In at the Death (47 page)

The military attorney did some more scrawling. “Maybe you want to forget the word
nigger
.”

“How come?” Pinkard asked, genuinely confused.

“Because you hammer another nail into your coffin every time you say it,” Goldstein answered. “In the United States, it’s an insult, a fighting word.” The idea that Negroes could fight whites without having the whole country land on them with both feet deeply offended Jeff. He was shrewd enough to see saying so wouldn’t do him any good. He just nodded instead. So did Isidore Goldstein, who went on, “And they’ll say things were so bad for the colored population in the Confederate States under Freedom Party rule that it had no choice but to rebel.”

“Well, they can can say any damn thing they want,” Jeff replied. “Saying something doesn’t make it so, though.”

“‘I’m Jake Featherston, and I’m here to tell you the truth,’” Goldstein quoted with savage relish. “Yes, we’ve noticed that.”

“Oh, yeah. You damnyankees never once told a lie. And every one of you just loves coons, too. And I bet your shit don’t stink, either.”

“All of which would be good points except for two minor details.” The lawyer ticked them off on his fingers: “First one is, the United States are going to win and the Confederate States are going to lose. Second one is, you really are responsible for upwards of a million deaths.”

“So what?” Jeff said. That made even Goldstein blink. Angrily, Pinkard said it again: “So what, goddammit? Who gave the orders to drop those fucking superbombs on our cities? You think that asshole ain’t a bigger criminal than me? You gonna hang him by the balls? Like hell you will! Chances are you’ll pin a medal on the motherfucker instead.”

“Again, two minor details,” Goldstein said. “First, you used the superbomb before we did—”

“Yeah, and I wish we woulda started a year ago,” Jeff broke in. “Then you’d be laughing out of the other side of your face.”

Goldstein continued as if he hadn’t spoken: “And, again, we’re winning and you’re not. You might do well to sound sorry for what you’ve done and to blame it on Featherston and on Ferdinand Koenig. I’m afraid I don’t think it will do you much good, but it may do you some.”

“You want me to turn traitor,” Jeff said.

“I’m trying to tell you how you have some small chance of staying alive,” Isidore Goldstein said. “If you don’t care, I can’t do much for you. I’m very much afraid I can’t do much for you anyhow.”

“I’ll tell you what I’m sorry about. I’m sorry we lost,” Pinkard said. “I’m sorry it comes down to me havin’ to try and beg my life from a bunch of damnyankees. Seems like I got a choice between dyin’ on my feet and maybe livin’ on my knees. You had a choice like that, Mr. Smartass Lawyer, what would you do?”

“I don’t know. How can any man know for sure before he has to find out the hard way?” Goldstein said. “But I’m still Jewish. That says I likely have some stubborn ancestors up in the branches of my family tree.”

Jeff hadn’t thought of it like that. He didn’t exactly love Jews. But, like most Confederates, he aimed the greater portion of his scorn at Negroes and a big part of what was left at Mexicans. (He wondered what Hip Rodriguez would do in a mess like this. He didn’t think Hip would crawl; greaser or not, Hip was a man. But why—
why
, dammit?—did he go and eat his gun?)

“There you are, then,” Jeff said.

“Yeah, here I am. And here you are, and how the hell am I supposed to defend you?” Goldstein shook his head. “I’ll give it my best shot. Better than you deserve, too. But then like I said, it’s the guys who don’t deserve a defense who deserve it most of all.”

What was that supposed to mean? Jeff was still chewing on it when the U.S. MPs took him back to jail. He looked around as he walked, hoping for a glimpse of Edith. No luck. Wherever she was, she wasn’t close by. He wondered whether he’d ever see her again. If the Yankees hanged him, would they be cruel enough to keep her away even then? He never wondered what the Negroes on their way to his bathhouses thought of him.

T
hese days, the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War had less to do. Congress had set it up to hold the Army’s feet to the fire—and the Navy’s, too. With the war almost won, the Senators and Representatives didn’t have much to criticize. Flora Blackford wished the superbomb had vaporized Jake Featherston—but so did the Army. Sooner or later, it would catch him. Either that, or he’d die fighting to escape capture. Flora didn’t much care which, as long as the world was rid of him.

A Senator was grilling a Navy captain about why the United States was having so much trouble matching the new German submersible designs. Those promised a revolution in submarine warfare once the USA got them right. That hadn’t happened yet.

