American Empire_ Blood And Iron Part 3

She interrupted: "If I convert my holdings in those currencies to gold and U.S. dollars and German marks while the C.S. dollar and the pound and the franc are still worth something something, Mr. Whitson, I will have something something left when the Confederate States get back on their feet. If I wait any longer, I will have nothing. I've waited too long already. Now, sir: will you do as I instruct you, or would you sooner converse with my attorneys?" left when the Confederate States get back on their feet. If I wait any longer, I will have nothing. I've waited too long already. Now, sir: will you do as I instruct you, or would you sooner converse with my attorneys?"

"I am trying to save you from yourself, Miss Colleton," Whitson said peevishly.

"You are my broker, not my pastor," Anne said. "Answer the question I just gave you, if you would be so kind."

Whitson sighed. "Very well. On your head be it." He hung up.

So did Anne, angrily. Her brother, Tom, came into the room. "You look happy with the world," he remarked. His words held less in the way of lighthearted humor and more sardonicism than they would have before the war. He'd gone off, as if to a lark, a captain, and come back a lieutenant-colonel who'd been through all the horrors the Roanoke front had to offer.

"Delighted," Anne returned. She was still sorting out what to make of her brother. In a way, she was pleased he didn't let her do all his thinking for him, as he had before. In another way, that worried her. Having him under her control had been convenient. She went on, "My idiot broker is convinced I'm the maniac. Everything will be rosy day after tomorrow, if you listen to him."

"You're right-he's an idiot," Tom agreed. "You know what I paid for a pair of shoes yesterday? Twenty-three dollars-in paper, of course. I keep my gold and silver in my pocket. I'm I'm not an idiot." not an idiot."

"It will get worse," Anne said. "If it goes on for another year, people's life savings won't be worth anything. That's when we really have to start worrying."

"I'll say it is." Her brother nodded. "If the Red n.i.g.g.e.rs had waited to rise up till that happened, half the white folks in the country would have grabbed their squirrel guns and joined in."

"If they hadn't risen up when they did, we might not be in this mess now," Anne said grimly. "And they did bad enough when they rose."

Tom nodded. The Marxist Negroes had killed Jacob, his brother and Anne's, who was at the Marshlands plantation because Yankee poison gas left him an invalid. They'd burned the mansion, too; only in the past few months had their remnants been cleared from the swamps by the Congaree River.

"Hmm," Tom said. "We need an idiot to take Marshlands off our hands for us. Maybe we ought to sell it to your broker."

"As a matter of fact, I think we need an imbecile to take Marshlands off our hands," Anne said. "G.o.d only knows when anyone will be able to raise a crop of cotton on that land: one fieldhand in three is liable to be a Red, and how could you tell till too late? And the taxes-I haven't seen anyone talking about taking the war taxes off the books, have you?"

"Not likely." Tom snorted. "Government needs every dime it can squeeze. Only good thing about that is, the government has to take paper. If they don't take the paper they print, n.o.body else will, either."

"Small favors," Anne said, and her brother nodded again. She went on, "I'd take just about any kind of offer for Marshlands, and I'd take paper. I'd turn it into gold, but I'd take paper. If that doesn't prove I'm desperate, I don't know what would."

"A hundred years," Tom said. "More than a hundred years-gone." He snapped his fingers. "Like that. Gone." He snapped them again. "Better than fifty years of good times for the whole country. That's gone, too."

"We have to put the pieces back together," Anne said. "We have to make the country strong again, or else the d.a.m.nyankees will run over us again whenever they decide they're ready. Even if they don't decide to run over us, they can make us their little brown cousins, the way we've done with the Empire of Mexico."

"I'm d.a.m.ned if I'll be anybody's little brown cousin," Tom Colleton ground out. He swore with studied deliberation. He'd never cursed in front of her before he went off to the trenches. He still didn't do it in the absentminded style he'd no doubt used there. But when he felt the need, the words came out.

"I feel the same way," Anne answered. "Anyone with an ounce of sense feels the same way. But the Congressional elections prove n.o.body knows how to take us from where we are to where we ought to be."

"What?" Her brother raised an eyebrow. "Split as near down the middle between Whigs and Radical Liberals as makes no difference? And a couple of Socialists elected from Chihuahua, and one from Cuba, and even one from New Orleans, for Christ's sake? Sounds to me like they'll have everything all straightened out by day after tomorrow, or week after next at the latest."

Anne smiled at Tom's pungent sarcasm, but the smile had sharp corners. "Even that mess shouldn't get things too far wrong. We have to do enough of what the Yankees tell us to keep the USA from attacking us while we're flat. Whatever dribs and drabs we happen to have left after that can go to putting us back on our feet. Lean times, yes, but I think we can come through them if we're smart."

