American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (50 page)

  He wondered where he would live, too. A fired man had two weeks to leave company housing. If he didn’t go after that, they’d pitch his belongings out of his cottage and onto the sidewalk.

  At least the yellow clapboard house he had now was a long way from the one he’d shared with Emily back in happier times.
How can I afford a new place if I just got fired?

  It was a good question. Again, he wished he had a good answer for it. He wished he had any answer at all. Inside the cottage, he had a cheap iron bed and a cheap iron stove, an icebox, a rickety table, and one chair. A furnished room would have had more in it. He didn’t want to think about a room. Thinking about one reminded him he didn’t know what he’d do when they threw him out of here.

  He made a mess of bacon and eggs for supper. He’d had them for breakfast, too. He was no kind of cook. He never had been. He did a tolerable job on bacon and eggs most of the time. He’d started getting sick of them. But he did so few things well, he didn’t have much choice.

  When he went to bed that night, he set the alarm clock, forgetting he wouldn’t need to get up the next morning. The clock was cheap, too. Its tinny jangle jolted him awake. He was dressed and eating breakfast—bacon and eggs yet again—before he realized he had nowhere to go.

  “Shit,” he said, without originality but with great feeling.

  That morning was one of the strangest of his life. He sat on the one chair in the cottage and watched men streaming toward the Sloss Works, and others coming off the night shift. He could have been one of them. Up till the day before, he had been one of them. Now he felt as far apart from them as a prisoner of war did from his army. He didn’t go to work there, not any more.

  After a while, the two streams of men stopped. Everything grew quiet. Wives came out of the cottages to shop or gossip with the neighbors. Children headed for school. The ones too little to go to school played in front of their houses. All that had gone on for years while he worked at the steel mill, but he’d seen it only when he was too sick to go in. Now he felt fine (except for being sick of bacon and eggs), but he had nowhere to go.

  He started to read a magazine, a pulp called
Aeroplane Adventures
. Some of the tales in it were set in the Great War, others afterwards. It was printed in Richmond; all the war stories had Confederate pilots gunning down Yankees, or Englishmen knocking German aeroplanes out of the sky. The later tales were set in the Confederate West or in odd corners of the world.

 
  Aeroplane Adventures
had sat on the kitchen table for more than a week without his looking at it. He’d been too tired to read when he came back from the Sloss Works. Now, with nothing else to do, he went through the magazine twice. A young Texan from a town called Cross Plains had written an exciting story about the air war over West Texas, where Jeff had served. The fellow had a few details wrong—he hadn’t been old enough to see combat—but he could tell a tale. The other pieces were much less memorable.

  Jeff started the magazine for a third time late that afternoon, but set it aside instead. He wished he had a wireless set, to make time pass more quickly. But then he brightened. “Freedom Party meeting tonight!” he said: the first words he’d spoken since the morning. As he’d forgotten to leave the alarm alone, he’d almost forgotten the weekly meeting.

  When the time came, he put on a white shirt and butternut trousers and hurried to the trolley stop where he could ride into central Birmingham. Crickets chirped. Lightning bugs winked on and off, on and off.

  The trolley stop was crowded. Several men had on the same kind of outfit as Jeff. “Freedom!” one of them said.

  “Freedom!” Jeff echoed. “When was the last time you went to a Party meeting, Clem?”

  “Been four-five years,” the other steelworker answered. “I didn’t reckon it was on the right track. Now I’m wondering if maybe I was wrong. Won’t hurt none to come and find out.”

  “You stopped coming to meetings for a while, too, Jeff,” another man said.

  Pinkard shook his head. “Not me. Not like you mean, anyhow. I never walked away from the Party.

  What I did was, I went down to the Empire of Mexico.”

  “Oh,” said the fellow who’d brought it up. He said not another word after that. Anybody who’d fought in Mexico took the Freedom Party and its business very seriously indeed. The trolley rolled up then, clanging its bell. The men bound for the Freedom Party meeting climbed aboard with everyone else at the stop. Pinkard threw a dime in the fare box. He hadn’t worried about money since coming back from Mexico, not while he’d had work. But now, without it, those ten cents suddenly seemed to loom as large as ten dollars would have.

