“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 fucking 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 s
cratch 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.
Blood and Iron Page 17
