American Empire: The Center Cannot Hold (6 page)

  “Saturday afternoon? I won’t be here anyway,” George, Jr., said.

  “What? Why not?” Sylvia asked.

  “Because I got a job carrying fish and ice down on T Wharf, that’s why.” Her son looked ready to burst with pride. “Thirty-five cents an hour, and it lets me get started, Ma.” Slowly, Sylvia nodded. “Your father started on T Wharf right about your age, too,” she said. People who caught fish in Boston almost always started young. But George, Jr., suddenly didn’t seem so young as all that. He was old enough to have convinced someone to hire him, anyhow.

  He said, “I’ll bring all my money home to you, Ma, every penny. Cross my heart and hope to die if I don’t. I won’t spend a bit on candy or pop or anything, honest I won’t. I know we need it. So did the fellow who hired me. He asked if I was Pa’s boy, and when I said yes he gave me the job right there. His name’s Fred Butcher.”

  “Oh, yes. I know him—you’ve met him, too, you know.” Sylvia nodded again. “He used to go out with your father on the
Ripple
. He was first mate in those days, and he’s done well for himself since.”

  “As soon as I can, Ma,
I’ll
go out and make money,” Mary Jane promised, adding, “I don’t much like school anyway.”

  “You need to keep going a while longer,” Sylvia said sternly. She rounded on her son. “And so do you.

  If you study hard, maybe you can get a good job, and you won’t stay down on T Wharf your whole life.” She might as well have spoken Chinese. Staring at her in perfect incomprehension, George, Jr., said,

  “But I
like
it down on T Wharf, Ma.”

  Sylvia flipped the halibut steaks with a spatula. She thought about explaining why all the backbreaking jobs associated with the fishing weren’t necessarily good choices, but she could tell he wouldn’t listen.

  His father wouldn’t have, either. She didn’t start a fight she had no hope of winning. Instead, she just said, “Supper will be ready in a couple of minutes. Go wash your hands, both of you.” Joe Kennedy and his wife knocked on the door that Saturday afternoon a few minutes after Sylvia got home. Rose Kennedy was pretty in a bony way, and more refined than Sylvia had expected. She did warm up, a little, to Mary Jane. “You’re sweet, dear. Will we be friends?” Mary Jane considered, then shrugged. Joe Kennedy said, “Come on, Mrs. Enos. My motorcar’s out in front of the building. People are looking forward to hearing you; they really are.” That still astonished Sylvia. So did Kennedy’s motorcar. She’d expected a plain black Ford, the kind most people drove. But he had an enormous Oldsmobile roadster, painted fire-engine red. He drove as if he owned the only car on the street, too, which in Boston was an invitation to suicide. Somehow, he reached the Democratic Party hall unscathed. Sylvia discovered a belief in miracles.

  “Here she is, ladies and gentlemen!” Kennedy introduced her as if she were a vaudeville star. “The brave lady you’ve been waiting for, Sylvia Enos!”

  Looking out at that sea of faces frightened Sylvia. The wave of applause frightened and warmed her at the same time. She stammered a little at first, but gained fluency as she explained what she’d done in South Carolina, and why. She’d told the story before; it got easier each time. She finished, “If we forget
about the war, try to pretend it never happened, what did we really win? Nothing!” The applause that came then rang louder still.

 
J
ake Featherston drummed his fingers on his desk. Spring was in the air in Richmond; the trees were putting on new leaves, while birdsong gladdened every ear. Or almost every ear—it did very little for Featherston. He’d led a battery of three-inch guns during the war, and much preferred their bellowing to the sweet notes of catbird and sparrow. When the guns roared, at least a man knew he was in a fight.

  “And we are, God damn it,” Featherston muttered. The leader of the Freedom Party was a lanky man in his mid-thirties, with cheekbones and chin thrusting up under the flesh of his face like rocks under a thin coat of soil on some farm that would always yield more trouble than crops. His eyes . . . Some people were drawn to them, while others flinched away. He knew that. He didn’t quite understand it, but he knew it and used it.
I always mean what I say,
 he told himself.
And that shows. With all the lying sons
of bitches running around loose, you’d better believe it shows.

