XIX
Sylvia Enos sat in a Charleston, South Carolina, jail cell, wondering what would happen to her next. Looking back on it, she decided she shouldn't have shot Roger Kimball. Now she would have to pay for what she'd done. Try as she would, though, she couldn't make herself sorry she'd done it.
She shared the small women's wing of the Charleston city jail with a couple of drunks and a couple of streetwalkers. They all kept sending her awestruck looks because she was locked up on a murder charge. She hadn't imagined anything like that. It was funny, if you looked at it the right way.
A matron with a face like a clenched fist came down the hall and stopped in front of Sylvia's cell. "Your lawyer is here," she said, and unlocked the door. Then she quickly stepped back, as if afraid Sylvia might overpower her and escape. Sylvia found that pretty funny, too.
Her lawyer was a chubby, white-mustached, very pink man named Bishop Polk Magrath. He insisted that she call him Bish. She'd never called anyone Bish in her life, but didn't argue. He sat on one side of a table in a tiny visiting room, she on the other. The matron stood close by to make sure they didn't pass anything back and forth.
"I still don't understand why you're helping me," she said. She'd said that before, and hadn't got any kind of answer that made sense to her.
Now she did, after a fashion. Magrath's blue, blue eyes sparkled. "You don't seem to have realized what a cause celebre your case has become, ma'am," he said. "I'll draw more notice for defending you than I would in ten years of ordinary cases."
"I don't see how you'll draw notice for defending me and losing," Sylvia said. "I did it." She hadn't tried to run after shooting Kimball. She'd given her revolver to the first man who stuck his head out the door of another apartment and waited for the police to come arrest her.
"Let's just put it like this, Mrs. Enos," the lawyer said: "There are a good many people in this town who think Mr. Kimball deserved what you gave him, a good many people who aren't the least bit sorry he's dead. If we can get enough of them on a jury, you might just see Rhode Island again."
"Massachusetts," Sylvia said automatically. She scratched her head. "I don't follow you at all. Isn't—wasn't—Roger Kimball a hero down here for sinking the Ericsson?"
"Oh, he is, ma'am. To some people, he is," Magrath said. By the expression on the matron's face, she might well have been one of those people. The lawyer went on, "But he's not a hero to everybody in the Confederate States, not after what happened last June he's not."
"Oh," Sylvia said softly. At last, a light went on in her head. "Because he was a Freedom Party bigshot, you mean."
"What a clever lady you are, Mrs. Enos." Magrath beamed at her. "That's right. That's just exactly right. There are people in this country—there are people in this town—who would be happy if the same thing that happened to Roger Kimball would happen to the whole Freedom Party."
One of those people, whoever they might be, was without a doubt paying Bishop Polk Magrath's fees. Sylvia certainly wasn't. She'd spent more than she could afford getting a passport and a one-way ticket down to Charleston. She hadn't expected she'd be going back to Boston. Maybe she'd been wrong.
"Time's up for this visit," the tough-looking matron said. Sylvia obediently got to her feet. The lawyer started to reach across the table to shake hands with her. A glance from the matron stopped him. He contented himself with tipping his derby instead. "Come along," the matron told Sylvia, and Sylvia came.
Halfway back to her cell, she asked, "Will supper be more of that cornmeal mush?" It didn't taste like much of anything, but it filled her stomach.
As if she hadn't spoken, the matron said, "You damnyankees killed my husband and my son. and my brother's got a hook where his hand used to be."
"I'm sorry," Sylvia said. "I haven't got a brother, and my son's too young to be a soldier. But the man I shot snuck up on my husband and more than a hundred other sailors after the war was over, and he didn't just kill them—he murdered them like he'd shot them in the back."
The matron said nothing more till they got back to Sylvia's cell. As she locked Sylvia inside once more, she remarked, "Grits for supper again, yes," and went on her way.
"What's your lawyer got to say?" one of the streetwalkers called to Sylvia. "A lawyer—God almighty." She sounded as if she never expected to enjoy a lawyer's professional services, though a lawyer might enjoy hers.
