American Empire : The Center Cannot Hold

by Harry Turtledove

  “That’s right,” Jeff growled, and his was far from the only angry, baying voice in the crowd. He turned to a man beside him and said, “We should have strung those bastards up a long time ago.”

  “Oh, hell, yes,” the other man said, as if the idea that anyone could disagree was unimaginable. He slammed a hand against the side of his thigh. “Hell, yes.”

  Mizell was continuing, “—no chance the Whigs will fix their own house. They’ve been in power too long. All they know about is hanging on to what they’ve already got. And the Radical Liberals?” He made a scornful gesture. “Losers. They’ve always been losers. They’ll never be anything but losers. No. If we’re going to set our own house in order, what we need is . . .” His voice trailed away. He waited expectantly.

  He didn’t have to wait long. The cry of, “Freedom!” roared from almost every throat. After that first great yell, it settled down into a steady chant: “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” Pinkard shouted it along with all the others, his fist pumping the air.

  Amos Mizell raised his hands once more. Slowly, reluctantly, silence came. Mizell said, “That’s right, friends. The Tin Hats know what this country needs. We need a new broom, a broom that will sweep all the old fools out of Richmond. We reckon the Freedom Party is the right one for the job. That’s why I want all the Tin Hats in the country, regardless of whether they’re registered in the Freedom Party or not, to vote for Jake Featherston. I tell you, we need to do everything we can to make that man president of the Confederate States of America. We’ll throw everything we’ve got behind him, on account of he’ll make this a country we can be proud to live in again.”

  He paused. “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” The chant rang out again. And then, a little at a time, another chant began to supplant it: “Featherston! Featherston! Featherston!” The heavy, thudding stress on the last syllable was almost hypnotic.

  “Featherston! Featherston! Featherston!” Jefferson Pinkard shouted it, too. He’d been a Freedom Party man ever since the first time he heard Jake Featherston speak, not long after the war ended. He’d come this far with Jake; he wanted to go further. And now it looked as if he could, as if the whole CSA could.

  As he looked around the crowd, he saw knots of men in white and butternut from whom the chant of, “Featherston!” came loudest. He smiled to himself. No, Caleb Briggs didn’t miss a trick. He must have given some of the boys special instructions. The only thing that surprised Pinkard was that the local Party boss hadn’t recruited him to help change the chant. He shrugged. Briggs did as Briggs pleased.

  “Featherston! Featherston!” Mizell seemed startled to hear the Freedom Party leader’s name. The cry of, “Freedom!” he’d undoubtedly expected. This? No.

  Well, too bad, Jeff thought. You back the Freedom Party, you’ve got to back Jake Featherston, too. No way around that, even if you wish there were.

  By his manner up there on the rostrum, maybe the head of the Tin Hats wished exactly that. No matter how he wished things had turned out, his outfit was in second place, not first. Hearing Jake’s name roared in his face at his own rally had to show him he would never run first.

  Caleb Briggs stepped up to the microphone. It helped his harsh near-whisper carry: “We’re all in this together, friends: Freedom Party, Tin Hats, the Redemption League out West, all the people who see what’s wrong and who’ve got what it takes to stand up and fix it. When Jake Featherston wins this fall, we all win—every single one of us, and every single group. That’s what we’ve got to take away from this rally today. Just like we were in the trenches, we’re all in this together. Only difference is, this time, by God, we’re going to win!”

  No chant rose this time, just a great roar of agreement. Jeff pumped his fist in the air again, and his was far from the only one raised high. Up on the rostrum, Briggs put a hand on Amos Mizell’s shoulder. He was smaller than the man who led the Tin Hats, but still somehow had the air of a father consoling a son.

  After a moment, Mizell straightened—almost to attention, as if he were back in the Army again. He went to the microphone and said, “Dr. Briggs is right. When Jake Featherston’s president, we all win. And we will win come November!”

  He got his own round of applause then. Somebody in the crowd started singing “Dixie.” Maybe it was one of the men with instructions from Briggs, maybe someone who’d had a good idea on his own. Either way, in the blink of an eye everyone sang it. Along with the rest of the men and women in Avondale Park, Pinkard bawled out the words. Tears stung his eyes. This was what mattered, this feeling of being part of something bigger, more important, than himself.

