Whig headquarters in Charleston a week before the election reminded Clarence Potter of Army of Northern Virginia headquarters a week before the Confederate States had asked the United States for an armistice. He was among the walking wounded: two fingers of his left hand were splinted, he sported a shiner and wore a new pair of glasses he couldn’t afford, and he was all over bruises. And, all things considered, he was one of the lucky ones.
Braxton Donovan had a bandage wrapped around his head. He’d needed an X ray to make sure he didn’t have a fractured skull. His nod held a graveyard quality. “Almost over now,” he said.
“Everything’s almost over now,” Potter said gloomily. “We showed those bastards we could fight, too, by God.”
The lawyer nodded, then grimaced and reached into his jacket pocket for a vial of pills. He washed down two of them with a sip from his drink. “Wonderful stuff, codeine,” he remarked. “It’s especially good with whiskey. Doesn’t quite make the headache go away, but it sure makes you stop caring. Yeah, we showed the yahoos we could fight, too. Fat lot of good it’s done us. How many dead?”
“A couple of dozen here in Charleston.” Even before Potter went into intelligence, he’d always had figures at his fingertips. “Over a hundred in the state. All over the country? Who knows? More than a thousand, or I miss my guess. Close to fifty men killed in that one shootout in Birmingham all by itself. Hugo Black is lucky to be alive, if you want to call it luck.”
“Ha. Funny.” Donovan drained the whiskey. He scowled. “I hope those pills hurry up. My head feels like it wants to fall off. If that bastard had hit me just a little harder, you’d be counting one more dead man here.”
“I know.” Potter held up his left hand. “I got these broken keeping another one of those stinking stalwarts from caving in my skull. We have made them pay, though. Even if they do win, they know they’ve been in a brawl.”
“If they win, it doesn’t matter,” Braxton Donovan said. “Do you know what I wish?”
“Hell, yes, I know what you wish. You wish the same thing I do,” Potter said. “You wish the Radical Liberals would drop out of the race and throw whatever weight they’ve got left behind Longstreet and Black. And you know what?”
“What?”
For once, Potter let a full, rich drawl come into his voice as he answered, “It ain’t a-gonna happen, that’s what.”
“It should, by God,” Donovan said. “The Rad Libs have just as much to lose if Jake Featherston wins as we do.”
“You know that, and I know that, but Hull and Long don’t know that,” Clarence Potter said. “All they know is, we’ve been kicking their tails every six years as long as there’ve been Confederate States of America. If we were in hell—”
“What do you mean, ‘if’?” Donovan said. “With Jake Featherston president . . .”
“If we were in hell and screaming for water, they’d throw us a big jar of gasoline to drink.” Potter was damned if he’d let the lawyer step on a good line.
“What are we going to do?” Braxton Donovan said. “What can we do? Only thing left is to go down swinging.”
“Far as I’m concerned, we battle ’em all the way up till next Tuesday,” Potter replied. “The more Congressmen and legislators we elect, the more trouble Featherston and his goons will have getting their laws through. And the bastard can’t run again in 1939, so this too shall pass.”
“Like a kidney stone,” Donovan said morosely. By the way he set one hand on the small of his back for a moment, he spoke from experience. But then he managed a smile and gently touched his bandaged head. “Codeine is starting to work.”
“Good,” Potter said. People were setting down drinks and taking seats on the folding chairs at the front of the hall. “Looks like the meeting’s going to come to order. Let’s see how exciting it is, shall we?”
It was about as bad as he’d expected. The speakers insisted on staying optimistic long after the time for optimism had passed. When Potter heard, “Sam Longstreet will make a great president of the Confederate States!” for the fourth time, he stopped listening. He didn’t think Longstreet was a bad man at all—on the contrary. But as long as the Whigs kept running sons and grandsons and great-grandsons of the men who’d won the War of Secession, they gave Jake Featherston an easy target.
He thought about getting to his feet and saying so. In the end, he didn’t. Time enough for that at the postmortem; the death wasn’t official yet. The meeting was less quarrelsome than a lot he’d been to. He doubted he was the only one saving recriminations for after the election.
