"Freedom!" Jeff echoed. "When was the last time you went to a Party meeting, Clem?"
"Been four-five years," the other steelworker answered. "I didn't reckon it was on the right track. Now I'm wondering if maybe I was wrong. Won't hurt none to come and find out."
"You stopped coming to meetings for a while, too, Jeff," another man said.
Pinkard shook his head. "Not me. Not like you mean, anyhow. I never walked away from the Party. What I did was, I went down to the Empire of Mexico."
"Oh," said the fellow who'd brought it up. He said not another word after that. Anybody who'd fought in Mexico took the Freedom Party and its business very seriously indeed. The trolley rolled up then, clanging its bell. The men bound for the Freedom Party meeting climbed aboard with everyone else at the stop. Pinkard threw a dime in the fare box. He hadn't worried about money since coming back from Mexico, not while he'd had work. But now, without it, those ten cents suddenly seemed to loom as large as ten dollars would have.
And here was the old livery stable again, the smell of horses fainter than ever but still there. Here were the old folding chairs, even more battered than they had been before he'd headed south. Here was the rostrum at one end of the hall, and the Stars and Bars and Confederate battle flag on the wall behind it. The two flags hadn't changed; they still carried the stars representing Kentucky and Sequoyah, though the states lay under U.S. occupation.
The meeting was crowded. That steelworker wasn't the only man returning after a long absence. And there were faces Jeff had never seen before, some of them belonging to men surely too young to have fought in the Great War. Jeff recognized the way those men bore themselves: stiff with a special, nervous sort of dignity. He carried himself the same way. It was the distinctive posture of men who'd lost their jobs but didn't want the world to know.
Somebody swigged from a bottle of homebrew. Pinkard grinned to see that. Some things hadn't changed. Alabama remained dry. But the police had never come around trying to enforce the temperance laws at a Party meeting. They had to know they would have had a fight on their hands if they'd been so rash.
He found a chair and sat down. He'd sat right about here, he remembered, when he'd got up and pushed past Grady Calkins on his way out of one meeting. People had still sat on hay bales in those days, not folding chairs. He cursed under his breath. Calkins, a Freedom Party man, had done more to hurt the Party by turning assassin than all its enemies put together.
Caleb Briggs stepped up onto the rostrum and took his place behind the podium. The dentist looked out over the crowd and called, "Freedom!"
"Freedom!" people shouted back.
Briggs cupped a hand behind one ear. "I can't hear you."
"Freedom!" This time, the yell shook the rafters.
"That's better." Briggs nodded. "Good to see some old familiar faces back with us again. Nice to know y'all have seen the light one more time. And you're welcome. We wish you'd've stayed with us all along, but it's good to have you back. And how many folks are here for the very first time?"
Several men raised their hands. Briggs nodded again. "Good to see new blood, too. We need you. We need everybody. For years and years now, we've been telling anyone who'd listen that the Confederate States were going over a cliff. Not enough people did listen, and over we went, dammit. Now we've got to get back up again, and we need help. We've got to fight for what we believe in. You new men, are you ready to do that?"
"Yes, sir!" the newcomers chorused. Jeff wondered whether they knew Briggs meant it literally. If they didn't, they'd find out.
Sure enough, the dentist said, "You'll have your chance, I promise you. We'll set this country to rights yet. Maybe people are starting to see what's wrong in Richmond. About time. And if we have to knock a few heads together, or more than a few, to get things going again, we'll do it, that's all. You can't make an omelette without breaking eggs."
"That's right," Pinkard said. "You bet that's right. If you aren't afraid to get blood on your clothes, you don't belong here. Remember, the stuff washes out with plenty of cold water."
"It sure does." Briggs turned his attention to Pinkard. "Did I hear right that the Sloss Works flung you out?"
"Yes, sir, you did." Jeff knew a certain amount of pride that the Birmingham head of the Freedom Party kept such close tabs on him. "You know of any other outfit that wants a man who's been on the casting floor since before the Great War, I'd be much obliged."
