Blood and Iron (30 page)

Featherston felt like kissing Amos Mizell. He couldn’t have put the leader of the Redemption League on the spot like that himself. Knight looked like a man who’d found a worm—no, half a worm—in his apple. Very slowly, he replied, “I think we can work with the Freedom Party, depending on who’s stronger in any particular place.”

“That’s a bargain,” Jake answered at once. “We’ll pull a couple of our candidates in Arkansas, where you look to have a better chance, and we’ll throw our weight behind you. There are some districts in Alabama and Mississippi and one in Tennessee I can think of where I want you to do the same.”

Even more slowly, Knight nodded again. If the Freedom Party outperformed the Redemption League in this election, support would swing Featherston’s way, leaving Knight in the lurch. He could see that. He couldn’t do anything about it, though.

He’d want a high post if the Redemption League got folded into the Freedom Party. Jake could already tell as much. He’d give Knight a good slot, too. That way, he could keep an eye on him. The CSA, he thought, had been stabbed in the back. He didn’t intend to let that happen to him.

Jonathan Moss slid out of his Bucephalus and stumbled toward his Evanston apartment building. He was glad he’d managed to get home without running over anybody. After his last course, he and Fred Sandburg and several other people—he couldn’t recall how many right now—had found a friendly saloon and done their best to drink it dry.
Why not?
he thought. It was a Friday night. He wouldn’t need his brains again till Monday morning.

His breath smoked. The wind off Lake Michigan blew the smoke away. It was chilly, despite the antifreeze he’d poured into his pipes. “Not as chilly as it would be up in Ontario,” Moss said, as if someone had asserted the opposite. He stepped up onto the stairs. “Not half as chilly as Laura Secord’s heart.”

Fred never had stopped ribbing him about Laura Secord. Even now, after she’d rejected him again, he couldn’t get her out of his mind. He’d come home. He’d done well at Northwestern. He hadn’t found a girl he cared about, though. He wondered if he ever would. He wondered if he ever could.

He opened the door at the top of the stairs, then quickly shut it behind him. Getting out of the wind felt good. He fumbled for the key to his mailbox. It wasn’t easy to find, not when every key on the ring looked like one of twins. He almost gave it up as a bad job and headed for bed. But, figuring he’d probably have trouble finding his apartment key, too, he chose to regard the mailbox key as a test. He made a determined drunk.

“There you are, you sneaky little bastard,” he said, capturing the errant key. Making it fit the lock was another struggle, but he won that one, too.

A couple of advertising circulars fell onto the floor. Bending to pick them up made his head spin. He also had a letter from a cousin out in Denver and another envelope with his address written in a hand he didn’t recognize. He’d taken two steps toward the stairs before he remembered to go back and shut and lock the mailbox.

He did have a devil of a time finding the key that opened the apartment door, but by luck he got it into the lock on the first try. He flipped on the electric light and tossed the mail down on the table in front of the sofa. He tossed himself down on the sofa and fell asleep.

Next thing he knew, the sun was streaming in the window. A determined musician pounded on kettle drums inside his head. His mouth tasted the way a slit trench smelled. His bladder was about to explode. He staggered off to the bathroom, pissed forever, brushed his teeth, and dry-swallowed two aspirin tablets. Black coffee would have helped, too, but making it seemed too much like work.

After splashing cold water on his face, he slowly went back out into the front room. He discovered he hadn’t thrown out the circulars, so he did that. Then he read his cousin’s letter. It had already started snowing in Denver, and David looked likely to get a promotion at the bank where he worked.

“Bully,” Moss muttered. His voice sounded harsh and unnaturally loud in his ears. He let the letter lie where he’d left it. Cousin David was not the most interesting man God ever made.

That left the other envelope, the one with the unfamiliar handwriting. It bore no return address. Something about the stamp looked funny. When he peered closely, he saw that Ben Franklin’s portrait had the word
ONTARIO
printed over it.

“No,” he said hoarsely. He shook his fist at the window, in the general direction of the Northwestern campus. “God damn you to hell for the practical-joking son of a bitch you are, Fred.” He found it much easier to believe that his friend had got hold of some occupation stamps than that anyone in Ontario should write to him. He knew only one person in the conquered Canadian province, and she wished she didn’t know him.

