American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (22 page)

  He threw his hand in the air and was, in due course, recognized. “I have a simple question for you, Mr.

  Chairman,” he said. “Where are our hooligans, to break up Freedom Party rallies the way Featherston’s bastards work so hard to break up ours?”

  People started buzzing. You didn’t often hear such questions at a gathering like this. The chairman’s gavel came down, once, twice, three times. Robert E. Washburn was a veteran of the Second Mexican War. He wore a big, bushy white mustache, and both looked and acted as if the nineteenth century had yet to give way to the twentieth. “You are out of order, Mr. Potter,” he said now. “I regret to state that I have had to point this out to you at previous gatherings as well.” Heads bobbed up and down in polite agreement with Washburn’s ruling. Too many of those heads were gray or balding. The Whigs had dominated Confederate politics for a long time, as the Democrats had in the USA. The Democrats had got themselves a rude awakening. Potter feared the Freedom Party would give the CSA a worse shock than the Socialists had given the United States.

  He said, “I am not out of order, Mr. Chairman, and it’s a legitimate question. When the damnyankees started using gas during the war, we had to do the same, or else leave the advantage with them. If we don’t fight Featherston’s fire with fire, what becomes of us now?” Down came the gavel again. “You
are
out of order, Mr. Potter,” Washburn repeated. “Your zeal for the cause has outrun your respect for the institutions of the Confederate States of America.”

  He seemed to think that was plenty to quell Potter, if not to make him hang his head in shame. But Clarence Potter remained unquelled. “Featherston’s got no respect for our institutions,” he pointed out.

  “If we keep too much, we’re liable not to have any institutions left to respect after a while.” Now heads went back and forth. People didn’t agree with him. He’d run into that before. It drove him wild. He’d seen a plain truth, and he couldn’t get anyone else to see it. Jake Featherston had come much too close to smashing his way to a victory in 1921, and he would be even more dangerous now if that Calkins maniac hadn’t shown up the Freedom Party for what it was. Potter felt like knocking these placidly disagreeing heads together. That brought him up short.
I’m not so different from Featherston
after all, am
I?

  Robert E. Washburn said, “We rely upon the power of the police to protect us against any further, uh, unfortunate outbursts.”

  That was an answer of sorts, but only of sorts. “And how many coppers start yelling, ‘Freedom!’ the minute they take off their gray suits?” Potter asked. “How well do you think they’ll do their job?” He did make the buzz in the room change tone. A great many policemen favored the Freedom Party.

  That was too notorious a truth to need retelling. It had caused problems in 1921 and again in 1923, though the Freedom Party men had been on their best behavior then. How could anybody think it wouldn’t cause problems in the upcoming Congressional election?

  The local chairman was evidently of that opinion. “Thank you for expressing your views with your usual vigor, Mr. Potter,” Washburn said. “If we may now proceed to further items of business. . . ?” And that was that. They didn’t want to listen to him. And what the Whigs didn’t want to do, they didn’t have to do. More than sixty years of Confederate independence had taught them as much, and confirmed the lesson again and again.
What would teach them otherwise?
 he wondered. The answer to that seemed obvious enough:
losing to the Freedom Party.

  As the Charleston Whigs droned on, Potter got to his feet and slipped out of their meeting. Nobody tried to call him back. Everybody seemed glad he was going. They didn’t want to hear their grip on things was endangered.
They deserve to lose, by God,
 he thought as he went out into the heat and humidity of a Charleston summer. But then, remembering Jake Featherston’s burning eyes as he’d seen them again and again during the Great War, Potter shook his head.
They almost deserve to lose. No one
deserves
what those “Freedom!”-shouting yahoos would
give us if they won.

  Pigeons strutted along the street, cooing gently. They were slow and stupid and ever so confident nobody would bother them. Why not? They’d proved right again and again and again. This one stranger in their midst wouldn’t prove any different . . . would he?

