Chapter V
“There are times when I’m stupid,” Jonathan Moss said, “and then there are times when I’m really an idiot.”
He looked around. The more he looked, the more this seemed like one of the times when he was really an idiot. Chicago winters were bad. He’d known about them. Winters up in Ontario were worse. He’d known about them, too. He’d shivered his way through three of them during the Great War. Hardly anything was more useless than the pilot of a flying scout in the middle of an Ontario winter.
“I can think of one thing, though,” he said, and his breath blew out in a great icy cloud, “and that’s a man who comes up here in December after a woman who can’t stand him—a married woman who can’t stand him, mind you.”
If he hadn’t done it, though, he would have wondered for the rest of his life. Now, one way or the other, he would know. He had his doubts about whether knowing would make him happy. It would make him sure, though, and that counted, too. So he’d told himself, at any rate, when he left law school.
Coming into the battered little town of Arthur now, he wondered. No town in Ontario through which the front had passed was anything but battered. The Canucks and the British had fought with dreadful intensity for every square foot of ground they’d held. In the end, that had done them no good at all. But the end came much slower and much, much harder than any American had dreamt it would before the war began.
People in heavy coats and fur hats stared at Moss’ sturdy Bucephalus as he halted the motorcar in front of the general store. If he’d been driving a lightweight Ford, say, he didn’t think he’d have been able to make his way north from Guelph; the road, such as it was, would have defeated him. Here he was, though, and Arthur, Ontario, and Laura Secord would have to make the best of it.
As he got out of the automobile, he wished for the furs and leathers in which he’d flown. He’d lived in them in wintertime. Under canvas, without even a proper roof over his head, they were the only things that had kept him from freezing to death. A cloth coat, even a cloth coat with a fur collar, wasn’t the same.
Inside the general store, a potbellied stove glowed a cheery red. The storekeeper was shoveling more coal into it as Moss came inside. He went from being too cold to too warm in the twinkling of an eye.
Setting down the coal shovel, the storekeeper said the same thing any small-town storekeeper in the USA might have said: “Help you, stranger?” Then his eyes narrowed. “No. Wait. You ain’t a stranger, or not quite. You were one o’ them Yank fliers at the aerodrome outside of town, weren’t you?”
“Yes.” Moss hadn’t expected to be recognized. He didn’t know whether that would make things easier or harder. The storekeeper would have been able to tell he was an American before long anyhow. Now the fellow knew which American, or which kind of American, he was. “How are you today, Mr. Peterson?”
“I’ve been better, but I’ve been worse, too,” the Canuck allowed. He fixed Moss with a flinty stare. “Other thing is, I’m mindin’ my business in the town where I’ve lived all my days. You can boil me for tripe before I figure out why the hell a Yank’d want to come back here. You all of a sudden recollect you left a collar stud over at the aerodrome, or what?”
All at once, Jonathan Moss felt very much alone. No American occupation forces were within miles. The troops had more important places to occupy than a little town in the middle of nowhere like Arthur. If he had an unfortunate accident here, nobody would ever find out anything about it except what the locals revealed. And if it turned out not to be quite so accidental as it looked…he would be in no position to explain.
Even so, he decided to grasp the nettle. He’d come here to ask this question. He’d planned on doing it a little later, but he’d seen no plan survived contact with the enemy. Straight ahead, then: “Did Laura Secord’s husband come home safe from the war?”
Peterson the storekeeper gave him another long look. “You’re that crazy Yank,” he said at last. “She told me there was one who’d come sniffing around her that was peskier than all the rest. Don’t reckon she ever thought you’d be pesky enough to come back here, though.”
“You didn’t answer my question, Mr. Peterson,” Moss said. Peterson went right on not answering it, too. With a sigh, Moss dug in his pocket. He pulled out a twenty-dollar goldpiece. After examining the double eagle for a moment, he let it fall on the counter. It rang sweetly. “You didn’t answer my question, Mr. Peterson,” he repeated.
The storekeeper studied the coin as if he’d never seen any like it before. Likely he hadn’t; not much U.S. gold would have got up here. The eagle in front of crossed swords on the reverse was close to the emblem with which U.S. aeroplanes flew. The legend below held one word: REMEMBRANCE. Peterson scooped up the double eagle and stuck it in his pocket. “She never said you were a rich fool of a Yank.”
“Thanks so much,” Moss replied. “Now will you please answer what I asked you?”
“Nope,” Peterson said. For a moment, Moss thought that meant he wouldn’t answer. The American wondered if he could get back his goldpiece without killing the storekeeper. As he was making up his mind to try, Peterson slowly went on, “No, Isaac ain’t come back. That should make her fall right straight into your arms, don’t you reckon?”
“Nope,” Moss said, imitating him. What Laura Secord had said the last time he’d seen her still scorched his memory. What was he doing here, anyway? Without another word, he spun on his heel and went back out to his automobile.
Winter slapped him in the face as soon as he opened the door to the general store. The sweat the red-hot stove had brought out on his forehead promptly started to freeze. He got into the Bucephalus and stabbed the starter button, silently thanking God he didn’t have to stand in the snowy street cranking the engine to life.
He drove out to the aerodrome; it was from there that he knew how to get to the farm Laura Secord had been running. He had some trouble finding the base from which he and his comrades had flown against the Canadians and British. They’d lived under canvas, and the canvas had moved along with the front. But he’d served in these parts through a winter, and so the ground began to look familiar after a while. One field, plainly rutted despite the snow on it, sent chills through him that had nothing to do with the weather. He’d jounced along there any number of times, taking off on missions and coming back afterwards. Now—how strange!—it was only a field again.
It was the field he needed, though. Instead of casting about, he drove confidently once he’d found it. Five minutes later, he pulled off a road even more rutted than the field and up a narrow lane that led to a farmhouse and barn and a couple of smaller outbuildings. The Bucephalus’ brakes reluctantly brought him to a halt not far from a stump with a hatchet driven into it. By that, and by the stains on the wood, he guessed it did duty for a chopping block.
He got out of the motorcar. Before he could head for the farmhouse door as he intended, a figure muffled to the eyes walked out of the barn. “Who’s coming to see me in a fancy automobile?” The demand was sharp and curious at the same time.
Hearing Laura Secord’s voice for the first time in a year and a half sent a shiver through him, as if he’d taken hold of a live electrical wire. The first time he tried to answer, all that came out was a hoarse cough. He felt sixteen years old again, calling on a girl for the first time. His hands and feet couldn’t suddenly have grown large and clumsy, but they felt as if they had. He took a deep breath and spoke again: “It’s Jonathan Moss, Miss Secord.”
He’d forgotten her married name—done his best to blot it from his mind. He wondered if she’d forgotten him altogether. He hadn’t seen her that many times, and he’d been far from the only American flier who’d seen her. But her sharp gasp said she remembered. “The mad Yank!” she exclaimed.
“I don’t think so,” he said, his breath steaming with every word.
“Well, you most certainly are,” she said. “Not mad for being a Yank—I don’t suppose you can help that—but mad for coming up here again. Why on earth did you? No matter how daft you are, you can’t have wanted to see this part of the world again—or can you?”
“No, I didn’t come here for that.” Moss took another deep breath. He wished he could take a drink, too. “I came up here to see you.”
