Scipio paid five cents for a copy of the Augusta Constitutionalist. In one way, that struck him as a lot of money to shell out for a newspaper. In another, considering that he would have paid millions if not billions of dollars when the currency went crazy a couple of years before, it wasn’t so bad.
“Thanks, uncle,” said the white man who took his money. He didn’t answer. He just opened up the paper and read it as he hurried towards Erasmus’ fish market and restaurant.
Had he answered, what would he have said? Angry at himself for even wondering, he shook his head as he walked along. White men never called black men mister, not in the Confederate States of America they didn’t. If he held his breath till they started to, he’d end up mighty, mighty blue. The fellow with the pile of papers at his feet would just have called him an uppity nigger, or maybe a crazy nigger, if he’d complained.
Maybe the worst of it was, the white man had been trying to be polite. I can’t win, Scipio thought. Why do I bother imagining I could?
Even more to the point, he wondered why he’d wasted any money on the paper. The headline screamed about a lurid love triangle that had ended in an axe murder. It would have been made to seem a lot more lurid had the parties involved been colored. Or, on the other hand, it might not have made the paper at all in that case. A lot of whites expected Negroes to act that way, and took it for granted when they did.
Much smaller stories talked about Congressional candidates’ latest promises. Scipio wondered why he bothered even glancing at those. It wasn’t as if he could vote. But the remarks of Eldridge P. Dinwiddie, the Freedom Party candidate in Augusta, did make his eyes widen as if he’d just poured down a couple of cups of Erasmus’ strong, chicory-laced coffee.
“Too many Red rebels are still hiding in plain sight,” Dinwiddie was quoted as saying. “The Whigs have forgotten all about them. Going after them would remind people of how badly the party that’s in power bungled the war effort. But if you elect me, I’ll make sure they aren’t forgotten and are brought to justice. I aim to see all those nigger traitors hang.”
Mr. Dinwiddie, wrote the reporter who’d listened to him, received prolonged and vociferous support for his suggestion.
“Hell wid Mistuh Dinwiddie,” Scipio muttered under his breath. Being one of those fugitive Reds himself, he didn’t care for the notion of getting hunted down and hanged. Here and there, faded posters still offered a reward for his capture.
But that was in another country; and besides, the wench is dead. Every so often, a phrase from the education Anne Colleton had made him acquire floated up out of his memory. This one fit. South Carolina might have been another country. The name on his passbook here in Georgia was Xerxes. Everyone here, even his wife, knew him by that name and no other.
Anne Colleton, though, wasn’t dead. If she ever saw him, he would be, and in short order. Like most late summer days in Augusta, this one was hot and muggy. Scipio shivered even so.
Foreign news got shoved onto page three. There’d been another battle in the endless Mexican civil war. Imperial forces claimed victory. The rebels weren’t calling them liars too loudly, so maybe they’d actually won. Venezuela and Colombia were talking about going to war with each other. The paper said the United States had sent the Kaiser a note warning him against arming or encouraging the Venezuelans, and that he’d denied doing any such thing—and warned the USA against encouraging or arming the Colombians. A party called French Action had caused riots in Paris at the same time as the French government claimed it was two years ahead of schedule in paying reparations in Germany. Japanese aeroplanes had bombed a town somewhere in China.
He was so engrossed in the article about allowing the forward pass in football—some people condemned it as a damnyankee innovation, while others claimed it added excitement to the game—he almost walked past Erasmus’ place. “Mornin’, Xerxes,” his boss said when he came in.
“Mornin’,” Scipio answered. “How you is?”
“Tolerable,” Erasmus said. “Little better’n tolerable, mebbe. How’s your ownself?”
Scipio shrugged. “Not bad. I’s gettin’ by.”
“Can’t ask much more’n that, not till Judgment Day, anyways.” Erasmus raised a salt-and-pepper eyebrow. “You saved, Xerxes?”