  And here was the old livery stable again, the smell of horses fainter than ever but still there. Here were the old folding chairs, even more battered than they had been before he’d headed south. Here was the rostrum at one end of the hall, and the Stars and Bars and Confederate battle flag on the wall behind it.

  The two flags hadn’t changed; they still carried the stars representing Kentucky and Sequoyah, though the states lay under U.S. occupation.

  The meeting was crowded. That steelworker wasn’t the only man returning after a long absence. And there were faces Jeff had never seen before, some of them belonging to men surely too young to have fought in the Great War. Jeff recognized the way those men bore themselves: stiff with a special, nervous sort of dignity. He carried himself the same way. It was the distinctive posture of men who’d lost their jobs but didn’t want the world to know.

  Somebody swigged from a bottle of homebrew. Pinkard grinned to see that. Some things hadn’t changed. Alabama remained dry. But the police had never come around trying to enforce the temperance laws at a Party meeting. They had to know they would have had a fight on their hands if they’d been so rash.

  He found a chair and sat down. He’d sat right about here, he remembered, when he’d got up and pushed past Grady Calkins on his way out of one meeting. People had still sat on hay bales in those days, not folding chairs. He cursed under his breath. Calkins, a Freedom Party man, had done more to hurt the Party by turning assassin than all its enemies put together.

  Caleb Briggs stepped up onto the rostrum and took his place behind the podium. The dentist looked out over the crowd and called, “Freedom!”

  “Freedom!” people shouted back.

  Briggs cupped a hand behind one ear. “I can’t hear you.”

 
  “Freedom!”
 This time, the yell shook the rafters.

  “That’s better.” Briggs nodded. “Good to see some old familiar faces back with us again. Nice to know y’all have seen the light one more time. And you’re welcome. We wish you’d’ve stayed with us all along, but it’s good to have you back. And how many folks are here for the very first time?” Several men raised their hands. Briggs nodded again. “Good to see new blood, too. We need you. We need everybody. For years and years now, we’ve been telling anyone who’d listen that the Confederate States were going over a cliff. Not enough people did listen, and over we went, dammit. Now we’ve got to get back up again, and we need help. We’ve got to fight for what we believe in. You new men, are you ready to do that?”

  “Yes, sir!” the newcomers chorused. Jeff wondered whether they knew Briggs meant it literally. If they didn’t, they’d find out.

  Sure enough, the dentist said, “You’ll have your chance, I promise you. We’ll set this country to rights yet. Maybe people are starting to see what’s wrong in Richmond. About time. And if we have to knock a few heads together, or more than a few, to get things going again, we’ll do it, that’s all. You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.”

  “That’s right,” Pinkard said. “You bet that’s right. If you aren’t afraid to get blood on your clothes, you don’t belong here. Remember, the stuff washes out with plenty of cold water.”

  “It sure does.” Briggs turned his attention to Pinkard. “Did I hear right that the Sloss Works flung you out?”

  “Yes, sir, you did.” Jeff knew a certain amount of pride that the Birmingham head of the Freedom Party kept such close tabs on him. “You know of any other outfit that wants a man who’s been on the casting floor since before the Great War, I’d be much obliged.”

  “Nooo,” Briggs said slowly. “But don’t I remember right that when you were down in Mexico, you were the fellow who ran a prisoners’ camp for the rebels Maximilian’s boys caught?”

  “Yeah, that was me,” Pinkard answered. “What about it?”

  “I’ll tell you what about it. I happen to know the Birmingham city jail’s looking for an assistant jailer. If you want the job, fellow you ought to talk to is named Albert Sidney Griffith, over in city hall. He’s a Party man, too. Let him know who you are and what you did down in Mexico. Tell him to give me a telephone call if he’s got any questions. I’ll set him straight.”

  “My Lord,” Jeff whispered. He’d had hope machine-gunned with the pink slip in his pay envelope.

  Now, suddenly, it lived again. Tears stung his eyes. “God bless you, sir. Thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.”

  Caleb Briggs waved that aside. “Don’t you worry about it, Pinkard. Don’t you worry one little bit. This here is the Freedom Party, remember. We aren’t the Whigs or the Radical Liberals. We take care of our own. You’ve been a good Party man for a long time. We owe you for that, and we pay our debts. We pay ’em to our enemies, and we pay ’em to our friends.”

