American Front (49 page)

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s went off, incongruously cheerful. Maria’s shriek was louder than her sister’s. She couldn’t even run to Angelina; the crowd, panicked by gunfire, swept them apart. When Maria tried to go against it, she was swept off her own feet. Flora dragged her up before she could get too badly trampled, then dragged her away.

Clinging to each other, weeping, the two of them struggled to get off Broadway and onto Twenty-third Street so they could escape the riot. “Oof!” A portly man ran into Flora. He acted as if he were trying to fend her off, but his hands slid up her body till they closed on her breasts, the crowd and turmoil offering concealment for what he did. She’d had such unwelcome attentions before. Snatching a pin from the floral hat she wore, she stuck him with it. He howled and whirled away. She stuck him again as he fled, this time where he sat down. He howled again, almost seeming to levitate. The pin was long and sharp and had blood on a good part of its length. Savagely pleased at that, she stuck it back amidst the artificial greenery on her hat.

Maria Tresca didn’t react, staring numbly. Maybe she was too numb to think too much about Angelina yet.

“It would be better if they knew not to do such things,” Flora said, not wanting to think about Angelina, either, “but we have to educate them if they don’t.”

She wished her sister had stuck a hat pin in Yossel Reisen. But no, that wasn’t fair. He hadn’t taken anything from Sophie she hadn’t wanted to give. It was only what he’d given her in return…

A man stepped on her foot. He didn’t try to feel her up; he just went on his way as if she didn’t exist. That she didn’t mind so much; it could have happened at any time in the streets of New York City, the biggest, most indifferent city in the USA. In a way, in fact, it almost comforted her, showing the world wasn’t devoid of normality even in the midst of riot.

Off Broadway, things were quieter. Flora and Maria walked quickly down Twenty-third Street, to put some distance between themselves and the insanity that had swallowed the Soldiers’ Circle parade.

“Trouble will come from this,” Flora said grimly, and then amended that: “More trouble, I mean.” Back behind them, Angelina was almost surely dead.

Even as Maria nodded, tears streaming down her face, a burly policeman grabbed a Jewish-looking fellow in a shabby suit and demanded, “You wouldn’t be a Socialist, would you now?” When the man nodded, the policeman hit him in the head with his billy club. Blood streaming down his face, the fellow turned to run. The policeman kicked him in the seat of the pants, shouting, “Lucky I don’t shoot you, you black-hearted traitor!”

“Shame!” Flora cried, and Maria added her voice an instant later. Flora went on, “You have no business beating a man for what he believes, only for what he does. Haven’t you heard of the Constitution of the United States?” Yes, thinking of politics was easier than thinking of death unleashed on the streets of New York.

The policeman stamped toward her and Maria, nightstick still upraised. To Flora’s relief, at the last moment he discovered he didn’t quite have the crust to beat two women. Voice strangled with rage, he said, “Get out o’ here this minute, or I’ll run the both of you in.”

“On what charge?” Flora asked, her chin jutting in defiance.

“Streetwalking.” The policeman stripped her and Maria with his eyes.

“We’re not the ones who sell ourselves to get our daily bread,” Flora retorted.

“Get out!” the policeman screamed. His face was crimson, furious. He spat on the sidewalk. “And
that
for the God-damned Constitution of the United States. There’s a war on now, and the gloves are off.
Get
out!”

He would have hit them had they stayed an instant longer. Flora was willing to suffer a beating for the cause, but now Maria dragged her away. “We can’t,” the secretary said. “Enough blood spilled already.
Please
, Flora—not after Angelina.”

Later, Flora decided the secretary was right; the Socialists already had martyrs aplenty today, Maria Tresca’s sister among them. The policeman’s hate-filled words kept ringing in her ears.
The gloves are off
. She shivered. If TR felt the same way—and he probably would—what was the government going to do now?

A Negro maid lifted her feather duster from the windowsill—not that she’d been working hard anyhow, but an excuse to stop was always welcome—in one of the forward-facing rooms at Marshlands and said to Scipio, “Here come de man from de
Mercury
wid a paper for we.”

“Thank you very much, Griselda,” he answered gravely, and heard her snicker by way of reply. He ignored her amused scorn; so long as he was on duty in the mansion, he was obliged to sound like an educated white man, not a Negro of the Congaree.

