III
Having been beached, Roger Kimball, like so many of his comrades, was making the painful discovery that very little he'd learned at the Confederate Naval Academy in Mobile suited him to making a living in the civilian world. He was a first-rate submarine skipper, but there were no civilian submarines. The C.S. Navy was no longer allowed to keep submersibles, either; otherwise, he would have stayed in command of the Bonefish.
He had a fine understanding of the workings of large Diesel engines. That also did him very little good. Outside the Navy, there were next to no large Diesel engines, nor small ones, either. He understood gasoline and steam engines, too, but so did plenty of other people. None of them seemed willing to sacrifice his own position for Kimball's sake.
"Miserable bastards, every last one of'em," he muttered as he trudged through the streets of Charleston, South Carolina. Then he laughed at himself. Had he had a steady job, he wouldn't have let go of it, either. Maybe he should have headed down to South America, as he'd told Anne Colleton he might.
A lot of former Navy men were trudging the streets of Charleston these days, most of them overqualified for the jobs that turned up—when any jobs turned up, which wasn't often. Kimball kept money in his pocket partly because he wasn't too proud for any kind of work that came along—having grown up on a hardscrabble farm in Arkansas, he was no pampered Confederate aristocrat—and partly because he was a damn fine poker player.
He walked into a saloon called the Ironclad. "Let me have a beer," he told the barkeep, and laid a ten-dollar banknote on the bar.
He got back a beer and three dollars. Sighing, he laid some briny sardellen on a slice of cornbread from the free-lunch counter and gobbled them down. Pickled in brine, the little minnows were so salty, they couldn't help raising a thirst. He sipped the beer, and had to fight the urge to gulp it down and immediately order another. Provoking just that response was the free lunch's raison d'etre.
A couple of men farther down the bar were talking, one of them also nursing a beer, the other with a whiskey in front of him. Kimball paid them only scant attention for a bit, but then began to listen more closely. He emptied his schooner and walked over to the fellow who was drinking whiskey. "You wouldn't by any chance be from the United States, would you?" he asked. His harsh Arkansas drawl made it very plain he was not.
He was looking for a yes and a fight. As the man on the bar stool turned to size him up, he realized the fight might not be so easy. He was a little heavier and a little younger than the other man, but the fellow owned a pair of the steeliest gray eyes he'd ever seen. If he got in a brawl, those eyes warned he wouldn't quit till he'd either won or got knocked cold.
And then his friend laughed and said, "Jesus, Clarence, swear to God I'm gonna have to stop taking you out in public if you don't quit talking that way."
"It's the way I talk," the man with the hard eyes—Clarence— said. He turned back to Kimball. "No, whoever the hell you are, I am not a damnyankee. I sound the way I sound because I went to college up at Yale. Clarence Potter, ex-major, Army of Northern Virginia, at your service—and if you don't like it, I'll spit in your eye."
Kimball felt foolish. He'd felt foolish before; he expected he'd feel foolish again. He gave his own name, adding, "Ex-commander, C.S. Navy, submersibles," and stuck out his hand.
Potter took it. "That explains why you wanted to wipe the floor with a Yankee, anyhow. Sorry I can't oblige you." He threw a lazy punch in the direction of his friend. "And this creature here is Jack Delamotte. You have to forgive him; he's retarded— only an ex-first lieutenant, Army of Northern Virginia."
"I won't hold it against him," Kimball said. "Pleased to meet the both of you. I'd be happy to buy you fresh drinks." He wouldn't be happy to do it, but it would make amends for mistaking Potter for someone from north of the Mason-Dixon Line.
"I'm pleased to meet damn near anybody who'll buy me a drink," Delamotte said. He was a big, fair-haired fellow who sounded as if he was from Alabama or Mississippi. He kicked the bar stool next to him. "Why don't you set yourself down again, and maybe we'll get around to buying you one, too."
Being closer to Clarence Potter, Kimball sat beside him. The bartender served up two more beers and another whiskey. Kimball raised his schooner on high. "To hell with the United goddamn States of America!"
