American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (51 page)

  “When you vote Freedom, you know the Party cares,” Rodriguez said. “Nobody else does, not like that.”

  “But the election is still more than a month away,” Magdalena said. “What can the Party do in the meantime? What can anyone do if—the Blessed Virgin forbid it!—the general store closes its doors?” She crossed herself.

  “I don’t know,” Rodriguez answered. “I don’t think anyone knows.”

  “As long as we have enough water to keep the corn and beans growing and the livestock healthy, we can go on,” his wife said. “Life may be hard, but life has been hard before. We will get through till it is better again.”

  “I hope so,” Rodriguez said. He’d got used to being a fairly prosperous farmer—prosperous by the standards of southern Sonora, at any rate. He’d seen just enough of the rest of the Confederate States to have a suspicion bordering on certainty that prosperity here was something less than it might have been elsewhere in the country.

  As a measure of that prosperity, Magdalena had a treadle-powered sewing machine. She’d bought it secondhand, from a woman in Baroyeca who’d got a better machine, but even secondhand it was a status symbol for a farmer’s wife. It also let her get more work done faster than she could have managed without it. With six children to be clothed, that was no small matter.

  A few days after Rodriguez came back from Baroyeca, the needle in the sewing machine broke. Like any farmer, he was a good handyman. Fixing anything that small and precisely made, though, was beyond him. “You have to go back into town,” Magdalena told him. “I have half a dozen pairs of pants to make. You don’t want the boys to run around naked, do you?”

  “I’ll go,” he said. “Give me the broken needle, so I can be sure I’m getting the matching part. There are as many different kinds as there are different sewing machines, and you would have something to say to me if I brought back the wrong one, now wouldn’t you?”

  “Maybe not,” his wife answered. “Maybe I’d just think you’d spent too much time in
La Culebra Verde
before you tried to buy the right one.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Rodriguez said with dignity. Magdalena laughed so raucously, she distracted Miguel and Jorge enough to make them stop wrestling for a little while.

  With that laughter still ringing in his ears, Hipolito Rodriguez set out for Baroyeca the next morning.

  When he got there, he made sure he bought the sewing-machine needle first. Magdalena would never have let him live it down if, after all his care, he came back with the wrong one.

  The general store remained open. Rodriguez was astonished to discover that a packet of three needles cost only eight cents. The machine, when Magdalena bought it, had come with the one that had just broken, and no others. “I expected they would be much more,” he told Jaime Diaz as the proprietor took his money.

  “Then I will gladly charge you twice as much,” Diaz said. “One way or another, I have to make some money. With the mine closed, I don’t know how I’m going to do it. And the railroad, too! How will I get supplies?”

  “I don’t know,” Rodriguez answered in a low voice. “My wife and I were talking about this. If you don’t, how will Baroyeca go on?”

  “I have no answers,” the storekeeper said. “Every day, I keep hoping things will get better, and every day they get worse. Be thankful you live on a farm. It’s not so bad for you. For anyone who has to get things from other places every day . . .” He shook his head.

  “What can you do?” Rodriguez asked. “What can anyone do?”

  “No one can do anything,” Diaz replied. “No one can do anything to make things better, I mean. That’s what makes this whole business so dreadful, my friend. The whole
world
is broken, and no one has the faintest idea how to fix it.”

  Hipolito Rodriguez hadn’t thought of the collapse in those terms. He’d thought about what it meant to Baroyeca, to Sonora, and, to some degree, to the Confederate States. The world? That was too much for him to grasp. He said, “
Señor
Diaz, I know the man who can set things right.”

  “Who is that, then?” Diaz said. “In the name of God and the Blessed Virgin, tell me. If anyone can make the mine open and the train come back to Baroyeca, I will bless him with all my heart.” In spite of his talk of the world, most of his thoughts stayed close to home, too. Such is life for most men.

  “Jake Featherston of the Freedom Party, that’s who,” Rodriguez said. “They can make the country strong again, and if we are strong, how can we help being rich again, too?”

