Chester Martin sat down in a folding chair at the Socialist Party hall near the Toledo steel mill where he worked. "What did you call the Freedom Party down in the CSA?" he asked Albert Bauer. "Reaction on the march? Was that it? You hit the nail right on the head."
"Yeah, even for a reactionary party, shooting a reactionary president dead because he's not reactionary enough to suit them takes a lot of doing," Bauer allowed. "They'll be sorry, too, you mark my words."
"They're sorry already, I'll bet," Martin said. "It'll be a cold day in hell before they come so close to winning an election again."
"They'll be sorrier, too," Bauer predicted. "They've done something I wouldn't have bet they could: they've made people in the United States feel sorry for the Confederate States."
"They've even made me feel that way, and some Rebel bastard shot me," Martin said. "But shooting a president—" He shook his head. "Nobody's ever done that before, there or here. What is the world coming to?"
"Revolution," Bauer answered. "And the reactionaries in the CSA just gave the progressive forces here a leg up. Before, President Sinclair couldn't have gotten ending reparations through Congress if his life depended on it. Now, though, I think he may just have the votes to pull it off."
"Do you?" Martin wasn't so sure he liked the idea. "As far as I can see, we'd be better off if the Confederates stayed broke and weak."
"Sure we would, in the short run," Bauer said. "But in the long run, if the Confederate States keep going down the drain, who does that help? That Featherston lunatic almost won the election last year because the Rebs were in such bad shape. What happens if they get worse?"
"Well, they aren't going to have a revolution—not a Red one, anyway," Martin said. He got up, went over to a coffeepot that sat on top of an iron stove, and poured himself a cup. After he set it down on the table, he lit a cigarette.
Bauer waited patiently till he'd puffed a couple of times, then nodded. "No, they won't have a Red revolution, not right away. It's a conservative country, and Marxism is tied to the black man there, which means the white man has, or thinks he has, a strong extra reason to hate it. But the Confederates' time is coming, too. Sooner or later, all the capitalist countries will have their revolutions."
He spoke with the certainty of a devout Catholic talking about the miracle of transubstantiation. Chester Martin's faith in Socialism was newer, more pragmatic, and neither so deep nor so abiding. He said, "Maybe so, Al, but there's liable to be a hell of a long time hiding in that sooner or later."
"The dialectic doesn't say how fast things will happen," Bauer answered calmly. "It just says they will happen, and that's enough for me."
"Maybe for you," Martin said. "Me, I'd sort of like to know whether a revolution's coming in my time or whether it's something my great-grandchildren will be waiting for—if I ever have any." He wasn't so young as he had been. There were times when he wished he'd found a girl as soon as he came home from the war, or maybe even before then. But work in the foundry and work for the Socialist Party left little time for courting, or even thinking about courting.
Back when he'd been a Democrat, he'd thought Socialist girls were loose, without a moral to their name. People said it so often, he'd been sure it was true. Now, rather to his regret, he knew better. A lot of the women in the Socialist Party were married to Socialist men. A lot of the ones who weren't might as well have been married to the Party. That left. .. slim pickings.
Albert Bauer said, "Even if we don't get a revolution in the CSA any time soon, we don't want the reactionaries in charge down there. That would turn the class struggle on its head. As far as I'm concerned, keeping the Freedom Party down is reason enough to let reparations go."
"Well, maybe," Martin said. He wouldn't say any more than maybe, no matter how his friend tried to argue him around. He was sorry the Confederates had had their president shot. He wouldn't have wished that even on the CSA. But not wishing anything bad on the Confederate States didn't necessarily mean he wished anything good on them, either.
After he got home that evening, the topic came up again around the supper table. He'd expected it would; the newsboys were hawking papers by shouting about reparations. "What do you think, Chester?" Stephen Douglas Martin asked. "You were the one who was doing the fighting."
"Hard to say, Pa," Martin answered. "I used to think that, if I ever saw a Reb drowning, I'd toss him an anvil. Now—I just don't know."
"Can't we let the war be over at last?" Louisa Martin said. "Haven't both sides been through enough yet? When can we be satisfied?"
