don’t know what would.”
She made a face at him. “The only thing it proves is that you’re mad. I’d already had a pretty fair notion of that from the way you behaved during the war.”
“Mad about you,” he said, which made her blush and look down at the grass. Jonathan Moss knew—had known for years—that was metaphorically true. He’d also wondered a good many times if it was literally true, in the alienist’s use of the word mad.
“My mad Yank.” Laura Secord spoke with a curious mixture of affection and bemusement. “Till you stood up for that poor fellow done out of his property—done out of the property where you had your office—I didn’t think I should ever want to see you again.”
Maybe it would have been just as well for both of us if you hadn’t, Moss thought. Here he was, when he would have been almost anywhere else with almost anyone else. All his friends from down in Chicago—a lot of his friends from down in Berlin—would have called him a fool. He called himself a fool a lot of the time. He kept coming back here.
“Would you like anything else here?” Laura Secord asked him. He finished the glass of tea she’d given him, then shook his head. “All right,” she said, and started loading things back into the picnic hamper. As he always did when he came up to her farm, he tried to help. As she always did, she refused to let him. “You’ll just make a hash of things.”
“Roast-beef hash, by choice,” Moss said.
With a snort, Laura got to her feet. Moss stood up, too. As she always did, she consented that he carry the hamper back to the farmhouse. She rubbed that in, too: “I really would have no trouble with it, you know. It’s not nearly as heavy as a bale of hay, and I haul those all the time.”
“Well, up till you said that, I did feel useful,” Moss confessed. “But don’t worry about it—you’ve cured me.”
She muttered something under her breath. Moss thought it was Mad Yank again, but couldn’t be sure. She hurried on ahead of him and opened the kitchen door. He set the picnic basket on the counter next to the tin sink, which was full of water. She put the dirty dishes and bowls and glasses in the water, saying with her back to him, “They’ll be frightful to clean if I let them dry.”
“All right,” he answered; that was also part of her routine.
When the picnic basket was empty, she turned and took a step toward him. He took a step toward her, too, which brought him close enough to put his arms around her. She was reaching for him, too, her face tilted up, her mouth waiting for his.
The first time that had happened, he’d taken her right there on the kitchen floor. They’d both been mad then. He was sure he’d hurt her, ramming home like a pile driver, again and again. She hadn’t acted as if it hurt, though. She’d clawed his back to ribbons and yowled like a cat on a back fence and finally screamed out his name loud enough to rattle the windows. She’d gone without for a long time, and had done her best to make up for it all at once.
They weren’t quite so frantic now, but they were hurrying when they went to her bedroom, hurrying when they undressed, hurrying when they lay down together. His hand closed on her breast. He teased her nipple with his thumb and forefinger. She sighed and pulled his head down to follow his fingers. Her breath sighed out. “Oh, Jonathan,” she whispered.
She took him in hand, more roughly than any other woman he’d ever known. “Careful there,” he gasped, both because he was afraid she’d hurt him and because he’d spurt his seed out onto her breasts and belly if she didn’t ease up.
His own hand slid down to the joining of her legs. She was already wet and wanton, waiting for him. A few picnics hadn’t come close to fully sating her, not when she hadn’t seen her husband since early in the war. He wondered what he would have been like after abstaining for so long. He couldn’t imagine. He couldn’t come close. He knew women were different, but even so…
She pulled him over onto her. It wasn’t the wild bucking and plunging of the first time they’d joined, but it was a long way from calm and sedate and gentle. She bit his shoulder hard enough to make him yelp. His hands dug into her backside, shoving her up as he thrust down. She wrapped her legs around him and did her best to squeeze him breathless.
She squeezed him inside her, too. He groaned and gasped and spent himself at the same instant as she cried out, wordlessly this time. “My God,” he said, like a man waking from the delirium of the Spanish influenza. And he had been in a delirium, though one far more pleasant than the influenza brought.
Laura Secord’s face was still slack with pleasure; a pink flush mottled her breasts. She shook her head, as if she too were returning to herself. “Which of us is going to the opium den?” she murmured. Before Moss could answer—if, indeed, he’d been able to find anything to say—she got out of bed and squatted over the chamber pot. A doctor friend of Moss’ had once told him getting rid of the stuff like that did only a little good, because a woman couldn’t get rid of all of it, but he supposed—he hoped—it was better than nothing.