  “I’ll see this Griffith fellow first thing in the morning,” Jeff said. With the chance of work ahead of him, he felt like a new man. And the new man was every bit as loyal to the Freedom Party as the old one had been. “This is the best outfit in the
world
!” he exulted.

  Briggs smiled and nodded. “Damn right it is.”

 
H
ipolito Rodriguez had never thought about what a stock-market crash could do to the town of Baroyeca, and to the silver mine in the hills on which the town depended for its existence. Just because he hadn’t thought about such things, though, didn’t mean they weren’t real. The mine shut down in September. A few days later, the railroad stopped coming into Baroyeca.

  “A good thing we got the stove when we did,” his wife said when he brought that news home. “It would take a lot longer to come here now.”

  “
Sí,
 Magdalena,” he said. “Everything will take a lot longer to come here now. The town is liable to dry up and blow away, and then what will become of the farms all around it?”

  “We go on and do as we always did,” Magdalena answered. “We stay on our land and mind our own business.”

  “But we can’t make
everything
here,” Rodriguez said. “If the general store closes, life will get very hard.”

  “How can the general store close?” Magdalena said. “Everyone around here goes to it.
Señor
Diaz is a rich man.”

  “How rich will he be if he has to ship everything into Baroyeca by wagon or by truck?” Rodriguez asked. “I don’t know how much that costs, but I know it costs a lot more than the railroad.”

  “Now you worry me,” Magdalena said. “I think you did that on purpose.”

  “As a matter of fact, yes,” he replied. “I’m worried myself. I didn’t want to be the only one.”

  “Oh.” She’d been making tortillas. After rubbing cornmeal off her hands and onto her apron, she gave Hipolito Rodriguez a hug. “Who would have thought it could be this bad?”

  “Who, indeed?” he answered. “Up till now, we complained that things that happened in Richmond didn’t matter one way or the other here in Sonora, and that nobody back there cared about us.” His laugh rang bitter. “Now things that happened in Richmond and in New York City matter very much here, and
Madre
de Dios!
 but I wish they didn’t.”

  Magdalena nodded. “How do these things work out like this? You go to the meetings of the
Partido de
la Libertad
—what do they say there? Do they know? Can they make it better?”

  “What can they do now?” he asked in return. “The president is a Whig. Most of the Senators and Congressmen are Whigs. The Freedom Party can only protest what the Whigs do, and the Whigs don’t do much. They don’t seem to know what to do. They are fools.” He’d always thought the Whigs were fools. Even before Sonora started electing men from the Freedom Party to Congress, the state had sent Radical Liberals off to Richmond.

  “If the Freedom Party had power, what would it do?” Magdalena asked.

  “Put people to work,” Rodriguez answered at once. “Make sure they stayed at work. Make the country strong again. Tell the United States to leave us alone, and be strong enough to make sure the United States did it. Take back the states the USA stole from us in the war.” The only time he’d ever seen men from the United States was during his service in the Confederate Army during the Great War. The soldiers from the USA had done their best to kill him, and had come alarmingly close more than once. A lot of the west-Texas prairie where he’d fought was now included in the U.S. state of Houston. It was as if the USA were mocking all his effort, all his courage—yes, and all his fear, too. Anything he could do to pay back the United States of America, he would do, and do gladly.

  Nodding—she knew how he felt—Magdalena said, “These things sound wonderful. How will the Freedom Party make them happen?”

  “Why . . .” He hesitated, then shrugged. “I don’t know, not exactly,” he admitted. “I don’t think anyone knows. But I do know they will work hard and try everything. And I know they have no hope of helping the country if they aren’t in power. The Whigs have made too many mistakes. It’s time for them to go.” Robert Quinn, the Freedom Party organizer in Baroyeca, had said that very thing in his accented Spanish. Hipolito Rodriguez didn’t mind that he spoke the language like a man whose first language was English. That Quinn spoke Spanish at all mattered to the farmer. It told him the Freedom Party was serious about winning followers in Baroyeca, in all of Sonora. The Whigs never had been. Even the Radical Liberals had worried about the big men, the rich men, first, and had expected them to bring the
campesinos
into line. It had worked for many years, too. But no more.