"Might as well ask the Mormons out West, Ma," her daughter Sue said. "They just took some shots at a couple of Army trucks—did you see that in the newspaper? They don't forget we beat them. You can bet the Confederates haven't forgotten we beat them. So why should we forget it?"
"It goes both ways, though," Chester said. "It's not an easy question. If we keep holding the Rebs down, they'll hate us on account of that. They did it to us for years and years, after the War of Secession and then after the Second Mexican War. Do we want them thinking about nothing but paying us back, the way we worked so hard to get even with them and with England and France?"
"You sound like a Socialist, all right," his father said, laughing. "Pass the peas, will you, you lousy Red?"
Chester laughed, too, and passed the bowl. "Talking to you and Mother, I sound like a Socialist. When I talk to people down at the Socialist hall, I sound like a Democrat half the time. I've noticed that before. I'm stuck in the middle, you might say."
"People who can see both sides of the question usually are," his mother told him. "It's not the worst place in the world to be."
Sue Martin looked curiously at Chester. "With that Purple Heart in your bedroom, I'd think you'd be the last one to want to let the Confederates up off the floor."
He shrugged. "Like Mother says, maybe it's time for the war to be over and done with. Besides, the one thing I don't want to do is have to fight those ... so-and-so's again." Talking about a new war almost made him slip back into the foul language of the trenches. "If they can settle down because they're not paying reparations any more, that might not be too bad."
"You make good sense, son," Stephen Douglas Martin said. His wife nodded. After a moment, so did Sue. Martin's father went on, "Now, what are the odds that anybody in Congress would know common sense if it flew around Philadelphia in an aeroplane?"
"There's a Socialist majority," Martin said. But that didn't prove anything, and he knew it. "We'll just have to wait and see, won't we?"
Out of the blue, Sue asked, "How do you think that Congresswoman you met would vote? You know the one I mean—the one whose brother got wounded while he was in your squad?"
"Flora Hamburger," Martin said. "Yeah, sure, I know who you mean. That's a good question. She usually does what's right. I don't really know. We'll have to keep watching the newspapers, I guess."
"Flora Hamburger." Louisa Martin snapped her fingers. "I know where I saw that name. She's the one who got engaged to the vice president a little while ago." She looked from her son to her daughter and back again, as if to say getting engaged would satisfy her: catching a vice president was unnecessary.
"Mother," Sue said in warning tones.
"She's just giving you a rough time," Martin said. That got his sister and his mother both glaring at him. He forked up some peas, freshly conscious of the dangers peacemakers faced when they stepped between warring factions.
When Chester looked up from the peas, he found his father eyeing him with more than a little amusement. Stephen Douglas Martin had the good sense to stay out of a quarrel he couldn't hope to influence.
Over the next few days, the debate about reparations stayed in the newspapers, along with the reprisals the Army was taking against the perennially rebellious Mormons in Utah. The collision of two aeroplanes carrying mail elbowed both those stories out of the headlines for a little while, but the excitement about the crash died quickly—though not so quickly as the two luckless pilots had.
When Flora Hamburger came out in favor of ending reprisals, the papers carried the news on the front page. "Conscience of the Congress says yes!" newsboys shouted. "Reparations repeal seen as likely!"
Martin was less impressed with the announcement than he would have been before Congresswoman Hamburger got engaged to Vice President Blackford. In a way, that made her part of the administration proposing the new policy. But then again, from what he knew of her, she wasn't so easy to influence. Maybe she was speaking her mind after all.
"I think the bill will pass now. I hope it works out for the best, that's all," Martin said when Sue asked him about it that night over oxtail soup. "Can't know till it happens."
"When you do something, you can't know ahead of time what will come of it," his father said. ^Politicians will tell you they do. but they don't. Sometimes, you just go ahead and do things and see where they lead."
"That's how the war happened," Martin said. "Nobody imagined it would be so bad when it started. When it started, people cheered. But we locked horns with the Rebs and the Canucks, and for the longest time nobody could go forward or back. I hope this doesn't go wrong the same way, that's all."
