Chapter XIX
Sylvia Enos sat in a Charleston, South Carolina, jail cell, wondering what would happen to her next. Looking back on it, she decided she shouldn’t have shot Roger Kimball. Now she would have to pay for what she’d done. Try as she would, though, she couldn’t make herself sorry she’d done it.
She shared the small women’s wing of the Charleston city jail with a couple of drunks and a couple of streetwalkers. They all kept sending her awestruck looks because she was locked up on a murder charge. She hadn’t imagined anything like that. It was funny, if you looked at it the right way.
A matron with a face like a clenched fist came down the hall and stopped in front of Sylvia’s cell. “Your lawyer is here,” she said, and unlocked the door. Then she quickly stepped back, as if afraid Sylvia might overpower her and escape. Sylvia found that pretty funny, too.
Her lawyer was a chubby, white-mustached, very pink man named Bishop Polk Magrath. He insisted that she call him Bish. She’d never called anyone Bish in her life, but didn’t argue. He sat on one side of a table in a tiny visiting room, she on the other. The matron stood close by to make sure they didn’t pass anything back and forth.
“I still don’t understand why you’re helping me,” she said. She’d said that before, and hadn’t got any kind of answer that made sense to her.
Now she did, after a fashion. Magrath’s blue, blue eyes sparkled. “You don’t seem to have realized what a cause célèbre your case has become, ma’am,” he said. “I’ll draw more notice for defending you than I would in ten years of ordinary cases.”
“I don’t see how you’ll draw notice for defending me and losing,” Sylvia said. “I did it.” She hadn’t tried to run after shooting Kimball. She’d given her revolver to the first man who stuck his head out the door of another apartment and waited for the police to come arrest her.
“Let’s just put it like this, Mrs. Enos,” the lawyer said: “There are a good many people in this town who think Mr. Kimball deserved what you gave him, a good many people who aren’t the least bit sorry he’s dead. If we can get enough of them on a jury, you might just see Rhode Island again.”
“Massachusetts,” Sylvia said automatically. She scratched her head. “I don’t follow you at all. Isn’t—wasn’t—Roger Kimball a hero down here for sinking the Ericsson?”
“Oh, he is, ma’am. To some people, he is,” Magrath said. By the expression on the matron’s face, she might well have been one of those people. The lawyer went on, “But he’s not a hero to everybody in the Confederate States, not after what happened last June he’s not.”
“Oh,” Sylvia said softly. At last, a light went on in her head. “Because he was a Freedom Party bigshot, you mean.”
“What a clever lady you are, Mrs. Enos.” Magrath beamed at her. “That’s right. That’s just exactly right. There are people in this country—there are people in this town—who would be happy if the same thing that happened to Roger Kimball would happen to the whole Freedom Party.”
One of those people, whoever they might be, was without a doubt paying Bishop Polk Magrath’s fees. Sylvia certainly wasn’t. She’d spent more than she could afford getting a passport and a one-way ticket down to Charleston. She hadn’t expected she’d be going back to Boston. Maybe she’d been wrong.
“Time’s up for this visit,” the tough-looking matron said. Sylvia obediently got to her feet. The lawyer started to reach across the table to shake hands with her. A glance from the matron stopped him. He contented himself with tipping his derby instead. “Come along,” the matron told Sylvia, and Sylvia came.
Halfway back to her cell, she asked, “Will supper be more of that cornmeal mush?” It didn’t taste like much of anything, but it filled her stomach.
As if she hadn’t spoken, the matron said, “You damnyankees killed my husband and my son, and my brother’s got a hook where his hand used to be.”
“I’m sorry,” Sylvia said. “I haven’t got a brother, and my son’s too young to be a soldier. But the man I shot snuck up on my husband and more than a hundred other sailors after the war was over, and he didn’t just kill them—he murdered them like he’d shot them in the back.”
The matron said nothing more till they got back to Sylvia’s cell. As she locked Sylvia inside once more, she remarked, “Grits for supper again, yes,” and went on her way.
“What’s your lawyer got to say?” one of the streetwalkers called to Sylvia. “A lawyer—God almighty.” She sounded as if she never expected to enjoy a lawyer’s professional services, though a lawyer might enjoy hers.
Two days later, the hard-faced matron marched up to Sylvia’s cell and announced, “You’ve got another visitor.” Disapproval congealed on her like fat in a pan cooling on the stove.
“Is it—Bish?” Sylvia still had to work to say that. The matron shook her head. Sylvia frowned in confusion. Now that Kimball was dead, her lawyer was the only person she knew or even knew of in Charleston. “Who is it, then?”
Through tight lips, the matron said, “Just come on.” Sylvia came. Sitting in an iron cage staled very quickly.
Waiting for her in the visitors’room was a blond woman about her own age whose sleek good looks, coiffure, and clothes all shouted Money! “Mrs. Enos, my name is Anne Colleton.”
That meant nothing to Sylvia—and then, to her dismay, it did. She’d seen the name in a couple of the newspaper stories that talked about Kimball. “You’re one of the people who helped the Freedom Party,” she said. Maybe Bishop Polk Magrath had been talking through that derby of his.
Anne nodded. “I was one of those people, yes, Mrs. Enos. And I was a friend of Roger Kimball’s, too—I was, up till his last day on earth.”
Sylvia heard, or thought—hoped—she heard, a slight stress on the past tense. “Were you?” she asked, with her own slight stress.
Maybe that was approval in Anne Colleton’s eyes. “You listen, don’t you?” the woman from the Confederate States said. “In fact, I’m not telling you any great secret when I say that Roger Kimball and I were more than friends, up till his last day on earth.”
Whatever hope Sylvia had went up in smoke. It hadn’t been approval after all. It must have been well-bred, well-contained fury. “Have you come here to gloat at me in jail, then?” she asked with gloomy near-certainty.
“What?” Anne Colleton stared, then started to laugh. “You don’t understand, then, do you, my dear?” Sylvia shook her head. She only understood that she didn’t understand. Anne’s voice went cold and harsh. “I’ll spell it out for you, in that case. Not too long before you shot him, Roger Kimball tried to take me by force when I told him I didn’t care to be more than his friend any more. He did not succeed, I might add.” She spoke proudly. “I might also add that I came very close to shooting him myself before you got the chance.”
“Oh,” Sylvia whispered. Something more seemed to be called for. She went on, “I’m glad you didn’t. It would have meant I’d spent all that money on my passport and train fare for nothing.”
“We wouldn’t want that, would we?” Anne Colleton said, and sounded as if she meant it. “With any luck at all, Mrs. Enos, the Confederate government or the government of South Carolina will pay your train fare north. Bish Magrath and I will do everything we can to see that that’s what happens.”
“Oh,” Sylvia repeated in a different tone of voice. She’d put her children on the train, too, to distant cousins in Connecticut—distant, but closer than any other relatives she had close by. George, Jr., and Mary Jane had thought it would be a short get-acquainted visit. So had her cousins. Maybe, just maybe, if God and Anne Colleton turned out kind, they’d be right.
