XX
Flora Blackford had been to a lot of Remembrance Day parades, in New York and in Philadelphia. This year’s parade in New York City took her back to the days before the Great War, when the holiday had truly been a day of national mourning. People had commemorated the loss of the War of Secession and of the Second Mexican War, and had pledged not to fail again. Flags had flown upside down on Remembrance Day, symbolizing the country’s distress.
Since the Great War, Remembrance Day had faded some in the nation’s consciousness. People had a triumph to remember now, not just a pair of scalding defeats. The custom of flying flags upside down had fallen into disuse. Teddy Roosevelt had been the first to abandon it, in the Philadelphia parade in 1918, the year after the war ended.
This year, the custom was back. Anyone who cared to look could see war clouds looming up from the south, bigger and blacker with each passing day. If that wasn’t cause for distress, Flora didn’t know what would be.
In the limousine just ahead of hers rode Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht, the ambassador from the German Empire, and his Austro-Hungarian opposite number, whose name Flora never could recall. Schacht was a much more memorable character. He spoke fluent English, as well he might, given his two middle names. He was a financial wizard, even in hard times. Nobody knew how much money he had, or exactly how he’d got it.
In 1915, riots had marred the Remembrance Day parade here. Even now, no one knew if Socialists or Mormons had started the fighting. Then, Flora had been in the crowd lining Fifth Avenue. She remembered the then ambassadors from Germany and Austria-Hungary going past. She’d never imagined that she might be taking part in the parade herself one day.
Socialists wouldn’t protest or disrupt the parade this year, not with Al Smith in Powel House. What heckling there was came from Democrats. Flora heard shouts like, “We should have cleaned house a long time ago!” and, “Now you Red bastards say you’re patriots!” That infuriated her and stung at the same time, for she knew it held a little truth. In politics as in life, the best slams often held a little truth.
There might have been more rude shouts than she heard. Her open car rolled along in front of a marching band that blared out martial music. The conductor wasn’t John Philip Sousa, whom she’d seen in 1915, but he thought he was.
Behind the band rolled another limousine. This one carried two ancient veterans of the War of Secession. More limousines carried survivors from the Second Mexican War. A handful of veterans from that war were still spry enough to march down the street on their own, too.
After them came what seemed like an endless stream of Great War veterans, organized by the year of their conscription class. They were the solid, middle-aged men who shaped opinion and ran the country these days. The way they marched said they knew it, too.
More limousines followed them. They carried Great War veterans who wanted to parade but had been too badly wounded to march. Her brother rode in one of them. David Hamburger hadn’t asked Flora to keep him out of the Army. He’d come out of the war with only one leg. He’d never asked Flora to pull strings for him since … till this Remembrance Day parade. She’d done it, and gladly. If he was a stubborn Democrat—so what? The Democrats turned out to have been closer to right about Jake Featherston than the Socialists had. Flora didn’t admit that in public, but she knew it was true.
Few cheers came from the crowds that lined the streets. Remembrance Day wasn’t a holiday for cheers. But the crowds were thicker than on any Remembrance Day that Flora remembered since the euphoric one after the end of the Great War.
The parade rolled along Fifth Avenue: limousines, marching bands, veterans, clanking military hardware, and all. More people filled Central Park, where it ended. Spring made the air taste sweet and green. Wherever people weren’t standing, robins and starlings hopped on the grass, digging up worms.
Strangely, the cheery birds made Flora sad. There are liable to be plenty of fat worms soon, she thought, because the bodies of our young men will feed them.
A temporary speaker’s platform stood in the middle of a meadow now packed with people. Policemen—one tough Irish mug after another—kept a lane clear for the limousines. They pulled up behind the platform. Dignitaries got out and ascended. Flora took her place with the rest. The other women on the platform were there because they were wives. Flora had her place because of what she did, and she was proud of it.
