IX
Jonathan Moss nodded to the military judge in front of him. “Sir, no matter what the occupation codes say about collusion and incitement, my client is not guilty. The prosecutor hasn’t introduced a single shred of evidence that Mr. Haynes either conspired against the United States, urged others to conspire or act against them, or, for that matter, acted against them himself in any way, shape, or form.”
The judge, a grim-faced major named Daniel Royce, said, “Didn’t you spend three years fighting against the Canucks?”
“Yes, sir, I did,” Moss answered. “Right around here, as a matter of fact.”
“I thought as much,” Major Royce rumbled. “Why the devil are you defending them now, in that case?”
“To make sure they get a fair shake, sir,” Moss said. “Plenty of people just want to jump on them with both feet now that they’re down. This conspiracy charge against my client is a case in point. It’s utterly groundless, as you can see.”
“It is not!” yelped the military prosecutor, a captain surely too young to have fought in the Great War.
“Look at the evidence, sir, not the allegations, and you’ll see for yourself,” Moss told Major Royce. He hadn’t lied to the judge. He did dislike seeing Americans swarming up into Ontario and ravaging the conquered province like so many locusts. But his reply hadn’t been the whole truth, either. What would Royce have said had he answered, Because I fell in love with a Canadian woman while my squadron’s aerodrome was up by Arthur? The major looked to have been a formidable football player in his younger days. He would have drop-kicked Moss clean out of his courtroom.
Scowling still, the military judge shuffled through the papers in front of him. He picked up one sheet and carefully read through it. Even from the back, Moss recognized it. It was a statement he’d got from his client’s neighbors, saying they’d never seen anyone visit Haynes’ house at a time when the prosecutor claimed he was shaping a plot there against the USA. His hopes leaped.
Bang! went Royce’s gavel. Everyone in the courtroom who’d seen combat started; the sudden noise was too much like a gunshot for comfort. “I’m sorry, Captain, but I find myself agreeing with the defense attorney here,” the military judge said. “I see no evidence of an offense against occupation regulations. Greed by people bringing the charges may be another matter. This case is dismissed. Keep your nose clean, Mr. Haynes, as you have been doing. You’re a free man.” The gavel banged again.
“Thank you very much, your Lordship.” Paul Haynes sounded astonished that he wasn’t heading for prison.
“I’m not a Lordship. You call me ‘your Honor,’ ” Judge Royce said. “No more Lordships here, and a good thing, too, if you want to know what I think.”
“Thank you, your Honor, then,” Haynes said, not contradicting the military judge but not offering his own opinion, either. He turned to Jonathan Moss and stuck out his hand. “And thank you very much. I didn’t think you could bring it off.”
“You’re not the only Canadian client I’ve had who’s told me the same thing,” Moss answered. “I’ll tell you what I’ve told a lot of them—our courts will try you fairly if you give them half a chance.”
“I wouldn’t have believed it,” Haynes said. “I thought they’d lock me up and throw away the key when they brought those treason charges against me.”
In a low voice, Moss said, “You’d be smart to follow the judge’s advice and not give them any excuse to charge you again. If you come before the court a second time, they’re liable to think that where there’s smoke, there’s fire, even if they did let you off the hook once before.” Listening to himself, he wondered how many clichés he could string together all at once.
“Wasn’t any excuse to charge me this time,” Paul Haynes grumbled. But then he nodded. “All right, Mr. Moss. I understand what you’re telling me.”
“Good,” Moss said.
They left the courtroom together. Spring had been on the calendar for more than a month. Now, as April gave way to May, it was finally visible in Berlin, Ontario, too. The sky was blue, with only a few puffy white clouds drifting across it. The sun was, if not warm, at least tepid. It got up early and went to bed late. Trees were coming into new leaf. A robin chirped in one of them.
“You’re a good fellow,” Haynes said. He didn’t even add for a Yank, as so many Canadians might have done. “I’ll send you the rest of my fee soon as I can scrape the money together. You don’t need to worry about that.”
“I wasn’t worried,” Moss said, which was true. His Canadian clients reliably paid what they said they would when they said they’d do it. He wished the Americans he represented up here were as reliable.
