Blood and Iron (50 page)

“Among a good many other executions, yes,” Dowling answered with a sigh he barely tried to hide. He’d been certain ahead of time Custer would take this line. Custer was irresistibly attracted to the obvious.

And, sure enough, Custer charged ahead as if he hadn’t spoken: “Other bombs around Rosenfeld, too. All of them either had to do with families that got his brat in trouble or with people connected to that other operative down there, the one who got himself blown sky high the night the war ended. Coincidence? Are you telling me it’s coincidence?”

“Sir,
someone’s
been making bombs, yes,” Dowling said. “But it’s no more likely to be McGregor than anyone else down there. Major Hannebrink—the operative who’s dead now—had to hold down the countryside during the war, and he didn’t use a light hand. No one used a light hand during the war, sir.”

Again, Custer might not have heard him. He went right on with his own thoughts, such as they were: “And was this McGregor down on his farm when Hy’s was bombed? He was not. You know he was not.”

“I know where he was, too: visiting kin in Ontario,” Dowling said. “He didn’t make a secret of where he was going. His farm was checked after the bombing, and then again a little before Christmas, in the hope he might have gotten careless. I don’t think he could have gotten careless, sir, because I don’t think he had anything to get careless about.”

“Ought to haul him in,” Custer said. “Ought to haul him in, give him a blindfold and a cigarette, and stand him up against a wall and give him the same his son got.”

“Sir!” Dowling exclaimed in real alarm. “Sir, the country’s been pretty quiet lately. Do you want to give the Canucks a martyr? If you execute a man when you can’t prove he’s done anything, you’re asking for trouble. Don’t you think it’s better to let sleeping dogs lie?”

“That dog of a McGregor lies, all right, but he’s not asleep,” Custer retorted. “He’s wide awake and laughing at us, that’s what he’s doing. And as for asking for trouble…” He looked sly, always a dangerous sign. “With the damned Socialists coming into power in another five weeks, I’d love to see the Canucks turn fractious. It might remind the Reds in Philadelphia why we have soldiers up here.”

That was devious. Dowling wondered how a soldier who’d gained his reputation by charging straight at the foe—regardless of whether the situation called for it—had acquired such a byzantine sense of politics. It might even be a clever move…if you didn’t stop and think about what it meant to this Arthur McGregor and what was left of his family.

Dowling said, “Sir, this fellow’s already lost his son. If you shoot him, you leave a widow and a couple of orphaned daughters. That’s pretty hard, sir. If he were the bomber, he would have conspired with somebody, wouldn’t he? There’s nothing to show he’s done that. I mean nothing at all, sir. No claims, no circumstantial evidence—zero. He hasn’t done it, period.”

“Lone wolf,” Custer said, but he didn’t sound so cocksure as he had a moment before. Lone-wolf mad bombers weren’t that easy to believe in, even for Custer.

Pressing his advantage, Dowling went on, “So you see, sir, it really isn’t that bad a report. I know it would be more satisfying if they could tie up the bomber with a pretty pink ribbon, but there are millions of Canucks and millions of square miles in this miserable icebox of a country. Catching the stinking bastard isn’t easy.”

“Bah,” Custer said—a sign of weakening. Then, as if it proved something, he added, “He almost blew you up, too.”

“Believe me, sir, I know that,” Dowling said fervently. Nobody cared enough about him personally to want to do him in. But if Custer went, he was liable to go, too. He’d make one line in the fourth paragraph of the newspaper stories.
The commanding general’s adjutant also perished in the blast
—all the obituary he’d ever get.

He sighed. His name and photograph wouldn’t make it into the encyclopedias or the history books. If he ever wrote his memoirs, the only reason they might find a publisher would be that people had an endless appetite for stories about Custer. Dowling coughed. He could tell stories about Custer, all right, stories that would curl the hair of anybody with an ounce of sense.