"Nooo," Briggs said slowly. "But don't I remember right that when you were down in Mexico, you were the fellow who ran a prisoners' camp for the rebels Maximilian's boys caught?"
"Yeah, that was me," Pinkard answered. "What about it?"
"I'll tell you what about it. I happen to know the Birmingham city jail's looking for an assistant jailer. If you want the job, fellow you ought to talk to is named Albert Sidney Griffith, over in city hall. He's a Party man, too. Let him know who you are and what you did down in Mexico. Tell him to give me a telephone call if he's got any questions. I'll set him straight."
"My Lord," Jeff whispered. He'd had hope machine-gunned with the pink slip in his pay envelope. Now, suddenly, it lived again. Tears stung his eyes. "God bless you, sir. Thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart."
Caleb Briggs waved that aside. "Don't you worry about it, Pinkard. Don't you worry one little bit. This here is the Freedom Party, remember. We aren't the Whigs or the Radical Liberals. We take care of our own. You've been a good Party man for a long time. We owe you for that, and we pay our debts. We pay 'em to our enemies, and we pay 'em to our friends."
"I'll see this Griffith fellow first thing in the morning," Jeff said. With the chance of work ahead of him, he felt like a new man. And the new man was every bit as loyal to the Freedom Party as the old one had been. "This is the best outfit in the world!" he exulted.
Briggs smiled and nodded. "Damn right it is."
XI
Hipolito Rodriguez had never thought about what a stock-market crash could do to the town of Baroyeca, and to the silver mine in the hills on which the town depended for its existence. Just because he hadn't thought about such things, though, didn't mean they weren't real. The mine shut down in September. A few days later, the railroad stopped coming into Baroyeca.
"A good thing we got the stove when we did," his wife said when he brought that news home. "It would take a lot longer to come here now."
" Si, Magdalena," he said. "Everything will take a lot longer to come here now. The town is liable to dry up and blow away, and then what will become of the farms all around it?"
"We go on and do as we always did," Magdalena answered. "We stay on our land and mind our own business."
"But we can't make everything here," Rodriguez said. "If the general store closes, life will get very hard."
"How can the general store close?" Magdalena said. "Everyone around here goes to it. Senor Diaz is a rich man."
"How rich will he be if he has to ship everything into Baroyeca by wagon or by truck?" Rodriguez asked. "I don't know how much that costs, but I know it costs a lot more than the railroad."
"Now you worry me," Magdalena said. "I think you did that on purpose."
"As a matter of fact, yes," he replied. "I'm worried myself. I didn't want to be the only one."
"Oh." She'd been making tortillas. After rubbing cornmeal off her hands and onto her apron, she gave Hipolito Rodriguez a hug. "Who would have thought it could be this bad?"
"Who, indeed?" he answered. "Up till now, we complained that things that happened in Richmond didn't matter one way or the other here in Sonora, and that nobody back there cared about us." His laugh rang bitter. "Now things that happened in Richmond and in New York City matter very much here, and Madre de Dios! but I wish they didn't."
Magdalena nodded. "How do these things work out like this? You go to the meetings of the Partido de la Libertad — what do they say there? Do they know? Can they make it better?"
"What can they do now?" he
asked in return. "The president is a Whig. Most of the Senators and Congressmen are Whigs. The Freedom Party can only protest what the Whigs do, and the Whigs don't do much. They don't seem to know what to do. They are fools." He'd always thought the Whigs were fools. Even before Sonora started electing men from the Freedom Party to Congress, the state had sent Radical Liberals off to Richmond.
"If the Freedom Party had power, what would it do?" Magdalena asked.
"Put people to work," Rodriguez answered at once. "Make sure they stayed at work. Make the country strong again. Tell the United States to leave us alone, and be strong enough to make sure the United States did it. Take back the states the USA stole from us in the war."
The only time he'd ever seen men from the United States was during his service in the Confederate Army during the Great War. The soldiers from the USA had done their best to kill him, and had come alarmingly close more than once. A lot of the west-Texas prairie where he'd fought was now included in the U.S. state of Houston. It was as if the USA were mocking all his effort, all his courage-yes, and all his fear, too. Anything he could do to pay back the United States of America, he would do, and do gladly.
