Her eyes widened. “I hadn’t thought of that,” she said. “I’ve never been to Philadelphia, even to visit. Now we’ll be living there, won’t we?”
“Unless they ever really get around to moving the War Department back to Washington,” Morrell answered. “They’ve been talking about it ever since the end of the war, but I’ll believe it when I see it.”
“Philadelphia,” Agnes said, her eyes far away. “What’s it like, living in Philadelphia?”
“Crowded,” he said. “Expensive. The air is full of soot and smoke all the time. It’s a big city. I don’t much like big cities.”
Agnes smiled. “I’ve noticed.”
“I figured you had.” Morrell smiled, too, but the smile slid into a grimace. “Just have to make the best of it, I suppose.”
“Philadelphia,” Agnes repeated. He wondered if she’d even heard him. “What will it be like in Philadelphia?”
As she’d come to know him, he’d also come to know her. At least half of what that question meant was, Will I measure up to the competition? Morrell smiled again. He was certain of the answer, and gave it: “Sweetheart, you’ll knock ’em dead.”
One of his wife’s hands flew to her hair, patting it into place or maybe the outward expression of an imagined new style. “You say sweet things,” she told him.
“Only when I mean them,” he said. “Of course, when I’m talking about you, I mean them all the time.”
She stepped up, hugged him, and kissed him. His arms tightened around her. One thing might have led to another—except that, with regret, he broke off the embrace. Agnes looked disappointed; yes, she’d been ready for more. But she didn’t frown for long. “You’re going to have a lot of work to do,” she said, proving she was indeed an Army wife.
Morrell nodded. “I sure am. I haven’t even told the base commandant about my orders yet—though I suppose a copy will have gone to him, too.” He hugged Agnes again, briefly now. “You’re really being a brick about this, honey.”
“I think they’re making a big mistake,” she answered. “But you’ve got your orders, and you’ve got to follow them.”
You’ve got your orders, and you’ve got to follow them. That was the way the Army worked, all right. Morrell had trouble imagining it working any other way. “Couldn’t have put it better myself,” he said. He gave Agnes one more kiss, then turned to go. “The work won’t do itself, however much I wish it would.”
“All right,” his wife said. “I’ll see you tonight, then.”
He smiled at the promise in her voice. He started looking ahead toward Philadelphia, too. Whatever they set him to doing, he’d do it as well as he knew how. He’d do it well, period; he had a good notion of his own ability. And performing well with important people watching did have certain advantages. With a little luck, he’d be wearing stars on his shoulders instead of eagles before too long.
He wouldn’t be so easy to move around like a pawn on a chess board then, not with general’s rank he wouldn’t. As a matter of fact, he’d be able to do some maneuvering of his own once he had general’s rank. Maybe John Abell thought he’d done Morrell’s career a bad turn. Morrell’s smile was predatory. Anyone who thought that about him had another think coming.
Jefferson Pinkard walked toward the livery stable. “Freedom!” he called to other men heading the same way.
“Freedom!” The greeting came back loud and clear as it had before the stalwarts went out to the Alabama State Fairgrounds when President Hampton came to Birmingham. The Freedom Party had raised a lot more hell than anybody—anybody except Grady Calkins, anyhow—expected.
And now the price of that hell was showing. Jeff called “Freedom!” a couple more times before he went into the stable, but only a couple more times. The building had no trouble holding meetings these days. A lot of people who had been in the Party—people who’d put on white and butternut and banged heads, too—weren’t any more. A lot of people who had been in the Party weren’t admitting it any more, either.
Fair-weather friends, Pinkard thought scornfully. He still thought most of the same things were wrong with the Confederate States now as had been wrong with the country before Wade Hampton V got shot. He had trouble understanding why more people didn’t feel the same way.
Up at the front of the stable, Caleb Briggs paced back and forth, pausing every so often to cough. Even by lamplight, the tough little dentist’s color wasn’t good. Pinkard wondered how long he could last, especially burning himself at both ends as he did. The damnyankees hadn’t killed him all at once when they gassed him. They were doing it an inch at a time, giving him years full of hell before they put him in his grave. To Jeff’s way of thinking, that was worse.
