Blood and Iron (38 page)

“Not bad, not bad.” Jake Featherston pointed to a chair. “Set yourself down, Kimball, and tell me what’s on your mind.”

“I’ll do that.” Kimball sat, crossed his legs, and balanced the whiskey glass on his higher knee. Featherston seemed as direct in his private dealings as he was on the stump. Kimball approved; nobody diffident ever commanded a submersible. “I want to know how serious you are about going after the high muckymucks in the War Department.”

“I’ve never been more serious about anything in my life.” If Featherston was lying, he was damn good at it. “They made a hash of the war, and they don’t want to own up to it.” Something else joined the anger that filled his narrow features, something Kimball needed a moment to recognize: calculation. “Besides, if the Freedom Party Congressmen keep asking for hearings and the Whigs and the Radical Liberals keep turning us down, who looks good and who looks bad?”

Slowly, Kimball nodded. “Isn’t that pretty?” he said. “It keeps the Party’s name in the papers, too, same as the passbook bill did.”

“That’s right.” The calculation left Featherston’s face. The anger stayed. Kimball got the idea that the anger never left. “Niggers haven’t gotten half of what they deserve, not yet they haven’t. And even the nigger-loving Congressmen up in Richmond now won’t stop us from giving it to ’em.”

“Bully.” Roger Kimball’s voice was savage. “When the uprising started, they kept my boat, the
Bonefish
, from going out on patrol against the damnyankees. Instead, I had to sail up the Pee Dee and pretend I was a river gunboat so I could fight the stinking Reds.”

“I knew they were going to rise up,” Featherston said. “I knew they were going to try and kick the white race right in the balls. And when I tried to warn people, what did I get? What did the goddamn War Department give me? A pat on the head, that’s what. A pat on the head and a set of stripes on my sleeve they might as well have tattooed on my arm, on account of I wouldn’t get ’em off till Judgment Day. That’s what I got for being right.”

His eyes blazed. Roger Kimball was impressed in spite of himself, more impressed than he’d thought he would be. He’d known how Featherston could sway crowds. He’d been swayed in a crowd himself. He’d expected the force of the Freedom Party leader’s personality to be less in a personal meeting like this. If anything, though, it was greater. With all his heart, he wanted to believe everything Jake Featherston said.

Kimball had to gather himself before he could say, “You don’t want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, though. The War Department could do the country some good, once the dead wood got cleared out.”

“Yeah, likely tell,” Featherston jeered. “Best thing that could happen to the War Department would be blowing it to hell and gone. And anybody who says anything different is just as big a traitor as the lying dogs in there.”

“That’s shit,” Kimball said without raising his voice. Featherston’s eyes opened very wide. Kimball grinned; he got the idea nobody had spoken that way to Featherston in quite a while. Grinning still, he went on, “Without the War Department, for instance, how are we going to get decent barrels built? You’d best believe the damnyankees are working to make theirs tougher, same as they are with aeroplanes. Don’t you reckon we ought to do the same?”

“Barrels. Stinking barrels,” Featherston muttered under his breath. He’d stopped jeering. Now he watched Kimball as a man might watch a rattlesnake in the shocked instant after its tail began to buzz. No, he hadn’t had a supporter talk back to him for a while. It threw him off stride, left him startled and confused. But he rallied quickly. “Well, yes, Christ knows we’ll need new barrels when we fight the USA again. But where the hell are they? Are we working on them? Not that I’ve ever heard, and I’ve got ears in all sorts of funny places. We’ve got people—mercenaries—using some old ones down south of the border, but new ones? Forget it. Proves what I told you, doesn’t it?—pack of damn traitors in the War Department.”

When we fight the USA again.
Featherston’s calm acceptance of the next war took Kimball’s breath away, or rather made it come fast and hard, as if Anne Colleton had greeted him in the doorway naked. He wanted that next war, too. He hadn’t wanted to give up on the last one, but he’d had no choice. Seeing how much Featherston longed for it made him forget their disagreement of a moment before.

