by Ward Just
Table of Contents
ALSO BY WARD JUST
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Autumn, 1953
TRUMAN DEFENDS WHITE; SCORES SEN. MCCARTHY
2.
3.
4.
5.
September, 1960
2.
3.
4.
Autumn, 1973
2.
3.
Copyright Page
ALSO BY WARD JUST
NONFlCTION
To What End: Report From Vietnam
FICTION
A Soldier Of The Revolution
Military Men
The Congressman Who Loved Flaubert And Other Washington Stories
Stringer
Nicholson At Large
A Family Trust
Honor, Power, Riches, Fame, And The Love Of Women
In The City Of Fear
The American Blues
The American Ambassador
Jack Glance
Twenty-One: Selected Stories
The Translator
Ambition & Love
Echo House
A Dangerous Friend
PLAY
Lowell Limpett
As always, for Sarah
And for Joy Just Steiner
It is a strange thing to be an American.
... We dwell
On the half earth, on the open curve of a continent.
Sea is divided from sea by the day-fall. The dawn
Rides the low east with us many hours;
First are the capes, then are the shorelands, now
The blue Appalachians faint at the day rise;
The willows shudder with light on the long Ohio:
The Lakes scatter the low sun: the prairies
Slide out of dark...
—ARCHIBALD MACLEISH, “American Letter”
Prologue
IN HIS LAST lucid moments he remembered it exactly. Capone’s man was due at eight. Haight and Cavaretta arrived at seven-thirty. He put them out of sight in Charles’s office. Haight was nervous and talkative but Cavaretta was mute. Haight never told him where Cavaretta had come from and he was glad not to know. He had no desire to know. When the man came he’d close the office door. Then Haight and Cavaretta were to leave Charles’s office and station themselves on either side of the door, and listen. When they heard two thumps—he banged, his big shoe against the desk leg twice, showing them—they were to enter without delay and show the man to the street, and they need not be in any way particular about how they did it.
Capone’s man came at the appointed hour. He met the man in the lobby, as promised, and they went to his third-floor office. The man took the visitor’s chair. Capone’s man wore a pearl-gray fedora and a white linen suit, and he’d arrived in a black Packard. No chauffeur; he’d driven himself.
It was twenty-two years ago; he was sixty-three then. Capone’s man looked to be in his middle thirties, though it was hard to tell; he was an Irishman with a quick smile. He’d taken his seat and begun to talk without delay. He said there were two ways they could go. He and his associates would buy fifty-one percent of the newspaper. Or they would start another newspaper. They had two men who were willing to do it: one man would be editor and the other would be publisher. Their capital was unlimited and they were willing to cut advertising rates to almost nothing—to a flat nothing, in fact, if that was what it took to drive the Intelligencer out of business. They’d give the paper away if necessary Or everyone could be saved grief and anxiety not to mention money if you—he pointed at the editor—lay off our operations. He said, We’re not bringing girls in here. We’re not going to build a racetrack, contrary to any rumor you might’ve heard. It’s just two clubs in the country, some dice, a wheel, half a dozen slots, a wire, and a gentlemanly card game or three. And of course refreshments will be served. These games of chance, and the refreshments, will be thoroughly supervised by Mr. Capone’s people and I am here to personally assure you—he pointed his finger again—that the operation will be completely clean. We do not tolerate disorder, he said.
Where are the locations of the clubs?
The man in the fedora named them. Now, he said, we have been subject to harassment. Your sheriff, Haight, has harassed us. It has taken some time and trouble to find out who was behind Haight. And we have discovered that it is you. You own this town.
He looked at him, expressionless.
The man said, You’re just like Mr. Capone in his town. Then he laughed, a high giggle. The man in the fedora was polite and fastidious in his language. What we want to do, the man said, is make a deal. Something fair and equitable to both sides. So that it will not be necessary to do the other.
