Blood and Iron

by Harry Turtledove

  After some thought, he settled on Major Tom Colleton, Marshlands Plantation, South Carolina. He had no idea whether the plantation was still a going concern; he’d been in a Yankee prisoner-of-war camp when the black rebellion broke out in the CSA. With that address, though, the letter ought to get to the right Tom Colleton. He was just glad he’d managed to recall the name of the plantation; he couldn’t have heard it more than a couple of times.

  He licked a stamp and set it on the envelope. The stamp didn’t have a picture of Davis or Lee or Longstreet or Jackson or a scene of Confederate soldiers triumphing over the damnyankees, as most issues up through the war had done. It said C.S. POSTAGE at the top. The design, if it deserved such a name, was of many concentric circles. Printed over it in black were the words TEN THOUSAND DOLLARS.

  His important work done, Reggie read the Richmond Examiner and then a couple of chapters of a war novel written by someone who didn’t seem to have come close to the front. Reggie liked that sort better than the realistic ones: it gave him something to laugh at. The way things were, he took laughter wherever he could find it.

  The next morning, he woke up before the alarm clock did its best to imitate a shell whistling down on his trench. He hadn’t done that in a while. After frying himself some eggs, he carried the letter to the mailbox on the corner and dropped it in. He nodded, well pleased, as he headed toward Harmon’s drugstore. If he’d dawdled for a week, the cost of a stamp would probably have gone up to $25,000.

  He looked back over his shoulder at the mailbox. “Well,” he said, “let’s see what that does.”

  Jonathan Moss turned the key in his mailbox. Since he was sober, he had no trouble choosing the proper key or getting it to fit. Whether the mail would be worth having once he took it out of the box was another question. The bulk of what he got went straight into the trash.

  “There ought to be a law against wasting people’s time with so much nonsense,” he said. He knew perfectly well that such a law would violate the First Amendment. Faced with a blizzard of advertising circulars, he had trouble caring about free-speech issues.

  Then he saw the envelope franked with a two-cent stamp with an ONTARIO overprint. His heart neither fluttered nor leaped. He let out a resigned sigh. He wouldn’t throw that envelope into the wastebasket unopened, as he would a lot of others, but he’d learned better than to get too excited about such things.

  When he got up to his apartment, he slit the envelope open. It held just what he’d expected: a postal money order and a note. The money order was for $12.50. The note read, Dear Mr. Moss, With this latest payment I now owe you $41.50. I hope to get it all to you by the end of the year. The crops look pretty good, so I should have the money. God bless you again for helping me. Laura Secord.

  She’d been sending him such money orders, now for this amount, now for that, since the middle of winter. He’d written her that it wasn’t necessary. She’d ignored him. The only thing he’d managed to do—and it hadn’t been easy—was persuade her she didn’t owe him any interest.

  “Lord, what a stiff-necked woman,” he muttered. He’d realized that when he was up in Canada during the war. She hadn’t bent an inch in her animosity toward the Americans.

  He’d made her bend to the extent of being polite to him. He hadn’t made her bend to the extent of wanting to stay obligated to him one instant longer than she had to. As soon as she’d paid off the last of what she owed, she could go back to pretending he didn’t exist.

  He couldn’t even refuse to redeem the money orders. Oh, he could have, but it wouldn’t have made things any easier for Laura Secord. She’d already laid out the cash to buy the orders. Not redeeming them would have been cutting off his nose to spite his face.

  “Haven’t you done enough of that already?” he asked himself. Since he had no good answer, he didn’t try to give himself one.

  He cooked a little beefsteak on the stove, then put some lard in with the drippings and fried a couple of potatoes to go with it. That didn’t make a fancy supper, but it got rid of the empty feeling in his belly. He washed the plate and silverware and scrubbed the frying pan with steel wool. His housekeeping was on the same order as his cooking: functional, efficient, uninspired.

  Once he’d taken care of it, he hit the books. Bar examinations would be coming up in the summer. Much as he’d enjoyed most of his time at the Northwestern law school, he didn’t care to wait around another semester to retake the exams after failing.

