Reggie had to wait a couple of minutes, for none of the booths was open. A lot of men were doing their civic duty before heading for work. At last, a fellow in overalls came out of a booth. He nodded to Bartlett and said “Freedom!” in a friendly way. The voting officials glared at him. So did Reggie. The man didn’t even notice.
In the voting booth, Bartlett stared down at the names of the candidates as if they’d lost their meaning. That didn’t last long, though. As soon as he saw Featherston’s name, he wanted to line through it. Hampton or Layne? he wondered. Wade Hampton surely had the better chance against the Freedom Party, but he liked Ainsworth Layne’s ideas better.
In the end, he cast defiant ballots for Layne and the rest of the Radical Liberal ticket. If Jake Featherston took Virginia by one vote, he’d feel bad about it. Otherwise, he’d lose no sleep.
He came out of the voting booth and handed his ballot to the old man with the hook. The precinct official folded it and stuffed it into the ballot box. “Mr. Bartlett has voted,” he intoned, a response as ingrained and ritualistic as any in church. Secular communion done, Reggie left the polling place and hurried to the drugstore.
“Good morning,” Jeremiah Harmon said as he came in. “You vote?” He waited for Reggie to nod, then asked, “Have any trouble?”
“Not really,” Reggie answered. “Some of those Freedom Party so-and-so’s were making noise outside the polling place, but that’s all they were doing. I think the cops out front would have shot them if they’d tried anything worse, and I think they’d have enjoyed doing it, too. How about you?”
“About the same,” the druggist said. “I wonder if Featherston’s boys aren’t shooting themselves in the foot with all these shenanigans, I truly do. If they make everyone but a few fanatics afraid of them, they won’t elect anybody, let alone the president of the Confederate States.”
“Here’s hoping you’re right,” Bartlett said, and then, “You don’t mind my asking, boss, who’d you vote for?”
“Wade Hampton,” Harmon answered evenly. “He’s about as exciting as watching paint dry—you don’t need to tell me that. But if anybody’s going to come out on top of Featherston, he’s the man to do it. Layne’s a lost cause. He’s never been the same since that brawl down in South Carolina, and his party hasn’t, either.” He raised a gray eyebrow. “I suppose you’re going to tell me you voted for him.”
“I sure did,” Reggie said with a wry chuckle. “Why should I worry about lost causes? I live in the Confederate States, don’t I?”
“That’s funny.” Harmon actually laughed a little, which he rarely did. “It’d be even funnier if it weren’t so true.”
“We’ll find out tonight—or tomorrow or the next day, I suppose—just how funny it is,” Reggie said. “If Jake Featherston gets elected, the joke’s on us.”
“And isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” his boss replied. “Whoever wins, though, the work has to get done. What do you say we do it? After all, if we don’t make a few million dollars today, we’ll have to beg for our suppers.”
That would have been funnier if it weren’t so true, too. Reggie dusted the shelves with a long-handled feather duster. He put out fresh bottles and boxes and tins to replace the ones customers had bought. He kept track of the prescriptions Harmon compounded, and set them under the counter to await the arrival of the people for whom the druggist made them. When customers came in, he rang up their purchases and made change.
Ringing things up wasn’t so easy. The cash register, a sturdy and massive chunk of gilded ironmongery, dated from before the Great War. It was a fancier machine than most of that vintage, and could handle a five-dollar purchase with the push of but one key. Had Reggie had to do all the pushing he needed to ring up something that cost $17,000,000—and a lot of things did this week, give or take a couple of million—he would have been banging that five-dollar key from now till doomsday.
Everyone wanted to talk politics, too. Women couldn’t vote, but that didn’t stop them from having opinions and being vociferous about them. “Isn’t Mr. Featherston the handsomest man you ever saw in your life?” asked a lady buying a tube of cream for her piles.
“No, ma’am,” Reggie answered. In the back of the drugstore, Jeremiah Harmon raised his head. He didn’t want to lose customers, regardless of Reggie’s own politics and opinions. Reggie thought fast. “Handsomest man I ever saw was my father,” he told the woman. “Pity I don’t take after him.”