Potter and Delamotte both drank: no Confederate officer cut loose from his country's service in the aftermath of defeat could refuse that toast. The ex-major who talked like a Yankee and looked like a tough professor offered a toast of his own: "To getting the Confederate goddamn States of America back on their feet!"
That too was unexceptionable. After drinking to it, Kimball found himself with an empty schooner. He wasn't drunk, not on two beers, but he was intensely and urgently thoughtful. He didn't much care for the tenor of his thoughts, either. "How the hell are we supposed to do that?" he demanded. "The United States are going to be sitting on our neck for the next hundred years."
"No, they won't." Potter shook his head. "We will get the chance."
He sounded positive. Roger Kimball was positive, too: positive his new acquaintance was out of his mind. "They made you butternut boys say uncle," he said, which might have come close to starting another fight. Confederate Navy men, who'd battled their U.S. counterparts to something close to a draw, resented the Army for having to yield. But now, not intending pugnacity, he went on, "Why do you reckon they'll be fools enough to ever let us do anything again?"
"Same question I've been asking him," Delamotte said.
"And I'll give Commander Kimball the same answer I've given you." Potter seemed to think like a professor, too; he lined up all his ducks in a row. In rhetorical tones, he asked, "Toward what have the United States been aiming ever since the War of Secession, and especially since the Second Mexican War?"
"Kicking us right square in the nuts," Kimball answered. "And now they've finally gone and done it, the bastards." He'd done some nut-kicking of his own, even after the cease-fire. That last, though, was a secret he intended to take to the grave with him.
"Just so," Clarence Potter agreed, emphasizing the point with a forefinger. "Now they've finally gone and done what they've been pointing toward since 1862. Up till now, they had a goal, and they worked toward it. Christ, were they serious about working toward it; you have no notion how serious they were if you've never seen a Remembrance Day parade. Scared me to death when I was up in Connecticut, believe you me it did. But now they don't have a goal any more; they've achieved their goal. Do you see the difference, Commander?"
Before Kimball could answer, Jack Delamotte said, "What I see is, I'm thirsty, and I bet I'm not the only one, either." He ordered another round of drinks, then ate some sardellen and lit a cigar almost as pungent as the fish.
After a pull or two at his beer, Kimball said, "Major, I don't follow you. Suppose their next goal is wiping us out altogether? How in blazes are we supposed to stop 'em?"
"Goals don't work like that, not usually they don't," Potter said. "Once you got to where you always thought you were going, you like to ease back and relax and smoke a cigar—a good cigar, mind you, not a stinking weed like the one Jack's stuffed into his face—and maybe marry a chorus girl, if that's what you reckoned you would do after you made it big."
"So that's what you figure is going to happen, eh?" Kimball chuckled. "You figure the United States scrimped and saved for so long, and now they'll buy a fancy motorcar and put a beautiful dame in it? Well, I hope you're right, but I'll tell you this much: it won't happen as long as that goddamn Roosevelt is president of the USA. He hates us too much to care about chorus girls."
"I never said it would happen tomorrow," Potter replied. "I said it would happen. Countries live longer than people do." He knocked back his whiskey with a sharp flick of the wrist and ordered another round.
While the bored man behind the bar was drawing the beers, Jack Delamotte leaned toward Kimball and said, "Now you're going to hear Clarence go on about how we need to find a goal of our own and stick to it like the damnyankees did."
"It's the truth." Potter looked stubborn—and slightly pie-eyed. "If we don't, we'll be second-raters forever."
"Won't see it with the regular politicians," Kimball said with conviction. "They got us into the swamp, but I'm damned if I reckon they've got even a clue about how to get us out." Neither Potter nor Delamotte argued with him; he would have been astonished if they had. He went on, "I heard this skinny fellow on the stump a week or two ago. The Freedom Party, that was the name of his outfit. He wasn't too bad—sounded like he knew what he wanted and how to get there. His name was Feathers, or something like that."
To his surprise, Clarence Potter, who'd struck him as a sour-puss, threw back his head and guffawed. "Featherston," the ex-major said. "Jake Featherston. He's about as likely a politician as a catfish is on roller skates."
"You sound like you know him," Kimball said.
