XI
Hipolito Rodriguez had never thought about what a stock-market crash could do to the town of Baroyeca, and to the silver mine in the hills on which the town depended for its existence. Just because he hadn’t thought about such things, though, didn’t mean they weren’t real. The mine shut down in September. A few days later, the railroad stopped coming into Baroyeca.
“A good thing we got the stove when we did,” his wife said when he brought that news home. “It would take a lot longer to come here now.”
“Sí, Magdalena,” he said. “Everything will take a lot longer to come here now. The town is liable to dry up and blow away, and then what will become of the farms all around it?”
“We go on and do as we always did,” Magdalena answered. “We stay on our land and mind our own business.”
“But we can’t make everything here,” Rodriguez said. “If the general store closes, life will get very hard.”
“How can the general store close?” Magdalena said. “Everyone around here goes to it. Señor Diaz is a rich man.”
“How rich will he be if he has to ship everything into Baroyeca by wagon or by truck?” Rodriguez asked. “I don’t know how much that costs, but I know it costs a lot more than the railroad.”
“Now you worry me,” Magdalena said. “I think you did that on purpose.”
“As a matter of fact, yes,” he replied. “I’m worried myself. I didn’t want to be the only one.”
“Oh.” She’d been making tortillas. After rubbing cornmeal off her hands and onto her apron, she gave Hipolito Rodriguez a hug. “Who would have thought it could be this bad?”
“Who, indeed?” he answered. “Up till now, we complained that things that happened in Richmond didn’t matter one way or the other here in Sonora, and that nobody back there cared about us.” His laugh rang bitter. “Now things that happened in Richmond and in New York City matter very much here, and Madre de Dios! but I wish they didn’t.”
Magdalena nodded. “How do these things work out like this? You go to the meetings of the Partido de la Libertad—what do they say there? Do they know? Can they make it better?”
“What can they do now?” he asked in return. “The president is a Whig. Most of the Senators and Congressmen are Whigs. The Freedom Party can only protest what the Whigs do, and the Whigs don’t do much. They don’t seem to know what to do. They are fools.” He’d always thought the Whigs were fools. Even before Sonora started electing men from the Freedom Party to Congress, the state had sent Radical Liberals off to Richmond.
“If the Freedom Party had power, what would it do?” Magdalena asked.
“Put people to work,” Rodriguez answered at once. “Make sure they stayed at work. Make the country strong again. Tell the United States to leave us alone, and be strong enough to make sure the United States did it. Take back the states the USA stole from us in the war.”
The only time he’d ever seen men from the United States was during his service in the Confederate Army during the Great War. The soldiers from the USA had done their best to kill him, and had come alarmingly close more than once. A lot of the west-Texas prairie where he’d fought was now included in the U.S. state of Houston. It was as if the USA were mocking all his effort, all his courage—yes, and all his fear, too. Anything he could do to pay back the United States of America, he would do, and do gladly.
Nodding—she knew how he felt—Magdalena said, “These things sound wonderful. How will the Freedom Party make them happen?”
“Why . . .” He hesitated, then shrugged. “I don’t know, not exactly,” he admitted. “I don’t think anyone knows. But I do know they will work hard and try everything. And I know they have no hope of helping the country if they aren’t in power. The Whigs have made too many mistakes. It’s time for them to go.”
Robert Quinn, the Freedom Party organizer in Baroyeca, had said that very thing in his accented Spanish. Hipolito Rodriguez didn’t mind that he spoke the language like a man whose first language was English. That Quinn spoke Spanish at all mattered to the farmer. It told him the Freedom Party was serious about winning followers in Baroyeca, in all of Sonora. The Whigs never had been. Even the Radical Liberals had worried about the big men, the rich men, first, and had expected them to bring the campesinos into line. It had worked for many years, too. But no more.
“When you vote Freedom, you know the Party cares,” Rodriguez said. “Nobody else does, not like that.”
“But the election is still more than a month away,” Magdalena said. “What can the Party do in the meantime? What can anyone do if—the Blessed Virgin forbid it!—the general store closes its doors?” She crossed herself.