How do I answer that? Scipio wondered. His education had weakened his faith. And, he discovered, so had his time with the Red rebels, all of whom had been as passionate in their disbelief as a lot of Christians were in their belief. He hadn’t thought the Marxist ideology had rubbed off on him, but it seemed to have after all. After a moment’s thought, he said, “Hope so.”
“Should ought to be able to say better’n that,” Erasmus said, but then, to Scipio’s relief, he let it go. Pointing to the Constitutionalist, he asked, “You done with that?”
“Done wid it now, yeah,” Scipio answered: the only thing he could have said. Erasmus didn’t put up with reading on the job. That wasn’t because he couldn’t read a newspaper himself, though he couldn’t. It was because, when you worked for Erasmus, you worked for Erasmus.
“Throw it on the fish-wrappin’ pile, then,” Erasmus said.
As Scipio did, he asked, “What you think ‘bout de for’ard pass, boss?”
“Bunch o’ damn foolishness, you ask me,” Erasmus answered. “Anybody got the time to git all hot and bothered about it gots too goddamn much time, an’ dat’s the Lord’s truth. Devil fill up your time just fine, you bet. Forward pass?” He rolled his eyes. “Might as well worry over that other damnfool damnyankee game—what the hell they call it? Baseball, dat’s the name.”
Scipio had never seen a baseball game, or even a baseball, in his life. Because he was—or rather, had been—widely read, he knew the sport was played in the northeastern part of the United States. But it had never caught on all across the USA, the way football had. And it certainly hadn’t caught on in the Confederate States.
Erasmus eyed him. “You got any more ways o’ wastin’ time ‘fore you starts earnin’ what I pays you?”
“Only one,” Scipio said with a grin. He grabbed a mug and poured it full of coffee from the big pot on the stove, then added cream and sugar. But he didn’t sit down to drink it. He carried it with him as he started sweeping and tidying up. Erasmus had a steaming mug at his side, too. As long as Scipio worked hard, the older man didn’t mind coffee or things like that.
The first breakfast customer came in a couple of minutes later. “Mornin’, Aristotle,” Scipio said. “How you is?” By now, he knew dozens of regulars by name and preferences. “You wants de usual?”
“Sure enough do,” Aristotle answered. Scipio turned to Erasmus, who was already doing up a plate of ham and eggs and grits. Erasmus knew his customers even better than Scipio did. They were his, after all.
After the breakfast rush petered out, Scipio washed a young mountain of dishes and silverware, then dried them and stacked them neatly to get ready for lunch, which would be even more hectic. Once he’d done that, he helped Erasmus clean catfish and crappie. The proprietor would fry a lot of them during lunch, and even more during dinner. Erasmus was a wizard with a knife. Every cut he made was perfect, and he moved as fast as any slicing machine. Scipio . . .
“You makes me ’shamed,” Scipio said, for Erasmus could clean three fish to his one, and do a neater, better job on them to boot. “Watchin’ you makes me ’shamed.”
“Shouldn’t ought to,” Erasmus answered. “You is doin’ the best you kin. Good Lord don’t want no more’n dat from nobody. I been cuttin’ up fish for a livin’ since I was ten years old. Maybe you went fishin’ couple-three times a year, gutted what you cotched. It make a difference, it surely do.”
“Mebbe.” Scipio would have thought Erasmus was humoring him, but Erasmus had no sense of humor when it came to work, none at all.
And now his boss said, “You’s better’n you was, too, an’ dat’s a good thing. You didn’t get no better, don’t reckon I’d let you mess around with knives no more.”
Scipio looked at his hands. He had a couple of cuts, along with several scars he’d picked up earlier. Seeing what he was doing, Erasmus held out his own hands. He had more scars than Scipio could count, a maze, a spiderweb, of scars, new, old, short, long, and in between. “Do Jesus!” Scipio said softly.
Erasmus only shrugged. “Ain’t nobody perfect, Xerxes. Ain’t nobody even close to perfect. Yeah, I’s pretty damn good. But I been doin’ this goin’ on fifty years now. Every so often, the knife is gonna slip.”