When he didn’t answer back right away, the sparkle returned to Featherston’s eye. The Freedom Party leader said, “Reckon you were just sticking up for the officers in Richmond, seeing as you were one yourself.”

“Screw the officers in Richmond,” Kimball said evenly. “Yes, I was an officer. I fucking earned being an officer when I won an appointment at the Naval Academy in Mobile off a lousy little Arkansas farm. I earned my way through the Academy, too, and I earned every promotion I got once the war started. And if you don’t like that, Sarge”—he laced Featherston’s chosen title with scorn—“you can go to hell.”

He thought he’d have a fight on his hands then and there. He wasn’t sure he could win it, either; Jake Featherston had the hard, rangy look of a man who’d cause more than his share of trouble in a brawl. But Featherston surprised him by throwing back his head and laughing. “All right, you were an officer, but you ain’t one of those blue-blooded little goddamn pukes like Jeb Stuart III, that worthless sack of horse manure.”

“Blue-blooded? Me? Not likely.” Kimball laughed, too. “After my pa died, I walked behind the ass end of a mule till I figured out I didn’t want to do that for a living any more. I’ll tell you something else, too: it didn’t take me real long to figure
that
out, either.”

“Don’t reckon it would have,” Featherston said. “All right, Kimball, you were an officer, but you were my kind of officer. When I’m president, reckon I can find you a place up in Richmond, if you want it.”

When I’m president.
He said that as calmly as he’d said,
When we fight the USA again.
He said it as surely, too. His confidence made Kimball gasp again. A little hoarsely, the ex-submersible skipper said, “So you are going to run next year?”

“Hell, yes, I’ll run,” Featherston answered. “I won’t win. The people here aren’t ready yet to do the hard things that need doing. But when I run, when I tell ’em what we’ll have to do, that’ll help make ’em ready. You know what I’m saying, Kimball? The road needs building before I can run my motorcar down it.”

“Yeah, I know what you’re saying.” Kimball knew he sounded abstracted. He couldn’t help it. He’d thought about guiding Jake Featherston the way a rider guided a horse. After half an hour’s conversation with Featherston, that seemed laughable, absurd, preposterous—he couldn’t find a word strong enough. The leader of the Freedom Party knew where he wanted to go, knew with a certainty that made the hair stand up on the back of Kimball’s neck. Whether he would get there was another question, but he knew where the road went.

Far more cautiously than he’d spoken before, Kimball said, “I’m not the only officer you could use, you know. You shouldn’t be down on all of us. Take Clarence Potter, for instance. He—”

Featherston cut him off with a sharp chopping gesture. “You and him are pals. I remember that. But I haven’t got any real use for him. There’s no fire in the man; he thinks too damn much. It’s not the fellow who thinks like a professor who gets a pile of ordinary working folks all het up. It’s somebody who thinks like them. It’s somebody who talks like them. He’d just piss and moan about that, on account of he can’t do it himself.”

Recalling Potter’s Yale-flavored, Yankee-sounding accent and his relentless precision, Kimball found himself nodding. He said, “I bet you would have had more use for him, though, if he’d come over to the Party right away.”

“Hell and blazes, of course I would,” Featherston said. “But I can see him now, lookin’ down his nose, peerin’ over the tops of his spectacles”—he gave a viciously excellent impression of a man doing just that—“and reckoning I was nothing but a damn fool. Maybe he knows better nowadays, but maybe it’s too late.”

Kimball didn’t say anything at all. Featherston’s judgment of Clarence Potter was close to his own. Clarence was a fine fellow—Kimball wouldn’t have gone so far in denigrating him as Featherston had—but he did think too much for his own good.

“We’re on the way up,” Featherston said. “We’re on the way up, and nobody’s going to stop us. Now that I’m here, I’m damn glad I came down to Charleston. I can use you, Kimball. You’re a hungry bastard, just like me. There aren’t enough of us, you know what I’m saying?”

