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Snow swirled through the air. Colonel Abner Dowling stood at stiff attention, ignoring the raw weather. Even when a flake hit him in the eye, he didn’t—he wouldn’t—blink. I’ll be damned if I let Salt Lake City get the best of me now, he thought stubbornly. A military band struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Beside Dowling, his adjutant drew himself up even straighter than he had been.
When the last notes of the National Anthem died away, Dowling moved: he marched forward half a dozen paces to face the newly elected governor of Utah, who stood waiting in a black suit an undertaker might have worn. A mechanism might have given Dowling’s salute. “Governor Young,” he said.
Heber Young returned a nod at least as precisely machined. “Colonel Dowling,” he replied, his tone as cool and formal as the officer’s.
Flashbulbs popped, recording the moment for posterity. Purple and green spots filled Dowling’s vision. He did his best not to blink on account of the flashbulbs, either. “Governor Young,” he said, “at the order of President Smith, Utah is now taking its place as a state like any other in the United States, its long military occupation coming to an end. I wish you and your fellow citizens good fortune in years to come, and hope with all my heart that the peace and tranquility established here may long continue.”
“Thank you very much, Colonel Dowling,” Governor Young replied, and more flashbulbs popped. “We of Utah have waited a long time for this moment. Now that our government is in our own hands once more, you may rest assured that we will be diligent and careful in serving the public good.”
He’s as big a liar as I am, Dowling thought. Utah wasn’t a land of peace and tranquility, and the new civilian government—the new Mormon government, since Latter-Day Saints held all the elected offices in the executive and solid majorities in both houses of the Legislature—would do whatever it damn well pleased.
Young went on, “For more than half a century now, the United States have persisted in believing that the people of Utah are different from others who call the USA home. At last, we will have the opportunity to show the country—to show the entire world—that that is not so. We are our own masters once more, and we will make the most of it.”
Dowling listened politely, which took effort. Young hadn’t mentioned a few things. Polygamy was one. Disloyalty was another. After an attempted secession during the Second Mexican War, an armed rebellion during the Great War, and an assassination in front of Dowling’s own eyes, were the people of Utah really no different from others who called the USA home? Dowling had his doubts.
But President Smith evidently didn’t, and Smith’s opinion carried a lot more weight than Dowling’s (even if Dowling himself carried a lot more weight than Smith). Removing the U.S. garrison from Utah would save millions of dollars that might be better spent elsewhere—provided the state didn’t go up in flames and cost more money, not less. We’ll find out, Dowling thought.
“I will work closely with the government of the United States to make sure peace prevails,” Heber Young said. “Utah has been born again. With God’s help, our liberty will long endure.”
He nodded once more to Dowling. What did that mean? Get out, you son of a bitch, and don’t come back? Probably, though Young, a thorough gentleman, would never have said such a thing.
Dowling gave him another salute, to show that civilian authority in the United States was superior to military. Then the commandant—now the former commandant—of Salt Lake City did a smart about-face and marched back to his men. The ceremony was over. Civilian rule had returned to Utah for the first time in more than fifty years.
Trucks waited to take the soldiers to the train station. Dowling and Captain Toricelli went in a green-gray automobile instead. Toricelli said, “Five minutes after we leave the state, the Mormon Temple will start going up again.”
“What makes you think they’ll wait that long?” Dowling asked, and his adjutant laughed, though he hadn’t been joking. He went on, “How much do you want to bet that gilded statue of the angel Moroni will go on top of the new Temple, too?”
“Sorry, sir, but I won’t touch that one,” Captain Toricelli answered. The gilded copper statue that had surmounted the old Mormon Temple had disappeared before U.S. artillery and aerial bombs brought the building down in 1916. The occupying authorities had put up a huge reward for information leading to its discovery. In more than twenty years, no one had ever claimed that reward, and the statue remained undiscovered.
“I wonder what the Mormons will do now that they’re legal again,” Dowling said in musing tones.
“Young had to promise they wouldn’t bring back polygamy,” Toricelli said. “The president did squeeze that much out of him.”
“Bully,” Dowling replied, at which his adjutant, a much younger man, looked at him as if amazed anyone could say such a thing. Dowling’s ears heated. His taste in slang had crystallized before the Great War. If he sounded old-fashioned … then he did, that was all.
