They weren’t quite so frantic now, but they were hurrying when they went to her bedroom, hurrying when they undressed, hurrying when they lay down together. His hand closed on her breast. He teased her nipple with his thumb and forefinger. She sighed and pulled his head down to follow his fingers. Her breath sighed out. “Oh, Jonathan,” she whispered.
She took him in hand, more roughly than any other woman he’d ever known. “Careful there,” he gasped, both because he was afraid she’d hurt him and because he’d spurt his seed out onto her breasts and belly if she didn’t ease up.
His own hand slid down to the joining of her legs. She was already wet and wanton, waiting for him. A few picnics hadn’t come close to fully sating her, not when she hadn’t seen her husband since early in the war. He wondered what he would have been like after abstaining for so long. He couldn’t imagine. He couldn’t come close. He knew women were different, but even so…
She pulled him over onto her. It wasn’t the wild bucking and plunging of the first time they’d joined, but it was a long way from calm and sedate and gentle. She bit his shoulder hard enough to make him yelp. His hands dug into her backside, shoving her up as he thrust down. She wrapped her legs around him and did her best to squeeze him breathless.
She squeezed him inside her, too. He groaned and gasped and spent himself at the same instant as she cried out, wordlessly this time. “My God,” he said, like a man waking from the delirium of the Spanish influenza. And he had been in a delirium, though one far more pleasant than the influenza brought.
Laura Secord’s face was still slack with pleasure; a pink flush mottled her breasts. She shook her head, as if she too were returning to herself. “Which of us is going to the opium den?” she murmured. Before Moss could answer—if, indeed, he’d been able to find anything to say—she got out of bed and squatted over the chamber pot. A doctor friend of Moss’ had once told him getting rid of the stuff like that did only a little good, because a woman couldn’t get rid of all of it, but he supposed—he hoped—it was better than nothing.
Once that was done, she turned modest again, and dressed quickly and with her back to him. He got into his own clothes. “I’d better head back down to Berlin,” he said.
“Empire, you mean,” Laura Secord told him.
Moss laughed. They disagreed on so many things…but when their bodies joined, it wasn’t sparks flying, it was thunder and lightning. He’d never known nor imagined anything like it. “I still say it’s Berlin, and so does everybody else,” he answered, “and if you don’t like that, you can let me know about it, and maybe I’ll come up here and argue about it.”
“Would you like to come up here and argue about it next Sunday?” she asked. “You never can tell when the weather in these parts will change, but it should still be good then.”
“Next Sunday?” Moss said. “I can do that.” His pulse quickened at the thought of it. “As a matter of fact, I can hardly wait.”
As the clock in Jeremiah Harmon’s drugstore chimed six, Reggie Bartlett put on his coat and hat. “Where’s the fire?” the druggist asked him. “Are you going to leave before you get paid?”
“Not likely, boss,” Reggie answered. “My wallet’s been whimpering at me for the last couple of days. Thank heaven it’s finally Friday.”
“Well, I’ve got the prescription a whimpering wallet needs,” Harmon said. “Here you are, Reggie.” He counted out banknotes, then added a coin. “One week’s pay: seventeen dollars and fifty cents.”
“Thank you.” Bartlett put the notes in his wallet and the coin—he saw it was dated 1909—in his pocket. “And do you know what, boss? I’m happier, I’m a hell of a lot happier, to get this than I was when you paid me millions and millions every week a couple of months ago.”
“Of course you are—you’re a sensible fellow,” Harmon said. “When I paid you millions and millions, three days after you got them they’d be worth even less than they were when I gave them to you. Seventeen-fifty’s not a whole lot of money, Lord knows, but it’ll still be worth seventeen-fifty next Friday.”
“I hope it will, anyhow,” Reggie said. “I don’t think I’m ready to put any of it in the bank just yet, though. A lot of people who put money in the banks got wiped out after the war.”
“And isn’t that the sad and sorry truth?” his boss said. “I was lucky, as these things go: I got mine out while it was still worth something, anyhow, and I spent it on whatever I needed then, and ever since I’ve been living week to week and hand to mouth like everyone else.”