“I don’t know,” Rodriguez answered. “I don’t think anyone knows.”
“As long as we have enough water to keep the corn and beans growing and the livestock healthy, we can go on,” his wife said. “Life may be hard, but life has been hard before. We will get through till it is better again.”
“I hope so,” Rodriguez said. He’d got used to being a fairly prosperous farmer—prosperous by the standards of southern Sonora, at any rate. He’d seen just enough of the rest of the Confederate States to have a suspicion bordering on certainty that prosperity here was something less than it might have been elsewhere in the country.
As a measure of that prosperity, Magdalena had a treadle-powered sewing machine. She’d bought it secondhand, from a woman in Baroyeca who’d got a better machine, but even secondhand it was a status symbol for a farmer’s wife. It also let her get more work done faster than she could have managed without it. With six children to be clothed, that was no small matter.
A few days after Rodriguez came back from Baroyeca, the needle in the sewing machine broke. Like any farmer, he was a good handyman. Fixing anything that small and precisely made, though, was beyond him. “You have to go back into town,” Magdalena told him. “I have half a dozen pairs of pants to make. You don’t want the boys to run around naked, do you?”
“I’ll go,” he said. “Give me the broken needle, so I can be sure I’m getting the matching part. There are as many different kinds as there are different sewing machines, and you would have something to say to me if I brought back the wrong one, now wouldn’t you?”
“Maybe not,” his wife answered. “Maybe I’d just think you’d spent too much time in La Culebra Verde before you tried to buy the right one.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rodriguez said with dignity. Magdalena laughed so raucously, she distracted Miguel and Jorge enough to make them stop wrestling for a little while.
With that laughter still ringing in his ears, Hipolito Rodriguez set out for Baroyeca the next morning. When he got there, he made sure he bought the sewing-machine needle first. Magdalena would never have let him live it down if, after all his care, he came back with the wrong one.
The general store remained open. Rodriguez was astonished to discover that a packet of three needles cost only eight cents. The machine, when Magdalena bought it, had come with the one that had just broken, and no others. “I expected they would be much more,” he told Jaime Diaz as the proprietor took his money.
“Then I will gladly charge you twice as much,” Diaz said. “One way or another, I have to make some money. With the mine closed, I don’t know how I’m going to do it. And the railroad, too! How will I get supplies?”
“I don’t know,” Rodriguez answered in a low voice. “My wife and I were talking about this. If you don’t, how will Baroyeca go on?”
“I have no answers,” the storekeeper said. “Every day, I keep hoping things will get better, and every day they get worse. Be thankful you live on a farm. It’s not so bad for you. For anyone who has to get things from other places every day . . .” He shook his head.
“What can you do?” Rodriguez asked. “What can anyone do?”
“No one can do anything,” Diaz replied. “No one can do anything to make things better, I mean. That’s what makes this whole business so dreadful, my friend. The whole world is broken, and no one has the faintest idea how to fix it.”
Hipolito Rodriguez hadn’t thought of the collapse in those terms. He’d thought about what it meant to Baroyeca, to Sonora, and, to some degree, to the Confederate States. The world? That was too much for him to grasp. He said, “Señor Diaz, I know the man who can set things right.”
“Who is that, then?” Diaz said. “In the name of God and the Blessed Virgin, tell me. If anyone can make the mine open and the train come back to Baroyeca, I will bless him with all my heart.” In spite of his talk of the world, most of his thoughts stayed close to home, too. Such is life for most men.
“Jake Featherston of the Freedom Party, that’s who,” Rodriguez said. “They can make the country strong again, and if we are strong, how can we help being rich again, too?”
“Rich? I don’t care about rich. All I care about is having the money to go on from day to day,” the storekeeper said. He was polite enough to understate what he had and what he wanted. Rodriguez nodded, polite enough to accept the understatement for what it was. Diaz went on, “I don’t know about the Freedom Party, either.” He drummed his fingers on the countertop behind which he stood. “But the Whigs have no notion what to do. A blind man could see that. And the Radical Liberals”—he smiled a wry smile—“what have they ever been good for but making faces at the Whigs? So maybe, just maybe, you could be right.”
