Blood and Iron

by Harry Turtledove

  “Could be so,” Cincinnatus agreed. In fact, he found it very likely, and likely to happen sooner than Schacht had predicted, too. He wouldn’t have been surprised to find out that the livery-stable man thought the same thing.

  “You take care of yourself, Cincinnatus,” Schacht said after he’d brought in the last barrel of oats, “and take care of that rattletrap contraption you drive.”

  “Thank you kindly, Mistuh Schacht.” Cincinnatus touched the brim of his cloth cap in salute. “Hope it’s me bringin’ your oats next time you need some.”

  “I wouldn’t mind.” Schacht scratched at that walrus mustache again; he didn’t bother waxing it up into a stylish Kaiser Bill. As Cincinnatus fired up the Duryea, the stable owner added, “By the time you get as old as I am, folks will be trading in their autos for flying machines—but rich folks’ll still keep horses.” He shouted to make himself heard over the thunderous roar of the engine.

  “Flying machines,” Cincinnatus said to himself. All he knew about them was that he didn’t want to go up in one; the miserable things were too likely to fall out of the sky, with gruesomely fatal results the newspapers liked to play up. Maybe they’d solve all the problems by the time Achilles was an old man. Maybe they wouldn’t, too. Either way, it would be for his son to worry about.

  He picked up another hauling job when he went back to the railroad yard, and then another one. That one took him through his own neighborhood—right past the school where Achilles went. The kindergarten classes were just letting out as he drove by: sure enough, there was Achilles along with his schoolmates, who included blacks, whites, and the daughter of the Chinese laundryman upstairs. In Kentucky, Cincinnatus would never have dreamt that his son would go to a school whites also used. Iowans seemed to take it for granted.

  Cincinnatus squeezed the bulb of the Duryea’s raucous horn. All the little kids looked his way. “That’s my pa!” Achilles squealed, loud enough for Cincinnatus to hear him over the Duryea’s motor.

  “Wow! What a swell truck!” a white boy exclaimed, also loudly. Cincinnatus laughed, waved, and drove on. Only to a six-year-old would this truck have seemed swell. Had the kid said funny-looking or beat-up, he would have been closer to the mark. But Cincinnatus had succeeded in impressing one of his son’s pals, so swinging by the school had been all to the good.

  “Pals.” Cincinnatus spoke the word he’d just thought. Could a Negro boy in Des Moines have real white friends? He’d probably have to be able to, if he expected to have more than a handful of friends: there wouldn’t be enough other colored boys to go around. But, for a Negro from Covington, it was a strange and troubling notion. Cincinnatus would have been willing to bet it was a strange and troubling notion for a lot of whites from Des Moines, too.

  When he got home that evening, Achilles was still bubbling over with pride. “Louie Henderson and Joey Nichols both said that was the swellest truck they ever saw,” he reported.

  “That’s good,” Cincinnatus said. He paused and listened again in his mind to what his son had just told him. When he’d been Achilles’ age, back before the turn of the century, he would surely have said they ever seen. He still said things like that every now and then, or maybe more often than every now and then. Achilles had said them, too, till he started going to school: he’d listened to his mother and father and, while they were still down in Covington, to his grandmother as well. Now he listened to his teacher and to the boys and girls in class with him.

  “Yeah, he’s learnin’ to talk like a Yankee, all right,” Elizabeth said when Cincinnatus remarked on it over supper. “I seen that myself.” She didn’t notice her own slip. To her, it wasn’t a slip: it was just the way she talked. It had been the same for Cincinnatus, too, but it wasn’t any more. The more like a white he talked, the less likely people here—even other Negroes here, he’d seen—were to reckon him a dumb nigger. Not being thought of that way usually worked to his advantage.

  After supper, Achilles read aloud from his primer and Cincinnatus read to him from an abridgement of Robinson Crusoe he’d picked up for a dime in a secondhand store. The sentences in the primer and the story of the castaway both used white folks’ grammar—they used it rather better than a lot of the white folks with whom Cincinnatus did business. The more of those kinds of sentences Achilles read and had read to him, the more natural they would seem, and the more he would likely end up sounding like a white man himself. Up here, that couldn’t help but be useful.

