“My God,” Anne said again. “Oh, my God.” Mechanically, she kept turning the floured chicken in the hot fat.
“I think you’d better do the same with your investments in the Freedom Party as you did with your Confederate investments right after the war,” Tom told her, “and that’s get rid of ’em. This time tomorrow, Jake Featherston’s going to be worth less than a Confederate dollar, and that’s saying something.”
She shook her head. “Featherston would never order that kind of thing.”
“I didn’t say he did, though I wouldn’t put it past him if he thought he could get away with it,” Tom replied. “But that hasn’t got anything to do with it. You think what he ordered or didn’t order matters? Only thing that matters is, one of his people pulled the trigger. Who’s going to vote for a party that blows the head off the president if they don’t care what he’s up to?”
“No one,” Anne said dully. Tom was right. She wasn’t so naive as to pretend otherwise. She’d been riding the crest of the Freedom Party wave up and up and up. She’d been sure she could ride it all the way into the president’s residence in Richmond. And so she could have. She remained certain of that. But now…“The son of a bitch,” she whispered. “The stupid son of a bitch.”
“Who? The late Grady Calkins?” Tom said. “You bet he was a stupid son of a bitch. But who built a whole party out of stupid sons of bitches? Who aimed ’em at the country and fired ’em off, first with bare knuckles and then with clubs and pistols? You know who as well as I do, Sis. Is it any wonder one of ’em picked up a Tredegar and decided to go president hunting?”
Anne had never thought, never dreamt, such a thing might happen. That didn’t necessarily mean it was any wonder, though, not when you looked at it the way her brother suggested. “What do we do now?” she said. She rarely asked for advice, but her mind remained blank with shock.
Tom didn’t have a lot of help to offer. “I don’t know,” he said. “You burned a lot of bridges when you went with Featherston. How the devil do you propose to get back across them?”
“I don’t know, either,” Anne said. “Maybe things will straighten out somehow.” Even to herself, she didn’t sound as if she believed that. Hot lard splashed up and bit the back of her hand. She swore with a fervor that wrung a couple of embarrassed chuckles from her brother.
The chicken was ready a few minutes later. In the years since Marshlands burned, she’d turned into a pretty fair cook. Before then, she’d have had trouble boiling water. But she took no pleasure in crispy skin or moist, juicy, flavorsome flesh. She hardly noticed what she ate, as a matter of fact: the chicken was bones and the baked potato that went with it reduced to its jacket without any apparent passage of time.
After supper, Tom pulled a bottle of whiskey from the shelf where it sat. That, Anne noticed. “Pour me a slug, too, will you?” she asked.
“I sure will.” He did. Anne wanted to drink to the point of oblivion, but refrained. Far more than most in the Confederate States, she appreciated the value of a clear head. But oh, the temptation!
As she drank the one drink she allowed herself, she read the newspaper Tom had brought home. Grady Calkins was an out-of-work veteran who’d belonged to the Freedom Party. Past that, the reporters hadn’t found out much about him. That was plenty. That was more than plenty.
“He shouted ‘Freedom!’ after he shot Hampton down,” Tom said, as if to rub salt in the wound.
“Yes, I read that,” Anne answered. “It’s a disaster. I admit it. I don’t see how I can deny it. It’s a disaster every way you look at it.”
“It sure is,” Tom said. “God only knows what kind of president Burton Mitchel will make.”
“I don’t think anybody outside of Arkansas knows anything about Burton Mitchel, maybe including God,” Anne said. Tom let out a startled snort of laughter. Anne went on, “The Whigs plucked him out of the Senate to balance the ticket; Featherston would have done the same thing if he’d chosen Willy Knight. All Mitchel was supposed to do was sit there for the next six years.”
“He’ll do more than that now,” her brother said. “Christ, a backwoods bumpkin running the country till 1927. Just what we need!”
“Look on the bright side,” Anne told him.
“I didn’t know there was any bright side to look on,” Tom answered.
“Of course there is. There always is,” Anne said. “The bright side here is: how could things get any worse?”
