Blood and Iron

by Harry Turtledove

  “We’re on the way up,” Featherston said. “We’re on the way up, and nobody’s going to stop us. Now that I’m here, I’m damn glad I came down to Charleston. I can use you, Kimball. You’re a hungry bastard, just like me. There aren’t enough of us, you know what I’m saying?”

  “I sure do.” Kimball stuck out his hand. Featherston clasped it. They clung to each other for a moment, locked in the alliance of the mutually useful. The president of the Confederate States, Kimball reflected, was eligible for only one six-year term. If Jake Featherston did win the job, who would take it after him? Roger Kimball hadn’t known any such ambition before, but he did now.

  Excitement built in Chester Martin as winter gave way to spring. Before long, spring would give way to summer. When summer came to Toledo, so would the Socialist Party national convention.

  “Not Debs again!” he said to Albert Bauer. “He’s run twice, and he’s lost twice. We’ve got to pick somebody new this time, a fresh face. It’s not like it was in 1916, or in 1912, either. We’ve got a real chance to win this year.”

  “In 1912 and 1916, you were a damn Democrat,” Bauer returned, stuffing an envelope. “What gives you the right to tell the Party what to do now?”

  Martin’s wave took in the local headquarters. “That I am here now and wouldn’t have been caught dead here then. Proves my point, doesn’t it?”

  His friend grunted. “Maybe you’ve got something,” Bauer said grudgingly. After a moment, though, he brightened. “This must be how the real old-time Socialists felt when Lincoln brought so many Republicans into the Party after the Second Mexican War. It was nice having more than half a dozen people come to meetings and vote for you, but a lot of the new folks didn’t know a hell of a lot about what Socialism was supposed to mean.”

  “Are you saying I don’t know much?” Martin asked, amusement in his voice.

  “Tell me about the means of production,” Albert Bauer said. “Explain why they don’t belong in the hands of the capitalist class.”

  “I don’t have to sit still for examinations: I’m not in school any more, thank God,” Martin said. “I don’t know much about the means of production, and I don’t give a damn, either. What I do know is, the Democrats have jumped into bed with the fat cats. I want a party to jump into bed with me.”

  “You’re voting your class interest,” Bauer said. “Well, that’s a start. At least you know you have a class interest, which is a devil of a lot more than too many people do. You wouldn’t believe how much trouble we’ve had educating the proletariat to fulfill its proper social role.”

  “Yeah, and one of the reasons why is that you keep talking so fancy, nobody wants to pay any attention to you,” Martin said. “You keep on doing that, the Socialists are going to lose this election, same as they’ve lost all the others. And God only knows when we’ll ever have a better chance.”

  By the way Bauer winced and grimaced, he knew he’d struck a nerve, maybe even struck it harder than he’d intended. “What do you think?” Bauer asked, shifting the subject a little. “Will TR run for a third term?”

  “Nobody ever has before,” Martin answered, but that wasn’t the question Bauer had asked. At length, he said, “Yeah, I think he will. What’s he going to do, dust off his hands and walk away? Go hunt lions and elephants in Africa? You ask me, he likes doing what he’s doing. He’ll try and keep doing it.” He held up a forefinger. “Here’s one for you, Al: if Teddy does run again, will that make things easier or harder for us?”

  “I’m damned if I know,” Bauer replied, his voice troubled. “Nobody knows. Maybe people will remember he fought the war and won it. If they do, they’ll vote for him. Or maybe they’ll remember how many men died and all the trouble we’ve had since. If they do that, they won’t touch him with a ten-foot pole.”

  “The war will have been over for almost three and a half years by the time the election rolls around,” Martin said.

  “That’s a fact.” Albert Bauer sounded glad it was a fact, too. “People don’t remember things very long. Of course”—he didn’t seem to want to be glad about anything—“the Great War is a big thing to forget.”

  “Losing two elections in a row is a big thing to forget, too, and that’s what Debs has done,” Martin said. “If we do run him again, what’ll our slogan be? ‘Third time’s the charm’? I don’t think that’ll work.”