No one shot at the auto or the trucks on the way to the station. Dowling had wondered if his men would have to fight their way out of Salt Lake City, but the withdrawal hadn’t had any trouble. Maybe the Mormons didn’t want to do anything to give Al Smith an excuse for changing his mind. Dowling wouldn’t have, either, not in their shoes, but you never could tell with fanatics.
The Mormons did find ways to make their feelings known. Pictures and banners with beehives—their symbol of industry and the emblem of the Republic of Deseret they’d tried to set up—were everywhere. And Dowling saw the word FREEDOM! painted on more than a few walls and fences. Maybe that just meant the locals were glad to be getting out from under U.S. military occupation. But maybe it meant some of them really were as cozy with Jake Featherston’s party and the Confederate States as Winthrop W. Webb had feared.
Dowling hoped the skinny little spy was safe. As far as he knew, no one had ever figured out that Webb worked for the occupying authorities. But, again, you never could tell.
At the station, most of the soldiers filed into ordinary second-class passenger cars. They would sleep—if they slept—in seats that didn’t recline. Dowling and Toricelli shared a Pullman car. Dowling remembered train rides with General Custer. He didn’t think he was as big a nuisance as Custer had been.
No matter what he thought, he’d never broached the subject to Captain Toricelli. Custer was a great hero to the USA, but not to Abner Dowling. As Dowling knew too well, no man was a hero to his adjutant, any more than he was to his valet. Toricelli stayed polite. That sufficed.
With a squeal of the whistle and a series of jerks, the train began to move. Toricelli said, “I won’t be sorry to get out of Utah, sir, and that’s the Lord’s truth.”
“Neither will I,” Dowling allowed. “I wonder what the big brains in Philadelphia will do with me now.”
He had to wait and see. He’d spent ten years as Custer’s adjutant (and if that wasn’t cruel and unusual punishment, he didn’t know what would be) and all the time since in Utah. What next? He’d proved he could put up with cranky old men and religious fanatics. What else did that suit him for? He himself couldn’t have said. Maybe the General Staff back in the de facto capital would have some idea.
Military engineers kept the train tracks in Utah free of mines. Dowling hoped they were on the job as the Army garrison left the state. He also hoped trains wouldn’t start blowing up once the engineers stopped patrolling the tracks.
When the train passed from Utah to Colorado, Dowling let out a silent sigh of relief. Or maybe it wasn’t so silent, for Captain Toricelli said, “By God, it really is good to get out, isn’t it?”
“I spent fourteen years in the middle of Mormon country,” Dowling answered. “After that, Captain, wouldn’t you be glad to get away?”
His adjutant thought it over, but only for a moment. “Hell, yes!” he said. “I’ve been there too damn long myself.”
The farther east the train got, the more Dowling wondered what sort of orders would wait for him in Philadelphia. All he knew was that he was ordered to the War Department. That could mean anything or nothing. He wondered if he still had any sort of career ahead of him, or if they would assign him to the shore defense of Nebraska or something of the sort. The farther east the train got, the more he worried, too. He was an outspoken Democrat, who’d been adjutant to one of the most outspoken Democrats of all time, and he was coming home in the middle of a Socialist administration. He’d met omens he liked better.
Captain Toricelli seemed immune to such worries. But Toricelli was only a captain. Dowling was a colonel. He’d been a colonel a long time. If he didn’t get stars on his shoulders pretty soon, he never would. And a superannuated colonel was as pathetic as any other unloved old maid.
On the way to Philadelphia, the train went through Illinois and Indiana and Ohio, not through Kentucky. Going through Kentucky was less dangerous than going through Houston, but only a little. Freedom Party men, whether homegrown or imported from the CSA, made life there a pretty fair approximation of hell. Long military occupation and memories of a lost uprising had helped cow the Mormons. Nothing seemed to cow the militants in the states taken from the Confederacy.
“Think of it this way, sir,” Captain Toricelli said when Dowling remarked on that. “When we put them down, our men are getting real combat training.”
Dowling was tempted to go, Bully! again, but feared his adjutant wouldn’t understand. Instead, he said, “Well, so we are, but the Confederates get it, too.”
“Yes, sir. That’s true.” Toricelli might have bitten into a lemon at the prospect. Then he brightened. “They don’t if we kill all of them.”
