The Center Cannot Hold ae-2

by Harry Turtledove

  That probably means we have got more men than they do, Jeff thought. Then the first Whig swung a club at him, and he stopped thinking. He blocked the blow and aimed one of his own at the Whig's head. They stood there smashing at each other for a few seconds. Then someone tripped the Whig. Jeff hit him in the face with his bludgeon, kicked him in the ribs with those steel-toed shoes, and strode forward, looking for a new foe.

  He and another man in white shirt and butternut trousers teamed up on a Whig. They both stomped the fellow once he was down. Shouting "Freedom!" they pressed forward, shoulder to shoulder. "Freedom!" Jeff yelled again. "Featherston and freedom!"

  "Longstreet!" the Whigs yelled back. "Longstreet and liberty!" Samuel Longstreet, a grandson of the famous James, was a Senator from Virginia. He wasn't bad on the stump, either. "Longstreet and Black!" a rash Whig shouted.

  That gave the Freedom Party men an opening. "Longstreet the nigger-lover!" they yelled, and pushed forward harder than ever.

  Pinkard's left arm ached where a club had got home. Another one had laid his forehead open above his left eyebrow. He kept shaking his head like a restive horse, trying to keep the blood out of his eyes. Step by bitter step, the Freedom Party men forced the Whigs back toward the end of the street. If they broke out into the crowd, they'd win the day, rampaging through the crowd and wrecking Hugo Black's rally.

  A pistol barked. Jeff saw the muzzle flash rather than hearing the report; that was lost in the din of battle. The Freedom Party man next to him grunted and clutched his belly and folded up like a concertina.

  As soon as the first shot was fired, pistols came out on both sides. Freedom Party men and Whigs blazed away at one another from point-blank range. The Whigs had fired first-Pinkard thought they had, anyhow-but the Freedom Party men had more firepower and more determination, or maybe just more combat experience. They kept going forward, smashing down or shooting the last few Whigs who stood against them.

  "Freedom!" Pinkard bawled as he ran across the grass toward the people who'd thought they were going to hear the Whig vice-presidential candidate speak. "Freedom!" his fellow stalwarts howled at his side and behind him. This had to be what a breakthrough felt like, what the damnyankees had known when they smashed the Confederate lines in Tennessee and Virginia during the war.

  He whooped with delight when more Freedom Party men burst out from another street and charged the assembled Whigs. Then the stalwarts were in among the crowd, some clubbing, some kicking, some shooting. A few of the men in the crowd tried to fight back. Most of the tough ones, though, had tried to hold the Freedom Party men out and were already down.

  From the podium, Hugo Black cried out, "This is madness!"

  He was right, not that it did him any good. Madness it was, madness engulfing his party, madness engulfing his country. After the third bullet cracked past him, after the Birmingham police did nothing to slow down the Freedom Party stalwarts, he leaped down and made his escape.

  Pinkard's club broke when he hit a rich-looking man in the head. The Whig's skull broke, too; Jeff could feel it. He waded on through the fray with fists and heavy shoes. "Freedom!" he yelled exultantly. "Featherston and freedom!"

  W hig headquarters in Charleston a week before the election reminded Clarence Potter of Army of Northern Virginia headquarters a week before the Confederate States had asked the United States for an armistice. He was among the walking wounded: two fingers of his left hand were splinted, he sported a shiner and wore a new pair of glasses he couldn't afford, and he was all over bruises. And, all things considered, he was one of the lucky ones.

  Braxton Donovan had a bandage wrapped around his head. He'd needed an X ray to make sure he didn't have a fractured skull. His nod held a graveyard quality. "Almost over now," he said.

  "Everything's almost over now," Potter said gloomily. "We showed those bastards we could fight, too, by God."

  The lawyer nodded, then grimaced and reached into his jacket pocket for a vial of pills. He washed down two of them with a sip from his drink. "Wonderful stuff, codeine," he remarked. "It's especially good with whiskey. Doesn't quite make the headache go away, but it sure makes you stop caring. Yeah, we showed the yahoos we could fight, too. Fat lot of good it's done us. How many dead?"