“I sure do.” Kimball stuck out his hand. Featherston clasped it. They clung to each other for a moment, locked in the alliance of the mutually useful. The president of the Confederate States, Kimball reflected, was eligible for only one six-year term. If Jake Featherston did win the job, who would take it after him? Roger Kimball hadn’t known any such ambition before, but he did now.

Excitement built in Chester Martin as winter gave way to spring. Before long, spring would give way to summer. When summer came to Toledo, so would the Socialist Party national convention.

“Not Debs again!” he said to Albert Bauer. “He’s run twice, and he’s lost twice. We’ve got to pick somebody new this time, a fresh face. It’s not like it was in 1916, or in 1912, either. We’ve got a real chance to win this year.”

“In 1912 and 1916, you were a damn Democrat,” Bauer returned, stuffing an envelope. “What gives you the right to tell the Party what to do now?”

Martin’s wave took in the local headquarters. “That I
am
here now and wouldn’t have been caught dead here then. Proves my point, doesn’t it?”

His friend grunted. “Maybe you’ve got something,” Bauer said grudgingly. After a moment, though, he brightened. “This must be how the real old-time Socialists felt when Lincoln brought so many Republicans into the Party after the Second Mexican War. It was nice having more than half a dozen people come to meetings and vote for you, but a lot of the new folks didn’t know a hell of a lot about what Socialism was supposed to mean.”

“Are you saying I don’t know much?” Martin asked, amusement in his voice.

“Tell me about the means of production,” Albert Bauer said. “Explain why they don’t belong in the hands of the capitalist class.”

“I don’t have to sit still for examinations: I’m not in school any more, thank God,” Martin said. “I don’t know much about the means of production, and I don’t give a damn, either. What I do know is, the Democrats have jumped into bed with the fat cats. I want a party to jump into bed with me.”

“You’re voting your class interest,” Bauer said. “Well, that’s a start. At least you know you have a class interest, which is a devil of a lot more than too many people do. You wouldn’t believe how much trouble we’ve had educating the proletariat to fulfill its proper social role.”

“Yeah, and one of the reasons why is that you keep talking so fancy, nobody wants to pay any attention to you,” Martin said. “You keep on doing that, the Socialists are going to lose this election, same as they’ve lost all the others. And God only knows when we’ll ever have a better chance.”

By the way Bauer winced and grimaced, he knew he’d struck a nerve, maybe even struck it harder than he’d intended. “What do you think?” Bauer asked, shifting the subject a little. “Will TR run for a third term?”

“Nobody ever has before,” Martin answered, but that wasn’t the question Bauer had asked. At length, he said, “Yeah, I think he will. What’s he going to do, dust off his hands and walk away? Go hunt lions and elephants in Africa? You ask me, he likes doing what he’s doing. He’ll try and keep doing it.” He held up a forefinger. “Here’s one for you, Al: if Teddy
does
run again, will that make things easier or harder for us?”

“I’m damned if I know,” Bauer replied, his voice troubled. “Nobody knows. Maybe people will remember he fought the war and won it. If they do, they’ll vote for him. Or maybe they’ll remember how many men died and all the trouble we’ve had since. If they do that, they won’t touch him with a ten-foot pole.”

“The war will have been over for almost three and a half years by the time the election rolls around,” Martin said.

“That’s a fact.” Albert Bauer sounded glad it was a fact, too. “People don’t remember things very long. Of course”—he didn’t seem to want to be glad about anything—“the Great War is a big thing to forget.”

“Losing two elections in a row is a big thing to forget, too, and that’s what Debs has done,” Martin said. “If we do run him again, what’ll our slogan be? ‘Third time’s the charm’? I don’t think that’ll work.”

“He walks in and he knows all the answers.” Bauer might have been talking to the ceiling; since he spoke of Martin in the third person, he wasn’t—quite—talking to him. But then he was once more: “All right, all right, maybe not Debs. But if we don’t run him, who do we run? He’s the one fellow we’ve got who has a following across the whole damn country.”