Quarrels did go on, though, through the streets of Charleston and across the Confederate States. Potter did his share. He didn’t need his left hand to swing a blackjack. He dented a couple of Freedom Party crania—and had his new pair of spectacles broken. Only afterwards did he realize he hadn’t had to wear them into the brawl. Hindsight was twenty-twenty. He, unfortunately, wasn’t, and now he had to pay twice for the privilege of seeing straight. He was pretty sure the stalwarts he’d clobbered couldn’t see straight now, either. That was something.
Tuesday, November 7, 1933, dawned chilly and drizzly. Polls opened at eight in the morning. Jamming a broad-brimmed fedora down low on his forehead to keep water out of his eyes, Potter made his myopic way to the polling place around the corner from his apartment building. Election officials had chalked on the sidewalk a hundred-foot semicircle with the polling place as its center. Inside that circle, electioneering was forbidden. Outside it, Freedom Party men chanted Jake Featherston’s name.
Potter smiled at them. “Go ahead, boys. Make yourselves as obnoxious as you can. The more votes you cost your man, the better.”
As he walked into the charmed circle, one of the men in white and butternut asked, “Who’s that smart-mouthed son of a bitch?”
“Name’s Potter,” another answered. “Lives around the block. You don’t need to write him down. He’s already on the list.”
Already on the list, am I? Potter thought. An honor I could do without. Behind him, the Freedom Party men resumed their chant. Where are our men, shouting for Longstreet and Black? he wondered. He knew the Whigs had men outside some polling places. Not this one. The business collapse wasn’t the only reason the Freedom Party looked like winning today. How-ever much Potter hated to admit it, even to himself, the opposition was better organized than his own party. He would have bet every Freedom Party man—and woman, in states where women could vote—would get to the polls today. He wished he could have made the same bet about Whig backers. How many of them would sit on their hands? Too many. Any at all would be too many.
He cast his own ballot, then walked back the way he’d come. He didn’t think the Freedom Party men would set on him so close to the polling place, where people could see them for what they were. They didn’t . . . quite. They shouted, “Nigger-lover!” and, “You’ll get yours!” at him, but they didn’t try to give it to him. He was almost disappointed. For this trip, he had a pistol in his pocket, not a blackjack.
Having voted, he went to work. It was less than interesting today: a husband wanted evidence his wife was cheating, but the wife, busy with shopping and the couple’s two small children, gave none. Potter thought the husband was inventing things to worry about, but he kept his opinions to himself. For one thing, clients seldom paid attention to opinions contradicting their own. For another, the man paid well. If he wanted to throw away his money . . . well, it was a free country, wasn’t it?
It is till that Featherston bastard takes over, Potter thought.
On the trolley ride back to his flat after knocking off for the day, he passed another polling place. Police cars were parked in front of it. Blood stained the sidewalk and nearby walls. Freedom Party men waving their reversed-color Confederate battle flags still stood on the street. “Featherston! Featherston!” Even through the trolley’s closed windows, the chant lacerated Clarence Potter’s ears. The police didn’t try to run the stalwarts off. If Whigs had been here, they were no longer. This skirmish belonged to the Freedom Party.
After pan-frying a pork chop and some potatoes and washing them down with a stiff whiskey, Potter went over to Whig headquarters to hear . . . whatever he heard. Dance music blared from the wireless sets: the polls hadn’t closed yet. He pulled out his pocket watch. It was a little past seven-thirty—less than half an hour to go.
That gave him plenty of time for another drink, or two, or three. He nodded to Braxton Donovan, who also had a whiskey in his hand, and said, “The condemned man drank a hearty meal.”
“Funny,” the lawyer said. “Funny like a crutch.”
“Oh, I didn’t mean you,” Potter said. “If you think I meant you, I apologize. I meant the country. Before they execute a man, they give him a blindfold and a cigarette. What do we do when the Confederate States of America go up against the wall?”
Donovan studied him. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you say you were sorry before. You must mean it. You don’t waste time being polite.”
I try not to waste time at all, Potter thought. But he had nothing to do but stand there banging his gums till clocks in Charleston started striking eight. “All along the eastern seaboard of the Confederate States, the polls have closed,” an announcer on the wireless declared. “We’ll bring you the latest results from the presidential, Congressional, state, and local elections—but first, a word from our sponsor.” A chorus of young women started singing about the wonders of a soap made from pure palm oil. Potter wondered what could be going through their minds as they trilled the inane lyrics. Probably something like, We’re getting paid. Times were hard indeed.