“Isn’t it a fact, Captain Rickover, that the German Navy has had these new models in service for almost a year?”

“Yes, but we only got the plans a few months ago,” Rickover answered.
You tell him
, Flora thought: the captain was a Jew, one of the few to rise so high. He had no give in him, continuing, “We’ll get the boats built faster than the
Kriegsmarine
did, but we can’t do it yesterday. I’m sorry. I would if I could.”

“I don’t need you to be facetious, Captain.”

“Well, I don’t need you to play Monday-morning coach, Senator, but the rules are set up to let you do that if you want to.”

“Mr. Chairman, this witness is being uncooperative,” the Senator complained.

“I am not,” Rickover said before the chairman could rule on the dispute. “The distinguished gentleman from Dakota—a state famous for its seafaring tradition—wants the Navy Department to accomplish the impossible. The merely improbable, which we’ve done time and again, no longer satisfies him.”

The Senator from Dakota spluttered. The chairman plied his gavel with might and main. Before Flora found out how the exciting serial ended, a page hurried up to her and whispered, “Excuse me, Congresswoman, but you have a telegram.”

“Thank you.” Flora stood and slipped out.
Escaping this nonsense is a relief, nothing else but
, she thought.

Then she saw the kid in the Western Union uniform, darker and greener than the one soldiers wore. When a messenger boy waited for you, did you really want the wire he carried? Too often, it was like seeing the Angel of Death in front of you. Her hand shook a little as she reached out for the flimsy yellow envelope.

“Much obliged, ma’am,” he said when she gave him a quarter. He touched two fingers to the brim of his cap in a sort of salute, then hurried away.

She had to make herself open the envelope. The blood ran cold in her veins—it almost didn’t want to run at all—when she saw the telegram was from the War Department.
The Secretary of War deeply regrets to inform you…
Tears blurred the words; she had to blink several times before she could see to go on.
…that your son, Joshua Blackford, was wounded in action on the Arkansas front. The wound is not believed to be serious, and a full recovery is expected
. The printed signature of a lieutenant colonel—an assistant adjutant general—followed.

“How bad is it, ma’am?” the Congressional page asked.

“Wounded,” Flora answered automatically. “The wire says they think he’ll get better.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” the page said. If the war went on another year—which didn’t seem likely—he might be in uniform himself. He probably had friends who already were. Did he have any who’d been unlucky? Flora didn’t want to ask.

She hurried over to the bank of telephones down the hall from the committee meeting room. Instead of calling Lieutenant Colonel Pfeil, whose signature probably went out on dozens of wires a day, she rang up Franklin Roosevelt. In one way, a wounded private was no concern of his. But when the wounded private was the son of a Congresswoman who was also a former First Lady and who was friends with the Assistant Secretary of War…Maybe Roosevelt would know more than he might if she were calling about Private Joe Doakes.

She got through in a hurry. “Hello, Flora.” Roosevelt didn’t sound as ebullient as usual, so he probably knew something. “Yes, I had heard. I’m sorry,” he said when she asked.

“What happened?” she demanded.

“Well, this is all unofficial, because I’m not supposed to keep track of such things, but I understand he’s lost the middle finger on his left hand,” Roosevelt said. “Bullet or a shell fragment—I don’t know which, and I’m not sure anyone else does, either. Not a crippling wound…Um, he isn’t left-handed, is he?”

“No,” Flora said. She didn’t know whether to be relieved it wasn’t worse or horrified that it had happened at all. She ended up being both at once, a stew that made her heart pound and her stomach churn.

“That’s good. If he isn’t, I’d say it’s what the men call a hometowner.”

“A hometowner.” She’d heard the phrase, too. “
Alevai
,” she said. “By the time he gets well, the war will be over, won’t it?”

“We sure hope so,” Roosevelt answered. “Nothing is ever as sure as we wish it would be, but we hope so.”

“Do you know where he is? The wire didn’t say.”

“I don’t know, but I’m sure I can find out for you. Are you in your office?”

“No, I’m at a telephone outside the committee meeting room. But I can get there in five minutes.”

“All right. Let me see what I can find out, and I’ll call you back.” The Assistant Secretary of War hung up.