"Sometimes being afraid of what could go wrong is a good reason not to do anything," Stephen Douglas Martin observed.
"You're a Democrat, all right," Chester said.
"Well, so I am," his father agreed. "Upton Sinclair's been in for more than a year now, and I'm switched if I can see how he's set the world on fire."
Louisa Martin said, "We already set the world on fire once, not very long ago. Isn't that enough for you, Stephen?"
"Well, maybe it is, when you put it like that," her husband said. "If letting the Confederates off the hook means we don't have to fight another war, I suppose I'm for it. But if they start spending the money they would have given us on guns and such, that'll cause trouble like you wouldn't believe." He raised his mug of beer. "Here's hoping they've learned their lesson." He sipped the suds.
"Here's hoping," Chester Martin echoed. He drank, too. So did his mother and sister.
Roger Kimball was drunk. He'd been drunk a lot of the time since Grady Calkins shot President Wade Hampton V Staring down into his glass of whiskey, he muttered, "Stupid bastard. Stupid fucking bastard." Calkins might as well have taken his Tredegar and shot the Freedom Party right between the eyes.
The whiskey, Kimball decided, was staring back at him. He drank it down so it wouldn't do that any more. Any old excuse in a storm, he thought. He poured himself a fresh glass. Maybe this one would be more polite. Whether it was or not, he'd drink it.
He did a lot of his own pouring these days. Too many people recognized him on the streets and in the saloons of Charleston. A few weeks before, a lot of those people would have greeted him with a wave and a cheery call of "Freedom!" Now they glared. Sometimes they cursed. One man had threatened to kill him if he saw him again. Kimball wasn't too alarmed—he knew how to take care of himself—but he spent more time in his flat than he had.
That meant his bankroll shrank with every day's inflation. He didn't get into so many card games as he had, which was too damn bad, because they'd been what kept him afloat. Without them, the millions that paid the rent one week bought a sandwich the next week, a cigar the week after that, and were good only as pretty paper the week after that.
"God damn Grady Calkins," he said, and drank some of the polite whiskey. It wasn't fair. The more whiskey he drank, the more obviously it wasn't fair. The Freedom Party still stood for exactly the same things as it had before the madman shot the president. Kimball still thought those things were as important as he had then. A couple of weeks before, people had applauded him and applauded Jake Featherston. Now they wouldn't give the Freedom Party the time of day. Where was the justice in that?
Tears came into his eyes, a drunk's easy tears. One rolled down his cheek—or maybe that was just a drop of sweat. Charleston in the summer, even early in the summer, taught a man everything he needed to know about sweating and then some.
Kimball knocked back the rest of his drink. At last, instead of leaving him furious or maudlin, it did what he wanted it to do: it hit him over the head like a rock. He staggered into the bedroom, took off his shoes, lay down diagonally across the bed, and passed out before he could undress.
Sunlight streaming in through the bedroom window woke him the next morning. It seemed so hot, so bright, so molten, he thought for a moment he'd died and gone to hell. He squinted his eyes down to narrow slits so he could come close to bearing the glare. When he rolled away from it, his head pounded like a sub-mersible's diesel running at full throttle.
His mouth tasted as if too many people had stubbed out too many cigars in there. Greasy sweat bathed his body from aching head to stockinged feet. He thought about getting up and taking a small nip to ease the worst of the pain, but his stomach did a slow, horrified loop at the mere idea.
Eventually, he did get up. "Only proves I'm a hero," he said, and winced at the sound of his own voice even though he hadn't been so rash as to speak loudly. He staggered into the bathroom, splashed his face with cold water, and used more cold water to wash down some aspirins. His stomach let out another loud shout of protest when they landed, as if it were a submarine under heavy attack from depth charges. He wondered if they'd stay down. He gulped a few times, but they did.
He brushed his teeth, which got rid of the worst of the cigar butts. Then he ran a tub full of cold water, stripped off his sweat-soaked clothes, and gingerly stepped in. It felt dreadful and wonderful at the same time. After he'd toweled himself dry and put on a shirt and trousers that didn't smell as if he'd stolen them from a drunk in the gutter, he felt better. Before too long, he might decide he wanted to live after all.