Two days later, the hard-faced matron marched up to Sylvia's cell and announced, "You've got another visitor." Disapproval congealed on her like fat in a pan cooling on the stove.
"Is it—Bish?" Sylvia still had to work to say that. The matron shook her head. Sylvia frowned in confusion. Now that Kimball was dead, her lawyer was the only person she knew or even knew of in Charleston. "Who is it, then?"
Through tight lips, the matron said, "Just come on." Sylvia came. Sitting in an iron cage staled very quickly.
Waiting for her in the visitors' room was a blond woman about her own age whose sleek good looks, coiffure, and clothes all shouted Money! "Mrs. Enos, my name is Anne Colleton."
That meant nothing to Sylvia—and then, to her dismay, it did. She'd seen the name in a couple of the newspaper stories that talked about Kimball. "You're one of the people who helped the Freedom Party," she said. Maybe Bishop Polk Magrath had been talking through that derby of his.
Anne nodded. "I was one of those people, yes, Mrs. Enos. And I was a friend of Roger Kimball's, too—I was, up till his last day on earth."
Sylvia heard, or thought—hoped—she heard, a slight stress on the past tense. "Were you?" she asked, with her own slight stress.
Maybe that was approval in Anne Colleton's eyes. "You listen, don't you?" the woman from the Confederate States said. "In fact, I'm not telling you any great secret when I say that Roger Kimball and I were more than friends, up till his last day on earth."
Whatever hope Sylvia had went up in smoke. It hadn't been approval after all. It must have been well-bred, well-contained fury. "Have you come here to gloat at me in jail, then?" she asked with gloomy near-certainty.
"What?" Anne Colleton stared, then started to laugh. "You don't understand, then, do you, my dear?" Sylvia shook her head. She only understood that she didn't understand. Anne's voice went cold and harsh. "I'll spell it out for you, in that case. Not too long before you shot him, Roger Kimball tried to take me by force when I told him I didn't care to be more than his friend any more. He did not succeed, I might add." She spoke proudly. "I might also add that I came very close to shooting him myself before you got the chance."
"Oh," Sylvia whispered. Something more seemed to be called for. She went on, "I'm glad you didn't. It would have meant I'd spent all that money on my passport and train fare for nothing."
"We wouldn't want that, would we?" Anne Colleton said, and sounded as if she meant it. "With any luck at all, Mrs. Enos, the Confederate government or the government of South Carolina will pay your train fare north. Bish Magrath and I will do everything we can to see that that's what happens."
"Oh," Sylvia repeated in a different tone of voice. She'd put her children on the train, too, to distant cousins in Connecticut— distant, but closer than any other relatives she had close by. George, Jr., and Mary Jane had thought it would be a short get-acquainted visit. So had her cousins. Maybe, just maybe, if God and Anne Colleton turned out kind, they'd be right.
"Time's up," the matron announced, and even Anne Colleton, who seemed able to outstare the lightning, did not argue with her. Sylvia got to her feet and headed back toward her cell. When she was about halfway there, the matron said, "Some rich folks reckon they can buy their way out of anything."
/ hope this one's right, Sylvia thought. Saying that out loud didn't seem to be the best idea she'd ever had.
Anne Colleton did not visit her again. Bishop Polk Magrath did, a couple of times. He didn't ask many questions; he seemed to come more to cheer her up than for any other reason. She didn't know how cheerful she should be. She'd gathered Anne Colleton was a power in the land, but how big a power? Sylvia couldn't find out till she went to court.
She came before a judge two weeks after Anne Colleton visited her. Bish Magrath kept beaming like a grandfather with plenty of candy canes in his pockets for his grandchildren to find. The lawyer at the other table in front of the judge—the district attorney, Sylvia supposed he was—seemed anything but happy. But was that because of the case or because he'd had a fight with his wife before coming here? Sylvia couldn't tell.
"I understand you have a request before we proceed, Mr. Chesterfield?" the judge asked the district attorney.
