XVII
“Here, Papa. Let me show you how it’s done.” Georges Galtier dug his pitchfork into a bale of hay and flung food to the livestock in the barn. When he got to the horse’s stall, he said, “I don’t know why you don’t turn this miserable animal into glue and food for pampered poodles in Montreal.”
“Tabernac!” Lucien Galtier said, and shook his head at his younger son. “I could never do that.”
“What does he do but eat?” Georges persisted. “He doesn’t take you into Rivière-du-Loup any more. He doesn’t pull a plow. What good is he?”
“He listened to me. For years, he listened to me,” Lucien answered. “Whenever I would hitch up the wagon, I would talk to him. He knows every thought I had.”
“All the more reason to get rid of him,” Georges said, absurd as usual. “Dead horses tell no tales.” But even as he mocked the old beast, he gave it more hay than Lucien was in the habit of doing.
“With help like yours . . .” Lucien shook his head. “The trouble with you is, you think I can do nothing for myself any more.”
“The trouble with you is, you think you can still do everything for yourself,” Georges said.
“By the good God, I can!” Lucien said hotly. “I’m not sixty yet, and even sixty doesn’t mean one foot in the grave.” He grimaced, wishing he hadn’t put it like that. Poor Marie had never seen sixty.
His son said, “Papa, you are a formidable man.” Georges’ praise alarmed him more than anything else he could think of. The younger Galtier continued, “Even so, will you tell me you are as formidable as you were when you were my age? Will you say that?”
“Well . . . no.” Lucien wanted to say yes, but it would have been a lie. He knew it as well as Georges did—better. His joints were stiff, he got tired more easily than he had, his wind wasn’t what it had been. . . .
“Even for a young man, farm work isn’t easy,” Georges said. “I ought to know. There are times when I wish I were still in my twenties.”
Twenties! Lucien laughed at that. For him, the twenties seemed as long gone as Caesar’s conquest of Gaul. He wished he were in his forties. That would no doubt have horrified Georges, who had yet to see them. Lucien said, “Thanks to you and your brother and my sons-in-law, I do not have to do everything by myself. I am not ready to walk away from the farm. Did you think I would?”
“No, not really,” Georges replied. “But one day, you know, it could be that you might need to. If you think about it now, you will be readier when the time comes.”
“Mauvais tabernac!” Lucien said, which summed up what he thought about that. “ ‘Osti!” he added for good measure. “I will worry about such things when the time comes, and not until then. Meanwhile, let’s get this work done here—or would you rather stand around and gab? You always were a lazy one.”
“Nonsense,” Georges said with dignity. “I am merely . . . efficient.”
“You are the most efficient I have ever seen at getting out of work,” Lucien said. But, between them, they quickly finished off the rest of what needed doing.
Cold smote when they left the barn. As always, the land around Rivière-du-Loup laughed at the calendar, which insisted spring was only a couple of weeks away. Snow blanketed the ground. More danced in the air. Lucien took it altogether for granted—and then, all at once, he didn’t. How would one explain something so curious to someone from, say, the Confederate state of Cuba, or the U.S. state of California, or someplace else where it didn’t snow? It wasn’t like rain, which simply fell, splat. It fluttered on the breeze, it swirled, it twisted. Would a stranger who didn’t know about it take your word when you described it?
“I wouldn’t believe it myself,” Lucien muttered, stamping up the stairs toward the kitchen door.
Georges, on his heels, asked, “Wouldn’t believe what?”
“I wouldn’t believe what a nosy son I have.” Lucien opened the door. “But come in anyhow, and I’ll see what I can find for you to eat. I know you’ll waste away if I don’t.” Charles, his older son, was small and lean like him and Marie. Georges, somehow, had grown up a great strapping man, most of a head taller than Lucien and broad through the shoulders. His appetite—all his appetites—seemed in proportion.
He sighed as he followed Lucien out of the snow. “Every time I come in here, I keep thinking—I keep hoping—I’ll see chère Maman at the stove, baking something good.”
