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.”
For perhaps the first time in his professional life, Colonel Irving Morrell wished he were back in Philadelphia. Fighting arguments about barrels by way of letters and telegrams from Leavenworth, Kansas, was not getting the job done in the way he would have hoped. Letters and wires were all too easy to ignore.
“What can we do, Colonel?” Lieutenant Jenkins asked when the latest unsatisfactory reply came back from the War Department. “We should have a design ready to build now, and we’re not even close.”
“Damned if I know, Lije,” Morrell answered. He tapped the papers with the tip of his index finger. “I think we would have a design by now, if the budget were what people thought it was going to be when they set up the Barrel Works.”
“Miserable Socialists,” Jenkins said angrily. “They’re trying to take away everything we won on the battlefield.”
“They’re not making anything easy for us, that’s for sure,” Morrell said. “I want to make hay while the sun shines, if you know what I mean. You have to figure the Rebs won’t stay down forever. The farther ahead of them we are when they do start getting back on their feet, the better I’ll like it.”
“Yes, sir,” Jenkins said. “We’d be a lot better off, sir, if they’d listen to you more. If they don’t want to listen to you, why did they send you out here in the first place?”
“To get me out of their hair, for one thing,” Morrell answered. “To drive me out of my mind, for another. These days, they’re so worried about spending money that they’re trying to build barrels on the cheap. I don’t know how many times I’ve explained and explained and explained that the engines in our machines aren’t strong enough to do the job, but what sort of answer do I get? What it boils down to is, ‘They did the job in the last war, so of course they’ll do the job in the next one, too.’” He looked disgusted.
So did Lije Jenkins. “With that kind of thinking, we’d have gone into the Great War with single-shot black-powder Springfields.”
Morrell nodded. “You understand that, and I understand that. The War Department understands it can get White truck engines—even the ones built in mirror image to pair with the regular model—in carload lots, cheap as it wants. Coming up with something better won’t be anywhere near as cheap. And cheap counts. Right now, cheap counts a lot.”
“Are they going to leave our country’s safety hanging on nickels and dimes?” Lieutenant Jenkins demanded indignantly. He was still very young, young enough to believe in the tooth fairy, the common sense of Congress, and a great many other unlikelihoods.
“Probably,” Morrell said, at which the lieutenant looked as if he’d just watched his puppy run over in the street. Trying not to smile, Morrell went on, “They spent twenty years after the War of Secession tossing the Army nickels and dimes and not much more, remember. They paid for it, too, but that doesn’t mean they can’t do it again.”
“They’d have to be crazy,” Jenkins exclaimed.
“No, just shortsighted,” Morrell said, shaking his head. “I think it was President Mahan who noted that the biggest trouble republics have is that, over time, the voters are apt to get tired of paying for what their country needs to defend itself. They’d sooner spend the money on bread and circuses, or else not spend it and keep it in their own pockets.”
“After everything we’ve gone through, sir, that would be a crime,” Jenkins said.
“You think so, and I think so, and the War Department thinks so, too,” Morrell replied, this time with a shrug. “The voters don’t think so. They’ve sent a lot of Socialists to Congress this year. We do what we can with what we have, that’s all. If we haven’t got much, we do what we can with that. Pharaoh made the Israelites make bricks without straw.”
“A crime,” Lieutenant Jenkins repeated. He wasn’t old enough to recall the cheeseparing the Army had had to put up with during the dark years after the War of Secession. Neither was Morrell, but he’d listened to older soldiers grouse about it ever since he’d put on a green-gray uniform. General Custer, under whom he’d served in Tennessee, had been through it all.
And now, he’d heard, Custer was up in Canada, in charge of the soldiers bringing U.S. authority to a land larger than the United States. He didn’t know how the old warhorse would shape in that assignment. It didn’t seem to call for the slam-bang drive that characterized Custer’s fighting style. On the other hand, Morrell would have preferred it to sitting behind a desk in Philadelphia. No doubt Custer did, too.
Morrell dismissed his former commander from his mind. He glanced over at Lije Jenkins, who still looked unhappy with the world. “The only thing we can do is our best,” Morrell said. A cuckoo came out of the clock on the wall and announced six o’clock. Morrell grinned. “The other thing we can do now is head over to the mess hall and get supper. And after that, didn’t I hear something about a dance in town tonight?”
“Yes, sir.” Jenkins’ eyes sparkled. “I’m going over there. You feel like cutting a rug, too, sir?” He eyed Morrell with a certain bemused curiosity.
Morrell had all he could do to keep from laughing out loud. “I’m not a great-grandfather ready for the boneyard yet, Lieutenant,” he said. “There’s still some juice left in here.” He set a hand over his chest and grinned wickedly. “After supper, sha
ll we race over to the dance hall?”
“Uh, no, sir,” Jenkins said. “You ran me into the mud out on the practice range. I figure you can probably do the same thing on sidewalks.” His grin had a wicked touch, too. “But, sir, there’ll be girls there, you know.”
“I should hope so,” Morrell said. “You don’t think I’d want to waltz or foxtrot with an ugly customer like you, do you?” As a matter of fact, Lieutenant Jenkins was a handsome young man. That still didn’t mean Morrell wanted to dance with him.
Morrell was heading toward thirty now, and had never come close to acquiring a wife. His eye had always been on the war ahead, as the eyes of the United States had been. But now the war was over and won, and single-minded devotion to duty was looking harder and less desirable not only to the country but also to Irving Morrell.
He did not head for the dance with Lieutenant Jenkins seriously expecting to find a wife the minute he stepped out onto the floor. That would have been unreasonable in the extreme, and he knew it. But if he did find a young lady, a lady he found attractive, he was ready and more than ready to pursue the matter and see where it led. He nodded as he left Fort Leavenworth. He’d never had that kind of determination before, not about anything except the battlefield.
Leavenworth, Kansas, was a town of about twenty thousand people. Not all of them served the fort, by any means. Many mined the large coal deposits in the area, while others worked in flour and lumber mills. But, regardless of whether the locals worked for the Army or not, soldiers got solid respect in Leavenworth. It had been an antislavery settlement back in the days before the War of Secession, when the South tried to make Kansas a slave state. Only the oldest of the old-timers recalled those days now, but the tradition of hatred for the Confederacy ran strong here, as it did in much of Kansas.
Blood and Iron Page 19