He did not think he was boastful in reckoning himself smarter than the senior soldier in the U.S. Army. Custer had graduated dead last in his West Point class—hardly a shining example, save perhaps of what not to do. Whenever Custer had been right, all through his enormously long military career, he’d been right for the wrong reasons. The shouting match he’d got into with Teddy Roosevelt about how and why they’d used their Gatling guns in Montana Territory the way they had proved how far back that went.

And yet, for all his failings, Custer was, and deserved to be, famous. He might have been right for the wrong reasons, but he’d been right at the right times. That counted for more. And Custer, whatever else you said about him, never did anything by halves. That counted for a lot, too.

Flaws and all—and Dowling, from long exposure to them, knew how massive they were—Custer would live in the country’s memory for generations to come. And, when authors got around to writing historical novels about him, they would have to invent a character to play his adjutant, because no one would remember that perfectly competent but uninspired lieutenant colonel, Abner Dowling, whose only measurable defect was measurable indeed, in his uncommon and ever-increasing girth. It hardly seemed fair.

No doubt it wasn’t fair. But then, life wasn’t fair. Some people were smarter than others. Some were handsomer than others. Some—Custer sprang to mind—were pushier than others. You did what you could with what you had. And, even if no one would recall the contributions of an obscure officer named Dowling, Custer had done more than he might have otherwise because he’d had that obscure officer at his side and guarding his back.

Testily, Custer said, “Oh, very well, Dowling—have it your way. If you think this McGregor is pure as the driven snow”—a comparison that hardly required a poetic spirit in Winnipeg in January—“we’ll leave him alone. On your head be it. And if he sets off another bomb, on your head it will be.”

“You already pointed that out, sir.” Dowling sounded on the testy side himself. “I would point out to you in return that this is not merely my opinion. It is the opinion of the expert on the spot. If we pay no attention to the opinion of the expert on the spot, where are we?”

He’d meant it for a rhetorical question. Custer answered as if it were literal: “In the General Staff offices in Philadelphia.” That jerked a startled snort of laughter out of Dowling. Custer went on, “But if we fall down and worship the expert on the spot, where are we then? With the Israelites who fell down and worshiped the Golden Calf, that’s where.”

Dowling thought the second comparison far-fetched. What Custer meant was that he wanted the liberty to do as he damn well pleased. That was all Custer had ever wanted. Since he was eighty-one years old and still hadn’t learned the difference between liberty and license, he wasn’t likely to gain that knowledge in however much time he had left.

“I do think you’re doing the right thing by letting this McGregor alone,” Dowling said. “The whole country has been noticeably calmer lately than it was when you first took over.”

“I put the fear of God in the Canucks, that’s why, and I had my own good reasons for doing it,” Custer said. There might even have been some truth in his words, though Dowling thought the Canadians’ despair over a cause obviously lost had more to do with it. “We will make a desert if we have to, and we shall call it peace.”

“Yes, sir,” his adjutant said resignedly. No use expecting Custer to become a decent Latin scholar at his age, either (more hope that he might become a scholar of indecent Latin). When Tacitus had said the Romans made a desert and called it peace, he was condemning them. Custer took it for praise.

“I don’t care if they hate us,” Custer added, “as long as they’re afraid of us.” That was another Latin tag. Custer probably knew as much; having thought of the one, coming up with the other would have been easier for him. But did he remember the phrase came from Caligula’s lips?
Not likely,
Dowling judged. He glanced over at Custer. Would Caligula have been like this if he’d lasted to eighty-one? Dowling’s shiver had nothing to do with the subzero cold outside. He couldn’t recall the last time he’d had such a frightening thought.

He said, “Now that they
are
quiet, sir, I really do think it’s best not to stir them up.”

“So you’ve said—over and over and over,” Custer said. “So everyone says. Well, I have something to say to you, too: you and everyone else had better be right, or the United States are going to end up with egg on their face. And what do you think of that?”

“I think you’re right, sir.” Dowling didn’t see what good pointing out Custer’s unfailing gift for the obvious would do.