Reporters were seldom allowed in military courts. Censorship still lay heavily on occupied Canada. Moss understood that without necessarily approving of it. Here in the street, a couple of newspapermen pounced on Paul Haynes. Moss slipped away before they could start grilling him, too. If they wanted him badly enough, they could run him down at his office. Meanwhile . . .
Meanwhile, he aimed to celebrate his victory in his own way. He got into his Bucephalus and pressed the starter button. The engine roared to life. A Bucephalus was a big, powerful motorcar. Owning one went a long way toward saying you were a big, powerful man. Owning a new one went a long way toward saying that, anyhow. Moss had owned this one when it was new. Here in the spring of 1928, it was anything but. One reason the engine roared was that it needed work he hadn’t given it. The automobile’s paint job and upholstery had seen better years. He had put new tires on it recently, but only because he’d got sick of patching the old ones when they blew out.
He put the car in gear and drove west out of Berlin. Roads were better than they had been when he first hung out his shingle in Ontario. The war, by now, had been over for ten and a half years. The roads the grinding conflict had cratered and pocked with shell holes were smooth once more—smoother than ever, in fact. Paving stretched for miles where only dirt had gone before.
About an hour after leaving Berlin, he drove through the much smaller town of Arthur, thirty miles to the west. Arthur hadn’t bounced back from the war the way Berlin had. It lay off the beaten track. Few—hardly any—Americans came here with their money and their energy and their connections with the powers that be in the USA. But for a few more motorcars on the streets than would have been visible in 1914, time might have passed Arthur by.
A couple of people pointed to the Bucephalus as it rolled through town. Jonathan Moss saw one of them nod. They’d seen the motorcar before, many times. They had to know who he was. If a diehard wanted to take a shot at him . . . He shrugged. It hadn’t happened yet. He wasn’t going to start worrying about it now.
When he got to Laura Secord’s farm, he found her where he’d expected to: out in the fields, plowing behind a horse about the size of a half-grown elephant. She must have seen his automobile pull in beside the farmhouse, but she didn’t come in right away. The work came first. She’d stubbornly got a crop from the farm every year since the end of the war, and she didn’t look like intending 1928 to be an exception.
Only after she’d done what she thought needed doing did she unhitch the enormous horse and lead him back toward the house and the barn. Moss got out of the Bucephalus and waved to her. She nodded back, sober as usual, but her gray eyes danced. “You got Paul Haynes off, didn’t you?” she said.
“Sure did. Not just a reduced sentence, either: full acquittal,” Moss said proudly. “Don’t win one of those every day, not from Major Royce.”
“That’s . . . swell,” she said. The hesitation probably meant she’d almost said bully instead; the old slang died hard, especially in out-of-the-way places like this. She led the immense horse into the barn. When she came out, she asked, “And how do you have in mind celebrating, eh, Yank?”
“I expect we’ll think of something,” he answered.
“What I’m thinking of first is a bath,” she said.
Moss nodded. “Sure, sweetheart. I’ll scrub your back, if you want me to.”
“I’m sure you will,” she told him. And, as a matter of fact, he did. One thing pleasantly led to another. After a while, they lay naked, side by side, on her bed. Lazy and sated, Moss lit a cigarette. He offered her the pack. She shook her head. That made other things jiggle, too. He watched with interested admiration. Though he didn’t care to remember it, he was a little closer to forty than thirty these days; a second round wasn’t so automatic as it had been a few years before. He thought he could rise to the occasion today, though. Laura Secord watched him watching her. “Did you enjoy your celebration?” she asked.
Had she smiled, that would have been different. As things were, her voice had an edge to it. “What’s the matter, darling?” he asked, and reached out to toy with her left nipple.
She twisted away. “Why should anything be the matter?” she asked. “You come up here when it suits you, you . . . celebrate, and then you drive back down to Empire.” She stubbornly kept using the name the Canadians had tried to hang on Berlin during the war, before the USA took it.
Although Jonathan Moss didn’t have experience with a great many women, he knew trouble when he heard it. “Dammit, Laura, you’d better know by now that I don’t come up here just to have a good time,” he said.
“I know you didn’t used to,” she answered. “But things have been going on for a while now, and I do start to wonder. Can you blame me? Will you still drive up here every couple of weeks in 1935, or will you have found someone younger and prettier and closer to Empire by then?”
“I’m not looking for anybody else,” Moss said. “I love you, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
“Do you?” Laura Secord asked.