“You pick somebody,” Chester Martin said. “You’re always going on about how you’re the old-time Red, so you have to know all these people. I’m nothing but a damn recruit. That’s what you keep telling me, anyway.”

“Go peddle your papers,” Bauer said. A little less gruffly, he continued, “Go on, take the rest of the day off. It’s Sunday, for Christ’s sake. Don’t you have anything better to do with your time?”

“Probably.” Martin got up from the table where he and his friend had been preparing fliers for mailing. “But if too many people find better things to do with their time than work for the Party, the work won’t get done. Where will we be then?”

“Up the same old creek,” Bauer admitted. “But the Rebs won’t capture Philadelphia if you have yourself a couple of beers or something.”

“Twist my arm,” Martin said, and Bauer did, not very hard. Martin groaned anyway. “Aii! There—you made me do it. See you later.”

When he stepped outside, spring was in the air. While he’d fought in the Roanoke Valley, it had arrived sooner and more emphatically than it did here by the shore of Lake Erie. That was the one good thing he could say about Virginia. Against it, he set filth and stench and horror and fear and pain and mud and lice. They sent the scales crashing down against the place.

How many veterans would weigh what they’d been through in the same fashion? Was what they’d done worth it? Could anything have been worth three years of hell on earth? He didn’t think so, especially not when he reckoned in the trouble he’d had after the war was over. Would the rest of the millions who’d worn green-gray—those of them left alive, anyhow—feel as he did? If so, Teddy Roosevelt faced more trouble than he guessed.

Red flags flew above the Socialists’ building. Toledo cops still prowled past. Martin no longer carried a pistol in his pocket. Something like peace had returned to the labor scene. He wondered how long it would last. The answer supplied itself:
till the day after the election.

One of the policemen in brass-buttoned dark blue flashed Martin a thumbs-up. Martin was so surprised to get it, he tripped on a crack in the sidewalk and almost fell. During the great wave of strikes, that cop had undoubtedly broken workers’ heads along with his goonish chums. Did he think he could turn into a good Socialist with one simple gesture? If he did, he was an even bigger fool than the usual run of cop.

Or maybe he was a straw, blowing in the wind of change. If a cop found it a good idea to show somebody coming out of the Socialist hall that he wasn’t hostile, who held the power? Who was liable to hold it after March 4, 1921? Maybe the policeman was hedging his bets.

“Won’t do you any good,” Martin muttered under his breath. “We’ll still remember you bastards. Hell, yes, we will.”

He listened to himself. That was when he began to think the party that had wandered so long in the wilderness might have a chance to come home at last. The Democrats had ruled the roost for a long time. They wouldn’t be happy about clearing out, not after all these years they wouldn’t.

“Too damn bad,” Martin said.

Red Socialist posters were plastered on every wall and fence and telegraph pole. They shouted for freedom and justice in big black letters. For once, more of them were up than their red-white-and-blue Democratic counterparts. Those showed the U.S. eagle flying high over a burning Confederate flag, and bore a one-word message:
VICTORY
!

As poster art went, the Democrats’ handbills were pretty good. The only drawback Chester Martin found in them was that they bragged about old news. As Bauer had said, people forgot things in a hurry.

Martin walked over to the trolley stop and rode back to the apartment building where he and his parents and sister lived. They were playing hearts three-handed. “About time you got home,” his father said. “This is a better game when the cards come out even when you deal ’em.”

“See what you get for starting without me?” Martin said, drawing up a chair.

“Dad wants to throw in this game because he’s losing,” his sister said. But Sue’s grin said she didn’t mind throwing it in, either.

“My own flesh and blood insult me,” Stephen Douglas Martin said. “If I’d told
my
father anything like that—”

“Gramps would have laughed his head off, and you know it,” Martin said. He gathered the cards and fanned them in his hand. “Draw for first deal.” He ended up dealing himself. After generously donating the ace of spades and a couple of hearts to his mother, who sat on his left (and receiving a similar load of trash from his sister, who sat on his right), he called, “All right, where’s the deuce?”