“Oh, dear God,” Laura Secord said quietly. She gathered herself. “Didn’t you listen to a word I told you the last time you came here? If that’s not madness, I don’t know what is. You should have stayed wherever you were and gone on doing whatever you were doing.”
“I did that,” Jonathan Moss said. “For more than a year, I did that. When I couldn’t do it any more, I came.” He hesitated, then went on, “I heard in Arthur that your husband didn’t come home. I’m very sorry, for whatever that may be worth to you.”
“You decided to come up here without even knowing that?” she said in open astonishment, and he nodded. Maybe he was mad after all. She remarked, “He would have shot you, you know. He was very good with a rifle even before he went into the Army.” Moss didn’t say anything. He could think of nothing to say. Had she told him to go then, he would have got back into his motorcar and driven away without another word. Instead, she continued, “Come inside and have a cup of tea. I wouldn’t turn out a mongrel dog in this weather before he had a cup of tea.”
That did not strike him as the warmest commendation of his personal charms, if any, but it was kinder than anything she’d said to him the last time he was here. He followed her up the stairs and into the farmhouse. The stove was going in the kitchen, but not like the one in Peterson’s general store. Laura Secord shoveled in more coal, filled the teapot from a bucket, and set it on the stove. As she busied herself in readying cups and tea, she kept shaking her head. Doing his best to make light of things, Moss said, “I really am a harmless fellow.”
“If you really were a harmless fellow, you would have been shot down,” she retorted. Then she pointed to a chair by the table. “Sit, if you care to. I can get you bread and butter.” He sat and nodded. She served him, then tended to the tea when the pot started whistling.
No matter what he might have expected, the tea wasn’t particularly good. It was hot. He gulped it, savoring the warmth it brought. It helped unfreeze his tongue, too: he said, “I came to tell you that, if there’s ever anything you need—anything at all—let me know, and I’ll take care of it.”
“A knight in shining armor?” Her eyebrows rose.
Moss shook his head. “I thought of myself like that at the start of the war: a knight of the air, I mean. It didn’t last, of course. War’s a filthy business no matter how you fight it. But I’ll do that for you. So help me God, I will. You’re—special to me. I don’t know how else to put it.” He was more afraid of saying love than he had been of facing machine-gun bullets from a Sopwith Pup.
“You’d better go now,” Laura Secord said. She wasn’t reviling him, as she had the last time he’d come to her, but there was no give in her voice, either. “You mean to be kind; I’m sure you mean to be kind. But I don’t see how I can take you up on…any part of that generous offer. When I see you, I see your country, too, and your country has destroyed mine. Find yourself an American girl, one who can forgive you for that.” She laughed. “Melodramatic, isn’t it? But life is sometimes.”
He got to his feet. He’d known from the beginning the odds were against him—to put it mildly. “Here.” He pulled a scrap of paper and pencil from his pocket and scrawled down three lines. “This is my address. What I said still goes. If you ever need me, let me know.” He turned and left as fast as he could, so he wouldn’t have to watch her crumple up the paper and throw it away. Soon he was driving back toward Arthur, and then back past Arthur, toward the life he’d done his best to toss out the window. He kept telling himself he was lucky. He had a devil of a time making himself believe it.
“This feels good,” Reggie Bartlett said to Bill Foster as the two of them strolled through Richmond. “We haven’t done it as much lately as we used to.”
“Time has a way of getting on,” Foster said, and Reggie nodded. His friend went on, “And we’d stop in a saloon for a beer afterwards, too. When a beer costs twenty-five dollars instead of five cents, stopping in a saloon doesn’t seem like such a bully idea any more. My pay’s gone up, sure, but it hasn’t gone up as fast as prices have.”
“It never does,” Bartlett said with mournful certainty. This time, Bill Foster nodded. Reggie added, “And you’ve got to watch your money nowadays. After all, you’re going to be a married man this time next month, and Sally’s the sort of girl who deserves the best.”
“I only hope I’ll be able to give it to her.” Foster’s voice held worry. “How am I supposed to watch my money? All I can do is watch it go away. A dollar I put in the bank at the start of the year isn’t worth a quarter now, even with interest.”
“Watching money these days means spending it as soon as you get it,” Reggie replied. “If you do anything else, you watch it shrink, like you said.”
Foster sighed. “Didn’t used to be this way. How are we supposed to get on with our lives if we can’t even save money? The Freedom Party’s right, if you ask me—we’ve got to put a stop to things before the whole country goes down the water closet.”
“Yeah, we’ve got to put a stop to things,” Reggie said. “That doesn’t mean the Freedom Party is right. We heard those fellows going on and on when they were new as wet paint, remember? I thought they were crazy then, and I still think they’re crazy.”
They’d come a long way into the northwestern part of town, to the public square at the corner of Moore and Confederate Street (it had been Federal before the War of Secession). In spite of the chilly weather, somebody was holding a rally in the square: Confederate flags whipped in the breeze, and a gesticulating speaker stood on a platform of fresh yellow pine.
“Is that the Freedom Party again?” Bartlett asked. Then he spotted the signs behind the platform. “No, I see—it’s the Radical Liberals. Want to listen, Bill?”
“Sure. Why not?” Foster said. “They have some interesting ideas. If they don’t go off the deep end, the way they did when they nominated Arango in ’15, I may vote for ’em for president in ’21.”
“Me, too.” Reggie nodded. “That fellow up there, whoever he is, he doesn’t look like he’s ever gone off the deep end of anything in his whole life.”
As he got closer, he noticed a placard identifying the speaker as Congressman Baird from Chihuahua. Waistcoated and homburged, Baird looked more like a banker than a Congressman. “We have to face the facts,” he was saying as Reggie and Foster got close enough to hear. “We are not the top dogs any more. Our friends are not the top dogs any more. We can stick our heads in the sand and pretend things still are the way they were in 1914, but that won’t do us any good. The war has been over for almost a year and a half, and most of the people in this country don’t really understand that things have changed.”
Bill Foster looked disgusted. “I take back what I said a minute ago. He wants us to go sucking up to the United States, and I’ll see him and everybody else in hell before I lick Teddy Roosevelt’s boots.”
“We’ve got to do something,” Reggie answered. “If we don’t, it’s $500 beer next month, or maybe $5,000 beer. They licked us. You going to tell me they didn’t?” As if to remind him, his shoulder twinged.
While they were talking, so was Congressman Baird. Reggie started listening to him again in midsentence: “—whole continent, north and south and west alike, might be better off if we dropped our tariff barriers and the USA did the same. I don’t say we ought to do that all at once, but I do say it is something toward which we can work, and something liable to lead to greater prosperity throughout America. We share a heritage with the United States; in their own way, the Yankees are Americans, too. We fought a revolution against England, but England became the Confederacy’s friend. Even though we have fought wars against the United States, they too may yet become our friends.”
“You want to hear any more of this, Reggie?” Foster asked. “If the sign didn’t say this fellow was from Chihuahua, I’d reckon he snuck in from California or Connecticut or one of those damnyankee places.”
“Damnyankees aren’t as bad as all that. They don’t have horns and tails,” Reggie said. His friend gave him what was plainly meant for a withering look. He didn’t wither, continuing, “They doctored me as well as anybody could, when it would have been easier for them to give up and let me die. All you did was fight ’em. They had me in their hands.”