  "A couple of dozen here in Charleston." Even before Potter went into intelligence, he'd always had figures at his fingertips. "Over a hundred in the state. All over the country? Who knows? More than a thousand, or I miss my guess. Close to fifty men killed in that one shootout in Birmingham all by itself. Hugo Black is lucky to be alive, if you want to call it luck."

  "Ha. Funny." Donovan drained the whiskey. He scowled. "I hope those pills hurry up. My head feels like it wants to fall off. If that bastard had hit me just a little harder, you'd be counting one more dead man here."

  "I know." Potter held up his left hand. "I got these broken keeping another one of those stinking stalwarts from caving in my skull. We have made them pay, though. Even if they do win, they know they've been in a brawl."

  "If they win, it doesn't matter," Braxton Donovan said. "Do you know what I wish?"

  "Hell, yes, I know what you wish. You wish the same thing I do," Potter said. "You wish the Radical Liberals would drop out of the race and throw whatever weight they've got left behind Longstreet and Black. And you know what?"

  "What?"

  For once, Potter let a full, rich drawl come into his voice as he answered, "It ain't a-gonna happen, that's what."

  "It should, by God," Donovan said. "The Rad Libs have just as much to lose if Jake Featherston wins as we do."

  "You know that, and I know that, but Hull and Long don't know that," Clarence Potter said. "All they know is, we've been kicking their tails every six years as long as there've been Confederate States of America. If we were in hell-"

  "What do you mean, 'if'?" Donovan said. "With Jake Featherston president…"

  "If we were in hell and screaming for water, they'd throw us a big jar of gasoline to drink." Potter was damned if he'd let the lawyer step on a good line.

  "What are we going to do?" Braxton Donovan said. "What can we do? Only thing left is to go down swinging."

  "Far as I'm concerned, we battle 'em all the way up till next Tuesday," Potter replied. "The more Congressmen and legislators we elect, the more trouble Featherston and his goons will have getting their laws through. And the bastard can't run again in 1939, so this too shall pass."

  "Like a kidney stone," Donovan said morosely. By the way he set one hand on the small of his back for a moment, he spoke from experience. But then he managed a smile and gently touched his bandaged head. "Codeine is starting to work."

  "Good," Potter said. People were setting down drinks and taking seats on the folding chairs at the front of the hall. "Looks like the meeting's going to come to order. Let's see how exciting it is, shall we?"

  It was about as bad as he'd expected. The speakers insisted on staying optimistic long after the time for optimism had passed. When Potter heard, "Sam Longstreet will make a great president of the Confederate States!" for the fourth time, he stopped listening. He didn't think Longstreet was a bad man at all-on the contrary. But as long as the Whigs kept running sons and grandsons and great-grandsons of the men who'd won the War of Secession, they gave Jake Featherston an easy target.

  He thought about getting to his feet and saying so. In the end, he didn't. Time enough for that at the postmortem; the death wasn't official yet. The meeting was less quarrelsome than a lot he'd been to. He doubted he was the only one saving recriminations for after the election.

  Quarrels did go on, though, through the streets of Charleston and across the Confederate States. Potter did his share. He didn't need his left hand to swing a blackjack. He dented a couple of Freedom Party crania-and had his new pair of spectacles broken. Only afterwards did he realize he hadn't had to wear them into the brawl. Hindsight was twenty-twenty. He, unfortunately, wasn't, and now he had to pay twice for the privilege of seeing
straight. He was pretty sure the stalwarts he'd clobbered couldn't see straight now, either. That was something.

  Tuesday, November 7, 1933, dawned chilly and drizzly. Polls opened at eight in the morning. Jamming a broad-brimmed fedora down low on his forehead to keep water out of his eyes, Potter made his myopic way to the polling place around the corner from his apartment building. Election officials had chalked on the sidewalk a hundred-foot semicircle with the polling place as its center. Inside that circle, electioneering was forbidden. Outside it, Freedom Party men chanted Jake Featherston's name.

  Potter smiled at them. "Go ahead, boys. Make yourselves as obnoxious as you can. The more votes you cost your man, the better."

  As he walked into the charmed circle, one of the men in white and butternut asked, "Who's that smart-mouthed son of a bitch?"