Governor LaGuardia, a peppery little Socialist in an outsized fedora, called the German ambassador to the microphone. Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht spoke better, more elegant English than the governor. “We have been rivals, your country and mine, because we are both strong,” he said. “The strong notice each other. They also draw the jealousy of the weak. Like you, we have neighbors who would like to bite our ankles.” That patrician scorn drew a laugh. Schacht went on, “So long as we stand together, though, nothing can overcome us both.” He got another big hand, and sat down.
The Austro-Hungarian envoy—his name was Schussnigg, Governor LaGuardia said—delivered a thickly accented speech that sounded ferocious but didn’t make much sense. When he stepped away from the microphone, the applause he got seemed more relieved than anything else.
LaGuardia himself made a speech that called down fire and brimstone on the Democratic Party and the Confederate States in equal measure. Then he introduced the mayor of New York City, who was just as Italian as he was, and who ripped the Socialists and the Confederate States up one side and down the other. The two men glared at each other. Flora couldn’t help laughing.
More speeches followed, some very partisan, others less so. Then Governor LaGuardia said, “And now, the former First Lady of the United States, New York City’s favorite daughter, Congresswoman Flora Blackford!”
Flora stood up and strode to the microphone. A few cries of, “Blackfordburghs!” floated out of the crowd, but only a few. She hadn’t expected not to hear them. If anything, she got less heckling than she’d looked for.
“I don’t want to talk about political parties today,” she said, and enough applause erupted to drown out the jeers. “I want to talk about what’s facing the United States. It will be trouble. I don’t see how it can be anything but trouble. The government now ruling the Confederate States does not respect the rights of its own people. That being so, how can we hope it will respect the rights of its neighbors?”
That got a big hand. She went on, “Many of you came to the United States or had parents who came to the United States to escape pogroms in Europe. And now we see pogroms in North America. Is a man any less a man because he has a dark skin? Jake Featherston thinks so. Is he right?”
This time, the applause was sparser, less comfortable. Again, Flora had thought it would be. She’d seen again and again that the plight of Negroes in the Confederate States did not get people in the United States hot and bothered. When people in the USA thought about Negroes, it was generally with relief that the vast majority of them were the CSA’s worry.
That wasn’t right. Flora drove the point home: “A lot of you have ancestors who came here because someone was persecuting them in Europe. Someone is persecuting the Negroes in the Confederate States right now, and we won’t let them in. We turn them back. We shoot them if we have to. But we keep them out. And don’t you see? That’s wrong.”
Now she got almost no applause. She would have been more disappointed if she were more surprised. “A lot of you don’t care,” she said. “You think, They’re only niggers, and you go on about your business. And do you know what? That sound you hear from Richmond is Jake Featherston, laughing. If you don’t care about a wrong to people in his country, he thinks you won’t care about a wrong to people in your country, either. Is that so?”
“No!” She got the answer she wanted, but from perhaps a third of the throats that should have shouted it.
“I’m going to say one more thing, and then I’m through,” she told the crowd. “If you say that oppression of anybody anywhere is all right, you say that oppression of everybody everywhere is all right. I don’t think that’s what the United States are all about. Do you?”
“No!” This time, the shout was louder. A lot of people clapped and cheered as she went back to her seat.
Governor LaGuardia introduced another member of Congress. The man, a Democrat, harangued the crowd about how good they were and how wicked the Confederates were. He said not a word about the Negroes in the Confederate States. To him, the Confederates were wicked for no other reason than that they presumed to challenge the people of the United States of America.
He told the people in Central Park what they wanted to hear. They ate it up. The park rang with cheers. Flora had done her best to tell the people the truth. They hadn’t liked that nearly so well.
The dignitary sitting next to her leaned over and said, “I see why they call you the conscience of the Congress.”
“Thank you,” she whispered. Someone, at least, had understood.
Then he went on, “But really! To get excited about a bunch of niggers? Those black bastards—pardon my French, ma’am—aren’t worth it. We’d all be better off if they were back in Africa swinging through the trees.”