“Time’s up,” the matron announced, and even Anne Colleton, who seemed able to outstare the lightning, did not argue with her. Sylvia got to her feet and headed back toward her cell. When she was about halfway there, the matron said, “Some rich folks reckon they can buy their way out of anything.”
I hope this one’s right, Sylvia thought. Saying that out loud didn’t seem to be the best idea she’d ever had.
Anne Colleton did not visit her again. Bishop Polk Magrath did, a couple of times. He didn’t ask many questions; he seemed to come more to cheer her up than for any other reason. She didn’t know how cheerful she should be. She’d gathered Anne Colleton was a power in the land, but how big a power? Sylvia couldn’t find out till she went to court.
She came before a judge two weeks after Anne Colleton visited her. Bish Magrath kept beaming like a grandfather with plenty of candy canes in his pockets for his grandchildren to find. The lawyer at the other table in front of the judge—the district attorney, Sylvia supposed he was—seemed anything but happy. But was that because of the case or because he’d had a fight with his wife before coming here? Sylvia couldn’t tell.
“I understand you have a request before we proceed, Mr. Chesterfield?” the judge asked the district attorney.
“Yes, your Honor, I do,” the lawyer—Chesterfield—said. When he glanced over to Sylvia, he looked as if he’d bitten down hard on a lemon. “May it please the court, your Honor, the state must recognize the extraordinary circumstances that prompted the defendant to act as she has admitted acting. In light of the fact that the decedent did cause the death of the defendant’s husband not during wartime but after he knew combat had ended, the state is willing”—he looked none too willing himself—“to further the cause of international understanding and amity by not pressing charges in this case, provided that the defendant leave the Confederate States on the first available transportation north and solemnly swear never to return to our nation again, on pain of rearrest and the charges’ being reinstituted.”
“How say you, Mr. Magrath?” the judge inquired.
“I am in complete accord with my learned colleague, your Honor,” Magrath said placidly. “I should also like to note for the record that the government of the United States has formally requested clemency for my client from both the government of the Confederate States and the government of the sovereign state of South Carolina. It now rests in your hands, your Honor.”
Things were happening too fast for Sylvia. They weren’t just arranged—they were nailed down tight. “How say you, Mrs. Enos?” the judge asked her. “If set at liberty, will you quit the Confederate States of America, never to return?”
Bish Magrath had to nod before she could stammer, “Y-Yes, sir.”
Bang! Down came the gavel. “So ordered,” the judge declared. “Mrs. Enos, you will be on a northbound train before the sun sets this evening.” Numbly, Sylvia nodded. She had her life back. Now she would have to figure out what to do with it.
Lieutenant Lije Jenkins sorted through the mail that had come into the barrel unit at Fort Leavenworth. He held out an envelope to Irving Morrell. “Letter from Philadelphia for you, Colonel.”
“War Department?” Morrell asked, not that he had much doubt. Jenkins nodded. Morrell took the envelope. “Well, let’s see what kind of birthday present they have for me today.” His birthday still lay a month away, but he thought about it more than he had before he got married, because Agnes’ came only a week afterwards. Have to get into Leavenworth and do some shopping for her, he thought, and laughed under his breath. Amazing, the small domestic things in which he took pleasure these days because he was doing them for the woman he loved.
He opened the envelope and unfolded the letter it held. As his eyes went back and forth across the typewritten page, he stiffened. Colonel Morrell, the letter read, Having completed work on the test vehicle for a new-model barrel and having also completed evaluation of optimum strategic utilization of barrels irregardless of model, you are ordered to terminate the program you now head at Fort Leavenworth and to report to the War Department Personnel Office here in Philadelphia no later than 1 March 1923 for reassignment. Each day earlier than the aforesaid date for the closure of the project will be greatly appreciated due to reduced expenditures as a result thereof.
Only after he’d gone through the letter twice did he notice who had signed it: Lieutenant Colonel John Abell, the adjutant to General Hunter Liggett, who’d replaced Leonard Wood as U.S. Army Chief of Staff a few months into President Sinclair’s administration.
“Well, well,” Morrell said softly. A pigeon had come home to roost. He’d spent some time as a General Staff officer during the Great War, and had not got on well with John Abell. Abell was a brilliant man, everything a military administrator should be and then some. Morrell had always made it plain he would sooner have been out in the field fighting. When he’d got out in the field, he’d smashed the enemy. And now he was going to pay for it.
“Something wrong, sir?” Lieutenant Jenkins asked.
“No good deed goes unpunished,” Morrell answered.
“Sir?” Jenkins said. Morrell handed him the letter. He read it, then stared at his superior. “Close down the Barrel Works? They can’t do that!”
“They can. They are. Whether they ought to or not is a different question, but not one that’s mine to answer,” Morrell said. “You see why they’re doing it—they need to save money.” He saw no point to saying anything about John Abell. If personal animosity had dictated where the savings would come from…If that had happened, it wouldn’t be the first time.
“But you haven’t finished your work with the test model, sir,” Jenkins protested.
“In a way, I have,” Morrell told him. “I’ve done about everything I can do with one machine. If they’d coughed up the money for more than one, I could have done a lot more than I did. I just wish they were passing the Barrel Works on to someone else instead of closing it down.”
“Yes, sir!” Jenkins’ face was red with anger. “They might as well be telling us we’ve wasted all the time and work we put in here.” He didn’t think about what he would do next himself. In Morrell’s book, that made him a good soldier.
“That’s probably what they think,” Morrell told him. He remembered how Abell had looked at him during the war when he’d agreed with Custer that the barrel doctrine the General Staff had developed needed changing. He might have been an atheist ripping into Holy Writ.
That he’d been right hadn’t made things better. It might have made things worse.
“What are you going to do?” Jenkins asked.
“Obey the order,” Morrell said with a sigh. “What else can I do? They have the test model. They have my reports. They can go on from there. Things won’t disappear. They’ll just stop for a while.” That might prove as bad, but he didn’t care to dwell on such gloomy possibilities.
He left the office to break the news to the men who had worked so hard for so long with the test model. The first one he ran into was Sergeant Michael Pound. “What’s the matter, sir?” the barrel gunner asked. “You look ready to chew bolts and spit rivets.”
“We’re out of business, that’s what,” Morrell said, and went on to explain how and why—or what he understood of why—they were out of business.
Pound frowned. With his thick body, wide shoulders, and broad face, he could easily have looked like a lout. He didn’t; his features were clever and expressive. “That’s—very shortsighted, isn’t it, sir?” he said when Morrell had finished. “The point is to stay ahead of everybody else, after all. How are we going to do that if we drop out of the race?”
“I don’t know the answer to that question, Sergeant,” Morrell replied. “I do know I’ve received a legal order to shut down the Barrel Works and report to Philadelphia once I’ve done it. I have to obey that order.”
“Yes, sir, I understand,” Pound said. “I hope you raise some hell when you get to Philadelphia, though.”
“I intend to try, anyhow,” Morrell said. “How much good that will do, God only knows. Now—what about you, Sergeant? Do you have any new assignment in mind? I’ll do what I can to help you get it.”