Foster was plainly unconvinced. But Congressman Baird got a bigger round of applause than Reggie Bartlett had really expected. Foster looked surprised at that, too. Grudgingly, he said, “Some people here think the way you do. I still don’t see it, but I’ll listen a while longer.”
Buoyed by the cheers, Baird went on, “I don’t say for a moment that we should not try to regain as much of our strength as we can. We must be able to defend ourselves. But we must also bear in mind the colossus to our north and west, and that, as I said, our friends have fallen by the wayside. We are on our own, in a world that loves us not. We would be wise to remember as much.”
That made good sense to Reggie. The Whigs, who had dominated Confederate politics even more thoroughly than the Democrats had dominated those of the USA, still seemed stuck in the past without any notion of how to face the future. The Freedom Party and others of its ilk wanted to throw out the baby with the bathwater, although they quarreled over which was which. Baird, at least, had some idea of the direction in which he wanted the CSA to go.
His supporters in the crowd raised a chant: “Radical Liberals! Radical Liberals!” Whigs would never have done anything so undignified. But the Whigs didn’t have to do anything undignified. They often seemed to think they didn’t have to do anything at all. That, Reggie thought, was what holding power for half a century did to a party.
And then, from behind, another chant rose, or rather a furious howl: “Traitors! Filthy, stinking, goddamn traitors!” Reggie spun around. Charging across the yellowed grass were a couple dozen men armed with clubs and bottles and a variety of other improvised weapons. They all wore white shirts and butternut trousers. “Traitors!” they howled again, as they smashed into the rear of Congressman Baird’s crowd. They howled something else, too, a word that made Bartlett’s hair try to stand on end: “Freedom!”
The Congressman’s voice rose in well-modulated indignation: “What is the meaning of this uncouth interruption?”
No one answered him, not in so many words. But the meaning was obvious even so—the newcomers were breaking up his rally, and breaking the heads of the people who’d been listening to him.
“Fight!” Reggie shouted. “Fight these bastards!”
A club whizzed past his ear, swung by a thick-necked, thick-shouldered chap screaming “Freedom!” at the top of his lungs. Reggie kicked him in the side of the knee as he ran past. Then, as the man started to crumple, he kicked him in the belly. He’d learned to fight fair once upon a time, and had to unlearn it in a hurry when he got to the trenches.
He grabbed the muscular goon’s club after the fellow lost interest in holding it, then started swinging it at everybody in a white shirt he could reach. Some of the others at the rally were fighting back, too. Most Confederate white men had done a tour in the Army. They’d seen worse fights than this. But the attack force from the Freedom Party had size, ferocity, youth, and surprise on their side. They also had a joyful zest for the brawl unlike anything Reggie had encountered in the trenches.
He knocked two or three of them flat even so. But then somebody hit him from behind. He staggered and fell. A couple of people—one of them was Bill Foster, who was trying, with no luck at all, to play peacemaker—stepped on him, someone else kicked him in the ribs, and he decided to stay down, lest something worse happen to him.
The ruffians had just about completed routing the rally when police at last appeared. Half a dozen men in old-fashioned gray took billy clubs off their belts. Their leader blew a whistle and shouted, “That will be quite enough of that!”
“Freedom!” the goons bawled. All of them still on their feet rushed straight at the cops. They had one other thing Reggie Bartlett noticed only while prone: more than a little discipline. They fought like soldiers after a common goal, not like individual hellraisers. The startled policemen went down like wheat under the blades of a reaper. Had one of them drawn a pistol…Had one of the Radical Liberals drawn a pistol…But no one had. The ruffians, or most of them, got away.
Slowly and painfully, Reggie dragged himself to his feet. He looked around for Bill Foster, and spotted him holding a handkerchief to a bloody nose. A couple of the fallen Freedom Party fighters were also rising. Reggie stooped to grab the club, though quick movement hurt. But showing he was ready to fight meant he didn’t have to. The goons lifted a comrade who couldn’t get up on his own and, with his arms draped over their shoulders, left the public square.
From up on the platform, Congressman Baird kept saying “This is an outrage! An outrage, I tell you!” over and over again. Nobody paid much attention to him. He wasn’t wrong. That didn’t make what he had to say useful.
“They break your nose, Bill?” Reggie asked.
“Don’t think so.” Foster felt of it. “No, they didn’t. I just got hit, not clubbed or stomped.”
“Bastards,” Reggie said. That didn’t seem nearly strong enough. He tried again: “Goddamn f*cking sons of bitches.” That didn’t seem strong enough, either, but it came closer. He looked around for his hat, and discovered it had got squashed during the brawl. Picking it up, he asked, “Still like what the Freedom Party stands for?”
Foster suggested the Freedom Party do something illegal, immoral, and anatomically unlikely. His hat, when he found it, was in worse shape than Reggie’s. Sadly, he dropped it back onto the grass. Then he said, “The thing is, though, plenty of people will like it. Damn hard to stomach anybody saying anything good about the United States. A couple of times, I wouldn’t have minded walloping Baird myself.”
“Thinking about it’s one thing,” Bartlett said. “Doing it, though…” He shook his head. “People won’t be able to stomach that. No way in hell will people be able to stomach that.” Bill Foster thought it over, then nodded. “People just aren’t so stupid,” Reggie said, and his friend nodded again.
Lieutenant Colonel Abner Dowling sat at his desk—because of his protruding belly, sat some distance behind his desk—clacking away at a typewriter. He would have starved to death in short order had he had to try to make his living as a secretary, but he was a good typist for an Army officer.
He wished he were out in the field instead of banging out a report no one would ever read here in a War Department office in Philadelphia. He’d wished he were in the field instead of back of the lines at First Army headquarters all through the Great War. He could have commanded a battalion, maybe a regiment—maybe even a brigade, considering how fast front-line officers went down. Of course, he might have gone down himself, but that was the chance you took.
“Dowling!” At the howl from behind him, he made a typographical error. Save that it held the sounds of his name, the howl might have burst from the throat of a trapped wolf.
“Coming, sir.” He pushed the chair back far enough to let himself rise, then hurried into the larger, more spacious office behind his own. Sleet beat on the window that gave a blurry view of downtown Philadelphia. Even though it was freezing out there, a steam radiator kept the office warm as toast. Saluting, Dowling asked, “What can I do for you this morning, General Custer?”
Custer stared at him, through him. Dowling had seen that stare before. It meant Custer had been into the bottle he didn’t know Dowling knew he had in a desk drawer. No: after a moment, Dowling realized the stare held more than that. Custer’s pale, red-tracked eyes roamed the office. Again, he might have been a wild beast in a cage.
“What can I do for you, sir?” his adjutant repeated.
“Do for me?” Custer said slowly; he might have forgotten he’d summoned Dowling in the first place. “You can’t do anything for me. No one can do anything for me, no one at all.”
Dowling had heard Custer in a great many moods before, but never despairing. “What’s wrong, sir?” he asked. “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“No, you can’t help me, Major—uh, Lieutenant Colonel.” Custer’s wits weren’t particularly swift, but he hadn’t started turning forgetful. As the general continued, Dowling realized that was part of the problem: “I entered West Point in July 1857. July 1857, Lieutenant Colonel: sixty-two years ago come this summer. I have served in the United States Army longer than most men have been alive.”