“Of course I do!” he said. She looked at him. She didn’t say what she was obviously thinking: in that case, what are you going to do about it? The question was, if anything, more effective left hanging in the air. Jonathan Moss took a deep breath. His response looked pretty obvious, too. “Will you marry me?” he asked. “Will you sell this farm and come over to Berlin—you can even call it Empire if you want—and live with me for the rest of our lives?”
Her nod said that that was the right question, sure enough. But it wasn’t a nod of acceptance. She asked a question of her own: “Why didn’t you ask me that a long time ago, Jonathan?”
“Why? Because I know I’m nothing but a lousy American, and I figured you’d tell me no for sure. I’d sooner have gone on the way things were than have that happen. Hearing no to a question like that hurts worse than anything else I can think of.”
“What if I said yes?” she asked quietly.
“I’d throw you into my motorcar, and we’d get back to Berlin in time to find a justice of the peace. If you think I’d let you have the chance to change your mind, you’re nuts.”
Laura Secord gave him the ghost of a smile. “It couldn’t be quite that fast, I’m afraid. I’d have to make arrangements to sell the livestock or to have it taken care of before I leave the farm.”
“Are you telling me yes?” Moss demanded. She nodded again. This time, she meant it the way he’d hoped she would. He let out a whoop that probably scared some of her feral farm cats out of a year’s growth. Moss didn’t care. And he did rise again, and they found the best way to inaugurate their engagement.
Afterwards, she said, “I was afraid you didn’t want to buy a cow as long as milk was cheap.”
“Moo, me?” he answered, and startled her again, this time into laughter. If that wasn’t a good omen, he didn’t know what would be.
George Enos, Jr., set cash on the kitchen table—more of it than Sylvia Enos had expected. “Here you go, Ma,” her son said, his voice breaking with excitement. “We had us a he . . . heck of a run. Cod like you couldn’t believe.” He looked down at his hands, which had acquired the beginnings of the scabs and scars that always marked fishermen’s fingers and palms. “I did more gutting than anybody could think of. And with the offal over the side, the birds that came, and the sharks—I never imagined anything like it.”
“Your father used to talk the same way,” Sylvia answered. She remembered him sitting up over a mug of coffee in the days when they were first married, telling her about what he’d done and what he’d seen and what it had felt like.
But this wasn’t quite the same, after all. George Enos had done enough fishing by the time he married her that it had become routine, and wearying routine at that. George, Jr., didn’t seem tired at all. Maybe that was because everything still seemed bright and new to him. Or maybe it was just because, at seventeen, he never got tired at all. His father certainly had, though, and he’d been only a few years older.
“How much is it, Ma?” Mary Jane asked, looking up from the onions she was chopping. She paused to rub her streaming eyes, then let out a yelp—she must have had onion juice on her fingers, and made things worse instead of better.
“Quite a bit,” answered Sylvia, who’d been trained from childhood not to talk about money in any detail. “It will help a lot.”
“That’s good,” Mary Jane said. “I’m going to look for a shopgirl job again tomorrow. I bet I find something, too. That one I had last summer was swell, but then you went and made me go back to school.” She sent Sylvia as severe a look as a fifteen-year-old girl could give her mother.
Sylvia had no trouble withstanding it; she’d known far worse. “Summer work is one thing,” she said. “School is something else. You need your schooling.”
George, Jr., glanced at his sister. They both almost—but not quite; no, not quite—invisibly shook their heads. These days, they were old enough to team up on Sylvia, instead of fighting each other as they’d done for so long. Sylvia knew why George, Jr., sneered at school. He was making good money without it.
And Sylvia had a pretty good idea why Mary Jane didn’t want to keep going. She was bound to be thinking something like, Who cares whether I can divide fractions and diagram sentences? What difference will it make? I’m going to get married and have babies, and my husband will make money for me.
“You never can tell,” Sylvia said, half to herself, half to her daughter. “I thought George, Jr.’s, father was going to take care of things forever. But then the war came, and the Confederates captured him, and after that he joined the Navy, and he . . . he didn’t come home. And I’ve had to run like crazy ever since, just trying to make ends meet. If I knew more about spelling and typing and arithmetic, I’d’ve had better jobs and made more money, and we’d’ve done better for ourselves. And if you think things like that can’t happen to you and the people you love, Mary Jane, you’re wrong. I wish you weren’t, but you are. Because you never can tell.”