"He commanded a battery in the First Richmond Howitzers through most of the war," Potter answered. "Good fighting man— should have been an officer. But that battery had belonged to Jeb Stuart III, and Jeb, Jr., blamed Featherston when his son got killed. Since Jeb, Jr.'s, a general. Featherston wouldn't have got past sergeant if he'd stayed in the Army till he died of old age."
Slowly, Kimball nodded. "No wonder he was ranting and raving about the fools in the War Department, then."
"No wonder at all," Potter agreed. "Not that he's wrong about there being fools in the War Department: there are plenty. I was in intelligence; I worked with some and reported to others. But you need to take what Featherston says with a grain of salt about the size of Texas."
"He's got some good ideas about the niggers, though," Kimball said. "If they hadn't risen up, we'd still be fighting, by God." He didn't want a grain of salt, not one the size of Texas nor a tiny one, either. He wanted to believe. He wanted his country strong again, the sooner the better. He didn't care how.
Clarence Potter shook his head. "I doubt it," he said. "A good big man will lick a good little man—not all the time, but that's the way to bet. Once we didn't knock the USA out of the fight in a hurry—once it turned into a grapple—we were going to be in trouble. As I said, I was in intelligence. I know how much they outweighed us." Even with a good deal of whiskey in him, he was dispassionately analytical like a scholar.
Kimball cared for dispassionate analysis only when calculating a torpedo's track. Even then, it was a means to an end, not an end in itself. The end was action—blowing up a ship. Feather-ston wanted action, too. "You know how I can find out more about this Freedom Party?" he asked.
"They've started up an office here in town, I think," Potter answered, distaste on his face. "Jake Featherston calls Richmond home, though, and I think the Party does, too "
"Thanks," Kimball said. "Do me a little poking around, I think." He signaled to the bartender. "Set 'em up again, pal."
Cincinnatus Driver—the Negro was getting more and more used to the surname he'd taken the year before—had hoped the war's end would bring peace to Kentucky, and especially to Covington, where he lived. Now here it was the middle of spring, and Covington still knew no peace.
Every day when he left his house to start up the ramshackle truck he'd bought, his wife would say, "Be careful. Watch yourself."
"I will, Elizabeth," he would promise, not in any perfunctory way but with a deep and abiding sense that he was saying something important. He would crank the truck to noisy, shuddering life, climb into the cabin, put the machine in gear, and drive off to hustle as much in the way of hauling business as he could.
He wished he were inside one of the big, snarling White trucks the Army used to carry its supplies. He'd driven a White during the war, hauling goods that got shipped across the Ohio from Cincinnati through Covington and down to the fighting front. The Whites were powerful, they were sturdy, they were, in fact, everything his antiquated Duryea was not. That included expensive, which was why he drove the Duryea and wished for a White.
As he turned right onto Scott from out of the Negro district and drove up toward the wharves this morning, he kept a wary eye open. A good many U.S. soldiers in green-gray uniforms were on the streets. They also looked wary, and carried bayoneted Springfields, as if ready to start shooting or stabbing at any moment.
They needed to be wary, too. After more than fifty years in the Confederacy, Kentucky was one of the United States again. It was, however, like none of the other United States, in that a large part of the population remained unreconciled to the switch from Stars and Bars to Stars and Stripes.
The city hall had U.S. machine-gun nests around it. Somebody— odds were, a Confederate diehard—had taken a shot at the mayor a couple of weeks before. Cincinnatus wouldn't have been brokenhearted had the malcontent hit him. The mayor cooperated with U.S. authorities, and tried to placate the locals with rabblerousing speeches against blacks.
Blue St. Andrew's crosses, some of them new, marked buildings and suggested the Confederate battle flag. Two horizontal red stripes with a white one between similarly suggested the Confederate national flag. Some of those were new, too. The diehards hadn't given up, not by a long chalk, i ain't no Yankee, someone had written beside one of those not-quite-flags.
New posters marred walls, too, some of them slapped over the pro-Confederate graffiti. The posters were solid red, with broken chains in black stretched across them. The Red uprising had not got so far among the Negroes of Kentucky as among their brethren still in Confederate-owned territory at its outbreak. But it had not been brutally suppressed here, either. Being a Red wasn't illegal in the USA, even if it was hazardous to a black man's health.