Once that was done, she turned modest again, and dressed quickly and with her back to him. He got into his own clothes. “I’d better head back down to Berlin,” he said.
“Empire, you mean,” Laura Secord told him.
Moss laughed. They disagreed on so many things…but when their bodies joined, it wasn’t sparks flying, it was thunder and lightning. He’d never known nor imagined anything like it. “I still say it’s Berlin, and so does everybody else,” he answered, “and if you don’t like that, you can let me know about it, and maybe I’ll come up here and argue about it.”
“Would you like to come up here and argue about it next Sunday?” she asked. “You never can tell when the weather in these parts will change, but it should still be good then.”
“Next Sunday?” Moss said. “I can do that.” His pulse quickened at the thought of it. “As a matter of fact, I can hardly wait.”
As the clock in Jeremiah Harmon’s drugstore chimed six, Reggie Bartlett put on his coat and hat. “Where’s the fire?” the druggist asked him. “Are you going to leave before you get paid?”
“Not likely, boss,” Reggie answered. “My wallet’s been whimpering at me for the last couple of days. Thank heaven it’s finally Friday.”
“Well, I’ve got the prescription a whimpering wallet needs,” Harmon said. “Here you are, Reggie.” He counted out banknotes, then added a coin. “One week’s pay: seventeen dollars and fifty cents.”
“Thank you.” Bartlett put the notes in his wallet and the coin—he saw it was dated 1909—in his pocket. “And do you know what, boss? I’m happier, I’m a hell of a lot happier, to get this than I was when you paid me millions and millions every week a couple of months ago.”
“Of course you are—you’re a sensible fellow,” Harmon said. “When I paid you millions and millions, three days after you got them they’d be worth even less than they were when I gave them to you. Seventeen-fifty’s not a whole lot of money, Lord knows, but it’ll still be worth seventeen-fifty next Friday.”
“I hope it will, anyhow,” Reggie said. “I don’t think I’m ready to put any of it in the bank just yet, though. A lot of people who put money in the banks got wiped out after the war.”
“And isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” his boss said. “I was lucky, as these things go: I got mine out while it was still worth something, anyhow, and I spent it on whatever I needed then, and ever since I’ve been living week to week and hand to mouth like everyone else.”
“I never had enough in the bank to worry too much about what I lost,” Reggie said. “If I can keep my head above water for a little while now…” The new money had been in circulation for six weeks, and was still holding its value against the U.S. dollar and the German mark. Maybe it would go on doing that.
“What do you think of President Burton Mitchel these days?” Harmon asked slyly. “Don’t you wish you’d voted Whig in the election last fall?”
“Long as I didn’t vote for Jake Featherston, who I did vote for doesn’t matter a hell of a lot,” Bartlett answered. “And Mitchel’s had nothing but good luck since he got the job.”
“I wouldn’t say the way he got it was good luck,” Harmon observed, his voice dry.
“Not for Wade Hampton V, that’s for sure,” Reggie agreed. “But good luck for the country? I reckon it is. Those wild men in the Freedom Party even got the damnyankees to feel sorry for us when they shot Hampton. Now that we aren’t sending every dime in the country up to the USA, all the real money that’s been hiding can come out again.” He reached into his pocket. He hadn’t had a half dollar in there for years. “And besides, Mitchel’s got Congress eating out of the palm of his hand. Whatever he wants, they give him. Even the Freedom Party Congressmen have quit arguing with him.”
“Maybe it’s the sign of a guilty conscience, though I wouldn’t have bet they were possessed of any such equipment,” Harmon said. “I don’t know how long the honeymoon will last, but Mitchel’s making the most of it.”
“Anything that makes the Freedom Party shut up is good in my book.” Reggie touched a finger to the brim of his hat. With September heading into October, he’d traded in his flat-crowned straw for a fedora. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning for my half-day.”
“Good night, Reggie,” Harmon told him.
Bartlett left the drugstore. Light was draining out of the sky. At this season of the year, nightfall came earlier, perceptibly earlier, every day. Street lamps threw little puddles of light down at the feet of the poles they surmounted. With dusk, people hurried wherever they were going, wanting to get there before full darkness if they could.
A man Reggie recognized passed him under one of those street lamps. The fellow came into Harmon’s drugstore every so often, and was an outspoken Freedom Party backer. Reggie didn’t know whether he was a Freedom Party goon, but he looked as if he might have been.