“That’s very kind of you, sir.” Pound scratched his brown mustache as he thought. “I suppose I’d better go back to the regular artillery, sir. Whether we have barrels or not, we’ll always need guns.”
“That’s true. It’s a sensible choice,” Morrell said. He got the idea that most of Pound’s choices were sensible. “I’ll see what I can arrange. I hate to say it, but it’s liable to be a better choice than staying in barrels, the way things are.”
“If we do get in trouble again, we’ll wish we’d done more now,” Pound said with a massive shrug. “We’ll all be running around trying to do what we should have done in years in a few weeks.”
That was also likely to be true. Trying not to dwell on how likely it was, Morrell slapped Sergeant Pound on the shoulder and went on to find the rest of the test model’s crew. They took the news hard, too. Then he had to break it to the crews of the other barrels, the Great War machines that also tested tactics, and to the mechanics who kept all the big, complex machines running. Little by little, he realized what a mountain of paperwork he’d have to climb by the first of March.
After he’d spread the word to the soldiers it affected, he went to tell the other person who needed to know: his wife. He found Agnes ironing clothes. “What are you doing here at this hour of the morning?” she said in surprise. Something in her smile as he kissed her told him what she hoped he was there for.
But he hadn’t come home for that, however much he would have enjoyed it. He told her why he had come home. The explanation came out smooth as if he’d rehearsed it. As a matter of fact, he had rehearsed it, going over it again and again with his men.
Agnes pursed her lips. She was an Army wife, and had taken on many of the attitudes of her officer husband (she’d probably had some of those attitudes already, her first husband also being a soldier). She said, “They should be giving you all the tools you need to do the job right, not taking away the ones they did let you have.”
“You know I feel the same way about it, honey, but I can’t do anything about it except close down the Barrel Works, pack my bags, and hop on the train for Philadelphia. That means you get to hop on the train for Philadelphia, too.”
Her eyes widened. “I hadn’t thought of that,” she said. “I’ve never been to Philadelphia, even to visit. Now we’ll be living there, won’t we?”
“Unless they ever really get around to moving the War Department back to Washington,” Morrell answered. “They’ve been talking about it ever since the end of the war, but I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“Philadelphia,” Agnes said, her eyes far away. “What’s it like, living in Philadelphia?”
“Crowded,” he said. “Expensive. The air is full of soot and smoke all the time. It’s a big city. I don’t much like big cities.”
Agnes smiled. “I’ve noticed.”
“I figured you had.” Morrell smiled, too, but the smile slid into a grimace. “Just have to make the best of it, I suppose.”
“Philadelphia,” Agnes repeated. He wondered if she’d even heard him. “What will it be like in Philadelphia?”
As she’d come to know him, he’d also come to know her. At least half of what that question meant was, Will I measure up to the competition? Morrell smiled again. He was certain of the answer, and gave it: “Sweetheart, you’ll knock ’em dead.”
One of his wife’s hands flew to her hair, patting it into place or maybe the outward expression of an imagined new style. “You say sweet things,” she told him.
“Only when I mean them,” he said. “Of course, when I’m talking about you, I mean them all the time.”
She stepped up, hugged him, and kissed him. His arms tightened around her. One thing might have led to another—except that, with regret, he broke off the embrace. Agnes looked disappointed; yes, she’d been ready for more. But she didn’t frown for long. “You’re going to have a lot of work to do,” she said, proving she was indeed an Army wife.
Morrell nodded. “I sure am. I haven’t even told the base commandant about my orders yet—though I suppose a copy will have gone to him, too.” He hugged Agnes again, briefly now. “You’re really being a brick about this, honey.”
“I think they’re making a big mistake,” she answered. “But you’ve got your orders, and you’ve got to follow them.”
You’ve got your orders, and you’ve got to follow them. That was the way the Army worked, all right. Morrell had trouble imagining it working any other way. “Couldn’t have put it better myself,” he said. He gave Agnes one more kiss, then turned to go. “The work won’t do itself, however much I wish it would.”
“All right,” his wife said. “I’ll see you tonight, then.”
He smiled at the promise in her voice. He started looking ahead toward Philadelphia, too. Whatever they set him to doing, he’d do it as well as he knew how. He’d do it well, period; he had a good notion of his own ability. And performing well with important people watching did have certain advantages. With a little luck, he’d be wearing stars on his shoulders instead of eagles before too long.
He wouldn’t be so easy to move around like a pawn on a chess board then, not with general’s rank he wouldn’t. As a matter of fact, he’d be able to do some maneuvering of his own once he had general’s rank. Maybe John Abell thought he’d done Morrell’s career a bad turn. Morrell’s smile was predatory. Anyone who thought that about him had another think coming.
Jefferson Pinkard walked toward the livery stable. “Freedom!” he called to other men heading the same way.
“Freedom!” The greeting came back loud and clear as it had before the stalwarts went out to the Alabama State Fairgrounds when President Hampton came to Birmingham. The Freedom Party had raised a lot more hell than anybody—anybody except Grady Calkins, anyhow—expected.
And now the price of that hell was showing. Jeff called “Freedom!” a couple more times before he went into the stable, but only a couple more times. The building had no trouble holding meetings these days. A lot of people who had been in the Party—people who’d put on white and butternut and banged heads, too—weren’t any more. A lot of people who had been in the Party weren’t admitting it any more, either.
Fair-weather friends, Pinkard thought scornfully. He still thought most of the same things were wrong with the Confederate States now as had been wrong with the country before Wade Hampton V got shot. He had trouble understanding why more people didn’t feel the same way.
Up at the front of the stable, Caleb Briggs paced back and forth, pausing every so often to cough. Even by lamplight, the tough little dentist’s color wasn’t good. Pinkard wondered how long he could last, especially burning himself at both ends as he did. The damnyankees hadn’t killed him all at once when they gassed him. They were doing it an inch at a time, giving him years full of hell before they put him in his grave. To Jeff’s way of thinking, that was worse.
After a while, Briggs didn’t seem able to stand waiting any longer. “Come on, y’all, move up to the front,” he rasped. “Talking’s hard enough for me; I’ll be goddamned if I’m gonna shout when I don’t have to. And there’s room. Wish to Christ there wasn’t, but there is.”
A year before, the livery stable would have been packed. Men would have been milling around outside. Now there were more folding chairs and hay bales set out than people to sit on them. Jeff plopped his bottom down onto a chair in the second row. He could have sat in the first row—plenty of chairs to take—but memories of getting called on in school made him stay less conspicuous.
Caleb Briggs looked over the house. He pursed his lips, coughed again, and began: “Well, we’re still here, boys.” Maybe he gave a dry chuckle then, or maybe it was just another cough.
“Freedom!” Jefferson Pinkard called, along with his comrades.
“Freedom!” Briggs echoed. It sounded like a dying echo, too, enough so to send a chill through Jeff. But the dentist picked up spirit as he went on, “We are still here, dammit, and we aren’t going to go away, either, no matter how much the niggers and the folks in striped trousers and top hats and the generals in the War Department wish we would. We’re here for the long haul, and we’re going to win.”