  “Rich? I don’t care about rich. All I care about is having the money to go on from day to day,” the storekeeper said. He was polite enough to understate what he had and what he wanted. Rodriguez nodded, polite enough to accept the understatement for what it was. Diaz went on, “I don’t know about the Freedom Party, either.” He drummed his fingers on the countertop behind which he stood. “But the Whigs have no notion what to do. A blind man could see that. And the Radical Liberals”—he smiled a wry smile—“what have they ever been good for but making faces at the Whigs? So maybe, just maybe, you could be right.”

  “I think so,” Rodriguez said. “When did you ever see the Whigs or even the Radical Liberals with a headquarters here in town? The Freedom Party has one. And Robert Quinn even learned Spanish to get us to join the Party. When have the others cared so much about us?”

  “A point,” Diaz admitted. “Quinn buys from me.” Everyone who actually lived in town bought from him; what other choice did people have? Again, he was polite. He continued, “He always pays his bills on time, I will say, and he never treats me like a damn greaser.” The rest of the conversation had been in Spanish. He used English for those two words.

  Rodriguez nodded, a sour smile on his face. He’d also heard those English words, more often than he ever wanted to. He said, “You see? They speak English, but they don’t look down their noses at Sonorans. If they can manage that, I think they can manage the whole country.”

  “I hadn’t thought of it in that way,” Diaz said. “Maybe you’re right. It could be so.”

  “I really think it is,” Rodriguez said. “Look at the mess the other parties have got us into. Doesn’t the Freedom Party deserve the chance to get us out?” The storekeeper didn’t say no. Rodriguez added the clincher: “And the election is coming up soon—only a little more than a month to go.”

  A
nne Colleton drove a five-year-old Birmingham down toward Charleston. She’d finally sold the ancient Ford she’d acquired during the war after Confederate soldiers confiscated her Vauxhall. She knew she’d kept it longer than she should have, as a reminder of those grim times. But when she weighed sentiment against ever more cranky machinery, sentiment came off second best.

  The Robert E. Lee Highway was better going than it had been in those days. It was paved all the way, where long stretches of it had been only rutted dirt. A lot more motorcars traveled up and down it, too.

  And nowadays, the bodies of hanged Negro Reds didn’t dangle from trees by the side of the road.

  She’d seen plenty of them, coming back from Charleston to St. Matthews in 1915. She’d been going to see a lover then; she was going to see a lover now.

  Back then, regardless of whether Roger Kimball had had a flat in Charleston rather than being on leave from the Navy, not even Anne, radical as she’d reckoned herself, would have dared park her motorcar in front of the building where he lived. That would have meant scandal. They’d always met in hotels: in Charleston, in Richmond, down in Georgia.

  Times had changed. Much of what had been radical was now taken for granted. Anne didn’t think twice about leaving the Birmingham in front of Clarence Potter’s block of flats, or of knocking on his door.

  Inside, the clattering of a typewriter abruptly stopped. A man’s voice kept on coming out of a wireless set.

  Potter opened the door. He gave Anne a quick kiss and said, “Come in. Fix yourself a drink. I’m almost done with this damn report. Pretty soon, we’ll find out how good the news is.” By his tone, he didn’t expect her to take
good
literally.

  “A heavy turnout is expected in today’s Congressional election,” the reporter on the wireless said as Anne went into the kitchen to deal with whiskey and water and ice. “The Whigs remain confident of holding their strong position in the House despite the unfortunate state of the economy, and—”

  The typewriter started clacking again just then, drowning out the rest. Clarence Potter was far and away the most unusual man Anne had ever met. He not only believed she could take care of herself, he encouraged her to do it. He’d never shown any interest what ever in running her life. A thoroughly competent man, he respected competence wherever he found it, and seemed happy he’d found it in her.

  Her whole life long, she’d fought against men who either tried to control her or simply assumed they would. Potter hadn’t tried. Anne sometimes had trouble figuring out what to make of that.

  Drink in hand, she came back into the front room. “Do you want me to fix one for you, too?” she asked.

  He didn’t expect her to fix drinks. That, no doubt, was why she was willing to do it.

