— American Empire: Blood and Iron —
Harry Turtledove

 

Edna Semphroch came back into the coffeehouse. Nellie Jacobs gave her daughter an unhappy look, even though midafternoon business was slow. Truth to tell, business had never got back to what it was during the war, when Confederate officers from the force occupying Washington had kept the place hopping morn­ing, noon, and night. Nellie didn't miss the Rebs, not even a little bit, but she did miss their cash.

"Took you long enough, didn't it?" Nellie said sourly. "I reckon I could have looked at every skirt between here and St. Louis in the stretch of time you've been gone. And you didn't even buy anything. Can't you make up your mind?" People who joked about women's indecision had never met Nellie.

"Nope, didn't buy anything," Edna agreed. She eyed her mother with an odd mix of amusement and apprehension. "Didn't even go looking at skirts, as a matter of fact."

Nellie had no fancy education. She was, most ways, shrewd rather than really clever. But when Edna said something like that, her mother didn't need a road map to figure out what she'd say next. "You've been sneaking around behind my back," Nellie said, and could have sounded no more outraged if she'd been reading a philandering husband the riot act.

She would have had an easier time accepting a philander­ing husband. Men got it where they could. That was part—too large a part, as far as she was concerned—of how they were made. Women, though ... She'd known for a long time that Edna burned hot. Her daughter had seemed calmer the past couple of years, so Nellie had dared hope she'd got it out of her system. No such luck, evidently.

"I've been trying to have a life, Ma," Edna said. "God knows you don't make it easy for a girl." But the unbearably smug look on her face said she'd had her desire fulfilled—and had some­thing else filled full, too, more than likely.

"You little hussy," Nellie hissed. She wished Clara, who was taking a nap upstairs, would pick that moment to wake up. Otherwise, she'd be locked in a fight with her older daughter of the sort they'd had during the war, the sort they hadn't had since Nellie married Hal Jacobs.

Again, no such luck. Edna tossed her head. "Hussy? Huh! Takes one to know one, I guess." Had Nellie had a knife in her hand, she might have used it. Fortunately, she'd been washing cups and saucers. Edna ignored her furious squawk. Edna seemed inclined to ignore just about everything. She went on, "But none of that matters, anyhow. He asked me to marry him today."

"Did he think about asking you to get an abortion instead?" Wounded, Nellie wanted to hit back any way she could.

Her daughter shook her head. "I ain't in a family way, Ma. And I ought to know, too, I felt so lousy last week." She laughed. 'Turned out you were the one who ended up in a family way. I still think that's the funniest thing in the whole wide world."

If she'd had to find out for sure she wasn't pregnant, she'd been doing things that left doubt in her mind. "At least I was married," Nellie said.

"And I'm going to be," Edna said. "Whether you like it or not, I'm going to be. I ain't getting any younger, you know. I'm sick and tired of you watching me the way Teddy Roosevelt watched the damn Rebs."

Edna wasn 't getting any younger, Nellie realized. She was closer to thirty than twenty, as Nellie was closer to fifty than forty. Even better than three years of marriage to Hal Jacobs hadn't come close to making Nellie understand why a woman would marry for the sake of bedroom pleasures; for her, bed­room pleasures were at most rare accidents that brought as much embarrassment as release. But Edna wasn't like that, however much Nellie wished her daughter were.

"Who is this fellow?" After Nellie asked the question, she realized it should have been the first one out of her mouth.

Her daughter seemed surprised she'd asked it at all. In less snippy tones than she'd been using, Edna answered, "His name is Grimes, Ma, Merle Grimes. He's right my age, and he's a clerk for the Reconstruction Authority."

"If he's right your age, how come he hasn't got a wife al­ready?" Nellie asked, wondering if in fact he had one Edna didn't know about.

But Edna said, "He had one, but she died of the Spanish in­fluenza a couple-three years ago. He showed me a snapshot once. I asked him to. She looked a little like me, I think, only her hair was darker."

That took some of the wind out of Nellie's sails. When she asked "What did you tell him about Lieutenant Kincaid?" she didn't sound mean at all.

"I Ve told him I was engaged during the war, but my fiance got killed," Edna said. "I didn't tell Merle he was a Reb, and I'll thank you not to, neither."