“And served with distinction, sir,” Dowling said, which in its own strange way was true. “That’s why you have four stars on each shoulder strap, sir; that’s why you’re here now, still serving your country, at an age when most men”—are dead, but he wouldn’t say that—“are sitting in a rocking chair with pipe and slippers.”
“What do you think I’m doing now, Dowling?” General Custer demanded. “I’ve been in the army almost sixty-two years, as I say, and in an active command during nearly the whole of that time.” He waved a plump, age-spotted hand. “Where is my active command now, pray tell?”
He was feeling trapped, Dowling realized. Custer’s adjutant picked his words with care: “Sir, there aren’t a lot of active commands with the country at peace and our foes beaten. And your assignment here—”
“Is only sound and fury, signifying nothing,” Custer broke in. “I have no duties: no duties that matter, at any rate. Evaluate the transmission of orders from corps headquarters to divisions and regiments, they told me. Jesus Christ, Dowling, it’s a job for a beady-eyed captain, not for me!”
He had a point, a good point. To try to cheer him up, his adjutant had to ignore it. “No doubt they want the benefit of your long experience.”
“Oh, poppycock!” Custer snapped. “Nonsense! Drivel! They’ve put me out to pasture, Lieutenant Colonel, that’s what they’ve done. They don’t give two whoops in hell whether I ever write this goddamn evaluation. Even if I do, no one will ever read it. It will sit on a shelf and gather dust. That’s what I’m doing now: sitting on a shelf and gathering dust. They got all they could out of me, and now they’ve put me on the shelf.”
“Everyone is grateful for what you did, General,” Dowling said. “Would you have headed last year’s Remembrance Day parade if that weren’t so?”
“So Teddy Roosevelt was generous enough to toss an old dog one last bone,” Custer said, a distinct sneer in his voice. “Ha! If he lives long enough, he’ll go into the dustbin of the outmoded, too. And if the election returns from last November are any guide, he may get there faster than I have.”
Dowling didn’t know what to say to that. He judged Custer was likely to be right. The general formerly commanding First Army did have a makework assignment here in Philadelphia. But what else could he expect? He was going to be eighty at the end of the year. He couldn’t very well hope to be entrusted with anything of real importance.
He could. He did. “Barrels!” he said. “That’s where I want to be working. Sure as hell, Lieutenant Colonel, the Rebs are plotting ways to make theirs better even as we speak. I know they’re not going to be allowed to have any, but they’re plotting just the same. We’ll fight another round with them, see if we don’t. I may not live till then, but you will, I expect.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me if you were right, sir,” Dowling said. No one in the U.S. Army trusted the Confederate States, no matter how peaceful they tried to make themselves seem.
“They need me on barrels,” Custer said. “Those chowderheads didn’t know what to do with what they had till I showed them. They won’t know how to make barrels better, either, you mark my words.”
“Sir, there I don’t really know if you’re right or not,” Dowling said, by which he meant Custer was talking through his hat. “Colonel Morrell is doing good work out in Kansas. I’ve seen a couple of the analyses he’s sent in. They’re first-rate. I was very impressed.” He meant that. The more he had to do with Morrell, the more he was convinced the former commander of the Barrel Brigade would wear four stars long before his late seventies.
“Oh, Morrell’s a sound lad, no doubt about that,” Custer said, by which he meant Morrell had given him the victories he’d craved. “But he’s only a colonel, and he’s only a lad. Will they read his analyses, or will they just shelve them alongside of mine? They aren’t soldiers here, Dowling; they’re nothing but a pack of clerks in green-gray.”
That held enough truth to be provocative, not enough to be useful. Dowling said, “Colonel Morrell will make himself noticed, one way or another.”
Custer’s thoughts were running down their own track, as they often did. He hardly noticed his adjutant’s words. “Nothing but a pack of clerks in green-gray,” he repeated. “And now they’re making me a clerk, too. How am I supposed to turn into a clerk, Dowling, when I’ve spent the past sixty years as a fighting man?”
“Sir, I know this isn’t your first tour at the War Department,” Dowling said. “How did you manage before?”
“God only knows,” Custer answered gloomily. “I sat behind a desk, the same as I’m sitting behind a desk now. Then, though, I had an Army to help reform. I had wars to look forward to. I had a purpose that helped me forget I was—stuck here. What have I got now? Only the desk, Lieutenant Colonel. Only the desk.” His sigh ruffled his bushy mustache.
Exasperation. Fury. Scorn. Occasional astonished admiration. Horror. Those were the emotions Custer usually roused in Abner Dowling. That he should pity the ancient warrior had never crossed his mind till now. Setting Custer to makework was like harnessing an old, worn-out ex-champion thoroughbred to a brewery wagon. He still wanted to run, even if he couldn’t any more.
Quietly, Dowling asked, “Can I get you anything, sir? Anything at all that might make you more comfortable?” Even if Custer told him he wanted an eighteen-year-old blonde—and Custer’s asking for something along those lines would not have unduly surprised his adjutant, for he still fancied himself a ladies’ man, especially when Libbie wasn’t around—Dowling resolved to do his best to get him one.
But the general asked for nothing of the sort. Instead, he said, “Can you get me the president’s ear? We still have soldiers in action, enforcing our rule on the Canadian backwaters we didn’t overrun during the Great War. Even a command like that would be better than sitting around here waiting to die. And, by God, I still owe the Canucks more than a little. The British bastards who killed my brother Tom rode down out of Canada almost forty years ago. Even so late as this, revenge would be sweet.”
Dowling wished he’d kept his mouth shut. He had no great desire to go traipsing up into the great American Siberia, no matter what Custer wanted. But, seeing the desperate hope on the old man’s face, he said, “I don’t know whether I can get President Roosevelt’s ear or not, sir. Even if he hears me, I don’t know whether he’ll listen to me, if you know what I mean.”
“Oh, yes.” Custer nodded and looked shrewd. “It might be interesting to find out whether Teddy would enjoy keeping me here under his eye and useless better than he would knowing he’s sent me to the ends of the earth. Yes, I do wonder how he’d decide there.” Reluctantly, Dowling nodded. Teddy Roosevelt would be making exactly that calculation.
Even more reluctantly, Custer’s adjutant telephoned Powel House, the president’s Philadelphia residence. He was not immediately put through to Theodore Roosevelt. He hadn’t expected to be. He left his name—and Custer’s name, too—and how to reach him. If the president decided to call back, he would. If he decided not to…well, in that case, Dowling had made the effort.
Two days later, the telephone rang. When Dowling answered, a familiar gravelly voice on the other end of the line said, “This is Theodore Roosevelt, Lieutenant Colonel. What can I do for you and what, presumably, can I do for General Custer?”
“Yes, Mr. President, that’s why I called,” Dowling said, and explained.
A long silence followed. “He wants me to send him up there?” Roosevelt sounded as if he couldn’t believe his ears.
“Yes, sir,” Dowling answered. “He feels useless here at the War Department. He’d rather be doing something than vegetating. And he wants to rule the Canadians with a rod of iron, you might say, because of what happened to his brother during the Second Mexican War.” Loyally, Dowling refrained from offering his own opinion of a transfer to Canada.