After a while, Briggs didn’t seem able to stand waiting any longer. “Come on, y’all, move up to the front,” he rasped. “Talking’s hard enough for me; I’ll be goddamned if I’m gonna shout when I don’t have to. And there’s room. Wish to Christ there wasn’t, but there is.”
A year before, the livery stable would have been packed. Men would have been milling around outside. Now there were more folding chairs and hay bales set out than people to sit on them. Jeff plopped his bottom down onto a chair in the second row. He could have sat in the first row—plenty of chairs to take—but memories of getting called on in school made him stay less conspicuous.
Caleb Briggs looked over the house. He pursed his lips, coughed again, and began: “Well, we’re still here, boys.” Maybe he gave a dry chuckle then, or maybe it was just another cough.
“Freedom!” Jefferson Pinkard called, along with his comrades.
“Freedom!” Briggs echoed. It sounded like a dying echo, too, enough so to send a chill through Jeff. But the dentist picked up spirit as he went on, “We are still here, dammit, and we aren’t going to go away, either, no matter how much the niggers and the folks in striped trousers and top hats and the generals in the War Department wish we would. We’re here for the long haul, and we’re going to win.”
“Freedom!” The shout was louder this time, stronger. Pinkard felt a little of the jolt of energy he always got from hearing Jake Featherston speak. He wondered if Caleb Briggs would last long enough to see the Freedom Party win. He had his doubts, even if victory came soon—and it wouldn’t, dammit.
But Briggs was undeterred. He’d been a soldier, and pulled his weight like a soldier. “What we have to do now is make it through the hard times,” he said. “They aren’t over yet. They won’t be over for a while. It’ll be God’s own miracle if we don’t lose seats in Congress this fall. What we’ve got to do is try and hold on to as many as we can, so we don’t look like we’re going down the toilet in front of the whole damn country. And what we’ve got to do right here in Birmingham is make sure we send Barney Stevens back to Richmond in November.”
Jeff clapped his hands. He wanted to see Stevens sent back to Richmond to keep the Freedom Party’s seat there. He also wanted Stevens in Richmond because the Congressman was a rough customer whom he didn’t particularly want coming home to Birmingham.
“We hang tough,” Briggs was saying. “We try not to lose too much here in 1923, and we try to build up toward 1925 and especially 1927, when we vote for president again. Rome wasn’t built in a day. The Confederate States won’t be rebuilt in a day, either. But we will build our country back up, we will shove our niggers back down where they belong, and we—the Freedom Party—will be the ones who do that. So help me God, we will.”
“Freedom!” Jeff yelled, along with his friends. The cry echoed from the roof, almost as it had in the days when the Party was swelling.
“One more thing, and then I’m through,” Briggs said. “We got as far as we did by standing up and fighting for what we know is right. We’re going to go right on fighting. Don’t you have any doubts about that. We may pick our spots a little tighter than we did before, but we’ll put on the white and butternut whenever we see the need.”
Pinkard whooped. The chance to
get out there and smash a few heads was one of the reasons he’d joined the Freedom Party. A good many other men cheered Caleb Briggs, too. But Jeff couldn’t help noticing how many others sat silent.
Then he thought, Grady Calkins would have cheered. He shook his head, rejecting the comparison and all it implied. Calkins had been a madman. Every party had some. But Jeff wasn’t crazy. Caleb Briggs wasn’t crazy. And Jake Featherston sure as hell wasn’t crazy.
Still, the idea left him uneasy. He didn’t sit around and yarn and drink homemade whiskey, as he usually did after the business part of a meeting wound down. Instead, glum and oddly dissatisfied, he headed for the door. One of the guards there caught his eye. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a dollar, and tossed the banknote into the bucket at the guard’s feet. “Thank you kindly, Jeff,” the bruiser said. “Party needs every penny it can get its hands on these days.”