He was, she remembered with something approaching horror, a judge. “What do you do if one of them comes into your court?” she asked.
“Oh, I try to be fair,” he answered. “You have to. But they’re usually guilty. That’s just how things go.”
He didn’t see anything wrong with what he said. The only way Flora could have let sense into his head would have been to bash it open with a rock. She knew that. She’d met the type before. If she did it here at a Remembrance Day rally, people would talk. Even telling him off was useless. He’d just get offended. She could talk till Doomsday without persuading him.
Sitting there quietly felt as much like a compromise with evil to her as letting the Confederates do what they wanted to the Negroes in their country. She made herself remember there were degrees of wickedness, as there were with anything else. If you couldn’t tell the difference between one and another, how were you supposed to make choices?
You couldn’t. She knew that, however distasteful she found it. The Confederates were worse than the judge. That still doesn’t mean he’s good, she thought defiantly. At the microphone, the Democratic Congressman kept on laying into the CSA. The crowd ate up every word.
When Jake Featherston told the people who protected him that he was going to make a speech in Louisville, they started having conniptions. They screamed about black men with guns. They screamed about white men with guns who didn’t want to live in the CSA. They screamed about damnyankees with mortars on the other side of the Ohio River. For the USA to try to bump him off would be an act of war, but it wouldn’t be a war he got to run if they went ahead and did it.
That last comment worried him, because he didn’t think anyone else in the Confederacy had the driving will and energy to do what needed doing when the war started. But he stuck out his chin and told the Freedom Party guards, “I’m going, goddammit. You keep the people in Louisville from shooting me. That’s your job. I’ll worry about the rest. That’s mine.”
Even Ferdinand Koenig flabbled about the trip. “You’re the one man we can’t replace, Jake,” he said.
These days, he was almost the one man who could call Jake by his Christian name. Featherston looked across his desk at the attorney general. “It’s worth the risk,” he said. “The Party guards’ll keep me safe from niggers and nigger-loving bastards who wish they were Yankees. And Al Smith is too nice a fellow to turn his artillery loose while we’re at peace.”
Al Smith was a damned fool, as far as Jake was concerned. Had the USA had a dangerous leader—say, another Teddy Roosevelt—Jake would have done everything he could to get rid of the man. People like that were worth an army corps of soldiers, likely more.
But Ferd Koenig had another worry. Quietly, he asked, “And who’s going to keep you safe from the guards?”
Featherston glared at him. He’d already lived through two assassination tries—three if you counted Clarence Potter, who hadn’t come to Richmond to play checkers. The stalwarts who’d backed Willy Knight against him still shook him to the core. But he said, “If I can’t trust the Party guards, I can’t trust anybody, and I might as well cash in my chips. And if I can’t trust them, they can try and do me in right here in Richmond as easy as they can in Louisville.”
By the look on Koenig’s heavy-featured, jowly face, he might have just bitten down on a lemon. “You’re bound and determined to do this, aren’t you?”
“You bet I am,” Jake answered. “You take over a place, you need to let the people there get a look at you.” He’d been reading The Prince. He couldn’t pronounce Machiavelli’s name to save his life, and if he wrote it down he wouldn’t have spelled it the same way twice running. All the same, he knew good sense when he ran into it, and that was one hell of a sly dago.
He went to Louisville. He’d decided he would, and his deciding was what made things so. And when he went, he went in style. He didn’t just fly in, make a speech, and fly out again. He took a train up from Nashville, and at every whistle stop all the way north across Kentucky he stood on a platform at the back of his Pullman and made a speech.
The Pullman had armor plating and bulletproof glass. Nothing short of a direct hit by an artillery shell would make it say uncle. The lectern on the platform was armored, too. But from the chest up and from the sides, he was vulnerable. The Freedom Party guards told him so, over and over. He went right on ignoring them.
