Blood and Iron

by Harry Turtledove

  He built up the fire in the stove and got a pot of coffee going. Then he went back to the bathroom and dry-swallowed a couple of aspirins. He lathered his face and shaved. As he was toweling himself dry afterwards, he wondered why he hadn’t cut his own throat. It wasn’t the first time that question had occurred to him.

  After a cup of strong black coffee, after the aspirins started to work, the world looked a little less gloomy. He ate a big chunk of bread and ham and cut off a piece of last night’s partly cremated ham steak to toss into his dinner pail. Since he’d thrown Emily out, he’d discovered just what a lousy cook he was. “Ain’t starved yet,” he declared, and headed out the door. The place was an unholy mess, but he lacked the time, the energy, and the skill to do anything about it.

  He had to walk past Bedford Cunningham’s cottage on the way to the foundry. He looked straight ahead. He didn’t want to see Bedford, even if he was there. He didn’t want to see Fanny Cunningham, either. He blamed her, too. If she’d kept her husband happy in bed, he wouldn’t have had to go sniffing around Emily.

  More steelworkers, white and black, crowded the path leading to the Sloss Works. Greetings filled the air: “Hey, Lefty!” “Mornin’, Jeff.” “How you is, Nero?” “What’s up, Jack?” “Freedom!” Pinkard heard that a couple-three times before he got to the time clock and stuck in his card to start the day. As the aspirins and coffee had done, the slogan made him feel better.

  He winced only a little when he stepped out onto the foundry floor. Once he was out there, he knew he’d make it through the day. If he could stand the clangor now, he wouldn’t even notice it by the time afternoon rolled around.

  Vespasian came onto the floor only a minute or so after he did. “Mornin’, Mistuh Pinkard,” the Negro steelworker said.

  “Morning,” Pinkard answered. Every time he thought about it these days, the idea of working with a black buck graveled him more. But Vespasian had been out on the foundry floor since 1915, and he wasn’t even slightly uppity. He gave Jeff’s anger no place to perch. That in itself was infuriating.

  They had no time for light conversation, not this morning. The big crucible swung down and poured a fiery load of molten metal down onto the sand of the foundry floor. Steam rose in hissing, stinking clouds. The steel seemed as determined to get free of the mold as any house cat was to get outdoors.

  Whatever else Pinkard thought of Vespasian, he had to allow that the big Negro knew his way around steel. Vespasian made as good a partner as Bedford Cunningham ever had, and he wasn’t likely to try and sleep with Emily.

  Or maybe he is, Jeff thought. Who the hell knows? Emily’s liable to be taking on niggers these days. He didn’t know what the woman he’d married, the woman he’d loved, was doing these days, not for certain. He’d finally let her back into the house so she could put on some clothes and gather up whatever she could carry in her arms. Then he’d thrown her out again. She hadn’t come round the place since. He wouldn’t have let her in if she had.

  Maybe she was working in a factory somewhere downtown. Maybe she was standing on a streetcorner, shaking her ass whenever a man walked by and hoping he’d give her five or six million dollars for a fast roll in the hay.

  “I don’t care what she’s doing,” Pinkard said, quickly, fiercely. Vespasian shouldn’t have been able to hear that low-voiced mumble. But the Negro had been on the foundry floor a long time. He’d got as good as anybody could get at hearing under the racket and picking up talk. He knew about Emily. Everybody at the Sloss Works knew about Emily, sure as hell. Just for a second, he looked at Pinkard with pity in his eye.

  Jeff glared back, and Vespasian flinched as if from a blow. The last thing in the world Jeff wanted was a black man’s pity. “Work, God damn you,” he snarled. Vespasian did work, his face as blank of expression now as a just-erased blackboard.

  Before Pinkard had been conscripted, he wouldn’t have talked to Vespasian that way. He’d thought the Negro a pretty good fellow then. He might not have talked to Vespasian that way before he first heard Jake Featherston speak. He might as well have been blind before. But Featherston had opened his eyes, all right.

  “Joining the Freedom Party was the best thing I ever did,” he said. If Vespasian heard that, he pretended he didn’t.