"Yes, your Honor, I do," the lawyer—Chesterfield—said. When he glanced over to Sylvia, he looked as if he'd bitten down hard on a lemon. "May it please the court, your Honor, the state must recognize the extraordinary circumstances that prompted the defendant to act as she has admitted acting. In light of the fact that the decedent did cause the death of the defendant's husband not during wartime but after he knew combat had ended, the state is willing"—he looked none too willing himself—"to further the cause of international understanding and amity by not pressing charges in this case, provided that the defendant leave the Confederate States on the first available transportation north and solemnly swear never to return to our nation again, on pain of rearrest and the charges' being reinstituted."
"How say you, Mr. Magrath?" the judge inquired.
"I am in complete accord with my learned colleague, your Honor," Magrath said placidly. "I should also like to note for the record that the government of the United States has formally requested clemency for my client from both the government of the Confederate States and the government of the sovereign state of South Carolina. It now rests in your hands, your Honor."
Things were happening too fast for Sylvia. They weren't just arranged—they were nailed down tight. "How say you, Mrs. Enos?" the judge asked her. "If set at liberty, will you quit the Confederate States of America, never to return?"
Bish Magrath had to nod before she could stammer, "Y-Yes, sir."
Bang! Down came the gavel. "So ordered," the judge declared. "Mrs. Enos, you will be on a northbound train before the sun sets this evening." Numbly, Sylvia nodded. She had her life back. Now she would have to figure out what to do with it.
Lieutenant Lije Jenkins sorted through the mail that had come into the barrel unit at Fort Leavenworth. He held out an envelope to Irving Morrell. "Letter from Philadelphia for you, Colonel."
"War Department?" Morrell asked, not that he had much doubt. Jenkins nodded. Morrell took the envelope. "Well, let's see what kind of birthday present they have for me today." His birthday still lay a month away, but he thought about it more than he had before he got married, because Agnes' came only a week afterwards. Have to get into Leavenworth and do some shopping for her, he thought, and laughed under his breath. Amazing, the small domestic things in which he took pleasure these days because he was doing them for the woman he loved.
He opened the envelope and unfolded the letter it held. As his eyes went back and forth across the typewritten page, he stiffened. Colonel Morrell, the letter read, Having completed work on the test vehicle for a new-model barrel and having also completed evaluation of optimum strategic utilization of barrels ir-regardless of model, you are ordered to terminate the program you now head at Fort Leavenworth and to report to the War Department Personnel Office here in Philadelphia no later than I March 1923 for reassignment. Each day earlier than the aforesaid date for the closure of the project will be greatly appreciated due to reduced expenditures as a result thereof
Only after he'd gone through the letter twice did he notice who had signed it: Lieutenant Colonel John Abell, the adjutant to General Hunter Liggett, who'd replaced Leonard Wood as U.S. Army Chief of Staff a few months into President Sinclair's administration.
"Well, well," Morrell said softly. A pigeon had come home to roost. He'd spent some time as a General Staff officer during the Great War, and had not got on well with John Abell. Abell was a brilliant man, everything a military administrator should be and then some. Morrell had always made it plain he would sooner have been out in the field fighting. When he'd got out in the field he'd smashed the enemy. And now he was going to pay for it.
"Something wrong, sir?" Lieutenant Jenkins asked.
"No good deed goes unpunished," Morrell answered.
"Sir?" Jenkins said. Morrell handed him the letter. He read it, then stared at his superior. "Close down the Barrel Works? They can't do that!"
"They can. They are. Whether they ought to or not is a different question, but not one that's mine to answer," Morrell said. "You see why they're doing it—they need to save money." He saw no point to saying anything about John Abell. If personal animosity had dictated where the savings would come from ... If that had happened, it wouldn't be the first time.
"But you haven't finished your work with the test model, sir," Jenkins protested.