“I know.” Lucien sighed, too. “I feel the same. But it will not happen, not this side of heaven—which means a couple of sinners like us had better mend our ways.”
“This is a better reason to be good than most others I can think of,” Georges said. “And what do we have?”
“Cold chicken in the icebox,” Lucien answered. “Bread on the counter there—all the ladies for miles around give me bread, for they know I am no baker—and a good jug of applejack in the pantry. Even for a walking steam shovel like you, it should be enough, n’est-ce pas?”
“Steam shovel? I believe I’ve been insulted,” Georges said. “Do you know, Papa, I permit only two people in all the world to insult me—you and Sophie.”
“You do not need to permit your wife to insult you,” Lucien said, pouring two glasses of applejack. “It will happen whether you permit it or not—of this you may be sure.” He handed one glass to his younger son, then raised the other. “Your good health.”
“And yours.” Georges knocked back the drink. “Whew!” He whistled respectfully. “A good thing I didn’t have a cigarette in my mouth, or I think my lungs would have caught fire. That’s strong stuff.”
Lucien sipped. The applejack, like most of what he drank, didn’t conform to the Republic of Quebec’s tedious rules about licenses and taxes. A nearby farmer cooked it up from the harvest of his orchard. As a result, quality varied widely from one batch to the next. As Georges had said, this jug was on the potent side.
“Here,” Lucien said. “Slice the bread and get some butter for it. I’ll cut up the chicken. If you want it hot, I can build up the fire in the stove.”
“Don’t bother,” Georges told him. “If the stove were electric like everything else here, so it was easy . . . But now, cold is fine.”
“All right. Cold it will be, then.” As Lucien got out the chicken and a knife, he felt Marie’s ghost hovering there. He could almost hear her telling him he was making a clumsy botch of things, that he didn’t keep the kitchen clean enough to suit her. No matter what he did, he knew he couldn’t hope to match her standards. He tried as hard as he could, though. He wanted her to know he was making the effort.
Georges sighed as he dug in. “I ate a lot of suppers in this house,” he said. “No matter where I live, this will always be what I think of as home.”
“It is your patrimony,” Lucien said simply.
“It is where I grew up,” Georges said, which wasn’t quite the same thing but wasn’t far removed from it, either. He sighed again. “It was another time.”
“When you were a boy, it was another country,” Lucien said.
“I don’t think about Canada much any more,” Georges said. “Considering what’s happened to the rest of it, we’re lucky to be where we are.”
“Yes. Considering.” Lucien Galtier could hardly disagree with that. He poured himself some more apple brandy. “You were young when the change happened—not so hard for you to get used to it. I was a grown man. There were times when I felt torn in two, especially when the Americans treated us so badly in the first part of their occupation. I did all the small things a man can do to resist—all the small things, but none of the large. I had not the courage for that, not with six children, and four of them girls.”
“And now you have an American son-in-law, and a half-American grandson,” Georges said. “And what do you think of that?”
“Leonard O’Doull is a fine man. Even you will not deny he is a fine man,” Lucien said, and Georges didn’t. Lucien went on, “And the boy who bears my name . . . He is as fine a boy as a grandfather could want. I wish he had brothers and sisters, but that is in the hands of le bon Dieu.”
He suspected it was in Dr. O’Doull’s hands at least as much as in God’s. Contraception was of course illegal in staunchly Catholic, staunchly conservative Quebec. If anyone could get around such laws, though, a doctor could. And his son-in-law, while a good Catholic, was also a man who thought his own thoughts. A priest probably would not hear everything he might have to confess.
“Well, Charles has three, Susanne has three, Denise has four, my Sophie’s expecting her third, and even Jeanne is going to have her second in a few weeks,” Georges said. “Lucien may lack for brothers and sisters, but he doesn’t lack for cousins.”
