American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (89 page)

  We know we can pay back all the bastards who held us while the damnyankees sucker-punched us. We can do it, and we’re gonna do it. Right?”

  “Right!” Willy Knight said. Jake was watching him. He seemed as hearty as he should have. Maybe he’d just had cold feet for a moment. Featherston shrugged. How much did it really matter? As vice president, all Willy’d do was make speeches, and Jake intended to make sure of what was in them before they came out of the handsome puppet’s mouth. Knight still hadn’t figured out he’d been condemned to oblivion. That only proved he wasn’t so smart as he thought he was.

  Jake and Ferdinand Koenig looked at each other. Koenig nodded, ever so slightly. The more he’d thought about it, the more he’d liked escaping the worthless number-two slot and being promised one where he could actually do things. Featherston had plans for the attorney general’s office.
Once I’m
elected . . .

  Three days later, he took another step toward the Gray House in Richmond. When he strode up onto the speakers’ platform at the Memorial Auditorium to accept the Freedom Party nomination, the roar from the assembled delegates left his ears as stunned and battered as any artillery barrage ever had. The klieg lights blazing on him put the sun to shame. A thicket of microphones in front of him amplified his voice for the delegates, for people listening on the wireless web, and for the newsreels that would soon show his image all over the Confederate States.

  “Hello, friends,” Jake said to all the millions who would see and listen to him. “You know me. You know what I stand for. I’ve been up here in front of you before. I’m Jake Featherston, and I’m here to tell you—”

 
“The truth!”
 the Freedom Party men bellowed.

  Featherston nodded. “That’s right. I’m here to tell you the truth. I’ve been doing that for a long time now. I think you’re finally ready to listen. The truth is, this country needs to put people—white people, decent people—back to work, and we will. The truth is, this country needs to put the niggers who stabbed us in the back in their place, and we will. The truth is, Kentucky and Sequoyah and that joke the USA calls Houston still belong to the Confederate States. We ought to get ’em back—and we will.” He had to stop then; the applause was too loud and too long to let him continue. When at last it ebbed, he went on, “The truth is, the Whigs have had seventy years to run this country, and they’ve run it into the ground. Somebody else needs to do it, and do it right—
and we will
.” Another great roar. He held up his hands. Silence fell, completely and at once. Into it, he said, “If you like the way things have gone the past few years, vote Whig. But if you want to tell those people what you really think of ’em, vote—”

 
“Freedom!”
 That cry outdid all that had gone before. And then the delegates began to chant, “Feather
ston
! Feather
ston
! Feather
ston
!” Jake stood tall on the platform, waving to the crowd, waving to the country, glorying in what he had and reaching out for what he wanted.

 
B
ouncing around South Carolina, from Charleston to Columbia to Greenville and to the smaller towns in between, Anne Colleton felt more than a little like a table-tennis ball. When she got out of her Birmingham in St. Matthews, her brother greeted her with, “Hello. Didn’t I know you once upon a time?”

  “Funny, Tom,” she answered, meaning anything but. “Very funny. For God’s sake, fix me a drink.” Her own flat looked unfamiliar to her. Maybe her brother hadn’t been joking after all.

  He mixed whiskey and a little water for her and plopped in a couple of ice cubes. After he’d made himself a drink, too, he said, “Well, you’ve got Jake Featherston, and it looks like he’s going to win. Are you happy?”

  “You bet I am.” She would have said more, but a long pull at the whiskey came first. “Thank you. That’s a lifesaver.”

  “I ought to go places with a little cask around my neck, like those St. Bernard dogs in the Alps,” Tom Colleton said.

  “I’d be glad to see you, that’s for sure.” Anne took another sip. “Yes, I’m happy. I’ve waited for this day ever since the end of the war, even though I didn’t know what I was waiting for at first.”

  “You walked away from Featherston once,” Tom said.

  “I made a mistake,” Anne said. “Aren’t you glad you never made a mistake in all your born days?”

  “Now that you mention it, yes.” Tom was irrepressible. Anne snorted. Her brother went on, “I’ll tell you one mistake I didn’t make: once I got out of politics, I didn’t get back in.”

