He didn’t like what he’d heard about the Freedom Party. That put it mildly. The local papers said little about the outfit; these days, they did their best to ignore what went on in the Confederate States. But word drifted up out of the CSA even so, word spread on the black grapevine that ran alongside and occasionally overlapped the one the diehards used. None of that word was good. And now the Freedom Party had done better in the elections than anyone expected. That was not good news, either.
When he got home that evening, he told Elizabeth what he’d heard from Conroy. She nodded. “White lady I clean house for, she was talkin’’bout the same thing on the telephone. She sound happy as a pig in a strawberry patch.”
“I believe it,” Cincinnatus said. Kentucky had been taken out of the USA by main force at the end of the War of Secession. It had been dragged back into the United States the same way during the course of the Great War. A lot of Kentuckians—a lot of white Kentuckians—wished the return had never happened. Cincinnatus went on, “The government ever lets people here vote for the Freedom Party, they ain’t gonna like the votes they see.”
Elizabeth sighed. Part of the sigh was weariness after a long day. Part of it was weariness after living among and having to work for people who despised her the second they set eyes on her. She said, “Reckon you’re right. Wish it wasn’t so, but it is.”
“Pa’s right,” Achilles said cheerfully. “Pa’s right.” He didn’t know what Cincinnatus was right about. He didn’t care, either. He had confidence that his father was and always would be right.
Cincinnatus wished he had that same confidence. He knew all too well how many mistakes he’d made over the years, how lucky he was to have come through some of them, and how one more could ruin not only his life but those of his wife and little son. Slowly, he said, “Maybe we ought to talk some more about pullin’ up stakes, Elizabeth. We can do it. Don’t need no passbook, not any more.”
“We got us a lifetime of roots in this place,” Elizabeth said. She’d said the same thing when Cincinnatus brought up the idea of leaving Covington earlier in the year.
He hadn’t pressed her very hard then. Now he said, “Sometimes the only thing roots is good for is gettin’ pulled out of the ground. Sometimes, if you don’t pull ’em out, they hold you there till somethin’ cuts you down.”
Instead of answering directly, Elizabeth retreated to the kitchen. Over her shoulder, she said, “Go set yourself down. Smells like the ham is just about ready.”
Sit himself down Cincinnatus did, but he didn’t abandon the subject, as his wife plainly hoped he would. “I been thinkin’ about this,” he said. “Been thinkin’ about it a lot, even if I ain’t said much. If we leave, I know where I’d like us to go. I been lookin’ things up, best I can.”
“And where’s that?” Elizabeth asked, resignation and fear mingling in her voice.
“Des Moines, Iowa,” he answered. “It’s on a river—the Des Moines runs into the Mississippi—so there’ll be haulin’ business off the docks. Iowa lets black folks vote. They let women vote for president, too.”
“I reckon they got women there,” Elizabeth allowed. “They got any black folks there at all?”
“A few, I reckon,” he answered. “There’s a few black folks in just about every good-sized town in the USA. Ain’t any more than a few very many places, though.” He held up a hand before his wife could say anything. “Maybe that’s even for the best. When there ain’t very many of us, can’t be enough for the white folks to hate us.”
“Who says there can’t?” Elizabeth spoke with the accumulated bitter wisdom of her race. “And Jesus, how far away is this Des Moines place? It’d be like fallin’ off the edge of the world.”
“About six hundred miles,” Cincinnatus said, as casually as he could. Elizabeth’s eyes filled with horror. He went on, “Reckon the truck’ll make it. They got a lot o’ paved roads in the USA.” He pursed his lips. “Have to pick the time to leave, make sure everything’s all good and dry.”
“You aim on bringin’ your ma an’ pa along?” Elizabeth asked. Her own parents were both dead.
“They want to come, we’ll fit ’em in some kind of way,” Cincinnatus answered. “They don’t—” He shrugged. “They’re all grown up. Can’t make ’em do nothin’they don’t take a shine to.”
“I don’t take no shine to this myself.” Elizabeth stuck out her chin and looked stubborn.
“You take a shine to livin’ here in Kentucky if that Freedom Party starts winnin’ elections?” Cincinnatus asked. “Somethin’ like that happen, you’ll be glad we got somewheres else to go.”
That hit home. “Maybe,” Elizabeth said in a small voice.