His memory faded then. They talked for some time; or the man talked. The editor listened, occasionally interjecting a question. But while he listened, he weighed. This was a determined man and he had resources. He tried to calculate what the man in the fedora would settle for, Capone (assuming Capone was truly the principal) had obviously given him instructions and the editor wanted to know exactly what those instructions were. How much effort were they willing to put into Dement? The longer they talked, the less he liked the man. After thirty minutes his language became rough and his manner discourteous. He’d thought for a moment that an arrangement was possible, one club perhaps on the county line; local men involved. If the man in the fedora were trustworthy they in Dement could live with that. His foot floated near the desk leg.
Finally the man jabbed a finger at him. “Amos, I can’t fart around here all evenin—”
And the editor had roared at him, “Don’t you ever call me Amos!”
“—and this shitting little rag—”
The editor came out of his chair in a second and swept the fedora to the floor, Capone’s man following. Haight and Cavaretta burst through the door and Cavaretta kicked him once in the head and Haight, swinging a billy, missed and cracked the editor on the arm. The man was on his feet then, dazed. He ducked one of Cavaretta’s blows, side-stepped Haight, and swung wildly at the editor. Then he kneed Cavaretta and pushed Haight aside. The editor swung at him twice, missing both times. Cavaretta, grunting with pain, drove his head into the man’s stomach. Haight, flailing, stumbled into the editor and they both went down. The man and Cavaretta were now in the outer office, beating on each other. By then the sheriff had his revolver in hand and was advancing slowly into the hall. But when he got there Cavaretta was slumped over a desk and the man had disappeared. Then they heard the crash of breaking glass and the engine of the Packard. The editor heard the horn, an insolent beepbeep. And he was gone, having flung an inkpot through the front window of the I on the way out.
All in all, Amos Rising thought, a success.
Autumn, 1953
DEMENT, the town—
Forty miles north is a renowned spa, mineral baths and a golf course and a fine hotel and a lake; one great city lies a distance to the east and another to the south. The state capital lies farther still south-east. Dement the town is at the eastern edge of Dement County. In the county are a dozen smaller towns, ranging in size from a few hundred to a few thousand. Dement town, thirty thousands souls, is a county seat—containing the courthouse, the industries, the hospital, the Sears, the railroad station and the newspaper. It is a hard, thriving core surrounded by prairie. The highway skirts its eastern edge and a traveler from Chicago or St. Louis bound by road or rail to the spa would take no special notice of Dement. The town’s character cannot be seen from the highway. In the manner of midwestern towns its features are plain, the business district low and compact, the streets narrow and regular. To the noiseless east lies a shallow river and the Reil
ly Bog. The town sits on a low bluff overlooking the bog, and the prairie beyond the bog. West, there are no impediments. An early traveler noted that Dement’s situation, though remote, was agreeable and blessed with a climate “pure, bracing and healthful.”
ELLIOTT TOWNSEND stretched, and moved heavily to the window, where he stood watching dusk. He threw up the sash and cold air caught him by surprise. The sun had disappeared behind the big oak, darkening the lawn and casting blurred shadows in the backyard cornfield. Townsend rested his fingernails on the sill and leaned out, shaking his big shaggy head. Then he closed the window and stepped into the narrow hall to fetch his hat and coat. He lit a cigar and marched into the kitchen and through the back door. He was halfway down the steps when the telephone rang. He paused for a moment, listening to the ringing, then continued on his way, closing the door firmly behind him. The ringing continued. Crows screamed. at him and flew off into the cornfield, circling the decrepit scarecrow.
He scuffed through the leaves, breathing heavily. “Bastards,” he said aloud. He pulled his fedora down over one eye and jammed his hands in his overcoat pockets. Almost winter now and it seemed to him that April was only yesterday. He measured the seasons in degrees of difficulty Spring was difficult, winter was very difficult. He cocked his head and listened; the telephone was fully silent now. He’d have to hurry along; they’d try again in half an hour and if he didn’t answer then they’d send someone over to find out why. A deputy hat in hand, half expecting to find him face down in the bathtub. He grunted out loud. Fat chance.