“If Tom Custer hadn’t got killed, we probably would have lost the battle by the Teton River, because our Gatling guns would have been wrongly placed,” Roosevelt said. “But that’s neither here nor there, now, I admit.” The president paused. Dowling could almost hear the wheels going round inside his head. At last, he said, “Well, by jingo, if that’s what General Custer wants, that’s what he shall have. Let no one ever say I put my personal differences with him in the way of fulfilling the reasonable desires of the most distinguished soldier the United States have known since George Washington.”
“Thank you, your Excellency, on General Custer’s behalf,” Dowling said. “You have no idea how pleased he’ll be at going back under the saddle again.”
“Our old warhorse.” Roosevelt chuckled, a sound Dowling wasn’t sure he liked. “Tell him to pack his long johns—and you pack yours, too, Lieutenant Colonel.”
“Yes, sir.” Dowling did his best to sound cheerful. His best, he feared, was far from good enough.
“Lies!” Julia McGregor furiously tossed her head. The flames in the fireplace caught the red highlights of her hair and made it seem about to catch fire, too. “The lies the Americans make the teachers tell!”
“What is it now?” her father asked. Arthur McGregor smiled grimly. The harder the Americans tried to indoctrinate his daughters, the more they shot themselves in the foot.
“They call the Tories traitors! They stayed loyal to their own king when everyone around them was rebelling, and for that the Americans call them traitors!” Julia was furious, all right. “I’d sooner be around people who stay loyal even if it costs them than a pack of fools who blow like weather vanes, whichever way the wind happens to catch them.”
Maude looked up from her knitting. “She’s your daughter,” she remarked to her husband.
“That she is,” McGregor said with no small pride. “My daughter, my country’s daughter—not any American’s daughter.”
“I should say not,” Julia exclaimed indignantly.
Mary shoved aside a piece of scratch paper on which she was practicing multiplication and division. “Pa, do the Yanks lie about nine times eight being seventy-two, too?” she asked, her voice hopeful. “It would work a lot better if it were seventy-one.”
“I’m afraid they’re telling the truth there, chick,” he answered. “Numbers don’t change, no matter which side of the border they’re on.”
“Too bad,” his younger daughter said. “I thought the Americans would lie about everything under the sun.”
“They lie about everything that happened under the sun,” Julia said. “But numbers aren’t exactly things that happen under the sun. They’re real and true all by themselves, no matter how you look at them.”
“How does that make them different than anything else?” Mary asked.
Before Julia could answer, one of the kerosene lamps that helped the fireplace light the front room burned dry. The stink of lamp oil spread through the room. McGregor heaved himself up out of his chair and started over to get some kerosene to refill the lamp.
“Don’t waste your time, Arthur,” Maude said. “We’re as near out as makes no difference.”
“That’s…too bad,” he said; he did his best not to curse in front of his womenfolk. “Have to ride into town tomorrow and buy some more at Gibbon’s general store. Can’t go around wandering in the dark.”
“Why not, Pa?” Mary said with a wicked smile. “The Yanks do it all the time.”
“Hush, you,” McGregor said, snorting. “Tend to your ciphering, not your wisecracks.” Mary dutifully bent her head to the paper. Five minutes later, or ten, or fifteen, she’d come out with something else outrageous. He was as sure of it as of the sun coming up tomorrow morning.
When he drove out in the wagon the next morning, he was only half convinced the sun had come up. A thick layer of dirty gray clouds lay between it and him. In that murky light, the snow covering the ground also looked gray and dirty, though most of it was freshly fallen. Under the wagon’s iron tires, the frozen ground was as hard—though by no means as smooth—as if it were macadamized.
As usual, U.S. soldiers meticulously checked the wagon before letting McGregor go on into Rosenfeld. He had nothing to hide, not here: all his bomb-making paraphernalia remained hidden in his barn. After he’d taken his revenge on Major Hannebrink, who’d ordered his son executed, the urge to make his deadly toys had eased.
The Yanks hadn’t rebuilt the sheriff’s station after he bombed it. All they’d done was clear away the wreckage. He smiled as he jounced slowly past the bare, snow-covered stretch of ground. It was not enough. Nothing could ever be enough to make up for losing Alexander. But it was something. It was more than most Canadians had, a lot more.
Rosenfeld was a far cry from the big city. It didn’t hold even a thousand people. If two railroad lines hadn’t met there, it might not have existed at all. Throughout the war, though, Americans had packed it to the bursting point, as it became a staging area and recuperation center for the long, hard campaign against Winnipeg.
Now, with just a small occupation garrison, it seemed much more nearly its old self than it had during the war years. People on the street nodded to McGregor. Why not? No need to bother avoiding his eyes. Alexander was two and a half years dead now: old news, to everyone but his family. No one knew McGregor had had his revenge. Had anyone known, the Yanks would have found out. They would have stood him against a wall, as they’d stood his son, and shot him down, too.
He hitched the horse on the main street in front of the post office. He couldn’t have done that during the war; the Yanks had reserved the street for themselves. Digging in his pockets for some change, he went into the post office.
“Hello, Arthur,” said Wilfred Rokeby, the postmaster. He was a small, fussily precise man who wore his hair parted in the middle and plastered down to either side with some spicy-smelling oil. “Didn’t expect to see you coming into town quite so soon.”
“Ran out of kerosene sooner than I thought I would.” McGregor set a couple of dimes on the counter. “Long as I’m here, let me have some stamps, too, Wilf.”
“I can do that,” Rokeby said. He peeled ten red two-cent stamps from a sheet and handed them to McGregor. They were ordinary U.S. stamps, adorned with Benjamin Franklin’s fleshy portrait, but had the word MANITOBA overprinted on them in black.
“At least we don’t have to pay double any more, to help the singers and dancing girls come up here and perform for the Yankee soldiers,” McGregor said, pocketing the stamps. “That was nothing but highway robbery.”
“Things are settling down a mite,” the postmaster said. “I hear some fellow’s going to come up from Minnesota and start us a new weekly paper when the weather gets better. Been a long time since that bomb in front of Malachi Stubing’s place shut down the old Register.”
That bomb had not been one of McGregor’s. He hadn’t been in the bombing business back then. He had been in Henry Gibbon’s general store when the bomb went off. The Americans had almost taken him hostage after the blast. Frowning, he said, “One more way for the Yanks to peddle their lies.”
“That’s so,” Rokeby admitted, “but it’ll be good to have the town news, too, and all the advertising. We’ve missed it. You can’t say we haven’t, Arthur.”
“Well, maybe,” McGregor said, but then, as if to rebut himself, he added, “Minnesota.” Shaking his head, he turned and walked out of the post office.
The general store was half a block up the street, and on the other side. Henry Gibbon was wiping his hands on his apron when McGregor came inside carrying a large sheet-iron can. A hot stove gave relief from the chill outside. “Didn’t expect to see you for another week or ten days, Arthur,” the storekeeper said. He raised an eyebrow almost to what would have been his hairline had his hair not long since retreated to higher ground.
“Ran out of kerosene.” McGregor set the can on the counter with a clank. “Want to fill me up again?”
“Sure will,” Gibbon said, and did so with a large tin dipper. When he was through, he put the top securely back in place and held out his right hand, palm up. “Five gallons makes sixty-five cents.”
“Would only have been half a dollar before the war,” McGregor said. The fifty-cent piece and dime he gave Gibbon were U.S. coins, the five-cent piece Canadian. More and more of the money in circulation came from the USA these days.