Something else occurred to Cincinnatus: if the Freedom Party started winning elections in the Confederate States, what would the Negroes there do? They couldn’t run away to Iowa. They’d already tried rising up, tried and failed. What did that leave? For the life of him, Cincinnatus couldn’t see anything.
Stephen Douglas Martin’s eyes went from his daughter to his son and back again in something that looked like pleased bemusement. “You don’t have to do this on account of me, you know,” he said. “If you want to go out and paint the town red, go right on out and do it.”
Chester Martin grinned at his father. “You already say I’m too much of a Red. I don’t even want to go out and paint the town green.”
“We just want to spend New Year’s Eve with you and Mother, that’s all,” Sue Martin said, nodding vigorously. Chester’s kid sister looked a lot like him, with sharp nose, green eyes, and sandy hair. She thought a lot like him, too, on labor matters and on a lot of other things as well.
“Besides, Pa,” he added, “where the devil could I go in Toledo to paint the town red even if I wanted to? This isn’t exactly Philadelphia or New York City.” Toledo also didn’t boast the multitude of saloons and brothels that sprang up behind an army’s lines to cater to the needs—or at least the desires—of soldiers briefly free from the trenches.
“Well, you’ve got me there,” his father answered. “Yes, sir, you’ve got me there. Once upon a time, I used to know where all the hot joints were, but that was a while ago now. Don’t look so much to go out and get rowdy, like I used to before I hooked up with your mother and settled down.”
From the kitchen, Louisa Martin called, “What are you blaming me for now, Stephen?” Dishes rattled as she put them back into the cabinet. “I’m almost finished in here. Whatever you’re trying to pin on me, in a minute I’ll be out there and you won’t be able to do it.”
She was as good as her word. Her husband said, “What I was trying to pin on you, dear, was settling me down. If you don’t think you’ve done it, I’ll go out and get drunk and leave you home with the kids.” His eyes twinkled. “I’ll probably beat you when I get back, too, the way I always do.”
“I don’t know why you haven’t quit yet,” Louisa Martin said with a pretty good martyred sigh. “I’m all over bruises, and the police keep dragging you down to the station every other day.”
They both started laughing. Sue looked from one of them to the other, as if astonished her parents could act so absurd, and about something that would have been very serious had they been serious themselves. Chester said, “Well, Ma, that’s better work for the cops than most of what they do, believe me.”
“Hold on there.” His father held out his hand like a cop halting traffic. “If we’re going to have a happy New Year’s Eve, let’s see if we can manage not to talk politics. Otherwise, we’ll just start arguing.”
“I’ll try,” Chester said, knowing his father was likely to be right. He let out a wry chuckle before going on, “Doesn’t leave me much to talk about but my football team, though.”
“I wish you wouldn’t talk about that, either,” his mother said. “It’s just as dangerous as going out there on the picket line.”
“Not even close.” Chester shook his head. “The fellows on the teams we play hardly ever carry guns, the way the cops and the company goons do.”
“What did I say a minute ago?” Stephen Douglas Martin asked rhetorically. “If you want to turn out editorials, son, go work for a newspaper.”
“All right,” Chester said.
His father looked at him in some surprise, evidently not having expected such an easy victory. The older male Martin arose with a grunt from the chair in which he’d been ensconced since suppertime. He went into the kitchen and came out with a bottle of whiskey and two glasses.
“Well, I like that,” Sue said with annoyance only partly affected. “Are you going to leave Mother and me thirsty?”
“I only have two hands.” Her father set the whiskey and the glasses on the side table by his chair, then held up the members in question. “Count ’em—two.” He returned to the kitchen and brought out two more tumblers.
Chester wondered if his father had intended to include Sue and his mother in the drinking. If he hadn’t, nobody could prove it now. Whiskey gurgled into four glasses. Chester raised his. “To 1920!” he said.
“To 1920!” his sister and his parents echoed. They all drank. Chester sighed as the whiskey ran down his throat. It wasn’t the smoothest he’d ever drunk, but it wasn’t bad, either. Some of the rotgut he’d had in back of the lines—and, every once in a while, in a canteen or jug smuggled up to the forward trenches—had been like drinking liquid barbed wire.
His father stood to propose a toast. “To the 1920s—may they be a better ten years than the ten we’ve just gone through.” Everyone drank to that, too. Stephen Douglas Martin said, “Now we ought to all pitch our glasses into the fireplace. Only trouble with that is, you go through a lot of glasses.”
