They paused when the waiter came up. Knight ordered a beefsteak, Mizell fried chicken, and Jake a ham steak. “I’m shooting for ten Congressmen next session,” he said, though he expected perhaps half that many would win seats. “How about you, Knight?”
“We’ll win Dallas—I’m pretty sure of that,” the leader of the Redemption League said. “They can see the Yankees up in Sequoyah and over in that damned new state of Houston from there. We may take a couple of other seats, too. I’ll tell you what we will do, though, by God: we’ll scare the Radical Liberals clean out of their shoes.”
“No arguments there,” Amos Mizell said. He raised the drink to his lips again. “I wish more of the new leaders who think along our lines would have joined us here tonight. The Tennessee Volunteers, the Knights of the Gray, and the Red-Fighters all have ideas we might find worthwhile, and they aren’t the only ones.”
“There’s plenty of people angry with the way things are going now,” Jake allowed. “A couple of years ago, the Freedom Party wasn’t anything more than a few people sitting around in a saloon grousing.” He drew himself up straight with pride. “We’ve come a long ways since then.”
“That you have,” Mizell said. Knight nodded once more. Now he looked jealous. The Freedom Party had come further and faster than the Redemption League. Mizell continued, “I know for a fact that a lot of Tin Hats are Freedom Party men, too.”
“I never thought we could get away with breaking up the soft parties’ rallies,” Will Knight said, and looked jealous again. “But you’ve gone and done it, and you’ve gone and gotten away with it, too.”
“You bet we have,” Jake said. “If you reckon the cops love the Whigs and the Radical Liberals and the niggers, you can damn well think again. And”—he lowered his voice a little—“if you reckon the soldiers love the traitors in the War Department, you can damn well think again about that, too.”
“Some of the things you’ve said about the War Department have been of concern to me,” Amos Mizell said. “I don’t care to bring disrepute down on men who served so bravely against the foe. Traitor is a hard word.”
Featherston fixed him with that savage grin. “Jeb Stuart III was my commanding officer,” he said. “Pompey, his nigger servant, was ass-deep in the rebellion. He shielded that nigger from Army of Northern Virginia Intelligence. His old man, Jeb, Jr., shielded him when it turned out he’d been wrong all the time. If that doesn’t make him a traitor to his country, what the hell does it do?”
Before either Mizell or Knight could answer, the waiter returned with their suppers. They ate in silence for a while. Knight was the first to break it. “Suppose what you say is true. If you say it too loud and too often, don’t you figure the Army is going to land on your back?”
“I reckon the generals’d love to,” Jake answered with his mouth full. “But I don’t reckon they’d have an easy time of it, even now, on account of the soldiers who got the orders wouldn’t be happy about following ’em. And the longer they wait, the harder it’ll be.”
“You may be right about the second part of that,” Mizell said. “I’ve got my doubts about the first, I have to tell you. You might be smarter to take a step back every now and then so you can take two forward later on.”
“The Freedom Party doesn’t back up.” Featherston eyed Mizell, but was really speaking more to Knight. “You talk about people who want to straighten out the mess we’re in and you talk about us first. Everybody else comes behind us.”
“You go on like that, why’d you bother coming down here at all?” Knight asked. “What have we got to talk about?”
That was a good question. Jake did not want to negotiate with the Redemption League. Negotiating implied he reckoned Knight his equal, which he did not care to do. But he did not dare risk antagonizing the Tin Hats. If Amos Mizell started saying harsh things about him and about the Freedom Party, it would hurt. But he was not about to admit that, either.
Picking his words with more care than usual, he replied, “We’re on the way up. You want to come with us, Knight, you want to help us climb, that’s fine. You want to fight, you’ll slow us down. I don’t say anything different. But you won’t stop us, and I’ll break you in the end.” That wasn’t party against party. It was man against man. The only thing Featherston knew how to do when threatened was push back harder than ever. Knight was a man of similar sort. He glared across the table at Jake.
“We’re here to stop these brawls before they hurt all of us,” Amos Mizell said. “If we work things out now, we don’t have to air our dirty linen in public and waste force we could aim at our enemies. That’s how I see it.”