By something surely not far from a miracle, she got through to her daughter. Instead of giving her a snippy answer, Mary Jane nodded and said, “I wish I could’ve known Pa better.”
George, Jr., got up and set a hand on his younger sister’s shoulder. “I wish I could have, too.” His voice roughened. “But at least Ma paid back the stinking son of a bitch”—had he been out on the trawler instead of in his kitchen, he undoubtedly would have said something much hotter than that—“who sank the Ericsson. Everybody I sail with knows Ma’s a hero.”
Sylvia brushed that aside. “It won’t get me any supper,” she said, and stood up herself so she could start cooking. She hadn’t felt heroic when she’d pumped a revolverful of bullets into Roger Kimball. She had trouble remembering now exactly how she had felt. Frightened and resigned was about as close as she could come to it. She hadn’t thought she would ever see her children or Boston again.
But here she was, with all the same problems, all the same worries, she’d had before getting on the train for Charleston. Being a hero, she’d rapidly discovered, paid few bills. When she’d come home, she had got back the job she’d left so she could go to the Confederate States. She’d made a few speeches that brought in a little money. By now, though, she was old news. Even in this presidential election year, no one asked her to come out. Joe Kennedy, for instance, had used her and forgotten about her. Every once in a while, she wondered how many women he’d really, rather than metaphorically, seduced and abandoned. More than a few, or she missed her guess.
While washing dishes later that evening, Mary Jane asked, “Who are you going to vote for come November, Ma?”
Women’s suffrage had finally come to Massachusetts—and to the rest of the holdout states in the USA—with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment. These days, all the men who’d opposed it were busy explaining how they’d never really done any such thing, how they’d always looked out for the country’s best interests, and as many other lies as they could find.
Most of those men were Democrats. Even so, Sylvia answered, “I’m going to vote for Governor Coolidge for president, because he’s a Democrat and he’d be harder on the Confederates than Vice President Blackford. Coolidge fought in the war, too; he didn’t stay back of the lines.”
“Do you think Coolidge will win?” Mary Jane asked.
“I don’t know,” Sylvia said. “That’s why they have the election—to find out who wins, I mean. Hardly anybody thought President Sinclair would beat Teddy Roosevelt in 1920, but he did.”
“I was still little then,” Mary Jane said thoughtfully, scrubbing at a frying pan with steel wool.
To Sylvia, Mary Jane was still little now, and would be the rest of her life. But she put that aside, and went back to the question her daughter had asked a little while before: “I do wish Governor Coolidge would be a little more . . . lively. People don’t seem to get very excited about him, and that worries me. Blackford and his wife can really whip up the crowds. It matters a lot.”
The following Sunday, someone knocked at the door to her flat. There stood her neighbor, Brigid Coneval. The Irishwoman said, “Blackford his own self will be after speaking on the Common today at half past two. Now that we can vote and all, I’m for hearing what he has to say for himself. Will you come with me, now?”
Sylvia found herself nodding. “I sure will,” she said. “You’re right—we ought to find out all we can about them.”
“Indeed and we should,” Brigid Coneval agreed. A war widow like Sylvia, she hadn’t had an easy time of it since her husband was shot. She made ends meet by taking care of other people’s children—though her own boys, by now, were also old enough to get jobs of their own and bring in a little money to help. Through everything, she’d kept an infectious grin. “And besides, it’ll be fun. We can ride the subway over to the Common; there’s a station close by there.”
“Why not?” Sylvia didn’t often do things on impulse, but this would be out of the ordinary, and it wouldn’t cost anything except subway fare.
She didn’t like the subway. It was even more crowded than trolley cars, and noisier, too. Between stations, the tunnel was black as coal. She kept wondering things like, What would happen if this train broke down? She knew she shouldn’t. She knew that wasn’t likely. But she couldn’t help it.
The subway train got to the Common without incident. Sylvia and Brigid Coneval emerged from the bowels of the earth into bright sunshine. It glowed off the gilded dome of the State House, in front of which Vice President Blackford would speak. “Let’s get under one of the trees,” Sylvia said, pointing. “We’re early. There’s still room under there. We can stay in the shade. It’ll be cooler.”