“Uh-huh.” Scipio couldn’t take his eyes off those battered hands. He’d noticed them, but he hadn’t really studied them. They repaid study. Like so many who did something supremely well, Erasmus had suffered for his art. Scipio kept looking at them till a fat woman came in and asked Erasmus for three pounds of crawdads.
What have I got that shows what I’ve done with my life? Scipio wondered. Only one thing occurred to him: the way he talked, or could talk if doing so wouldn’t put him in mortal danger. He felt smarter when he talked like an educated white man than he did using the thick Congaree River Negro dialect that was his only other way of putting his thoughts out for the world to know. He didn’t suppose he actually was smarter, but the illusion was powerful, and it lingered.
Erasmus wrapped the crawdads in the Augusta Constitutionalist Scipio had been reading that morning. The woman paid him, said, “Thank you kindly,” and left.
“I been tellin’ you and tellin’ you,” Erasmus said, “you ought to save your money and git yourself your own place. You end up doin’ a lot better working for your ownself than you do when you works for me.”
“Don’t like tellin’ folks what they gots to do,” Scipio answered, not for the first time. “Reckon I kin”—if he’d run Marshlands for Anne Colleton, he could surely manage a little café for himself—“but I don’t like it none.”
“You gots to have some fire in your belly to do a proper job,” Erasmus agreed. “But you gots to have some fire in your belly to git ahead any which way.”
He eyed Scipio speculatively. Scipio concentrated on cleaning a catfish. He was better at doing what others told him than at telling others what to do. Back at Marshlands, he’d had Anne’s potent authority behind him. If he started his own business, he’d be the authority. No, he didn’t care for that. Still feeling Erasmus’ eye on him, he said, “I gits by.”
He sounded defensive, and he knew it. Erasmus said, “Any damn fool can get by. You could do better, an’ you should ought to.”
Scipio didn’t answer. Before too long, the first dinner customers started coming in. He hurried back and forth from the stove to the tables out front. The sizzle and crackle of fish going into hot oil filled the place. He served and took money and made change and then did endless dishes, getting ready for the next morning. When he finally left, Erasmus stayed behind, still busy.
And when he got back to his flat, Bathsheba was waiting at the door to give him a kiss. Her eyes glowed. Scipio hoped he knew what she had in mind, and hoped that, after a long, hard day, he could perform. He turned out to be wrong—or, at least, not exactly right. She took his hand and set it just above her navel. “We gonna have us a young ‘un,” she said.
All of a sudden, Scipio discovered he might have fire in his belly after all.
Hipolito Rodriguez knew he should have counted himself a lucky man. For one thing, he’d come through the Great War without a scratch. If that by itself wasn’t enough to make him light candles in the church in the little mining town of Baroyeca, he couldn’t imagine what would be.
And, for another, Baroyeca lay in the Confederate state of Sonora, not in the Empire of Mexico farther south. It was close enough to the border to hear the echoes of the civil war that convulsed the country of which Sonora had once been a part, but not close enough to have let any of the fighting come near.
Nothing bothered Baroyeca very much. A couple of men hadn’t come home from the war in the north. A few others had come home, but maimed. Mostly, though, days went on as they always had. Rodriguez’s farm outside of town yielded no better crops than it ever had, but he managed to keep his wife, three sons, and two daughters fed.
And, every so often, he had enough money left in his pocket to go into town and spend some time at La Culebra Verde—the Green Snake—the cantina across the street from the church where he lit candles to thank God for his salvation. Having been preserved alive, didn’t he have the right to enjoy himself every once in a while?
“Why not?” Carlos Ruiz said when he posed the question out loud one day. Carlos was his age, and had fought in Tennessee, where things had been, by all accounts, much worse than his own experience in Texas. Ruiz asked his counterquestion in English, not Spanish.
“Sí, why not?” Rodriguez agreed, the last two words also in English. He dropped back into Spanish to continue, “My children speak as much of the new language as of the old. Ten million devils from hell take me if I know whether to be glad or sorry.”