Nobody shot him. Nobody shot at him. People swarmed to the train stations to hear him. They waved Confederate and Freedom Party flags. They shouted, “Freedom!” and, “Featherston!”—sometimes both at once. Women screamed. Men held up little boys so they’d see him and remember for the rest of their lives. The Party had organized some of the crowds, but a lot of the response was genuine and unplanned. That made it all the more gratifying.
He didn’t see any black faces in the crowds. He would have been surprised and alarmed if he had. If he never saw any black faces anywhere in the CSA, that wouldn’t have broken his heart.
“You folks helped us take back what’s ours,” he told the crowds at the whistle stops. “We got part of the job done, but the damnyankees won’t make the rest of it right. They’re nothing but a pack of thieves, and how are you supposed to live with a thief next door?”
People cheered. People howled. People shook their fists toward the north, as if Al Smith could see them. They’d been back in the Confederate States not even a handful of months, but they were ready to fight for them.
Jake tasted their jubilation. It was different from the cold lust for revenge he felt in the rest of the CSA. People here had spent a generation under Yankee rule. They’d had their men conscripted into the U.S. Army. They knew what they’d abandoned, and they were glad to be back where they belonged.
Or most of them were: enough to have voted Kentucky back into the CSA, even with Negroes given the franchise to try to queer the deal. But there were white men—white men!—who looked north with longing, not with hate. If they knew what was good for them, they’d be lying low right now. If they didn’t know what was good for them, Confederate officials and Party stalwarts would give them lessons on the subject.
He got into Louisville a little before six in the evening. People waving flags lined the route from the train station to the Galt House, the hotel where he would spend the night. He didn’t stop there for long now—just enough time to grab a bite to eat and run a comb through his hair. Then it was on to the Memorial Auditorium a few blocks away for his speech.
The auditorium was a postwar building, of reinforced concrete that could have gone into a fortress. Most of Louisville was new. The city had been destroyed twice in the past sixty years. The USA had tried to take it in the Second Mexican War—tried and got a bloody nose. In the Great War, General Pershing’s Second Army had driven the Confederates out, but not till the defenders, fighting from house to house, made the Yankees wreck the city to be rid of them.
Before the Second Mexican War, and to a degree after it, Louisville had been an un-Confederate sort of place. Because it did so much business with the United States, it had looked north as well as south. But once it got taken into the USA, it wasn’t a booming border town any more. Even before the collapse of 1929, business was slow here. That made people all the more glad to return to the Confederacy.
A rhythmic cry of, “Featherston! Featherston! Featherston!” greeted Jake as he strode up to the lectern. The bright lights glaring into his face kept him from getting a good look at the blocks of stalwarts who kept the chant strong, but he knew they were there. They weren’t the only ones shouting, though—far from it. When he held up his hands for quiet, they fell silent at once. The rest of the crowd, less disciplined, took longer.
When he had enough quiet to suit him, he said, “I am Jake Featherston, and I’m here to tell you the truth.” That brought him a fresh eruption of cheers. They knew his catch phrase, and had known it for years. Wireless stations from northern Tennessee had beamed his speeches up into Kentucky long before it returned to the Confederate States. He went on, “Here’s what the truth is. The truth is, the Yankees don’t want peace in North America. Oh, Al Smith says he does, but he’s lying through his teeth.”
Boos and hisses rose when he named the president of the United States. One loudmouthed fellow yelled, “We didn’t vote for him!” That drew a laugh. Jake scowled. Nobody was supposed to get laughs at his speeches but him.
He said, “It’s been almost twenty-five years since the United States stole our land from us. They coughed up a couple of pieces, and now they think they ought to get a pat on the head and a dish of ice cream on account of it. Well, folks, they’re wrong. No two ways about it. They are wrong.
“And they think that might makes right. They aren’t so wrong about that. But they think it gives ’em the right to hold on to things. They may think it does, but I’m here to tell you it isn’t so. We’ve got the right to take back what’s ours, and we’ll do it if we have to.
