Blood and Iron (75 page)

“But you
haven’t
finished your work with the test model, sir,” Jenkins protested.

“In a way, I have,” Morrell told him. “I’ve done about everything I can do with one machine. If they’d coughed up the money for more than one, I could have done a lot more than I did. I just wish they were passing the Barrel Works on to someone else instead of closing it down.”

“Yes, sir!” Jenkins’ face was red with anger. “They might as well be telling us we’ve wasted all the time and work we put in here.” He didn’t think about what he would do next himself. In Morrell’s book, that made him a good soldier.

“That’s probably what they think,” Morrell told him. He remembered how Abell had looked at him during the war when he’d agreed with Custer that the barrel doctrine the General Staff had developed needed changing. He might have been an atheist ripping into Holy Writ.

That he’d been right hadn’t made things better. It might have made things worse.

“What are you going to do?” Jenkins asked.

“Obey the order,” Morrell said with a sigh. “What else can I do? They have the test model. They have my reports. They can go on from there. Things won’t disappear. They’ll just stop for a while.” That might prove as bad, but he didn’t care to dwell on such gloomy possibilities.

He left the office to break the news to the men who had worked so hard for so long with the test model. The first one he ran into was Sergeant Michael Pound. “What’s the matter, sir?” the barrel gunner asked. “You look ready to chew bolts and spit rivets.”

“We’re out of business, that’s what,” Morrell said, and went on to explain how and why—or what he understood of why—they were out of business.

Pound frowned. With his thick body, wide shoulders, and broad face, he could easily have looked like a lout. He didn’t; his features were clever and expressive. “That’s—very shortsighted, isn’t it, sir?” he said when Morrell had finished. “The point is to stay ahead of everybody else, after all. How are we going to do that if we drop out of the race?”

“I don’t know the answer to that question, Sergeant,” Morrell replied. “I do know I’ve received a legal order to shut down the Barrel Works and report to Philadelphia once I’ve done it. I have to obey that order.”

“Yes, sir, I understand,” Pound said. “I hope you raise some hell when you get to Philadelphia, though.”

“I intend to try, anyhow,” Morrell said. “How much good that will do, God only knows. Now—what about you, Sergeant? Do you have any new assignment in mind? I’ll do what I can to help you get it.”

“That’s very kind of you, sir.” Pound scratched his brown mustache as he thought. “I suppose I’d better go back to the regular artillery, sir. Whether we have barrels or not, we’ll always need guns.”

“That’s true. It’s a sensible choice,” Morrell said. He got the idea that most of Pound’s choices were sensible. “I’ll see what I can arrange. I hate to say it, but it’s liable to be a better choice than staying in barrels, the way things are.”

“If we do get in trouble again, we’ll wish we’d done more now,” Pound said with a massive shrug. “We’ll all be running around trying to do what we should have done in years in a few weeks.”

That was also likely to be true. Trying not to dwell on how likely it was, Morrell slapped Sergeant Pound on the shoulder and went on to find the rest of the test model’s crew. They took the news hard, too. Then he had to break it to the crews of the other barrels, the Great War machines that also tested tactics, and to the mechanics who kept all the big, complex machines running. Little by little, he realized what a mountain of paperwork he’d have to climb by the first of March.

After he’d spread the word to the soldiers it affected, he went to tell the other person who needed to know: his wife. He found Agnes ironing clothes. “What are you doing here at this hour of the morning?” she said in surprise. Something in her smile as he kissed her told him what she hoped he was there for.

But he hadn’t come home for that, however much he would have enjoyed it. He told her why he had come home. The explanation came out smooth as if he’d rehearsed it. As a matter of fact, he had rehearsed it, going over it again and again with his men.

Agnes pursed her lips. She was an Army wife, and had taken on many of the attitudes of her officer husband (she’d probably had some of those attitudes already, her first husband also being a soldier). She said, “They should be giving you all the tools you need to do the job right, not taking away the ones they did let you have.”