  A tome he studied with particular diligence was titled, Occupation Law: Administration and Judicial Proceedings in the New American Colonial Empire. The field, naturally, had swollen in importance since the end of the Great War. Before the war, it had hardly been part of U.S. jurisprudence at all, as the United States, unlike England, France, and Japan, had owned no colonial empire. How things had changed in the few years since! Occupation law was said to form a large part of the examination nowadays.

  Moss told himself that was the only reason he worked so hard with the text. Still, if he decided to hang out his shingle somewhere up in Canada, it behooved him to know what he was doing, didn’t it? He didn’t think about hanging out his shingle anywhere near Arthur, Ontario…not more than a couple of times, anyway.

  He realized he couldn’t study all the time, not if he wanted to stay within gibbering distance of sane. The next morning, he met his friend Fred Sandburg at the coffeehouse where they’d whiled away—wasted, if one felt uncharitable about it—so much time since coming to law school.

  “You’ve got that look in your eye again,” Sandburg said. Moss knew he was a better legal scholar than his friend, but he wouldn’t have wanted to go up against Fred in a courtroom: Sandburg was ever so much better at reading people than he was at reading books. He went on, “How much did she send you this time?”

  “Twelve-fifty,” Moss answered. He paused to order coffee, then asked, “How the devil do you do that?”

  “All in the wrist, Johnny my boy; all in the wrist.” Sandburg cocked his, as if about to loose one of those newfangled forward passes on the gridiron. Moss snorted. His friend said, “No, seriously—I don’t think it’s something you can explain. Sort of like card sense, if you know what I mean.”

  “Only by hearing people talk about it,” Jonathan Moss confessed sheepishly. “When I played cards during the war, I lost all the damn time. Finally, I quit playing. That’s about as close to card sense as I ever got.”

  “Closer than a lot of people come, believe me,” Fred Sandburg said. “Some of the guys I played with in the trenches, it’d take inflation like the damn Rebs are having to get them out of the holes they dug for themselves.”

  Up came the waitress. She set coffee in front of Moss and Sandburg. Sandburg patted her on the hip—not quite on the backside, but close—as she turned away. She kept walking, but smiled at him over her shoulder. Moss was gloomily certain that, had he tried the same thing, he’d have ended up with hot coffee in his lap and a slap planted on his kisser. But Fred had people sense, no two ways about it.

  Moss decided to put his pal’s people sense to some use and to change the subject, both at the same time: “You think Teddy Roosevelt can win a third term?”

  “He’s sure running for one, isn’t he?” Sandburg said. “I think he may very well, especially if the Socialists throw Debs into the ring again. You’d figure they’d have better sense, but you never can tell, can you? As a matter of fact, I hope Teddy loses. Winning would set a bad precedent.”

  “Why?” Moss asked. “Don’t you think he’s done enough to deserve to get elected again? If anybody ever did, he’s the one.”

  “I won’t argue with you there,” Sandburg said. “What bothers me is that, if he wins a third term, somewhere down the line somebody who doesn’t deserve it will run, and he’ll win, too.”

  “All right. I see what you’re saying,” Moss told him, nodding. “How many other people will worry about that, though?”

  “I don’t know,” San
dburg admitted. “I don’t see how anybody could know. But I’ll bet the answer is, more than you’d think. If it weren’t, we’d have elected someone to a third term long before this.”

  “I suppose so.” Moss sipped his coffee. He watched people stroll past the coffeehouse. When a man with only one leg stumped by on a pair of crutches, he sighed and said, “I wonder how the fellows who didn’t come through the war would vote now if they had a chance.”

  “Probably not a whole lot different than the way our generation will end up voting,” Sandburg said. Moss nodded; that was likely to be true. His friend continued, “But we’re in the Half Generation, Johnny my boy. Every vote we cast will count double, because so many of us haven’t even got graves to call our own.”

  “The Half Generation,” Moss repeated slowly. “That’s not a bad name for it.” He waved for the waitress and ordered a shot of brandy to go with the coffee. Only after he’d knocked back the shot did he ask the question that had come into his mind: “Did you ever feel like you didn’t deserve to come back in one piece? Like fellows who were better than you died, but you just kept going?”