“That’s how I see it, too,” Jake said. “If the Redemption League was bigger than the Freedom Party, I’d ease back. Since it’s the other way round—”
“You’re the one who gets to talk that way,” Willy Knight said. Jake only smiled. He knew he was lying—he would have done anything to get ahead of a rival—but nobody could prove it.
“It appears to me, things being as they are, that our best course is to use the Freedom Party as the spearhead of our movement and the Redemption League and other organizations as the shaft that helps give the head its striking power,” Mizell said. “How does it appear to you, Mr. Knight?”
Featherston felt like kissing Amos Mizell. He couldn’t have put the leader of the Redemption League on the spot like that himself. Knight looked like a man who’d found a worm—no, half a worm—in his apple. Very slowly, he replied, “I think we can work with the Freedom Party, depending on who’s stronger in any particular place.”
“That’s a bargain,” Jake answered at once. “We’ll pull a couple of our candidates in Arkansas, where you look to have a better chance, and we’ll throw our weight behind you. There are some districts in Alabama and Mississippi and one in Tennessee I can think of where I want you to do the same.”
Even more slowly, Knight nodded again. If the Freedom Party outperformed the Redemption League in this election, support would swing Featherston’s way, leaving Knight in the lurch. He could see that. He couldn’t do anything about it, though.
He’d want a high post if the Redemption League got folded into the Freedom Party. Jake could already tell as much. He’d give Knight a good slot, too. That way, he could keep an eye on him. The CSA, he thought, had been stabbed in the back. He didn’t intend to let that happen to him.
Jonathan Moss slid out of his Bucephalus and stumbled toward his Evanston apartment building. He was glad he’d managed to get home without running over anybody. After his last course, he and Fred Sandburg and several other people—he couldn’t recall how many right now—had found a friendly saloon and done their best to drink it dry. Why not? he thought. It was a Friday night. He wouldn’t need his brains again till Monday morning.
His breath smoked. The wind off Lake Michigan blew the smoke away. It was chilly, despite the antifreeze he’d poured into his pipes. “Not as chilly as it would be up in Ontario,” Moss said, as if someone had asserted the opposite. He stepped up onto the stairs. “Not half as chilly as Laura Secord’s heart.”
Fred never had stopped ribbing him about Laura Secord. Even now, after she’d rejected him again, he couldn’t get her out of his mind. He’d come home. He’d done well at Northwestern. He hadn’t found a girl he cared about, though. He wondered if he ever would. He wondered if he ever could.
He opened the door at the top of the stairs, then quickly shut it behind him. Getting out of the wind felt good. He fumbled for the key to his mailbox. It wasn’t easy to find, not when every key on the ring looked like one of twins. He almost gave it up as a bad job and headed for bed. But, figuring he’d probably have trouble finding his apartment key, too, he chose to regard the mailbox key as a test. He made a determined drunk.
“There you are, you sneaky little bastard,” he said, capturing the errant key. Making it fit the lock was another struggle, but he won that one, too.
A couple of advertising
circulars fell onto the floor. Bending to pick them up made his head spin. He also had a letter from a cousin out in Denver and another envelope with his address written in a hand he didn’t recognize. He’d taken two steps toward the stairs before he remembered to go back and shut and lock the mailbox.
He did have a devil of a time finding the key that opened the apartment door, but by luck he got it into the lock on the first try. He flipped on the electric light and tossed the mail down on the table in front of the sofa. He tossed himself down on the sofa and fell asleep.
Next thing he knew, the sun was streaming in the window. A determined musician pounded on kettle drums inside his head. His mouth tasted the way a slit trench smelled. His bladder was about to explode. He staggered off to the bathroom, pissed forever, brushed his teeth, and dry-swallowed two aspirin tablets. Black coffee would have helped, too, but making it seemed too much like work.
After splashing cold water on his face, he slowly went back out into the front room. He discovered he hadn’t thrown out the circulars, so he did that. Then he read his cousin’s letter. It had already started snowing in Denver, and David looked likely to get a promotion at the bank where he worked.