Showing stern military discipline, he walked past the whiskey bottle on the coffee table in the front room and into the kitchen. Black coffee was almost as painful to get down as the aspirins had been, but made him feel better. After some thought, he cut a couple of thick slices of bread and ate them. They sank to his stomach like rocks, but added ballast once there.
He went back into the bathroom and combed his hair in front of the mirror. Only red tracks across the whites of his eyes and a certain general weariness betrayed his hangover to the world. He would do. Donning a straw hat to help shield his eyes from the slings and arrows of outrageous sunbeams, he left the apartment. However much he might have wanted to, he couldn't stay indoors all the time.
Newsboys selling the Courier and the Mercury both shouted the same headline: "United States end reparations!" The boys with stacks of the Mercury\ the Whig outlet, added, "President Mitchel says Confederate currency will recover!"
"I'll believe that when I see it," Kimball sneered: both newspapers cost a million dollars. But, if enough people believed it, it might happen. The prospect made him less happy than he would have thought possible. The shrinking—hell, the disappearing— Confederate dollar had helped fuel the Freedom Party's rise.
A cop strode up the street toward Kimball, twirling his billy club in a figure-eight. He recognized the ex-Navy man, and aimed the nightstick at him like a Tredegar. "I catch you and your pals going around making trouble like you used to, I'll run y'all in, you hear? Them's the orders I got from city hall."
"Oh, for Christ's sake, Bob," Kimball answered wearily, "tell me you didn't vote for Featherston and I'll call you a liar to your face."
"That don't have nothing to do with nothing." The policeman brushed a bit of lint from the sleeve of his gray tunic. "Word is, we got to be tough on keeping public order. We ain't messin' around with you boys no more, you hear?"
"I hear you," Kimball said, and went on his way. He would have made sure the Freedom Party walked small for a while, anyway—only sensible thing to do. But getting orders from a fair-weather friend rankled.
And, when he opened the door to the Freedom Party's Charleston offices, he realized the orders had been unnecessary for a different reason. The way things were right now, he would have had a devil of a time raising trouble even had he wanted to. The headquarters that had bustled all the way through the presidential campaign and afterwards felt more like a tomb now. Only a few people sat at their desks, none of them doing anything much. Damn that Calkins, Kimball thought again.
"God damn it," he said loudly, "it isn't the end of the world."
"Might as well be." Three people, one in the front of the office, one in the middle, and one at the back, said the same thing at the same time.
"No! Jesus Christ, no," Kimball said. "If we were right before that miserable son of a bitch of a Hampton got his head blown off, we're still right now. People will see it, so help me God they will."
One of the men who'd said Might as well be replied, "I had a rock chucked through my front window the other night. Had a note tied round it with a string, just like in the dime novels "
"The dime novels that cost millions nowadays," Kimball broke in.
As if he hadn't spoken, the Freedom Party functionary went on, "Said my neighbors would whale the tar out of me if I ever went out wearing white and butternut again, or else burn my house down." He gave Kimball as hard a look as he could with his round, doughy face.
Kimball glared back. The leftover pain of his hangover made his scowl even fiercer than it would have been otherwise. "God damn you to hell, Bill Ambrose, I didn't have a thing to do with burning down Tom Brearley's house. I don't do things like that. I might have shot the bastard—Lord knows I wanted to—or I might have beat him to death with a two-by-four, but I wouldn't have done that. It's a coward's way out, like throwing a rock through a window. I go straight after what I don't like. You understand me?"
Bill Ambrose muttered something. Kimball took two swift strides toward him. Feeling the way he did, he was ready—more than ready—to brawl. Ambrose wasn't, though he'd been bold enough when the stalwarts marched. Hastily, he said, "I understand you, Roger."
"You'd damn well better," Kimball growled. "We've got to walk small for a while, that's all. Yeah, some of our summer birds have flown south. Yeah, the cops are going to give us a rough time for a bit. But Jake Featherston's still the only man who can save this country. He's still the only man who has a prayer of licking the United States when we tangle with 'em again. All right, getting to the top won't be as easy as we hoped it would. That doesn't mean we can't do it."