"Outside of a couple of panics, we haven't had lean times before," Tom said. "We do need better politicians than the gang we've got. We could use somebody who'd really lead us out of the wilderness instead of stumbling through it for forty years."

"Of the current crop, I'm not going to hold my breath," Anne said. "I-" The telephone interrupted. She picked it up. "h.e.l.lo?" Her mouth fell open, just a little, in surprise. "Commander Kimball! How good to hear from you. I was hoping you'd come through the war all right. Where are you now?"

"I'm in Charleston," Roger Kimball answered. "And what the h.e.l.l is this 'Commander Kimball' nonsense? You know me better than that, baby." Unlike her brother, Kimball swore whenever he felt like it and didn't care who was listening. He not only had rough edges, he gloried in them. And he was right-she did know him intimately enough, in every sense of the word, to call him by his Christian name.

That she could, though, didn't mean she had to. She enjoyed keeping men off balance. "In Charleston? How nice," she said. "I hope you can get up to St. Matthews before long. You do know my brother, Lieutenant-Colonel Colleton, is staying with me here in town?" You do know that, even if you get up to St. Matthews, you're not going to make love with me right now? You do know that, even if you get up to St. Matthews, you're not going to make love with me right now?

Kimball was brash. He wasn't stupid. Anne couldn't abide stupidity. He understood what she meant without her having to spell it out. Laughing a sour laugh, he answered, "And he'll whale the living turpentine out of me if I put my hands where they don't belong, will he? Sweetheart, I hate to tell you this, but I haven't got the jack for pleasure trips without much pleasure. I'm on the beach, same as every other submarine skipper in the whole G.o.dd.a.m.n Navy." Where he could banter about pa.s.sing on a chance to pay a social call that was only a social call, his voice showed raw pain when he told her the Navy had cut him loose.

"I'm very sorry to hear that," she said, and trusted him to understand she understood what grieved him most. "What are you going to do now?"

"Don't know yet," Kimball said. "I may try and make a go of it here, or I may head down to South America. Plenty of navies there that could use somebody who really knows what he's doing when he looks through a periscope."

That was likely to be true. The South American republics had chosen sides in the Great War as the rest of the world had done. Losers would be looking for revenge. Winners would be looking to make sure they didn't get it.

Anne said, "Whatever you decide to do, I wish you the very best."

"But not enough for you to send your brother out to hunt possums or something, eh?" Kimball laughed again. "Never mind. We'll get another chance one of these days, I reckon. Good luck to the lieutenant-colonel, too, the son of a b.i.t.c.h." Before she could answer, he hung up.

So did she, and she laughed, too. She admired the submariner; he was, she judged, almost as thoroughly self-centered as herself. Tom raised an eyebrow. "Who's this Commander-Kimball, is it?"

"That's right. He captained a submarine," Anne answered. "I got to know him on the train to New Orleans not long after the war started." He'd seduced her in his Pullman berth, too, but she didn't mention that.

"How well do you know him?" Tom asked.

"We're friends," she said. I was in bed with him down in Charleston when the Red Negro uprising broke out. I was in bed with him down in Charleston when the Red Negro uprising broke out. She didn't mention that, either. She didn't mention that, either.

She didn't have to. "Are you more than...friends?" her brother demanded.

Before the war, he wouldn't have dared question her that way. "I've never asked what you did while you weren't fighting," she said. "What I did, or didn't do, is none of your business."

Tom set his jaw and looked stubborn. He wouldn't have done that before the war, either. No, she couldn't control him any more, not with certainty. He said, "If you're going to marry the guy, it is. If he's just after your money, I'll send him packing. What you're doing affects me, you know."

Nor would he have had that thought in 1914. "If he were just after my money, don't you think I I would have sent him packing?" she asked in return. "I can take care of myself, you know, with a rifle or any other way." would have sent him packing?" she asked in return. "I can take care of myself, you know, with a rifle or any other way."

"All right," Tom said. "People who fall in love are liable to go all soft in the head, though. I wanted to make sure it hadn't happened to you."

"When it does, you can shovel dirt on me, because I'll be dead." Anne spoke with great conviction. Tom came over and kissed her on the cheek. They both laughed, liking each other very much at that moment.

In the trenches down in Virginia, Chester Martin had heard New Englanders talk about a lazy wind, a wind that didn't bother blowing around a man but went straight through him. The wind coming off Lake Erie this morning while he picketed the Toledo steel mill where he would sooner have been working was just that kind. In spite of coat and long underwear, in spite of hat and ear m.u.f.fs, he s.h.i.+vered and his teeth chattered as he trudged back and forth in front of the plant.