Jefferson Pinkard’s alarm clock went off with a sound like doom. The steelworker thrashed and writhed and finally managed to turn the bloody thing off. He wished he could thump himself in the head and get rid of his headache the same way. Alabama was a dry state, but that didn’t mean he and his Freedom Party buddies couldn’t lay their hands on some whiskey after meetings when they set their minds to it.

“Ought to know better than to go into work hungover,” he said. He did know better. He’d learned better the hard way. He hadn’t headed for the Sloss Works hurting in years—not till he threw Emily out of the house after catching her whoring with Bedford Cunningham a second time. Since then…since then, he knew he’d been drinking more than he should, but knowing and stopping were two different critters.

He built up the fire in the stove and got a pot of coffee going. Then he went back to the bathroom and dry-swallowed a couple of aspirins. He lathered his face and shaved. As he was toweling himself dry afterwards, he wondered why he hadn’t cut his own throat. It wasn’t the first time that question had occurred to him.

After a cup of strong black coffee, after the aspirins started to work, the world looked a little less gloomy. He ate a big chunk of bread and ham and cut off a piece of last night’s partly cremated ham steak to toss into his dinner pail. Since he’d thrown Emily out, he’d discovered just what a lousy cook he was. “Ain’t starved yet,” he declared, and headed out the door. The place was an unholy mess, but he lacked the time, the energy, and the skill to do anything about it.

He had to walk past Bedford Cunningham’s cottage on the way to the foundry. He looked straight ahead. He didn’t want to see Bedford, even if he was there. He didn’t want to see Fanny Cunningham, either. He blamed her, too. If she’d kept her husband happy in bed, he wouldn’t have had to go sniffing around Emily.

More steelworkers, white and black, crowded the path leading to the Sloss Works. Greetings filled the air: “Hey, Lefty!” “Mornin’, Jeff.” “How you is, Nero?” “What’s up, Jack?” “Freedom!” Pinkard heard that a couple-three times before he got to the time clock and stuck in his card to start the day. As the aspirins and coffee had done, the slogan made him feel better.

He winced only a little when he stepped out onto the foundry floor. Once he was out there, he knew he’d make it through the day. If he could stand the clangor now, he wouldn’t even notice it by the time afternoon rolled around.

Vespasian came onto the floor only a minute or so after he did. “Mornin’, Mistuh Pinkard,” the Negro steelworker said.

“Morning,” Pinkard answered. Every time he thought about it these days, the idea of working with a black buck graveled him more. But Vespasian had been out on the foundry floor since 1915, and he wasn’t even slightly uppity. He gave Jeff’s anger no place to perch. That in itself was infuriating.

They had no time for light conversation, not this morning. The big crucible swung down and poured a fiery load of molten metal down onto the sand of the foundry floor. Steam rose in hissing, stinking clouds. The steel seemed as determined to get free of the mold as any house cat was to get outdoors.

Whatever else Pinkard thought of Vespasian, he had to allow that the big Negro knew his way around steel. Vespasian made as good a partner as Bedford Cunningham ever had, and he wasn’t likely to try and sleep with Emily.

Or maybe he is,
Jeff thought.
Who the hell knows? Emily’s liable to be taking on niggers these days.
He didn’t know what the woman he’d married, the woman he’d loved, was doing these days, not for certain. He’d finally let her back into the house so she could put on some clothes and gather up whatever she could carry in her arms. Then he’d thrown her out again. She hadn’t come round the place since. He wouldn’t have let her in if she had.

Maybe she was working in a factory somewhere downtown. Maybe she was standing on a streetcorner, shaking her ass whenever a man walked by and hoping he’d give her five or six million dollars for a fast roll in the hay.

“I don’t care what she’s doing,” Pinkard said, quickly, fiercely. Vespasian shouldn’t have been able to hear that low-voiced mumble. But the Negro had been on the foundry floor a long time. He’d got as good as anybody could get at hearing under the racket and picking up talk. He knew about Emily. Everybody at the Sloss Works knew about Emily, sure as hell. Just for a second, he looked at Pinkard with pity in his eye.