He knew what he sounded like: a fellow at a football game when his team was down by two touchdowns more than halfway through the fourth quarter. If they only tried hard enough, they could still pull it out. If they gave up, they'd get steamrollered.
Looking around the office, he thought a lot of the men still there were on the point of giving up. They'd drift away, go back to being Whigs, and try to pretend their fling with the Freedom Party never happened, as if they'd gone out with a fast woman for a while and then given her up for the homely, familiar girl next door.
"Don't quit," he said earnestly. "That's all I've got to tell you, boys: don't quit. We are making this country what it ought to be. We never would have seen passbook laws with teeth if there hadn't been Freedom Party men in Congress. That bastard Layne might have won the election if it hadn't been for us."
Some of the men looked happier. Kimball knew he wasn't the only true-blue Party man here. But somebody behind him said, "Maybe things'll get better anyhow, now that we're not stuck with reparations any more."
That was Kimball's greatest fear. To fight it, he loaded his voice with scorn: "Ha! I know about Burton Mitchel, by God— I'm from Arkansas, too, remember? Only reason he got into the Senate is that his daddy and granddad were there before him— he's another one of those stinking aristocrats. You ask me, if he does anything but sit there like a bump on a log, it'll be the biggest miracle since Jesus raised Lazarus."
A few people laughed: not enough. Kimball spun on his heel and stalked out of the Freedom Party offices. He'd never been aboard a slowly sinking ship, but now he had a good notion of what it felt like.
And he got no relief out on King Street, either. Up the sidewalk toward him came Clarence Potter and Jack Delamotte. Potter's face twisted into a broad, unpleasant smile. "Hello, Roger. Haven't see you for a while," he said, his almost-Yankee accent grating on Kimball's ears. "I expect you're pleased with the pack of ruffians you chose. By all accounts, you fit right in."
Kimball's hands balled into fists. "First time I ever heard your whiny voice, I wanted to lick you. Just so you know, I haven't changed my mind."
Potter didn't back away, not an inch. And Delamotte took a step forward, saying, "You want him, you've got us both."
Joyously, Kimball waded in. The tiny rational part of his mind said he'd probably end up in the hospital. He didn't care. Potter's nose bent under his fist. As long as he got in a few good licks of his own, what happened to him didn't matter at all.
Sam Carsten was sick to death of the Boston Navy Yard. As far as he could see, the USS Remembrance might stay tied up here forever. He expected to find cobwebs hanging from the hawsers that moored the aeroplane carrier to its pier.
"There's nothing we can do, Carsten, not one damn thing," Commander Grady said when he complained about it. "The money's not in the budget for us to do anything but stay in port. We ought to count ourselves lucky they aren't cutting the ship up for scrap."
"They're fools, sir," Sam said. "They're nothing but a pack of fools. There's enough money in the budget for them to let the goddamn Confederates off the hook. But when it comes to us, when it comes to one of the reasons the Rebs had to pay reparations in the first place, a mouse ate a hole in the Socialists' pockets."
"If it makes you feel any better," Grady said, "the Army's feeling the pinch as hard as we are."
"It doesn't make me feel better, sir," Carsten answered. "It makes me feel worse."
"What kind of a Navy man are you, anyway?" the gunnery officer demanded in mock anger. "You're supposed to be happy when the Army takes it on the chin. Besides"—he grew serious once more—"misery loves company, doesn't it?"
"I don't know anything about that," Carsten said. "All I know is, I want us strong and the CSA weak. Whatever we need to do to make sure that happens, I'm for it. If it goes the other way, I'm against it."
"You do have the makings of an officer," Grady said thoughtfully. "You see what's essential, and you don't worry about anything else."
"Long as we are tied up here, sir, I've been trying to hit the books a little harder, as a matter of fact." Sam scratched his nose. His fingertips came away white and sticky from zinc-oxide ointment. A wry grin twisted up one corner of his mouth. "Besides, the more I stay belowdecks, the less chance I get to sunburn."