His sign was stark in its simplicity. It bore but one word, that in letters a foot high: THIEVES THIEVES! "They want to cut our wages," he said to the fellow in front of him, a stocky man named Albert Bauer. "We went out and got shot at-h.e.l.l, I got shot-and they stayed home and got rich. No, they got richer; they were already rich. And they want to cut our wages."

Bauer was a solid Socialist. He said, "This is what we get for reelecting that b.a.s.t.a.r.d Roosevelt."

"He's not so bad," Martin said. A Democrat himself, he walked the picket line with his more radical coworkers. "He visited my stretch of the front once; h.e.l.l, I jumped on him when the Rebs started sh.e.l.ling us. Later, when I got wounded, he found out about it and sent me a note."

"Bully!" Bauer said. "Can you eat the note? Can you take it to the bank and turn it into money? Roosevelt will oblige. Feudal n.o.bles do. But does he care about whether you starve? Not likely!"

"Hus.h.!.+" Chester Martin said suddenly. He pointed. "Here come the scabs." The factory owners always had people willing to work for them, no matter how little they paid. They also had the police on their side.

Jeers and curses and all manner of abuse rained down on the heads of the workers taking the places of the men who'd gone on strike. So did a few rocks and bottles, in spite of Socialist calls for calm and in spite of the strong force of blue-uniformed policemen escorting them into the steel mill. "Well, now they've gone and done it," Albert Bauer said in disgusted tones. "Now they've given the G.o.dd.a.m.n cops the G.o.dd.a.m.n excuse they need to go on and suppress us."

He proved a good prophet. As soon as the police had hustled the scabs into the plant, they turned around and yanked the nightsticks off their belts. A whistle blew, as if an officer during the war were ordering his men out of the trenches and over the top. Shouting fiercely, the police charged the strikers.

Chester Martin had not been an officer. But, thanks to casualties in the ranks above him, he'd briefly commanded a company in Virginia not long before the CSA asked for an armistice. Almost all the men on the picket line had seen combat, too. "Come on!" he shouted. "We can take these fat sons of b.i.t.c.hes! Let's give 'em some bayonet drill."

He tore the cardboard sheet off his picket sign. The stick he was left holding wasn't as good a weapon as a billy club, but it wasn't to be despised, either. All around him, his companions imitated his action.

Here came the cops, a solid phalanx of them. Even so, they were outnumbered. They relied on discipline and on being able to create fear to get their way. After gas and machine guns and artillery and Confederate barrels, Martin found absurd the idea that he should be afraid of conscription-dodgers with clubs. He heard laughter from the men to either side of him, too.

In the instant before the red-faced policemen slammed into the picketers, Martin saw surprise and doubt on the features of a couple of blue-uniformed goons. Then he was at close quarters with them, and had no chance to study their expressions in any detail.

One of them swung a nightstick at his head. As if the cop were a Rebel with a clubbed rifle, Martin ducked. Things seemed to move very slowly, as they had in combat in the trenches. As he would have with a bayoneted rifle, Martin jabbed the end of his stick into the policeman's beefy side. A bayonet would have deflated the fellow for good. As things were, the cop grunted in pain and tried to twist away. Martin kicked him in the belly. He folded up like a concertina, the nightstick flying out of his hand.

Martin wished he could have grabbed the solid club, but it landed on the sidewalk, well out of his reach. He caught another policeman in the throat with the end of what had been the handle for his picket sign. Anyone who'd been in the trenches would have had no trouble blocking that lunge or knocking it aside. The cop let out a gargling shout and went over on his back.

"See?" Martin shouted. "They aren't so G.o.dd.a.m.n tough-the Rebs'd eat 'em for breakfast. And we can whip 'em, too."

"Rally!" one of the policemen shouted. The cops were taking longer than the strikers to figure out what was going on. Not until something close to half their number had fallen or had their nightsticks taken away did another cry ring out: "Drop back and regroup!"

Yelling in triumph, the men from the picket line surged after them. "Down with the scabs!" they roared. "Down with the cops!" They trampled underfoot the policemen who couldn't fall back and regroup.

Maybe one of those police officers was first to yank out his pistol and start shooting at the men who were stomping him. But after one or two sharp cracks rang out, it suddenly seemed as if every cop in Toledo were drawing his revolver and blazing away at the striking steelworkers.

Against gunfire, the strikers had no defense. Some fell screaming in pain. Some fell silently, and would not rise again. A few kept trying to advance on the police in spite of everything. Most, though, Chester Martin among them, knew how hopeless that was. He was not ashamed to run.