Red posters and blue crosses were both thick around the waterfront. Cincinnatus wondered if the diehards and the Reds had bumped into each other on their clandestine rounds of pasting and painting. Down in the CSA, they would have been deadly foes. Here in Kentucky, they sometimes reckoned the U.S. government a common enemy. Cincinnatus whistled softly. They sometimes didn't, too.
Both soldiers and police patrolled the wharves. Confederate policemen had commonly worn gray, like soldiers from the War of Secession. Now that Kentucky belonged to the USA, policemen—sometimes the same policemen—wore dark blue, as their grandfathers might have done had they fought for the Stars and Stripes.
And some policemen wore no uniforms at all. Some of the idlers, some of the roustabouts who strode up and down the piers and along the waterfront, were sure to belong to Luther Bliss' Kentucky State Police, an outfit that made Kentucky the only U.S. state with its own secret police force. Cincinnatus knew Luther Bliss better than he wanted to. Knowing Bliss at all was knowing him better than Cincinnatus wanted to; the chief of the State Police made a formidable foe.
Roustabouts were hauling crates and barrels off a barge. Cincinnatus braked to a halt: cautiously, as the Duryea didn't like to stop any more than it liked to start. He hopped out of the cab and hurried over to a discontented-looking fellow holding a clipboard. "Mornin', Mr. Simmons," he said. "What you got, where's it got to get to, and how fast does it got to be there?"
"Hello, Cincinnatus," the steamboat clerk answered, pointing to some of the barrels. "Got oatmeal here: five for TwitchelPs general store, and another five for Dalyrimple's, and three for Conroy's. You fit all of them in there?" He pointed to Cincinnatus' truck. "Damn tight squeeze, if you do."
"Mr. Simmons, they'll go in there if I got to make one of 'em drive," Cincinnatus said, at which the white man laughed. Cincinnatus went on, "Haifa dollar a barrel for haulage, like usual?"
Simmons looked more discontented than ever. At last, he said, "Wouldn't pay it to any other nigger driving a raggedy old truck, that's for damn sure. But yeah, fifty cents a barrel. Bring me your receipts and I'll pay you off."
"Got yourself a deal, suh." Cincinnatus beamed. That was good money, and he might have the chance to pick up another load, or maybe even two, before the day ended. Then he hesitated, really hearing the third name Simmons had given him. "That Joe
Conroy?" he asked. "Fat man, used to have hisself a store before it burned down?"
"Let me check." Simmons flipped papers. "Joseph Conroy, that's what it says. I don't know about the other part. How come?"
"Didn't know he was back in business, is all," Cincinnatus replied. It wasn't all, not even close, but he kept that to himself. "Where's his new store at?"
Simmons checked his papers again. "Corner of Emma and Bakewell, it says here. You know where that is? This ain't my town, you know."
"I know where it's at, yeah," Cincinnatus said. "Over on the west side, gettin' out towards the park. Twitchell's over here on Third, and Dalyrimple's on Washington, so I reckon I'll deliver theirs first and then head over to Conroy's." He held out his hand. "Give me the papers I got to get signed."
"Here you go." The steamboat clerk handed them to him. "That's the other reason I pay you like I would a white man, or almost: you read and write good, so things get done proper."
"Thank you," Cincinnatus said, pretending not to hear that or almost. He couldn't do anything about it. Stowing the papers in his shirt pocket, he started crowding barrels of oatmeal into the back of the truck. He did end up with one of them on the seat beside him; Simmons was a keen judge of how much space merchandise took up.
The truck rode heavy, the weight in back smoothing out its motion and making it laugh at bumps that would have jolted Cincinnatus had it been empty. He appreciated that. The ponderous cornering and the greater likelihood of a blowout were something else again. He drove carefully, avoiding the potholes that pocked the street. A puncture would cost him precious time.
His first two stops went smoothly, as he'd thought they would. He'd delivered to both Hank Twitchell and Calvin Dalyrimple before. Twitchell, a big, brawny fellow, even helped him lug barrels of oatmeal into his general store. Calvin Dalyrimple didn't; a strong breeze would have blown him away. They both signed their receipts and sent Cincinnatus on his way in jig time.
