And here, at the other podium to her right, stood Congressman Daniel Miller, appointed to the seat she wanted. He wasn’t quite so handsome and debonair as his campaign posters made him out to be, but who was? He looked clever and alert, and the Democrats had the money and the connections to make a strong campaign for whatever candidate they chose.
Up in between the two candidates strode Isidore Rothstein, the Democratic Party chairman for the Fourteenth Ward. A coin toss had made him master of ceremonies rather than his Socialist opposite number. More tosses had determined that Miller would speak first and Flora last.
Rothstein held up his hands. The crowd quieted. “Tonight, we see democracy in action,” he said, making what Flora thought of as unfair use of his party’s name. “In the middle of the greatest war the world has ever known, we come together here to decide which way our district should go, listening to both sides to come to a fair decision.”
Here and there, people in the crowd applauded. Flora wondered how much anything they did here tonight would really matter. The Democrats would keep a strong majority in Congress unless the sky fell. One district-what was one district? But Myron Zuckerman had spent his whole adult life working to improve the lot of the common people. His legacy would be wasted if this Democrat kept this seat to which he had been appointed. Plenty of reason there alone to fight.
“And now,” Isidore Rothstein thundered, a bigger voice than had any business coming out of his plump little body, “Congressman Daniel Miller!” Democrats in the crowd cheered. Socialists hissed and whistled.
Miller said, “Under Teddy Roosevelt, the Democrats have given every American a square deal. We are pledged to an honest day’s pay for an honest day’s work, to treating every individual as an individual and as he deserves”-the code phrase Democrats used when they explained why they were against labor unions-“to the rights of cities and counties and states to govern themselves as far as possible, and to-”
“What about the war?” a Socialist heckler shouted. Before the debate, the two parties had solemnly agreed not to harass each other’s candidates. Both sides had sounded very sincere. Flora hadn’t taken it seriously, and didn’t expect the Democrats had, either.
Daniel Miller was certainly ready for the shout. “And to keeping the commitments made long ago to our friends and allies, I was about to say,” he went on smoothly. “For years, the USA was surrounded by our enemies: by the Confederacy and Canada and England and France, even by the Japanese. Germany was in the same predicament on the European continent. We are both reaching out together for our rightful places in the sun. Not only that, we are winning this war. It hasn’t been so easy as we thought it would be, but what war is? To quit now would be to leave poor Kaiser Bill in the lurch, fighting England and France and Russia all alone, or near enough as makes no difference, and to guarantee that the old powers will hold us down for another fifty years. Do you want that?” He stuck out his chin. In profile, as Flora saw him, his jawline sagged, but from the front he probably looked most impressively political.
She made her own opening statement. “We are winning this war, Mr. Miller says.” She wouldn’t call him Congressman. “If you want to buy a pound of meat, you can go down to the butcher’s shop and get it. If you have to pay twenty dollars for it, you begin to wonder if it’s worth the price. Here we are, almost two and a half years into a fight the Socialist Party never wanted, and what have we got to show for it? Quebec City is still Canadian. Montreal is still Canadian. Toronto is still Canadian. Winnipeg is still Canadian. Richmond is still Confederate. Our own capital is still in Confederate hands, for heaven’s sake.
“And Nashville is still Confederate. Just this past week, the brilliant General Custer, the heroic General Custer, attacked again. And what did he get? Half a mile of ground, moving away from Nashville, mind you, not toward it. And what was the cost? Another division thrown away. Three-quarters of a million dead since 1914, two million wounded, half a million in the enemy’s prisoner-of-war camps. Poor Kaiser Bill!” Her voice dripped venom.
“And will you have all those brave men die in vain?” Daniel Miller demanded. “Will you have the United States abandon the struggle before it’s over, go back to our old borders, tell our enemies, ‘Oh, we’re sorry; we didn’t really mean it’?” He was sarcastic himself. “Once you’ve begun a job of work, you don’t leave it in the middle. We have given as good as we’ve got; we have given better than we’ve got. The Canucks are tottering; the Confederates are about to put rifles into black men’s hands. We are winning, I tell you.”