"All right," Nellie said, and Edna looked surprised. Nellie guessed Merle Grimes would eventually find out, and there would be trouble on account of it. Too many people knew about the late Nicholas H. Kincaid for the secret to keep. His death at what would have been Edna's wedding had even made the news­papers, though a clerk for the U.S. government wouldn't have been in Washington then.

Bill Reach and me, we can keep a secret, Nellie thought. If anybody else knew. .. But no one else did, not Edna, not Hal, no one. No one ever would.

"He's a nice man, Ma," Edna said. "He's a good man. You'll like him when you meet him, swear to God you will."

If he was such a nice man, if he was such a good man, what was he doing sticking it into Edna before he put a ring on her finger? Nellie started to ask that very question, but caught her­self. For one thing, it would make Edna mad. For another, this Grimes had offered to put a ring on her finger. Nellie found a dif­ferent question to ask: "How did you meet him?"

Edna giggled. "The first couple times were right here in the coffeehouse. I don't reckon you'd recall him"—which was cer­tainly true—"but he was here, all right. He doesn't live too far away. We ran into each other at the greengrocer's one time, and then again a week later. After that, one thing sort of led to another."

I'll bet it did, Nellie thought. But, regardless of whether she thought Edna was a fool, she couldn't deny Edna was also a grown woman. "All right," Nellie said again. "If he wants to marry you, if you want to marry him, the only thing I can say is, I hope you don't end up sorry on account of it."

"I don't think we will, Ma," Edna said. A few years before, she'd been unshakably certain she and Confederate Lieutenant Kincaid would live happily ever after. Maybe she really was growing up as well as grown—even if she did have more trouble keeping her legs together than she should have. Edna was thinking about such things, too, but in a different way, for she asked, "Wouldn't you like to have a little grandbaby?"

"With Clara around, it feels like I've already got one," Nellie said. "If you had a baby, the biggest difference would be that I wouldn't have to keep an eye on the kid every single second of the day and night. I hope you'll be happy, Edna. I wish you didn't think you had to sneak around to meet somebody, and to see him."

Edna didn't answer that, which was probably just as well. Nellie had done everything but shove her daughter into a chas­tity belt to keep her from meeting and seeing anybody. Nellie had been sure—was still sure—she'd done the right thing, but Edna cl finally managed to get around her. Now she had to make the best of it.

Her husband was very little help. "High time she gets married, if that is what she wants," Hal said. "If she is unhappy after­wards, she will have no one to blame but herself. But I hope and pray she will not be unhappy."

"So do I," Nellie said. "If she is, though, I bet she blames me."

"We will see what we will see when we meet the young man," Hal said. "He may turn out to be very nice." Nellie was inclined to doubt that on general principles—hardly any young men, in her estimation, were very nice—and on specifics—had this Merle Grimes been very nice, he wouldn't have yanked Edna's drawers down till after they were married, and not too often then, either. By that standard, Hal Jacobs was very nice.

After Edna's announcement, Nellie didn't want to let her leave the coffeehouse for any reason whatever. With Edna a woman grown, that wasn't easy. It was, in fact, impossible. And one day, about a week after Edna's bombshell, she did go out. When she came back, she came back arm in arm with a man. "Ma," she said proudly, "this here's my intended. Merle, this is my mother. She's Nellie Jacobs now; like I told you, my pa's been dead a long time."

"I'm very pleased to meet you at last, Mrs. Jacobs," Grimes said.

"Pleased to meet you, too," Nellie said grudgingly. She'd in­tended to limit herself to a simple hello. But Grimes wasn't what she'd expected. For one thing, he walked with a cane, and wore the ribbon for the Purple Heart in a buttonhole. For another, he didn't look like a practiced seducer. He seemed serious and quiet; his long, rather horsy face and gold-framed spectacles might have belonged to a lawyer, not a clerk.

Nellie knew that didn't necessarily prove anything. Some of the men she recalled from her own sordid past had seemed ordi­nary enough on the outside. But she didn't hate Grimes on sight, as she'd thought she would.

He said, "I think I'm the luckiest man in the world. Edna may have told you, ma'am, I lost my wife to the influenza. I never thought I'd fall in love with another woman again till I met your daughter. She showed me I was wrong, and I'm ever so glad she did."