To stay on the safe side, Reggie stuck his hand in the pocket in which he still carried a pistol. The Freedom Party man knew he didn’t have any use for Jake Featherston. If the fellow also knew he’d been the one who helped aim Tom Brearley at Roger Kimball, all sorts of fireworks might go off.
Whatever the Freedom Party man knew, he kept walking. His head was down, his face somber and, Reggie thought, a little confused. Was he looking for the certainty he’d known before Grady Calkins shot the president of the Confederate States, the certainty that Jake Featherston was on the way up and he himself would rise with his leader from whatever miserable job he held now? If he was, he wouldn’t find it on the dark, dirty sidewalks of Richmond.
Posters on a board fence shouted HANG FEATHERSTON HIGHER THAN HAMAN! in big letters. Underneath, in much smaller type, they added, Radical Liberal Party of the Confederate States. They’d gone up less than a week after Wade Hampton V got shot, and no one, not even the men of the Freedom Party, had had the nerve to deface them or tear them down. Even the goons in white and butternut might have known some shame at being goons.
Back at his flat, Reggie took a chunk of leftover fried chicken out of the icebox and ate it cold with a couple of slices of bread and a bottle of beer to wash everything down. It was, he knew, a lazy man’s supper, but he figured he had the right to be lazy once in a while if he felt like it.
After washing the dishes, he took out the new banknotes he’d got and looked at them. The one-dollar notes bore the image of Jefferson Davis, the five-dollar notes that of Stonewall Jackson: no doubt to remind people of the Stonewall, the five-dollar goldpiece hardly seen since the end of the war. Maybe, now that specie wasn’t flowing out of the CSA as reparations, the government would start minting Stonewalls again.
Reggie walked into the bedroom and got out a banknote he’d kept from the last days before the currency reform: a $1,000,000,000 banknote. It might have been the equivalent of twenty-five or thirty cents of real money. It showed Jeb Stuart licking the Yankees during the Second Mexican War, and was every bit as well printed as the new banknotes, even if all the zeros necessarily made the design look crowded.
“A billion dollars,” Reggie said softly. If only it had been worth more than a supper at a greasy spoon or a couple of shots of whiskey at a saloon with sawdust on the floor. But it hadn’t; it was nothing more than a symbol of a whole country busy going down the drain. Reggie set it on the table by the sofa. “If I ever have kids,” he said, “I’ll show this to them. Maybe it will help them understand how hard times were after the war.”
He shook his head. They wouldn’t understand no matter what, any more than they would understand what life in the trenches was like. Experience brought understanding. Nothing else came close.
When he got to work the next morning, he glanced affectionately at the cash register. All of a sudden, its keys corresponded to prices once more. He didn’t mentally have to multiply by thousands or millions or billions any more.
A customer came in and bought some aspirins. “That’ll be fifteen cents,” Bartlett said. The man pulled from his pocket a $1,000,000,000 banknote like the one Reggie had contemplated the night before. Reggie shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t take this.”
“Why not?” the man said. “It’s still worth more’n fifteen cents, I reckon.”
“Yes, sir,” Bartlett said, “but all these old banknotes have been—what’s the word?—demonetized, that’s it. You can’t spend ’em for anything. Suppose you took one to a bank and tried to get a billion real dollars for it?”
“I wouldn’t do that,” the fellow said. He no doubt meant it: he was just a petty chiseler, not a big one. There couldn’t be anybody in the Confederate States who didn’t know you couldn’t use the old money any more, not even for small purchases. Grumbling, the customer put the preposterously inflated banknote back in his pocket and handed Reggie a real dollar instead.
Reggie rang up the sale and then anxiously checked the till; coins were coming back into circulation more slowly than notes. But he was able to make change, even if he had to use ten pennies to do it. “Here you are, sir.”
“Thanks.” The man put the little flat tin of tablets in his pocket along with the change. Jingling, he turned away. “See you again sometime. Freedom!”
No one had said that to Reggie for quite a while. He would happily have gone another fifty or a hundred years without hearing it again, too. He had to make himself hold still and not go after the customer to beat hell out of him. “Freedom to butcher anybody you don’t like, you mean,” he ground out, “even if it’s the president of the CSA.”
He waited for the man to come back hotly at him, whether with words or with fists. That was the Freedom Party’s style, and had been since its beginnings in the black days after the war. But the man only tucked his chin down against his chest, as if he were walking into a cold, rainy wind, and hurried out of the drugstore.