"In a way, I have," Morrell told him. "I've done about everything I can do with one machine. If they'd coughed up the money for more than one, I could have done a lot more than I did. I just wish they were passing the Barrel Works on to someone else instead of closing it down"
"Yes, sir!" Jenkins' face was red with anger. "They might as well be telling us we've wasted all the time and work we put in here." He didn't think about what he would do next himself. In Morrell's book, that made him a good soldier.
"That's probably what they think," Morrell told him. He remembered how Abell had looked at him during the war when he'd agreed with Custer that the barrel doctrine the General Staff had developed needed changing. He might have been an atheist ripping into Holy Writ.
That he'd been right hadn't made things better. It might have made things worse.
"What are you going to do?" Jenkins asked.
"Obey the order," Morrell said with a sigh. "What else can I do? They have the test model. They have my reports. They can go on from there. Things won't disappear. They'll just stop for a while." That might prove as bad, but he didn't care to dwell on such gloomy possibilities.
He left the office to break the news to the men who had worked so hard for so long with the test model. The first one he ran into was Sergeant Michael Pound. "What's the matter, sir?" the barrel gunner asked. "You look ready to chew bolts and spit rivets."
"We're out of business, that's what," Morrell said, and went on to explain how and why—or what he understood of why—they were out of business.
Pound frowned. With his thick body, wide shoulders, and broad face, he could easily have looked like a lout. He didn't; his features were clever and expressive. "That's—very shortsighted, isn't it, sir?" he said when Morrell had finished. "The point is to stay ahead of everybody else, after all. How are we going to do that if we drop out of the race?"
"I don't know the answer to that question, Sergeant," Morrell replied. "I do know I've received a legal order to shut down the Barrel Works and report to Philadelphia once I've done it. I have to obey that order."
"Yes, sir, I understand," Pound said. "I hope you raise some hell when you get to Philadelphia, though."
"I intend to try, anyhow," Morrell said. "How much good that will do, God only knows. Now—what about you, Sergeant? Do you have any new assignment in mind? I'll do what I can to help you get it."
"That's very kind of you, sir." Pound scratched his brown mustache as he thought. "I suppose I'd better go back to the regular artillery, sir. Whether we have barrels or not, we'll always need guns."
"That's true. It's a sensible choice," Morrell said. He got the idea that most of Pound's choices were sensible. "I'll see what I can arrange. I hate to say it, but it's liable to be a better choice than staying in barrels, the way things are."
"If we do get in trouble again, we'll wish we'd done more now," Pound said with a massive shrug. "We'll all be running around trying to do what we should have done in years in a few weeks."
That was also likely to be true. Trying not to dwell on how likely it was, Morrell slapped Sergeant Pound on the shoulder and went on to find the rest of the test model's crew. They took the news hard, too. Then he had to break it to the crews of the other barrels, the Great War machines that also tested tactics, and to the mechanics who kept all the big, complex machines running. Little by little, he realized what a mountain of paperwork he'd have to climb by the first of March.
After he'd spread the word to the soldiers it affected, he went to tell the other person who needed to know: his wife. He found Agnes ironing clothes. "What are you doing here at this hour of the morning?" she said in surprise. Something in her smile as he kissed her told him what she hoped he was there for.
But he hadn't come home for that, however much he would have enjoyed it. He told her why he had come home. The explanation came out smooth as if he'd rehearsed it. As a matter of fact, he had rehearsed it, going over it again and again with his men.
Agnes pursed her lips. She was an Army wife, and had taken on many of the attitudes of her officer husband (she'd probably had some of those attitudes already, her first husband also being a soldier). She said, "They should be giving you all the tools you need to do the job right, not taking away the ones they did let you have."
"You know I feel the same way about it, honey, but I can't do anything about it except close down the Barrel Works, pack my bags, and hop on the train for Philadelphia. That means you get to hop on the train for Philadelphia, too."
Her eyes widened. "I hadn't thought of that," she said. "I've never been to Philadelphia, even to visit. Now we'll be living there, won't we?"
"Unless they ever really get around to moving the War Department back to Washington," Morrell answered. "They've been talking about it ever since the end of the war, but I'll believe it when I see it."