“I think so,” Rodriguez said. “When did you ever see the Whigs or even the Radical Liberals with a headquarters here in town? The Freedom Party has one. And Robert Quinn even learned Spanish to get us to join the Party. When have the others cared so much about us?”
“A point,” Diaz admitted. “Quinn buys from me.” Everyone who actually lived in town bought from him; what other choice did people have? Again, he was polite. He continued, “He always pays his bills on time, I will say, and he never treats me like a damn greaser.” The rest of the conversation had been in Spanish. He used English for those two words.
Rodriguez nodded, a sour smile on his face. He’d also heard those English words, more often than he ever wanted to. He said, “You see? They speak English, but they don’t look down their noses at Sonorans. If they can manage that, I think they can manage the whole country.”
“I hadn’t thought of it in that way,” Diaz said. “Maybe you’re right. It could be so.”
“I really think it is,” Rodriguez said. “Look at the mess the other parties have got us into. Doesn’t the Freedom Party deserve the chance to get us out?” The storekeeper didn’t say no. Rodriguez added the clincher: “And the election is coming up soon—only a little more than a month to go.”
Anne Colleton drove a five-year-old Birmingham down toward Charleston. She’d finally sold the ancient Ford she’d acquired during the war after Confederate soldiers confiscated her Vauxhall. She knew she’d kept it longer than she should have, as a reminder of those grim times. But when she weighed sentiment against ever more cranky machinery, sentiment came off second best.
The Robert E. Lee Highway was better going than it had been in those days. It was paved all the way, where long stretches of it had been only rutted dirt. A lot more motorcars traveled up and down it, too. And nowadays, the bodies of hanged Negro Reds didn’t dangle from trees by the side of the road. She’d seen plenty of them, coming back from Charleston to St. Matthews in 1915. She’d been going to see a lover then; she was going to see a lover now.
Back then, regardless of whether Roger Kimball had had a flat in Charleston rather than being on leave from the Navy, not even Anne, radical as she’d reckoned herself, would have dared park her motorcar in front of the building where he lived. That would have meant scandal. They’d always met in hotels: in Charleston, in Richmond, down in Georgia.
Times had changed. Much of what had been radical was now taken for granted. Anne didn’t think twice about leaving the Birmingham in front of Clarence Potter’s block of flats, or of knocking on his door. Inside, the clattering of a typewriter abruptly stopped. A man’s voice kept on coming out of a wireless set.
Potter opened the door. He gave Anne a quick kiss and said, “Come in. Fix yourself a drink. I’m almost done with this damn report. Pretty soon, we’ll find out how good the news is.” By his tone, he didn’t expect her to take good literally.
“A heavy turnout is expected in today’s Congressional election,” the reporter on the wireless said as Anne went into the kitchen to deal with whiskey and water and ice. “The Whigs remain confident of holding their strong position in the House despite the unfortunate state of the economy, and—”
The typewriter started clacking again just then, drowning out the rest. Clarence Potter was far and away the most unusual man Anne had ever met. He not only believed she could take care of herself, he encouraged her to do it. He’d never shown any interest what ever in running her life. A thoroughly competent man, he respected competence wherever he found it, and seemed happy he’d found it in her. Her whole life long, she’d fought against men who either tried to control her or simply assumed they would. Potter hadn’t tried. Anne sometimes had trouble figuring out what to make of that.
Drink in hand, she came back into the front room. “Do you want me to fix one for you, too?” she asked. He didn’t expect her to fix drinks. That, no doubt, was why she was willing to do it.
And he shook his head now. Lamplight glinted from the metal frames of his spectacles. “No, thanks. Not yet. Let me finish up here. I think I’ve figured out who’s been lifting crates from Lucas Williamson’s warehouse, and how he can keep it from happening again.” Concentration on his face, he went back to typing.
“You did remember to vote, didn’t you?” Anne asked.
He nodded. “Oh, yes. I’m not going to give the Freedom Party any help at all. The Whigs have done too much of that lately.” He went back to typing, and might almost have forgotten Anne was in the room with him.