At the back of the store, Jeremiah Harmon coughed. “Yeah, I know, boss: I’m not supposed to do things like that,” Bartlett said. “I know it’s bad for business. But when those white-and-butternut boys come in, I see red. I can’t help it. And this one had his nerve, going ‘Freedom!’ after what that Grady Calkins son of a bitch went and did.”
“I didn’t say anything, Reggie,” Harmon answered. “As a matter of fact, I think I’m coming down with a cold.” He coughed again. “I don’t like to lose business, mind you, but I don’t seek business from imbeciles, either. And any man who will call out ‘Freedom!’ with President Hampton still new in his grave is either an imbecile or whatever’s one step down from there.”
“A half-witted cur dog—a son of a bitch, like I said,” Reggie suggested.
“It could be so,” his boss said.
“When I was in the hospital after the damnyankees shot me and caught me, one of the other people in there was one of our nigger soldiers who’d lost a foot,” Reggie said. “You ask me, he had more brains in that missing foot than the whole Freedom Party does in all its heads.” He wondered how Rehoboam was doing down in Mississippi. Even if the black man had been a Red, he’d been a pretty good fellow, too.
Harmon chuckled. “Something to that, I shouldn’t wonder. But now, if God is kind to us, the Freedom Party dealt itself a blow no one else could have given it, and one it won’t get over.”
“Amen,” Reggie said with all his heart.
Cincinnatus Driver worked like a man possessed, unloading a truckload of filing cabinets he’d brought from the Des Moines railroad yards to the State Capitol on the other side of the river. It was, he admitted to himself, easier to work hard in Iowa in November than it had been in Kentucky in, say, July. But he would have put extra effort into things today even if it had been hotter and muggier than Kentucky ever got.
He finished faster than anyone would have imagined he could. Instead of racing back to the yard to see what other hauling work he could pick up—which was what he usually did when he finished a job—he used the time he’d saved to hurry back to the near northwest, to an Odd Fellows hall not far from his flat. He parked the truck on the street and hurried inside.
Four white men sat behind a long table in the middle of the hall. “Let me have your name, please, and your street address,” the one at the end nearest Cincinnatus said to him.
He gave the fellow his particulars. The second man behind the table checked a list. Cincinnatus had a moment’s fear his name would not appear there. But the gray-haired white man ticked it off and pointed to a register in front of him. “If you’ll just sign here, Mr. Driver,” he said.
“I surely will, suh.” Cincinnatus grinned from ear to ear. White men didn’t call Negroes mister down in Kentucky. They didn’t always do it here, either, but he liked it better every time he heard it. He wrote his name in a fine round hand.
The third man at the table handed him a folded sheet of paper. “Choose any voting booth you please, Mr. Driver,” he said.
“Yes, suh. Thank you kindly, suh,” Cincinnatus said, and then, because he couldn’t hold it in any more, “You know somethin’, suh? This here is the first time in my whole life I ever got to vote. Used to live in Kentucky, and I never reckoned I’d get me the chance.”
“Well, you’ve got it,” the polling official said. “I’m glad it means something to you, and I hope you use it wisely.”
“Thank you,” Cincinnatus said. He went to a voting booth—it was before the dinner hour, and he had plenty from which to choose—and pulled the curtain shut after himself. Then he unfolded the ballot, inked the little X-stamper in the booth with great care, and began to vote.
He voted for Democrats for Congress, for the State House of Representatives, and for the State Senate. That would, no doubt, have startled Luther Bliss; the boss of the Kentucky State Police had been convinced he was a Red. Apicius—Apicius Wood, now—had known better. A Red himself, Apicius could tell Cincinnatus wasn’t…quite.
Cincinnatus finished marking the ballot, folded it again, and left the voting booth. He handed the folded sheet of paper to the fourth white man at the table. That worthy pushed it through the slot of the locked ballot box beside him. “Mr. Driver has voted,” he said in a loud voice.
Mr. Driver has voted. As far as Cincinnatus was concerned, the words might have been accompanied by music from a marching band: they sounded in horns and drums in his ears. He felt ten feet tall as he strode out to the old Duryea truck, and marveled that he still fit inside the cab. But he did, and, having voted, he went off to eat a quick dinner and hunt up more work.
He was still eating on a bench down by the train tracks when Joe Sims sat beside him. “Why are you grinnin’ like a fool?” the older black man asked. “You look like you just tore off a piece your wife doesn’t know about.”