"Philadelphia," Agnes said, her eyes far away. "What's it like, living in Philadelphia?"
"Crowded," he said. "Expensive. The air is full of soot and smoke all the time. It's a big city. I don't much like big cities."
Agnes smiled. "I've noticed."
"I figured you had." Morrell smiled, too, but the smile slid into a grimace. "Just have to make the best of it, I suppose."
"Philadelphia," Agnes repeated. He wondered if she'd even heard him. "What will it be like in Philadelphia?"
As she'd come to know him, he'd also come to know her. At least half of what that question meant was, Will I measure up to the competition? Morrell smiled again. He was certain of the answer, and gave it: "Sweetheart, you'll knock 'em dead."
One of his wife's hands flew to her hair, patting it into place or maybe the outward expression of an imagined new style. "You say sweet things," she told him.
"Only when I mean them," he said. "Of course, when I'm talking about you, I mean them all the time."
She stepped up, hugged him, and kissed him. His arms tightened around her. One thing might have led to another—except that, with regret, he broke off the embrace. Agnes looked disappointed; yes, she'd been ready for more. But she didn't frown for long. "You're going to have a lot of work to do," she said, proving she was indeed an Army wife.
Morrell nodded. "I sure am. I haven't even told the base commandant about my orders yet—though I suppose a copy will have gone to him, too." He hugged Agnes again, briefly now. "You're really being a brick about this, honey."
"I think they're making a big mistake," she answered. "But you've got your orders, and you've got to follow them."
You've got your orders, and you've got to follow them. That was the way the Army worked, all right. Morrell had trouble imagining it working any other way. "Couldn't have put it better myself," he said. He gave Agnes one more kiss, then turned to go. "The work won't do itself, however much I wish it would."
"All right," his wife said. "I'll see you tonight, then."
He smiled at the promise in her voice. He started looking ahead toward Philadelphia, too. Whatever they set him to doing, he'd do it as well as he knew how. He'd do it well, period; he had a good notion of his own ability. And performing well with important people watching did have certain advantages. With a little luck, he'd be wearing stars on his shoulders instead of eagles before too long.
He wouldn't be so easy to move around like a pawn on a chess board then, not with general's rank he wouldn't. As a matter of fact, he'd be able to do some maneuvering of his own once he had general's rank. Maybe John Abell thought he'd done Mor-rell's career a bad turn. Morrell's smile was predatory. Anyone who thought that about him had another think coming.
* * *
Jefferson Pinkard walked toward the livery stable. "Freedom!'" he called to other men heading the same way.
"Freedom!" The greeting came back loud and clear as it had before the stalwarts went out to the Alabama State Fairgrounds when President Hampton came to Birmingham. The Freedom Party had raised a lot more hell than anybody—anybody except Grady Calkins, anyhow—expected.
And now the price of that hell was showing. Jeff called "Freedom!" a couple more times before he went into the stable, but only a couple more times. The building had no trouble holding meetings these days. A lot of people who had been in the Party— people who'd put on white and butternut and banged heads, too—weren't any more. A lot of people who had been in the Party weren't admitting it any more, either.
Fair-weather friends, Pinkard thought scornfully. He still thought most of the same things were wrong with the Confederate States now as had been wrong with the country before Wade Hampton V got shot. He had trouble understanding why more people didn't feel the same way.
Up at the front of the stable, Caleb Briggs paced back and forth, pausing every so often to cough. Even by lamplight, the tough little dentist's color wasn't good. Pinkard wondered how long he could last, especially burning himself at both ends as he did. The damnyankees hadn't killed him all at once when they gassed him. They were doing it an inch at a time, giving him years full of hell before they put him in his grave. To Jeff's way of thinking, that was worse.
After a while, Briggs didn't seem able to stand waiting any longer. "Come on, y'all, move up to the front," he rasped. "Talking's hard enough for me; I'll be goddamned if I'm gonna shout when I don't have to. And there's room. Wish to Christ there wasn't, but there is."