  It was true, though. The Freedom Party gave him a family, a place to go, things to do. If he hadn’t been active in the Party, he might have gone clean round the bend when Emily took off her dress for Bedford Cunningham that second time. That Emily might not have done any such thing if he hadn’t so immersed himself in the Freedom Party never once entered his mind.

  What he did think about was that several of his Party buddies had had their marriages go to hell and gone in the past few months. None of the other blowups had been quite so spectacular as his, but having pals who understood what he was going through because they were going through the same thing made life easier. None of his friends had been able to figure out why they and their wives had broken up. Trying gave them something to talk about at Party meetings and when they got together betweentimes.

  The only place where he didn’t think that much about the Freedom Party was out on the foundry floor. If you thought about anything but what you were doing out there, you were asking for a trip to the hospital if you were lucky and a trip to the graveyard if you weren’t. He’d learned that early on, and relearned it when he came back to the Sloss Works after the war. Work came first. That was a matter of life and death.

  At last, work ended for the day. As the screech of the steam whistle faded, Pinkard turned to Vespasian and said, “See you tomorrow. Freedom!”

  Vespasian’s lips had started to shape the word see. But he didn’t say anything at all. He showed expression now: the expression was pain. Jeff had seen it on Yankees’ faces as he drove home the bayonet. Vespasian turned away from him and stumbled off to clock out as if he too had taken a couple of feet of sharpened steel in the guts. He might have had a pretty good notion of Jeff’s politics beforehand, but now he was left in no possible doubt. Jeff laughed out loud. The future was on his side. He felt it in his bones.

  He clocked out and hurried home to his cottage. Fanny Cunningham sat out on the front porch of hers next door. Jeff leered at her, wondering if this was how Bedford had looked at Emily. It didn’t draw Fanny into his arms. She fled back into the house. He laughed again. His hot, burning laughter filled the street, as molten steel filled its mold.

  He took some sausages out of the icebox and burned them for supper. His suppers, these days, were of two sorts: burnt and raw. He ate bread with them, and gulped down a glass of homebrew that was no better than it had to be. The dishes sat in the sink, waiting. As far as he was concerned, they could go right on waiting, too. He had a Freedom Party meeting tonight. That was a hell of a lot more important than a pile of goddamn dishes.

  “Freedom!” The greeting filled the livery stable. It wasn’t a challenge here, nor a shout of defiance: it was what one friend said to another. The men who filled the stable—filled it almost to overflowing; before long, like it or not, the Birmingham chapter would have to find a new place to meet—were friends, colleagues, comrades. Those who’d been in the Party longer got a little more respect than johnny-come-latelys, but only a little. Jeff had joined long enough ago to deserve some of that respect himself.

  With Barney Stevens up in Richmond, a skinny little dentist named Caleb Briggs led the meetings and led the Party in Birmingham. “Freedom!” he shouted, his voice thin and rasping—he’d been gassed up in Virginia, and wouldn’t sound right till they laid him in his grave.

  “Freedom!” Pinkard shouted with the rest of the men who’d come together to find, to build, something larger and grander than themselves.

  “Boys, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know when I say that Jake Featherston’s going to be running for president this year.” Briggs paused to suck more air into his ruined lungs—and to let the Party members cheer till they sounded almos
t as hoarse as he always did. Then he went on, “We’ve done a little bit of brawling every now and again, but it’s not a patch on what we’re going to be doing, let me tell you that!”

  More cheers erupted. Jeff pumped his fist in the air. Brambles and thorns in his throat, Briggs went on, “The Whigs will be holding rallies here in town. The goddamn Radical Liberals will be holding rallies here in town.” He shook his head. Lamplight reflected wetly from his eyes. “That’s not right. Those traitor bastards will try and hold rallies here in town. Are we going to let ’em?”

  “No!” Jeff shouted, along with most of the Freedom Party men. The rest were shouting “Hell, no!” and other, coarser, variations on the theme instead.

  “That’s right.” Caleb Briggs nodded now, which made his eyeballs glitter in a different way. Jeff could not have said how it was different, but it was. Briggs went on, “That’s just right, boys. This is a war we’re in, same as the one we fought in the trenches. We would have won that one, only we got stabbed in the back. This time, we hit the traitors first.”