“Well, aren’t you the clever one, now?” her friend said. They staked out their spot with no trouble at all.
They were early. The crowd hadn’t really begun to fill the Boston Common. Most of the people there so soon were either Blackford’s Socialist backers or the Democratic activists who would heckle the vice president when he spoke. The two groups jockeyed for position and traded insults, mostly good-natured. They’d squared off against each other many times before, and knew they’d often meet again after this afternoon.
One of the men carrying an 8 YEARS IS ENOUGH! sign was Joe Kennedy. Seeing him, Sylvia shrank back farther under the tree. She didn’t want him to see her, even though she had every right to be here. But he did—she got the feeling he missed very little. He saw her, recognized her, and turned his back. She wanted to call out, I’m going to vote for Coolidge! She didn’t. She could tell it would do no good.
A big black car pulled up by the platform. A tall, gray-haired man and a short woman, much younger than he, got out and went to the platform. “That’s himself’s wife,” Brigid Coneval said. “A Congresswoman from New York City, she is, and a Christ-killing sheeny besides.”
Sylvia didn’t care much about Jews one way or the other. She said, “By all they say, she’s done a good job in Congress. And look at her! She’s been there since the war, and she doesn’t look any older than we are.”
“Foosh!” said Brigid, who seemed determined to stay unimpressed. “And what’s her husband, then? Sure and he’s a dirty old man, for I’d not care to hang since he’s seen the sweet side of forty.”
Flora Blackford stepped up to the microphone. The Democrats in the crowd immediately started to jeer. She made as if to urge them on, and then said, “Listen to them, comrades. They won’t tell the truth themselves, and they don’t want to let anyone else tell it, either. Is that fair? Is that honest? Is that what you want in the Powel House for the next four years?”
“No!” people shouted.
The Congresswoman from New York City made a short, strong speech, giving the Socialists credit for everything that had gone right the past eight years: the booming stock market, laws allowing strikes for higher wages, and on and on.
“What about the revolt in Canada? What about cutting off Confederate reparations?” the Democrats yelled. “What about the bank troubles in Europe?”
“Well, what about them?” Flora retorted, meeting the hecklers head on. “The Canadians lost. And we’re at peace with the Confederate States, and getting along with them well enough. Isn’t it about time this country was at peace with its neighbors? As for the banks in Europe, well, what can we do about them here?”
Most people cheered. The Democrats went right on heckling. Vice President Blackford himself stepped up to the microphone. “We’ve had eight good years!” he said. “Let’s have four more. We’ve got prosperity. We’ve got peace. Give us a few more Socialists in the Senate and we’ll have old-age insurance, too. If you want to go back to gearing up for a war every generation, vote for Governor Coolidge. He’ll give you one. If you want to make sure your sons and husbands and brothers live to grow old, vote for me. It’s that simple.”
But it wasn’t, not as far as Sylvia was concerned. She wanted the Confederate States punished for what they’d done to the Ericsson, not forgiven their reparations. Hosea Blackford might not want a war, but wouldn’t the Confederates if they ever got strong again? “I’m glad we came,” she told Brigid Coneval on their way back to the subway station. “Now I’m surer than ever I’ll vote for Coolidge.”
“Sure and you can’t mean it!” Brigid exclaimed, and argued with her all the way home even though she’d mocked both Hosea Blackford and his wife. She didn’t change Sylvia’s mind, or even come close.
Over the supper table, Chester Martin grinned at his wife. “Election Day coming up,” he said with a sly smile.
“And so?” Rita answered. But she smiled, too. “Plenty of worse ways to meet than at a polling place.”
“I should say.” Martin had met women at worse places—and that didn’t even count the soldiers’ brothels behind the front during the war, when you’d stand in line outside in the rain for a couple of minutes of what was much more catharsis than rapture. At least I never got a dose of the clap, he thought.
“Do you think Blackford can do it?” Rita asked.
“Hope so,” Martin said. “I don’t see why not. Everybody’s making good money. Why should we change when things are going the way they’re supposed to?” He spread his hands. “I still don’t much like the Socialists’ foreign policy—I’d take a stronger line than they do—but that’s not enough reason to vote for the Great Stone Face.”
Rita laughed at the nickname. “Coolidge doesn’t have much to say for himself, does he?”