Then the numbers started coming in. Somebody posted each new installment on a big blackboard at the front of the room. That meant the Whigs could go on chattering and still keep up. As soon as Clarence Potter saw the early results from North Carolina, he knew what kind of night it would be. North Carolina was a solid, sensible, foursquare Whig state. The collapse hadn’t hit it so hard as a lot of other places.
Jake Featherston led there. He led by more every time the fellow at the board erased old numbers and put up new ones. And he had coattails. Freedom Party Congressional candidates were winning in districts where they’d never come close before. And it looked as bad everywhere else.
Braxton Donovan stared owlishly at the returns. He fixed himself another drink, then came back to stand by Potter and stare some more. He didn’t say anything for a long, long time. At last, he did: “Jesus Christ. It’s like watching a train wreck, isn’t it?”
Potter shook his head. “No, Braxton. It’s like being in a train wreck.” Donovan thought that over, then slowly nodded.
And it got no better, not from a Whig point of view, as the polls closed in states farther west. Back in 1921, Tennessee had decided the election when it finally went Whig. This year, it went for Featherston and the Freedom Party. So did Mississippi and Alabama. Potter hadn’t expected anything different there, but he would have loved to be proved wrong. The Whigs led in Arkansas, but Arkansas wasn’t big enough to matter.
“My God,” somebody behind Potter said. “What is the world coming to?”
He didn’t need to ask the question, not when he could see the answer. Jake Featherston was going to be president. He would have a majority—a big majority—in the House. The Senate, whose members were chosen by state legislatures rather than popular vote, wasn’t so obvious. Even so, it all added up to the same thing: after seventy years in the saddle, the Whigs were going into the minority.
“The minority?” the man in back of Potter said when he spoke that thought aloud. “That’s crazy.” He still seemed unbelieving.
“If you don’t get it, think like a nigger,” Potter said. “It’ll come to you then, believe me.”
Along with news of a corruption scandal in the Iowa legislature, newsboys in Des Moines shouted about Jake Featherston’s victory down in the Confederate States. More of them yelled about the scandal, which was right there in town. The election news hit Cincinnatus Driver a lot harder. He got out of his truck on the way to the railroad yards and bought a paper, something he hardly ever did: getting there a minute late might cost him a good cargo. But today he spread the Register and Remembrance on the seat beside him and read a paragraph or two whenever he had to stop.
He was still shaking his head when he got out of the Ford at the yards and started dickering with a conductor over a load of beds and dressers and nightstands. “What’s the big deal?” asked the conductor, a white man too young to have fought in the Great War. “Who cares what happens down in the Confederate States?”
“I cares.” Cincinnatus knew that was bad grammar even without Achilles telling him so. “I grew up in Kentucky when it was part of the CSA. Glad it ain’t no more. I got out of there once the USA took it over. This here’s a better place if you’re colored.”
The conductor was not only white, he was a blond who couldn’t have got any whiter if somebody’d thrown him into a tub of bleach. He said, “I don’t know nothin’ about that. All I know is, you may be colored, but you haggle like a damn kike.”
If he’d been talking about Cincinnatus to a Jew, he probably would have called him a damn nigger. Cincinnatus took such names in stride; he’d heard them all, especially the one applying to his own race, too often to get excited about them. He said, “I tell you, Mr. Andersen, I don’t reckon it’s against the law to try an’ git me enough money to make the job worth my while. I ain’t no charity.”
“Well, I’m a penny-pinching squarehead myself, and I won’t tell you anything different,” Andersen said. Cincinnatus liked him better after that; if he could insult himself as casually as he insulted everybody else, odds were none of those insults meant much.
Cincinnatus got fairly close to the price he wanted for hauling the load of bedroom furniture, too. He drove it over to a furniture store on Woodland Street on the west side of town, only a little north of the bend of the Raccoon River. After growing up by the bank of the Ohio, Cincinnatus didn’t think either the Raccoon or the Des Moines was anything special.
Olaf Thorstein, who ran the furniture store, was even paler than Andersen. Cincinnatus had trouble believing anybody this side of a ghost could be. Thorstein was a tall, thin man of stern rectitude, the sort who would skin you in a deal if he could but would walk across town in the snow to give back a penny—or a hundred-dollar bill—you accidentally left in his store. With a similar streak in his own character, Cincinnatus had no trouble getting along with him.
