Authors: Harry Turtledove
“It’s in another country these days,” Clay Herndon reminded him. “The Confederate States have been a going concern for a long time now.”
“Yes, a long time ago, and in another country—and besides, the wench is dead,” Clemens said, scratching his mustache.
Herndon gave him a quizzical look. However clever the reporter was, he wouldn’t have known Marlowe from a marlinspike. “The way you do go on,” he said. “Let’s us go on over to Martin’s and get some dinner.”
“Now you’re talking.” Clemens rose from his chair with enthusiasm and stuck his hat on his head. “Any excuse not to work is good enough for me. Weren’t for this”—he patted the battered copy of the
American Cyclopedia
on his desk with a touch as tender as a lover’s for his beloved—”I don’t know how I’d ever manage to come out for something or against something every
day of the year. As if any man needs so blamed many opinions, or has any business holding them! Wasting my sweetness on the morning air, that’s what I’m doing.”
Herndon pulled out his pocket watch. “As of right now, you’re wasting your sweetness on the afternoon air, and you have been for the past ten minutes. Now let’s get moving, before we can’t find a place to sit down at Martin’s.”
Clemens followed his friend out onto the street. It was an April midday in San Francisco: not too warm, not too cold, the sun shining down from a clear but hazy sky. It might as easily have been August or November or February. To Clemens, who had grown up with real seasons, always seeming not far from spring remained strange after almost twenty years.
When he remarked on that, Herndon snorted. “You don’t like it, go down to Fresno. It’s always July there, and a desert July at that.”
With a lamb chop, fried potatoes, and a shot of whiskey in front of Sam Clemens, life improved. He knocked back the shot and ordered another. When it came, he knocked it back, too, with the sour toast, “Here’s to hard work every day.”
Clay Herndon snorted again. “I’ve heard that one almost as often as the Tennessee lands, Sam. What the devil would you be doing if you weren’t running the
Morning Call?”
“Damned if I know,” Clemens answered. “Writing stories, maybe, and broke. But who has time? When the big panic of ‘63 hit after we lost the war and hung on and on and on, the whole world turned upside down. I was damn lucky to have any sort of position, and I knew it. So I hung on like a limpet on a harbor rock. If I ever get ahead of the game—” He laughed. “About as likely as the Mormons giving up their extra wives, I expect.”
Herndon had a couple of shots of whiskey in him, too. “Suppose you weren’t a newspaperman? What would you do then?”
“I’ve tried mining—I was almost rich once, which is every bit as fine as almost being in love—and I was a Mississippi River pilot. If I wanted to take that up again, I’d have to take Confederate citizenship with it.”
“Why not?” Herndon said. “Then you could have yourself another go at those Tennessee lands.”
“No, thank you.” Briefly, Clemens had served in a Confederate regiment operating—or rather, bungling—in Missouri, which remained one of the United States, not least because most Confederate
troops there had been similarly inept. He didn’t admit to that; few in the USA who had ever had anything to do with the other side admitted it these days. After a moment, he went on. “Their record isn’t what you’d call good—more like what you’d call a skunk at a picnic.”
Herndon laughed. “You do come up with ’em, Sam. Got to hand it to you. Maybe you ought to try writing yourself a book after all. People would buy it, I expect.”
“Maybe,” Clemens said, which meant
no
. “Don’t see a lot of authors living off the fat of the land, do you? Besides, it may have taken me a while to cipher out what steady work was about, but I’ve got it down solid now. I lived on promises when I was a miner. I was a boy then, pretty much. I’m not a boy any more.”
“All right, all right.” Herndon held up a placatory hand. He looked at his plate, as if astonished the beefsteak he’d ordered had disappeared. His shot glass was empty, too. “You want one more for the road?”
“Not if I intend to get any work done this afternoon. You want to listen to me snore at my desk, that’s another matter.” Clemens got to his feet. He set a quarter and a small, shiny gold dollar on the table. Herndon laid down a dollar and a half. They left Martin’s—a splendid place, for anyone who could afford to eat there—and walked back to the
Morning Call
office.
Edgar Leary, one of the junior reporters, waved a flimsy sheet of telegraph paper in their faces when they got in. He was almost hopping with excitement. “Look at this! Look at this!” He had crumbs in his sparse black beard; he brought his dinner to the
Morning Call
in a sack. “Didn’t come in five minutes ago, or I’m a Chinaman.”