  When the last raucous chorus ended, Briggs went over to the microphone. “Remember this, folks,” he said. “Remember it good. What we’ve got here today, the whole country gets when we win.”

  Only a smattering of applause answered him. No more than a handful of people understood what he was talking about. But Jefferson Pinkard was one of those few. He beat his palms together till they were red and sore. That was what he wanted—the whole country like a Freedom Party rally. What could be better? Nothing he could think of.

  The way things looked, the whole country wouldn’t be able to think of anything better, either. That seemed very fine indeed to Jeff.

  * * *

  Something tickled Anne Colleton’s memory when she checked into the Excelsior Hotel in Charleston. It tickled harder when she got into her room. The tickling wasn’t of the pleasant sort. After she looked around the room, she realized why. Roger Kimball had tried to rape her here, almost ten years ago now. She’d given him a knee between his legs, aimed a pistol at him, and sent him on his way. In short order, he was dead, shot by that woman from Boston.

  Anne sighed. Kimball had been loyal to Jake Featherston come hell or high water. Anne was loyal to nobody but herself, not like that. She’d thought Featherston was a loser, and she’d broken her ties to the Freedom Party. That was the biggest reason she and Roger had broken up, the biggest reason she hadn’t given herself to him, the biggest reason he’d tried to take her by force.

  And now here she was, back in Charleston, back in the Freedom Party. She tasted the irony there. Had Roger been right all along? Anne shook her head. She didn’t care to admit that, even to herself. After she’d walked away from Featherston, the country had changed. That was what had brought her back.

  Still, she granted herself the luxury of another sigh. It was too bad. She’d never found anybody who could match Roger Kimball in bed.

  A glance in the mirror on the dresser told her she probably never would. A good start on a double chin, lines on her face no powder could hide, the harshness of dye to hold gray at bay . . . She wasn’t a young beauty any more. Now she had to get her way with brains, which wasn’t so easy and took longer.

  “What can’t be cured . . .” she said, and deliberately turned away from the mirror. The only alternative to getting older was not getting older. The Yankees had gassed her younger brother, Jacob. They’d gassed him, and the Negroes on the Marshlands plantation had murdered him in the uprising of 1915. He’d never had a chance. She’d taken some revenge on them after the war. More still waited. She’d never disagreed with the Freedom Party about that.

  She unpacked her own suitcase. Once upon a time, she’d have had a colored maid to do it for her. The last one she’d had came much too close to murdering her in the long aftermath of the uprising. No more.

  Once everything was put away, she went downstairs. A man sitting on an overstuffed chair in the lobby, a chair whose upholstery had seen better days, got to his feet and took off his hat. “Evening, Miss Colleton!” he said. “Freedom!”

  “Good evening, Mr. Henderson,” Anne answered. A beat slower than she should have, she added, “Freedom!” herself. The Party greeting still struck her as foolish. But she’d made the bargain, and she had to go through with it.

  “Hope you had a pleasant drive down,” James Henderson said. He held out his hand. She briskly sh
ook it. His eyes widened slightly. He hadn’t expected so firm a grip. He was a few years younger than Anne—everyone is a few years younger than I am these days, she thought unhappily—lean as a lath, with a face so bony, it might have come off the label of an iodine bottle. He wore the ribbon for the Purple Heart on his lapel.

  “It was all right,” Anne said. “Some people drive for the sport of it. I drive to get where I’m going.”

  “Sensible,” Henderson said. Men said that to her a lot these days, as they’d once said, Beautiful. She missed the other. This would have to do. Beauty didn’t last. Brains did. She’d realized that a long time ago. She’d had brains even then, though men had done their best not to notice. Henderson went on, “Shall we eat some supper? We can talk then, and figure out where to go from there.”

  “All right,” Anne said. Not so many years earlier, he would have wanted to go back to her room and take her to bed. Now he probably didn’t. That made doing business simpler. Most of the time, she appreciated it because it did. Every once in a while, she found herself pining for days gone by.

