The words seemed to hang in the air. Hal Jacobs' eyes widened. Edna's mouth fell open. "Ma," she said slowly, "you don't suppose… you don't suppose you're in a family way again, do you?"
"What a ridiculous notion!" Nellie exclaimed. But, when she thought about it, maybe it wasn't so ridiculous as all that. Her time of the month should have been… Her jaw dropped, too. Her time of the month should have come a couple of weeks before. She'd never thought of asking Hal to wear a French letter on the infrequent occasions when she yielded him her body. She hadn't even worried about it. She was far enough past forty that she'd figured having a baby was about as likely as getting struck by lightning.
She glanced cautiously up toward the ceiling. That was foolish, and she knew it. If a lightning bolt came crashing through, she'd never know what hit her.
"Are you going to have a child, Nellie?" Hal Jacobs asked in tones of wonder.
"I think-" Try as she would, Nellie had trouble forcing out the words. At last, she managed: "I think maybe I am."
Edna burst out laughing. No matter how tired Nellie felt, she wasn't too tired to glare. A moment later, her daughter looked contrite. "I'm sorry, Ma," Edna said. "I was just thinking that, if you had a baby now, it'd be almost like I had a baby now, and-" She dissolved in more giggles.
Hal looked delighted and awed at the same time. Softly, he said, "With my first wife, I had two children, two little girls. Neither one of them lived to be three years old. Now God has given me another chance, when I never thought He would." He bent his head in thanks.
Nellie wasn't nearly so sure she felt thanks. She hadn't figured on taking care of a child again-not unless Edna had misfortune strike her in the shape of a man (and Nellie could think of no more likely shape for misfortune to assume). And then Nellie started to laugh in the same way Edna had. "It is funny," she said. "It's funny now, anyways. Won't be so funny when the baby finally comes. I remember that."
"Oh, yes," Hal said. "I remember, too. It is much work. But you, Nellie, we must take the very finest care of you, to make sure everything goes on in exactly the way it should."
What he meant was, she was getting long in the tooth to have a baby. She couldn't get annoyed about that. For one thing, he'd put it very nicely. For another, she'd thought she was too long in the tooth herself.
Over a gap of half a lifetime, she remembered what bringing forth Edna had been like. Maybe, this time, she'd go to a hospital and have them stick an ether cone over her face. That was one other thing doctors were good for.
"Ma's a tough bird," Edna said with no small pride. She beamed at Nellie. Nellie could hardly recall her beaming before. "Aren't you, Ma?"
Before Nellie could answer, Hal said, "A woman in a delicate condition is in a delicate condition, which means she is… delicate, is what it means." He'd talked himself twice round a circle, hadn't said a single, solitary thing, and didn't realize it.
"I'll be all right," Nellie said. "This is something God meant women to do." And if that doesn 'tprove God is a man, I don't know what does. She didn't feel like a tough bird, but she didn't feel delicate, either. What she mostly felt was tired.
Edna said, "If you really are in a family way, Ma, why don't you go on upstairs? I'll do the dishes."
"Why, thank you, sweetheart." Nellie cherished every friendly gesture she got from Edna, not least because she didn't get that many of them. That she'd been watching Edna like a hawk for years never once entered her mind.
When she went upstairs and took off her corset, she sighed with relief. Before too long, she wouldn't be able to wear a corset any more. Her belly would stick out there for all the world to see. But she had a ring on the proper finger-she held up her hand to look at the thin gold circlet-so that was all right.
She sighed again when she lay down on the bed. She felt as if her bones were turning to rubber. She raised an arm and then let it flop limply to the mattress. She wasn't quite ready to fall asleep-though she knew she would be very soon-but she wasn't going anywhere, either.
Her eyes had just started to slide closed when Hal came into the bedroom. "I know we didn't think this would happen, Nellie," he said, "but it will be a blessing in our old age."
"I suppose so," Nellie said, not yet convinced but willing to be. She laughed once more. "I never thought I'd be a mother again at the age I am now."