  “You wouldn’t have talked that way before you got married,” Anne said.
It made you soft,
 was what she meant. To anyone else, she would have said that, said it without a moment’s hesitation. With Tom, she hesitated.

  He understood what she meant whether she said it or not. With a shrug, he answered, “Maybe you wouldn’t talk the way you talk if you had. Nothing to cure the fire in your belly like a little boy.”

  “Maybe,” Anne said tonelessly. Some small part of her wished she had settled down with Roger Kimball or Clarence Potter or that Texas oil man or one of her other lovers. A husband, a child to carry on after her . . . Those weren’t the worst things in the world. But they weren’t for her, and never would be. “I’m on my own, Tom. Too late to change it now.”

  Her brother eyed her. “And heaven help anybody who gets in your way?” he said.

  Anne nodded. “Of course.”

  “What happens if Featherston decides you’re in his way?” She wished he hadn’t asked that particular question. For a long time, she’d been a big fish in the small pond of South Carolina politics, and not the smallest fish in the much bigger pond of Confederate politics.

  Going from the Whigs to the Freedom Party, back to the Whigs and now back to Freedom had cut her influence down to size. So had getting older, as she was all too ruefully aware.

  What if Jake Featherston decided she was in the way? What if
President
Jake Featherston decided she was in the way? She saw only one answer, and gave it to her brother: “In that case, I’d better move, don’t you think?”

  “You say that? You?” Tom looked and sounded as if he couldn’t believe his ears. “You don’t move for anybody.”

  “If it’s a question of move or get squashed, I’ll move,” Anne said. “And Jake has more clout than I do.

  Jake has more clout than anybody does.” She spoke with a certain somber pride. She might have been saying,
Yeah, I got licked, but the fellow who licked me was the toughest one of the bunch
. She shook her head. Might have? No. She
was
saying exactly that.

  Tom shook his head, too, in wonder. “What’s going to happen to the country, if a fellow who can make
you
pull in your horns starts running things?”

  “We’ll all go in the same direction, and it’ll be the right direction,” Anne said. “We’ve owed a lot of debts for a long time. Don’t you want to pay them back? I know I do.”

  “Well, yes, but not if I have to go bust to do it.”

  “We won’t,” Anne said positively. “He’ll do what needs doing, instead of fumbling around the way Burton Mitchel has ever since things went sour.”

  “Maybe. I hope so,” her brother said. “Hell, I’ll probably even vote for him myself. But that’s all I intend to do. You can go running around the state if you want to. Me, I’ll stay home and tend my garden.” Had he read
Candide
? She doubted it; she couldn’t imagine a book that seemed less her brother’s cup of tea. She said, “The whole Confederacy is my garden.”

  “You’re welcome to it,” Tom replied. “It’s too big for me to get my arms around. South Carolina’s too big. I think even St. Matthews is too big, but I can try that. My wife and my little baby boy, now—
that
I understand just fine.”

  He’d gone into the war a captain, and a boy himself. He’d come out a lieutenant-colonel, and a man.

  Now he was a family man, but that seemed a pulling-in, not a growing-out. It made Anne sad. “You’ve got a lot of time left,” she said. “I hope you do, anyway. You can do whatever you want with it. What I’m going to do with mine is, I’m going to put this country back on its feet.”

  “I hope so.” Tom got up and kissed her on the cheek. “What I’m going to do is, I’m going home to my family. Take care of yourself, Sis. I worry about you.” He went out the door, taking her chance for the last word with him.

 
  I’m going home to my family.
 Ever since they’d lost their parents when they were small,
she’d
been his family, she and their brother Jacob, who was dead. He didn’t think that way any more. He didn’t care about the country any more, either. Anne made herself another whiskey. Tom might have his wife and a little boy. She had a cause, and a cause on its way to victory.

  She slept in her own bed that night. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d slept there. It had been weeks, she knew. Her own mattress felt as unfamiliar as any of the hotel beds where she’d lain down lately.

  When morning came, she was on her way again, driving down to Charleston. Featherston was coming into town in a couple of days for a rally that should finish sewing up South Carolina for the Freedom Party. She hurled herself into the work of making sure everything went off the way it was supposed to.