He checked for himself before going to the front hall to open the door; the rest of the staff was not above playing small jokes. But, sure enough, here came Virgil Hobson on a mule, carrying with him a copy of the
Charleston Mercury
. Anne Colleton got the
Daily Courier
, too, and the
South Carolinian
and
Southern Guardian
from Columbia. Marshlands was a good way out of the way for all of them, but you declined to render its mistress a service at your peril.

Virgil was just climbing down off the mule as Scipio opened the door for him. “Good afternoon, sir,” he said. Hobson was a poor buckra who spent half his time drinking and the other half hung over, but he was white folks—and the white folks who didn’t deserve respect raised the most hell if they didn’t get it.

“Afternoon,” Virgil said. He walked straight, but very gently, as if touching the ground hurt. That meant he was after a binge, not in the middle of one. He thrust the
Mercury
at Scipio. “Here y’are.” Without waiting for a reply, he turned and walked back toward his long-cared mount.

“Thank you, sir,” Scipio said to his back. He waited till the delivery man rode away before shutting the door. As he set the newspaper on the tray to take it to Anne Colleton, he glanced down at the front page.

Big black headlines shouted up at him:
SOCIALISTS AND MORMONS RAMPAGE IN NEW YORK CITY
!
REDS AND FANATICS RIOT, FORCE YANKS TO DECLARE MARTIAL LAW
!
UNREST IN U.S. ARMY REPORTED
. He didn’t know how the
Mercury
had got the story or how much truth was in it, but if it was even a quarter true, the USA was in a peck of trouble.

On reading past the headlines, the other thing he noted, less happily, was that the U.S. Army, despite the claims of unrest in its ranks, was going about the business of keeping a lid on New York City. The people they were putting a lid on might be Socialists, but they were white folks. If damnyankee soldiers would put down an uprising from white folks, what would Confederate troops do if—when—their Negro laborers rose up under the red flag?

He was afraid he knew the answer to that question. He’d tried telling it to the Reds among the field hands here. They kept laughing at him. He resolved to hang on to this newspaper and the others that came in over the next few days, to let Cassius and his fellow revolutionaries see what happened in the real world. How could you expect a band of Marxist fanatics to seize power in a country? They didn’t seem to understand how big a place a country was.

Going on with that argument, fortunately, could wait. He carried the
Charleston Mercury
upstairs to Anne Colleton’s office: of an afternoon, you could expect to find her there. She was on the telephone. He stood in the doorway, waiting to be noticed.

“No,” she said crisply into the mouthpiece. “I told you to buy, not sell. You shall carry out my instructions as I give them, sir, or I will find another broker and you will find a lawsuit…What?…An oversight? I have no more tolerance for oversights than I have for deliberate errors. Whatever it was, this is your first, last, and only warning. Good day.” She hung up, muttered something sulfurous under her breath, and then, anger expunged, smiled at Scipio. “I hope you have better news for me than that chucklehead did.”

“I believe so, yes.” Without another word, Scipio set the tray with the
Mercury
on the desk in front of Anne Colleton, turning it as he did so to make sure the headlines were right side up for her.

Her eyes widened. Her mouth twisted into something halfway between a smile and the expression a tiger wears on spotting a juicy sheep. Scipio was heartily glad that expression bore on the newspaper, not on him. The mistress of Marshlands rapidly read through the stories having to do with the troubles in the USA, pursuing them into the inner pages. When she finished, she looked up at Scipio and asked, “Did you take any notice of these?” She paused. “You must have. You told me the news was good.”

“I did look at the headlines, yes, ma’am,” Scipio answered. You didn’t want to be in a position of having to lie to Anne Colleton. She was sharp as the edge of a straight razor, and even more dangerous.

