Flora did check the roster of poll-watchers, and suggested some changes and additions. If you want something done right, do it yourself, she thought. After everything satisfied her, she headed back to the flat where she’d lived most of her life. The years on the floor of Congress had sharpened her debating; she had no trouble discouraging Bruck from walking along with her.
Coming in through the door reminded her anew of how much her life had changed. The apartment where she lived alone in Philadelphia was far bigger than this one, which housed her parents, two brothers, two sisters, and a toddler nephew, and which had housed her as well. It hadn’t seemed particularly crowded before she went away: everyone she knew lived the same way, and sometimes took in boarders to help make ends meet. Now she knew there were other possibilities.
Her sisters, Sophie and Esther, helped her mother in the kitchen. The smell of beef-and-barley soup rising from the pot on the stove mingled with the scent of her father’s pipe tobacco to make the odor of home. Her brothers, David and Isaac, bent over a chess board at one corner of the dining-room table. All was as it had been there, too, save for the crutch on the floor by David’s chair.
David moved a knight and looked smug. Isaac grunted, as if in pain. Looking up from the board, he consciously noticed Flora for the first time, though she hadn’t been particularly quiet. “Hello,” he said. “Got my conscription notice today.” He was eighteen, two years younger than his brother.
“You knew it was coming,” Flora said, and Isaac nodded: everyone put in his two years. Flora quietly thanked the God in Whom her Marxist exterior did not believe that Isaac would serve in peacetime. By the way David’s face twisted for a moment, that thought was going through his mind, too.
“How does the leg feel?” she asked him.
He slapped it. The sound it made was nothing like that of flesh: closer to furniture. “Not too bad,” he said. “I manage. I only need one leg for a sewing-machine treadle, and it doesn’t much matter which.” At that, guilt rose up and smote Flora. Seeing it, her brother said, “I didn’t mean to give you a hard time. It’s just the way things are, that’s all.”
A fresh puff of smoke rose from behind the Daily Forward their father was reading. Abraham Hamburger said, “It’s usually not a good idea to say anything that makes you explain yourself afterwards.”
“I wish more Congressmen would pay attention to that advice, Father,” Flora said, which caused fresh smoke signals to rise from behind the Yiddish newspaper.
Little Yossel Reisen grabbed Flora by the leg and gravely said, “Wowa”: the closest he could come to her name. Then he walked on unsteady feet to Sophie and said, “Mama.” That he had down solid.
Sophie Reisen stirred the soup, then picked him up. Yossel’s father, after whom he was named, had never seen him; he’d been killed in Virginia long before the baby was born. Had he not got Sophie in a family way, they probably wouldn’t have been married before he met a bullet.
When supper reached the table, the tastes of home were as familiar as the smell. Afterwards, Flora helped her mother with the dishes. “You will win again,” Sarah Hamburger said with calm assurance.
She would have thought the same had Flora reckoned herself out of the running. As things were, Flora nodded. “Yes, I think I will,” she answered, and her mother beamed; Sarah Hamburger had known it all along.
Going to sleep that night was a fresh trial for Flora. She’d got used to dozing off in quiet surroundings, queer as the notion would have struck her before she went to Congress. The racket in the apartment, the sort of noise that had once lulled her, now set her teeth on edge because she wasn’t accustomed to it any more. Even having to answer Esther’s “Good night” struck her as an imposition.
She stumped hard through the last few days of the campaign. On Tuesday the fifth, she voted at Public School 130. The Socialist poll-watcher tipped his cap to her; his Democratic opposite number did not raise his expensive black homburg.
Then it was back to Socialist Party headquarters to wait for the polls to close in the district and across the country. As the night lengthened, telephone lines and telephone clickers began bringing in reports. By the third set of numbers from her district, she knew she was going to beat Marcus Krauskopf: her lead was close to two to one.
Well before midnight, Krauskopf read the writing on the wall and telephoned to concede. “Mazeltov,” he said graciously. “Now that you’ve won, go right on being the conscience of the House. They need one there, believe me.”