  “He walks in and he knows all the answers.” Bauer might have been talking to the ceiling; since he spoke of Martin in the third person, he wasn’t—quite—talking to him. But then he was once more: “All right, all right, maybe not Debs. But if we don’t run him, who do we run? He’s the one fellow we’ve got who has a following across the whole damn country.”

  “You pick somebody,” Chester Martin said. “You’re always going on about how you’re the old-time Red, so you have to know all these people. I’m nothing but a damn recruit. That’s what you keep telling me, anyway.”

  “Go peddle your papers,” Bauer said. A little less gruffly, he continued, “Go on, take the rest of the day off. It’s Sunday, for Christ’s sake. Don’t you have anything better to do with your time?”

  “Probably.” Martin got up from the table where he and his friend had been preparing fliers for mailing. “But if too many people find better things to do with their time than work for the Party, the work won’t get done. Where will we be then?”

  “Up the same old creek,” Bauer admitted. “But the Rebs won’t capture Philadelphia if you have yourself a couple of beers or something.”

  “Twist my arm,” Martin said, and Bauer did, not very hard. Martin groaned anyway. “Aii! There—you made me do it. See you later.”

  When he stepped outside, spring was in the air. While he’d fought in the Roanoke Valley, it had arrived sooner and more emphatically than it did here by the shore of Lake Erie. That was the one good thing he could say about Virginia. Against it, he set filth and stench and horror and fear and pain and mud and lice. They sent the scales crashing down against the place.

  How many veterans would weigh what they’d been through in the same fashion? Was what they’d done worth it? Could anything have been worth three years of hell on earth? He didn’t think so, especially not when he reckoned in the trouble he’d had after the war was over. Would the rest of the millions who’d worn green-gray—those of them left alive, anyhow—feel as he did? If so, Teddy Roosevelt faced more trouble than he guessed.

  Red flags flew above the Socialists’ building. Toledo cops still prowled past. Martin no longer carried a pistol in his pocket. Something like peace had returned to the labor scene. He wondered how long it would last. The answer supplied itself: till the day after the election.

  One of the policemen in brass-buttoned dark blue flashed Martin a thumbs-up. Martin was so surprised to get it, he tripped on a crack in the sidewalk and almost fell. During the great wave of strikes, that cop had undoubtedly broken workers’ heads along with his goonish chums. Did he think he could turn into a good Socialist with one simple gesture? If he did, he was an even bigger fool than the usual run of cop.

  Or maybe he was a straw, blowing in the wind of change. If a cop found it a good idea to show somebody coming out of the Socialist hall that he wasn’t hostile, who held the power? Who was liable to hold it after March 4, 1921? Maybe the policeman was hedging his bets.

  “Won’t do you any good,” Martin muttered under his breath. “We’ll still remember you bastards. Hell, yes, we will.”

  He listened to himself. That was when he began to think the party that had wandered so long in the wilderness might have a chance to come home at last. The Democrats had ruled the roost for a long time. They wouldn’t be happy about clearing out, not after all these years they wouldn’t.

  “Too damn bad,” Martin said.

  Red Socialist posters were plastered on every wall and fence and telegraph pole. They shouted for freedom and justice in big black letters. For once, more of them were up than their red-whit
e-and-blue Democratic counterparts. Those showed the U.S. eagle flying high over a burning Confederate flag, and bore a one-word message: VICTORY!

  As poster art went, the Democrats’ handbills were pretty good. The only drawback Chester Martin found in them was that they bragged about old news. As Bauer had said, people forgot things in a hurry.

  Martin walked over to the trolley stop and rode back to the apartment building where he and his parents and sister lived. They were playing hearts three-handed. “About time you got home,” his father said. “This is a better game when the cards come out even when you deal ’em.”

  “See what you get for starting without me?” Martin said, drawing up a chair.

  “Dad wants to throw in this game because he’s losing,” his sister said. But Sue’s grin said she didn’t mind throwing it in, either.