“That’s a point,” Tom acknowledged. “The other side of the coin is, now we get to find out how things get worse.”
Anne opened the South Carolinian to the inside page on which the story of President Hampton’s assassination was continued. She read aloud: “‘After taking the oath of office, President Mitchel declared a week of national mourning and lamentation. The new president prayed for the aid of almighty God in the difficult times that lie ahead, and said he would do his best to promote internal order, establish good relations with foreign neighbors, and put the currency on a sound basis once more.’” Her lip curled. “And while he’s at it, he’ll walk across the James River without getting his trouser cuffs wet.”
“What’s he supposed to say?” her brother asked, and she had no good answer. Tom continued, “Those are the things that need doing, no doubt about it. I haven’t any idea whether he can do them, but at least he knows that much. And after this”—Tom took a deep breath—“after this, maybe people will back off and give him room to move in for a while.”
“Maybe,” Anne said. “I don’t know if that will help, but maybe.” She shoved the newspaper to one side. “And maybe everything I’ve done since the end of the war to try to set the CSA to rights went up in smoke with a couple of shots from that maniac’s gun. If the militiamen hadn’t killed that Calkins, I’d be glad to do it myself—but I think I’d have to stand in line behind Jake Featherston.”
“Probably,” Tom agreed. “Calkins may have killed the Freedom Party along with a Whig president. Featherston has to know that—he isn’t stupid. But he’s the one who raised the devil. He’s got no business being surprised if it ended up turning on him.”
“That isn’t fair,” Anne said, but even in her own ears her voice lacked conviction. Tom said nothing at all, leaving her with the last word. She’d never been so sorry to have it.
When she walked to the tailor’s the next morning, people in the streets of St. Matthews, white and black alike, fell silent and stared at her as she went by. They’d been talking about the assassination. They started talking about the assassination again as soon as she passed. While she was close by, they would not talk. Some of them moved away from her, as if they didn’t want her shadow to fall on them. She’d been the dominant force in this part of South Carolina for more than a decade. People had always granted her the deference she’d earned. By the way they acted now, she might have just escaped from a leper colony.
Going into Aaron Rosenblum’s shop felt like escaping. Clack, clack, clack went the treadle of his sewing machine. The clacking stopped when the bell above his door rang. He looked up from the piece of worsted he’d been guiding through the machine. “Good morning, Miss Colleton,” he said, polite but no more than polite. He got to his feet. “I have ready the skirt you asked me to make for you.”
“Good. I hoped you would.” As was often her way, Anne chose to take the bull by the horns. “Terrible about President Hampton yesterday.”
“Yes.” The little old tailor looked at her over the tops of his half-glasses. “A very terrible thing. But what can you expect from a party that would sooner fight than think?”
Rosenblum had to know she backed the Freedom Party. She’d made no secret of it—on the contrary. If he thought he could rebuke her like this…If that was so, the Party was in as much trouble as she’d feared. In a tight voice, she said, “The Freedom Party is trying to make the Confederate States strong again.”
“Oh, yes. Of course.” The tailor had a peculiar accent, half l
azy South Carolina Low Country, the other half Yiddish. “And I, I am a lucky man to live now in the Confederacy. In Russia, where I am from, parties that try to make the country strong again go after the Jews. Here, you go after black people instead, so I am safe. Yes, I am a lucky man.”
Anne stared at him. She knew sarcasm when she heard it. And Rosenblum’s words held an uncomfortable amount of truth. “That isn’t all the Freedom Party does,” Anne said. The tailor did not answer. What hung in the air was, Yes, you also shoot the president. Twice now in two days, she would sooner not have been left with the last word. She attempted briskness: “Let me see the skirt, if you please.”
“Yes, ma’am.” He gave it to her, then waved her to a changing room. “Try it on. I will alter it if it does not suit you.”
Try it on she did. The gray wool skirt fit perfectly around the waist; she might be irked at Rosenblum, but he did good work. And the length was in the new mode, as she’d requested: it showed off not only her ankles but also several inches of shapely calf. Tom would pitch a fit. Too bad for Tom. Roger Kimball would approve, though he’d sooner see her naked altogether.