But the envelope carried a postmark from Arthur. Could Fred have arranged to have someone up there put it in the mail? Moss knew Fred could have. His friend would go to great lengths to jerk his chain.

“Only one way to find out,” he mumbled, and opened the envelope with fingers not all of whose shaking sprang from his hangover. The paper inside was coarse and cheap. He unfolded it. The letter—a note, really—was in the hand that had addressed the envelope.

Dear Mr. Moss,
it read,
Now you have the chance to pay me back. I daresay it will be sweet for you. I would sooner do anything than rely on the word of a man to whom I offered nothing but insult, but I find I have no choice. The harvest this year was very bad, and I have no way to raise the $200 I need to keep from being taxed off my farm. So far as I can tell, all my kin are dead. My friends are as poor as I am. Even if you do find it in your heart to send the money, I can make no promise to feel toward you the way you would want me to feel. I would not deceive you by saying anything else. Laura Secord.
Her address followed.

Moss stared. The letter couldn’t be anything but genuine. He’d told Fred Sandburg some of what he’d said and done up in Ontario, but he’d never mentioned the promise he’d given Laura Secord. He’d known too well how Fred would laugh.

“What do I do now?” he asked the ceiling. The ceiling didn’t answer. It was up to him.

If he threw the letter away, he would have his revenge. The trouble was, he didn’t much want revenge. He hadn’t been angry at Laura Secord when she turned him down. He’d been disappointed. He’d been wounded, almost as if by machine-gun fire. But what he’d felt for her hadn’t turned to hate, though for the life of him he couldn’t have said why.

If he sent her the two hundred dollars, he’d be throwing his money away. He knew that. Had he not known it, she’d made it very plain. But, that frozen day up in Arthur, he’d told her that if she ever needed him for anything, all she had to do was ask. Now she’d asked. Was he going to break his promise? If he did, what would that make her think of Americans? What would it make her think of him?

He’d never been a man in whom altruism burned with a fine, hot flame. He was well-to-do, but not so well-to-do that spending two hundred dollars wouldn’t hurt—it wasn’t as if he were playing with Confederate money.

“What do I do?” he said again. The ceiling still wasn’t talking.

He went back into the bathroom and stared at himself in the mirror over the sink. He looked like hell: bloodshot eyes, stubble, hair all awry because he hadn’t bothered combing it yet. If he threw Laura Secord’s letter into the wastebasket, what would he see the next time he looked in a mirror?

“A lying bastard.” That wasn’t the ceiling talking. That was him. Did he want to go through life thinking of himself as a liar every time he lathered up with his shaving brush? Some people wouldn’t care. Some people would figure rejection made their promise null and void.

But he’d given that promise after Laura Secord had rejected him, in spite of her rejecting him. His headache had only a little to do with the hangover. He sighed, fogging the mirror. That proved he was still alive. He knew what he would do. He’d never tell Fred Sandburg. Fred wouldn’t let him live it down if he found out. He’d do it anyway.

It was Saturday morning. The banks would be closed. The post office was open, though. He could send a money order—if he had two hundred dollars in cash. By turning the apartment upside down, he came up with $75.27. He cursed under his breath for a minute, then telephoned Fred Sandburg.

“Hullo?” When Sandburg answered the phone, he sounded as if he’d just been raised from the dead and wished he hadn’t been.

“Hello, Fred,” Moss said cheerfully—the aspirins were working. “Listen, if I write you a check for a hundred and thirty bucks, can you cash it?”

“Yeah, I think so,” his friend answered.

“Good. See you in a few minutes,” Moss said. Sandburg started to ask him why he wanted the money right away, but he hung up without answering. Throwing on some clothes, he drove the few blocks to Sandburg’s flat.

“What the hell is this all about?” Sandburg asked. He looked like a poor job of embalming; he’d had more to drink than Moss had. “You eloping with some broad and you need to buy a ladder?”

“Got it the first time,” Moss told him. He wrote a check and thrust it at his friend. In return, Sandburg gave him two fifties, a twenty, and a gold eagle. “Thanks, pal, you’re a lifesaver,” Moss said. He headed out, leaving Sandburg scratching his head behind him.