He drove out to the west side of town with much more trepidation. That didn't shrink when he discovered Conroy's new general store sat between a saloon and a pawnshop. None of the looks he got from passersby as he stopped the truck in front of the store was friendly, or anything close. Most of them translated to, What the hell you doing here, nigger? He hoped the truck would still be there when he got done with his business with Conroy.
He also hoped the storekeeper wouldn't recognize him. When he brought the first barrel into the store, all he said was, "Here's your oatmeal, suh, straight off the docks. Got two more barrels in the truck; fetch 'em right in for you. All you got to do is sign the receipt shows you got 'em, and I be on my way."
Joe Conroy grunted. He was a round, middle-aged white man with narrow, suspicious eyes. He was also a Confederate diehard, and a friend of Cincinnatus' former boss, Tom Kennedy. Kennedy had involved Cincinnatus with the diehards, too, having him plant firebombs on cargoes heading down to U.S. forces. Eventually, Cincinnatus had planted one in Conroy's old store, but the white man had never figured that out.
Cincinnatus had never decided how smart Conroy was. Smarter than he let on, was the Negro's guess. He proved smart enough to recognize Cincinnatus, whom he hadn't seen in a year, and who would have been glad never to see him again. "Well, well," he said slowly, the unlit cigar in his mouth jerking up and down. "Look what the cat drug in."
"Mornin', Mistuh Conroy." Cincinnatus hurried out to the truck to haul in the second barrel of oatmeal. As long as he was working, he didn't have to talk. He wished a customer would come into the cramped, dark general store. Conroy couldn't afford to talk, not where anyone could hear him.
But nobody came in except Cincinnatus. Conroy gave him an appraising stare. "Hear tell it was that damnyankee you was workin' for who shot Tom Kennedy," he said.
"Yes, suh, that's a fact. Hear him say so my ownself," Cincinnatus agreed. He got in a dig of his own: "Wasn't the Reds, like you told me in the park last year."
"No, it wasn't the Reds," the storekeeper said. "But it was a friend of yours, just the same. We don't forget things like that, no indeed, we don't."
"I saved Tom Kennedy's bacon from the Yankees back when the war was new," Cincinnatus said angrily. "I hadn't done that, I never would've met you—and believe you me, that would've suited me fine."
"We know where you're at." Conroy put menace in his voice.
"And I know where you're at, too," Cincinnatus said. "I get into trouble from you and your pals, Luther Bliss'll know where you're at and what you've been doin'. Don't want no trouble, Conroy." He used the white man's unadorned surname with relish, to shock. "But I get trouble, I give it right back."
"Damn uppity nigger," Conroy growled.
"Yes, sir" Cincinnatus went outside and manhandled the last barrel of oatmeal into the store. He thrust the receipt at Joe Conroy. "You want to sign right here, so I can go on about my business."
"Why do I give a damn about that?" Conroy said.
"On account of if you don't sign, I take this here oatmeal back to the docks and you don't get no more shipments." Cincinnatus wondered how much Conroy cared. If the store was nothing but a front for the diehards, he might not care at all. That would make Cincinnatus' life more difficult.
But Conroy grabbed a pencil, scrawled his signature, and all but hurled the paper back at Cincinnatus. "Here, God damn you."
"Much obliged, Mistuh Conroy." Cincinnatus headed for the door. "Got me a lot of work left to do."
"Come on," Sylvia Enos said to her children. "Get moving. I've got to take you over to Mrs. Dooley's so I can go to work."
"I like it better when you're not working, Ma," Mary Jane said. She would be five soon, which Sylvia found hard to believe. "I like it when you stay home with us."
"When she stays home with us, though, it's because she's out of work again, silly." George, Jr., spoke with the world-weary wisdom of his seven years—and wasn't shy about scoring points off his sister, either. "We have to have money."
He had a hard streak of pragmatism in him. His father had been the same way. George, Jr., looked very much like his father, though he was missing the brown Kaiser Bill mustache Sylvia's husband had worn. Seeing her son, Sylvia again cursed the fate
that had put a submersible in the way of the USS Ericsson the night after the Confederate States yielded to the USA.
