American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (92 page)

  Across the street from the headquarters, a couple of Whigs were arguing with a gray-clad policeman.

  “They’re preparing for a riot in there!” one of them said loudly. “You’ve got to do something to stop them.”

  The cop shrugged broad shoulders. “I can’t arrest anybody till he commits a crime,” he said. “It’s still a free country, you know.” As the Whigs started to expostulate, he smiled and sank his barb: “Freedom!” They jerked as if stung. The loud one cried, “Why, you miserable, stinking—”

  “Shut up, buddy, or I’ll run you in.” The policeman set a hand on his nightstick.

  “I thought you couldn’t arrest anyone till he committed a crime.”

  “Disturbing the peace is a crime.”

  “What do you think the Freedom Party’s going to do?” the Whig demanded.

  “That’s a political demonstration. That’s different.”

  Into the old livery stable Pinkard went. When he came out again, a stout bludgeon in his hand, the Whigs were still yelling at the cop. They withdrew—hell, they ran for their lives—as soon as the Freedom Party started coming out. Jeers chased them down the street.

  The day Grady Calkins killed Wade Hampton V, Tredegar-carrying state militiamen had held the stalwarts away from the president of the CSA. Nobody had called out the militia this time—so Caleb Briggs insisted. Back in the early 1920s, people had thought they could suppress the Freedom Party. The governor of Alabama wouldn’t dare try it now. The legislature might not impeach him, convict him, and throw him out on his ear if he did. On the other hand, it might.

  Down the street toward the park marched the Freedom Party stalwarts, several hundred strong. People on the sidewalk either cheered or had the sense to keep their mouths shut. People in autos drove away in a hurry. The ones who didn’t got their windscreens and windows smashed. Pinkard supposed, if the Whigs had been ruthless enough, they could have sent cars smashing through the ranks of Freedom Party men. Featherston’s followers would have done it to the Whigs in a minute if they thought it would help.

  The Whigs didn’t try it.

  Jeff was up in the fifth or sixth row of marchers. The leaders let out whoops when they turned the last corner and saw Ingram Park, near city hall, dead ahead. Shouts followed the whoops a heartbeat later, as the Whig stalwarts charged them. The Whigs aimed to fight in the narrow confines of the street and not let the Freedom Party men into the park at all.

 
  That probably means we
have
got more men than
they do,
 Jeff thought. Then the first Whig swung a club at him, and he stopped thinking. He blocked the blow and aimed one of his own at the Whig’s head.

  They stood there smashing at each other for a few seconds. Then someone tripped the Whig. Jeff hit him in the face with his bludgeon, kicked him in the ribs with those steel-toed shoes, and strode forward, looking for a new foe.

  He and another man in white shirt and butternut trousers teamed up on a Whig. They both stomped the fellow once he was down. Shouting “Freedom!” they pressed forward, shoulder to shoulder. “Freedom!” Jeff yelled again. “Featherston and freedom!”

  “Longstreet!” the Whigs yelled back. “Longstreet and liberty!” Samuel Longstreet, a grandson of the famous James, was a Senator from Virginia. He wasn’t bad on the stump, either. “Longstreet and Black!” a rash Whig shouted.

  That gave the Freedom Party men an opening. “Longstreet the nigger-lover!” they yelled, and pushed forward harder than ever.

  Pinkard’s left arm ached where a club had got home. Another one had laid his forehead open above his left eyebrow. He kept shaking his head like a restive horse, trying to keep the blood out of his eyes. Step by bitter step, the Freedom Party men forced the Whigs back toward the end of the street. If they broke out into the crowd, they’d win the day, rampaging through the crowd and wrecking Hugo Black’s rally.

  A pistol barked. Jeff saw the muzzle flash rather than hearing the report; that was lost in the din of battle.

  The Freedom Party man next to him grunted and clutched his belly and folded up like a concertina.

  As soon as the first shot was fired, pistols came out on both sides. Freedom Party men and Whigs blazed away at one another from point-blank range. The Whigs had fired first—Pinkard thought they had, anyhow—but the Freedom Party men had more firepower and more determination, or maybe just more combat experience. They kept going forward, smashing down or shooting the last few Whigs who stood against them.

