Applause rang out, and a couple of Rebel yells with it. People raised glasses and bottles on high and poured down the whiskey as if they’d never see it again. “Congress is going to be ours!” somebody howled. That set off more applause.
It made Kimball want to laugh or cry or bang his head against the wall. A couple of seats made people think they’d win a majority, which wouldn’t, couldn’t, come within nine miles of happening. Maybe Clarence Potter was right: maybe the Freedom Party did attract idiots.
From everything Kimball had heard, even Jake Featherston wasn’t predicting more than about ten seats’ ending up with Freedom Party Representatives in them. That didn’t make up a tenth part of the membership of the House. And if the leader of a party wasn’t a professional optimist before an election, who was? Kimball had figured the night would be a success if the Freedom Party elected
anybody
. By that undemanding standard, things already looked to be going well.
“Here we go—First District, South Carolina. That’s us. Quiet down, y’all,” somebody at the bank of telegraph tickers called. People did quiet down—a little. The fellow waited for the numbers to come in, then said, “Damn, that Whig bastard is still a couple thousand votes up on Pinky. We’re way out in front of the Radical Liberals, though.”
Kimball looked around to see if Pinky Hollister, the Freedom Party candidate, was in the office. He didn’t spot him. That didn’t surprise him too much: Hollister actually lived not in Charleston but in Mount Holly, fifteen miles outside of town. He was probably getting the results there.
“Well, we scared the sons of bitches, anyways,” a bald man said loudly. That signaled yet another round of cheers and clapping.
“To hell with scaring the sons of bitches,” Kimball said, even more loudly. “We scared the sons of bitches up in the USA, but in the end they licked us. What I want us to do, God damn it to hell, is I want us to
win
.”
Another near silence followed that. After a moment, people started to clap and yell and stomp on the floor. “Freedom!” somebody shouted. The cry filled the room: “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!”
Dizziness that had nothing to do with the whiskey he’d drunk or with the tobacco smoke clogging and thickening the air filled Kimball. He’d known something of the same feeling when a torpedo he’d launched slammed into the side of a U.S. warship. Then, though, the pride had been in something he was doing himself. Now he rejoiced in being part of an entity larger than himself, but one whose success he’d had a hand in shaping.
“Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” The shout went on and on. It was intoxicating, mesmerizing. Kimball howled out the word along with everybody else. While he was yelling, he didn’t have to think. All he had to do was feel. The rhythmic cry filled him full.
The door out onto the street opened. Kimball wondered if another cop was going to come in and try to make people quiet down. (He hadn’t seen the first policeman leave. There he was, as a matter of fact, drinking like a fish.) A good many people must have had the same thought, for the chant of “Freedom!” came to a ragged halt.
But it wasn’t a cop standing there. It was Anne Colleton. Not everybody in the office recognized her. Not everybody who recognized her knew she’d helped the Freedom Party. Most of the people who followed Jake Featherston were poor, or at best middle-class. One of the reasons they followed him was the vitriol he poured down on the heads of the Confederacy’s elite. And here was an obvious member of that elite—Anne could never be anything else—coolly inspecting them, as if they were in the monkey house at the Charleston zoo.
Kimball started to explain who she was and what she’d done for the Party. Before he could get out more than a couple of words, she took matters into her own hands, as was her habit. “Freedom!” she said crisply.
At that, the chant resumed, louder than ever. Men surged toward Anne, as men had a way of doing whenever she went out in public. If she’d accepted all the drinks they tried to press on her, she would have gone facedown on the floor in short order. After she took one, though, she was vaccinated against taking any more.
Instead of acting like a chunk of iron in the grip of a magnet, Kimball hung back. Anne took her own attractiveness so much for granted, a man who showed he wasn’t completely in her grasp often succeeded in piquing her interest by sheer contrariness.
“Hello, Roger,” she said when she did finally notice him in the crowd. “I wondered if I’d find you here.”
“Wouldn’t miss it,” he answered. “Best show in the world—this side of the circus, anyhow.” She laughed at that. He said, “I didn’t expect to see you here, though. If you got out of St. Matthews, I reckoned you’d go on up to Columbia.”
“I didn’t come down just for the election,” Anne said. “I’ve taken a room at the Charleston Hotel on Meeting Street. The shops in Columbia don’t compare to the ones they have here.”