With the CSA out of the war, she thought, it had to be a British boat. George hadn't worried about the Royal Navy. A Confederate submarine had almost sunk his destroyer earlier in the war. He'd fought Rebel boats all the way up to the end. To have his ship sunk by the limeys after that... even now, it was hard to take. George hadn't deserved that much bad luck.
"Come on," Sylvia said again. "I can't be late on account of you. I can't be late at all."
That was nothing less than the gospel truth. With men home from the war in droves, jobs for women were harder and harder to come by. She didn't know how long the work at the galoshes factory would last, and she couldn't afford to anger the people over her in any way. She was the sole support for her family as much as any man was for his, but nobody looked at things that way. Men came first. Women had been fine during the war. Now.. .
Now she couldn't even vote for anyone who might better her plight. Massachusetts had no women's suffrage. Had she been able to cast a ballot, she would have voted Socialist in a heartbeat. The Democrats had been fine when it came to winning the war. What were they good for in peacetime? Only counting their profits, as far as she could see.
She hurried the children out of the apartment and down to the clamorous streets of Boston. With a sigh of regret, she walked past a newsboy hawking the Globe. She couldn't justify laying out a couple of cents on it, not when she didn't know if she'd have work next week.
"England signs treaty!" the newsboys shouted, trying to persuade others to part with pennies. "Limeys give up all claim to Sandwich Islands and Canada! England signs treaty! Recognizes Ireland and Quebec!"
It was, she supposed, good news. The best news, though, as far as she was concerned, would have been for the ocean to swallow England and all her works. And while the ocean was at it, it could swallow the CSA, too.
Mrs. Dooley was an aging widow with wavy hair defiantly hennaed, and with bright spots of rouge on her cheeks. To Sylvia, it looked more like clown makeup than anything alluring, but she would never have said so. The woman took good care of her children and did not charge too much.
After kissing George, Jr., and Mary Jane good-bye, Sylvia went back to the trolley stop, tossed another nickel in the fare box (and soon she would have to start paying Mary Jane's fare, too: one more expense), and headed to the galoshes factory. To her relief, she got there on time.
The place stank of rubber from which the rubber overshoes were made. Sylvia's post came just after the galoshes emerged from the mold. She painted a red ring around the top of each one. Had the firm been able to train a dog to do the job, it would have. That failing, it grudgingly paid her.
When she'd worked in a mackerel-canning plant, she'd been able to operate the machine that glued gaudy labels to cans almost without thinking about it; sometimes, when she was lucky, she would hardly notice the time going by between getting to the factory and dinner or between dinner and going home. She hadn't had that luxury at the shoe factory where she'd been working when George was killed. If she didn't pay attention to what she was doing there, the powerful needle on the electric sewing machine would tear up her hand. She'd seen it happen to operators who'd been at the place longer than she'd been alive. A moment's lapse was all it took.
All that could happen with a moment's lapse here was her ending up with red paint on her hand, not red blood. Still, she couldn't let her mind wander, as she'd been able to do in the canning plant. What she did here wasn't simple repetitive motion, the way that had been. She had to pay attention to painting the rings precisely. If she didn't, the foreman started barking at her.
Frank Best wasn't a hardened old Tartar like Gustav Krafft, the foreman at the shoe factory where she'd worked, who gave a walking demonstration of why the limeys and frogs thought of Germans as Huns. Best's style was more the sly dig: "Thought you were going to slip that one by me, did you?" was a favorite remark.
The other difference between the two men was that Krafft had been too old to serve in the Army. Frank Best wore a Soldiers' Circle pin with the year 1904 on it. That being his conscription class, he was only a handful of years older than Sylvia. He was also single, and convinced he was the greatest gift to women God had ever set on the planet.
A lot of women who worked in the galoshes factory were widows, some still wearing mourning, others not. Most of them, like Sylvia, heartily despised the foreman. "Like to put a certain part of him in the mold—the size-two mold," Sarah Wyckoff, one of those widows, said at dinner on a day when Best was being particularly obnoxious. "Wouldn't need nothin' bigger."
That produced a good set of giggles. Sylvia said, "No, for goodness' sake, you don't want him vulcanized there. He'd never keep quiet about it then." More giggles rose.