“If you want them to stay here and be farmers or marry farmers, Spanish is good enough,” Ruiz said—in Spanish. “If you hope they try to make money, English is better.”
He was a farmer himself, and wore the ribbon for a Purple Heart on his baggy cotton shirt. Had he been a rich man, or a townsman, or even someone who hadn’t also fought in the north, Hipolito Rodriguez might have got angry, especially since he’d been drinking for a while. As things were, he only shrugged and said, “How much good will English do people who look like us, Carlos?” Like Ruiz, like almost everybody in Baroyeca, he was short, with red-brown skin and hair blacker than moonless midnight. “Even with English, what are we but a couple of damn greasers?” The last five words were in the official language of the Confederacy.
“We may be greasers,” Ruiz said, also in English, “but we ain’t no niggers. Mallates,” he added in Spanish, in case Rodriguez didn’t understand him. Then back to English: “In the law, we’re the same as anybody else.”
That was true. The people of Sonora and Chihuahua were Confederate citizens, not merely residents of the CSA. They could vote. They could run for office. They could—if they were rich enough, which some few were—marry whites from the other states in the Confederacy. They could. And yet . . . Rodriguez sighed and took another pull at the beer in front of him. “The law, it means only so much.”
That was also true. If it weren’t for Negroes, Sonorans and Chihuahuans would have been at the bottom of the pile. Most Confederates who called themselves white looked down their noses at them. Rodriguez had seen as much during the war, the first time he’d ever had much to do with ordinary whites.
“When the election comes, who will you vote for?” Ruiz asked.
Rodriguez shrugged. “My patrón is a Radical Liberal.” Ever since Sonora and Chihuahua came into the CSA, small farmers like him had voted as the great landowners in the area wanted them to vote. But, like so many things, that wasn’t quite as it had been before the Great War. Rodriguez didn’t want to say as much out loud, though. What he didn’t say couldn’t get back to anyone. He lifted his cup, emptied it, and asked the same question of Carlos Ruiz.
Ruiz gave back the same shrug. “Don Joaquin is a Radical Liberal, too.” Hipolito Rodriguez nodded. The Radical Liberals had been strong in the Confederate Southwest for years. Voting for them had always been a way to show Richmond the people here weren’t happy with the neglect the Whigs gave them.
“I’d better go home,” Rodriguez said, setting his mug on the table in front of him. “If I go now, Magdalena won’t yell at me . . . so much.” He got to his feet. The room swayed slightly, but only slightly. I’m not drunk, he thought. Of course I’m not drunk.
“Hasta luego, amigo,” Ruiz said. By the way he sat, he wasn’t going anywhere for quite a while.
“Luego,” Rodriguez answered. He walked to the door—steadily enough, all things considered—and left La Culebra Verde. The cantina had thick adobe walls that kept out the worst of the heat. When he went out into the street, it smote full force. His broad-brimmed straw hat helped some, but only some. He sighed as he drew in a lungful of bake-oven air. He’d known it would be like this. It always was.
Baroyeca looked a lot like any other little Sonoran town. The main street was unpaved. Dust hung in the air. Horses and a few motorcars stood in front of shops. Like the cantina, most of the rest of the buildings were of adobe. Some had roofs of half-round red tiles, some of thatch, a few of corrugated tin.
A roadrunner trotted down the street as if it owned it. The bird held a still-wriggling lizard in its beak. When a stray dog came towards it, it flapped up into the branches of a cottonwood tree and gulped the lizard down. The dog sent a reproachful stare after it, as if to say, That’s not fair.
“Life’s not fair,” Rodriguez muttered. Both dog and roadrunner ignored him.
Advertising slogans were painted on the whitewashed fronts of the shops. Here and there, signs and posters added to the urge to sell. Rodriguez remembered his father saying there hadn’t been so many of those when he was young.