“I never had enough in the bank to worry too much about what I lost,” Reggie said. “If I can keep my head above water for a little while now…” The new money had been in circulation for six weeks, and was still holding its value against the U.S. dollar and the German mark. Maybe it would go on doing that.
“What do you think of President Burton Mitchel these days?” Harmon asked slyly. “Don’t you wish you’d voted Whig in the election last fall?”
“Long as I didn’t vote for Jake Featherston, who I did vote for doesn’t matter a hell of a lot,” Bartlett answered. “And Mitchel’s had nothing but good luck since he got the job.”
“I wouldn’t say the way he got it was good luck,” Harmon observed, his voice dry.
“Not for Wade Hampton V, that’s for sure,” Reggie agreed. “But good luck for the country? I reckon it is. Those wild men in the Freedom Party even got the damnyankees to feel sorry for us when they shot Hampton. Now that we aren’t sending every dime in the country up to the USA, all the real money that’s been hiding can come out again.” He reached into his pocket. He hadn’t had a half dollar in there for years. “And besides, Mitchel’s got Congress eating out of the palm of his hand. Whatever he wants, they give him. Even the Freedom Party Congressmen have quit arguing with him.”
“Maybe it’s the sign of a guilty conscience, though I wouldn’t have bet they were possessed of any such equipment,” Harmon said. “I don’t know how long the honeymoon will last, but Mitchel’s making the most of it.”
“Anything that makes the Freedom Party shut up is good in my book.” Reggie touched a finger to the brim of his hat. With September heading into October, he’d traded in his flat-crowned straw for a fedora. “I’ll see you tomorrow morning for my half-day.”
“Good night, Reggie,” Harmon told him.
Bartlett left the drugstore. Light was draining out of the sky. At this season of the year, nightfall came earlier, perceptibly earlier, every day. Street lamps threw little puddles of light down at the feet of the poles they surmounted. With dusk, people hurried wherever they were going, wanting to get there before full darkness if they could.
A man Reggie recognized passed him under one of those street lamps. The fellow came into Harmon’s drugstore every so often, and was an outspoken Freedom Party backer. Reggie didn’t know whether he was a Freedom Party goon, but he looked as if he might have been.
To stay on the safe side, Reggie stuck his hand in the pocket in which he still carried a pistol. The Freedom Party man knew he didn’t have any use for Jake Featherston. If the fellow also knew he’d been the one who helped aim Tom Brearley at Roger Kimball, all sorts of fireworks might go off.
Whatever the Freedom Party man knew, he kept walking. His head was down, his face somber and, Reggie thought, a little confused. Was he looking for the certainty he’d known before Grady Calkins shot the president of the Confederate States, the certainty that Jake Featherston was on the way up and he himself would rise with his leader from whatever miserable job he held now? If he was, he wouldn’t find it on the dark, dirty sidewalks of Richmond.
Posters on a board fence shouted HANG FEATHERSTON HIGHER THAN HAMAN! in big letters. Underneath, in much smaller type, they added, Radical Liberal Party of the Confederate States. They’d gone up less than a week after Wade Hampton V got shot, and no one, not even the men of the Freedom Party, had had the nerve to deface them or tear them down. Even the goons in whit
e and butternut might have known some shame at being goons.
Back at his flat, Reggie took a chunk of leftover fried chicken out of the icebox and ate it cold with a couple of slices of bread and a bottle of beer to wash everything down. It was, he knew, a lazy man’s supper, but he figured he had the right to be lazy once in a while if he felt like it.
After washing the dishes, he took out the new banknotes he’d got and looked at them. The one-dollar notes bore the image of Jefferson Davis, the five-dollar notes that of Stonewall Jackson: no doubt to remind people of the Stonewall, the five-dollar goldpiece hardly seen since the end of the war. Maybe, now that specie wasn’t flowing out of the CSA as reparations, the government would start minting Stonewalls again.
Reggie walked into the bedroom and got out a banknote he’d kept from the last days before the currency reform: a $1,000,000,000 banknote. It might have been the equivalent of twenty-five or thirty cents of real money. It showed Jeb Stuart licking the Yankees during the Second Mexican War, and was every bit as well printed as the new banknotes, even if all the zeros necessarily made the design look crowded.