  “My own flesh and blood insult me,” Stephen Douglas Martin said. “If I’d told my father anything like that—”

  “Gramps would have laughed his head off, and you know it,” Martin said. He gathered the cards and fanned them in his hand. “Draw for first deal.” He ended up dealing himself. After generously donating the ace of spades and a couple of hearts to his mother, who sat on his left (and receiving a similar load of trash from his sister, who sat on his right), he called, “All right, where’s the deuce?”

  Out came the two of clubs. As the hand was played, his father asked, “Did you get the whole world settled, there at the Socialist meeting hall?”

  “Sure as heck did,” Martin said cheerfully. “The revolution of the proletariat starts next Wednesday, seven o’clock in the morning sharp. You’d better step lively, Pop—you don’t want to be late.” He took a trick with the ace of diamonds, then led the ten of spades. “Let’s see where the queen’s hiding.”

  “Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer,” his father said. As Chester’s mother had done, he ducked the spade. So did Sue. Stephen Douglas Martin went on, “Do people want it to be that rabblerousing fool of a Debs again?”

  “Some people do,” Martin answered. “I think we’d have a better chance with somebody else.” Since the ten of spades had failed to flush out the queen, he led the nine. “Maybe this’ll make her show up.”

  His mother pained and set out the ace of spades. His father grinned and tucked the king under it. His sister grinned even wider and dropped the queen, sticking his mother with thirteen points she didn’t want. “There you go, Ma,” Sue said sweetly.

  “Thank you so much,” Louisa Martin said. She turned to her son. “When the revolution comes, will the queen only be worth one point, to make her equal with all the hearts in the deck?”

  “Don’t know about that one, Ma,” Chester said. “I don’t think there’s a plank that talks about it in the Socialist Party platform.”

  “Is there a plank that explains why they think we need anybody but bully old Teddy?” Stephen Douglas Martin inquired.

  “I can think of two,” his son replied. “First one is, nobody’s ever had three terms. If TR decides to run again, he shouldn’t, either. And even if the Democrats run somebody else, they have to explain what we got for all the men who got killed and maimed during the war, and why they’ve been in the trusts’ pocket ever since.”

  When he was around Albert Bauer, he sounded like a reactionary. When he was around his parents—who were, in his view of things, reactionaries—he sounded as radical as Bauer did. The more he thought about that, the funnier it seemed.

  The quitting whistle’s scream cut through the din on the floor of the Sloss Works like a wedge splitting a stump. Jefferson Pinkard leaned on his crowbar. “Another day done,” he said. “Another million dollars.”

  He wasn’t making a million dollars a day, but he was making better than a million a week. Next month, probably, he’d be up over a million a day. It didn’t matter. What the CSA called money was only a joke, one that kept getting funnier as the banknotes sprouted more and more zeros. The bottom line was, he’d lived better before the war than he did now. That was so for almost everybody in the Confederate States.

  “See you in the mornin’, Mistuh Pinkard,” Vespasian said.

  “Yeah,” Jeff answered. “See you.” He didn’t make his voice cold on purpose; it just came out that way. The more he went to Freedom Party meetings, the less he cared to work alongside a black man. Vespasian turned away and headed for the time clock to punch out without another word. Pinkard wasn’t in the habit of bragging about going out on Freedom Party assault squadrons, but he wouldn’t have been surprised had Vespasian known about it. Blacks had funny ways of finding out things like that.

  Too damn bad, Jeff thought. Tired and sweaty, he headed toward the time clock himself.

  Going into and out of the Sloss foundry, whites had always hung with whites and Negroes with Negroes. That hadn’t changed. What had changed, lately, was how men from one group eyed those from the other. Blacks seemed warier than they had been during the war. Whites seemed less happy about having so many colored men around, doing jobs they wouldn’t have been allowed to do before the war started. Pinkard understood that down to the ground. It was how he felt himself.

  He didn’t stop sweating just because he’d stopped working for the day. Spring had come to Birmingham full of promises about what the summer would be like. If those promises weren’t so many lies, summer would be hotter than hell, and twice as muggy. Summer in Birmingham was usually like that, so the promises probably held truth.

  When he got close to home, Bedford Cunningham waved to him. Bedford was sitting on his own front porch, with a glass of something unlikely to be water on the rail in front of him. “Come on over after supper, Jeff,” he called. “We’ll hoist a few.” He hoisted the one sitting on the rail.