“Thank you very much,” she said. “You ran a good race.” That wasn’t quite true, but matched his graciousness.
“I did what I could.” She could almost hear him shrug over the wire. “But you’ve made a name for yourself, it’s a Socialist district anyhow, and I don’t think this is a Democratic year.”
As if to underscore that, Maria Tresca exclaimed, “We just elected a Socialist in the twenty-eighth district in Pennsylvania. Where is that, anyhow?”
People looked at maps. After a minute or so, Herman Bruck said, “It’s way up in the northwestern part of the state. We’ve never elected a Socialist Congressman from around there before—too many farmers, not enough miners. Maybe the people really have had enough of the Democratic Party.”
“Even if they are finally fed up, it’s taken them much too long to get that way,” Maria said. As far as she was concerned, the proletarian revolution was welcome to start tomorrow, or even tonight.
The later it got, the more returns came in from the West. The first numbers from Dakota showed Hosea Blackford handily ahead in his district. “A sound man,” Herman Bruck said.
“Sound? Half the time, he sounds like a Democrat,” Maria Tresca said darkly.
But even her ideological purity melted in the face of the gains the Socialists were making. A couple of districts in and just outside Toledo that had never been anything but Democratic were going Socialist tonight. The same thing happened in Illinois and Michigan and, eventually, in distant California, too.
“Is it a majority?” Flora asked, a question she hadn’t thought she would need tonight. She’d been optimistic going into the election, but there was a difference between optimism and cockeyed optimism.
Except, tonight, maybe there wasn’t. “I don’t know.” Herman Bruck sounded like a man doing his best to restrain astonished awe. “A lot of these races are still close. But it could be.” He looked toward a map where he’d been coloring Socialist districts red. “It really could be.”
Every time Cincinnatus Driver got downwind of the Kentucky Smoke House, spit gushed into his mouth. He couldn’t help it; Apicius Wood ran the best barbecue joint in Kentucky, very possibly the best in the USA. Negroes from the neighborhood came to the Kentucky Smoke House. So did Covington’s whites. And so did the men who’d come down from the other side of the Ohio since the Stars and Stripes replaced the Stars and Bars atop the city hall. Nobody turned up his nose at food like that.
Lucullus—Lucullus Wood, now that his father Apicius, like Cincinnatus, had taken a surname—was turning a pig’s carcass above a pit filled with hickory wood and basting the meat with a sauce an angel had surely brought down from heaven. He nodded to Cincinnatus. “Ain’t seen you here for a while,” he remarked. “What you want?”
Cincinnatus stretched out his hands in the direction of the pit. For a moment, he wanted nothing more than to revel in the warmth that came from it: the weather outside held a promise of winter. “I want to talk to your pa,” he answered as he began to warm up himself.
Lucullus made a sour face. “Why ain’t I surprised?”
“On account of you know me,” Cincinnatus said. “I’ll be damned if I know how you can look like you done bit into a green persimmon when you’re takin’ a bath in the best smell in the world.”
“Only thing I smell when you come around here is trouble,” Lucullus said. He never missed a beat in turning the carcass or basting it.
With a bitter laugh, Cincinnatus an
swered, “That’d be funny, except it ain’t. I get into trouble around here, it’s trouble your pa put me in. Now”—he let his voice roughen—“can I see him, or not?”
Lucullus Wood was harder to lean on than he had been. He was twenty now, or maybe a year past, and had confidence in himself as a man. Even so, a show of determination could still make him back down. He bit his lip, then said, “That room in back I reckon you know about.”
“Yeah, I know about that room.” Cincinnatus nodded. “He in there with anybody, or is he by his lonesome?”
“By his lonesome, far as I know,” Lucullus said. “Go on, go on. You barged in before. Barge on in again.” Had his hands been free, he probably would have made washing motions with them to show that whatever happened next was not his fault. As things were, his expression got the message across.