“A billion dollars,” Reggie said softly. If only it had been worth more than a supper at a greasy spoon or a couple of shots of whiskey at a saloon with sawdust on the floor. But it hadn’t; it was nothing more than a symbol of a whole country busy going down the drain. Reggie set it on the table by the sofa. “If I ever have kids,” he said, “I’ll show this to them. Maybe it will help them understand how hard times were after the war.”
He shook his head. They wouldn’t understand no matter what, any more than they would understand what life in the trenches was like. Experience brought understanding. Nothing else came close.
When he got to work the next morning, he glanced affectionately at the cash register. All of a sudden, its keys corresponded to prices once more. He didn’t mentally have to multiply by thousands or millions or billions any more.
A customer came in and bought some aspirins. “That’ll be fifteen cents,” Bartlett said. The man pulled from his pocket a $1,000,000,000 banknote like the one Reggie had contemplated the night before. Reggie shook his head. “I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t take this.”
“Why not?” the man said. “It’s still worth more’n fifteen cents, I reckon.”
“Yes, sir,” Bartlett said, “but all these old banknotes have been—what’s the word?—demonetized, that’s it. You can’t spend ’em for anything. Suppose you took one to a bank and tried to get a billion real dollars for it?”
“I wouldn’t do that,” the fellow said. He no doubt meant it: he was just a petty chiseler, not a big one. There couldn’t be anybody in the Confederate States who didn’t know you couldn’t use the old money any more, not even for small purchases. Grumbling, the customer put the preposterously inflated banknote back in his pocket and handed Reggie a real dollar instead.
Reggie rang up the sale and then anxiously checked the till; coins were coming back into circulation more slowly than notes. But he was able to make change, even if he had to use ten pennies to do it. “Here you are, sir.”
“Thanks.” The man put the little flat tin of tablets in his pocket along with the change. Jingling, he turned away. “See you again sometime. Freedom!”
No one had said that to Reggie for quite a while. He would happily have gone another fifty or a hundred years without hearing it again, too. He had to make himself hold still and not go after the customer to beat hell out of him. “Freedom to butcher anybody you don’t like, you mean,” he ground out, “even if it’s the president of the CSA.”
He waited for the man to come back hotly at him, whether with words or with fists. That was the Freedom Party’s style, and had been since its beginnings in the black days after the war. But the man only tucked his chin down against his chest, as if he were walking into a cold, rainy wind, and hurried out of the drugstore.
At the back of the store, Jeremiah Harmon coughed. “Yeah, I know, boss: I’m not supposed to do things like that,” Bartlett said. “I know it’s bad for business. But when those white-and-butternut boys come in, I see red. I can’t help it. And this one had his nerve, going ‘Freedom!’ after what that Grady Calkins son of a bitch went and did.”
“I didn’t say anything, Reggie,” Harmon answered. “As a matter of fact, I think I’m coming down with a cold.” He coughed again. “I don’t like to lose business, mind you, but I don’t seek business from imbeciles, either. And any man who will call out ‘Freedom!’ with President Hampton still new in his grave is either an imbecile or whatever’s one step down from there.”
“A half-witted cur dog—a son of a bitch, like I said,” Reggie suggested.
“It could be so,” his boss said.
“When I was in the hospital after the damnyankees shot me and caught me, one of the other people in there was one of our nigger soldiers who’d lost a foot,” Reggie said. “You ask me, he had more brains in that missing foot than the whole Freedom Party does in all its heads.” He wondered how Rehoboam was doing down in Mississippi. Even if the black man had been a Red, he’d been a pretty good fellow, too.
Harmon chuckled. “Something to that, I shouldn’t wonder. But now, if God is kind to us, the Freedom Party dealt itself a blow no one else could have given it, and one it won’t get over.”
“Amen,” Reggie said with all his heart.
Cincinnatus Driver worked like a man possessed, unloading a truckload of filing cabinets he’d brought from the Des Moines railroad yards to the State Capitol on the other side of the river. It was, he admitted to himself, easier to work hard in Iowa in November than it had been in Kentucky in, say, July. But he would have put extra effort into things today even if it had been hotter and muggier than Kentucky ever got.