“Bully,” Moss muttered. His voice sounded harsh and unnaturally loud in his ears. He let the letter lie where he’d left it. Cousin David was not the most interesting man God ever made.
That left the other envelope, the one with the unfamiliar handwriting. It bore no return address. Something about the stamp looked funny. When he peered closely, he saw that Ben Franklin’s portrait had the word ONTARIO printed over it.
“No,” he said hoarsely. He shook his fist at the window, in the general direction of the Northwestern campus. “God damn you to hell for the practical-joking son of a bitch you are, Fred.” He found it much easier to believe that his friend had got hold of some occupation stamps than that anyone in Ontario should write to him. He knew only one person in the conquered Canadian province, and she wished she didn’t know him.
But the envelope carried a postmark from Arthur. Could Fred have arranged to have someone up there put it in the mail? Moss knew Fred could have. His friend would go to great lengths to jerk his chain.
“Only one way to find out,” he mumbled, and opened the envelope with fingers not all of whose shaking sprang from his hangover. The paper inside was coarse and cheap. He unfolded it. The letter—a note, really—was in the hand that had addressed the envelope.
Dear Mr. Moss, it read, Now you have the chance to pay me back. I daresay it will be sweet for you. I would sooner do anything than rely on the word of a man to whom I offered nothing but insult, but I find I have no choice. The harvest this year was very bad, and I have no way to raise the $200 I need to keep from being taxed off my farm. So far as I can tell, all my kin are dead. My friends are as poor as I am. Even if you do find it in your heart to send the money, I can make no promise to feel toward you the way you would want me to feel. I would not deceive you by saying anything else. Laura Secord. Her address followed.
Moss stared. The letter couldn’t be anything but genuine. He’d told Fred Sandburg some of what he’d said and done up in Ontario, but he’d never mentioned the promise he’d given Laura Secord. He’d known too well how Fred would laugh.
“What do I do now?” he asked the ceiling. The ceiling didn’t answer. It was up to him.
If he threw the letter away, he would have his revenge. The trouble was, he didn’t much want revenge. He hadn’t been angry at Laura Secord when she turned him down. He’d been disappointed. He’d been wounded, almost as if by machine-gun fire. But what he’d felt for her hadn’t turned to hate, though for the life of him he couldn’t have said why.
If he sent her the two hundred dollars, he’d be throwing his money away. He knew that. Had he not known it, she’d made it very plain. But, that frozen day up in Arthur, he’d told her that if she ever needed him for anything, all she had to do was ask. Now she’d asked. Was he going to break his promise? If he did, what would that make her think of Americans? What would it make her think of him?
He’d never been a man in whom altruism burned with a fine, hot flame. He was well-to-do, but not so well-to-do that spending two hundred dollars wouldn’t hurt—it wasn’t as if he were playing with Confederate money.
“What do I do?” he said again. The ceiling still wasn’t talking.
He went back into the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror over the sink. He looked like hell: bloodshot eyes, stubble, hair all awry because he hadn’t bothered combing it yet. If he threw Laura Secord’s letter into the wastebasket, what would he see the next time he looked in a mirror?
“A lying bastard.” That wasn’t the ceiling talking. That was him. Did he want to go through life thinking of himself as a liar every time he lathered up with his shaving brush? Some people wouldn’t care. Some people would figure rejection made their promise null and void.
But he’d given that promise after Laura Secord had rejected him, in spite of her rejecting him. His headache had only a little to do with the hangover. He sighed, fogging the mirror. That proved he was still alive. He knew what he would do. He’d never tell Fred Sandburg. Fred wouldn’t let him live it down if he found out. He’d do it anyway.
It was Saturday morning. The banks would be closed. The post office was open, though. He could send a money order—if he had two hundred dollars in cash. By turning the apartment upside down, he came up with $75.27. He cursed under his breath for a minute, then telephoned Fred Sandburg.
“Hullo?” When Sandburg answered the phone, he sounded as if he’d just been raised from the dead and wished he hadn’t been.