She listened to the wireless. The commentator kept on sounding optimistic about the Whigs’ prospects. She hoped he was right. Like Clarence Potter, she hoped and believed two different things.
Ten minutes later, Potter took the sheet of paper out of the machine. “There,” he said in his half-Yankee accent, laying it on a neat stack. “Another week’s bills paid. Now I get to remember I’m a human being.” He went back into the kitchen and fixed a whiskey for himself. Raising it in salute, he added, “It’s damn good to see you, you know that? Always nice to have company on the deck as the ship goes down.”
“It won’t be as bad as that,” Anne said.
“No, indeed. It’ll probably be worse.” Potter looked out the window. Twilight was setting in. “Polls’ll close before long. Then we’ll start getting returns, and then we’ll know how big a mess we’ll have for the next two years. To tell you the truth, I’d almost sooner not find out.”
“Would you rather stay here and stay in bed, then?” Anne asked. “The election will be what it is, regardless of whether we go to Whig headquarters after supper.”
Potter smiled but shook his head. “Plenty of time for that afterwards. I have this restless itch to know, and it needs satisfying as much as any other urge.”
“All right.” And, to Anne’s internal surprise, it was all right. She knew Clarence Potter was interested; she’d had plenty of very pleasant proofs of that. If he put business before pleasure . . . well, didn’t she, too? I’m keeping company with a grownup, she thought. It was, in her experience, a novelty, but one she didn’t mind.
When they went out for supper, she ordered a big plate of boiled shrimp. “They don’t come fresh to St. Matthews,” she said.
“No, I suppose not,” Potter agreed. “When I first moved here, I remember thinking how wonderful all the seafood was.” He’d chosen crab cakes for himself. “Now, unless people remind me about it the way you just did, I take it for granted. I shouldn’t do that, should I?”
“No,” Anne said. “The whole country’s taken too many things for granted.”
“We’re liable to pay the price for it, too,” he said. “That goes back a long way now, you know—starting when we took it for granted we’d win the Great War and be home to celebrate by the time the leaves turned red and gold.”
The colored waiter brought their suppers. As Anne began to eat, she said, “I took that for granted, and I can’t say otherwise. You didn’t, did you?”
“No—but remember, I went to Yale. I was there for four Remembrance Days. I had a pretty fair notion of how desperately in earnest those people were. We figured we could whip them. They went out and made damn sure they could whip us.” He took a bite of crab cake, nodded, and went on in meditative tones: “We’ve always figured we could whip the Freedom Party, too. But the damnyankees aren’t the only people who are desperately in earnest. That’s what worries me.”
“We’ll find out.” Anne feared he might be right, but didn’t want to think about it, not just then.
After they finished supper, they walked over to the Whig headquarters. It lay only three or four blocks away. Even in November, bugs still buzzed around street lamps. Something—a bird? a bat?—swooped down, grabbed one of them out of the air, and vanished into darkness again.
When Anne and Clarence Potter came into the headquarters, they got their share, and more than their share, of suspicious looks. Anne had former Freedom Party ties that made people distrust her. Her companion didn’t, but he did have the unfortunate habit of saying exactly what he thought, and that regardless of what the received wisdom was.
But then someone called out to them: “Have you heard the news?”
Potter shook his head. Anne said, “No, that’s what we came here for. What’s the latest?”
“Horatio Standifer out in North Carolina,” the man replied. “In Congress since before the war, but a Freedom Party man just did him in.”
“Oh, good God,” Potter said. “If Standifer lost his seat, nobody’s safe tonight. And if nobody’s safe tonight, then God help the country tomorrow.”
“What’s the news here in South Carolina?” Anne asked.
“Not as bad as that,” the Whig said. “We’re going to lose the seat we picked up two years ago, and maybe one more besides.”
Potter pointed at the blackboard on which new results were going up. “Maybe two more besides, looks like to me.”
After a second look at the numbers, the other Whig scowled and nodded. “Maybe two more besides,” he admitted, and went off as if Potter had some sort of contagious disease.