Bullets zipped past his head. Now that the police had opened fire, they seemed intent on emptying their revolvers and slaying as many strikers as they could. In their shoes, Martin probably would have done the same. After the men from the picket line had come so close to overwhelming the cops altogether, they wanted their own back. If strikers got to thinking they could defeat the police, no man in blue would be safe.

"Next time," somebody not far away panted, "next time we bring our own guns to the dance, by Jesus!"

"That's right," somebody else said. "They want a war, we'll give 'em a f.u.c.king war, see if we don't."

All Martin wanted was to be able to work and to bring home a halfway decent wage. He didn't think that was too much to ask. The men who ran the steel mill-the trust bosses with their top hats and diamond pinky rings, so beloved of editorial cartoonists-evidently thought otherwise. A bullet slapped into the flesh of a man close by. Martin had heard that sound too many times on too many fields to mistake it for anything else. The steelworker crumpled with a groan.

Martin dashed around a corner. After that, he didn't need to worry about getting shot. The people on the street weren't striking; they were going about their ordinary business. If the cops suddenly started spraying lead through their ranks, they-or their survivors-could complain to city hall with some hope of being heard.

It looked to be open season on picketers, though. Martin realized he was still holding the stick he'd used against the police to such good effect. As casually as he could, he let it fall to the pavement. Pulling his cap down over his eyes (and wondering how it had managed to stay on his head through the melee), he trudged down the street toward the nearest trolley stop.

Several policemen, pistols drawn, ran past him while he stood waiting. His eyes widened; maybe he'd been wrong about how much mayhem the cops were willing to dish out to the general public. Since he didn't do anything but stand there, they left him alone. If he'd tried to flee...He didn't care to think what might have happened then.

When the trolley came clanging up to the stop, he threw a nickel in the fare box and took a seat even though it was heading away from his parents' flat, where he was staying. He rode for more than a mile, till he'd put the steel mill well behind him. When he did get off, he was only a block or so away from the county courthouse.

Across the street from the building stood a statue of Remembrance, a smaller replica of the great one in New York harbor. Remembrance had finally brought the United States victory over the CSA. What sort of statue would have to go up before anyone recognized that the working man deserved his due? How long would it take before he did?

Those were questions that made Martin look at Remembrance in a new way. His left arm bore a large, ugly scar, a reminder of what he'd suffered for his country's sake. What was his country willing to do for him?

"Shoot me again, that's what," he muttered. "Is that what I fought for?"

Teddy Roosevelt made noises about caring over what happened to the ordinary working man. Martin's brief meeting with the president in the trenches had made him think Roosevelt was sincere. He wondered what Roosevelt would say about what had happened in Toledo. That would tell whether he meant what he said.

Martin wondered if writing him a letter would do any good. He doubted it. He knew what happened when a private wrote a general a letter: either nothing, or somebody landed on the private like a ton of bricks. Roosevelt would do what he would do, and Chester Martin's view of the matter wouldn't count for beans.

"That's not right," he said. "That's not fair." But it was, he knew too well, the way the world worked.

After a while, he took a streetcar back to his parents' apartment building in Ottawa Hills. His younger sister, Sue, was at work; she'd landed a typist's job after he recovered from his wound and went back to the front. His father was at work, too. That graveled him some; Stephen Douglas Martin had been a steelworker longer than Chester had been alive. He labored down the street from the plant his son was striking. He He had a good job and a good day's pay; Chester wondered if he himself would have to wait till he was gray and wrinkled to say the same. He wondered if he'd ever be able to say the same. had a good job and a good day's pay; Chester wondered if he himself would have to wait till he was gray and wrinkled to say the same. He wondered if he'd ever be able to say the same.

His mother, Louisa, who looked like an older version of Sue, exclaimed in surprise when he came through the door. "I thought you'd be out there all day," she said. She didn't approve of his striking, but he was her son, and she stayed polite about it.

At the moment, he knew a certain amount of relief he'd made it here ahead of the news of trouble. "It got a little lively when the scabs came in," he said, which was technically true but would do for an understatement till a better one came along.

"Were the cops busting heads?" his mother asked. He nodded. She shook her own head, in maternal concern. "That's why I don't want you out there picketing, Chester. You could get hurt."

He started to laugh. He couldn't help it. It wasn't that she was wrong. It was much more that she had no idea how right she was. "If I came through the war, I'm not going to let Toledo goons worry me," he answered.

"You need to worry. You could step in front of a streetcar tomorrow," his mother said. He nodded. She said that a lot. If he was going to worry, trolley cars wouldn't go high on the list. Two other questions topped it. One was, had anyone recognized him while he nerved the strikers to resist the police? The second followed hard upon the first: would any of those people let the police know who he was?