“So what?” Flora said. The blunt question seemed to catch her opponent by surprise. She repeated it: “So what? What can we win that will bring those boys back to life? What can we win that’s worth a hundredth part of what they paid? Even if we make the CSA make peace instead of the other way round, what difference does it make? Two thousand years ago, there was a king who looked around after a battle and cried out, ‘One more victory like this and I am ruined!’ He could see. He gave up the war. Is the Democratic Party full of blind men?”
“No. We’re full of men who remember what happened in 1862, who remember what happened twenty years later,” Miller shot back. “We’re full of men who believe the United States of America must never be humiliated again, men who believe we must ten times never humiliate ourselves.”
“A man who makes a mistake and backs away from it has sense,” Flora said. “A man who makes a mistake and keeps on with it is a fool. We-”
“Traitor!” came a voice from the crowd. “You’re just a woman. What do you know about what war costs?”
Tight-lipped, Flora pointed to her family. “Sophie, stand up.” Her sister did, still holding little Yossel. “There’s my nephew,” Flora said into sudden silence. “He’ll never know his father, who died on the Roanoke front.” She pointed again. “David, stand up.” The older of her two brothers rose, wearing U.S. green-gray. “Here is my brother. He has leave. He’s just finished his training. He goes to the front day after tomorrow. I know what this war costs.”
The crowd applauded. To her surprise, the heckler subsided. She’d thought the Democrats would have pests more consistent than that fellow.
No matter. She turned to-turned on-Daniel Miller. “You love the war so well, Congressman.” Now she did use the title, etching it with acid. “Where are your hostages to fortune?”
Miller was a little too old to be conscripted himself. He had no brothers. His wife, a woman who looked to be very nice, sat in the audience not far from Flora’s family. With her were her two sons, the older of whom might have been thirteen. Flora had known the Democratic appointee couldn’t well come back if she raised the question, and she’d been hoping she’d get or be able to make the chance to do it.
And, just for a moment, her opponent’s composure cracked. “I honorably served my time in the United States Army,” he said. “I yield to no one in-”
“Nobody was shooting at you then!” Four people, from four different sections of the hall, shouted the same thing at the same time. A storm of applause rose up behind them. Miller looked as if he’d had one of his fancy clients stand up in court and confess: betrayed by circumstances over which he had no control.
The debate went on. Daniel Miller even made a few points about what a Democratic congressman could do for his district that a Socialist couldn’t hope to match. “Wouldn’t you like to have the majority on your side again?” he asked, almost wistfully. It was not the best question, not in a hall full of Jews. When, since the fall of the Second Temple, had they had the majority on their side? And, after the blow Flora had got in, it mattered little.
At last, like a referee separating two weary prizefighters, Isidore Rothstein came out again. “I know you’ll all vote next month,” he told the crowd. “I expect you’ll vote the patriotic way.” Flora glared at the Democratic Party chairman. He had no business-no business but the business of politics-getting in a dig like that.
Now more l
ike a corner man than a referee, Rothstein led Miller away. Flora had to go offstage by herself. Only when she was walking down the dark, narrow corridor to the dressing room did she fully realize what she’d done. Her feet seemed to float six inches above the filthy boards of the floor.
When she opened the door, Maria Tresca leaped out and embraced her. “It’s ours!” she exclaimed. “You did it!”
Right behind her, Herman Bruck agreed. “His face looked like curdled milk when you reminded people he has no personal stake in watching the war go on.”
“That stupid Democratic heckler gave me the opening I needed,” Flora said. “Rothstein must be throwing a fit in the other dressing room.”
Maria looked at Bruck. Bruck looked uncommonly smug, even for him. “That was no stupid Democrat. That was my cousin Mottel, and I told him what to say and when to say it.”
Flora stared at him, then let out a shriek, then kissed him on the cheek. “Shall we go out and have supper to celebrate?”
She thought she’d meant the invitation to include Maria, too, but Maria didn’t seem to think so. And Flora discovered she didn’t mind. Herman Bruck had just given her the congressional seat on a silver platter. If that didn’t deserve a dinner what did?