Townsend moved away from the house. He reckoned he had about thirty minutes to collect himself, to put his private emotions behind him. That was Amos Rising’s boy on the telephone and he knew what the message was. No other reason to call at five o’clock on a Sunday afternoon. Townsend wanted time to think, because quite a lot would depend on that first conversation, he and the three Rising boys together, probably at Charles Rising’s house. Then the second conference in Amos’s office. It was not just a simple matter of reading a document and translating lawyer’s language into family language. No, that was the least of it.
He strolled on down to the cornfield. Hardly anyone left now, he said to himself. Then aloud., “Except me.” He’d outlasted everyone, friends as well as enemies; Rising was the last one. The smoke from his cigar smelled clean in the chill air, mingling with the aroma of dead leaves and cold soil, as familiar to Townsend as his own sweat. He paused at the barbecue pit, the pit black from fire; they’d had a fine cornroast this year. The corn was good every year. This year it had been very good, though Amos had not tended it properly. Couldn’t. Townsend dipped his toot into the pit and kicked at an ember. Steppe and Tilberg and Harold (“Aces”) Evans drunk, as usual; Tom Kerrigan sarcastic; the young ones nervous and careful with their smiles. And Amos not himself, nursing his brandy distracted and irritable and, Townsend knew, in pain. No doubt this was the last of the cornroastss, the real cornroasts; damn thing was Amos’s affair as much as it was his. More. For forty years the two of them had met the day after Labor Day to draw up the list. The cornroasts was always held on the second of October, rain or shine. They’d begun with a dozen men and it had grown to fifty and then to a hundred and last month they’d fed and watered a hundred and fifty men and Marge Reilly, who came early and stayed only a short while. She felt, as she said, like a fish on dry land and it was true that she was an inhibiting influence. It was important to know what everyone was thinking. He and Amos, they wanted to be forearmed; they did not like surprises, so they worked the crowd like a couple of grifters, glad-handing, listening hard, lying a little ... Well. They would do it again next year; same corn, same people. The boys would be there but the mood would be artificial. The thing was Amos’s.
Townsend moved away from the barbecue pit and leaned unsteadily against the big oak. It was the only thing on the place that was older than he was. He’d built the house in 1910 and planted the cornfield the same year. Looking at the cornfield, fading now in the last light, he thought of the Indian Summer drawing in the Chicago Tribune, the Trib’s regular announcement of autumn. This was John T. McCutcheon’s drawing, a man and a boy sitting before a fire, the old man relating stories of a frontier past in the Midwest. Indians rise from the flames; you can almost hear the war whoops. It was the heritage of the region, a swift dispatch of the Indians; no Sitting Bulls, no Cochises. In the Midwest the Indian leaders were faceless and quick to yield their lands. As a boy he himself had listened to the backwoodsmen talk of homesteading Birks’ Prairie, fashioning cabins twenty-six by sixteen. One of them claimed to’ve known Lincoln, as a young man to have retained Lincoln in a suit against the government (and lost). Lincoln, he’d said, “was weird.” But mostly they talked about the Indians—promiscuous, filthy, brutish, savage, citing the great Custer as evidence. Cluster said the Indian was “a creature possessing the human form but divested of all other attributes of humanity, and whose traits of character, habits, modes of life, disposition, and savage customs disqualified him from the exercise of all rights and privileges, even those pertaining to life itself.” He’d been that close to it; close enough to touch. Townsend remembered them becoming furious just talking about it, their voices loud and trailing off in obscenities. He remembered them so well, with their wide, unblinking eyes and lined foreheads. His father had told him that these backwoodsmen had good and sufficient reason for their hatreds. They’d been there after all, they were talking firsthand, men of strong prejudice. They didn’t like bankers either, or the railroads or government officials, or land agents or attorneys. Townsend’s lawyer father believed that it was the freedom guaranteed by the Constitution that restrained the murderous impulses of the people. He told his son, If this were Europe these men would be revolutionaries. We’re lucky we live in the heartland of America. We’re lucky we’re where we are. These are good men, stubborn and hotheaded but not rebellious.