  "Name's Potter," another answered. "Lives around the block. You don't need to write him down. He's already on the list."

  Already on the list, am I? Potter thought. An honor I could do without. Behind him, the Freedom Party men resumed their chant. Where are our men, shouting for Longstreet and Black? he wondered. He knew the Whigs had men outside some polling places. Not this one. The business collapse wasn't the only reason the Freedom Party looked like winning today. How-ever much Potter hated to admit it, even to himself, the opposition was better organized than his own party. He would have bet every Freedom Party man-and woman, in states where women could vote-would get to the polls today. He wished he could have made the same bet about Whig backers. How many of them would sit on their hands? Too many. Any at all would be too many.

  He cast his own ballot, then walked back the way he'd come. He didn't think the Freedom Party men would set on him so close to the polling place, where people could see them for what they were. They didn't… quite. They shouted, "Nigger-lover!" and, "You'll get yours!" at him, but they didn't try to give it to him. He was almost disappointed. For this trip, he had a pistol in his pocket, not a blackjack.

  Having voted, he went to work. It was less than interesting today: a husband wanted evidence his wife was cheating, but the wife, busy with shopping and the couple's two small children, gave none. Potter thought the husband was inventing things to worry about, but he kept his opinions to himself. For one thing, clients seldom paid attention to opinions contradicting their own. For another, the man paid well. If he wanted to throw away his money… well, it was a free country, wasn't it?

  It is till that Featherston bastard takes over, Potter thought.

  On the trolley ride back to his flat after knocking off for the day, he passed another polling place. Police cars were parked in front of it. Blood stained the sidewalk and nearby walls. Freedom Party men waving their reversed-color Confederate battle flags still stood on the street. "Feather ston! Feather ston!" Even through the trolley's closed windows, the chant lacerated Clarence Potter's ears. The police didn't try to run the stalwarts off. If Whigs had been here, they were no longer. This skirmish belonged to the Freedom Party.

  After pan-frying a pork chop and some potatoes and washing them down with a stiff whiskey, Potter went over to Whig headquarters to hear… whatever he heard. Dance music blared from the wireless sets: the polls hadn't closed yet. He pulled out his pocket watch. It was a little past seven-thirty-less than half an hour to go.

  That gave him plenty of time for another drink, or two, or three. He nodded to Braxton Donovan, who also had a whiskey in his hand, and said, "The condemned man drank a hearty meal."

  "Funny," the lawyer said. "Funny like a crutch."

  "Oh, I didn't mean you," Potter said. "If you think I meant you, I apologize. I meant the country. Before they execute a man, they give him a blindfold and a cigarette. What do we do when the Confederate States of America go up against the wall?"

  Donovan studied him. "I don't think I've ever heard you say you were sorry before. You must mean it. You don't waste time being polite."

  I try not to waste time at all, Potter thought. But he had nothing to do but stand there banging his gums till clocks in Charleston started striking eight. "All along the eastern seaboard of the Confederate States, the polls have closed," an announcer on the wireless declared. "We'll bring you the latest results from the presidential, Congressional, state, and local elections-but first, a word from our sponsor." A chorus of young women started singing about the wonders of a soap made from pure palm oil. Potter wondered what could be going through their minds as they trilled the inane lyrics. Probably something like, We're getting paid. Times were hard indeed.

  Then the numbers started coming in. Somebody posted each new installment on a big blackboard at the front of the room. That meant the Whigs could go on chattering and still keep up. As soon as Clarence Potter saw the early results from North Carolina, he knew what kind of night it would be. North Carolina was a solid, sensible, foursquare Whig state. The collapse hadn't hit it so hard as a lot of other places.

  Jake Featherston led there. He led by more every time the fellow at the board erased old numbers and put up new ones. And he had coattails. Freedom Party Congressional candidates were winning in districts where they'd never come close before. And it looked as bad everywhere else.

  Braxton Donovan stared owlishly at the returns. He fixed himself another drink, then came back to stand by Potter and stare some more. He didn't say anything for a long, long time. At last, he did: "Jesus Christ. It's like watching a train wreck, isn't it?"

  Potter shook his head. "No, Braxton. It's like being in a train wreck." Donovan thought that over, then slowly nodded.