Posters—well printed in both Spanish and English—extolled the virtues of Horacio Castillo, who was seeking a fourth term in the Confederate Congress. Castillo, his pictures showed, was a plump man with a neat, thin mustache. FOR PROGRESS AND SECURITY, VOTE RADICAL LIBERAL, his posters said.
A few posters also touted the Whig candidate. Vicente Valenzuela wouldn’t win, but he’d put up a respectable showing.
And then there were the scrawls on the walls, again in both Spanish and English. ¡LIBERTAD! some said, while others shouted, FREEDOM! Rodriguez eyed them thoughtfully. The Freedom Party had never been strong in Sonora up till this election. It probably wouldn’t win now, either. But it was making itself known in ways it hadn’t before.
Most of what Rodriguez knew about the Freedom Party was that it wanted another go at the USA and wanted to keep black men in their place. He didn’t like the USA, either. And if black men weren’t on the bottom in the CSA, he would be, so he wanted them kept down.
But a Freedom Party man had murdered the president of the Confederacy. Rodriguez scowled. That was no way to behave. He sighed. It was too bad. If people could only forget that . . .
He sighed again, and headed for his farm. A horse-drawn wagon coming into town kicked up more dust, a yellow-gray cloud of it. A couple of men with rifles rode atop the wagon. They gave Rodriguez a hard, watchful stare as it rattled past. He sighed yet again. He was no bandido. And, even if he were a bandido, it wasn’t as if the silver mines in the hills outside of Baroyeca yielded enough precious metal to be worth stealing. Fewer than half as many miners as before the war went down into those dark shafts. If the mine ever failed altogether, what would become of Baroyeca? He didn’t like to think about that, either.
High up in the sky, several vultures wheeled, riding the columns of hot air that rose from the baking ground. If Baroyeca dried up and blew away, even the vultures might not find enough to eat in this valley.
After not quite half an hour, Rodriguez got back to his farm. He raised corn and beans and squashes and chickens and pigs. A sturdy mule, one of the best for miles around, did the plowing and hauling. He raised almost all his own food. But if Baroyeca fails, what will I do for salt and nails and cotton cloth and coffee and all the other things I can’t make for myself? He clicked his tongue between his teeth. He had no idea.
A scrawny dog ran toward him, growling and baring its teeth. “Cállate, Maximiliano!” Rodriguez shouted. The dog skidded to a stop about ten feet away. It whined and wagged its tail, as if to say, Well, you might have been someone dangerous, and I was on the job. Rodriguez wasn’t fooled. He’d had Maximiliano for three years now, and had never seen a stupider dog. He’d known exactly what he was doing when he named the beast for the Emperor of Mexico.
On the other side of the border, naming a dog for the Emperor might have got him stood up against a wall and shot for a rebel. All things considered, he was just as glad to be where he was.
His older daughter, Guadalupe, carried a hen by the feet toward the chopping block by the house. Spit flooded into Rodriguez’s mouth at the thought of chicken stew or any of the other interesting things Magdalena, his wife, could do with the bird. He waved to Guadalupe. She was eleven now; she’d been born just before he got conscripted. It wouldn’t be more than another year or two before she started having a real shape, before boys began sniffing around, and before life began wheeling through a new cycle. The thought made him feel old, though he’d just passed thirty.
In the house, Miguel and Jorge were wrestling. They were less than a year apart, seven and six, and Jorge, the younger, was big for his age, so the match was pretty even. Susana, who was five, watched them with her thumb in her mouth, probably glad they weren’t picking on her. Rodriguez didn’t see Pedro, the youngest; he was probably taking a nap.
“Hola,” Rodriguez said to Magdalena, who sat patting tortillas into shape. His mouth watered again. As far as he was concerned, she made the best tortillas in the whole valley.
“Hola,” she answered, cocking her head to one side to study him. “Como estás?”
He recognized that gesture, and straightened up in indignation. “I’m not drunk,” he declared.