  “Freedom!” Pinkard bawled as he ran across the grass toward the people who’d thought they were going to hear the Whig vice-presidential candidate speak. “Freedom!” his fellow stalwarts howled at his side and behind him. This had to be what a breakthrough felt like, what the damnyankees had known when they smashed the Confederate lines in Tennessee and Virginia during the war.

  He whooped with delight when more Freedom Party men burst out from another street and charged the assembled Whigs. Then the stalwarts were in among the crowd, some clubbing, some kicking, some shooting. A few of the men in the crowd tried to fight back. Most of the tough ones, though, had tried to hold the Freedom Party men out and were already down.

  From the podium, Hugo Black cried out, “This is madness!” He was right, not that it did him any good. Madness it was, madness engulfing his party, madness engulfing his country. After the third bullet cracked past him, after the Birmingham police did nothing to slow down the Freedom Party stalwarts, he leaped down and made his escape.

  Pinkard’s club broke when he hit a rich-looking man in the head. The Whig’s skull broke, too; Jeff could feel it. He waded on through the fray with fists and heavy shoes. “Freedom!” he yelled exultantly.

  “Featherston and freedom!”

 
W
hig headquarters in Charleston a week before the election reminded Clarence Potter of Army of Northern Virginia headquarters a week before the Confederate States had asked the United States for an armistice. He was among the walking wounded: two fingers of his left hand were splinted, he sported a shiner and wore a new pair of glasses he couldn’t afford, and he was all over bruises. And, all things considered, he was one of the lucky ones.

  Braxton Donovan had a bandage wrapped around his head. He’d needed an X ray to make sure he didn’t have a fractured skull. His nod held a graveyard quality. “Almost over now,” he said.

  “Everything’s almost over now,” Potter said gloomily. “We showed those bastards we could fight, too, by God.”

  The lawyer nodded, then grimaced and reached into his jacket pocket for a vial of pills. He washed down two of them with a sip from his drink. “Wonderful stuff, codeine,” he remarked. “It’s especially good with whiskey. Doesn’t quite make the headache go away, but it sure makes you stop caring. Yeah, we showed the yahoos we could fight, too. Fat lot of good it’s done us. How many dead?”

  “A couple of dozen here in Charleston.” Even before Potter went into intelligence, he’d always had figures at his fingertips. “Over a hundred in the state. All over the country? Who knows? More than a thousand, or I miss my guess. Close to fifty men killed in that one shootout in Birmingham all by itself.

  Hugo Black is lucky to be alive, if you want to call it luck.”

  “Ha. Funny.” Donovan drained the whiskey. He scowled. “I hope those pills hurry up. My head feels like it wants to fall off. If that bastard had hit me just a little harder, you’d be counting one more dead man here.”

  “I know.” Potter held up his left hand. “I got these broken keeping another one of those stinking stalwarts from caving in my skull. We have made them pay, though. Even if they do win, they know they’ve been in a brawl.”

  “If they win, it doesn’t matter,” Braxton Donovan said. “Do you know what I wish?”

  “Hell, yes, I know what you wish. You wish the same thing I do,” Potter said. “You wish the Radical Liberals would drop out of the race and throw whatever weight they’ve got left behind Longstreet and Black. And you know what?”

  “What?”

  For once, Potter let a full, rich drawl come into his voice as he answered, “It ain’t a-gonna happen, that’s what.”

  “It should, by God,” Donovan said. “The Rad Libs have just as much to lose if Jake Featherston wins as we do.”

  “You know that, and I know that, but Hull and Long don’t know that,” Clarence Potter said. “All they know is, we’ve been kicking their tails every six years as long as there’ve been Confederate States of America. If we were in hell—”

  “What do you mean, ‘if’?” Donovan said. “With Jake Featherston president . . .”

  “If we were in hell and screaming for water, they’d throw us a big jar of gasoline to drink.” Potter was damned if he’d let the lawyer step on a good line.

  “What are we going to do?” Braxton Donovan said. “What
can
we do? Only thing left is to go down swinging.”

  “Far as I’m concerned, we battle ’em all the way up till next Tuesday,” Potter replied. “The more Congressmen and legislators we elect, the more trouble Featherston and his goons will have getting their laws through. And the bastard can’t run again in 1939, so this too shall pass.”