“I’m happy,” Cincinnatus said, “but I ain’t happy like that. I went down and voted—first time ever—is what I did.”
Sims scratched his head. “I was happy when I voted the first time, too. It meant I was twenty-one. It meant I could buy whiskey, too, back when whiskey was still legal here. But I can’t recollect looking like I just tripped over a steamer trunk full of double eagles because I made some X’s.”
Cincinnatus studied the other Negro, who hadn’t the faintest idea how much he took for granted. “You was born here,” Cincinnatus said at last. Sims nodded. Cincinnatus went on, “You knew from the time you was a little fellow you’d be able to vote when you got big.”
“Well, sure I did,” Joe Sims said, and then, belatedly, got the point. “Wasn’t like that for you, was it?”
“Not hardly.” Cincinnatus’voice was dry. “My ma and pa was slaves up till a few years before I was born. Before the USA took Kentucky away from the CSA, wasn’t a legal school for niggers in the whole state. I learned my letters anyways, but I was lucky. I wasn’t a citizen of the CSA; I was just somebody who lived there, and all the white folks told me what to do. Now, when I vote, I get to tell white folks what to do, and it ain’t even against the law. Anybody reckons I ain’t wild about that, he’s crazy.”
Sims took a big bite out of his sandwich. It wasn’t ham, but a pungent sausage Cincinnatus hadn’t seen much in Covington. Salami, people called it; it was pretty good. After chewing and swallowing, Sims said, “The stories you tell remind me of the ones I heard from my grandpa when I was growing up. I always thought he was making things out to be worse than they really were.”
“Only reason you reckoned that is on account of you was born here,” Cincinnatus said. “Nobody could make it out to be worse than it was—and it wasn’t even so bad in Covington, because we was right across the river from Ohio. But it was bad there, and it got worse the further south you went.”
“It ain’t so good here, either,” Sims said.
Negroes in Des Moines—Negroes in the USA generally—were fond of saying that. They weren’t even wrong; Cincinnatus had seen as much. Nevertheless…“You don’t know what you’re talkin’ about,” Cincinnatus said. “Get down on your knees and praise the Lord on account of you don’t, too. I seen both sides now. This here may not be heaven, but it ain’t hell, neither.”
“Yeah, you say that every chance you get.” Sims breathed pepper and garlic into Cincinnatus’ face. “I can’t argue with you. I never set foot inside the Confederate States. I do admit, I never heard of any colored fellow leaving the USA to go there.”
“It would happen,” Cincinnatus said. “About every other year, it would happen. The papers in the CSA would always bang the drum about it, too, to make the niggers there—and the white folks, heaven knows—happy about how things was.”
“Happy.” Joe Sims chewed on the word as he’d chewed on his salami. “How could you be happy, when you knew you were lying to each other down there?”
That was a better question than most of the ones about the Confederate States Cincinnatus heard up here. He had to think before he answered, “Well, the white folks were happy ’cause they were on top. And us niggers? We were happy some of the time. I don’t reckon you can get through life without bein’happy some of the time.” Cincinnatus crammed the rest of his own sandwich into his mouth. Indistinctly, he said, “Let’s see what they got for us to do. With a new young-un in the house any day now, I got to keep busy.”
“Got to stay out of there to get some rest once the baby comes,” Sims said with a reminiscent chuckle. “I know all about that, damned if I don’t. What are you and your missus going to call the kid?”
“Seneca if it’s a boy—that’s my pa’s name,” Cincinnatus said. “And Elizabeth’s ma was called Amanda, so we’ll name the baby that if it’s a girl.”
“Those are good names.” Sims shut his dinner pail and got to his feet. “Like you say, we have to keep busy. We don’t, everybody goes hungry.”
Cincinnatus found enough work to put money in his pocket all through the afternoon. He went back to his apartment well pleased with himself. Elizabeth greeted him at the door with a kiss. “Did you vote?” she demanded. “Did you really and truly vote?” She wouldn’t get her chance till the 1924 election, for Iowa women had only presidential suffrage.
“I really and truly voted,” Cincinnatus said, and his wife’s eyes shone. Joe Sims might not understand what the franchise meant to him, but Elizabeth did. She waddled back toward the kitchen, her legs so wide apart, the baby she carried might almost have fallen out between them.