"And I never expected to be a father," her husband answered. "You made me the happiest man in the world when you said you would be my bride, and you have made me the happiest man in the world since, too." Every hair in his mustache seemed to quiver with joy.
Nellie was a long way from the happiest woman in the world. A million dollars, a fancy house full of servants, and a rich, handsome husband for Edna would probably have turned the trick. But Hal was doing his best to make her happy, and she'd never had anyone do that before. "You're sweet," she told him. "Everything will be fine." Was she talking to herself as well as to her husband? If she was, who could blame her?
Hal said, "I shall have to get more business from the shop across the street."
"How do you aim do to that?" Nellie asked with genuine curiosity. The shoe-repair shop brought in a steady, reliable trickle of money. Building that trickle to anything more struck her as unlikely.
"I know what we need," her husband said: "another war and another invasion." He sighed. "Only the Confederates whose boots I made and mended would probably pay me in scrip, the way they did last time. But even with scrip, I made more from them during the war than from my regular customers before or after."
"I'd sooner be poor," Nellie said. Considering how she felt about money, that was no small assertion.
"So would I," Hal Jacobs said. "The United States have spent my entire life working to get even with the Rebels. Now that we have finally done it, I don't ever want them to have another chance to invade our beloved country. And, of course," he added, "'now that our flag flies down to the Rappahannock, the Confederates would have a harder time reaching and shelling Washington than they did in the last two wars."
"I was just a little girl when they shelled the city during the Second Mexican War," Nellie said. "I thought the end of the world had come." Her expression grew taut. "And then I went through 1914, and I was sure the end of the world had come. And then I went through the shellings and bombings during the last few months of the war, and by the time they were through, I was wishing the end of the world would come."
"It was a very hard time," Hal agreed. "But you came through safe, and your lovely Edna, and so did I." He kissed her. "And now this! I never imagined it, but I am ever so glad it has happened."
Nellie wondered how glad he would be when she was bent over a bucket heaving her guts out. She remembered doing that for weeks and weeks when she was carrying Edna. She wondered how glad he would be when she was big as an elephant and couldn't find a comfortable position in which to sleep and had to get up to use the pot every hour on the hour. She wondered how happy he would be with the baby screaming its head off all night long three or four nights in a row.
She would find out. She glanced over at Hal Jacobs, who was gazing fondly at her. He'd made a better husband than she thought he would. Odds were he'd make a good father, too.
Nellie smiled. "If we have a little girl, you're going to spoil her rotten."
"I hope so!' Hal exclaimed. "And if we have a little boy, I expect to spoil him rotten, too. A son!'" He blinked. Was he blinking back tears? "I never thought I might have a son. Never. Not for many, many years."
"Well, we don't know if you've got him yet," Nellie said. "We've still got a good many months to go before we find out." She yawned once more, enormously this time. "But I've only got a couple of minutes to go before I'm asleep." She closed her eyes, and discovered she didn't have even that long.
Jefferson Pinkard wished he could walk into a saloon and have himself a cold beer. He didn't feel like getting drunk, or so he told himself. He just wanted one schooner of beer, to take the edge off
a bad mood. But Alabama had gone dry before the Great War. All the saloons were either padlocked and ankle-deep in dust or long since converted to some other way of separating a customer from his cash.
That didn't mean a thirsty man had to dry up and blow away. Some beer was sitting back in the icebox in Jeff's cottage. He didn't feel like going back there, though. He'd eyed Emily like a fox eyeing a henhouse ever since he came home from the war. That was more than a year and a half now: heading on toward two years. You couldn't keep watch every livelong minute of every livelong day.
Spring hadn't come to Birmingham yet, but it was on the way. The breezes weren't roaring down out of the freezing USA any more. They might not be very warm yet, but they blew off the Gulf of Mexico, wafting up a hint of Mobile, a hint of the subtropical, even though tree branches remained bare of leaves as skeletons were of flesh and all the grass on the lawns and in the parks was yellow and dead. Somewhere under the bark, somewhere under the ground, new life lurked, and would soon be bursting forth.