Her finger stabbed down at one of those headlines. “
That’s
why we’ll win the war, Scipio. The United States are divided against themselves. They haven’t the stomach for a fight to the finish. We have no Socialists here, by God!” That predatory expression grew even fiercer. “We have no Mormons here, either, but that doesn’t keep us from using them against the USA. Our states are truly united, even if the Yankees have the name. And because of that, we’ll dictate terms to them in the end, as we did two generations ago and then again in my parents’ time.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Scipio repeated. Some of the sweat springing out on his face came from having to wear tailcoat, vest, and boiled shirt on a muggy spring day that threatened summer. Part, though, came from his own fear. Sharp as Anne Colleton was, she looked right at Negroes—at one person in three in the CSA—without even seeing them…or maybe seeing them only as laborers, not as people. An awful lot of white folks saw—or didn’t see—blacks the same way. Anne Colleton was more clever than most of them, though. If she ever really looked instead of taking things for granted—

She looked…toward a clock on the wall. Her expression faded to one of discontent. “Probably too late for Cassius to bring in a couple of turkeys before nightfall. Go tell him to hunt tomorrow. I want to lay on a fancy supper then.”

“Yes, ma’am.” Scipio slid the tray out from under the
Charleston Mercury
and took it back to the table in the front hall where it rested. He was always delighted at escaping the mistress’ attention—except when she sent him out to Cassius. Her eyes remained closed to the double game Scipio was playing. Whatever else you said about him, Cassius had his eyes wide, wide open.

He was sitting on the steps in front of his cottage, running a cleaning patch through the barrels of his shotgun, when Scipio came up. The hunter’s weathered face cracked into a leathery grin. He jumped to his feet, limber as a man half his age. “Kip! What fo’ you do me de favor o’ yo’ comp’ny?” Ignoring the irony, Scipio told him what Anne Colleton wanted. Cassius nodded vigorously. “I do that.” He waved Scipio an invitation. “Come inside. You ’n’ me, we talk.”

Normally, Scipio dreaded that invitation, though he found it impossible to refuse. Today, though, he thought he would do more talking than usual. As soon as Cassius shut the door to give them privacy, he began, “You know what de Socialists do in New York City? They rise up, an’ do Jesus! they make the USA—”

Cassius waved him to silence. “Kip, dat
ol
’ news,” he said scornfully. “Dat happen
las
’ week. It over an’ done with now, ’cep’ fo’ de ’pression. De ’pression, dat go on a long time. Always do.” He sounded very cynical, very sure.

Scipio stared. “But de newspaper jus’ say today—”

“White folks’ paper.” Cassius laced his voice with even more scorn than before. “Dey got to wait, dey got to decide what they want they good little boys an’ girls to hear about. De buckra, you give bad news to they, they get res’less.”

“How you know ’fo’ de newspaper come?” Scipio asked.

“Somebody not so far, they got a wireless set,” Cassius answered after a moment’s hesitation. In lieu of staring, Scipio looked down at the weathered pine boards of the floor. That somebody—presumably a Negro—among the Red would-be revolutionaries had the knowledge to run a wireless set, that that somebody (and, unless Scipio was wrong, a lot of somebodies in the CSA) had acquired such knowledge under the nose of the Confederate authorities…put that together with the undoubted desperation of the rising that would come, and maybe, just maybe…

“Maybe, jus’ maybe, come de revolution, we win,” Scipio said softly.

“Do Jesus! Hell yes, we win,” Cassius declared. “De dialectic say, when de whole of de proletariat rise up, de capitalists an’ de bourgeoisie, they cain’t no way put we down again.”

Saying a thing didn’t make it so. Scipio knew that. He’d even tried telling Cassius and Island and the other Reds as much. They didn’t listen to him, any more than the preacher would have if he’d denied Jesus. If they had men on wireless sets—maybe, just maybe, they had reason not to listen.

Chester Martin ducked behind a stretch of brick wall that reached up to his belly button. It was a hard landing; more bricks lay all around what was left of the wall. Somewhere not far away were two whitewashed pieces of wood nailed together at right angles. Once upon a time, this had been a church on the outskirts of Big Lick, Virginia. Now it offered him a different kind of salvation.

A Confederate bullet smacked the other side of the bricks. Maybe it had been aimed at him, maybe fired at random. He had no way of knowing. What he did know was that the bricks were good and solid, and would keep rifle and machine-gun fire from him, as long as he stayed low. Anybody who hadn’t learned to stay low by now was already dead or wounded.

Martin took advantage of the momentary respite to put a fresh, full clip on his Springfield. Never could tell when you’d have to try to kill somebody—or several somebodies—in a hurry. If one of the Rebs had more bullets in his rifle than you did in yours…“You’d be sorry,” Martin muttered. “I don’t want to be sorry. I want the other son of a bitch to be sorry.”