Ignoring that expression, Cincinnatus went down the hall at the back of the Kentucky Smoke House till he got to the door he knew. He didn’t barge in; he knocked instead. “Come in,” a voice from within said. Cincinnatus worked the latch. Apicius Wood looked at him with something less than pleasure. “Oh. It’s you. Reckoned it might be somebody I was glad to see.”
“It’s me.” Cincinnatus shut the door behind him.
With a grunt, Apicius pointed to a battered chair. The proprietor of the Kentucky Smoke House looked as if he’d eaten a great deal of his own barbecue. If that was how he’d got so fat, Cincinnatus didn’t think he could have picked a better way. “Well,” Apicius rumbled, “what we gonna fight about today?”
“Don’t want no fight,” Cincinnatus said.
Apicius Wood laughed in his face. “Ain’t many niggers in this town as stubborn as I am, but you’re sure as hell one of ’em. We don’t see eye to eye. You know it, an’ I know it, too. When we get together, we fight.”
Cincinnatus let out a long sigh. “I ain’t enough of a Red to suit you, I ain’t enough of a diehard to suit Joe Conroy, and I’m too goddamn black to suit Luther Bliss. Where does that leave me?”
“Out on a limb,” Apicius answered accurately. “Well, say your say, so I know what we gonna fight about this time.”
“What you think of the elections?” Cincinnatus asked.
“What the hell difference it make what I think or even if I think?” Apicius returned. “Ain’t like I got to vote. Ain’t like you got to vote, neither. Have to wait till after the revolution for that to happen, I reckon.”
“Maybe not,” Cincinnatus said. “Put ’em together, the Socialists and the Republicans got more seats in the House than the Democrats do. First time the Democrats lose the House in more’n thirty years. They lost seats in the Senate, too.”
“Didn’t lose a one here in Kentucky,” Apicius said. “’Fore they let somebody here vote, they make damn sure they know who he vote for.”
Cincinnatus refused to let the fat cook sidetrack him. “How much you work with the white Socialists before the elections?” he asked.
“Not much,” Apicius said. “Ain’t much to work with. Don’t hardly have no homegrown white Socialists, and every one that come over the Ohio, Bliss and the Kentucky State Police got their eye on him. Don’t want them bastards puttin’ their eye on me any worse than they done already.”
“How hard did you try?” Cincinnatus persisted. “Did you—?”
But Apicius wasn’t easy to override, either. Raising a pale-palmed hand, he went on, “’Sides, them white Socialists ain’t hardly Reds. They’re nothin’ but Pinks, you know what I mean? They jaw about the class struggle, but they ain’t pickin’ up guns and doin’ anything much.”
“What you talkin’ about?” Cincinnatus said. “All these strikes—”
Apicius broke in again: “So what? Ain’t much shootin’ goin’ on, not to speak of. When the niggers in the Confederate States rose up, that was a fight worth talkin’ about. We’d have done the same thing here, certain sure, if the Yankees hadn’t taken us out of the CSA by then. Did do some of it anyways.”
That was true, and Cincinnatus knew it. He also knew something else: “Yeah, they rose up, sure enough, but they got whipped. Reds rise up in the USA, they get whipped, too. Got to be more to the class struggle than shootin’ guns all the blame time, or the folks with most guns always gonna win.”
“Not if their soldiers and their police work out whose side they really ought to be on,” Apicius said. This time, he spoke quickly, to make sure Cincinnatus couldn’t interrupt him: “Yeah, I know, I know, it ain’t likely, not the way things is now. I ain’t sayin’ no different.”
“All right, then,” Cincinnatus said. “If it ain’t all struggle with guns, we—you—ought to be workin’ with the white folks, ain’t that right?”
“You ain’t been enough of a Red your ownself to tell me what I ought to be doin’, Cincinnatus,” Apicius said heavily.
“You don’t fancy it, you don’t got to listen,” Cincinnatus returned. “Other thing you ought to be doin’ is, you ought to start workin’ to get black folks the vote. Ain’t impossible, not in the USA.”