“Freedom!” The shout was louder this time, stronger. Pinkard felt a little of the jolt of energy he always got from hearing Jake Featherston speak. He wondered if Caleb Briggs would last long enough to see the Freedom Party win. He had his doubts, even if victory came soon—and it wouldn’t, dammit.
But Briggs was undeterred. He’d been a soldier, and pulled his weight like a soldier. “What we have to do now is make it through the hard times,” he said. “They aren’t over yet. They won’t be over for a while. It’ll be God’s own miracle if we don’t lose seats in Congress this fall. What we’ve got to do is try and hold on to as many as we can, so we don’t look like we’re going down the toilet in front of the whole damn country. And what we’ve got to do right here in Birmingham is make sure we send Barney Stevens back to Richmond in November.”
Jeff clapped his hands. He wanted to see Stevens sent back to Richmond to keep the Freedom Party’s seat there. He also wanted Stevens in Richmond because the Congressman was a rough customer whom he didn’t particularly want coming home to Birmingham.
“We hang tough,” Briggs was saying. “We try not to lose too much here in 1923, and we try to build up toward 1925 and especially 1927, when we vote for president again. Rome wasn’t built in a day. The Confederate States won’t be rebuilt in a day, either. But we will build our country back up, we will shove our niggers back down where they belong, and we—the Freedom Party—will be the ones who do that. So help me God, we will.”
“Freedom!” Jeff yelled, along with his friends. The cry echoed from the roof, almost as it had in the days when the Party was swelling.
“One more thing, and then I’m through,” Briggs said. “We got as far as we did by standing up and fighting for what we know is right. We’re going to go right on fighting. Don’t you have any doubts about that. We may pick our spots a little tighter than we did before, but we’ll put on the white and butternut whenever we see the need.”
Pinkard whooped. The chance to get out there and smash a few heads was one of the reasons he’d joined the Freedom Party. A good many other men cheered Caleb Briggs, too. But Jeff couldn’t help noticing how many others sat silent.
Then he thought, Grady Calkins would have cheered. He shook his head, rejecting the comparison and all it implied. Calkins had been a madman. Every party had some. But Jeff wasn’t crazy. Caleb Briggs wasn’t crazy. And Jake Featherston sure as hell wasn’t crazy.
Still, the idea left him uneasy. He didn’t sit around and yarn and drink homemade whiskey, as he usually did after the business part of a meeting wound down. Instead, glum and oddly dissatisfied, he headed for the door. One of the guards there caught his eye. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a dollar, and tossed the banknote into the bucket at the guard’s feet. “Thank you kindly, Jeff,” the bruiser said. “Party needs every penny it can get its hands on these days.”
“I know, Tim,” Pinkard answered. He laughed. “And think—just last year, we had more millions than you can shake a stick at.” It wasn’t really funny, not for the Freedom Party. A sound currency had done as much to squeeze folks out of the Party as had Wade Hampton’s assassination. Real money gave people one less thing to be angry about, and anger was the gasoline that fueled the Party’s engine.
It had started to drizzle. Jeff jammed his cap down low on his head and tugged up his coat collar. He was angry, by God—angry about having to wait for the trolley in the rain. The trolley got there late, too, which did nothing to improve his mood. He threw five pennies in the fare box (bronze coins were returning faster than silver) and rode out to the Sloss Works company housing.
A woman was waiting at the trolley stop. Pinkard thought she would get on after he got off. When she didn’t, he gave a mental shrug and started off toward his cottage. The trolleyman clanged his bell. The car rattled down the tracks.
“Jeff?” the woman called.
Pinkard stopped—froze, in fact. “Emily,” he whispered, and slowly turned. In the darkness and drizzle, he hadn’t recognized her, but he would have known her voice anywhere. His own roughened as he went on, “What the devil are you doing here?”
“Waiting for you,” she answered. Her own tone was sharp: “I sure enough knew what you’d be doing this night of the week, didn’t I? I just got here myself, though—didn’t expect you back quite so soon. Things ain’t so lively at the Party nowadays?”
“None of your business—you made sure of that, by God,” Jeff said. “What do you want with me, anyway, you…tramp?” He could have used a stronger word, and nearly had.
“Wanted to see how you were,” Emily answered. “Wanted to see what you were up to.” She sighed and shook her head. “Not like you cared enough about me to find out any of that.”
“After what you done, why should I care?” he said. “You’re lucky I don’t kick you down the street.” Had he had some whiskey in him, he thought he would have done it.
“I got lonesome,” she said. “I got lonesome when you was in the Army, and I got lonesome when you started caring more about the Freedom Party than you did about me. I don’t like being lonesome, so I went and did something about it.”
She didn’t mean lonesome. She meant horny. Pinkard knew that. She’d been fine as long as he gave her everything she needed. When he stopped, she’d gone out and taken what she needed, as a man with a frigid wife might have done. It would have been all right in a man. In a woman…Pinkard shook his head. No man could put up with what she’d done, not if he wanted to stay a man.
Emily said, “I was almost hoping I wouldn’t find you here, on account of that’d mean you were back at the house, not at that stinking livery stable. It’d mean you’d wised up and gotten out of the Freedom Party. But if what happened to President Hampton didn’t open your eyes, I reckon nothin’ ever will.”
She’d hoped he’d given up the Party? Did that mean she wanted him back, or would have wanted him back? Did he want her back? She was explosive between the sheets. He knew that. But how would he keep from thinking he wasn’t the only man she’d taken to bed? How would he keep from thinking she wasn’t taking some other man to bed along with him? He shook his head again. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t.
To keep from thinking about that now, he asked, “What are you doing these days?”
“Working in a textile mill,” she answered with a shrug. “It ain’t a lot of money, but I don’t need a lot, so I get by. I get lonesome sometimes, though.”
She meant horny again. “Bet you can find plenty of fellows if you do.” Jeff didn’t try to keep the scorn from his voice.
“Of course I can. A woman always can.” Emily sounded scornful, too, and weary, so weary. “Harder to find anybody who cares about more than that, though.”
“Too bad,” Jeff said harshly. “Too damn bad.”
Emily sighed. “I don’t know why I bothered doing this. Just wasted my time. Reckon I was hoping you’d changed—changed back into the fellow I knew before the war.”
“He’s dead,” Pinkard said. “The damnyankees killed him, and the niggers killed him, and you helped kill him, too. The country he lived in is dead along with him. He ain’t ever coming back. Maybe the country we had back then will. That’s what the Freedom Party is all about.”
“To hell with the Freedom Party!” Emily said furiously. A distant street lamp showed tears running down her cheeks. “And to hell with you, too, Jefferson Davis Pinkard.”
“Go on, get out of here. Go peddle your tail somewhere else, or I’ll give you what I gave you before, only more of it.” Jeff made a fist and raised his arm. “I sure as hell don’t need you. I don’t need anybody, by God. As long as I’ve got the Party, that’s everything I need in the whole wide world.”