“If you say so,” Kimball replied.
“I do say so,” she answered seriously. “I know what I want, and I aim to get just that, nothing less.” She glanced at him out of the corner of her eye. “Some ways, we’re very much alike, you and I.”
“That’s a fact,” he said. With a scowl, he went on, “If you’re going to tease me, pick another time. I’ve got a little too much whiskey in me to take kindly to it tonight.”
“That’s frank enough.” She appraised him as frankly. “But I’d already made up my mind that I wasn’t gong to tease you if I found you tonight: I was going to invite you up to my room. I just told you, I know what I want, and I aim to get it.”
He thought about turning her down to prove she couldn’t take him for granted. It might make her respect him more. It might also make her furious. And he didn’t want to turn her down. He wanted to throw her down on a big soft bed and take her while she clawed his back to ribbons. If she had something like that in mind, he was ready, willing, and able—he hadn’t drunk so much as to leave him in any doubts on that score.
“We’re ahead in the Seventh in Tennessee,” a man at the telegraph tickers announced, which produced a new roar of applause. Through it, the fellow went on, “That’s around Nashville. They had the damnyankees occupying them—they got themselves some debts to pay.”
Another Freedom Party man was keeping an eye on a different telegraphic instrument. “The Redemption League looks like they’re gonna win themselves a seat in Texas,” he said. “Ain’t as good as if we did it, but it’s the next best thing.”
“How long do you want to stay here?” Anne asked.
“Up to you,” Kimball answered. “We’ve already done about as much as I reckoned we could, and there’s a lot of votes out there waiting to be counted. Maybe we really will get ten seats, the way Featherston said we would.”
“That would be remarkable,” Anne said. She echoed his own thought: “Most brags before an election turn to wind the second the voting’s done.” She slipped her arm into his. “Shall we go celebrate, then? My motorcar’s a couple of doors down.”
She was still driving the spavined Ford she’d got after the C.S. Army commandeered her Vauxhall. That told Kimball she hadn’t come all the way back from the financial reverses she’d taken during the war. But then, who in the Confederate States had? He wondered what would have become of him had he not had more than usual skill with a deck of cards.
The Charleston Hotel was a large building of white stucco with a colonnaded entranceway. An attendant took charge of the Ford as if it had been a Vauxhall. The house detective didn’t blink an eye as Kimball got into the elevator with Anne.
Their joining was fierce as usual, as much a struggle for dominance as what a lot of people thought of as lovemaking. When it was good, as it was tonight, they both won. Afterwards, they lay side by side, lazily caressing each other and talking…politics.
“You were right, Roger,” Anne said, the sort of admission she seldom made. “The Freedom Party
is
on the way up, and Jake Featherston
is
someone to reckon with.”
“I want to meet him myself,” Kimball said. He tweaked her nipple, gently enough to be another caress, sharply enough to be a demand and a warning. “You owe me that, seeing as I was right.”
She knocked his hand away and answered with more than a hint of malice: “What makes you think he’d want to meet
you
? You were an officer, after all, and he’s not what you’d call keen on officers.”
“He’s not keen on
rich
officers,” Kimball retorted. “You ever saw the farm I grew up on, you’d know I’m not one of those. He’ll know it, too.”
He saw he’d surprised her by answering seriously. He also saw his answer wasn’t something she’d thought of herself. “All right,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do.” She rolled toward him on the broad bed. “And now—”
He took her in his arms. “Now I’ll see what I can do.”
Cincinnatus Driver wished he didn’t keep getting shipments for Joe Conroy’s general store. He wished he could stay away from Conroy for the rest of his life. Like so many wishes, that one wasn’t granted. He couldn’t turn down deliveries to Conroy’s. If he started turning down deliveries to one storekeeper, he’d stop getting deliveries to any storekeepers.
He also wished his rattletrap truck had windshield wipers. Since it didn’t—he counted himself lucky it had a motor, let alone any fripperies—he drove from the Ohio to the corner of Emma and Blackwell as slowly and carefully as he could, doing his best to peer between the raindrops spattering his windshield. His best was good enough to keep him from hitting anybody, but he clucked to himself at how long he was taking to drive across Covington.