Achilles was doing homework at the kitchen table. He had a sheet of paper turned upside down in front of him: his spelling words, which he was supposed to be committing to memory. “Orange,” he said. “O-R-A-N-G-E. Orange.”
“That’s good, son.” Cincinnatus made as if to clap his hands together. “The better you spell, the smarter folks’ll reckon you are. I don’t spell near as good as I wish I did, but I know you got that one right.”
“It ain’t…It’s not”—Achilles carefully corrected himself—“that hard once you get the hang of it.”
“You won’t get any wrong on your test, then, will you?” Cincinnatus said.
“Hardly ever do,” his son replied. Had that not been the truth, Cincinnatus would have clouted him for his uppity mouth. But Achilles was doing very well in school, which made Cincinnatus proud. The boy’s eyes went far away. “Month. M-O-N-T-H. Month.”
“Supper,” Elizabeth announced. “I ain’t gwine try an’ spell it, but I done cooked it an’ it’s ready.”
“Smells good,” Cincinnatus said. It tasted good, too: roast beef with buttery mashed potatoes and greens on the side. “Turnip greens, ain’t they?” Cincinnatus asked, lifting another forkful to his mouth.
“That’s right,” Elizabeth said. “Can’t hardly get no other kind round these parts. Even black folks don’t hardly seem to know about collard greens, an’ they’re better’n turnip greens any day of the week.” She paused, looked down at her swollen belly, and laughed. “Baby just kick me.”
“Pretty soon, the baby will be kicking Achilles,” Cincinnatus said. He and Elizabeth both laughed then, at their son’s expression. Having a new brother or sister still didn’t seem real to Achilles. It would before long.
Elizabeth returned to the earlier subject: “Wish I had me a mess o’ collard greens. You’d reckon everybody in the whole world’d know about collard greens, but it ain’t so.”
“Turnip greens are fine,” Cincinnatus said. Elizabeth shook her head, stubbornly unconvinced. He reached out and patted her hand. “Life ain’t perfect, sweetheart, but it’s pretty good right now.”
Where simple praise hadn’t, that reached her. Slowly, she nodded. The baby must have chosen that moment to kick again, because she smiled and put both hands on her belly. “Reckon you may be right.”
“Reckon I am,” Cincinnatus said. “Buy me a newspaper tomorrow, find out who won the elections. Anybody win by one vote or lose by one vote, I made the difference. Never would have gotten to vote down in Kentucky. Didn’t make no never mind whether the Stars and Bars or the Stars and Stripes was flyin’ over the Covington city hall, neither—white folks was on top, and aimin’ to stay there. Ain’t like that here. Ain’t quite like that here, anyway.”
“This here’s a better place,” Elizabeth said quietly. Cincinnatus nodded. It wasn’t a perfect place, but he didn’t imagine there was any such thing. And, since he’d come from a worse place, a better one would do just fine.
When Anne Colleton opened the door to her hotel room for him, Roger Kimball took her in his arms. She let him, but only for a moment, and then pushed him away. She was strong, and she’d caught him by surprise to boot. He had to take a quick step back, and knocked the door closed before catching himself. “What’s going on?” he asked in no small annoyance.
“I didn’t invite you up here for that,” Anne answered, her own voice sharp. He’d seen that grimly determined look in her eye before, but rarely with it aimed at him.
“Well, why did you ask me up, then?” he said: a serious question, seriously meant. Whatever else hadn’t always been smooth with them, their lovemaking was something special. It always had been, ever since he’d seduced her the first night they’d met, on a train rolling down to New Orleans when the war was young.
“Why?” she echoed. “To say good-bye, that’s why. I owe you that much, I think.”
“Good-bye?” He stared at her, hardly believing he’d heard the word. “Jesus! What did I do to deserve that?”
Now her eyes softened to sadness. “You still belong to the Freedom Party. You still believe in the Freedom Party,” she said, her voice sad, too, sad but firm, like that of a judge passing sentence on a likable rogue.
“Of course I do,” Kimball answered. “When I join something, I don’t quit when the going gets rough. The damnyankees found out about that.” He’d never thought he would be grateful to Tom Brearley for breaking the news of the Ericsson, but he was. Now he could talk about it. “And I still say Jake Featherston’s the only man who can get this country going again.”
“We are going again.” Anne walked over to the bed and picked up her handbag. Kimball was glad to watch her; her gray skirt, one of the new short ones, displayed most of the lower half of her calf—and her legs were worth displaying.