Edna looked as if she would have lain down on the floor for him then and there if Nellie hadn't been in the coffeehouse. Nellie did her best to hide her disgust. Grimes had asked Edna to marry him. He hadn't got her in a family way, either, as Edna's father had before he married Nellie.

"Where are your people from, Mr. Grimes?" Nellie asked. "What do they do?"

"I was born in New Rumley, Ohio, Mrs. Jacobs," Grimes an­swered, "the same town that saw the birth of the great General Custer. My father runs the weekly newspaper there: the New Rumley Courier. His father ran it before him; I reckon my brother Caleb'11 take it on when the time comes."

"Why aren't you still back there yourself?" What Nellie meant was, If you were still back there, you wouldn 't be rumpl­ing my daughter's clothes.

Merle Grimes could hardly have missed that, but it didn't faze him. He said, "I wanted steady work. The newspaper business is a lot of things, but it's not steady. You go to work for the U.S. government, you know you've got a paycheck for the rest of your days. I won't get rich, but I won't go hungry, either."

Nellie didn't know what sort of answer she'd thought she would get, but that wasn't it. "You seem a steady enough young fellow," she said, an admission she hadn't looked to make.

"I try to be," Grimes said—steadily.

"Isn't he the bulliest thing in the whole wide world, Ma?" Edna said.

She was thinking with her cunt, a phrase that hadn't come to Nellie's mind since her days in the demimonde. But Merle Grimes did look to be a much better bargain than Nellie had ex­pected. "He may do," she said. "He just may do."

*    *    *

Engine roaring, the barrel bounded across the Kansas prairie north of Fort Leavenworth. Colonel Irving Morrell stood head and shoulders out of the turret, so he could take in as much of the battlefield as possible. The test model easily outran and out-maneuvered the Great War machines against which it was pitted.

Morrell ducked down into the turret and bawled a command to the driver in the forward compartment: "Halt!" And the driver halted, and it was not divine intervention. With the engine sepa­rated from the barrel's crew by a steel bulkhead, a man could hear a shouted order. In a Great War barrel, one man could not hear another who was screaming into his ear.

At Morrell's order, the gunner traversed the turret till the cannon bore on the barrel he had chosen. The old-style machines were trying to bring their guns to bear on him, too, but they had to point themselves in the right direction, a far slower and clum­sier process than turning the turret.

"Fire!" Morrell yelled. The turret-mounted cannon roared. A shell casing leaped from the breech as flame spurted from the muzzle. It was only a training round, with no projectile, but it made almost as much noise as the real thing, and getting used to the hellish racket of the battlefield was not the least important part of training. The loader passed a new shell to the gunner, who slammed it home.

An umpire raised a red flag and ordered the barrel at which Morrell had fired out of the exercise. Morrell laughed. This was the fifth or sixth lumbering brute to which he'd put paid this afternoon. The Great War barrels hadn't come close to hurting him. Had it been a prizefight, the referee would have stopped it.

But, in the ring or on the battlefield, he who stood still asked to get tagged. Morrell ducked down again and shouted, "Go! Go hard! Let's see how many of them we can wreck before they make us call it a day."

He laughed. This was as close to real combat as he could come. He might have enjoyed going up to Canada with a few companies of barrels, but he knew General Custer didn't really need his services. The Canucks had been pretty quiet lately. The Confederate States were still licking their wounds, too. So he would pretend, as he'd pretended before the Great War, and have a dandy time doing it, too.

The barrel up ahead had the name peaches painted on its ar­mored flanks. That made Morrell laugh, too. Since the earliest days of barrels, men had named them for girlfriends and wives and other pretty women. Peaches belonged to Lieutenant Jen­kins; Morrell could see him standing up in the cupola. He saw Morrell, too, and sent him a gesture no junior officer should ever have aimed at his superior. Morrell laughed again.

Jenkins tried to keep him off by opening up with his rear and starboard machine guns. They fired blanks, too. Not only was that cheaper, but live ammunition would have torn through the thin steel of the test model's superstructure. This time, Mor­rell's chuckle had a predatory ring. It wouldn't do Jenkins any good. This machine was assumed to be armored against such nuisances.