“This is good. This is all good,” Galtier said. Repeating himself—was the applejack hitting so hard? Was he getting old, so he couldn’t hold his liquor? Or was he getting old, so he talked too much whether he was drunk or not? He was getting old. However much he’d been at pains to deny it to Georges, he knew better than to deny it to himself.
Georges said, “Sure enough, we Galtiers will end up taking over Quebec before we’re through.”
“And why not?” Lucien said. “After all, someone has to. And if we don’t, it’s liable to be people like Bishop Pascal’s—excuse me, Pascal Talon’s—twins.”
His son laughed. “Not all children can have such a distinguished father.”
“He was always out for whatever he could get. Always,” Lucien said. “He served God so he could help himself. He served the Americans so he could help himself. And if the Americans had lost, if the English-speaking Canadians and the British had won instead, he would have wormed his way back into their good graces, too.”
“He certainly wormed his way into his lady friend’s good graces,” Georges said. “Twins!”
“That’s what I said at the time,” Lucien agreed. “A priest—even a bishop—is also a man. This is true, beyond a doubt. But twins are excessive.”
“Excessive. There’s a good word.” Georges nodded. This time, he was the one who filled the glasses with apple brandy. “Tell me, Papa—do you not think it is also excessive to begin sending our young men from Quebec to help the Americans hold down the parts of Canada they occupy?”
“They have asked us to do this for a long time,” Galtier said slowly. “Up till now, we have always managed to get around it.”
“Now they say that, because they are fighting this war with Japan, they need our help more than ever,” Georges said. “I don’t see how we can get around it any more. So what do you think?”
“What I always thought. When the Americans recognized the Republic of Quebec, they didn’t do it for us Quebecois. They did it for themselves. They are the big brother, the rich brother; we are the little brother, the poor relation, and we have to do what they say. That is how they see it, anyhow.”
“How do you see it?”
Before answering, Lucien drained the glass Georges had poured for him. “How do I see? Blurrily . . . But that is not what you asked. The United States are very large. They are very rich. They are the ones who made us a country they say is free. But if we truly are free, we can tell them no if we like.”
“And suppose they don’t like it after that?”
“Will they go to war with us because they don’t like it? I have my doubts. Whether our politicians in Quebec City have the wit to see this . . . Malheureusement, that is another question. We will probably end up doing what the Americans want without even thinking about whether we should. What do you think?”
“I think you’re right. I think it’s too bad. And I think nobody cares what either one of us thinks,” Georges answered.
Lucien reached for the jug of applejack. “I think that calls for another drink,” he said.
Clarence Potter smelled trouble as soon as he walked into Whig headquarters in Charleston. The first thing he did was go over to a neat rank of bottles set against one wall and pour himself a whiskey. Thus armed, he buttonholed Braxton Donovan, who, by his red face, had started drinking quite a while before. Donovan was typical of the men in the hall: more than whiskey, which he held well, made him look as if he’d been hit in the head with a club. A speechless lawyer was a novelty Potter had thought he would relish, but he turned out to be wrong.
“God damn it, snap out of this funk,” Potter said crisply.
“Why?” Donovan answered, breathing whiskey fumes into his face. “I don’t even know why I’m going through the motions. It’s only March, but you can already see how the Freedom Party is going to kick our ass come November. What’s the use of pretending anything different?”
“Of course those know-nothing bastards will win—if nobody stands up and tries to stop ’em,” Potter said. “That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it?”
“What can we do? What can anybody do?” Donovan said. “Who’s going to vote for us, with one white man in four out of work? Christ, if I’d lost my job I wouldn’t vote Whig, either.”
“Yes, I believe that.” Withering scorn filled Potter’s voice. “You’d be out there yelling, ‘Freedom!’ and wondering how to spell it.”
The lawyer glared. “Fuck you, Clarence.”
Potter beamed. “Now you’re talking!” Donovan stared at him. He nodded emphatically and repeated himself: “Now you’re talking, I say. If you can get pissed off about me, you can get pissed off about the Freedom Party, too. And you’d better—if you don’t, the Confederate States are going right down the drain.”
