American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (82 page)

  Then Caleb Briggs stepped up to the microphone. In his ruined voice, he said, “This is a Tin Hats rally, boys, not one of ours,” and he started singing “The Bonnie Blue Flag.” That tipped the balance.

  Following his lead, the Freedom Party men in the crowd sang the Tin Hats’ anthem. Amos Mizell tipped his hat to Briggs. He still didn’t look perfectly happy, though. The men weren’t singing “The Bonnie Blue Flag” because they’d thought of it themselves, but because a Freedom Party big wig had asked them to.

  That had to sting.

  Jeff pushed and elbowed his way toward the front of the crowd, trying to get as close to the platform as he could. A lot of other determined men were doing the same thing. He didn’t get quite so close as he would have liked. Still, he was taller than most, and he could see well enough.

  When the loud chorus of “The Bonnie Blue Flag” ended, Caleb Briggs walked up to the microphone again. He raised both hands in the air, asking for quiet. Little by little, he got it. “Let’s give a big hello to a man who’s done a lot for the cause of freedom in the Confederate States,” he said, and paused to draw in a wheezing breath. He sounded as if he’d smoked a hundred packs of cigarettes all at once. “Friends, here’s Mr. Amos Mizell.”

  Mizell towered over Briggs. He held up both hands, too. He was missing his left little finger—one more man who’d spilled his blood for the Confederate States. The fat cats had got the CSA into the war, Pinkard thought, and then they’d sat back in Richmond, miles away from the trenches, and let other people do the fighting. Well, their time was coming. His smile had nothing to do with mirth. Yes, their time was coming fast.

  “We’ve been through it,” Mizell said. “We’ve all been through it, and we wonder why the devil we went.

  By the time we were done, the Confederate States were worse off than when we started, and that’s not how things were supposed to work. We were patriots. They told us we were going to teach the damnyankees another lesson. And then what happened?

  “I’ll tell you what, my friends.
They left us in the lurch.
 We had to stand up to gas before we could give it back. We had to face barrels before we had any barrels of our own. We were fighting the USA, but we had to fight our own civil war, too, on account of they were asleep at the switch and didn’t know the niggers were going to rise up and kick us in the . . . the slats. I see some ladies here.” The veterans who made up most of the audience snickered. They knew what Mizell would have said if he were, say, sitting in a saloon with a whiskey in his hand. The few women surely knew, too, but he
hadn’t
said it, so their honor was satisfied.

  He went on, “And then, after we did everything we could do, we lost anyway. I don’t reckon we would have if the niggers had stayed and done their work, but we did. And what about the folks who sent us out to die? They kept on getting rich. They let the money go down the drain, but you didn’t see them missing any meals.”

  “That’s right,” Jeff growled, and his was far from the only angry, baying voice in the crowd. He turned to a man beside him and said, “We should have strung those bastards up a long time ago.”

  “Oh, hell, yes,” the other man said, as if the idea that anyone could disagree was unimaginable. He slammed a hand against the side of his thigh. “
Hell,
 yes.” Mizell was continuing, “—no chance the Whigs will fix their own house. They’ve been in power too long. All they know about is hanging on to what they’ve already got. And the Radical Liberals?” He made a scornful gesture. “Losers. They’ve always been losers. They’ll never be anything but losers. No.

  If we’re going to set our own house in order, what we need is . . .” His voice trailed away. He waited expectantly.

  He didn’t have to wait long. The cry of,
“Freedom!”
 roared from almost every throat. After that first great yell, it settled down into a steady chant: “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” Pinkard shouted it along with all the others, his fist pumping the air.

  Amos Mizell raised his hands once more. Slowly, reluctantly, silence came. Mizell said, “That’s right, friends. The Tin Hats know what this country needs. We need a new broom, a broom that will sweep all the old fools out of Richmond. We reckon the Freedom Party is the right one for the job. That’s why I want all the Tin Hats in the country, regardless of whether they’re registered in the Freedom Party or not, to vote for Jake Featherston. I tell you, we need to do everything we can to make that man president of the Confederate States of America. We’ll throw everything we’ve got behind him, on account of he’ll make this a country we can be proud to live in again.”