Magdalena didn’t answer right away. After she’d finished studying him, though, she nodded. “No, you’re not,” she admitted. “Good. And what’s new in town?”
“It’s still there,” he said, which, given the state of the silver mine, wasn’t altogether a joke. He added, “A wagon came into town from the mine while I was walking home.”
“Yes, I saw it go by,” Magdalena said. “Who was at the cantina? What’s the gossip?”
“I was mostly talking with Carlos,” he answered. “We were going on about how you hear more and more English these days.” He spoke in Spanish; Magdalena was far more comfortable in it than in the other language.
She nodded even so. “The way the older children bring it back from school, I wonder if their children will know any Spanish at all.”
“It’s good they go to school, in English or Spanish,” Rodriguez said. “Maybe then they won’t have to break their backs and break their hearts every day, the way a farmer does.”
Magdalena raised an eyebrow. Rodriguez felt heat under his swarthy skin. He hadn’t broken his back today. He spread his hands, as if to say, You want too much if you expect me to work hard every day. His wife didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to. The eyebrow had already done the job.
Rodriguez said, “And we talked politics.”
“Ah.” Magdalena perked up. “What will you do?” Here in Sonora, women’s suffrage was a distant glow on the horizon, if that. She couldn’t vote herself. But that didn’t keep her from being interested.
“I don’t know yet,” Rodriguez answered. “I don’t know, but I think I may just vote for the Freedom Party.”
Brakes squeaking a little, the Birmingham pulled up in front of the Freedom Party offices in Richmond. Jake Featherston’s guards fanned out and formed a perimeter on the sidewalk. They were well armed and alert; they might have been about to clear the damnyankees out of a stretch of trench. Featherston’s enemies inside the CSA weren’t so obvious as U.S. soldiers in green-gray, but they probably hated him even more than the Yankees had hated their Confederate foes. Soldiering, sometimes, was just a job. Jake had also discovered politics was a serious business.
One of the guards nodded and gestured. As Jake came forward from the building, another guard opened the curbside door for him. “Freedom!” the man said as he got into the motorcar.
“Freedom, Henry,” Featherston echoed. He settled himself on the padded seat. This beat the hell out of life as an artillery sergeant, any way you looked at it.
“Freedom!” the driver said, putting the Birmingham in gear.
“Freedom, Virgil,” Featherston answered. “Everything ready at the other end?”
“Far as I know, Sarge.” Virgil Joyner made that sound as if he were addressing a general, not a noncom. Yes, this was a pretty good life, all right.
They went only a few blocks. When the driver pulled to a stop, Featherston scowled. “What the hell?” he said angrily. A squad of Freedom Party guards were arguing with some Richmond policemen in old-fashioned gray uniforms. Several reporters scribbled in notebooks. A photographer’s flash immortalized the moment. Featherston got out of the motorcar in a hurry. “What’s going on here?” he demanded.
“This is a polling place,” one of the cops said. “No electioneering allowed within a hundred feet. Far as I’m concerned, they sure as hell count as electioneering.” He pointed to the armed guards.
“We’re just here to protect Mr. Featherston,” one of the men in not-quite-Confederate uniform insisted. He sounded ready for business. The policemen looked nervous. Well they might—the Freedom Party guards outgunned them, and had proved to the CSA they weren’t shy about mixing it up with the police, or with anyone else they didn’t like.
Here, though, Jake judged it a good time to walk soft. “It’s all right, boys,” he said, as genially as he could. “Don’t reckon anybody’ll take a shot at me while I go and vote.” He walked past the policemen and toward the doorway above which the Stars and Bars fluttered.
The guards didn’t look happy. Like watchdogs, they wanted to stay with their master all the time. But, once he’d decided, they didn’t argue. The cops didn’t bother hiding their relief.
“Who you gonna vote for, Mr. Featherston?” a reporter shouted.
“Freedom—the straight ticket,” Jake answered with a wave and a grin.