“You know I feel the same way about it, honey, but I can’t do anything about it except close down the Barrel Works, pack my bags, and hop on the train for Philadelphia. That means you get to hop on the train for Philadelphia, too.”

Her eyes widened. “I hadn’t thought of that,” she said. “I’ve never been to Philadelphia, even to visit. Now we’ll be living there, won’t we?”

“Unless they ever really get around to moving the War Department back to Washington,” Morrell answered. “They’ve been talking about it ever since the end of the war, but I’ll believe it when I see it.”

“Philadelphia,” Agnes said, her eyes far away. “What’s it like, living in Philadelphia?”

“Crowded,” he said. “Expensive. The air is full of soot and smoke all the time. It’s a big city. I don’t much like big cities.”

Agnes smiled. “I’ve noticed.”

“I figured you had.” Morrell smiled, too, but the smile slid into a grimace. “Just have to make the best of it, I suppose.”

“Philadelphia,” Agnes repeated. He wondered if she’d even heard him. “What will it be like in Philadelphia?”

As she’d come to know him, he’d also come to know her. At least half of what that question meant was,
Will I measure up to the competition?
Morrell smiled again. He was certain of the answer, and gave it: “Sweetheart, you’ll knock ’em dead.”

One of his wife’s hands flew to her hair, patting it into place or maybe the outward expression of an imagined new style. “You say sweet things,” she told him.

“Only when I mean them,” he said. “Of course, when I’m talking about you, I mean them all the time.”

She stepped up, hugged him, and kissed him. His arms tightened around her. One thing might have led to another—except that, with regret, he broke off the embrace. Agnes looked disappointed; yes, she’d been ready for more. But she didn’t frown for long. “You’re going to have a lot of work to do,” she said, proving she was indeed an Army wife.

Morrell nodded. “I sure am. I haven’t even told the base commandant about my orders yet—though I suppose a copy will have gone to him, too.” He hugged Agnes again, briefly now. “You’re really being a brick about this, honey.”

“I think they’re making a big mistake,” she answered. “But you’ve got your orders, and you’ve got to follow them.”

You’ve got your orders, and you’ve got to follow them.
That was the way the Army worked, all right. Morrell had trouble imagining it working any other way. “Couldn’t have put it better myself,” he said. He gave Agnes one more kiss, then turned to go. “The work won’t do itself, however much I wish it would.”

“All right,” his wife said. “I’ll see you tonight, then.”

He smiled at the promise in her voice. He started looking ahead toward Philadelphia, too. Whatever they set him to doing, he’d do it as well as he knew how. He’d do it well, period; he had a good notion of his own ability. And performing well with important people watching did have certain advantages. With a little luck, he’d be wearing stars on his shoulders instead of eagles before too long.

He wouldn’t be so easy to move around like a pawn on a chess board then, not with general’s rank he wouldn’t. As a matter of fact, he’d be able to do some maneuvering of his own once he had general’s rank. Maybe John Abell thought he’d done Morrell’s career a bad turn. Morrell’s smile was predatory. Anyone who thought that about him had another think coming.

Jefferson Pinkard walked toward the livery stable. “Freedom!” he called to other men heading the same way.

“Freedom!” The greeting came back loud and clear as it had before the stalwarts went out to the Alabama State Fairgrounds when President Hampton came to Birmingham. The Freedom Party had raised a lot more hell than anybody—anybody except Grady Calkins, anyhow—expected.

And now the price of that hell was showing. Jeff called “Freedom!” a couple more times before he went into the stable, but only a couple more times. The building had no trouble holding meetings these days. A lot of people who had been in the Party—people who’d put on white and butternut and banged heads, too—weren’t any more. A lot of people who had been in the Party weren’t admitting it any more, either.

Fair-weather friends,
Pinkard thought scornfully. He still thought most of the same things were wrong with the Confederate States now as had been wrong with the country before Wade Hampton V got shot. He had trouble understanding why more people didn’t feel the same way.