Flora ducked back into the meeting room to explain what had happened. The Senators and Representatives made sympathetic noises; a lot of them had fought in the last war, and several had sons at the front this time around. Captain Rickover gave her his best wishes from the witness stand.

The telephone was ringing when she hurried into her office. Bertha stared in surprise. “Hello, Congresswoman! How funny you should walk in. Mr. Roosevelt is on the line for you.”

“I’ll take it right here,” Flora said, and grabbed the handset away from her secretary. “Hello, Franklin! Here I am.”

“Hello, Flora. Joshua is in the military hospital in Thayer, Missouri, which is right on the border with Arkansas.”

“Thayer, Missouri,” Flora repeated. “Thank you.” She hung up, then turned to Bertha. “Get me to Thayer, Missouri, as fast as humanly possible.”

That turned out to be a flight to St. Louis and a railroad journey down from the big city. Bertha squawked till she found out why Flora needed to make the trip. Then she shut up and arranged the tickets with her usual competence.

Landing in St. Louis, Flora saw to her surprise that it had been hit almost as hard as Philadelphia. The war in the West never got the press things farther east did. But Confederate bombers still came up to strike St. Louis, and long-range C.S. rockets fired from Arkansas had hit the town hard.

The train ride southwest from St. Louis to Thayer was…a train ride. Every few miles, a machine-gun nest—sometimes sandbagged, more often a concrete blockhouse—guarded the track. Here west of the Mississippi, spaces were wide and soldiers thin on the ground. Confederate raiders slipped north every now and again. The Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War would have had something sharp to say about that…if it hadn’t had so many other bigger things closer to home to worry about.

Thayer had gone up as a railroad town. It had flourished, in a modest way, as a cross-border trading center—and then suffered when the war strangled the trade that kept it going. The military hospital on the edge of town put a little life back into the economy—but at what a cost!

Joshua wasn’t in his bed when Flora got there to see him. She feared something had gone wrong and he was back in the doctors’ clutches, but the wounded man in the bed next to his said, “He’s playing cards in the common room down at the end of the corridor, ma’am.”

“Oh,” Flora said. “Thank you.”

When Flora walked in, Joshua held five cards in his right hand. Bandages swathed the left. He put down the cards to toss money into the pot. “See your five and raise you another five.” Then he looked up from the poker game. “Oh, hi, Mom,” he said, as if they were bumping into each other back home. “Be with you in a minute. I have to finish cleaning Spamhead’s clock.”

“In your dreams, kid. I’ll raise you five more.” Another greenback fluttered down in the center of the table. The sergeant called Spamhead did have a square, very pink face. He seemed to take the nickname for granted. Flora wouldn’t have wanted to be called anything like that.

He won the pot, too—his straight beat Joshua’s three tens. Joshua said, “Oh, darn!” All the other poker players laughed at him. What would he have said if his mother weren’t there to hear it? Something spicier, no doubt. He stood up from the table and walked over to Flora. “I didn’t think you’d get here so fast.”

“How are you?” Flora asked.

Joshua raised his wounded hand. “It hurts,” he said, as he might have said,
It’s sunny outside
. “But not too bad. Plenty of guys here are worse off. Poor Spamhead lost a foot—he stepped on a mine. He’s lucky it wasn’t one of those bouncing ones—it would’ve blown his balls off…. Sorry.”

“It’s all right,” Flora told him. “How else can you say that?”
Spamhead got mutilated, and Joshua think’s he’s lucky. I can see why, but…
“What does your doctor say?”

“That it was a clean wound. That it’s nothing much to flabble about. That—”

“Easy for him to say,” Flora broke in indignantly. “He didn’t get hurt.”

“Yeah, I know. I thought of that, too,” Joshua said. “But he’s seen plenty worse, so it’s not like he’s wrong, either. I’ll heal from this, and I’ll heal pretty fast. The only thing I won’t be able to do that I could before is give somebody the finger with my left hand.”

“Joshua!” Flora wasn’t exactly shocked, but she was surprised.

Her son grinned sheepishly, but not sheepishly enough—he’d done that on purpose. “I didn’t even think of it,” he said. “The medic who took me back to the aid station was the one who said it first.”

“Terrific. Now I know who to blame.” Flora sounded as if she were about to haul that medic up before the Joint Committee on the Conduct of the War. She was tempted to do it, too. She recognized abuse of power when she saw it, which didn’t mean it failed to tempt her.