“During the war, you’d have been out of luck if you didn’t have your ration book,” Gibbon said with a massive shrug. “It’s not as good as it was, but it’s not as bad as it was, either.”
He hadn’t had a son killed. He could afford to say things like that. McGregor had, and couldn’t. He started to head out the door, then checked himself. Gibbon might not know good and bad from the man in the moon, but he heard all the gossip there was to hear in Rosenfeld. “Has Wilf Rokeby got it straight? Is some fellow coming up from the United States to put out a paper here?”
“That’s what I’ve heard, anyway,” Gibbon answered. “Be right good to let folks know every week that I’m still alive and still in business.”
“But a Yank,” McGregor said. The storekeeper shrugged again. The notion didn’t bother him. As long as he got his advertisements in the newspaper, he couldn’t have cared less what else went in.
With a grunt, McGregor picked up the can of kerosene and went back out into the cold. He started across the street. A motorcar’s horn blared at him. He froze like a deer—he hadn’t paid the least attention to traffic. If the automobile hadn’t been able to stop in time, it would have run him down.
It halted with its front bumper inches from him. It was a big open touring car, with a U.S. soldier who looked very cold driving and two men in buffalo robes and fur hats in the back seat. One of them looked older than God, with a beaky nose projecting from a wrinkled face. “Jesus Christ, I wanted to see what one of these little towns looked like,” he said, his voice American-accented. “I didn’t aim to kill anybody while I was doing it.”
“Sorry, General Custer, sir,” the driver said. His greatcoat didn’t offer him nearly the protection from the bitter winter chill that a buffalo robe would have done.
“I think your wife had the right idea, sir,” the younger man in back said. He was a porky fellow, porky enough that his blubber probably helped keep him warm. “You might have done better to stay on the train till we got up to Winnipeg.”
“I’m supposed to be in charge of things,” the old man said querulously. “How can I be in charge of things if I don’t see for myself what the hell I’m in charge of?” He shook a mittened fist at McGregor. “What are you standing there for, you damn fool? Get out of the way!”
McGregor unfroze and took a few steps forward. The motorcar shot past him with a clash of gears; its tires spat snow up into his face. He stared after it. He’d learned about General Custer in school. During the Second Mexican War, he’d beaten General Gordon’s British and Canadian army down in Montana, beaten it after the USA had agreed to a cease-fire. McGregor had assumed he was long dead till his name started cropping up in war news.
And now he was coming to Canada to be in charge of things? And not just to Canada but to Winnipeg, only a couple of days to the north even by wagon? McGregor hurried back to the wagon. Purpose had indeed leaked out of his life after he’d avenged himself on Major Hannebrink. Now, suddenly, it was back. This time, he wouldn’t just be avenging himself. He’d be avenging his whole country.
Nellie Jacobs yawned, right in the middle of business hours. Edna laughed at her. “This is a coffeehouse, Ma,” Nellie’s daughter said. “If you’re sleepy, pour yourself a cup.”
“I’ve been drinking it all day long.” Nellie punctuated her reply with another yawn. “I don’t want another cup right now.” She hesitated and lowered her voice so the couple of customers in the place wouldn’t hear: “It hasn’t tasted quite right, anyway. Did we get a bad batch of beans?”
“I don’t think so,” Edna Semphroch answered, also quietly. “Tastes fine to me. Nobody’s said anything about it, either, unless somebody went and complained to you.”
“No,” Nellie admitted. She yawned again. “Goodness! I can’t hold my eyes open. If this keeps up, I’m going to have to go upstairs and lie down for a while.”
Edna said, “Sure, go ahead, Ma. Leave me with all the work.” Maybe she was joking. On the other hand, maybe she wasn’t.
In the end, Nellie didn’t go upstairs. A few more customers had come in, and sticking Edna with all of them didn’t seem fair. She got through the day, though by the end of it she felt as if she had a couple of sacks of cement strapped to her shoulders. “Oh, Lord, I’m beat,” she said over the ham steaks and string beans and fried potatoes that made up supper.
“You look it,” Hal Jacobs said sympathetically. “What have you been doing, to make yourself so tired?” Her husband looked worried. “Do you think it is something you ought to see the doctor about?”
“I haven’t been doing anything special,” Nellie answered, “but today—no, the past few days—I’ve felt like I was moving under water.”
“Maybe you should go to a doctor, Ma,” Edna said. “That ain’t like you, and you know it ain’t. You’ve always been a go-getter.”
“Doctors.” Nellie tossed her head. “They’re all quacks. Half the time, they can’t tell what’s wrong with you. The other half, they know what’s wrong but they can’t do anything about it.”
Neither her daughter nor her husband argued with her. If you had a broken arm, a doctor could set it. If you had a boil, a doctor could lance it. If you needed a smallpox vaccination, a doctor could give you one. But if you had the Spanish influenza, a doctor could tell you to stay in bed and take aspirin. And if you had consumption, he could tell you to pack up and move to New Mexico. That might cure you, or it might not. Doctors couldn’t, and the honest ones admitted as much.
Nellie found herself yawning yet again. She covered her mouth with her hand. “Gracious!” she said. “I swear to heaven, I haven’t felt this wrung out since I was carrying you, Edna.”
The words seemed to hang in the air. Hal Jacobs’ eyes widened. Edna’s mouth fell open. “Ma,” she said slowly, “you don’t suppose…you don’t suppose you’re in a family way again, do you?”
“What a ridiculous notion!” Nellie exclaimed. But, when she thought about it, maybe it wasn’t so ridiculous as all that. Her time of the month should have been…Her jaw dropped, too. Her time of the month should have come a couple of weeks before. She’d never thought of asking Hal to wear a French letter on the infrequent occasions when she yielded him her body. She hadn’t even worried about it. She was far enough past forty that she’d figured having a baby was about as likely as getting struck by lightning.
She glanced cautiously up toward the ceiling. That was foolish, and she knew it. If a lightning bolt came crashing through, she’d never know what hit her.
“Are you going to have a child, Nellie?” Hal Jacobs asked in tones of wonder.
“I think—” Try as she would, Nellie had trouble forcing out the words. At last, she managed: “I think maybe I am.”
Edna burst out laughing. No matter how tired Nellie felt, she wasn’t too tired to glare. A moment later, her daughter looked contrite. “I’m sorry, Ma,” Edna said. “I was just thinking that, if you had a baby now, it’d be almost like I had a baby now, and—” She dissolved in more giggles.
Hal looked delighted and awed at the same time. Softly, he said, “With my first wife, I had two children, two little girls. Neither one of them lived to be three years old. Now God has given me another chance, when I never thought He would.” He bent his head in thanks.
Nellie wasn’t nearly so sure she felt thanks. She hadn’t figured on taking care of a child again—not unless Edna had misfortune strike her in the shape of a man (and Nellie could think of no more likely shape for misfortune to assume). And then Nellie started to laugh in the same way Edna had. “It is funny,” she said. “It’s funny now, anyways. Won’t be so funny when the baby finally comes. I remember that.”
“Oh, yes,” Hal said. “I remember, too. It is much work. But you, Nellie, we must take the very finest care of you, to make sure everything goes on in exactly the way it should.”