“I know, Tim,” Pinkard answered. He laughed. “And think—just last year, we had more millions than you can shake a stick at.” It wasn’t really funny, not for the Freedom Party. A sound currency had done as much to squeeze folks out of the Party as had Wade Hampton’s assassination. Real money gave people one less thing to be angry about, and anger was the gasoline that fueled the Party’s engine.
It had started to drizzle. Jeff jammed his cap down low on his head and tugged up his coat collar. He was angry, by God—angry about having to wait for the trolley in the rain. The trolley got there late, too, which did nothing to improve his mood. He threw five pennies in the fare box (bronze coins were returning faster than silver) and rode out to the Sloss Works company housing.
A woman was waiting at the trolley stop. Pinkard thought she would get on after he got off. When she didn’t, he gave a mental shrug and started off toward his cottage. The trolleyman clanged his bell. The car rattled down the tracks.
“Jeff?” the woman called.
Pinkard stopped—froze, in fact. “Emily,” he whispered, and slowly turned. In the darkness and drizzle, he hadn’t recognized her, but he would have known her voice anywhere. His own roughened as he went on, “What the devil are you doing here?”
“Waiting for you,” she answered. Her own tone was sharp: “I sure enough knew what you’d be doing this night of the week, didn’t I? I just got here myself, though—didn’t expect you back quite so soon. Things ain’t so lively at the Party nowadays?”
“None of your business—you made sure of that, by God,” Jeff said. “What do you want with me, anyway, you…tramp?” He could have used a stronger word, and nearly had.
“Wanted to see how you were,” Emily answered. “Wanted to see what you were up to.” She sighed and shook her head. “Not like you cared enough about me to find out any of that.”
“After what you done, why should I care?” he said. “You’re lucky I don’t kick you down the street.” Had he had some whiskey in him, he thought he would have done it.
“I got lonesome,” she said. “I got lonesome when you was in the Army, and I got lonesome when you started caring more about the Freedom Party than you did about me. I don’t like being lonesome, so I went and did something about it.”
She didn’t mean lonesome. She meant horny. Pinkard knew that. She’d been fine as long as he gave her everything she needed. When he stopped, she’d gone out and taken what she needed, as a man with a frigid wife might have done. It would have been all right in a man. In a woman…Pinkard shook his head. No man could put up with what she’d done, not if he wanted to stay a man.
Emily said, “I was almost hoping I wouldn’t find you here, on account of that’d mean you were back at the house, not at that stinking livery stable. It’d mean you’d wised up and gotten out of the Freedom Party. But if what happened to President Hampton didn’t open your eyes, I reckon nothin’ ever will.”
She’d hoped he’d given up the Party? Did that mean she wanted him back, or would have wanted him back? Did he want her back? She was explosive between the sheets. He knew that. But how would he keep from thinking he wasn’t the only man she’d taken to bed? How would he keep from thinking she wasn’t taking some other man to bed along with him? He shook his head again. He wouldn’t. He couldn’t.
To keep from thinking about that now, he asked, “What are you doing these days?”
“Working in a textile mill,” she answered with a shrug. “It ain’t a lot of money, but I don’t need a lot, so I get by. I get lonesome sometimes, though.”
She meant horny again. “Bet you can find plenty of fellows if you do.” Jeff didn’t try to keep the scorn from his voice.
“Of course I can. A woman always can.” Emily sounded scornful, too, and weary, so weary. “Harder to find anybody who cares about more than that, though.”
“Too bad,” Jeff said harshly. “Too damn bad.”
Emily sighed. “I don’t know why I bothered doing this. Just wasted my time. Reckon I was hoping you’d changed—changed back into the fellow I knew before the war.”
“He’s dead,” Pinkard said. “The damnyankees killed him, and the niggers killed him, and you helped kill him, too. The country he lived in is dead along with him. He ain’t ever coming back. Maybe the country we had back then will. That’s what the Freedom Party is all about.”
“To hell with the Freedom Party!” Emily said furiously. A distant street lamp showed tears running down her cheeks. “And to hell with you, too, Jefferson Davis Pinkard.”