  Clarence Potter laughed. He threw his arms wide. Some of the pigeons scurried back from him. One or two even spread their wings and fluttered away a few feet. Most? Most kept right on strutting and pecking, and paid him no attention whatsoever. “You goddamn dumb sons of bitches,” he told them, laughing though it wasn’t really funny. “You might as well be Whigs.” The birds went right on ignoring him, which proved his point.

  He wondered whether the Radical Liberals would take him seriously. Odds were, they would. The Freedom Party, after all, was replacing them as the Whigs’ principal opposition. But then he wondered if it mattered whether the Rad Libs took him seriously. It probably didn’t. No one except a few dreamers had ever thought the Radical Liberals could govern the CSA. They gave the states of the West and Southwest a safety valve through which they could blow off steam when Richmond ignored them, as it usually did. Closer to the heart of the CSA, the Radical Liberals let people pretend the country really was a democratic republic—without the risks and complications a real change of power would have entailed.

 
  Why do I bother?
 Potter wondered as he strode past the pigeons that, fat and happy and brainless, went on pretending he wasn’t there—or, if he was, that he couldn’t possibly be dangerous.
Easier just to sit
back and let nature take its course.

  But he knew the answer to that. It was simple enough: he knew Jake Featherston.
Ten years now since
I walked into the First Richmond Howitzers’ encampment. Ten years since he told me Jeb Stuart
III’s body servant might be a Red, and since Jeb Stuart III, being III of an important family, made
sure nothing would happen to the nigger.
 Jeb Stuart III was dead, of course. He’d looked for death when he realized he’d made a bad mistake. He’d had plenty of old-fashioned Confederate courage and honor. But he’d taken however many Yankee bullets he took without having the faintest conception of just how bad a mistake he’d made.

  “The whole Confederacy is still finding out just how bad a mistake you made, Captain Stuart,” Clarence Potter muttered. A young woman coming the other way—a young woman in a shockingly short skirt, one that reached so high, it let him see the bottom of her kneecap—gave him a curious glance as she went by.

  Potter was by now used to garnering curious glances. He wasn’t nearly so used to women showing that much leg. He looked back over his shoulder at her. For a little while, at least, he forgot all about the Freedom Party.

 
W
hen the steam whistle announcing shift change blew, Chester Martin let out a sigh of relief. It had been a good day on the steel-mill floor. Everything had gone the way it was supposed to. Nobody’d got hurt.

  You couldn’t ask for more than that, not in this business.

  Instead of heading straight home, he stopped at the Socialist Party hall not far from the mill. A good many men from his mill and others nearby sat and stood there, talking steel and talking politics and winding down from the long, hard weeks they’d just put in. “How’s it going, Chester?” somebody called.

  Martin mimed falling over in exhaustion, which got a laugh.

  Somebody else said, “They don’t work us as hard as they worked our fathers.”

  “Only goes to show what you know, Albert,” Chester retorted. “My old man’s got one of those soft foreman’s jobs. He hardly even has calluses on his hands any more, except from pushing a pencil. They work me a hell of a lot harder than they work him.”

  “Sold out to the people who own the means of production, has he?” Albert Bauer said—he was and always had been a Socialist of the old school.

  Before Chester could answer that, someone else did it for him: “Oh, put a sock in it, for Christ’s sake.

 
We’re
starting to own the means of production. At least, I’ve bought some shares of stock, and I’ll bet you have, too. Go on, tell me I’m a liar.”

  Bauer said not a word. In fact, so many people said not a word that something close to silence fell for a moment.
Have that many of us bought stocks?
 Chester wondered. He had a few shares himself, and knew his father had more than a few: Stephen Douglas Martin had been picking up a share here, a share there, ever since he started making good money when he wasn’t conscripted into the Great War.

  “Funny,” Martin said. “The Party talks about government owning the means of production, but it never says much about the proletariat buying ’em up one piece at a time.”

  “Marx never figured anything like that would happen,” someone said. “Neither did Lincoln. Back when they lived, you couldn’t make enough money to have any left over to invest.”

  “As long as Wall Street keeps going up and up, though, you’d have to be a damn fool
not
to throw your money that way,” somebody else said. “It’s like stealing, only it’s legal. And buying on margin makes it even easier.”