"Nobody can say you're not a white man," Grady agreed gravely. "With that stuff smeared all over your face, you're about the whitest man around."
"I only wish it did more good," Sam said. "I put it on just like the pharmacist's mate says, or even thicker, but I still toast. Hell, most of the time I look more like a pink man than a white one. I even burned over in Ireland."
"I remember that. It wasn't easy," Grady said. "They should have given you some kind of decoration for it."
"I guess they figured me turning red was decoration enough, even if I didn't think it was real pretty," Carsten said, which wrung a strangled snort from Commander Grady. Sam went on, "Sir, do you think we'd have more to do and more to do it with if Lieutenant Sandes hadn't flown his aeroplane into the stern when we were coming back across the Atlantic?"
"Nope," Grady answered. "We'd had accidents and battle damage before then. This business of flying aeroplanes off ships may be important, but it sure as hell isn't easy. The Remembrance doesn't carry as much armor as a battleship, either."
Remembering the shell that had struck his gun position, Sam nodded. "All right," he said. "I did wonder."
"I think we could have come through without any damage or accidents and still wound up right here," Grady said. "The problem isn't how we fought, because we fought well. The problem is politics." He made it a swearword.
"Yes, sir," Carsten said resignedly. He raised one of his pale eyebrows. "Can you think of any troubles that aren't politics, when you get down to it?"
Commander Grady rocked back on his heels and laughed. "No, by God, or not many, anyhow." He slapped Sam on the back, then pulled out a pad and a fountain pen and wrote rapidly. He pulled the top sheet off the pad and handed it to Carsten. "And here's a present for you: twenty-four hours' liberty. Go on across the river into Boston and have yourself a hell of a time."
"Thank you very much, sir!" Sam exclaimed.
He wanted to charge off the Remembrance then and there, but Grady held up a hand. "Just don't come back aboard Sunday afternoon with a dose of the clap, that's all. You do and I'll tear your stupid shortarm off and beat you over the head with it."
"Aye aye, sir," Sam said. "I promise." There were ways to make that unlikely to happen even if he didn't put on a rubber, though not all the girls in any house cared to use their mouths instead of doing what they usually did. If he had to pay a little extra for his fun, he would, that was all. He usually preferred a straight screw himself, but he hadn't expected to get this liberty and sure didn't want to end up in trouble on account of it. And the other was a hell of a lot of fun, too.
Several houses operated on the narrow streets across the Charles from the Navy Yard. Go where the customers are was a rule as old as the oldest profession. Sam got what he wanted— got it twice in quick succession, in fact, from an Italian woman about his own age who was as swarthy as he was fair. "Thanks, Isabella," he said, lazy and happy after the second time. He ran his hand through her hair. "And here's an extra dollar you don't have to tell anybody about."
"I thank you," she said as she got to her feet. "My little girl needs shoes. It will help." He hadn't thought about whores having children, but supposed it was one of the hazards of the trade.
A lot of the businesses near the south bank of the Charles that weren't brothels were saloons. Sam had himself a couple of schooners of beer. He thought about getting drunk—Commander Grady hadn't told him not to do that. But, after he'd emptied that second glass, he wiped his mouth on his sleeve and walked out of the dingy dive where he'd been drinking. He'd had his ashes hauled, he'd drunk enough to feel it, and nothing in the whole wide world seemed urgent, not even getting lit up. If he felt like doing it later, he would. If he didn't. . . well, he still had most of a day left without anyone to tell him what to do. For a Navy man, that was a pearl of great price.
He sauntered through the streets of Boston, thumbs in the pockets of his bell-bottomed trousers. He wasn't used to sauntering. When he went somewhere aboard the Remembrance, he always went with a purpose in mind, and he almost always had to hurry. Taking it easy was liberty of a sort he rarely got.
Half by accident, half by design, he came out onto the Boston Common: acres and acres of grass intended for nothing but taking it easy. If he wanted to, he could lie down there, put his cap over his eyes, and nap in the sun.