  After Achilles had gone to bed, Cincinnatus sat on the sofa and read ahead in Robinson Crusoe; he was enjoying the tale himself. Elizabeth mended clothes on a chair under the other electric lamp. She’d sew a few stitches along a seam, yawn, and then sew a few more stitches.

  Cincinnatus set down his book. “You know,” he said, “we’ve done a lot better for ourselves up here than I figured we would ’fore we left Covington. Things keep going good a little while longer, maybe we can think about buyin’ us a house here.” He spoke hesitantly; he wasn’t used to getting even a little ahead of the game.

  Elizabeth yawned again. “You reckon Achilles asleep yet?” she asked.

  Despite the yawn, Cincinnatus thought he knew why she asked that question. “Hope so,” he answered, a large, male grin on his face. “Sure do hope so.”

  His wife would usually make a face of her own in response to that grin. Tonight, she ignored it. “Didn’t want to say nothin’ where he can hear it,” she told Cincinnatus, “not yet—too soon. But I reckon I’m in the family way again.”

  “For true?” he said, and Elizabeth nodded. He thought about that, then started to laugh.

  His wife’s eyes flashed. “What’s funny? Don’t you want another baby?”

  “Don’t have much choice, do I?” Cincinnatus said, but that wasn’t close to the right answer. He tried to improve it: “Just when you think you get up on things, life goes and hands you another surprise. This one, though, it sure enough is a nice surprise.” He waited anxiously, then thought of something better to do: he walked over and kissed Elizabeth. Even without words, that did turn out to be the right answer.

  Jefferson Pinkard put on his white shirt and butternut trousers. Both were freshly laundered and pressed. Ever since throwing Emily out of his cottage, he’d grown careless about the shirts and overalls and dungarees he wore to work. When he donned the white and butternut, though, he wasn’t just himself: he was part of the Freedom Party. If he didn’t look sharp, he let the Party down.

  He went into the bathroom, examined himself in the streaky mirror there, and frowned. He rubbed some Pinaud’s brilliantine into his hair, washed the greasy stuff off his hands, and combed out a nice, straight part. “That’s more like it,” he said. He grabbed his club off the sofa in the front room and headed out the door.

  Bedford Cunningham sat on his front porch, enjoying the warm June Sunday afternoon. By the glass at his side and by the way he sprawled, he’d been enjoying it for quite a while. Pinkard raised the club as he walked by. His neighbor, his former friend, cringed. That was what he’d wanted to accomplish. He kept walking.

  He wasn’t the only man in Party regalia who’d come to the trolley stop by the Sloss Works company housing. Three or four of his comrades greeted him as he came up: “Freedom!”

  “Freedom!” he answered, and grinned a fierce grin. “Reckon we’re going to teach Wade Hampton V a thing or two about sticking his nose in where it’s not welcome, ain’t we, boys?”

  “That’s right. That’s just right,” the other Freedom Party men said, almost in chorus. Jeff was glad to have the reassurance, though he didn’t really need it. Hampton might have won the election, but he had a lot of damn nerve to go barnstorming around the country making speeches and trying to pump up the Whigs. Who did he think he was, Jake Featherston or somebody?

  Nobody sat near the men in white and butternut as the trolley rattled through the streets of Birmingham all the way out to the Alabama State Fairgrounds at the west edge of town, wher
e Hampton would speak. When Negroes got on or off, they edged past the Freedom Party men and made their way to or from the back of the trolley car as if afraid they would be set upon at any moment. They had reason to fear; such things had happened before.

  “State Fairgrounds! End of the line!” the trolley driver announced, and loudly clanged his bell.

  “End of the line for Wade Hampton, all right,” Pinkard said, and the other Freedom Party men laughed wolfishly.

  Caleb Briggs, the dentist who headed the Freedom Party in Birmingham, was marshaling his forces at the edge of the fairgrounds. “Won’t be easy this time, boys,” he rasped in his gas-ruined voice. “Goddamn governor got wind of what we had in mind and called out the goddamn militia. Anything we want, we’re going to have to take.”