“I want peace. Anybody who’s seen a war and wants another one has to have a screw loose somewhere.” Jake got a hand when he said that. He’d known he would, which was why he put it in the speech. He didn’t believe it, though. He’d never felt more alive than when he was blasting Yankees to hell and gone in the First Richmond Howitzers. By contrast, peacetime was boring. He went on, “But if you back away from a war now, a lot of the time that just means you’ll have to fight it later, when it costs you more. If the people in the United States reckon we’re afraid to fight, they’d better think twice.”
He got another hand for that, a bigger one. He’d hoped it would. It meant people were ready. They might not be eager, but they were ready. And ready was all that really counted.
Shaking his fist toward the country across the Ohio, he rolled on: “And if the damnyankees reckon they can get our own niggers to stab us in the back again, they’d better think twice about that, too.” A great roar of applause went up then. Louisville had been in U.S. hands when the Negroes in the CSA rebelled in 1915, but the white folks here were just as leery of blacks as if they’d never left the Confederacy. Negroes had never got the right to vote in Kentucky, not till the plebiscite earlier this year. There wouldn’t be a next time for them, either. Jake went on, “We’ve got our niggers under control now, by God. Oh, there’s still some trouble from ’em—I won’t try to tell you any different—but we’re teaching ’em who’s boss.”
More thunderous applause. Jake hoped that, if he killed enough rebellious blacks, the rest of them would learn who held the whip hand. As an overseer’s son, he took that literally. And if the Negroes didn’t care to learn from their lessons … He shrugged. He’d go on teaching. Sooner or later, they would get it.
He knew damn well the United States were helping blacks resist the Confederate government. His people had already seized more than one arms shipment right here in Kentucky. His mouth opened in a predatory grin. Two could play at that game.
“Here’s the last thing I’ve got to say to you, folks,” he cried. “Kentucky is Confederate again. As God is my witness, Kentucky will always be Confederate from here on out. And I promise you, I won’t take off this uniform till we’ve got everything back that belongs to us. We don’t retreat. We go forward!”
He slammed his fist down on the podium. The Memorial Auditorium went wild. He couldn’t make out individual cheers amid the din. He might have been in the middle of artillery barrages louder than this, but he wasn’t sure. After a while, it all got to be more than the ears could handle.
He looked north toward the United States again. He was ready. Were they? He didn’t think so. They’d started rearming a lot more slowly than he had. They’re soft. They’re rotten. They’re just waiting for somebody to kick the door in.
“Featherston! Featherston! Featherston!” Little by little, the chant emerged from chaos. Jake waved to the crowd. The cheers redoubled. The Yanks are waiting for somebody to kick the door in, and I’m the man to do it.
Anne Colleton muttered a mild obscenity when someone knocked on the door to her St. Matthews apartment. She hadn’t been home for long, and she’d head out on the road again soon. She wanted to enjoy what time she had here, and her idea of enjoyment didn’t include gabbing with the neighbors.
She took a pistol to the door, as she usually did when someone unexpected knocked. The Congaree Socialist Republic was dead, but Negro unrest in these parts had never quite subsided. If a black man wanted to try to do her in, she aimed to shoot first.
But it wasn’t a homicidal Red. It was a middle-aged white man in a lieutenant-colonel’s uniform, two stars on each collar tab. That was all she saw at first. Then she did a double take. “Tom!” she exclaimed.
“Hello, Sis,” her younger brother said. “I came to say good-bye. I’ve been called up, and I’m on my way out to report to my unit.”
“My God,” Anne said. “But you’re married. You’ve got a family. What will Bertha do with the kids?”
“The best she can,” Tom Colleton answered, which didn’t leave much room for argument. “You’re right—I didn’t have to go. But I couldn’t have looked at myself in a mirror if I hadn’t. The Yankees have got more men than we do. If we don’t use everybody we can get our hands on, we’re in a hell of a lot of trouble.”