  “Like a kidney stone,” Donovan said morosely. By the way he set one hand on the small of his back for a moment, he spoke from experience. But then he managed a smile and gently touched his bandaged head. “Codeine
is
starting to work.”

  “Good,” Potter said. People were setting down drinks and taking seats on the folding chairs at the front of the hall. “Looks like the meeting’s going to come to order. Let’s see how exciting it is, shall we?” It was about as bad as he’d expected. The speakers insisted on staying optimistic long after the time for optimism had passed. When Potter heard, “Sam Longstreet will make a
great
president of the Confederate States!” for the fourth time, he stopped listening. He didn’t think Longstreet was a bad man at all—on the contrary. But as long as the Whigs kept running sons and grandsons and great-grandsons of the men who’d won the War of Secession, they gave Jake Featherston an easy target.

  He thought about getting to his feet and saying so. In the end, he didn’t. Time enough for that at the postmortem; the death wasn’t official yet. The meeting was less quarrelsome than a lot he’d been to. He doubted he was the only one saving recriminations for after the election.

  Quarrels did go on, though, through the streets of Charleston and across the Confederate States. Potter did his share. He didn’t need his left hand to swing a blackjack. He dented a couple of Freedom Party crania—and had his new pair of spectacles broken. Only afterwards did he realize he hadn’t had to wear them into the brawl. Hindsight was twenty-twenty. He, unfortunately, wasn’t, and now he had to pay twice for the privilege of seeing straight. He was pretty sure the stalwarts he’d clobbered couldn’t see straight now, either. That was something.

  Tuesday, November 7, 1933, dawned chilly and drizzly. Polls opened at eight in the morning. Jamming a broad-brimmed fedora down low on his forehead to keep water out of his eyes, Potter made his myopic way to the polling place around the corner from his apartment building. Election officials had chalked on the sidewalk a hundred-foot semicircle with the polling place as its center. Inside that circle, electioneering was forbidden. Outside it, Freedom Party men chanted Jake Featherston’s name.

  Potter smiled at them. “Go ahead, boys. Make yourselves as obnoxious as you can. The more votes you cost your man, the better.”

  As he walked into the charmed circle, one of the men in white and butternut asked, “Who’s that smart-mouthed son of a bitch?”

  “Name’s Potter,” another answered. “Lives around the block. You don’t need to write him down. He’s already on the list.”

 
  Already on the list, am I?
 Potter thought.
An honor I could do without.
 Behind him, the Freedom Party men resumed their chant.
Where are our men, shouting for Longstreet and Black?
 he wondered.

  He knew the Whigs had men outside some polling places. Not this one. The business collapse wasn’t the only reason the Freedom Party looked like winning today. How-ever much Potter hated to admit it, even to himself, the opposition was better organized than his own party. He would have bet every Freedom Party man—and woman, in states where women could vote—would get to the polls today. He wished he could have made the same bet about Whig backers. How many of them would sit on their hands? Too many. Any at all would be too many.

  He cast his own ballot, then walked back the way he’d come. He didn’t think the Freedom Party men would set on him so close to the polling place, where people could see them for what they were. They didn’t . . . quite. They shouted, “Nigger-lover!” and, “You’ll get yours!” at him, but they didn’t try to give it to him. He was almost disappointed. For this trip, he had a pistol in his pocket, not a blackjack.

  Having voted, he went to work. It was less than interesting today: a husband wanted evidence his wife was cheating, but the wife, busy with shopping and the couple’s two small children, gave none. Potter thought the husband was inventing things to worry about, but he kept his opinions to himself. For one thing, clients seldom paid attention to opinions contradicting their own. For another, the man paid well. If he wanted to throw away his money . . . well, it was a free country, wasn’t it?

 
  It is till that Featherston bastard takes over,
 Potter thought.

  On the trolley ride back to his flat after knocking off for the day, he passed another polling place. Police cars were parked in front of it. Blood stained the sidewalk and nearby walls. Freedom Party men waving their reversed-color Confederate battle flags still stood on the street. “Feather
ston
! Feather
ston
!” Even through the trolley’s closed windows, the chant lacerated Clarence Potter’s ears. The police didn’t try to run the stalwarts off. If Whigs had been here, they were no longer. This skirmish belonged to the Freedom Party.