  “Hotel restaurant suit you, or would you rather go somewhere else?” Henderson was doing his best to be polite. A fair number of Freedom Party men either didn’t bother or didn’t know how.

  “The hotel restaurant is fine,” she answered.

  She ordered crab cakes; she took advantage of Charleston seafood whenever she came down to the coast. Henderson chose fried chicken. They both ordered cocktails. The colored waiter who took their orders went back to the kitchen without writing them down; odds were he couldn’t write. James Henderson’s eyes followed him. “Wonder where he was in 1915, and what he did.”

  “He looks too young to have done anything much,” Anne said. “Of course, you never can tell.”

  “Sure can’t.” Henderson scowled. He needed a visible effort to draw himself back to the business at hand. “Let’s talk about Congress and the Legislature.”

  “Right,” Anne said briskly. Henderson might be skinny enough to dive through a soda straw without hitting the sides, but he came to the point. She liked that. She went on, “We can figure that Jake Featherston is probably going to win this state.”

  “Doesn’t mean we won’t campaign for him here,” Henderson said.

  “No, of course not,” Anne agreed. “We don’t want any nasty surprises. But the rest of the ticket has to run well, too. Freedom Party Congressmen will help Jake get his laws through. The state legislators need to back us, too—and they’re the ones who choose C.S. Senators. We’re still weak in the Senate, because we didn’t start getting a lot of people elected to state legislatures till 1929.”

  James Henderson nodded. He began to say something more, but the waiter came back with drinks, and then with dinner. The fellow started to give Anne the chicken; she pointed to her companion to show where it should go. “Sorry, ma’am,” the colored man said. He set things right, then withdrew.

  Henderson looked around to make sure he was out of earshot before resuming. “Can’t trust ’em,” the Freedom Party man said. Anne couldn’t quarrel with him there. Henderson continued, “Anything they hear, the Rad Libs know tomorrow and the Whigs the day after.”

  Anne wasn’t so sure about that, but didn’t care to argue with it, either. All she said was, “They know they have to try to stop us any way they can. They know, but I don’t think they can do it.”

  “Have to make sure they don’t. We have to make sure any way we need to.” Henderson let her draw her own pictures.

  She had no trouble doing just that. “We don’t want to go too far,” she said. “If we do, it’ll only hurt us, cost us votes. The average law-abiding Confederate has to think we’re the right answer, not the wrong one. We’ve shot ourselves in the foot before when we pushed too hard. We need to pick our spots.”

  The skeletal man across the table from her nodded. “See who’s really dangerous,” he said, and bared a lot of teeth in a grin. “Won’t be so dangerous once we run over ’em with barrels a few times.”

  Anne thought that was a figure of speech. She wasn’t quite sure, though, and didn’t care to ask. Theoretically, the armistice with the USA banned barrels from the CSA. The government had never admitted to having any—nor could it, without risking Yankee wrath. If a couple of them should suddenly clatter down a street with Freedom Party men inside . . . If that happened, Anne wouldn’t have been astonished.

  She said, “Looks to me like we’re thinking along the same lines, Mr. Henderson . . . Do you want to get some more chicken?” He’d reduced half a bird to bones in nothing flat.

  “Don’t mind if I do.” Henderson waved for the waiter. As the Negro took the request back to the kitchen, Henderson gave a half apologetic smile. “Always been scrawny, no matter how much I eat.”

  “I wish I could say that.” Corsets had been out of fashion for a good many years now, but Anne was tempted to get back into one to help her remind the world she did still have a waist. She wished she could wear a corset under her jaw, too, to fight the sagging flesh there. In fact, there were such things, intended to be put on at night. Three different doctors, though, had assured her they did no good.

  The waiter returned with another whole chicken leg. Henderson devoured it. He patted his pale lips with his napkin. “Hit the spot.”

  “Good.” Even if she envied him at the same time, Anne couldn’t help liking a man who put away his food like that. She went on, “We have to hit the spot in November, too. We have to. If we lose this time, I don’t think we’ll ever get another chance.”