Jefferson Pinkard kept a wary eye on the crucible as it swung into position to pour its molten contents onto the Sloss Works foundry floor. The kid handling the crucible had some notion of what he was doing, but only some. Herb Wallace, the best crucible man Jeff had ever known, had gone off to fight the d.a.m.nyankees-conscription nabbed him early-but he hadn't come home to Birmingham. His bones lay somewhere up in Kentucky.

This time, the pouring went smoothly. Only a tiny, fingerlike rivulet of molten steel broke through the earth and sand walling the mold, and Pinkard and his partner had no trouble stemming it with more earth. Leaning on his rake afterwards, Jeff said, "Wish they were all that easy."

His partner nodded. "Yes, suh, Mistuh Pinkard," Vespasian agreed. The big, bulky Negro-as big and bulky as Pinkard himself-took off his cloth cap and wiped sweat from his forehead. Winter might rule outside, but it was always summertime in h.e.l.l on the foundry floor. Vespasian pointed toward the crucible operator. "Hope to Jesus Billy up there figure out his job before he kill somebody. Ain't happened yet, but he come too d.a.m.n close a couple times."

"Yeah-one of 'em was me last month." Pinkard jumped sideways to show how he'd escaped the misplaced stream of metal. "You was right lively, that's a fact," Vespasian said.

"d.a.m.n well had to be." Pinkard sh.o.r.ed up the edge of the mold at another place where it looked as if it might give way. "The floor did run smoother before the war, and that's a fact, too."

Vespasian didn't answer. He hadn't been on the foundry floor before the war. Back then, Negroes had fed the furnaces and done other jobs that took strong backs and no brains, but the better positions had been in white hands. Jeff's partner then had been his next-door neighbor and best friend, Bedford Cunningham.

But the war had sucked white men into the Confederate Army. The CSA had still needed steel-more steel than ever-to fight the d.a.m.nyankees. Negroes started filling night-s.h.i.+ft jobs once solely the property of white men, then evening-s.h.i.+ft, and then, at last, day-s.h.i.+ft, too.

Back then, before he got conscripted himself, Jeff hadn't wanted to work alongside a black man. He'd done it, though, for the sake of his country. Bedford Cunningham had come back to Birmingham without an arm. A lot of other steel men had come back as invalids. A lot more, like Herb Wallace, hadn't come back at all.

And so even now, with the war over for half a year, Negroes remained in some of the places they had taken during the war: they'd gained experience. Pinkard couldn't argue against experience, not when he'd just been griping about Billy. And Vespasian, who was in his forties, didn't get uppity the way a lot of younger blacks did. As far as the work went, he made a good enough partner. Jeff still felt uncomfortable working beside him.

He didn't quit. He'd have felt a lot more uncomfortable unemployed. Steel was all he knew. If he got a job at another foundry, he had no guarantee he wouldn't be working with another Negro, and one harder to get along with than Vespasian. He didn't care to move out of Sloss company housing, either (though he wished he didn't live next door to Bedford any more). He endured.

He never once wondered what Vespasian thought of working next to him.

At s.h.i.+ft-changing time, the steam whistle blew a blast that cut through the rest of the din on the floor like a hot knife through pork fat. "See you in the mornin', Mistuh Pinkard," Vespasian said.

"Yeah," Jeff answered. "See you."

They clocked out separately, and left the enormous foundry building separately, too. It wasn't the way it had been, when Pinkard and Bedford had sometimes gone home to their side-by-side yellow cottages with their arms draped over each other's shoulders. Vespasian didn't have a yellow cottage. His cabin was painted primer red, which was cheaper.

Some of the white men going home waved to Pinkard, as did a couple coming onto the evening s.h.i.+ft. He waved back. He was always glad to see familiar faces. He didn't see that many. s.h.i.+ft changes reminded him how little remained the same as it had been in 1914. Being reminded hurt.

His breath smoked as he hurried home. They'd had snow the week before, which wasn't common in Birmingham. On top of everything else, it had been a hard winter. The gra.s.s was yellow-brown and dead. Somebody sneezed not far from Jeff. He hoped it was from a cold, or from a tickling mustache hair. The Spanish influenza was killing men who'd lived through all the bullets the d.a.m.nyankees aimed at them-and killing their wives and mothers and children, too.

In spite of the cold, f.a.n.n.y Cunningham was standing in front of her house, gossiping with the woman who lived on the other side of her from the Pinkards. She waved to Jeff as he walked by. He waved back, calling, "How's Bedford doing?"

"Right good," she answered. "He's been cheerful the whole day through."