Despite that cocky grin, he remained alert as he went to the polling place. If anybody wanted to take a shot at him, this was a hell of a good place to do it. If a rifle muzzle came out of that building, where would he jump? Or from that one? Or that one? He hadn’t fought in the trenches—the First Richmond Howitzers had been in back of them—but he’d had plenty of bullets whip past his head. He knew everything that needed knowing about diving for cover.
No shots rang out. He strode into the polling place with grin intact. A man coming out of a curtained booth recognized him, did a double take, and grinned a grin of his own, a big, delighted one. “Freedom!” the fellow blurted.
“Freedom,” Featherston said.
Somber, disapproving coughs from the officials at the polling place, four or five graybeards who might have fought in the Second Mexican War or maybe even the War of Secession, but surely not in the Great War. One of them said, “No electioneering, gentlemen, if you please.”
“Right,” Jake said; he was doing this by the rules. He scrawled his name and address in their registry book, and went into the booth the fellow who’d recognized him had vacated. As he’d told the reporter he would, he put an X by the name of the Freedom candidates for Congress, for the Virginia Assembly and State Senate, and for the Richmond City Council. The last race was nominally nonpartisan, but everybody knew better. With the Whigs and Radical Liberals pretty evenly split in the district, he thought the Freedom Party man had a decent chance of sneaking home a winner, too.
After finishing the ballot, he went out and presented it to the election officials. One of them folded it and put it into the ballot box. “Jacob Featherston has voted,” he intoned solemnly.
“Jacob Featherston is a murdering son of a bitch,” said a man who’d come out of his voting booth a moment after Jake emerged from his.
More coughs from the old men. “None of that here,” one of them said. Another took the ballot. “Oscar Herbert has voted,” he declared.
A few years earlier, when the Freedom Party was just getting off the ground, Jake Featherston would have mixed it up with Herbert right outside the polling place, or maybe here inside it. He was no less angry now, but he was shrewder than he had been. Some day soon, pal, somebody’s gonna pay you a little visit, he thought. Your name’s Oscar Herbert and you live in this precinct. We’ll find you. You bet we will.
Herbert went one way, Featherston the other. He walked through the cops and out to his guards. With audible sighs of relief, they closed in around him. Photographers took more flash pictures. He waved to them.
“How many seats do you expect to lose this time?” a reporter called.
“What’s that?” Jake cupped a hand behind his ear as he got into the Birmingham. “Spent too long in the artillery, and my ears aren’t what they ought to be.” He slammed the car door before the reporter could finish the question again. He had lost some hearing during the war, but not so much as that. Still, artilleryman’s ear came in handy for avoiding questions he didn’t want to answer.
“Back to headquarters, Sarge?” the driver asked.
“You bet,” Featherston answered. The car pulled away from the curb.
On the short ride over to Party headquarters, Jake contemplated the question he’d pretended not to hear. He liked none of the answers he came up with. His best guess was that Freedom would lose seats in the House of Representatives. He hoped the Party would hold its own, but he didn’t believe it. And if he lost seats—he took everything personally, as he always had—how long would people keep finding him a force to be reckoned with?
“We were so close,” he muttered. “So goddamn close.”
“What’s that?” Virgil Joyner said.
“Nothin’. Not a thing.” Jake lied without hesitation.
When he got back to Freedom Party headquarters, he wished he hadn’t gone and voted so soon. He had nothing to do but sit around and wait and stare at the banks of telegraph clickers and phones and wireless sets that would bring in the election results when there were election results to bring in. That wouldn’t be for a while yet. Polls in Virginia didn’t close till seven P.M., and those farther west would stay open a couple of hours longer than that. Meanwhile . . .
Meanwhile, he did some more scribbling in Over Open Sights. He’d fiddled with the—maybe journal was the right name for it—now and again in the days since the Great War, but he’d never quite managed to recapture the heat he’d known while writing it in the odd moments when he wasn’t throwing three-inch shells at the damnyankees.