He does, Anne thought. He tells the truth as he sees it, and he pulls no punches. Such men are dangerous.
Returns from Georgia started coming, and then Tennessee and Alabama. The more of them there were, the longer the faces at Whig headquarters got. People started slipping over to the saloon across the street. Some of them came back. Others didn’t—they stayed away and began the serious business of drowning their sorrows.
Clarence Potter didn’t go. Each new seat lost to the Freedom Party—and those came in one after another, with no possible room for doubt in most of them—brought not howls of dismay from him, but rather a bitter smile. He might have been telling the world, I knew this was going to happen. Now here it is, and what are you going to do about it? No one in the Whig headquarters seemed to have the slightest idea what to do about it . . . except for the men who headed across the street to get drunk.
As Anne watched the man she was with, so he watched her, too. After a while, he said, “It’s probably not too late for you, you know.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, though she had a pretty good idea.
And, sure enough, he said, “Your politics aren’t that far from Jake Featherston’s. If you want to, you can probably make your peace with him.”
She wanted to haul off and slap him. She wanted to, but she couldn’t, for the same thought had crossed her mind. He told her the truth as he saw it, too. Still, she said, “I don’t know. I turned him down once when he asked for money, years ago. He doesn’t forget things like that.”
Potter laughed scornfully. “I’ll tell you what he won’t turn down. He won’t turn down money if you give it to him now, that’s what.”
Anne wondered about that. She decided Potter was probably half right. Jake Featherston might take her money if she offered it to him again. But would he ever trust her, ever let her have any real influence? She had her doubts. Featherston struck her as a man whose memory for slights an elephant would envy.
Casually, Clarence Potter added, “If you do go back to him, we’re through. I don’t know how much that means to you. I hope it means something. Losing you would mean a lot to me. But I’ve known Featherston longer than any of the ‘Freedom!’-shouting yahoos who go marching for him these days. We aren’t on the same side, and we’re never going to be.”
“What if he gets elected president?” Anne asked.
A muscle jumped in his right cheek, perhaps an inch below his eye. “No one ever went broke underestimating the stupidity of the Confederate people, but I still find that hard to imagine—even harder than it was in 1921, when he came so close. And 1933’s still a long way away. Things are bound to look better by then.” He paused and sighed. “And the way you asked that question makes me wonder if we aren’t through anyhow.”
“Up till now, you never put any conditions on me,” Anne said. “I liked it that you never put any conditions on me.”
“Up till now, I never imagined I needed to,” he answered. “But I can’t put up with the Freedom Party. I’m sorry, but I can’t.”
“Don’t you want revenge on the USA?” she asked.
“I don’t want anything that badly,” Potter said.
Anne sighed. “Some things are worth any price.” He shook his head. Now she sighed. “It’s been fun, Clarence,” she said. “But I’ll do what I think I have to do, and not what anyone else tells me to. Not ever.” No wonder I never got married, she thought. She walked out of the Whig headquarters and back toward her motorcar.
Kamloops, British Columbia, was a long way from Philadelphia, and a long way from the Confederate States, too. That didn’t keep news from getting there about as fast as it got anywhere else, though, not in this age of telegraph clickers and wireless sets. Colonel Irving Morrell studied the Confederate election returns with a sort of horrified fascination.
“Sweet Jesus Christ!” he said, looking at the newspaper that had set them out in detail.
“Er—yes, sir,” his aide-de-camp said, and chuckled.
“No offense, Lieutenant,” Morrell said hastily. “Just a manner of speaking.”
“Oh, yes, sir. I know that,” Lieutenant Ike Horwitz answered. “You’re not like that damn German sergeant who was tagging along with your buddy from the General Staff over there.”
“I should hope not.” Morrell set the paper on Horwitz’s desk. “But look at this. For heaven’s sake, look at this. The Freedom Party went from—what?—nine Congressmen to twenty-nine. They won three governorships down there. They took control of four state legislatures, too, and that means they’ll start electing Senators, because their state legislatures still choose ’em. They didn’t switch to popular vote, the way we did.”