  And it got no better, not from a Whig point of view, as the polls closed in states farther west. Back in 1921, Tennessee had decided the election when it finally went Whig. This year, it went for Featherston and the Freedom Party. So did Mississippi and Alabama. Potter hadn't expected anything different there, but he would have loved to be proved wrong. The Whigs led in Arkansas, but Arkansas wasn't big enough to matter.

  "My God," somebody behind Potter said. "What is the world coming to?"

  He didn't need to ask the question, not when he could see the answer. Jake Featherston was going to be president. He would have a majority-a big majority-in the House. The Senate, whose members were chosen by state legislatures rather than popular vote, wasn't so obvious. Even so, it all added up to the same thing: after seventy years in the saddle, the Whigs were going into the minority.

  "The minority?" the man in back of Potter said when he spoke that thought aloud. "That's crazy." He still seemed unbelieving.

  "If you don't get it, think like a nigger," Potter said. "It'll come to you then, believe me."

  A long with news of a corruption scandal in the Iowa legislature, newsboys in Des Moines shouted about Jake Featherston's victory down in the Confederate States. More of them yelled about the scandal, which was right there in town. The election news hit Cincinnatus Driver a lot harder. He got out of his truck on the way to the railroad yards and bought a paper, something he hardly ever did: getting there a minute late might cost him a good cargo. But today he spread the Register and Remembrance on the seat beside him and read a paragraph or two whenever he had to stop.

  He was still shaking his head when he got out of the Ford at the yards and started dickering with a conductor over a load of beds and dressers and nightstands. "What's the big deal?" asked the conductor, a white man too young to have fought in the Great War. "Who cares what happens down in the Confederate States?"

  "I cares." Cincinnatus knew that was bad grammar even without Achilles telling him so. "I grew up in Kentucky when it was part of the CSA. Glad it ain't no more. I got out of there once the USA took it over. This here's a better place if you're colored."

  The conductor was not only white, he was a blond who couldn't have got any whiter if somebody'd thrown him into a tub of bleach. He said, "I don't know nothin' about that. All I know is, you may be colored, but you haggle like a damn kike."

  If he'd been talking about Cincinnatus to a Jew, he
probably would have called him a damn nigger. Cincinnatus took such names in stride; he'd heard them all, especially the one applying to his own race, too often to get excited about them. He said, "I tell you, Mr. Andersen, I don't reckon it's against the law to try an' git me enough money to make the job worth my while. I ain't no charity."

  "Well, I'm a penny-pinching squarehead myself, and I won't tell you anything different," Andersen said. Cincinnatus liked him better after that; if he could insult himself as casually as he insulted everybody else, odds were none of those insults meant much.

  Cincinnatus got fairly close to the price he wanted for hauling the load of bedroom furniture, too. He drove it over to a furniture store on Woodland Street on the west side of town, only a little north of the bend of the Raccoon River. After growing up by the bank of the Ohio, Cincinnatus didn't think either the Raccoon or the Des Moines was anything special.

  Olaf Thorstein, who ran the furniture store, was even paler than Andersen. Cincinnatus had trouble believing anybody this side of a ghost could be. Thorstein was a tall, thin man of stern rectitude, the sort who would skin you in a deal if he could but would walk across town in the snow to give back a penny-or a hundred-dollar bill-you accidentally left in his store. With a similar streak in his own character, Cincinnatus had no trouble getting along with him.

  Thorstein said, "Way you talk, you used to live in the Confederate States." He was not far from Cincinnatus' age, which meant he'd likely fought in the Great War.

  "Yes, suh, that's a fact." Cincinnatus nodded. "Came to Des Moines ten years ago. Ain't been sorry, neither. This here's a lot better'n Kentucky." He remembered Luther Bliss and shivered in spite of himself.

  "Well, what do you think of what's going on down there now?" the white man asked.

  "Don't reckon you'll hear no black man sayin' nothin' good about the Freedom Party," Cincinnatus answered. "What do you think, Mr. Thorstein?" A surprising-or maybe a depressing-number of whites weren't the least bit shy about saying what they thought of people who didn't look like them. Had the USA had more Negroes, it probably would have had something like the Freedom Party, too.