What he meant was, she was getting long in the tooth to have a baby. She couldn’t get annoyed about that. For one thing, he’d put it very nicely. For another, she’d thought she was too long in the tooth herself.
Over a gap of half a lifetime, she remembered what bringing forth Edna had been like. Maybe, this time, she’d go to a hospital and have them stick an ether cone over her face. That was one other thing doctors were good for.
“Ma’s a tough bird,” Edna said with no small pride. She beamed at Nellie. Nellie could hardly recall her beaming before. “Aren’t you, Ma?”
Before Nellie could answer, Hal said, “A woman in a delicate condition is in a delicate condition, which means she is…delicate, is what it means.” He’d talked himself twice round a circle, hadn’t said a single, solitary thing, and didn’t realize it.
“I’ll be all right,” Nellie said. “This is something God meant women to do.” And if that doesn’t prove God is a man, I don’t know what does. She didn’t feel like a tough bird, but she didn’t feel delicate, either. What she mostly felt was tired.
Edna said, “If you really are in a family way, Ma, why don’t you go on upstairs? I’ll do the dishes.”
“Why, thank you, sweetheart.” Nellie cherished every friendly gesture she got from Edna, not least because she didn’t get that many of them. That she’d been watching Edna like a hawk for years never once entered her mind.
When she went upstairs and took off her corset, she sighed with relief. Before too long, she wouldn’t be able to wear a corset any more. Her belly would stick out there for all the world to see. But she had a ring on the proper finger—she held up her hand to look at the thin gold circlet—so that was all right.
She sighed again when she lay down on the bed. She felt as if her bones were turning to rubber. She raised an arm and then let it flop limply to the mattress. She wasn’t quite ready to fall asleep—though she knew she would be very soon—but she wasn’t going anywhere, either.
Her eyes had just started to slide closed when Hal came into the bedroom. “I know we didn’t think this would happen, Nellie,” he said, “but it will be a blessing in our old age.”
“I suppose so,” Nellie said, not yet convinced but willing to be. She laughed once more. “I never thought I’d be a mother again at the age I am now.”
“And I never expected to be a father,” her husband answered. “You made me the happiest man in the world when you said you would be my bride, and you have made me the happiest man in the world since, too.” Every hair in his mustache seemed to quiver with joy.
Nellie was a long way from the happiest woman in the world. A million dollars, a fancy house full of servants, and a rich, handsome husband for Edna would probably have turned the trick. But Hal was doing his best to make her happy, and she’d never had anyone do that before. “You’re sweet,” she told him. “Everything will be fine.” Was she talking to herself as well as to her husband? If she was, who could blame her?
Hal said, “I shall have to get more business from the shop across the street.”
“How do you aim do to that?” Nellie asked with genuine curiosity. The shoe-repair shop brought in a steady, reliable trickle of money. Building that trickle to anything more struck her as unlikely.
“I know what we need,” her husband said: “another war and another invasion.” He sighed. “Only the Confederates whose boots I made and mended would probably pay me in scrip, the way they did last time. But even with scrip, I made more from them during the war than from my regular customers before or after.”
“I’d sooner be poor,” Nellie said. Considering how she felt about money, that was no small assertion.
“So would I,” Hal Jacobs said. “The United States have spent my entire life working to get even with the Rebels. Now that we have finally done it, I don’t ever want them to have another chance to invade our beloved country. And, of course,” he added, “now that our flag flies down to the Rappahannock, the Confederates would have a harder time reaching and shelling Washington than they did in the last two wars.”
“I was just a little girl when they shelled the city during the Second Mexican War,” Nellie said. “I thought the end of the world had come.” Her expression grew taut. “And then I went through 1914, and I was sure the end of the world had come. And then I went through the shellings and bombings during the last few months of the war, and by the time they were through, I was wishing the end of the world would come.”
“It was a very hard time,” Hal agreed. “But you came through safe, and your lovely Edna, and so did I.” He kissed her. “And now this! I never imagined it, but I am ever so glad it has happened.”
Nellie wondered how glad he would be when she was bent over a bucket heaving her guts out. She remembered doing that for weeks and weeks when she was carrying Edna. She wondered how glad he would be when she was big as an elephant and couldn’t find a comfortable position in which to sleep and had to get up to use the pot every hour on the hour. She wondered how happy he would be with the baby screaming its head off all night long three or four nights in a row.
She would find out. She glanced over at Hal Jacobs, who was gazing fondly at her. He’d made a better husband than she thought he would. Odds were he’d make a good father, too.
Nellie smiled. “If we have a little girl, you’re going to spoil her rotten.”
“I hope so!” Hal exclaimed. “And if we have a little boy, I expect to spoil him rotten, too. A son!” He blinked. Was he blinking back tears? “I never thought I might have a son. Never. Not for many, many years.”
“Well, we don’t know if you’ve got him yet,” Nellie said. “We’ve still got a good many months to go before we find out.” She yawned once more, enormously this time. “But I’ve only got a couple of minutes to go before I’m asleep.” She closed her eyes, and discovered she didn’t have even that long.
Jefferson Pinkard wished he could walk into a saloon and have himself a cold beer. He didn’t feel like getting drunk, or so he told himself. He just wanted one schooner of beer, to take the edge off a bad mood. But Alabama had gone dry before the Great War. All the saloons were either padlocked and ankle-deep in dust or long since converted to some other way of separating a customer from his cash.
That didn’t mean a thirsty man had to dry up and blow away. Some beer was sitting back in the icebox in Jeff’s cottage. He didn’t feel like going back there, though. He’d eyed Emily like a fox eyeing a henhouse ever since he came home from the war. That was more than a year and a half now: heading on toward two years. You couldn’t keep watch every livelong minute of every livelong day.
Spring hadn’t come to Birmingham yet, but it was on the way. The breezes weren’t roaring down out of the freezing USA any more. They might not be very warm yet, but they blew off the Gulf of Mexico, wafting up a hint of Mobile, a hint of the subtropical, even though tree branches remained bare of leaves as skeletons were of flesh and all the grass on the lawns and in the parks was yellow and dead. Somewhere under the bark, somewhere under the ground, new life lurked, and would soon be bursting forth.
Maybe new life lurked somewhere under the ground for the Confederate States, too. If it did, Jefferson Pinkard couldn’t sense it as he could the coming spring. He wanted renewal. The country needed renewal. He had no idea where to find it. Nobody else in the CSA seemed to know, either.
Birmingham had been a fine, bustling city before the war. Now it just idled along, like a steam engine running on about a quarter of the pressure it needed. The steel mills remained busy, but most of what they made went north as reparations for the damnyankees. No profit there for the foundry owners. And when they made no profit, the whole town suffered.
Some of the general stores and haberdasheries and furniture stores were recognizable only by the lettering on their windows, being empty, locked shells of their former selves, almost as parched and dead as the deceased saloons with which they shared business blocks. Others still survived. On a Saturday afternoon, though, they shouldn’t have been surviving. They should have been thriving, full of steelworkers with money in their pockets to spend on a half-holiday.
Jefferson Pinkard had money in his pockets—more than two hundred dollars. “Hell of a lot of good that does me,” he muttered under his breath. The way things were these days, you couldn’t even get good and drunk on two hundred dollars. Maybe it was just as well the saloons were all deceased.