But Braxton Donovan, no matter how angry at Potter he might be, couldn’t or wouldn’t turn that anger where it might do some good. He said, “I can deal with you. How are we supposed to deal with Featherston? Grady Calkins’ way?”
“If you want to know the truth, I’ve heard ideas I liked less,” Potter answered. “The Freedom Party without Jake Featherston is like a locomotive without a boiler. Odds are it wouldn’t go anywhere, and it wouldn’t take the country with it.”
“Fine sort of republic you want,” Donovan said. “Anybody disagrees with you, off with his head.”
“Oh, rubbish,” Potter said. “I’ve got no quarrel with the Radical Liberals. I think they’re wrong, but the world wouldn’t end if they got elected. And you know why, too: they play by the same rules we do. But the only thing the Freedom Party cares about when it comes to the republic is using the rules to take it over. If Featherston wins the election, look out.”
“What can he do?” Donovan asked. “We’ve got the Constitution. If he does get in, he has to play by the rules, too.”
He had a point—of sorts. It was enough of a point to make Potter draw back from more direct argument. He said, “I hope you’re right,” and let it go at that.
“Of course I am,” Donovan said, which made Potter regret being conciliatory. The lawyer fixed himself another drink, then added, “The regular meeting’s going to start in a few minutes. If you intend to fortify yourself before it does, you’d better do it now.”
“God forbid I should face it sober.” Potter built himself a tall one.
After the minutes and other routine business, the meeting might have been a reaction against the Freedom Party. People talked about more effective campaigning on the wireless. They talked about recruiting tough young men to protect Whig street rallies and even to try to break up the Freedom Party’s. They talked about getting the Whig message out to disaffected voters.
That made Potter raise a hand. With the look of a man doing something against his better judgment, Robert E. Washburn recognized him. “Mr. Chairman, what is our message?” Potter asked. “ ‘Sorry you’re out of work, and we’ll see if we can do better next time’? That didn’t do the Socialists up in the USA much good.”
Bang! went the gavel. “Mr. Potter, you are out of order—again,” Washburn said.
“Not me—I’m fine,” Potter insisted. “The country’s out of order. We’re supposed to be trying to make it better.”
“I was under the impression that was what we were doing,” the chairman said. “Forgive me if I’m wrong.”
“What’s our message?” Potter asked for the second time. “Why should anybody vote for us? If you ask me, the only chance we’ve got is to make Jake Featherston look like a dangerous lunatic. That shouldn’t be too hard, because the son of a bitch really is a dangerous lunatic. But we aren’t working hard enough to make him out to be one.”
Bang! went the gavel again. “I repeat, you’re out of order, Mr. Potter.”
“Hang on.” That was Braxton Donovan. “Clarence has a point, by God. We can’t campaign on what we did this past presidential term, that’s for damn sure. And if we can’t make ourselves look good, we’d better try to make the Freedom Party look bad. Otherwise, we are stone, cold dead.”
“I’ll be damned,” Clarence Potter muttered. Somebody had listened to him. He wasn’t used to that. Even the clients who paid him pretty decent money to find out this, that, or the other thing often ignored what he learned when it didn’t gibe with what they thought they already knew.
Donovan went on, “We ought to pass that notion on to the national party in Richmond. They may not have thought of it for themselves.” He made a sour face. “Who knows how well they’re thinking up there these days?”
Reluctantly, Washburn nodded. “Let it be noted in the minutes,” he said. He was a good man. He’d been a good man for a long time—he had to be seventy, near enough. Potter wondered if the Freedom Party had any city chairmen that old. He would have bet money against it.
As far as he was concerned, nothing else of any importance happened during the meeting. Since he hadn’t expected anything at all important to happen, he left feeling ahead of the game: not easy, not for anyone who cared about the Whig Party in 1933. Maybe, just maybe, the Whigs could keep Jake Featherston out of power one more time by making him look like a raving maniac. Potter felt like Horatius at the bridge, doing everything he could to keep the enemy from breaking into the city.