Nodding-she knew how he felt-Magdalena said, "These things sound wonderful. How will the Freedom Party make them happen?"
"Why…" He hesitated, then shrugged. "I don't know, not exactly," he admitted. "I don't think anyone knows. But I do know they will work hard and try everything. And I know they have no hope of helping the country if they aren't in power. The Whigs have made too many mistakes. It's time for them to go."
Robert Quinn, the Freedom Party organizer in Baroyeca, had said that very thing in his accented Spanish. Hipolito Rodriguez didn't mind that he spoke the language like a man whose first language was English. That Quinn spoke Spanish at all mattered to the farmer. It told him the Freedom Party was serious about winning followers in Baroyeca, in all of Sonora. The Whigs never had been. Even the Radical Liberals had worried about the big men, the rich men, first, and had expected them to bring the campesinos into line. It had worked for many years, too. But no more.
"When you vote Freedom, you know the Party cares," Rodriguez said. "Nobody else does, not like that."
"But the election is still more than a month away," Magdalena said. "What can the Party do in the meantime? What can anyone do if-the Blessed Virgin forbid it! — the general store closes its doors?" She crossed herself.
"I don't know," Rodriguez answered. "I don't think anyone knows."
"As long as we have enough water to keep the corn and beans growing and the livestock healthy, we can go on," his wife said. "Life may be hard, but life has been hard before. We will get through till it is better again."
"I hope so," Rodriguez said. He'd got used to being a fairly prosperous farmer-prosperous by the standards of southern Sonora, at any rate. He'd seen just enough of the rest of the Confederate States to have a suspicion bordering on certainty that prosperity here was something less than it might have been elsewhere in the country.
As a measure of that prosperity, Magdalena had a treadle-powered sewing machine. She'd bought it secondhand, from a woman in Baroyeca who'd got a better machine, but even secondhand it was a status symbol for a farmer's wife. It also let her get more work done faster than she could have managed without it. With six children to be clothed, that was no small matter.
A few days after Rodriguez came back from Baroyeca, the needle in the sewing machine broke. Like any farmer, he was a good handyman. Fixing anything that small and precisely made, though, was beyond him. "You have to go back into town," Magdalena told him. "I have half a dozen pairs of pants to make. You don't want the boys to run around naked, do you?"
"I'll go," he said. "Give me the broken needle, so I can be sure I'm getting the matching part. There are as many different kinds as there are different sewing machines, and you would have something to say to me if I brought back the wrong one, now wouldn't you?"
"Maybe not," his wife answered. "Maybe I'd just think you'd spent too much time in La Culebra Verde before you tried to buy the right one."
"I don't know what you're talking about," Rodriguez said with dignity. Magdalena laughed so raucously, she distracted Miguel and Jorge enough to make them stop wrestling for a little while.
With that laughter still ringing in his ears, Hipolito Rodriguez set out for Baroyeca the next morning. When he got there, he made sure he bought the sewing-machine needle first. Magdalena would never have let him live it down if, after all his care, he came back with the wrong one.
The general store remained open. Rodriguez was astonished to discover that a packet of three needles cost only eight cents. The machine, when Magdalena bought it, had come with the one that had just broken, and no others. "I expected they would be much more," he told Jaime Diaz as the proprietor took his money.
"Then I will gladly charge you twice as much," Diaz said. "One way or another, I have to make some money. With the mine closed, I don't know how I'm going to do it. And the railroad, too! How will I get supplies?"
"I don't know," Rodriguez answered in a low voice. "My wife and I were talking about this. If you don't, how will Baroyeca go on?"
"I have no answers," the storekeeper said. "Every day, I keep hoping things will get better, and every day they get worse. Be thankful you live on a farm. It's not so bad for you. For anyone who has to get things from other places every day…" He shook his head.
"What can you do?" Rodriguez asked. "What can anyone do?"
"No one can do anything," Diaz replied. "No one can do anything to make things better, I mean. That's what makes this whole business so dreadful, my friend. The whole world is broken, and no one has the faintest idea how to fix it."