  Nobody argued with him. Even now, most of the men who left their jobs at the steel mills left only because they were too old or too physically worn or too badly hurt to do them any more. Those were the people for whom the Socialists were trying to push their old-age insurance policy through Congress.

  But if you could quit your work at sixty-five, or even sixty, and be sure you had enough left to live on for the rest of your days thanks to what you’d done for yourself while you were working . . . If you could manage that, the whole country would start looking different in twenty or thirty years.

 
  I’ll turn sixty-five in 1957,
 Martin thought. It didn’t seem so impossibly far away—but then, he had just put in that long, long day at the mill.

  He rode the trolley home, ate supper with his parents and his sister, and went to bed. When the wind-up alarm clock next to his head clattered the next morning, he just turned it off. He didn’t have a moment’s sleepy panic, thinking it was some infernal device falling on his trench.
I’ve been home from the Great
War for a while now,
 he thought as he put on a clean work shirt and overalls. But he would take a couple of puckered scars on his left arm to the grave. As it had on so many, the war had left its mark on him.

  When he went into the kitchen, his father was already there, smoking his first cigar of the day. His mother fried eggs and potatoes in lard. She used a wood-handled iron spatula to flip some onto a plate for him. “Here’s your breakfast, dear,” she said. “Do you want some coffee?”

  “Please,” he said, and she poured him a cup.

  His father said, “Saturday today—only a half day.”

  Chester nodded as he doctored the coffee with cream and sugar. “That’s right. You know I won’t be home very long, though—I’m going out with Rita.”

  Stephen Douglas Martin nodded. “You already told us, yeah.” His mother gave him an approving smile. “Have a good time, son.”

  “I think I will.” Chester dug into the hash browns and eggs so he wouldn’t have to show his amusement.

  His folks had decided they approved of Rita Habicht, or at least of his seeing her. They must have started to wonder if he would ever see anybody seriously. But he wasn’t the only Great War veteran in no hurry to get on with that particular part of his life. Plenty of men he knew who’d been through the mill (and, as a steelworker, he understood exactly what that phrase meant) were still single, even though they’d climbed into their thirties. It was as if they’d given so much in the trenches, they had little left for the rest of their lives.

  He took the trolley past the half-scale statue of Remembrance—who would have looked fiercer without half a dozen pigeons perched on her sword arm—to the mill, where he put in his four hours. Then he hurried back home, washed up, shaved, and changed from overalls, work shirt, and cloth cap to trousers, white shirt, and straw hat. “I’m off,” he told his mother.

  “You look very nice,” Louisa Martin said. He would have been happier if she hadn’t said that every time he went anywhere, but still—you took what you could get.

  He rode the trolley again, this time to the block of flats where Rita lived. She had one of her own. She’d got married just before the war started. Her husband had stopped a bullet or a shell in one of the endless battles on the Roanoke front. Martin had fought there, too, till he got wounded. He’d never met Joe Habicht, but that proved exactly nothing. Rita had had a baby, too, and lost it to diphtheria the day after its second birthday. Women fought their own battles, even if not with guns. Through everything, though, she’d managed to hang on to the apartment.

  She didn’t keep Chester waiting when he knocked on the door. His heart beat faster as she opened it.

  “Hi,” he said, a big, silly grin on his face. “How are you?”

  “Fine, thanks.” She patted at her dark blond hair. It was a little damp; she must have washed after getting back from her Saturday half day, too. “It’s good to see you.”

  “It’s good to be here,” he said, and leaned forward to kiss her on the cheek. “You look real pretty.” Rita smiled. “You always tell me that.”

  “I always mean it, too.” But Martin started to laugh. When she asked him what was funny, he wouldn’t tell her.
I’ll be damned if I want to admit I sound just like my mother,
 he thought. Instead, he said,

  “Shall we go on over to the Orpheum?”

  “Sure,” she said. “Who’s playing there today?”

  “Those four crazy brothers from New York are heading the bill,” he answered.