Emily turned away, her shoulders slumping. She was crying harder now, crying like a little lost child. Jeff headed home, a smile on his face now in spite of the chilly drizzle. Why not? He’d won. He knew damn well he’d won.
Chester Martin liked playing football. He liked it in the snow, and he liked it here in springtime, too. In that, he was very little different from anybody else in the United States. In New England and New York, a few people still enjoyed baseball, a game that had briefly flourished in the couple of decades before the War of Secession. Even there, though, football was king.
He pulled on his leather helmet. Being a burly steelworker, he played in the line on offense and defense. In the trenches, people called that these days. The comparison wasn’t far-fetched. Plenty of times, he’d wished for a bayoneted rifle to hold off whatever charging rhinoceros the other team aimed at him. And not a game went by when he didn’t wish he were wearing a green-gray steel pot on his head instead of mere leather.
Albert Bauer played beside him in the line. Bauer pointed to their opponents, a team of bruisers in dark blue wool shirts. “Here we go, Chester,” he said. “Legal revenge for everything the police have given us since the end of the war—and before that, too.”
“You don’t need to fire me up, Al. I’m ready now.” Martin looked down at his own shirt, which was bright red. “We licked ’em in the presidential election, and we licked ’em again in the Congressional election last year, and we’ve licked ’em a few times on the gridiron, too. I figure we can do it again.”
“That’s the proletarian spirit,” Bauer said. “Don’t take them lightly, though. The enemies of progress fight hard, even if their cause is doomed. They will lose the war. They can win the battles.”
On one sideline, steelworkers’ friends and families gathered to cheer their gladiators. Sue Martin waved to Chester. He waved back. On the other sideline stood friends and relatives of the cops. A stranger couldn’t have guessed which side was which. Seeing how ordinary policemen’s families were never ceased to surprise Martin.
The two referees were newspapermen; they’d covered both sides, and both sides trusted, or rather distrusted, them about evenly. They waved the team captains over to them and flipped a silver dollar. The cop let out a happy little grunt; he’d guessed right. “Give us the ball,” he said.
“Yeah, give it to ’em in the balls,” a steelworker said. He grinned, but it was a sharp-toothed sort of grin.
Martin held the ball upright with his finger as the kicker booted it down the field—the park, actually—toward the cops. Then he was on his feet and running as hard as he could. A policeman ran toward him, yelling in a language that didn’t sound like English. Martin lowered a shoulder and knocked him sprawling. The first hit always felt good. He banged into a couple of other policemen before two of his teammates brought down the fellow with the ball.
When he lined up at right tackle, the cop playing opposite him looked familiar. “Have I seen you someplace before?” Martin asked.
Before the cop could answer, the center snapped the ball back to the quarterback, who stood waiting for it. The cop gave Martin a body block that took him out of the play, though the run gained only a yard or two. Then he helped him up. “I dunno. I been playing football for a while, same as most guys.”
“I don’t think that’s it,” Martin said. “Where’d you fight in the war?”
Another play intervened. This time, Martin spun past the blocker in dark blue and flattened the fullback behind the line of scrimmage. The fullback accused him of unsavory practices. He laughed.
“I was in Kentucky with the First Army—Custer’s men,” the cop answered with no small pride as they took their places once more. “Then I got sent to Utah, to put down the Mormon uprising. After that, I fought in Arkansas. How about you, bud?”
Before Martin could answer, the ball was snapped again. The quarterback booted it away in a quick kick. It rolled dead deep in the steelworkers’ territory. Now it would be Martin’s turn to try to hold the cop away from the ball carrier.
“Me?” he said as he took his stance. “I was in Virginia the whole time—on the Roanoke front till I got wounded, then up in the north.”
The cop charged at him. Martin managed to hold his own. Even while he held the policeman at bay, he was puzzled. He was almost sure he’d seen the broken-nosed face in front of him twisted with fury while the policeman aimed a gun at…at…
He laughed. “What’s funny?” the cop asked.
“I’ll tell you what’s funny,” Martin answered. “You tried to shoot me a couple-three years ago, I think.”
“Oh.” The policeman frowned. Then he also started to laugh. “You should have been wearing a goddamn red shirt then, too. I would have hit what I was aiming at.”
The ball flew back to the steelworkers’ quarterback. He retreated till he stood more than five yards behind the line, then let fly with a forward pass. An end caught it and ran another ten yards before being dragged down from behind.
One more pass a couple of plays later moved the ball deep into the cops’ territory. From there, the steelworkers pounded it into the end zone, running straight at their opponents and defying them to bring down the ball carrier. They were, Martin realized as he took the measure of the opposition, a little heavier and bigger and a little younger than their opponents. He smiled, thinking they would have an easy game and punish the policemen who had given them so much trouble on the picket line.
On the try for the point after the touchdown, he knocked the cop across from him over on his back. The steelworkers’ kicker drop-kicked the ball through the uprights for the extra point.
“Smash ’em!” Sue yelled as the steelworkers trudged back to their side of the field for the kickoff.
“Of course we’ll smash ’em!” Chester Martin yelled back. One of the referees tossed him the ball. He knelt down and held it for the kicker to send it down the field to the policemen. He didn’t think he was bragging or doing anything but telling the truth. How could the cops compete against bigger, younger men?
Before long, he found out. One of the halfbacks on the policemen’s team was nothing special to look out: a skinny little fellow with a blond Kaiser Bill mustache. But when he got the ball, that scrawny halfback was quick as a lizard and twisty as a snake. He did most of the work on the cops’ drive, and capped it by sprinting into the end zone on a pretty fifteen-yard run.
Martin’s tongue was hanging out from chasing him. “Jesus,” he panted as both sides lined up for the cops’ try for the point after touchdown. “If I had a gun right now, I wouldn’t shoot you.” He nodded to the policeman who’d fired during the labor unrest. “I’d shoot that miserable son of a bitch instead. He’s trying to give me a heart attack.”
“Yeah, Matt’s dangerous,” the cop agreed. “You try taking a shot at him, I figure it’s about even money he dodges the bullet.”
“Maybe,” Martin said. “Have to bring along a machine gun, then, and see if he can dodge that.” The cop chuckled and nodded. They both understood the weapons of war, even if they’d stood on opposite sides of the barricade. The policemen’s drop-kick was also good, and knotted the game.
It swayed back and forth all afternoon. The steelworkers had size and youth and a quarterback who threw enough to keep the policemen from doing nothing but storming forward to stop the run. The cops had nothing but Matt. All by himself, he kept them in the game, tackling pass receivers on defense and running like the wind whenever the policemen had the ball. He never wore down. Martin started to wonder whether he was human or mechanical. However many times he got smashed to the dirt, he rose again as if nothing had happened. Even his mustache stayed unruffled, which made Chester all the more suspicious.
In the end, the steelworkers won, 27–23. Martin made himself a minor hero, falling on a fumble in the closing moments to ensure that the cops couldn’t come back. After shaking hands with the policemen, he limped off the field, covered in glory and sweat and mud and bruises. He still had all his front teeth, which made him unusual on the team.