  Jeff applauded till his hard, horny hands were sore. Somebody not far away pulled out a flask of moonshine and passed it around. Pinkard took a swig. “Son of a bitch!” he said reverently, his vocal cords for the moment nearly as charred as Briggs’. He passed the flask along, half sorry to see it go, half relieved it was gone.

  Someone started singing “Dixie.” Jeff roared out the words, a fiery fury in him that had surprisingly little to do with the whiskey he’d just drunk. The Freedom Party sang “Dixie” at every meeting. Then someone else began “Louisville Will Be Free.” That one dated from just after the Second Mexican War, and recounted the greatest fight of that war. With Louisville forced back into the USA in the Great War, it took on a poignancy now that it hadn’t had then.

  Tears ran down Jefferson Pinkard’s face. They took him by surprise. He wondered if he was weeping for ravaged Louisville or for himself. A great determination filled him. Like his country, he’d paid for doing what he remained convinced was right. Sooner or later, everyone else would pay, too.

  “Freedom!” he cried at the top of his lungs. “Freedom! Freedom!”

  Reggie Bartlett nodded in some surprise when Tom Brearley came into Harmon’s drugstore. He hadn’t seen much of Brearley since the ex–Navy man went down to South Carolina to talk with Anne Colleton. Reggie had been waiting for fireworks to spring from that meeting. He was still waiting.

  Evidently, Brearley was getting tired of waiting. He said, “All right, Mr. Bartlett, what’s your next great idea for blowing the Freedom Party out of the water?”

  “I haven’t got another one,” Reggie admitted. “Wish to heaven I did.”

  “Well, I’ve got another one.” Brearley looked very determined. Reggie could easily picture him peering through a periscope at a U.S. cruiser. Oddly, he also looked much younger than he had before sticking out his chin. He said, “If I can’t get those bastards fighting among themselves, I’ll just have to take the story to the newspapers.”

  “Jesus,” Reggie said. “Are you sure you want to do that? I wouldn’t, not unless I had my life-insurance premiums all paid up.”

  “As a matter of fact, I do,” Brearley said, doing a determined and pretty good best to sound unconcerned. “I made sure they were before I went down to talk to Tom Colleton’s sister, because I wasn’t sure I’d be coming back. But by now Kimball has to know I’ve talked. He has to figure I’ll talk more. That means he’ll try and kill me sooner or later—likely sooner. I’m kind of surprised he hasn’t tried it yet—him or some of the Freedom Party apes up here. I want to make sure the word gets out before he does.” He didn’t sound unconcerned any more: just matter-of-fact, a man tackling a job he knew was dangerous.

  Reggie understood that. He wouldn’t have, not before the war. Going through the trenches—coming out of the trenches on command to attack—changed a man forever. He knew he would be afraid again, many times in his life. But fear would never paralyze him, as it might have done before. He had its measure now.

  He said, “If you’re bound and determined to do it, you’d better think hard about which paper you go to. You don’t want to head for the Sentinel, because—”

  “Don’t teach your grandpa to suck eggs,” Brearley said with a wry grin. “Do I look that stupid? Half the time, I reckon Jake Featherston puts that rag out himself. Shame and a disgrace, the garbage it prints.”

  “Why don’t I just shut up?” Reggie said to nobody in particular.

  “I don’t want you to shut up,” Brearley told him. “You go to political rallies for fun. You really think about this stuff, a lot more than I do. So I want your advice: you reckon I should talk to the Whig or the Examiner?”

  “Go with the Whigs or the Radical Liberals?” Reggie stroked his chin. After a minute or so of silent thought, he said, “That’s an interesting one, isn’t it? The Freedom Party’s probably giving the Whigs a harder time—they were the ones who ran the country during the war. But I think the Radical Liberals are more afraid of Featherston and his gang, don’t you? For one thing, they’re farther away from the stand he takes, where some of the right-wing Whigs might as well start yelling ‘Freedom!’ themselves. And for another, the Rad Libs are running scared. If they don’t get a break, the Freedom Party’ll be number two in the country after this fall’s election. You give them some dirt, they’ll run with it.”