“Hello, Fred,” Moss said cheerfully—the aspirins were working. “Listen, if I write you a check for a hundred and thirty bucks, can you cash it?”
“Yeah, I think so,” his friend answered.
“Good. See you in a few minutes,” Moss said. Sandburg started to ask him why he wanted the money right away, but he hung up without answering. Throwing on some clothes, he drove the few blocks to Sandburg’s flat.
“What the hell is this all about?” Sandburg asked. He looked like a poor job of embalming; he’d had more to drink than Moss had. “You eloping with some broad and you need to buy a ladder?”
“Got it the first time,” Moss told him. He wrote a check and thrust it at his friend. In return, Sandburg gave him two fifties, a twenty, and a gold eagle. “Thanks, pal, you’re a lifesaver,” Moss said. He headed out, leaving Sandburg scratching his head behind him.
At the post office, Moss discovered he couldn’t buy a money order for two hundred dollars. “Hundred-dollar maximum, sir,” the clerk said, “but I can sell you two.” Moss nodded. The clerk went on, “That will be $200.60—thirty-cent fee on each order.” Moss gave him the money. When he got the money orders back, he put them in an envelope he’d already addressed. For another two cents, the clerk sold him a stamp.
After that, he drove home. Now that the deed was done, he wondered how foolish he’d been. Two hundred dollars foolish, he thought—and sixty cents. When he asked his parents for money, as he’d eventually need to do, they’d want to know where it had gone. They were liable to suspect he’d spent it on a loose woman. He laughed mirthlessly. If only Laura Secord were loose, or even a little looser!
He returned to the study of the law on Monday. Every day when he went home, he checked the mail in hope of finding another envelope with an overprinted stamp. Ten days later, he got one. The note inside read simply, I see there are decent Yanks after all. God bless you. He read it a dozen times, convinced beyond contradiction that that was the best two hundred dollars he’d ever spent.
Nellie Jacobs opened her eyes. She was lying on a hard, unyielding bed, staring up into a bright electric light bulb. When she blinked, the bulb seemed to waver and float. It also seemed much farther away than a self-respecting ceiling lamp had any business being.
Hovering between her and the lamp were her daughter and h
er husband. Hal Jacobs asked, “Are you all right, darling?”
“I’m fine.” Even to herself, Nellie sounded anything but fine. What she sounded was drunk. She felt drunk, too, at least to the point of not caring what she said: “Don’t worry about me. I was born to hang.” She coughed. That hurt. So did talking. Her throat was raw and sore and dry. As she slowly took stock of herself, that was far from the only pain she discovered. Someone had been using her belly for a punching bag.
“Do you know where you’re at, Ma?” Edna Semphroch asked her.
“Of course I do,” she answered indignantly. That bought her a few seconds in which to cast about through the misty corridors of her memory and try to find the answer. Somewhat to her own surprise, she did: “I’m in the Emergency Hospital at the corner of Fifteenth and D, Miss Smarty-Britches.” Recalling where she was made her recall why she was there. “Holy suffering Jesus! Did I have a boy or a girl?”
“We have a daughter, Nellie,” Hal said. If he was disappointed at not having a son, he didn’t show it. “Clara Lucille Jacobs, six pounds fourteen ounces, nineteen and a half inches—and beautiful. Just like you.”
“How you do go on,” Nellie said. A little girl. That was nice. Little girls, thank God, didn’t grow up to be men.
Someone new floated into her field of view: a man clad all in white, even to a white cloth cap on his head. A doctor, she realized, and giggled at being able to realize anything at all. Businesslike as a stockbroker, he asked, “How are you feeling, Mrs. Jacobs?”
“Not too bad,” she said. “I had ether, didn’t I?” She remembered the cone coming down over her face, the funny, choking smell, and then…nothing. The doctor was nodding. Nellie nodded, too, though it made her dizzy, or rather, dizzier. “I had ether, and after that I had the baby.” The doctor nodded again. Nellie giggled again. “A lot easier doing it like that than the regular way,” she declared. “One hell of a lot easier, believe me.”
Blood and Iron Page 26