Maybe new life lurked somewhere under the ground for the Confederate States, too. If it did, Jefferson Pinkard couldn't sense it as he could the coming spring. He wanted renewal. The country needed renewal. He had no idea where to find it. Nobody else in the CSA seemed to know, either.
Birmingham had been a fine, bustling city before the war. Now it just idled along, like a steam engine running on about a quarter of the pressure it needed. The steel mills remained busy, but most of what they made went north as reparations for the damnyankees. No profit there for the foundry owners. And when they made no profit, the whole town suffered.
Some of the general stores and haberdasheries and furniture stores were recognizable only by the lettering on their windows, being empty, locked shells of their former selves, almost as parched and dead as the deceased saloons with which they shared business blocks. Others still survived. On a Saturday afternoon, though, they shouldn't have been surviving. They should have been thriving, full of steelworkers with money in their pockets to spend on a half-holiday.
Jefferson Pinkard had money in his pockets-more than two hundred dollars. "Hell of a lot of good that does me," he muttered under his breath. The way things were these days, you couldn't even get good and drunk on two hundred dollars. Maybe it was just as well the saloons were all deceased.
A man in a pair of denim pants and a shirt with one sleeve pinned up came out of a secondhand clothing store. Pinkard stopped short. Plenty of men in Birmingham these days had an arm gone above the elbow. But, sure enough, it was Bedford Cunningham, Jeff's best friend once upon a time.
"How are you today, Jeff?" Cunningham asked. He was as tall as Pinkard, and had been as burly when they were both down on the floor at the Sloss Works. Since being wounded, he'd lost a lot of flesh.
"All right," Pinkard answered shortly. He still remembered- he could never forget-what Bedford Cunningham and Emily had been doing when he'd walked into his cottage on leave. But if Bedford was here, he couldn't be back there doing anything with Emily now. That made Jeff somewhat better inclined toward him, enough so to ask, "What you doin' now?"
"I was heading over toward Avondale Park," Cunningham answered. "This new Freedom Party is holding a rally. I want to see what they have to say."
"Christ, Bedford, they're just politicians," Jeff said, now certain he had the excuse he needed not to go along. "You've heard one of 'em, you've heard 'em all. You've heard one of 'em, you've heard too many, too."
"These boys are supposed to be different," Bedford said. "They're the ones who've been banging heads up in Richmond, if you've been reading the papers." He essayed a small joke: "They've been banging heads up in Richmond even if you haven't been reading the papers."
As it happened, Jeff had been reading the papers, though not with so much attention as he might have. "Forgot the name of that outfit," he admitted. "I didn't know they got down here to Birmingham, either." He rubbed his chin. Bristles rasped; he needed a shave. "What the hell? I'll come along with you." Curiosity about the new party outweighed dislike and distrust for his old friend.
People-mostly working-class white men like Pinkard or his shabbier, out-of-work counterparts-straggled into the park and toward a wooden platform bedecked with Confederate flags. In front of the platform stood a row of hard-faced men in what might almost have been uniform: white shirts and butternut trousers.
"Don't reckon you want to pick a quarrel with those boys," Bedford Cunningham said.
"You wouldn't want to do it more than once," Jeff agreed. "They've all been through the trenches, I'll lay-they've got that look to 'em." Cunningham nodded.
On top of the platform prowled a thin man with lank brown hair. He kept looking out at the crowd, as if he wanted to launch into his speech but was making himself wait so more people could hear him. "He's seen the elephant, too," Bedford said. "That's what my grandpappy would call it, anyway."
"Yeah," Pinkard said. "Sure has." Even this long after the war, he usually had little trouble telling a combat veteran from a man who wasn't.
At last, unable to contain himself any more, the skinny man strode to the front edge of the platform. "Aren't you folks proud to be puttin' money in the damnyankees' pockets?" he called in a harsh but compelling voice. "Aren't you glad to be workin' your fingers to the bone so they can put their mistresses in the fancy motorcars they build out of the steel you make? Aren't you glad the fools and the traitors in Richmond blow kisses to the damnyankees when they send 'em our steel and our oil and our money? They didn't make those things, so why the devil should they care?"