She changed back into the black skirt she’d worn, then paid Rosenblum for the new gray one: a bargain at two billion dollars. “Thank you very much,” he said, tucking the banknotes into a drawer.
“You’re welcome,” she said, and then, “I am sorry the president is dead. I don’t care whether you believe me or not.”
“If you didn’t care, you wouldn’t say you didn’t care,” Rosenblum answered. While she was still unraveling that, he went on, “I do believe you, Miss Colleton. But now you believe me, too: a party that shouts and shoots for freedom is not a party that really wants it.”
Another paradox. Anne shook her head. “I haven’t got time for riddles today. Good morning.” The new skirt folded over her arm, she stalked out of the tailor’s shop.
Chester Martin sat down in a folding chair at the Socialist Party hall near the Toledo steel mill where he worked. “What did you call the Freedom Party down in the CSA?” he asked Albert Bauer. “Reaction on the march? Was that it? You hit the nail right on the head.”
“Yeah, even for a reactionary party, shooting a reactionary president dead because he’s not reactionary enough to suit them takes a lot of doing,” Bauer allowed. “They’ll be sorry, too, you mark my words.”
“They’re sorry already, I’ll bet,” Martin said. “It’ll be a cold day in hell before they come so close to winning an election again.”
“They’ll be sorrier, too,” Bauer predicted. “They’ve done something I wouldn’t have bet they could: they’ve made people in the United States feel sorry for the Confederate States.”
“They’ve even made me feel that way, and some Rebel bastard shot me,” Martin said. “But shooting a president—” He shook his head. “Nobody’s ever done that before, there or here. What is the world coming to?”
“Revolution,” Bauer answered. “And the reactionaries in the CSA just gave the progressive forces here a leg up. Before, President Sinclair couldn’t have gotten ending reparations through Congress if his life depended on it. Now, though, I think he may just have the votes to pull it off.”
“Do you?” Martin wasn’t so sure he liked the idea. “As far as I can see, we’d be better off if the Confederates stayed broke and weak.”
“Sure we would, in the short run,” Bauer said. “But in the long run, if the Confederate States keep going down the drain, who does that help? That Featherston lunatic almost won the election last year because the Rebs were in such bad shape. What happens if they get worse?”
“Well, they aren’t going to have a revolution—not a Red one, anyway,” Martin said. He got up, went over to a coffeepot that sat on top of an iron stove, and poured himself a cup. After he set it down on the table, he lit a cigarette.
Bauer waited patiently till he’d puffed a couple of times, then nodded. “No, they won’t have a Red revolution, not right away. It’s a conservative country, and Marxism is tied to the black man there, which means the white man has, or thinks he has, a strong extra reason to hate it. But the Confederates’ time is coming, too. Sooner or later, all the capitalist countries will have their revolutions.”
He spoke with the certainty of a devout Catholic talking about the miracle of transubstantiation. Chester Martin’s faith in Socialism was newer, more pragmatic, and neither so deep nor so abiding. He said, “Maybe so, Al, but there’s liable to be a hell of a long time hiding in that sooner or later.”
“The dialectic doesn’t say how fast things will happen,” Bauer answered calmly. “It just says they will happen, and that’s enough for me.”
“Maybe for you,” Martin said. “Me, I’d sort of like to know whether a revolution’s coming in my time or whether it’s something my great-grandchildren will be waiting for—if I ever have any.” He wasn’t so young as he had been. There were times when he wished he’d found a girl as soon as he came home from the war, or maybe even before then. But work in the foundry and work for the Socialist Party left little time for courting, or even thinking about courting.
Back when he’d been a Democrat, he’d thought Socialist girls were loose, without a moral to their name. People said it so often, he’d been sure it was true. Now, rather to his regret, he knew better. A lot of the women in the Socialist Party were married to Socialist men. A lot of the ones who weren’t might as well have been married to the Party. That left…slim pickings.
Albert Bauer said, “Even if we don’t get a revolution in the CSA any time soon, we don’t want the reactionaries in charge down there. That would turn the class struggle on its head. As far as I’m concerned, keeping the Freedom Party down is reason enough to let reparations go.”