  After Grady Calkins assassinated President Hampton, after the Confederate currency stabilized when the USA eased back on reparations, the Freedom Party had sunk like a stone, and had stayed down though almost all the 1920s. If it failed again, she was sure it wouldn’t revive. She couldn’t stand the idea of trying to make peace with the Whigs once more. This run had to reach the top.

  “Don’t you worry about that, ma’am,” James Henderson said. “Jake Featherston, he isn’t about to lose.” So, four hundred years before, a Spanish soldier seeing the might and wealth of the Inca Empire might have spoken of Pizarro. The Spaniard would have been right. Anne thought the Freedom Party man was, too, even if that ma’am rankled. Henderson wasn’t so very much younger than she was.

  She said, “It’s not just Jake, remember. We want to grab with both hands.”

  “Think you’re right,” Henderson said. “Legislators, Congressmen—every place where we can win, we’ll fight like the devil.”

  “That’s right. Mayors and county commissioners and sheriffs, too. Some of those people can appoint judges, and the more judges on our side, the better. Same with sheriffs. A lot of them—and city policemen, too—have been on our side for a long time.”

  “Better be,” Henderson said, nodding. The waiter came up with a coffeepot. After he’d filled cups for Anne and Henderson, he retreated once more. Henderson waited, poured in lots of cream and sugar, tasted, added more sugar yet, and then continued, “By the time we’re done, we’ll have this state sewed up tight, you bet.”

  “Oh, yes,” Anne said softly. “And not just South Carolina, either. By the time we’re done, we’ll have the whole country sewn up tight.”

  “That’s the idea,” Henderson said.

  Anne wondered if Jake Featherston had thought he could come within arm’s reach of ruling the Confederate States when he first joined the Freedom Party. What would he say if she asked him? And would what he said be true? Would he really recall here in 1933 what he’d thought and hoped and dreamt back in 1917? Even if he did, would he admit it? She had her doubts.

  The waiter returned again. “Dessert, folks? Apple pie is mighty fine today, or we’ve got cherry or lemon meringue or pecan, too.”

  “Apple,” Henderson said at once. “Slap some ice cream on top, too.”

  “Yes, suh.” The waiter looked to Anne. “Anything for you, ma’am?”

  She shook her head. “I couldn�
��t possibly.”

  James Henderson could, and did. He had a second cup of coffee to go with the pie à la mode, too, and doctored it as thoroughly as he had the first. With a sigh of regret, he pushed away the empty plate. “Yeah, that hit the spot.”

  “If we do as well in November as you did at the supper table here, the Whigs are in even more trouble than I thought,” Anne said.

  He grinned. “We’ll clean ’em up and wash ’em down the drain. Just what they’ve got coming.” Anne nodded. She felt victory in the air, too.

  * * *

  When Scipio walked into Erasmus’ fish store and café, he knew right away something was wrong. His boss looked like a man whose best friend had just died. Without preamble, Erasmus said, “I gwine shut her down, Xerxes.”

  “Do Jesus!” Scipio said. He’d spent a lot of time here; he’d thought the place would go on forever—or at least as long as Erasmus did, which had looked as if it might be the same thing. “Why for you do dat?” he demanded.

  “You recollect how once upon a time them Freedom Party bastards come by here?” Erasmus said. “They was gonna take money from me so nothin’ happen to the store.”

  “I recollects, uh-huh,” Scipio said. “Then the Freedom Party go down de drain, an’ dey don’t come back no mo’.”

  “They’s back.” All of a sudden, Erasmus looked old. He looked beaten. And he looked afraid. “Can’t rightly tell if they’s the same bastards as all them years ago, but they’s the same kind o’ bastards, an’ that’s what counts. They say I don’t pay ’em what they want, I git bad luck like you don’t believe. I ain’t no fool, Xerxes. You don’t got to draw me no pictures. I know what that means.”

  “How much they want?” Scipio asked.

  “Too much,” his boss answered. “Too damn much. Cut my profit down to nothin’. Down to less’n nothin’. I try an’ tell ’em that. Way they look at me, it’s That’s your worry, nigger. We don’t care, long as we gits ours. So I’s shuttin’ down, like I say. Sell this place, live off what I gits. I’m an old man now. Reckon the money’ll last me.”