  Pinkard looked west across the rolling, grassy countryside to the platform from which President Hampton would speak. Sure enough, there were men in butternut and old-fashioned gray uniforms along with those in shirtsleeves or black civilian coats. The sun glinted off bayonets. He’d seen that too many times in Texas to mistake it for anything else.

  Suddenly, the club in his hand didn’t seem such a wonderful weapon at all. He asked, “We move on those sons of bitches, they going to open up on us?”

  “I don’t know,” Briggs answered. “Only one way to find out, though, and that’s what we’re going to do.” He raised his voice: “Anybody who hasn’t got the balls to go forward, run along home to mama. The rest of us, we’ll see if those summer soldiers mean it or if they’ll fold when we come at ’em. Nobody’s stopped us yet. My bet is, nobody can. Let’s go.”

  Everybody advanced. Pinkard’s mouth was dry, as it had been when he came up out of the trenches, but he kept going. It wasn’t that he lacked fear: far more that he feared letting his comrades know he was afraid. If they didn’t feel the same way, he’d have been astonished. On they came, through the ankle-high grass, past the little groves of shade trees planted here and there on the fairgrounds. The muggy heat accounted for only some of the sweat on Jeff’s face.

  The militiamen deployed to meet the Freedom Party stalwarts. They were outnumbered, but they had the rifles and the bayonets and the helmets. Pinkard didn’t like the way they moved. Their manner said they were not about to give way for anything or anybody.

  To applause from the smallish crowd in front of him, President Hampton began to speak. Pinkard paid scant heed to his amplified words. Why bother? They’d be full of lies anyhow. The major moving out ahead of the militiamen was more important. The fellow held up a hand. “You men halt right there,” he said. “This is your first, last, and only warning.”

  “Hold up, boys,” Caleb Briggs said, and the Freedom Party men obeyed him, not the militia major. He spoke to the officer: “Who are you to tell us we can’t protest against the so-called policies of the government in Richmond?”

  “You can stay right here,” the major answered. “You can shout your fool heads off. I don’t give a damn about that. If you take one step forward from where you stand now, I will assume you are attempting to riot, not to protest, and I will order you shot down like dogs. Those are my orders, and I shall carry them out. So will my men. If you think we are bluffing, sir, I invite you to try us.”

  Jeff didn’t think the major was bluffing. The soldiers behind him looked ready, even eager, to open fire. The governor had picked with care the troops he’d activated. Caleb Briggs came to the same conclusion. “You’ll pay for this, Major, when the day comes,” he hissed.

  “If you take that step, sir, you’ll pay for it now,” the major told him. “Your ruffians have gotten away with too many things for too long. You will not get away with anything today, by God. You may do what the law allows. If you do even a single thing the law does not allow, you will pay for it.”

  The stalwarts jeered him and hooted at him and cursed him. He seemed to worry about that no more than a man with a good slicker and a broad-brimmed hat worried about going out in the rain. And not one of the Freedom Party men took the step forward that would have made the officer issue his fatal order.

  “All right, boys,” Briggs said. “Maybe we won’t give Hampton the tyrant what-for today in person. But we can let him know what we think of him, right? This here country still has freedom of speech.”

  “Freedom!” was the chant they raised, a loud and mocking chant. Jefferson Pinkard bellowed out the word as ferociously as he could, doing everything in his power to drown out the president of the Confederate States. As far as he was concerned, Jake Featherston should have been up on the platform a few hundred yards away. He would have told the truth, not the bland lies Wade Hampton V spewed forth. The bland crowd ate them up, too, and cheered Hampton almost as if they had true spirit.

  “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!” All the stalwarts were roaring, doing their best to show Hampton and show the world the militia hadn’t cowed them. Maybe next time we’ll bring rifles, too, Pinkard thought. It had almost come to that during the presidential campaign. After fighting the damnyankees, he did not shy away from fighting his own government. “Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!”

  When the first shot rang out from the grove of hackberry trees off to the right of the Freedom Party men, Jeff didn’t hear it. But he saw Wade Hampton V stagger on the platform and clutch at his chest. He did hear the second shot. That second bullet must have caught Hampton in the head or the heart, for he stopped staggering and went down as if all his bones had turned to water.