Jeff glared back, and Vespasian flinched as if from a blow. The last thing in the world Jeff wanted was a black man’s pity. “Work, God damn you,” he snarled. Vespasian did work, his face as blank of expression now as a just-erased blackboard.

Before Pinkard had been conscripted, he wouldn’t have talked to Vespasian that way. He’d thought the Negro a pretty good fellow then. He might not have talked to Vespasian that way before he first heard Jake Featherston speak. He might as well have been blind before. But Featherston had opened his eyes, all right.

“Joining the Freedom Party was the best thing I ever did,” he said. If Vespasian heard that, he pretended he didn’t.

It was true, though. The Freedom Party gave him a family, a place to go, things to do. If he hadn’t been active in the Party, he might have gone clean round the bend when Emily took off her dress for Bedford Cunningham that second time. That Emily might not have done any such thing if he hadn’t so immersed himself in the Freedom Party never once entered his mind.

What he did think about was that several of his Party buddies had had their marriages go to hell and gone in the past few months. None of the other blowups had been quite so spectacular as his, but having pals who understood what he was going through because they were going through the same thing made life easier. None of his friends had been able to figure out why they and their wives had broken up. Trying gave them something to talk about at Party meetings and when they got together betweentimes.

The only place where he didn’t think that much about the Freedom Party was out on the foundry floor. If you thought about anything but what you were doing out there, you were asking for a trip to the hospital if you were lucky and a trip to the graveyard if you weren’t. He’d learned that early on, and relearned it when he came back to the Sloss Works after the war. Work came first. That was a matter of life and death.

At last, work ended for the day. As the screech of the steam whistle faded, Pinkard turned to Vespasian and said, “See you tomorrow. Freedom!”

Vespasian’s lips had started to shape the word
see
. But he didn’t say anything at all. He showed expression now: the expression was pain. Jeff had seen it on Yankees’ faces as he drove home the bayonet. Vespasian turned away from him and stumbled off to clock out as if he too had taken a couple of feet of sharpened steel in the guts. He might have had a pretty good notion of Jeff’s politics beforehand, but now he was left in no possible doubt. Jeff laughed out loud. The future was on his side. He felt it in his bones.

He clocked out and hurried home to his cottage. Fanny Cunningham sat out on the front porch of hers next door. Jeff leered at her, wondering if this was how Bedford had looked at Emily. It didn’t draw Fanny into his arms. She fled back into the house. He laughed again. His hot, burning laughter filled the street, as molten steel filled its mold.

He took some sausages out of the icebox and burned them for supper. His suppers, these days, were of two sorts: burnt and raw. He ate bread with them, and gulped down a glass of homebrew that was no better than it had to be. The dishes sat in the sink, waiting. As far as he was concerned, they could go right on waiting, too. He had a Freedom Party meeting tonight. That was a hell of a lot more important than a pile of goddamn dishes.

“Freedom!” The greeting filled the livery stable. It wasn’t a challenge here, nor a shout of defiance: it was what one friend said to another. The men who filled the stable—filled it almost to overflowing; before long, like it or not, the Birmingham chapter would have to find a new place to meet—
were
friends, colleagues, comrades. Those who’d been in the Party longer got a little more respect than johnny-come-latelys, but only a little. Jeff had joined long enough ago to deserve some of that respect himself.

With Barney Stevens up in Richmond, a skinny little dentist named Caleb Briggs led the meetings and led the Party in Birmingham. “Freedom!” he shouted, his voice thin and rasping—he’d been gassed up in Virginia, and wouldn’t sound right till they laid him in his grave.

“Freedom!” Pinkard shouted with the rest of the men who’d come together to find, to build, something larger and grander than themselves.