  “Better fighters? I don’t know about that,” Fred Sandburg said. “Harder to tell on the ground than it was in the air, I expect. But I figured out a long time ago that it’s just fool luck I’m still breathing and the fellow next to me caught a bullet in the neck. I don’t guess that’s too far from what you’re saying.”

  “It’s not,” Moss said. For that matter, Sandburg had caught two bullets and was still breathing. No doubt luck had a great deal to do with that. Moss wished there were something more to it. “I feel I ought to be living my own life better than I am, to make up for all the lives that got cut short. Does that make any sense to you?”

  “Some, yeah.” Sandburg cocked an eyebrow. “That’s why you’re still mooning over this Canuck gal who sends you rolls of pennies every couple of weeks, is it? Makes sense to me.”

  “God damn you.” But Moss couldn’t even work up the energy to sound properly indignant. His buddy had got him fair and square. He defended himself as best he could: “You don’t really have much say about who you fall in love with.”

  “Maybe not,” Sandburg said. “But you’re not quite ready to be a plaster saint yet, either, and don’t forget it.”

  “I don’t want to be a plaster saint,” Moss said. “All I want is to be a better person than I am.” This time, he caught the gleam in Fred’s eye. “You tell me that wouldn’t be hard and I’ll give you a kick in the teeth.”

  “I wasn’t going to say anything of the sort,” Sandburg answered primly. “And I’ll be damned if you can prove anything different.”

  “You’re not in court now, Counselor,” Moss said, and they both laughed. “But what the devil are we going to do—the Half Generation, I mean, not you and me—for the rest of our lives? We’ll always be looking over our shoulders, waiting for the other half to come up and give us a hand. And they won’t. They can’t. They’re dead.”

  “And you were the one who just got through saying Teddy Roosevelt deserved a third term,” Sandburg pointed out. “And I was the one who said I couldn’t argue with you. God help us both.”

  “God help us both,” Jonathan Moss agreed. “God help the world, because there’s hardly a country in it that doesn’t have a Half Generation. With the Canucks, it’s more like a Quarter Generation.”

  “Italy came through all right,” Sandburg said. “The Japs didn’t get hurt bad, either, damn them.”

  “Yeah, we’ll have to have a heart-to-heart talk with the Japs one day, sure enough,” Moss said. “They’re like England, only more so: they don’t really know they were on the losing side.” He thought for a moment. “The only thing worse than going through the Great War, I guess, would have been going through the Great War and losing. Roosevelt saved us from that, anyway.”

  “So he did.” Sandburg’s whistle was low and doleful. “Can you imagine what this country would be like if the Rebs had licked us again? We’d have had ourselves another revolution, so help me God we would. I don’t mean Reds, either. I just mean people who’d have wanted to hang every politician and every general from the nearest lamppost they could find.”

  “Like this Freedom Party down in the CSA,” Moss said, and Sandburg nodded. Moss went on, “You know, maybe TR really does deserve a third term. Even if he didn’t do anything else, he spared us that.” His friend nodded again. Moss discovered he still had a couple of drops of brandy in the bottom of the shot glass. He raised it again. “To TR!” he said, and drained them.

  “Down with TR! Down with TR! Down with TR!” Along with everyone else in the great hall in Toledo, Flora Hamburger howled out the chant. The air was thick with tobacco smoke. It was also thick with an even headier scent, one never caught before at a Socialist Party national convention: the smell of victory.

  “We can do it this time.” Flora didn’t know how often she’d heard that since coming to Toledo. Whether it was true or not remained to be seen. True or not, though, people believed it. Scarred and grizzled organizers who’d been coming to conventions since long before the turn of the century were saying it, and saying it with wonder in their voices and on their faces. They’d never said it before.

  “Mr. Chairman! Mr. Chairman!” Half a dozen people here on the floor clamored for the attention of the august personage on the rostrum.