“Right,” Dowling said. There was bloodthirstiness the irascible George Armstrong Custer himself would have approved of.
Even a luxurious Pullman car palled after a few days. Dowling began to wish he’d taken an airliner from Salt Lake City. More and more people were flying these days. Still, he doubted the government would have held still for the added expense.
The train was going through Pittsburgh when he saw flags flying at half staff. Alarm shot through him. “What’s gone wrong?” he asked Captain Toricelli, but his adjutant, of course, had no better way of knowing than he did. No one else on the train seemed to have any idea, either. All he could do was sit there and fret till it pulled into the station in downtown Philadelphia.
He hurried off, intending to ask the first man he saw what had happened. But a General Staff lieutenant colonel was waiting on the platform, and greeted him with, “Welcome to Philadelphia, Brigadier General Dowling. I’m John Abell.” He saluted, then stuck out his hand.
In a crimson daze of delight, Dowling shook it. He heard Captain Toricelli’s congratulations with half an ear. Lieutenant Colonel Abell led him to a waiting motorcar. They think I’ve done something worthwhile with my time after all, he thought. He’d wondered, as any man might.
Not for hours afterwards did he think about the flags again. It hadn’t been a disaster after all, he learned: only a sign of mourning for the passing of former President Hosea Blackford.
Flora Blackford felt empty inside, empty and stunned. The rational part of her mind insisted that she shouldn’t have. Hosea had been getting frail for years, failing for months, dying for weeks. He’d lived a long, full life, fuller than he could ever have imagined it before he chanced to meet Abraham Lincoln on a train ride through Dakota Territory. He’d risen from nothing to president of the United States, and he’d died peacefully, without much pain.
And Flora had loved him, and being without him felt like being without part of herself. That made the emptiness. No matter what the rational part of her mind told her, she felt as if she’d just walked in front of a train.
Joshua took it harder yet. Her son wasn’t quite fourteen. He didn’t have even the defenses and rationalizations Flora could throw up against what had happened. She knew Joshua was a child born late in the autumn of Hosea’s life, that her husband had been lucky to see their son grow up as far as he had. All Joshua knew was that he’d just lost his father. To a boy heading toward manhood, losing a parent was more a betrayal than anything else. Your mother and father were supposed to be there for you, and be there for you forever.
In their New York apartment, Flora said, “Think of Cousin Yossel. He never got to see his father at all, because his father got killed before Yossel was born. You knew your father your whole life up till now, and you’ll remember him and be proud of him as long as you live.”
“That’s why I miss him so much!” Joshua said, his voice cracking between the treble it had been and the baritone it would be. Tears ran down his face. He fought each spasm of sobs, fought and lost. A few years younger, and crying would still have seemed natural to him; he would have done it without self-consciousness. Now, though, he was near enough a man to take tears hard.
Flora held him. “I know, dear. I know,” she said. “So do I.” Joshua let himself be soothed for a little while, then broke free of her with a man’s sudden heedless strength and bolted for his bedroom. He slammed the door behind him, but it couldn’t muffle the pain-filled sound of fresh sobs. Flora started to go after him, but checked herself. What good would it do? He was entitled to his grief.
The telephone rang. Flora stared at it with something close to hatred. Hosea was only one day dead, and she’d already lost track of how many reporters and wireless interviewers she’d hung up on. She’d put out a statement summing up her husband’s accomplishments and her own sorrow, but did that satisfy them? Not even close. The more she had to deal with them, the more convinced she grew that they were all a pack of ghouls.
Staring at the telephone didn’t make it shut up. Muttering under her breath, she went over to it and picked it up. “Hello?”
“Flora, dear, this is Al Smith.” That rough New York voice couldn’t have belonged to anybody else. “I just wanted to call and let you know how sorry I am.”
“Thank you very much, Mr. President.” Flora mentally apologized to the telephone. “Thank you very much. I appreciate that, believe me.”
“He was a good man. He did everything he could. The collapse wasn’t his fault, and fixing it isn’t easy.” The president sighed. “Hoover found that out, and I’m doing the same damn thing. Not fair he should be stuck with the memory of it.”
“I know,” Flora answered. “I’ve been saying the same thing since 1929. The next person who pays attention will be the first.”