  And he shook his head now. Lamplight glinted from the metal frames of his spectacles. “No, thanks. Not yet. Let me finish up here. I think I’ve figured out who’s been lifting crates from Lucas Williamson’s warehouse, and how he can keep it from happening again.” Concentration on his face, he went back to typing.

  “You did remember to vote, didn’t you?” Anne asked.

  He nodded. “Oh, yes. I’m not going to give the Freedom Party any help at all. The Whigs have done too much of that lately.” He went back to typing, and might almost have forgotten Anne was in the room with him.

  She listened to the wireless. The commentator kept on sounding optimistic about the Whigs’ prospects.

  She hoped he was right. Like Clarence Potter, she hoped and believed two different things.

  Ten minutes later, Potter took the sheet of paper out of the machine. “There,” he said in his half-Yankee accent, laying it on a neat stack. “Another week’s bills paid. Now I get to remember I’m a human being.” He went back into the kitchen and fixed a whiskey for himself. Raising it in salute, he added, “It’s damn good to see you, you know that? Always nice to have company on the deck as the ship goes down.”

  “It won’t be as bad as that,” Anne said.

  “No, indeed. It’ll probably be worse.” Potter looked out the window. Twilight was setting in. “Polls’ll close before long. Then we’ll start getting returns, and then we’ll know how big a mess we’ll have for the next two years. To tell you the truth, I’d almost sooner not find out.”

  “Would you rather stay here and stay in bed, then?” Anne asked. “The election will be what it is, regardless of whether we go to Whig headquarters after supper.” Potter smiled but shook his head. “Plenty of time for that afterwards. I have this restless itch to
know
, and it needs satisfying as much as any other urge.”

  “All right.” And, to Anne’s internal surprise, it
was
all right. She knew Clarence Potter was interested; she’d had plenty of very pleasant proofs of that. If he put business before pleasure . . . well, didn’t she, too?
I’m keeping company with a grownup,
 she thought. It was, in her experience, a novelty, but one she didn’t mind.

  When they went out for supper, she ordered a big plate of boiled shrimp. “They don’t come fresh to St.

  Matthews,” she said.

  “No, I suppose not,” Potter agreed. “When I first moved here, I remember thinking how wonderful all the seafood was.” He’d chosen crab cakes for himself. “Now, unless people remind me about it the way you just did, I take it for granted. I shouldn’t do that, should I?”

  “No,” Anne said. “The whole country’s taken too many things for granted.”

  “We’re liable to pay the price for it, too,” he said. “That goes back a long way now, you know—starting when we took it for granted we’d win the Great War and be home to celebrate by the time the leaves turned red and gold.”

  The colored waiter brought their suppers. As Anne began to eat, she said, “I took that for granted, and I can’t say otherwise. You didn’t, did you?”

  “No—but remember, I went to Yale. I was there for four Remembrance Days. I had a pretty fair notion of how desperately in earnest those people were. We figured we could whip them. They went out and made damn sure they could whip us.” He took a bite of crab cake, nodded, and went on in meditative tones: “We’ve always figured we could whip the Freedom Party, too. But the damnyankees aren’t the only people who are desperately in earnest. That’s what worries me.”

  “We’ll find out.” Anne feared he might be right, but didn’t want to think about it, not just then.

  After they finished supper, they walked over to the Whig headquarters. It lay only three or four blocks away. Even in November, bugs still buzzed around street lamps. Something—a bird? a bat?—swooped down, grabbed one of them out of the air, and vanished into darkness again.

  When Anne and Clarence Potter came into the headquarters, they got their share, and more than their share, of suspicious looks. Anne had former Freedom Party ties that made people distrust her. Her companion didn’t, but he did have the unfortunate habit of saying exactly what he thought, and that regardless of what the received wisdom was.

  But then someone called out to them: “Have you heard the news?” Potter shook his head. Anne said, “No, that’s what we came here for. What’s the latest?”

  “Horatio Standifer out in North Carolina,” the man replied. “In Congress since before the war, but a Freedom Party man just did him in.”

  “Oh, good God,” Potter said. “If Standifer lost his seat, nobody’s safe tonight. And if nobody’s safe tonight, then God help the country tomorrow.”