"No, thanks," he said aloud at that thought. If he napped in the sun. he'd roast, sure as pork would in the galley ovens of the Remembrance. But there were trees here and there on the Common. Napping in the shade might not be so bad.
He headed for a good-sized oak with plenty of drooping, leafy branches to hold the sun at bay. Also heading for it from a different direction were a girl of nine or so, a boy who looked like her older brother, and, behind them, a woman with a picnic basket. Seeing Sam, the girl started to run. When she got to the shade under the oaks, she said, "This is our tree. You can't have it."
"Mary Jane, there's plenty of room for us all," the woman said sternly. "And don't you dare be rude to a sailor. Remember, your father was a sailor."
"Ma'am, if it's any trouble, I'll find another tree," Sam said.
The woman shook her head. "It's no trouble at all—or it won't be, unless you make some. But if you made a lot of trouble, you wouldn't have said you'd go someplace else like that."
"I'm peaceable," Sam agreed. If he hadn't paid a call on the house where Isabella worked, he might have felt like making some trouble: she was a pretty woman, even if she looked tired. And she'd said the girl's—Mary Jane's—father was a sailor, which probably made her a widow. Sometimes widows missed what their husbands weren't there to give them any more. As things were, though, Sam just sat down on the grass near the tree trunk, in the deepest part of the shade.
In a rustle of wool, the woman sat down, too, and took a blanket from the basket and spread it out on the grass. She started putting bowls of food on the blanket. While she was doing that, her son asked Sam, "Sir, did you know anybody who sailed aboard the USS Ericssonl"
"Can't say that I did," Carsten answered. Then his eyes narrowed as he remembered where he'd heard the name. "That ship! Was your father on her, sonny?"
"Yes, sir," the boy said. "And the stinking Rebs sank her after the war was over. That's not right."
"It sure as . . . the dickens isn't," Sam said, inhibited in his choice of language by the presence of the woman and little girl. "I'm awfully sorry to hear that. My ship got torpedoed once, by the Japs out in the Pacific. We didn't sink, but I know we were just lucky."
"And the Confederate skipper who sank the Ericsson is still walking around free as a bird down in South Carolina," the woman said. "He murdered my husband and more than a hundred other men, and no one cares. Even the president doesn't care."
"If Teddy Roosevelt had won his third term, he'd have done something about it," Carsten said. "If the Rebs didn't hand that.. . fellow over, TR would have walloped the Confederate States till they did."
"I think so, too," the woman said. "If women had the vote in Massachusetts, I would have voted for Sinclair when he got elected. I've changed my mind since I found out about the Ericsson > though."
"I bet you have," Sam said. "One thing you have to give Teddy—he never took any guff from anybody."
"No." The woman pointed to the food. "Would you like some fried chicken and ham and potato salad? I made more than we can eat, even if these two"—she pointed at her children—"do put it away like there's no tomorrow."
"Are you sure, ma'am?" Carsten asked. If she was a widow, things were liable to be as tough for her as for the whore who'd gone down on her knees in front of him—tougher, maybe. But she nodded so emphatically, turning her down would have been rude.
He ate a ham sandwich and a drumstick and homemade potato salad and pickled tomatoes, and washed them down with lemonade that made him pucker and smile at the same time. Even though her children did eat like starving Armenians, the woman tried to press more on him.
"Couldn't touch another bite," he said, which wasn't quite true, and, "Everything was terrific," which was. "Haven't sat down to a spread like that since I was a kid." That was true, too.
"I'm glad you enjoyed it," she said, and seemed happy for a moment. She took a pack of cigarettes from her handbag. He got out a box of matches and lit the smoke for her. But as she drew on it, she frowned. "He's probably walking around down there in Charleston, puffing a big fat cigar. Damn him."
Sam had heard women swear before, but never with that quiet intensity. He didn't know what to say, so he didn't say anything. He watched the children play for a while, then got to his feet. "Obliged, ma'am—much obliged," he said. "Good luck to you." She nodded, but didn't speak. He went on his way. Only after he'd crossed half the Common did he realize he hadn't learned her name.