  If he looked out his window, he could see Capitol Square, and the Confederate Capitol in it. His lip curled in fine contempt. If that wasn’t the home of some of the biggest, lyingest sons of bitches in the whole wide world . . . “If it isn’t, then I’m a nigger,” Featherston declared. He talked to himself a fair amount, hardly noticing he was doing it. More than three years of serving a gun had taken a good deal of his hearing. People who didn’t care for him claimed he was selectively deaf. They had a point, too, though he wasn’t about to admit it.

  The Capitol shared the square with a large equestrian statue of George Washington—who, being a Virginian, was much more revered in the CSA than in the USA these days—and an even larger one of Albert Sidney Johnston, hero and martyr during the War of Secession. Somewhere between one of those statues and the other, Woodrow Wilson had declared war on the USA almost ten years before.

  “We should’ve licked those Yankee bastards,” Featherston said, as if somebody’d claimed otherwise.

  “If the niggers hadn’t risen up and stabbed us in the back, we
would’ve
licked those Yankee bastards.” He believed it with every fiber of his being.

 
  And if that jackass down in Birmingham hadn’t blown out President Hampton’s stinking brains,
what there were of them, the Party’d be well on its way
towards putting this country back on its
feet again.
 Jake slammed a scarred, callused fist down on the desk. Papers jumped.
I was
so
close,
dammit.
 He’d come within a whisker—well, two whiskers—of winning the presidential election in 1921.

  Looking toward 1927, he’d seen nothing but smooth sailing ahead.

  Of course, one of the reasons the Freedom Party had almost won in 1921 was that its members went out there and brawled with anybody rash enough to have a different opinion. If you looked at things from one angle, President Hampton’s assassination followed from the Freedom Party’s nature almost as inexorably as night followed day.

  Jake Featherston was not, had never been, and never would be a man to look at things that way.

  He’d watched the Party lose seats in the 1923 Congressional elections. He’d been glad the losses weren’t worse. Other people celebrated because they were as large as they were. Up till that damned unfortunate incident, the Freedom Party had gone from success to success, each building momentum for the next. Unfortunately, he was finding the process worked the same way for failure.

 
  What do we do if the money doesn’t keep coming in? What
can
we do if the money doesn’t keep
coming in?
 he wondered. Only one answer occurred to him.
We go under, that’s what.
 When he’d first joined the Freedom Party in the dark days right after the war, it had been nothing to speak of: a handful of angry men meeting in a saloon, with the membership list and everything else in a cigar box. It could end up that way again, too; he knew as much. Plenty of groups of disgruntled veterans had never got any bigger, and the Party had swallowed up a lot of the ones that had. Some other group could swallow it the same way.

  “No, goddammit,” Jake snarled. For one thing, he remained convinced he was right. If the rest of the world didn’t think so, the rest of the world was wrong. And, for another, he’d got used to leading an important political party. He liked it. Without false modesty—and he was singularly free of modesty, false and otherwise—he knew he was good at it. He didn’t want to play second fiddle to anybody else, and he didn’t want to go back to being a big fish in a tiny pond.

  The telephone on his desk jangled. He picked it up. “Featherston,” he barked into the mouthpiece.

  “Yes, Mr. Featherston,” his secretary said. “I just wanted to remind you that you’ve got that talk on the wireless coming up in a little more than an hour. You’ll want to make sure you’re at the studio on time.”

  “Thank you kindly, Lulu,” Featherston answered. He was more polite to Lulu Mattox than to practically anybody else he could think of. Unlike most people, his secretary deserved it. She was a maiden lady, somewhere between forty and seventy. Once upon a time, he’d read or heard—he couldn’t remember where or when—that Roman Catholic nuns were the brides of Christ. What he really knew about Catholicism would fit on the head of a pin; he’d been raised a hardshell Baptist, and he didn’t get to any church very often these days. But Lulu Mattox, without a doubt, was married to the Freedom Party. She gave it a single-minded devotion that put the enthusiasm of any mere Party man to shame. She had all the files at her fingertips, too, for she was the best-organized person Jake had ever met. He didn’t know what he would do without her.

  A few minutes later, he went downstairs. Guards outside the building came to attention and saluted.