Hipolito Rodriguez hadn't thought of the collapse in those terms. He'd thought about what it meant to Baroyeca, to Sonora, and, to some degree, to the Confederate States. The world? That was too much for him to grasp. He said, " Senor Diaz, I know the man who can set things right."
"Who is that, then?" Diaz said. "In the name of God and the Blessed Virgin, tell me. If anyone can make the mine open and the train come back to Baroyeca, I will bless him with all my heart." In spite of his talk of the world, most of his thoughts stayed close to home, too. Such is life for most men.
"Jake Featherston of the Freedom Party, that's who," Rodriguez said. "They can make the country strong again, and if we are strong, how can we help being rich again, too?"
"Rich? I don't care about rich. All I care about is having the money to go on from day to day," the storekeeper said. He was polite enough to understate what he had and what he wanted. Rodriguez nodded, polite enough to accept the understatement for what it was. Diaz went on, "I don't know about the Freedom Party, either." He drummed his fingers on the countertop behind which he stood. "But the Whigs have no notion what to do. A blind man could see that. And the Radical Liberals"-he smiled a wry smile-"what have they ever been good for but making faces at the Whigs? So maybe, just maybe, you could be right."
"I think so," Rodriguez said. "When did you ever see the Whigs or even the Radical Liberals with a headquarters here in town? The Freedom Party has one. And Robert Quinn even learned Spanish to get us to join the Party. When have the others cared so much about us?"
"A point," Diaz admitted. "Quinn buys from me." Everyone who actually lived in town bought from him; what other choice did people have? Again, he was polite. He continued, "He always pays his bills on time, I will say, and he never treats me like a damn greaser." The rest of the conversation had been in Spanish. He used English for those two words.
Rodriguez nodded, a sour smile on his face. He'd also heard those English words, more often than he ever wanted to. He said, "You see? They speak English, but they don't look down their noses at Sonorans. If they can manage that, I think they can manage the whole country."
"I hadn't thought of it in that way," Diaz said. "Maybe you're right. It could be so."
"I really think it is," Rodriguez s
aid. "Look at the mess the other parties have got us into. Doesn't the Freedom Party deserve the chance to get us out?" The storekeeper didn't say no. Rodriguez added the clincher: "And the election is coming up soon-only a little more than a month to go."
A nne Colleton drove a five-year-old Birmingham down toward Charleston. She'd finally sold the ancient Ford she'd acquired during the war after Confederate soldiers confiscated her Vauxhall. She knew she'd kept it longer than she should have, as a reminder of those grim times. But when she weighed sentiment against ever more cranky machinery, sentiment came off second best.
The Robert E. Lee Highway was better going than it had been in those days. It was paved all the way, where long stretches of it had been only rutted dirt. A lot more motorcars traveled up and down it, too. And nowadays, the bodies of hanged Negro Reds didn't dangle from trees by the side of the road. She'd seen plenty of them, coming back from Charleston to St. Matthews in 1915. She'd been going to see a lover then; she was going to see a lover now.
Back then, regardless of whether Roger Kimball had had a flat in Charleston rather than being on leave from the Navy, not even Anne, radical as she'd reckoned herself, would have dared park her motorcar in front of the building where he lived. That would have meant scandal. They'd always met in hotels: in Charleston, in Richmond, down in Georgia.
Times had changed. Much of what had been radical was now taken for granted. Anne didn't think twice about leaving the Birmingham in front of Clarence Potter's block of flats, or of knocking on his door. Inside, the clattering of a typewriter abruptly stopped. A man's voice kept on coming out of a wireless set.
Potter opened the door. He gave Anne a quick kiss and said, "Come in. Fix yourself a drink. I'm almost done with this damn report. Pretty soon, we'll find out how good the news is." By his tone, he didn't expect her to take good literally.
"A heavy turnout is expected in today's Congressional election," the reporter on the wireless said as Anne went into the kitchen to deal with whiskey and water and ice. "The Whigs remain confident of holding their strong position in the House despite the unfortunate state of the economy, and-"
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