He took off his helmet and ran a hand through his damp, matted hair. “Whew!” he said. “This is supposed to be fun, they tell me. I feel like I’ve been slammed by a triphammer a couple dozen times.”
His sister gave him a hug. “You were wonderful, Chester.” She wrinkled her nose. “You don’t smell so wonderful, though.”
“If you were out there, you wouldn’t smell so wonderful, either,” Martin retorted. He stretched. It hurt.
His father said, “It’s a different game nowadays, with all this throwing. Might as well be baseball, if you ask me. When I was playing, back around the time you were born, we just ran. That was a real man’s game, if you ask me.”
“Sure it was, Pa,” Chester said. “Nobody had helmets then, and—”
“Nobody did,” Stephen Douglas Martin broke in.
“Nobody had helmets,” Martin repeated, “and the ball was solid steel, and the field was a mile and a half long and half a mile wide and uphill both ways, too, and everybody on the other side was always ten feet tall and weighed seven hundred pounds, and even dead men had to stay in the game—and run the ball, too. That’s how they played it in the old days.”
“And you are a heartless whippersnapper, and I ought to turn you over my knee and whip you black and blue,” his father said, rolling his eyes. “But you’re already black and blue, I expect. And you’re wrong—dead men didn’t have to stay in. They changed that rule in my father’s day.”
Laughing, they helped Sue and Louisa Martin spread out the picnic feast that had come along in a wicker basket. Steelworkers and policemen wandered back and forth, talking about the game and sharing food and beer and other potables. It was as if the two groups had never clashed anywhere save in a friendly game of football.
Chester gnawed a drumstick. When Matt, the fast halfback on the policemen’s team, walked by, Martin held up a bottle of beer to get him to stop. The lure worked as well as a worm would have with a trout. “Thanks,” Matt said, and sat down beside him. “I’d sure as the devil sooner drink with you than have you jump on my kidneys like you were doing all day long.”
“Like heck I was.” Martin had finally got used to watching his language again when his mother and sister were around. “Most of the time, I was flat on my fanny watching you run by.”
They bantered back and forth, each making the other out to be a better football player than he really was. Then Matt got up and headed off to chin with somebody else, just as if he’d never clubbed a striking steelworker in all his born days. And Martin waved when he went, just as if he’d never kicked a cop. Everything in the park was peaceful and friendly. Chester Martin liked that fine.
It couldn’t be plainer that no Negro ever born has got what it takes to be a true citizen of the Confederate States of America. Jake Featherston’s pen raced across the page. One of those days, Over Open Sights would be done, and everyone in the country would realize he’d been telling the truth all along.
Anyone with half an eye to see can understand the reasons for this. They are—Before Jake could set down what they were, his secretary came back into his inner office. “What do you want, Lulu?” he growled; like any writer, he hated interruptions.
“Someone to see you, Mr. Featherston,” she said.
“Who is it?” he asked. “I don’t want to see any reporters right now.” Fewer reporters wanted to see him these days, too. That worried him, but not enough to make him feel friendly right this second.
“It’s not a reporter, sir,” Lulu answered. “It’s General Jeb Stuart, Jr.”
“What?” Jake had trouble believing his ears. As far as he was concerned, Jeb Stuart, Jr., was the author of all his troubles. Who else had made sure he would stay a sergeant as long as he stayed in the Army? Jeb Stuart, Jr., blamed him for the death of Jeb Stuart III. Jake blamed Jeb Stuart, Jr., for suppressing an investigation that might have given warning of the great Red uprising. And now the general wanted to see him? Slowly, Jake said, “Well, I reckon you can bring him on in.”
Jeb Stuart, Jr., was in his late fifties. He looked very much like an older version of his handsome son, save that he wore a neat gray chin beard rather than the little strip of hair under the lower lip Jeb Stuart III had affected. After cautious greetings, Stuart said, “You’re probably wondering why I’ve called on you now, after pretending for so long that you and the Freedom Party and all the insults you’ve thrown at me don’t exist.”
Jake did his best to sound dry: “I’d be a liar if I said it hadn’t crossed my mind—and I’m no liar.”
“You say that. I wonder if even you believe it.” Stuart looked at him. No—Stuart looked through him. He’d had upper-crust Confederate officers give him that look a great many times. It showed without words that they relegated him to the outer darkness: he wasn’t quite a nigger in their eyes, but he might as well have been.
It also made Featherston want to punch those upper-crust Confederates right in the face. “You’ve got anything to say, say it and then get the hell out,” he snapped. “Otherwise, just get the hell out.”
“I intend to say it. You needn’t worry about that,” Jeb Stuart, Jr., replied. “I came to say good-bye.”
“Good-bye?” Jake echoed. “Why? Are you leaving? If you are, it’s about ten years too late, but good riddance anyway. I’m sure as the devil not going anywhere.”
To his surprise, Stuart smiled. “I know you’re not. You’re not going anywhere at all in the Confederate States of America, not in politics, not any more you’re not. And so, Sergeant Featherston”—he laced the title with contempt—“good-bye.” He waved, a delicate fluttering of the fingers.
Jake laughed in his face. “Go ahead and dream, General.” He showed what he thought of Stuart’s title, too. “You fancy-pants boys won’t be rid of me that easy.” He couldn’t help a nasty stab of fear, though. Nothing had gone right for him or the Freedom Party since Grady Calkins took a Tredegar out to the Alabama State Fairgrounds and shot down Wade Hampton V.
Stuart might have picked his pocket for that very thought. “People know what the Freedom Party is now, Featherston: a pack of murdering ruffians. They’ll run your henchmen out of Congress in a few months, and you’ll never, ever be president of the Confederate States. And for that, believe me, I get down on my knees and thank God.”
“Go ahead and laugh,” Featherston said. “The fellow who laughs last laughs best, or that’s what they say. I fought the damnyankees till I couldn’t fight any more, and I reckon I’ll keep on fighting the traitors here the same way.” Not for the life of him would he let Jeb Stuart, Jr., see how closely his words reflected Jake’s own nightmares.
“There are no traitors, damn you,” Stuart said.
“Hell there aren’t,” Featherston returned. “I’m sitting across the desk from one. God damn you, that nigger Pompey, your son’s body servant, was as Red as he was black. They were going to take him away and grill him, but your precious brat didn’t want ’em to, and they didn’t. Who stopped ’em? You stopped ’em, that’s who. If that doesn’t make you a traitor, what the hell are you?”
“A man who made a mistake,” Stuart answered. “I don’t suppose you’ve ever made a mistake, Featherston?”
“Not one that big, by Jesus,” Jake said.
Stuart startled him again, this time by nodding. “It couldn’t have been much bigger, could it? It ended up costing me the life of my only son.”
“It cost a lot more than that,” Featherston said. “It cost thousands dead, by God. If any one thing cost us the war, that was it. And all you do is think about yourself. I reckon I ought to be surprised, but I ain’t.”
“You don’t know what I think, so don’t put words in my mouth,” Jeb Stuart, Jr., said. Slowly, sadly, he shook his head. “I blamed you for my son’s death, you know.”