At the post office, Moss discovered he couldn’t buy a money order for two hundred dollars. “Hundred-dollar maximum, sir,” the clerk said, “but I can sell you two.” Moss nodded. The clerk went on, “That will be $200.60—thirty-cent fee on each order.” Moss gave him the money. When he got the money orders back, he put them in an envelope he’d already addressed. For another two cents, the clerk sold him a stamp.

After that, he drove home. Now that the deed was done, he wondered how foolish he’d been.
Two hundred dollars foolish,
he thought—
and sixty cents.
When he asked his parents for money, as he’d eventually need to do, they’d want to know where it had gone. They were liable to suspect he’d spent it on a loose woman. He laughed mirthlessly. If only Laura Secord
were
loose, or even a little looser!

He returned to the study of the law on Monday. Every day when he went home, he checked the mail in hope of finding another envelope with an overprinted stamp. Ten days later, he got one. The note inside read simply,
I see there are decent Yanks after all. God bless you.
He read it a dozen times, convinced beyond contradiction that that was the best two hundred dollars he’d ever spent.

Nellie Jacobs opened her eyes. She was lying on a hard, unyielding bed, staring up into a bright electric light bulb. When she blinked, the bulb seemed to waver and float. It also seemed much farther away than a self-respecting ceiling lamp had any business being.

Hovering between her and the lamp were her daughter and her husband. Hal Jacobs asked, “Are you all right, darling?”

“I’m fine.” Even to herself, Nellie sounded anything but fine. What she sounded was drunk. She felt drunk, too, at least to the point of not caring what she said: “Don’t worry about me. I was born to hang.” She coughed. That hurt. So did talking. Her throat was raw and sore and dry. As she slowly took stock of herself, that was far from the only pain she discovered. Someone had been using her belly for a punching bag.

“Do you know where you’re at, Ma?” Edna Semphroch asked her.

“Of course I do,” she answered indignantly. That bought her a few seconds in which to cast about through the misty corridors of her memory and try to find the answer. Somewhat to her own surprise, she did: “I’m in the Emergency Hospital at the corner of Fifteenth and D, Miss Smarty-Britches.” Recalling where she was made her recall why she was there. “Holy suffering Jesus! Did I have a boy or a girl?”

“We have a daughter, Nellie,” Hal said. If he was disappointed at not having a son, he didn’t show it. “Clara Lucille Jacobs, six pounds fourteen ounces, nineteen and a half inches—and beautiful. Just like you.”

“How you do go on,” Nellie said. A little girl. That was nice. Little girls, thank God, didn’t grow up to be men.

Someone new floated into her field of view: a man clad all in white, even to a white cloth cap on his head.
A doctor,
she realized, and giggled at being able to realize anything at all. Businesslike as a stockbroker, he asked, “How are you feeling, Mrs. Jacobs?”

“Not too bad,” she said. “I had ether, didn’t I?” She remembered the cone coming down over her face, the funny, choking smell, and then…nothing. The doctor was nodding. Nellie nodded, too, though it made her dizzy, or rather, dizzier. “I had ether, and after that I had the baby.” The doctor nodded again. Nellie giggled again. “A lot easier doing it like that than the regular way,” she declared. “One hell of a lot easier, believe me.”

“Most women say the same thing, Mrs. Jacobs,” the doctor answered. Her cursing didn’t bother him. He’d surely heard a lot of patients coming out from under ether. He hadn’t even noticed. Edna had, and was smirking.

Nellie went on taking stock. She’d felt a lot of labor pains before Hal and Edna brought her to the hospital, and a lot more before the doctors put her under. But she’d missed the ones at the end of the affair, and those were far and away the worst. And she’d missed the process of, as one of her fallen sisters had put it many years before, trying to shit a watermelon. Sure as sure, this was better.

“Would you like to see your daughter, Mrs. Jacobs?” the doctor asked.

“Would I ever!” Nellie said. Smiling, the doctor turned and beckoned. A nurse brought the baby, wrapped in a pink blanket, up to Nellie. Clara was tiny and bald and pinkish red and wrinkled. Edna had looked the same way just after she was born.

“She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” Hal said.

“Of course she is,” Nellie answered. Edna looked as if she had a different opinion, but she was smart enough to keep it to herself.

“If you want to give her your breast now, you may,” the doctor said.