One of these days, he told himself. One of these days, I’ll be ready to put it out, and people will be ready to read it. I’ll know when. I’m sure I’ll know when. But the time isn’t ripe yet. He fiddled with the pile of Gray Eagle scratchpads in lieu of twiddling his thumbs, and accomplished about as much as he would have twiddling them. He changed a word here, took out a couple of words there, added a phrase somewhere else. It all added up to nothing, and he knew that, too.
His secretary stuck her head into the office. “Can I get you something to eat, Mr. Featherston?” she asked, as if she were his mother.
He wouldn’t have taken that from anyone else—certainly not from his real mother, were she still alive. But he nodded now. “Thank you kindly, Lulu,” he said. “Some fried chicken’d go down mighty nice about now.”
“I’ll take care of it,” she promised, and hurried away. Take care of it she did, as she always did. Jake ate like a wolf. No matter how much he ate, his gaunt form never added an ounce. He ate as much from duty as from hunger. His stomach would pain him no matter what when he watched the returns coming in, but it would pain him less with food in there.
A little before seven, Freedom Party leaders and telegraph operators gathered at the headquarters. Featherston made himself greet them, made himself shake hands and smile and slap backs, the way he’d made himself eat. It needed doing, so he did it. But it was a distraction he could have done without.
“Polls are closing,” said somebody—somebody with a gift for the obvious—as church bells all through Richmond chimed seven times. A minute or so later, the very first returns began coming over the wire. They meant as little as the changes Jake had made in Over Open Sights earlier in the day, but everybody exclaimed over them even so. Featherston did a little exclaiming himself when a Freedom Party candidate jumped into an early lead in a Virginia district he’d been sure was safely Whig.
“Maybe the people are wising up,” he said. “I hope they are, God damn it.”
In the first days of the Great War, he’d thought the Confederate Army would drive everything before it, too. He’d taken unholy glee in shelling Washington, and he’d delighted in swarming up into Pennsylvania and toward Philadelphia. If the de facto capital of the USA had fallen along with the de jure one . . . But Philadelphia had held, and, inch by painful inch, the C.S. Army had been driven back through Pennsylvania and Maryland and into Virginia itself.
If the niggers hadn’t risen up and stabbed us in the back . . . But he knew they had, however much white men nowadays tried to pretend otherwise.
On one of the competing wireless sets, an announcer said, “If this trend holds up, it looks like the third district in South Carolina will be coming back to the Whigs in the next Congress after staying in Freedom Party hands these past two terms.”
Curses ran through the headquarters, Featherston’s loud among them. The Party had held that seat in the debacle of 1923; he’d counted on holding it again. Maybe the people weren’t wising up after all. Maybe they were an even bigger pack of damned idiots than he’d thought.
A colored waiter, hired for the occasion, brought around a tray of drinks. Featherston took a whiskey. The Negro nodded respectfully as he did. Jake tossed back the drink. His mouth tightened. Where were you in the uprising, you sorry black son of a bitch? You didn’t have a penguin suit on then, I bet. Probably just another goddamn Red. If we’d shot a few thousand bastards like you before you got out of line, we wouldn’t have had any trouble like we did. He had some sharp things to say about that in Over Open Sights.
Another Freedom Party seat, this one from Arkansas, went down the drain. Amid more curses, somebody said, “Well, we didn’t elect any Senators till 1921, so we don’t have to worry about them for another couple o’ years.”
That was exactly the wrong attitude to take, as far as Jake was concerned. “We’re playing this game to win, dammit,” he snarled. “We don’t play not to lose. We don’t play safe. We’re playing to win, and we’re gonna win. Remember it, damn you all!”
Nobody argued with him, not out loud. But nobody seemed anything close to convinced, either. That meant he got to crow extra loud when, out of a clear blue sky, the Freedom candidate won a tight three-way race for governor of Texas, and then, in the wee small hours of the morning, when a new Freedom Congressman came in from, of all places, southern Sonora.
“See, boys?” Featherston said around a yawn. “We ain’t dead yet. Not even close.” I hope not even close, anyhow.