She knew perfectly well that he was right. The USA had always outweighed the CSA two to one. If the United States could bring their full strength to bear, the Confederate States would face the same squeeze as they had a generation earlier. The USA hadn’t managed that in the War of Secession, and had failed spectacularly in the Second Mexican War. In the Great War, they’d succeeded, and they’d won. Keeping them from succeeding again would be essential if the Confederacy was to have a chance.
All of which passed through Anne’s mind in a space of a second and a half and then blew away. “For God’s sake come in and have a drink,” she said. “You’ve got time for that, don’t you?”
“The day I don’t have time for a drink is the day they bury me,” Tom Colleton answered with a trace of the boyish good nature he’d largely submerged over the past few years.
Anne was all for revenge. She was all for teaching the United States a lesson. When it came to putting her only living brother’s life on the line, she was much less enthusiastic. She poured him an enormous whiskey, and one just as potent for herself. “Here’s to you,” she said. Half of hers sizzled down her throat.
Tom drank, too. He stared at the glass, or maybe at the butternut cuff of his sleeve. “Christ, I did a lot of drinking in this uniform,” he said. He might have been talking about somebody else. In a way, he was. He’d been in his early twenties, not fifty. He’d been sure the bullet that could hurt him hadn’t been made. Men were at that age, which went a long way toward making war possible. By the time you reached middle age—if you did—you knew better. Ask not for whom the bell tolls, …
“How’s Bertha doing?” Anne asked. She’d always thought her brother had married below his station, but she couldn’t deny that he and his wife loved each other.
He shook his head now. “She’s not very happy. I don’t reckon I can blame her for that. But I have to go.” He finished the whiskey and held out the glass. “Pour me another one. Then I’ve got to head for the station and catch the northbound train.”
“All right.” Anne poured herself another drink, too, even though the first one was already making her head swim. It loosened her tongue, too. Without it, she never would have asked, “What do you think our chances are?”
Tom only shrugged. “Damned if I can tell you. Last time I went off to war, I was sure we’d lick the Yankees in six weeks and be home in time for the cotton harvest. One whole hell of a lot I knew about that, wasn’t it? This time, I’ve got no idea. We’ll find out.”
“Maybe there won’t be a war.” Anne knew she was trying to talk herself into believing what she suddenly wanted with all her heart to believe, but she went on, “Maybe the damnyankees will back down and give us what we’re asking for.”
“Not a chance,” Tom said. “I thought they were a pack of cowards last time. I know better now. They’re as tough as we are. And even if they did, how much difference would it make?”
“What do you mean?”
“You know what I mean. If the damnyankees back down tomorrow, what’ll Jake Featherston do the day after? Ask ’em for something else, that’s what. And he’ll keep right on doing it till they say no and have to fight. Because whether you want a war or I want a war, Featherston damn well does, and he’s got the only vote that counts. You going to tell me I’m wrong?”
Part of Anne—most of Anne—wanted to, but she knew she couldn’t. She shook her head. “No, you’re not wrong. But the time is ripe, too, and you know it. Things are going to blow up in Europe any day. The old Kaiser can’t possibly last much longer, and his son’s going to spit in France’s eye. What’ll happen then?”
“Boom,” Tom said solemnly. “I’m surprised the French have waited as long as they have, but Action Française doesn’t seem to have one clear voice at the top, the way the Freedom Party does.”
“No, they don’t,” Anne agreed. “But if they and the British and the Russians can put Germany in her place and give us even a little help against the USA, we’ll do all right. If you don’t think so, why are you wearing the uniform again?”
“It’s not for the Freedom Party. You can tell that to Jake Featherston’s face next time you see him. I don’t care,” Tom said. “It’s for the country. I’d fight for my country no matter who was in charge.”
Anne had no intention of telling the president any such thing, regardless of what Tom said. It wouldn’t do her brother any good, and might do him a lot of harm. Tom didn’t seem to understand how thoroughly politics had twined themselves around everything else in the CSA these days. If you said uncomplimentary things about the Freedom Party, you’d probably be thought disloyal to the Confederate States, too.