Thorstein said, “Way you talk, you used to live in the Confederate States.” He was not far from Cincinnatus’ age, which meant he’d likely fought in the Great War.
“Yes, suh, that’s a fact.” Cincinnatus nodded. “Came to Des Moines ten years ago. Ain’t been sorry, neither. This here’s a lot better’n Kentucky.” He remembered Luther Bliss and shivered in spite of himself.
“Well, what do you think of what’s going on down there now?” the white man asked.
“Don’t reckon you’ll hear no black man sayin’ nothin’ good about the Freedom Party,” Cincinnatus answered. “What do you think, Mr. Thorstein?” A surprising—or maybe a depressing—number of whites weren’t the least bit shy about saying what they thought of people who didn’t look like them. Had the USA had more Negroes, it probably would have had something like the Freedom Party, too.
“Me? I don’t know much. I have not been there, except in the Army,” Thorstein said, confirming Cincinnatus’ guess. The furniture-seller went on, “I tell you this, though: I think that man Featherston will bring trouble. He lies. How can you trust a man who lies? You cannot. And any man who comes on the wireless and says, ‘I am going to tell you the truth’—well, what else can he be except a liar?” Behind bifocals, his ice-blue eyes flashed. Plainly, he was condemning Jake Featherston to some chilly hell.
Cincinnatus wished getting rid of the man were that simple. But he nodded to Thorstein. Hating dishonesty of any sort, the Swede might also hate injustice of any sort. “I got me no quarrel with any o’ that,” Cincinnatus said.
“How could anyone quarrel with it?” Olaf Thorstein sounded genuinely bewildered. “Is it not as plain as the nose on a man’s face? And yet how could the people in the Confederate States have voted for the man if they saw it? They must not have seen it. This I do not understand.”
“Sometimes folk don’t want to see,” Cincinnatus said. “I reckon that had a lot to do with it.”
“But why would anyone blind himself on purpose?” Thorstein asked, seeming more bewildered still.
Cincinnatus had asked himself the same question, more than once. He said, “Seems to me they got a choice. They can look square in the mirror and see how ugly they are, or they can be blind. Looks like they done picked what they aim to do.”
“Uh-huh.” Olaf Thorstein chewed on that. At last, he asked, “And what would a Freedom Party man say about what you just said?”
“Oh, that one’s easy.” Cincinnatus laughed. “Reckon he’d say I was an uppity nigger, a crazy nigger. Reckon he’d be right. When I used to live in the CSA, I wouldn’t never’ve said nothin’ like that. Colored fella livin’ in the CSA got to be crazy to talk that way. But I been in the USA since 1914 now. This ain’t no great place for black folks—don’t reckon there’s anywhere that’s a great place for black folks—but you take it all in all an’ it’s a lot better than the Confederate States ever was. I got me a chance here—not a good one, maybe, but a chance. Down there?” He shook his head. “No way, nohow, not before the Freedom Party, an’ not now, neither.”
Again, Thorstein thought before he spoke. “I have never heard a Negro talk so freely of these things,” he said, and then shrugged. “How many Negroes are there in Des Moines for me to talk to?”
“Not many. We’re thin on the ground here. We’re thin on the ground all over the USA,” Cincinnatus said. And maybe that’s why things are a little easier for us here, he thought. White folks in the USA don’t like us much, but they ain’t afraid of us like in the Confederate States. Not enough of us here to be afraid of.
“I hope I have not delayed you too much,” the furniture-store owner said. “I know you need as much work as you can get. Who does not, the way things are these days?”
“It’s all right, Mr. Thorstein. Don’t you worry about it none,” Cincinnatus said, for Thorstein really did sound concerned. “When I seen in the paper that that Featherston fella won, I was so upset, I didn’t know what to do. Times gonna be hard for colored folks down in the CSA—gonna be real hard. Glad I got me a chance to talk about it some.”
He was less glad when he got back to the railroad yard just in time to see another driver go off with a choice load that might have been his had he returned five minutes earlier. But he got a load for himself half an hour after that, when a train full of canned salmon from the Northwest puffed to a stop. Several groceries were waiting for their fish, and he took them a lot of it.