He finished faster than anyone would have imagined he could. Instead of racing back to the yard to see what other hauling work he could pick up—which was what he usually did when he finished a job—he used the time he’d saved to hurry back to the near northwest, to an Odd Fellows hall not far from his flat. He parked the truck on the street and hurried inside.
Four white men sat behind a long table in the middle of the hall. “Let me have your name, please, and your street address,” the one at the end nearest Cincinnatus said to him.
He gave the fellow his particulars. The second man behind the table checked a list. Cincinnatus had a moment’s fear his name would not appear there. But the gray-haired white man ticked it off and pointed to a register in front of him. “If you’ll just sign here, Mr. Driver,” he said.
“I surely will, suh.” Cincinnatus grinned from ear to ear. White men didn’t call Negroes mister down in Kentucky. They didn’t always do it here, either, but he liked it better every time he heard it. He wrote his name in a fine round hand.
The third man at the table handed him a folded sheet of paper. “Choose any voting booth you please, Mr. Driver,” he said.
“Yes, suh. Thank you kindly, suh,” Cincinnatus said, and then, because he couldn’t hold it in any more, “You know somethin’, suh? This here is the first time in my whole life I ever got to vote. Used to live in Kentucky, and I never reckoned I’d get me the chance.”
“Well, you’ve got it,” the polling official said. “I’m glad it means something to you, and I hope you use it wisely.”
“Thank you,” Cincinnatus said. He went to a voting booth—it was before the dinner hour, and he had plenty from which to choose—and pulled the curtain shut after himself. Then he unfolded the ballot, inked the little X-stamper in the booth with great care, and began to vote.
He voted for Democrats for Congress, for the State House of Representatives, and for the State Senate. That would, no doubt, have startled Luther Bliss; the boss of the Kentucky State Police had been convinced he was a Red. Apicius—Apicius Wood, now—had known better. A Red himself, Apicius could tell Cincinnatus wasn’t…quite.
Cincinnatus finished marking the ballot, folded it again, and left the
voting booth. He handed the folded sheet of paper to the fourth white man at the table. That worthy pushed it through the slot of the locked ballot box beside him. “Mr. Driver has voted,” he said in a loud voice.
Mr. Driver has voted. As far as Cincinnatus was concerned, the words might have been accompanied by music from a marching band: they sounded in horns and drums in his ears. He felt ten feet tall as he strode out to the old Duryea truck, and marveled that he still fit inside the cab. But he did, and, having voted, he went off to eat a quick dinner and hunt up more work.
He was still eating on a bench down by the train tracks when Joe Sims sat beside him. “Why are you grinnin’ like a fool?” the older black man asked. “You look like you just tore off a piece your wife doesn’t know about.”
“I’m happy,” Cincinnatus said, “but I ain’t happy like that. I went down and voted—first time ever—is what I did.”
Sims scratched his head. “I was happy when I voted the first time, too. It meant I was twenty-one. It meant I could buy whiskey, too, back when whiskey was still legal here. But I can’t recollect looking like I just tripped over a steamer trunk full of double eagles because I made some X’s.”
Cincinnatus studied the other Negro, who hadn’t the faintest idea how much he took for granted. “You was born here,” Cincinnatus said at last. Sims nodded. Cincinnatus went on, “You knew from the time you was a little fellow you’d be able to vote when you got big.”
“Well, sure I did,” Joe Sims said, and then, belatedly, got the point. “Wasn’t like that for you, was it?”
“Not hardly.” Cincinnatus’voice was dry. “My ma and pa was slaves up till a few years before I was born. Before the USA took Kentucky away from the CSA, wasn’t a legal school for niggers in the whole state. I learned my letters anyways, but I was lucky. I wasn’t a citizen of the CSA; I was just somebody who lived there, and all the white folks told me what to do. Now, when I vote, I get to tell white folks what to do, and it ain’t even against the law. Anybody reckons I ain’t wild about that, he’s crazy.”
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