“And when I finally get there, I get to deal with Joe Conroy,” he said. He talked to himself a lot while driving, for lack of anyone else with whom to talk. “Won’t that just make my day? Sour old—”
But, when he hauled the first keg of molasses into the general store, he found Conroy in a mood not merely good but jubilant. He stared suspiciously at the fat storekeeper; Conroy wasn’t supposed to act like that. Conroy didn’t usually sign the shipping receipt till Cincinnatus had fetched in everything, but he did today. “Ain’t it a beautiful mornin’?” he said.
Cincinnatus looked outside, in case the sun had come out and a rainbow appeared in the sky while his back was turned. No: everything remained as gray and dark as it had been a moment before. Nasty cold drizzle was building toward nasty cold rain; he didn’t relish the upcoming drive back to the wharves.
“Tell you straight out, Mistuh Conroy, I’ve seen me a whole hell of a lot of days I liked the looks of better,” he answered, and went back out into the wet to fetch some more of what Conroy had ordered. The sooner he got it all into the store, the sooner he could get away.
When he came inside again, Joe Conroy said, “Didn’t say it was pretty out. I said it was a beautiful mornin’, and it damn well is.”
“I ain’t got the time to play silly games.” Cincinnatus spoke more rudely to Conroy than to any other white man he knew, and enjoyed every minute of it. “Tell me what you’re talkin’ about or let it go.”
Conroy was in the habit of making noises about what an uppity nigger Cincinnatus was. He didn’t even bother with those today. “I’ll tell you, by Jesus,” he answered. “I sure as hell will tell you. It’s a beautiful mornin’ on account of the Freedom Party won eleven seats in the Congress down in Richmond, and the Redemption League took four more.”
That didn’t make it a beautiful morning for Cincinnatus—but then, Cincinnatus, though he’d had to work with the Confederate diehards in Kentucky, wasn’t one himself. His considered opinion was that a black man would have to be crazy to want the Stars and Bars flying here again. The Stars and Stripes weren’t an enormous improvement, but any improvement, no matter how modest, seemed the next thing to a miracle to him.
Then he thumped his forehead with the heel of his hand. He might not be crazy, but maybe he was stupid. “
That’s
how come I’ve seen ‘Freedom!’ painted on about every other wall this past couple weeks,” he said.
“Sure as hell is,” Conroy said. “Those folks is gonna do great things for the country—for
my
country.” His narrow little eyes probed at Cincinnatus. Cincinnatus stared back impassively. He didn’t want Conroy to know what he was thinking. The storekeeper grunted and went on, “Reckon there’ll be a Freedom Party startin’ up in Kentucky any day now.”
“How do you figure the USA’s gonna let you get away with that?” Cincinnatus asked in surprise. “They ain’t gonna let there be no party that don’t really belong to the United States at all.”
Joe Conroy looked sly. He might not have been all that smart, but he was one crafty devil: that much Cincinnatus could not help but recognize. “They let Reds operate in the USA, don’t they?” he said. “It’s a free country, ain’t it? Says it is, anyways—says it out loud, bangin’ on a big drum. If the Freedom Party, say, wants to try and get the votes to take Kentucky back into the CSA, how can they stop us from doin’ that?”
He looked smug, as if certain Cincinnatus could have no answer. But Cincinnatus did have an answer, and gave it in two words: “Luther Bliss.”
“Huh,” Conroy said. “We’ll handle him, too, when the time comes.”
Cincinnatus didn’t argue, not any more. Arguing with a fool had always struck him as a waste of time. And Conroy sure as hell wasn’t all that smart if he thought he could handle Luther Bliss. Cincinnatus had his doubts about whether Apicius Wood could handle Bliss if he had to. Apicius, he judged, had the sense not to try, but then Apicius really was pretty smart.
“Let me get the rest of your stuff,” Cincinnatus said. If he wasn’t face-to-face with Conroy, he couldn’t possibly argue with him.
The storekeeper wanted to keep on jawing, but Cincinnatus didn’t have to play, not today he didn’t. With Conroy’s receipt in his pocket, all he had to do was finish the delivery and get out. He did exactly that.
As he drove back up toward the river, he really noticed how many walls and fences had
FREEDOM
! painted on them. The word had replaced the blue crosses and red-white-red horizontal stripes as the diehards’ chosen scribble.