He was tired but happy—he’d made good money that day—when he got back to his apartment building and parked the truck in front of it. Joey Chang, the Chinaman who lived upstairs, was checking his mailbox when Cincinnatus walked into the lobby. “Hello,” Cincinnatus said, affably enough. He got on well with Chang, who brewed good beer in a dry state.
“Hello,” Chang answered, his English flavored with an accent unlike any other Cincinnatus had heard. “We talk a few minutes?”
“Sure,” Cincinnatus said in some surprise. “What’s on your mind?”
“Your son Achilles ask my daughter Grace to go to the cinema with him,” Chang replied. “What you think of this?”
“Did he?” Cincinnatus said, and the other man solemnly nodded. Achilles had said he thought Grace Chang was cute. As Olaf Thorstein had remarked, there weren’t that many Negroes in Des Moines. If Achilles found somebody he might like who wasn’t a Negro . . . Well, if he did, what then? “What do you think of that, Mr. Chang?” Cincinnatus asked.
“Don’t know what to think,” Chang said, which struck Cincinnatus as basically honest. He went on, “Your Achilles good boy. I don’t say he not good boy, you understand? But he not Chinese.”
Cincinnatus nodded. He had similar reservations about Grace. He asked, “What’s your daughter think?”
“She is modern. She wants to be modern.” Mr. Chang made it sound like a curse. “She says, what difference it make? But it makes a difference, oh yes.”
“Sure does,” Cincinnatus said. The laundryman gave him a surprised look. Perhaps Chang hadn’t thought a Negro might mind if his son wanted to take a Chinese girl to the cinema. After scratching his head, Cincinnatus went on, “Maybe we just ought to let ’em go out and not say anything about it. Going to the moving pictures together ain’t like gettin’ married. And if we tell ’em no, that’ll only make ’em want to do it more to rile us up. Leastways, Achilles is like that. Dunno ‘bout your Grace.”
“Her, too,” Chang said morosely. “The more I do not like, the more she does. Modern.” He made the word sound even worse than he had before. Now he screwed up his face. “Yes, maybe we do this. I talk to my wife, see what she say.” By his tone, whatever Mrs. Chang decided would prevail.
“Fair enough,” Cincinnatus said. “I’ll talk to Elizabeth, too—and to Achilles.”
His wife wasn’t home yet. Neither was his son. After graduating from high school, Achilles was doing odd jobs and looking—along with so many others—for something more permanent. He got home before Elizabeth did, and set two dollars on the kitchen table, where Amanda sat doing homework. He was a good kid; he brought his pay home every day he worked.
As casually as Cincinnatus could, he said, “Hear you’re goin’ to the pictures with Grace Chang.” Amanda dropped her pencil.
Achilles glared defiance. “That’s right. What about it? I think some of the money I make ought to be mine to have some fun with. Don’t you?”
Having fun with the money wasn’t the point. Having fun with Grace Chang was. But all Cincinnatus said was, “Reckon I do. It’s all right with me. Just wish I’d’ve heard about it from you and not from Grace’s pa.”
Set for a fight, Achilles didn’t seem to know what to do when he didn’t get one. “Oh,” he said, and left his mouth hanging open. After a long moment, he added, “I figured you’d have a fit.” Another pause, even longer. “Maybe I was wrong.”
“Maybe you was,” Cincinnatus agreed. “No matter what you think, son, I ain’t quite one o’ them dinosaur things. Not quite.” He waited out one more pause. At last, Achilles nodded. His agreement made Cincinnatus feel he’d done a few things right after all.
Thanksgiving was supposed to be one of the happiest days of the year. When Chester Martin and Rita went to his parents’ apartment for dinner, that was in the back of his mind. In the front of his mind was the chance to stuff himself till he was about ready to burst at the seams. The money his father had given him let his wife and him keep their own apartment and keep eating. It didn’t let them keep eating well. He was sick of cabbage and potatoes and boiled noodles and day-old brown bread.
“Turkey,” he said dreamily as he and Rita got off the trolley and walked toward the block of flats where he’d lived so long. The weather was sunny but crisp—a perfect late November afternoon. “Roast turkey. Stuffing with giblet gravy.” He’d eaten a lot of giblets since losing his job, but they belonged in gravy. “Mashed potatoes. Sweet potatoes. Rolls and butter. Pumpkin pie. Apple pie, too. Whipped cream.”