He tried to remember the circumstances of that particular conversation. It had begun with a reference to the martyred Cluster. He thought it was probably when he was eight or thereabouts; in 1886, give or take a year. The man who hated Indians must have been about seventy. Elliott Townsend smiled to himself. It was a long link; his reach went back to the early nineteenth century All that time in one location, what he didn’t know about the region wasn’t worth knowing. He and his father had practiced law continuously for eighty years, including the two bad years, 1887 and 1888. His father had got his wind up, God knows why; he’d pulled up stakes and taken his wife and young son to Nebraska. Elliott Townsend never knew why had never been told; it had something to do with his mother, he was certain, but just what it was he never knew and never would know. When men died it wasn’t just flesh and bone and soul that perished, or maybe not even mainly those things; it was veracity His father thought he was going to bring law to western Nebraska. It was 1887. They acquired land with a cabin on it and his father made the rounds by horseback. The next year, as if in revenge for a decade of mild winters, the worst blizzard in the history of the West struck the region. This land, known then as “the great American desert,” was occupied by new arrivals like the Townsends who did not understand the violence of the plains. That January morning in 1888 it was sixty-five degrees where they lived, men working the fields in shirtsleeves; in schoolhouses the stoves were cold and woodpiles neglected. By dusk that day it was ten below, the snow whirling in a frenzy; in two days there were some six hundred dead in Nebraska alone, west of the hundredth meridian. Forever after the hundredth meridian was the line of demarcation; beyond it was the great desert. The following summer his father packed up and they went back to the Mississippi Valley and settled in Dement. The blizzard wiped out a generation of homesteaders and stopped the westward movement dead, until memories dimmed. That beautiful day in January, the sun so high and milky; and the savagery that followed. His father never recovered; he was frightened for the rest of his life, haunted always by the sight of his wife froze
n by the side of the road. She’d been caught only a mile or two from their cabin, had lost her way, and died. They did not find her for some time; drifting snow covered everything and a second storm followed the first. It was Elliott Townsend’s earliest memory; that, and the backwoodsman talking of Indians, and General Custer.
He stared into the dead cornfield, his own, and wiped his eyes. He had lived seventy-five years but the memory of that January day had stayed with him, the canvas on which he’d painted his life. Nothing ever had been as bad as seeing his mother dead, and the cold silence before, his father mute with grief; he had known at the time that nothing ever again would be as bad. He forced his mind away from Nebraska and fastened on the backwoodsman. He was a primary source and not so different in his own way from Amos. Amos who was eighty-five, who’d heard the same stories, and whose reach went back even farther. He thought of Amos standing at the barbecue pit late at night, after the young men had gone. He and Amos and Tilberg and Steppe and Aces Evans and one or two others, talking quietly as the fire roared and spat. They talked of the young men, which ones were comers and which were not; they did not discuss the sons of those men who were present. There were always threats from the outside and it was important that a young man be reliable, “sound.” Too often there was trouble of some kind, bottle trouble, women trouble, smart trouble—that last an Amos coinage meaning too smart or too dumb, depending on the inflection. A month before everyone had been sub-duped. Amos looked like death itself, gray and ponderous. He was the senior man and when he went it would rearrange the hierarchy, except unlike a pope or president no one could take his place. Every year one or two of them died and the town now was like an army with too few general; restless foot soldiers everywhere and no one to command them. Law firms passed into younger hands; judges retired; the sheriff was old and ineffective. Now Amos. The end of the Korean War signaled something, though what it was seemed as ambiguous as the truce itself; they had not finished the war, they had ended it. Veterans returning to Dement seemed to Townsend a generation of pint-sized Insulls; they wanted to make their fortunes at once. In the past few years politics had moved off in unfamiliar directions, constituents to the east agitating for a highway, four lanes, to hook into the main road to Chicago and beyond. “Industrialists” from St. Louis and Chicago were negotiating for land and everywhere there was an abundance of loose money. All his life Amos Rising had feared the big cities, their turbulence and aggression, savagery, chaos, and surprise. He hated it when young men, the sons of old-line families, left Dement for the riotous cities, considering it a betrayal. The old man still had some of the backwoodsman in him. Dement wasn’t a frontier anymore and the hatreds weren’t so sharp-edged. The Indians were gone, replaced by a new and more formidable enemy. Amos called them aliens; by which he meant, outsiders.