A year before, the livery stable would have been packed. Men would have been milling around outside. Now there were more folding chairs and hay bales set out than people to sit on them. Jeff plopped his bottom down onto a chair in the second row. He could have sat in the first row—plenty of chairs to take—but memories of getting called on in school made him stay less conspicuous.
Caleb Briggs looked over the house. He pursed his lips, coughed again, and began: "Well, we're still here, boys." Maybe he gave a dry chuckle then, or maybe it was just another cough.
"Freedom!' Jefferson Pinkard called, along with his comrades.
"Freedom!" Briggs echoed. It sounded like a dying echo, too, enough so to send a chill through Jeff. But the dentist picked up spirit as he went on, "We are still here, dammit, and we aren't going to go away, either, no matter how much the niggers and the folks in striped trousers and top hats and the generals in the War Department wish we would. We're here for the long haul, and we're going to win."
"Freedom!" The shout was louder this time, stronger. Pinkard felt a little of the jolt of energy he always got from hearing Jake Featherston speak. He wondered if Caleb Briggs would last long enough to see the Freedom Party win. He had his doubts, even if victory came soon—and it wouldn't, dammit.
But Briggs was undeterred. He'd been a soldier, and pulled his weight like a soldier. "What we have to do now is make it through the hard times," he said. "They aren't over yet. They won't be over for a while. It'll be God's own miracle if we don't lose seats in Congress this fall. What we've got to do is try and hold on to as many as we can, so we don't look like we're going down the toilet in front of the whole damn country. And what we've got to do right here in Birmingham is make sure we send Barney Stevens back to Richmond in November."
Jeff clapped his hands. He wanted to see Stevens sent back to Richmond to keep the Freedom Party's seat there. He also wanted Stevens in Richmond because the Congressman was a rough customer whom he didn't particularly want coming home to Birmingham.
"We hang tough," Briggs was saying. "We try not to lose too much here in 1923, and we try to build up toward 1925 and especially 1927, when we vote for president again. Rome wasn't built in a day. The Confederate States won't be rebuilt in a day. either. But we will build our country back up, we will shove our niggers back down where they belong, and we—the Freedom Party—will be the ones who do that. So help me God, we will."
"Freedom!" Jeff yelled, along with his friends. The cry echoed from the roof, almost as it had in the days when the Party was swelling.
"One more thing, and then I'm through," Briggs said. "We got as far as we did by standing up and fighting for what we know is right. We're going to go right on fighting. Don't you have any doubts about that. We may pick our spots a little tighter than we did before, but we'll put on the white and butternut whenever we see the need."
Pinkard whooped. The chance to get out there and smash a few heads was one of the reasons he'd joined the Freedom Party. A good many other men cheered Caleb Briggs, too. But Jeff couldn't help noticing how many others sat silent.
Then he thought, Grady Calkins would have cheered. He shook his head, rejecting the comparison and all it implied. Calkins had been a madman. Every party had some. But Jeff wasn't crazy. Caleb Briggs wasn't crazy. And Jake Featherston sure as hell wasn't crazy.
Still, the idea left him uneasy. He didn't sit around and yarn and drink homemade whiskey, as he usually did after the business part of a meeting wound down. Instead, glum and oddly dissatisfied, he headed for the door. One of the guards there caught his eye. He reached into his pocket, pulled out a dollar, and tossed the banknote into the bucket at the guard's feet. "Thank you kindly, Jeff," the bruiser said. "Party needs every penny it can get its hands on these days."
"I know, Tim," Pinkard answered. He laughed. "And think— just last year, we had more millions than you can shake a stick at." It wasn't really funny, not for the Freedom Party. A sound currency had done as much to squeeze folks out of the Party as had Wade Hampton's assassination. Real money gave people one less thing to be angry about, and anger was the gasoline that fueled the Party's engine.