“I never would have guessed,” Jake said with a fine sardonic sneer. “That’s why I spent the next year and however long commanding a battery and staying a sergeant. I could have been in the Army for the next five wars—hell, the next ten wars—and I never would’ve had more than three stripes. Thank you very kindly, General goddamn Stuart, sir.”
He wanted to fight with Stuart. He would have loved to spring out of his chair, smash the general to the floor, and stomp him. Every muscle quivered. Give me an excuse, he said silently. Come on, you son of a bitch. Give me even a piece of an excuse.
But Stuart only looked sad. “And that was the other half of my mistake. Yes, I blocked your promotion. It seemed the right thing to do at the time, but it turned out wrong, so wrong. If you’d ended the war a lieutenant or a captain, would you ever have done what you did with—and to—the Freedom Party?”
Featherston stared at him. That question had never crossed his mind. He tried to imagine himself without the smoldering resentment he’d carried since 1916. For the life of him, he couldn’t. That endless burning inside was as much a part of him as his fingers.
He said, “It’s a little f*cking late to worry about that now, don’t you reckon?”
“I do. I certainly do.” Stuart got to his feet. “And it’s a little f*cking late to worry about you, Featherston. You’re yesterday’s news, and you won’t be tomorrow’s. You don’t need to get up for me.” Jake hadn’t been about to get up for him, as he must have known. “I can find my own way out.”
“Don’t come back, either,” Jake snarled.
Leaving the inner office, Jeb Stuart, Jr., got the last word: “I wish you the same.” He closed the door behind him.
With another snarl, this one wordless, Jake snatched up his pen and began to write furiously. He filled two pages in Over Open Sights in something less than half an hour. But even venting his anger through the growing book was not enough to satisfy him. He slammed his pad shut, threw it into his desk, and locked the drawer that held it. Until he was ready for it to see the light of day, it wouldn’t.
He sprang up and paced the inner office like a caged wolf. The Party would lose ground when elections came, and they were only four months away. He saw no way around it. The trick was going to be holding as much as he could—and making people think the Freedom Party would be a force to reckon with in elections after 1923. He’d known it wouldn’t be easy long before General Stuart stopped by to gloat.
He wished he could talk with Roger Kimball. But Kimball was dead, and the damnyankee woman who’d murdered him had got off scot-free. That was one more on the list he’d already started compiling against President Mitchel. “Go ahead, kiss the USA’s ass,” he muttered.
He wished he could talk with Anne Colleton, too. He valued her money, he valued her sense of theatrics, and he valued her brains. But she didn’t value him or the Freedom Party any more. Of all the defections he’d had to endure over the past year, hers might have hurt most.
Since he couldn’t talk with either of them, he telephoned Ferdinand Koenig. “Jeb Stuart, Jr.?” his former running mate exclaimed. “Well, isn’t that a kick in the head? Stopped by to gloat, you say?”
“That’s just what he did,” Jake answered. “Said the Party was as good as dead and buried, God damn him to hell.”
“Don’t take it too much to heart,” Koenig said. “If he’s as right about that as he was during the war, we’re in fine shape.”
“Yeah!” Featherston said gratefully; he hadn’t thought of it like that. “You’ve got a good way of looking at things, Ferd.”
“Don’t reckon you’ll let us down, Sarge,” Koenig answered. “I remember where we were back in 1917, and I can see where we are now. Maybe we haven’t climbed all the way to the top of the mountain, but we’ll get there.”
Thousands of Party stalwarts might—would—have said the same thing. But Jake set no special stock in what stalwarts said. They weren’t stalwarts because they were long on brains. They were stalwarts because they were long on muscle and short on temper. Ferdinand Koenig was different. He not only had good sense, he wasn’t embarrassed about showing it.
“Of course we’ll get there,” Jake said, sounding more confident than he felt. “Just have to come through this November without getting skinned.”
“Figure we will?” Koenig asked.
“That’s the question, all right,” Jake allowed. He let out a long, slow sigh. “We’ll get hurt some. We’ll have to put the best face on it we can, and then we’ll have to start building toward 1925. We can’t afford to waste a minute there. I only hope to God we don’t lose so much, people won’t take us serious any more.” With Kimball dead and Anne Colleton gone, Ferdinand Koenig was the only one to whom he would have said even so much.
Koenig answered, “You never can tell, Sarge. Folks don’t think we matter so much now that money doesn’t burn a hole in their pockets if they leave it in there more than a minute and a half, but who knows how long that’ll last? Who knows what all’s liable to go wrong between now and 1925?”
“That’s right,” Jake said, smiling for the first time since Jeb Stuart, Jr., had left. “That’s just right. With the Whigs running things, they will go wrong, sure as the sun comes up tomorrow.” He hung up feeling better, but only for a little while. Would anything be left of the Freedom Party when a chance to rule came round at last?
“Mama!” Clara Jacobs screeched from what had been the storeroom. “Little Armstrong just tore up the picture I was drawing!”
She was almost four, more than twice the age of her little nephew. But Armstrong Grimes, even as a toddler, gave every sign of being hell on wheels. He takes after Edna, Nellie thought. I bet Merle Grimes was a nice man even when he was a little boy. She had such a good opinion of almost no one else in the male half of the human race; the more she got to know her son-in-law, the more he impressed her.
Fortunately, the coffeehouse was almost empty. She could hurry back to the old storeroom and mete out punishment. Armstrong hadn’t just torn up Clara’s picture; he’d made a snowstorm of pieces out of it. He was happily sticking one of those pieces in his mouth when Nellie yanked it away from him, upended him over her knee, and walloped his backside. “No, no!” she shouted. “Mustn’t tear up things that don’t belong to you!”
Her grandson howled. Since he was wearing a diaper that shielded his bottom, Nellie knew she wasn’t hurting him much. The spanking made an impressive amount of noise, though, as did her yelling.
“Now,” she said, “are you going to do that any more?”
“No,” little Armstrong answered. Nellie wiped his nose, which was dripping yellowish snot. She didn’t believe him. For one thing, he was heading toward the age where he said no every other time he opened his mouth. For another, a toddler’s promise lasted only till he forgot he’d made it, which meant anywhere from two minutes to, in extraordinary circumstances, an hour or so.
“You be good, you hear me?” Nellie said.
“No,” Armstrong Grimes answered. That was neither defiance nor ignorance, only the first thing that came out of his mouth.
“I’m good, Mama,” Clara said, so virtuously that Nellie expected to be blinded by the halo about to spring into being above her head.
“Of course you are—when you feel like it,” Nellie told her own daughter. “Pick up those scraps, and don’t let him eat any more of them. Don’t let him eat your crayons, either.”
“I won’t, Mama.” Clara turned to her nephew. “You see? You can’t have anything.” Thus made forcibly aware that he was being deprived, Armstrong started crying again. Nellie had to spend more time soothing him before she could go out front again.
Edna was supposed to come get her son at half past three; she’d left him with Nellie so she could do some unencumbered shopping. She didn’t show up till a quarter after four. “Hello, Ma—I’m sorry,” she said in a perfunctory way. “How crazy did he drive you?”