“If you’ll stop fanning me with it, I will have a look,” Clemens said. When Leary still waved the wire around, Sam snatched it out of his hand. “Give me that, dammit.” He turned it right side up and read it. The more he read, the higher his bushy eyebrows climbed. Once he’d finished, he passed it to Clay Herndon, saying, “Looks like I’ve got something for the editorial after all.”
Herndon quickly skimmed the telegraphic report. His lips shaped a soundless whistle. “This here is more than something to feed you an editorial, Sam. This here could be trouble.”
“Don’t I know it,” Clemens said. “But I can’t do the first thing about the trouble, and I can do something about the editorial. So I’ll do that, and I’ll let the rest of the world get into trouble. You
ever notice how it’s real good about taking care of that whether anybody wants it to or not?”
He pulled a cigar from a waistcoat pocket, bit off the end, scraped a match against the sole of his shoe, lighted the cigar, and tossed the match into a shiny brass cuspidor stained here and there with errant expectorations. Then he went over to his desk and pulled out the
George F. Cram Atlas of the World
. He flipped through it till he found the page he needed.
His finger traced a line. Herndon and Leary were looking over his shoulder, one to the right, the other to the left. Herndon whistled again. “This is going to be big trouble,” he said. “Bigger than I thought.”
“That’s a fact.” Clemens slammed the atlas closed with a noise like a rifle shot. Behind him, Edgar Leary jumped. “Hell of a big mess.” He spoke with somber anticipation. “But I don’t have to worry about what I’m going to write this afternoon, so I’m as happy as Peeping Tom in Honolulu, if half of what they say about the Sandwich Islands is true.”
He inked a pen and began to write.
If the wires are not liars—and of course experience has made us all familiar with Messrs. Western and Union’s solemn vow that only the truth shall be permitted to pass over their telegraphic lines, and with the vigilance with which they guard them from every falsehood; of course experience has done such a thing, we say, for under our grand and glorious Constitution anyone may say what he pleases—if this is so, then it seems that His Mexican Majesty Maximilian has been persuaded to sell his northwestern provinces of Chihuahua and Sonora to the Confederate States for the sum of three millions of dollars.
This is remarkable news on several counts, which is how lawyers speak of indictments. First and foremost, superficially, is the feeling of astonishment arising in the bosoms of those who are familiar in the least with the aforesaid provinces at learning that anyone, save possibly Old Scratch in contemplation of expanding the infernal regions due to present overcrowding, should want to purchase them at any price, let alone for such a munificent sum.
But, as the fellow said after sitting on a needle, there is more to this than meets the eye. Consider, friends. Mexico’s principal export, aside from the Mexicans whose charm pervades our Golden State, is, not to put too fine a point on it—that being the
needle’s business, after all—debt. She owes money to Britain, she owes money to France, she owes money to Germany, she owes money to Russia—no mean feat, that—and she is prevented from owing money to the Kingdom of Poland only by that Kingdom’s extinction before she was born.
Being a weak country in debt to a strong one—or to a slew of strong ones—is in these enlightened times the quickest recipe known for making gunboats flock like buzzards to one’s shores, as the Turkish khedives will assure Maximilian if only he will ask them. Time was when the United States held up the Monroe Doctrine to shield the Americas from European monarchs, bill collectors, and other riffraff, but the Doctrine these days is as dead as its maker, shot through the heart in the War of Secession.
So the Empire of Mexico needs cash on hand if it is to go on being the Empire of Mexico, or at least the abridged edition thereof. Thus from Maximilian’s point of view the sale of Chihuahua and Sonora makes a deal of sense, but he is apparently going ahead and doing it anyhow. The question remaining before the house is why the Confederate States would want to buy the two provinces, no matter how avidly he might want to sell them.
Owning Texas, the Confederacy would already seem to have in its possession a sufficiency—indeed, even an oversupply—of hot, worthless land for the next hundred years. Sonora, though, has one virtue Texas lacks—not that having a virtue Texas lacks is in itself any great marvel—it touches on the Gulf of California, while Chihuahua connects it to the rest of the CSA. With these new acquisitions, the Confederate States would extend, like the USA, from sea to shining sea, and, even more to the point, run a railroad from the same to the shining same. Is that worth three millions of dollars? Pete Longstreet seems to think so.