“I’m paying attention,” Smith said. “The services will be out West?”
“That’s right. He wanted to be buried in Dakota. That was home for him. I’ll do what he would have wanted.”
“Good. That’s good.” Across the miles, Flora could all but see the president nod. “You have any trouble dealing with a goyishe preacher?”
In spite of everything, she laughed. The USA was a special country, all right, and New York a special state—where else would a Catholic leader come out with a perfectly fitting bit of Yiddish? “Everything seems all right so far,” she answered.
“Fine,” Smith said. “He gives you any tsuris, though, you tell him to talk to me. I’ll fix him—you see if I don’t.”
“Thank you,” Flora said. That made quite a picture, too: a Catholic president offering to browbeat a Methodist minister. She went on, “Joshua and I are going to fly back to Dakota this afternoon. We’ll finish making arrangements on the spot, and we’ll be ready when … when Hosea gets there.” Her husband’s body was coming by special train.
“Charlie will come out to the funeral,” Smith said.
Now Flora found herself nodding. When Hosea was vice president, one of his duties had been going to important people’s funerals, too. La Follette would only follow a long tradition there. And Al Smith himself didn’t want to seem too closely associated with Hosea Blackford even in death: people still blamed Blackford for the business collapse, and Smith didn’t want that to rub off on him no matter how unfair it was. Flora said, “President Sinclair has already left for Dakota.”
“He can afford to,” Smith answered. “He’s not going to run again year after next.” Yes, they were both thinking along the same lines.
“And Hoover asked if he was welcome,” she added.
“What did you tell him?” the president asked. “He’s not going to run again, either, not after the way I kicked his tukhus.” More Yiddish, jut as fitting.
“I said yes,” Flora replied. “I don’t agree with a lot of the things he did—Hosea couldn’t stand a lot of the things he did—but he’s an honest man. You have to respect that.”
“If you ask me, he’s a stiff-necked, sour prig,” Smith said, “but have it your own way.” Flora didn’t think that verdict was wrong. Maybe she had a bit of stiff-necked prig in herself, too, though, even if she did hope she wasn’t sour. The president went on, “If there’s anything I can do, you let me know, you hear? Don’t be shy about it.”
“I won’t,”she promised. They said their good-byes. As soon as she hung up the telephone, she started running around again. Too many things to do before she had to leave for the airport, not enough time to do them.
The airport itself was in Newark. New York City had a major airport under construction—largesse from a hometown president, and many, many jobs for local workers, all paid with federal money—but it wouldn’t be done for another couple of years. The aeroplane was a twin-engined Curtiss Skymaster. It carried thirty-two people in reasonable comfort west to Omaha. Flora and Joshua spent the night in a hotel there, then boarded a smaller Ford trimotor for the trip north to Bismarck.
That flight was like falling back through time. The Ford was smaller, with corrugated-metal skin rather than smooth aluminum. The seats inside were smaller, too, and more cramped. When the aeroplane took off, it was noisier, too. It didn’t fly so high, either, which meant the ride was bumpier. They flew around a storm on the prairie. Even the rough air on the outskirts was plenty to make Flora glad the airline provided airsickness bags. She turned out not to need hers, and neither did Joshua, but some of the other passengers weren’t so lucky. The rest of the flight was unpleasant even with the bags. Without them … Well, without them it would have been worse.
A black limousine waited at the field on the outskirts of Bismarck. It took her down to the little town of Frankfort, on the James River. Hosea Blackford’s nephew, William, owned a farm just outside of Frankfort; the former president would lie in the churchyard there. William Blackford and Flora weren’t far from the same age. The farmer and the Congresswoman from New York City were about as different as two Americans could be, but they had an odd sort of liking. And the farm fascinated Joshua. So did William’s daughter, Katie, who was blond and blue-eyed and very pretty. Flora watched that with more than a little amusement.
William Blackford did, too. “Maybe you’ll have to bring the boy out some other time,” he said, his voice dry.
“Maybe I will.” Flora couldn’t keep herself from smiling. “Or maybe you could visit New York or Philadelphia.”
Her husband’s nephew shook his head. “No, thanks. For one thing, you don’t mean me. And I’ve seen Philadelphia. I don’t care to go back. More people on the sidewalks, I think, than there are in all of Dakota.” He wasn’t far wrong, and Flora knew it. He went on, “I grew up with elbow room. I don’t know what to do without it.”