“Well, maybe,” Martin said. He wouldn’t say any more than maybe, no matter how his friend tried to argue him around. He was sorry the Confederates had had their president shot. He wouldn’t have wished that even on the CSA. But not wishing anything bad on the Confederate States didn’t necessarily mean he wished anything good on them, either.
After he got home that evening, the topic came up again around the supper table. He’d expected it would; the newsboys were hawking papers by shouting about reparations. “What do you think, Chester?” Stephen Douglas Martin asked. “You were the one who was doing the fighting.”
“Hard to say, Pa,” Martin answered. “I used to think that, if I ever saw a Reb drowning, I’d toss him an anvil. Now—I just don’t know.”
“Can’t we let the war be over at last?” Louisa Martin said. “Haven’t both sides been through enough yet? When can we be satisfied?”
“Might as well ask the Mormons out West, Ma,” her daughter Sue said. “They just took some shots at a couple of Army trucks—did you see that in the newspaper? They don’t forget we beat them. You can bet the Confederates haven’t forgotten we beat them. So why should we forget it?”
“It goes both ways, though,” Chester said. “It’s not an easy question. If we keep holding the Rebs down, they’ll hate us on account of that. They did it to us for years and years, after the War of Secession and then after the Second Mexican War. Do we want them thinking about nothing but paying us back, the way we worked so hard to get even with them and with England and France?”
“You sound like a Socialist, all right,” his father said, laughing. “Pass the peas, will you, you lousy Red?”
Chester laughed, too, and passed the bowl. “Talking to you and Mother, I sound like a Socialist. When I talk to people down at the Socialist hall, I sound like a Democrat half the time. I’ve noticed that before. I’m stuck in the middle, you might say.”
“People who can see both sides of the question usually are,” his mother told him. “It’s not the worst place in the world to be.”
Sue Martin looked curiously at Chester. “With that Purple Heart in your bedroom, I’d think you’d be the last one to want to let the Confederates up off the floor.”
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p; He shrugged. “Like Mother says, maybe it’s time for the war to be over and done with. Besides, the one thing I don’t want to do is have to fight those…so-and-so’s again.” Talking about a new war almost made him slip back into the foul language of the trenches. “If they can settle down because they’re not paying reparations any more, that might not be too bad.”
“You make good sense, son,” Stephen Douglas Martin said. His wife nodded. After a moment, so did Sue. Martin’s father went on, “Now, what are the odds that anybody in Congress would know common sense if it flew around Philadelphia in an aeroplane?”
“There’s a Socialist majority,” Martin said. But that didn’t prove anything, and he knew it. “We’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?”
Out of the blue, Sue asked, “How do you think that Congresswoman you met would vote? You know the one I mean—the one whose brother got wounded while he was in your squad?”
“Flora Hamburger,” Martin said. “Yeah, sure, I know who you mean. That’s a good question. She usually does what’s right. I don’t really know. We’ll have to keep watching the newspapers, I guess.”
“Flora Hamburger.” Louisa Martin snapped her fingers. “I know where I saw that name. She’s the one who got engaged to the vice president a little while ago.” She looked from her son to her daughter and back again, as if to say getting engaged would satisfy her: catching a vice president was unnecessary.
“Mother,” Sue said in warning tones.
“She’s just giving you a rough time,” Martin said. That got his sister and his mother both glaring at him. He forked up some peas, freshly conscious of the dangers peacemakers faced when they stepped between warring factions.
When Chester looked up from the peas, he found his father eyeing him with more than a little amusement. Stephen Douglas Martin had the good sense to stay out of a quarrel he couldn’t hope to influence.
Over the next few days, the debate about reparations stayed in the newspapers, along with the reprisals the Army was taking against the perennially rebellious Mormons in Utah. The collision of two aeroplanes carrying mail elbowed both those stories out of the headlines for a little while, but the excitement about the crash died quickly—though not so quickly as the two luckless pilots had.
Blood and Iron Page 61