“Ain’t possible, not in Kentucky,” Apicius said. “Some of the sons of bitches in the Legislature remember when they used to own us. You was born after manumission. You don’t know how things was. When I was a boy, I was a slave. I don’t know how to tell you how bad bein’ a slave is.”
“My pa was a slave,” Cincinnatus said. “My ma, too. There’s some states in the USA that let niggers vote. If we can’t vote, we might as well still be slaves, on account of we ain’t got no say in what happens to us.”
“Yeah, and you know what states they are,” Apicius said with a toss of the head. “They’re states that ain’t got more than about a dozen niggers, maybe two dozen tops, so havin’’ em vote don’t matter one way or the other. Kentucky ain’t like that. We got to vote here, we’d have us some say. What that means is, we ain’t never gettin’ the vote here. White folks won’t let it happen.”
That held an unpleasant ring of truth. Cincinnatus said, “If we can’t win a fight and we can’t win the vote, what good are we?”
“Damned if I know what good you are, ’cept to drive me crazy,” Apicius said. “What I’m good for is, I make some pretty good barbecue.”
Cincinnatus exhaled in exasperation. “If you don’t try, how the devil you find out what you can do?”
“I go up on the roof at city hall, I don’t need to jump off to know I land in the street,” Apicius said. “What you want I should do, hand Luther Bliss a petition to ask him to tell the gov’nor to give us the vote? Not likely!” That not likely didn’t refer to the orders the chief of the Kentucky secret police might give the governor. But Apicius could never sign such a petition, being unable to read or write.
“This here is one of the United States now,” Cincinnatus said stubbornly. “You and me, we’re citizens of the United States. We weren’t never citizens of the Confederate States. We can try now. Maybe we don’t win, but maybe by the time my Achilles grows up, he be able to vote.”
“Don’t hold your breath,” Apicius advised, “or you end up the bluest damn nigger anybody ever seen.”
That also sounded altogether too likely to suit Cincinnatus. But he was not a man to give in to trouble if he could get around it. And, as a U.S. citizen, he had more ways to try to get around it than he’d had as a Confederate resident. “I end up bangin’ my head against a stone wall here, I can move to one of them states where they do let black folks vote.” He didn’t know exactly which states allowed Negro suffrage, but a trip to the library would tell him.
He’d succeeded in startling Apicius. “You’d move up to one of them Yankee states?” The barbecue cook seemed to listen to himself, for he laughed. “Hellfire, this here’s a Yankee state these days, ain’t it?”
“Yeah, except most of the white folks here ain’t figured that out,” Cincinnatus answered. “So why the hell shouldn’t I move? Couldn’t be worse’n what I’ve got now, not in the USA it couldn’t”—the Confederate Sta
tes were a different story altogether, and both men knew it—“so what’s keepin’ me here? Ought to throw my family in the truck and get on the road.”
“I seen that truck,” Apicius said. “If it ain’t one thing keepin’ you here, damned if I know what is. You be lucky to get over the river into Ohio, let alone anywheres else.”
“Maybe,” Cincinnatus said. “It is a shame and a disgrace, ain’t it?” But, even though he chuckled at the barb, the idea of packing up and leaving stayed in his mind. The more he thought about it, the better it seemed. He wouldn’t have to worry about Luther Bliss, or Apicius and the Reds, or the diehards. He’d seen that white people from the rest of the USA didn’t love Negroes—far from it—but white people in Kentucky didn’t love Negroes, either.
He wondered what Elizabeth would say if he proposed pulling up stakes. He wondered what his mother and father would say, too. All of a sudden, finding out didn’t seem like the worst idea in the world. He’d never cast a vote in his life. Being able to do that would be worth a lot.
“You got that look in your eye,” Apicius said.
“Maybe I do,” Cincinnatus answered. “God damn, maybe I do.”
“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.”
Blood and Iron Page 15