Yet to be seen is how the new administration in Washington will view this transaction. There can be no doubt that any of the previous governments—if by that the reader will forgive our stretching a point—would do no more than passively acquiesce to the sale, in much the same manner as the bull acquiesces to the knife that makes him into a steer. Richmond, London, Paris, and Ottawa form a formidable stall in which the United States are held.
But will James G. Blaine, having been elected on a platform that consisted largely of snorting and pawing the ground, now have to show the world it was nothing but humbug and hokum? Even if it was humbug and hokum, will he dare admit it, knowing that if he should confess to weakness, even weakness genuinely
and manifestly in existence, he will become a laughingstock and an object of contempt not only in foreign capitals but in the eyes of the exasperated millions who sent him to the White House to make America strong and proud again and will with equal avidity send him home with a tin can tied to his tail if he bollixes the job?
Our view of the matter is that caution is likelier to be necessary than to be, while our hope is that, for once, our well-known editorial omniscience is found wanting.
Sighing, Clemens set down the pen and shook his wrist to get the cramp out of it. “I want to buy me one of those type-writing machines they’re starting to sell,” he said.
“Good idea,” Clay Herndon said. “They can’t weigh much more than a hundred pounds. Just the thing to take along to listen to the mayor, or to cover a fire: that’d be even better.”
“They’re the coming thing, so you can laugh all you like,” Clemens told him. “Besides, if I had one, the compositors would be able to read the copy I give ’em.”
“Now you’re talking—that’s a whole different business.” Herndon got up from his desk and ambled over to Sam. “I never have any trouble—well, never much—reading your writing. You were really scratching away there. What did you come up with?”
Wordlessly, Clemens passed him the sheets. Herndon had a lot of political savvy, or maybe just a keen eye for where the bodies were buried—assuming those two didn’t amount to the same thing. If he was thinking along the same lines as Clemens …
He didn’t say anything till he was through. Then, with a slow nod, he handed the editorial back. “That’s strong stuff,” he said, “but you’re spot on. When I first saw the wire, I thought about the ports on the Pacific, but I didn’t worry about the railroad the Rebs’ll need to do anything with the ports they get.”
“What about Blaine?” Sam asked.
“I’m with you there, too,” Herndon answered. “If he lies down for this, nobody will take him seriously afterwards. But I’m damned if I know how much he can do to stop it. What do you think’s going to happen, Sam?”
“Me?” Clemens said. “I think there’s going to be a war.”
General Thomas Jackson left his War Department office in Mechanic’s Hall, mounted his horse, and rode east past Capitol Square toward the president’s residence on Shockoe Hill—some
from his generation still thought of it as the Confederate White House, though younger men tried to forget the CSA had ever been connected to the USA. Richmond brawled around him. Coaches clattered over cobblestones, Negro footmen in fancy livery standing stiff as statues at their rear. Teamsters driving wagons filled with grain or iron or tobacco or cotton cursed the men who drove the coaches for refusing to yield the right of way. On the sidewalk, lawyers and sawyers and ladies with slaves holding parasols to shield their delicate complexions from the springtime sun danced an elaborate minuet of precedence.
A middle-aged fellow who walked with a limp tipped his homburg in Jackson’s direction and called out, “Stonewall!”
Jackson gravely returned the salutation. It rang out again, shortly thereafter. Again, he touched a hand to the brim of his own hat. Somber pride filled him. Not only his peers but also the common people remembered and appreciated what he’d done in the War of Secession. In a world where memory was fleeting and gratitude even more so, that was no small thing.
An iron fence surrounded the grounds of the presidential mansion. At the gateway, guards in the fancy new butternut uniforms stiffened to attention. “General Jackson, sir!” they exclaimed in unison. Their salutes were as identical as if they’d been manufactured in succession at the same stamping mill.
Conscientiously, Jackson returned the salutes. No doubt the guards were good soldiers, and would fight bravely if the need ever came. When he measured them against the scrawny wildcats he’d led during the War of Secession, though, he found them wanting. He was honest enough to wonder whether the fault lay in them or in himself. He’d turned fifty-seven earlier in the year, and the past had a way of looking better and the present worse the older he got.