But an umpire raised a flag and pointed at Morrell. Morrell started to shout a hot protest—sometimes the umpires forgot they were supposed to pretend his barrel was properly armored. But then he realized the officer was pointing not at the barrel but at himself. He could not argue about that. His own body was vul­nerable to machine-gun fire, even if that of the barrel was sup­posed not to be.

It was, in fact, a nice test of his crew. He bent down into the turret one last time. "I'm dead," he said. "You're on your own. I'll try not to bleed on you." He started to tell them to nail Jen-kins' barrel, but decided he'd used up enough "dying" words already.

The men made him proud. His gunner, a broad-shouldered sergeant named Michael Pound, said, "If you're dead, sir, get the hell out of the way so I can see what I'm doing." As soon as Mor­rell moved, Pound peered out of the turret and then started giving orders with authority a general might have envied. They were good orders, too, sensible orders. Maybe he couldn't have com­manded an entire brigade of barrels, but he sounded as if he could.

And he went straight after the barrel that had "killed" his commander. Morrell knew he couldn't have done a better job himself. In short order, Pound shelled Jenkins' machine from the side: fire to which its main armament could not respond. An umpire soon had to raise a flag signaling the Great War barrel destroyed.

"Bully!" Morrell shouted, and smacked Pound on his broad back. "How did you learn to command so well?"

"Sir, I've been listening to you all along," his gunner an­swered, "and keeping an eye on you, too. I copied what you'd do and what you'd say."

"At least you didn't copy my accent," Morrell said. Pound laughed. His voice had a northern twang to it that made him sound almost like a Canadian. Morrell went on, "It's still your barrel, Sergeant. What are you going to do next?"

Sergeant Pound went barrel hunting as ferociously as Morrell could have wanted. When the umpires finally whistled the exer­cise to a halt, one of them approached the test model. "Colonel, you were supposed to have been killed," he said in the fussily precise tones that failed to endear umpires to ordinary soldiers.

"Captain, on my word of honor, I did and said nothing at all to fight this barrel after your colleague signaled that I'd been hit," Morrell answered. He climbed out onto the top of the turret, then called down into it: "Sergeant Pound, stand up and take a bow." Pound did stand up. When he saw the captain with the umpire's armband, he came to attention and saluted.

As if doing him a favor he didn't deserve, the captain returned the salute. Then he gave Morrell a fishy stare. "I have a great deal of trouble believing what you just told me, Colonel," he said.

That was the wrong tack to take. "Captain, if you are sug­gesting that I would lie to you on my word of honor, I have a sug­gestion for you in return," Morrell said quietly. "If you like, we can meet in some private place and discuss the matter man to man. I am, I assure you, at your service."

U.S. Army officers hadn't dueled since before the War of Se­cession. Morrell didn't really have pistols at sunrise in mind. But he would have taken a good deal of pleasure in whaling the stuffing out of the officious captain. He let that show, too. As he'd expected, the captain wilted. "Sir, I think you may have mis­understood me," he said, looking as if he wished he could sink into the churned-up prairie.

"I hope I did," Morrell said. "I also hope Sergeant Pound's outstanding achievement will be prominently featured in your reports of the action. He deserves that, and I want to see him get it."

"He shall have it," the umpire said. "You may examine the re­port as closely as you like." He wasn't altogether a fool, not if he realized Morrell would be reading that report to make sure he kept his promise. He still came too close to being a perfect fool to make Morrell happy.

Pound said, "Thank you very much, sir," as Morrell climbed down into the turret once more.

"Don't thank me," Morrell said. "You're the one who earned it. And now, let's take this beast back to the barn. We keep show­ing them and showing them that we can run rings around every other barrel in the United States. If that won't make them build more like this one, I don't know what will."

Odds were, nothing would make the Socialists build new, im­proved barrels. The political fight back in Philadelphia at the moment had to do with old-age pensions, not the War Depart­ment. Morrell was convinced he'd have a better chance of living to collect an old-age pension if the Army got better barrels, but he had no friends in high places, not in President Sinclair's administration.