  “Can’t tonight,” Pinkard answered. “Got a meeting.”

  “Man alive.” Cunningham shook his head, back and forth, back and forth. By the way he did it, that one on the rail wasn’t the first he’d hoisted. “Never reckoned you’d dive into the Freedom Party like a turtle diving off a rock into a creek.”

  It was, when you got down to it, a pretty fair figure of speech. Jeff felt a lot happier swimming in the river of the Party than he did out on a rock by his lonesome. He said, “Maybe you ought to come along, give yourself somethin’ to do besides gettin’ lit up.”

  “I like getting lit up,” Cunningham said. “What the hell better have I got to do, anyhow? Can’t hardly work, not shy an arm. I’ll vote Freedom, sure as hell I will, but I don’t fancy sitting around and listening to people making speeches.”

  “It’s not like that,” Jeff protested, but Bedford Cunningham was hoisting his glass again. With a shrug, Pinkard went up the walk and into his own house.

  “Hello, dear,” Emily said. She tilted up her face for a kiss. He gave her one, rather a perfunctory job. She didn’t try to improve it. “I know you got your meeting tonight,” she went on when he let her go, “so supper’ll be on the table for you in two shakes of a lamb’s tail.” She went back into the kitchen to dish it out. She didn’t shake her own tail, as she would have not so long before.

  Jeff paid no attention to the change. “Good thing you remembered,” he told her. “Barney Stevens is back in town from Richmond, and he’s going to let us know what those bastards in Congress are up to. I don’t want to be late, not for that.”

  “You won’t be,” Emily promised, her voice floating out through the hall. “Come on and set yourself down.”

  He did, then shoveled chicken and dumplings into his face with the single-minded dedication a stoker might have shown in shoveling coal into a steam engine’s firebox. Then, after bestowing another absentminded kiss on his wife, he headed over to the closest trolley stop for the ride to the livery stable where the Freedom Party still met.

  He felt at home there, more even than he did in the cottage he’d shared with Emily since the days before the war. Almost all the men who’d joined the Party were veterans, as he was; they’d fought
the damnyankees in Virginia, in Kentucky, in Arkansas, in Sequoyah, in Texas, in Sonora. And most of them had put on white shirts and butternut pants these past few months and gone charging forth to break up rival parties’ rallies and to remind the blacks of Birmingham where in the scheme of things they belonged.

  “Freedom!” he said every time he shook somebody’s hand or slapped somebody else on the back. And men also reached out to clasp his hand and slap his back and hailed him with the one-word greeting that was also a battle cry. He might have been a Freemason or an Odd Fellow: everyone in the livery stable with him was his brother.

  Along with everyone else, he stamped and whistled and clapped when Barney Stevens, massive and impressive in a black suit, strode to the front of the open area. “Freedom!” Stevens—now Congressman Stevens—called.

  “Freedom!” his audience roared back. Jefferson Pinkard felt different when he used the slogan along with his comrades. It took on a power then that it lacked when it was simply a greeting. It became a promise, and at the same time a warning: anyone who didn’t care for the Freedom Party’s ideas needed to get out of the way, and in a hurry, too.

  “Boys, we’ve got a power of work to do, and that’s a fact,” Barney Stevens said. “Nobody’s mucked out that big barn they call the Capitol in a hell of a long time. Most of the folks, they’ve been there since dirt, or else their pappies were there since dirt, and they’re taking over after the old man finally upped and dropped dead. Damn fancy-pants bluebloods.” Stevens fluttered his hand on a limp wrist. The Freedom Party men howled laughter. He went on, “But we’re starting to get things moving, to hell with me if we’re not. This business with passbooks was just the first shell in the bombardment. Let me tell you some of what I mean…”

  After a while, Jeff found himself yawning. Stevens wasn’t a bad speaker—far from it. But Jeff hadn’t joined the Freedom Party to pay close attention to the nuts and bolts of policy. He’d joined because he’d felt down in his bones that something had gone dreadfully wrong with his country and he thought Jake Featherston could fix it.