As she reached inside the handbag, he asked, “What are you doing?”
“I’ll show you.” She pulled out a banknote and held it up. “Do you see that?” After Kimball nodded, she drove the point home: “Take a good look at it. It’s a one-dollar banknote. You haven’t seen anything just like it since just after the war ended, not till this past fall you haven’t. And it’s still worth a real dollar, too.”
“That’s not all we need, dammit, not even close,” Kimball said furiously. “We’re naked to whatever the United States want to do to us.” He wished Anne were naked to whatever he wanted to do to her, but a different urgency filled him fuller. “We’ve got no submarines, we’ve got no battleships, we’ve got no barrels—Christ, they don’t even want us to have machine guns in case the niggers rise up again. You see the Whigs fixing any of that? I sure as hell don’t.”
Anne put the banknote back in her bag. “We will have all those things again,” she said. “It may take longer than I’d hoped, but we’ll have them. As long as the money stays good, we’ll have them. And”—she took a deep breath—“we’ll have them without murdering any more presidents to get them.”
“You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs,” Kimball said. “I’ve broken plenty of eggs myself—and you’ve set up plenty to be broken.” That got home. Anne bit her lip and looked down at the floor. Kimball laughed. “You know what you remind me of? Somebody who likes bacon but won’t butcher a hog.”
“You are a bastard,” Anne said. “I’ve known it for a long time, but—”
Roger Kimball loosed another loud, jeering laugh. “Takes one to know one, I reckon. That’s likely the only reason we’ve put up with each other as long as we have—well, that and the screwing, anyway.”
He’d hoped to anger her, but found he’d failed. She also laughed, and seemed to gain strength from it. “Yes, that and the screwing,” she said. “I’ll miss you. I’ll be damned if I won’t. But I won’t miss the Freedom Party. Since you’re staying in, I have to cut you loose. Grady Calkins showed me once and for all there’s no controlling those people.”
“I got into it thinking Jake Featherston needed controlling, too,” Kimball said. “He doesn’t. But the Yankees want to control him, and that’s a fact.”
“Featherston’s clever,” Anne admitted. “But he can’t do everything himself. And if he can’t control his people, he can’t do anything at all.” By the way she talked, controlling was the be-all and end-all.
Kimball supposed it was natural she thought that way. She’d spent her whole life till the Red uprising controlling a plantation, controlling money, controlling everyone around her. Her ancestors had done the same thing for a hundred years before her time. She was, in fact, one of the aristocrats against whom Jake Featherston had campaigned.
With a shrug, Kimball said, “Well, yeah, a bigger egg than Jake wanted got busted, but you can’t blame the whole Freedom Party for Calkins.”
“Why can’t I? Everyone else does,” Anne said. “And there’s a lot of truth in it. With all the brawling, with the stalwarts with the clubs, with the riots during the campaign in ’21, where else was the Freedom Party going but towards shooting a president?”
Uneasily, Kimball remembered keeping a stalwart in white and butternut from taking a shot at Ainsworth Layne when the Radical Liberal candidate spoke in Hampton Park. Even so, he said, “You’re making—the whole country’s making—it out to be bigger than it is. Sure, we’ve lost some folks for now on account of what happened down in Birmingham, but they’ll be back.”
Anne Colleton shook her head. “I don’t think so. And that’s the other reason I’ve gotten out of the Freedom Party—I never back a loser. Never. I think the Party’s name will stink all across the CSA for years to come, and I don’t want any of that stink sticking to me.”
“You’re wrong,” Kimball told her. “You’re dead wrong.”
Now she shrugged. “I’ll take the chance.”
“Nothing fazes you, does it?” he said, and she shook her head again. He stepped toward her. “Last kiss before I go?”
He watched her consider it. Mischief filled her eyes. “Why not?” she said, and held out her arms.
When their lips met, he wondered if she’d bite him instead of kissing. But her malice was subtler than that. She put everything she had into the kiss, reminding him of what he wouldn’t be getting any more. She held him tight as if no clothes separated them, grinding her crotch into his.
“Jesus!” he said, his voice hoarse, when he had to take his mouth away from Anne’s to breathe. She laughed, delighted with the effect she’d created. His hand cupped her breast. “Last lay before I go, too?”
“No,” Anne said deliberately, and knocked the hand away. “Good-bye, Roger.”