  Things were more complicated than they had been when she first started planning rallies. Making sure the wireless web and the newsreels were taken care of kept her busy up until an hour and a half before Featherston’s speech began. Saul Goldman did a lot of work with them—more than she did, in fact. She wondered if the head of the Freedom Party knew just what a smart little Jew he had running that part of his operation.

  “Hello, there,” Featherston said, coming up behind her as she peered out from the wings to make sure the lighting arrangements were the way she wanted them.

  She jumped. She wasn’t the sort of person who jumped when someone came up behind her, but Jake Featherston wasn’t the ordinary sort of person coming up behind her. “Oh. Hello.” She hated herself for how callow she sounded. No one had any business making her feel so unsure, so . . .
weak
was the only word that seemed to fit. No one had any business doing it, but Jake did.

  He eyed the hall with the knowing gaze of a man who’d given speeches in a lot of different places.

  “Good to have you back in the Party,” he said, his attention returning to her. “I wasn’t even close to sure it would be, in spite of the pretty speeches you made me. But it is. You’ve given me a lot of help here, and I do appreciate it.”

  “Happy to do anything I can,” Anne said: a great thumping lie. She knew she was doing things
for
Featherston, doing them as a subordinate. She wasn’t used to being a subordinate, wasn’t used to it and despised it. Once, she and Roger Kimball had thought they would guide Jake Featherston to power and then enjoy it themselves, with him in the role of puppet. The only small consolation she had was that they weren’t the only ones who’d underestimated him. At one time or another, almost everybody in the CSA had underestimated Featherston.

  He said, “There’s a lot of people I owe, and I’m going to pay every single one of them back. But you, you owe me—you owe me plenty for walking out on me when I really needed a hand.” He hadn’t forgotten. He never forgot a slight, no matter how small. Anne knew as much. And hers hadn’t been small, not at all. She said, “I know. I’m trying to pay you back.” Her gesture encompassed the hall where he’d speak.

  The answer seemed to catch him by surprise. Slowly, thoughtfully, he nodded. “Well, you’re doing better than a lot of folks I can think of,” he said.

  “Good.” Anne didn’t like the way he looked at her. He’d been an artilleryman during the war, not a sniper, but he eyed her as she thought a sniper would: all cold, deadly concentration. She was used to intimidating, not being intimidated. Being on the receiving end of a glance like that chilled her.

  But Featherston sounded warm and lively when he went into his speech. “I never had a fancy name,” he declared. “I was only one more Confederate soldier, with a stamped tin identity disk around my neck.

  But every great idea draws men to it. Every idea steps out before the nation. It has to win from the nation the fighters it needs, so one day it’s strong enough to turn the course of destiny. Our day is here!” The hall erupted. Anne found herself clapping as hard as anyone else in the building. When she listened to Jake on the stump, she always believed what he said while he was saying it. She might not believe it later, when she thought about it, but at the time. . . . She shivered, though she also went on clapping. She hadn’t met many people who frightened her. He did.

  He thundered on: “Lots of people in the Confederate States think the Freedom Party can’t do the job if we get in. They’re fooling themselves! Today our movement can’t be destroyed. It’s here. People have to reckon with it, whether they like it or not. We recognize three principles—responsibility, command, and obedience. We’ve built a party—a party of millions, mind—based on one thing: achievement. And if you don’t like it, we say, ‘We’ll fight today! We’ll fight tomorrow! And if you don’t fancy our rally today, we’ll hold another one next week, even bigger!’ ”

  He slammed his fist down on the podium. More applause interrupted him. Anne looked down at her carefully tended, carefully manicured hands. Her palms were red and sore. She’d broken a nail without even noticing.

  “I’m not just here to ask you for your vote, or to ask you to do this or that for the Party,” Featherston said. “I’m here to tell you the truth, and what I aim to do. What I’ve got to give is the only thing that can pull our country back on its feet again. If all you Confederates had the same faith in your country that our Freedom Party stalwarts do, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in. We
will
pull ourselves together. We’re on the way, and I know you’ll help.”