What, right here in front of you?
Nellie almost blurted. That was foolish, and she figured it out before the words passed her lips. He’d had his hands on her private parts while delivering Clara. After that, how could she be modest about letting him see her bare breast?

But she was. He must have read it in her face—and, of course, he would have seen the same thing in other women, too. He said, “Mr. Jacobs, why don’t you step out into the hall with me? I think your wife might have an easier time of it with just the ladies in here with her.”

“Oh. Yes. Of course,” Hal said. He followed the doctor out of the room, looking back over his shoulder at Nellie as he went.

“Slide down your gown, dearie, and you can give your wee one something good,” the nurse said. She was a powerfully built middle-aged woman with the map of Ireland on her face. After Nellie exposed her breast, she set the baby on it. Clara knew how to root; babies were born knowing that. She didn’t need long to find the nipple and start to suck.

“Ow,” Nellie said, and made a hissing noise between her teeth. She’d forgotten how tender her breasts were and would be till nursing toughened them up.

“She’s getting something, sure enough,” the nurse said. Nellie heard the gulping noises the baby was making, too. The nurse went on, “You’ll be better off if you go right on nursing her, too. Breast-fed babies don’t get the bowel complaints that carry off so many little ones, not nearly as often as them that suck a bottle.”

“Cheaper and easier to nurse a baby, too,” Nellie said. “Nothing to buy, nothing to measure, nothing to boil. I’ll do it as much as I can.”

Edna watched in fascination. “They know just what to do, don’t they?”

“They do that,” the nurse said. “If they didn’t, not a one of ’em’d live to grow up, and then where would we be?”

“You were the same way,” Nellie told Edna. “I reckon I was the same way, too, and my ma, and her ma, and all the way back to the start of time.” She didn’t mention little Clara’s father, nor Edna’s father, nor her own father, nor any other man. That wasn’t because she assumed they were the same way, too. It was because, as far as she was concerned, men weren’t worth mentioning.

After about ten minutes, the baby stopped nursing. Nellie handed her to the nurse, who efficiently burped her. Clara cried for a little while, the high, thin wail of a newborn that always put Nellie in mind of a cat on a back fence. Then, abruptly, as if someone had turned a switch on her back, she fell asleep.

Nellie found herself yawning, too. Not only were the remnants of the ether coursing through her, but she’d also been through labor and delivery: hard work, even if she hadn’t felt most of it.

“Rest now, if you want to,” the nurse said. “We’ll want to keep you here for a week, maybe ten days, make sure you don’t come down with childbed fever or anything else.” She cast a speculative eye toward Nellie. That
or anything else
no doubt meant
or anything else that’s liable to happen to an old coot like you.

Had Nellie had more energy, she might have resented that. As she was now, without enough get-up-and-go to lick a postage stamp, she simply shrugged. A week or ten days with nothing to do but nurse the baby and eat and sleep looked like heaven to her.

Edna took a different perspective. “A week? Ten days?” she exclaimed in mock anger. “You’re going to leave me running things by myself so long, Ma? That’s a lot to hand me.”

“I’ve already done a lot,” Nellie said. “Besides, the place has to bring in enough to pay for my little holiday here.”

It didn’t, not really. She and Hal had saved up enough to meet the hospital bill. Hal knew how to sock away money. It wasn’t the worst thing in the world. Nellie wished she were better at that. She’d learned some from paying attention to the way her husband handled things. Maybe she could learn more.

Edna stopped complaining, even in fun. Nellie thought she recognized the gleam in her daughter’s eye. Hal wouldn’t be able to watch Edna the way Nellie had ever since she’d become a woman. Edna wouldn’t have a lot of time to get into mischief, but a girl didn’t need a lot of time to get into mischief. Fifteen minutes would do the job nicely.

And maybe, nine months from now, Edna would have an ether cone clapped over her face and wake up with a baby hardly younger than its aunt. If she did, Nellie hoped the baby would have a last name.

She yawned again. She was too tired even to worry about that very much. Whatever Edna did in the next week or so—if she did anything—she would damn well do, and she and Nellie and Hal would deal with the consequences—if there were consequences—later. The only thing Nellie wanted to deal with now was sleep. The light overhead and the hard hospital mattress fazed her not at all.