Anne wondered if she ought to warn him. The only thing that held her back was the near certainty he wouldn’t listen to her. Maybe he’d learn better when he got back on active duty. Or maybe he wouldn’t, and he’d run his mouth once too often, and get cashiered and sent home.
He was her kid brother. Having him safe back here in South Carolina wouldn’t break her heart. Oh, no, not at all.
“Be careful,” was all she did tell him.
He nodded. “You know what they say: old soldiers and bold soldiers, but no old bold soldiers. I’m going out there to do a job, Anne. I’m not going out there looking to get shot. I’ve got too much to come home to.”
“All right, Tom.” Was it? Anne wondered. She never liked it when somebody whose life she’d run for a long time slipped away from her control. She’d made more allowances for Tom than she did for most because they were flesh and blood. And now here he was, leaving not only her control but his wife’s as well, heading off into the brutal, masculine world of war.
Clarence Potter was going the same way. He actively despised the regime. He was ready to put his life on the line for it just the same, and for the same reason: it was in charge of the country, and the country mattered to him.
“Be careful,” she said again, and reminded herself to say the same thing to Clarence as soon as she could.
“You, too,” Tom said then.
“Me?” She laughed. “I won’t be up at the front, and you probably will.” That probably was her hope against hope. She knew damn well he would. She took another sip of whiskey. However much she drank, though, the most she could do was blur that knowledge. She couldn’t make it leave.
But her brother was serious, even if he’d taken on enough in the way of whiskey to speak with owlish intensity: “How much difference do you think being at the front will make? Bombers have a long reach these days. In this war, everybody’s going to catch hell, not just the poor bastards in uniform.”
That had an unpleasant feel of truth to it. Anne said, “Bite your tongue.”
He took her literally. He stuck it out and clamped his teeth down on it so she could see. She laughed; she’d had enough that things like that were funny. But she couldn’t help asking, “You think they’ll bomb civilians, then?”
“Look what they did to Richmond last time,” he said. “And it’s not like our hands are clean. They had more airplanes, that’s all.”
Anne had been in Richmond for one of the U.S. air raids. She still remembered the helpless terror it had roused in her. “Well, we’d better have more this time, that’s all,” she said. “Let them find out what they did to us.”
“I hope so,” Tom said. “I expect so, as a matter of fact. But God help us if it turns out they give us another dose.”
He got to his feet. Anne stood up, too. They hugged. “You be careful,” she said for a third time.
“I promise,” he answered. She didn’t believe him for a minute. He would do what he would do. The only reason he hadn’t got killed in the last war was dumb luck. She wished him more of that. It might serve where promises didn’t.
Tom went out the door and off to the train station. Anne watched him from the window. He wobbled as he walked; she’d poured a lot of whiskey into him. That was all right. He’d sober up before he got to wherever he needed to go. She realized he hadn’t said where that was. Military security had fallen between them like a blanket.
She muttered a curse against military security. She muttered another curse against war. That second one was halfhearted, and she knew it. She wanted all the horrors of war to come down on the damnyankees’ heads. She just didn’t want anything to happen to Tom or to Clarence or to the people of the Confederate States. That wasn’t fair, of course. She couldn’t have cared less.
Tom turned a corner and was gone. No. Anne shook her head. He wasn’t gone. She just couldn’t see him any more. There was a difference. “Of course there’s a difference,” she said aloud, as if someone had told her there wasn’t.
Another drink didn’t seem likely to let her know what the difference was. She fixed one for herself anyway. She’d thought Tom would have the sense to stay home with his wife and children. She’d thought so, but she’d been wrong. She hated being wrong.
And she even saw how she’d been wrong. Jake Featherston had spent years building up the passion for war in the Confederate States. He’d needed to, to get the revenge on the United States he wanted. Anne also wanted that revenge, and so she’d helped him. What could be more natural, then, than that the passion took someone who otherwise would have stayed home?
What indeed? Anne gulped the new drink in a hurry. Somehow, seeing where she’d been wrong didn’t help a bit.