“I think there’s a reason for that, too,” Chester replied. “He’s never done anything worth talking about.”
“Massachusetts is prosperous,” Rita said. “He takes credit for that.”
After sarcastically clapping his hands a couple of times, Martin said, “He may take it, but who says he deserves it? The whole country’s prosperous, and the Socialists deserve credit for that.” He’d come late to the Socialists, but had what amounted to a convert’s zeal. “Look where we were in 1920, before President Sinclair won, and look where we are now.”
“You’re preaching to the choir, you know,” his wife told him with a smile. “I’m going to vote for Blackford, too.”
“I know, but look.” Chester felt expansive. He wanted to tell the whole world how well his party had run the country over the past eight years. Since the whole world wasn’t sitting across the kitchen table from him and Rita was, she got to listen to him. He went on, “Look how high the stock market’s risen. Who would have thought the proletariat could start owning the means of production by buying shares in the big companies? With buying on margin, though, it’s awfully easy to do.” He laughed. “If we can afford to do it, it must be easy to do.”
Rita pointed to the newspaper, which lay on a chair. “The Wireless Corporation is splitting its stock again.”
Martin nodded. “I saw that. I’m glad I got into Wireless somewhere close to the ground floor. I think it’s going to be the big thing for years and years, and those four shares I managed to buy last summer are sixteen shares now. It’s swell. Everything keeps going up and up and up. It’s like coining money.”
“Did you see that Congresswoman Blackford is coming to town Saturday?” Rita asked.
“No, I missed that,” he answered. “Do you want to go see her?”
“Sure? Why not? It’ll be fun,” Rita said. “And besides, she shows what a woman can do when she puts her mind to it.”
Although Chester wasn’t sure he liked the sound of that, he said, “All right,” anyhow, finding agreement the better part of valor. Then he added, “Did I ever tell you that I—”
“Met Flora Blackford when she was still Flora Hamburger?” Rita cut in. “Had her brother in your company during the war?” She shook her head. Her bobbed dark blond hair flipped back and forth. “No. You never, ever told me that. I’ve never heard it, not even once. Can’t you tell?”
“I can tell you’re giving me a hard time,” he answered. She grinned. So did he.
Flora Blackford chose to speak near the Toledo city hall, in the shadow of the smaller copy of the great statue of Remembrance that stood on Bedloe Island in New York harbor. Chester found that interesting, even challenging. For more than a generation, remembrance had been the loudest drum the Democrats beat. For a nation twice defeated, twice humiliated, by the CSA and the Confederates’ European allies, it was a drumbeat that had struck deep chords.
But now the Great War was eleven years past. The United States had won it. People still held Remembrance Day parades, but they didn’t march with flags upside down any more. Having won, the United States were no longer in distress. And, ever since the Great War ended, the Democrats hadn’t been able to find any other theme that resonated with the voters as remembrance had.
And now, here stood Flora Blackford under that great statue with the gleaming sword. By the way she stood there, she said Remembrance—and the Democrats—spoke to yesterday’s worries, yesterday’s needs. I’m going to talk about what you need to hear today—and tomorrow, she said without words, merely by standing there.
“We’ve come a long way the past eight years,” she said, “but we’ve still got a long way to go. When President Sinclair was elected, you risked losing your job if you went out on strike. Some of you had lost your jobs. That can’t happen any more, thanks to the laws we’ve passed.”
Chester Martin pounded his palms together. He’d fought company goons, and he’d fought the police who served as the big capitalists’ watchdogs and hunting hounds. Next to what he’d been through in the trenches, those brawls hadn’t been anything much. And if you weren’t willing to fight for what you wanted, did you really deserve to get it? He believed in the class struggle. He believed in it all the way down to his toes.
When the applause died down a little, Vice President Blackford’s wife went on, “You know the Democrats never would have passed a bill like that, or like the one that gives workers the right to take leave without pay if there’s a baby in the family or someone takes sick and then get their jobs back. They were in power from 1884 to 1920, and they still behave as though it’s 1884.”