Flora had grown up with none whatsoever. Her family had crowded a cold-water flat, and they’d taken in boarders besides to help make ends meet. She took people and noise as much for granted as William Blackford took wide open spaces and peace and quiet. “The first time Hosea brought me to Dakota, I felt like a bug on a plate,” she said. “There was too much country, too much sky, and not enough me.”
“I’ve heard folks from back East say that before,” her host replied, nodding. “I reckon it’s heads to my tails, but—” He broke off, alarm on his face. “Here, let me get you a handkerchief.”
“I have one.” Flora reached into her handbag, pulled out a square of linen, and dabbed at her eyes. “Sometimes it catches me by surprise, that’s all. I remember the good times I had with Hosea, the things he showed me, and then I remember we won’t have any more, and … this happens.” She blew her nose.
William Blackford nodded. “I know how that goes, sure enough. I lost a brother in the war. Now and again, I’ll still think about going trout fishing with Ted, just like it was day before yesterday when we did it last. And I’ll be … darned if I don’t still puddle up every once in a while, too.”
Three days later, dignitaries and reporters crowded Frankfort’s tiny white clapboard church. The building might have come straight from New England. The enormous sweep of the horizon beyond it, though, could only have belonged to the West. Waiting had torn at Flora. Now she sympathized more than ever with the Jewish custom of holding the funeral as quickly as possible after death. These days in between were nothing but a torment.
The Reverend Albert Talbot had a face like a fish, with pale skin, big blue eyes, and a perpetually pursed mouth. His eulogy, to Flora’s ears, was purely conventional, and caught little of what Hosea Blackford had stood for, little of what he had been. She started to get angry, wondering if she should have sicced President Smith on him after all.
But she didn’t need long to decide the answer was no. Everyone else in the church, including Joshua, seemed satisfied with, even moved by, those ordinary phrases. That was what really mattered. As long as the minister’s audience went away pleased with what they heard, nothing else counted for much.
And the vice president and two former presidents of the United States served as pallbearers, helping Joshua and William Blackford and a more distant relative carry the coffin out to the graveyard under that vast sky.
“He was a good man—a fine man,” Upton Sinclair said.
“He was indeed,” Herbert Hoover agreed. They nodded to each other, and to Flora. Socialist and Democrat, they agreed on very little, but they would not quarrel about that. Flora nodded, too, though more tears stung her eyes. Here, they were both right.
Brigadier General Daniel MacArthur was not a happy man. Colonel Irving Morrell had trouble blaming his superior. MacArthur’s cigarette holder jerked in his mouth. By all appearances, the U.S. commandant in Houston was having trouble not biting right on through the holder.
“Ridiculous!” he burst out. “Absolutely ridiculous! How are we supposed to keep this state in the USA if we go easy on all the rebels and traitors inside it?”
Morrell gave him the only answer he could: “Sir, I’ll be damned if I know.”
“May Houston and everybody in it be damned!” MacArthur growled. “That would be just what it—and they—deserve. It’s a running sore. We ought to cauterize it with hot metal.”
He meant hot lead, from rifles and machine guns. Morrell didn’t disagree—on the contrary. He said, “It’s hard to operate where everybody in the country where you’re stationed wants you to go to the devil and does his best to send you there. I thought Canada was bad. Next to this, Canada was a walk in the park.”
“Next to this, hell is a walk in the park, Colonel.” MacArthur gestured to the officers’ club bartender. “Another one, Aristotle.”
“Yes, suh, General, suh.” Aristotle did the honors, then slid the whiskey across the bar to MacArthur. Well, he’s loyal, anyway, Morrell thought. Any Negro who preferred Jake Featherston to Al Smith wasn’t just a traitor—he was certifiably insane. Morrell wished Houston held more Negroes; they would have made a useful counterweight to all the pro-Confederate fanatics. But they were thin on the ground here.
After a sip—no, a gulp—from the new drink, Daniel MacArthur went on, “By God, Colonel, there were stretches of the front during the Great War where a man was safer than he is in Houston today. During the war, only cowards got shot in the back. Here, it can happen to anybody at any hour of the day or night.”