She laughed. Bartlett’s boss relaxed. Reggie felt some small triumph. Even if he’d sugarcoated what he said, he hadn’t had to take it back.
He tried to gauge the shape of the election from conversations with customers. That wouldn’t prove anything, and he knew it. He kept trying anyhow. From what he saw and heard, Jake Featherston had a lot of support. So did Wade Hampton V. Only a few people admitted to backing Ainsworth Layne and the Radical Liberals. Reggie hadn’t expected anything different. He was disappointed just the same.
When six o’clock rolled around, he said, “Boss, I think I’m going to get myself some supper somewhere and then head over to the Richmond Examiner. I reckon they’ll be posting returns all night long.”
“I expect they will,” Harmon answered. “While you’re there, do try to recall you’re supposed to come in to work tomorrow.” The druggist’s voice was dry; he had a pretty good idea that Reggie was liable to be up late.
Supper was greasy fried chicken and greasier fried potatoes, washed down with coffee that had been perking all day. Reggie’s stomach told him in no uncertain terms what it thought of being assaulted in that fashion. He ignored it, shoved a few banknotes with a lot of zeros on them across the counter at the cook, and hurried on down Broad Street to the Examiner’s offices, which were only a few blocks from Capitol Square.
Like the Whig and the Sentinel and the other Richmond papers—like papers across the CSA—the Examiner was in the habit of setting up enormous blackboards on election night and changing returns as the telegraph brought in new ones. When Reggie got there, the blackboards remained pristine: the polls were still open throughout the country. Because of that, only a few people stood around in front of the offices. Reggie got an excellent spot. He knew he might have to defend it with elbows as the night wore along, but that was part of the game, too.
A man came up, loudly unhappy that all the saloons were closed on election day. “Bunch of damn foolishness,” he said. “Fools we’ve got running this year, we need to get drunk before we can stand to vote for any of ’em.” By his vehemence, he might already have found liquid sustenance somewhere.
At half past seven, a fellow in shirtsleeves and green celluloid visor came out with a sheaf of telegrams in his hand. He started putting numbers from states on the eastern seaboard in their appropriate boxes. Earliest returns showed Hampton ahead in South Carolina and Virginia, Jake Featherston in North Carolina and Florida, and the Radical Liberals—Reggie clapped his hands—in Cuba. The numbers meant hardly more than the blanks they replaced. He was glad to have them anyhow.
More numbers went up as the hour got later. Hardly any of them made the people who awaited them very happy. The Examiner leaned toward the Radical Liberals, and it soon became abundantly clear that, whatever else happened, Ainsworth Layne would not be the next president of the Confederate States.
That would have disappointed Reggie more had he thought going in that Layne enjoyed any great chance of winning. The Radical Liberals always did best on the fringes of the Confederacy; they were liable to win Sonora and Chihuahua, too, when results finally trickled out of the mountains and deserts of the far Southwest.
But the real battle would be decided between Texas and Virginia. Returns also came in slowly from the Confederate heartland. They hadn’t seemed so slow during the last Congressional election, nor the one before that. Bartlett had been in no position to evaluate how fast the returns for the last presidential election came in, not in November 1915 he hadn’t. Back in 1909, he h
adn’t cared; he hadn’t been old enough to vote then.
“Hate to say it, but I’m pulling for Wade Hampton,” a man about his own age said not far away. “I’ve voted Radical Liberal ever since I turned twenty-one, and I’d get into screaming fights with Whigs. But you look around at what the other choice is—” The fellow shivered melodramatically.
“I voted for Layne,” Reggie said. “I’m not sorry I did, either. I’m just sorry more people didn’t.”
Off in the distance, somebody shouted, “Freedom!” But the Freedom Party muscle boys did not wade into the crowd outside the Examiner building. They would have paid for any attack they made; Reggie was sure he wasn’t the only Radical Liberal packing a revolver in case of trouble from goons.
More and more numbers went up. By midnight or so, they started to blur for Reggie. Strong coffee at supper or not, he couldn’t hold his eyes open any more. Things weren’t decided, but he headed back toward his flat anyway. He was glad the election remained up in the air. Only when he’d got very close to home did he realize he should have been sorry Jake Featherston hadn’t been knocked out five minutes after the polls closed.