  A few of the stalwarts whooped when the president of the Confederate States fell. Most, though, Pinkard among them, stared in the horrified silence that filled the crowd of Hampton’s backers. Men dashed across the platform to the president’s side. Jeff didn’t think they’d be able to do much for him. He’d seen too many men go down in that boneless way during the Great War. Hardly any of them ever got up again.

  From the hackberry grove came a wild, exultant shout: “Freedom!”

  “Sergeant Davenport! Sergeant Sullivan!” the militia major rapped out. “Take your troops in among those trees and bring that man to me. I don’t care whether he’s breathing or not, but bring him to me.”

  Two squads of militiamen trotted toward the hackberries. Another shot rang out. A man fell. Another shot from the trees—this one a miss, the bullet whining past not far from Pinkard. Without conscious thought, he threw himself flat. A lot of Freedom Party men and a lot of militiamen did the same. The advancing militiamen opened fire on the grove.

  Caleb Briggs stayed on his feet. More than gas roughened his voice as he said, “That man is not one of ours, Major. My God, I—”

  One of the dignitaries on the platform walked up to the microphone. “President Hampton is dead.” He sounded astonished, disbelieving.

  Jeff understood that. He felt stunned and empty himself. He’d been ready—he’d been eager—to fight for the Freedom Party, but this…No one had murdered—assassinated, he supposed was the proper word—a president in the history of the Confederate States, or in the history of the United States before the Confederacy seceded.

  Drawing his pistol, the militia major aimed it at Briggs. More shots came from the hackberries. Another militiaman went down with a shriek. But some of the others were in among the trees. The major ignored that action. Infinite bitterness filled his voice: “Not one of yours, you say? He shouts your shout. He uses your methods. Politics was not war till the Freedom Party made it so.”

  “Now listen here—” Briggs began.

  Triumphant cries rang out from the hackberry grove. Through them, the major said, “No, sir. You listen to me. Get your rabble out of here by the count of five, or I will turn my men loose on them and we will have a massacre the likes of which this country has never seen. Maybe it’s one we should have had a couple of years ago—then things wouldn’t have come to this. One…two…three—”

  “Go home, boys,” Caleb Briggs said quickly. His face was gray. “For the love of God, go home. There’s been enough blood spilled to
day.”

  “Too much,” the militia major said. “Far too much. You disappoint me, Mr. Briggs. I would have liked to shoot you down.”

  Briggs stood silent, letting himself be reviled. As Jefferson Pinkard got to his feet, militiamen came out of the hackberry grove. They were dragging a body by the feet. The corpse wore butternut trousers and a green shirt, now soaked with blood. The gunman must have been almost invisible in among the trees. Jeff stared at his long, pale, sharp-nosed face. He’d seen that face at Party meetings, not regularly, but every so often. The fellow was named Grady…Grady Something-or-other. Jeff knew he’d talked with him, but couldn’t remember his surname.

  From the appalled looks on other Party stalwarts’ faces, he knew they also recognized the assassin. The militia major saw that, too. “Not one of yours, eh?” he repeated. “Another lie. Get out of my sight before I forget myself.”

  Briggs went. Jeff stumbled after him, along with his comrades. Someone close by was moaning. After a moment, he realized it was himself. What do we—what do I—do now? he wondered. Sweet suffering Jesus, what do I do now?

  Anne Colleton was frying chicken for supper when her brother came into the kitchen of the large apartment they still shared. She started to greet him, then got a good look at his face. She hadn’t seen that kind of dazed, horrified expression since the war. Above the cheerful crackling of the chicken, she asked, “My God, Tom, what’s gone wrong?”

  By way of answer, he held up the copy of the Columbia South Carolinian he carried under his arm. The headline was enormous and very, very black:

  PRESIDENT MURDERED IN BIRMINGHAM!!!

  Under it, a half-page subhead said, FREEDOM PARTY ASSASSIN SHOT DEAD AT ALABAMA STATE FAIRGROUNDS.