He started back toward his neat little flat. Behind him, Donovan called, “Wait a second, Potter. I had an idea.”
Clarence stopped. “Congratulations.”
“Smarty-britches. Your pa should have walloped you more when you were little.” But the lawyer spoke without heat. He went on, “You ever see Anne Colleton these days?”
“No,” Potter said shortly. That he didn’t still pained him. They’d got on very well; in a lot of ways, they were two of a kind. But they hadn’t come close to seeing eye to eye about politics, and they both took politics too seriously to let them stay together. So much for bedfellows, strange or otherwise, he thought.
“Maybe you ought to try again,” Donovan said. “If you can convince her that Featherston needs a straitjacket and a rubber room, you’ll hurt the Freedom Party.”
“I would,” Potter said, “but I don’t think she’s likely to pay any attention to me.”
“What have you got to lose?” Donovan asked. “If you haven’t got the price of a long-distance telephone call, I can pay for it.” He reached for his hip pocket.
“I’ve got it, I’ve got it.” Potter waved for him to stop, and he did. What have you got to lose? It was a good question. How would he be worse off if Anne hung up on him or told him to go peddle his papers? Oh, his self-respect would take a beating, but that didn’t have anything to do with the Whigs and their hopes, such as those were. He nodded to Braxton Donovan. “All right, I’ll take a shot at it. Don’t say I never did the Party a good turn.”
“Heaven forbid such a thought from ever crossing my mind.” Donovan sounded pious as a preacher. Such fine phrases meant exactly nothing, as Potter knew perfectly well. Maybe Donovan would remember them, maybe he wouldn’t. Potter also knew which way he would guess.
Being in the line of work he was, he had a telephone back at his flat. As he took the mouthpiece off the hook, a black excitement filled him. “Operator, I’d like to make a long-distance call, please,” he said, and gave the telephone number he’d never scratched out of his address book.
“One moment, sir, while I place the call,” the operator replied. “And whom shall I say is the calling party?” Potter gave her his name. The call took longer than the promised moment to complete. He listened to clicks and pops on the line and a couple of faint, almost unintelligible, conversations between operators.
Then a telephone rang. He heard that quite plainly. “Hello?” There was Anne Colleton’s voice, almost as clear as if she were down the block instead of halfway across the state. Telephones had come a long way since the Great War. The operator announced the long-distance call and gave her Potter’s name. “Yes, I’ll speak to him,” Anne said at once, and then, “How are you, Clarence? What’s this all about?”
“I’m fine,” he answered. “How have you been? Haven’t talked to you in a while.”
“No—you chose your party, and I chose mine,” Anne said. “When November rolls around, we’ll see who chose better.”
Clarence knew then his call was hopeless. He went ahead anyway: “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. You’ve met Jake Featherston. You must know as well as I do, he’s got a few screws loose up there. Lord knows we’re sinners here in the CSA, Anne, but do we really deserve Jake for president? What ever we may have done to make God angry at us, it’s not that bad.”
Anne laughed. “What does he say that’s wrong? That we need to get back on our feet? We do. That the niggers rose up and stabbed us in the back? They did. That the War Department didn’t know what was going on till way too late? It didn’t. That we ought to stand up to the United States? We should. If any of that’s crazy, then I’m crazy, too.”
“Wherever you want to go, there are lots of ways to get there,” Potter said stubbornly. As long as they were talking, he’d give it his best try even if he was sure it wasn’t good enough. “Featherston’s going over the rocks and through the swamp. You ask me, he’s more likely to put us on our backs than on our feet.”
“I didn’t ask you, Clarence,” Anne said. “You made this call.”
“I’m trying to tell you the man’s dangerous.”
“I know he is—to everybody who wants to keep us down.”