That drew not only applause but whoops of laughter. It also fit in very well with what Chester had been thinking not long before. Flora Blackford continued, “And we tried to give you old-age insurance, too. We tried hard. But we couldn’t quite manage that, because the Democrats had enough men in the Senate to tie up the bill with a filibuster. We’ve got to elect more Socialists. Friends, comrades, the presidency is important, but it’s not enough, not by itself. We have to fight the forces of reaction wherever we find them. That’s what the class struggle is all about.”
It wasn’t how Martin imagined the class struggle. He took the phrase literally. He’d broken enough heads in his time to have reason to take it literally. He’d taken his lumps, too; the real problem with the class struggle was that the capitalists and their lackeys fought back hard. But the idea of carrying the struggle even to the halls of Congress held a powerful appeal for him.
“We don’t need the enormous Army and Navy we had before the Great War, the Army and Navy that ate up so much money and so much of our industry,” Flora said. “We’ve won the war. Now we can enjoy what we won. Factories can make goods for people, not for killing. We can spend our wealth on what we need, not on battleships and machine guns and barrels. We’ve fought our neighbors too many times. We can work toward living at peace with them now.”
That drew more loud cheers. Chester joined in them, but more than a little halfheartedly. This was the part of the Socialist platform that still graveled him. Still, Flora Blackford expressed it well. Maybe the 1920s were so prosperous because less money was going into weapons and fortifications and more into people’s pockets. Maybe.
“Hosea Blackford will take us on toward the middle of the twentieth century,” Flora declared. “Calvin Coolidge will drag us back into the nineteenth century. Which way do you want to go? The choice is yours—it’s in the people’s hands. I ask you not to turn your back on the future! I ask you to vote Socialist, to vote for Hosea Blackford for president and Hiram Johnson for vice president. Let Dakota and California show the rest of the country the way! Thank you!”
More applause—thunderous applause. Rita said, “I can’t wait for November.”
“Neither can I,” Chester agreed. That was how a good stump speech was supposed to work. It made the faithful eager. Men and women pushed forward, trying to get a word with Flora Blackford now that she’d come down off the platform. “Come on,” Martin told his wife, and did some pushing himself, wondering if the vice president’s wife would remember him.
He didn’t really expect her to, and she didn’t, not when she looked at him. But when he shouted his name at her, she nodded. “You were David’s sergeant,” she said.
“That’s right, ma’am.” Chester grinned and nodded. “And this is my wife, Rita.”
“Pleased to meet you.” Flora clasped Rita’s hand. “Will you vote for my husband on Election Day?”
“I sure will,” Rita answered. “I was going to even before I heard you talk. But even if I’d been thinking about voting for the Democrats before, you would have made me change my mind.”
“Thank you very much,” Flora Blackford said. “He needs all the votes he can get, believe me. We can’t take anything for granted. If we do, we’re liable to lose.”
“We’d better not,” Chester Martin said. Before Vice President Blackford’s wife could answer, a fresh surge of people from behind pushed Rita and him away from her. Again, that was no surprise; he felt lucky to have talked with her at all. Turning to Rita, he asked, “What do you think?”
“She’s honest,” Rita said at once. “If she is, it’s a good bet her husband is, too. And she knew who you were as soon as you told her your name. That was something.” She proudly took his arm. “You know important people.”
He laughed. “Stick with me, kiddo, and I’ll take you to the top.”
Rita laughed, too, but only for a moment. Then she sobered. “You really do know important people, Chester. That might turn out to be important one of these days. You never can tell.”
“Maybe.” But Chester didn’t believe it, not down deep. “I don’t think Flora Blackford’s the sort of person you can use to pull strings. She was in Congress, remember, when her brother got conscripted, and she didn’t pull any for him. He could have had some soft, safe job behind the lines—typist or driver or something like that. He could have, but he didn’t. He went into the fighting, and he got shot. If she didn’t help David Hamburger, she’s not likely to help me.”
“That depends on what you’d need to ask her,” Rita answered. “Like I said a minute ago, you never can tell.”
Somebody stepped on Chester’s foot, hard. “Ow!” he said. In the crowd, he couldn’t even tell who’d done it. He pointed toward the trolley stop. “Let’s get out of here and go home before we get trampled.”
“Suits me,” his wife said. “I’m glad we came, though. She made a good speech—and I found out what a special fellow I married.”
Martin started to tell her he was just an ordinary guy. He started to, but he didn’t. If Rita wanted to think he was a special fellow, he didn’t mind a bit.