After the barrel returned to the shed that sheltered it from the elements—and at whose expense the quartermasters had grumbled—Morrell climbed out and headed for the Bachelor Officer Quarters. Then he stopped, did a smart about-face, and went off in the other direction. As he went, he shook his head and laughed at himself. He'd been married only a little more than a month, and the habits he'd acquired over several years died hard.

The cottage toward which he did go resembled nothing so much as the company housing that went up around some facto­ries. It was small and square and looked like the ones all around it. It was also the first time Irving Morrell had had more than a room to himself since joining the Army more than half a lifetime before.

Agnes Hill—no, Agnes Morrell; the habit of thinking of her by her former name died hard, too—opened the door when he was still coming up the walk. "How did it go today?" she asked.

He kissed her before waggling his hand and answering, "Soso. We blew a bunch of Great War barrels to smithereens, the way we always do, but I got shot in the middle of the exercise ."

To his surprise, Agnes looked stricken. She needed a few sec­onds to realize what he meant. Even when she did, her laugh came shaky. "An umpire decided you got shot," she said, sound­ing as if she needed to reassure herself.

Morrell nodded. "That's right. See? No blood ." He did a neat pirouette. When he faced Agnes again, she still wasn't smiling. Now he had to pause to figure out why. When he did, he felt stupid, not a feeling he was used to. Her first husband had died in combat; was it any wonder she didn't find cracks about getting shot very funny? Contritely, Morrell said, "I'm sorry, dear. I'm fine. I really am."

"You'd better be." Agnes' voice was fierce. "And now come on. Supper's just about ready. I've got a beef tongue in the pot, the way you like it—with potatoes and onions and carrots."

"You can spend the rest of the night letting out my trousers, the way you feed me," Morrell said. Agnes laughed at that with real amusement. However much Morrell ate—and he was a good trencherman—he remained skinny as a lath.

After supper, Morrell stayed in the kitchen while his wife washed dishes. He enjoyed her company. They chatted while she worked, and then while she read a novel and he waded through reports. And then they went to bed.

Though he'd hardly been a virgin before saying "I do," Mor-rell's occasional couplings with easy women had not prepared him for the pleasures of the marriage bed. Every time he and his wife made love, it was as if they were getting reacquainted, and at the same time learning things about each other they hadn't known before and might have been a long time finding out any other way. "I love you," he said afterwards, taking his weight on elbows and knees while they lay still joined.

"I love you, too," Agnes answered, raising up a little to kiss him on the cheek. "And I love—this. And I would love you to get off me so I can get up and go to the bathroom, if that's all right."

"I think so," he said. Agnes laughed and poked him in the ribs. When she came back to bed, he was nearly asleep. Agnes laughed again, on a different note. She put on her nightgown and lay down beside him. He heard her breathing slow toward the rhythms of sleep, too. Feeling vaguely triumphant at staying awake long enough to notice that, he drifted off.

 

Anne Colleton had always fancied that she had a bit of the artist in her. Back before the war, she'd designed and arranged the ex­hibition of modern art she'd put on at the Marshlands man­sion. Everyone had praised the way the exhibit was laid out. Then the world went into the fire, and people stopped caring about modern art.

Now Anne was working with different materials. This Free­dom Party rally in Columbia would be one of the biggest in South Carolina. She was bound and determined it would also be the best. She'd done her best to get permission to hold the rally on the grounds of the State House, but her best hadn't been good enough. The governor was a staunch Whig, and not about to yield the seat of government even for a moment to Jake Feather-ston's upstarts. She'd hoped for better without really expect­ing it.

Seaboard Park would do well enough. Neither the governor nor the mayor nor the chief of police could ban the rally alto­gether, though they would have loved to. But the Confederate Constitution guaranteed that citizens might peaceably assemble to petition for redress of grievances. The Freedom Party wasn't always perfectly peaceable, but it came close enough to make re­fusal to issue a permit a political disaster.

Tom Colleton touched Anne's arm. "Well, Sis, I've got to hand it to you. This is going to be one devil of a bash."

"Nice of you to decide to come up from St. Matthews and watch it," Anne replied coolly. "I didn't expect you to bother."

"It's my country," Tom said. "If you remember, I laid my life on the line for it. I want to see what you and that maniac Feather-ston have in mind for it."

"He's not a maniac." Anne did her best to hold down the anger in her voice. "I don't deal with maniacs—except the ones I'm re­lated to."