“No, to us,” Potter insisted. “Is he going to pay the niggers back or scare them into another uprising? Wasn’t one bad enough?”
“If they try it twice, they’ll never try it three times.” Anne sounded almost as if she looked forward to crushing another Negro revolt.
Even so, Potter went on, “If he cleans out the War Department, who goes in instead? His drinking buddies? Will they be any better?”
“How could they be any worse?” Anne returned.
“I don’t know. I don’t want to find out, either. And do you really want us to fight the United States again and lose?”
“No. I want us to fight those goddamn sons of bitches again and win,” Anne said. “And so does Jake Featherston, and I think we will.”
“How?” Potter demanded. “Think straight, Anne. I know you can if you want to. They’re bigger than we are. They’re stronger than we are. They would be even if they hadn’t stolen two of our states and pieces of others. Whatever we want to do to them—and I don’t love them, either; believe me, I don’t—what chance have we got to actually do it?”
“We haven’t got any chance if we don’t try,” Anne said. “Good-bye, Clarence.” She hung up. Potter wondered if he ought to call her again and try to make her see reason. Slowly, he shook his head. She wouldn’t do it. That seemed only too plain. With a soft curse, he set the mouthpiece back in its cradle.
Like most Confederate veterans, Jefferson Pinkard belonged to the Tin Hats. They weren’t nearly so important in his life as the Freedom Party. He paid his dues every year, and that was about it. Still, when Amos Mizell, the longtime head of the Tin Hats, came to Birmingham to make a speech on a bright spring Sunday, Jeff went over to Avondale Park to hear what he had to say.
Taking the trolley to the east side of town, just past the Sloss Works, made him mutter to himself. He hadn’t gone that way very often since losing his job at the steel mill. Even the air here tasted different: full of sulfur and iron. The first good lungful made him cough. The second one made him smile. He’d lived with that taste, that smell, for most of his adult life. He hadn’t even known he missed it till he found it again.
He wore a clean white shirt and butternut trousers, the not-quite-uniform of the Freedom Party. Most of the people on the trolley car were men about his age, and many of them had on the same kind of outfit he did. He didn’t see anybody with a bludgeon. This wasn’t supposed to be that kind of meeting. You could belong to the Tin Hats without being a Freedom Party man, and some people did.
When the trolley stopped at the Sloss Works, half a dozen more men got on. He recognized two or three of them. They nodded to one another. “Good to see you,” one of them said. “How are you doing?”
“Not too bad, Tony,” Pinkard answered. “No, not too bad. Party found me a job after I got canned, so I’m eating. And things look mighty good when the election rolls around.”
“Sure do,” Tony said. “About time, too.”
The trolley stopped, brakes screeching. The motorman clanged his bell. “Avondale Park!” he said loudly. By the time men finished getting off the car, it was almost empty.
Under that warm, hopeful sun, Jeff walked toward the rostrum from which Amos Mizell would speak. Confederate flags and Tin Hat banners fluttered in the breeze. Here and there in the swelling crowd, men waved Freedom Party flags: the Confederate battle flag with colors reversed, red St. Andrew’s cross on blue. Those, though, were unofficial.
Or were they? Up there on the rostrum, chatting with Mizell, stood Caleb Briggs, the head of the Freedom Party in Birmingham. The leader of the Tin Hats leaned closer to hear what Briggs had to say. Even nowadays, Briggs couldn’t talk above a rasping whisper; the damnyankees had gassed him during the Great War.
Somebody yelled, “Freedom!” In an instant, the cry was deafening. Jefferson Pinkard shouted it out at the top of his lungs. The Freedom Party was the most important thing in his life these days. If it weren’t for the Party, he hardly would have had a life.
Caleb Briggs grinned out at the crowd. His teeth were white and straight. A good thing, too—he was a dentist by trade. If he’d had a couple of missing choppers, he wouldn’t have made much of an advertisement for his own work. He waved. The cries of, “Freedom!” redoubled.