“Stop it, Chester,” Rita said. “I’m going to drool on my shoes.” A motorcar went by. Somebody inside waved. The Chevrolet parked in front of the apartment building. “There’s your sister and her husband and little Pete.”
“I see ’em.” Chester waved back. His brother-in-law, Otis Blake, worked in a plate-glass plant and still had a job. He’d never given Chester a hard time about losing his. He couldn’t very well, not when his own brother was out of work.
“Uncle Chester! Aunt Rita!” Pete Blake, who was five, hit Chester in the knees with a tackle harder than a good many he’d met on the gridiron.
“Careful there, tiger.” Martin ruffled his hair. “You almost knocked me on my can. You gonna be a tough guy when you grow up?”
“Tough guy!” Pete yelled. Then he gave Rita a kiss. Either he wasn’t so tough yet, or he knew a pretty girl when he saw one.
Chester hugged Sue and shook hands with her husband. Otis Blake had his blond hair permanently parted in the middle by a scar from a scalp wound during the war. An inch lower and he wouldn’t have been standing there. “How are you?” he asked now.
With a shrug, Martin answered, “I’m still here. They haven’t knocked me out yet.”
“Good,” Blake said. “That’s good.”
“Come on. Let’s go up to the place,” Sue said. She turned to Pete. “You want to see Gramps and Grandma, don’t you?”
“Gramps! Grandma!” Pete was enthusiastic about everything. Chances were he’d never heard of a business collapse. If he had, it meant nothing to him. Chester wished he could say the same.
Wonderful smells filled his nose as soon as he walked through the door. When he saw his mother’s face a moment later, he knew something was wrong no matter how good the odors wafting out of the kitchen were. She looked as if she’d been wounded and didn’t want to admit it even to herself. After the hugs, after the kisses, Martin asked, “What is it, Ma? And don’t tell me it’s nothing, on account of I know that’s not so.”
Sue and Otis exchanged glances. Whatever it was, they already knew. Louisa Martin spoke in a low voice, as if in a sickroom: “Your father’s been laid off.”
Five words. Five words that changed—ruined—not just one life but at least two, maybe four. “Oh,” Chester said, a soft, pained exhalation—he might have been punched in the stomach. Rita’s lips skinned back from her teeth. Like her mother-in-law, she was trying to find out how much it hurt.
Laid off. It hurt bad. Martin didn’t need to find out how much. What, after all, was the difference between bad and worse? Not enough to matter.
A toilet flushed. Out came Stephen Douglas Martin, rubbing his hands together. One look at Chester’s face told him everything he needed to know. “So you heard already, did you?”
“Yeah,” Chester said harshly. “I heard. What are you going to do, Pa?”
“Darn good question,” his father replied. “Wish I had a darn good answer to go with it. Almost forty years at that place, and then—” He snapped his fingers. “I’m scrap metal. That’s what I am now, scrap metal. Yesterday was my last day. But I tell you one thing: I’m going to have the best darn Thanksgiving anybody ever had, and you can take that to the bank.” If Louisa and Sue and Rita hadn’t been there, and especially if Pete hadn’t, he might have expressed himself more pungently.
“This is a fancy spread.” Chester wouldn’t say any more than that. Lurking behind the bland statement was a not-so-bland worry. If you’re out of work, how can you afford it?
Casually, Louisa Martin said, “Otis and Sue gave us a little help. Not much, just a little.” Chester nodded. Otis was still working. The older Martins must have told him so they could make sure they got whatever help they needed for a proper holiday dinner.
Knowing what Chester knew took some of the enjoyment away from the feast: it seemed too much like sharing a condemned man’s last meal. But that didn’t stop him from eating till he was groaningly full. When would his next chance to gorge himself on meat come? He had no idea. Like a savage in the jungle, he made the most of the chance he did have.
About ten o’clock, Pete started getting sleepy and fussy. Sue and Otis took their son and some leftovers and headed back to their place. Chester had waited for that; he needed to speak to his parents without his sister and brother-in-law listening. He started, “Pa, the bosses had no business—”
“No business?” Stephen Douglas Martin said. “Ha! Business is all they had, the . . . so-and-so’s.” Yes, he had trouble swearing in front of women.
“What I meant was, we’ll figure out something now that . . .” Chester’s voice trailed away. He thought his father would know what he meant any which way. Now that the elder Martins had no money coming in, how could they afford to give anyone else a hand? They had to worry about keeping their own place.