"If so many of us hate him," said May Cavendish, another widow, "why does he think he's so bully?"
"He's a man," Sarah Wyckoff said, as if she expected that to cover everything. By the way the other women nodded, it probably did.
May Cavendish tossed her head; her blond curls bounced on her shoulders. "What frosts me is that some of the girls do like him."
"I can't imagine that anybody would really like him," Sylvia said with a shudder. Her companions nodded. She went on, "But if he says, 'Be nice to me or go look for another job,' some of the girls are going to be nice to him. Times are hard. Believe me, I know."
"We all know, sweetheart," Sarah said. "If he said anything like that to me, though, I'd break him in half." She was built like a longshoreman; Sylvia didn't think she meant it any way but literally.
"There ought to be a law," Sylvia said. She'd had that thought before, when she lost her job at the canning plant because she'd had to stay home and tend to her children after they came down with the chicken pox.
"There ought to be a lot of things that there ain't," Sarah Wyckoff said with authority. "If I was Teddy Roosevelt—"
"You'd look silly with a mustache, Sarah, and you haven't got enough teeth to be TR," May Cavendish said. She pulled a pack of cigarettes from her handbag, scraped a match on the sole of her shoe, got the cigarette lighted, and blew out a creditable smoke ring. Then she coughed. "Sorry. I'm still getting the hang of this."
"Doesn't it make people think you're fast?" Sylvia asked.
May shook her head. "Not the way it would have before the war," she said, and drew on the cigarette again. The coal glowed red. She let the smoke go without showing off this time. "It's not like it's a big, smelly cigar or anything. It's not like it was hooch, either. You don't get drunk or anything—you feel better about things for a little while, that's all." She extended the pack toward Sylvia. "Want to try one?"
"Sure. Why not?" Sylvia said. "It's not like they can hurt you or anything." She took a cigarette. May Cavendish struck another match. Sylvia didn't drag deeply on the cigarette, the way May had done. She drew in a cautious mouthful of smoke—or so she thought. When she tried to suck it down into her lungs, she hacked and wheezed and started to choke.
"Very same thing happened to me the first time I tried," May assured her. "It gets easier, believe me it does. You get used to it."
Sylvia's mouth tasted as if someone had just doused a camp-fire in there. She stared at the cigarette in dismay. "Why would you want to get used to it?" she asked, and coughed again. But she felt tingly all the way out to her fingers and toes, tingly and light-headed in a strange and pleasant sort of way. Ever so cautiously, she took another puff.
It still tasted bad. It made her chest burn. But the tingles and that good feeling in the middle of her brain got stronger.
"Don't do too much the first time," May Cavendish advised her. "You can get sick if you do. Think about whether you like it or not. It's not like cigarettes are expensive, or anything like that."
"That's true," Sylvia said. "They've come down since the war ended, too. I've noticed that, even if I don't usually buy them."
May nodded. "And the tobacco's better now. It's the one good thing you can say about the Rebs—they grow better tobacco than we do. Some of the stuff they were selling while the war was still on .. . Honey, I swear to Jesus they were sweeping the horseballs off the street and wrapping paper around 'em."
"People kept smoking, though," Sarah Wyckoff said.
"Why not?" Sylvia said. "It's not a bad thing, and May's right—it does make you feel nice for a little bit." Despite saying that, she had no great urge to smoke the rest of the cigarette May Cavendish had given her. She let it fall to the ground and crushed it with her foot. Maybe she'd acquire the habit and maybe she wouldn't. If she did, she'd do it slowly. If she tried to do it in a hurry, she had the feeling she would get sick instead.
"Time to get back to work," Sarah said, "or Frank'll start sweet-talking us again." She rolled her eyes to show how much she looked forward to that.
When Sylvia went back into the plant, it didn't stink so badly of rubber, or so it seemed. After a while, she realized the cigarette had numbed her sense of smell. That seemed a good reason to start smoking all by itself.
The line began to move. Sylvia painted red rings on a pair of galoshes. The machinery sent them down the line to the next worker, who would trim off extra rubber. Sylvia dipped her brush in the paint can and painted more rings.