It had started to drizzle. Jeff jammed his cap down low on his head and tugged up his coat collar. He was angry, by God— angry about having to wait for the trolley in the rain. The trolley got there late, too, which did nothing to improve his mood. He threw five pennies in the fare box (bronze coins were returning faster than silver) and rode out to the Sloss Works company housing.
A woman was waiting at the trolley stop. Pinkard thought she would get on after he got off. When she didn't, he gave a mental shrug and started off toward his cottage. The trolleyman clanged his bell. The car rattled down the tracks.
"Jeff?" the woman called.
Pinkard stopped—froze, in fact. "Emily," he whispered, and slowly turned. In the darkness and drizzle, he hadn't recognized her, but he would have known her voice anywhere. His own roughened as he went on, "What the devil are you doing here?"
"Waiting for you," she answered. Her own tone was sharp: "I sure enough knew what you'd be doing this night of the week, didn't I? I just got here myself, though—didn't expect you back quite so soon. Things ain't so lively at the Party nowadays?"
"None of your business—you made sure of that, by God," Jeff said. "What do you want with me, anyway, you . .. tramp?" He could have used a stronger word, and nearly had.
"Wanted to see how you were," Emily answered. "Wanted to see what you were up to." She sighed and shook her head. "Not like you cared enough about me to find out any of that."
"After what you done, why should I care?" he said. "You're lucky I don't kick you down the street." Had he had some whiskey in him, he thought he would have done it.
"I got lonesome," she said. "I got lonesome when you was in the Army, and I got lonesome when you started caring more about the Freedom Party than you did about me. I don't like being lonesome, so I went and did something about it."
She didn't mean lonesome. She meant horny. Pinkard knew that. She'd been fine as long as he gave her everything she needed. When he stopped, she'd gone out and taken what she needed, as a man with a frigid wife might have done. It would have been all right in a man. In a woman . . . Pinkard shook his head. No man could put up with what she'd done, not if he wanted to stay a man.
Emily said, "I was almost hoping I wouldn't find you here, on account of that'd mean you were back at the house, not at that stinking livery stable. It'd mean you'd wised up and gotten out of the Freedom Party. But if what happened to President Hampton didn't open your eyes, I reckon nothin' ever will."
She'd hoped he'd given up the Party? Did that mean she wanted him back, or would have wanted him back? Did he want her back? She was explosive between the sheets. He knew that. But how would he keep from thinking he wasn't the only man she'd taken to bed? How would he keep from thinking she wasn't taking some other man to bed along with him? He shook his head again. He wouldn't. He couldn't.
To keep from thinking about that now, he asked, "What are you doing these days?"
"Working in a textile mill," she answered with a shrug. "It ain't a lot of money, but I don't need a lot, so I get by. I get lonesome sometimes, though."
She meant horny again. "Bet you can find plenty of fellows if you do." Jeff didn't try to keep the scorn from his voice.
"Of course I can. A woman always can." Emily sounded scornful, too, and weary, so weary. "Harder to find anybody who cares about more than that, though."
"Too bad," Jeff said harshly. "Too damn bad."
Emily sighed. "I don't know why I bothered doing this. Just wasted my time. Reckon I was hoping you'd changed—changed back into the fellow I knew before the war."
"He's dead," Pinkard said. "The damnyankees killed him, and the niggers killed him, and you helped kill him, too. The country he lived in is dead along with him. He ain't ever coming back. Maybe the country we had back then will. That's what the Freedom Party is all about."
"To hell with the Freedom Party!" Emily said furiously. A distant street lamp showed tears running down her cheeks. "And to hell with you. too. Jefferson Davis Pinkard."
"Go on, get out of here. Go peddle your tail somewhere else, or I'll give you what I gave you before, only more of it." Jeff made a fist and raised his arm. "I sure as hell don't need you. I don't need anybody, by God. As long as I've got the Party, that's everything I need in the whole wide world."
Emily turned away, her shoulders slumping. She was crying harder now, crying like a little lost child. Jeff headed home, a smile on his face now in spite of the chilly drizzle. Why not? He'd won. He knew damn well he'd won.