"Heh," her brother said. But then he surprised her by nodding. "I suppose you're right—Featherston's not a maniac. He knows what he wants and he knows how to go after it. You ask me, though, that makes him more dangerous, not less."

Anne wondered and worried about the same thing herself. Even so, she said, "When he does win, whether it's this year or not, he'll set the Confederate States to rights. And he'll remem­ber who helped him get to the top." Tom started to say some­thing. She shook her head. "Can't talk now. The show's about to start."

Gasoline-powered generators came to life. Searchlights be­gan to glow all around Seaboard Park. Their beams shot straight up into the air, making the park seem as if it were surrounded by colonnades of bright, pale light. Anne had come up with that ef­fect herself. She was proud of it. Churches wished they made people feel the awe those glowing shafts inspired.

More electric lights came on inside the park. Tom caught his breath. They showed the whole place packed with people. Most of the crowd consisted of the ordinary working people of Co­lumbia in their overalls and dungarees and cloth caps and straw hats, with a sprinkling of men in black jackets and cravats: doc­tors and lawyers and businessmen, come to hear what the new man in the land had to say.

At the front, though, near the stage a team of carpenters had spent the day running up, stood neat, military-looking ranks of young men in white shirts and butternut trousers. Many of them wore tin hats. If the Whigs and the Radical Liberals tried imi­tating Freedom Party tactics and assailing the rally, the protec­tion squads would make them regret it.

The foremost rows of Party stalwarts carried flags—some Confederate banners, some C.S. battle flags with colors re­versed, some white banners blazoned with the red word free­dom. The tall backdrop for the flag-draped stage was white, too, with freedom spelled out on it in crimson letters twice as tall as a man.

"You don't need to worry about investing money," Tom said. "You could make billions designing sets for minstrel shows and vaudeville tours. Christ, you might make millions even if Con­federate dollars were really worth anything."

"Thank you, Tom," Anne Colleton said. She wasn't altogether sure whether he offered praise or blame, but took it for the former. "Look—here comes Featherston." Her own vantage point was off to the right, beyond the edge of the crowd, so she could see farther into the left wing than any of the regular audience. She tensed. "If those spotlight men have fallen asleep on the job, God damn them, they'll never work in this state again."

But they hadn't. As soon as Jake advanced far enough to be visible to the crowd, twin spotlight beams speared him. One of the Freedom Party bigwigs from Columbia rushed to the micro­phone and cried, "Let's hear it for the next president of the Con­federate States, Jaaake Featherstonl"

"Free-atom! Free-atom! Free-atom!'' The rhythmic cry started among the stalwarts in white and butternut. At first, it had to compete with the unorganized cheers and clapping and the scat­tered boos from the larger crowd behind them. But the stalwarts kept right on, as they'd been trained to do. And, little by little, the rest of the crowd took up the chant, till the very earth of Seaboard Park seemed to cry out: "Free-c/om! Free-atom! Free-c/om!"

The two-syllable beat thudded through Anne. She'd orches­trated this entire performance. Thanks to her, Jake Featherston stood behind the microphone, his hands raised, soaking up the adulation of the crowd. Knowing what she knew, she should have been immune to what stirred the thousands of fools out there. But, to her own amazement and rather to her dismay, she found she wasn't. She wanted to join the chant, to lose herself in it. The excitement that built in her was hot and fierce, almost sexual.

She fought it down. The farmers and factory hands out there didn't try. They didn't even know they might try. They'd come to be stirred, to be roused. The ceremony had started that work. Jake Featherston would finish it.

He dropped his hands. Instantly, the Freedom Party faithful in white and butternut stopped chanting. The cries of "Freedom!'' went on for another few seconds. Then the people in the ordinary part—much the bigger part—of the crowd got the idea, too. A little raggedly, the chant ended.

Jake leaned forward, toward the microphone. Anne discovered she too was leaning forward, toward him. Angrily, she straight­ened. "God damn him," she muttered under her breath. Tom gave her a curious look. She didn't explain. She didn't want to admit even to herself, let alone to anyone else, that Jake Feather-ston could get her going like that.