“That’s a big pickup, no doubt about it.” Horwitz leaned forward to study the numbers. He looked up at Morrell. “I’m awful damn glad I’m a Jew in the USA, and not a shvartzer in the CSA.”
“A what?” Morrell said, and then he nodded, making the connection from Yiddish to German. “Oh. Yeah. I bet you are.”
“There’s people here who don’t like Jews—plenty who feel just like that stupid sergeant,” Horwitz said. “But it isn’t all that bad. Hell, even the president’s wife’s Jewish, not that I’ve got any use for her politics or his. If you’re colored in the Confederate States, you’ve got to be shaking in your shoes—if they let you have any shoes.”
He was right. Morrell hadn’t even wondered what the Negroes in the CSA felt about the election returns he’d been dissecting. He rarely thought about Negroes. What white man in the USA did? Maybe Horwitz, being a Jew, was more likely to look at other people who had a hard time in their homeland.
“I’ll tell you what,” Morrell said. “Write me an appreciation of the Confederate Negroes’ likely response to this. Do a good job on it and I’ll forward it to Philadelphia, see if I can get you noticed.”
“Thank you, sir. That’s damn white of you,” his aide-de-camp answered.
Morrell’s own thoughts were on the more immediate. “Any time the Freedom vote goes up, that’s trouble for us, because those bastards want another shot at the USA. And Featherston’s boys haven’t seen numbers like these since 1921. I hope to heaven the president sits up and takes notice.”
“What do you think the odds are?” Lieutenant Horwitz asked.
“Do I look like a Socialist politician to you? I’d better not, that’s all I’ve got to say,” Morrell replied. “They cut off Confederate reparations early, they haven’t been checking about rearmament near as hard as they should have, they’ve cut our budget. . . .” He sighed. “They think everybody should just be friends. I wish that would work, I really do.”
“People vote for it,” Horwitz said. “Nobody wants to go through another war like the last one.”
“No, of course not. But both sides have to want peace. You only need one to have a war. And the only thing worse than fighting a war like that is fighting it and losing. Ask the Confederates if you don’t believe me.”
“I don’t need to ask anybody,” Horwitz said. “I can see that for myself. Anyone with a brain in his head ought to be able to see that for himself. But what are we going to do?”
“That’s the question, all right.” Morrell drummed his fingers on the desktop. “I don’t know. I just don’t know. Half of those people who voted for Featherston’s gang of goons probably don’t hope for anything but jobs and three square meals a day if he calls the shots. They sure aren’t getting ’em with the folks they’ve got running things now.”
His aide-de-camp smiled unhappily. “And isn’t that the sad and sorry truth, sir? When I joined the Army, I never thought I’d be glad to be in for the food and for the roof over my head. But that’s how it looks nowadays. If I were a civilian, I’d probably be scuffling like everybody else.”
“Good point.” Morrell nodded. “We’re insulated from that, anyhow, thank God.”
“I suppose the Socialists are doing everything they can there,” Ike Horwitz said grudgingly. “Feeding people who are out of work and giving some of ’em makework jobs—it’s not great, God knows, but it’s better than nothing, you know what I mean?”
“I guess so.” Morrell sighed. “If you give a man something for nothing, though, will he want to stand up on his own two feet again when times get better, or will he keep wanting a handout for the rest of his life?”
“You ask me, sir, most people want to work if you give ’em the chance,” Horwitz answered. “Other thing is, if they do starve, talking about the rest of their lives starts looking pretty silly, doesn’t it? And if they’re afraid they’re going to starve, then what happens? Then they start voting for somebody like Jake Featherston in the USA, right?”
“I suppose so,” Morrell said again. Up till now, his politics had always been firmly Democratic; he’d never had to think about it. He still didn’t, not really. But he’d never been a man to worry about subtleties, either, and now he wondered whether he’d made a mistake. “You’re saying the Socialists are giving us a safety valve, aren’t you?”
“I wouldn’t have put it quite that way, but yes, sir, I guess I am,” Lieutenant Horwitz answered. “If things blow up, what have we got? Trouble, nothing else but.” Like any soldier—and like anyone else with an ounce of sense—he was convinced staying out of trouble was a good idea.