Sue looked at the clock on the mantel over the fireplace. “Three hours till midnight, less a couple of minutes. Will starting a new calendar really make a difference? It’d be nice to think it would.”
“We always hope it will,” her mother said wistfully. She sighed. “And we usually end up looking back and saying, ‘Well, that’s another year down.’”
“This wasn’t too bad a year,” Chester said. “I’ve had work through most of it, anyway, and that’s more than I can say for the rest of the time since I got out of the Army.”
He left it at that. Had he said more, he and his father would have got to arguing politics. He was convinced the factory owners had settled with the steelworkers because of the 1918 election returns. Whatever else you might say about them, big capitalists weren’t stupid. When handwriting went up on the wall, they could read it. If they didn’t come to terms with the people who worked for them, Congress would start passing laws they didn’t fancy.
His mother sat down at the tired old upright piano and began to play. Her choice of tunes made him smile. After a little while, he said, “I’m not in the Army any more. You don’t have to give me one Sousa march after another.” He stomped up and down the room as if on parade.
“I like playing them, Chester,” Louisa Martin said. “They make me want to go marching—except I can’t, not while I’m playing.” She swung into a spirited if not technically perfect rendition of “Remembrance and Defiance.”
“She’ll do as she pleases, son,” Stephen Douglas Martin said. “If you haven’t learned that about her by now, how long is it going to take you?”
“If she’s playing them for herself, that’s fine,” Chester said. “If she’s doing them for me, though, she’s wasting her time. I never was so glad as the last time I took that uniform off.”
“You went through a lot,” Sue said. “I remember the hard time you gave that military policeman in the park when you were home on convalescent leave. It was like you’d seen a lot of things he never had, so you didn’t think he had any business bothering you.”
“That’s just what I was thinking, Sis,” he answered. “He behaved like he thought God had sent him down in a puff of smoke. The people who really went through the mill don’t act that way.”
“I’ve seen that with the younger fellows I work with,” his father said. “One of ’em won the Medal of Honor, but you’d never hear it from him.”
“That’s the way it ought to be,” Martin said. “We didn’t go out there to blow our own horns or to have a good time—not that there were any good times to have in the trenches. We went out there to win the war, and we did that.” He tossed down the rest of his whiskey. “And you know what? I wonder if what we bought is worth what we paid for it.”
“We licked the Rebs,” his father said. “Along with Kaiser Bill, we licked everybody. We’ve paid people back for everything they ever did to us.”
“That’s so,” Chester said, “but there are—what? a million? something like that—say a million men who won’t ever see it. And Lord only knows how many there are on crutches and in wheelchairs and wearing a hook instead of a hand.” He touched his own left arm. “I’m one of the lucky ones. All I got was a Purple Heart and some leave time—a hometowner, we called a wound like that. But it was just luck. It wasn’t anything else. A few inches to one side and I wouldn’t be here now. I wouldn’t be anyplace. I was a good soldier, but that’s not why I came out in one piece. Nothing but luck.”
The Sousa march Louisa Martin was playing came to a ragged halt. “You’ve upset your mother,” Stephen Douglas Martin said, and then, to his wife, “It’s all right, dear. He
is
here. He’s fine. If he weren’t here and fine, he wouldn’t be spouting such nonsense, would he?”
“No,” Chester’s mother said in a small voice. “But I don’t like to think about…about things that might have been.”
Chester poured his glass full of whiskey again. He didn’t like to think about things that might have been, either. Most of them were worse than the way things had really turned out. Some of them still made him wake up sweating in the night, even though the war had been over for two and a half years. He drank. If he got numb, he wouldn’t have to think about them.
His mother got herself another drink, too. He raised an eyebrow at that; she didn’t usually take a second glass. Maybe she had things she didn’t want to think about, too. Maybe he’d given her some of those things. All at once, he felt ashamed.
“I’m sorry,” he mumbled.
His father got up and clapped him on the shoulder. “You’ll make a man yet,” he said. “I think that’s the first time I ever heard you say you were sorry and sound like you meant it. Kids say it, too, but they don’t say it the same way. ‘I’m sorry.’” Stephen Douglas Martin did a good imitation of a nine-year-old apologizing lest something worse happen to him.