“Yes, sir,” Morrell agreed mournfully. “Taking hostages after someone does get shot hasn’t worked so well as I wish it would have.”
MacArthur looked disgusted—not with him, but with Houston, and perhaps with the world. “Some of these sons of bitches seem glad to die. It’s not that I’m not glad to see them dead, either, but… .”
“Yes, sir. But.” Morrell turned the word into a complete, and gloomy, sentence. He went on, “I think we’re doing a better job of making martyrs for the Freedom Party than we are of making people decide not to take shots at us.”
“Unfortunately, you are correct. Even more unfortunately, I don’t know what to do about it.” MacArthur stubbed out the cigarette. He stuck another one in the holder, lit it, and puffed moodily. Then he looked at the pack. “ ‘Finest quality tobacco from the Confederate States of America,’ ” he read, and made as if to throw it away. Reluctantly, he checked himself. “God damn it to hell and gone, they do have the best tobacco.”
“Yes, sir,” Morrell agreed. “When they asked for a cease-fire in 1917, the officer who came into our lines with a white flag gave me one of his smokes. After three years of the chopped hay and horse turds we called cigarettes, it was like going to heaven.”
“I’d like to send half this state to heaven, assuming anybody here would go in that direction,” MacArthur growled. “But even that wouldn’t do much good.” He finished the whiskey with another gulp. Instead of asking for another refill, he sprang to his feet and stalked out of the officers’ club, trailing smoke from his cigarette. He was hot enough, he might have trailed smoke without it.
“Your glass is empty, suh,” Aristotle said to Morrell. “You want I should get you another one?”
“No, thanks,” he answered. “You’ve lived here a good long time, haven’t you?” He waited for the bartender to nod, then said, “All right. Fine. What would you do to keep Houston in the USA?”
The black man’s eyes widened. “Me, suh?” He needed a moment to realize Morrell meant the question seriously—after the time Morrell had had in Houston, he would have meant it seriously if he’d asked it of an alley cat. Aristotle said, “I reckon the first thing you do is, you blow off that Jake Featherston’s head.”
“I reckon you’re absolutely, one hundred percent right,” Morrell said. The real Greek philosopher couldn’t have solved the problem better. If anything would do the job, that was it. Unfortunately … “Suppose we can’t?”
“In that case, suh, I dunno,” Aristotle said. “But I know one thing. You Yankees ever decide you leavin’ this here state, you take me with you, you hear?”
“I hear you.” What Morrell heard was naked terror in the man’s voice. He soothed him as he would have soothed a frightened horse: “Don’t you worry. We’ve been here twenty years. We aren’t going anywhere.”
“Not even if they have one o’ them plebi—whatever the hell you call them things?” Aristotle asked.
“I don’t think you need to fret about that,” Colonel Morrell told him. “We paid for Houston in blood. I don’t expect we’ll give it back at the ballot box.”
That seemed to get through to the bartender. He pulled out a rag from under the bar and ran it over the already gleaming polished wood. Though Aristotle seemed happier, Morrell was anything but. The colored man probably didn’t pay much attention to what Al Smith said. Because of the nature of Morrell’s duties, he had to. He didn’t like what he’d heard. Talk of democracy and self-determination sounded very noble. He’d had some things to say on the subject himself, when the Ottoman Turks were persecuting Armenians. But when democracy and self-determination ran up against a country’s need to defend itself …
Morrell supposed the United States could lose Houston without hurting themselves too badly, though losing the oil found in the 1920s would be a nuisance—and seeing it fall into Confederate hands would be a bigger one. The same applied to Sequoyah, where the Indians most cordially despised the U.S. occupiers, who hadn’t even deigned to let the state enter the USA. Losing Kentucky, though, wouldn’t be a nuisance. Losing Kentucky would be a disaster. During the War of Secession, Lincoln had said he hoped to have God on his side but he had to have Kentucky. Losing the war and the state, he’d proved to have neither.
“I take it back. Let me have another drink,” Morrell said suddenly.
Aristotle fixed it for him. “On the house, suh,” he said. “You done set my mind at ease, and I’m right grateful.”
“Thanks.” Morrell felt guilty about taking the free drink, but couldn’t insist on paying without making the barkeep worry again. Morrell was worried himself. If the northern border of the Confederate States returned to the Ohio River, why had so many soldiers from the United States died to push that frontier south? What had they died for? Anything at all? Morrell couldn’t see it.