“Crazy enough,” Nellie replied. “I was thinking he reminds me of you.” Edna laughed, but Nellie wasn’t joking. She went on, “Please come get him when you say you will. I’ve got enough to do keeping up with Clara and the coffeehouse. Put Armstrong in there, too, and I start climbing the walls.”
Edna sniffed. “I take care of Clara for you sometimes, and you don’t hear me complaining about it.”
“Oh, I do sometimes,” Nellie said. “And besides, when you take care of the children, that’s all you do. You have Merle to make a living for you. I’ve got to make my own living, and this place won’t run by itself.”
Before Edna could answer, Armstrong picked up something from the floor and started chewing on it. He bit Edna when she stuck her finger in his mouth to get it out. She finally did—it was a nasty little clump of hair and dust—and then whacked him a lot harder than Nellie had done. He wasn’t crying now because he was angry or frightened; he was crying because his bottom hurt.
“You’ve never been fair with me,” Edna said.
And here we go again, Nellie thought. One more round in the fight that never stops for good. She said, “You think being fair means doing whatever you want. I’ve got news for you, dearie—it doesn’t work that way.”
“I’ve got news for you, Ma—you never do what I want.” Edna glared. “You do as you please, and what pleases you most is doing whatever you think will make me maddest.”
“Why, you little liar!” Nellie snapped, as she might have at Clara. But Edna’s charge held just enough truth to sting more than it would have had it been made up from whole cloth. “And you were the one who was always sneaking around behind my back. You ought to be ashamed of yourself.”
“I had to sneak around behind your back. You wouldn’t let me live any kind of life in front of your face,” Edna said.
“I don’t call living fast and loose any kind of a life.” To forestall her daughter, Nellie added, “And I ought to know, too. I found out the hard way.”
“Yeah, and you’ve been frozen up ever since on account of it,” Edna said, another shot with all too much truth in it. “I got what I was looking for in spite of you, and do you know what else? I like it just fine.” She carried her son out of the coffeehouse, slamming the door behind her hard enough to rattle the windows.
“Why is my big sister angry?” Clara asked from the door to her playroom. “If I slammed a door like that, I’d get a whipping.”
“Edna’s too big to get a whipping.” Under her breath, Nellie mumbled, “No matter how much she needs one.”
That slammed door also drew Hal from across the street. “You had another quarrel with Edna,” he said. It was not a question.
“Well, what if I did?” Nellie said. “I don’t suppose I would have, if she’d come and gotten her brat when she was supposed to.”
Exercising her temper proved a mistake. Clara started chanting, “Armstrong is a brat! Armstrong is a brat!”
“Stop that!” Hal Jacobs said sharply, and, for a wonder, Clara stopped it. She listened to her father more often than to her mother, perhaps because Hal gave her fewer orders than Nellie did.
Nellie sighed. “I wish Edna would pay as much attention to you as Clara does.” She sighed again. “I wish anyone would pay attention to me.”
“I always pay attention to you, my dear,” Hal said.
That was true. It was so true, Nellie had come to take it for granted in the years since she and Hal got married. Because she took it for granted, it no longer satisfied her. She said, “I wish Edna would pay attention to me.”
“She is a grown woman,” Hal said. “With a little luck, she is paying attention to her own husband now.”
“It’s not the same,” Nellie replied in a sulky voice.
“No, I suppose it is not,” Hal admitted. “But it is good that she should pay attention to someone, I think. And Merle Grimes is a young man worth paying attention to.”
“I know he is. I was thinking the same thing myself earlier today,” Nellie said. “But he’s not her mother, and I am.” She shook her head, discontented with the world and with Edna. “That’s probably why she doesn’t pay attention to me.”
“Yes, it probably is,” Hal said. “When I was becoming a man, I paid as little attention to my mother and my father as I could get away with.”
Nellie had hardly known her own father. When she’d got away from her mother at an early age, it was to go into the demimonde. Hal didn’t need to know any more about that than whatever he’d already found out. Nellie said, “But Edna isn’t becoming a woman. By now, she is one, like you said. Shouldn’t she have figured out that I know what I’m doing by now?”
“Maybe,” Hal said. “But maybe not, too.” He looked at Nellie with amused affection. “She has a stubborn streak as wide as yours. I wonder where she could have gotten it.”
“Not from me,” Nellie said automatically. She needed a moment to recognize the expression on her husband’s face. Hal Jacobs was doing his best not to laugh out loud. Again, Nellie spoke automatically: “I’m not stubborn!” Hal let the words hang, the most devastating thing he could have done. Nellie’s face went hot. She said, “I’m not that stubborn, anyway.”
“Well, maybe not,” Hal said; he should have been a diplomat in striped trousers, not a cobbler and sometimes spy. He went on, “You are my dear wife, and I love you exactly the way you are.”
“You’re sweet.” That was usually another automatic reply. This time, Nellie listened to what she’d just said. “You really are sweet, Hal. I’m glad I married you. I was scared to death when you asked me, but it’s worked out pretty well, hasn’t it?” If she sounded a little surprised, she could hope her husband didn’t notice.
If he did, he was too much a gentleman to show it. “The best five years of my life,” he said. “Being here with you, and being here to watch Clara grow up…” His face softened. “Yes, the best years of my life.”
With more than a little surprise, Nellie realized the years since the war had been the best of her life, too. She’d made more money when the Confederates occupied Washington, but she’d been worried and afraid all the time: worried about what Edna would do, afraid Bill Reach would tell the whole world what he knew, worried and afraid the U.S. bombardment would blow her and Edna and the coffeehouse to hell and gone.
Now Edna was married, Bill Reach was dead, and the country was at peace. And living with Hal Jacobs hadn’t proved nearly so hard as she’d feared. “I love you, Hal,” she exclaimed.
Saying it surprised her: it seemed an afternoon for surprises. And discovering she meant it surprised her even more. Hearing it made her husband’s face light up. “I love it when you tell me that,” Hal said. “I did not know I could be more happy than I already was, but now I am.”
“I’m happy, too,” Nellie said. By the way all the stories were written, she should have been in love with her husband before she married him, instead of finding out she was five years later. Well, she thought, it’s not like I’ve lived a storybook life. She tried to remember if she’d ever told Hal she loved him before. Once or twice, maybe, in a dutiful fashion, as she occasionally gave him her body. But the words hadn’t come from her heart, not till today.
Perhaps Hal sensed something of the same thing. He walked up to her and gave her a kiss a good deal warmer than the pecks that usually passed between them. She returned it with more warmth than usual, too. For once, she didn’t mind the gleam that came into Hal’s eye. The idea of making love while kindled suddenly struck her as delicious, not disgusting.
But Clara was still playing not far from one of the tables, and a customer chose that moment to come in. Can’t have everything, Nellie thought as she walked over to ask the man what he wanted. She looked around. No, she couldn’t have everything—she wouldn’t be rich as long as she lived, for instance. What she had, though, was pretty good.