  “Freedom!” they said. The uniforms they wore were similar but not quite identical to those of the Confederate Army. The bayoneted Tredegar rifles they carried were Army issue. Someone might have asked questions about that, but the Freedom Party had gone out of its way to show the world that asking questions about it wasn’t a good idea.

  “Freedom!” Jake echoed, returning those salutes as if he were a general himself. Part of him loathed the fat fools with the wreathed stars on their collar tabs who’d done so much to help the CSA lose the war.

  The rest of him wished he had that kind of power himself.
I’d do a better job with it than those
bastards ever could have.

  A motorcar driven by another uniformed Freedom Party man stopped in front of the building. It was a boxy Birmingham, built in the CSA. Jake Featherston was damned if he’d go around Richmond in a Yankee automobile. “That wireless place,” he told the driver.

  “Sure, Sarge,” the man replied. He was a large, burly fellow named Virgil Joyner. He’d been with the Freedom Party almost as long as Featherston had, and he’d been through all of the faction fights and the brawls with the Whigs and the Radical Liberals. Not many people could get away with calling Jake anything but “boss,” but he’d earned the right.

  The broadcasting studio was in a new brick building on Franklin near Seventh, not far from the house in Richmond where Robert E. Lee and his family had lived for a time after the War of Secession.

  Featherston knew that only because he’d grown up in and around Richmond. Nothing remained of the house these days; Yankee bombs and the fires that so often followed them had leveled it.

  “Hello, Mr. Featherston!” exclaimed the bright little man who ran the studio and the wireless station of which it was a part. His name was Saul Goldman. Since he was a Jew, Featherston assumed he sounded so cheerful, so friendly, because he was getting paid. He was bound to be a Radical Liberal himself, if not an out-and-out Red.
Long as we give ’em the money, these bastards’ll sell us the rope we use to
hang ’em,
 Featherston thought scornfully.

  But if Goldman acted friendly, he’d play along—for now. “Good to see you,” he said, and shook hands polite as a banker. “Everything ready for me?”

  “Yes, sir. You’re in Studio B this time. Follow me. You have your script?”

  “Oh, yeah. You bet I do.” Featherston followed Goldman down a narrow, dingy hall to a cramped little studio whose walls and ceiling were covered by what looked like the cardboard bottoms of egg cartons.

  The stuff looked funny, but it helped kill echoes. The studio held a table with a microphone on it and a rickety chair. That was all. Jake pointed to the engineer in the next room, whom he could see through a window. “He’ll give me the signal when it’s time?”

  Saul Goldman smiled. “That’s right. You know the routine almost like you work here.”

  “I’d better by now, don’t you think?” Featherston sat down in front of the microphone and set his script on the table. He went through it quickly to make sure he had all the pages. Once he’d lost one, and had to ad-lib a bridge to the next one he had. Goldman slid out of the studio, closing the door behind him.

  The back of the door had more of those egg-carton sound deadeners glued to it.

  After a bit, the engineer flashed two fingers—two minutes to go. Jake nodded to show he got it. The engineer was a professional, a man whose competence Jake respected. One finger—one minute. Then the fellow pointed straight at him at the same time as a red light went on. For half an hour, the airwaves were his.

  “Confederates, wake up!” he said harshly. “This is Jake Featherston of the Freedom Party, and I’m here to tell you the truth.” He used that phrase to introduce every wireless talk.

  He leaned toward the microphone, as he would have leaned toward a crowd. The first few times he’d done this, not having an audience in front of him had thrown him off stride. Now, though, he could imagine the crowd, hear it in his mind shouting for more. And he had more to give it.

  “We can be a great country again,” he said. “We can, but will we? Not likely, not with the cowards and idiots we’ve got running things in Richmond these days. All they want to do is lick the Yankees’ . . .

  boots.” You couldn’t say some things on the air. No, you couldn’t say them, but sometimes implication worked better anyhow.

  “They want to lick the Yankees’ boots,” Jake repeated. “They’re great ones for sucking up to people, the Whigs are. They even suck up to our Negroes, our own Negroes, if you can believe it. And do you know what, folks? They’ve got reason to do it, may I go to the Devil if I lie.” He couldn’t say
hell
on the air, either, but he got his message across. “I’ll tell you what the reason is. Thanks to the Whigs, some of those niggers are citizens of the Confederate States, just like you and me.