Amos Mizell grinned and waved, too. A few people started singing “The Bonnie Blue Flag,” the song the Tin Hats had taken for their own. Only a few, though—“The Bonnie Blue Flag” was hard to make out among the shouts of, “Freedom!” Mizell’s grin slipped, although he kept waving. As at the rally, so across the CSA: these days, the Freedom Party spoke with a louder voice than the Tin Hats. That hadn’t always been so. Had things gone a little differently, Mizell might have been standing in Jake Featherston’s shoes. He had to be thinking about what might have been.
Then Caleb Briggs stepped up to the microphone. In his ruined voice, he said, “This is a Tin Hats rally, boys, not one of ours,” and he started singing “The Bonnie Blue Flag.” That tipped the balance. Following his lead, the Freedom Party men in the crowd sang the Tin Hats’ anthem. Amos Mizell tipped his hat to Briggs. He still didn’t look perfectly happy, though. The men weren’t singing “The Bonnie Blue Flag” because they’d thought of it themselves, but because a Freedom Party big wig had asked them to. That had to sting.
Jeff pushed and elbowed his way toward the front of the crowd, trying to get as close to the platform as he could. A lot of other determined men were doing the same thing. He didn’t get quite so close as he would have liked. Still, he was taller than most, and he could see well enough.
When the loud chorus of “The Bonnie Blue Flag” ended, Caleb Briggs walked up to the microphone again. He raised both hands in the air, asking for quiet. Little by little, he got it. “Let’s give a big hello to a man who’s done a lot for the cause of freedom in the Confederate States,” he said, and paused to draw in a wheezing breath. He sounded as if he’d smoked a hundred packs of cigarettes all at once. “Friends, here’s Mr. Amos Mizell.”
Mizell towered over Briggs. He held up both hands, too. He was missing his left little finger—one more man who’d spilled his blood for the Confederate States. The fat cats had got the CSA into the war, Pinkard thought, and then they’d sat back in Richmond, miles away from the trenches, and let other people do the fighting. Well, their time was coming. His smile had nothing to do with mirth. Yes, their time was coming fast.
“We’ve been through it,” Mizell said. “We’ve all been through it, and we wonder why the devil we went. By the time we were done, the Confederate States were worse off than when we started, and that’s not how things were supposed to work. We were patriots. They told us we were going to teach the damnyankees another lesson. And then what happened?
“I’ll tell you what, my friends. They left us in the lurch. We had to stand up to gas before we could give it back. We had to face barrels before we had any barrels of our own. We were fighting the USA, but we had to fight our own civil war, too, on account of they were asleep at the switch and didn’t know the niggers were going to rise up and kick us in the . . . the slats. I see some ladies here.”
The veterans who made up most of the audience snickered. They knew what Mizell would have said if he were, say, sitting in a saloon with a whiskey in his hand. The few women surely knew, too, but he hadn’t said it, so their honor was satisfied.
He went on, “And then, after we did everything we could do, we lost anyway. I don’t reckon we would have if the niggers had stayed and done their work, but we did. And what about the folks who sent us out to die? They kept on getting rich. They let the money go down the drain, but you didn’t see them missing any meals.”
“That’s right,” Jeff growled, and his was far from the only angry, baying voice in the crowd. He turned to a man beside him and said, “We should have strung those bastards up a long time ago.”
“Oh, hell, yes,” the other man said, as if the idea that anyone could disagree was unimaginable. He slammed a hand against the side of his thigh. “Hell, yes.”
Mizell was continuing, “—no chance the Whigs will fix their own house. They’ve been in power too long. All they know about is hanging on to what they’ve already got. And the Radical Liberals?” He made a scornful gesture. “Losers. They’ve always been losers. They’ll never be anything but losers. No. If we’re going to set our own house in order, what we need is . . .” His voice trailed away. He waited expectantly.