Rage ripped through him. “Why, you goddamn little tease,” he rasped, and shoved her against the bed. She let out a startled squeak as she landed on her back. “I’ll give you something to remember me by—see if I don’t.” He sprang on her.
Years before, he’d realized trying to take her by force wasn’t a good idea. Since then, he never had tried. He’d never needed or wanted to try. Now…If she thought he’d just walk away after that kiss, she could damn well think again. Whatever he’d realized years before was dead as the Ericsson, dead as Tom Brearley.
It shouldn’t have been, for his fury overpowered not only good sense but also caution. Anne might have been startled when he pushed her onto the bed, but she didn’t stay that way longer than a heartbeat. With exquisite timing, her knee came up between his legs and caught him exactly where it did her the most good.
He howled and doubled up and clutched at himself, as any wounded animal might have done. Anne twisted away from him. He couldn’t possibly have stopped her, not for the first few seconds there. “Now I think you’d better go,” she said coolly.
He didn’t want to take her any more. He wanted to kill her. But when he looked up, he discovered she’d had more in her handbag than a one-dollar banknote. She aimed a revolver straight at his head. He hadn’t the least doubt she would pull the trigger if he moved in any way that did not suit her.
“Get off the bed,” she said. He had to obey, though he still walked doubled over. The pistol tracked him. She’d killed before, helping to put down the Negro rebellion. No, she wouldn’t hesitate now. Iron in her voice, she went on, “Go to the door, get out, and never come back.”
At the door, he paused. “Can I wait till I can straighten up?” he asked, not wanting to publish his humiliation to the world.
He thought she’d send him out in anguish, but she nodded and let him have a couple of minutes. Then she gave a peremptory gesture with the pistol. Out he went. He still wasn’t moving well—he felt like bloody hell—but, if he walked like an old man, he didn’t walk like a wounded old man.
He made his slow, painful way back to his flat without meeting anyone he knew, for which he thanked God. “That would be just what I need,” he muttered as he walked spraddle-legged up the stairs, “to run into Potter and Delamotte again.” He grunted. Anne had hurt him worse than they had when he brawled with them—not in so many places, but worse.
He poured himself a tall whiskey, and then ran the bath half full of cold water. He shivered when he sat down in it, but the steam radiator made the apartment tolerably warm and the whiskey made him tolerably warm, so he didn’t think he’d come down with pneumonia or the Spanish influenza. And the cold water helped numb his poor, abused balls—or maybe that was the whiskey, too.
At last, he let the water run down the drain. After cautiously drying, he put on the loosest drawers and baggiest trousers he owned. Then he went back to the kitchen and poured out some more whiskey. He didn’t want food. The knee Anne had given him still left him faintly nauseated.
He drank from the second glass of whiskey. “Stupid bitch,” he said, as if someone in the room might disagree. “Miserable stupid bitch.” He took another big sip from the glass. He wished he’d wrung her neck, back there at the hotel. But he hadn’t got the chance. Say what you would about her, Anne Colleton took a back seat to nobody when it came to nerve.
The glass was empty again. He refilled it. Might as well get drunk, he thought. What else have I got to do? Even if he never saw Anne again, he’d have no trouble getting laid. He knew that. He’d never had any trouble getting laid. Why, then, did he feel like a man whose tongue kept exploring the empty spot where a wisdom tooth had been before the dentist got his forceps on it?
“Dammit, we were two of a kind,” he muttered. “We are two of a kind. She’s just being stupid about the Party, that’s all. She’ll come around.” He nodded. “She gives me half a chance—hell, she gives me even a quarter of a chance—I’ll horn her into coming around.” With better than two glasses of whiskey in him, it not only sounded simple, it sounded inevitable.
Someone knocked on the door. Kimball hurried to open it. “There she is already, by God!” he said happily. Of course she wouldn’t stay away.
But the woman who stood in the hallway was darker and plainer and tireder than Anne Colleton. “You are Mr. Roger Kimball, the naval officer?” she asked.
“That’s right,” he answered. Only after the words were out of his mouth did he realize she had a Yankee accent—she sounded a little like Clarence Potter.
“Oh, good,” she said. “I’m so glad I found you.” As Anne had before, she reached into her purse. And, as Anne had before, she pulled out a pistol. Two bullets had slammed into Roger Kimball’s chest before she said, “My husband was on the Ericsson.” She kept firing till the revolver was empty, but Kimball never heard the last few shots.