  He paused. “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” The chant rang out again. And then, a little at a time, another chant began to supplant it: “Feather
ston
! Feather
ston
! Feather
ston
!” The heavy, thudding stress on the last syllable was almost hypnotic.

  “Feather
ston
! Feather
ston
! Feather
ston
!” Jefferson Pinkard shouted it, too. He’d been a Freedom Party man ever since the first time he heard Jake Featherston speak, not long after the war ended. He’d come this far with Jake; he wanted to go further. And now it looked as if he could, as if the whole CSA could.

  As he looked around the crowd, he saw knots of men in white and butternut from whom the chant of,

  “Feather
ston
!” came loudest. He smiled to himself. No, Caleb Briggs didn’t miss a trick. He must have given some of the boys special instructions. The only thing that surprised Pinkard was that the local Party boss hadn’t recruited
him
to help change the chant. He shrugged. Briggs did as Briggs pleased.

  “Feather
ston
! Feather
ston
!” Mizell seemed startled to hear the Freedom Party leader’s name. The cry of, “Freedom!” he’d undoubtedly expected. This? No.

 
  Well, too bad,
 Jeff thought.
You back the Freedom Party, you’ve got to back Jake Featherston, too.

 
No way around that, even if you wish there were.

  By his manner up there on the rostrum, maybe the head of the Tin Hats wished exactly that. No matter how he wished things had turned out, his outfit was in second place, not first. Hearing Jake’s name roared in his face at his own rally had to show him he would never run first.

  Caleb Briggs stepped up to the microphone. It helped his harsh near-whisper carry: “We’re all in this together, friends: Freedom Party, Tin Hats, the Redemption League out West, all the people who see what’s wrong and who’ve got what it takes to stand up and fix it. When Jake Featherston wins this fall, we all win—every single one of us, and every single group. That’s what we’ve got to take away from this rally today. Just like we were in the trenches, we’re all in this together. Only difference is, this time, by God, we’re going to
win
!”

  No chant rose this time, just a great roar of agreement. Jeff pumped his fist in the air again, and his was far from the only one raised high. Up on the rostrum, Briggs put a hand on Amos Mizell’s shoulder. He was smaller than the man who led the Tin Hats, but still somehow had the air of a father consoling a son.

  After a moment, Mizell straightened—almost to attention, as if he were back in the Army again. He went to the microphone and said, “Dr. Briggs is right. When Jake Featherston’s president, we all win. And we
will
win come November!”

  He got his own round of applause then. Somebody in the crowd started singing “Dixie.” Maybe it was one of the men with instructions from Briggs, maybe someone who’d had a good idea on his own. Either way, in the blink of an eye everyone sang it. Along with the rest of the men and women in Avondale Park, Pinkard bawled out the words. Tears stung his eyes.
This
was what mattered, this feeling of being part of something bigger, more important, than himself.

  When the last raucous chorus ended, Briggs went over to the microphone. “Remember this, folks,” he said. “Remember it good. What we’ve got here today, the whole country gets when we win.” Only a smattering of applause answered him. No more than a handful of people understood what he was talking about. But Jefferson Pinkard was one of those few. He beat his palms together till they were red and sore. That was what he wanted—the whole country like a Freedom Party rally. What could be better? Nothing he could think of.

  The way things looked, the whole country wouldn’t be able to think of anything better, either. That seemed very fine indeed to Jeff.

* * *

 
 S
omething tickled Anne Colleton’s memory when she checked into the Excelsior Hotel in Charleston. It tickled harder when she got into her room. The tickling wasn’t of the pleasant sort. After she looked around the room, she realized why. Roger Kimball had tried to rape her here, almost ten years ago now.

  She’d given him a knee between his legs, aimed a pistol at him, and sent him on his way. In short order, he was dead, shot by that woman from Boston.

  Anne sighed. Kimball had been loyal to Jake Featherston come hell or high water. Anne was loyal to nobody but herself, not like that. She’d thought Featherston was a loser, and she’d broken her ties to the Freedom Party. That was the biggest reason she and Roger had broken up, the biggest reason she hadn’t given herself to him, the biggest reason he’d tried to take her by force.

  And now here she was, back in Charleston, back in the Freedom Party. She tasted the irony there. Had Roger been right all along? Anne shook her head. She didn’t care to admit that, even to herself. After she’d walked away from Featherston, the country had changed. That was what had brought her back.