Besides, she always had her hatpin, if she felt like using it. Maybe she wouldn’t.
“We’ve got to hold this town, boys,” Lieutenant Jerome Nicoll said. “Below Waurika, there’s no more Sequoyah left, not hardly. There’s just the Red River, and then there’s Texas. The whole Confederacy is depending on us. If the damnyankees push over the river and into Texas, you can kiss Sequoyah good-bye when the war is done.”
“Wish I could kiss Sequoyah good-bye right now,” Reginald Bartlett muttered under his breath. “Wish I was back in Virginia.”
Napoleon Dibble gaped. “You wish you was back on the Roanoke front, Reggie?” He sounded as if he thought Bartlett was crazy.
Had Reggie wished that, he would have been crazy. “No. I wish I was back in Richmond, where I came from.” Dibble nodded, enlightened, or as enlightened as he got. Under his breath, Reggie went on, “The other thing I wish is that Lieutenant Nicoll would get himself a new speech.”
Nap Dibble didn’t hear him, but Sergeant Hairston did. “Yeah,” he said. “We got to hold this, we got to hold that. Then what the hell happens when we don’t hold? We supposed to go off and shoot ourselves?”
“If we don’t hold a place, the damnyankees usually shoot a lot of us,” Bartlett said, which made Pete Hairston laugh but which was also unpleasantly true. The regiment-the whole division-had taken a lot of casualties trying to halt the U.S. drive toward the Red River.
An aeroplane buzzed overhead. Reggie started to unsling his rifle to take a shot at it: it wasn’t flying very high, for gray clouds filled the sky. But it carried the Confederate battle flag under its wings. He stared at it in tired wonder. The USA didn’t have many aeroplanes out here in the West, but the CSA had even fewer.
Hoping it would do the damnyankees some harm, he forgot about it and marched on toward Waurika. The town’s business district lay in a hollow, with houses on the surrounding hills. “We’ll have to hold the Yanks up here,” he said, as much to himself as to anyone else. “We go down there into that bowl, we’re going to get pounded to death.”
As had been true up in Wilson Town, not all the civilians had fled from Waurika. Most of the men and women who came out of the houses to look over the retreating Confederates had dark skins: Waurika, Lieutenant Nicoll had said, was about half Kiowa, half Comanche. Reggie couldn’t have told one bunch from the other to save himself from the firing squad.
Some of the civilians had skins darker than copper: the Indians’ Negro servants. Most of those, or at least most of the ones Bartlett saw, were women. The men had probably been impressed into labor service already: either that or they’d run off toward the Yankees or toward the forests and swamps of the Red River bottom country, where a man who knew how to live off the land could fend for himself for a long time.
More than a few Indians, men wearing homespun and carrying hunting rifles, tried to fall in with the column of Confederate soldiers. “You braves don’t know what you’re getting into,” Lieutenant Nicoll told them. “This isn’t any kind of fighting you’ve ever seen before, and if the damnyankees catch you shooting at them without wearing a uniform, they’ll kill you for it.”
“What will the Yankees do to us if they take this land?” one of the Indians answered. “We do not want to be in the USA.”
“Our grandfathers have told us how bad the living was under the Stars and Stripes,” another Indian agreed. “We want to stay under the Stars and Bars.” He pointed toward the business section of Waurika, where several Confederate flags flew in spite of the threatening weather.
At that moment, the weather stopped threatening and started delivering chilly rain mixed with sleet. Shivering, Bartlett consoled himself with the thought that the rain would be harder on the Yankees, who would have to fight their way through it, than on his own unit, which had already reached the place it needed to defend.
Sergeant Hairston spoke in a low, urgent voice: “Sir, you can’t give them redskins any stretch of line to hold. They ain’t soldiers.”
“We are warriors,” one of the Indians said proudly. “The tribes in the east of Sequoyah have their own armies allied to the Stars and Bars.”