  Tom Brearley looked at him as if he’d never seen him before. “You’re wasting your time shoving pills across a counter, Bartlett. You should have been a lawyer, something like that. You think straight. You think real straight.”

  “Maybe I do,” Reggie said. “You’re the one who’s not thinking straight now, I’ll tell you that. Where the devil am I going to get the money to study law? Where am I going to get the money to get the education I’d need so I could study law? If I’d had a million dollars before the war, it might have been a different story.”

  Brearley shrugged. “If you want something bad enough, you can generally find a way to get it. What I want right now is to torpedo the Freedom Party. I tried one way. It didn’t work. All right—I’ll try something else. The Examiner it’ll be. Thanks, Bartlett.” He sketched a salute and left.

  Jeremiah Harmon came up from the back of the drugstore. “I overheard some of that,” he said, sounding apologetic—astonishing in a boss. “None of my business, but anybody who goes up against a machine gun without a machine gun of his own is asking for a whole peck of trouble. You ask me, the Examiner’s a popgun, not a machine gun. Wish I could say different, but I can’t.”

  “Where do you find a machine gun to fight the Freedom Party?” Reggie asked.

  “Haven’t the foggiest notion,” the druggist replied. “Don’t know if there is any such animal. But if I didn’t have one, I think I’d stay down in my dugout and hope no big shell caved it in.”

  He hadn’t been to the front. He’d passed the war in Richmond, making pills and salves and syrups. He never pretended otherwise. But the vocabulary of the trenches had come to be part of everyone’s day-to-day speech in the CSA. An awful lot of men had passed through the fire. Reggie wasted a moment wondering if expressions from the front line filled the sharp-sounding English of the United States, too.

  Harmon went back to whatever he’d been doing when Tom Brearley came into the drugstore. He didn’t waste a lot of time banging a drum for what he thought. If you agreed with him or decided he had a point, fine. If you didn’t, he wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.

  And it wasn’t just an interesting discussion to Reggie Bartlett. He’d signed his name to the letter that had gone down to Tom Colleton. If Freedom Party thugs came after Tom Brearley, they were liable to come after him, too.

  All at once, he wished he’d told Brearley to keep the hell away from newspapers. Part of him wished that, anyhow. The rest realized such worries came far too late. The cat had been out of the bag ever since he touched pen to paper.

  He
started watching the newspapers, especially the Richmond Examiner, like a hawk. Day followed day with no banner headline about a U.S. destroyer sunk after the Confederate States asked for quarter. Maybe Brearley had got cold feet and hadn’t bent a reporter’s ear after all. In a way, that disappointed Reggie down to the depths of his soul. In another way, one that left him ashamed, it relieved him. Maybe Brearley had talked, and the reporter hadn’t believed him. Reggie almost hoped that was so. It would have given him the best of both worlds.

  And then one day with March approaching, and with it the first inauguration of a Socialist president of the USA, that banner headline did run in the Examiner: WAR CRIMINAL HIGH IN FREEDOM PARTY CIRCLES! For a moment, Reggie hoped the story under the headline would be about some other war criminal; he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn the Freedom Party sheltered battalions of them under its banner.

  But it wasn’t. The reporter didn’t name Tom Brearley—citing concerns for his informant’s safety—but he did name Roger Kimball, the Bonefish, and the USS Ericsson. Reggie hadn’t known exactly what kind of secret Brearley was keeping. Now he did. Now everybody did. He nodded to himself. Brearley hadn’t been stretching things—it was a big one.

  The reporter made it sound as if several members of the submersible’s crew had confirmed what Brearley said, too. Maybe that was camouflage, to make the story seem more authoritative and to take some of the heat off Brearley. Maybe he really had checked with other crewmen, and that was why the story had waited so long to run.

  However that worked, the story made the Freedom Party hopping mad. The very next day, a blistering denunciation ran in the Sentinel. What it amounted to was that the damnyankees had had it coming, and that anyone betraying a Confederate officer who’d done his duty as he saw it deserved whatever happened to him. It didn’t quite declare open season on Tom Brearley, but it didn’t miss by much. Reggie was glad he didn’t figure in the piece in any way.