  Still, she granted herself the luxury of another sigh. It
was
too bad. She’d never found anybody who could match Roger Kimball in bed.

  A glance in the mirror on the dresser told her she probably never would. A good start on a double chin, lines on her face no powder could hide, the harshness of dye to hold gray at bay . . . She wasn’t a young beauty any more. Now she had to get her way with brains, which wasn’t so easy and took longer.

  “What can’t be cured . . .” she said, and deliberately turned away from the mirror. The only alternative to getting older was
not
getting older. The Yankees had gassed her younger brother, Jacob. They’d gassed him, and the Negroes on the Marshlands plantation had murdered him in the uprising of 1915.

  He’d never had a chance. She’d taken some revenge on them after the war. More still waited. She’d never disagreed with the Freedom Party about that.

  She unpacked her own suitcase. Once upon a time, she’d have had a colored maid to do it for her. The last one she’d had came much too close to murdering
her
in the long aftermath of the uprising. No more.

  Once everything was put away, she went downstairs. A man sitting on an overstuffed chair in the lobby, a chair whose upholstery had seen better days, got to his feet and took off his hat. “Evening, Miss Colleton!” he said. “Freedom!”

  “Good evening, Mr. Henderson,” Anne answered. A beat slower than she should have, she added, “Freedom!” herself. The Party greeting still struck her as foolish. But she’d made the bargain, and she had to go through with it.

  “Hope you had a pleasant drive down,” James Henderson said. He held out his hand. She briskly shook it. His eyes widened slightly. He hadn’t expected so firm a grip. He was a few years younger than Anne—
everyone is a few years younger than I am these days,
 she thought unhappily—lean as a lath, with a face so bony, it might have come off the label of an iodine bottle. He wore the ribbon for the Purple Heart on his lapel.

  “It was all right,” Anne said. “Some people drive for the sport of it. I drive to get where I’m going.”

  “Sensible,” Henderson said. Men said that to her a lot these days, as they’d once said,
Beautiful.
 She missed the other. This would have to do. Beauty didn’t last. Brains did. She’d realized that a long time ago. She’d had brains even then, though men had done their best not to notice. Henderson went on,

  “Shall we eat some supper? We can talk then, and figure out where to go from there.”

  “All right,” Anne said. Not so many years earlier, he would have wanted to go back to her room and take her to bed. Now he probably didn’t. That made doing business simpler. Most of the time, she appreciated it because it did. Every once in a while, she found herself pining for days gone by.

  “Hotel restaurant suit you, or would you rather go somewhere else?” Henderson was doing his best to be polite. A fair number of Freedom Party men either didn’t bother or didn’t know how.

  “The hotel restaurant is fine,” she answered.

  She ordered crab cakes; she took advantage of Charleston seafood whenever she came down to the coast. Henderson chose fried chicken. They both ordered cocktails. The colored waiter who took their orders went back to the kitchen without writing them down; odds were he couldn’t write. James Henderson’s eyes followed him. “Wonder where he was in 1915, and what he did.”

  “He looks too young to have done anything much,” Anne said. “Of course, you never can tell.”

  “Sure can’t.” Henderson scowled. He needed a visible effort to draw himself back to the business at hand. “Let’s talk about Congress and the Legislature.”

  “Right,” Anne said briskly. Henderson might be skinny enough to dive through a soda straw without hitting the sides, but he came to the point. She liked that. She went on, “We can figure that Jake Featherston is probably going to win this state.”

  “Doesn’t mean we won’t campaign for him here,” Henderson said.

  “No, of course not,” Anne agreed. “We don’t want any nasty surprises. But the rest of the ticket has to run well, too. Freedom Party Congressmen will help Jake get his laws through. The state legislators need to back us, too—and they’re the ones who choose C.S. Senators. We’re still weak in the Senate, because we didn’t start getting a lot of people elected to state legislatures till 1929.” James Henderson nodded. He began to say something more, but the waiter came back with drinks, and then with dinner. The fellow started to give Anne the chicken; she pointed to her companion to show where it should go. “Sorry, ma’am,” the colored man said. He set things right, then withdrew.