“Boys, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know when I say that Jake Featherston’s going to be running for president this year.” Briggs paused to suck more air into his ruined lungs—and to let the Party members cheer till they sounded almost as hoarse as he always did. Then he went on, “We’ve done a little bit of brawling every now and again, but it’s not a patch on what we’re going to be doing, let me tell you that!”

More cheers erupted. Jeff pumped his fist in the air. Brambles and thorns in his throat, Briggs went on, “The Whigs will be holding rallies here in town. The goddamn Radical Liberals will be holding rallies here in town.” He shook his head. Lamplight reflected wetly from his eyes. “That’s not right. Those traitor bastards will try and hold rallies here in town. Are we going to let ’em?”

“No!” Jeff shouted, along with most of the Freedom Party men. The rest were shouting “Hell, no!” and other, coarser, variations on the theme instead.

“That’s right.” Caleb Briggs nodded now, which made his eyeballs glitter in a different way. Jeff could not have said how it was different, but it was. Briggs went on, “That’s just right, boys. This is a war we’re in, same as the one we fought in the trenches. We would have won that one, only we got stabbed in the back. This time, we hit the traitors first.”

Jeff applauded till his hard, horny hands were sore. Somebody not far away pulled out a flask of moonshine and passed it around. Pinkard took a swig. “Son of a bitch!” he said reverently, his vocal cords for the moment nearly as charred as Briggs’. He passed the flask along, half sorry to see it go, half relieved it was gone.

Someone started singing “Dixie.” Jeff roared out the words, a fiery fury in him that had surprisingly little to do with the whiskey he’d just drunk. The Freedom Party sang “Dixie” at every meeting. Then someone else began “Louisville Will Be Free.” That one dated from just after the Second Mexican War, and recounted the greatest fight of that war. With Louisville forced back into the USA in the Great War, it took on a poignancy now that it hadn’t had then.

Tears ran down Jefferson Pinkard’s face. They took him by surprise. He wondered if he was weeping for ravaged Louisville or for himself. A great determination filled him. Like his country, he’d paid for doing what he remained convinced was right. Sooner or later, everyone else would pay, too.

“Freedom!” he cried at the top of his lungs. “Freedom! Freedom!”

Reggie Bartlett nodded in some surprise when Tom Brearley came into Harmon’s drugstore. He hadn’t seen much of Brearley since the ex–Navy man went down to South Carolina to talk with Anne Colleton. Reggie had been waiting for fireworks to spring from that meeting. He was still waiting.

Evidently, Brearley was getting tired of waiting. He said, “All right, Mr. Bartlett, what’s your next great idea for blowing the Freedom Party out of the water?”

“I haven’t got another one,” Reggie admitted. “Wish to heaven I did.”

“Well, I’ve got another one.” Brearley looked very determined. Reggie could easily picture him peering through a periscope at a U.S. cruiser. Oddly, he also looked much younger than he had before sticking out his chin. He said, “If I can’t get those bastards fighting among themselves, I’ll just have to take the story to the newspapers.”

“Jesus,” Reggie said. “Are you sure you want to do that? I wouldn’t, not unless I had my life-insurance premiums all paid up.”

“As a matter of fact, I do,” Brearley said, doing a determined and pretty good best to sound unconcerned. “I made sure they were before I went down to talk to Tom Colleton’s sister, because I wasn’t sure I’d be coming back. But by now Kimball has to know I’ve talked. He has to figure I’ll talk more. That means he’ll try and kill me sooner or later—likely sooner. I’m kind of surprised he hasn’t tried it yet—him or some of the Freedom Party apes up here. I want to make sure the word gets out before he does.” He didn’t sound unconcerned any more: just matter-of-fact, a man tackling a job he knew was dangerous.

Reggie understood that. He wouldn’t have, not before the war. Going through the trenches—coming out of the trenches on command to attack—changed a man forever. He knew he would be afraid again, many times in his life. But fear would never paralyze him, as it might have done before. He had its measure now.

He said, “If you’re bound and determined to do it, you’d better think hard about which paper you go to. You don’t want to head for the
Sentinel
, because—”