“Go on, get out of here. Go peddle your tail somewhere else, or I’ll give you what I gave you before, only more of it.” Jeff made a fist and raised his arm. “I sure as hell don’t need you. I don’t need anybody, by God. As long as I’ve got the Party, that’s everything I need in the whole wide world.”
Emily turned away, her shoulders slumping. She was crying harder now, crying like a little lost child. Jeff headed home, a smile on his face now in spite of the chilly drizzle. Why not? He’d won. He knew damn well he’d won.
Chester Martin liked playing football. He liked it in the snow, and he liked it here in springtime, too. In that, he was very little different from anybody else in the United States. In New England and New York, a few people still enjoyed baseball, a game that had briefly flourished in the couple of decades before the War of Secession. Even there, though, football was king.
He pulled on his leather helmet. Being a burly steelworker, he played in the line on offense and defense. In the trenches, people called that these days. The comparison wasn’t far-fetched. Plenty of times, he’d wished for a bayoneted rifle to hold off whatever charging rhinoceros the other team aimed at him. And not a game went by when he didn’t wish he were wearing a green-gray steel pot on his head instead of mere leather.
Albert Bauer played beside him in the line. Bauer pointed to their opponents, a team of bruisers in dark blue wool shirts. “Here we go, Chester,” he said. “Legal revenge for everything the police have given us since the end of the war—and before that, too.”
“You don’t need to fire me up, Al. I’m ready now.” Martin looked down at his own shirt, which was bright red. “We licked ’em in the presidential election, and we licked ’em again in the Congressional election last year, and we’ve licked ’em a few times on the gridiron, too. I figure we can do it again.”
“That’s the proletarian spirit,” Bauer said. “Don’t take them lightly, though. The enemies of progress fight hard, even if their cause is doomed. They will lose the war. They can win the battles.”
On one sideline, steelworkers’ friends and families gathered to cheer their gladiators. Sue Martin waved to Chester. He waved back. On the other sideline stood friends and relatives of the cops. A stranger couldn’t have guessed which side was which. Seeing how ordinary policemen’s families were never ceased to surprise Martin.
The two referees were newspapermen; they’d covered both sides, and both sides trusted, or rather distrusted, them about evenly. They waved the team captains over to them and flipped a silver dollar. The cop let out
a happy little grunt; he’d guessed right. “Give us the ball,” he said.
“Yeah, give it to ’em in the balls,” a steelworker said. He grinned, but it was a sharp-toothed sort of grin.
Martin held the ball upright with his finger as the kicker booted it down the field—the park, actually—toward the cops. Then he was on his feet and running as hard as he could. A policeman ran toward him, yelling in a language that didn’t sound like English. Martin lowered a shoulder and knocked him sprawling. The first hit always felt good. He banged into a couple of other policemen before two of his teammates brought down the fellow with the ball.
When he lined up at right tackle, the cop playing opposite him looked familiar. “Have I seen you someplace before?” Martin asked.
Before the cop could answer, the center snapped the ball back to the quarterback, who stood waiting for it. The cop gave Martin a body block that took him out of the play, though the run gained only a yard or two. Then he helped him up. “I dunno. I been playing football for a while, same as most guys.”
“I don’t think that’s it,” Martin said. “Where’d you fight in the war?”
Another play intervened. This time, Martin spun past the blocker in dark blue and flattened the fullback behind the line of scrimmage. The fullback accused him of unsavory practices. He laughed.
“I was in Kentucky with the First Army—Custer’s men,” the cop answered with no small pride as they took their places once more. “Then I got sent to Utah, to put down the Mormon uprising. After that, I fought in Arkansas. How about you, bud?”
Before Martin could answer, the ball was snapped again. The quarterback booted it away in a quick kick. It rolled dead deep in the steelworkers’ territory. Now it would be Martin’s turn to try to hold the cop away from the ball carrier.
“Me?” he said as he took his stance. “I was in Virginia the whole time—on the Roanoke front till I got wounded, then up in the north.”
Blood and Iron Page 68