He didn’t have to wait long. The cry of, “Freedom!” roared from almost every throat. After that first great yell, it settled down into a steady chant: “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” Pinkard shouted it along with all the others, his fist pumping the air.
Amos Mizell raised his hands once more. Slowly, reluctantly, silence came. Mizell said, “That’s right, friends. The Tin Hats know what this country needs. We need a new broom, a broom that will sweep all the old fools out of Richmond. We reckon the Freedom Party is the right one for the job. That’s why I want all the Tin Hats in the country, regardless of whether they’re registered in the Freedom Party or not, to vote for Jake Featherston. I tell you, we need to do everything we can to make that man president of the Confederate States of America. We’ll throw everything we’ve got behind him, on account of he’ll make this a country we can be proud to live in again.”
He paused. “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” The chant rang out again. And then, a little at a time, another chant began to supplant it: “Featherston! Featherston! Featherston!” The heavy, thudding stress on the last syllable was almost hypnotic.
“Featherston! Featherston! Featherston!” Jefferson Pinkard shouted it, too. He’d been a Freedom Party man ever since the first time he heard Jake Featherston speak, not long after the war ended. He’d come this far with Jake; he wanted to go further. And now it looked as if he could, as if the whole CSA could.
As he looked around the crowd, he saw knots of men in white and butternut from whom the chant of, “Featherston!” came loudest. He smiled to himself. No, Caleb Briggs didn’t miss a trick. He must have given some of the boys special instructions. The only thing that surprised Pinkard was that the local Party boss hadn’t recruited him to help change the chant. He shrugged. Briggs did as Briggs pleased.
“Featherston! Featherston!” Mizell seemed startled to hear the Freedom Party leader’s name. The cry of, “Freedom!” he’d undoubtedly expected. This? No.
Well, too bad, Jeff thought. You back the Freedom Party, you’ve got to back Jake Featherston, too. No way around that, even if you wish there were.
By his manner up there on the rostrum, maybe the head of the Tin Hats wished exactly that. No matter how he wished things had turned out, his outfit was in second place, not first. Hearing Jake’s name roared in his face at his own rally had to show him he would never run first.
Caleb Briggs stepped up to the microphone. It helped his harsh near-whisper carry: “We’re all in this together, friends: Freedom Party, Tin Hats, the Redemption League out West, all the people who see what’s wrong and who’ve got what it takes to stand up and fix it. When Jake Featherston wins this fall, we all win—every single one of us, and every single group. That’s what we’ve got to take away from this rally today. Just like we were in the trenches, we’re all in this together. Only difference is, this time, by God, we’re going to win!”
No chant rose this time, just a great roar of agreement. Jeff pumped his fist in the air again, and his was far from the only one raised high. Up on the rostrum, Briggs put a hand on Amos Mizell’s shoulder. He was smaller than the man who led the Tin Hats, but still somehow had the air of a father consoling a son.
After a moment, Mizell straightened—almost to attention, as if he were back in the Army again. He went to the microphone and said, “Dr. Briggs is right. When Jake Featherston’s president, we all win. And we will win come November!”
He got his own round of applause then. Somebody in the crowd started singing “Dixie.” Maybe it was one of the men with instructions from Briggs, maybe someone who’d had a good idea on his own. Either way, in the blink of an eye everyone sang it. Along with the rest of the men and women in Avondale Park, Pinkard bawled out the words. Tears stung his eyes. This was what mattered, this feeling of being part of something bigger, more important, than himself.
When the last raucous chorus ended, Briggs went over to the microphone. “Remember this, folks,” he said. “Remember it good. What we’ve got here today, the whole country gets when we win.”
Only a smattering of applause answered him. No more than a handful of people understood what he was talking about. But Jefferson Pinkard was one of those few. He beat his palms together till they were red and sore. That was what he wanted—the whole country like a Freedom Party rally. What could be better? Nothing he could think of.
The way things looked, the whole country wouldn’t be able to think of anything better, either. That seemed very fine indeed to Jeff.