“Yes, we’ll manage. One way or another, we’ll manage,” Rita said. She had the same stubborn pride as anyone born a Martin.
Stephen Douglas Martin said, “I hear you two were talking about California.”
“Yes, that’s true,” Chester said. “There’s no work in Toledo, or none to speak of. If you have a job, you’re all right. If you lose one, though, you haven’t got a prayer of finding anything new.”
“Thanks so much,” his father said. “That’s just what I wanted to hear.”
“I’m sorry, Pa. I’m sorry as . . . the devil. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t telling the truth.”
“I know,” his father said. “I sure wish it did, though.”
“What about California?” Rita kept her mind on business.
“I’ll tell you what,” Chester’s father said. “Louisa and I have some money set aside. They aren’t going to throw us in the poorhouse right away, so you don’t need to worry your heads about that. I know this is a hard place to find work, on account of you’ve both done everything you could, but you haven’t had any luck. If I stake you two train tickets out West and enough money to keep you going a couple of months . . . well, what do you think about that?”
“We’ll pay you back,” Chester said without even looking at Rita. “As soon as one of us gets something, we’ll pay you back, a little bit at a time till it’s all done.”
“You don’t need to say that, Chester,” his father said with a small smile. “If I wasn’t sure of it, you think I’d offer?”
“I don’t know,” Chester answered. “Depends on how bad you and Ma want to get rid of us, I guess.”
“Chester!” his mother said reproachfully.
“California.” Rita murmured the word. “Things are supposed to be good there, or as good as they are anywhere. They’ve got the farms, and they’ve got the moving pictures, and they’ve got all the people building houses for the people moving there for the other things.”
“And the weather,” Chester said. “If we go to Los Angeles, we can kiss snow good-bye. I wouldn’t miss it a bit, and that’s the truth.”
“You ready to tear everything up by the roots?” Stephen Douglas Martin asked. “If you do this, I can’t give you much more help till I’m back on my own feet.” If I ever am hung unspoken in the air. He went on, “Don’t want you winding up in a Blackfordburgh out there, even if you did vote for the fellow.”
“I voted for Coolidge and Hoover this time around,” Chester said. Rita made a face at him. He made a face right back, and went on, “I held my nose, but I did it. But I don’t think Hoover’s exactly a ball of fire.”
“He’s a ball of . . .” Now Rita seemed hampered in her choice of language. “I didn’t vote for Coolidge,” she added.
“He’s had most of a year to make things better. He hasn’t done it,” Louisa Martin said. “He hasn’t done much of anything, not as far as I can see.”
“President Blackford did everything under the sun for four years in a row,” Stephen Douglas Martin said. “He didn’t make things better, either.” Chester’s father was a rock-ribbed—Chester sometimes thought a rock-headed—Democrat. He continued, “Look how the war with the Japs is winding down now.”
“Neither side ever wanted to fight that one all out, though,” Chester said. “That’s why it’s winding down. It’s not anything special Hoover’s done.”
“They haven’t dropped any bombs on his head, the way they did on Blackford’s,” his father retorted. He wagged a finger at Chester. “Still want to go to Los Angeles after that?”
“Yes!” This time, Rita spoke up before Chester could. She sounded even hungrier for California than he was.
“Thank you, Pa, from the bottom of my heart,” Chester said.
“If you get work, I may come out there myself,” his father said. “Anybody who thinks I’d miss snow is crazy.”
“California,” Rita said again, as if she expected to pan for gold and pull nuggets the size of eggs from a clear, cold mountain stream.
“California,” Chester echoed, as if he expected to go to Los Angeles and wind up a motion-picture leading man the day after he got there. He went on, “There are people who hop a freight for a chance like this.” He had, every now and then, thought of being one of them. “I will pay you back, Pa. So help me God, I will.”
“I told you once, I wouldn’t stake you if I didn’t think you were good for it,” Stephen Douglas Martin answered. “Only thing I worry about is how many people will be going out there, looking for whatever they can find.”
“At least there are things to find in California,” Chester said. “This town is dying on its feet. I’ve lived here all my life, except for when I was in the Army, but I won’t be sorry to say good-bye.” He laughed. Sorry? He hadn’t been so glad since the day the guns stopped and he realized he’d made it through the Great War alive.