"He's got something," Bedford Cunningham said.
Pinkard nodded, hardly noticing he was doing it. "Yeah, he does." He waved a hand. "Now hush up, Bedford. I want to hear what he has to say for himself."
"Do they remember, up there in Richmond, up there in the Capitol, up there in that whited sepulcher, do they remember we fought a war with the United States not so long ago?" the skinny man demanded. "Do they? Doesn't look like it to me, friends. How does it look to you?"
"Hell, no!" Jeff heard himself shout. His was far from the only voice raised from the crowd. Beside him, Cunningham yelled louder than he did. He grinned at his old friend, the first time he'd done that since he'd caught him with Emily.
"Up there in Richmond, do they care if we're weak?" the skinny man asked, and answered his own question: "No, they don't care. Why should they care? All they care about is getting elected. Nothing else matters to 'em. So what if the United States kick mud in our face? We were a great country once, before the traitors in Congress and the fools in the War Department stabbed us in the back. We can be great again, if we want to bad enough. Do they care, up there in Richmond? No, they don't care. Do you care, you people in Birmingham?"
He could give the same speech in Chattanooga and just drop in the different place-name and a couple of details. Jeff knew that. Somehow, it didn't matter. It didn't matter at all. He felt the skinny man was speaking to him alone, showing him what was wrong, leading the way toward making it better. "Yes!" he yelled at the top of his lungs, his voice one among hundreds, all crying the same word.
"I don't blame the United States for doing what they're doing to us," the skinny man said. "If I was in Teddy Roosevelt's shoes, I'd try and do the same thing. But I blame those people up in Richmond for letting him get away with it-no, by God, for helping him get away with it. We ought to throw every one of those bastards on the trash heap for that by itself Before we stand tall again, we have to throw 'em on the trash heap.
"But we've got more reasons than just that. They sat there sleeping while the niggers plotted and then rose up. And what did they do after that? They said, fine, from here on out niggers are just as good as white men. Tell me, friends, you reckon niggers are just as good as white men?"
"No!" roared the crowd, Jefferson Pinkard loud among them. Vespasian wasn't a bad fellow, and he did his job pretty well, but working alongside a white man didn't make him as good as a w
hite man.
"Well, now, you see, you're smarter than they are up in Richmond," the Freedom Party speaker said. "Niggers aren't as good as white men, never were, never will be. Never can be, and the liars up in Richmond can't make 'em that way, even if they did give 'em the vote. The vote!" His voice rose to a furious, contemptuous howl. "I've got a donkey back in Richmond. I can whip him from now till doomsday, and he won't ever win a horse race. You can say a nigger's as good as a white man, but that doesn't make it so. Never has. Never will. Can't.
"We've got to give those fools up in Richmond the heave-ho and elect some people who can stand up to the United States and stand up for the white man here. That's what the Freedom Party is all about. We've got Congressional elections coming up this fall. I hope you'll remember us. I'm Jake Featherston. I'll be by again if the money holds out. You'll have somebody on the ballot here who thinks the way I do. Get on over to your polling place and vote for him." He waved to show he was done.
While the applause still thundered, a hat came through the crowd, as if to underscore that if the money holds out. Jeff pulled a hundred-dollar banknote out of his pocket and stuck it in the hat. He imagined doing such a thing back in 1914, or tried. He couldn't imagine having a hundred-dollar banknote in his pocket back then.
"There's a man who knows what we need," Bedford Cunningham said as the rally began to break up.
"Sure as hell is. Sure as hell does," Pinkard said. His voice was awed, almost as if he'd gone to church and been born again. He felt born again. Listening to Featherston made him believe the Confederate States could pull themselves together again. "I'd follow him a long way."
"Me, too," Cunningham said. "If whoever the Freedom Party runs is even a quarter as good on the stump as this Feathersmith-"
"Featherston," Jeff corrected; he'd listened with great attention to every word the skinny man said. "Jake Featherston."
"Featherston," Cunningham said. "If I like who they're running here, I'll vote for him. I've been a Whig a long time, but I'd change."
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