Up at the front of the stable, Caleb Briggs paced back and forth, pausing every so often to cough. Even by lamplight, the tough little dentist’s color wasn’t good. Pinkard wondered how long he could last, especially burning himself at both ends as he did. The damnyankees hadn’t killed him all at once when they gassed him. They were doing it an inch at a time, giving him years full of hell before they put him in his grave. To Jeff’s way of thinking, that was worse.

After a while, Briggs didn’t seem able to stand waiting any longer. “Come on, y’all, move up to the front,” he rasped. “Talking’s hard enough for me; I’ll be goddamned if I’m gonna shout when I don’t have to. And there’s room. Wish to Christ there wasn’t, but there is.”

A year before, the livery stable would have been packed. Men would have been milling around outside. Now there were more folding chairs and hay bales set out than people to sit on them. Jeff plopped his bottom down onto a chair in the second row. He could have sat in the first row—plenty of chairs to take—but memories of getting called on in school made him stay less conspicuous.

Caleb Briggs looked over the house. He pursed his lips, coughed again, and began: “Well, we’re still here, boys.” Maybe he gave a dry chuckle then, or maybe it was just another cough.

“Freedom!” Jefferson Pinkard called, along with his comrades.

“Freedom!” Briggs echoed. It sounded like a dying echo, too, enough so to send a chill through Jeff. But the dentist picked up spirit as he went on, “We
are
still here, dammit, and we aren’t going to go away, either, no matter how much the niggers and the folks in striped trousers and top hats and the generals in the War Department wish we would. We’re here for the long haul, and we’re going to win.”

“Freedom!” The shout was louder this time, stronger. Pinkard felt a little of the jolt of energy he always got from hearing Jake Featherston speak. He wondered if Caleb Briggs would last long enough to see the Freedom Party win. He had his doubts, even if victory came soon—and it wouldn’t, dammit.

But Briggs was undeterred. He’d been a soldier, and pulled his weight like a soldier. “What we have to do now is make it through the hard times,” he said. “They aren’t over yet. They won’t be over for a while. It’ll be God’s own miracle if we don’t lose seats in Congress this fall. What we’ve got to do is try and hold on to as many as we can, so we don’t look like we’re going down the toilet in front of the whole damn country. And what we’ve got to do right here in Birmingham is make sure we send Barney Stevens back to Richmond in November.”

Jeff clapped his hands. He wanted to see Stevens sent back to Richmond to keep the Freedom Party’s seat there. He also wanted Stevens in Richmond because the Congressman was a rough customer whom he didn’t particularly want coming home to Birmingham.

“We hang tough,” Briggs was saying. “We try not to lose too much here in 1923, and we try to build up toward 1925 and especially 1927, when we vote for president again. Rome wasn’t built in a day. The Confederate States won’t be rebuilt in a day, either. But we will build our country back up, we will shove our niggers back down where they belong, and we—the Freedom Party—will be the ones who do that. So help me God, we will.”

“Freedom!” Jeff yelled, along with his friends. The cry echoed from the roof, almost as it had in the days when the Party was swelling.

“One more thing, and then I’m through,” Briggs said. “We got as far as we did by standing up and fighting for what we know is right. We’re going to go right on fighting. Don’t you have any doubts about that. We may pick our spots a little tighter than we did before, but we’ll put on the white and butternut whenever we see the need.”

Pinkard whooped. The chance to get out there and smash a few heads was one of the reasons he’d joined the Freedom Party. A good many other men cheered Caleb Briggs, too. But Jeff couldn’t help noticing how many others sat silent.

Then he thought,
Grady Calkins would have cheered.
He shook his head, rejecting the comparison and all it implied. Calkins had been a madman. Every party had some. But Jeff wasn’t crazy. Caleb Briggs wasn’t crazy. And Jake Featherston sure as hell wasn’t crazy.