"Columbia," Jake said. "I want you all to know, I'm glad—I'm proud—to set foot in the capital of the first state of the Confed­eracy." He talked in commonplaces. His voice was harsh, his accent none too pleasing. Somehow, none of that mattered. When he spoke, thousands upon thousands of people hung on his every word. Anne was one of them. She knew she was doing it, but couldn't help herself. Featherston was formidable in a small setting. In front of a crowd, he was much more than merely formidable.

Through cheers, he repeated, "Yes, sir, I'm proud to set foot in the capital of the first state of the Confederacy—because I know South Carolina is going to help me, going to help the Freedom Party, give the Confederate States back to the people who started this country in the first place, the honest, hard-working white men and women who make the CSA go and don't get a dime's worth of credit for it. Y'all remember dimes, right? That'd be a couple million dollars' worth of credit nowadays, I reckon."

The crowd laughed and cheered. "He's full of crap," Tom said. "The people who started this country were planters and lawyers, just about top to bottom. Everybody knows that."

"Everybody who's had a good education knows that," Anne said. "How many of those folks out there do you figure went to college?" Before Tom could answer, she shook her head. "Never mind now. I want to hear what he's going to say."

"Now I know the Whigs are running Wade Hampton Y and I know he's from right here in South Carolina," Featherston went on. "I reckon some of you are thinking of voting for him on ac­count of he's from here. You can do that if you want to, no doubt about it. But I'll tell you something else, friends: I thought this here was an election for president, not for king. His Majesty Wade Hampton the Fifth." He stretched out the name and the number that went with it, then shook his head in well-mimed disbelief. "Good Lord, folks, if we vote him in, we'll be right up there with the Englishmen and George V"

"He is good," Tom said grudgingly as the crowd exploded into more laughter. Anne nodded. She was leaning forward again.

"Now, Hampton V means well, I don't doubt it for a minute," Jake said. "The Whigs meant well when Woodrow Wilson got us into the war, too, and they meant well when a War Department full of Thirds and Fourths and Fifths fought it for us, too. And you'd best believe they meant well when they stuck their heads in the sand instead of noticing the niggers were going to stab us in the back. If you like the way the war turned out, if you like paying ten million dollars for breakfast—this week; it'll be more next Wednesday—go right ahead and vote for Wade Hampton V You'll get six more years of what we've been having.

"Or if you want a real change, you can vote for Mr. Layne. The Radical Liberals'll give you change, all right. I'll be . . . switched if they won't. They'll take us back into United States, is what they'll do. Ainsworth Layne went to Harvard, folks—Harvard! Can you believe it? It's true, believe it or not. And the Rad Libs want him to be president of the CSA1 I'm sorry, friends, but I've seen enough damnyankees come down on us already. I don't need any homegrown ones, thank you kindly."

That drew more laughter and applause than his attack on Wade Hampton had done. The Radical Liberals, though neither very radical nor very liberal, had always been weak in hard-line South Carolina. Were Hampton not a native son, Anne would have thought Jake Featherston the likely winner here. Even with things as they were, she thought he had a decent chance to take the state.

Featherston went on, "The Whigs and the Rad Libs both say we have to learn from the war, to take what the Yankees dish out on account of we're not strong enough to do anything else. What I say is, we have to learn from the war, all right. We have to learn that when we hit the United States, we have to hit 'em hard and we have to keep on hitting 'em till they fall down! They've stolen big chunks of what's ours. I give you my word, friends—one fine day, it's going to be ours again!"

The crowd exploded. Anne caught herself shouting at the top of her lungs. She thirsted for revenge against the USA. She glanced over toward her brother. Tom was shouting, too, his fist pumping the air. Whatever he thought of Jake Featherston and the Freedom Party, he wanted vengeance on the United States, too. That yen for revenge brought together people in the CSA who had nothing else in common. With luck, it would bring them together under the Freedom Party banner.

"Free-do/w! Free-doml Free-t/om!" The stalwarts began the chant as Jake stepped back from the microphone. It swelled until the whole huge crowd bellowed the word as if it came from a single throat. Anne looked at Tom again. He was shouting it, too. She'd been shouting it till she made a deliberate effort of will and stopped. All of Columbia could hear that furious roar. By the time November came, all of the Confederate States would hear it.