Jake Featherston yawned so wide, his jaw cracked like a knuckle. He hadn’t been so tired since the battles of the Great War. It was half past four Wednesday morning, and he’d been up since first light Tuesday. He’d voted early, posed for photographers outside the polling place, and then headed here to the Spottswood Hotel at the corner of Eighth and Main to see what he would see. He’d wanted the Ford Hotel, right across the street from Capitol Square, but the Whigs had booked it first.
He looked down at the glass of whiskey in his hand. Yawning again, he realized he might not have felt so battered if he hadn’t kept that glass full through the night. He shrugged. Too late to worry about it now. He wasn’t in the habit of looking back at things he’d done, anyway.
Somebody knocked on the door to his room. He opened it. As he’d expected, there stood Ferdinand Koenig, his backer when the Freedom Party was tiny and raw, his vice-presidential candidate now that the Party was a power in the land…but not quite enough of a power. Koenig held the latest batch of telegrams in his left hand. His face might have been a doctor’s coming out of a sickroom just before the end.
“It’s over, Jake,” he said—like Roger Kimball and only a handful of others, he talked straight no matter how bad the news was. “Our goose is cooked. We won’t win it this time.”
Featherston noticed he was still holding that whiskey. He gulped it down, then hurled the glass against the wall. Shards sprayed every which way, like fragments from a bursting shell. “Son of a bitch,” he snarled. “Son of a bitch! I really reckoned we might pull it off.”
“We scared ’em,” Koenig said. “By God, we scared ’em. You’re still outpolling Ainsworth Layne. We took Florida. We took Tennessee. We took Texas. We’ve got—”
“We’ve got nothing,” Jake said flatly. “God damn it to fucking hell, we’ve got nothing. During the war, we killed a million Yankees. Didn’t do us one damn bit of good. We lost. I didn’t want to scare Wade Hampton the goddamn Fifth. I wanted to whip the Whigs out of office like the cur dogs they are.”
Koenig stared, then shook his head in rueful admiration. “You never did aim to do anything by halves, did you?”
“Why do you think we are where we’re at?” Jake returned. “Anybody who settles for what he reckons is good enough deserves whatever happens to him. I want the whole damn shootin’ match. Now I have to wait till 1927 to try again. That’s a goddamn long time. What the hell’s going to happen to the country from now till then? Christ, we aren’t going to hell in a handbasket, we’re already there.”
“You can come down off the stump for a few minutes, anyway,” Ferdinand Koenig said. “The election’s over, even if the reporters are waiting downstairs to hear what you’ve got to say.”
“Goddamn vultures,” Featherston muttered. The election’s over meant nothing to him. His life was a seamless whole; he could not have told anyone, himself included, where Jake Featherston the man stopped and Jake Featherston the Freedom Party leader began. He wished he had another glass to shatter. “All right, I’ll go down. Maybe they’ll all be passed out drunk by then, and I won’t have to make a speech after all.”
Koenig was still trying to look on the bright side of things: “We picked up four, maybe five seats in Congress, not counting the Redemption League. Florida gave us a Senator; looks like we’ll pick up the governor’s spot in Tennessee, and maybe in Mississippi, too.”
“That’s all fine and dandy, but it’s not enough, either.” Even now, worn and half drunk and sorely disappointed, Jake knew he’d be happier in a few days. The Freedom Party had done very well. It just hadn’t done well enough to suit him. He’d have to start building on what it had done, and to start looking ahead to see what it could do for 1923. He made a fist and slammed it into his own thigh several times. The pain was oddly welcome. “The reporters are waiting, eh? Let’s go, by Jesus. Let’s see how they like it.”
Now his running mate looked faintly—no, more than faintly—alarmed. “If you want to get a couple hours’ sleep, Jake, those bastards won’t care one way or the other. Maybe you should grab the chance to freshen up a touch,” Koenig said.
“Hell with it,” Featherston replied. “Might as well get it over with.” He headed for the stairway. Had Koenig not jumped aside, Jake would have pushed him out of the way.