  Bang! The gavel came down. “The chair recognizes the leader of the delegation from the great state of Indiana.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Chairman,” that worthy bellowed. The chairman rapped loudly once more, and kept rapping till something a little quieter than chaos prevailed. The leader of the Indiana delegation spoke into it: “Mr. Chairman, in the interest of victory and unity, the state of Indiana shifts twenty-seven votes from its own great patriot and statesman, Senator Debs, to the next president of the United States of America, Mr. Sinclair! We so act at the specific request of Senator Debs, who understands that the interests of the Party should, indeed must, come ahead of all personal concerns.”

  Flora had never been on the battlefield. If the roar that went up at that announcement didn’t match that of a great cannonading, though, she would have been astonished. More men, including the chairman of the delegation from New York, waved hands or hats or banners to attract the chairman’s attention. After five indecisive ballots, the Socialists had their presidential nominee. Someone moved that the nomination be made unanimous; the motion passed by overwhelming voice vote. That done, the proud and happy delegates voted to adjourn till the next day.

  But they did not want to leave the floor. As if they had already won the election, they milled about in celebration, meeting old friends, making new ones, and having themselves a terrific time.

  Being taller than most of the men at the convention, Hosea Blackford was easy for Flora to spot as he made his way from the small Dakota delegation to the large one from New York. “It’s done,” he said. “The first part of it’s done, anyhow, and done well.” When he grinned, he shed years. “Ain’t it bully, Flora?”

  “Yes, I think so,” she answered. “And the second part—who knows what the second part may be?” She wanted to take him in her arms. She couldn’t, not in public. She couldn’t, even in private, not while the convention was going on: no privacy in Toledo was private enough. “When you find out the second part, please let me know, whenever it is you happen to hear.”

  “Whether it goes one way or the other, I will do that,” Blackford promised solemnly. “Shall we have supper now?”

  “Why not?” Flora said. They left the hall and went back to the hotel where they were both staying. Neither of them minded being seen in public with the other; their friendship was common knowledge in Philadelphia. That they were anything more than friends, they kept to themselves.

  They were working their way through indifferent beef stew when an excited-looking young man in a brightly checked jacket approached the table and said, “Congressman Blackfo
rd?”

  “That’s right,” Blackford answered. The young man in the gaudy jacket glanced toward Flora. Understanding that glance, Blackford said, “Do I understand that you come from Mr. Sinclair?” The newcomer nodded. “Speak freely,” Blackford urged him. “You may rely on Congresswoman Hamburger’s discretion no less than my own.”

  “Very well.” The eager youngster tipped his bowler to Flora. “Pleased to meet you, ma’am.” He gave his attention back to Blackford. “Mr. Sinclair says I am to tell you that you are his first choice. It’s yours if you want it.”

  Flora clapped her hands together. “Oh, Hosea, how wonderful!” she exclaimed.

  “Is it?” Blackford said, more to himself than to anyone else. “I wonder. If I take it and lose, I go home. If I take it and win, I go into the shadows for four years, maybe for eight. It’s not a choice to be made lightly.”

  “You can’t turn it down!” Flora said. “You can’t, not this year.”

  “Can’t I?” Blackford murmured. She looked alarmed. The young man in the loud jacket didn’t. Pointing to him, Blackford smiled and said, “You see? He knows there are plenty of other fish in the lake.” Flora sputtered angrily. Smiling still, Blackford went on, “But no, I don’t suppose I can, not this year. Yes, sir: if it pleases Mr. Sinclair to have my name placed in nomination for the vice presidency, I shall be honored to run with him and see if we can’t tie a tin can to Teddy Roosevelt’s tail and send him yapping down the street.”

  “Swell!” The youngster stuck out his hand. Blackford shook it. “My principal will be delighted, and I already am. This time, by thunder, we’re going to lick ’em.” He waved and departed.

  “We’re going to lick them,” Blackford repeated. His smile was wide and amused. “Well, by thunder, maybe we are. What I’m afraid of is that tomorrow you’re going to have to listen to nominating speeches telling the convention what a saint I am, and you’ll laugh so loud, you’ll get yourself thrown out of the hall.”