But if President Smith let a plebiscite go forward, Houston, Sequoyah, and Kentucky would all vote to return to the CSA. Morrell was sure of that. And if Smith didn’t let the plebiscite go forward, Jake Featherston could cuss him up one side and down the other for trampling on those wonderful things, democracy and self-determination.
Featherston had done some trampling on them himself, but not that much. He might well have won a completely honest election, and Morrell was painfully aware of it. (That Featherston had triumphed in elections with a third of his country’s population disenfranchised never once crossed Morrell’s mind. Negroes were politically invisible to him, as they were to most whites in the USA.)
Morrell swallowed his guilt and his worries along with the free drink. Then he left the officers’ club. Fences and sandbags guarded against snipers as he made his way to Bachelor Officers’ Quarters. He was sick of BOQ, but he didn’t intend to bring Agnes and Mildred down from Fort Leavenworth. He got paid to risk his life for his country. The people he loved didn’t.
More sandbags and barbed wire and machine-gun emplacements protected the barrels outside of Lubbock. Morrell went out to them early the next morning. A few enthusiastic Houstonians had tried to sneak in and sabotage them in spite of the defenses. The locals’ next of kin were surely most unhappy. The would-be saboteurs themselves no longer cared one way or the other. But no one had ever caught the enterprising fellows who’d lobbed mortar rounds into the U.S. encampment from somewhere inside Lubbock. Large rewards for their capture had been highly publicized, but nobody in Houston seemed interested in collecting that kind of reward.
Crewmen started showing up only a couple of minutes after Morrell got to the barrel park. “Good morning, sir,” Sergeant Michael Pound said. “I thought I’d beat you here.”
Sometimes he did, which annoyed Morrell. “Not today,” he answered. “I spent too much of last night thinking about the way things look.”
Pound shook his head. “You’re braver than I am, sir. That’s a dangerous thing to do these days.”
“What would you do if you were king?” Morrell asked, interested to see what the sergeant would come up with.
“Abdicate,” Pound said at once, which jerked a laugh out of him. The underofficer went on, “It’s a lousy time to be a king, sir. All these damned democrats around—small-d, of course. But if I had my druthers, I’d smash the Confederate States now, before Jake Featherston uses our own better instincts to steal territory from us that we really ought to keep … and before he starts building barrels the way he’s building tractors these days.”
That marched much too well with what Morrell was thinking—right down to the remark about tractors. A factory that turned out engines or caterpillar treads for one type of vehicle wouldn’t have much trouble converting to make parts for another type.
Before long, a squad of three barrels was rumbling through the streets of Lubbock. YANKEES GO HOME! was amongst the mildest of the graffiti on the walls these days. So was FREEDOM! A lot of messages told what the scribblers wanted to do with everyone in the state government of Houston who didn’t belong to the Freedom Party. Morrell had seen a good deal in his time. Some of those suggestions sickened him.
Freedom Party banners flew everywhere. The reversed-color C.S. battle flag was legal, being the symbol of a political party like the Socialists’ red flag and the Democrats’ donkey. Morrell thought Socialist Al Smith was a donkey to let that inflammatory flag fly here, but Smith did. Featherston uses our own better instincts to steal from us. Michael Pound’s words came back uncomfortably.
And then a middle-aged man on the street pulled out a pistol and fired at Morrell, who as usual rode with his head and shoulders and upper torso out of the cupola so he could get a better look at what was going on. The bullet clanged off the barrel’s armor plate. Morrell ducked. The turret machine gun of the barrel behind him chattered. When Morrell stood straight again a moment later, he had his own .45 out and ready.
No need. The shooter was down in a pool of blood, the pistol still in his outstretched hand. A man and a woman who’d been near him were down, too, the man writhing and howling, the woman very still, her skirt flipped up carelessly over one gartered thigh. Plainly, she wouldn’t rise again.
Screams filled the air after the gunfire stopped. People who’d thrown themselves flat when it started now cautiously got to their feet. A woman looked from the corpse of the man who’d tried to plug Morrell to him, then back again. She pointed a red-nailed finger at the U.S. officer in the barrel and shrieked one word: “Murderer!”