“I’ve heard about that,” Nicoll said. “Isn’t anything like it hereabouts, though.” He scowled, visibly of two minds. At last, he went on, “You want to fight?” The Indians gathered round him made it loudly clear they did indeed want to fight. He held up a hand. “All right. This is what we’ll do. You go out in front of the line we’ll hold. You snipe at the damnyankees and bring us back word of what they’re doing and how they’re moving. Don’t let yourselves get captured. You get in trouble, run back to the front. Is it a bargain?”
“We know this country,” one of the Indians answered. “The soldiers in the uniforms the color of horse shit will not find us.” The rest of the men from Waurika nodded, then trotted quietly north, in the direction from which the U.S. soldiers would come.
Reggie turned to Nap Dibble. “The damnyankees may not find ’em, but what about machine-gun bullets? I don’t care how brave or how smart you are, and a machine gun doesn’t care, either.” He spoke with the grim certainty of a man who had been through the machine-gun hell of the Roanoke River valley.
All Nap Dibble knew was the more open fighting that characterized the Sequoyah front. No: he knew one thing more. “Better them’n us,” he said, and, taking out his entrenching tool, began to dig in.
Along with using the Indians of Waurika as scouts and snipers, Lieutenant Nicoll used the few Negro men left in town as laborers. None of the Indian women and old men left behind objected. No one asked the Negroes’ opinions. With shovels and hoes and mattocks, they began helping the Confederate soldiers make entrenchments in the muddy ground.
Once there were holes in which the men of Nicoll’s company could huddle, the lieutenant set the blacks to digging zigzag communications trenches back toward a second line. “Lawd have mercy, suh,” one of them said, “you gwine work us to death.”
“You don’t know what death is, not till the Yankees start shelling you,” Nicoll answered. Then his voice went even colder than the weather: “Weren’t for the way you niggers rose up last winter, the Confederate States wouldn’t be in the shape they’re in.”
“Weren’t us, suh,” said the Negro who had spoken before. “Onliest Reds in Sequoyah, they’s Indians, and they was born that way.” The other black men impressed into labor nodded emphatic agreement.
“Likely tell,” Nicoll said, dismissing their contention with a toss of the head. “You want to show me you’re good, loyal Confederates, you dig now and help your country’s soldiers beat the Yanks.”
Sullenly, the Negroes dug alongside the soldiers. Bartlett began to hope the Confederates around Waurika would hav
e the rest of the day and the whole night in which to prepare their position for the expected U.S. onslaught. Having slogged through a lot of mud himself, he knew what kind of time the Yankee troops would be having.
But, a little past three in the afternoon, a brisk crackle of small-arms fire broke out ahead of the line. He found himself in a trench and peering out over the parapet almost before he realized he’d heard the rifles. Some of the reports were strange; not all rifles sounded exactly like the Tredegars and Springfields with which he’d been so familiar for so long.
Machine guns were heavy. Units not of the first quality-which, on the Sequoyah front, meant a lot of units-didn’t make sure they kept up with the head of an advancing column. But that malignant hammering started only moments after the rifle fire broke out.
“Now we see what kind of balls the redskins have,” Sergeant Hairston said with a sort of malicious anticipation. “Warriors!” He hawked and spat in the mud.
Here came the Kiowas and Comanches, running back toward the hastily dug entrenchments. Behind them, trudging across the fields, firing as they advanced, were U.S. soldiers. An Indian fell, then another one. An Indian leaped into the trench near Bartlett. “Why do you not shoot at them?” he demanded. “Do you want them to kill us all?”
“No,” Reggie answered. “What we want is for them to get close enough for us to hurt ’em bad when we do open up. Fire discipline, it’s called.”
The Indian stared at him without comprehension. But when the Confederate company did open up with rifles and machine guns and a couple of trench mortars, the U.S. soldiers went down as if scythed. Not all of them, Reggie knew, would be hit; more were taking whatever cover they could find. But the advance stopped.
More Indians jumped into the trenches with the Confederates. They kept on shooting at the Yankees, and showed as much spirit as the men alongside whom they fought. “Maybe they are warriors,” Bartlett said.
Walk in Hell gw-2 Page 61