Out came the two of clubs. As the hand was played, his father asked, “Did you get the whole world settled, there at the Socialist meeting hall?”

“Sure as heck did,” Martin said cheerfully. “The revolution of the proletariat starts next Wednesday, seven o’clock in the morning sharp. You’d better step lively, Pop—you don’t want to be late.” He took a trick with the ace of diamonds, then led the ten of spades. “Let’s see where the queen’s hiding.”

“Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer,” his father said. As Chester’s mother had done, he ducked the spade. So did Sue. Stephen Douglas Martin went on, “Do people want it to be that rabblerousing fool of a Debs again?”

“Some people do,” Martin answered. “I think we’d have a better chance with somebody else.” Since the ten of spades had failed to flush out the queen, he led the nine. “Maybe this’ll make her show up.”

His mother pained and set out the ace of spades. His father grinned and tucked the king under it. His sister grinned even wider and dropped the queen, sticking his mother with thirteen points she didn’t want. “There you go, Ma,” Sue said sweetly.

“Thank you so much,” Louisa Martin said. She turned to her son. “When the revolution comes, will the queen only be worth one point, to make her equal with all the hearts in the deck?”

“Don’t know about that one, Ma,” Chester said. “I don’t think there’s a plank that talks about it in the Socialist Party platform.”

“Is there a plank that explains why they think we need anybody but bully old Teddy?” Stephen Douglas Martin inquired.

“I can think of two,” his son replied. “First one is, nobody’s ever had three terms. If TR decides to run again, he shouldn’t, either. And even if the Democrats run somebody else, they have to explain what we got for all the men who got killed and maimed during the war, and why they’ve been in the trusts’ pocket ever since.”

When he was around Albert Bauer, he sounded like a reactionary. When he was around his parents—who were, in his view of things, reactionaries—he sounded as radical as Bauer did. The more he thought about that, the funnier it seemed.

The quitting whistle’s scream cut through the din on the floor of the Sloss Works like a wedge splitting a stump. Jefferson Pinkard leaned on his crowbar. “Another day done,” he said. “Another million dollars.”

He wasn’t making a million dollars a day, but he was making better than a million a week. Next month, probably, he’d be up over a million a day. It didn’t matter. What the CSA called money was only a joke, one that kept getting funnier as the banknotes sprouted more and more zeros. The bottom line was, he’d lived better before the war than he did now. That was so for almost everybody in the Confederate States.

“See you in the mornin’, Mistuh Pinkard,” Vespasian said.

“Yeah,” Jeff answered. “See you.” He didn’t make his voice cold on purpose; it just came out that way. The more he went to Freedom Party meetings, the less he cared to work alongside a black man. Vespasian turned away and headed for the time clock to punch out without another word. Pinkard wasn’t in the habit of bragging about going out on Freedom Party assault squadrons, but he wouldn’t have been surprised had Vespasian known about it. Blacks had funny ways of finding out things like that.

Too damn bad,
Jeff thought. Tired and sweaty, he headed toward the time clock himself.

Going into and out of the Sloss foundry, whites had always hung with whites and Negroes with Negroes. That hadn’t changed. What had changed, lately, was how men from one group eyed those from the other. Blacks seemed warier than they had been during the war. Whites seemed less happy about having so many colored men around, doing jobs they wouldn’t have been allowed to do before the war started. Pinkard understood that down to the ground. It was how he felt himself.

He didn’t stop sweating just because he’d stopped working for the day. Spring had come to Birmingham full of promises about what the summer would be like. If those promises weren’t so many lies, summer would be hotter than hell, and twice as muggy. Summer in Birmingham was usually like that, so the promises probably held truth.

When he got close to home, Bedford Cunningham waved to him. Bedford was sitting on his own front porch, with a glass of something unlikely to be water on the rail in front of him. “Come on over after supper, Jeff,” he called. “We’ll hoist a few.” He hoisted the one sitting on the rail.

“Can’t tonight,” Pinkard answered. “Got a meeting.”