A man in a pair of denim pants and a shirt with one sleeve pinned up came out of a secondhand clothing store. Pinkard stopped short. Plenty of men in Birmingham these days had an arm gone above the elbow. But, sure enough, it was Bedford Cunningham, Jeff’s best friend once upon a time.
“How are you today, Jeff?” Cunningham asked. He was as tall as Pinkard, and had been as burly when they were both down on the floor at the Sloss Works. Since being wounded, he’d lost a lot of flesh.
“All right,” Pinkard answered shortly. He still remembered—he could never forget—what Bedford Cunningham and Emily had been doing when he’d walked into his cottage on leave. But if Bedford was here, he couldn’t be back there doing anything with Emily now. That made Jeff somewhat better inclined toward him, enough so to ask, “What you doin’ now?”
“I was heading over toward Avondale Park,” Cunningham answered. “This new Freedom Party is holding a rally. I want to see what they have to say.”
“Christ, Bedford, they’re just politicians,” Jeff said, now certain he had the excuse he needed not to go along. “You’ve heard one of ’em, you’ve heard ’em all. You’ve heard one of ’em, you’ve heard too many, too.”
“These boys are supposed to be different,” Bedford said. “They’re the ones who’ve been banging heads up in Richmond, if you’ve been reading the papers.” He essayed a small joke: “They’ve been banging heads up in Richmond even if you haven’t been reading the papers.”
As it happened, Jeff had been reading the papers, though not with so much attention as he might have. “Forgot the name of that outfit,” he admitted. “I didn’t know they got down here to Birmingham, either.” He rubbed his chin. Bristles rasped; he needed a shave. “What the hell? I’ll come along with you.” Curiosity about the new party outweighed dislike and distrust for his old friend.
People—mostly working-class white men like Pinkard or his shabbier, out-of-work counterparts—straggled into the park and toward a wooden platform bedecked with Confederate flags. In front of the platform stood a row of hard-faced men in what might almost have been uniform: white shirts and butternut trousers.
“Don’t reckon you want to pick a quarrel with those boys,” Bedford Cunningham said.
“You wouldn’t want to do it more than once,” Jeff agreed. “They’ve all been through the trenches, I’ll lay—they’ve got that look to ’em.” Cunningham nodded.
On top of the platform prowled a thin man with lank brown hair. He kept looking out at the crowd, as if he wanted to launch into his speech but was making himself wait so more people could hear him. “He’s seen the elephant, too,” Bedford said. “That’s what my grandpappy would call it, anyway.”
“Yeah,” Pinkard said. “Sure has.” Even this long after the war, he usually had little trouble telling a combat veteran from a man who wasn’t.
At last, unable to contain himself any more, the skinny man strode to the front edge of the platform. “Aren’t you folks proud to be puttin’ money in the damnyankees’ pockets?” he called in a harsh but compelling voice. “Aren’t you glad to be workin’ your fingers to the bone so they can put their mistresses in the fancy motorcars they build out of the steel you make? Aren’t you glad the fools and the traitors in Richmond blow kisses to the damnyankees when they send ’em our steel and our oil and our money? They didn’t make those things, so why the devil should they care?”
“He’s got something,” Bedford Cunningham said.
Pinkard nodded, hardly noticing he was doing it. “Yeah, he does.” He waved a hand. “Now hush up, Bedford. I want to hear what he has to say for himself.”
“Do they remember, up there in Richmond, up there in the Capitol, up there in that whited sepulcher, do they remember we fought a war with the United States not so long ago?” the skinny man demanded. “Do they? Doesn’t look like it to me, friends. How does it look to you?”
“Hell, no!” Jeff heard himself shout. His was far from the only voice raised from the crowd. Beside him, Cunningham yelled louder than he did. He grinned at his old friend, the first time he’d done that since he’d caught him with Emily.
“Up there in Richmond, do they care if we’re weak?” the skinny man asked, and answered his own question: “No, they don’t care. Why should they care? All they care about is getting elected. Nothing else matters to ’em. So what if the United States kick mud in our face? We were a great country once, before the traitors in Congress and the fools in the War Department stabbed us in the back. We can be great again, if we want to bad enough. Do they care, up there in Richmond? No, they don’t care. Do you care, you people in Birmingham?”
He could give the same speech in Chattanooga and just drop in the different place-name and a couple of details. Jeff knew that. Somehow, it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter at all. He felt the skinny man was speaking to him alone, showing him what was wrong, leading the way toward making it better. “Yes!” he yelled at the top of his lungs, his voice one among hundreds, all crying the same word.
“I don’t blame the United States for doing what they’re doing to us,” the skinny man said. “If I was in Teddy Roosevelt’s shoes, I’d try and do the same thing. But I blame those people up in Richmond for letting him get away with it—no, by God, for helping him get away with it. We ought to throw every one of those bastards on the trash heap for that by itself. Before we stand tall again, we have to throw ’em on the trash heap.
“But we’ve got more reasons than just that. They sat there sleeping while the niggers plotted and then rose up. And what did they do after that? They said, fine, from here on out niggers are just as good as white men. Tell me, friends, you reckon niggers are just as good as white men?”
“No!” roared the crowd, Jefferson Pinkard loud among them. Vespasian wasn’t a bad fellow, and he did his job pretty well, but working alongside a white man didn’t make him as good as a white man.
“Well, now, you see, you’re smarter than they are up in Richmond,” the Freedom Party speaker said. “Niggers aren’t as good as white men, never were, never will be. Never can be, and the liars up in Richmond can’t make ’em that way, even if they did give ’em the vote. The vote!” His voice rose to a furious, contemptuous howl. “I’ve got a donkey back in Richmond. I can whip him from now till doomsday, and he won’t ever win a horse race. You can say a nigger’s as good as a white man, but that doesn’t make it so. Never has. Never will. Can’t.
“We’ve got to give those fools up in Richmond the heave-ho and elect some people who can stand up to the United States and stand up for the white man here. That’s what the Freedom Party is all about. We’ve got Congressional elections coming up this fall. I hope you’ll remember us. I’m Jake Featherston. I’ll be by again if the money holds out. You’ll have somebody on the ballot here who thinks the way I do. Get on over to your polling place and vote for him.” He waved to show he was done.
While the applause still thundered, a hat came through the crowd, as if to underscore that if the money holds out. Jeff pulled a hundred-dollar banknote out of his pocket and stuck it in the hat. He imagined doing such a thing back in 1914, or tried. He couldn’t imagine having a hundred-dollar banknote in his pocket back then.
“There’s a man who knows what we need,” Bedford Cunningham said as the rally began to break up.
“Sure as hell is. Sure as hell does,” Pinkard said. His voice was awed, almost as if he’d gone to church and been born again. He felt born again. Listening to Featherston made him believe the Confederate States could pull themselves together again. “I’d follow him a long way.”
“Me, too,” Cunningham said. “If whoever the Freedom Party runs is even a quarter as good on the stump as this Feathersmith—”
“Featherston,” Jeff corrected; he’d listened with great attention to every word the skinny man said. “Jake Featherston.”
“Featherston,” Cunningham said. “If I like who they’re running here, I’ll vote for him. I’ve been a Whig a long time, but I’d change.”
“So would I,” Jefferson Pinkard said. “This Featherston, he knows what he’s talking about. You can hear it in every word he says.”