Before she could sleep, though, her husband came back into the room. He bent over her and kissed her on the cheek. “Everything will be fine,” he said. “The doctor tells me you could not have done better. You will be well, and little Clara will be well, and every one of us will be well.”

“Bully,” Nellie said, and then a new word she’d started hearing in the coffeehouse: “Swell. Hal, you’re sweet as anything, but will you please get the hell out of here and let me rest?”

“Of course. Of course.” He almost stumbled over his own feet, he went out the door so fast. He paused in the doorway to blow her a kiss, and then he was gone. A moment later, Nellie was gone, too.

They woke her in the middle of the night to nurse the baby again. By then, all the anesthetic had worn off. Not to put too fine a point on it, she felt like hell. The night nurse brought her some aspirin. That was sending a boy to do a man’s job. She wondered if she’d be able to go back to sleep once they took Clara away again. She did, which testified less to the tablets’ effectiveness than to her own overwhelming exhaustion.

When she woke in the morning, she was ravenous. She would have yelled at Edna for serving a customer such greasy scrambled eggs, overcooked bacon, and cold toast. The coffee they gave her with it might have been brewed from mud. She didn’t notice till the whole breakfast was gone. While she was eating, she noticed only that it filled the vast, echoing void in her midsection.

After Clara had had breakfast, too, a nurse escorted Nellie down the hall so she could take a bath. It was the first time she’d had a good look at her body since the baby was born. She didn’t care for what she saw, not even a little bit. The skin of her belly hung loose and flabby, having been stretched to accommodate the baby who wasn’t in there any more. It would tighten up again; she remembered that from the days following Edna’s birth. She’d been a lot younger in those days, though. How much would it tighten now?

If Hal wanted her less after she came home…that wouldn’t break her heart. It would, if anything, be a relief. She resolved to lay in a supply of safes. Now that she knew she could catch, she didn’t intend to do it again. If Hal didn’t care to wear them—She grimaced. There were other things they could do, things that carried no risk. She hated those things, having had to do them for men who laid coins on the nightstands of cheap hotel rooms, but she hated the notion of getting pregnant again even more.

As it had been on the way to the bathtub, her walk on the way back was not only slow but distinctly bowlegged. She remembered that, too. She’d had a baby come through there, all right. Clara was waiting for her when she returned to her bed. Nellie startled herself with a smile. Another baby, no. This one? “Not so bad,” she said, and took her daughter in her arms.

On the night of November 4, Roger Kimball headed over to Freedom Party headquarters on King Street to get the Congressional election returns as fast as the telegraph brought them into Charleston. He’d tried to get Clarence Potter and Jake Delamotte to come along with him. They’d both begged off.

“If your madman friends do win some seats, I’ll want to go out and get drunk, and I don’t mean by way of celebration,” Potter had said. “That being so, I may as well go straight to a saloon now. The company’s apt to be better, anyhow.”

“I aim to get drunk no matter what happens,” Jack Delamotte had echoed. He’d gone along with Potter.

Summer soldiers,
Kimball thought. They’d been willing enough to think about using Jake Featherston, but hadn’t settled down for the long haul of using Featherston’s party. A submersible skipper learned patience. Those who didn’t learn ended up on the bottom of the ocean.

Smoke filled the Freedom Party offices when Kimball walked in. As soon as the door closed behind him, he held up a gallon jug of whiskey. A raucous cheer went up, and everybody in the place welcomed him like a long-lost brother. His was far from the only restorative there; several men already seemed distinctly elevated. He laughed. Potter and Delamotte could have got drunk here and saved themselves thousands of dollars—not that thousands of dollars meant much any more.

“We’re leading in the fourth district up in Virginia!” somebody at one of the bank of telegraph clickers announced, and more cheers rang out. People had yelled louder for Kimball and his whiskey, though.

He poured himself a glass and raised it high. “Going to Congress!” he shouted, and another burst of happy noise filled the rooms.

It must have spilled out into the street, too, for a gray-uniformed cop poked his head inside to see what the commotion was about. Somebody stuck a cigar in his mouth, as if the Freedom Party had had a baby. Somebody else asked, “Want a snort, Ed?” Before the policeman could nod or shake his head, he found a glass in his hand. He emptied it in short order.

“First votes in from Alabama—we’re winning in the Ninth. That’s Birmingham,” a red-faced Freedom Party man said.