Down in the lobby of the Spottswood, the victory celebration for which the Freedom Party had hoped was a shambles now. A few young men in white shirts and butternut trousers remained on their feet and alert. They’d been detailed to keep order, and keep order they would. The task was easier than Jake had thought it would be when he assigned it. Six more years of waiting. The thought was as bitter as yielding to the damnyankees had been.
More Freedom Party men sprawled snoring on couches and chairs and on the floor, too, some with whiskey bottles close at hand, others simply exhausted. A lot of reporters, by the look of things, were already gone. Watching the Freedom Party lose an election so many thought it might win had been story enough for them. But half a dozen fellows in cheap but snappy suits converged on Jake when he showed himself.
“Do you have a statement, Mr. Featherston?” they cried, as if with a single voice.
“Damn straight I have a statement,” Featherston answered.
“Jake—” began Ferdinand Koenig, who had followed him downstairs.
“Don’t you worry, Ferd. I’ll be fine,” Jake said over his shoulder. He turned back to the reporters. “Reckon you boys are waiting for me to say something sweet like how, even though I wish I was the one who’d gotten elected, I’m sure Wade Hampton V will make a fine president and I wish him all the best. That about right? Did I leave anything out?”
A couple of the reporters grinned at him. “Don’t reckon so, Sarge,” one of them said. “That’s what we hear from the Radical Liberals every six years.”
“To hell with the Radical Liberals,” Featherston said. “And to hell with Wade Hampton V, too.” The reporters scribbled. Jake warmed to his theme, despite Koenig’s dark mutterings in the background: “To hell with Wade Hampton V, and to hell with the Whig Party. They led us off a cliff in 1914, they don’t have the slightest scent of a notion of how to turn things around, and now they’ve got six more years to prove they don’t know what the devil they’re doing.”
“If they’re such a pack of bums, why’d you lose the election?” a reporter called.
“Don’t you think you ought to ask, ‘How’d you do so well the first time you tried to run anybody for president?’” Jake returned. No matter how he felt in private, in public he put the best face on things he could. “Christ, boys, in 1915 there was no Freedom Party. We didn’t elect anybody to Congress till two years ago. And now, our first time out of the gate, we get more votes than the Radical Liberals, and they’ve been around forever. And what do you ask? ‘Why’d you lose?
’” He shook his head. “We’ll be back. As long as Hampton and the Whigs leave us any kind of country at all, we’ll be back. You wait and see.”
“You really have it in for Hampton, don’t you?” a man from the Richmond Whig asked.
Jake bared his teeth in what was not a smile. “You bet I do,” he said. “He’s part of the crowd that’s been running the Confederate States since the War of Secession: all the fancy planters, and their sons, and their sons, too. And he’s part of the War Department crowd, like Jeb Stuart, Jr., and the other smart folks who helped the damnyankees lick us. When I look at Wade Hampton and the Whigs, I look at ’em over open sights.”
He’d let his journal by that name slip when the Freedom Party began to climb; the furious energy that had gone into the writing came out in Party work instead. Now, for the first time in a while, he might have some leisure to put his ideas down in paper. Have to look back over what I did before, he thought. Pick up where I left off.
“If you don’t work with the other parties, why should they work with you?” the reporter from the Whig asked.
“We’ll work with our friends,” Jake said. “I don’t have any quarrel with folks who want to see this country strong and free. People who want us weak or who try and sell us to the USA had better steer clear, though, or they’ll be sorry.”
“Sorry how?” Two men asked the question at the same time. The man from the Richmond Whig followed it up: “Sorry the way Tom Brearley’s sorry?”
Though half loaded himself, Jake knew a loaded question when he heard one. “I don’t know any more about what happened to that Brearley than I read in the papers,” he answered. That was true; he’d also made a point of not trying to find out any more. “I do know a jury didn’t convict the people the police arrested for burning down his house.”
“They were all Freedom Party men.” This time, three reporters spoke together.
“They were all acquitted,” Jake said. The reporters looked disappointed. Jake smiled to himself. Did they think he was stupid enough to carry ammunition to their guns? Too bad for them if they did. He went on, “A lot of people like the Freedom Party these days—not quite enough to win me the election, but a lot.”
Blood and Iron Page 53