A couple of days later, Morrell went into the town of Kamloops to do some shopping—Christmas was coming, and he wanted to buy some things for Agnes and Mildred that he couldn’t hope to find at the post exchange. The weather was crisp and chilly, the sun shining bright out of a blue, blue sky but not giving much in the way of warmth even so.
The reception he got in Kamloops gave little in the way of warmth, either. Here a dozen years after the end of the war, the Canucks cared for the green-gray uniforms their occupiers wore no more than they had after the USA finally battered them into submission. People on the streets turned their backs when Morrell walked by.
Most of them did, anyhow. He’d got used to that. What he hadn’t got used to were the ragged-looking men who held out their hands and whined, “Spare change, pal?” And he especially hadn’t got used to the respectable-looking men who held out their hands and said the same thing. One of them added, “Been a long time since my twin boys saw any meat on the table.”
“Why don’t you get a job, then?” Morrell asked.
“Why?” The man glared at him. “I’ll tell you why, even though you’re a damned fool to need telling. Because there damned well aren’t any jobs to get, that’s why. Lumber companies aren’t hiring—that’s what I got fired from. Farms aren’t taking on hired men, not when they can’t sell half the sheep and cows and wheat they raise. Even here in town, only way you can keep your job is if you’re somebody’s brother—if you’re just a brother-in-law, you’re in trouble. That’s why, you stinking Yank.”
Well, I asked him, and he went and told me, Morrell thought. He dug in his pocket and gave the Canadian some coins. “Here, buddy. Good luck to you.”
“I ought to spit in your eye,” the hungry man told him. “Hell of it is, I can’t. I’ve got to tip my hat”—he did—“and say, ‘Thank you, sir,’ on account of I need the money so goddamn bad.”
Never in all his days had Morrell heard Thank you, sir sound so much like Go to hell, you son of a bitch.
And he discovered the problem that sprang from giving one beggar some money. As soon as he did, all the others became four times as obnoxious, swarming around him and cursing him as foully as they knew how when he pushed past without doing for them what he’d done for one of their fellows. Maybe they hoped they’d make him feel guilty. All they really did was make him mad.
He’d just shaken free of the crowd when a woman sidled up to him. Skirts were longer than they had been a couple of years before, and the day wasn’t warm, but what she wore displayed a lot of her. “Want a good time, soldier?” she said. “Three dollars.”
She was skinny. Like any town with soldiers in it, Kamloops had its share of easy women, but she didn’t look as if she’d been part of their sorry sisterhood for very long. “What did you used to do?” Morrell asked quietly.
“What difference does it make?” she answered. “Whatever it was, I can’t do it any more. Do you want to go someplace?”
“No, thanks,” he answered. She cursed him, too, with a sort of dreary hopelessness that hit him harder than the anger the male beggars had shown.
Even the storekeepers’ attitudes seemed different from the way they had before things went sour. He’d never seen men so glad to take money from him. When he remarked on that, the fellow who’d just sold him a doll for Mildred said, “You bet I’m glad. You’re only the second customer I’ve had today. Anybody with any money at all looks good to me right now. How am I going to pay my bills if nobody buys anything from me? And if I can’t pay my bills, what happens then? Do I end up out on the street? I sure hope not.”
Later, another shopkeeper said, “Hate to tell you this, but Kamloops’d wither up and die if it wasn’t for you Yank soldiers. They still pay you regular, so you still have money in your pockets. Damn few folks do, and you’d better believe that.”
A third man was even blunter: “If things don’t turn around pretty quick, what the hell’s going to happen to us?”
Morrell had to run the gauntlet of beggars once more on the way back to the U.S. Army base. The men cursed him all over again, this time for spending money on himself and not on them. “How would you like it if you were hungry?” one of them called after him—a parting shot, as it were.
It was a good question. He had no good answer. Nobody wanted to be hungry. He remembered that skinny woman. Nobody wanted to have to choose between whoring and starving. But nobody seemed to have much of an idea how to make things better, either. Morrell hurried home, a troubled man.